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Leon Bennett / Budrul Chukrut / SOPA Images / LightRocket / Jabin Botsford / Getty Images
George Santos seems to have never met a camera or spin he didn’t like, except when it comes to Jimmy Kimmel.
Lacking any sense of irony, the former Republican congressman expelled from New York today hit the late-night host, ABC and Disney with a lawsuit for fraud and copyright infringement for the jokes and punks admitted by Kimmel to Santos through the site Personalized Celebrity Cameo Messages.
“At the center of this dispute is the defendants’ deliberate deception and misappropriation of plaintiff’s digital content, orchestrated through the Cameo.com platform, where celebrities and public figures are required to connect with their fans through personalized video messages,” declares Santos’ jury filed a complaint Saturday in federal court in the Empire State.
“Defendants openly admitted to deceiving plaintiff under the guise of fandom, requesting custom videos only to then air them on national television and social media channels for commercial gain, actions that flagrantly violate the original agreement and constitute clear infringement.” of copyright”.
Specifically, Santos and his attorneys claim that Cameo’s fine print terms of service do not allow users/customers to post the purchased video on national television. The fraud claim arises because “Defendant Kimmel misrepresented himself and his motives to induce Plaintiff to create personalized videos for the sole purpose of capitalizing on and ridiculing Plaintiff’s gregarious personality.”
Considering Santos is clearly a public figure and considering his brief, scandal-filled year in Congress, that’s one way to look at it.
Without regular work and income since he became the sixth member of the House of Representatives to be expelled in the nation’s history on December 1 of last year, luxury fabulist Santos seeks at least $750,000 from Kimmel and the House mouse. Additionally, being the subject of an HBO biopic (or not), Santos and his attorneys at Mancilla & Fantone want preliminary and permanent injunctions to prevent those embarrassing Cameo videos from being broadcast, published, viewed, or apparently even talked about again. . They also want “defendants’ actual damages, punitive damages, and disgorgement of profits to be determined at trial, plus interest.”
AKA – Give me a couple million dollars.
Neither representatives for past and future Oscar host Kimmel nor Disney responded to Deadline’s request for comment on Santos’ lawsuit. If they do, we will update it.
Now the truth is, Kimmel has been teasing Santos on Cameo for laughs for months.
Under the pseudonym of “Chris Cates,” Kimmel paid Santos $400 on Dec. 6 to congratulate a fake friend for winning the Clearwater, Florida, beef-eating contest. The same day, under the name “Jane,” Kimmel paid Santos to praise her fake mother for successfully cloning her “beloved schnauzer Adolf.” On December 7, as “Uncle Joe” (an homage to Biden?), Kimmel paid Santos to praise her falsely blind niece for passing her driving test. “That being said, the day after I got her license, she was in a really bad car accident, so if she could also wish her a speedy recovery, that would be awesome,” the fake request adds. “She is in a cast and she is very discouraged, but with the help of Jesus and President Trump, she will soon be traveling again!”
And there were more.
“I couldn’t resist,” Kimmel told his audience on December 7, 2023 in a monologue clip that has since been viewed nearly 1.7 million times on You Tube. “So, I sent George through Cameo a bunch of different ridiculous requests,” he went on to say. “I will distribute them over the next week. I didn’t say they were from me. I simply wrote and sent them to find out, will Santos say it?”
The answer is: Yes, it will, as you can see in the following clip starting at 6:52:
In fact, with Santos bragging last month about how much money he’s been making from Cameo since being kicked out of Congress, today’s lawsuit should come as no surprise: Kimmel literally asked for it.
“I sent him a bunch of crazy video requests because I wanted to see what he would read and what he wouldn’t read, and I showed some of them on the air on Thursday, and now he’s demanding $20,000 for a commercial rate,” Kimmel said at the end of his December 11 program. “Can you imagine if George Santos sued me for fraud? I mean, how cool would that be? “It would be like a dream come true.”
At the intersection of DC and Hollywood, dreams clearly come true.