George Santos seems to have never met a camera or a misrepresentation he didn’t like, except when it comes to Jimmy Kimmel.
Lacking all sense of irony, the expelled GOP ex-Congressman from New York today has hit the late-night host, ABC and Disney with a fraud and copyright infringement lawsuit over Kimmel’s admitted punking and pranking of Santos via personalized celebrity messaging site Cameo.
“At the heart of this dispute lies the deliberate deception and wrongful appropriation of the Plaintiff’s digital content by the Defendants, orchestrated through the platform Cameo.com, where celebrities and public figures are meant to connect with their fans through personalized video messages,” declares Santos’ jury-seeking complaint filed Saturday in federal court in the Empire State. (Read the lawsuit here).
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“Defendants openly admitted to deceiving the Plaintiff under the guise of fandom, soliciting personalized videos only to then broadcast these on national television and across social media channels for commercial gain—actions that starkly violate the original agreement and constitute clear copyright infringement.”
Specifically, Santos and his attorneys are claiming that Cameo’s fine print terms of service don’t allow users/clients to put the purchased video up on national TV. The fraud claim is 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 short-lived and scandal filled one year in Congress, that’s one way of looking at it.
Out of a regular gig and income since he became on December 1 last year only the sixth member of the House of Representatives to be expelled in the nation’s history, fabulist deluxe Santos is after at least $750,000 from Kimmel and the Mouse House. Additionally, the subject of an HBO biopic (or not), Santos and his Mancilla & Fantone lawyers want preliminary and permanent injunctions to stop those embarrassing Cameo videos from being broadcast, posted, seen or seemingly even spoke of ever again. They also want “actual damages, punitive damages, and disgorgement of Defendants’ profits to be determined at trial, plus interest.”
AKA – Give me a couple of million bucks.
Neither reps for past and future Oscar host Kimmel nor Disney responded to Deadline’s request for comment on Santos’ suit. If and when they do, we will update.
Now the truth is Kimmel has been punking Santos on Cameo for laughs for months.
Under the pseudonym of “Chris Cates,” Kimmel on December 6 paid Santos $400 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 hios fake mom for successfully cloning her “beloved schnauzer Adolf.” On December 7, going be “Uncle Joe,” (a Biden homage?), Kimmel paid Santos to praise his fake blind niece for passing her driving test. “That said, the day after she got her license, she got in a really bad car accident so if you could also wish her a speedy recovery that would be amazing,” the fake request added. “She’s in a bodycast and is a very bummed out – but with help from Jesus and President Trump, soon she will be back on the road!”
And, there were more.
“I couldn’t resist,” Kimmel told his audience back on December 7, 2023 in a monologue clip that has been viewed almost 1.7 million times on You Tube since. “So, I sent George through Cameo a number of different ridiculous requests,” he went on to say. “I’ll be parceling these out over the next week. I didn’t say these were from me. I just wrote them and sent to find out will Santos say it?”
Answer is, Yes he will – as you can see in the clip below starting at the 6:52 mark:
In fact, with Santos bragging last month of how much money he’s been making off Cameo since being kicked out of Congress, today’s lawsuit shouldn’t be any 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 from me to be paid a commercial rate,” Kimmel said at the top of his December 11 show. “Could you imagine if I get sued by George Santos for a fraud? I mean how good would that be? It would be like a dream come true.”
In the intersection between DC and Hollywood, dreams clearly do come true.