Celebrities sued for promoting crypto crap
Remember when Jimmy Fallon and Paris Hilton sat on his show and chatted about their monkeys? They, among various other celebrities, are being sued for what was allegedly unknown and paid for promoting the Bored Ape Yacht Club and other crypto wheezes at the peak of the NFT hype cycle. They pumped it, the lawsuit alleges, but when the inevitable crash came, they weren’t the ones holding the bag.
The class action claims that “this alleged interest in ‘Bored Apes’ by high-profile tastemakers was entirely manufactured by [Hollywood agent Guy] Oseary commissioned by “Yuga Labs.” In order to make the promotion of, and subsequent interest in, the BAYC NFTs appear to be organic (as opposed to being the result of a paid campaign), the company needed a way to pay discreetly their celebrity cohorts.” The suit alleges they did this through MoonPay.
When Jimmy Fallon introduced his audience to crypto, he also presented a frictionless way to buy in: MoonPay, a payment company that allows customers to buy crypto through most major payment systems such as with a credit card. In November 2021, Fallon said on “The Tonight Show” that he had purchased his first NFT through MoonPay. “MoonPay? MoonPay! I did my homework — Moonpay, which is like PayPal, but for crypto,” Fallon said. The following January, when Hilton showed her the monkey on the show, she said, “You said you got it on MoonPay, so I went and copied you.”
Just look at this Paltrow tweet! As if she would randomly come up with this.
The likelihood that these lawsuits will force private correspondence into the public record has also seemed to revive long-held suspicions that the monkey designs were Internet-style “ironic racism” where the irony turns out to be a fig leaf.
“Imagine if you were a racist, like, ‘Guess what I’m going to do? I’m going to make black people love monkeys so much they’re going to buy them, wear them around their necks… go to something called ApeFest and they’re going to love it! Doesn’t that sound fun?” Dash said on the podcast. — That’s what’s happening.
Dash told CNN that he did not intend to target Yuga directly. But he had begun to wonder if he was being trolled, given the generality of monkeys in crypto. “Racism is different these days — you can’t be so overt about it. You kind of have to troll,” Dash said.
This week, Yuga agreed to settle a lawsuit with a developer who worked with Ripps, in which the developer agreed to pay them $25,000 and said he would reject any disparaging statements against Yuga Labs.
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This week, Yuga co-founder Wylie Aronow published a 24-page letter explaining his resignation from the company and addressing widespread rumors that the company and its products were linked to the alt-right.
