Saying without an iota of self-awareness the late-night talk show host defrauded him, former Brazilian Carnaval dancer and Republican New York Congressman George Santos filed a lawsuit against Jimmy Kimmel for using Cameo videos Santos created based on requests Kimmel’s staff submitted using aliases, NBC News reports. Santos seeks an easy payday $750,000.
After being booted from Congress for multiple lies and acts of fraud and a small matter of a criminal indictment, Santos found a new income stream by selling custom videos on the Cameo platform, where has-beens and never-wases prostitute their little remaining fame to make personalized custom videos requested by patrons. In a sketch on his show two months ago, Kimmel features videos Santos filmed congratulating a fictional “beef eating contest” winner or imploring a non-existent woman to forgive her fake spouse for burning their shed down.
Santos has an uphill battle. While Cameo’s terms of service bar patrons from the “commercial” use, it specifically encourages patrons to distribute and publicize Cameo and the custom video, granting the person who pays the celebrity to make the video “a non-exclusive, royalty-free, fully paid, worldwide, sublicensable, revocable license to use, reproduce, distribute, and publicly display that CAMEO Video, in any and all media (for example, on social media platforms), whether now known or hereafter invented or devised.”