Depp-Heard Fallout, Obama Drama, & Seth Green’s Stolen Ape

Happy Tuesday, I’m Eriq Gardner.

Welcome back to The Rainmaker, my private newsletter focused on the legal intrigues of Hollywood, Silicon Valley, Washington, and Wall Street.

In today’s column, I tackle bored apes and fast cars, and what they both have to do with the future of ownership. I break news about a development on the Kevin Spacey front—one that should be very concerning for journalists. Plus, the Matrix franchise, the Rust debacle, and is Barack Obama trying to bust Hollywood’s unions?

But first…

Why the Depp-Heard “Shit Show” Matters

As we get ready to hear the Johnny Depp verdict, what more can really be said about this trial? Over the past six weeks, I’ve been watching it play out in court, and also been consuming the seemingly endless takes about the social dimensions. The end of #MeToo? The rise of TikTok bullying? A YouTube bonanza for legal punditry? Six weeks is a very long time.

As someone who has been following this case from the beginning—as a reporter who traveled to Fairfax, Virginia for pretrial motions (often it was just me and someone from CourthouseNews in the gallery), and as someone who has been talking to insiders with both camps for years—allow me to make two key observations.

First, the weight of this dispute shouldn’t be underestimated. I know that some in the legal community may look at this as a celebrity “shit show” (to quote one lawyer who texted me). I think that assessment ignores some truly remarkable legal issues that have arisen: The quirks of the Virginia venue, for instance, which I’ll get back to in a moment, or the issue of whether judge Penney Azcarate should have halted this case after a U.K. court ruled in late 2020 that a tabloid’s “wife beater” headline about Depp was substantially true. (Azcarate didn’t let collateral estoppel or res judicata on the international front stop the actor. Nor the Uniform Foreign-Country Money Judgments Recognition Act, which I’ll resist the temptation to discuss further.)...

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The Legal Nightmare of Seth Green’s Stolen Ape

There are enormous unresolved questions surrounding N.F.T. rights. A similarly baffling case involving ‘Gone in 60 Seconds’ shows just how ugly the dispute could get.

ERIQ GARDNER

At a time when war is raging, Covid endures, kids are being shot in schools, and inflation threatens a new recession, what is it that America’s brightest legal minds are obsessing over? For some, it’s Seth Green and his Bored Ape, a tale about ownership in the crypto age that exploded into public this week.

For those not familiar, there’s a series of 10,000 ape N.F.T.s known as the Bored Ape Yacht Club—highly-prized digital collectables living on the Ethereum blockchain. Green, best known for Austin Powers and Buffy the Vampire Slayer, purchased one of the apes (#8389), named Fred, and then planned on having this ape star in a new animated series. But then, Green fell victim to a phishing scam. “Days before he’s set to make his world debut, he’s literally kidnapped,” Green said at a recent N.F.T. conference.

Believe it or not, this isn’t the first Bored Ape to be, um, kidnapped, and the N.F.T. marketplace OpenSea is facing a few negligence lawsuits for not doing more to impede hacks and scams. (OpenSea is pushing for arbitration in those cases and didn’t respond to a request for comment.) Yet this story isn’t about lax security in crypto, but rather about what happens now? Can Green move forward with his new show? The concerned actor/producer is now pleading with the individual who subsequently bought #8389—a collector known as “DarkWing84”—for Fred’s safe return, and some news sites are sending lawyers into a tizzy by dragging in copyright law, a subject that will forever be mangled in the popular press...

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