Late last June Yuga Labs, the parent company behind the NFT projects Bored Ape Yacht Club and Crypto Punks filed a lawsuit against artist Ryder Ripps, who had created a NFT collection of his own that shared imagery with the former. On Monday, Ripps’s legal team hit back, claiming that the lawsuit was being used to silence him through legal intimidation.
A legal action with that intention is known as SLAPP, which stands for strategic lawsuits against public participation. According to the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press, an anti-SLAPP motion is a request to have a case dismissed on the grounds that the case involves “speech on a matter of public concern.”
Ripps’s legal team claims that the artist “used his craft to call out a multi-billion-dollar company built on racist and neo-Nazi dog whistles.”
Yuga Labs declined to comment.
Since the beginning of 2022, Ripps, his partner Jeremy Cahen, and ten John Does have been leading a viral campaign which claims that the founders of Yuga Labs threaded alt-right imagery throughout their mega-successful NFT project Bored Ape Yacht Club.
Ripps published the research he and his team have collected on the matter on a website called gordongoner.com. He has spoken about the issue extensively on social media, and has done interviews with the press and internet personalties on the subject.
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