Cookbook author sues Seinfelds

2008-01-08 13:31

New York - An author who claims Jerry Seinfeld's wife plagiarised her cookbook has sued the famous couple, finding little humour in the comedian's television comments regarding the books.

The lawsuit, seeking unspecified compensatory and punitive damages for copyright and trademark infringement, was filed on Monday in US District Court in Manhattan by Missy Chase Lapine, author of The Sneaky Chef: Simple Strategies for Hiding Healthy Foods in Kids' Favourite Meals.

"Jerry Seinfeld is an enormously wealthy and well-known comedian, and Jessica Seinfeld is his wife, but that does not give them license to slander and plagiarise," the lawsuit said.

The Seinfelds' lawyer, Richard Menaker, denied Lapine's claims of defamation and plagiarism and suggested Lapine was seeking publicity to boost her book's sales.

"Both are without merit," said Menaker, who added the Seinfelds had yet to receive the complaint.

"There's no truth in fact or law to this claim of plagiarism. The idea for Jessica Seinfeld's book came from her own experiences with her family out of her own kitchen."

'No basis'

He said there was "no basis" for any kind of legal claim of defamation, noting that although Jerry Seinfeld is a public figure he "doesn't lose his right to free speech because of that."

In October, HarperCollins published Jessica Seinfeld's Deceptively Delicious: Simple Secrets to Get Your Kids Eating Good Food.

Lapine's book was published six months earlier in April. Hearing about the Seinfeld book in May while promoting her own book, Lapine complained, setting off a war of words.

The lawsuit said the Seinfelds were warned even before the book was published that it had blatant similarities to Lapine's book.

Still, when Jerry Seinfeld appeared on CBS's Late Show with David Letterman in October, he suggested Lapine was a crackpot and declared his wife not guilty of "vegetable plagiarism," the lawsuit said.

'Wackos'

The lawsuit also quoted him telling Letterman: "Now you know, having a career in show business, one of the fun facts of celebrity life is wackos will wait in the woodwork to pop out at certain moments of your life to inject a little adrenalin into your life experience."

Seinfeld also played off the fact that Lapine uses three names saying "if you read history, many of the three-name people do become assassins." He then made reference to Mark David Chapman," who killed John Lennon, and James Earl Ray, who assassinated Martin Luther King.

The lawsuit said a reasonable person watching Seinfeld on Letterman's show would conclude that he had described Lapine as mentally ill with "potentially violent or, at a minimum, hostile, tendencies, proclivities and activities."

It said Lapine, the former publisher of Eating Well magazine, was not a public figure, does not suffer mental infirmity, is not a celebrity stalker, is not violent or dangerous and does not engage in extortion or lies.

- AP