Creator of Pepe the Frog Wins $15,000 Settlement From InfoWars

By Sophie Weiner | June 11, 2019 | 12:21pm

Media

Matt Furie, the comic artist who created the character known as Pepe the Frog, has settled a lawsuit against Alex Jones’ conspiracy outlet InfoWars for $15,000, according to the Daily Beast.

Pepe was just one of Furie’s many illustrations before his image of the sad frog became a viral meme on 4chan. Later, Pepe’s image became associated with the alt-right and Trump supporters, who used variations of the image as a dog whistle to connect with their fellow online racists.

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In the past several years, Furie has launched several lawsuits in an attempt to shut down the use of his character by far-right personalities and media entities. The InfoWars suit stemmed from a poster sold by the site that showed an illustration of Pepe alongside Roger Stone, Diamond & Silk, and other Trumpland icons.

Things got weird, according to the Daily Beast:

Before settling, InfoWars tried a novel legal strategy of suggesting, without evidence, that Furie had actually based Pepe on an Argentinian amphibian cartoon character named “El Sapo Pepe.” But on Tuesday, InfoWars agreed to destroy all remaining copies of the poster, and pay back the $14,000 it made from the poster sales—along with an additional $1,000.

“From our perspective, we got everything we wanted,” Louis Tompros, a lawyer representing Furie, told the site.

Somehow, despite settling for $15,000, InfoWars also claimed to have won the suit.

“They would have made more money if they went and waitressed with Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez for a few months,” InfoWars attorney Robert Barnes said in a hilarious statement. “So, the Pepe trial is over. We made our point.”

All right, dude.

This isn’t Furie’s first victory in his battle against the alt-right. He was previously successful in getting his illustration removed from a prominent neo-Nazi site. He also sued the author of a book that used Pepe’s image to tell an anti-Muslim children’s story. That case was also eventually settled, barring further sale of the book and forcing the author to donate the proceeds to the Council on American-Islamic Relations, according to Vice.

Furie has a sense of humor too—his lawyer also said he would donate $1,000 of the settlement to a conservation organization called Save the Frogs.

“It’s a charity dedicated to frog preservation,” Tompros told The Daily Beast. “Real frogs, not cartoon frogs.”