Image by Wikimedia

By Sam Kestenbaum September 19, 2017

Pepe the Frog creator Matt Furie is taking new legal action against the “alt-right” for using illustrations of his cartoon, the amphibian character that has become an iconic meme of the far-right.

Furie has protested the transformation of his cartoon character into a cartoon associated with racism and anti-Semitism and is seeking to disassociate the smiling frog from the “alt-right” by serving cease and desist orders to a number of far-right sites and personalities, including Richard Spencer, Baked Alaska, Mike Cernovich and the Reddit channel the_Donald, Motherboard reported.

On Spencer’s site Altright.com, Pepe’s face makes frequent appearances, notably as an icon for a regular podcast.

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Baked Alaska, whose real name is Tim Gionet, has also been singled out. Lawyers told Motherboard that they they were able to stop Amazon from selling Gionet’s book “Meme Magic: Secrets Revealed,” which features Pepe’s face on the cover.

Cernovich has apparently been using Pepe’s likeness a number of different ways, including posting a video of a 3D version of Pepe dancing with Hillary Clinton reading aloud sections of her new book, a lawyer said.

Furie and others have previously sought to disassociate Pepe from the “alt-right,” including a social media campaign with the Anti-Defamation League to “save Pepe” from the far right. Furie also theatrically declared Pepe dead in a cartoon this summer, also as a response to the “alt-right” hijacking of the frog’s image.

This summer, Furie reached a settlement an author who was also using Pepe’s image in a children’s book that lawyers called Islamophobic. The book’s author agreed to stop selling the book, Motherboard reported, and to donate his profits to the Council on American-Islamic Relations. Lawyers said this encouraged them to continue pushing back at unauthorized “alt-right” uses of the Pepe icon.

Email Sam Kestenbaum at [email protected] and follow him on Twitter at @skestenbaum

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