Clint Eastwood secures victory over CBD company
Cannabidiol retailer ordered to pay film star more than $2 million in damages| Company stands accused of misappropriating the Hollywood star’s name to sell CBD products online.
In an order handed down Tuesday, August 2 at the US District Court for the Central District of California, District Judge Cormac Carney also enjoined CBD retailer Norok Innovation from using Eastwood’s likeness to sell products and from manipulating web search results.
In January last year, Eastwood’s company Garrapata accused Norok Innovation and its CEO Eric Popowicz of illegally using Eastwood’s celebrity and name to drive traffic to an online marketplace selling CBD products.
According to the suit, Norok was placing Eastwood’s name within blog posts and webpage meta descriptions as a means to promote the CBD products.
“Like many of his most famous characters, Mr Eastwood is not afraid to confront wrongdoing and hold accountable those that try to illegally profit off his name,” said the suit.
To date, neither Norok Innovation nor Popowicz have responded to the lawsuit.
Then, in May this year, the court granted Eastwood’s motion for default judgment in substantial part. The following month, Eastwood’s renewed motion for attorneys’ fees and costs in connection with the default judgment was granted.
At the time, Carney said: “$2 million is a reasonable representation of the fair market value of Eastwood’s services in lending his influential and known name to a hidden metatag campaign for products he likely would have been unwilling to endorse in the first place."
This isn’t the first time Eastwood has taken on CBD companies. In August 2020, he secured an injunction against two retailers, blocking them from using his name or likeness in advertising their products. The Hollywood star had sued the sellers after he discovered that his image was being used in a fake news article to promote CBD products.
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