(Videos posted below) He may be funny, but talk-show host Jimmy Kimmel is no mensch.
Kimmel swiped a YouTube video of a ranting Hasidic man and spliced it into a skit to poke fun at hoops superstar LeBron James without permission, according to a suit filed yesterday in Brooklyn Supreme Court.
Dovid Sondik was featured in the YouTube video, titled the “Flying Rabbi,” which shows the Borough Park man raving in Yiddish in the street.
In August, “Jimmy Kimmel Live” grabbed snippets of that video to pretend its host was getting advice from the man.
The bit spoofed James’ recent sit-down with rabbi-to-the-stars Yishayahu Yosef Pinto.
“See, now it makes sense, LeBron went to Miami to become Jewish,” Kimmel joked as he set up the spoof.
“Apparently, [Pinto is] a very high-paid consultant when it comes to business matters. One time, I actually consulted with the rabbi myself.”
In the skit, Sondik is then seen hooting incoherently in Yiddish, framed to look as if he were talking to Kimmel through a car window.
Kimmel, who re-upped his contract with ABC yesterday for two years, pretends he’s getting sage advice, saying, “Yeah, that’s true,” as Sondik continues his rant.
The scene cuts back and forth between them and the bit ends with Kimmel joking, “You know, it turned out he was right.”
Sondik’s lawyer, Robert Tolchin, said the man was just “goofing around” when he made the video and never meant it to be broadcast to Kimmel’s 1.5 million viewers.
“It has caused me difficulty and pain,” said Sondik, who, though not a rabbi, would speak of scripture to people in the neighborhood. “Now they think I’m a joke, a comedian.”
The suit, seeking unspecified damages, accuses Kimmel of appropriation of likeness and violating YouTube’s service terms.
A rep said Kimmel’s people were unaware of the suit.
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(Source: NY Post)
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10 Responses
If you’re stupid enough to post on Youtube, you canNOT expect that others won’t use it or misinterpet it, I don’t think Sondik has a case here, he should have thought twice before posting a video…
Why do pepole try to always choose the negative out of everything.
Think of it as free publicity, this is what’s making him (sodnik)famous.
Now let sodnik try to profit out of using the positive side of his fame from the 1.5 million viewers that saw him to maybe “get a real job”….
maybe he should take him to peoples court 🙂
I agree with #1 (assuming that Sodnik was the one that posted the viral video on youtube)
it’s deliberately racist. that shot of rabbi pinto deliberately makes it look like their in a trailer in a trailer park for some reason. it makes torah look like a clown doctrine for retards.
would they like it if we found a crackhead and put a crusifix on him and made it look like they were all like that? well theres plenty of christians that look like garbage so maybe we should have a garbage christian media campaign so they can know how it feels.
its slander, take a good man and make a joke out of him.
Sodnik did NOT post the original video. Someone else took it of him and posted it on his own.
I think you should take the Jimmy Kimmel video down, considering the fact that it was taken off of youtube anyway so we wont be able to see it!
Jimmy Kemmel just deleted the video from his YouTube account!
Agree. If they took down the video, maybe it should not be up here. It might be duplicated from here.
#1,2 and 4-
If you knew this man (Sondick) then you wouldnt say that. He’s nebach had a very hard life and is emotionally unstable. Despite all this he’s always b’simcha. He runs around Boro Park telling everybody divrei torah mixed with nonsense and the whole community over there knows him. He has no family and seems to be homeless. There is no way that he put that video on you tube. Many people in Boro Park get a kick out of him, because he does sound funny, so someone must have thought it was cute to put it up there.