Shortly after being ousted from Congress in December, Santos began offering to record personalized video messages via the online service Cameo for $500 per video — inspiring a humorous prank for Kimmel’s talk show. In a December episode of his talk show, Kimmel mocked the disgraced congressman with a segment called “Will Santos Say It?” in which Kimmel paid for Cameo videos under fake names and requested that Santos read out absurd messages.
Former U.S. Rep. George Santos alleged in a lawsuit filed Saturday that late-night host Jimmy Kimmel deceived him into making videos on the Cameo app that were used to ridicule the disgraced New York Republican on the show. Kimmel misrepresented himself to induce Santos to create personalized videos “capitalizing on and ridiculing” his “gregarious personality,” the lawsuit alleges.
Santos claims Kimmel duped him into producing over a dozen personalized videos through the video platform, which he then featured on his late-night talk show, according to a complaint filed Saturday in Manhattan federal court. Among Kimmel’s scripts for Santos were videos congratulating a woman for successfully cloning her schnauzer named Adolf, as well as a man for winning a competitive ground beef eating contest, court papers noted.
