Woody Allen might have had a few allegations of being sleazy thrown at him in his time (not least by former wife Mia Farrow), but that hasn’t put him off accusing retail giant American Apparel of being the same.
The Annie Hall director and New York institution filed suit for a whopping £6.9 million against the firm last year, claiming that his likeness had been used on billboards without prior consent – something he’d never have agreed to anyway considering he finds the campaigns “sexually gross, in a witless and infantile way”.
The firm responded by asking Allen to back up his claim by identifying the ads to which he referred. However, as reported by the New York Post, a judge at Manhattan’s Federal Court overruled the claim by saying Allen had already proved “he would not have voluntarily agreed to endorse” the company’s products on the unauthorised posters. “There is no reason to require him to identify specific advertisements that he finds distasteful,” Judge Thomas Griesa said.
Hmmm, if he’d been pushed, he probably would have pointed to any one of the firm’s ads featuring a Lycra unitard and dead-eyed teen.
