Jim Cornette, who filed a lawsuit back in December 2019 in regards to a t-shirt with his likeness being stabbed that read “F*** Jim Cornette”, lost a preliminary injunction in his lawsuit against independent wrestler G-Raver (real name Brandon Graver), whose attorney filed a motion to dismiss the lawsuit that was denied.

The court ruled in the preliminary injunction that the t-shirts sold by G-Raver are not commerce, but speech, noting that G-Raver sold the shirts to critique Cornette’s views on deathmatch wrestling through parody.

The court noted that this protects this expression, because parodies are a valuable means of expression to weaken the ideas the celebrity espouses and that on top of that, the shirts do not create a likelihood of confusion and that Cornette’s name may possess the distinctiveness that would make it a trademark, but it is certainly not a famous one capable of dilution and that even if it were a mark, the defendant’s uses are not similar.

The court holds the t-shirts to be the works invented by G-Raver’s imagination and thus, they are transformative, while Cornette’s right of publicity claim was denied, with the ruling stating that even when the use is facially for a commercial, or advertising purpose, the relevant exception here is, the shirts are expressive works and the use is through a communications medium.