A Wyoming federal court should reconsider whether Kanye West was correct that a marketing company shouldn’t be suing him at all, over money it didn’t receive for helping with his 2020 presidential campaign, the 10th Circuit Court of Appeals ruled Monday.
And U.S. District Court Judge Alan Johnson was correct that the marketing company, SeedX, can’t show that West’s campaign, Kanye 2020, had a contract with it at all, let alone failed to honor the contract, the appeals court added.
SeedX Inc., a marketing company that accused the Kanye 2020 campaign of denying it payments for services it said it provided West’s presidential campaign lost in court in April.
But it wasn’t a loss altogether, as U.S. District Court Judge Alan B. Johnson, of Wyoming, dismissed the case “without prejudice.”
That means SeedX could reorganize and file a better version of its case if it wished.
When the Kanye campaign asked the court to reconsider and dismiss the case permanently, the judge said his court lacked jurisdiction to do that.
That’s not correct, a three-judge panel of the 10th Circuit Court of Appeals countered Monday. The higher court sent the case back to Wyoming for reconsideration, though it stopped short of dismissing the case against West’s campaign altogether.
Now Cheyenne-based attorney Amy Iberlin, who represents Kanye 2020, has the chance to argue for final dismissal in the lower court.
“Ultimately I think the 10th Circuit decision is absolutely the correct one,” Iberlin told Cowboy State Daily in a Tuesday interview. She said she hopes soon to secure a final dismissal, “so we can end the years of litigation against Kanye.”
How We Got Here
SeedX in the summer of 2020 started working with Arizona-based campaign consultants Lincoln Strategy Group, Fortified Consulting, and Nathan Sproul.
The 10th Circuit calls those latter three “the Lincoln defendants.”
By August, SeedX had started providing services to one of the Lincoln defendants’ clients. That same month, the Lincoln defendants asked SeedX if it would like to help with the Kanye 2020 campaign, says the opinion.
SeedX agreed and asked for a written agreement of the terms, and the campaign consultants “repeatedly assured SeedX that the agreement would be reduced to writing once the scope of the work became clearer,” says the opinion.
“With no written contract,” however, “SeedX began its work for Kanye 2020.”
It built a slideshow with public-relations strategies for the campaign. It let the Lincoln groups replace the “SeedX” label on the first slide with the name “Lincoln,” and SeedX agreed because the Lincoln groups would be making the presentation.
SeedX also built a campaign website and digital storefront for Kanye 2020, says the filing.
Once the website went live, SeedX started communicating with the Knaye 2020 campaign. It alleges it “became the hub of a massive marketing effort.”
Kanye 2020 paid more than $13.2 million for campaign services in 2020 — and about $4.8 million of that went to the Lincoln defendants. “But SeedX was never paid for its work,” the 10th Circuit recounted.
So SeedX sued Kanye 2020 and the Lincoln defendants in the U.S. District Court for Wyoming, because Kanye 2020 was based in Wyoming.
But SeedX’s claims that it had an oral or implied contract with Kanye 2020, and that the latter violated those, are not plausible, the appeals court ruled – in agreement with the lower federal court of Wyoming.
“For an oral contract to exist, its essential terms must be defined with certainty,” the order reads, citing a 2022 Wyoming case.
Here, SeedX’s pleadings show “almost no communications” between it and Kanye 2020, and no discussion of contract terms.
SeedX failed to show a contract in place between itself and Kanye 2020, the appeals court added.
But SeedX’s case against the Lincoln defendants is still ongoing, though the Wyoming federal court sent it to an Arizona federal court for jurisdictional reasons.
That part of the lawsuit “appear(s) to have merit,” Johnson had observed in his April order. So he kept it alive and ahead of legal deadlines that may have killed it by transferring rather than dismissing it on jurisdictional grounds.
The 10th Circuit declined to review whether transferring that case was the right move.
Clair McFarland can be reached at clair@cowboystatedaily.com.
