The Seinfeld Cookbook Lawsuit: What Came First

Missy Chase Lapine, The Sneaky Chef author has been more than just a little irritated with the Seinfeld household.  At about the same time she published her book, The Sneaky Chef, Jessica Seinfeld published her book Deceptively Delicious.  The contention– Lapine believes that Seinfeld’s book is too close to her own and is not thrilled with the husband’s antics on late-night talk shows.

From Natalie Finn on E! Online:

Lawyers for the former sitcom star have asked that a defamation lawsuit brought against him by a steamed cookbook author be tossed out on First Amendment grounds, arguing that any statements she perceived to be derogatory were made while he was in comedian mode.

“Nobody who was listening to Jerry Seinfeld thought he was doing anything but making very funny jokes,” attorney Orin Snyder told E! News Monday. “Nobody believed him to be stating facts. Everyone understood him to be doing what he has done so well for so many years, which was telling jokes and entertaining. So the claim against him is frivolous and we have asked the court to dismiss it too.”

Missy Chase Lapine, author of The Sneaky Chef: Simple Strategies for Hiding Healthy Foods in Kids’ Favorite Meals, has accused Jessica Seinfeld of swiping her methods for getting kids to eat vegetables and her funny hubby of slandering her during an appearance on The Late Show with David Letterman in October.

Noting that the plaintiff was accusing his wife of committing “vegetable plagiarism” in her book Deceptively Delicious: Simple Secrets to Get Your Kids Eating Good Food, Seinfeld told Letterman that Lapine being a “three-name woman” worried him.

“If you read history, many of the three-name people do become assassins. Mark David Chapman and, you know, James Earl Ray. So, that’s my concern.”

None of which Lapine took lightly when she added a defamation charge to the copyright-and-trademark-infringement lawsuit she filed against the Seinfelds in January (after Jerry had made those comments).

But while she referred to Seinfeld as a comedian in her original complaint, in a revised suit filed several weeks Lapine stated: “Jerry Seinfeld is an enormously wealthy and well-known actor.”

Seinfeld’s lawyers beg to differ, considering he was expected to be funny when he was a guest on the Late Show.

“No reasonable viewer could have thought that Seinfeld really meant that Lapine…might become an ‘assassin’ simply because she has three names,” state court documents filed Tuesday in response to Lapine’s suit.

In a separate filing arguing the validity of Lapine’s copyright suit, Mrs. Seinfeld’s camp argued that the hide-vegetables-in-food idea was hardly invented by Lapine and that the two books have nary a recipe in common.

“This is a bogus lawsuit,” Snyder said. “It is absurd that this plaintiff would try to take credit for the idea of hiding healthy food in kids’ meals. People have been using this obvious cooking technique in their kitchens for generations. Not surprisingly, it is easy to find countless other cookbooks and articles using this age-old idea that were written decades before this plaintiff claims to have invented it.”

I don’t believe that any one’s cookbook was plagiarised.  This is an idea that has been around for a while…maybe not prune laced brownies, but pureeing and sneaking veggies in kids foods is a maneuver many mothers have used.  None of them were just smart enough to develop recipes and put them in a cookbook. 

For sake of argument, I suppose that some one along the line might have seen this book in development and approached Jessica Seinfeld, but I have a hard time believing this theory just by looking at publishing dates.  Sneaky Chef was published in April of 2007 and Deceptively Delicious was published in October of that same year.  It would have been an impossible feat.  I have a sister who writes jewelry how-to books and I know the time involved with conception, development, photos, and writing.  This is not something that takes just a few months.

I think what probably got to Lapine was the publicity machine behind the cookbook.  Due to being the wife of Jerry Seinfeld and her celebrity connection, Jessica Seinfeld was able to get people like Joy Bauer from the Today Show and Bob Greene from Oprah to rave about her cookbook.  She also was fortunate enough to get a show dedicated to her cookbook endeavor.  Where Lapine has gone wrong is not taking advantage of the free publicity ride.  I know that after the Oprah show there were no more Deceptively Delicious cookbooks available in the stores or even on Amazon.  They ended up promoting Lapine’s cookbook to purchase while you waited.  Sadly, I think Lapine fueled this fire and in the end will end up the loser.  In the big picture, Lapine is a professional who’s life hasn’t stopped with one cookbook.  She lectures, has written another cookbook and has developed her career path.  Jessica Seinfeld is a stay-at-home mom who wrote one cookbook…the 15 minutes are up.

On a personal note I have both cookbooks and like them both.  Some of Lapine’s recipes are better and some of Seinfeld’s are.  I prefer the type of information in The Sneaky Chef, but Deceptively Delicious is a better layed-out cookbook.  I have experimented with them both, have made some of my own changes and recommend that if you are interested in attempting this with your family, they are both useful additions to your cookbook shelf.