Newark Mayor Cory Booker and rapper Snoop Lion are mentioned in a federal suit over MTV’s campaign to turn illegal guns into jewelry.
Booker and Snoop’s names pop up in the suit from activist jewelry line Fonderie 47’s Peter Thum against Jessica Mindich, founder of Jewelry for a Cause. Thum claims he shared ideas with Mindich about his line — which turns AK-47 assault rifles into jewelry in Africa, with each bauble engraved with the melted gun’s serial number — and that Mindich, who had her own jewelry line, “saw a chance to profit.”
The suit says Thum and Mindich both attended the annual The Weekend to be Named Later conference in 2011, and claims during a “small group discussion” with Booker present, Thum “disclosed detailed information about [his gun] re-purposing program . . . not publicly available.”
Thum’s suit says the talk was confidential because of the conference’s privacy policy, and Mindich “approached Thum after the session about . . . working with [Booker]” on a gun re-purposing program in Newark. But “Thum advised [her] he did not intend to work with Booker or her, and also made it clear that he did not consent to her exploiting his ideas.”
Mindich went ahead with the Newark plan anyway, the lawsuit alleges, and after Thum complained to conference organizers, Mindich agreed to abandon it and said “the seed” of the idea came from Thum’s talk.
But she continued “working on a repurposing program in Newark . . . in relative secret,” the suit says, and then launched her own Caliber Collection — which became a success and brought MTV and Snoop in to promote it this month.
“In the charity world, it is crucial to be first,” Thum’s lawyer Judd Burstein told The Post’s Richard Johnson. “That’s who people want to work with, the person who had the idea, the person who came up with the concept.” Thum intends to donate any award to charity.
A rep for Mindich said, “We believe that the complaint is without merit, and we will defend it vigorously.”