• Oprah Winfrey’s company sued “Oprahdemics” podcast creators over flash allegations.
• The company seeks the creators to change the name.
• Oprah has a net worth of $2.5 billion.

The company of Oprah Winfrey has launched a lawsuit against the creators of the “Oprahdemics” podcast, alleging that the programme misleads listeners into believing that she funded or endorsed it.

In a complaint filed late Tuesday night in Manhattan federal court, Winfrey’s Harpo Inc. stated that it is neither seeking profits or damages from “Oprahdemics” founders Kellie Carter Jackson and Leah Wright Rigueur, nor is it attempting to halt the podcast.

Instead, it seeks a name change, arguing that the podcast and related live events weaken Harpo’s “Oprah” and “O” trademarks and improperly profit on the reputation Winfrey has spent decades cultivating.

Harpo, which is Oprah spelled backwards, stated that simply being connected with the “Oprah” brand might result in a “exponential” increase in sales, often known as “The Oprah Effect” or “The O Factor.”

The “Oprahdemics” website portrays Jackson and Rigueur as historians and friends who analyse historic episodes of Winfrey’s talk show and evaluate the “Queen of Talk’s” cultural impact.

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Co-producer Jody Avirgan, whose firm Roulette Productions is also a defendant, described “Oprahdemics” as a “journalistic investigation by history professors and sincere, longtime supporters of Oprah Winfrey” in a statement.

He said Roulette “has been engaged with the team at Harpo for some time–while genuinely surprised by this, we hope to resolve it.”

In an interview with NPR in April, Rigueur referred to Winfrey as an institution.

“This is a woman, a Black woman, who has dominated multiple spaces and arenas” since the 1980s, she said. “I say that in a way that doesn’t absolve her of … constructive criticism or feedback or anything like that, but instead as recognition of … the institution of Oprah Winfrey and the Oprah Winfrey brand.”

Winfrey, 68, is an actress and philanthropist who built a media and economic empire from her Chicago talk show. She has a net worth of $2.5 billion, per Forbes magazine.

Case number 22-06787 is Harpo Inc v. Jackson et al. in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York.

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