A group of 12 plaintiffs filed a lawsuit against two of the creators of HAWK, a memecoin promoted by the so-called Hawk Tuah girl Hailey Welch, in the Eastern District Court of New York this morning. Welch is notably not party to the suit, which lists only her business partners, a launchpad and a Cayman Islands foundation as defendants. Welch became the latest celebrity to launch a Solana memecoin this year — and far from the first to have it blow up on her.
Haliey Welch became the face of the “Hawk Tuah” meme after appearing in a man on the street social media post in Nashville this summer. Improbably, Welch turned her brief clip into a promising influencer career: her Talk Tuah podcast rose to #4 on the charts. Welch also made some crypto ties, attending Bitcoin Nashville and appearing virtually at Korea Blockchain Week. Her X profile picture is a reference to the Mog memecoin.
In late November, a little-known company called overHere announced it had partnered with Welch to launch HAWK, a memecoin that would “redefine the crypto space.” The HAWK token is the only product listed on OverHere’s website. It was founded by Clinton So, a Hong Kong resident who is one of the lawsuit’s defendants.
“We have been extremely transparent about the limited scope and extent of our involvement in the Hawk Tuah token project. We are confident that we have done nothing wrong. As for any litigation, we will let the process play out in court,” said So’s PR firm, which is called Rekt Partners, when reached for comment. The crypto twitter personality Alex Larson Schultz, a Los Angeles resident known online as Doc Hollywood, also helped promote the launch. Some of the HAWK tokens were pre-sold and used to fund the project, the lawsuit says.
The token debuted Dec. 4 and saw its market capitalization shoot up before falling 90% all within a few hours, the suit adds. Welch, So, and Schultz initially defended the failed launch in an X space before largely disappearing from social media for the past two weeks. Welch has not posted or uploaded anywhere online since the incident.
So has already thrown Schultz under the bus for the incident: the overHere X account posted that Schultz/Doc Hollywood had full control of the token and “vanished when things got hard.” OverHere cast Welch and her team as wanting to tap “Web3’s potential” but not having the experience to do so in a savvy way.
Celebrities being taken for a ride by business partners urging them to debut hopeless projects is a time-honored tradition in crypto — just ask Caitlin Jenner. Reading between the lines, that seems to be the case here as well. Welch not being a defendant in the suit is telling in that regard. That story becomes sadder when the celebrity involved is a 22 year-old girl who just became famous overnight.
Max Burwick, whose Burwick Law firm filed the suit alongside Wolf Popper, told me the firm is “engaged in discussions” with Welch’s counsel. He added that the case “underscores a troubling pattern in the crypto space: the targeted exploitation of celebrity and public figures’ names to generate profit, often at the expense of everyday people.”