Kim Kardashian giver afkald på $167.000, når New York mand dropper sin appel over en dødsrække instagram mix- up

The lawsuit that started with the wrong face on Kim Kardashian’s Instagram is over, and the New York man who filed it will not have to write her a six-figure check. In late July 2026, after a Los Angeles judge had already thrown the case out and ordered Ivan A. Cantu to pay roughly $167,000 in attorneys’ fees, Kardashian’s lawyers told the court she would waive the award. Cantu dropped his appeal and dismissed the action with prejudice.

That ending is the part the first wave of headlines missed. For more than a year the story was treated as a celebrity gaffe that might cost a billionaire her reputation. It became a case study in California’s anti-SLAPP statute: a plaintiff who sued over a short-lived post about a matter of public concern lost the case, got billed for the defense, and then needed the defendant to let him off the hook so the fight would actually end.

The post, der navngav den forkerte Ivan Cantu

On February 26, 2024, Kardashian used her Instagram account, which then reached more than 360 million people, to write about Ivan Cantu, a Texas death-row prisoner whose execution was two days away. The photograph she used was not the condemned man. It was Ivan A. Cantu, a Westchester County, New York project manager who shares the name and nothing else about the crime. Reporting later said her team had pulled the New Yorker’s headshot from LinkedIn.

The Texas prisoner, Iván Cantu, had been convicted in 2001 of capital murder in the killings of his cousin, James Mosqueda, and Mosqueda’s fiancée, Amy Kitchen. He maintained his innocence for more than two decades. Texas executed him by lethal injection on February 28, 2024. Kardashian’s post was up for a few hours. Her team later called the mix-up “a simple error of using the wrong photo.”

The New York Cantu sued in Los Angeles in February 2025 for slander, libel, false light, intentional infliction of emotional distress, and negligence. He later added a claim for misappropriation of likeness. His complaint called the post “shocking, scandalous, degrading, disgraceful, and/or shameful” and said the association with a condemned killer wrecked his reputation and sent him into treatment. His lawyer, Greg Sobo, said the client was still “working through it.”

Hvordan california 's anti-slapp lov sluttede dragten

Kardashians advokater prøvede ikke sagen, som han sagde, hun sagde om et fotografi. De indgav en anti-SLAPP bevægelse. Californiens lov lader en tiltalt smide en retssag ud, der sigter på beskyttet tale om et offentligt spørgsmål, og det flytter gebyrer til sagsøgeren, hvis forslaget lykkes.

Den 5. november 2025, Los Angeles overlegen domstol dommer Michael lille Dansk tekst foreligger endnu ikke.Han behandlede en stilling om en forestående henrettelse som tale om et spørgsmål af offentlig interesse. Kardashian sagde i en edsvoren erklæring, at hun ikke vidste, at billedet var den forkerte mand, mens det var levende.

Fee-shifting followed. Kardashian’s team asked for about $186,000. Cantu’s lawyers argued a billionaire collecting from a private individual would flatten him. They also asked the judge to deny the fee request while the appeal was pending. In May 2026 Judge Small awarded her $167,475 in fees and $1,062 in costs, trimming items he called excessive, including more than $57,000 her lawyers said they spent preparing the fee motion itself. Cantu had noticed an appeal on December 30, 2025, then spent the first half of 2026 fighting the bill.

Afkaldet, der lukkede sagen

Den 30. og 31. juli 2026, TMZ og De uafhængige Meldte aftalen. En Kardashian advokat sagde, "Dette er en retssag, der aldrig skulle have været indgivet. Retten accepterede og smed det ud og beordrede, at [Ivan Cantu] betale Kims advokathonorar. Kim indvilligede i at give afkald på disse gebyrer, så [Ivan] har afvist sin sag med fordomme".

Med forbehold betyder, at han ikke kan indgive de samme krav igen. Appellen er opgivet. Gebyret er på papir og vil ikke blive opkrævet. For en mand, der sagde, at dommen ville ødelægge ham, det er den eneste ende, der ikke forvandlede en fire-timers Instagram fejl til en konkurs.

Hvad er det egentlig, der er besluttet?

The ruling did not say the New York plaintiff enjoyed being labeled a condemned killer. It said Kardashian’s post sat inside a category of speech California protects, even when the caption is sloppy. That is a narrower holding than either camp advertised. It is not a free pass to defame private people. It is a reminder that suing a celebrity over advocacy content can trigger a fee statute written to deter exactly those suits.

Syracuse University’s Jennifer Grygiel has argued that large accounts carry a duty to check a face before attaching a capital-murder caption. That duty still exists as an ethical matter. After Judge Small’s orders, it is a duty a plaintiff may not be able to enforce in a California courtroom without risking a six-figure invoice.

AEGIS Alliance har set andre offentlige personer lære samme lektie på den hårde måde, når en post forarger fakta, herunder dækning af, hvor hurtigt en viral video kan blive en kriminel sag når folk i det er identificeret. Kardashian blandede sig ikke. Det var et søgeresultat, der knyttede den forkerte civile til en mand Texas var ved at dræbe.

Advokatproblemet retssagen aldrig løst

Kardashian has spent years using that same Instagram account to push clemency campaigns and prison-reform cases. The Cantu post belonged to that project. The Texas prisoner’s supporters wanted attention on a conviction they considered shaky. They got a photo of somebody else, an execution that went forward on schedule, and a two-year civil fight about a New Yorker who never sat on death row.

Fact-checking a face against a Texas Department of Criminal Justice inmate number is not complicated. Skipping that step turned a criminal-justice post into a defamation file, then into an anti-SLAPP seminar, then into a story about whether a billionaire would collect from the man she misidentified. She did not collect. The Texas Ivan Cantu is still dead. The New York Ivan Cantu is out of court.

The incentive the statute creates is the part that will outlast all three of them. Think hard before you sue over a deleted photo, because California will make you pay for the thinking you skipped. Think just as hard before you paste a LinkedIn headshot onto a death-row caption, because 360 million people will see the face you did not check. The law protected the post. It did not make the post careful. Those are different jobs, and only one of them happened in this file.