A few weeks ago WWE released a total of 10 talents including the one and only Chelsea Green. Following her release Chelsea launched a podcast called 50 Shades of Green, but she recently revealed that she was forced to change the name after receiving a cease and desist on May 11th.
The podcast has since been renamed Green With Envy, and on the latest episode Chelsea Green explained that the company behind the 50 Shades of Grey franchise sent her the letter.
“On Tuesday [May 11], I received a surprising email from my lawyer and it read, ‘Chelsea, much to our surprise, we received the attahed cease and desist letter concerning your use of 50 Shades of Green trademark concerning your podcast and merchandise. As you know from this letter, the complaining party is the owner of 50 Shades of Grey, the brand. My gut tells me they are not going away and they certainly had deep pockets to fight this.’ The real fucking 50 Shades of Grey cares about me and this podcast. ‘Christian Grey, what are you going to do, handcuff me? How about we make up a safe word, Mr. Grey. How about cease and fucking desist.'”
The former WWE star went on to explain why she ended up choosing the name, and also why she didn’t think it would be a problem at the end of the day.
“A lot of people were wondering about the name I chose. When I was picking the name, trust me, we went through many different options. We probably went through 20 different options. We did our research on the trademarks and went through Apple podcasts and Spotify to see what our competition looked like for names and we finally ended up on 50 Shades of Green for a few reasons. Hot Mess was extremely oversaturated in the podcast world, as well as trademarks, so that was tough. We moved onto different options with Green in it. The reason we chose 50 Shades of Green wasn’t because there was no podcast with the name. It was the opposite, it’s because there were two or three, which meant if they are coexisting then, in theory, we should be able to coexist with them. The name also wasn’t oversaturated. There were a few podcasts with the name, but nothing to do with wrestling and nobody had the trademarks. We thought it was great. What we didn’t consider was that a massive movie and book franchise would care about a tiny podcast hosted by a wrestler.”
Green then went on to read part of the letter that was sent to her and her lawyer, and she also noted that she changed the name of the podcast because she didn’t feel like it was worth it to fight a “bajillion dollar company.”
H/T Fightful
