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Justin Timberlake added to soft drink false advertising lawsuit

By Chris Cooke | Published on Friday 4 May 2018

Remember how Justin Timberlake was going to restore MySpace to its former glory? That was fun, wasn’t it? Although that business venture didn’t get the pop star listed on any false advertising class action lawsuits. So, it could have been funner.

Having famously rescued MySpace, Timberlake entered into another business venture two years ago by investing in an American soft drinks company called Bai Brands and taking the nonsense job title of Chief Flavor Officer at the business. His involvement in the drinks company continues, he appearing in an advert for the brand just this week.

More fun than that, last month he was added as a defendant in a long-running legal action which accuses Bai of false advertising. Pursued by a California-based man called Kevin Branca, the lawsuit alleges that Bai promotes its drinks as being “all-natural” when in fact they contain artificial flavours.

According to gossip website The Blast, the lawsuit says Bai’s products contain a synthetic chemical flavouring compound “identified as ‘malic acid’, which is an inexpensive synthetic chemical used in processed food products to make the taste like tangy fresh fruit”.

Branca has justified adding Timberlake as a defendant on the lawsuit – alongside the business itself, its founder and parent company the Dr Pepper Snapple Group – because the musician “knowingly entered into a single agreement and/or multiple agreements to commit fraud and other unlawful acts by agreeing to promote artificially flavoured beverage products as if they were solely naturally flavoured without synthetic chemical ingredients”.

Referencing an earlier ad for the drinks company in which Timberlake appeared, the lawsuit goes on: “Timberlake aided this scheme by agreeing to promote the products and their ingredients on a nationally aired commercial advertisement during the 2017 Super Bowl, which reached millions of consumers, which was an essential tool to carry out the fraudulent sales and marketing of the Bai products”.

You know, it’s just as well Timberlake didn’t successfully restore MySpace to its former glory. There’d have probably been some kind of embarrassing user-data scandal down the line, resulting in him also being ordered to answer stern questions in US Congress alongside Mark Zuckerberg. And given that half of those Congressmen’s entire knowledge of Facebook seemed to come from ‘The Social Network’ movie, that would have confused everyone.