A Cat With an Underbite Won $710,001 in Federal Court

How it began

Tardar Sauce was born on 4 April 2012 in Morristown, Arizona, in the household of Tabatha Bundesen. She had feline dwarfism and an underbite, a combination that gave her a permanently downturned mouth. On 22 September 2012 Bundesen's brother Bryan posted a photograph of her to Reddit. Within forty-eight hours it was everywhere, and within a fortnight the family had a lawyer.

That last detail is what separates this story from every other viral animal. The people around Grumpy Cat treated the image as an asset from the first week: they registered trademarks, incorporated Grumpy Cat Limited, licensed the likeness carefully and sued when a licensee exceeded its terms. In January 2018 that decision produced a federal jury verdict of $710,001 — the extra dollar being a nominal award on one of the claims.

Chronology of the record

1. 4 April 2012

   Tardar Sauce is born in Morristown, Arizona. Her expression is the result of feline dwarfism and an underbite, both documented by her veterinarian.

2. 22 September 2012

   Bryan Bundesen posts a photograph of her to Reddit. It reaches the front page the same day.

3. 2013

   Grumpy Cat Limited is formed and begins registering trademarks. The cat appears at SXSW in Austin in March.

4. 2013

   A licensing agreement is signed with Grenade Beverage LLC covering an iced-coffee product marketed as the Grumppuccino.

5. 2015

   A wax figure of Grumpy Cat is unveiled at Madame Tussauds in San Francisco.

6. December 2015

   Grumpy Cat Limited sues Grenade Beverage in federal court in California, alleging use of the likeness beyond the licensed product. The defendant counterclaims.

7. January 2018

   A jury in the Central District of California awards Grumpy Cat Limited $710,001 for copyright and trademark infringement.

8. 14 May 2019

   Grumpy Cat dies at the age of seven from complications of a urinary tract infection. Her owners announce the death publicly three days later.

What the sources support

• The cat's registered name was Tardar Sauce; the expression was a medical feature, not a trained pose or a digital edit.
• The image went viral after a Reddit post on 22 September 2012 — a date preserved in the site's own public record.
• Grumpy Cat Limited held registered US trademarks and pursued them in federal court.
• A jury awarded $710,001 in January 2018 in the Central District of California against Grenade Beverage LLC.
• The cat died on 14 May 2019, aged seven, from complications of a urinary tract infection.

What was reported and denied

The most-repeated claim about Grumpy Cat is that she earned around one hundred million dollars. That figure originated in a British newspaper report in 2014 and was publicly rejected by Tabatha Bundesen, who called it wildly inaccurate. No filing, tax record or company account has ever supported it, and the family never published one. We do not print it as a figure; we print it as a claim that the owner denied.

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The other persistent claim — that the cat was ill-treated or overworked — was denied consistently by the owners, who said appearances were capped at a small number of hours and that the cat travelled with a handler. No welfare authority ever made a finding against them. There is no evidence either way beyond the parties' own statements, which is exactly how we label it.

Why this is the best-documented meme of the era

Almost every famous internet image has a rights problem. The photographer is unknown, the subject never consented, the copyright sits with someone who never monetised it, and the picture circulates for a decade in a legal fog — which is why so few of them can be published legitimately even now.

Grumpy Cat is the exception. Ownership was established within weeks, the trademarks are searchable in the USPTO database, the litigation is on the federal docket, and the photographs used on this page are separate works released by their own photographers under Creative Commons licences. It is possible to tell this story entirely from primary documents, which cannot be said of most things the internet made famous in 2012.

What followed

The Bundesen family retired the commercial operation after the cat's death and has continued to run the accounts as an archive rather than a business. The verdict remains one of the very few court decisions to place a monetary value on a meme, and it is cited in intellectual-property teaching material for precisely that reason.

Tardar Sauce lived seven years, travelled with a handler, sat through a book tour and a wax unveiling, and generated a body of paperwork more complete than that of most human celebrities of the same decade. The expression that made all of it possible was, from the beginning, a dental condition.