Judge says Caitlyn Jenner’s JENNER memecoin is not a security in class action lawsuit

A California judge ruled that a memecoin launched by media personality and retired Olympian Caitlyn Jenner is not a security despite claims in a class action lawsuit. 

The plaintiff, Lee Greenfield, said he lost more than $40,000 investing in $JENNER in a complaint that argued the memecoin launch constituted a sale of unregistered securities. Greenfield said that Jenner used her status as a celebrity to “hype the token and suggested that her promotion efforts would cause its value to rise.”

An initial complaint was filed at the end of 2024 against Jenner and her manager, Sophia Hutchins. Hutchins died in July 2025. In the most recent complaint from May 2025, the lead plaintiff, UK citizen Greenfield, said he first bought $JENNER on the Solana blockchain in May 2024 and then on the Ethereum blockchain a few days later. 

The complaint cited X posts from Jenner, including one featuring “an AI-generated image of Jenner in a ‘JENNER ETH’ T-shirt, carrying an American flag through a crowd in which one member holds up a sign reading, ‘LETS MAKE EVERYONE RICH!’),” according to the order filed on Thursday. 

Meanwhile, the defendants pushed back and said the Ethereum-based $JENNER token was not a security and that Hutchins was “not a statutory seller.” 

Throughout the ruling, U.S. District Judge Stanley Blumenfeld, Jr., cited the Howey Test — a 1946 Supreme Court Case that defines sales of securities as “investment contracts” — to seemingly agree with the defendants. An investment contract exists when there is the investment of money in a common enterprise with a reasonable expectation of profits to be derived from the efforts of others, according to the Securities and Exchange Commission.

The order says that the defendants are not arguing against the first prong of the test that Greenfield invested money to buy $JENNER, but says the other two prongs fail. Judge Blumenfeld says there is no common enterprise.

“Taken together, the allegations in the SAC [second amended complaint] do not plausibly allege that the investors agreed to split profits and losses or that they pooled their resources to create capital for investment in anything other than the coin itself, including through the alleged transaction tax, buybacks, or marketing efforts,” the judge said. “Greenfield therefore has not plausibly alleged a common enterprise based on horizontal commonality.”

“Because Greenfield does not plausibly allege either horizontal or vertical commonality, he has not alleged the existence of a common enterprise,” Judge Blumenfeld added. “The Court therefore need not determine whether he has plausibly alleged the third prong of the Howey test—whether investors expected profits solely from Jenner’s efforts.”

The other non-federal claims can be resolved in state court, the judge said.

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