Days after the New York Knicks won the NBA championship, a Queens state Senate candidate backed by Mayor Zohran Mamdani slapped the team's trademarked logo on her campaign stickers, and the Knicks' lawyers responded with a cease and desist letter accusing her of trademark infringement and false advertising.
Aber Kawas, a Palestinian-American activist who secured the Democratic nomination for a Queens state Senate seat, promoted the stickers on X with an orange-and-blue logo identical to the Knicks' branding. The only difference: "Knicks" was swapped out for "Kawas" in the same font and colors.
Brian N. Warner, senior vice president and head of legal for Madison Square Garden Sports, sent the letter Friday night. The New York Post first reported its contents, and the letter demands immediate removal of all promotional materials using Knicks intellectual property. Neither Kawas nor her campaign has publicly responded.
Warner's letter lays out a string of legal theories. As the Daily Mail reported, the cease and desist accuses the Kawas campaign of trademark infringement, trademark dilution, false advertising, false association, and unfair competition, a broad legal broadside that covers both consumer confusion and brand damage.
Warner wrote:
"Neither the Knicks nor NBA [Properties] have authorized the Campaign to use Knicks Intellectual Property in any way, including the Unauthorized Advertisements, which are likely to mislead the public into believing that the Campaign is affiliated with or in some way connected with the Knicks."
The letter also stated:
"The Campaign's activities in this regard constitute, among other things, trademark infringement, trademark dilution, false advertising, false association, and unfair competition."
The Knicks and NBA Properties are named as co-holders of the intellectual property at issue. No specific federal or state statutes have been publicly identified from the letter's text, but the legal theories cited track standard Lanham Act claims, the bread and butter of trademark enforcement.
This is not the first time a Mamdani-aligned political figure has run afoul of the Knicks' legal department. Mamdani himself attempted a similar logo stunt during his mayoral campaign launch in October, using the Knicks' branding without permission. He pulled the ad after receiving what has been described as an identical warning from the team.
That Kawas repeated the exact same play, after her own political patron got caught doing it, raises an obvious question about whether anyone in Mamdani's political orbit takes intellectual property law seriously, or whether they view the resulting publicity as worth the legal risk.
The pattern fits a broader picture. Mamdani has drawn fire from party leaders for backing socialist challengers against fellow Democrats, and his political operation has repeatedly courted controversy.
Fox News noted the incident establishes a pattern of unauthorized Knicks logo use among Mamdani-aligned political figures, a pattern that does not reflect well on the discipline or judgment of the movement he leads.
Kawas promoted the doctored stickers on X shortly after the Knicks won the championship, writing:
"Head to the polls and claim your 'I Voted for Aber Kawas' champion sticker. Earn bragging rights, make your friends jealous, and let everyone know that you're part of our movement to fight for the world in the world's borough."
The timing was calculated. Riding the wave of the Knicks' title run in Queens, a borough full of basketball fans, Kawas tried to borrow the team's cultural cachet for her campaign. The Knicks saw it differently: an unauthorized advertisement designed to create false association with the franchise.
This is not Kawas's first brush with public backlash. In 2017, she made remarks at an Asian American Writers' Workshop that drew sharp criticism for their framing of the September 11 attacks. Kawas said:
"The system of capitalism and racism and white supremacy and Islamophobia have all been used to colonize lands, to take resources from other people, so this is a long trajectory and we're just seeing the manifestations of that continuation with 9/11."
She also said that being asked to respond to terrorist attacks was itself objectionable, given historical grievances. "The idea that we have to apologize for a terror attack that a couple people did and then there is no apology for genocides or slavery is something that I find reprehensible," Kawas stated at the same event.
Those comments drew public criticism at the time. That Mamdani chose to back her candidacy anyway fits a pattern. He has previously endorsed a far-left congressional candidate despite deleted anti-American social media posts, suggesting a high tolerance for inflammatory rhetoric among his political allies.
The cease and desist does not exist in a vacuum. Billionaire Knicks owner James Dolan has been locked in a dispute with Mamdani's administration over security measures outside Madison Square Garden. The specifics of that disagreement have not been fully detailed, but the tension between City Hall and the Garden's ownership is real and ongoing.
Whether the Knicks' legal team would have sent the same letter regardless of the political dynamic is unknowable. What is knowable is that a candidate aligned with the mayor who is feuding with the team's owner chose to use that team's logo without asking permission, and got exactly the response any trademark lawyer would predict.
Mamdani's broader political movement has reshaped New York Democratic politics in recent months. His socialist slate swept New York Democratic primaries, ousting incumbents and alarming the party establishment.
That success has come with friction. New York Attorney General Letitia James has blamed Mamdani for deepening the Democratic Party rift in the state, and the Kawas trademark episode adds another item to a growing list of self-inflicted problems for his political operation.
The cease and desist letter demands that the Kawas campaign immediately stop using all Knicks-related branding. Whether the campaign complies, or whether the Knicks escalate to formal legal action, remains an open question. The Daily Mail reached out to Kawas's campaign for comment but received no response.
No lawsuit has been filed as of the letter's issuance. But the legal theories cited, trademark infringement, dilution, false advertising, false association, and unfair competition, give Madison Square Garden Sports a wide menu of options if the campaign ignores the warning.
Kawas secured the Democratic nomination for her Queens state Senate seat on Tuesday. In a deep-blue district, that nomination is typically tantamount to election. The cease and desist does not change the vote count, but it does put a spotlight on the kind of judgment voters can expect from a candidate who could not be bothered to check whether she had the right to use someone else's logo.
When your political mentor already got caught doing the exact same thing and had to pull the ad, repeating the stunt is not bold. It is careless. And in politics, carelessness with other people's property has a way of becoming carelessness with other people's trust.
