The Florida Joker, like seemingly everyone else in his state, has seen the Grand Theft Auto VI trailer that dropped last week. Now he wants to get paid.
Lawrence Patrick Sullivan, a South Florida tattoo model whose mugshot went viral for resembling a Batman villain, has posted several TikToks responding to the new GTA trailer from Rockstar Games.
The 90-second trailer is packed with Florida Man-inspired imagery pulled directly from the state’s splashiest headlines (someone even made a compilation comparing frames directly to real news stories).
Shortly after the one-minute mark of the trailer, there’s a mugshot of a guy with dyed hair and face tats that Sullivan found familiar.
“We gotta talk, GTA” Sullivan said in one of his TikToks. “Or if not, you gotta give me like a (million) or two.”
The Florida Joker, sometimes referred to as the Miami Joker, entered our collective consciousness after being arrested on May 23, 2017, in West Kendall. Miami-Dade police accused him of aiming a gun at passing vehicles. The Miami Herald reported that Sullivan admitted to having a loaded gun in his pocket, but no concealed weapons permit.
“It’s expensive,” Sullivan had explained.
Then, his mug shot – featuring a shock of green hair and colorful tattoos that loosely resemble Heath Ledger’s portrayal of the Joker — spread across the Internet.
In 2018, Sullivan was arrested at a Pinellas County home on the 200 block of Mirror Lake Drive North on a charge of violating his probation. He told WFLA-Ch. 8 it was because he missed several court-ordered appointments.
“My mom is 70 years old and she has multiple sclerosis, so I really don’t work and my dad is 70 years old, so it’s hard for me to get money to pay for the classes and get an Uber over there. So I didn’t have a ride or money at the time,” Sullivan said in an interview from the Pinellas County Jail.
In that WFLA interview, he shared that the Joker character reminds him of a rose. His tattoos, which helped him earn money through social media promotions, represent rebirth. Sullivan has been through many tragedies, from a breakup with his fiance to the death of a friend in Orlando.
“Reborn, re-death type of stuff. That old Lawrence you saw with the plain face, he’s dead,” he said. “This is the new Lawrence slash Joker.”
Sullivan is not the first person to demand money after recognizing themselves in a GTA game. Business Insider reported that Lindsay Lohan sued Rockstar Games in 2014 after noticing a resemblance to herself in the character Lacey Jones. Her suit was dismissed by the New York Supreme Court in 2016, since Rockstar Games “never referred to Lohan by name or used her actual name in the video game, never used Lohan herself as an actor for the video game, and never used a photograph of Lohan.”
“Further, Lohan’s claim that her image was used in advertising materials for the video game should also be dismissed,” the court said. “The images are not of Lohan herself, but merely the avatar in the game that Lohan claims is a depiction of her.”
This has not stopped Sullivan from seeking justice.
“Florida Joker ain’t having that,” Sullivan said in one of his TikToks. “Y’all took my likeness. Y’all took my life.”
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