Inside the bizarre 2-decade battle by Pamela Anderson's hat designer to prove she created Scrat from 'Ice Age'

Paired with a white bustier and blue eyeshadow, Anderson's hat has become an iconic moment in red-carpet fashion. Kim Kardashian wore one when she dressed up as Anderson for Halloween in 2018. When Tom Ford debuted a similar hat in his 2019 collection, W magazine hired Anderson to model it.

For Ivy Silberstein, a hat designer who goes by the name Ivy Supersonic, it was a proud moment. But it was supposed to be only a footnote in her quest to be a major player in the entertainment industry.

As her hat made headlines across the globe, Supersonic was diligently crafting the idea for which she thought she'd be remembered: an animated half-squirrel, half-rat character called Sqrat.

If that name brings back memories of the lovable, acorn-obsessed rodent from the "Ice Age" franchise, you're not alone. One key difference: In the movies, it's spelled "Scrat," with a C.

Supersonic knows all about that Scrat. She's spent more than 20 years trying to prove the makers of the "Ice Age" movies stole the idea for the character from her.

Since the early 2000s, Supersonic, 54, has battled in court and held attention-grabbing protests to prove she came up with one of the most recognizable animated characters of the past two decades. In 2020, it appeared she'd finally won when the studio behind "Ice Age" dropped its challenge to the trademark for "Sqrat" with a Q — which meant she had the exclusive right to sell merchandise with the Sqrat branding.

Now, Disney+ is set to release "Ice Age: Scrat Tales," a series starring the character — but Supersonic said she wasn't seeing a dime of the profits. She's heading back to court once again to fight for her dream.

"God gives gifts," Supersonic told Insider in her thick Long Island accent during a phone call last month. "Some sing. Some dance. God gave me Sqrat."

Birthing the idea of 'the next Mickey Mouse'

"It ran in front of me," Supersonic said. "It was a squirrel, but it looked like a rat. It was a Sqrat!"

Instantly, Supersonic realized she might be onto something, she said. Her mind began to race: an animated character, part rat and part squirrel, whose wacky adventures would entertain and delight children.

"It's a $100 million idea," she thought. "I've got the next Mickey Mouse."

At the time, Supersonic was involved in several unconventional ventures that gained her entry to the world of celebrity. In addition to her line of feathered hats, she put on events with female models clad in nothing but body paint and did publicity for parties thrown for stars, including Howard Stern and Wyclef Jean.

But Sqrat was different, she said. This was her way into the mainstream.

Supersonic acted fast. On June 1, 1999, less than a month after her encounter in the park, she hired a lawyer and filed an intent-to-use trademark application for Sqrat. She had a friend create an initial concept sketch for the character, which she emblazoned on a banner.

On June 11, 1999, Supersonic and her body-painting models headed to Jones Beach, on the outskirts of Long Island, for a backstage gig at K-Rock radio's annual Dysfunctional Family Picnic concert.

As the headliner Limp Bizkit closed out the night with the group's chart-topping rendition of George Michael's "Faith," Supersonic's body-painted models took the stage. Behind them, the banner unfurled, revealing a 5-foot-tall furry rodent with big buck teeth and a fluffy tail. Underneath was a URL: www.sqrat.com.

The lawyer's daughter who became a New York City club fixture

Born in Brooklyn and raised on Long Island, she said her dogged work ethic came from her father, Jerome Silberstein, a renowned medical-malpractice trial attorney. According to Supersonic, there was a 10-year period in which her dad never lost a case.

In her early 20s, Supersonic devoured Tony Robbins' self-help books, which gave her the confidence to follow her entrepreneurial dreams. At 23 she started her own denim line, I.B.I.V, but it didn't take off. She shifted to hats after graduating from the Fashion Institute of Technology at 27.

Drawn to New York City's nightlife, Supersonic became a fixture in the club scene through the 1990s.

"I was this girl that anybody who came to New York — rock star, anybody — everybody called me to know what was going on," Supersonic said. "I was that girl."

That's how she began building her Rolodex of influential people. Celebrities, musicians, Hollywood players — no one could resist Supersonic's bubbly personality, big smile, and striking good looks.

"She reminds me of a cartoon character herself," Iris Cole-Hayworth, who used to hang out with Supersonic, told Insider. "There's no one like her. She really is a force of nature."

The pink hat she made for Anderson elevated Supersonic's status. Suddenly, she was featured on MTV and VH1, pinballing between coasts to make hats for everyone from Snoop Dogg to Enrique Iglesias. And everywhere she went, from Los Angeles' Playboy Mansion to the trendy New York City nightclub The Tunnel, Supersonic made her pitch for Sqrat.

If you encountered Supersonic in 1999 and 2000, you were likely to walk away with stickers, T-shirts, or even a press release about the character. In February 2000, CNN even interviewed Supersonic about whether a squirrel-rat hybrid could really exist and prominently featured the Sqrat concept sketch made by her friend.

"I remember the looks on people's faces when she would talk to them about Sqrat," Cole-Hayworth said. "Huge smile, kind of dumbfounded — they just couldn't believe she was so passionate about this."

Cole-Hayworth said Supersonic never drank or did drugs at parties because she didn't want it to take away from her focus on pitching Sqrat.

Supersonic's hustle led to legitimate interest. In early 2000, the boxing promoter-film producer Lou DiBella, whom Supersonic had met at clubs, and the TV director Michael Simon commissioned a pilot script for a Sqrat animated series from Norah Lally, a writer for MTV's then popular "Celebrity Deathmatch." Supersonic even got Tommy Lee to agree to be the voice of Sqrat, according to 2003 court documents obtained by Insider.

But when it came time for the network to negotiate terms with Supersonic's lawyer — her father — the project fell apart. DiBella and Simon told Insider they couldn't come to an agreement and decided to walk away. (Silberstein died in 2005.)

From there, Supersonic entered into talks to make a Sqrat web series for Urban Box Office Network, a site that specialized in hip-hop and Latino entertainment in the early 2000s. But when the network offered $50,000, instead of the seven figures she believed the character was worth, she passed.

Still searching for a deal worthy of a character she believed was the next Mickey Mouse, Supersonic continued to work her connections. Then in November 2001, a friend of Supersonic's in LA called with shocking news: A mischievous rodent named Scrat was a major character in an upcoming Fox animated movie called "Ice Age." The friend told Supersonic she should get a lawyer.

"I went to Los Angeles in 2000 with a suitcase full of Sqrat scripts," Supersonic said. "Now, I'm running all over town trying to figure out who stole my idea."

On February 13, 2002, a month before "Ice Age" debuted in theaters, Supersonic went to court against Fox, alleging copyright infringement.

The 'Ice Age' Scrat's creation story is filled with inconsistencies

"To me, it was fucked up," Supersonic said of the experience.

"Ice Age" was the first feature film from Blue Sky Studios, a computer-animation studio based in White Plains, New York. In the late '90s, Blue Sky was bought by Fox, which asked it to run with a project it already had in development: an animated comedy about a group of prehistoric animals who set out to return a lost human baby to its family.

With stars like Ray Romano, John Leguizamo, and Denis Leary lending their voices, "Ice Age" went on to become the highest-grossing animated film of 2002, spawning four theatrical sequels.

According to 2003 court documents obtained by Insider, the "Ice Age" director and Blue Sky cofounder Chris Wedge said Scrat was created after principal production when the team was struggling to figure out how to open the movie.

"Originally, Scrat died at the end of the opening sequence, when a mammoth foot stepped on it," Wedge, who also voiced Scrat in the movies, said. "Fox, however, used that opening sequence in a teaser trailer, and it got such positive feedback from the theaters that Fox asked us to put more Scrat in the movie."

Wedge did not respond to a request for comment.

The character's acorn-seeking antics ended up bookending the movie, and Scrat went on to appear in all four theatrically released "Ice Age" sequels, as well as a series of short films, two of which were nominated for Academy Awards for best animated short film. Perhaps the franchise's most recognizable character, Scrat has been featured in tie-in TV specials, video games, and merchandise.

Yet the stories around Scrat's creation are inconsistent.

In the 2003 court documents, Wedge said the original Scrat character drawing was created by the illustrator Peter de Sève and that the Blue Sky Studios model maker John Dodelson came up with the name "Scrat" in late 1999, while crafting a clay model of the rodent.

"While I'm working on the character, to me, it looked like a squirrel and a rat, so the natural thing was to put the two words together," Dodelson told Insider this month. "It's probably something that more than a few people have thought of. It's not an original concept."

But Dodelson's and Wedge's accounts conflict with a 2009 interview with the "Ice Age" screenwriter Michael J. Wilson, who said that his daughter Flora, 3 at the time, created Scrat.

"She came up with a character in 'Ice Age' that is a combination of a squirrel and a rat. She called him Scrat," Wilson said. "'What does Scrat want?' I asked Flora. 'Dad. Hello? Scrat wants the acorn.' Wow! So simple."

Insider contacted Wilson and de Sève for comment but didn't get a response.

One key difference between the two cartoon rodents is that Supersonic's is "Sqrat" with a Q, while Blue Sky's is "Scrat" with a C. Dodelson confirmed to Insider that his original spelling was Sqrat with a Q, which was apparent in internal Blue Sky emails included in the lawsuit, obtained by Insider.

In one email, a technical director made the case for keeping the "Q" by noting it was all over the computer files for the character animation.

"Since all the scripts that make this animal are with the prefix sqrat, and all the directories for this animal are started with sqrat, and all the maps of this guy are started with sqrat, I think it's going to stay that way," the email said.

Supersonic and Fox battle over ownership of clip art

"The character Scrat as it appears in 'Ice Age' used Ivy Silberstein's Sqrat as its foundation, and was not, in my opinion, independently created by Fox," Gerberg said at the time, according to court documents. He noted the similarities in both characters' "long snouts," "jutting front teeth," and "protruding eyes."

"It is obvious to me, and it is my expert opinion, that Fox copied from Silberstein's drawing, reproduced the fundamental character that she created, and made only minor variations to it in order to come up with Fox's Scrat," Gerberg added.

Insider reached out to Gerberg for comment but didn't get a response.

Unfortunately for Supersonic, there was another problem: Unbeknownst to her, the Sqrat concept drawing her friend Peter Levine had made for the Jones Beach banner in 1999 was slightly altered clip art.

To keep his daughter's case alive, Jerome Silberstein tracked down the artist who'd made the original piece of clip art and struck a deal that made Supersonic its owner. But Fox was not to be outdone. According to court documents, its lawyers made their own deal with the company that had released the clip art, gaining a retroactive license dated earlier than the deal Supersonic had made with the artist.

Fox also tried to buy out Levine, Supersonic's friend who made the banner. In court documents, Levine said Fox lawyers offered him and his business partner "a lot of money" if they would give their rights to the clip art over to the studio. They passed on the offer. (Disney, which owns Fox, declined to comment for this story.)

Ultimately, an arbitrator ruled that ownership of the clip-art Sqrat would be split 50-50 between Supersonic and Fox. But the copyright to the character remained in play.

In the copyright suit, Fox never contested the allegation that Supersonic's Sqrat was the basis for the "Ice Age" Scrat. But a year later, when the copyright case came to a close, none of that mattered.

In a summary judgment of the case, Judge Richard J. Holwell concluded that Fox's Scrat "evolved and developed in an incremental fashion" that wasn't influenced by Supersonic's Sqrat.

He granted Fox the copyright to Scrat with a C and Supersonic the copyright to Sqrat with a Q. Neither could infringe on the other, which meant that Supersonic would see no upside from the copyright to the "Ice Age" character.

"I don't even know what the fuck this means," Supersonic said, reacting to the decision. "It still feels shitty to me."

Supersonic rented a plane to fly a topless photo of herself over the premiere of the 'Ice Age' sequel

(A quick refresher: Copyright owners get control over what others can do with their protected creative works, while trademark owners can protect the association between their trademarks and the things they sell. A "trademark" can be almost anything that consumers identify with a seller, usually a name or a logo. For example, if someone started producing a soda called "Koka-Kola," Coca-Cola would be able to exercise its trademark rights to get the name changed.)

The Scrat-Sqrat trademark battle took years, filled with countersuits and appeals. As she waited out Fox's lawyers, Supersonic decided to make her case in the court of public opinion.

In the early 2000s, Supersonic set out on a series of antics to protest "Ice Age." She said she camped out in front of the Fifth Avenue apartment of Rupert Murdoch, then Fox's chairman. She took out full-page ads in trade magazines. She got "Justice" tattooed across her chest, then took a picture of herself topless with her arms covering her breasts, put it on a 100-foot banner, and hired a plane to fly it over the 2006 red-carpet premiere of "Ice Age 2: The Meltdown."

Unfortunately, Supersonic's 2000-era insistence on getting a seven-figure payout for Sqrat was hurting her in court. Not going forward on either Sqrat project made it harder to prove she was planning to use the trademark commercially, she said.

"We had these documents of contracts, but what hurt us in the courtroom was we didn't land any of those deals," she said. "But I had just been trying to get the best deal."

Supersonic's quest for "justice" was beginning to affect her financially. She'd hired lawyers to represent her after her father's death, but in 2008, she had to represent herself at a court date because she'd run out of money.

Her efforts did pay off in one way: Try as it might, Fox couldn't get Scrat with a C trademarked. In 2009, seven years after the original "Ice Age" opened, the studio applied and was rejected. It tried again in 2015 — then again in 2018. In all, the studio attempted to trademark the name 26 times between 2009 and 2018 but was never successful, according to records from the US Patent and Trademark Office.

A victory turns into more frustration

A year after buying Fox, Disney settled with Supersonic, walking away from its challenge to her trademark of Sqrat with a Q. While Supersonic signed an agreement not to disclose the details of the settlement, she said she didn't receive any monetary compensation. She has since made some money selling Sqrat T-shirts and merchandise through pop-up shops, though she declined to share how much.

What Supersonic did receive was peace of mind. When Disney+ released the sixth "Ice Age" film, "The Ice Age Adventures of Buck Wild," in January, Scrat was the only major franchise character not to appear.

"I WON!" Supersonic proclaimed in a tweet.

But the celebration didn't last long. In February, Disney+ announced the release of the "Scrat Tales" series, which is set to premiere on April 13.

Supersonic's current lawyer, Neil Burstein, said he'd received no notification about the project. He said his client believes that the new show infringes on the Sqrat trademark she won from Disney. A person with knowledge of the situation at Disney told Insider that Fox, now called 20th Century Studios, is confident in its rights to use the Scrat character now and in the future.

"I am looking into protecting Ivy's IP and expect to prevail," Burstein told Insider this month.

After all, Supersonic has the trademark for Sqrat — so shouldn't it protect her for "Scrat," its phonetic equivalent? Not necessarily.

"This is very much in Fox's favor," Michael Donaldson, a veteran entertainment lawyer at Donaldson Callif Perez, told Insider. "By law, you can use somebody's name or trademark in a title of a film or TV series if it has some relationship to the creative content of the new work."

Donaldson cited 1989's landmark Rogers v. Grimaldi ruling, in which Ginger Rogers sued the producer of the Federico Fellini film "Ginger and Fred," whose characters emulated her famous 1930s dances with Fred Astaire. Now known as the "Rogers test," the ruling allows trademarked work to be used in a title.

"It's hard for me to come up with a strong argument that Fox can't do that," Donaldson said.

'Someone stole this from Ivy'

DiBella put it more bluntly: "Someone stole this from Ivy. She got fucked."

Supersonic said the recent announcement of "Scrat Tales" was painful.

"Disney has so much money, so many lawyers. They can do anything they want to anybody," she said. "And I'm just one person."

But despite the legal hurdles, she refuses to give in. Asked why she continued to fight, even though the odds were stacked against her, Supersonic simply said, "My idea was stolen."

When Supersonic gets discouraged, she thinks back to her youth on Long Island, reading those Tony Robbins self-help books, she said.

"All these motivational speakers, they all say, 'I knocked on 1,000 doors with my idea, and they all slammed in my face. No one would help me. But it was that 1,001 that opened.'" she said. "So I learned early on that you keep going — you never take no for an answer."