Netflix has settled a defamation lawsuit brought a Vanity Fair staffer who claimed that she was falsely portrayed in the Shonda Rhimes series \u201cInventing Anna.\u201d<\/p>\n
Rachel DeLoache Williams, a former friend of con artist Anna Sorokin, sued in 2022, claiming that the series gave the false impression that she had abandoned and betrayed Sorokin and depicted her as \u201csnobbish\u201d and \u201cgreedy.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cWilliams and Netflix have resolved the lawsuit,\u201d said a Netflix spokesperson and her attorney, Alexander Rufus-Isaacs, in matching statements on Friday.<\/p>\n
Popular on Variety<\/p>\n
The series was based on a New York magazine article about the fake heiress, who went by Anna Delvey and who served nearly four years in prison for fraud.<\/p>\n
Williams argued that the Netflix series sought to get audiences to root for Sorokin, transforming her from a real-life villain into a more palatable anti-hero. In the process, she alleged that she was turned from a victim into Sorokin\u2019s foil.<\/p>\n
\u201cShonda Rhimes and the others responsible for creating and writing \u2018Inventing Anna\u2019 believed that the Series needed a villain,\u201d Williams\u2019 lawyers wrote in a court filing. \u201cOut of animus toward Williams, they cynically decided to portray Williams as that villain.\u201d<\/p>\n
Netflix tried to throw out the lawsuit in 2024, arguing that the show\u2019s creators had a literary license to give their interpretation of events. A federal judge in Delaware denied that motion.<\/p>\n
Netflix next filed a motion for summary judgment following extensive discovery. That motion was still pending when the case settled.<\/p>\n
Rufus-Isaacs has also filed suits against Netflix on behalf of Nona Gaprindashvili, a Georgian chess champion who alleged she was disparaged in \u201cThe Queen\u2019s Gambit\u201d: and on behalf of Francisco \u201cPipin\u201d Ferreras, who claimed that the film \u201cNo Limit\u201d falsely implied that he had killed his wife.<\/p>\n
Rufus-Isaacs has argued that films based on true events do not enjoy a special exemption from defamation law. While deposing Rhimes in November 2024, he asked her whether she had any rules about fictionalizing the behavior of real people.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe had a position on accurately portraying people based on the facts and their behavior and then fictionalizing moments that made those facts even clearer,\u201d Rhimes said. \u201cI feel like I wanted to capture the essence of what that person was in those moments that we were portraying, and I definitely had a rule that we would never portray a woman in a severely negative way. That\u2019s not what we do. We create three-dimensional people.\u201d<\/p>\n
Source: RhinoEasy News<\/strong><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Netflix has settled a defamation lawsuit brought a Vanity Fair staffer who claimed that she was falsely portrayed in the<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":1189,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"colormag_page_container_layout":"default_layout","colormag_page_sidebar_layout":"default_layout","footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1190","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-entertainment"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/rhinoeasy.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1190","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/rhinoeasy.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/rhinoeasy.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rhinoeasy.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rhinoeasy.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1190"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/rhinoeasy.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1190\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rhinoeasy.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/1189"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/rhinoeasy.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1190"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rhinoeasy.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1190"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rhinoeasy.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1190"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}