Rebel Wilson is being sued by the producers of her upcoming movie The Deb.
The 44-year-old actress is making her directorial debut with the comedy, and she recently made some big allegations against three people involved with the movie.
Rebel said they blocked the movie from premiering at the upcoming Toronto International Film Festival and accused them of misconduct and embezzlement.
Now, after denying her accusations, the producers are in turn suing Rebel for defamation.
Keep reading to find out more…
In their lawsuit, the producers continued to deny the accusations and “claimed that Wilson has attempted to hold the film hostage over credits for screenwriting and musical recordings,” according to Variety.
The suit is alleging Rebel of unprofessional conduct, “including claims she disappeared from set for extended periods of time and threatened financiers with ‘exposing’ them to her roughly 11 million Instagram followers.”
One of the big things in the lawsuit is over credits, after Rebel sought co-writing the screenplay and rights to the movie’s original music.
The Australian Writers Guild awarded Hannah Riley, the original screenwriter, a full credit after an appeal, and granted Rebel with an “additional writing by” credit, but she was reportedly not happy with just that.
“Rebel is a bully who will disregard the interests of others to promote her own,” a lawyer for the producers shared in the filing.
Rebel claims she has proof of the producers’ financial misconduct, and they are responding, saying she “has run this playbook one time too many,” and had “jeopardized the success of the film, as Rebel’s statements carry the clear and unmistakable defamatory meaning: that [the producers] criminally embezzled funds from the film.”
“[Wilson] revived a fictitious story about Ms. Ghost sexually harassing a lead actor in The Deb that has absolutely no basis in reality, as the actor that is the subject of this defamatory tale has repeatedly confirmed,” the producers said in the defamation suit filing.
It also states that producers Amanda Ghost, Gregor Cameron and executive producer Vince Holden had to “consider carefully whether to proceed with marketing the film while it was embroiled in numerous credit and licensing disputes instigated by Rebel. Plaintiffs continuously attempted to resolve the disputes in good faith, but Rebel had other ideas. Even though the plan was always to show the film at TIFF, Rebel attempted to force the issue and bully them into capitulating to her other unreasonable demands by leveraging her popularity on social media to spread these malicious and baseless lies.”
