Netflix Roasted In ‘Inventing Anna’ Suit For Inventing Double-Crossing Traits For Real Person; Plaintiff Rachel Williams Previously Sold Life Story Rights To HBO

deadline.com:

Not for the first time, Netflix is today facing legal action for adding fictional traits to a real person for one of its dramas.

In this defamation and false light invasion of privacy case, the drama in question is Inventing Anna, and the real person is ex-Vanity Fair photo editor Rachel Williams, played in the Emmy nominated and Shonda Rhimes produced miniseries by Katie Lowes.“This action will show that Netflix made a deliberate decision for dramatic purposes to show Williams doing or saying things in the Series which portray her as a greedy, snobbish, disloyal, dishonest, cowardly, manipulative and opportunistic person,” asserts an unspecified damages seeking complaint filed Monday in federal court in Delaware (read it here). “The Defamatory Statements are defamatory because they tend to expose her to public contempt, ridicule, aversion or disgrace, or to induce an evil opinion of her, and they are defamatory per se because their import is apparent from the face of the Series without resort to any other source,” adds the jury trial seeking document from Beverly Hills firm Rufus-Isaacs Acland & Grantham LLP and Wilmington’s Farnan LLP.The lawsuit also seeks an injunction to have all the alleged defamatory material involving Williams edited out of the February 11 launched Inventing Anna.

Alongside Julia Garner as fake heiress and convicted con artist Anna “Delvey” Sorokin, Lowes’ Williams is the only significant real-life and accurately named individual in the Rhimes created hit.

That naming of names is a real sore point with the plaintiff, who previously sold the rights to her own part in the high society scam to HBO.“The magnitude of the harm to Williams caused by the Netflix’s defamation has been extraordinary by any