Netflix, Ava DuVernay Settle Defamation Lawsuit Over ‘When They See Us’

Netflix’s ‘When They See Us’

Netflix

Netflix and Ava DuVernay have settled a lawsuit brought by a former New York City prosecutor who alleged she was defamed over her portrayal in When They See Us, a dramatized mini series about the Central Park Five case.

Under the deal, Netflix will move a disclaimer from the credits to the beginning of each episode. “While the motion picture is inspired by actual events and persons, certain characters, incidents, locations, dialogue, and names are fictionalized for the purposes of dramatization,” the disclaimer states.

The agreement, announced on Tuesday, arrives as the trial was scheduled to start next week.

“The parties announce that they have resolved this lawsuit,” Netflix, DuVernay and Linda Fairstein, the ex-prosecutor, said in a joint statement. “Netflix will donate $1 million to the Innocence Project. Ms. Fairstein will not receive any money as part of this settlement.”

Throughout the series, Fairstein is portrayed as the face of an unscrupulous criminal justice system intent on securing convictions against five Harlem teenagers alleged to have raped Trisha Meili, a white jogger in Central Park. She’s depicted as directing officers to harshly interrogate the boys in violation of their constitutional rights and ultimately coercing the confessions that landed them in prison. In 2020, she sued for defamation in a lawsuit claiming that certain plot points were reverse-engineered to falsely attribute actions, responsibility and viewpoints to her that weren’t true.

The case has been closely watched by industry insiders over the impact it could’ve had on artistic liberties given to creatives overseeing content that chronicles real life events.

Last year, the court overseeing the case issued a pivotal ruling when it sided with Fairstein on summary judgment, clearing the lawsuit for trial. U.S. District Judge P. Kevin Castel found that five scenes could be defamatory. “A reasonable jury could conclude by clear and convincing evidence that the decision to make Fairstein ‘the face’ of the system and the central ‘villain’ caused defendants to act with actual malice by recklessly imputing conduct to Fairstein that is unsupported by the writers’ substantial body of source materials,” the order stated.

Kara Gorycki, a lawyer for Fairstein, said in a statement, “It is our sincere hope that this settlement serves as a wakeup call to Netflix and other media companies that they have a responsibility to show fidelity to the truth when portraying real human beings and should not attempt to profit from the utterly false villainization of people, as they did in Linda’s case.”

In one allegedly defamatory scene, Fairstein’s character, played by Felicity Huffman, gives an order to dispatch an army of New York Police Department officers to Harlem. “Every young black male who was in the park last night is a suspect in the rape of that woman who is fighting for her life right now,” she says. “You go into those projects and you stop every little thug you see. You bring in every kid who was in the park last night.”

In another, Fairstein’s character is accused of coercing the confessions that landed convictions for the group. “You knew you coerced those boys into saying what they did,” her character is told by another prosecutor.

Fairstein sought damages of up to $8 million. She also asked for a court order forcing Netflix to remove the allegedly defamatory scenes and place a disclaimer at the beginning of each episode, among other things.

In a statement, Fairstein said she pursued the lawsuit to set the “historical record straight that the villainous caricature invented by the defendants and portrayed on screen was not me.” She was dropped by her literary agency and by the publisher of her crime novels after the series debuted.