Rebel Wilson‘s memoir “Rebel Rising” will be published in the U.K. with redacted passages about her experience working with Sacha Baron Cohen.
“We are publishing every page, but for legal reasons, in the U.K. edition, we are redacting most of one page with some other small redactions and an explanatory note,” publisher HarperCollins told The Guardian in a statement. “Those sections are a very small part of a much bigger story.”
Following the news of the redaction in the U.K. edition, a spokesperson for Baron Cohen told Variety in a statement, “Harper Collins did not fact check this chapter in the book prior to publication and took the sensible but terribly belated step of deleting Rebel Wilson’s defamatory claims once presented with evidence that they were false.”
The statement continued, “Printing falsehoods is against the law in the U.K. and Australia; this is not a ‘peculiarity’ as Ms. Wilson said but a legal principle that has existed for many hundreds of years. This is a clear victory for Sacha Baron Cohen and confirms what we said from the beginning — that this is demonstrably false, in a shameful and failed effort to sell books.”
Variety has reached out to Wilson’s reps for comment.
Last month, Wilson alluded to a “massive a**hole” that’s been attempting to stop her from publishing her memoir; she later revealed that it was Baron Cohen.
In a chapter titled “Sacha Baron Cohen and Other Assholes,” she recounts Baron Cohen’s alleged inappropriate behavior while filming the 2016 action-comedy “The Brothers Grimsby.” Wilson played Dawn Grobham, the girlfriend of Baron Cohen‘s dimwitted character Nobby.
Baron Cohen denied Wilson’s claims about his behavior on the “Brothers Grimsby” set, saying in a statement through a spokesperson, “While we appreciate the importance of speaking out, these demonstrably false claims are directly contradicted by extensive detailed evidence, including contemporaneous documents, film footage, and eyewitness accounts from those present before, during and after the production of ‘The Brothers Grimsby.’”
The U.K. edition of “Rebel Rising” hits bookshelves Thursday.
From Variety US