Yahoo News Griselda Blanco Estate Settles Lawsuit With Netflix Over Sofia Vergara Show
A lawsuit aimed at the Sofia Vergara-starring Netflix show Griselda has been settled. In documents obtained by The Hollywood Reporter on Friday, the counsel of the family of the late Griselda Blanco dismissed the complaint with prejudice, which means the same claim can’t be brought back to court.
The settlement comes weeks after the actress and the streamer were sued over the miniseries, in which Vergara portrays the Colombian drug lord, who was killed in 2012.
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Blanco’s son, Michael Corleone Blanco, and his wife, Marie, filed the suit on Jan. 17 in a Miami-Dade County Court, claiming the family did not authorize Netflix to use their “image, likeness and/or identity” and wanted to block the six-part show from airing on Jan. 25.
According to the complaint, Michael alleged that he discussed the possibility of developing a book and show about his mother’s story with producers from 2009 to 2022, as well as sat down for interviews and shared other material with them. But he said he only became aware of the limited series “through news publications” later, and claimed Netflix used his narrative and other materials for the show without crediting or compensating him for it.
The suit reads that Michael’s (listed as Michael Sepulvedablanco in the complaint) “unreleased and private artistic literary work is used to depict the life story of himself and his mother, Griselda Blanco De Trujillo, in this limited series, Griselda … with no credit to [Michael] for his artistic literary work.”
Vergara, who executive produced Griselda, and Netflix were two of seven defendants listed in the lawsuit. When asked about the suit by THR ahead of the series’ launch, executive producer Eric Newman, who was not a named defendant, had compared the claim to his experiences with Pablo Escobar’s children while making Netflix’s Narcos franchise. “The reality is that we’re a fictionalized account,” he said. “We’re not making a documentary; we’re not writing a book about Griselda [Blanco]. So, we’re not going to tell a story that’s going to make everybody happy or that people are going to say, ‘Oh, that’s exactly what happened.'”
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