“They portrayed police officers as dirty, they portrayed my clients as dirty,” lawyer Ignacio Alvarez said. “Now their reputations are hurt.”
Two Miami sheriff’s deputies have filed a lawsuit against Matt Damon and Ben Affleck, claiming that a recently-released Netflix film could lead viewers to conclude that some of the city’s most experienced law enforcement agents are little more than “dirty cops.”
According to The Guardian, the two officers, identified in court filings as Miami-Dade deputies Jonathon Santana and Jason Smith, are seeking damages from the actors’ production company, Artists Equity.
The lawsuit revolves around a Netflix-exclusive release called “The Rip,” a dramatization of a 2016 drugs bust on a private residence in Miami Lakes. Over the course of the real-life operation, law enforcement agents recovered more than $24 million in cash.
The money, notes The Guardian, was found in 24 buckets, with each bucket containing about $1 million. It was the largest-ever recovery of narcotics-related cash by the Miami-Dade Police Department, which has since been reformed as a sheriff’s office.
The Netflix movie, starring Damon and Affleck, indicates that some agents involved in the operation were tempted to claim part of the haul for themselves. The two plaintiffs, who were involved in the bust, said that “The Rip” portrays them and their colleagues in an unfairly negative light.
“When you rip something, you’re stealing something,” Santana told 7 News Miami. “We never stole a dollar. [They’re] pretty much saying, you know, how many buckets of money did I steal?”
Other Florida officials have condemned the film for straying too far from reality.
The mayor of Hialeah, for instance, criticized Affleck and Damon for filming the raid scenes in his city rather than the location where they actually occurred.
“This movie is a slap in the face of our law enforcement community,” Hialeah Mayor Bryan Calvo said. “Movies can tell a story, but they are fiction. We respect fiction, but our work here, and [that of] the men and women of the Hialeah police department, is to defend our residents and defend the truth.”
An attorney representing Santana and Smith told 7 News Miami that the lawsuit was filed because the two deputies have suffered “substantial harm to their personal and professional reputations” as the direct result of how “The Rip” portrays certain law enforcement figures.
“They portrayed police officers as dirty, they portrayed my clients as dirty,” lawyer Ignacio Alvarez said. “Now their reputations are hurt.”
Although the film’s characters are fictionalized, the lawsuit claims that it contains sufficient references to verifiable, real-world events to damage the reputations of both Santana and Smith.
Smith, notes Fox News, was the sergeant charged with supervising the real investigation; Smith was a lead detective who has since been promoted to sergeant. Their names were not used in the movie, but the lawsuit claims that Affleck and Damon’s characters were based on the plaintiffs.
The lawsuit indicates that Santana and Smith were later scrutinized by local prosecutors, who launched inquiries after watching the film on Netflix. A county-level prosecutor, for instance, contacted one of the two men to ask “whether any allegations of theft have ever been made in connection with the case, and further stated that his office would be looking into it.”
Santana and Smith also say that, since “The Rip” was released,” they’ve faced repeated questions about “how many buckets they kept” and whether they used any of the money to pay for home improvements.
Sources
Miami sheriff’s deputies sue Ben Affleck and Matt Damon over The Rip movie
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