A Sydney court has cleared Rebel Wilson of defamation claims made by Australian actress Charlotte MacInnes, who starred in Wilson’s 2024 film The Deb.
MacInnes had sued Wilson for Instagram posts the Pitch Perfect star had made on her own account in 2024 and 2025 that saw Wilson accuse MacInnes of retracting her complaint of sexual harassment against a film producer so she could further her career. MacInnes has denied Wilson’s claim.
On Wednesday, the BBC reports that Australian federal court jude Elizabeth Raper dismissed the case against Wilson, saying that the claim that MacInnes had changed her story about the incident was not defamatory and that the actress had failed to establish the posts had caused or were likely to serious harm. Additionally, MacInnes was ordered to pay Wilson’s legal costs.
The defamation sprung from a September 2023 incident, where The Deb’s lead actress MacInnes went for a swim at Bondi Beach with Amanda Ghost, a British entertainment executive, a former president of Epic Records and one of the producers of Wilson’s film. According to the BBC, Ghost suffered an allergic reaction and both Ghost and MacInnes returned to the producer’s apartment, where they ended up in the bath together wearing swimsuits.
Justice Raper cited the bath incident in her decision. “To say that the circumstance surrounding how they came to be in the bath are unusual would be an understatement,” she told the court.
The Sydney defamation case is part of a larger set of legal cases related to The Deb, the Australian musical film comedy that Wilson produced, directed and had a support role in. In July 2024, Wilson revealed the acrimony behind the scenes, accusing the film’s producers Gregor Cameron, Vince Holden and Ghost of blocking the film’s premiere at the Toronto International Film Festival as well as making claims of embezzlement of $900,000 from the The Deb‘s budget and Ghost’s inappropriate behavior towards the film’s lead actress MacInnes.
In response, Cameron, Holden and Ghost filed a defamation lawsuit against Wilson. In January, a Los Angeles judge has tossed most of Wilson‘s lawsuit against The Deb producers, calling many of the allegations “conclusory without specific facts” and “abusive.”
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