Rebel Wilson has seemingly lost her battle against Sacha Baron Cohen in the fight to have her memoir released intact.
Australian readers will be unable to read an entire chapter where Wilson detailed her account of working with Cohen.
Despite already being published in the US, Australian and New Zealand versions of the book were held from shelves due to a legal battle that’s now been resolved, forcing Wilson to edit the book in the process.
HarperCollins Australia confirmed that “for legal reasons we have redacted one chapter in the Australian/New Zealand edition and included an explanatory note accordingly. That chapter is a very small part of a much bigger story and we’re excited for readers to know Rebel’s story when the book is released, on Wednesday 8 May.”
The chapter, titled “Sacha Baron Cohen and Other A**holes”, will be printed entirely as blacked out lines in Australia and New Zealand.
This means the Australian edition of Rebel Rising will be the most redacted version of the book in the world. Differences in defamation law around the world have determined how much of the chapter can be included.
It comes after it was confirmed that the UK version would have “almost a page” blacked out.
A spokesman for Baron Cohen said 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.”
Meanwhile, elsewhere in the book, Wilson alleges that she was once invited to a drug-fuelled orgy by a member of the British royal family.
The Aussie actress claims the incident happened in 2014 at a US tech billionaire’s home, reported the UK’s Telegraph.
“I got thrown a last-minute invite to a tech billionaire’s party – the guy who invited me … had said to my male friend, ‘We need more girls’,” Wilson claimed, without identifying the royal in question.