Two sheriff’s deputies have filed a lawsuit against Matt Damon and Ben Affleck, claiming that their portrayal in Netflix crime drama The Rip made them look like “dirty cops”.
Miami-Dade county officers Jonathan Santana and Jason Smith are seeking defamation damages from the actors’ production company, Artists Equity, and alleged in a legal filing this week that their action film mixed fictionalised details with real-life facts from the officers’ lived experiences too liberally.
The Rip was written and directed by Joe Carnahan, and follows narcotics officers, with the story drawing from the account of Miami-Dade County Police Captain Chris Casiano, a longtime friend of Carnahan.
“The Rip came out of a deeply personal experience that my friend went through, both as a father and as head of tactical narcotics for the Miami Dade police department,” Carnahan told Netflix’s Tudum.
“It’s inspired in part by his life and then, by my enduring love for those classic ‘70’s cop thrillers.”
In the film, a narcotics team in Miami discovers millions in cash hidden inside a drug cartel stash house during a raid, causing suspicion and paranoia to grow among the squad. Per The Hollywood Reporter, Santana and Smith claimed that a series of drug busts in South Florida they were involved in in 2016 are recreated in The Rip in ways that depict them as “dirty cops” – and added that this portrayal has caused “substantial harm” to their reputations.
The lawsuit does not specify the amount Santana and Smith are seeking in damages, but the filing requests compensatory damages, punitive damages, attorney fees, a public retraction, and a correction.
