Those Sacha Baron Cohen allegations will be missing from the U.K. edition of Rebel Wilson’s candid memoir, Rebel Rising. On April 24, publisher HarperCollins confirmed passages and select lines relating to the bullying claims against Baron Cohen will appear blacked out, the Guardian reported. “We are publishing every page, but for legal reasons, in the U.K. edition, we are redacting most of one page with some other small redactions and an explanatory note,” a spokesperson for the publisher told the Guardian. “Those sections are a very small part of a much bigger story.” Wilson recounts Baron Cohen’s alleged inappropriate behavior on the set of The Brothers Grimsby in a chapter titled “Sacha Baron Cohen and Other Assholes.”
New text in the U.K. edition says the removal was due to the “peculiarities” of British law. “What followed was the worst experience of my professional life,” Wilson writes in the U.K. edition, alluding to the allegations she made against Cohen in the original. “An incident that left me feeling bullied, humiliated, and compromised. It can’t be printed here due to peculiarities of the law in England and Wales.”
A spokesperson for Baron Cohen describes the removal as a “victory,” adding “HarperCollins 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,” a spokesperson for the actor told Variety in a statement. “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.”
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