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.
#BreakingNews: MDPD Narcotics detectives arrest 2, seize millions💰and recover a high powered weapon🔫 in NW Dade pic.twitter.com/MWIbeBHEqX
— Miami-Dade Sheriff’s Office (@MiamiDade_SO) June 29, 2016
According to a disclaimer at the beginning of the film, The Rip is “inspired by true events”.
In 2016, the Miami-Dade police executed an operation similar to the one depicted in the drama, and conducted a search on a house in Miami Lakes after a yearslong drug trafficking investigation.
Santana was the lead detective assigned to the real case, while Smith was the sergeant who supervised the investigative team. More than $21 million in cash was discovered in an attic of the home, with bundles of $100 bills packed in 24 orange buckets.
“When you rip something, you’re stealing something,” Santana told 7 News Miami earlier this week. “We never stole a dollar.” He added that since the film’s release, colleagues who have seen the film have asked him things like, “How many buckets of money did you steal?”
In the suit, the deputies allege that Affleck and Damon’s production company should have compensated Santana, Smith, and the other officers involved in the real case as consultants.
Instead, Artists Equity paid a member of the force who was not part of that investigation – with Captain Chris Casiano listed as a technical advisor on the film. Back in January, Damon told The Associated Press that he and Affleck spent time with Casiano and other narcotics officers in preparation for the film.
The lawsuit claims Casiano was not involved with the initial investigation.
As noted by THR, Artists Equity legal representative Leita Walker wrote a response to the plaintiffs’ demand letter back in March stating that the film does not purport to tell the true story of the 2016 Miami drug bust or portray real-life people. She noted that this fact is clearly stated in a disclaimer in the film’s credits.
