Just one day after we reported on a pair of songwriters filing a $20 million lawsuit against Ed Sheeran for allegedly ripping off one of their songs for his hit “Photograph,” another superstar is being accused of stealing from some non-famous person. This time, Beyoncé is the one facing the accusations, but it’s not because of her music. It’s actually because of the trailer for her HBO Lemonade special, which a filmmaker named Matthew Fulks believes is a ripoff of his short film Palinoia.
This comes from The Hollywood Reporter, which says that Fulks sent links to Palinoia to some people at Columbia Records regarding a possible gig directing a music video. Apparently, he was also in contact with a guy named Bryan Younce, who has worked on Beyoncé videos in the past and theoretically watched Fulks’ short (and is definitely not Beyoncé herself with a fake mustache, despite the name). THR says the filming of Lemonade began a few months after all of this, so there would technically have been time for the Lemonade people to see Palinoia ahead of time.