Publisher cuts the Sacha Baron Cohen stuff out of U.K. version of Rebel Wilson's memoir

A page of material about Sacha Baron Cohen and The Brothers Grimsby has been cut out of U.K. editions of Rebel Wilson's Rebel Rising

By William Hughes  |  April 25, 2024 | 2:28am
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Publisher cuts the Sacha Baron Cohen stuff out of U.K. version of Rebel Wilson's memoir
Sacha Baron Cohen and Rebel Wilson on the set of The Brothers Grimsby Photo: Tania Coetzee

The U.K. version of Rebel Wilson’s new memoir Rebel Rising will be a bit different from the version previously published in the United States—to the tune of most of the material contained in the attention-heavy chapter “Sacha Baron Cohen And Other Assholes,” and specifically all of the stuff about Cohen himself. The Guardian reports that the Cohen stories in Wilson’s book, which cover unhappy experiences she had on the set of 2016's The Brothers Grimsby, have been redacted with big black bars in the British version of the book, along with a short preface from Wilson explaining that the story “can’t be printed here due to peculiarities of the law in England and Wales.”

Cohen himself took some issue with that descriptor today (while celebrating the redaction in general), putting out a statement via a spokesman in which it was noted that “Printing falsehoods is against the law in the UK and Australia; this is not a ‘peculiarity’ as Ms. Wilson said, but a legal principle that has existed for many hundreds of years.” Cohen’s statement also accused publisher HarperCollins of failing to fact-check the chapter, saying that the publisher has now taken “the sensible but terribly belated step of deleting Rebel Wilson’s defamatory claims once presented with evidence that they were false.”

All told, it sounds like the Cohen/Grimsby material in the book only added up to “most of one page with some other small redactions,” according to a statement put out by HarperCollins; the story, already pretty well-recounted by now, involves Wilson asserting that she was deliberately put in humiliating clothing and other degrading situations during the make of the film, including saying she was pressured to film a nude scene despite having a no-nudity clause in her contract. Cohen’s team has aggressively pushed back on these assertions, stating that Wilson was “welcomed as a collaborator in all creative areas; the script, costume, hair, makeup.”

Rebel Rising was released in the U.S. back on April 4; its release in other territories has been delayed, officially “to coincide with Rebel Wilson’s press tours.”

 
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