Rebel Wilson's memoir will be published in the U.K. with redacted passages about her experiences with Sacha Baron Cohen. After the Pitch Perfect actress, 44, accused her The Brothers Grimsby co-star, 52, of being inappropriate toward her on the set of their 2016 comedy, Rebel Rising's publisher has chosen to redact certain portions of the U.K. edition.
"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," HarperCollins told The Guardian in a statement. "Those sections are a very small part of a much bigger story."
After news of the U.K. redaction broken, Baron Cohen's rep told Variety in a statement, "Harper Collins 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." The statement continued, "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. This is a clear victory for Sacha Baron Cohen and confirms what we said from the beginning – that this is demonstrably false, in a shameful and failed effort to sell books."
Wilson's attorney, Bryan Freedman, also issued a statement, telling E! News, "Rebel and I want to thank all the women who have shared their stories with us about their experiences with Sasha Baron Cohen. We are grateful for their strength and bravery."
Last month, Wilson hinted on social media that there was a "massive asshole" who had been trying to keep her from publishing her memoir, later naming Baron Cohen explicitly. In Rebel Rising, Wilson claims in a chapter titled "Sacha Baron Cohen and Other Assholes" that the Borat star wanted her to go naked while filming The Brothers Grimsby and asked her to stick her finger up his butt for a scene. "I was now scared. I wanted to get out of there, so I finally compromised: I slapped him on the ass and improvised a few lines as the character," Wilson wrote, adding that in the end, "The movie bombed, which to me was karma enough. I'm not about canceling anybody and that's not my motivation for sharing this story. I'm sharing my story now because the more women talk about things like this, hopefully the less it happens." Baron Cohen vehemently denied the allegations against him at the time.
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