Rebel Wilson's book, published in its entirety in the US, has been censored in the UK, as well as in Australia and New Zealand, due to a chapter on Sacha Baron Cohen.
ADVERTISEMENTWeeks after it was published in its entirety in the US, Australian actress Rebel Wilson’s memoir “Rebel Rising” has hit bookshelves today in the UK - with redacted passages about her experience working with Sacha Baron Cohen.
“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,” publisher HarperCollins told The Guardian in a statement. “Those sections are a very small part of a much bigger story.”
The explanatory note says the redaction has been made "due to the peculiarities of the law in England and Wales".
Last month, Wilson alluded to a “massive asshole” that’s been attempting to stop her from publishing her memoir. She later revealed that it was Baron Cohen.
In a chapter titled “Sacha Baron Cohen and Other Assholes,” she recounts Baron Cohen’s alleged inappropriate behavior while filming the 2016 comedy The Brothers Grimsby.
Baron Cohen denied Wilson’s claims, saying in a statement through a spokesperson: “While we appreciate the importance of speaking out, these demonstrably false claims are directly contradicted by extensive detailed evidence, including contemporaneous documents, film footage, and eyewitness accounts from those present before, during and after the production of ‘The Brothers Grimsby.’”
Following the news of the redaction in the UK edition, a spokesperson for Baron Cohen 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.”
It has been reported the entire chapter relating to Baron Cohen has been redacted in Australia and New Zealand, making the version released in those countries the most censored of any edition of the book.
Royal orgies... apparently
Elsewhere in “Rebel Rising”, Wilson recalls the moment she was allegedly invited by a member of the British royal family to a party, where drugs were being taken, and an orgy was set to happen.
The incident reportedly occurred in 2014. Wilson says a “Windsor” gave her “a last-minute invite to a tech billionaire’s party” that she innocently thought was just a costume party.
“The guy who invited me, who’s like fifteenth or twentieth in line to the British throne, had said to my male friend, ‘We need more girls,’” the book reads.
“The party was insane. Men were jousting on horses in a field, girls dressed as mermaids were in the pool,” Wilson wrote. “The property was massive, and because it was quite a drive, people had been assigned rooms to sleep there overnight.”
She continues: “Now the comment by the Windsor about needing more girls started to make a lot more sense,” Wilson wrote. “They weren’t talking about a boy-girl ratio like it was a year-eight disco. They were talking about an ORGY!”
"Rebel Rising" is out now.
