LOS ANGELES (AFP) – A Georgian former chess world champion’s US$5 million (S$6.7 million) lawsuit towards Netflix will go forward after she claimed she was defamed in an episode of The Queen’s Gambit, a Los Angeles decide has dominated.
Chess grandmaster Nona Gaprindashvili, 80, filed a go well with in September claiming {that a} line within the collection during which a personality claims she had “by no means confronted males” in her profession was “grossly sexist and belittling.”
Gaprindashvili had confronted dozens of male rivals by 1968, the yr during which the wildly widespread restricted collection The Queen’s Gambit is especially set.
Legal professionals for Netflix tried to have the go well with dismissed on the bottom that the collection is a piece of fiction and subsequently lined by the First Modification of the US Structure, which protects free speech.
However federal decide Virginia Phillips on Thursday denied their movement, noting that “the truth that the collection was a fictional work doesn’t insulate Netflix from legal responsibility for defamation if all the weather of defamation are in any other case current.”
The Queen’s Gambit, starring Anya Taylor-Pleasure, is predicated on a 1983 novel by Walter Tevis and tells the story of a younger orphan who turns into the world’s best chess participant.
Whereas central character Beth Harmon is fictional, the collection options a number of real-life chess characters together with Gaprindashvili.
Gaprindashvili was the primary lady to be awarded the Worldwide Chess Federation title of Grandmaster, in 1978.