Sofia Vergara is best known for playing the brilliantly funny Gloria on Modern Family, and similarly, anyone who’s ever seen her as a judge on America’s Got Talent can attest to her skills of injecting humor into any situation. However, there seems to be nothing funny about the drama surrounding her latest project Griselda — a dramatized look at Griselda Blanco’s life as a drug queen-pin in Miami — as she and Netflix have been sued by Blanco’s estate.
Griselda Blanco’s adult children have filed a lawsuit as representatives of their late mother’s estate, seeking an injunction to stop the Netflix limited series from hitting the 2024 TV schedule as planned on January 25, according to legal documents obtained by TMZ. Sofia Vergara serves as an executive producer on the project, as well as its star, which is likely why she’s named in the suit.
The subject of the miniseries, Griselda Blanco — known as the “Cocaine Godmother,” a prominent drug lord in Miami in the 1970s — was a public figure, and the court filing allegedly doesn’t prohibit her depiction in Griselda. However, the plaintiffs believe that their likenesses and material obtained from interviews are used in the six-episode series without their permission.
According to TMZ, Griselda’s son Michael said he began doing interviews and consultation in 2009 for a series and book based on his family’s story. In 2016, the people he’d been working with on the project reportedly said they’d start shopping the story around. Michael was told that Netflix allegedly had shown interest in developing the story, but the streaming service didn’t want to use the anecdotes and information that Michael had provided. However, the lawsuit claims that Michael has learned Griselda does, in fact, pull from the stories he told without providing him compensation.
The trailer shows Sofia Vergara, with a dramatic physical transformation into the queen-pin, making a lot of money and a lot of enemies as she ran her operation. Get a more detailed look from the preview below:
Griselda Blanco was gunned down in 2012 at the age of 69 by two assassins on motorcycles. According to authorities after her arrest in 1985, Blanco was estimated to have made billions of dollars in drug money and was thought to have killed hundreds, allegedly including three husbands. She was released from prison in 2004 and moved back to Colombia, where she was killed eight years later.
Sofia Vergara has not spoken out about the legal issues surrounding her upcoming Netflix series, and there’s no indication from the streamer if the lawsuit will be successful in delaying its release. We’ll have to see if the court does indeed file an injunction or if Griselda will premiere as planned. In the meantime, there are plenty of other movies and TV series coming to Netflix in 2024 that can be streamed with a Netflix subscription.