Trial: “Nasty Articles” Hurt Rebel Wilson’s Career

Summary: Youthful-looking actress Rebel Wilson has sued an Australian publisher for revealing her real age.

Funny lady Rebel Wilson isn’t laughing with Bauer Media. The blonde betty is suing the Australian publication for allegedly harming her career with articles that said Wilson lied about her background and age.

The 37-year-old had snagged roles as a millennial in big flicks like Pitch Perfect and How To Be Single, but Wilson said her career hit a snag when Bauer revealed her age in a series of magazine articles. According to Fox News, she said that she was devastated by the claims in the stories, and she said she was made out to be a liar.

Through her lawyer, Wilson said that after the 2015 articles came out, she lost movie roles in ageist Hollywood. The articles were published around the same time that Pitch Perfect 2 was being released, and the sequel to Pitch Perfect was supposed to be a high point of the comedic actress’ career.

“She thought she’d never been hit with such nastiness, coincided to time with the pinnacle of her career,” Wilson’s lawyer, Matthew Collins, said in court on Monday.

Collins said that Australia-born Wilson was upset when she learned that 1.5 million people had read a Bauer Media article that said she lied about her name, age, and background. On Monday, the attorney represented Wilson in the Supreme Court of Victoria to discuss the defamation case. Wilson had flown to Melbourne for the three-week trial, and she was accompanied by her sister.

According to Fox News, Wilson will testify at a later date, and she is seeking unspecified damages.

An attorney for Bauer Media told Fox News that the publication did not harm Wilson and that their reports were factual. Wilson had called their stories “nasty articles,” which Bauer’s lawyer Georgina Schoff rebuffed.

Before Bauer’s articles, the American media had reported that Wilson was seven years younger. Last year, she told ABC’s Australia’s show Home Delivery that she had nothing to hide but had just stopped telling people her age when she made it to Hollywood.

“If I was guilty of something, I mean, I don’t really have any skeletons in my closet, which is why it’s quite hard for people to write bad stuff about me,” Rebel said. “You know, I don’t have a drug addiction or a secret child. But I think when I did go to America, I kind of just stopped saying my age.”

In court, Scoff said that Wilson had lied about growing up in the “ghetto” of Sydney when she had in fact gone to an elite boarding school. In the articles published by Bauer, the publication had spoken to an alleged former classmate of Wilson’s who said she was lying about her age and name.

At the time, Wilson had tried to laugh at the stories. On Twitter, she had written, “OMG I’m actually a 100-year-old mermaid formerly known as “CC Chalice” ….thanks shady Australian press for your tall poppy syndrome x.”