Grandmaster gambit
Female chess legend sues Netflix over ‘sexist’ drama
Soviet-era chess legend Nona Gaprindashvili has sued Netflix over the “Queen’s Gambit” series, alleging defamation and saying that a line in the hit show’s finale was “grossly sexist and belittling.”
“The only unusual thing about her, really, is her sex, and even that’s not unique in Russia,” an announcer of a chess tournament in the show’s final episode says as the camera pans to a woman watching the match. “There’s Nona Gaprindashvili, but she’s the female world champion and has never faced men.”
The real Gaprindashvili, an 80-year-old woman from the former Soviet republic of Georgia, was the first woman to be named a grandmaster, and she did compete against dozens of men throughout her career.
In fact, by 1968, the year in which the fictional episode was set, Gaprindashvili had “competed against at least 59 male chess players (28 of them simultaneously in one game), including at least ten Grandmasters of that time,” according to a lawsuit filed Thursday in federal District Court in Los Angeles.
Gaprindashvili’s suit says the line was a “devastating falsehood, undermining and degrading her accomplishments before an audience of many millions.”
“Netflix brazenly and deliberately lied about Gaprindashvili’s achievements for the cheap and cynical purpose of ‘heightening the drama’ by making it appear that its fictional hero had managed to do what no other woman, including Gaprindashvili, had done,” the suit says.
She is seeking at least $5 million in damages for defamation and “false light invasion of privacy,” as well as an additional $75,000 for lost business opportunities.
Gaprindashvili, who served multiple terms in the Georgian Parliament, also alleged that she “confronted” Netflix after the series aired and “demanded a public statement acknowledging the falsity of the statement, an apology, and a retraction.”
Gaprindashvili says in her suit that Netflix responded with “extraordinary hubris,” “dismissing [her] assertion of defamation by claiming that the false statement was ‘innocuous.’ ”
Netflix said in a statement, “Netflix has only the utmost respect for Ms. Gaprindashvili and her illustrious career, but we believe this claim has no merit.”