Nona Gaprindashvili is a Georgian chess legend, is said to have launched a $5 million lawsuit against Netflix for slander in an episode of The Queen’s Gambit.
According to the chess legend’s slander case, as reported by Deadline:
“The claim that Gaprindashvili “had never encountered males” is demonstrably incorrect, as well as sexist and demeaning.”
Netflix filed an appeal to have the charges dropped, arguing that The Queen’s Gambit is a work of fiction and that the series’ authors should be afforded creative freedom. It also claimed that the material was protected by the First Amendment, but U.S. District Judge Virginia A. Phillips rejected the plea.
Judge Virginia A. Phillips, according to Deadline, wrote:
“The fact that the Series was a fictitious work does not exclude Netflix from defamation responsibility if all of the elements of defamation are present.”
As previously reported, the chess legend has demanded a jury trial, and this may all end there. However, the streaming service made no remark on the decision.
Nona Gaprindashvili is the world’s first female Grandmaster.
Nona Gaprindashvili, at 80 years old, is a chess Grandmaster who resides in Tbilisi, Georgia. She was the first woman to be given the renowned International Chess Federation title of Grandmaster in 1978. From 1962 through 1978, she was the sixth women’s World Chess Champion. She won the Women’s Soviet Championship five times in a row, in 1964, 1973, 1981, 1983, and 1985.
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Gaprindashvili had played against around 59 male chess players by the year 1968 when this episode of The Queen’s Gambit is set. At least ten Grandmasters from that period are on the list, including Dragolyub Velimirovich, Paul Keres, Svetozar Gligoric, Bojan Kurajica, Boris Spassky, Mikhail Tal, and a few more.
The lawsuit was brought in response to a passage in The Queen’s Gambit that said Nona had never faced a male opponent.
The Netflix limited series launched in October 2020 and was seen by around 62 million households in its first month. A pundit remarks in the last episode of Netflix’s The Queen’s Gambit, “The only distinctive thing about her, really, is her s*x, and even that isn’t uncommon in Russia.” This statement is delivered by Beth Harmon after a difficult match against a male competitor in Moscow in 1968. “There’s Nona Gaprindashvili, but she’s the female world champion and has never fought males,” the announcer says.
The 1983 book The Queen’s Gambit by Walter Tevis, upon which the series was primarily based, makes no mention of her having never encountered men. “There was Nona Gaprindashvili, not quite up to the level of this competition, but a player who had encountered all these Russian Grandmasters many times before,” the book says. The real-life chess hero from Georgia objected to a sentence in the series’ last episode, “End Game,” that compared her real-life accomplishments to Anya Taylor-fictitious Joy’s depiction of Beth Harmon in The Queen’s Gambit.
