‘Griselda’ Star Sofía Vergara And Netflix Are Being Sued By The So-Called ‘Cocaine Godmother’s Family

Sofía Vergara’s first dramatic role is a doozy. She portrays Griselda “Cocaine Godmother” Blanco in Netflix’s Griselda, which hails from the Narcos and Narcos: Mexico guys. Granted, her new Netflix series is not directly related to the older ones, but rumor has it that Pablo Escobar was slightly terrified of Griselda (the show references this, too), so that’s promising for anyone curious about whether to give Griselda a whirl.

The Emmy-nominated Modern Family actress went the transformative extra mile for the role, which was a passion project. And no, the on-set cocaine wasn’t real, but she sure learned a lot from the experience of portraying the woman who pioneered Miami’s drug trade in the late 1970s and 1980s.

Less than a week away from the show’s release date, however, Griselda might be seeing a wrinkle in the form of a lawsuit. Griselda Blanca’s real-life youngest son, the very non-subtly-named Michael Corleone Blanco, is suing on behalf of his mother’s estate. TMZ broke the news about how he was involved in developing a project based upon his life story. The facts of the case appear to be complicated and require plenty of parsing, but Michael claims that some of his anecdotes have surfaced in the series (possibly with some of the same people involved that he spoke with, although that’s not clear), and no one has paid him. As a result, he’s seeking to push pause on the show’s release:

The gist of their argument boils down to this … Griselda’s son, Michael, claims he’d been doing interviews for years now with some guys who were trying to get his life story — and that of his mother — on paper in the hopes of developing it into a production of some sort. He alleges these interviews he did with them date back to ’09 all the way through 2022.

Michael claims that these fellas he was consulting with not only wanted to develop his narrative into a show, but into a book as well — and he says they told him they’d start shopping it around Hollywood in 2016. He alleges they pitched it to a producer … ahead of a meeting with Netflix about it. Michael claims he was then told Netflix was interested — but that they didn’t wanna use any of his details or consultations from the interviews he’d done.

The lawsuit also rests upon claims that the series makes “unauthorized use of their family’s image and likeness in this upcoming series,” although Griselda as a subject is not off limits, considering that she is a public figure. Given that Michael alleges that his own anecdotes appear in the show, we’ll simply have to see how this story develops in the next week.

In the meantime, Griselda is still scheduled to stream on January 25.