SAN FRANCISCO (CN) – While celebrated novelist Emma Cline’s bestseller “The Girls” may have things in common with a screenplay penned by her ex-boyfriend, a federal judge ruled late Thursday that he didn’t find the two works substantially similar enough to support the accusation that she stole her material from him.
“There are undeniable similarities between the works, but they are predominantly isolated to a few intermittent scenes and general plot ideas,” U.S. District Judge William Orrick III said in his 60-page ruling on cross-motions to dismiss. “Both stories are ‘coming of age’ tales of sorts. But they vary significantly in detail, breadth, and texture.”
The dispute came to a head with Cline’s completion of “The Girls” in 2014. By then, she had broken up with Chaz Reetz-Laiolo, a fellow writer she met in 2009 and dated on and off for four years.
Cline was a 20-year-old student at the time, and Reetz-Laiolo a 33-year-old lecturer at the Academy of Art University in San Francisco. They shared drafts of their writing before the relationship soured, and while Cline says she repeatedly asked that he review her manuscript “both because she wanted his input and so he would be aware that certain facts from his life and their shared life had been included,” Reetz-Laiolo declined.
Penguin Random House bought the book in 2014 for $2 million. After some back and forth with Cline, Reetz-Laiolo requested a copy of the manuscript that sold. In November 2015 he wrote to Cline: “I would not publish this novel if I were you. It is vile how much of my work you have plagiarized in it.”
“The Girls” was published in 2016 skyrocketed Cline to literary stardom. It also marked the start of her legal troubles with Reetz-Laiolo, who sent her a demand letter claiming she had stolen some 36 phrases, sentences and scenes she accessed by installing a key-logging software called Refog on his computer, which had formerly been hers.
“This litigation grist for its own novel,” Orrick said in untangling the pair’s claims in dueling lawsuits both filed on November 29, 2017.
Reetz-Laiolo later revealed that the allegedly infringed work was his unpublished screenplay entitled “All Sea,” a coming-of-age tale set in the 1990s that features a teenage protagonist named Gabe. Cline’s book, inspired by the Manson Family, is set alternately in 1969 and the present day and is told from the prospective of a teenaged girl named Evie who is drawn into a cult led by a charismatic older man. According to Cline, it also draws on details from her own life, including when she was dating Reetz-Laiolo.
In her lawsuit, Cline describes “an escalating campaign by her abusive ex-boyfriend to extract millions of dollars by intimidation and threat, all under the auspices of frivolous claims of copyright infringement, a long-stale complaint that Cline ‘invaded’ his privacy, and a ludicrous theory that she hacked into and stole unpublished written work from his computer.”
Orrick said it was not enough that both stories had some similar basic elements when the plot, characters and settings are so vastly different.
He took a paragraph to contrast the works: