10 Huge TV Shows That Have Been Sued For Being Complete Rip-Offs
5. The Haves And The Have Nots
A Detroit-based playwright named Vanessa Lynn filed a lawsuit against The Haves and the Have Nots creator Tyler Perry and Oprah Winfrey's Harpo Productions in 2014, a year after the show premièred as the first scripted series on the Opera Winfrey Network.
Perry’s show follows the affluent Cryer family and the help working at their Georgia mansion, and Lynn’s stage drama Affairs (which received a wide DVD release after a successful run) focuses on a small-town Georgia family that is shaken after patriarch George is outed for having an affair with his daughter’s friend – a storyline that Lynn claims Perry stole for use in his TV show.
As well as unspecified damages, the writer’s legal team were initially pushing for her name to appear on the opening and closing credits of Perry’s show, but Lynn dropped the suit in September 2014 after a quick response from OWN. Lynn’s company Parable Entertainment dismissed the lawsuit without prejudice, indicating that the two parties managed to reach a settlement.
This was not the first time that Perry had been accused of plagiarism. A federal judge in New York dismissed a lawsuit against the writer/actor and Lionsgate in 2013 after author Terri Donald claimed that Perry’s film Good Deeds was a rip-off of her book Bad Apples Can Be Good Fruit. Donald claimed to have sent a copy of her book to Perry’s company long before production on the film began.