Disney Sued for Defamation Over FX Series ‘Say Nothing’

The good news for the acclaimed FX series Say Nothing is that it’s lately been on an awards-season tear, racking up a Peabody Award, a USC Scripter Award and an Emmy nomination. The bad news: Marian Price — one of the former Provisional Irish Republican Army volunteers depicted in the series and played by Hazel Doupe — is suing Disney for defamation.

Her complaint, filed on July 2 in Dublin High Court, singles out the series’ ninth and final episode for erroneously portraying her “as having carried out the execution-style murder” of a Belfast mother of 10 in the series by shooting her in the back of the head.

Price is calling for damages and an injunction preventing defendants Disney and Minim UK Productions Limited “from further publishing the same or similar defamatory statements.” The complaint also calls for Disney to remove a pivotal sequence in the ninth episode of the series that shows Price, who is now known by her married name Marian McGlinchey, carrying out the execution.

The action is no surprise, given that Price threatened the lawsuit in late 2024, about a month after the series premiered. “Given the context, it is difficult to envisage a more egregious allegation than the one to which has been levelled against our client,” an attorney at Price’s law firm, Phoenix Law, stated at the time.

The Hollywood Reporter has reached out to Disney for comment.

The FX series is based on the 2019 nonfiction book of the same name that explores a period of sectarian violence in Northern Ireland known as the Troubles. In the book, author Patrick Radden Keefe investigates the murder of Jean McConville, who was abducted from her Belfast apartment by Irish Republicans in 1972 and killed after facing accusations of being an informant for the British Army. McConville subsequently became one of the “Disappeared,” or a group of people thought to be murdered by Republican militants.

In the book Radden Keefe chronicles the efforts of her orphaned children to find her remains and seek justice while, at the same time, following the radicalization of sisters Marian and Dolours Price, who became Provisional IRA volunteers. The author ultimately writes that Price fired the shot that killed McConville.

McConville’s remains were found on a beach in Ireland in 2003. Three years later, an investigation by the police ombudsman for Northern Ireland concluded that she did not pass information on to the British Army.

Price did not comment for the book, according to Radden Keefe, even though she has denied its allegations.

When it premiered in 2024, Say Nothing made a splash in Northern Ireland, earning praise from some quarters and criticism from others as it resurfaced a subject that is still raw. Sectarian divisions are alive and well in Northern Ireland, which remains a part of the U.K., and four members of the Disappeared have yet be found. Earlier this year The Belfast Telegraph reported that The Independent Commission for the Location of Victims’ Remains has received new information on the Disappeared as a result of the series.

Price famously was convicted for participating in the Provisional IRA bomb attack in 1973 on London’s Old Bailey. She and her sister, Dolours, went on hunger strike during their imprisonment in England in a bid to be transferred to a prison in Northern Ireland instead. After her release in 1980, Price pled guilty in 2013 to buying a cell phone that was later used by Real IRA members to claim responsibility for the shooting of two British soldiers.