Author of The Girls is being sued by former boyfriend, who alleges that her bestselling novel about a Manson-style cult uses material from his own writing

An ex-boyfriend of author Emma Cline has filed a lawsuit claiming that she plagiarised parts of her bestselling novel The Girls by using spyware to access his email and other accounts.



The novelist, who vehemently denies the claims, said in a countersuit that the allegations are the “ludicrous” acts of a man who is jealous of her success and are part of a two-year assault on her mental health and literary reputation.

The clashing lawsuits, filed on Wednesday in federal court in San Francisco, made public a bitter fight that has been churning behind the scenes for years.

Chaz Reetz-Laiolo, Cline’s former boyfriend, also names Penguin Random House in the lawsuit, saying the publishing house knowingly released plagiarised content when it published The Girls.

The novel, released in June 2016, tells the story of a 14-year-old girl who gets involved in a dark 1960s cult that closely resembles the Charles Manson “family”. The book got glowing reviews, made Cline a burgeoning literary celebrity and was on the New York Times bestseller list for 12 weeks.

Cline’s countersuit says the alleged plagiarism amounts to a few stray phrases and passages that stemmed from the couple’s shared lives, conversations and reading of each other’s work when they were both aspiring writers who were romantically involved.

Reetz-Laiolo alleges that Cline sold him her computer with spyware installed, which she used to gain access to his email and other private accounts, stealing from drafts of screenplays he was writing for scenes and language in The Girls.

His suit says Cline used the access to “systematically surveil his private email obsessively over a period of years”.

Cline’s countersuit acknowledges that she used the spyware to look into Reetz-Laiolo’s alleged infidelity during their relationship, but says she had no access to the software once she sold the computer. The suit says it is baseless to suggest she used the software to plumb his writings for her own.

Cline’s lawyers say she is attempting to “put a stop to 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a long-stale complaint that Cline ‘invaded’ his privacy, and a ludicrous theory that she hacked into and stole unpublished written work from his computer”.

She asks the court to declare that she has not infringed any copyright and seeks damages of at least $75,000 (£55,000).

Reetz-Laiolo’s lawsuit demands that Penguin Random House stop printing further copies of the book and asks for unspecified damages.

