Joyce McKinney, the former US beauty queen who is the subject of documentarian Errol Morris's latest film, Tabloid, is suing the makers of the film, claiming it misrepresents her story. She claims it portrays her as "crazy, a sex offender, an S&M prostitute, and/or a rapist".

The film tells the story of the sensation McKinney caused in the British tabloid press after the brief disappearance of Kirk Anderson, a US Mormon missionary, from Ewell in Surrey in September 1977. When he reappeared, a few days later, he told police he had been kidnapped and imprisoned in Devon, where McKinney forced him to have sex with her. The affair became known in the UK press as "the case of the manacled Mormon".

McKinney has always insisted Anderson came with her willingly, but she fled the country. Though she and her alleged co-conspirator, Keith May, were later arrested in the US on charges of making false statements to obtain passports, the UK authorities did not request her extradition. In her absence, an English court sentenced McKinney to a year in prison.

McKinney's lawsuit, filed with the Los Angeles Superior court, claims Morris and his producer Mark Lipson tricked her into appearing in the movie, which she believed was going to be a TV documentary series about paparazzi. The complaint states: "The film promotes vicious and malicious lies about McKinney. It casts a positive light on various unscrupulous tabloid 'journalists' who created the scandal and who repeatedly insulted and slandered McKinney, questioned her character and morality, and accused her of raping a 300 pound, 6-foot 5-inch man. The film portrays McKinney as a prostitute. It portrays her as engaging in S&M for money, while flashing sex ads with pictures of women who are not McKinney. It portrays her with a hypodermic needle inserted in her genital area. It includes comments about 'vagina dentata' while showing an X-ray of a vagina with teeth, followed by a stolen photo of McKinney where the camera has zoomed in on her crotch, then pans up to her face. The film uses a stolen, innocent photo of McKinney in a college musical, The Apple Tree, to portray her as an evil seductress. McKinney never authorised any of this."

McKinney has been critical of the film, which was shown at the 2010 London film festival, for some time. She has attended screenings to heckle the film and film-makers, and has told interviewers of her distress at the film. In July, she told the New York Times it was a "celluloid catastrophe". In her complaint, she claims one screening of the film left her "extremely distressed, to the point of shaking and vomiting".

After the lawsuit was announced yesterday, Morris told the New York Times, by email, that McKinney had long been a willing participant in the film's promotion: "Joyce McKinney was provided limos, travel and expenses for a number of festival appearances. Joyce and I appeared together at the New York and Los Angeles openings and answered questions from the audience. She was interviewed for more than six hours for the movie and in no way was an unwilling subject."

McKinney had a further encounter with newspaper fame in 2008, when it emerged she was the owner of the world's first commercially cloned dogs.