Rasputin Lawsuit Creates Fiction Disclaimer

The familiar disclaimer, "The characters depicted here are fictitious and any similarity to actual persons is purely coincidental," grew out of a lawsuit over MGM's 1932 film Rasputin and the Empress. MGM portrayed Princess Natasha as being seduced by Russian mystic Grigori Rasputin, and Russian princess Irina Alexandrovna argued that the character represented her. Her husband, Russian aristocrat Felix Yusupov, had helped kill Rasputin, and Irina sued MGM for libel. In 1934, the English Court of Appeal agreed that MGM had defamed her.

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