Two Miami sheriff’s deputies have filed a lawsuit against Matt Damon and Ben Affleck, claiming the Hollywood actors’ portrayal in a Netflix crime drama makes them look like “dirty cops”.

The officers, Jonathan Santana and Jason Smith, deputies with the Miami-Dade county sheriff’s office, are seeking defamation damages from the actors’ production company Artists Equity. The Rip is a dramatization of a 2016 drugs bust on a private residence in Miami Lakes in which $24m cash was recovered.

The money was found in 24 buckets containing a million dollars each – hidden behind drywall in the property – and represented the largest haul ever recovered by the Miami-Dade police department, which transitioned into a sheriff’s office in January 2025.

The Netflix movie, with Damon and Affleck in lead roles, presents a tale of temptation and trust, given the large sum of money in the immediate and unsupervised custody of a team of narcotics agents. The lawsuit’s plaintiffs, who were part of the real-life team that made the bust on which the fictionalized account in the film was built, say The Rip portrays them in a negative light.

“When you rip something, you’re stealing something,” Santana told 7 News Miami, referring to the crime thriller’s title. “We never stole a dollar.

“[They’re] pretty much saying, you know, how many buckets of money did I steal?”

It is not the first time The Rip, which was released in January, has angered members of the south Florida community. Bryan Calvo, the Hialeah mayor, slammed the movie and its lead actors after they chose to place the scene of the raid in his city – and not its immediate neighbor where the real marijuana stash house was located.

“This movie is a slap in the face of our law enforcement personnel,” Calvo said at a news conference at the time.

“Movies can tell a story, but they are fiction. We respect fiction, but our work here, and the men and women of the Hialeah police department, is to defend our residents and defend the truth.”

An attorney representing Santana and Smith told 7 News that the lawsuit was filed because the officers had suffered “substantial harm to their personal and professional reputations” from their representation by Affleck and Damon.

“They portrayed police officers as dirty, they portrayed my clients as dirty,” the lawyer, Ignacio Alvarez, said. “Now their reputations are hurt.”

Alvarez noted that the lawsuit – filed on 6 May in a Florida federal courthouse – contends the pair should also have been paid as consultants, as another officer not involved in the raid was.

“If an individual got paid for the story then they should be compensated for being present,” he said.

Neither of the deputies is mentioned by name in the movie. That does not preclude a defamation action being filed, but it generally sets the bar higher for its success, according to libel lawyers.

“The description of the fictional character must be so closely aligned with a real person that someone who knows that person would have no difficulty linking the two,” Lloyd Jassin, a publishing attorney, wrote on his blog Copylaw.

“For a novel or other fictional work to be actionable, readers must believe the allegedly defamatory statements are actually about the plaintiff.”

According to a report Monday on WCVB News, attorneys representing Artists Equity – the company the actors founded jointly in 2022 – denied the allegations in a March demand response letter included with the original complaint.

The film used fictional names, settings and storylines – and the movie’s disclaimer made clear the story was dramatized and not intended to portray real people, the report said.

The Guardian has contacted Artists Equity for comment.

Netflix, which is not part of the deputies’ lawsuit, settled a defamation case in 2022 with the chess grandmaster Nona Gaprindashvili, who said she was defamed in its drama The Queen’s Gambit, the New York Times reported.

Gaprindashvili, who was mentioned by name in the series’ final episode, sued over the “devastating falsehood” that she had never played against men – whereas in reality she had played against and defeated many.