You couldn’t make it up.
A Hollywood screenwriter with an enviable list of credits, including the forthcoming Star Wars: Episode IX, Jurassic World, and Kong: Skull Island, is suing a woman he dated, claiming she threatened to use a famous episode of Entourage as a template to blackmail him.
Derek Connolly has filed a lawsuit against a woman named Ada Hui, alleging she stalked and invaded his privacy, TMZ reports.
Connolly claims the pair met on Tinder (which is owned by The Daily Beast’s parent company IAC) in May 2016 before going through a bad breakup last month.
Connolly, who won an Independent Spirit Award for best screenplay for the film Safety Not Guaranteed, alleges that after the messy split, Hui posted copies of their text-message exchanges on Instagram, threatened to damage his career, and said she would “gut” his identity and self-worth.
TMZ reports that Hui told him to drop off her belongings or face a situation similar to “Entourage S7 E7,” referring to an episode in the HBO series called “Tequila and Coke,” in which agent Ari Gold was blackmailed.
In the episode, Ari is pictured frantically trying to get back a set of compromising audio tapes that a disgruntled former employee has obtained. The former employee uses the tapes to try to force Ari to get her another job in the industry. At the end of the episode, after Ari has negotiated a deal to ensure what he believes is the safe return of the tapes, he discovers the contents have already been leaked to Deadline Hollywood.
The publication runs a story headlined “Gold to Staff: ‘You’re all c--ts and c---suckers!’” detailing how the tapes reveal Gold to have berated “members of his staff with sexually perverse and emotionally abusive barbs that would make Tony Soprano blush.”
In real life, the screenwriter’s ex allegedly told him “You won’t see it coming” and told him it would be as if he had been hit by “a ton of bricks,” according to Connolly.
Connolly is suing for stalking and invasion of privacy. He appealed to the judge to order Hui to put a stop to her activities.