Two former Miami-Dade deputies have sued Matt Damon, Ben Affleck and their production company, saying the film The Rip painted them as dirty cops and damaged their names. Jonathan Santana and Jason Smith filed the lawsuit on 6 May in a Florida federal courthouse over a movie they say turned a real narcotics bust into a story about corruption.

The deputies say they suffered substantial harm to their personal and professional reputations. In the complaint, they argue that if another officer was paid to help shape the story, they should have been paid too, and Santana said the film was effectively saying how many buckets of money he stole even though, as he put it, they never stole a dollar.

The dispute centers on a 2016 drugs bust at a private residence in Miami Lakes that recovered $24 million in cash, hidden behind drywall in 24 buckets holding a million dollars each. At the time, the seizure was the largest haul ever recovered by the Miami-Dade police department, which later transitioned into a sheriff’s office in January 2025. The Rip, released in January, dramatizes that raid as a Netflix crime drama with Damon and Affleck in lead roles.

The lawsuit says Santana and Smith were part of the real team that made the bust, even though neither is named in the movie. Their lawyer, Ignacio Alvarez, said they were portrayed as dirty police officers and said their reputations are hurt. He also argued that if someone was paid for the story, then the deputies should be compensated for being present.

The film had already drawn criticism from Hialeah officials over its depiction of the raid scene in the wrong city. Bryan Calvo called the movie a slap in the face of law enforcement personnel and said movies can tell a story, but are fiction, adding that Hialeah police work is to defend residents and defend the truth. The filing now pushes that fight from city hall to federal court, where the question is no longer whether the movie took liberties, but whether those liberties crossed into defamation.

That is the issue the court will have to sort out: whether a dramatization of a famous drug raid can imply corruption strongly enough to expose the filmmakers to liability, even when the deputies are not named on screen.