Two Miami-Dade county sheriff’s deputies have sued Matt Damon and Ben Affleck over The Rip, the Netflix crime drama released in January that depicts a 2016 drugs bust in Miami Lakes. Jonathan Santana and Jason Smith filed the lawsuit on 6 May in a Florida federal courthouse, saying the film tied them to the case in a way that left them with damaged reputations and a grievance they want answered in court.
The lawsuit seeks defamation damages from the actors’ production company, Artists Equity, over a movie centered on the recovery of $24 million in cash hidden behind drywall in a private residence. That haul, found in 24 buckets containing $1 million each, was described as the largest ever recovered by the Miami-Dade police department. Santana’s attorney, Ignacio Alvarez, said the officers suffered substantial harm to their personal and professional reputations and accused the film of portraying police officers as dirty. The legal filing comes months after the movie’s January release and amid scrutiny over how the real-life raid was depicted.
The Rip is a Netflix crime drama with Damon and Affleck in lead roles, and it is described as a dramatization of a real drug bust involving Miami-Dade law enforcement. Santana and Smith are not named in the movie, according to the filing, but their lawsuit argues that the connection is clear enough to have caused harm. The Miami-Dade police department also transitioned into a sheriff’s office in January 2025, putting the case in the middle of a period of institutional change for the agency tied to the original investigation.
The dispute widened after Hialeah Mayor Bryan Calvo criticized the film’s raid scene for placing it in Hialeah rather than the neighboring city where the real marijuana stash house was located. Calvo called the movie a slap in the face of law enforcement personnel and said movies can tell a story but are fiction, while his department’s work is to defend residents and defend the truth. Santana, for his part, told 7 News Miami that when you rip something, you’re stealing something, insisted that we never stole a dollar and said the movie was essentially asking how many buckets of money he stole. The lawsuit now sets up a test of how far a dramatized version of a famous bust can go before the people connected to it say the portrayal crossed into defamation.
If the deputies can show that the film’s depiction left viewers with the impression that they were corrupt, the case could force a reckoning over how true-crime stories are framed when the names are left out but the target feels unmistakable.
