Satanic Temple Settles ‘Chilling Adventures of Sabrina’ Lawsuit Against Netflix
The Satanic Temple has settled with Netflix after filing a $50 million copyright lawsuit that accused the streaming platform of copying the temple’s statue of Baphomet in its new series “The Chilling Adventures of Sabrina.”
In a statement released Wednesday, the religious organization announced that both parties had reached an amicable settlement requiring Netflix to acknowledge copied elements of the Baphomet statue in the credits of episodes that have already filmed. Other terms of the settlement are unknown due to a confidentiality agreement.
In the statement, the temple also drew attention to the the large amount of hate directed at the organization in recent weeks before criticizing the media.
“I have gotten quite a bit of hate mail from people seemingly basic enough to conceive of the situation as one in which a large powerful Satanic organization is using its might to bully an uncertain and innocent teenage witch who has just been newly exposed to the wide, cruel world,” the statement reads. “The truth is, it is a poor commentary upon our entire culture, in my eyes, that media overwhelmed this copyright claim, relative to which the coverage of our rally in Arkansas, which confronted still unresolved questions about the continued American dedication to Liberal Democracy, received sparse reporting for a day.”
The original lawsuit, filed in the U.S. District Court in New York, alleged that four episodes of the show featured a Baphomet statue that bore a striking resemblance to the one created by the temple. The temple’s statue, which was built in 2013 and 2014, cost about $100,000 to build and drew upon inspiration from iconography dating back to the 19th century.
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