Can a Performer Sue Over Being Labeled “Difficult”?

by Chris Peterson

I was recently alerted to a situation that is a first for me.

A performer. A strong résumé. Years of steady work. And then, quietly, the phone stops ringing.

No big public fallout. No scandal. No moment you can point to and say, that’s when everything changed. Just a slow fade. Fewer callbacks. Fewer chances. And eventually, a realization that something isn’t adding up.

Recently, she discovered that a director she worked with more than five years ago, an experience she describes as miserable but long behind her, has been telling other producers and casting professionals that she was “difficult to work with.” Not recently. Not in the heat of that production. But years later. Repeatedly.

She believes those comments have cost her work. And now she’s wondering if she has any legal recourse. Specifically, whether she could sue for defamation of character.

It’s a question that sounds dramatic until you sit with it for more than five minutes.

Because if you’ve spent any real time in this industry, you know how much weight a single sentence can carry.

I spoke with a lawyer friend about this. Not because I wanted to play armchair attorney, but because I wanted to understand whether what she’s experiencing even registers under the law. The short answer was sobering.

Generally speaking, calling someone “difficult to work with” is considered opinion. Opinion is protected. Even if that opinion is shared with others. Even if it hurts. Even if it costs someone opportunities.

Here’s what they emailed to me:

“To win a defamation case, you typically need a false statement of fact, not a subjective assessment. You need to show that it was presented as fact, that it was knowingly false or recklessly made, that it was shared with others, and that it caused specific, measurable harm. In an industry where casting decisions are subjective and rarely documented, proving that last part is almost impossible.”

In other words, what she suspects may be very real, but that doesn’t mean it’s legally actionable.

That disconnect is the most unsettling part.

Because while the law may struggle to recognize the damage, anyone who works in theatre understands how devastating comments like these can be.

The theatre industry is small. Smaller than we like to admit. People talk. They share war stories. They trade warnings. And once a label sticks, especially one as vague and loaded as “difficult,” it can follow you longer than any credit on your résumé.

What makes this even harder is how unevenly that label gets applied.

Men who push back are often called passionate or intense. Men who assert boundaries are seen as confident. Men who challenge authority are sometimes even admired for it.

Women are not afforded the same grace.

A woman who advocates for herself risks being branded emotional. A woman who asks questions risks being labeled uncooperative. A woman who says no risks being remembered as a problem.

And for women of color, the margin for error is even thinner.

We know this. We’ve seen it play out again and again. The benefit of the doubt is smaller. The forgiveness window is shorter. The narrative calcifies faster. A single negative characterization can overshadow years of professionalism, especially when it comes from someone with power and connections.

What troubles me most about this situation isn’t whether a lawsuit would succeed. It’s that the system allows this kind of reputational damage to happen quietly, indefinitely, and without accountability.

Five years is a long time in a career. People grow. Circumstances change. One bad collaboration should not become a permanent footnote attached to someone’s name. And yet, in practice, it often does.

There is also something deeply unfair about how these stories travel. The director gets to tell their version freely, casually, over coffee or in a hallway. The performer rarely even knows it’s happening, let alone gets a chance to respond. By the time she senses something is wrong, the damage has already been done.

This is not about saying directors shouldn’t be honest about their experiences. It’s not about pretending every collaboration goes smoothly. And it’s certainly not about weaponizing the courts over hurt feelings.

It’s about recognizing the power imbalance at play, and how easily “honesty” can slide into career sabotage when it’s repeated without context, without balance, and without any expiration date.

The law may say this is protected speech. But that doesn’t mean it’s harmless speech.

If anything, situations like this force us to confront an uncomfortable truth about our industry. We rely heavily on informal reputation sharing, but we have very few safeguards against abuse of that system. Once a narrative takes hold, especially about a woman, especially about a woman of color, it can be nearly impossible to shake.

And maybe the most painful part is this: even when someone does everything right afterward, even when they show up prepared, collaborative, and professional, they may still be auditioning against a story they never got to tell.

That’s not something a lawsuit can easily fix. But it is something we should be willing to talk about honestly.