Australian actress and comedian Rebel Wilson has been cleared of defamation by a Sydney federal court, ending a bitter legal dispute with Charlotte MacInnes, the young actor who starred in Wilson's directorial debut film The Deb. Justice Elizabeth Raper handed down her decision on Wednesday, dismissing the case and ordering MacInnes to pay Wilson's legal costs.

The dispute centred on a series of Instagram posts Wilson published in 2024 and 2025, directed at her 11 million followers, in which she alleged that MacInnes had confided feeling uncomfortable after The Deb's co-producer Amanda Ghost asked to bathe together — and had later retracted that complaint to protect her career prospects. MacInnes denied ever making or withdrawing such a complaint. She maintained that she had not been uncomfortable when she and Ghost shared a bath in swimwear at Ghost's Bondi Beach apartment in September 2023, after Ghost suffered an allergic reaction to cold water during a swim. MacInnes sued Wilson for defamation, seeking aggravated damages for anxiety and a period of lost work.

Justice Raper found that MacInnes had failed to establish that the posts caused or were likely to cause serious harm to her reputation — a threshold required under Australian defamation law. The judge also noted that the imputation that MacInnes had changed her story was not in itself defamatory, adding dryly that the circumstances surrounding the bath incident were unusual