🎙️ Voice is AI-generated. Inconsistencies may occur.
Fox's Empire has been praised for its portrayal of the cutthroat record industry and how it paints a realistic portrait of hip-hop moguls and their families. But it's become a cult favorite for its abundance of characters spouting unforgettable one-liners—notably the cutting Loretha "Cookie" Lyon. In the show's critically acclaimed first season, Cookie ran the joint and offered nuggets of salient advice like, "You want Cookie's nookie, ditch the bitch," and such burns as, "Yeah, difficult. I know that word. You see, y'all like to toss us to the side when you can't control us anymore, because you're lazy and you don't want to do your job."
But Cookie's creators might be feeling a burn of their own soon. A woman named Sophia Eggleston, who claims she's the real-life Cookie, has accused Fox and Empire co-creator Lee Daniels of swiping her life story for television. Now, Eggleston is suing the network and Daniels for $300 million, citing copyright infringement, according to the Chicago Tribune.
After catching the tail end of an Empire episode earlier this year, Eggleston said she saw uncanny resemblances between herself and Taraji P. Henson's character—from the perpetual mink coat to placing a "hit" on someone shortly after being sprung from jail. "The whole city's been telling me Cookie is basically me," she said, referring to Chicago, where the show just wrapped its forthcoming second season.
Eggleston, who filed the suit in May at a Michigan court, purports that the details of her 2011 memoir The Hidden Hand, including accounts of doing time for manslaughter and having a gay relative, were stolen by her memoir co-writer Rita Grant Miller, according to the New York Post'sPage Six. Eggleston claims that Miller pitched her life story to Daniels, which he then subsequently used to build the Cookie character.
Eggleston is angling for a jury trial, saying: "There is no possibility the similarities are...mere coincidence." Empire writer Danny Strong has said in the past that the show idea was birthed from a radio story about hip-hop impresario Sean "Puff Daddy" Combs, and that the character of Lucious Lyon was inspired by Jay Z's early life.
Empire is slated to return to the throne in September.