Satanic Temple Raises Hell With $50 Million ‘Sabrina’ Lawsuit

Netflix’s Chilling Adventures of Sabrina has unleashed the fires of hell…through litigation. The Satanic Temple has filed a $50 million copyright lawsuit against Warner Bros. and Netflix, claiming the Baphomet statue spotted in The Chilling Adventures of Sabrina is a rip-off of a statue the Temple had created themselves. No amount of magic, black or otherwise, is going to make this disappear, and the Sabrina lawsuit is moving forward…for now.

Halfway through Netflix’s Chilling Adventures of Sabrina, viewers get to lay eyes on a huge statue located at the Academy of the Unseen Arts – the fancy witch school Sabrina is attending. While this may look like a statue of the devil to the untrained eye, it is, in fact, a demon named Baphomet. The roots of Baphomet can be traced all the way back to the 1300s, but the statue in Sabrina bears an uncanny resemblance to one commissioned by the Satanic Temple in 2013. It looks so similar, in fact, that the Satanic Temple has filed a lawsuit.

Per Variety, the suit “alleges that the statue contains several elements that make it an ‘original expression,’ and subject to copyright. The statue features two children looking up in awe at a goat-headed man-beast. The temple says the statue cost about $100,000 to design and build.” The statue was commissioned with hopes of installing it alongside the Ten Commandments Monument in Oklahoma. The Temple believes The Chilling Adventures of Sabrina is profiting from their hard, unholy work.

It’s likely the makers of Sabrina spotted the Baphomet statue someone – online, perhaps – and assumed it was an old enough design that it was free to use. There have been Baphomet statues in the past, of course, and it’s probable that no one realized this particular design – which features two very modern children grinning up at the winged, goat-headed man – was created recently.

Satanic Temple co-founder Lucien Greaves believes that their Baphomet statue “has come to represent [satanists] as a people,” and adds: “To have that all at once entirely eclipsed by some Netflix show by a production department who did a Google Image Search… A lot of people who haven’t heard of us first stand to just recognize that monument as the Sabrina monument, which dilutes and denigrates the entire project.”

I get where Greaves is coming from here. And yet, at the same time, you’d think the Satanic Temple might just be cool with something like this and let it slide, but apparently not. Netflix and Warner Bros. refused to comment on the matter, and it’s unclear now what will happen. The entities could of course always reach a settlement with the Satanic Temple, or this could go to court. Hopefully if the latter happens, Baphomet himself is called to testify.

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