Remember the movie "Amadeus"? In it, Antonio Salieri, a contemporary composer of Mozart's era, is presented as an absolute villian, consumed by jealousy of Mozart's gifts (combined with his crude and eccentric behavior) and bitter resentment towards God that his piety was rewarded by musical mediocrity while the shameless Mozart produced such heavenly works. It made for a gripping film, which won eight Academy Awards, but it was an utterly slanderous work with regard to the historical Salieri.
This is of course standard operating procedure in Hollywood, which uses the magic weasel words "based on a true story" to exempt itself from defamation lawsuits, or in other cases offers up the boilerplate statement beginning "any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental" - even when the parallels are obvious to even the most innocent and simple-minded viewer aware of the real-life counterpart.
I don't think these disclaimers are a bad thing per se. The world of dramatic fiction is much richer for not having to confine itself to documentary evidence or stories with no real-world counterparts. But the disclaimers can be abused, and they shouldn't be - and aren't - a license for an "anything goes" approach to filmmaking.
One would have expected a major lawsuit to have been filed based on some work based, however loosely, on the life of Bobby Fischer, but none has occurred, as far as I know. But there is now an interesting case before the courts, and the plaintiff is Nona Gaprindashvili, the women's world chess champion from 1962-1978 and first woman to achieve the "full" grandmaster title (1978). Her complaint is against Netflix, the producers of the hit miniseries "The Queen's Gambit" (TQG). In it, a fictional chess commentator says of Gaprindashvili that she never faced men in her chess career--a claim that is patently false, and would take a competent chess consultant no time at all to refute. (I could have told them that instantly, and someone who wasn't aware of Gaprindashvili during her career would only need a few seconds browsing a database to discover the error.)
A second, even more foolish though less disparaging error is that she is referred to as a "Russian", when she is and always has been Georgian. (Maybe this was a wink at Fischer's old claim that all the Soviet players of his era were Russians, when they frequently were not. If so, it would have been better to keep both eyes open and look for another allusion.)
I can understand Gaprindashvili's annoyance, and I think that she has been given unduly short shrift even within the chess community. But is her annoyance, and the erroneous statements offered in TQG, something that merits a five million dollar judgment from the courts? That's to be determined, but I'd be interested to know what any of you think, especially if you are attorneys. It wouldn't break my heart if Netflix has to pay something--not because I have any animus against the company or TQG. Rather, I think there should be a presumption of honesty and accuracy when dealing with the facts about real people (with a tendency to err in their favor rather than against it), to be overcome only when necessary for the demands of the story (and with a disclaimer to this effect somewhere).
Various links: The New York Times (I was not able to access this, unfortunately), the Washington Post, USA Today, and Chess.com.