An attorney is accusing bestselling romantasy author Tracy Wolff of stealing from her unpublished manuscript to create her novel Crave, the New Yorker reports.
Lynne Freeman has filed suit against Wolff, her agent, Emily Sylvan Kim, and her publishers, claiming that she is the victim of “extraordinary theft and betrayal.” Freeman alleges that Wolff’s Crave, the first in a hugely successful series of romantasy novels, draws from a manuscript that Freeman submitted to Kim in 2010.
Wolff denies the accusations.
New Yorker reporter Katy Waldman writes that Freeman signed with Kim but had no luck selling her manuscript, Blue Moon Rising, to publishers. The novel follows a young woman who falls for a werewolf.
Wolff’s novel, published in 2020 by Entangled, has a similar plot, but the protagonist’s crush is a vampire. Wolff was also a client of Kim’s.
“[I]n both stories the heroine moves from San Diego to Alaska after members of her family are killed in an accident,” Waldman writes. “She lives with the only two relatives she believes she has left, both of whom are witches. A female rival slips her drugs. There’s an intimate moment under the northern lights.”
The lawsuit alleges that Kim committed fraud and deceit, breach of fiduciary duty, fraudulent concealment, and breach of contract, and it accuses Wolff and Entangled—to which Freeman submitted her manuscript in 2014—of copyright infringement.
Wolff told Waldman that she was “blindsided” and “devastated” by the allegations, saying, “I didn’t do what I’m accused of.”
Michael Schaub is a contributing writer.
