Over the weekend, we reported on a story out of Baltimore that “drug dealers” had supposedly tried to get $50,000 out of the producers of the Natalie Portman-starring Apple TV+ drama Lady In The Lake and threatened to “shoot someone” if they didn’t get it. According to a statement from the police at the time, the people working on the show simply rescheduled what they were planning to film and found a new location for it.
Now, though, the cops in Baltimore have released a new statement and, well, it turns out they had the whole thing wrong. Those gun-wielding drug dealers, looking to squeeze half-a-million out of a prestigious Apple TV+ production? It was actually one “local street vendor” who couldn’t sell clothes in his usual spot because of where the show was being filmed, and he was “arrested on narcotics charges” while “awaiting paperwork to receive compensation for lost business.”
This comes from The Hollywood Reporter, which says everything about someone coming to set with a gun was also wrong. Apparently the person who said they saw a gun retracted their statement, and an employee of the security company working on the set who said they heard someone threatening to “shoot in the air” if they didn’t get paid later noted that they “did not have firsthand knowledge of the incident” (as THR puts it). THR also stresses that the cops say this is still an ongoing investigation, so there might even be more twists.
Lady In The Lake is based on the book of the same name by Laura Lippman and stars Natalie Portman as a housewife in ‘60s Baltimore who gets invested in an unsolved murder mystery and becomes an investigative journalist, which brings her into contact with a social worker providing support to the city’s Black community.