Australian actor Rebel Wilson has been hit with a defamation lawsuit in California over accusations against the producers of her directing debut The Deb.

44-year-old Wilson this week made an Instagram video in which she slammed producers Amanda Ghost and Gregor Cameron, and executive producer Vince Holden, accusing them of “bad behaviour” on set.

She also accused them of embezzling funds from the film and called them “vile and disgusting”, claiming she had encountered “absolute viciousness and retaliatory behaviour” after reporting their actions.

However, the trio deny the accusations and have hit back in a new lawsuit, filed at the Superior Court of California.

According to court documents obtained by People: “She flatly refused to collaborate with plaintiffs, absconded from the film for months at a time, behaved unprofessionally with employees of the film, and repeatedly made unauthorised and improper disclosures about the film.

“Rebel’s goal in these several disputes was to get credit for work she did not do, and to overshadow young, upcoming artists who truly deserved the credit.

“(We) had to consider carefully whether to proceed with marketing the film while it was embroiled in numerous credit and licensing disputes instigated by Rebel.

“(We) continuously attempted to resolve the disputes in good faith but Rebel had other ideas.

“Even though the plan was always to show the film at the Toronto International Film Festival in September, Rebel attempted to force the issue and bully them into capitulating to her other unreasonable demands by leveraging her popularity on social media to spread these malicious and baseless lies about (the producers) to her 11 million Instagram followers.

“This was a vindictive attempt to destroy (the producers’) reputations with what she knew were demonstrably false statements.”

Wilson responded to the lawsuit on Instagram by posting: “It’s not defamation if it’s the TRUTH (those ‘producers’ who I mentioned in my last post have just filed a defamation suit against me and sent to the press)!

“Let our cool movie play at Toronto and stop messing about with a rubbish defamation suit against me!”

—AAP