Paula Deen attorney says people shouldn’t take issue with her saying N-word in context

Southern foodie and celebrity cook Paula Deen’s career took a massive hit after she admitted in a legal deposition to “of course” using the N-word in the past. Now, her former attorney, Bill Glass, says in a new documentary that people “should not take any issue with it” if they know the context behind his client’s usage of the racial slur.

Sitting for interviews in the new film Canceled: The Paula Deen Story, which world-premiered Saturday at the 2025 Toronto International Film Festival, Deen and Glass defend the star’s integrity after she lost brand endorsements, a Food Network deal, and her standing in the public sphere after she admitted in the 2013 deposition to using the N-word.

“My lawyer, he said, ‘Paula, it’s easy. Just tell the truth,'” Deen says in the documentary of her legal advice at the time. “I said, ‘Well, I can do that.'”

Glass says that lawyers should “stay away from anything off-topic that can get your client in trouble” in a deposition. Deen was deposed following a lawsuit from a former manager, a white woman named Lisa Jackson, who worked at one of Deen’s Georgia restaurants and later sued Deen and her brother, Earl Hiers, for racial bias and sexual harassment.

“It wasn’t, ‘Do you use it at the restaurant?’ It wasn’t, ‘Have you used it recently?’ It was, ‘Have you ever used the N-word?'” Glass says in the documentary. “There’s two reasons to object to that line of questioning. One was it was directed at leverage, not truthfulness. The second reason is it had nothing to do with the claims in the case.”

Deen tells the documentary cameras that she said, “Yes, of course I’ve used that word” in the past, but attempts to justify it by linking it to a 1987 robbery she experienced at a bank.

“I said, ‘It may have been the day this Black man came in to the bank and put the gun up to my head,'” Deen says in the film. “I look up, and in comes a man totally masked with a gun in his hand and put that gun to my temple. And it was dancing on my temple. I said this man is as scared as I am. He’s going to shoot me. All he said was, ‘Get the big bills.’ So I did that and gave it to him. And he left. I couldn’t believe I was still alive.”

The film outlines that Deen’s use of the N-word came during a private conversation with her husband about the robbery, and that she wouldn’t have used it publicly.

“If anybody brings any sense to her comments and heard her answer and understood the context, they should not take any issue with it,” Glass stresses in the movie.

On page 23 of the deposition transcript — which was published at the time by CNN — Deen admitted to “of course” using the N-word. She was later asked about the context of her usage of the word, and she replied, “Well, it was probably when a Black man burst into the bank that I was working at and put a gun to my head,” and that she “didn’t feel real favorable towards him.” She said, however, that she didn’t call him the word in the moment, and later explained that she used it “probably in telling my husband” about the incident.

In August 2013, a federal judge dismissed the racial bias portion of Jackson’s suit, though fallout from the admission had already deeply impacted Deen’s career.

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Deen maintains throughout Canceled that she isn’t racist, and the film also includes interviews with many of her associates and family members, who also say that they don’t think she has racially discriminated against others throughout her life.

At the time of the lawsuit, a spokesperson for Deen told the New York Times, “As Ms. Deen has stated before, she is confident that those who truly know how she lives her life know that she believes in equal opportunity, kindness and fairness for everyone.”