The team behind an emotionally charged new Netflix series inspired by a real-life sexual assault investigation is taking the project straight to Capitol Hill.
Sens. John Cornyn (R-Texas) and Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.), along with several other lawmakers, will be present Wednesday at a screening and discussion of “Unbelievable.”
{mosads}The limited-run series, which stars Kaitlyn Dever, Toni Collette and Merritt Wever, follows the investigation of a sexual assault from two perspectives: a young woman who recants her story after extensive questioning from police, and a pair of female detectives looking into similar cases involving a serial rapist.
“It really looks at how we look and think about sexual assault at a cultural level,” says executive producer and showrunner Susannah Grant. The series is drawn from a 2015 Pulitzer Prize-winning article from the Marshall Project and ProPublica by T. Christian Miller and Ken Armstrong called “An Unbelievable Story of Rape.”
CBS Studios and the Rape, Abuse & Incest National Network are hosting the viewing at the Hart Senate Office Building. The event coincides with the deadline to reauthorize the Debbie Smith Act of 2004, which created a grant program for state and local crime labs aimed at cutting the backlog in testing forensic DNA evidence, particularly rape kits. The program is set to expire Monday. The Senate voted unanimously on legislation introduced by Cornyn and Feinstein reauthorizing the act in May.
“A large part of the first episode is the experience of the processing of data after sexual assault,” Grant tells ITK of the eight-hour drama, currently streaming on Netflix. “A phrase one hears often is that the investigation of a sexual assault can feel like a second assault. … I wanted to really unpack that and pull that out of what has come to feel a little bit like a phrase that’s lost its impact and its meaning, and bring it into a really emotional experience for a viewer — so we show it in detail.”
“You go through the process with a young woman who has just experienced a sexual assault,” explains Grant, the Academy Award-nominated screenwriter behind “Erin Brockovich.”
“So the idea that somebody would go through all that, and have her body treated as a crime scene, and then have that data go completely ignored, feels very relevant and feels like such an insult to the victim,” Grant says.
The producing pro says “Unbelievable” continues discussions that began before the rise of the “Me Too” anti-sexual misconduct movement.
“This is not a brand-new conversation we’re having,” Grant says. “It does feel as if we’re in a time where, as a country, and maybe globally, people are ready to have the conversations that we’ve been avoiding for a long time.”