In November 2016, Emma Mannion, a freshman at the University of Alabama, called her mom in distress. She had been going to bars with friends, she said, and something happened that she didn’t want to happen. Her mother advised her to go to the hospital. While receiving a vaginal exam as part of a “rape kit”, Tuscaloosa police arrived; they took an initial statement while she was still in her hospital gown.
Three days later, Mannion responded to a request for a formal interview at the police station. She again stated what she could remember: that she had met a few guys while out with friends; that while intoxicated, two guys put their arms around her and forced into the backseat of a car in a gravel parking lot; that one stood outside while the other raped her. As seen in interview footage, the investigator, Jared Akridge, pointed to “inconsistencies” in her account – he has security footage, he says but does not provide, that shows her making out with her alleged perpetrator. “You’re not being honest with me,” he says. “I do not believe you. I do not believe you at all.”
Mannion hadn’t slept well in days, and after 1hr 40mins of questions casting doubt on her account, she was exhausted. “I wanted to leave,” she recalls in Victim/Suspect, a new Netflix documentary which examines the chillingly flimsy veil between reporting a rape and being charged with a crime. “I did not want to be in front of this man anymore, because all I heard was that it was my fault, and I fucked up.” When Akridge informs her that it’s a crime to “lie to us”, she merely nods. He then arrests her for false reporting.
Mannion’s story drew the attention of Rachel “Rae” de Leon, a journalist with the Center for Investigative Reporting in Oakland. Stories of false accusations of rape draw attention and condemnation, but often not independent verification of the details – was the case fully investigated? How was the interview conducted? What evidence supports a false report over a sex crime?
Victim/Suspect follows De Leon as she uncovers common patterns within what the director Nancy Schwartzman calls “this Kafka-esque nightmare couched in rape myths”: women, usually young and vulnerable, who go to police to report sexual assault end up not only dismissed, but arrested themselves. Maybe they omitted a detail, or changed some of their story, or couldn’t remember exactly what happened – behavior consistent with traumatic memory. Maybe due to pressure, trauma, exhaustion or a desire to get it all over with, they recanted – not the same thing as lying, but treated as an admission of guilt. Maybe the department wanted to get a case file off their hands and poked and poked until they could find a way out of it.
Often, police used alleged prior interactions with an alleged perpetrator to undermine a report, as in Mannion’s case. But even stranger reports were liable to backfire, as in the ProPublica investigation turned Netflix series Unbelievable and the case of Dyanie Bermeo. As she explains in the film, Bermeo was a criminology student aspiring for a career like Detective Olivia Benson, of Law & Order: SVU, when she went to police to report an assault by an officer or a man posing as one during a traffic stop. Police records later indicated that officers had an immediate suspect in mind, but they never reached out to him. Instead, they charged Bermeo with filing a false report and posted her mugshot to their social media accounts.
In over three years of intensive reporting, De Leon found over 160 cases over the past decade in which the person voluntarily reporting to police turned into the suspect, charged with false reporting. Each case was complicated, accounts riddled with trauma misunderstood, mischaracterized and twisted by law enforcement into a crime. “I was just seeing that people were living very hard lives,” she said. “It was very complex and it just required a level of sympathy [from law enforcement] that I wasn’t finding.”
But there were commonalities – through several cases and a bounty of police interview footage, Victim/Suspect illustrates how systemic forces, a lack of training and boilerplate misogyny create a trap door for those reporting a sex crime. Most of the departments De Leon studied didn’t have a specialized sex crimes unit, instead tasking overstretched detectives with everything from rape cases to homicides. Primarily male investigators are schooled in interrogation techniques, but not trauma sensitivity. Police are legally allowed to lie to victim/suspects, as was the case with Mannion’s supposed security footage, which can confuse an already trauma-addled victim. Law enforcement are incentivized to get cases off their desk, and not investigating a sex crime, then charging an easily manipulatable victim, is efficient.
And then there’s the persistent myth of the prevalence of falsely reported sexual assaults, which numerous studies put somewhere between two and 10%. “It’s like reporting a false kidnapping,” said Schwartzman, whose previous film, 2018’s Roll Red Roll, looked at the permissive bro culture around the 2012 rape case in Steubenville, Ohio. “It’s very, very low, yet it looms so large that women wield this power that is just so clearly not the case.” As the film points out, of the estimated 460,000 assaults each year in the US, only 30% reported to police, and only 1% result in prosecution of alleged perpetrators.
Still, Victim/Suspect is “not here to prove or disprove whether an assault happened”, said Schwartzman. “We are there to look at whether the police did a proper and thorough investigation and did it rise to the level of accusing someone of making it up? And what we found was that they stopped the investigation midway, completely dropped it, did not follow up on very clear leads and then prosecuted the victim.”
Mannion accepted a plea deal, in part because she read about what happened to her fellow Alabama classmate Megan Rondini. In the early hours of 2 July 2015, 20-year-old Rondini went to a Tuscaloosa hospital, then the police station, to report a rape by the 34-year-old local business scion TJ Bunn Jr. In a two-hour interview, police badgered her on the details: why she couldn’t remember stopping at her apartment, why she didn’t kick or physically resist him, why she stole $3 and a gun to protect herself after escaping his locked room through a window.
In contrast, they took Bunn’s story of consensual sex at face value. “If it was me on the other side, I’d want to do the same thing for me,” says the detective. His interview lasts 18 minutes. Faced with the threat of prosecution for theft or false reporting, Rondini withdrew from school and killed herself in February 2016 (Rondini’s parents, who eventually settled with the university in a wrongful death suit, appear in the film).
De Leon and Schwartzman sought comment from Tuscaloosa PD, the officers involved in Bermeo’s case, and others, to no avail. Only one law enforcement representative agreed to speak on the record, to explain his standard use of ruses and deceptive evidence in interrogations. “I think their silence and their unwillingness speaks volumes,” said Schwartzman.
Though many of the cases in Victim/Suspect took place before the #MeToo movement, the film illuminates the gap between how we talk about sexual assault on a cultural level – an awareness of its prevalence, of insidious cultures, of the long warped tail of traumatic memory – and the local institutions that are supposed to handle it. “There is a really large institutional problem with law enforcement and they’re all run in their own little communities and towns and fiefdoms and there’s a whole ecosystem,” said Schwartzman. “There’s a DA, there’s a mayor, there are those who vote them in.”
In other words, there are many systems through which a pursuit of justice can become a miscarriage of it. Victim/Suspect proposes some solutions for this criminal justice trick mirror, namely officer sensitivity training and disallowing the use of deceptive evidence in victim interviews. But it ends at an inevitable, fair question: is reporting worth it? Dyanie Bermeo, the former criminology student who was eventually found not guilty of false reporting on an appeal, ends the film still wanting to make a difference. “But do I still have the same faith in the criminal justice system like I did before?” she says. “No, I don’t.”
Victim/Suspect is available on Netflix on 23 May
