Victim/Suspect is hard to watch, and that’s the point. The new documentary from director Nancy Schwartzman (Roll Red Roll) chronicles journalist Rachel (Rae) de Leon’s investigation into a disturbing pattern she found in 2018: Young women who reported their sexual assaults to the police were shortly thereafter arrested for filing a false report, even though de Leon’s own investigations found that they were telling the truth. As de Leon’s exhaustive research into this troubling trend unfolded, so did her awareness of the shocking number of these cases nationwide. Nothing about what transpires for the women in the film is easy to digest, but the story that unfolds from that discomfort raises crucial questions about how the criminal justice system views and treats sexual assault victims — and what’s being done to change it.
Much of Victim/Suspect was filmed in real time during de Leon’s first solo investigation for the Center for Investigative Reporting. Schwartzman captures de Leon gathering firsthand accounts from numerous young women, as well as chasing down interviews with police and legal experts. The doc also sees de Leon uncovering a breadth of evidence from the initial police investigations, including disturbing recordings of police using coercive tactics to question the women’s experiences, pressuring them to withdraw their claims and eventually charging them with falsifying police reports.
“I always thought we needed to retell their narratives, because they were stolen from them from the very beginning,” de Leon tells Tudum. “It was about offering them a space to finally tell it from their point of view.”
Schwartzman says that in addition to sharing de Leon’s tireless efforts to exonerate the wrongfully accused, there was a larger mission behind creating the film: changing the narrative of how we think about the role of law enforcement to bring about justice, as well as how we treat victims who come forward.
“I think there’s this misconception that only law enforcement can investigate the truth, and that’s actually just not true. There’s been a lot of people working outside of the system who do investigative work,” Schwartzman explains to Tudum. “And there’s this idea that victims and survivors need to report — that it’'s their ‘duty’ to report. That puts a huge burden on the victim. And as you can see in our film, it can go terribly, terribly wrong.”
De Leon and Schwartzman hope that Victim/Suspect gives their subjects the opportunity they were previously denied, a chance to share their experiences with the ultimate goal of bringing the perpetrators to justice.
“All we can offer anyone is the opportunity to speak their truth, and we have to ask them to trust us,” Schwartzman says. “That’s absolutely up to them. Getting to share their story and hear people’s outrage and support on their behalf will, hopefully, feel really good.”
Victim/Suspect premieres on Netflix on May 23.
