In 2015, an exposé in The New York Times Magazine brought national attention to Anna Stubblefield’s sexual assault trial. Stubblefield, a white Rutgers University philosophy professor specializing in critical race and disability studies, raped a non-verbal Black man with cerebral palsy named Derrick Johnson, who is legally incapable of providing sexual consent. After a complicated legal process, Stubblefield pleaded guilty to rape in 2018. The case became fodder for philosophers and disability advocates alike, serving as an elaborate thought experiment at the intersections of disability, race, and power.
Tell Them You Love Me
Now, six years later, Tell Them You Love Me, recently released in the United States on Netflix, has recreated the public spectacle around the case. By turning sexual violence against someone with a significant disability into a “true crime” narrative, the documentary perpetuates negative stereotypes about people with disabilities. As a disability bioethicist living with cerebral palsy, I believe that it revictimizes the disabled person at the center of the story, Mr. Johnson. As we celebrate Disability Pride Month in July, the film is a sad reminder of how the media and the general public continue to see the struggles of the disability community as objects for mass consumption.
Despite the ethical ambiguities in this case, the fact remains that Stubblefield had sex with someone who could not consent. That was wrong. No amount of speculation can absolve Stubblefield from responsibility for her actions.
Yet the documentary denies and objectifies Derrick Johnson throughout. Because Johnson’s thoughts and feelings about Stubblefield remain unknown, I experience the film as nothing more than a series of testimonies that talk around him—marginalizing him as a human being. I am a survivor of two sexual assaults. I know what it feels like to have other people question the circumstances around an act of sexual violence. It is not an experience I would wish on anyone, especially an individual who has no clear means of communication. People with disabilities confront high rates of sexual assault and state-sanctioned restrictions on their sexual and reproductive freedom. A film about the Stubblefield case could have brought much-needed public attention to these issues in all their complexities. This documentary failed to explore these profoundly important issues.
Access to Assistive Technology
The film spends considerable time discussing Johnson’s use of facilitated communication, the controversial method Stubblefield used to help him communicate. The viewer is told at the end of the film that many professional organizations have dismissed this method as ineffective, but without acknowledging that there are alternative forms of technology that Johnson could conceivably have used. As someone who works with a considerable amount of assistive technology in my daily life, I ask why Johnson seems to have never been offered an adaptive keyboard or other augmentative communication device, which would not have required someone like Stubblefield to be an intermediary.
Complicit
Instead, the film acts as a mirror that allows viewers to see the Stubblefield case from whatever perspective they like. Stubblefield’s defenders are able to see her as a champion of Johnson’s sexual freedom. Her critics will continue to see Stubblefield as hubristic and opportunistic, having engaged in behavior undermining Johnson’s dignity and ignoring the wishes of those who have cared for him his entire life. As viewers, we all become complicit in Johnson’s marginalization by participating in the spectacle that the “true crime” narrative of the documentary invites.
Derrick Johnson is, from the film’s perspective, a helpless cripple. Stubblefield, the Johnsons, and the filmmakers disagree on what exactly makes him helpless. To Stubblefield, he is the victim of an overprotective family. To the Johnsons and the filmmakers, his developmental challenges are insurmountable obstacles that the family alone must confront as the ones who genuinely love him.
Arbiters of Disability Rights
In telling their respective sides of the story, Stubblefield and Johnson’s family members are portrayed as representing two divergent perspectives on what it is like to live with Johnson’s disabilities. By depicting Stubblefield and her defenders as the arbiters of disability rights, the filmmakers create a false dichotomy between the championing of disability rights and the Johnsons’ genuine desire to protect him from harm at the hands of Stubblefield. But it is possible to both condemn Stubblefield for assaulting Derrick Johnson and to affirm his right to as full and rich a life as possible.
Perpetuating Ableism
As the film continues streaming on Netflix, more and more people will end up taking sides without realizing that they are now complicit in a crime of a different sort: the endless perpetuation of the stereotype that people with Derrick’s level of disability are categorically helpless and worthy of pity or disgust, rather than dignity and respect. If it was to be filmed at all, Johnson’s story should have been told alongside those of other disabled survivors of sexual assault. This approach would shed light on how the Stubblefield case is – and is not – unique. Even more importantly, a documentarian who is a person of color with a disability should have been the person to tell Johnson’s story on film. Someone with lived experience of what it is like to be Black and disabled in our racist and ableist society would likely have a very different style and perspective in telling Johnson’s story.
Anna Stubblefield wronged Derrick Johnson and his family. Now, Netflix and the filmmakers have also wronged them—and the entire disability community—by sensationalizing Derrick’s rape all over again.
Kevin Mintz, PhD is a post-doctoral scholar at the Stanford Center for Biomedical Ethics.