The documentary “Audrie & Daisy” looks at the stories of two teenage girls who were sexually assaulted in separate incidents while in high school.
Even though Audrie and Daisy never met, their stories are terrifyingly similar. Soon after they were assaulted, their alleged perpetrators used social media to circulate photos of their victims. Audrie Pott, a 15-year-old from Saratoga, California, wrote to a friend: “I now have a reputation that I can never get rid of … My life is over.” A few days later, she committed suicide.
Daisy Coleman is from Maryville, Missouri and was 14 when she was sexually assaulted and subsequently cyber-bullied. She attempted suicide, but survived and has since found strength in a community of survivors.
“Audrie & Daisy” was directed by the married filmmaking team of Bonni Cohen and Jon Shenk, who premiered the documentary at the Sundance Film Festival this year. We spoke with Cohen and Shenk in Park City, soon after their movie debuted.
Interview Highlights:
As most people know, the names of victims of sexual assault are usually not disclosed — especially if they are minors. So I'm curious, how did you come to focus on the stories of these two teens?
COHEN: There's a very small group of girls, not a club you necessarily want to be a part of, who have come out with their names. Their names are public for a variety of reasons: whether that be that the press captured it, in Audrie's case, after her death; whether it's because a girl is outed on social media, as was the case with Daisy; or simply that a family decides to take an activist position. Those are very few and far between. At the time we started researching this film, there were probably 10 girls whose names were actually public in the press nationally. We started to explore the different factors that were applicable to each of the stories. Obviously Saratoga, California is very close to us. We found that a very difficult and tragic story. We were living in San Francisco and we made contact with the Pott family first to understand and initiate how we could get together and try and help tell Audrie's story.
As you're working on the film and discovering these texts and these Facebook messages, how does that start to influence the way in which you're making the film? And as you're looking at these messages, I suspect that part of you is appalled by what you're seeing and also riveted as documentary filmmakers in terms of what they explain.
SHENK: Most of the films we've made have had some element of archival footage or sound or pictures involved. This film had the added dimension of archival documentary evidence that came from Facebook and Instagram and Twitter. To use that as part of the storytelling was, of course, appalling because of content. Audrie, for people who haven't seen the film, ends up investigating her own crime on Facebook in a proactive, almost positive use of social media. But both Audrie and Daisy [were] bullied on Facebook and Twitter and Instagram. I think Bonnie calls it the third character in the film and I think that's a good way to describe it. You have it exactly right. It's both appalling and riveting and there's a couple moments in the film, even though I've seen it a hundred times now, where there's a Facebook post that comes up and it still brings tears to my eyes because it shows one girl reaching out to another through the ether of social media. So it's both a positive and terribly negative thing.
COHEN: The documentary filmmakers who watched working cuts of this film were so riveted by the depositions of the boys, and the social media messaging, that there was a whole discussion around how we have to shift our thinking as documentary filmmakers now that we have all this rich material. In Audrie Pott's case, there were 122 pieces of evidence, all of which were social media. The criminal case was shut, the boys were sentenced with quite lenient sentencing, mostly because they're juveniles and it's very hard to get "justice" in the juvenile court, as the Potts say. One boy got 30 days, the other boy 45 days and that was served on weekends and probation. So [the Potts] opened a wrongful death suit, a civil suit to make the case more public in the hope that they could get an apology from the boys. It was out of the wrongful death suit that the settlement was born that included a piece about the boys agreeing to provide a 45-minute interview to us. We were completely unaware of this.
You were unaware that was part of the stipulation in the settlement? Had you started interviewing the family at that point?
SHENK: We had been working with the Potts for the previous year or so. We knew that the civil case was going on, of course, and had been talking about whether we wanted to cover it and whether we needed it. Bonni got a phone call one day from Larry Pott and he informed her that they had reached a settlement. Maybe Bonni wants to take over the story from there. It was quite surprising.
COHEN: They very badly wanted to go to court. They wanted a jury. They wanted blood. The judge that was assigned to the case, Judge Walsh, is a very progressive judge in Contra Costa County. He worked with the Potts to figure out and get to essence of what they wanted. When he got down to it, what they really wanted was a formal apology — a formal public apology that took the blame off of Audrie and would also have in it some form of educational forward motion in terms of other cases that might come up like this. The Potts put forward to the judge [that] maybe [the defendants] should be forced to participate in this documentary we're making. Maybe that's something we can do and they'll agree to it and we can move on. That's a very strange phone call to get. I think it maybe unprecedented in documentary [filmmaking].
The question is when.
SHENK: Well actually, we didn't quite know what to say.
Because then you become a part of the story?
SHENK: Exactly. I mean, as a journalist can you imagine getting a call where you've been court-ordered to interview somebody and they don't have a choice about it? Of course you want to interview the perpetrators of a crime if you're investigating the crime, but to do it under their duress seemed like kind of an odd thing. So we actually wrung our hands over it. Ultimately, we decided that we felt like the balance tipped in favor of doing it because we felt like if we could go about doing it in a transparent way and, as you say, even mention in the documentary that the circumstances that led to it, we felt like we might be able to glean some more truth about what happened that night.
I was struck by something that was happening more broadly around how young people talk about sex and how they share sexual information. And how women, young girls particularly, share fully nude photos of themselves with boys. What is actually happening in terms of the broader conversation about how sex is discussed and the unhealthy ways in which girls are talking about their bodies and about sex?
SHENK: One thing we did see that's very common is that it seems like the percentage of girls who have been asked for a nude selfie, or a topless selfie, is close to a hundred. It is amazing how common it is and how banal it's become for boys to ask girls for nude pictures of themselves.
COHEN: This is a new normal for what teenagers expect. There's a lot of pressure to participate in this kind of communication. We see it as kind of a contemporary version of note-passing. Because they have these tools at their disposal, it has taken on this out-of-control piece that we don't know how to talk about.
Part of this film is about the need to document what happens to these women, in that they take photographs of their victims, they take videos of the rapes, that they want to document, prove or share — I have no idea what the motivation is. But it's not enough to assault these women. It's to make sure that everybody knows that they did it and they can boast about it? I have no idea.
COHEN: That's the reason we made the movie. Unfortunately, sexual assault is kind of an age-old problem, right? It's this new piece — of documenting it, sharing it, other people participating in it, the public square of shame for the girls — that is completely out of control. They don't even know what the boundary lines are anymore for who's seen them or participated in the pictures. It didn't necessarily happen this way in the cases in our film, but the boys, we've heard, will share amongst themselves these nude selfies and they'll trade them like baseball cards. Like, Oh, I've had these two. I've had them for a while, but you've got that new one. I'll swap you.
If your film is successful in the way in which you intend it, and teenagers or their parents or together are watching this film, what kinds of conversations do you hope it will elicit? It's unlikely that [the number of] sexual assaults against young girls are going to go down. It's unlikely that the way in which social media is used to shame people is going to go down. But do you hope at least there's the beginning of a conversation around that topic?
COHEN: I can tell you about a conversation we had with our kids, specifically about this. Our son's about to be 17 and we put the scenario of the Audrie Pott party to our son. We said, If you were at a party and you saw a friend of yours carry another friend of yours upstairs, and she was clearly unconscious or very drunk, what would you do? That's one of the conversations that needs to be had.
What was his answer?
COHEN: His answer was [that] he wasn't sure. We were actually shocked that his answer wasn't immediately, Oh, yes, I'd call my parents because I trust you two so much and you'd be there in a heartbeat to save the day. Kids feel a lot of pressure not to rat out their friends. We have to get in there and start these conversations about where behavior needs to change. The other conversation that needs to be had is the one that gets started by Amanda Lee, Audrie's friend, who says that when she got to the party, Audrie was already drunk. She tried to take her upstairs and Audrie just wanted to continue to participate in the party. So, as a girlfriend, what do you do at that point? Do you extract her from the house? Do you call her parents? There needs to be some discussion around what to do in that moment where you feel complicated, you know it's wrong, you know potentially things are going to get worse — what do you do?
SHENK: I think by the time we were in high school and drinking and going to parties, there was a basic sense that it was wrong for the drunk guy or drunk gal to drive home. It wasn't cool. The whole Mothers Against Drunk Driving movement had really taken hold from the '70s. That wasn't true in the '50s when my parents were in high school. There was no sense that it was necessarily wrong to get behind the wheel after you had several drinks. It's not crazy to think of a world in which high school kids could know at a very basic age — just as part of their education, part of the culture — that it's just not cool to leave a friend who's passed out, vulnerable at a party.