Highlighted in our Best of 2015 list, Ken Armstrong and T. Christian Miller’s ProPublica and The Marshall Project piece, “An Unbelievable Story of Rape,” was adapted into a Netflix series this year, debuting to critical acclaim last month and renewing the conversation around its vital subject. The young woman in the story, referred to as Marie, reported being raped and then was charged with making a false confession after being pressured to recant. The eight-episode show, visceral in its visual retelling of the story, details the eighteen-year-old Washington resident’s life through every infuriating step of the investigation while also showing how her attacker was eventually caught. This week, Armstrong talked about how he initially found the story, the work that went in before he asked his first question, and how the international hit has helped share three critical lessons that emerged during the reporting process. How did you come across the story, and why did you want to learn more about it? I live in Seattle and Marie was assaulted in Lynwood, which is about fifteen miles north of here. I was familiar with the basic outlines of her case; I knew she had reported being assaulted, that she had been accused of lying and that two years later, police in Colorado had arrested a serial rapist and found evidence showing she had been telling the truth all along. What I didn’t know was how the investigation in Lynwood went so wrong. The other thing missing was Marie’s voice; she had never spoken to the media about what she had gone through. So those were the two things that I hoped to pursue. I started filing public record requests with the Lynwood Police Department to figure out how their investigation went sideways and then I also reached out to Marie through her attorney to see if she might be in a place now where she would be willing to share her story. How was she identified by the media at the time? What did people know about her? She wasn’t identified by name and she still hasn’t been. What people knew about her was: She had been eighteen years old when the assault occurred, she had been in a transitional program for older teenagers who were transitioning out of foster care, and she was assaulted in Lynwood. But beyond that, there weren't a lot of details about her. How did you convince her to talk to you or open up about what happened? I didn’t convince her. I didn’t set out with that in mind. What I did is I contacted her attorney, who had represented her in a civil suit, and I asked him to ask as an intermediary. I thought it might be unsettling, given what she had been through, for me to call her cold or to contact her directly, so I asked if he would be willing to do that on my behalf and he very graciously agreed to do so after asking a lot about the background of the news shop I worked at before, The Marshall Project. He conveyed my message to her and for seven months, we basically corresponded through email. What happened is Marie would have a question, that question would be passed along to me from her attorney and then I would write a long answer trying to answer all questions as best as I could do, but I never applied any pressure, and that’s the last thing that I wanted to do and that she needed. Instead, I wanted to give her all the information she needed so she could make an informed decision on whether she wanted to do this. The key question she had was: What good could come from it if she did agree to talk? So I spent a lot of time going into my background as a reporter, going into the work This American Life—the radio show we were collaborating with at the time—that they had done; I basically provided a lot of examples about how attention to problems in our society can go a long way towards writing law and fighting misconceptions that people have. You can get laws changed, you can get regulations changed, you can basically change the way people think about things, and basically upset conventional wisdom in some instances. That took about seven months and then we talked on the phone off the record where she asked more questions; the main thing I wanted to do was answer every question she had before asking a question of my own.

"We are being tagged in tweets written in Farsi, in Portugese, in French, in some languages I don’t even recognize. It really has prompted a conversation."

Has this conversation around ‘What good can come out of it?’ resurfaced in light of the documentary—in seeing the impact this series has had? It has and one of the things I’m most grateful for is that she has not regretted talking with us for the story; the things that she thought might have happened, have happened. It has triggered a conversation not just in the United States, but elsewhere particularly. When you look at Netflix’s reach and that the series airs in 190 countries and when T. and I look at our Twitter feeds, we are being tagged in tweets written in Farsi, in Portugese, in French, in some languages I don’t even recognize. It really has prompted a conversation that we hoped for and she’s glad she agreed to share the story. One aspect that’s a bit unsettling to some people—and it’s something you’ve addressed in tweets—is how there are some people we thought to be ‘good,’ such as the foster mom, who make decisions we think to be bad, and it creates this complex story. While reporting this story, did you think that this might be a different type of story? I didn’t go into the story with any thoughts about where it could go; I let the reporting guide me. When we sat down with both foster moms, to their credit, they were willing to share their mistakes, what they got wrong, their regrets about it. It was clear that this was an instance that we see all the time, that they were utterly human, they made mistakes, they had misconceptions about trauma, they were making misreads on what someone ought to act like after being hurt. They are not alone in that; they are a lot of people in law enforcement and outside law enforcement who have similar misconceptions about trauma. One reason I think they agreed to talk and to share their mistakes was that they hoped by doing so they might prevent similar people from doing the same. You tweeted about a two-minute scene in the first episode in which Marie is swabbed by a nurse following her assault; you wrote that the scene was “clinical, unadorned, and powerful.” In your ProPublica story, there is a short line about this, but the series makes the description even more visceral for the viewer. I was wondering what you thought of this being brought to the screen? In the story, we didn’t even spend as much time as we did in the book, “A False Report: A True Story of Rape in America.” We wrote at considerable length about this examination and the writers of the show drew upon that. I’ve seen a lot of people talk about the first episode of the series, in which that scene occurs, and they describe it as the most difficult episode of the eight to watch. I think it’s because that first episode, more than any other, keeps to what actually happened, down to the smallest detail. That scene in the hospital is consistent with the medical report; other scenes in that first episode, where you see them act repeatedly to recount being assaulted; she’s asked in her apartment, she’s asked at the hospital, she’s asked at the police station. She’s then asked to describe it and put it down in writing. One of the most powerful things the series did was to simply show what really happened so people could see how an investigation is its own form of trauma. Have you talked to her about this scene? Not that particular scene; we talked after she watched the show and she brought up scenes that struck her. She mentioned two in particular: the scene where she is confronted by the police and is challenged, how she thought Kaitlyn Dever captured perfectly what she was going through that afternoon. The other scene she brought up was the final scene in the series, the one where she makes the call to the detective in Golden, Colorado, and thanks her—that’s real, that really happened, and she said that it was really meaningful to her. The words were not verbatim, but the feeling was just right, that’s how the call felt. And she also talked about how she got to see, even if it’s dramatized, just getting to see the detectives close in on Marc O’Leary and arrest him. [caption id="attachment_1919" align="alignnone" width="840"]

Charlie McDermott, Kaitlyn Dever, center, and Patricia Fa’asua in a scene from Netflix’s “Unbelievable.” (Beth Dubber/Netflix)[/caption] When you approached her, was the fact that she repeated this story so many times to investigators and police one of the reasons she was inclined to speak? I don’t know. I think that there are probably all kinds of reasons why she would have been wary of talking about this. One would have been, when this all occurred, she had reporters seeking her out for comment and so her lived experience with the media was not a pleasant one. She was sought after for comment after police said she lied so I think that probably was a prominent consideration. Beyond that, she had been victimized twice. It takes a great deal of courage to go back and revisit a story in its entirety. For a reporter to ask somebody to go back, it’s a big ask, and I think that’s a reason why she had many questions. You wrote: “Reporters become protective of stories. We want their lessons to come through. Reporters become protective of people. We want them to ring true.” Can you elaborate on what that protection means to you and how it applied to this story? I think some journalists have had their work adapted to the screen in ways that left them unhappy. T. Christian Miller and me are so grateful our experience was the opposite. I would have been so disappointed if the series had depicted all the people involved in the investigation going sideways as cartoon villains because I don’t think it’s consistent with what our reporting showed and the series kept to that. Susannah Grant, the show runner and Sarah Timberman, the executive producer, saw the same things that we did; that these were people that made bad mistakes but not everybody who makes a bad mistake is some kind of villain and they really went out of their way in this series to bring that point home and show how a lot of us could have made the same decision. And I deeply appreciated that. I was appreciative that people, when we were doing our initial story, talked to me so candidly about what they had gone through. I’ve written a lot about criminal justice and it’s rare, in my experience, for police to own their mistakes in the way the Lynwood police did here. They talked in detail about what they got wrong, they acknowledged their errors, they apologized for them and detailed what they would now do differently. I am grateful they did that and in my experience, that’s rare. And it would have been a disservice if the series had then gone and depicted the lead detective as somebody who is utterly uncaring and just was a bad person doing a bad job and that just didn’t care. You mentioned on Twitter that there were three lessons to this story. Do you hope there is a conversation that comes from this series in relation to those lessons? Take the second one about the interrogation techniques that were applied by Lynwood police. In our book, we write in detail about that technique, which is called the Reid technique. It’s been around for more than half a century and it’s a form of folk wisdom passed down from generation to generation in law enforcement circles. Now there’s a lot more skepticism attached to it because a lot of false confessions were obtained using the technique and that’s what happened with this case. Both detectives had received this training and if you read the book, it mentions how they followed the technique point by point by point. You’re only supposed to use the technique if you reasonably believe someone is guilty of what you are investigating and you need to break them down because it’s a high pressure, coercive techniques In law enforcement, you are seeing in many ways, if this is a practice they should be using.