“You’re a free man,” Angie Richardson
tells her little brother, Kevin, in the first
minutes of When They See Us, the latest drama from Ava
DuVernay, which premieres on Netflix this month. Given
the topic the four-part series addresses—the wrongful
conviction of five teenagers in the infamous 1989 Central
Park Jogger case—the comment has ominous overtones.
But for the moment at least, the implication is benign: She’s
picked him up from school on the last day before a weeklong
vacation. He’s fourteen, a child liberated from trumpet
practice and the daily grind.
Kevin will soon become one of the five teens accused of
the attack on and rape of 28-year-old Trisha Ellen Meili, who
went for a run in the Manhattan park on an April evening
in ’89 and was found later that night, brutally assaulted. At
the end of two trials, Korey Wise, Antron McCray, Raymond
Santana Jr., Yusef Salaam, and Richardson—all under the
age of sixteen—were sentenced to between five to fifteen
years in prison. In court and in the press, distinctions between
them were elided, with the boys dissolved into one indistinct,
malevolent mass.
The series pushes back against this perception. “I wanted
to show how this one pulls the blanket over his mother; this
one was eating burgers with his dad, talking about baseball,”
says DuVernay of the care she took to emphasize each boy’s
unique circumstances and the ordinariness of their lives. (All
five convictions were vacated in 2002, based on the confession
of a serial rapist and new DNA evidence.) DuVernay filmed
When They See Us last fall, as Dr. Christine Blasey Ford
recounted her allegations against now–Supreme Court Justice
Brett Kavanaugh to the Senate Judiciary Committee. The
resonance—the debate over which boys get to be boys—was
not lost on the director. “What kinds of boys truly get to
be young and carefree, and what others are indicted on sight?”
DuVernay asks. The director has become accustomed to
seeing these echoes: “When we were making Selma, Ferguson
was happening. When we were making 13th”—her history
of mass incarceration and racial inequality for Netflix—“it
was the middle of the Black Lives Matter movement.”
Perhaps because her projects point to the unjust cycles
of history, they can sometimes take a toll on the people who
make them. For the grimmest re-creations, DuVernay made
crisis counselors available to the full cast and crew. “I was
always, constantly, in this vulnerable state of emotion,” says
Michael K. Williams (best known for the role of Omar on
The Wire), who plays the father of Antron McCray. “Ava
called all of us to go as deep as we possibly could, and then
when we got there, she asked us to go even deeper.” The
result is a series that stares down fresh horrors: coerced
confessions, exculpating evidence that is brushed aside, and
families that warp and break under pressure.
If DuVernay has an aim with this project, it is not just to
revive the injustice meted out to these boys but to illuminate
the larger consequences. “When one person is incarcerated
or has a traumatic interaction with the police,” she says,
“there’s a generational and multipronged effect—not just
on that person but on that person’s mother, sister, daughter,
wife, siblings, neighbors, children.” The series, which
DuVernay co-wrote, includes 116 roles. “It was a beautiful
team effort,” she says—and that effort included all five real-
life men as well, who, over the course of the filming, visited
the set and made their voices heard.—mattie kahn
Ava DuVernay revisits a notorious case to
unpack injustice from the inside out.
Let the Record Show
MAKING A CASE
TOP LEFT:
DIRECTOR AVA
DuVERNAY.
ABOVE: STARS
AUNJANUE ELLIS
AND ETHAN
HERISSE. LEFT:
ANTRON McCRAY
(FRONT LEFT)
AND YUSEF
SALAAM (BACK
RIGHT) LEAVING
COURT IN 1990.
TELEVISION
VLIFE
74 JUNE 2019 VOGUE.COM
FROM
TOP LEFT: ART STREIBER/AUGUST IM
AGES; ATSUSHI NISHIJIM
A/NETFLIX; M
ARC VODOFSKY/
NEW
YORK POST
/PHOTO ARCHIVES, LLC/GETTY IM
AGES.
