THURSDAY, SEPTEMBER 19 , 2019. THE WASHINGTON POST EZ RE C3
Seattle suburb. She told police
her attacker had broken into her
apartment, which had been sub-
sidized through a program de-
signed to help young adults tran-
sition from the foster-care sys-
tem. She reported being blind-
folded during the attack but
believed her rapist had worn a
condom.
“Unbelievable” begins in the
hours after Marie’s rape, when
she is forced to recount the
attack repeatedly to male police
detectives, who — by the end of
the episode — find minor incon-
sistencies in her story troubling
enough that they suggest she
made the whole thing up.
Armstrong, the co-author of
the ProPublica story, devoted a
lengthy Twitter thread to the
series Monday. “To me, Marie is
not a character. She is someone
who trusted me with her story,
painful as it was,” he wrote. He
praised the series and showrun-
ner Susannah Grant, who he
noted “wanted t o capture how a n
investigation can b ecome its own
form of trauma.”
“To do that,” he added, “she let
the facts speak for themselves.”
As such, the series takes many
details directly from the article,
which recalls that two of Marie’s
former foster mothers, with
whom she maintained close rela-
tionships, also had doubts about
her story. One found it strange
that Marie became angry after
not being able to buy a new set of
the exact sheets that she had on
her bed during the attack. The
other was so disturbed by what
she considered to be attention-
UNBELIEVABLE FROM C1 ment investigation, which ulti-
mately led to the arrest of Marc
O’Leary, a serial rapist who had
taken pictures of all of his vic-
tims. One of them was Marie —
whose learner’s permit, with its
Lynnwood, Wash., address, was
displayed prominently in one of
the photos O’Leary forced her to
be in. O’Leary, the story notes,
“pleaded guilty to 28 counts of
rape and associated felonies in
Colorado.” He was given the
maximum sentence under the
law: 327½ years.
The fallout forced Lynnwood
to review its practices; a sex
crimes supervisor later declared
that what had happened to Ma-
rie was “nothing short of the
victim being coerced into admit-
ting that she lied about t he rape.”
Marie sued the city, settling for
$150,000 before leaving the state
— b ut n ot b efore confronting o ne
of the detectives who had pres-
sured her to recant. He told her
he was “deeply sorry.”
Armstrong said Monday on
Twitter that Marie had watched
the show and thought it was
“excellent,” t hough she admitted
it made her “cry quite a bit.” The
reporter shared that Marie was
struck by one s cene i n particular:
the one that depicts the police
interrogation that led her to
recant. The scene “was, like,
perfect,” she told him.
Marie also found solace in the
final episode, which follows the
Colorado detectives as they zero
in on Christopher McCarthy, the
fictionalized version of her at-
tacker. “Seeing him get put
away,” she told Armstrong, “that
was closure for me.”
[email protected]
ProPublica story, Marie de-
scribes this as “probably the only
time I just wanted to die in my
life.”) And that’s b efore t he p olice
department t akes the rare step of
charging her with a gross misde-
meanor for filing a false report,
despite the fact that she had
implicated no one and despite
the fact that — as two Colorado
detectives would later discover
— her account had been devas-
tatingly true.
The next episode jumps ahead
to 2011 in Colorado, where a
college student reports her rape
by a masked intruder who took
pictures of her and threatened to
post them on the Internet if she
called the police. Enter Wever’s
detective, Karen Duvall, who is
the antithesis of the officers who
investigated Marie’s rape. She
invites the victim, Amber
(“Dumplin’ ” star Danielle Mac-
donald), to talk in her truck, so
they can chat away from the
officers collecting crime scene
evidence in her apartment. Her
approach at every step of the
investigation is rooted in com-
passion.
Duvall teams up with Grace
Rasmussen (Toni Collette), a vet-
eran detective who investigated
a similar case and agrees they
may be looking for the same
elusive suspect. As many critics
have noted, the show sets up an
endearing buddy cop dynamic
between Duvall, based on Gold-
en, Colo., Detective Stacy Gal-
braith, and Rasmussen, based on
Galbraith’s real-life counterpart,
Westminster, Colo., Detective
Edna Hendershot.
The ProPublica story details
the duo’s dogged, multi-depart-ing — into crushing focus. She
loses friends and risks losing her
housing arrangement; she is vili-
fied (though not identified by
name) in news reports; she can
no longer count o n the f ew a dults
she had learned to trust. Unable
to cope with the compounded
trauma, she impulsively quits
her job.
The first episode’s final scene
shows Marie climbing over the
railing of a bridge, where she
contemplates jumping. (In theseeking behavior in the days
following Marie’s attack that she
called the lead police detective to
tell him she didn’t think the
department should waste its re-
sources on an investigation.
Ultimately, Marie recanted
her claim after the detectives on
her case insisted, following sev-
eral interrogations, that she had
lied about being raped. “Unbe-
lievable” puts the implications of
her recanted statement — which
Marie is forced to put into writ-paign by the Trump movement to
discredit news media so as to
allow the administration to act
without accountability.”
Lying to the media isn’t a
crime, but lying under oath is.
Several figures who were involved
in Trump’s 2016 campaign, in-
cluding George Papadopoulos,
Michael Flynn and Rick Gates,
have been indicted or convicted of
lying to federal authorities.
In his testimony Tuesday, Le-
wandowski said he tells the truth
while under oath. Asked by CNN
anchor Alisyn Camerota on
Wednesday if that is the only cir-
cumstance in which he feels obli-
gated to be honest, Lewandowski
deflected, invoking former FBI
director Andrew McCabe, now a
CNN contributor. McCabe was
fired last year just before he was
set to retire after the Justice De-
partment’s inspector general
found that he made an unauthor-
ized disclosure to the media, then
lied to investigators about it.
“You and your network contin-
ue to use him as a contributor who
has been lying under oath,” Le-
wandowski said of McCabe, who
authorized the initial investiga-
tion into Trump’s ties to Russia in- “So if you’re going to hold
me to a standard, hold your same
employees and contributors to
that same standard.”
In the interview, Lewandowski
declined to admit that he lies in
news interviews, despite telling
the House committee that Tues-
day.
[email protected]
fessor at the University of South-
ern California Annenberg School
for Communication and Journal-
ism, on Wednesday. “How would
any news organization properly
contextualize that for the audi-
ence? ‘We’re about to hear from
someone who quite possibly is not
telling the truth, but let’s hear
what he has to say anyway’?
“A ny news organization that
puts him live on camera now, no
matter what the chyron [or on-
screen graphic] reads, does so for
showmanship, not to further pub-
lic understanding,” Kahn said.
He described Lewandowski’s
bad faith as part of a bigger strat-
egy. I t’s “deliberate and calculated
and part of a long-running cam-Sanders have made plainly inac-
curate or false statements in their
dealings with the press.
But it’s rare for anyone closely
associated with Trump to correct
the record or admit fault in speak-
ing to the news media. And it’s
unheard of for them to admit that
they lied.
Until Lewandowski.
The admission raises questions
about how reporters should cover
him in the future, especially if, as
expected, he declares his candida-
cy for a U.S. Senate seat in New
Hampshire.
“I fail to see the value in inter-
viewing Lewandowski in any ca-
pacity as commentator or Trump
proxy,” said Gabriel Kahn, a pro-as I can be.”
Given his admission Tuesday,
that should have raised another
question: Was he being honest
about that?
CNN employed Lewandowski
as an on-air commentator be-
tween April 2017 and June 2018,
during which he repeatedly spoke
on behalf of Trump and his ad-
ministration’s policies. CNN did
not respond to a request for com-
ment about Lewandowski on
Wednesday.
Despite widespread cynicism
about honesty in Washington,
Eric Schultz, a former spokesman
for President Barack Obama, said
Lewandowski’s admission is one
of a kind. “To be fair, I don’t know
a single other Democratic or Re-
publican spokesperson who
thinks this way,” Schultz tweeted.
“We all work hard to make our
best case, but I’ve never worked
with (or against) anyone on either
side of the aisle who thinks lying
is okay.”
Journalists know their sources
sometimes hedge their answers
or spin for advantage. They also
suspect that a few outright lie (an
old saw in the reporting game: “If
your mother says she loves you,
check it out”).
As president, Trump has made
more than 12,000 suspect state-
ments, according to The Washing-
ton Post’s Fact Checker. Aides
such as Kellyanne (“alternative
facts”) Conway and former press
secretaries Sean Spicer and Sarah
LEWANDOWSKI FROM C1
BY SONIA RAOThere’s a new movie on Netflix
called “Tall Girl,” which, as you
might have guessed, is about a
girl who is tall. Jodi (Ava Mi-
chelle) is just over 6-foot-1 and
often reminds the audience,
whether through narration or
self-deprecating remarks to
friends and foes alike, that
73 i nches i s several too many. The
movie establishes her discomfort
early on, when multiple class-
mates ask her how the weather is
“up there.” An already tired joke
gets exponentially worse when
you hear it day in and day out.
When a dashing Swedish ex-
change student named Stig
(Luke Eisner) comes to town,
Jodi tries her best to win his
affection, ignoring her best
friends, Fareeda (Anjelika Wash-
ington) and Dunkleman (Griffin
Gluck), in the process. Sadly,
Dunkleman is madly in love with
Jodi, who dismisses him as too
short to date.
You might already have been
aware of this movie’s existence if
you spend a lot of time online,
given that its main conflict be-
came a joke on social media after
Netflix released the trailer last
month. Michelle, who plays the
title character, is a trained danc-
er who is tall and blonde in the
way that supermodels are often
tall and blonde. In the trailer,
Jodi’s mother, played by “The
Office” alum Angela Kinsey, tells
her teenage daughter that she
has to be “strong in the face of
adversity.”
It should be noted that, as
director Nzingha Stewart said in
response to the backlash, there
are a lot of teenagers out there
who are uncomfortable with
their height, and their feelings
are valid. But “Ta ll Girl” high-
lights Jodi’s insecurities in a
manner so blatantly lacking in
self-awareness that watching it
sometimes feels like a fever
dream — or, at the very least, li ke
someone built a bot to write a
high school movie but replaced
all of the protagonist’s usual
characteristics with “tall.”
Consider one of the first
things we hear Jodi say: “You
think your l ife is h ard? I’m a high
school junior wearing size 13
Nikes. Men’s Nikes. Beat that.”
She proceeds to complain some
more to Fareeda, an underused
character and one who, as a
black teenager who defied her
parents to pursue her dream of
becoming a fashion designer in-stead of a doctor, could probably
beat that.
Te enagers can be oblivious to
struggles outside of their own,
but “Ta ll Girl” f orgoes exploringthat angle and spends the bulk of
the movie trying to elicit sympa-
thy for Jodi in increasingly bi-
zarre ways. She is jealous of her
older s ister, beauty q ueen H arper(Sabrina Carpenter), who was
“spared the tall g ene” but is taken
down a peg by her severe aller-
gies. Jodi also finds it difficult to
connect with her parents: amother who says she was unpop-
ular “because I was so beautiful”
and a father (Steve Zahn) whose
best attempt at quelling his
daughter’s anxiety involves invit-
ing home dozens of tall people
who wear matching outfits and
belong to a club for tall people
called the Tip To ppers.
Perhaps the most baffling as-
pect of the film, though, is that it
gives almost as much weight to
the big reveal of why Dunkleman
carries his belongings around in
a milk crate, instead of a back-
pack, as it does to the climax of
Jodi’s emotional journey. I won’t
reveal the reason, but believe me
when I say it might make you
squirm as much as Stig’s proud
admission of having performed
in the musical “Cats.” (He says
this during a conversation in
which Jodi tells him that she q uit
playing the piano because she
was ashamed of having long
fingers, a valuable a sset for piano
players.)
In one of “Tall Girl’s” more
lucid moments, Jodi claims that
when you’re as tall as she is, “it’s
the o nly thing p eople s ee.” Unfor-
tunately, even the movie itself
fails to find meaning past its
unusual premise.
[email protected]MOVIE REVIEW
In a film about insecurity, ‘Tall Girl’ could use heightened awareness of struggle
SCOTT SALTZMAN/NETFLIX
Luke Eisner and Ava Michelle play classmates Stig and Jodi, the latter of whom stopped playing the
piano because she was ashamed of her long fingers.Netflix drama ‘Unbelievable’ follows the detectives who solved a serial rape case
NETFLIX
In “Unbelievable,” Kaitlyn Dever plays Marie, a young woman who said she was raped, then pressured
by authorities into recanting her claim and charged with filing a false report.Lewandowski gets candid on honesty with the media
JACQUELYN MARTIN/ASSOCIATED PRESS
Corey Lewandowski, President Trump’s former campaign manager,
after testifying at a House Judiciary Committee meeting Tuesday.Susannah Grant
“wanted to capture how
an investigation can
become its own form of
trauma.”
Ken Armstrong, co-author of the
Pulitzer Prize-winning article
“Unbelievable” is based onModern, Feminine,
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