Tell Them You Love Me (Nick August-Perna, 2023, USA/UK)

Tell Them You Love Me is a true crime documentary released via Netflix and directed by Nick August-Perna. The film tells the story of the sexual abuse case of Derrick Johnson, an adult man with cerebral palsy. He was abused by Anna Stubblefield, a Rutgers University professor who was a proponent of facilitated communication. Facilitated communication has been the subject of great controversy since its inception, and many of the purported breakthroughs in communication via FC were totally bogus or willfully manipulated by the person facilitating the communication. Cases of abuse, like the Stubblefield case, have also occurred.

Added to this strange case is a discussion of race, as Stubblefield became acquainted with Derrick via his brother, a student at the university. Stubblefield is white and Derrick is black. One of the central questions of the documentary is whether Derrick indeed had any consent in this entire process. The documentary does a good job of making this ambiguous at the beginning. By the documentary's end, it becomes apparent that Stubblefield was entirely manipulating Derrick's "communication."

While Stubblefield is allowed to make her case, she ultimately comes across as a deeply disturbed person. The question becomes if she was intentionally manipulating Derrick's communication, or if she was so convinced that FC is real that she had even convinced herself in some willful self-deception that the FC was real. Ultimately, at the end of the day, she violated the trust of a family and abused her position at the university. Tell Them You Love is one of those too-strange-to-be-true stories that illustrates many interesting elements of contemporary America. It is interesting to examine this film in light of the gender and racial dynamics and wonder what would have happened had the roles been reversed. August-Perna does a great job with the material.

8/10