A Haunting Doc About Crime and Consent

Summary

• Tell Them You Love Me
  is an unbiased documentary that challenges viewers to question their assumptions about consent, disability, and communication.
• The film is told in a very focused way, which might leave out some details, but gets to the heart of the true crime story of Anna Stubblefield and Derrick Johnson.
• Tell Them You Love Me
  is an ethically complicated film that leaves viewers with complex moral questions about communication and consent in relationships.

Beginning all the way back with Making a Murderer and even more so the past year or two, Netflix has become a behemoth of true crime documentaries lately, with new movies and especially docuseries dominating the zeitgeist seemingly every month. These titles often rise up to the top 10 most-watched lists, sparking even further interest in a feedback loop of crime and curiosity. American Nightmare, What Jennifer Did, Don’t F**k with Cats, Can I Tell You a Secret, Dancing for the Devil, Lover, Stalker Killer — these are just a handful of documentaries that have become the new watercooler topics in pop culture over the past year. The latest is the film Tell Them You Love Me, but it’s a very different addition.

Originally produced for Sky and executive produced by documentary master Louis Theroux and his production company Mindhouse, Nick August-Perna’s Tell Them You Love Me is ostensibly a true crime drama about the sexual abuse of a non-verbal man with cerebral palsy. However, the film is told in such an unbiased and intellectually curious way that you may start to question your presuppositions about things like consent, rape, disability, communication, and power, and realize that they can be disarmingly ambiguous. That’s the master stroke of Tell Them You Love Me, a film which turns on a tap in your mind and leaves you thinking about it for days with every haunting drip, drip, drip.

When Communication Becomes a Crime

Tell Them You Love Me

4/5

A documentary about an academic and professor who specializes in disability and facilitated communication who falls in love with a severely disabled man, and the legal trouble that follows.

Release Date June 14, 2024

Director Nick August-Perna

Cast Kate Dulcich , Jerron Herman , Brenda McCullough , Richard Rampolla , Julian Thomas

Distributor(s) Netflix

Pros

• An ethically complicated film that will leave you thinking for days.
• Simple and unbiased filmmaking creates a complete portrait of the situation and everyone involved.
• There’s great sympathy and understanding conveyed in the film.

Cons

• The film could’ve explored the legal aspect a bit more.

Tell Them You Love Me primarily follows the Johnson family — Derrick, a disabled Black man with cerebral palsy; his brother, John, who now has a Ph.D. from Rutgers University-Newark and is an assistant professor of history at St. Peter’s University; and Daisy, a single mother who raised John and Derrick, and continues to take care of the latter. While John was studying at Rutgers, he met professor Anna Stubblefield, a kind and helpful academic with an interest in disability studies, the intersectionality of disability, race, gender, and class, and the alternative medicine technique of facilitated communication.

It was that method, facilitated communication (or FC), which lit a fuse in John’s mind. The technique purports to allow non-verbal people with disabilities to communicate with the help of a facilitator, who would guide their hand or arm to allow them to write or type. The good intentions of FC met Stubblefield’s preconceived notion of disability — that just because someone is non-verbal does not mean that they are unintelligent; that people with disabilities have independent minds and can become empowered through FC.

Unfortunately, FC has become discredited in the scientific community, with people suggesting that any communication which results from the technique is simply a projection of the facilitator. It’s essentially the same way people debunk Ouija boards — even if you’re unconscious of doing so, you will guide your or others’ hand to spell out something you want to say.

This is why, when Derrick began wooing Anna with romantic writing and initiated a sexual relationship with her, John and Daisy Johnson believed that Anna was fabricating everything Derrick said. A court ultimately agreed, and Stubblefield was charged with two counts of aggravated sexual assault and sentenced to 12 years in prison.

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An Unbiased Film Where the True Crime Isn’t So Clear-Cut

Nick August-Perna’s film never sensationalizes anything, straying from any graphics, noticeable score, dramatic edits, or reenactments. It’s a quiet film that will sometimes let scenes play out without any commentary, focusing on Daisy getting Derrick out of bed, or on Anna bringing the trash can in from the street. The film doesn’t plaster an opinion across its narrative, and doesn’t emotionally manipulate you into forming any specific opinions; you feel sorrow for and develop some understanding of everyone involved.

Tell Them You Love Me presents the details from multiple different parties, with an appropriate amount of outside commentary. The best is from Devva Kasnitz, an adjunct professor of Disability Studies at CUNY and a disabled anthropologist. Kasnitz knew Anna and understands the world of disability, and provides fascinating and almost poetic commentary at times.

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The film is swift, a welcome break from the multipart documentaries that generally do well on Netflix. It could’ve delved further into Anna’s life and childhood, and discussed more about John and Daisy, but the direct focus on the ‘crime’ itself keeps the movie grounded and moving quickly, and prevents any emotional attachment to one party over the other. The fact that Stubblefield won an appeal and was released from prison only complicates things further. Tell Them You Love Me probably would’ve benefited from a deeper exploration of the legality of everything, and Stubblefield’s journey through the justice system and prison, but again, the runtime keeps things unbiased.

Tell Them You Love Me Is a Mystery That Leaves You with Many Questions

Ultimately, Tell Them You Love Me is a mystery. At the heart of this mystery is Derrick Johnson, who was either the victim of rape or a disabled man who wanted a relationship. The unanswerable ambivalence is found in the fact that we can’t know what Derrick was thinking, or if he was even thinking. He cannot communicate and tell us, and so everyone around him is projecting a bit of themselves onto him. Perhaps Daisy and John were being too protective; perhaps Anna was deluding herself. Derrick becomes the Lacanian ‘Real’ in Tell Them You Love Me, or a cypher we can’t decrypt.

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And so we are left with questions. Can someone who cannot communicate ever actually consent to sex? Are we denying someone their humanity if we remove the possibility of consent from their lexicon? Does personhood depend upon the ability to communicate? Was there a power imbalance here? And if so, would a power balance fix anything — can two non-verbal people have consensual sex? Can two severely disabled people who want to have sex do so without it being ethically compromised?

These are the kinds of questions that may plague your mind after watching Tell Them You Love Me. They don’t seem to haunt Anna Stubblefield, who seems to still think Derrick loved her and initiated a romantic relationship; her mother agrees. When the filmmaker asks Derrick’s mother, Daisy, “Do you think she believed that he was typing?” she responds by saying, “Yeah, in her wicked mind.” If Anna believes it, even after serving two years in prison, then one imagines she sleeps well. After watching Tell Them You Love Me, you might not.

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