Unbelievable: A Harrowing Tale Of A Serial Rapist’s Victim

I just binge-watched the best drama Netflix has brought to viewers this year. Maybe ever. It’s a harrowing eight-parter called Unbelievable.

It’s based on a true story about an 18-year old girl who is brutally raped in her apartment. She lives to tell the tale. But then, no-one believes the tale, and she is charged with filing a false report — a misdemeanor that carries a possible one-year jail sentence.

The true crimes on which this television adaptation is based were the subject of a 2015 Pulitzer Prize-winning article by two reporters, T. Christian Miller and Ken Armstrong. The article appeared in ProPublica, a nonprofit newsroom that investigates abuses of power, and follows two storylines which weave back and forth. The first horrifying thread focuses on Marie and her brutal rape and its aftermath in 2008 in Washington State.

The second storyline picks up in 2011 when two detectives from two different police departments join forces to find the rapist terrorizing women living alone in the suburbs of Denver. And, there’s nothing quite like a good buddy cop series — unless the buddy cops are also two driven, tough-as-nails female detectives which turns this series into over-the-top brilliant. Toni Collette and Merritt Wever play the detectives who are determined to find justice for the victims.

 

Reporters Miller and Armstrong pieced together the elements of their story by interviewing almost every single person involved in the two storylines. They filed records requests for thousands of pages of documents from the police as well as prosecutors’ offices in Washington and Colorado. They also pulled transcripts of television news coverage about Marie.

It is no spoiler to reveal what the first episodes obviously suggest: that Marie’s rape and the serial rapes three years later in Colorado are the evil doings of the same man animal. Nor is it much of a spoiler to disclose that, of course, the two female detectives will also find justice for Marie (and here, I will not reveal how that happens)  — something that the cops in Washington can’t do because they are insensitive male bullies.

That underlying message is not hammered home but is beautifully encapsulated in the brilliantly-written dialog between Det. Karen Duvall and a male detective on her team. This is how the best part of Duvall’s outraged outburst goes after her male colleague appears indifferent to the urgency of getting a lab report on a rape kit:

“Look around Morris, what do you see? No, I’ll answer that: a whole lot of human beings, well-intentioned, but wildly capable of error. Fallibility, I get that, but we’re talking about a violent rapist, a guy who at any minute could break into another woman’s house, and scar another woman for life because this is not something people get over.

“This is something they carry with them forever, like a bullet in the spine. So given that, yeh, I do expect everyone on my team to give me a hundred per cent of their effort a hundred per cent of the time.”

 Brilliant Writing & Acting

This is a brilliant TV drama, executive produced by former news anchor Katie Couric. It is brilliant in its writing  — which is the work of screenwriter Susannah Grant (of Erin Brockovich fame) and husband and wife team, Michael Chabon and Ayelet Waldman.

It’s also brilliant in its choice of actors. Kaitlyn Dever is splendid as the lost child-adult, Marie, and Toni Collette is just fabulous (Emmy nomination, please) as Det. Grace Rasmussen, as is Merritt Wever who delivers the speech quoted above.

But equally fabulous are the minor characters as for example, the rapist’s brother, Curtis, who is a totally bewildered suspect played by an actor who isn’t even mentioned in the full cast list on IMDb,  and Amber, the rapist’s victim in Colorado, played by Danielle Macdonald.

Unbelievable is also according to Vogue Magazine, “one of the most complex onscreen depictions of sexual assault in recent memory.” Indeed, Marie’s story alone could carry an entire TV drama. Her real-life background — abandoned by her mother, a life spent living in group homes and foster homes, raped the first time at the age of 7, and at times hungry enough to eat dog food — is only alluded to in this TV drama.

Marie’s Story

The main thrust of her story focuses on how she is forced to rethink and recant the account of her rape. In effect, the two male detectives gaslight her into signing a new statement in which she says she lied about the rape. It’s a statement which she makes without the presence of a lawyer, and which is an admission to the crime of making a false report, punishable by a jail sentence.

The  ProPublica article An Unbelievable Story of Rape became a true-crime book, A False Report: A True Story of Rape In America (later changed to Unbelievable: The Story of Two Detectives’ Relentless Search For the Truth.) The article includes ( which the show does not), the review by a sex crimes unit supervisor of the conduct of the cops who forced Marie to recant her story.

The supervisor concluded that Marie had been subjected to “bullying” and “hounding” and that the threats the cops made to her were “coercive and cruel.” The totally unsurprising conclusion of the review was that Marie had been “victimized twice.”

Suspense & Outrage

The TV series evokes many emotions including suspense, (Will Detectives Rasmussen (Collette) and Duvall (Wever) catch the rapist before he violates another woman?) and outrage over the conduct of the male cops. Not the least of it, is an overwhelming urge to slap almost every single person connected to Marie.

There are the cops, of course, but also her social workers who can’t be bothered to support or accompany her when she is prosecuted and has to appear in court for filing a false report. And, then, there are her two peachy foster mothers who plant the seed of doubt in the cops’ minds describing Marie as a child crying out for attention.

Less attention is focussed in the drama on the serial rapist — except for the emphasis on his M.O. –of being meticulous in cleaning up after his attacks and taking photos of his victims — which exhibits a pattern that eventually links him to all the rapes. However, for true-crime aficionados, more information about the real-life rapist (photo below) is to be found in an excellent magazine article which links to his arrest affidavit in the Denver Post.

Star Wars Made Me Do It

The article includes horrifying information that the rapist, a former Marine, Marc Patrick O’Leary, believed he was part of a secret society where people are divided into alphas and bravos. O’Leary believed he was an alpha which entitled him to have sex with any woman he wanted.

The article also mentions he had a girlfriend at the time whom he met on an online dating site.

He also told cops that “deviant fantasies had gripped him since he was a kid way back when he’d seen Jabba the Hutt enslave and chain Princess Leia.”