after neverland

After Leaving Neverland Special, Oprah Plans Documentary About Sexual Assault in the Music Industry

The filmmakers behind The Hunting Ground are set to produce and direct.
oprah
By Vera Anderson/Getty.

Oprah‘s Apple TV+ projects are slowly coming into focus. In September she revealed she was launching a serialized version of Oprah‘s Book Club, a series that will see her interview select authors, with new episodes airing every two months. Now she‘s diving into more trenchant waters. On Wednesday it was announced that the mogul was pairing up with the Oscar-nominated filmmaking duo Kirby Dick and Amy Ziering to make a documentary about sexual assault in the music industry, according to Variety.

One of duo’s most recent projects was the Oscar-nominated 2015 documentary The Hunting Ground, which Dick directed and Ziering produced. The explosive doc was about rape on college campuses and the continued uphill battle for justice.

The Oprah-produced documentary will premiere on Apple TV+ in 2020. It will, per Variety, revolve around a former music executive deciding whether or not to go public about her assault at the hands of a well-known figure in the music business. As the outlet noted, the film has been described as “a profound examination of race, gender, class and intersectionality, and the toll assaults take on their victims and society at large.”

This is the second time in recent memory that Winfrey has directly addressed the topic of sexual assault in the music industry. In March she conducted an interview with Wade Robson and James Safechuck, the men in the documentary Leaving Neverland who accused Michael Jackson of sexually assaulting them when they were children. In the special, titled After Neverland, she also interviewed Leaving Neverland director Dan Reed. (Jackson long denied the sexual abuse allegations and was acquitted on charges in 2005.)

After the special premiered, Winfrey said she received waves of hate from Jackson supporters. “I haven’t had that much hateration since I did ‘The Puppy Episode’ with Ellen [DeGeneres],” she said in April, referring to her guest-starring role in the iconic episode of the sitcom Ellen in which DeGeneres’s character came out as a lesbian.

However, Winfrey, a survivor of sexual abuse herself, said she wanted to do After Neverland so viewers could understand the dark pattern that sexual abusers follow. “I realized that a lot of people are going to be triggered by watching it, and that a lot of people will not understand what the pattern is...it’s not about one person, it is about the pattern,” she said. “It is about the seduction. And people call it molestation, but there is a big seducing that goes on...that was important enough for me to take the hateration for.”

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