Netflix has released a heartbreaking trailer for “Audrie & Daisy.” The documentary chronicles the lives of two underage teen girls in the aftermath of being sexually assaulted and having the awful crimes committed against them caught on camera. Rather than eliciting anger and disgust on their behalf, evidence of their horrific treatment leads to the girls being bullied mercilessly, particularly online.
The doc, co-directed by Bonni Cohen, premiered at Sundance earlier this year.
“I read about Audrie Pott in the newspaper and was devastated to read that boys had taken pictures of her naked body and shared them,” Cohen told Women and Hollywood. “It was a new, scary twist on social-media use.” She explained, “I wanted to explore how it was that teenage boys thought this was okay, that it was a joke, that it wasn’t a crime to take pictures of a naked 15-year old girl who was drunk and incoherent. [My co-director Jon Shenk and I] discovered that Audrie’s story was one of a number of cases around the country where there was a sexual assault, followed by social-media bullying. I wanted to dig deeper to find the human story.”
The trailer begins with footage of Audrie and Daisy as babies and young children, then reveals some of the nasty comments directed at them online, including “#filthywhore” and “#uwereonehornymofo.”
A press release for the film promises that the doc will bring “issues of truth, power, memory, and trauma” into focus. While the crimes took place in two different communities, the cases reveal similarly depressing reactions to sexual assault survivors. “With a legal system that cannot successfully prosecute these cases, the film explores the pursuit of justice against the backdrop of adverse social media and local community forces who don’t want to believe that this can happen in their own towns.”
“Audrie & Daisy” will hit theaters and be available to stream on Netflix September 23.