Oprah Winfrey backed out of the Russell Simmons sexual assault documentary. Why the fallout was ‘horrible’
Twenty minutes. That’s how long Kirby Dick and Amy Ziering had to digest the news that Oprah Winfrey was pulling her support of their documentary before she released the announcement to the press.
The email from Winfrey, sent at 3:10 p.m. on Jan. 10, had come as a shock. In her message, the filmmakers said, the Harpo Productions head said she would no longer be serving as the executive producer of their still untitled documentary about the survivors of Russell Simmons’ alleged sexual abuse. Subsequently, the movie —
set to premiere at the 2020 Sundance Film Festival — was dropped from a planned release on Apple TV+ through Winfrey’s deal with the streaming platform.
“In my opinion, there is more work to be done on the film to illuminate the full scope of what the victims endured and it has become clear that the filmmakers and I are not aligned in that creative vision,”
Winfrey said in her 3:30 p.m. statement, in which she also made it clear she “unequivocally” believes and supports the film’s subjects. “Kirby Dick and Amy Ziering are talented filmmakers. I have great respect for their mission but given the filmmakers’ desire to premiere the film at the Sundance Film Festival before I believe it is complete, I feel it’s best to step aside.”
Dick and Ziering, who have collaborated on six nonfiction films together, had never been under the impression that Winfrey had serious concerns about the documentary. On the contrary: Ever since they first met with her in New York in January 2019, they said, she had been effusive in her praise of the project.
“She loved, loved, loved what we did,” recalled Ziering, sitting in her Brentwood home alongside Dick — her filmmaking partner — earlier this week. “And then she saw it numerous times throughout the editing process. We had a very close working relationship and very, very positive — enthusiastically positive. There weren’t any issues.”
Winfrey, who did not respond to The Times’ request for comment, announced her collaboration with Dick and Ziering — then called “Toxic Labor” — at Apple TV’s
first media presentation in Cupertino, Calif. on March 25. Apple, which also did not respond to The Times’ inquiries, subsequently wrote the application submitting the movie to Sundance in October, the filmmakers said. It was accepted to the festival, and in November, Ziering and Dick locked picture. On Dec. 3 — a day before the Sundance lineup was released — Harpo and Apple put out their own announcement
touting the collaboration.
“Apple was busy booking us rooms and flights,” Ziering said. “There was no intonation of any problems whatsoever.”
Online, however, backlash was brewing. On Dec. 12, the rapper 50 Cent
posted a picture of a smiling Winfrey and Simmons together on his Instagram account, accompanied by a caption questioning “why Oprah is going after black men” instead of Harvey Weinstein or Jeffrey Epstein. He alluded to the fact that Winfrey had also supported two alleged survivors of Michael Jackson’s sexual abuse who appeared in the HBO documentary “Leaving Neverland.” After that film aired in March 2019,
Winfrey sat down with the subjects,
Wade Robson and James Safechuck, for an interview special. She has since said that never before in her career had one of her interviews sparked such “hateration.”
Simmons, meanwhile,
voiced his own disappointment with Winfrey on Dec. 13. In
a letter addressed to Winfrey, the disgraced former R&B mogul said he found it “troubling” that she had chosen him to “single out” in the project. The filmmakers were not alarmed by the post: “That’s accused predator playbook 2.0,” Ziering said.
But a few days later, the directors received a new round of notes from Harpo, and Winfrey suggested the film might not be ready for Sundance. The suggestions they’d received from the production company up to this point, they said, had been “wonderful” and “acute” — mostly small things such as “we don’t like the way this scene transitions” or “can we build out this scene because we want more of this character,” Dick explained.
Receiving a new round of notes after picture lock was startling to the filmmakers, but they were not alarmed. “We felt like we could address them,” Dick said. “We didn’t really feel like the film needed them, because the film was already good, but as good partners, we wanted to honor the relationship and just keep moving forward. So what we had to do was cancel a lot of holiday plans, but we have a great staff and we pushed forward and we got it out.”
The filmmakers urged Harpo to move ahead with the Sundance release, arguing that it could be traumatizing for the alleged survivors featured in the documentary to change the distribution path once it had already been announced. And more changes could be made to the film post-Sundance — a common scenario for movies that debut at the annual January festival.
“Much as we wanted [Winfrey] to be happy and keep up the amazing relationship we had — and as much as we really do totally respect her vision — we felt and argued that we couldn’t blink,” Ziering recalled. “People would say that there’s a problem. If she didn’t want to go to Sundance or there was a change of heart about the distribution plan, the time for that had passed.”
When Winfrey’s Jan. 10 statement went wide, the filmmakers immediately reached out to the women in the movie — Simmons’ accusers including Drew Dixon, Sil Lai Abrams, Sheri Hines and Alexia Norton Jones — to check in.
“I felt horrible that we didn’t have more advance time to set them up and warn them,” Ziering said, her eyes filling with tears. “That’s a shock wave. It was horrible. It’s been horrible.”
The Simmons documentary is the fourth that Ziering and Dick have tackled on the subject of sexual abuse. They have explored the issue in the church (“Twist of Faith”), on college campuses (
“The Hunting Ground”) and in the military (
“The Invisible War,” nominated for best documentary at the 2013 Oscars). For years, they said, they had wanted to delve into sexual harassment in Hollywood and had spoken with Weinstein’s alleged survivors prior to fall 2017, when claims of his predatory behavior first surfaced in the New York Times. (The Weinstein Co.'s RADiUS-TWC division had released “The Hunting Ground.”)
“We had gone to several distributors and did not get funding, not surprisingly,” Dick said of the pair’s pre-#MeToo movement efforts. But as soon as an avalanche of serious accusations involving powerful entertainment industry figures began to pour out in late 2017, the filmmakers were able to secure financing from Impact Partners — the company behind documentaries including Academy Award-winners “The Cove” and “Icarus.”
At first, Dick and Ziering cast a wide net — reaching out to victims, executives and even this reporter about appearing in the film. Through a mutual filmmaker friend, they were connected with Drew Dixon, who told them that Simmons had raped her in his Manhattan apartment while she was working as a 24-year-old executive assistant at Def Jam Recordings in 1995.
At the time, the Los Angeles Times had yet to publish the first public accusations against Simmons. That came on Nov. 19, 2017, when Keri Claussen Khalighi
told the paper that in 1991, when she was a 17-year-old model, Simmons had forced her to perform oral sex on him and then penetrated her from behind while she was showering. Since then,
an additional 19 women — including Dixon, who spoke out in a Dec. 13, 2017
New York Times article — have alleged that Simmons was sexually inappropriate with them. He has vehemently denied all the claims, describing himself as a reformed “womanizer” who has “never been violent or forced myself on anyone.”