Poor Aging Or Disgrace
the true crime that's worth your time
No, that subject line is not the title of my sex tape. Nor is it the subtitle to my upcoming memoir (jk, no one wants to read my bio, which is very boring). But it’s not entirely unrelated to memoir style-content, as well as documentary works, as today we’re wondering what folks behind true crime properties do (if anything) when their subjects are disgraced — and what movies, books, and podcasts start to fall apart when their central figure or tenet starts to show its seams.
I was starting to roll this around in my head yesterday as I listened to an interview with Naomi Klein, whose non-true-crime book, Doppelganger, has her doing the media rounds. The book began as a look at how she’s often confused with Naomi Wolf — a once vaunted writer whose misunderstanding of how gay men were prosecuted in Victorian England tanked the release of a recent book.
Klein argues that that repetitional damage was that last straw for Wolf, who’d already been demonstrating fringey beliefs in the years up to that scandal. Wolf has become a regular on Steve Bannon’s podcast, among other things, regularly perpetuating falsehoods about the pandemic, or worse.
Then I came home to Anna Merlan and Tim Marchman’s latest report on Tim Ballard, the former Homeland Security agent lionized in the controversial film Sound of Freedom. I spoke with Merlan and Marchman when I was working on my VF piece about the movie this summer; the pair (along with Lynn Packer, whose work proceeded theirs but is sometimes less accessible) have been on the forefront of separating fact from fiction when it comes to Ballard and the anti-child trafficking organization he cofounded, long before Sound of Freedom (which was made several years ago) found a distributor.
According to their report, Ballard — who is presented in the film as a tirelessly ethical family man, an image Ballard has also presented in his many interviews — is the subject of multiple sexual misconduct and harassment claims, allegations serious enough that he departed his nonprofit. Ballard denies the allegations, saying in recent days that “It’s not true, nothing you hear is true.”
If SoF were not so mired in political discourse, I’d wonder if the scandal might have an impact on how the movie is viewed; but given the divisiveness around it, I don’t know. But Ballard is certainly not the first person depicted in a podcast, book, doc, or drama who would later face potentially tarnishing allegations.
What I’m wondering is if that makes a difference to you, as a reader/listener/viewer? And if it does, what would you have the folks behind those properties do to address the problems raised after their projects have entered the world? — EB