A New Wave of Documentaries Is Taking On Sexual Assault

SALT LAKE CITY, Utah—Three weeks after the initial airing of Lifetime’s Surviving R. Kelly, the 2019 Sundance Film Festival saw the premieres of two separate documentaries that chronicle previously reported allegations of sexual abuse. The director Ursula Macfarlane’s Untouchable threads together numerous accounts of the film mogul Harvey Weinstein’s alleged systematized predation. Leaving Neverland, a two-part docuseries from the director Dan Reed, follows two men as they attempt to reconcile the effect that the late Michael Jackson’s alleged abuse has had on their lives. Though they vary in form and aesthetic sensibility, both new productions are jarring works that call attention to the wide-ranging effects of alleged sexual abuse and the silence that often follows it.

The men implicated in all three recent productions repeatedly denied allegations of abuse and, in some cases, before they could speak out. But the #MeToo-era documentary is a fraught genre for reasons that extend beyond the ire of the accused (or in Jackson’s case, an