Victim/Suspect review: When rape claims ended in gross miscarriage of justice

3/5

Story: When cub reporter Rachel de Leon looks for a subject to sink her teeth into, she stumbles upon reports of a college student being imprisoned for making a false report of alleged rape. Soon enough, Rachel finds that this was not an isolated incident and that there have been many more cases where rape victims eventually plead guilty to having concocted it all. Did they really lie about being attacked or did they get the raw end of the stick during the investigation into the crime?

Review: The Netflix docu-feature Victim/Suspect is a brief account of the years of investigative reporting that Rachel de Leon undertook to establish the lapses in the investigations of rape claims that eventually ended in the victims not only recanting, but also pleading guilty to having fabricated the claims and serving jail sentences.

While Rachel was profoundly affected by the revelations of her investigation, wherein rape victims were treated as suspects and not offered the support one would expect from law enforcement, as an investigative journalist, she was clear that she could not become an advocate for the victims. All she could do was present the facts as they were, which, of course, was easier said than done, what with the cops refusing to talk to her, share reports, etc., forcing Rachel to sue and get her hands on as many documents as possible that were relevant to her story.

The film features real-life victims, who were arrested and sent to jail, after investigative officers literally bullied them into not only admitting that they were not assaulted and had just had a consensual sexual activity, but taking the fall for it too. It’s depressing, to say the least, when law enforcement fails to provide protection and more so when you see that the ‘perpetrators’ here are men, who follow a pattern of, say, establishing that the victim knew the alleged attacker, was intoxicated, made out and got carried away in the heat of the moment. No harm done, apparently, except that by reporting rape, they’d committed a punishable crime and had to account for it. And if that wasn't bad enough, now, as a suspect, they no longer had a right to privacy and details of the cases were made available to the press, which, literally destroyed their lives just as much as the attack itself. 

Much of Victim/Suspect revolves around Rachel’s desperate attempts to put her story together, which included a lot of dead ends owing to the non-cooperation of the officers involved in these investigations. You feel for the victims as they are outraged at realizing how blatantly they were lied to by cops into admitting guilt. Yet, the docu-feature does not make for wholesome viewing because it essentially presents only one side of the story – we never get to the bottom of why so many cases are flipped around.

Verdict: Victim/Suspect is quite engaging, despite the simple narrative style. While it would have, no doubt, benefitted a great deal, had it provided the police version too, there’s no taking away from the years of hard toil that went into establishing a pattern of injustice meted out to women.