Reasonable Fear

How True Crime Shortchanges Women of Colour

Cavona Flenoy in S2, E6 of Netflix series ‘I Am A Killer’

‘What is essential is that black victims of crime almost always need to be the perpetrators of their own deaths. You’re the victim of a crime, but somehow you get turned into the criminal.’

-- Yance Ford, filmmaker. 

In the Netflix series I Am A Killer, the gambit is as bluntly basic as the title. Or at least, it seems that way at first glance. 

In each episode, a convicted murderer - either on death row or facing life imprisonment - speaks directly to camera about his or her involvement in the crime, essentially telling their story. Maybe at first glance, this appears to be a straightforward format, giving ‘agency’ to the prisoner and letting them speak for themselves. There’s some merit to that, but then, there are also other factors at play that are less appealing. 

Each episode of I Am A Killer is self-contained, squeezing a great deal of crucial information into just under an hour -- a truncated and frankly concerning choice, turning vastly complex stories into bite-sized entertainment. The show is designed to withhold major details of each case, wilfully keeping the viewer guessing as to the convict’s version of events. Typically, an episode will go on to feature a variety of other POVs, including witnesses, family members, and law enforcement, deepening and often contradicting the initial story. The first season, released in 2018, was a bald exercise in exploitative documentary-making. In one episode, an inmate’s alleged history of sexual abuse is held back and then levelled at him later on as a possible motive for his crime.

Episodes are titled with sensationalist phrases like ‘Sympathy for the Devil’ and ‘Intended Evil’. And there’s a duty of care owed to the prisoner; the vast majority of the inmates featured, when searched online, do not turn up much information beyond their appearance on the programme. That’s a two-fold ethical dilemma. On one hand, their perspective is presented in a neatly-edited package that can easily elide and deceive; on the other, they are being given a public voice in a way which many of the victims’ families find distasteful, to say the least. Regardless of any extenuating circumstances, the show presents a theatre of sorts for these convicted murderers to perform. At worst, it backs up the familiar true crime trope of placing the individual psyche of the criminal above the plight of the victim. This is maximum-throttle grotesquerie.

But what really interests me about I Am a Killer is the canniness with which it has altered its storytelling to evolve with the times. Its second season was released in 2020; in those two years, some of the discourse around true crime had shifted. A lot smart critiques had emerged around the ethics of the genre, murder as entertainment, and, as Rachelle Hampton phrases it, the way true crime ‘frames the justice system as inherently just, and long prison sentences as something to aspire toward’.  The producers and filmmakers behind I Am A Killer (ZNAK TV Productions, if you’re curious, who also have worked on a slew of popular reality TV) seemed to recognise that whatever dramatic ‘shortcuts’ they might be making, they needed to at least appear to be socially conscious.  In other words: they shoehorned in the matter of race and sex. 

In the first season of the show, there are zero women subjects in ten episodes; in the second, there are three, only one of whom is Black. And the story of that Black woman’s experience, both as a victim of violent crime and eventually a perpetrator of it, does feel like an improvement on what’s come before in the show, at least at first. 

Cavona Flenoy was convicted of second-degree murder when she was nineteen years old, after shooting a man named Hassan Abbas dead in his apartment. Flenoy had a history of childhood sexual abuse and serious addiction problems; she agreed to go on a date with Abbas in exchange for some liquor. He brought her back to his apartment and Flenoy claims he tried to rape her, so she acted in self-defense and shot him. State prosecutors weren’t interested in bringing the case to trial, instead pressuring Flenoy to plead guilty to second-degree murder or else fear being charged in the first degree. With a two-year-old son at home and wanting to avoid a long sentence, Flenoy took bad legal advice and pled guilty. She was sentenced to 25 years in prison; even though she had spent most of her adolescence suffering from sexual violence and seemed finally to have snapped, the prosector suggested she was trying to commit armed robbery. Granted, it’s good that I Am A Killer chose to address a case so littered by the old racist assumptions of Black women; that she was sexually profligate, ‘asking’ for trouble, or somehow more inherently capable of committing armed robbery than a nineteen-year-old white woman. 

The visual approach the episode uses is bog standard. It begins with Flenoy’s deeply upsetting direct address about the circumstances of her life and events leading up to the murder, and then a series of talking-head white policemen and prosecutors explaining how much more calculated her crimes were than she had made out. The only feeble defense Flenoy gets by the conclusion is that a woman who had committed premeditated murder wouldn’t have left her shoe in the apartment as she left, leaving the door open a sliver for us us to wonder if Flenoy’s claim of self-defense was true all along.

In short: the filmmakers pay lip service to the existence of an all-white, racist justice system, and play up Flenoy’s victimhood. Then they flip the switch on her, seemingly unable to resist throwing her account into question in order to make the story more twisty. It’s not just that she was a teenage substance abuser who was in a hysterical panic, and whose memory might not have been perfect. In these stories, it’s never the obvious and less exciting version of events; it’s always the ulterior motive and the secret lie. 

But hey, they figure. People want to binge-watch some thrilling true crime, not be bummed out by racism and sexism and the prison-industrial complex. In my last newsletter I wrote about why I felt that if all true crime falls on some kind of skewed moral sliding scale, then at least Youtubers like Bailey Sarian, for all their flaws, are operating in the mode of direct address. Here, there’s the mirage of editing and reshuffling chronologies - more borrowed from the vernacular of reality television than anything else - used to manipulate viewers. I Am a Killer is pretty crude in its methods, and utterly televisual, but it works. The intention is for white viewers to feel in-the-know about racism being at the centre of Flenoy’s harsh sentence, then to scratch their chins at the puzzle of ‘which story is true’ for a few minutes. It’s not for them to lose any sleep over, beyond that. 

I’m far from the first person to say it, but what true crime really needs is a radical expansion; a reimagining of its parameters, from the audience it’s serving to the people it’s casting in the same old roles. What could true crime look like in the hands of creators who rightly mistrusted the official police narrative of events, or who even actively avoided interviewing law enforcement? What about ones which centre stories on people of colour’s experience with crime and policing - and not as an anecdotal way to seem ‘plugged in’ to current events (a la the Cavona Flenoy case ) - but with integrity and sincerity? 

I would say, in part at least, a positive rejoinder might look like Yance Ford’s remarkable documentary Strong Island (2017). It’s not the sort of film that people are prone to label as true crime: it’s too smart, too unflinching, too zeroed in on racial injustice, and maybe most of all, on the sediment of grief that builds on a victim’s family. Yet it contains the major elements of true crime: the recounting of a real murder with a number of conflicting stories of its circumstances, extensive conversations with the victims’ family members, and exploration of the subsequent legal situation. It’s punctuated by tight close-ups on the filmmaker’s face as he asks a series of questions - many unanswerable - to the audience. It’s uncomfortable, and that’s the point.

Yance Ford, in his film Strong Island

Ford’s brother William was 24 years old and unarmed when he was shot and killed by a white man outside a Long Island body shop. But a Grand Jury failed to indict the killer and the case didn’t even make it to trial, leading to a series of shockwaves in the bereaved family and leading Ford to weave a story that goes far beyond the story of his brother’s murder. From his parents moving out of the Jim Crow South to suburban redlining to the pitfalls of upward mobility in a nation where - as Ford put it when I interviewed him in 2017 - ‘It was simple in 1992, and it is now: it’s relatively easy to take a black life and not be punished for it.’ 

So why should Strong Island be precluded from being called true crime? I think the answer matters. It could be because it’s a high-quality, thoughtful film, and that the label sounds pejorative. Or that it’s lacking in the chills and spills of murder-for-entertainment viewing, and streamers, et al, wouldn’t like to disappoint their expectant fans. Or it could be because it’s a Black story, directed by a Black man about his own brother’s homicide, and whose backbone derives from a series of interviews with his mother.

If true crime cannot and will not absorb this sort of story, which mostly it has so far failed to do, it will never grow into anything remotely worthwhile. Somewhere along the line, it was decided that the commonplace horror of violence against Black people and people of colour were not as interesting as aberrant tales of flesh-eaters and white-women-stabbers. As journalist Wesley Lowery put it succinctly, quoted here in Elon Green’s brilliant essay, ‘The subjective decisions that are made about what to portray in true crime is a financial decision, made based on what is presumed a white audience will care about.’ 

Ford family photo, still from Strong Island

And that bears itself out as I try to think of films and TV in this vein that feature women of colour prominently. One of the better of these, I think, comes in the second season of Mindhunter. It takes liberties, given that it’s a fictionalised account of the FBI investigation of the notorious Atlanta child murders. But it goes some way in undermining the authority of its cop protagonists, even the well-intentioned ones; it shows how politicking and bad PR eat into the integrity of an investigation, and how the media encourages indifference toward dead Black girls and stokes outrage over dead white ones. And it depicts the grassroots organisations run by predominantly Black Atlanta mothers, whose pressure on local government proved instrumental in continuing efforts to catch the killer. 

S2 Mindhunter. Actor June Carryl as Camille Bell

Similarly, in Strong Island, Barbara Ford’s testimony to the camera is the backbone of the story. Other questions arise from this. Here, she is talking to her child behind the camera; we can feel safe in the assumption there is nothing but care in how her on-screen moments are being handled. But overall, it’s a tricky one; we shouldn’t really be asking for women of colour to be performing their trauma, or repeating it for the camera at risk of re-traumatising themselves. But if trauma is going to be narrativized and pored over ad infinitum (and it is, because for better or worse that’s what true crime does; what is homicide if not traumatic?) then who is guiding us through it is also pivotal. 

At their best, docs like Errol Morris’ The Thin Blue Line (1988) have demonstrably influenced a push for real justice. So what audience power could potentially be harnessed if true crime, as a genre, was interested in spotlighting different stories and voices? What about the women who are not aberrations, not movie psychopaths or sentimental victims, but a part of a more banal and uncomfortable reality - young women like Cavona Flenoy, who was sexually abused and thrown to the wolves, or mothers like Barbara Ford who have been through the unthinkable and still retain their sharp insight into political reality?

Imagine if the more uncritical true crime TV consumers might be lured into watching something which actually challenges them to look askance at the role - and honesty - of law enforcement. Or to query long-held assumptions about who fits the profile of a victim and who fits the profile of a criminal, giving more space --- and visual real-estate -- to sex workers, trans women, or indigenous women, to name a few groups more at risk of violence than middle-class white ladies. 

True crime may never be exactly a respectable genre - even as someone who sometimes enjoys it,  it isn’t beyond me to admit that by its nature it may be inherently amoral, or at least posing serious ethical quandaries. But its fans aren’t going anywhere, so within that framework you have to wonder what might allow it to be a force for positive change. Unfortunately, if the faux-concern of shows like I Am a Killer are anything to go by, I think we still have quite a way to go before that happens.

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Thank you for reading the second part of the true crime edition of Sisters Under the Mink. If you liked it, please do feel free to share it on social media below.