As a filmmaker, Lisa F. Jackson doesn’t shy away from tough subjects. And there is no tougher subject than rape, and this country’s history of sexual assault laws and how often the victims were treated worse than the men who attacked them. In her documentary “Sex Crimes Unit,” Jackson examines how the laws have changed and the district attorneys and investigators who changed them and continue working tirelessly for victims today.
Up until the 1970s, New York State law—as well the laws in most other states in the country—were archaic when it came to sexual assault. The burden of proof for a rape case was completely unbalanced towards the victim. She had to corroborate every material element of her assault. Marital rape was not considered a crime, and rape had a strict statute of limitations. It was open season on the victim’s sexual history, as a defense attorney could use a woman’s prior sexual activity to try and weaken her case.
New York was the first state to enact reforms; longtime Manhattan District Attorney Robert M. Morgenthau created the first Sex Crimes Prosecution Unit, making Linda Fairstein the unit’s first chief. New York City has long been on the cutting edge and a model for other cities when it comes to prosecuting sex crimes, whether through the hard work of its Cold Case Unit or the extensive use of DNA in convicting criminals. Along with Morgenthau and Fairstein, the Cold Case Unit, formed in 2000 by Assistant District Attorneys Melissa Mourges and Martha Bashford, started to give hope to victims who thought their attackers could never be brought to justice.
“Sex Crimes Unit” had its premiere this past weekend at the L.A. Film Festival as part of its Summer Showcase, and will have its television premiere on HBO June 20th. Jackson’s relationship with the network extends back to the mid-1990s. It was HBO that gave the filmmaker her first development deal.
For New Yorker Jackson, the documentary has been a passion project of hers for some fifteen years. She has maintained contact with all the pioneers of the sex crimes unit, including Morgenthau and Fairstein, and finally saw the opportunity to get it done.
“I’ve known about the unit the whole time I’ve lived in Manhattan,” Jackson said, “and I first met Linda Fairstein in 1995 or 1996, and that’s when I first became obsessed with doing a film about the unit, either following Fairstein or the A.D.As (Assistant District Attorneys) and it became…it’s difficult to follow lawyers when they’re discussing an open case but I was just persistent and every two, three years I’d go back there and try again and then I heard Mr. Morgenthau, our wonderful district attorney, was retiring and I suggested to him that this is now or never. Let’s do a film about this incredible unit that you helped nurture and support and he went for it. So I started filming in 2009, and filmed for almost two years.”
What makes “Sex Crimes Unit” so fascinating is the way it weaves multiple narratives. It not only focuses on the case of a brutal rape against a prostitute (who requested not to be shown on camera) and the investigators and attorneys of the office (with plenty of banter as they go about their daily lives), but it also includes the story of Natasha Alexenko, who was raped in 1993, and through the work of Mourges and Bashford, her attacker was convicted a decade and a half later.
As the statute of limitations was about to run out on Alexenko’s case, Mourges and Bashford were able to file a John Doe indictment—kind of a placeholder until the attacker’s identity could be found. Alexenko’s attacker may have gone free at the time of the rape, but his DNA was on file in CODIS (Combined DNA Index System), and by using recently passed legislation, they were able to effectively halt the statute of limitations and wait until the DNA matched a person, no matter how long it took, to the crime.
“I knew that I wanted to find somebody that had gone through the process, a survivor that I could put a name and a face to her experience,” Jackson said. “And early on, Martha suggested Natasha Alexenko might be willing to speak with me since she had done a power point presentation for some police department; Martha and Melissa travel all the time and talk about their unit and help serve as a model for other units around the country, so they called Natasha and asked her if she’d be willing to talk to a journalist, a documentarian who was doing a film about the unit and she said yes. I went out to Long Island and met her and we just became instant best friends and it wasn’t until a year later that we actually did her interview and she’s my friend to this day.”
Alexenko’s story is one of perseverance. After the rape, she left New York, and it seems that she buried the attack as well as she could. When she received the call years later that the man who raped her had been arrested, she gathered her strength to face him in court. And not only did she confront him, she also returned to the apartment building where she was brutally assaulted. Jackson speaks highly of how Alexenko advocates for victims, and how it was at Alexenko’s insistence that they revisit the scene of the rape.
“She started a foundation, left her museum job, and dedicated herself to getting backlogged rape kits off the shelves, and she’s amazing,” Jackson said. “That was all her idea; I had no idea she was going to do that. We took her back just to get a shot of her in front of the building. A delivery man came and the door got opened and she was just, ‘let’s go.’”
For a veteran documentary filmmaker such as Jackson, the nuts and bolts of filmmaking and making the film are always a consideration. She received an amazing amount of access, as current Sex Crimes Unit Chief Lisa Friel opened up her office. That’s not to say there weren’t tricky moments along the way.
“It’s all a negotiation, it always is,” Jackson said. “There had to be ground rules for instance about what we filmed in Lisa Friel’s office, shooting in the court we had to have the judge’s permission, and we had to have the victim’s permission, even though she’s not on camera at her request . We had to have her permission to film and the defendant held out until the last minute; he didn’t want to be filmed. And then when I showed up to film the opening statements, I told him through his lawyer this was his last opportunity to get his side of the story told and he changed his mind on the spot.”
It’s through the prosecution of this case, and the juggling of several others, where we get to see the interactions of the different offices and the personalities come out, especially through Deputy Unit Chief Coleen Balbert and Assistant District Attorneys Melissa Penabad and Jennifer Sculco. They talk about everything from Derek Jeter and the New York Yankees to how “Law and Order” shooting on the streets of the city can mess up their day. It shows the humanity of the people in the office, and how they try to keep their lives normal so they don’t get consumed by their jobs.
Ultimately, “Sex Crimes Unit” works because Jackson and her team have made a well-paced, fascinating documentary about a subject that mostly gets glossed over on shows such as the aforementioned “Law and Order” or “CSI.” Jackson deftly lets her subjects do most of the talking.
It’s clear that documentaries have served Jackson well, and she readily admits it’s the only style of film that she really cares to do. It’s this reason that she continues to tackle the subjects that others may never even scratch the surface of.
“It’s all I’ve ever done. It’s an amazing privilege to be a sort of fly on the wall inside of other people’s lives, inside of a process that you otherwise would never have the privilege to observe. Every film is almost like a college education because so intensely are you immersed in this other world.”
