Tell Them You Love Me

The Netflix documentary Tell Them you Love Me sheds remarkable insight into a world filled with amazing stories of newly found literacy in nonspeaking people. It provides this understanding without preaching or throwing out a lot of facts, but through brilliant storytelling. While not always easy to watch, I found it riveting.

Anna Stubblefield, a former professor at Rutgers University-Newark, plays the key role in the story. A highly sympathetic character at the beginning of the story, the filmmakers quickly pull you into her narrative. You want to believe and take what she is saying at face value, but as the film progresses, and the more she talks, things don’t seem to be fitting together. Something is off. Stubblefield was convicted and sentenced to twelve years in prison for what she did to Derrick Johnson, a 33-year-old disabled man with cerebral palsy who cannot speak. Her sentence was later reduced to 2 years because of a legal misstep by the prosecution.

This is a great film to watch on several levels, and I highly recommend it. First, it is brilliantly directed by Nick August-Perna, who was born in Madison, Wisconsin, and graduated from New York University. The film took 6-7 years to make. It avoids all sensationalism, provides interviews with multiple perspectives, and deftly explores the complexities of the case without drawing conclusions or shoving answers at you. August-Perna had an uncle with disabilities, which may have sparked his curiosity about communication and missed opportunities.

Second, it shows the world of facilitated communication (FC), which was introduced in the early 1990s and was promoted by Douglas Bilen at Syracuse University. This is the theory that many nonspeaking people with cerebral palsy or severe autism have brilliant and intact minds beneath their broken bodies. With someone supporting their hands or arms, a trained facilitator, the nonspeaking person is able to type out messages on a keyboard. Suddenly, people never able to utter a sentence could write essays, novels and poetry with the assistance of their facilitators. FC began to spread rapidly and widely.

But then, science got involved and peer-reviewed studies of papers describing double-blind studies which showed no communication coming from the nonspeaking person. So who is really typing these messages? In the film, when the nonspeaking person and the facilitator work at a table with a barrier between preventing them from seeing the pictures of familiar objects. When both saw the picture of a tree, for instance, then “t-r-e-e” was spelled out. However, when shown different pictures, the typed word always match what the facilitator saw, not the non-speaking person.

A few weeks after watching the film, I was paging through one of my favorite magazines, Skeptical Inquirer, and saw an article by Stuart Vyse titled When Silence Speaks: The Harmful Pseudoscience of Facilitated Communication. His article describes the film but then goes into far more depth on the history of FC, its impact as well as providing an impressive set of references.

Watch the film, then let me know what you think? I’m curious as to your take on Anna Stubblefield. How would you judge her character and her actions? One important hint, be sure to watch to the end. One of the most critical bits of information is revealed in the end credits. What action, if any, should be directed at those promoting and offering FC services?

One last thing: Leila Latif reviewed the film for The Guardian and concluded: “What is fascinating about the documentary is how many topics it touches upon intelligently and sensitively in less than two hours. Beyond consent, disability and race there is space given to reflect upon the nature of language, the “white saviour” complex, the purpose of justice and what constitutes unconditional love. Tell Them You Love Me might be a hard watch, but it is also a vital one.”