When she was a young teenager, Jennifer Fox had an older boyfriend. So transformed was she by the experience that she wrote a fond account of the relationship for a class project. No, wait, that's not right. When she was a young teenager, Jennifer Fox was groomed and sexually abused by an adult. And she wrote a message for her future self to find.
"The Tale," debuting Friday on HBO, is the dramatized version of filmmaker Fox's real experiences. Its impact comes from showing the story from the point of view of both the trusting 13-year-old Jenny and the adult Jennifer (a devastating Laura Dern) coming to terms with what really happened to her at the hands of her coach (Jason Ritter) and his predatory accomplice Mrs. G.
Ignited by her mother's (Ellen Burstyn) horrified discovery of "The Tale" she wrote years earlier, Jennifer begins to confront the reality of a situation she had — for her own emotional protection — romanticized, and sees how vulnerable the girl who thought she was mature really was. A pivotal moment comes when it sinks in as Jennifer listens to someone else explain it to her: "If he abused . . . if you had a relationship . . . it usually means there were others. There's never only one."
The film was hailed as "of the biggest movies" at Sundance when it debuted earlier this year, for its complex, vivid exploration of a difficult subject. But "The Tale" is often a tough watch, even if you know the painstaking work the production team did to protect its cast, especially Isabelle Nélisse, who plays Jenny. It's also a deeply cathartic one. Watching it reminded me of my own pre-teen conviction that the attentions of men three times my age were somehow a sign of my own sophistication, instead of their pathology. It forced me to think about the heroin-addicted musician I'd known in my twenties who was "dating" a 14-year-old club kid and how I'd let myself believe that their so-called relationship could be somehow consensual. The reckoning is here, and for the sake of my own teen daughters, thank God.
I spoke recently to writer and director Jennifer Fox via phone about her tale, my tale and "The Tale." Here's what she said.
I grew up with Love’s Baby Soft and Brooke Shields and her Calvin Klein jeans. I had friends who were part of groupie culture. I was young in an age where the overt sexualization of very young girls was culturally not considered unusual, really.
A couple of months ago I interviewed Dianne Lake. She was one of the Manson girls, and she was fascinating because she joined the Family when she was 14. She was able to articulate being a 14-year-old girl who was adolescent, who was appropriately sexually curious, who had even been sexually active in her way, and to identify that that is normal and appropriate and healthy. No one is going to question that. But then having a sexual relationship with Charlie Manson is not OK.
Yes. It’s so funny because I was looking at a script based on Susan Atkins' life, and I was thinking exactly the thing you’re saying. There’s so much similarity between cult leaders and [sex abuser] grooming.
This was a process for you that was a very long time in coming. "The Tale" really starts with you about ten years ago, rereading an old story.
I was making a film called “Flying: Confessions of a Free Woman.” That film is not about sexual abuse. It’s actually investigating what does it mean to be free. In doing so, I just had one conversation after another where it would just turn up that the woman had been sexually abused.
What I was hearing sounded so much like my own little private story that I called a relationship, there was this seismic crack in my body. Suddenly I realized what I protected in my mind as special and unique was not unique at all. It was the paradigm of sexual abuse. So that just opened up my eyes suddenly, and I did a major shift.
Then soon after, my mom did find "The Tale," and called me, hysterical about it. So it was a combination of things that I was finally ready to see the story anew. When I read "The Tale," I was just shocked again because there was sexual abuse all over it, but as a child I didn't see that.
So many of us have experienced that, where we have told ourselves one story or convinced ourselves of one narrative in order to not have to acknowledge that something far worse occurred, and that someone we trusted did something wrong.
Exactly. It happens over and over again. I think it’s because these events are not one thing. If you trust someone, there's love, there’s feeling. It’s a relationship, and one gets caught in the confusion of that.
We certainly see this again and again with the abuse of boys, too, that just because you have a physical response or just because you even have an emotional response, that does not mean that you were asking for it. Even if you, as you did, return to your abuser, that doesn't mean you are participating in it. That gets very tangled up in the minds, I think, of people who don't understand the way that abuse works, particularly long-term abuse.
When you were revisiting a story, I imagine that it was like discovering another room in your house. It seems to me that you read this story, and suddenly it's this thing about myself that I knew, it turned out I didn't know.
It isn’t one room. It’s many, many rooms. I think the act of writing "The Tale" was discovering one room after another, after another. They weren’t all about abuse. They were also about concepts of self.
I, first of all, discovered that I wasn’t the same self anymore. I always thought I was one continuous self. I realized I didn't know who that 13-year-old was any more, and I had to go back and reinvestigate her. Then another discovery was how much she determined who I would become by her decision of what she believed. Then discovering these people, and discovering the predatory nature I didn’t see or the narcissism, for example. It was really quite a journey writing the script, and rewarding and exciting artistically to think, well, how do you show these things?
I’ve read that it was challenging for the cast and the crew to then come into it fresh when you had already gone through the experience of processing this and reframing this information. It's so difficult, I would imagine, for people working on a story like this to get their heads around, “How do I approach this in a way that is authentic and not exploitive?”
I think we just had the most courageous cast. Each of them jumped in these roles and swam in these parts in a way that was amazing. Laura Dern — to say, "I'm going to tell a story about this kind of taboo. I'm going to go on this journey from denial to eyes wide open." Jason — to play a role like this which is so antithetical to who he is. Isabelle Nélisse — who plays young Jenny. I don’t know how the gods aligned to choose these people to work with, but I am so blessed.
One of the things in this film that got me thinking about immediately was when a friend of my husband was having a “relationship” with a 14-year-old girl when he was in his early 30s. Thinking how I was disgusted by him, but I also, maybe ignorantly, didn't think, "Someone needs to help this girl." I really didn't.
I think it's the times. Our worlds have shifted. I had teachers, albeit they weren't that much older than us, who were going out with my friends of mine in high school. Fifteen-year-old friends. I think there's been a huge awakening, especially with #MeToo and #TimesUp, that's cracked open the question of what these relationships were, and what power does. Now we're moving into the taboo of child sexual abuse, which is even a further taboo than assault and violence with adults. I’m so happy that we’re in a time where finally things can be looked at. I think actually that "The Tale" is rising now because people are ready to face these very difficult topics in a way they weren’t even a year ago.
With this film coming out at this watershed moment, it does feel like this is a bigger conversation that we are ready to have as a culture. This is an issue that we are willing to look in ways that are nuanced and do acknowledge the complicity around abuse and the circumstances that permit it to happen.
I always wanted to make a film about it when I became a filmmaker, but I just didn’t know how. I didn’t have the maturity. It wasn’t until this wakeup moment in my 40s when I was making "Flying," that I thought, "OK, now I’m ready." For me, it was a lot of things. Suddenly I was ready to see it differently. I was also ready as an artist to fictionalize my own story. When I was making “Flying,” I was in it, so I learned learned the craft of turning myself into narrative, which I felt that I could do with this film.
It took me basically 35 years to be ready to make this story, t0 be strong enough, mature enough. I think it’s quite common, by the way, that people face these things in middle age. Only in middle age did I feel like I had the ego strength to face some of the darker issues and some of the darker things that I had put aside. It was when I was in my 40s that I knew I could look at these things without destroying myself, actually.
What has it been like for people who see this film, and what is it like for you hearing these other stories?
We're getting this groundswell. It sort of goes to two categories. One, if it’s from a person that hasn’t had this touch their life — which is only about 50 percent of the people — it's, "Now I understand the first time how these things happen." I think it is because the film is told so inside two characters at different ages, myself in different ages, that it can really answer it and go through the journey from inside, and people really understand.
Also, I get a response that, "This is so much about memory, and it helped me understand what I think was my divorce, or how I dealt with my father dying. Or didn't deal." It also makes people think about how they tell themselves stories. For people who have had abuse or assault in their lives, I think what I’m really hearing is a lot of, “Thank you. Now I can finally explore what happened to me. I didn’t think that it could be told in all its complexity and nuance."
This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.
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