Kirby Dick and Amy Ziering weren’t planning on making another documentary about institutional cover-ups of widespread sexual assault. They had just finished making The Invisible War, a critically-acclaimed, Oscar-nominated documentary about sexual assault in the United States Military. As they toured college campuses with the film, students were coming up to Dick and Ziering after the screenings, telling them, “You know, this happens here, too.” So they began work on The Hunting Ground, a documentary about sexual assault on college campuses, which opened this week.
The Hunting Ground is not about sports, but it does have some relevancy to the sports world. Most notably, Jameis Winston’s accuser, Erica Kinsman, speaks out for the first time. Tom Seeberg, the father of Lizzy Seeberg, the Notre Dame student who committed suicide after she was allegedly assaulted by a Notre Dame football player, tells his story as well.
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The film is relentless, uncompromising, brilliantly reported, and a potent reminder that the issue of sexual assault on college campuses extends far beyond the athletic departments. I sat down with Dick and Ziering recently in New York to talk about the making of the film and where we, as a society, go from here in the face of such an epidemic.
The following has been slightly edited for clarity and brevity.
When you reached out to colleges to get interviews for the film, what did they say?
Kirby Dick: Well, with college presidents, the vast majority of them either declined to be interviewed or didn’t respond at all. We did interview a couple, but it’s just so typical. The leaders of these schools do not want to speak about it.
Amy Ziering: They were grateful we were addressing it because it’s important but unfortunately they’d have to decline. Something like that is the usual response.
Did you reach out to any athletic departments specifically?
Amy Ziering: I did, and that was more friendly. A lot of times, it was just genuine scheduling problems.
Kirby Dick: We wanted to get a Division I coach of a football or basketball team who had a good record, obviously, to talk about what he was doing right and hopefully that would provide a model for other schools. People were receptive, but they weren’t willing to speak.
Amy Ziering: In this one case, it really had been greenlit and greenlit and then it disappeared.
Kirby Dick: So even in the case where the coach wanted to speak, they wouldn’t be allowed to.
In many cases highlighted in the film, the administrations were willfully ignoring the issue. Was that a surprise to you? How quickly did that become obvious to you?
Kirby Dick: It became obvious right away. From the very first stories we were hearing all the way through to the final stories, it’s a very recurring theme. Reputation is so important for schools because it affects the quality of the applicants they get and it certainly affects the amount of donations they get. Schools are incentivized to cover this up. In that regard, schools are no different than other institutions like the military and the Catholic church.
In many cases, we know of administrators who were willfully covering this up, preventing an investigation from going forward. I think there are other cases where administrators were ignorant, sometimes maybe even unknowingly victim-blaming or just didn’t believe survivors but weren’t doing it deliberately to cover things up. That’s one of the things we hope that this film does is for those administrators, at least, it opens their eyes to this issue.
So that’s one layer of the bureaucracy standing in the students’ way. Another is, sometimes, the athletic departments, which you cover as well.
Kirby Dick: Right, well there’s a whole history of this. Certainly, athletic departments are a big part of a school’s reputation and a big reason people apply and give money. One of the things we didn’t want to do in this film—I mean we did want to examine that and we do in depth—but I think there is a misperception that most of the problem is with athletes. Actually, that’s not the majority of the problem. That’s why we want to put great focus on fraternities and really broaden it. I think because athletes are higher profile, sort of get caught more often. But they do not cause a majority of the assaults.
Photo from The Hunting Ground
You focus on two cases involving athletes in the film: Lizzy Seeberg and obviously the Jameis Winston case. First, how did you decide to feature those two cases so prominently in the movie? And how did you get the Winston accuser to talk to you for the film?
Amy Ziering: Obviously, we wanted everyone to understand this is systemic, widespread, and institutional so we had to have different schools represent different demographics. We were looking for a state school where sports are a focus, a Catholic school, an Ivy League, a small school, a liberal arts school…so that was a strategic calculation. We had hundreds of stories from around the country. Each could have made a feature. So we used them all as different aspects of the problem.
So once we decided that, we saw Florida State in the news and thought it would be a great case to follow. So we started reaching out to Erica.
I can’t speak for her. My best guess is she responded because at the point we had contacted her, all anyone in the public had heard was largely Winston’s side of the story. So this was her opportunity to finally share her truth.
Kirby Dick: As far as the Lizzy Seeberg story, unfortunately suicides are not that rare in this situation. So that was the reason we focused on that story. By the way, there are a number of other suicides that we could have focused on as well and we actually had a montage at one point of them and decided not to put it in for cinematic reasons.
Was it ever a concern to put Erica in the film given the amount of threats she has received?
Kirby Dick: We were very aware of that. There are people who we actually ended up interviewing that we didn’t put into the film for that reason, that we felt, even though they were willing to go public, we just felt that perhaps at this moment, we felt kind of responsible not to put them in the film. But you can see Erica is very strong and it was the right choice.
In the film, several survivors said that the actions by the university to cover up the assault was worse than the assault itself. Did any survivors say that they second-guessed their decision to report the assault based on the reaction they got from the university?
Kirby Dick: I think in a number of cases they did say that they would not have done it again, which…
Amy Ziering: Yeah, it ended up not helping them, but hurting them, psychologically and emotionally.
You speak to a former Notre Dame campus security officer who details the degree to which the athletic department controls investigations. Did you come across this elsewhere?
Kirby Dick: The McCaskill Senate study found that over 20 percent of athletic departments oversee the sexual assault investigations. That [statistic] was in and out of the movie for a long time, but yeah, it’s very common.
Did you speak to any survivors who knew it was an athlete at the time of the assault?
Amy Ziering: Yes, several.
Did it affect their decision of whether to report or not?
Amy Ziering: Absolutely. There’s one woman I’m thinking of that her mom contacted me and I reached out to her several times and she really wanted to speak but felt very, very scared of doing so and actually it was sad. She ended up coming to Sundance to see the film and at that moment thought maybe she should have, but it’s interesting. The fear…and it was a very celebrated athlete. It was a very big case at her school.
Big case as in…?
Amy Ziering: It was known. She had received a lot of retaliation and blowback. It was very painful. She had never told her story publicly. We had been looking for her, but it was through a letter I got from a relative of hers, and that’s how I got connected with her.
From The Hunting Ground
A lot of people have their faith in these institutions shaken or completely destroyed as a result of their experiences. That ties in very closely with the way people identify with these schools through athletics as well. Did anyone re-evaluate their ties to the university as a result of the events that took place?
Kirby Dick: Well, Sophie at Berkeley comes to mind. She’s in Boston, she’s looking at schools across the country. She learns about Berkeley in the 60s and says, I’m going there because that is the social justice school in the country from her perspective. She just could not believe they didn’t respond in a supportive way and tried to cover things up and are still doing it. She’s been fighting this fight now for a couple of years and we are still getting reports of problems at Berkeley we would be putting in our film if we were still shooting.
Amy Ziering: Or just Molly in the film who talked about how her father used to wear his Notre Dame ring, used to go to the games. [Writer’s note: In the film, Molly said that after she told her father about the assault, he took the ring off and never put it back on.] There are a lot of sad stories actually, about families that really identify with the school. Obviously, Tom Seeberg, nine of his family members had gone to Notre Dame.
There was another case where we followed it, it was pursued a long time, and then he said, you know we can’t because the grandparents are trustees and they choose the school over their granddaughter. It was a very famous family and they were very shaken. They really thought about it long and hard and said, you know, we just can’t do it.
What does that even mean, choosing the school over their granddaughter?
Kirby Dick: They would disown the granddaughter.
Amy Ziering: If their granddaughter went forward and spoke in a way that reflected poorly on the institution publicly, they wouldn’t abide by that. Who knows?
Kirby Dick: They’re big donors of the school.
Two of the main characters are very active as agents for change. What did you find the most optimistic paths for change?
Kirby Dick: Each school should be doing regular surveys. Transparency is the first step in addressing this problem and what’s sadly missing from all school policies. Until every school does that and releases the information publicly, they’re still, in a way, participating in a cover-up of that information.
The second thing, I think, is to put much more money and really professionalize the investigation and adjudication processes. The result of that will be more people who assault will be found responsible and expelled, making the campus safer. But also, in the rare cases of false reports, the men who are falsely accused will be much better protected. So it’s better for everyone.
Amy Ziering: I would say awareness and conscious changing. If all these administrators see our film, I think a shift in their response would be huge. At a Q&A in Sundance with one of the survivors, one [person] asked [a survivor] what they could do and she said, “Just believe us.” We can at least do that. At least understand that in most of these cases the person is not making it up so respond like a human being.
