“I love Aaron … but I felt this storyline was unacceptable,” Alena Smith told BuzzFeed News.
HBO
HBO
As it nears the end of its three-season run, The Newsroom is going out like it came in: squarely in the middle of the gender wars, with a frisson of writers room intrigue thrown into the mix.
The penultimate episode of the Aaron Sorkin drama, titled "Oh Shenandoah," aired Sunday, Dec. 7, on HBO and featured a campus rape plot. ACN news producer Don Keefer (Thomas Sadoski) tracks down a Princeton student, Mary (Sarah Sutherland), a rape victim, who has anonymously put up a website on which women who have been sexually assaulted can tell their stories. The two characters debate throughout the course of the episode: Mary wants people to believe her and other rape survivors, while Don wants "to ensure an innocent person [i.e. man] isn't destroyed."
The episode was written and filmed months ago, but it coincidentally aired the weekend after the disastrous blowup of Rolling Stone's University of Virginia rape investigation.
And if the campus rape storyline was infuriating to watch for some of The Newsroom's viewers, that sentiment was clearly shared by one of Season 3's staff writers, Alena Smith. She took to Twitter to tell of her experience with Sorkin and this particular plot, describing it as a "storyline where a rape victim gets interrogated by a random man." She also cited Emily Nussbaum, the New Yorker's television critic, who wrote, "On a show dedicated to fantasy journalism, Sorkin's stand-in doesn't lobby for more incisive coverage of sexual violence or for a responsible way to tell graphic stories without getting off on the horrible details or for innovative investigations that could pressure a corrupt, ass-covering system to do better. Instead, he argues that the idealistic thing to do is not to believe her story."
According to Smith, Sorkin kicked her out of the writers room (she compared herself to Hallie, a Newsroom character who earlier in the season got fired for sending a political tweet from the news show's account).
