I read Daryl Hannah's guest essay in the New York Times the other day. Ms. Hannah is the actress who starred in such bangers as "Splash," "Roxanne," and "Wall Street." This isn't not really in my normal lane, but I feel compelled to write about it.
Ms. Hannah wrote her essay to push back on her depiction in an FX docudrama entitled "Love Story: John F. Kennedy Jr. and Carolyn Bessette." A docudrama is a "dramatized television movie based on real events." The docudrama portrays JFK Jr.'s relationship with Carolyn Bessette, but it also delves into Kennedy's relationship with Ms. Hannah, which ended before Kennedy took up with Bessette.
According to Ms. Hannah's essay, the docudrama portrays her as a drug addled shrew. In one scene, Hannah hosts a cocaine fueled party, with lines spread out on a Kennedy family heirloom. In another, she compares Jacquline Kennedy's death to the death of Ms. Hannah's dog. In another, she pressures Kennedy to marry her.
Ms. Hannah denies that any of these incidents actually happened. She denies ever using cocaine. She claims she never compared her grief over a dog's death with Kennedy's grief over his mother's passing. She writes that she never pressured Kennedy or anyone into marriage.
I don't know if Ms. Hannah is telling the truth, but I have no reason to doubt her. Her treatment in the docudrama is consistent with plenty of others who have been used as a plot device in TV shows and movies that purport to be an accurate portrayal of history. Occasionally, it's innocent enough. In "Remember the Titans" the state title game comes down to the last play, with the Titans winning on a walk off touchdown. In fact, the Titans won that game in a blowout.
But other times, it's destructive. For example, Clint Eastwood's 2019 movie "Richard Jewel" portrays Atlanta Journal Constitution reporter Kathy Scruggs as having traded sex with an FBI agent for inside information on the Jewell investigation. That never happened. But the movie presents it as a fact. Scruggs suffered professionally and personally from the bogus portrayal, eventually dying from a drug overdose in 2021.
All of this begs the question, does Ms. Hannah have a legal remedy? Well, yes and no. Her portrayal is presented as fact. And to the extent she can prove it's false, it's certainly defamatory. But as a public figure, she'll need to prove the producers and writers knew they were presenting false information. That might be too tall a hurdle. I suspect she will let her essay speak for itself and leave it there.
I am all for the First Amendment, but that doesn't mean I approve of all speech. And false portrayals, especially ones done knowingly, don't deserve protection. People aren't plot devices, no matter how much the lies advance the narrative.
