Huffington Post College
1.5.16 | Amy Ziering & Kirby Dick
We were warned.
At a public discussion following the premier of our film The Hunting Ground, which is about sexual assault on college campuses, Senator Barbara Boxer (D-CA) predicted: "The power on that status-quo side, you're going to see it in response to this film... Believe me, there will be fallout."
She was right.
Two powerful universities whose wrongdoings were exposed in the film have gone to great lengths to attack the accounts of survivors: Harvard Law, which protected an assailant who was repeatedly found to have committed assault, and Florida State University, which covered up a rape investigation of its star quarterback. Both have mounted aggressive disinformation campaigns to protect their reputations, only to be proven wrong as more facts about these schools have come to light.
Controversial subject matter is nothing new for us. We previously made the award-winning documentary The Invisible War, which lifted the curtain on the crisis of sexual assault in our military and spurred five Congressional hearings and the passage of dozens of reforms. The Pentagon, rather than attacking the film, began extensively using it as a training tool to address the problem. Many colleges and universities are doing the same with The Hunting Ground, and to date there have been nearly 1,000 screenings on college campuses.
