Sexual consent is essential, but it can be challenging. Even when there are no power differentials and both parties are sober, willing, and untouched by gender roles, racial biases, or societal pressures, there is still the possibility of human error and misinterpretation. This is especially troublesome when obtaining express consent is about more than simply delighting your partner. It is also about protecting yourself.
Tell Them You Love Me documentary makes it very evident that this is especially true in the dynamics between Black males and white women, where Black men and boys have traditionally been perceived as more sexually ravenous and predatory. The profoundly troubling story of Derrick Johnson and Anna Stubblefield demonstrates how a nonverbal, crippled Black man’s sexual abuse by his white carer can be transformed into an innocent act of misinterpretation.
The documentary Tell Them You Love Me, produced by Louis Theroux’s production business and directed by Nick August-Perna, employs his distinctive anti-socratic approach, allowing its subjects to explain themselves uninterrupted and occasionally hang themselves with their own rope. We hear the story of Derrick Johnson, who suffered a series of seizures as a newborn. According to his older brother, Dr. John Johnson, as a toddler, he was “diagnosed as mentally retarded, non-verbal with cerebral palsy”. His father abandoned the family soon after, but as Derrick grew into manhood, his loving mother and brother believed he was attempting to connect with them.
The program’s plot twist occurs when John begins his PhD at Rutgers University and attends Anna Stubblefield’s lecture on nonverbal disabilities, believing her methods could unlock hidden potential in his brother, unaware that Stubblefield would soon be having “romantic” and sexual relations with his sibling.
While Tell Them You Love Me first takes a detached perspective, with its subjects sticking to their accounts of events, by the third act it begins to exploit the legal case to expose broader realities about society’s engrained bias. The horrible account of abuse is exacerbated by witnesses and specialists who explain that Derrick may not have had the capacity to consent – and who continue to refuse to see this educated white middle-class woman as a perpetrator of sexual violence. Dr. Howard Shane attempts to explain how Derrick had the mental capacity of a six- to 12-month-old kid, and that his typed assent given through his “communication facilitator,” Stubblefield, was simply her “having conversations with herself.” But he claims: “I never considered her a predator. She honestly believed that what she was doing was best for Derrick.
Even if we assume that this claim of love is a hallucination, there is a victim in the person of young Derrick Johnson. And it’s difficult to witness Dr John Johnson describe how, during a nappy change, he discovered that his brother had bruises, grazes and lasting scars all over his little body from brutal sex on a mat on Stubblefield’s office floor. Stubblefield stays steadfast in her belief in a loving consensual relationship despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary. When asked if she has ever had any misgivings, she says, “Never.”
Tell Them You Love Me’s description of how nonverbal communication might be misread is as stunning as a study in white privilege and white female victimhood, in which Stubblefield’s good intentions are continuously accepted. When Stubblefield informs Derrick’s mother, Daisy, that she is in “a relationship” with him and that he is now “a man in every sense of the world,” Daisy instinctively sits on her hands, fearing that she will do something that will be used against her, leading to her being dismissed as an angry Black woman who does not understand what is best for her son.
Meanwhile, Stubblefield sees herself as so non-threatening that she still can’t see why leaving messages for the Johnson family suggesting she will “sign my name in blood so I can be with Derrick” could be taken as menacing.
Aside from the court system, there are very few people in the documentary that hold Stubblefield accountable. The significant exceptions are her ex-husband, who tells the court she is a “pathological liar and narcissist,” and the even-keeled Dr Johnson, who concludes: “That woman did not care about my brother.” The documentary is remarkable since it covers so many issues in less than two hours in an intellectual and sympathetic manner. Beyond consent, disability, and race, there is scope to consider the nature of language, the “white saviour” complex, the purpose of justice, and what unconditional love entails. Tell Them You Love Me may be a difficult watch, but it is also a necessary one.