2012-The Real Story

In fact, we found a lot of fraud, lies, and most horrifically capitalizing and making money on an issue where so many people are suffering from We are ready with others supporting us to take full legal action against Chong Kim. Kim's lawyer immediately sent Barnes a cease-and-desist letter, Barnes said, and in response, he removed the Facebook post.

Kony 2012: what's the real story?

Four months later, he put up another post elaborating on the claims, but in spite of his claim about legal action, no legal action has been brought against anyone. I am deeply concerned about it. Neither Kim nor Griffiths would agree to be interviewed for this article. If there were a lawsuit, that would include a "discovery" process, a jarring loose of evidence, potentially—facts that might lead us toward the truth.

But as things stand, we don't know who involved with the movie knew what when. And nobody, as far as I can tell, is pursuing legal action around the question of whether Eden is true, or whether Chong Kim, in her many and varied statements about sex trafficking in America, has been telling the truth.

M istress Matisse, a professional dominatrix and longtime Stranger contributor, is another person whose first impulse was to sue. She sent an e-mail to her editors here in late June referring to a potential lawsuit. Allegations have been made, and it's time for them to either double down—or fess up. And as The Stranger played a role in promoting the film, it's appropriate that The Stranger play a part [in] the truth being told about it. Matisse had done some research on her own. She attached to her e-mail a long list of citations of Kim's interviews and writings since These were the materials that led Matisse to conclude Kim had been lying, and which she believed could support a class-action lawsuit on behalf of sex workers who found Eden to be a grossly misleading depiction of sex work.

Matisse has since discussed the matter with a lawyer, whose opinion was that "it would be difficult to prove damages, because the prevailing sentiment of the legal system more or less goes along with us being either helpless victims, as in the movie, or just plain criminals," Matisse said by e-mail. We know very little about how Eden was made. But we do know that Kim, who has said she was born in and who lives in Texas, wrote a draft of her memoir and showed it to the screenwriter Richard B.

Phillips showed that script to producer Plank, who hired Griffiths "to compress a story about an elaborate, nefarious underworld of human trafficking" into an independent film, as Plank wrote in an industry paper he posted online on November 8, , called "Production Notes from Inside Eden. According to Plank, Griffiths wrote the final page draft that became Eden , about Kim's experience being sold for sex against her will in every permutation you can imagine, from servicing frat parties to catering to individual high rollers to being filmed chained and whipped for BDSM porn. The sex-trafficking ring Eden described was so hideous and huge, it pervaded every level of American life, including politics and law enforcement, which is what made it different from other movies about sex trafficking.

I was on the panel of critics who gave her that award. Griffiths and Kim went on the road to promote Eden , and the broadcast interviews were calm exchanges about horrible things, laced with clips setting up Kim's descriptions of her actual experiences. Her ordeal lasted from to , she said, and it was in that she "ranked up as a madam. She described finally escaping through an air vent in a Las Vegas casino by convincing a maintenance man to fall in love with her, so that he would show her how to climb through the vent into the laundry chute.

She explained that she first had the idea when she remembered a James Bond film she'd seen as a child, and it made her think, "Can you really crawl through there? At the end of the CNN interview, Kim called for action. She estimated that more than a thousand girls are still in the position she was in in the '90s, but that the "trend" in domestic trafficking is that women are taking over as ringleaders. This is because a woman can use her "feminine charm," she explained, to recruit girls in junior high and high school.

Asked whether she fears for her life as an outspoken advocate, Kim said, "I do. But at the same time, I cannot get rid of the faces of the girls I couldn't save. I cannot get rid of the screams. I was forced to watch a young child being raped and sodomized in front of me. And so it's always in my mind. And so I feel like when I speak, I'm bringing voices together. If we are the voters, then start asking questions to the leaders. In a HuffPost Live video interview that went online March 28, , the interviewer asked the director, Griffiths, what it had been like to make a movie that deals with such harsh reality.

It seemed possible that Eden might bring down actual bad guys. Or maybe the movie would simply launch a million micro-investigations in the minds of ordinary porn cruisers at their own private computers, causing perfectly decent people to think twice about the realities behind their fantasies. A male friend of mine had said the same thing. At one point in the HuffPost Live interview, the interviewer said to Griffiths, "So much of this seems like it cannot possibly be real.

But knowing that it's a realistic tale just makes it all the worse. By which she also meant all the better, since the realism was probably why Eden got a slot on HuffPost Live and CNN in the first place. W hen Griffiths told HuffPost Live that she'd been "researching" Kim's story and "the realities of these kind of situations," what exactly did she mean by that? How did Griffiths conduct her research? How much digging into "the realities" did she do? Did she ever consider just making Eden as a fictional film, like her previous films, and not labeling it "based on a true story"?

Did she see "based on a true story" as a burden, or did she figure her audience was smart enough to know it was a loose tag and maybe even a marketing strategy? When she was doing interviews, and when Eden events were used to raise money to support anti-sex-trafficking organizations, did Griffiths ever have twinges of doubt? And if she did, were they subsumed by believing that regardless of the value of this particular tale, sacrifices have to be made to serve the larger truth that trafficking is horrifying?

The only reason I ask is because even a little bit of research reveals that the source material is contradictory. Kim wrote about her experiences in the sex trade at least as early as There's a personal essay called "Nobody's Concubine," published in an anthology of academic and survivor writings called Not for Sale: In "Nobody's Concubine," Kim is abused as a child and raped as a teen, and starts working as a dancer in a strip club before joining an escort service. She is not kidnapped. There is no sex-trafficking ring and no Las Vegas casino air duct.

Instead, there is a less juicy, more complex story of abuse, victimization, racism, sexism, power, and desperation. The author writes of believing she was not worth anything except when she was dancing, feeling the rush of men's desire and women's jealousy. She had already been the victim of abuse and rape, she writes. Kim describes becoming clean and sober in , then starting her life as a spokesperson for women and children "who are victims of sexual violence and exploitation. But by , Kim's first-person autobiographical story had changed, at least her story as it is archived in the online resource The Survivor Archives Project survivorarchivesproject.

As a child, Kim writes, she was sexually abused by her father's friends, male principals and teachers at school, and her babysitter.

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She became "hostage" to a man who held her in an abandoned home in Oklahoma, then escaped him and met a woman "I thought I could trust," but who sold her. I was involved in trafficking for more than six months up to 2 and [a] half years. Repeatedly, I witnessed the beatings, rapes, and murders of innocent women. Finally, I was able to escape from my master through a wealthy client who bought me for an undisclosed amount of money.

This "wealthy client" is not part of Kim's life story as described in her and interviews.

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From the interview between Charles Powell and Chong Kim:. So what is the story again? Does it involve a sex-trafficking ring or not? Did she start off willingly or did she start off at gunpoint? Was there an air-vent escape or not? Some of these details aren't just different stories, they are different premises on which the stories are built.

Chong Kim firmly denies the allegations and knows that the real truth will prevail. My attempts to get Kim's side of the story—to get at "the real truth"—were unsuccessful. Recently I found her on Facebook, where I am identified on my profile as working at The Stranger , and sent her a friend request. She accepted the request within moments.

I wrote, "I'm writing about Eden from here in Seattle. Do you have a minute to chat here back and forth about the movie? In an attempt to understand the contradictory narratives that were already out there, I asked, "Do you feel your story was accurately told by Eden or were there parts you had to compromise on in order to make the movie more 'saleable' or whatever other forces come to bear on moviemaking?

The movie is washed down compared to what I went through. I wrote, "I have to ask a difficult question: How has it felt to be accused of not telling the truth of your story through Eden?

Is the film "Flight" based on a true story? - Movies & TV Stack Exchange

What do you say to people who doubt? Her next message was, "If you have any questions direct them to my manager or my attorney. You don't go on here befriending me to ask my [ sic ] questions. Have a good day. I wrote to both her manager, Angela Allen, and her attorney, Dan Schneider. Allen declined my request to speak further, and Schneider never replied.

Barnes, of the anti-sex-trafficking group Breaking Out, told me he believes the real truth will prevail, too. He told me that when he called the casino hotel in Las Vegas where Kim claimed that she climbed out the vents, "The head of security told me a mouse could barely fit through those vents. And he reiterated that other details "didn't add up" either. Barnes's Facebook post questioned Kim's credibility by referring to Kim's conviction of a felony charge of theft by swindle in St. Paul, Minnesota, in Barnes, who says he works with federal law enforcement doing Breaking Out's work, told me he's heard behind the scenes that officials are investigating Kim's claims.

I called the Department of Justice and asked whether they had any open investigations involving Chong Kim or her accusations that federal agents are involved in domestic sex trafficking. A frustrated writer struggles to keep his family alive when a series of global catastrophes threatens to annihilate mankind.

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Adrian Helmsley, part of a worldwide geophysical team investigating the effect on the earth of radiation from unprecedented solar storms, learns that the earth's core is heating up. President Thomas Wilson that the crust of the earth is becoming unstable and that without proper preparations for saving a fraction of the world's population, the entire race is doomed.

Meanwhile, writer Jackson Curtis stumbles on the same information. While the world's leaders race to build "arks" to escape the impending cataclysm, Curtis struggles to find a way to save his family. Meanwhile, volcanic eruptions and earthquakes of unprecedented strength wreak havoc around the world. Only a few years after the American geologist Adrian Helmsley's warnings of an impending global Armageddon by the year , the Earth is devastated from end to end by cataclysmic natural disasters.

Released between 2012-01-01 and 2012-12-31 based-on-true-story (Sorted by Popularity Ascending)

As the President of the U. Inevitably, the unfathomable catastrophes are rapidly escalating, while Jackson strives to give his family a future in Tibet, however, can he make it in time? Geophysicist Adrian Helmsley officially visits India's Dr. By using our site, you acknowledge that you have read and understand our Cookie Policy , Privacy Policy , and our Terms of Service. The film seems like it could easily have been based on a true story especially how detailed a lot of the story is. I reckon I would've heard of a plane flying upside down if it happened in real-life but I suppose you never know.

Interview with Robert Zemeckis. What was it about this project and the script in particular that grabbed you? Well, whenever a really good screenplay comes across your desk, you have to do it, and that's what the situation was with "Flight. It's unique -- it's at least for Hollywood today -- that it's not based on a book or a comic book or TV show. Was the originality part of the appeal? It's not, as we say, a pre-sold title. So the fact that it's very unique and original was very appealing.