Hollywood has finally adapted my book to the big screen. Oh, they changed the title, and I’m not getting any credit. But trust me, After the Hunt, the new film starring Julia Roberts and Andrew Garfield, is very much the story I tell in my 2022 book The Devil’s Triangle: Mark Judge vs the New American Stasi.
Before going any further, let me say that I am going to be reviewing key plot points in After the Hunt and giving away major spoilers and the conclusion. If you plan on seeing the movie, you’ve been warned.
After the Hunt is about how false #MeToo accusations can create a mob atmosphere and destroy lives, even driving people to suicide. It’s particularly bad if the setting is academia, where hyper-sensitive prevails even as students and faculty tremor to ruin anyone who doesn’t parrot leftist wokespeak.
After the Hunt stars Julia Roberts as Alma, a Yale philosophy professor who is about to get tenure. She is married to a psychotherapist, Frederik, and is close friends with Hank (Andrew Garfield). Alma’s best student is Maggie (Ayo Edebiri). One night, Maggie and Hank leave a cocktail party together. The next day, Maggie tells Alma that Hank sexually assaulted her. Hank replies that Maggie fabricated the story after he confronted her about plagiarism. This conflict creates hysteria on campus, with all of the characters in danger of losing their careers and their sanity.
I know what you’re thinking. A major Hollywood movie starring Julia Roberts and about #MeToo is not going to come down on the side of men, socially, when the character making the accusation is a minority and a lesbian. And yet - hang on - that’s exactly what happens. Star student and protege Maggie is in fact a plagiarist. Her professors pretend to think she’s brilliant because she’s the daughter of big donors and, as Michelle Goldberg put it in the New York Times, “presumably, because she’s Black and queer.” “You are the worst kind of mediocre student,” Alma tells Maggie. “With every availability to succeed but no talent or desire to do so, yet so many resources, so much of other people’s time is wasted on you.” This dialogue actually made it into a Hollywood movie starring Julia Roberts.
If that’s not enough, in the film’s climax, Alma reveals that as a teenager she had an affair with her father’s best friend. Then, in a jealous rage when he wanted to move on afterward, she falsely accused him of sexual assault. Eventually, the man commits suicide. “He was a good man, and I destroyed him with a lie,” Alma tells her husband.
It’s an understatement to say I was stunned by After the Hunt. My book The Devil’s Triangle is about the nightmare I lived in 2018 during the Brett Kavanaugh nomination battle, when a woman named Christian Blasey Ford claimed that Kavanaugh sexually assaulted her in 1982 and that I was in the room when it happened. As I have written on Hot Air, the last several years of my life have often been spent debunking attempts by Hollywood and the media to create a false narrative about what happened. Hollywood has been a central part of the attempt to declare me and Kavanaugh guilty.
This is why After the Hunt is such a surprise. The film actually condemns reckless accusations, the loss of due process, and the mob mentality. It admits that such accusations can result in suicide, something that I struggled with in the aftermath of the mauling of 2018. Even the film’s title itself brought back to mind something one of my oldest friends told Fox Nation when he was asked to describe what 2018 was like for me: “He was hunted.”
Of course, the media is already starting to pan After the Hunt. According to Michelle Goldberg in the New York Times, After the Hunt is a movie that “seethes with anti-woke resentment.” Goldberg goes on to write that “at a moment of ferocious federal government repression of the campus left, "After the Hunt is a bit of a silly anachronism. It’s interesting mostly for what it inadvertently reveals about the seething resentments that helped set the stage for today’s right-wing crackdown.”
Goldberg also comes after the film’s producer, Brian Grazer: “While After the Hunt plays coy about its central mystery, to one of its producers, Brian Grazer, its message is clear. 'Before this project existed, I was very much in the anti-woke category — it just got too extreme,’ he told The Hollywood Reporter. ‘And this movie shows the damage of that by dealing with false accusations on the Yale campus.’” Grazer, Goldberg goes on to write, “is the longtime Democratic donor who shocked Hollywood by revealing that he voted for Donald Trump last year. He’s been a bit vague about why, telling the Times, ‘As a centrist, it was because I could feel and see Biden’s deterioration and the lack of direction in the Democratic Party.’” Goldberg said the film helped her "better understand the worldview of men like him. The movie offers insight into the politics of victimhood, just not in the way its creators intended.”
In fact, After the Hunt shows exactly how lives are destroyed in a hysterical atmosphere where feelings and media hits, and politics trumps all else. It’s the Brett Kavanaugh movie I thought I would never see.
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