Transcriber: Leonardo Silva Reviewer: Ruy Lopes Pereira
Toward the end of March, in 2012, I opened my computer to see this:
"Choke on it."
It was a tweet that was directed towards me.
The next thing that I saw was this:
"Fuck you, asshole. I'm a big bully.
Yeah, well, make a movie about someone else, you ass.
Asshole, asshole, asshole."
It's also directed at me.
For days, and weeks, and months, this went on.
Every time I opened my computer, there were angry tweets,
there were hostile messages,
there were emails, there were YouTube comments,
there were Vimeo comments.
There was once a string of maybe 60 tweets that simply said, "You suck."
There was also a very complex story that posited that I was a pedophile
and I was running from state to state to escape the police,
and that particular one had the hashtag that said "#kidtoucherbitch,"
which caused my crew to nickname me "the notorious KTB."
But also, you can see on that one the hashtag that says "#killyourself."
So, what was it that I did to bring on this onslaught
of hostile and angry messages?
Well, about a year earlier,
I had read some articles about an alarming number,
five or six, depending on the article,
of teen suicides, allegedly from bullying,
that were all happening in one school, in one town, in Ohio.
And both the school and the town were ironically titled "Mentor."
So, I'm a filmmaker and that's how I like to look at things.
And so, I decided to go to Mentor, Ohio,
and I found Mentor, Ohio, extremely foreign to me,
but it was difficult for me to figure out
what exactly it was that felt off about it.
And, as I stayed there and observed the town,
it seemed like it was a culture of conformity:
either fit in or get out.
So, I put a crew together, a skeleton crew,
and we started going regularly to Ohio and making a documentary.
And the more that I spent time there,
we wanted to talk to anybody who would talk to us,
and I narrowed my subjects down to two sets of parents,
the Vidovics and the Mohats.
Both parents had lost children to suicide.
In the Vidovics' case, their daughter, Sladjana, had hanged herself,
and in the case of the Mohats, their son, Eric, had shot himself.
And both couples were bringing a law suit against the Mentor School District.
I did try and talk to any representatives of the Mentor School District.
I wanted to approach them with an open mind.
I wanted to hear what they had to say
about the bullying problem in their school.
Ideally, I didn't want to demonize them.
I would rather have worked with them
and try to find some kind of solution to the this issue.
Every single member of the Mentor School District declined to speak to me,
everyone of them.
The more I learned about these cases, the more horrified I became.
Sladjana Vidovic's case especially stood out.
In a lot of bullying cases,
parents don't know their kids are being bullied.
Teenagers just don't tell their parents everything.
But in Sladjana's case, she had been systemically bullied from 8th grade on,
she had told her parents
and her parents had gone to the school again and again and again to ask for help,
and they were ignored.
Now, every time that the Vidovics went to the Mentor High School to complain,
they took their older daughter with them to translate
because they did not speak English.
So, not only were they being vigilant about the safety of their daughter,
but they were doing it in a language that they didn't speak,
in a culture, in a country, that was completely foreign to them.
And still, they did everything that parents should do
in a situation like this,
and the school continued to ignore them.
The bullying got so bad for Sladjana
that she was eating her lunch every day in a bathroom stall, crying,
so that she would not be in the cafeteria where kids would throw food at her.
She was kicked down the stairs by a football player.
She was touched inappropriately.
She was made fun of for her clothes, and for her accent,
and for a mold that she had on her face.
Kids teased her for her name, which they rhymed with "vagina."
She received death threats on her cell phone after school.
She received death threats at the pizza parlor where she had a job.
She could never ever get away from it. She couldn't escape it.
And her parents were getting desperate,
and they were not getting help from the school.
So, they sought outside help.
Sladjana had made a suicide threat,
and they decided to admit her to an inpatient facility.
When she got out of this facility and went back to school,
all the students had heard that she had been there,
and the bullying only intensified.
So, her parents decided that it was time to homeschool her.
Sladjana had always been really excited about her school prom.
When she was going to be homeschooled, she went to the Mentor principal
and she asked, "If I'm being homeschool, can I still attend prom?"
And he told her, "No, I'm sorry. You cannot."
And this was devastating news to her.
Soon after that, Sladjana took a rope, and she tied one end to a bedpost
and she hanged herself out the window of her family home.
And her sister found her and cut her down,
and she was buried in the pink dress that she had chosen to wear to prom.
When I heard that the bullies showed up at the funeral parlor
and made fun of her in her casket and created a MySpace page
saying how uggly the dress was that she was wearing,
I had never heard anything like this before,
and I was completely shocked.
I think if you are going to make the argument that kids will be kids,
then, a teenager at some point has to realize
that they have taken things too far,
and if a kid's suicide is not that moment, then, I don't know what possibly could be.
When I personally received all of these threats, and emails,
and tweets, and messages,
I had a mixture of emotions.
I felt very upset.
And I'm an adult, and I live in New York City, far away from Mentor,
and I have friends and family,
and a really nice life and work that enjoy doing,
and still, it was very upsetting for me
to open my computer and see that every single day.
So, imagine what a 16-year-old girl,
who has to physically walk into that environment
and endure bullying so bad that she's crying in a bathroom stall every day -
imagine what she must feel.
But I also felt like, in case there was any lingering doubt,
the community had made my case for me.
By turning their anger towards me, they had handed me the evidence
that, yes, there was a problem in Mentor.
But I dont think that kids behave this way in a vacuum.
I think that they learn it from adults.
And when I was receiving these messages,
I was not only receiving them from students.
I received messages from parents, I received messages from teachers
and I even received an email from one person
who had no qualms about signing it: "The Mentor Teachers Association."
So, I did have the names of many of the bullies,
and I did try to reach out to them and see if they would talk to me.
I was hoping that one of them might be able to explain
how they got caught up in this kind of behavior and what had happened.
None of them wanted to talk to me.
And often I'm asked, "Why didn't you put their names in the film?"
Here's the problem that I have with pointing a finger
at a bully who is underage:
I believe that it lets everybody off the hook, everybody else.
I think it lets the people who teach at the school off the hook.
I think it lets all of the citizens of Mentor off the hook.
I think it lets me off the hook.
I think that it's way too easy to say,
"Mentor is a really big school. Of course there's going to be a bad apple there,"
and then wash your hands and go home, and forget about the whole thing.
And also, I don't believe that that's what I was seeing happening in Mentor.
In fact, I don't believe it's what happens anywhere.
I remember very well when Columbine happened.
Time Magazine ran this cover, and it said, "The Monsters Next Door."
And I cringed when I saw it because I think when you point a finger
at two teenagers and label them as monsters,
you absolve everybody else of any kind of culpability.
The problem in Mentor was systemic,
but this is not just a story about bullying.
And it's also not just a story about a high school
that failed to take action in the face of clear and present danger.
It's a story about all of our institutions that failed to take action.
It's a story about our military. It's a story about our law enforcement.
It's a story about our prisons.
It's even a story about our global economic crisis.
Any time that we allow ourselves to be lulled into the trap of believing
that a perpetrator caught equals a problem solved,
then, we lose the opportunity to attack society's problems at [their] root cause.
As Eric's father said to me once,
"You don't want to be standing in my shoes.
You really, really don't want to be."
(Applause)