The “Birth of a Nation” star and director has been mostly out of the public eye since 2016, when a rape charge from his college days resurfaced. He says he has grown and wants to do better. Will anyone believe him?
“He had become almost entirely isolated,” recalls Oyelowo, who has been close with Parker since they starred together in 2012’s “Red Tails.” “People who he had called friends or thought of as friends, desperate not to be caught on the wrong side of this, stopped calling. He became radioactive.”
As Parker continued to pursue conversations, he saw that “a great majority of the people I was speaking to were survivors themselves,” he says. “I realized this is much closer to me than I anticipated. And then I started talking to people in my family, and realizing that there are people … very close to me that had experienced sexual assault, rape, violence. And the more I learned, the more I felt responsible. The more I felt ashamed.
He began to make connections between his behavior as a 19-year-old and the stories he was hearing from survivors, he said. “When I think back to my 19-year-old self … I absolutely see how [the] rules around what is masculine, and what is acceptable and what is encouraged, create destructive environments,” he says. “When I think about what I would tell my 19-year-old self, I’d say, ‘Reject those rules.
It gets trickier when the focus shifts to the question of accountability, especially as it pertains to the events that brought Parker to this point: the early hours of Aug. 21, 1999, when he and Celestin allegedly assaulted an 18-year-old woman who was too intoxicated to give consent. Parker says that although he was found not guilty, he does not consider himself blameless.
“We help them name [the harm they caused]; we help them write an actual amends,” Ackerman says of working with perpetrators. Told of Parker’s situation, she says, “I would work for months before he ever sat down with a survivor, and make sure he really understands the work.” When he met with the women by video link last summer, Parker read an unpublished op-ed in which he expressed regret for his “tone-deaf response and narrow perspective” in 2016. “The change in me over these past years has been in shifting my focus from myself to survivors,” he wrote, saying that as a 19-year-old college student, “I had relationships, particularly with my accuser, that were no doubt psychologically toxic, opportunistic, and self-serving.
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