Erin Lee Carrhad a firm opinion on theMichelle Cartercase after reading about the teenwho encouraged her boyfriend to kill himselfvia text and phone calls.
“Why don’t you just drink bleach,” Carter wrote in one text to Roy. “Hang yourself, jump off a building, starve yourself idk there’s a lot of ways.”
Such messages created a “very uncomfortable” first impression, Carr tells PEOPLE. “But I also know nobody says those things if they’re doing well mentally.”
Carr never met Carter, who is now 22. But in digging beyond that surface, the director excavates information leading to more complex understanding of the events leading up to the tragedy, as told in the new HBO two-part documentary filmI Love You, Now Die: The Commonwealth v. Michelle Carter, premiering July 9 and 10 (8 p.m. ET/7 p.m. CT).
Michelle Carter.AP/REX/Shutterstock
The Massachusetts teens had been introduced years earlier while on separate vacations with their families to Florida. Carter was the granddaughter of a Roy family friend. Although they lived about an hour apart — Roy in Fairhaven, and Carter in Plainville —– they kept in touch through calls, emails and texts, with perhaps no more than five face-to-face meetings.
Roy Family
Carter nevertheless came to think of herself as his girlfriend. Among the things they shared: Each was taking prescription anti-depressants, and both had tried to kill themselves before Roy succeeded on July 12, 2014.
According to the judge who convicted her, Carter bore no blame for Roy’s planning, nor for his actions that led him to secure a generator, connect a hose from the generator to the cab of his pickup truck and start the motor to fill the space with deadly carbon monoxide.
But Carter crossed a legal line — and assumed fault — after Roy panicked and got out of the vehicle, and Carter in a phone call told him to “get back in,” according to an account she later texted to a friend, said Judge Lawrence Moniz in his ruling.
Matt West/The Boston Herald/AP
Carr challenges that version in a documentary that asks viewers to consider whether the judge — and the appeals court that upheld Carter’s conviction — got it right.
She also shows viewers that Carter, too, was suffering.
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Critics of the precedent-setting criminal charge and conviction claim that among thousands of messages between Carter and Roy, prosecutors presented only those that served their case.
Carr finds a wealth of additional revelations in the pair’s mountain of written words.
“This film would not have been possible 15 years ago,” she says, noting the preferred — and preserved — online interactions of their generation. Absent the ability to interview either Carter or Roy, “it was like having a conversation with them,” she says. “It was like being in the room with them.”
She adds, “I wanted you to walk away from this movie understanding what it’s like to be in Michelle’s head.”
She won’t say whether Carter deserves her conviction. “But I do think there’s so much more to consider,” she says.
The two-part HBO documentary filmI Love You, Now Die: The Commonwealth v. Michelle Carterdebuts July 9 and 10 (8 p.m. ET/7 p.m. CT).
If you or someone you know is considering suicide, please contact the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline at 1-800-273-TALK (8255), text “home” to the Crisis Text Line at 741-741 or go tosuicidepreventionlifeline.org.
source: people.com
