Audrie & Daisy

The documentary places two separate cases side by side. In California, fifteen year old Audrie Pott took her own life eight days after being assaulted at a party and having photographs of it circulate at school. In Missouri, fourteen year old Daisy Coleman saw the investigation into a comparable assault dropped, and her family was driven out by the town. Bonni Cohen and Jon Shenk direct. It premiered at Sundance in 2016 and went out on Netflix. Its subject is not the assault but what happens afterwards. In both cases the second and far longer injury comes from digital circulation and social reaction: the photographs, the messages, the school corridor, whose side the town takes. The film works with Audrie's family and with Daisy herself, who tells her own story on camera and who, after the film, built a support network for young people who had been through the same thing. The hard footnote came later: Daisy Coleman took her own life in 2020. It is the clearest measure of how long the damage the documentary describes actually lasts. Who it is for: viewers who follow social documentary and want to understand what digital circulation does to young people. Who it is not for: the content is sexual assault and suicide, directly. For anyone who has been through something similar it will be heavy.