"Tell Them You Love Me" - A Review
Exploring Issues of Race, Disability, Autonomy and Communication
This is not turning into a. film review blog, I promise. That being said, I can’t in good conscience not pen something about this film as a disability studies scholar and disability justice advocate.
Time for some self-disclosure here. I am an autistic and disabled person who speaks fluently and on a consistent basis. Both my comprehension of and ability to use langauge orally are things that have never been questionable or difficult for me to articulate to others. I do not use any forms of augmented alternative communication (AAC). Therefore, my review and opinions of this documentary will not be as valuable as a nonspeaking person’s review, but I do think it is worthwhile to read this blog post, anyway.
I am also a white woman, so my experiences with disability are vastly different than that of a Black disabled person. This film briefly discusses race, and how a White woman is seen as a safe and trustworthy person regardless of their actions, while Black men often are viewed as the opposite.
Tell Them You Love Me is a documentary about the background and result of a 2015 court case concerning a communication teacher and a disabled man. They communicate using a technique called facilitated communication (FC). I watched it twice in an effort to really absorb it.
Facilitated communication is widely seen as a scientifically discredited technique to help those who are unable to vocally speak communicate with others, by typing with someone else’s direct assistance. This technique and others that have been said to be in the “same family” has been the focus of much controversy. The “true” FC method involves a communication partner that helps the disabled individual type on a keyboard or point to letters, while holding on to their arm and guiding the movement. This is done due to some fol'ks’ inability for the motor planning involved in pointing or typing. Other forms that are often confused with or also referred to as FC involves typing done completely on one’s own. The communication partner may hold up a spelling board, but they never touch the communicator themselves. This is called Spelling to Communicate, and is often seen as a form of facilitated communication. However, Spelling to Communicate is a distinct form of communicating, with its own body of research.
Now that I’ve disclosed and explained, let’s get to the film itself. Let me say right off the bat, it was a rough watch.
In the mid 2000s, Derrick, a disabled non-speaking man with cerebral palsy is said by medical professionals to be severely cognitively impaired (without way to test this theory), as well as being physically impaired. This man’s brother attends a conference in which a presentation on facilitated communication is held. Through this, he meets Anna Stubblefield, a university professor with an interest in helping non-speaking people to communicate. She offers to work with Derrick and finds that he is able to spell and read. First he can type a few letters, then a few words, then a few sentences. After the first year, Anna Stubblefield claims that Derrick and herself can have really decent conversations and get to know one another. Derrick eventually signs up for an African-American literature class where he writes essays with the help of a classmate. Anna and Derrick continue to be communication partners. In one scene, Anna edits what Derrick spells, and she remembers him being very frustrated and adamant that she “never, ever, ever do that again”.
While Dman seems to flourish, his brother and mother are both happy for him. After years of being told that Derrick was significantly mentally delayed (the film used the old school term, but I will not be using it here), they were now being told that Derrick was extremely intelligent.
This is where it turns from a story about communication into a story about power, autonomy, consent, and victimhood.
Anna reveals that after learning who Derrick is, that she is in love with him. However, she is married and is confused about what her next steps should be.
Eventually, Anna broaches the topic with Derrick, telling him that she loved him, and he typed that he loved her too. Soon, she claims that Derrick’s favourite music is classical music, that he is a vegetarian, and that he perfers red wine to beer. These claims confuse Derrick’s mother and brother, who feel remember that he always appeared to enjoy gospel, and didn’t even like communion wine at the church. Derrick next types that he wants to live independently - and Anna tells his mother that she is smothering Derrick and treating him as a child rather than the man that he is. Derrick’s brother feels that Anna is tearing his mother down, and is ignoring and disrespecting the 30+ years in which their mother acquired expertise and honed her decision making when it came to her son.
Anna eventually broaches physical intimacy with Derrick, and she claims that Derrick asks her to take her clothes off and that he ‘longs to hold her as a men does’. After asking if intercourse would be possible with his cerebal palsy, Anna states; “There’s only one way to find out”, implying that sexual intercourse happens between the two.
When Derrick and Anna reveal their relationship to Derrick’s mother (Daisy) and brother, they are understandingly shocked, and they felt intense anger about the situation. Anna leaves the house feeling fine, having been reassured by Daisy that they would figure the situation out. Anna asks to set up meetings between herself, Derrick, and his family, but Daisy refuses, and eventually stops returning Anna’s calls.
Derrick’s brother then researches FC, and finds articles that raise concerns about the communication method. Several incidents of abuse were admitted via facilitated communication, and the cases went to court. During the trial, a professor was asked to evaluate whether or not that facilitated communication was coming from the individual, or whether it was coming from the unconscious thoughts of the facilitator. His double blind study concluded that rather than typing the communication in their minds, they were typing what the facilitator thought and saw. The facilitators may not even realize they are typing their own thoughts.
After the family has ceased communication with Anna, they tell the crew that that they have no intention to pursue any legal means against Anna. However, when Anna tried to see Derrick through his day program, behind the backs of his brother and mother, they decide to pursue legal action.
Anna receives a call from Daisy, who asks several questions about her relationship with Derrick, including how many times they had intercourse and how, with the guise that she was trying to understand Derrick’s feelings, claiming that Derrick seems unhappy and as though he misses her. This call is recorded and submitted as evidence.
Anna is suspended from her teaching job and is approached by cops, who have searched her house and told her husband about the investigation. A professional evaluates Derrick’s expressive and receptive communication ability at a level of 6-12 months of age.
A court case follows, where any communication that was facilitated was seen as insufficient evidence and disposed of. The jury consisted of entirely abled-bodied people who very little knowledge of disability or of a disability studies knowledge.
As a result of this trial, Anna is convicted of sexual assault of someone deemed incapable of consenting, and is sentenced to 2 terms of 12 years, to be served concurrently.
However, she appealed her conviction and was given a lesser sentence, due to her defence being compromised as a result of the judge’s decision to dismiss any facilitated communication evidence.
In the end, she served 2 years of her 24 year sentence. She no longer teaches at her university, and does not have contact with Derrick or his family.
This film explores several major themes.
Race
Disability
Consent
Autonomy
Sex
While the documentary featured both sides of this case; Derrick’s family, and Anna Stubblefield herself, it nonetheless leans in favour of Derrick’s family.
While it covers the controversy surrounding FC, there are no non-speakers consulted in the making of the film. In fact, the sole disabled person featured, other than Derrick himself (through photos) is a woman with a physical disability that causes her to make involuntary movements repeatedly, which results in speech being very difficult to perform. Despite this, the woman speaks orally.
The evaluator claims that while he does not believe Anna intentionally harmed Derrick, that she was having “conversations with herself” rather than Derrick, and that a life with Anna would’ve been “a false [one].”
So, how was it?
This documentary, like many, felt educational in some respects, but exploitative of Derrick first and foremost.The central mystery centres around whether he has the mental capacity to consent.
Derrick’s mother claims that he has been put on medication because he now has urges to masturbate. She believes this is caused by Anna’s sexual actions with him, and feels that if Derrick had never experienced the feeling of sexual pleasure, he would never had begun exploring his body. I do not agree with this, and believe that everyone deserves sexual education and sexual freedom to the extent they are On top of having your sexual exploits and masturbatory habits broadcast in a documentary, the film essentially tells a story of a man who is unable to desire or be desired. The thought of Derrick having sexual desires is seen as impossible due to his “mental age”. His mother uses terms like “normal”, and claims that his mind is young and that she will always be her baby. This isn’t necessarily the most PC things to say, nor do they reflect the terms that is used in disability-justice oriented or academic circles. However, as stated above, I am not Black, and am not equipped to understand the cultural or racial intricacies of the lives of Derrick and his family.
Having no non-speakers in this film leaves it lacking credibility in my opinion. The film does have a disclaimer at the very end which states that there are several disabled people who continue to claim facilitated forms of communication have fgiven them access to language, community, and autonomy. However, nothing much else is said to back up or to illustrate the claim.
I follow several advocates, both disabled folks themselves, and able-bodied and typical parents who claim that more recent forms of communication using letter boards and typing (Spelling to Communicate, for example), is a way for those with motor challenges to communicate with the world around them.
If the evaluations are accurate, and Derrick truly has the cognitive capacity to only understand very simple concepts, then what Anna did was sexual assault, and she harmed Derrick, and his family as well. However, if not, and Derrick did truly fall in love with Anna, I’m not so sure the relationship wasn’t one of abused power, regardless. Anna was his communication partner, she was teaching him, and in that relationship, there is an inherent level of mismatched power. In most cases, teacher-student relationships are viewed as predatory at worst, and manipulative or sketchy at best. This applies for adult students as well. However, I believe that people with cognitive and/or developmental impairements should not be written off as not being able to be in intimate relationships whatsoever, and based on the experience Derrick’s mom has had with Derrick, I strongly suspect that she seems Derrick as an adult-sized infant and therefore, unable to understand or desire much companionship at all, let alone romantic or sexual feelings.
However, this is not to say that Derrick’s mother doesn’t LOVE him endlessly. She seems to be a very loving mother, and his brother truly respects and values him as well. His mother, like many mothers, struggles to let go of her little boy, and these transitions are made even more complicated by the barriers Derrick faces.
Derrick’s brother claims that Anna, while being a person who hurt his family greatly, seemed to be a great teacher of Disability Studies, and a proficient scholar. Throughout the film, I thought that Derrick’s brother showed great respect for Derrick, and truly wanted him to live life to his fullest potential, hence why he attends the very conferences where he was first introduced to FC. Rather than the over-protectiveness of (many) mother-son relationships, Derek and his brother share a more lighthearted and silly relationship that I feel would be beneficial for Derrick to continue to experience. The concepts of mental age and IQ are very frequently misunderstood, misused, and at times, even wholly inaccurate. For this reason, I often scoff, or at least have a healthy distrust of, procedures and evaluations like those displayed in the film. Many times, folks with monetary or personal interests in one type of intervention for the disabled community want to discredit any other interventions or methods, so that they can continue to dominate the field of disability support. and education. Many professional organizations are run by able-bodied, typical individuals who do not have much knowledge of disability as a cultural identity.
Of course, I do not know Derrick, his family, or Anna Stubblefield. I am simply an autistic woman who is a strong proponent of disability justice, disability rights, and the right to communication and autonomy for all human beings, regardless of their disability status. The film attempted to answer a question that to me is close to unanswerable - namely, what is consent? How is it obtained? What is communication? Who decides, and how, what communication is deemed as valid, real, worthy of listening to? The question was not answered fully. It’s a question that I have begun to explore in my own life, and in my writing, but I, too, have no simple solution to give.
Namely, I want what I believe the filmmaker’s, Derrick’s family, perhaps even Anna, want - a world where those labelled as intellectually, cognitively, physically, and/or psychologically disabled individuals to lead full autonomous lives with freedom, dignity, safety and fulfillment. Everyone deserves connection, communication, friendship, and the right to a full life in which they live in the driver’s seat.
For more information on Spelling to Communicate, you can visit:
To read some stories from Non-Speakers, you can explore;
Directory of Non-Speaker Writings
Keep in mind, this is a non-exhaustive list of resources. Further, most individuals who are non-speaking (for whatever reason) don’t have an internet presence, therefore, the links provided are not claiming to speak for or on behalf of any full community. Nevertheless, their stories are valuable, worthy, and essential to understanding the human experience outside of the typical speaking world.
With love and (conflicted) screams,
Taryn