The true crime industry is booming. Countless podcasts, books, documentaries, and television shows are dedicated to the “ripped from the headlines” stories of crimes. Criminalized survivors—criminal defendants and people convicted of crimes who have experienced gender-based violence and whose crimes are often related to that violence—are fodder for true crime and have little to no legal recourse when their names, likenesses, and stories are used to create this form of entertainment. Its legality notwithstanding, true crime does enormous harm to criminalized survivors. True crime shapes narratives about criminalized survivors, dehumanizes people accused and convicted of crimes, shores up the carceral system, inflicts trauma on criminalized survivors, and makes it difficult for them to resume their lives if and when they are released from prison. True crime contributes to the kind of othering that provides a justification for mass incarceration and impedes progress towards abolition. In this article, in partnership with two of my clients who have been the subject of true crime programs, I examine the impact of true crime on criminalized survivors through the lenses of their experiences and my own.
