Truth Be Told — Filmmaker Cecilia Peck ’80 earns praise for exposing cults in true crime documentaries while safeguarding trauma survivors
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Open a streaming app on your television, and chances are you’re going to be bombarded with true crime documentaries about serial killers and cults. The true crime explosion has caused many to ask: Is it ethical to exploit the horrible trauma of still-living victims for entertainment? And perhaps more importantly, does the act of repackaging that suffering for popular consumption further traumatize the survivors?
Though many true crime documentaries have been criticized for sensationalizing the harrowing experiences of their subjects, Cecilia Peck ’80’s projects have attracted attention for their sensitivity to the participants. Some have even said that contributing to the films was a major step on their road to recovery.
Peck, the daughter of trailblazing French journalist Veronique Passani and Hollywood icon Gregory Peck, explained that her father’s interest in making films with social themes — such as racism in To Kill a Mockingbird and antisemitism in Gentleman’s Agreement — inspired the arc of her career. “I did grow up with a legacy of striving to do work that matters,” she says.
Her 2020 Starz series Seduced: Inside the NXIVM Cult charted the journey of India Oxenberg in the eponymous self-help cult (pronounced “nexium”; it has no relation to the stomach medicine).
The Albany-based cult was the shell company of leader Keith Raniere’s constellation of exploitative organizations, but the group became most notorious for sexually abusing women who belonged to Raniere’s “DOS” secret society and even branding them with his initials. In 2020, Raniere was convicted of racketeering, sex trafficking, wire fraud, and other related crimes and sentenced to 120 years in prison.
Though Seduced was released alongside The Vow, an HBO docuseries on the same subject, Peck’s series has drawn praise from participants in both productions, including Rick Alan Ross, the director of Trenton’s Cult Education Institute. “Seduced is probably going to end up being the definitive documentary on NXIVM,” says Ross, citing the documentary’s concise, hard-hitting narrative.
Peck continued with the 2023 Netflix series Escaping Twin Flames, which followed several women who became ensnared in Twin Flames Universe, a Facebook-based cult of more than 65,000 members that promises to identify the soulmates of its followers — if they sign up for pricey webinars and obey the increasingly controlling and abusive commandments of husband and wife Jeff and Shaleia Divine. Escaping Twin Flames was the No. 1 show on Netflix in the U.S. and No. 3 in the world in its first week, and in 2024 received an Emmy nomination for editing.
Content retrieved from: https://paw.princeton.edu/article/truth-be-told.
