Netflix’s latest film Luckiest Girl Alive is by no means an easy watch, and it’s all the more confronting considering it’s based on a true, and incredibly traumatic experience that occurred to Jessica Knoll while she was in high school.
The author has spent years coming to terms with what happened to her after she was gang raped by three boys who attended her school when she was just 15 years old.
Knoll didn’t know how to react to the attack, not least because her peers at school bullied her and branded her a “slut” in the aftermath. She began to believe that it was her fault, and she kept her trauma entirely to herself attempting to quash any feelings she had associated to the event.
But when she eventually went to write a book about a high schooler named Ani who is gang raped, everything changed.
“The first person to tell me I was gang-raped was a therapist, seven years after the fact,” Knoll revealed.
“The second was my literary agent, five years later, only she wasn’t talking about me. She was talking about Ani, the protagonist of my novel, Luckiest Girl Alive, which is a work of fiction.
“What I’ve kept to myself, up until today, is that its inspiration is not.”
Netflix’s film adaptation starring Mila Kunis has premiered to huge global success (and the number one most-streamed slot on the platform). Naturally, it’s got us wondering what Knoll is doing now.
Where is Jessica Knoll now?
Netflix approached Jessica Knoll to bring her2015 book to the screen in the 2022 film, Luckiest Girl Alive. Knoll ended up writing the screenplay and she also served as an executive producer.
Speaking to Today in October 2022, Knoll revealed that she did her best to separate the story the actors were portraying onscreen with her own experiences, and she actively chose not to be present when the assault scene was filmed.
“A lot of that had to do with the fact that I didn’t want to make the actors feel uncomfortable,” the author explained.
“I’m an executive producer and I wrote this thing and everyone knows that it’s inspired by my real life experience. I could tell people were nervous around me. I was like, ‘This is a job people need to do and I don’t want to make it any more uncomfortable than it needs to be.'”
While she has come a long way since the horrific attack, Knoll said she still to this day experiences hurdles as she continues to process what happened.
“I think I normalise what happened to me so that I can live with it,” she said in the same interview.
“Then when you see [the movie], you’re like, ‘Oh, there’s no rationalising here. I don’t need to minimise this. This was really bad,” she added.
Was Jessica Knoll really involved in a school shooting?
No, but Knoll was in high school when the Columbine High School shooting happened and the event stuck with her so much that she combined this into her story.
The author has revealed that this event also played into how she processed her own attack because in her head, she “still had the idea that what happened to Ani [her main character] wasn’t bad enough, because that’s what happened to me”.
In the film, two of Ani’s rapists were shot dead in the shooting while the third was left paralysed from the waist down. He grows up to become an activist for gun control, which is something that Ani has complicated feelings about.
“She’s now carrying the fact that they are a ‘good victim’. They’ve been gunned down. The community is mourning their deaths. Then, on top of it, Dean does something good and powerful with what happened to him. It becomes very, it becomes even harder for her to come forward,” Knoll explained.
“I still had the idea in my head that what happened to Ani wasn’t bad enough, because that’s what happened to me. I thought I had to make it worse,” she said.
But like Ani, Knoll eventually found her voice when she wrote her book and came forward with her true story. Like any person who has been through this kind of trauma, her journey to heal hasn’t been linear, but there’s a lot to be learned from her bravery in speaking up and talking about her experience.
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