Parker and Celestin were charged with raping the unidentified woman, who was an 18-year-old Penn State student at the time, while she was intoxicated and unconscious.
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As “The Birth of a Nation” writer, director and star Nate Parker continues to dominate the headlines on Wednesday for a 1999 sexual assault case, altered versions of his upcoming movie’s poster have popped up in Los Angeles. While I maintain my innocence that the encounter was unambiguously consensual, there are things more important than the law. Parker was acquitted of the charges, while his roommate Jean Celestin was convicted of sexual assault, a conviction that was later overturned with the woman opted not to testify in the 2005 retrial. I can’t tell you how hard it is to hear this news. I have a family.
The original poster showed Parker as Nat Turner – a former slave who led a revolt in 1831 to free African Americans in Virginia and whose story forms the basis of The Birth of A Nation – with a noose around his neck, made from an American flag.
Fox Searchlight, which bought the project for a record-breaking US$ 17.5 million at Sundance, said they are standing behind Parker as he was acquitted of the charges, reported the Entertainment Weekly.
Sabo, who calls himself an “UNSAVORYAGENT”, is known for creating street art with rightwing leanings and has stated that his “aim as an artist is to be as dirty, ground level, and mean as any liberal artist out there”. Sasha Stone, a veteran Oscar pundit and editor of AwardsDaily.com, says the situation is unlike any she’s seen before. “I understand why so many are concerned and rightfully have questions”, Parker continued.
Tuesday evening Variety released a story that the accuser had overdosed on sleeping pills in 2012 while undergoing treatment at a rehabilitation center.
The victim has not been named but her brother told Hollywood trade paper Variety this week that his sister was haunted by the incident that took place while she and Parker were at Penn State university in 1999 and subsequently took her own life. “As a 36-year-old father of daughters and person of faith, I look back on that time as a teenager and can say without hesitation that I should have used more wisdom”, he wrote. Despite all of this, Fox Searchlight’s plans to release the film in October have not changed. “I feel certain if this were to happen in 2016, the outcome would be different than it was”. I can not bring this young woman who was someone else’s daughter, someone’s sister and someone’s mother back to life… I don’t know that [the victim] would forgive them.
I have never run from this period in my life and I never ever will.
“Please don’t take this as an attempt to solve this with a statement”, he added. “I urge you only to take accept this letter as my response to the moment”, Parker concluded.
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While we don’t know and will never truly know anything more than Parker’s side of the story, we do know that his then roommate and now the co-writer of his film Birth of a Nation was sentenced to six months and then exonerated after the victim refused to withstand a retrial.
