The writer and director also told POLITICO in an interview that she didn’t initially pay attention to the news coverage of Winner until a New York magazine article led her to a POLITICO link. “There was something that said like ‘Read about the day Reality was visited at her home by the FBI’ … like, whoa, this is a weird story,” Satter remembers.
That moment is Winner’s fateful interrogation at the hands of three FBI agents, who secured a confession from the 26-year-old intelligence analyst in June of 2017 by gaining her trust — and neglecting to read Winner her Miranda Rights.
“Reality” plays with the concept in its namesake. It draws its dialogue entirely from the 80-page transcript of the conversation in Winner’s home that afternoon, which would land her the longest sentence ever for leaking classified documents to the media: five years in a federal prison.
The 83-minute drama also unfolds in near-real time. Satter said she wanted to strip viewers of any prepossessions they had about Winner, the subject of exhaustive media coverage at the time.
“Because it’s an interrogation, there’s this expositional nature where she herself tells you her relationship to service, why she learned the languages she learned, that all comes out,” Satter said.
If the film tries to pick a side about its protagonist, who is played by actress Sydney Sweeney, it’s not one about right or wrong. Even Satter admits she has mixed feelings about Winner.
“I wanted her portrayed in all of the actual complicated myths of who she is and the action she took,” said Satter. “It’s up to people to take away their own feelings from that.”
There’s no question Winner violated the law. She just claims to have done so for idealistic reasons: namely, to clear up any doubt that Russian President Vladimir Putin intervened to boost former President Donald Trump’s candidacy during the 2016 U.S. presidential election.
The then-president and his allies in conservative media denied those allegations at the time, despite the protestations of the U.S. intelligence community. Winner wanted to set the record straight. It’s not clear she ever did.
The single intelligence assessment Winner disclosed did little to answer the all-important question of just how much impact the Russian influence campaign had on American voters.
She never managed to surface more information due to missteps at The Intercept and, then, her interrogation. She was in handcuffs before that first leak had even gone public.
As with many leakers and whistleblowers, Winner’s actions raise important questions about the proper balance of truth and secrecy in a democracy. But her case is unique insofar as it didn’t amount to much — good or bad.
Billie Winner-Davis, Reality’s mom, told POLITICO that her daughter ‘regrets her actions’ for just that reason: “I hear her say that nothing changed, that it wasn’t worth it.”
That marks a sharp contrast with the recently deceased whistleblower Daniel Ellsberg, who blew the lid on the lies powering the war in Vietnam, as well as more complicated figures like Edward Snowden, who revealed reams of sensitive intelligence on American spies, diplomats and allies.
Behind the leak is the leaker. Satter said another important element of her story is why Winner — who came from a lower-middle class family — got off with such a rough sentence, while others who found themselves in similar positions, do not.
That question is increasingly on the minds of Americans as Trump faces federal criminal charges for violating the same law, the Espionage Act, as Winner did. Trump exposed far more sensitive information than the NSA linguist, but his prior role, his current influence and his presidential ambitions will all shape the way his case is prosecuted.
It’s an understanding of those dynamics that Satter hopes viewers take away from the film.
“It matters who you are and who you know when you get in trouble,” she said. “The imbalance of power and connections in this country, and then how the punitive system works, is just insane.”