In the first scene of the new Netflix documentary “Victim/Suspect,” Oakland investigative journalist Rachel de Leon is at her desk at Emeryville’s nonprofit Center for Investigative Reporting talking on her cell phone to a young sexual assault victim identified on her caller ID as “Indiana Jane Doe.”

“Was there a point with the investigation when you knew the police weren’t believing you?” she asks.

Indiana Jane Doe replies: “They just didn’t believe me from the start. They filed the charges before my rape kit even came in.”

She was just 12 at the time of the alleged assault.

Similar interactions abound in “Victim/Suspect,” which follows de Leon over four years during her investigation into numerous cases of sexual assault victims being treated as criminals themselves. She seeks to answer the following questions: How is it possible for a young woman who has just been raped, and has the courage to go to the police and report the assault, to wind up within days, and sometimes even within hours, being handcuffed, arrested and charged herself with the crime of making a false report? Why are law enforcement officials allowed to use the same aggressively misleading interrogation techniques they employ to ferret out the truth from suspected criminals on these traumatized alleged victims, who in some cases are imprisoned for allegedly fabricating their accusations, leaving the real predators at large to hurt others?

It’s a scenario that sounds implausible, or like a kind of one-off judicial travesty, and yet de Leon, a tenacious reporter working her first big story, has found more than 200 such cases with this disturbing pattern. She’s uncovered examples in just about every state in the country in which victimized women have been disbelieved, shamed and revictimized by the U.S. criminal justice system they thought would protect them.

“They’re experiencing violation upon violation,” de Leon told The Chronicle before an advance screening of the film earlier this month at the DocLands Documentary Film Festival in San Rafael. “There’s the awful incident itself, then the next violation when the police accuse her of not being forthright, and then while she’s in jail (and) an article is published and she’s violated once more, this time by a journalist and news outlet.

“In a very short period of time, someone can go from being seen as a victim to being a suspect.”

De Leon was joined May 8 at the Rafael Film Center by her editor, Amanda Pike, one of the film’s producers and head of CIR’s accomplished TV and documentary department. (Pike also produced the 2022 food security doc “The Grab.”) They recalled reading in 2017 about the first case de Leon discovered while perusing local news in search of a subject worthy of her first big investigative dive. It was an article about Connecticut college student Nikki Yovino, who was convicted of fabricating her allegation that she had been raped by two Sacred Heart University football players in 2016.

“We thought it was a small story, but then Rae kept finding more and more cases,” said Pike, including Emma Mannion, a former University of Alabama student who, just like Yovino, was arrested in 2016 for filing a false police report.

“我们意识到这是系统性的,”派克广告ded. “It’s not just one or two police officers, it’s nationwide.”

The two reached out to filmmaker Nancy Schwartzman, who made the 2019 Peabody Award-nominated documentary “Roll Red Roll” about the notorious Steubenville, Ohio, high school rape case, hoping she’d be a good fit for transforming de Leon’s reportage into a film.

“我觉得很幸运,他们想相信我与their jaw-dropping reporting,” said Schwartzman by phone from Los Angeles. “I was incredibly moved by the breadth of (Rae’s) reporting and I thought, ‘Oh, my gosh, this is yet another horrifying injustice that survivors go through.’ ”

“Victim/Suspect,” which premiered at the Sundance Film Festival, is a powerful look at the extreme vulnerability rape victims continue to face after their assaults, as well as a close-up portrait of what investigative reporting looks like in practice. Schwartzman follows de Leon as she knocks on doors, calls recalcitrant sheriffs and prosecutors and develops relationships with women who have every reason to be suspicious of more attention.

The documentary also shows de Leon essentially doing the detective work that law enforcement failed to do in the first place, like revisiting crime scenes and reviewing surveillance camera footage.

“Making this film was an opportunity to make a love letter to investigative journalism and really highlight the determination and all the hard work it takes,” said Schwartzman. “I’ve seen young women swarm Rae after a screening, saying they want to be like her, want to do this kind of dogged reporting work, and that’s amazing.”

Interrogation footage of young women being questioned by police officers, which de Leon received from attorneys or through public information requests, became key to the film’s persuasive power. In each clip, there’s a heartbreaking, surreal moment when it’s clear the alleged victim is realizing in real time, usually in a chilled room in a police station, alone with an older male detective, that “the tables are turning on her,” said de Leon.

De Leon said that throughout her reporting, the looming “question of why this has happened so frequently is what drove me up the wall.” She wondered if it was more than institutional bias and a lazy approach to the drudgery of detective work.

“Perhaps it was part of a #MeToo backlash,” she said, against the tide of women who started going public in 2017 with their sexual assault accusations. Or maybe a “media fascination with the ‘Gone Girl’ syndrome,” the rare instances of women intentionally lying about being assaulted, which studies have shown occur in 2% to 10% of cases.

“When there’s media coverage of a false report, the public feeds into it and the police get lots of applause for supposedly catching a liar,” said de Leon, noting that once a victim is reclassified a suspect, she loses her right to anonymity in the press.

当前在“受害者/怀疑”——统计1 in 3 women will be sexually assaulted in her lifetime, that there are more than 450,000 sexual assaults in the U.S. every year, of which 30% are reported to police and only 1% are prosecuted — reinforce the fact that not only is the threat of sexual assault very real, but so too is the risk involved in reporting it.

“We don’t want women to see (this film) and be more fearful of coming forward and reporting, which remains a very personal question,” said Schwartzman, “yet everyone needs to know what could happen. They need to know law enforcement is allowed to lie to you, so bring someone with you, possibly bring an attorney.”

Pike and de Leon both expressed their hope that the film, soon available to a global audience through Netflix starting Tuesday, May 23, is seen by the people who need to see it most: “prosecutors and police.”

“I certainly hope that the film can be used for positive change,” said de Leon, “and that really needs to happen within law enforcement.”

Jessica Zack is a freelance writer.