You may not have heard of John E. Reid & Associates, a Chicago firm that teaches law enforcement officers interrogation techniques. But you will now.
Choosing two snippets from When They See Us, Ava Duvernay’s blockbuster series on the false confessions that New York police elicited from five teenaged boys in the Central Park jogger case, Reid has sued Duvernay and the distributor, Netflix, for defamation. It contends that the two bits of dialog—one referring to Reid’s interrogation technique as universally rejected and the other suggesting that the lengthy, arduous interrogations of the five teenagers were consistent with the technique—were false and damaged its reputation and business.
