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In 2022, a couple of young teenagers in a small Michigan town were getting viciously cyberbullied from an anonymous cell phone number.
As hateful messages pinged their phones daily, people in the tight-knit community turned on each other, desperate to figure out who was behind the harassment. In a shocking twist, it turned out that the culprit was the mother of one of the victims.
Given the sheer amount of drama and high stakes, it should come as no surprise that this case has already been turned into a Netflix documentary. The film, Unknown Number: The High School Catfish, dropped on Aug. 29, and has quickly entered Netflix’s list of the top 10 currently most viewed titles on the platform.
Today on Commotion, guest host Amil Niazi speaks with journalist Lauren Smiley and Vulture critic Kathryn VanArendonk about the case, and the ethics of turning this tragedy into a must-watch true crime doc.
We’ve included some highlights below, edited for length and clarity. For the full discussion, listen and follow Commotion with Elamin Abdelmahmoud on your favourite podcast player.
WATCH | Today’s episode on YouTube:
Amil: Lauren, before we talk about the documentary, I want to spend a bit of time talking about this case itself. You know it probably better than just about anyone. What made this story so compelling to you as a journalist?
Lauren: I’m usually drawn to stories about how tech has warped human behavior in some way, and usually not for the better. So, definitely a mother cyberbullying their own kid got my attention. But maybe because I did not have access to the Lucari family at the center of this story, I became just as interested in how this was the story of a town. It’s a whodunit in this tiny town where everyone thinks they know everyone’s business, which made it so incredibly confounding to people that someone could get away with this for so long without being found out. That became really interesting to me….
And by the end, I realized this story also was a bit of a time capsule of, like, 2021 to 2022; it was, like, peak-adults throwing up their hands and saying, “There’s nothing we can do about teens and their cellphones.” Both the school and the parents of the kids who were getting bullied kept pointing the finger at each other, asking the other party to take away the kids’ phones, and sort of flabbergasted that they wouldn’t. And both of them claim they didn’t have the power to take away teens’ phones … and we’ve already seen a huge amount of backlash to phones just in the last few years. Jonathan Haidt has his book out about taking cellphones away from kids. States and districts are starting to put bans on phones during school hours. So we’re starting to see the backlash. But these were those final years where it was just like, “There’s nothing to be done!”
Amil: Kathryn, let’s talk about the documentary now. I admit fully, whatever it says about me as a person, as soon as I saw the thumbnail and I knew what the story was about, I clicked immediately on the Netflix doc. What did you think about it, and how did you feel watching it? Because we never come away from these things being like, “Well, that was just great.”
Kathryn: We do not, and yet we keep clicking, don’t we? And I do think there is something really telling about that. However else I feel about the documentary, I do think it’s worth noting up top that it succeeds at what it wants, which is to get people to watch it and talk about it. Netflix has really made sure that its creators can perfect exactly the form that will get people into these stories, keep eyeballs on them, and make us want to talk about them. So from that perspective, it is hard to describe it as anything other than wildly successful.
There are, however, a number of other perspectives from which to think about this documentary. And one of them is … this question of how we think about the role of minors in stories like this. I found it, by the end, to be incredibly uncomfortable to watch and to think about in terms of how they put it together and how it is presented, precisely because the person at the real centre of this story is a minor. There has been so little time for her to process and move through what this experience has been.
Amil: I should say, Lauryn and Owen were just 13 when they started getting these really horrible, sickening, hateful and sexually-explicit messages on their phones, just to give people a bit of context for how horrible this story really was.
Kathryn: 100 per cent…. I understand why there is this desire for fame. But at the same time, there have been all these other documentaries recently that are also about children, and I find them equally exploitative, and upsetting, and often ethically wrong. And for me, this documentary is a part of that cohort.
You can listen to the full discussion from today’s show on CBC Listen or on our podcast, Commotion with Elamin Abdelmahmoud, available wherever you get your podcasts.
Panel produced by Jess Low.
