The Future of Jihad is Female. That’s the name of a fictitious book in the new film After the Hunt. The film, starring Julia Roberts, is Hollywood finally, at long last, challenging the more hysterical aspects of the #MeToo movement. It takes place at Yale in 2019, and at one point students and academics attend a lecture by the author of this fictitious new book.
In other words, feminism and leftism are now religious causes in a holy war. Fairness, due process, and critical thinking be damned.
It’s hard to believe, but Hollywood has finally made a film — starring Roberts no less — that criticizes the excesses of academia and of the #MeToo movement. I will be giving away key plot points and the ending of After the Hunt, so turn away if you plan on seeing the movie.
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After the Hunt stars Roberts as Alma, a Yale philosophy professor on the brink of tenure. She is married to a psychotherapist, Frederik (Miachael Stuhlbarg), and is close friends with Hank (Andrew Garfield). Alma’s best student is Maggie (Ayo Edebiri). One night Maggie and Hank leave a party together, and the next day Maggie tells Alma that Hank sexually assaulted her. Hank replies that Maggie fabricated the story after he confronted her about plagiarism. This conflict creates hysteria on campus, with all of the characters in danger of losing their careers and their sanity.
Maggie is, in fact, a plagiarist. Her professors pretend to think she’s brilliant because she’s the daughter of a donor and, as Michelle Goldberg put it in the New York Times, “presumably, because she’s Black and queer.” “You are the worst kind of mediocre student,” Alma tells Maggie. “With every availability to succeed but no talent or desire to do so, yet so many resources, so much of other people’s time is wasted on you.” This dialogue actually made it into a Hollywood movie starring Julia Roberts.
Alma warns Maggie about running to the media with her story, but Maggie does anyway, her accusations landing in a story in Rolling Stone magazine. Rolling Stone, of course, is notorious for getting sued for making false rape accusations about the University of Virginia.
If that’s not enough, in the film’s climax, Alma reveals that as a teenager she had an affair with her father’s best friend. Then, in a jealous rage when he wanted to move on afterward, she falsely accused him of sexual assault. Eventually, the man committed suicide. “He was a good man, and I destroyed him with a lie,” Alma tells her husband.
For some of us, After the Hunt hits hard. My book The Devil’s Triangle is about the nightmare I lived in 2018 during the Brett Kavanaugh nomination battle, when a woman named Christian Blasey Ford claimed that Kavanaugh sexually assaulted her in 1982 and that I was in the room when it happened. The last several years of my life have often been spent debunking attempts by Hollywood and the media to create a false narrative about what happened. Hollywood has been a central part of the attempt to declare me and Kavanaugh guilty.
This is why After the Hunt is such a surprise. The film actually condemns reckless accusations, the loss of due process, and the mob mentality. It admits that such accusations can result in suicide, something that I struggled with in the aftermath of the mauling of 2018. Even the film’s title itself brought back to mind something one of my oldest friends told Fox Nation when he was asked to describe what 2018 was like for me: “He was hunted.”
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Of course, the media is already starting to pan After the Hunt. According to Michelle Goldberg in the New York Times, After the Hunt is a movie that “seethes with anti-woke resentment.” Goldberg goes on to write that “at a moment of ferocious federal government repression of the campus left, After the Hunt is a bit of a silly anachronism. It’s interesting mostly for what it inadvertently reveals about the seething resentments that helped set the stage for today’s right-wing crackdown.”
In fact, After the Hunt shows exactly how lives are destroyed in a hysterical atmosphere where feelings and media hits and politics trumps all else. It’s the movie I never expected to see.
