“On the Record” implicitly addresses longstanding criticism that black women have been overlooked in the conversation about sexual assault and power, but the film could have gone further.
“I don’t know if there is any comparable experience to coming forward, being believed, finding other victims of the same trauma by the same person and suddenly we’re together,” Drew Dixon says in “On the Record,” the documentary about sexual assault allegations against Russell Simmons that premiered last week on HBO Max.
“I’ve been alone for 22 years,” she continues, sitting next to Sil Lai Abrams and Jenny Lumet, two other African-American women who have also accused Simmons of rape. “I thought it was just me.” (Simmons has denied all accusations of nonconsensual sex and described his life as “devoid of violence” in a written response to the filmmakers.)
In a December 2017 article in The New York Times, four women — Dixon, Tina Baker, Toni Sallie and Christina Moore — went public with their accusations that Simmons had sexually assaulted them. Not only did Dixon, a former A&R executive at Simmons’s Def Jam Records, leave the music industry because of her experiences with sexual assault, but we also eventually learn that she has separated from her husband as a result of the heavy toll taken by her allegations, and the subsequent backlash.
Against that backdrop, the strength and solace she finds by sharing her story with Abrams and Lumet remains one of the most memorable scenes in the film. It’s a moment that encapsulates what “On the Record” and other documentaries like it do well, what they lack and where filmmakers interested in further exploring the subject can go from here.
It is also vintage Kirby Dick and Amy Ziering, the directing and producing team responsible for “Invisible War” (2012), about sexual assault in the military, and “The Hunting Ground” (2015), about campus rape. Those films predate the current trend of documentaries that explore the devastating impact sexual assault has on the lives of victims.
Rather than focus on hierarchical institutions like the United States armed forces and universities where rape is underreported because it often goes unpunished, “On the Record” strives to be more intimate and personal. By mainly centering on Dixon’s story, it is reminiscent of Dick’s 2004 Oscar-nominated “Twist of Faith,” about the struggle of an Ohio firefighter who was sexually abused as a teenager by a Catholic priest.
Dick didn’t start out intending to make films about sexual assault. HBO suggested the topic of “Twist of Faith” after another filmmaker took on the subject “but found the material too difficult,” he said in an email. “Amy and I continued to make films about survivors because we were so moved by their stories of pain and courage and because sexual assault has been ignored by society for far too long.
