"An Unbelievable Story of Rape" is a 2015 article about a series of rapes in the American states of Washington and Colorado that occurred between 2008 and 2011, and the subsequent police investigations. It was a collaboration between two American, non-profit news organizations, The Marshall Project and ProPublica. The article was written by Ken Armstrong and T. Christian Miller. It won the 2016 Pulitzer Prize for Explanatory Reporting and the 2015 George Polk Award for Justice Reporting.
The article alternates between two true stories of events occurring between August 2008 and June 2012. The first narrative is about a woman in Lynnwood, Washington, known pseudonymously as "Marie", who reports being raped to the police. After repeated interrogation by the police, who do not believe her, she says that her report was false. She is subsequently charged with a gross misdemeanor for false reporting. The second narrative details the police investigations into a serial rapist in Colorado, who is known to have raped four women and made a fifth attempt. The man is arrested in February 2011, and subsequent evidence on his hard drive reveals that Marie, not previously known to the local investigative team, was raped by him.
T. Christian Miller of ProPublica had been reporting on law enforcement failures in identifying rapists throughout 2015. In August, he learned of the case of Marie and contacted her lawyer, discovering that Ken Armstrong of The Marshall Project was already working on a similar story. They began to collaborate, with Armstrong writing about Marie's story in Washington and Miller writing about the police investigation in Colorado. Marie agreed to speak to Armstrong after six months of communication. The article was further informed by other interviews and thousands of pages of public records material.
The article was later adapted into the Netflix series Unbelievable (2019), which has received critical acclaim. The article also provided the basis of Miller and Armstrong's full-length book A False Report: A True Story of Rape in America (2018).
Background
History
"An Unbelievable Story of Rape" was written by Ken Armstrong and T. Christian Miller. A collaboration between The Marshall Project and ProPublica, it was published on both websites on December 16, 2015. Colorado publication Westword reprinted the article as their cover story on May 19, 2016. The Marshall Project and ProPublica are American non-profit online news organizations. The Marshall Project specializes in criminal justice.
T. Christian Miller was a senior reporter at ProPublica. Throughout 2015, he had been reporting on the failure of law enforcement to trace rapists, including the case of Darren Sharper, a football player who raped nine women. Miller had discovered that a Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) database to identify serial murderers and rapists was mostly unused in the cases of rape, as most police departments fail to upload sexual assault reports. His article "The FBI Built a Database That Can Catch Rapists — Almost Nobody Uses It" was published in July 2015.
By August 2015, Miller was working on a report about the Washington and Colorado serial rape cases, with focus on the woman who recanted a report of rape after intense police interrogation, proven true years later by the rapist's conviction—known in the article by her middle name "Marie". Miller called the woman's lawyer and discovered she was in contact with Ken Armstrong of The Marshall Project, who had been working on an article about the case for several months. The teams decided to collaborate.
Research and writing
Armstrong's editor Joe Sexton and Miller's editor Bill Keller had worked together at The New York Times. Numerous other editors contributed to the article, including managing editor Kirsten Danis of The Marshall Project. As the two reporters and two primary editors were all male, the team ensured that they consulted various women, some with knowledge of the case and some without, particularly in regards to how graphic or detailed to make the description of Marie's rape.
Miller wrote the sections about the woman in Colorado, while Armstrong wrote the sections about the investigation in Washington. The sections are ordered alternately, with an opening paragraph about the woman in Washington being charged with false reporting. The structure was proposed by Sexton. The first draft was 15,000 words in length, shortened to 12,000 in the final version. Keller and other editors recommended cutting down on the ending of the article, yielding a short epilogue.