Thoughts about “Tell Them You Love Me,” Anna Stubblefield, and FC/S2C/RPM
When I first heard that a documentary focusing on the Anna Stubblefield* case was in the works, I worried that the producers would romanticize Stubblefield’s relationship with her victim. I’ve watched the film twice. And, although I found Stubblefield’s unrepentant, almost giddy retelling of events creepy, I didn’t hate the documentary as much as I thought I would. I was surprised, though, that the producers of the film didn’t include the fact that she plead guilty to two counts of third degree sexual assault on an individual with disabilities rather than face a second criminal trial when the first court ruling was overturned on a technicality. They also omitted the fact that she lost a civil case where she was ordered to pay the victim and his family $4 million. (See my timeline of the Stubblefield case here).
For today’s blog post, I want to focus on Stubblefield as a facilitator, so I won’t say much more about the trial itself except that the plea agreement included a statement that she knew her victim was mentally incompetent and incapable of consent when she committed the acts, so, right from the get-go, it was tough for me to take Stubblefield at her word. I wonder why the producers skimmed over what to me are important details. Maybe to get her to talk on film?
By contrast, the strength of the victim’s family in defending their son and brother made the documentary for me. They love and accept Derrick for who he is, not who the facilitator(s) wanted him to be. And from what I can tell from reading reviews of the film most people, rightly, understand how shocking and heinous Stubblefield’s actions were. Some exceptions appear to be from individuals within the FC and the disabilities studies communities (see Katharine’s blog post from last week). Devva Kasnitz, for example, who appeared to be defending Stubblefield’s actions in the film, also contributed to a cringe-worthy book in 2012 called Politics of Occupation-Centred Practice: Reflections on occupational engagement across cultures in which she and others advocated for marriage and intimate relationships for people being subjected to FC (without the apparent need for authorship testing). (See Todd, 2012)
Promotional image of the film Tell Them You Love Me (2024)
For me, John Johnson’s victim impact statement at Stubblefield’s sentencing pretty much summed up the situation:
34 years ago, doctors said my brother would not live to see his third birthday. Those doctors and the devil are liars. My brother since then has grown to become a loving person. He is a beautiful brother, and he is a beautiful son. I don’t think Anna understood the depth of pain she caused my family. She tried to lay claim to him and rename him. She tried to supplant Derrick’s life, a life steeped…a life steeped in the history and culture of his God-fearing Southern-rooted African American family. She tried to supplant that with some version of life she thought was better. We need to disenchant ourselves from the notion that Anna Stubblefield is some tragic she-ro. Anna is not Sandra Bullock, and this is not The Blind Side. Derrick is not some poor Black kid from the ghetto that needs someone to save him. An able-bodied woman raped a disabled young man that could not consent to sex. You were wrong, Anna. You committed a crime. There is no gray area.
But, despite this, we’ve received some emails from readers who seem confused about the role Facilitated Communication (FC) played in creating a situation where an ethics professor from Rutgers University could victimize one of her students’ disabled family members. One person even asked if the family tried FC after the trial.
I’ll say what I say about FC in almost all my blog posts: There is no reliably controlled evidence proving that FC-generated messages are free from facilitator influence and control. Rather, the overwhelming evidence is that facilitators, not those being subjected to it, are authoring the messages. The research also indicates that facilitators are generally unaware of the extent to which they control the messages. Because facilitators are multi-tasking during letter selection (e.g., staring intently at the letter board, asking and answering questions, calling out letters), they’re in a terrible position to regulate their own behavior. In addition, motivated reasoning—or an intense desire to want FC to “work”—increases the chance that a facilitator will remember the “hits” (times they think FC is correct) and forget the “misses” (times when information conveyed via FC is incorrect or unintelligible). Facilitators also can feel they know their clients so well (as if they’re talking to themselves) that they believe they can “interpret” what may otherwise be random letters selected on the keyboard. In Stubblefield’s case, for example, she interpreted the letters G-M to mean “gym” (after guessing incorrectly a couple times before that and retrofitting a word that made “sense” to her afterwards). She then used FC to confirm that her guess was correct. (See Katharine’s prior blog post for further discussion of this phenomenon).
Stubblefield explains how she uses Facilitated Communication while testifying at her own trial. (Image: NJ.com)
Beyond that, I think it’s important to point out that Stubblefield wasn’t just any facilitator and, no, she did not do FC “wrong.” Stubblefield’s mother, Sandi McClennen, is an unapologetic first-generation facilitator with ties to founders Douglas Biklen (of Syracuse University in the U.S.) and the late Rosemary Crossley (of the DEAL centre in Australia). For all intents and purposes, Stubblefield was part of FC’s inner circle and, in her own words, was “part of the moment” when FC rose to popularity in the U.S in the early 1990s. And though Stubblefield claimed at the trial that she was one of Syracuse University’s “master trainers,” presumably after taking a 3-day workshop at the ICI, she, as a philosophy professor, was not qualified to act as a licensed speech/language pathologist, social worker, Occupational Therapist, Physical Therapist, psychologist, psychiatrist, literacy specialist, and/or expert on developmental disabilities and cerebral palsy in making treatment decisions for her client(s). And, even if Stubblefield was a so-called “master trainer” (for which there are no national standards, examinations or licensing requirements), it would not have mattered to the outcome of the case. FC (the technique) is flawed and does not work as an independent form of communication, regardless of how much “training” a facilitator has. Practicing FC for weeks, months, years even, does not make the technique any less flawed.
Regardless, Stubblefield chose to work with a non-speaking disabled student and had a responsibility—just as all facilitators do—not to use harmful or unproven/disproven techniques with her clients and to test for authorship under reliably controlled conditions to rule out facilitator control. Time and again (staying loyal to FC guidelines which admonish facilitators not to test for authorship) she chose not to find out if her victim had the language comprehension and literacy skills necessary to type independently. An historical accounting of Derrick’s physical, cognitive and emotional development, plus testing completed for the trial using evidence-based methods indicate he did not.
Regardless, when Stubblefield started using FC with her victim, she knew or should have known that because of the overwhelming evidence against it, many organizations, including the American Speech-Language-Hearing Association (ASHA), the American Psychological Association, and others had adopted statements that publicly opposed the use of FC. (See Opposition Statements). In recent years, many of these organizations have expanded their opposition to include variant forms of FC (namely, Spelling to Communicate and Rapid Prompting Method). If/when proponents distance themselves from FC because of the (mostly negative) media attention the documentary has created, don’t let them fool you into thinking S2C and RPM are any more reliable than FC. They are not. Like touch-based FC, none of these variants are evidence-based. (See Systematic Reviews)
To my knowledge, Stubblefield also had little or no experience setting up reliable testing to rule in or rule out facilitator control during letter selection. It seems Stubblefield made some attempt to have a second facilitator help Derrick with his homework outside of a Rutgers University class while she served as facilitator in class. Supposedly the second “naïve” facilitator hadn’t read the course material, but, according to the documentary, the FCed responses and the second facilitator’s roommate’s responses were similar. I’m not accusing the second facilitator or the roommate of deliberate wrongdoing here (beyond using a discredited technique with a minimally speaking client). While I suspect the second facilitator had good intentions and believed that FC “worked,” (1) it’s easy to share information without realizing it, (2) it’s not true that she was completely blinded to course materials, and (3) good intentions do not protect a facilitator from (inadvertently) cueing letter selection and causing harm to their clients. Facilitator cueing is built into the technique. It’s how the technique “works.”
According to Stubblefield’s recollection of events, Derrick was able to identify characters and plot elements from course materials, which to her “proved” he was independently completing the coursework. This seems strange to me since Stubblefield herself also reported that Derrick couldn’t identify letters until she (a highly literate person) touched his elbow. Nevertheless, consider the generalities in this homework sample provided in the documentary:
The girl in the book…is not allowed to leave because she is a slave. I believe I am facing the same thing with my body. I’m confined in my life. I live in a body that is not able to move the way that I would like, I live in it because it what I was given.
What are the chances that a book included in an African American Studies class would feature a girl who was not allowed to leave because she was a slave? I’m guessing that even someone who had not taken the course or read the book might be able to come up with that information simply by looking at the book’s cover or perhaps making inferences about the book’s content by reading questions from the homework assignment. Did those questions, for example, include the girl’s name (or female-identifying pronouns) or allude to her desire to escape her situation? And anyone taking an FC workshop and/or reading pro-FC articles would likely be primed to write the last two sentences. Pro-FC literature often includes content alluding to people being silently imprisoned in their bodies and/or being freed from a cage upon “discovering” FC.
In addition, facilitators are taught in workshops to downplay verbal and non-verbal forms of communication. In the documentary, Stubblefield describes her victim’s leaving the bed at his mother’s home after her first attack and “scooting down the hallway.” In her mind, he did this to regroup (akin to her getting a glass of water), but considering her victim’s physical limitations, this escape would have taken a tremendous amount of effort on his part and to my mind was a clear, if non-verbal, indication he did not want to be near her. But, Stubblefield, not taking no for a no, followed him down the hallway and used FC to get “confirmation” to continue the activity she wanted to engage in. It’s not possible to get independent consent with facilitator-dependent techniques like FC/S2C/RPM.
“Influence.” A 2018 film by Michael Bergmann featuring the discredited technique of Facilitated Communication (FC). (Bergmann, 2018)
One would hope that the Stubblefield case, tragic as it is, is a one-off situation (it isn’t, see Facilitator Crimes), but current-day pro-FC/S2C/RPM films and songs seem to be furthering the idea of taking facilitator-dependent relationships to “the next level” with no consideration for authorship testing or for the boundary-crossing, ethically questionable role facilitators should take in “supporting” the activity. I’ve written about two examples in previous blog posts. (See here and here).
And, while I probably could write two or three more blog posts about this movie, I’ll leave you with this one last thought. In The Reason I Jump, a movie based on an FC-generated book by Naoki Higashida and his mother, there’s a scene where Emma is being facilitated (S2C/RPM-style) by her mother. While the mother calls out the words, “We could finally tell each other how we felt,” Emma verbally says “No more! No more!” and a narrator tells viewers that spoken words are not reliable. Compared with the Stubblefield case, this scene is relatively benign, although Emma is clearly frustrated with the situation and would like it to stop. But what if in the future, Emma finds herself in a situation with a facilitator who would like to “take their relationship to the next level”? What if the facilitated words “We could finally tell each other how we felt” had a more adult (and perhaps sinister) connotation to it and Emma was verbally saying “No more! No more!”? By proponent standards and practices, Emma’s spoken words would be rendered meaningless. Is this really the message proponents want to send when they tell their facilitators to downplay or ignore the legitimate nonverbal or (minimally) spoken communications of their clients in lieu of untested facilitator-generated messages?
*I believe Anna Stubblefield is now going by her maiden name (McClennen), but for this blog post will continue using the name she used in the documentary. It’s also disturbing that she didn’t admit in the film that she plead guilty to two counts of third degree sexual assault on a person with disabilities in order to avoid a second jury trial. The plea agreement also included a statement saying she knew at the time of her sexual encounters with DJ that he had been found mentally incompetent and could not legally consent. FMI: Moriarty, Thomas. (2018, May 11). Ex-Rutgers prof who sexually assaulted a disabled man to be sentenced again. NJ Advance Media for NJ.com
Note: In 2014, the International Society for Augmentative and Alternative Communication (ISAAC) published a position statement on Facilitated Communication in the journal Augmentative and Alternative Communication. In it, they asserted that:
The use of FC appears to be in violation of several articles of the United Nations Conventions on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (i.e., Articles 12, 16, 17, and 21) as it has been shown to prevent individuals without sufficient spoken language from using their own “voice.” With the use of FC, the messages may be attributed to facilitators. For persons with limited or no functional speech, the use of FC risks the loss of valuable assessment and intervention efforts, time, and resources that might otherwise have been expended to implement AAC systems and strategies that are empirically validated and do not leave doubt about authorship. (p. 358)
Note: Article 12: Equal recognition before the law, Article 16: Freedom from exploitation, violence and abuse, Article 17: Protecting the integrity of the person, and Article 21: Freedom of expression and opinion, and access to information.
Recommended Reading
Note: Links to reviews of Tell Them You Love Me and other FC/S2C/RPM movies are available here.
Mostert, M. (2012). Facilitated Communication: The empirical imperative to prevent further professional malpractice. Evidence-Based Communication Assessment and Intervention, 6 (1), 1-10. DOI: 10.1080/17489539.2012.693840
Palfreman, J. (2012) The dark legacy of FC. Evidence-Based Communication Assessment and Intervention, 6 (1), 14-17. DOI: 10.1080/17489539.2012.688343
Todd , J.T. (2012) The moral obligation to be empirical: Comments on Boynton's “Facilitated Communication—what harm it can do: Confessions of a former facilitator”. Evidence-Based Communication Assessment and Intervention, 6 (1), 36-57. DOI: 10.1080/17489539.2012.704738
Von Tetzchner, S. (2012) Understanding facilitated communication: Lessons from a former facilitator—Comments on Boynton. Evidence-Based Communication Assessment and Intervention, 6 (1), 28-35. DOI: 10.1080/17489539.2012.699729
Blog posts:
Actually there are published results for S2C/RPM…and they aren’t good
An inside look at S2C: “We actually discourage them from using their speech while they are spelling”
Are individuals with Profound Autism “real?”: Bergmann’s “Influence”
At what point was Anna Stubblefield culpable for her criminal actions?
Can facilitators NOT cue their clients even if they wanted to (Hint: It’s not likely)
Four in the Bedroom: Lamentations or Exploitation of Non-Speaking Individuals?
The Reason I Jump: self-promotion trumps intellectual honesty (Part 1)
The Reason I Jump: self-promotion trumps intellectual honesty (Part 2)