'You Can See Everything' director Lance Oppenheim accused of stealing public defender films

For a filmmaker whose new documentary is called You Can See Everything, Lance Oppenheim is facing some awkward questions about what he chose to look at, and what he took home.

“Lance Oppenheim, the director of You Can See Everything, is a thief and I want to tell you about it,” Katie Carter said in an Instagram video posted on Sunday.

Carter is an investigator and mitigation specialist who has worked with Louisiana’s public defender system for 20 years. She makes mitigation films, short documentaries that argue a client’s case to judges and prosecutors, often in cases where judges and prosecutors still have not decided on a sentence.

In 2018, Oppenheim asked to attend a federal defender training on mitigation filmmaking. He was allowed to film the training and nothing else. Carter alleges he went further. She claims he used a private link to download every film public defenders across the US had shared for the session, cut them into his own documentary, No Jail Time: The Movie, and sold it to The New York Times.

“None of us knew any of this until I got to work and I sat down, and I saw my client and someone I filmed on the homepage of the New York Times website,” she said.

“He made money off of stealing stories from poor people facing crimes and surviving poverty.”

 

 

 

 

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A post shared by Katie Carter (@cartercarter26)

What Carter alleges

In a follow-up post, Carter said attendees were explicitly told not to use any of the films without permission from the lawyers involved, and not to film footage playing on the screen. She said nobody signed releases.

“I think he took a password that was in a PowerPoint and downloaded our films with that password, which he obviously was never given permission to do,” she wrote.

She also said Oppenheim, who was a Harvard student at the time, promised to show the group a cut before he submitted it. “He promised a cut of the film before he ‘turned it in’ for his ‘school project ’, which he did not do.”

Once the film went up, Carter said she called, emailed, texted, and messaged Oppenheim, and eventually reached his father, asking for it to be taken down from both the Times and Oppenheim’s own website. She also wrote to Harvard filmmaker Rob Moss about the damage done. According to Carter, the university could not take action because Oppenheim had falsely presented it as a school project.

She said the group discussed legal action but decided against it. The consequences fell on them instead. Carter said her mentor was fired over the incident, and the national mitigation trainings have not been held since.

“One of the people he stole from was executed. His life is over. He doesn’t walk on this earth anymore, and Lance made money off his story,” she said. Another of her clients featured in the film is still in prison.

“It’s inconceivable that he has had zero accountability. My clients, some of whom have committed great harm, have more insight and ability to reconcile with the harm that they’ve caused than Lance Oppenheim does.”

Carter made clear that whether Oppenheim breached copyright isn’t really her point. “Idk about fair use but what he did is highly unethical, and that’s the point of sharing this story. We should question his ethics.”

A very good month to be Lance Oppenheim… in some cases

The timing is bad for Oppenheim, who is in the middle of a career-best run.

You Can See Everything, which he co-directed with Nathan Fielder, follows Elizabeth Holmes and her partner Billy Evans through the month before she reported to prison. The A24 release opened in North America on 16 October and took US$15.6 million (A$22.2 million) from 855 theatres.

It follows Primetime, which Oppenheim directed and A24 released in September. Robert Pattinson plays investigative journalist Chris Hansen at the height of the reality series To Catch a Predator. Hansen has publicly criticised the film and has considered legal action against A24.

You Can See Everything opens in Australia on 20 November.