Summary Of The Film The Hunting Ground

The tone is one of excitement and eagerness as the film The Hunting Ground opens up, with graduation music playing and high school seniors opening up their college acceptance letters. As students arrive at college, however, the mood shifts from anticipation to foreboding. The documentary, composed of heart wrenching rape stories and frightening statistics, portrays college as a breeding ground for sexual assaults. By relying heavily on emotional appeal and twisting statistics to support his argument, director Kirby Dick falsely presents college as a hostile institute where the administration sides with the accused instead of the accuser.

What can make the documentary so convincing is the numerous emotional recountings of a sexual assault.

Kinsman claims that after drinking and being drugged at a bar, Winston took her back to his dorm where he violently raped her. The film does not present Winston’s side of the story, in which he claims the encounter was completely consensual. The film focuses a great deal its attention on the fact that Winston is one of the most prominent student athletes in the country. The documentary claims that since Winston is this larger than life athlete that he therefore has a sense of entitlement, thus proving he raped her. However this argument is illogical-- Winston being a major athlete does not solidify Kinsman’s rape

However, the video fails to mention that the two toxicology reports came back negative for both alcohol and drugs. It also fails to mention that during hearings, Kinsman never asserted that she was drugged. Kinsman also claimed that while at the hospital, the doctors and police saw bruises appear on her the next day. However, the nurse who examined Kinsman could not find a single bruise on her body. Kinsman was proven to be an unreliable source when she repeatedly changed her story and could not be counted on to go to trial. Most of the cases in the documentary are much less prominent than Kinsman’s infamous allegation. The very controversial way the film handles the Winston case, however, raises doubt on the fairness of the many other accusations that form the crux of the film.

The Hunting Ground continues to twist the allegations surrounding the Winston case when one of its crew members edited multiple Wikipedia pages to support the film’s claims. On Jameis Winston’s page, crew member Edward Alva removed several paragraphs of evidence depicting major issues with Erica Kinsman’s story and removed a significant section describing how Kinsman "broke off contact with [the Tallahassee Police Department] and her attorney indicated that she did not want to move forward at that