A Cautionary Tale….

A Cautionary Tale….

Photo credit: Courtesy of One Production Place

Imagine, if you will, that you and a colleague are working on a project and a month or so later you suddenly find yourself in the middle of a maelstrom. That’s exactly what happened to Neal Broffman and colleague Elisa Gambino while on a shoot for Johnson and Johnson’s maternal and infant health and their global initiative in Africa in March of 2013.  The shoot was like any other shoot and would have continued to be such had they not also been working alongside Sanjeet Tripathi.  We’ll connect the dots.

Broffman and  Gambino are two former longtime CNN international journalists based out of CNN’s London, Rome and Moscow bureaus for more than a decade. They covered revolutions, upheaval and human triumph across Europe, the Middle East, Africa and Asia. They subsequently created One Production Place with a collaborative approach to film-making grounded in their vast experience for a unique artistic vision. But what happened in March of 2013 was not on their storyboard.

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Neal Broffman

“The day we came back from the shoot, Sanjeet went back to New York and Elisa and I went back to Atlanta. We had worked together for a couple of weeks,” Broffman told Hollywood on the Potomac. “It was on that day we got back that was the day Sanjeet found out that his brother Sunil had gone missing. We offered as much emotional support as possible and helped with some video work while they were looking for Sunil.”  Both Broffman and Gambino followed the story for a month from Atlanta.

What happened next left them speechless. The timeline goes something like this: Sunil went missing from his apartment in Providence on March 16th where he was a student at Brown University. He had taken a leave of absence. When the family found out he was missing, they left their home in Bryn Mawr, Pennsylvania, drove up to Providence and spent the next month in an exhaustive search for Sunil using every tool that was available to them –  social media, outreach to local media, local TV, billboards, leafleting, Twitter, Facebook, everything they could do to raise the profile in the search to find Sunil. They worked with Brown University police and the Providence police and were also able to get the Providence FBI agents involved to help coordinate the search.

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Then came the Boston marathon bombing on April 15th.  Sunil had been missing for a month by then, one full month had elapsed during their search.  So now you know where this is going.

“Almost immediately,” explained Broffman, “social media started speculating who the bombers were, who the bomber was. They didn’t know it was multiples at that time. A few websites like Reddit and Facebook and Twitter were sharing information hoping to solve the bombing. This went on for several days, from Monday to Thursday. On Thursday, April 18th, at about 5 o’clock in the afternoon, the FBI held a press conference and released two photographs of suspects they were looking for. They did not have names for these people, just two photographs. They appealed to the public for help in finding them. All of this had already been percolating through social media and as soon as the photographs were released, somebody decided that one of the suspects looked like Sunil. It went viral. It was almost instantaneous.”

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“The family was on the receiving end of a barrage of hate-filled Facebook posts, messages, Tweets … it just went out of control, without any evidence whatsoever to tie Sunil to the marathon bombing. The police had not named him as a suspect. This went on all through the night, the night of the 18th to the morning of the 19th, to the point where it jumped out of social media and was picked up by mainstream traditional media. Journalists from NBC; Politico; several Australian stations; a station out in Cleveland; people from BuzzFeed, Newsweek, New York Times all picked up on these rumors with unsourced information, unverified information. They basically just passed it along to their followers, thereby amplifying what was already a terrible, terrible situation,” he explained.

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Photo courtesy of Portable Network

On the morning of the 19th the FBI released the names of the two suspects, the one who’s now on trial in Boston and his brother who’s dead. That was on Friday morning. Several days later Sunil’s body was found in the Providence river. He had committed suicide a month earlier. The night he disappeared from his apartment was the night he had committed suicide. In fact, everything happened after he was already dead … the marathon bombing, all the suspicion, accusations, all of this that had tied him to the event. He wasn’t even alive.

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Photo courtesy of Portable Network

“The idea that someone’s DNA can be changed because of internet based mob rumors, is for me,” said Neal, “very disturbing. “The fact that journalists piled on and helped amplify this was offensive for me as a journalist. It was also very disturbing that people could easily press the re-Tweet button and pass along information and not think about who is on the other end. In this case it was one young woman that went to high school with Sunil. She saw what was happening online and saw the photograph. She posted, ‘Hey, I’m a little freaked out. This looks like a kid that went missing that I knew from years ago.’  She posted that on Twitter. Really, if someone suspects someone has been involved in murdering lots of people at a marathon, the first place she should’ve gone was the police and of course the journalists should not have been hitting the retweet button, or passing along the information according to so-and-so; they should also have had a responsibility to check and make sure that they were being accurate.  Sunil Tripathi was never ever named by any police official as a suspect in the bombing. His name was never heard across the police department’s scanners even though people said they heard the name. The police had done forensic analysis of the radio, of the police feed, and his name was never mentioned. He was never a suspect.”

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The Tripathi siblings

According to all accounts, the police had to get involved so they went to his house in Providence at 3 o’clock in the morning, even though they had been looking for him for a month. The local police knew that he was not involved.  No one suspected him of being involved; but so much activity, so much of this innuendo and rumor had been flying around that of course the police had to do something. “These things when they get out of control have a real effect on people’s lives … a negative effect,” said Broffman.  “In this case, police diverted resources to go investigate leads that aren’t leads, but based on things that people are just retweeting and sharing with their readers.”

Journalistically, Neal and Elisa became interested in the personal story of Sunil which they couldn’t get out of their mine.  It was very disturbing on so many different levels and they wanted to tell the story so they approached the family who agreed to let them do the story…..an exclusive. The family had never spoken to anybody else about it. They worked on it for about a year and a half, finished it up last fall and just sent it out to film festivals.  Help Us Find Sunil Tripathi premiered in Atlanta on March 25th. It discusses not only what happened during the marathon, but it’s a portrait of this family as they were on the receiving end of this barrage of hatred, suspicion, and accusation. The film deals with that. The family didn’t know what happened to Sunil, but knew he had suffered from depression. They had spent quite a bit of time trying to find help for him, but suspected that he would go missing. “Every family, of course, in a situation like this would cling to hope that your loved one would be found … that he would be found alive and well somewhere. But they had nothing to indicate that he would have because he was gone,” said Broffman. “They believe that it was because of his depression that he committed suicide.”

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 Neal Broffman

When they were making the film they wanted to tell this story because it’s really something that can happen. It can happen to any family so quickly. The idea was that when people start to engage in rumor mongering, with no source and no reliable information, these things can happen. But then, the crowd moves on to something else. It doesn’t last very long. It usually moves on to somebody else and they forget. The film is an intimate portrait of this family as they were going through it … discussing what happened. When they started to make the film, they had originally thought, ‘okay, we’ll just go talk to some of these reporters and find out what sort of pressures they are under when they are trying to feed information.’ Reporters are under constant pressure to be engaged in social media. When Elisa and Neal approached a reporter or talked to him on the telephone, they refused to talk about their role, about their reporting and often deferred  to their PR departments. “You know, this is really surprising because as journalists Elisa and I had combined some thirty years, worked at CNN and other news outlets in the organization.  When a reporter would not talk about a story that he participated in was really kind of surprising. They either didn’t return any of our requests or said, yes, they would get back and then changed their minds. This is not a proud moment for journalism to be sure. We decided that we’d get this film made without them.”

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“A lot of people ask me about the marathon and what they went through. At the end of the day they lost their son and their brother,” concluded Broffman. “To them, they have such emotional baggage and such sadness in trying to grow as a family, to come to terms with this loss – what they were going through as a family dealing with their loss. They, I’m sure, followed the Boston bombing. I know they were very concerned about it when it happened like everybody – shocked and horrified by it. But, when it comes to the Boston marathon and their son, those two they don’t put in the same place. They’re dealing with grieving for their son as a family and their concern with the Boston marathon bombing is the same as yours or mine or anyone else’s; that we’d like to see justice done obviously and sad that so many people lost their lives. I just think that when people watch Help Us Find Sunil Tripathi  you learn usually about worlds, places, and personalities that are somewhat inaccessible to us. In this case, this is something that involves an activity that almost everybody does on a daily basis. They sit down at their computer. They’re 20-inches from their Facebook page or from Twitter, or from any other of the many other outlets for social media. People are always liking, retweeting, and passing on information. It has an effect on something that we all do. This could be a cautionary tale that, hey, before we send this bit of information, this is potentially hateful or volatile information that could hurt someone, so maybe we should just step back for a minute.”

Help Us Find Sunil Tripathi premieres at the Annapolis Film Festival on Friday the 27th and Sunday the 29th.  While the family has seen the film and they support the film, it’s a very painful film to watch if you’re a family member … if you’re Sunil’s mother or father. “There’s some very, very difficult scenes to watch in there,” said Neal. “While they support the film and want as many people as can to see it, it’s not something that they’d probably go and sit down and watch in a public setting. I’ve watched it with them privately.”

The city of Boston is again in the headlines as the bombing trial of Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, the real perpetrator gets underway.

Help Us Find Sunil Tripathi – Documentary Trailer from One Production Place on Vimeo.

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