A controversial film based on the real-life case of abortion clinic doctor and convicted murderer Kermit Gosnell will now be released in US cinemas, after the conclusion of legal action against it by the judge involved in Gosnell’s 2013 trial.
Variety magazine reports that the makers of Gosnell: The Trial of America’s Biggest Serial Killer, are free to release their film after they settled with Judge Jeffrey P Minehart, who objected to his portrayal in the film.
Gosnell’s case became a lightning rod in the battle over abortion rights in the US. Having owned and operated clinics in Pennsylvania since the early 70s, Gosnell was repeatedly accused of performing illegal late-term abortions in unsafe and grotesquely unhygienic conditions, and in 2011 was arrested and charged with killing seven infants who had survived the initial termination procedure. In 2013 he was convicted on three counts of murder and the involuntary manslaughter in 2009 of Karnamaya Mongar, one of his patients.
Gosnell: The Trial of America’s Biggest Serial Killer stars Dean Cain as a detective investigating the case, and Earl Billings as Gosnell. Among the team behind the camera are executive producer John Sullivan, who previously shared directing credit with Dinesh d’Souza on America: Imagine the World Without Her and 2016: Obama’s America; writer-producers Phelim McAleer and Ann McElhinney who previously collaborated on anti-environmentalist documentaries Not Evil Just Wrong and Mine Your Own Business; and conservative political columnist and novelist Andrew Klavan, who is credited for the “teleplay”.
Originally planned as a TV movie, Gosnell raised more than $2m on crowdfunding platform Indiegogo, and began filming in 2015.
Sullivan is quoted by Variety as saying: “I’ve been on hard films before, but this one was particularly difficult ... Hollywood is afraid of this content. It’s a true story the media tried to ignore from the very beginning, so I wasn’t surprised to see Hollywood ignore us.”
McElhinney said: “It’s a story that needs to be told fairly and we’ve done just that. The cover-up stops here.”
