Before she was accused of betraying her country and sympathising with terrorists, the former US Air Force Intelligence translator-turned-whistleblower Reality Winner doodled anime cartoons in her notepad and slept under a Pikachu bedspread. She believed in her country’s freedoms and its potential, which is why she says she leaked a classified National Security Agency report into Russian interference in the 2016 election. She despised Donald Trump, yet you’d also have to pry her massive, pink and black AR-15 from her cold, dead hands. If there was a guidebook for Americans on how to adopt coherent, easily decipherable political stances that make for clear-cut film adaptations, Winner had never read it.
“Edward Snowden and Chelsea Manning were ready to burn the whole thing down,” explains playwright and filmmaker Tina Satter, who has made her directorial debut with a movie drama based on Winner’s arrest. “But it was hard for Reality to be [claimed] by either political side. She’d served in the military and owned a bunch of automatic weapons. She had the profile of – in a very general way – a Republican patriot. But then she’d taken this other action, going against the government and against Trump. So she wasn’t a clear fit. She holds all these complexities.”
Up until the moment when Winner was given the longest prison sentence in American history for leaking government information (five years and three months), the most interesting thing about her was her name. It was a...
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