On June 3 2017, 25-year-old National Security Agency translator Reality Winner finished her grocery shopping and returned to her modest home in a suburb of Augusta, Georgia, to prepare to teach a yoga class. Just another mundane day of errands, with one key difference: the FBI was waiting for her.
Over the next couple of hours, an intense interrogation unfolded that circled the crime she was suspected of — the mishandling of classified information. But the conversation also took odd, near-comic detours. Winner was quizzed about her pets, a recent holiday, her CrossFit exercise routine and her preferred gun (a pink-and-black AR-15). It culminated with her arrest on suspicion of releasing classified documents that detailed suspected Russian interference in the 2016 US presidential election to online news outlet The Intercept. In August 2018, Winner was given the longest prison sentence ever imposed for unauthorised release of government information to the media: five years and three months.
That pivotal day in Winner’s life has now been dramatised twice, in both instances written and directed by playwright-turned-filmmaker Tina Satter. In both cases, the dialogue was taken verbatim from FBI transcripts of the interview. The first incarnation was as a successful stage play titled Is This a Room; now the events are revisited in Reality, a superb new film which stars Euphoria’s Sydney Sweeney in the central role.
Like many other Americans, Satter was only vaguely aware of the...
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