How ‘Luckiest Girl Alive’ Writer Jessica Knoll Found ‘Clarity’ Years After Being Assaulted at 15

Jessica Knoll doesn’t recognise whether her rapists will flow Luckiest Girl Alive while it’s on Netflix Friday. The thought in their other halves tuning in, although, has crossed her mind.

“It’s so difficult for me to assume them looking it,” the writer, 38, tells peope.

“It seems more than probable to me that their better halves might watch it now not knowing they are the boys from it, and that they may just walk in and see that.”

It was in an essay six years in the past that Knoll found out her personal connection to her 2015 bestselling novel: certainly one of its pivotal scenes is primarily based on her personal revel in at 15.

Knoll wrote that she changed into gang-raped by using 3 classmates at a celebration, however “no person called it rape” at the time.

Instead, afterward there was bullying, slut-shaming and no costs pressed.

After excessive school, Knoll “became enthusiastic about reinventing” herself, she recalled in the essay, confident that with “the right wardrobe, a glamorous process and a ring on my finger before the age of 28 I ought to go beyond my popularity.”

With that photograph of achievement, her “voice would sooner or later be worth hearing,” she concept, a mistake she came to realise considering “the advent of residing nicely isn’t always the equal thing as actually living properly” and “revenge does no longer beget restoration.”

Today, Knoll has performed the paintings, been to therapy and grew to become her youth trauma right into a profitable work of fiction — a “catharsis” that has not anything to do with the ones boys and the whole lot to do along with her personal wellbeing. “I don’t spend a great deal time thinking about them, truly,” she says.

“As a writer, my process is setting myself in any person else’s shoes and imagining why they do the things they do.

And they are the ones that I simply can not do that with. So I live away from questioning like that.”

Knoll is the screenwriter of the new film version of Luckiest Girl Alive, which stars Mila Kunis as mag editor Ani FaNelli.

By all accounts, the protagonist has all of it — the clothes, the activity identify, the rich fiancé.

But when darkish secrets and techniques from her past come to light, she’s compelled to find her own voice, in all likelihood on the value of her seemingly ideal lifestyles.

Telling the arena approximately the attack “turned into the clean element,” Knoll says.

“The tough part,” she explains, “have been the conversations I needed to have with my own family and pals who had been there on the time.

The difficult component became announcing to humans that you love who additionally love you and would take a bullet for you, ‘You allow me down and also you weren’t there for me.

I became a child. I wished you and I can not keep to behave like it really is OK.

We can paintings thru that, we can talk approximately it, and I still love you. Help me apprehend why you couldn’t be there.’ ”

“I apprehend in a much greater nuanced manner why people inside the community fail folks who come forward like this. It’s so complex,” admits Knoll.

“It goes to humans’s private circle of relatives histories, their very own reports with trauma. You can recognize all of that.

That information itself and that information and the logic at the back of it is a completely empowering issue to have because you can make feel of it.

Before, it all felt so mindless. I even have readability in a way that I did now not have lower back then.”

While she admits she should have “said some thing faster” approximately feeling let down through her family, Knoll found out she had to “supply them grace.”

“I assume a part of my problem was looking forward to humans to say the proper factor, the maximum kind of developed thing, and then I could get surely irritated when they did not,” she explains. “I had to apprehend it’s an not possible act that human beings be plugged into your trauma the way you are, so you need with a purpose to explain it to them, then allow them to be like, ‘OK, thank you,’ and circulate on from it.”

Cruel Summer alum Chiara Aurelia performs teenaged Ani within the movie’s flashbacks, and Connie Britton is her mom Dinah, who has a much less-than-compassionate reaction to studying of her daughter’s rape. Tasked with performing out a number of Knoll’s real-lifestyles traumas in this fictional story, Aurelia got near with the author over the route of production.

“Having her positioned younger Ani in my hands and certainly manual me through this adventure become a as soon as-in-a-lifetime opportunity,” says Aurelia, 20.

“There’s so much that I’m going to hold with me. There are so many phrases of information she gave me.”

Knoll says the younger actress became “shaken” whilst she shared her tale with her earlier than filming.

Though the star differs from the individual (Aurelia says Ani’s “journey isn’t always my journey, and her reports aren’t my stories”), Knoll sensed the actress could relate to it, similar situations having gone down in her own pal group.

“In a few ways we have made such a lot of strides ahead,” says Knoll, “and in a few methods it seems like it’s precisely the identical.”

Kunis, on the other hand, “couldn’t relate to this man or woman in any respect,” in line with Knoll — who walked away with some classes from the leading female, additionally a producer at the movie.

“Mila is actually the other of me, that’s a people-pleaser and who turned into raised to guard everyone around me and minimize my very own feelings inside the service of others; make sure they’re secure always, in no way talk up and propose for myself, even if I’m uncomfortable or dissatisfied. Mila is the polar opposite. She says exactly what is on her thoughts.”

Adds Knoll, “I might write those lines and she would examine them and be like, ‘Jess, I don’t even recognize what to say right now. Your brain is so twisted and so exclusive from mine.

I don’t get it.’ It changed into in reality very funny and I suppose that with a bit of luck made it a amusing assignment for her due to the fact she become playing a person who was so exclusive from how she is in actual life.” Kunis, 39, tells people it became “amusing to play a person very unpredictable” and notes that “all of us placed on a kind of façade” for others at times.

Luckiest Girl Alive, she says, “is just the intense version of it.” When it came to dealing with the non-public nature of the narrative, Kunis says Knoll become “really high-quality at being capable of separate herself from her tale and permit the filmmakers make it a new tale.”

Kunis adds, “But we additionally had the good fortune of having her write the ebook and having her write the script, so it was very tons her voice.”

Though Knoll chose now not to be on set for the filming of the rape scene (which is depicted in collaboration with RAINN experts approximately sensitivities), it is no longer tough for her to observe the movie now. Except if she’s watching alongside those closest to her.

“When I screened the film for a few friends, I regarded round at the organization and became like, ‘You understand what? I’m going to ought to rise up and go away for the duration of a positive scene. It’s just going to be too uncomfortable to have you men watch the assault scene understanding my personal tale,’ ” she says.

“It’s difficult round individuals who know you. That’s wherein the discomfort comes in for me.

When it is that closer organization, the human beings who have acknowledged you for a long term, it really is once I get a variety of anxiety about that scene in particular.”

Knoll proudly calls herself a “remedy nut,” attributing years of periods to supporting her personal development.

She’s nevertheless operating on speakme up for herself, however she’s made enhancements there — “It’s no longer constantly easy, however it gets easier with exercise,” she says.

What she simply desires is that the Luckiest Girl Alive film reaches a good large target audience, assisting fellow survivors feel less alone of their personal person journey.

She instructed her husband of 10 years, Greg Cortese, about her records early of their dating, however Knoll says ladies she knew advised her that, after the e-book and her essay, they shared their personal stories with their longtime partners for the first time. It led to “an entire new level of accept as true with for them that made them experience safer.”

She adds, “The idea that would appear on a Netflix scale makes my heart swell. I hope that occurs for humans.” “I wish that there may be more unburdening for people.”

If you or a person has been sexually assaulted, please touch the National Sexual Assault Hotline at 1-800-656-HOPE (4673) or go to rainn.Org.

Luckiest Girl Alive, directed through Mike Barker, is streaming on Netflix Friday. The novel is available anyplace books are offered.