Gosnell Movie Release Set for October, Filmmakers 'Thrilled' Given Timing of Kennedy Retirement
A motion picture recounting the harrowing story of the trial of a Philadelphia abortionist and his many victims has a distributor and is now set for release later this year.
Gosnell: The Trial of America's Biggest Serial Killer will be released in October in 750 theaters nationwide through GVN Releasing, the Hollywood Reporter said Tuesday.
The movie, which producers and Irish journalists Anne McElhinney and Phelim McAleer made with approximately $2.3 million in a crowdfunding campaign, features actor Dean Cain as the lead detective who chased the case of Kermit Gosnell, the Philadelphia abortionist who is now in prison.
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Gosnell is presently serving a life sentence for the murder of three infant babies and the involuntary manslaughter of one of his adult patients, Karnamaya Mongar.
"With the retirement of pro-abortion Kennedy, the release of our movie couldn't be more timely. The movie tells the truth about abortion, something sadly lacking in Hollywood and the mainstream media," said McElhinney in a statement to The Christian Post Wednesday, noting she was "thrilled."
Gosnell's abortion facility, which was referred to as a "House of Horrors" when it was finally exposed in 2010 — dozens of aborted babies and body parts were found in jars and the conditions inside were filthy — was allowed to operate because the state government failed to inspect the clinic for over 17 years.
The plot of the movie follows the trial of Gosnell, and includes gruesome details about Baby A, arguably the most famous of Gosnell's victims, the largest baby delivered who was estimated to be around 29 weeks old. Baby A was moving until Gosnell cut his spinal cord with scissors and witnesses testified that he joked that this particular baby was "big enough to walk me to the bus stop."
The movie also touches on the near total journalistic blackout on the story early in the trial. When Gosnell went to trail the press gallery was almost completely empty. Given the scale of the crimes committed the filmmakers maintain it ought to have made national headlines in the secular media but it did not until USA Today columnist Kirsten Powers learned of it and rebuked the mainstream media for deliberately ignoring the story.
The Christian Post had been reporting on the case long before Powers first wrote about it. You can read a few of CP's reports on the case here, here and here, and the grand jury's report here.
"It's a story that needs to be told fairly and we've done just that. The cover-up stops here," said McElhinney.
McElhinney and McAleer have been attempting to get the film into theaters for approximately four years, having had no success until now.
The two producers, whom The Christian Post interviewed in January 2017, also captured the story comprehensively in a book, Gosnell: The Untold Story of America's Most Prolific Serial Killer.
"It made us sick to our stomach, made us nauseous, because of how evil, how dehumanized, how banal the evil was," McElhinney told CP at the time.
"In that circle of Hell that [Gosnell] created, people were laughing, people were jovial, people joked around, and there's something uniquely macabre, something uniquely diabolical about that."
With respect to the reporters not paying attention to the story, McAleer said that they "didn't get together in some darkened room or some website where they all decided conspiratorially not to cover this. They all decided individually that this is something that they didn't want to cover."
"And the reason they didn't want to cover it is because it would shine a negative light on abortion. The honest ones will admit that. The dishonest ones will say, 'Oh, we were too busy' or 'We didn't have enough resources.'"
"This is a classic crime story. This is a classic, wonderful journalistic story about an issue of national importance, an issue of national debate. And if it was a pro-lifer doing something similar, murdering people, you can bet that they would have covered it. I don't want to over explain it. It's just simple journalistic bias."
The Hollywood Reporter also noted Tuesday that the filmmakers "thought they had a distribution deal a year ago but the judge at Gosnell's trial, Jeffrey Minehart, sued to block the release of the film, fearing he was portrayed as part of 'Philadelphia's liberal corrupt government.'"
The lawsuit, which was recently resolved, alleged that the producers "shamelessly exploit[ed] for profit the morally divisive issue of abortion and the notoriety of the horrific Kermit Gosnell trial, which involved a Philadelphia abortion doctor who was found guilty of grisly mass murders of fully developed in-vitro infants, some of whom were born alive."
