Anthony Anderson: Let's Focus on Nate Parker's Filmmaking

Nate Parker's rape allegation is back in the news, and fellow rape accusee Anthony Anderson says we should focus on his filmmaking.

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Complex Original

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TMZ gave Blackish and Barbershop star Anthony Anderson the old ambush street interview treatment, and managed to get him to sort of weigh in on the Nate Parker rape accusations controversy. An interviewer with a camera approached Anderson, who was sitting in the driver's seat of a parked car with the window down.

"Hey, everyone's talking about this Nate Parker situation with Birth of a Nation, they're bringing up a rape case that happened when he was 19. Do you think this is gonna affect the film?," he asks.

Why ask Anderson about this? Probably to get the opinion of a guy who has faced his own past accusations. Anderson himself was cleared of rape charges in 2004 after a woman accused him of sexual assault on the Hustle and Flow set. A judge dismissed that case after hearing the the woman's testimony.

There has been a lot of debate and controversy over whether people can or should separate the art from the artist when it comes to Parker's Birth of a Nationa film about Nat Turner's real-life slave uprising that seemed poised to be serious Oscar bait until the 1999 rape case resurfaced. 

Parker, then a 19-year-old student athlete at Penn State, was found not guilty at trial, partly because of testimony that he'd previously had consensual sex with the accuser. The details of the case, however, which have resurfaced recently via court transcripts, are highly troubling, describing a night when Parker invited his friend (and writing partner on Birth of a Nation) Jean Celestin into a room to have sex with the intoxicated woman he was already having sex with. That woman, who has remained anonymous, died in a suicide a decade later.

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