PARK CITY, UTAH – JANUARY 20: (L-R) Susanna Fogel and Reality Winner attend the “Winner” Premiere during the 2024 Sundance Film Festival at The Ray on January 20, 2024 in Park City, Utah. (Photo by Matt Winkelmeyer/Getty Images)
Note: The below op-ed was written by Winner director Susanna Fogel. Her new film, starring Emilia Jones, Connie Britton, Zach Galifianakis, and Kathryn Newton, is now available on VOD.
“I love cows and football. That’s pretty much South Texas in a nutshell.”
That’s the first thing Reality Winner said when I told her I was writing a piece about her and how growing up in Texas shaped her choices. The choice people will probably want to hear about is the one that landed her in a federal prison by the age of 26, so I’ll probably focus on that one. It’s the reason three films have been made about her, including the one directed by me that is now available on VOD and in select theaters! But not to make it about me. If Reality Winner directed a movie, she would never do that. All she does is think about other people. That’s kinda how she ended up in prison. We’ll circle back to that.
If you don’t know who Reality Winner is, do me a favor and don’t Google her. Just picture a nine-year-old blond girl with a pink BB gun running around the fields behind her family’s mobile home in Kingsville, Texas. Interests include: animals, fluorescent clothes, soccer, watching Futurama with her sister, and taking road trips with their dad to Mexico, which is just half an hour from their front door. Most of her friends are Mexican or first-generation Mexican-American and have family on both sides of the border, including the woman who’s caring for her father as he dies from complications of a painkiller addiction. When it comes to race, the concept of “us versus them” doesn’t make sense to Reality because she lives in such an integrated community. It’s a community in which her family is heavily involved: her mother is a social worker who advocates for children in foster care. She takes her daughters to church, where they learn the value of charity work.
Okay, now you can Google Reality Winner. Depending on your political leanings and the algorithm they created, the headlines will either paint her as a traitor trying to overthrow the government, or a grandstanding hero pushing a leftist agenda. The truth is, she’s neither. Reality is just a regular person from Texas who makes choices moment to moment based on her values, which are quintessentially Texan. She places a premium on the idea of personal freedom, of the right to think for herself. After high school, she joined the military like so many people from her town. She won medals for her service, then went on to work for the N.S.A. in a surveillance job, trying to root out potential threats to American safety. Like so many people reading this article right now, Reality is adventurous, bold, and fiercely individualistic, with a stubborn streak that makes her a force to be reckoned with. All qualities that are admirable in the abstract but a threat to a government that prefers its citizens be compliant.
Enough mystery. Getting back to R/reality, here’s what she actually did. You may remember right after the 2016 election, when our government claimed to have no proof that Russia had hacked our elections. For months, people on both sides of the aisle became obsessed with the question, and angry debates ensued that took over the news cycle. All the while, Reality Winner was sitting at her desk at her government job, staring at a document on her computer that proved there was a hack. And the government knew about it. It may not have proved votes were changed, but there was proof we were targeted. Reality was confused. Why keep the country spinning about this question that had an answer, wasting everyone’s time and energy and distracting our leaders from turning to the real problems in America that needed fixing? Economic inequality. Racism. The school system. Climate change. To name just a few. She felt regular Americans had a right to know their voting systems were vulnerable since voting is one of our basic rights as a Democracy. And more generally, she just didn’t like that regular Americans like you were being lied to. So Reality shared the document she found. Among other freedoms she believes in, she believes in freedom of information. She made a judgment call rooted in her own sense of justice. To her, that was being a patriot.
Patriotism is a hard thing to define, especially in this moment when our country is so divided and so many of our systems seem outdated and dysfunctional. Does being a patriot mean agreeing and complying with whatever the elected leader says, no matter who that leader is? This country was founded by people who were dissatisfied by their leadership and acted independently of it. Isn’t that what we celebrate every Fourth of July? Or does patriotism mean something more community-oriented and humanistic, that regardless of the power structure, we should strive to do what’s best for the most people in our country? If so, what’s best for most people? Reality believed the best thing for people was knowing the truth. To others, the patriotic thing for her to do would have been to look the other way.
What do you think? What would you have done in her position? Do you generally trust your leadership, or do you wish it could change? If so, in what way? What would you risk, if anything, to help? Maybe nothing. Maybe everything. There are no easy answers, but Reality’s story makes us ask the questions, which is essential right now as we all hurtle toward the next election.
Reality Winner is out of prison now. She’s back home in Kingsville, studying to be a vet tech. Interests include: Crossfit, Pit Bulls, Adult Swim. Yes, her story is epic, dramatic, the stuff of multiple movies, but at heart she’s a regular person from a small town near the Mexican border. Like so many Texans, she’s impossible to define in a headline. She calls Texas home because as a state, it feels “wild and free” (her words). It’s Reality’s greatest gift and her greatest liability that those words perfectly define her too.
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