'The Battle for Justina Pelletier' Director on 'Powerful' Meeting With Her

Director David Metzler found it a "powerful" experience meeting with Justina Pelletier for the new four-part Peacock documentary The Battle for Justina Pelletier, he told Newsweek.

The docuseries charts her family's fight to have her returned home from Boston Children's Hospital after they brought her to the facility in February 2013, aged 14, at which point the hospital took custody of her.

They did so by issuing a 51a, which is a report filed with the Department of Children and Families when a child care provider suspects child abuse or neglect.

In their 51a, Boston Children's Hospital claimed Justina's parents, Lou and Linda, were suspected of being medically negligent. They believed Justina had Somatoform disorder, a mental health illness when physical ailments have no physical cause, and Munchausen Syndrome by proxy, not the rare illness she'd been diagnosed with months before—mitochondrial disease.

The Pelletiers denied all of the accusations made against them, and fought for their daughter to be discharged.

In June 2014, a judge dismissed the case against Lou and Linda Pelletier and Justina was allowed to return home. Her parents then filed a medical malpractice lawsuit against Boston Children's Hospital in 2016, and in 2020 the five-week trial began, and a jury found the medical professionals had not been negligent in their care of Justina in February 2020.

In 2022, Justina spoke on camera for the first time since the court case, and Metzler told Newsweek how he felt she was "very brave" to do so, especially amid her ongoing health problems.

'The Battle for Justina Pelletier' Director on 'Powerful' Meeting With Her

The documentary sees Justina appear on camera alongside her sister Jennifer, and she spoke to the film crew just five months after having a stroke that left her unable to walk and saw her struggle with speech.

Metzler detailed the "powerful" experience, and said: "It was wonderful to have Justina, we find Justina to be a real inspiration. As you saw in the doc[umentary], she's got a lot of health struggles and struggles to speak now, but I always felt like she communicated a lot with her eyes and I always felt like she's just such a resilient person.

"There's so much that has happened around her, and yet she is the least resentful of the situation, and the most hopeful, which we found, as a group making the documentary, really inspiring.

"I also thought it was really important that, literally, her voice is heard on this topic, like right now. It's eight years after all these events, and she's an adult and I think it's really important that she had a way of expressing how she felt about it.

"I think she was very good and very brave to come forward and speak her mind. So we were honored to have her as part of it and grateful."

Reflecting on meeting her again in May 2022, he went on: "It was powerful being around her, and we were glad and inspired that the last time we saw her she was doing better than when we had seen her previously.

"That was nice, she was having a lot of physiotherapy, her hair had come back a bit. So it was great to see her doing well."

Metzler first began working on the documentary after reading the work of his friend and colleague David Kushner, a contributing editor of Rolling Stone who wrote a piece on Martin Gottesfeld.

Gottesfeld was a member of Anonymous, and he hacked the computer systems of Boston Children's Hospital in April 2014 to demand that they free Justina. He's currently serving a 10-year prison sentence for the cyberattack.

"I was very taken by the idea of what what happened in this story," Metzler explained. "And so we just decided we wanted to know what happened, and what happened to Justina, and what happened to Marty.

"So we just started reaching out and, of course, her family was one of the first people we reached out to, and we found her family to be very compelling, and to be very, very passionate, and to have an unwavering point of view on this story, and they really wanted to tell it. So we were excited to have them on board and be able to be able to tell their side of it, and their side is incredibly compelling.

"One of the many things that was great about having them was they were an open book, they told us everything, they weren't guarded, they gave us access to their point of view and their lives, and so it was great to meet them and great to be able to tell their story."

Balancing Both Sides of the Story

Metzler explained that Justina's parents had "been through a remarkably difficult experience" and their story is one that he felt plenty of parents would be able to relate to but, even so, it was important to show both sides of the case.

"There's two sides to the story, there's the hospital side and Massachusetts side, and there's the parent side," the director said. "We want people watching to form their own opinions about what happened and what should have happened.

"But, the thing I'll always say about Lou and Linda is, regardless of any issues that came up during this period, they were in a very difficult position and did their best, and I feel like it was really interesting to talk to them.

"We interviewed each of them for about a day and a half, And then we were in their home a couple of times, and [we were] grateful that they let us see what it's like for Justina to spend her life right now, and I think their family [is] trying to do the best for their daughter and I think it just been a situation where it's really hard to know what that is."

What was important for Metzler was that the documentary didn't give a biased view on the events, and that it presented both sides of the story so that viewers could fully understand the situation.

This was something that the director felt "was super challenging" to achieve: "It was so complicated. First of all, this case where Justina was taken by the state of Massachusetts, spent 16 months out of her parents' care, and then was returned to them and subsequently her parents filed a civil trial and that ended in 2020.

"The span of time that this took place is long and it's complicated. The legal issues are complicated, the health issues are complicated, and we, first and foremost, wanted to be clear and direct about all of those things, we wanted viewers to understand very clearly what Justina's health issues were, what the legal issues were, and what each side was saying about why they did what they did, and that was really hard.

"But it was super important to us that it was balanced, because as a viewer the only way to take something away from this is if you understand both sides.

"If you don't understand the full context you can't understand how important the issue is, right? Like how we deal with medical child abuse, how we deal with complex situations, and how we deal with the idea of 'what do you do when two sides so vehemently disagree'? We felt that that was a reflection of, quite frankly, our current state of society in a way."

"People want to present things as so black and white," Metzler continued. "And we've always said from the beginning that this story there's a lot of grey area, there's no simple solutions and no simple decisions. So it was hard to do that, we're very proud of the fact that we were able to."

Reflecting on the message he hoped to convey, Metzler added: "There are always two sides to a story, and I guess what I'd like people to take away is the idea of empathy. Is that, whether it's the Pelletier family, Marty, the doctors of [Boston Children's Hospital], everybody in this story is human, and if we're all a little more empathetic to the other people who may have a different point of view than us then compromise is achievable.

"If we can look at each other with more empathy, rather than judgement, then a lot more good will come out of it, and I think if you watch it thinking about that it's really interesting."

The Battle for Justina Pelletier is out on Peacock now.