'Tabloid' Subject Says Movie Maker Errol Morris Defamed Her ('Manacled Mormon' story)

[The Straight Story]

LOS ANGELES (CN) - The woman at the center of Errol Morris' documentary "Tabloid" claims the movie falsely portrays her as a rapist and prostitute, and says she was tricked into consenting to the film, partly by a false promise that its producers would save her service dog from extermination. Joyce McKinney, a former Ms. Wyoming, was caught up in a salacious British tabloid story in the late 1970s after she followed her fiancé, a Mormon missionary, to England.

In "Tabloid," lead defendant Errol Morris, creator of "The Thin Blue Line" and "The Fog of War," tells the story of what happened to McKinney 30 years ago.

McKinney's lengthy Superior Court complaint claims the film falsely suggests that she flew to England from the United States, kidnapped her former lover, then tied him to a bed and raped him for days.

McKinney says she was "unwittingly tricked" into granting Morris an interview for what she believed would be a Showtime series about paparazzi. She says the filmmakers told her the series would offer her a chance to clear her name. Instead, McKinney says, Morris made an R-rated documentary that portrayed her as "crazy, a sex offender, an S&M prostitute, and/or a rapist."

According to the complaint: "The film dredges up a long-dead tabloid hoax, the so-called 'Manacled Mormon' story. British tabloids concocted that story in 1977 based on false information that Mormons disseminated when McKinney tried to rescue her fiancé from the Mormons, which led to McKinney's wrongful arrest for 'carrying away' her fiancé. Over thirty years later, 'Tabloid' revives the 'Manacled Mormon' story and takes it to a new, outrageous level.

http://www.courthousenews.com/2011/11/07/41241.htm