What is Netflix’s Victim/Suspect all about? Everything you need to know about the show everyone is talking about

Warning: This story deals with rape, sexual assault, and suicide.

Netflix has produced some harrowing documentaries in its time, from Abducted in Plain Sight to Our Father – but Victim/Suspect might just make you the angriest yet.

The new documentary follows journalist Rachel ‘Rae’ de Leon as she investigates a disturbing pattern of judicial abuse she uncovered while working as a reporter for the Center for Investigative Reporting in California.

Here, she found that police were arresting women for filing false sexual assault reports, even though these women were telling the truth about their assaults, Rae later uncovered.

The hour and a half long documentary feels like a mix of a true crime thriller with an investigative journalism edge as Rae fights to advocate for the women that have been wrongly arrested.

Here’s everything you need to know about Victim/Suspect.

What is the premise of Netflix’s Victim/Suspect?

The documentary, which first premiered at the Sundance Film Festival in January this year, follows Rae de Leon, a reporter at The Center for Investigative Reporting in California, US.

Through her work, Rae discovered a number of legal cases across the US that involve women reporting sexual assault to the police only to be accused of lying about these assaults and being arrested for filing false accusations. Yep, spine-chilling stuff.

Rae discovers that some of these women are facing years in prison due to the charges they have been given, and she proceeds to talk to many of these women and their families about what they have experienced and what exactly happened during their police interviews (viewers get a glimpse of the interviews in question too).

In the trailer, which was released on 27 April, one survivor is heard telling Rae: “The detective told me, ‘He didn’t hold you down, so that’s not rape’.”