The chilling case of a former Rutgers professor is featured in new Netflix doc

Anna Stubblefield was a Rutgers University-Newark philosophy professor with a concentration in ethics when, while working with a nonverbal Black man with cerebral palsy, said that the two fell in love and had consensual sex.

Or did they?

That’s what Netflix’s new documentary “Tell Them You Love Me” asks audiences to decide – a question laden with issues of racism and consent that the legal system couldn’t answer, either.

Nearly two years after convicting Stubblefield, then a West Orange resident, of aggravated sexual assault in 2015 and sentencing her to 12 years at Edna Mahan Correctional Facility for Women in Hunterdon County, a New Jersey state appellate court overturned the conviction.

It was overturned on the basis that no expert on facilitated communication – a controversial method of communication with one person helping a nonverbal person to place their fingers on a keyboard to transmit their thoughts – was allowed to testify in the trial on Stubblefield’s behalf.

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Facilitated communication is how Stubblefield met and allegedly got to know Derrick Johnson, a man with cerebral palsy who had previously been evaluated to have the mental capacity of a 6-12 month-old.

But through Stubblefield’s facilitated communication with him, she claimed that Johnson was an intellectual trapped in a body that could not communicate his wishes. She and her assistant attended classes with Johnson and wrote papers for him on books they had not read, she said.

However, according to several prominent organizations, including the American Speech-Language-Hearing Association and the American Association on Intellectual and Developmental Disabilities, facilitated communication is a junk science where the facilitator is actually the author of typed messages, not the nonverbal person.

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After Stubblefield – then married to someone else and with two children – told Johnson’s mother and brother that she and Johnson were in love and had sex two times, his family contacted Rutgers which then reached out to the Essex County Prosecutor's Office.

Johnson’s family later recalled suspicious abrasions they saw on his back, insinuating that Johnson had been hurt by the escapades from the yoga mat Stubblefield had placed on her office floor for the two to have sex on. But according to Stubblefield, Johnson had been sexual aggressor, first typing to her that he wanted her to take off her shirt.

After the first conviction was overturned, she accepted a plea deal by pleading guilty to criminal sexual contact and was sentenced to time served. But her plea did not concede that she believed Johnson lacked adult mental capabilities or that she had typed the messages based on her own thoughts rather than his.

Looking back: Rutgers prof gets 12 years in prison

Today, Stubblefield lives a private life and maintains that she and Johnson were in love.

They key question in the case is whether Johnson had the intellectual ability to consent to sex.

Viewers are left to to answer that question and decide whether the case is a tragic love story or the story of a severely handicapped man who was victimized by the woman his family once thought would transform his life.

Staff Reporter Jenna Intersimone: JIntersimone@MyCentralJersey.com

This article originally appeared on MyCentralJersey.com: 'Tell Them You Love Me' on Netflix features case of Rutgers professor