Aurora Perrineau had planned to wait her turn. She’d been called for a second-round audition for a part in When They See Us, the much anticipated miniseries from director Ava DuVernay about the infamous Central Park Five case, in which five black and brown teens were charged with the rape and assault of a white jogger on scant evidence. Their convictions were later overturned, but after each had served extensive prison time. Ahead of their trial Donald Trump himself called for their execution in an ad in four major newspapers, The New York Times included. Raymond Santana was just 14 at the time of the incident in 1989 and was sentenced to up to a decade behind bars in 1990 for the crime. Perrineau was up for the role of his girlfriend.
DuVernay had cast her quintet, which meant Perrineau had to come in for a “chemistry read” with Freddy Miyares, who had been tapped to play the adult Santana. She was used to this; the recitation of lines with another actor so that a director or producer can evaluate how well the pair “melds.” This one was different. She’d expected to see a line of women there to audition for the part. That’s the point of a read—to see who tests best. But: “I got there and it was just me,” Perrineau recalls.
Someone called her in, and then DuVernay sat her and Miyares down. After a quick conversation about the role, the director turned to Perrineau. “I want you to be in this,” she said.
“I didn’t see many other people for that part,” DuVernay tells me later. “They had started to pull people for me, and I said, ‘Let me see her.’” She wasn’t familiar with much of Perrineau’s work. But like most people who’d been on the Internet in late 2017, DuVernay did know her name.
That November, The Wrap reported that Perrineau had filed a police report in Los Angeles, alleging that Girls writer and executive producer Murray Miller had assaulted her in 2012, when she was 17 and thus a minor. (He has denied all accusations. The legal team that represented Miller also claimed that Perrineau had tried to extract compensation from Miller, a characterization which his lawyer later retracted.) Perrineau had just under a dozen credits to her name; Miller was somewhat better known, for his work on American Dad! and Stacked. It was six weeks after The New York Times and The New Yorker had published their landmark Harvey Weinstein reports, and in that time more women had come forward with more accusations against more men. But the allegations about Miller took off when Girls cocreators Lena Dunham and Jenni Konner issued a statement.
The pair took pains to applaud the dozens of women who’d come forward to share their stories of sexual assault but insisted that Perrineau was not credible. “While our first instinct is to listen to every woman’s story, our insider knowledge of Murray’s situation makes us confident that sadly this accusation is one of the 3 percent of assault cases that are misreported every year,” Dunham and Konner wrote. “It is a true shame to add to that number, as outside of Hollywood women still struggle to be believed.”
It was not lost on feminists that Dunham and Konner had chosen to wield their formidable platform to cast doubt on Perrineau, a black woman. The statement kicked off a wave of think pieces and explainers; most focused on Dunham, who’s been open about her own experiences with sexual violence.
Within hours, searches for “Aurora Perrineau” exploded, and even now six of the first 10 results are not about her or her work but link her to Dunham and Konner. Earlier that week Perrineau had been an actress on the rise. Now she’d become a footnote in someone else’s public narrative, her lowest-moment fuel in a viral blaze.
As the news swept the Internet, the nuances of Perrineau’s circumstances faded. The link that Dunham and Konner’s statement had drawn between Perrineau and the cultural moment in which millions of women had found themselves gave rise to an impression that Perrineau had intended to make a public declaration. And so reaction to her decision to report was couched in some kind of perverse #MeToo shorthand, peppered with phrases like “spoke out” or “came forward.” But Perrineau hadn’t done that or ever even planned to. She had been prepared to talk to the police for months, submitting to a lie detector test in September 2017, a week before the Weinstein news broke. She hadn’t wanted to “go public” or join the #MeToo movement. As she puts it, she just wanted to feel like she could breathe.
Perrineau, 24, is in New York City to shoot a pilot when I meet her at the Hotel Indigo on the Lower East Side. Perrineau is dressed in a plaid coat and cross-checked pants, mixing prints with expert finesse. The new show is titled Prodigal Son, and this month Fox announced that the network had ordered it to series. For her role Perrineau took weapons training, and she’s gotten to do more stunts than usual. “She’s the toughest one in the show,” Perrineau says of her character, a detective. “She doesn’t take shit from people.”
The series comes in one of the busier periods of Perrineau’s career. Earlier this month she appeared in an episode of Into the Dark on Hulu, as a murder victim forced to relive her death in a geneticist’s grotesque experiments. And at last the world will be able to stream When They See Us when it premieres on Netflix on May 31. That project in particular is dear to Perrineau, who was raised with the weight of the case. “My dad is a black man who grew up in that time,” she says. She read the script and remembered what she understood even as a kid: It could have been him.
Her father is the actor Harold Perrineau (from Lost and Oz), and as a child Aurora followed him from New York to Australia, Hawaii, Los Angeles. The moves turned her into the kind of person who makes friends fast—warm and attentive, but serene. As if she understands the present moment just a little bit better than the rest of us, and lives in it. “Now I love it,” she says, thinking about how she grew up. “Then I was not so in love with it.” The back-and-forth between continents meant that while classmates came and went, her parents were the constant. (A tattoo on her forearm has the names of her mother, father, and sisters. Her parents liked it so much, both got ones to match.)
Perrineau tried to act for the first time as a little kid—an attempt that fizzled out when she realized she wouldn’t get every job she auditioned for, was devastated, and quit. In high school she developed a better tolerance for failure. She’s acted ever since, albeit now with an acute case of nerves. When she starts on a new set, she’s so anxious people have asked her if she’s OK. Once a project wraps, she bawls. “I have a hard time letting go,” she admits. It’s almost impossible to square the person she describes with the one who sits across from me in person—more composed than the Mona Lisa.
If Perrineau “came forward” at all, it wasn’t in November 2017 or even in September 2017. It was 18 months before that, when she relented and told her parents what she says happened to her. “It was a very dark time. I wasn’t very good,” she says. “There was a lot of self-harm.” She’d gotten so afraid of the outside world that she could barely leave her house. Her parents hazarded an intervention. The upshot was more or less, “We can’t help you unless you tell us what is going on because this is getting progressively worse and worse.”
To recount the assault, to their faces, was scary, she says. But when she did, it felt like salvation. “If I didn’t get it out, I don’t know what would have happened to me,” she says. With the help of a therapist, she started to think about what closure would mean for her. “It was never a thing like, ‘I’m going to tell my story,’” she says. “I just wanted justice.” Nine months after Perrineau filed her report, the Los Angeles District Attorney’s Office announced that it had declined to bring charges. The statute of limitations on one possible charge had expired, and the D.A. said the other charge wouldn’t be pursued due to “inconsistencies and the delay in reporting.”
Still, she’s proud she went to the police. She reaches around for words to describe it. How is it possible to feel vindicated when the scales of justice tip in someone else’s favor? “For a long time I tried to figure out how to get my power back,” she says. “Going to the police station, filing a report—it kind of got the monkey off my back.”
Then came the report in The Wrap. It all could have fizzled out there, but for the statement from Dunham and Konner. Perrineau had no advance notice that the women intended to speak. She woke up to the text no one wants to get: “Did you see the news?” Perrineau read the statement in total shock. She’d never worked with Dunham and Konner. “Woman to woman, I just thought that support would be there,” Perrineau says.
She’s reluctant to assess what motivated them, which speaks as much to her grace as it does to how serious it is to accuse someone of a false rape accusation. But her most generous guess is that it was fear. “Fear for their friend or someone that they thought was their friend,” she says.
Perrineau didn’t comment on the statement. She listened to her father, who told her: “We just need to take a second, be silent, let the facts speak for themselves.” He also assured her: “They’re going to be on the wrong side of history.” Perrineau remained quiet.
In the absence of a counter-narrative from her, black men and women filled the void. Perrineau names them: Zinzi Clemmons, Terry Crews, Tarana Burke, and DuVernay, of course. As sad as she was, she felt their embrace. And moreover, the experience alerted her to the particular indignities black women face. “It’s hard enough to ever come [forward], but then to be a woman of color and know that there’s a very good chance that no one is going to believe you? I think it opened my eyes to that,” she explains. “I’m grateful for that part of it.”
Within 24 hours of the joint statement, Dunham recanted on Twitter. “We have been given the gift of powerful voices and by speaking out we were putting our thumb on the scale and it was wrong,” Dunham wrote, without a direct mention of Perrineau. “We regret this decision with every fiber of our being.” Later Perrineau’s mother brokered a sit-down between Perrineau and Dunham, and Dunham apologized in person. But fuller restitution came in December 2018, when Dunham guest-edited the Hollywood Reporter’s Women in Entertainment issue and included in it a 1,400-word mea culpa. Dunham said she’d never had “insider information” to exonerate Miller and called her initial statement “a terrible mistake.”
At an event with the magazine, Dunham invited Perrineau’s mother to the podium and thanked both women for their forgiveness. (The Internet was less equanimous.) It wasn’t just a stunt or a PR tour, Perrineau tells me now: “She apologized [to me privately] and explained why she felt like she did, and I think that was a big thing for her to do. And she publicly did the same thing because she felt like she needed to right the wrong that she had done, and in the best way that she knows how.” It wasn’t the most elegant process, Perrineau allows, but at least Dunham did it.
Perrineau says she has still never heard a word from Konner. (Konner and Dunham split as a creative team in July 2018. As of press time, Konner hasn't responded to a request for comment.) “She’s been silent,” Perrineau says. She’s about to go on, but stops. “It’s been continuously about Jenni and Lena, and they weren’t the perpetrators. There is still a bigger problem than them.”
In the immediate aftermath Perrineau tried not to think about how Dunham's and Konner’s actions would affect her career, but other people did.
“I remember thinking, She could just go away,” DuVernay says of Perrineau. The director knows how the media machine operates. There’s a flash of attention, and then the details fade. What’s left is the vague sense that Perrineau had been implicated in some drama, branded as someone who had done bad. So DuVernay reached out to Aisha Coley, the casting director on When They See Us, who has previously collaborated with DuVernay on Queen Sugar and A Wrinkle in Time, and asked Coley to call Perrineau in. Her audition “was fantastic,” DuVernay says. Her work on set was the same. “She has real depth, and I have high hopes for her.”
After Dunham admitted she hadn’t had “insider information,” DuVernay turned the conversation back to Perrineau. “Proud to have worked with the stellar @AuroraPerrineau,” she tweeted. “She is a wonderful, focused actor. I hope other directors [and] producers remember this about her—and not this mess. She is the opposite of how she was initially publicly painted by this ordeal.”
But with the case now closed and a slate of press imminent ahead of When They See Us, it seems she wants to make clear that her life is more than a stop on Dunham’s endless contrition tour. With each audition and each new gig, Perrineau takes another step forward from the firestorm that threatened to swallow her whole. She has booked roles throughout the entire ordeal, and the Google News calculus has started to shift. “I just have to keep doing my work and letting people know that I am working hard to get to where I want to be in my life,” she says.
At a certain point an actor becomes so famous that her work doesn’t look like a job. The photo calls, the auditions, the hours lost to hair and makeup, the rehearsals, the empty, endless time on set—the glitz obscures the toil. But Perrineau isn’t quite on the far side of that divide, and she knows it. When she talks about her time on the set of When They See Us, she strains to communicate the effort. How she researched and studied and rehearsed. How important it was to her to demonstrate her respect for the real-life accused, who were present on set for crucial shoots. How she watched DuVernay set a standard and how she pushed hard to meet it. It was a labor of love, sure. But a labor all the same. Perrineau points out that the issues that the series deals with haven’t been resolved. People of color are still disbelieved and discounted. Their guilt, assumed.
The case, the extent to which it erased five individual identities and warped them into a series of gruesome headlines, how it ruined families and lives, “it’s one of those stories that I’m hoping lights a fire under people who don’t know that this happens,” Perrineau tells me. “A lot of people don’t know what this case is, but it’s like, ‘Oh, this was happening then. And it’s still going on.’”
Mattie Kahn is a senior editor at Glamour. Follow her @mattiekahn.
