Her actions, though undoubtedly well intentioned, never had the same impact on the public debate as those of her fellow leakers Snowden or Chelsea Manning. The viewer can only speculate about what makes Winner different from the FBI agents who arrest her, or from countless other ordinary servants of the deep state who would never dream of leaking classified information for any reason. But she knows, and we know, that she’s trapped no matter what she says, and that the menace of the carceral state lurks behind all the superficial pleasantries. There’s a gently couched threat to make her situation much worse if she won’t own up to that mistake, which she persists for as long as she can in not doing. When the Feds finally get around to what they suspect she’s done, they insist to her again and again that they don’t think she’s a spy but rather a public servant who made one uncharacteristic mistake.
RUSSIAN LINGUIST FEDERAL JOB FULL
We learn that Winner is a talented linguist who has learned Dari, Pashto, and Farsi to help carry out America’s “war on terrorism” (per her authorized “ Stand With Reality” website, prior to her arrest Winner “provided over 1,900 hours of enemy intelligence exploitation and assisted in geolocating 120 enemy combatants”) she seems scared not only for her freedom but for her career, which up until now has been full of promise. When she requests that she be able to put her groceries in the fridge or to attend to her pets, they do their best to accommodate her even as they scour her home for incriminating evidence. She’s not so different from them, they seem to be saying. Winner lives alone in a somewhat rough neighborhood with a cat and a dog and several firearms she does competitive CrossFit and yoga and she signed up to serve her country, all of which her cheerful interlocutors profess to find relatable. Winner’s FBI interrogators, played by Marchánt Davis and Josh Hamilton, both prefer to assume the good cop role and spend at least half the film’s running time attempting to establish rapport with a terrified Winner. The intimate, unsensationalized approach allows for a close read of how the security state polices itself. The result is sufficiently plausible that Winner, despite her cooperation, has said she can’t bring herself to watch and relive what must have been one of the worst moments of her life.
Spanning 83 minutes and proceeding in real time, with just a handful of speaking roles, Reality fulfills the double meaning of its title-every line of dialogue is authentic, everything happened just as portrayed, and Sweeney consulted with Winner extensively to capture her exact mannerisms-and succeeds at turning a simple recording into riveting human drama.
RUSSIAN LINGUIST FEDERAL JOB MOVIE
In 2019, the playwright Tina Satter adapted the FBI transcript of its interrogation and arrest of Winner into a stage play, Is This a Room, and now, four years later, that play in turn has been adapted as an HBO original movie called Reality, starring Sydney Sweeney in the title role. She surely never intended or expected that her own story would turn out to be of more lasting interest than the contents of the leak, but that’s what happened. It was the last of these, a matter of basic election security, that Winner decided to risk her career and her freedom to inform the public about.
After extracting a confession from Winner with no attorney present and without reading her Miranda rights, they arrested her- before the article based on her leak had even been published*- and she was sentenced under the Espionage Act to five years and three months in federal prison, the longest such sentence ever imposed for leaking classified documents to the media (thanks to good behavior, she was released after three years). Specifically, she chose The Intercept, the left-leaning news site launched by Glenn Greenwald-after he won a Pulitzer for publishing Edward Snowden’s leaks about NSA surveillance-with the core mission of soliciting and publishing similar leaks from within the national security state.īut both Winner and staffers at The Intercept mishandled the documents, and within days the FBI showed up with a search warrant at Winner’s home in Augusta, Georgia. In June 2017, one of them, a 26-year-old Air Force linguist with the stranger-than-fiction name of Reality Winner, decided to print out a classified report from the National Security Agency and mail a copy to journalists. The number of Americans who hold top secret security clearances-an estimated 1.2 million-likely exceeds the number who live in Montana.
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