The Staircase ruined Margie’s life. Now she’s taking it back

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The last time Margie Ratliff was in Australia, she swam with crocodiles in Darwin.

“It’s called the cage of death,” says the 41-year-old daughter of Michael Petersen, whose trial for the alleged murder of his wife Kathleen was documented in The Staircase before being dramatised in an HBO series of the same name.

“They put you in this little tube – it’s plastic and it’s got a mesh bottom – and then lower you into the water with a snorkel, and the 15-foot croc, William, comes up from below and wraps his croc jaws around the bottom of the cage like he wants to eat you.” It was, she says, terrifying, but also “the coolest thing ever”.

Margie Ratliff, photographed in Sydney on June 28, 2023.Credit: Rhett Wyatt

And given the choice between that and being a participant in a documentary about your family’s experiences, what would you choose? “The croc,” she says. “Any day.”

The Staircase, made by French filmmaker Jean-Xavier de Lestrade and released in three tranches in 2004, 2013 and 2018, has left a massive and indelible mark on Ratliff and the rest of her family, especially since all three rounds were bundled together as a 13-episode series released globally on Netflix in June 2018.

De Lestrade and his small team began filming in December 2001, soon after Petersen was charged; Margaret was 21, her sister Martha 19. The doc captured the most intimate moments at home, and the most public ones during the trial, which ended in October 2003 with Petersen’s conviction. They also captured the shocking revelation that the sisters’ birth mother had died in Germany in an incident similarly involving their adoptive father, Michael Petersen, and a staircase.

In 2012, de Lestrade was back to cover new developments in the case, including a failed appeal and the disclosure of tainted evidence, which led to Petersen’s release pending a retrial (but did not see the verdict overturned). In 2016, he was back in the lead-up to a new hearing, in which Petersen entered an Alford plea, a complicated legal convention in which he was allowed to plead guilty while maintaining his innocence. In February 2017, he was finally free.

French director Jean-Xavier de Lestrade, left, with Michael Peterson during the making of The Staircase.Credit: Netflix

Of course, Ratliff had no idea what she was signing up to when she agreed to be a participant in de Lestrade’s documentary. But if she had known then what she knows now, would she have done it?

“No, absolutely not,” she says. “If I could go back and hold my hand I would have said, ‘Dad, I’m sitting this one out; I’m going to be there for you, I’m going to film school, maybe I’ll make a film about our family experience. I’ll support you in whatever you decide to do, but I don’t want this for my life’.”

Now, she is putting that hard-won knowledge to use. She has allowed herself to participate in another documentary, and she’s also acted as one of its producers. But the subject of Subject is the impact that having your most exposed moments recorded for everyone to see can have on participants.

The film forms part of a campaign by Ratliff to agitate for the rights of participants.

Margaret Ratliff, right, was 21 when production on The Staircase began in late 2001. Her sister Martha, left, was just 19.Credit: Netflix

“I’m starting a nonprofit called the Documentary Participants Empowerment Alliance,” she says. “We need something like a guild, something we could get resources from and all connect through. I want to make sure that we have legal and mental-health resources, advocacy and community around documentary participants, making sure that there’s training for therapists so that they understand what it’s like to be a participant. And it would be really nice to have some lawyers on board who aren’t just understanding what the production side needs and protecting production, but protecting the other side as well.”

When Ratliff first heard co-director Camilla Hall pitch the idea for Subject just days before Netflix released The Staircase, she had no interest in being a participant (the word “subject”, as the film makes clear, is deemed highly problematic these days because of the power dynamic it implies).

“I said, ‘Well maybe I could consult on that; I don’t want to be onscreen, but I could talk you through it and maybe help you get some people involved’,” she says.

Hall knew the first two seasons of The Staircase from the Sundance Channel, where it had attained a cult following among devotees of the documentary format, but she had no idea it was about to burst into the mainstream. “That’s when I told her about Netflix, and that’s when we went on our journey together,” Ratliff says.

Her involvement was key to getting Jesse Friedman, whose complicated child sexual abuse conviction (and subsequent denial of the charges) was recorded in the 2003 documentary Capturing the Friedmans, onboard. Arthur Agee – one of the two teenage basketballers followed in the 1994 film Hoop Dreams – domestic violence survivor Mukunda Angulo (The Wolfpack, 2015), and Egyptian democracy activist Ahmed Hassan (The Square, 2013) also feature.

Prior to making the movie, Ratliff had no connection with any other documentary participants, and so had no idea how much their experiences had in common. It’s not all bad, she says, and while there’s a case to be made for compensating people for their time, footage or access to their archives, it’s not only about money. Mostly, it’s about ensuring participants have a good sense of what they’re getting into, what the impacts might be, and empowering them to have a say in what happens.

For Ratliff, The Staircase has leached into every aspect of her life. It stopped her getting a job in the documentary unit at Netflix, she is sure, because they claimed it would be too “stressful” for her. It makes her dating life incredibly complicated – though she lays that more at the feet of the HBO series (“I have no doubt there are kooks out there who think I’m like Sophie Turner, you know”) than the doc. And overall, she just can’t ever be sure that it isn’t going to crop up at random moments.

“I could very safely say that my siblings and I all feel the fear of when is it going to come up next, when is the next time we’re gonna get hit with it,” she says. “It’s like a visceral feeling when it pops up in my Instagram feed. There’s no way for me to make it stop.”

With or without a documentary, the experiences in the Petersen household would have left a mark, she acknowledges. But having those experiences captured, shaped and made available for strangers to judge dials everything up a very large notch.

“PTSD is like a movie inside of our heads that won’t stop going until we handle it with therapy or art or whatever we can do,” she says. “But when everybody knows the skeletons in your closet and your life it’s not easy.

“Whenever I meet anyone new I’m going to wonder how much they know about my family, wonder what they’ve seen, wonder what they think about my dad’s innocence,” she says. “And that’s just going to be a part of my life that wouldn’t be a part of it if it hadn’t been a major documentary.”

Subject will be released on docplay.com on July 10. To find out more about the Documentary Participants Empowerment Alliance visit subject.film

Contact the author at [email protected], follow him on Facebook at karlquinnjournalist and on Twitter @karlkwin, and read more of his work here.

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