There’s a spike of sextortion incidents

Saw this by Allison Tierney in Vice, thought there is germ of a screenplay idea in there somewhere.

The most obvious is a “you messed with the wrong guy” scenario. Teen gets sex-torted, then kills himself. Teen’s dad, a gangster gone straight, returns to his old life determined to avenge his son.

There’s a relatively pedestrian “police procedural” in there.  Victim of sex-tortion reports it to the police, and they chase down the perpetrators. There was a Channel 4 documentary recently, Celebrity Sextortion in which Dan Lobb tried and failed to tack down his sex-torters.

The issue for me seems to be in the tension between public and private behaviour, shame, privacy, greed, and morality. The only way anyone can be sex-ploited is if they are caught doing something they are ashamed of.

The more interesting story is overcoming the shame caused by the attempted sex-torsion. Someone is targeted, refuses to pay the ransom, and their video is released. What do they do? How does the experience change their relationships? Where does it take them?

This scenario puts me in mind of a #metoo connection between people. The person finds strength knowing they’re not alone. Their example starts a revolution that changes the world.

The revolutionaries of Algiers

Andrew Hussey reviews Elaine Mokhtefi’s book “Algiers, Third World Capital: Freedom Fighters, Revolutionaries, Black Panthers” in The New Statesman paints a picture of Algiers as a “hotbed of political and cultural activity as idealistic foreigners flocked there to help build a new world in the experimental nation”.

The New Statesman

“Mokhtefi, née Klein, was a young Jewish woman from Brooklyn” is compelling as the political activist, “working as a translator for a variety of anti-colonial causes”. The story has potential as the subject of screenplay.