Special Guest Star on "The Good Wife": Anonymous.

A common practice in the film industry is to use real life situations as catalysts for movie and television plots, often to invoke sympathy, debate or merely awareness. What makes this an effective technique is the portrayal of controversial real life events with compelling and emotional fictitious characters. Last week’s episode of the television show, “The Good Wife”, was a great example of said technique where art imitated life.

For those who aren’t familiar with the show or the premise, “The Good Wife” is on Sundays at 9pm on CBS. The show centers on the female lead, Alicia, who is one of the top lawyers at a prestigious law firm. Alicia is often shown to hold a high standard of ethics and morals, especially in dealing with the cases that have been appointed to her. She passionately strives to win cases, so long as it’s done legally and ethically. Alicia’s by the book methods plays an interesting dynamic with the episode’s anti-hero, Anonymous.

                The episode that aired last Sunday, April 22^nd, focused on a case involving a high school girl, Rainey, accusing another student, Bratcher, of raping her. Alicia and her boss, Will, are Rainey’s lawyer’s and are prosecuting Bratcher. In an unadvised stunt though, Rainey posts on Twitter "I don't care if they put me in jail. Todd Bratcher raped me" (Brissey). Unfortunately, this goes against the Judge’s gag order on the trail and so Rainey is held in contempt followed by being put in jail.

                Rainey’s tweeting incident is a direct relation to a real life situation where a girl, Savannah, from Louisville, Kentucky, keep tweeting about “two boys who had sexually assaulted her” (Pesta). In this instance, as in the show, the judge had ordered the girl not to talk about the rape publicly. The problem here is the right to freedom of speech and the parallelism with Savannah and Rainey is the first occasion of the show bringing these issues to light through the medium of television.

                Continuing throughout the episode Alicia and Will are having trouble with the case and slowly but surely it appears as if they will lose. Alicia talks, legally, about the case to another client of the law firms. The other client, Dylan Stack, then begins to sit in on the hearings as he appears interested in the case for some reason.

Later, a video mysteriously taken from Bratcher’s phone is sent to Alicia’s son. The video shows Bratcher making fun of Rainey and simulating having sex with a blow up doll. Since the video was obtained illegally the judge refuses its use in court. Alicia suspects Dylan sent her son the video and he confesses he didn’t but “admits that he mentioned the case to ‘friends’ of his, hackers associated with Anonymous” (Neubauer).

The video is another direct relation to a real life situation where Anonymous posted a video of students and football players of Steubenville High School, a high school in Ohio, making fun of a girl being raped. Anonymous later posted a statement essentially saying people can’t get away with crimes like rape anymore based on their athletic abilities and being inconspicuous based on living in a small town. (Bennett-Smith)

The presence of Anonymous begins to get more prominent within the show. They start showing up to the court cases, wearing the Guy Fox masks and yelling “Justice for Rainey”. At first there are only one or two members of Anonymous and then the numbers increase dramatically. Also, more evidence is sent to Alicia’s kids and still the judge doesn’t allow the evidence to be submitted being it has been obtained illegally.

Anonymous then releases a compilation video online with all the evidence they have retrieved from Bratcher’s cell phone (including incriminating pictures and videos) as well as condemning the judge for dismissing the evidence. The judge infuriated with the video had no choice but to “declare a mistrial” (Brissey). Meanwhile, Rainey is still in jail for her actions earlier and thus would stay there until a new trial commenced, which could have been months.

Alicia’s law firm has a private investigator, Kalinda, who takes action during the final moments of the episode. She retrieves a confession video of Bratcher, admitting he raped Rainey, that the police had but was inadmissible in court. Kalinda posts the video online, in a very similar fashion to the way Anonymous posted the previous compilation video, which lead to the suspicion that Kalinda A) was part of Anonymous all along, B) posted the compilation video online and C) sent Alicia’s kids the incriminating evidence from Bratcher’s phone. Again, all the above were suspicions and never substantiated.

Kalinda’s involvement, while never completely revealed, got me thinking. Whether Kalinda was or wasn’t part of Anonymous is irrelevant. What’s relevant is the fact that someone like Kalinda (someone with inside knowledge) could be a part of Anonymous. Anyone can join Anonymous and it would be almost impossible to know unless they told you. My point, and one of the points of this particular episode, is members of Anonymous have proven time and time again that if they want to get involved with an issue somehow, they can and will.

In closing, Anonymous was depicted as being positive and noble. Anonymous was the voice of Rainey when Rainey couldn’t speak (because she was in jail). Anonymous stood up for Rainey and directly affected her release from prison, but it was unknown what happened with the case other than a new trial date would be set later. Anonymous’ involvement wasn’t so the show could promote computer hacking or going against the law to seek justice, but that people should be held accountable for their actions. Case in point, Bratcher probably wouldn’t have gone to jail but was set to go to Princeton for college. In reality, if all this were to have transpired I highly doubt Princeton would be in his foreseeable future. The main purpose of Anonymous’ involvement with the show was to illustrate that in this new digital era, it is becoming easier to exploit people for their actions. So be careful, or else it may not be a judge or jury who you answer to, but Anonymous.

Works Cited:

Bennett-Smith, Meredith. "Steubenville High School Students Joke About Rape In Video Leaked By Anonymous." The Huffington Post. TheHuffingtonPost.com, 02 Jan. 2013. Web. 23 Apr. 2013. <http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/01/02/steubenville-high-school-joke-rape-targeted-anonymous-video_n_2398479.html>.

Brissey, Breia. "'The Good Wife' Recap: Help From Anonymous." EW.com. N.p., 15 Apr. 2013. Web. 23 Apr. 2013. <http://tvrecaps.ew.com/recap/the-good-wife-season-4-episode-20/>.

Neubauer, Miranda. "Aaron Swartz and Anonymous in 'The Good Wife'" TechPresident. N.p., 16 Apr. 2013. Web. 23 Apr. 2013. < http://techpresident.com/news/23740/aaron-swartz-anonymous-the-good-wife>

Pesta, Abigail. "'Thanks for Ruining My Life'" The Daily Beast. Newsweek/Daily Beast, 10 Dec. 2012. Web. 23 Apr. 2013. <http://www.thedailybeast.com/newsweek/2012/12/09/thanks-for-ruining-my-life.html>.