Alanis Morissette Rips “Salacious Agenda” Of ‘Jagged’ Doc; “Includes Implications & Facts That Are Simply Not True,” Singer Says Of HBO Film Debuting Today At TIFF

Dominic Patten
·3 min read
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Alanis Morissette has torn into the documentary about her landmark Jagged Little Pill album that’s set to world premiere Tuesday night at the Toronto Film Festival.

On a short break in her tour with Garbage and Cat Power, the Canadian-born Morissette shed more light on her absence from today’s Roy Thomson Hall debut of the Alison Klayman-directed HBO feature documentary. Sent to Deadline after my colleague Matthew Carey’s interview on Monday with an rather oblique Klayman at the Canadian festival, Morissette now accuses the film of having a “salacious agenda” and “includes implications and facts that are simply not true.”

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Read Morissette’s full statement here:

“i agreed to participate in a piece about the celebration of jagged little pill’s 25th anniversary, and was interviewed during a very vulnerable time (while in the midst of my third postpartum depression during lockdown). i was lulled into a false sense of security and their salacious agenda became apparent immediately upon my seeing the first cut of the film. this is when i knew our visions were in fact painfully diverged. this was not the story i agreed to tell. i sit here now experiencing the full impact of having trusted someone who did not warrant being trusted. i have chosen not to attend any event around this movie for two reasons: one is that i am on tour right now. the other is that, not unlike many “stories” and unauthorized biographies out there over the years, this one includes implications and facts that are simply not true. while there is beauty and some elements of accuracy in this/my story to be sure— i ultimately won’t be supporting someone else’s reductive take on a story much too nuanced for them to ever grasp or tell.”

HBO did not immediately respond to request for comment from Deadline on Morissette’s remarks.

“It’s a really hard thing to see a movie made about yourself and I think she’s incredibly brave and her reaction when she saw it was that it was a really — she could feel all the work, all the nuance that went into it,” Klayman herself said Monday of Morissette’s reaction to the film after a private screening.

Among aspects of the documentary, Morissette claims on-camera that she was raped by five different men when she 15, as the Washington Post first reported last week. Known for her blunt lyrics as an adult, Morissette was a TV and pop star in the Great White North in her teens.

For the record, the age of consent in Canada was 14 when now 47-year-old Morissette was a teen. It is now 16.

However, Canadian law clearly states that the consent age can be higher “when there is a relationship of trust, authority or dependency,” circumstances that Morissette strongly implies were a part of her early industry experiences.

Off the road since September 12, Morissette’s 25th anniversary tour of the initial release of the multi-platinum Jagged Little Pill is set to resume Wednesday in Cincinnati after a previous stop in Michigan. Both cities are a matter of less than a couple of hours from Toronto, if Morissette had decided to attend the gala Jagged screening.

The Toronto Film Festival runs until September 18.

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