Alanis Morissette skips Toronto Film Festival premiere of ‘Jagged Little Pill’ documentary, calls final cut ‘salacious’

Alanis Morissette has slammed the documentary that she collaborated on for the 25th anniversary of the release of “Jagged Little Pill,” and skipped the premiere of the HBO Max film at the Toronto International Film Festival.

The documentary was pitched to the now 47-year-old singer as celebrating the iconic album’s release and her meteoric rise to fame in her early 20s, as the Los Angeles Times reported, but she said that the first cut of the film showed her otherwise.

“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,” the groundbreaking musician said. “This is when I knew our visions were in fact painfully diverged. This was not the story I agreed to tell.”

She divulged on camera that she’d been raped at age 15 by multiple men who groomed and seduced her, and said it had taken her years of therapy to admit that was what had happened. At the time, the age of consent was 14, but it has since been raised to 16. But in cases of a “relationship of trust, authority or dependency” the consent age can be higher, Deadline noted.

She said she wouldn’t attend any events surrounding the movie both because she’s on tour at the moment and because of what she said was a misrepresentation of her experience.

“I sit here now experiencing the full impact of having trusted someone who did not warrant being trusted,” Morissette said in her statement, quoted in full by Deadline. “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.”

Director Alison Klayman told Deadline on Monday that it had to be “a really hard thing, I think, to see a movie made about yourself” and called her “incredibly brave” to have opened up as much as she did on film.

“She gave so much of her time and so much of her effort into making this, and I think that the movie really speaks for itself,” Klayman said.