The 'Making a Murderer' Creators Say They Were Not Trying to Prove Steven Avery's Innocence

This cannot be an easy time for Making a Murderer creators Moira Demos and Laura Ricciardi. After the initial success of their 10-part documentary series that followed the exoneration and subsequent murder trial of Steven Avery, both the public and the film's subjects are starting to turn on them. In an article in the upcoming January 25 New Yorker, Kathryn Schulz (you might remember her from this summer's blockbuster earthquake story), questions the ethics of Demos and Ricciardi during the filmmaking process, arguing:

Meanwhile, Avery's lawyers are publicly questioning his innocence, and his ex-fiance called him a monster during a scathing CNN interview. And suddenly, Demos and Ricciardi are on the defensive, forced to explain their intentions to Trevor Noah on The Daily Show on Monday.

"We did not intend to have an impact on that particular case," Ricciardi said. "We knew that the justice system had failed Steven Avery in 1985 and continued to fail him for another 18 years while wrongly imprisoned. What we really wanted to explore and understand was that the justice system had made meaningful progress since 1985."

Then Noah asks if the justice system has made progress.

"I think it's pretty clear from what we documented in the series that we have a long way to go until we have a reliable system," Demos said. And as the conversation continues, Ricciardi once again asserts that they did not want to act as Avery's defense.

"We did not set out to prove Steven Avery's innocence. He did," Ricciardi said. "We were documenting what he was doing and what his defense was doing."

So, Noah brings up the interviews with Avery's lawyers and ex-fiance, and asks if they feel like they've created a monster.

"Sometimes it feels like that, yeah. That's another conversation," Demos said. "They're not talking about the series, they're not talking about the important issues that really we need to be talking about."

Another interesting bit of news from this interview is that Demos and Ricciardi were forced at one point to defend their own footage, when the prosecutor filed a subpoena for it. The directors were forced to hire a lawyer and enter a legal battle of their own (which they won). And as the creators continue to defend their work, Avery still hasn't been allowed to watch the documentary series in prison.

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