Born Innocent
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| Born Innocent | |
|---|---|
 DVD cover |
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| Directed by | Donald Wrye |
| Written by | Book: Creighton Brown Burnham Teleplay: Gerald Di Pego |
| Starring | Linda Blair Richard Jaeckel Kim Hunter |
| Distributed by | NBC World Premiere Movie |
| Release date(s) | September 10, 1974 |
| Running time | 98 minutes |
| Language | English |
| IMDb profile | |
- For the Redd Kross album, see Born Innocent (album).
Born Innocent was a television movie which was first aired under the NBC World Premiere Movie umbrella on September 10, 1974. Highly publicized, Born Innocent was the highest-rated television movie to air in the United States in 1974. To this day, it has remained one of the most controversial films ever aired on American television.
The movie starred Linda Blair (fresh off her success with The Exorcist) as a teenage runaway, who was eventually sentenced to do time in a juvenile detention center, which doubled as a reform school for the girls. Blair's character, Christine Parker, came from an abusive home. Her father (played by Richard Jaeckel) beat her up, which caused Chris to run away many times. Her mother (Kim Hunter) was unfeeling, sitting in her recliner, watching television and smoking cigarettes all day. While the movie has a morality play tone, showing the harsh effects of the detention center on a young girl, it also blames society for Christine's downfall, as her social worker does not find out that her parents caused her to run away, and then had her sent off to reform school when she told others.
One scene in particular that gained the movie infamy was the rape of Blair's character in the communal showers by the other girls with a toilet plunger handle; this scene had the distinction of being the first all-female rape scene aired on American television. This scene was not glossed over in promotional spots for the movie; Linda Blair's screams as she was being attacked were aired in the promos, with the announcer intoning, "She was born innocent, but that was fourteen years ago!"
The scene drew much outcry on its first airing and was eventually pulled from the movie entirely when it was blamed for the rape of an eight-year-old girl, committed by some of her peers with a glass soda bottle. The California Supreme Court would declare the film was not obscene, and that the network which broadcast it was not liable for the actions of the persons who committed the crime. Olivia N. v. National Broadcasting Company, 126 Cal. App.3d 488 (1981).
In a response to the incident, re-airings in the late 1970s and 1980s did not air any of the sequence. The real-life rape, in part, helped establish the Family Viewing Hour which became mandatory for the networks in the late 1970s, as the movie was aired in the eight and nine o'clock hours on the East Coast, when some children may not have been in bed.
After the edited re-airings in the 1980s, the movie disappeared from circulation completely. In 2004, VCI Entertainment released Born Innocent on DVD with the rape scene intact, the first time it has been seen by the general public in thirty years.
