On Tuesday, September 14th, the new Alanis Morissette HBO documentary, Jagged, will premiere at the Toronto International Film Festival. According to the singer, however, it’s a misleading glance at her life. In a new statement, Morissette blasted Jagged and accused it of including “implications and facts that are simply not true.”
“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,” Morissette told Rolling Stone. “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.”
News first broke last Friday that Morissette had seen Jagged and disapproved of the documentary. The Washington Post reported that she did not plan to attend the film’s premiere — in part because she is currently touring behind the 25th anniversary of Jagged Little Pill — and has compared it to other “stories and unauthorized biographies” that have been released about her over the years.
Related Video
While Morissette didn’t directly call out the film’s director, Alison Klayman, the Such Pretty Forks in the Road singer did make it clear that she felt betrayed by the way answers were coaxed out of her and only to then be repurposed.
“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,” she told Rolling Stone. “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.”
As previously reported, the Jagged documentary includes footage of Morissette alleging that multiple men raped her when she was just 15 years old. She would have been a rising pop star at the time in question, and Canada’s age of consent is 16. While Morissette did not reveal the identities of her alleged rapists, she did accuse unnamed music industry professionals of ignoring what had happened.
