Freeform
When the harrowing revelations about Harvey Weinstein first broke in 2017, Cheryl Nichols—executive producer and subject of the Freeform docuseries Keep This Between Us—remembers reading the coverage in her living room. “The first thing I thought of,” she recently told The Daily Beast, “was what happened to me.”
As described in the docuseries, Nichols grew up in a small town in Texas called Little Elm. She alleges that her high school theater teacher’s husband groomed her as a teen—a relationship that continued into her college years. While Nichols knows that her experience as a survivor of grooming and sexual abuse is not identical to those of Weinstein’s accusers, the national news story did strike her “as part of this bigger problem of misogyny and patriarchy and abuse of power.” Seeing Weinstein’s accusers come forward prompted the filmmaker to start thinking about how she wanted to tell her own story.
Part personal narrative and part cultural exploration, Keep This Between Us examines grooming and sexual abuse in the American school system. The series combines expert interviews, first-person accounts, and social-media testimony. In addition to Nichols, the series’ second subject is a young survivor named Heaven Rubin—who brought the Miami-Dade School Board to court for its response to her own allegedly inappropriate relationship with a teacher when she was 17.