The controversy around Dahmer continues. Now a production assistant has spoken out about the Netflix series — also known as Monster: The Jeffrey Dahmer Story — saying she was “treated horribly” on set.
In a now-protected tweet, Alsup said she was often mistaken for another Black crew member working on Dahmer, a Ryan Murphy-produced limited series about the life and crimes of serial killer Jeffrey Dahmer (played by Evan Peters).
“I worked on this project and I was 1 of 2 Black people on the crew and they kept calling me her name,” she wrote, per Entertainment Weekly. “We both had braids. She was dark skin and 5’10. I’m 5’5. Working on this took everything I had as I was treated horribly. I look at the Black female lead differently now too.”
In a subsequent interview with the Los Angeles Times, Alsup said she hadn’t yet watched Dahmer. “I just feel like it’s going to bring back too many memories of working on it,” she explained. “I don’t want to have these PTSD types of situations. The trailer itself gave me PTSD, which is why I ended up writing that tweet and I didn’t think that anybody was going to read.”
Alsup also said that, as a Black woman, it was “one of the worst shows that [she had] ever worked on.”
She went on: “I was always being called someone else’s name, the only other Black girl who looked nothing like me, and I learned the names for 300 background extras.”
Alsup told the Times that the experience was exhausting and the set was unsupportive, claiming there weren’t mental health coordinators available during filming. She did say, however, that her experience improved during the filming of the show’s sixth episode, which had a Black writer and director (Janet Mock and Paris Barclay, respectively).
Netflix declined to comment to the Times about Alsup’s allegations about the workplace culture or the number of Black crew members. A spokesperson for the streamer did tell the newspaper, however, that all crew members are provided access to health and wellness resources — a licensed therapist included — free of charge.
Courtesy of Netflix
Other social media users have accused Dahmer of profiting off the trauma of Dahmer’s victims — and the loved ones of the 17 individuals, many of whom were LGBTQ people of color, whom Dahmer killed. “I want people to understand this is not just a story or historical fact, these are real people’s lives,” Eric Perry, whose relative Errol Lindsey was one of Dahmer’s victims, told the Times. “[Lindsey] was someone’s son, someone’s brother, someone’s father, someone’s friend that was ripped from [our] lives.”
Perry went on: “We’re all one traumatic event away from the worst day of your life being reduced to your neighbor’s favorite binge show. And most importantly, if you’re going to create something that uses real-world people and experiences, you should at minimum contact those people out of respect.”
And in yet another controversy for the show, social media users slammed Netflix for adding an LGBTQ tag for the show, with one TikTok user telling the company that this “is not the representation we’re looking for.” According to Variety, Netflix removed the LGBTQ tag after it had been tagged that way for at least two days.
Monster: The Jeffrey Dahmer Story, Now Streaming, Netflix