Alanis Morissette rips HBO documentary about her: 'I was lulled into a false sense of security'

A new documentary about Alanis Morissette doesn't exactly have a seal of approval from its subject.

The singer was interviewed for the new HBO documentary Jagged, which is premiering this week at the Toronto International Film Festival. But Morissette on Tuesday rebuked the film and said she's refusing to support it, the Los Angeles Times reports. She says she was interviewed "during a very vulnerable time" amid her "third postpartum depression during lockdown."

"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 said, per the Times. "This is when I knew our visions were in fact painfully diverged. This was not the story I agreed to tell."

Subscribe to The Week

Escape your echo chamber. Get the facts behind the news, plus analysis from multiple perspectives.

SUBSCRIBE & SAVE

Sign up for The Week's Free Newsletters

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

Sign up

Morissette went on to say that she trusted "someone who did not warrant being trusted" and alleged the film includes "implications and facts that are simply not true." For that reason, she said she "won't be supporting someone else's reductive take on a story much too nuanced for them to ever grasp or tell."

Morissette didn't specify what aspects of the film she is alleging aren't true. But The Washington Post previously reported that Morissette alleges in the film she was a victim of sexual abuse, saying that multiple men had sex with her when she was 15 years old in Canada.

"It took me years in therapy to even admit there had been any kind of victimization on my part," she reportedly says in the film. "I would always say I was consenting, and then I'd be reminded like 'Hey, you were 15, you're not consenting at 15.' Now I'm like, 'Oh yeah, they're all pedophiles. It's all statutory rape.'"