Filmmaker Joel Gilbert decided to start looking into the Trayvon Martin shooting after hearing Florida Democratic gubernatorial candidate Andrew Gillum say Martin was shot simply because he was wearing a hoodie. Gillum also said it had to do with “stand your ground” laws. Those laws, which almost half the states have, establish a right by which a person may defend himself or others against perceived threats, even up to the point of using lethal force.
Gilbert thinks the situation really had everything to do with self-defense. And why would Gillum bring up Martin so much? He saw that Martin’s mother was a big fan of Gillum’s. Gilbert decided to get to the bottom of it.
Gilbert got to know George Zimmerman, who shot Martin, and Martin’s real girlfriend, Diamond Eugene. Martin was on the phone to Eugene when he was shot. But Gilbert discovered that another woman appeared at the hearing pretending to be Eugene. He decided to produce a documentary exposing this, called “The Trayvon Hoax: Unmasking the Witness Fraud that Divided America.”
He interviewed Zimmerman, and discovered that he was not the racist loose cannon he’d been portrayed as. Zimmerman admitted he grew up a Democrat and was inspired by Barack Obama. He mentored two black teenagers whose father was in prison.
Zimmerman joined Neighborhood Watch after his wife urged him to. There was a lot of crime in the neighborhood, and Zimmerman had called the police several times himself. Contrary to how he’d been portrayed, he did not join the patrol because he was a “wannabe cop.”
Driving to the store one evening, he noticed a man in the rain, between two buildings, not trying to get out of the rain. He called the non-emergency police number to report it. He left his car because he was trying to give the dispatcher a more precise location of where the man was. The man, who was Martin, asked him if he had a problem. Then Martin punched him, pushed him to the ground, got on top of him and pummeled him and smothered him. A witness saw this happen. The witness yelled that he was calling the police, but Martin didn’t stop. That’s when Zimmerman shot him. His last words were “Tell Mama ‘Licia I’m sorry.” That referred to his stepmom, who he spent most of his years growing up with.
At first, the police did not treat Zimmerman as a suspect. He willingly spoke with the police without an attorney present. But then a woman came forward, Rachel Jeantel, and said she was Martin’s girlfriend and had been speaking with him on the phone when he was shot. Her coming forward led to his arrest.
The prosecution portrayed Martin as an innocent teenager who had merely gone to the store to get some skittles and Arizona Iced Tea. What they failed to tell you is that Martin would mix those two ingredients with cough syrup to get high, creating a drink called “Lean.”
Gilbert placed a public records request for the phone records in the case. The prosecution fought hard to keep them out of court, and Martin’s dad refused to turn them over, so the defense had to get a subpoena. Martin’s dad had a tattoo with the Crips symbol on it on his neck, but when the trial started, he had it tattooed over with something else.
Martin had a friend who bragged in photos about being in a gang. He and his friends smoked marijuana and posted photos of them doing so on social media. Martin used the name of a street gang for his Twitter name. His mom kicked him out after he had been suspended from school three times in three months. He went to live with his dad. In his texts, he admitted he got kicked out for getting into fights. He said he punched one person in the nose because he was a snitch. His YouTube channel had videos of fights. Shortly before his death, he was getting into gun dealing.
In Martin’s photo contacts, the photo he had for his girlfriend was clearly not Jeantel. Jeantel was quite overweight; Eugene was small and thin. Eugene’s attitude and confidence was nothing like Jeantel’s. Gilbert listened to and compared phrases between the two girls, and they weren’t alike. When investigators went to meet with Eugene, they were initially given a first address. When they got there, they were told to go to a second address, and that’s where they met Jeantel. Eugene was at the first address but was ducking the investigators.
When investigators asked Jeantel how many times she’d texted Martin on the day he died, she said one time. In reality, Martin and his girlfriend had texted 32 times. At the end of the interview, Jeantel told the detective she felt guilty.
Martin’s mom pulled out a letter right before the trial that she had received from Eugene, which relayed the details of her phone conversation with Martin when he died. When Jeantel was asked to review the letter on the stand, she said she couldn’t read cursive. Jeantel claims she told another woman to write the letter. While the letter was in cursive, the signature “Diamond Eugene” was printed.
Gilbert compared Eugene’s signature on the letter to Jeantel’s signature, which he obtained from parking tickets. They were nothing alike; Jeantel’s looked like she could barely write. He discovered that when she was 18 she was in ninth grade. She attended classes for students with learning disabilities. The Washington Post said she read and wrote at a fourth-grade level.
Jeantel said Martin had acted normal all day. But in reality their texts revealed a big fight; Eugene appeared to be dumping him. Gilbert noticed that Eugene had been talking to a reporter from ABC shortly after the shooting, so they clearly had the right girlfriend at first.
Gilbert drove to Miami to try and find Eugene. He even met with a voodoo priest. He finally found her by looking through high school annuals from the schools she might have attended, comparing photos of her that she had texted Martin against the photos in the annuals. Once he got her correct name, Brittany Diamond Eugene, he then was able to find her signature on a traffic citation and it matched the signature on the letter.
Due to her posts on social media, Gilbert figured out she worked as a model for a clothing store. He purchased multiple pieces of the clothing and flew to Tallahassee to pick them up. She showed up at his hotel room to drop them off. He asked her to write the names of eight girls on eight different cards, saying he was sending the clothing to them. Gilbert made their names very similar to words in the letter, so he’d be able to compare the handwriting.
He asked a handwriting expert for an analysis. The expert thought the letter was written by another person, and the signature by Eugene. He was sure that none of the letter was written by Jeantel. He says her signature shows she has a disorganized mind.
Gilbert then had DNA analyses taken of Eugene’s spit on the envelopes addressed to the fake girls, and compared them with DNA from garbage from outside Jeantel’s house. It turned out Eugene had similar DNA to Jeantel and Jeantel’s mom, whose last name was Eugene. Jeantel was Eugene’s half sister. No wonder Eugene chose her to pretend to be her. Gilbert thinks she took advantage of Jeantel’s lack of intelligence to convince her to participate.
The aftermath and fallout from the shooting and trial has been mostly unfortunate. Although he was exonerated by a jury, Zimmerman ultimately lost his job, was kicked out of college and lost his wife. Blacks rioted in Ferguson, Missouri, over the innocent verdict. Jeantel graduated from high school at age 21. Eugene went to community college and got a degree in criminal justice. Martin’s two close male friends have gotten into serious trouble with the law.
Martin’s mother spreads the Trayvon hoax and is a Democratic Party activist. Based on the Trayvon hoax, Black Lives Matter was formed. And Gilbert figured out that Gillum brought up the shooting during his campaign in order to race bait and get blacks to vote for Democrats.
Rent or buy the movie on Vimeo. Warning: Some explicit/profane language.
