Riverdale's Marisol Nichols' secret career as an undercover sex trafficking vigilante to become TV show
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According to Deadline, Sony Pictures Television is developing a TV show about Marisol Nichols, who plays Hermione Lodge on The CW’s Riverdale, but it’s not really going to be about her acting career. Instead, it’s going to be about her secret life as an undercover agent busting sex trafficking rings, as chronicled in a Marie Claire story by Erika Hayasaki. Nichols is going to executive produce the series and will “likely” star in it as well, but this all sounds like it’s pretty early at this point so it might be a while before it gets made—assuming it goes past this stage.
As for Nichols’ secret side-gig, the aforementioned Marie Claire story has all of the details, obviously, recounting one particular sting operation with local law enforcement in an unnamed midwestern town. One interesting detail from the story is that, despite working with officials and helping them make arrests, Nichols is decidedly a vigilante in this pursuit. She volunteers her services to cops and federal agents and uses her own connections and talents to aid their investigations, all for no money or credit, just in hopes of exposing sex traffickers. Generally and unsurprisingly, her involvement is usually acting-based: She’ll get on the phone with suspects and pretend to be a child, or she’ll dress up like a haggard woman selling a kid for drug money, even if it means being in the same room with some pretty awful people.
Nichols has also started a non-profit called Foundation For A Slavery Free World, which she uses to raise awareness for sex trafficking. Also, while the Deadline story doesn’t mention it, the original Marie Claire piece goes into the fact that Nichols is a dedicated Scientologist who credits the organization with saving her life and getting her off drugs in the ‘90s. She says the many allegations against the organization—Marie Claire mentions a lawsuit about “child abuse, human trafficking, and forced labor”—are “completely fabricated.” That stuff probably wouldn’t come up if/when this becomes a TV show, but it seems worth acknowledging.
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Love her in Vegas Vacation. Too bad she joined a cult.
Yeah, I was gonna post the same thing. She’s the best Audrey, I think.I had no idea she was a Scientologist until I saw this comments section.
For a delusional cultist she seems like a decent person.
I grew up in a cult, and a lot of the folk were decent people until you got behind closed doors. Especially the church leaders. Hypocrites at their finest.
Is she aware Scientology has covered up some pretty despicable things or…I mean it’s a net positive in the end because she’s literally saving lives but her self-awareness level can’t be very high.
As per the Marie Claire article, she flat out denies it on account of Scientology having never been convicted of kidnapping or abuse, and insinuates vaguely that another, nameless church is the one doing all of that — I’m guessing she was implying Catholicism?Which, duh, but never mind that the main ways Scientology escapes legal repercussions is by sending hired goons to your house at best, and at worst tossing you off a boat into international waters.At least combating international human trafficking seems more likely to get kiddie rapists thrown in jail than “To Catch a Predator.”
The Scientology beliefs do give me pause, given that it’s such a manipulative and shady cult, but from the article it seems like Nichols’s actions are pretty well-regulated by the law enforcement groups working with her. Another thing that gives me pause is the disconcerting internet obsession (QAnon) with sex-trafficking that is only vaguely connected to the reality of the global crime and its victims. People are processing real horror into titillating entertainment and certainty that the people they hate, usually the rich and powerful that they hate, are absolutely involved in sex trafficking and that the rich and powerful that they like are going to stop it. This show seems like it will fuel that phenomena. The ugly truth is that there are far more poor sex predators than rich ones, simply because there are far more poor people than rich people. It’s ugly that the rich get away with it and ugly that the poor get away with it. I’ll reserve judgement on this show, and it might just raise some awareness about red flags to watch for, but I’m not sure. I also I’m pretty certain that both Scientology and the Catholic Church have been involved in the cover up of sex crimes multiple times. People who hate Scientologists will amplify those crimes in their mind, people who hate Catholics will amplify those crimes in their mind. Yet, whether it is To Catch a Predator, a podcast about Epstein or this upcoming show, I’ve not seen any of this “awareness” by the public translate into preventing any of these crimes. There seems to be the same number of sex predators there always has been and they are still out there preying. It’s demoralizing. In sum, sex trafficking is a real thing and people who believe in QAnon don’t actually care about it.
In sum, sex trafficking is a real thing and people who believe in QAnon don’t actually care about it.Well, child sex trafficking is pretty ancillary to QAnon. Their primary thesis is that liberals and Democrats are evil; sex trafficking and cannibalism are just two of the alleged ways they demonstrate how evil they are.
We haven’t changed that much since the Middle Ages, have we? In the late Middle Ages, if you were a Catholic, the Protestants were sex predators and baby eaters and worshipped demons. If you were a Protestant, the opposite was true. If you looked, you’d no doubt be able to find a person in one or the other group that was at the very least some kind of sex pervert.
And before that, Romans said the same about Christians, who flipped it around on the pagans once Christianity came into power. We’ve done this before so many times!
Historians are now examining some of the wilder stories about Roman Emperors like Nero and Caligulia, wondering if, in fact, some of the stories about baby killing, sex predation and incest might actually have been spread by their political enemies and not be entirely true. Entirely, as one never knows. But we do know that Marie Antoinette never said Let Them Eat Cake, Nero did not fiddle while Rome burned and that story about Catherine the Great and a horse is entirely fictional. Yet, so many of these stories have stuck. I’m reading The Mirror and The Light right now and Mantel imagines Thomas Cromwell knowing that the lies about Anne Boleyn (incest with her brother) had to be over the top or people wouldn’t believe them. A few centuries later, they accused Marie Antoinette without evidence of incest with her son.
No doubt QAnon’s next post will reveal that COVID-19 is actually caused by malign humours and can only be cured by burning a whole bunch of heretics (a.k.a. Democrats) at the stake.
That’s been their goal all along. They’ve already been executing us (in the form of mass shooters) for a while now, they just want to kill us slower and under the veneer of the law.
Sex trafficking and pedophilia have become more common in the lexicon of ‘evil things the other side does’ in recent years because it’s one of the few things the modern world still almost universally agrees is evil.
hey maybe she just joined Scientology for the same reasoncause that part aside she’s a fucking bad ass motherfucker
This is great. It’s about time QAnon got a very own show of its own. Looking forward to the episode where she rescues a bunch of kids trapped in a basement at a pizza place
Yeah, my first thought was absolutely that this sounds like some totally made up qanon bullshit. Then I read the scientology part and kind of think that even more.
Must do a lot of mental gymnastics to see conspiracies about human trafficking everywhere and yet be part of an organization that’s involved in it
What’s going on in this photo? Is she getting a haircut? Where’s the barber chair?
Maybe the Scientology thing is a long con to rescue the slaves in SeaOrg?
A note about terminology: a person working in association with law enforcement, even on a volunteer or informal basis, is not a vigilante.
This is almost crazy enough to be a B-plot on a season of Riverdale.
https://www.buzzsprout.com/1112270/3883928-human-trafficking
By coincidence, Cinemax has a series about a vigilante who is also a secret sex trafficker!
Lots of people will talk about how Christianity ‘saved their lives’ as well, while choosing not to acknowledge the horrid pile of systematic fear-mongering culture warring that is the ‘modern’ Church.
It’s always a bit sad when people choose to give some magical Space Wizard credit for turning their lives around instead of themselves, but it happens with all flavors of Space Wizards.