To the writers, producers, and storytellers of Girl You Know It's True:
First, thank you.
I came into this film expecting to revisit the pop scandal of my youth-Milli Vanilli, the Grammy, the lip-syncing, the fall. That was the version of the story the world fed me back then. I loved the music. I believed, like many others, that we'd all been duped.
But what I watched was not a scandal.
It was a tragedy.
A human one.
And one that hit me harder than I ever expected.
What you gave us wasn't just the truth behind the band-
You gave us Rob Pilatus, the person behind the image.
And as an adoptee, I recognized that boy immediately.
When Rob said,
"I knew why they adopted me. They had something to prove,"
it was like someone reached into my chest and gripped my heart.
That was not a throwaway line. That was a life sentence.
A truth that every adopted person I know understands too well.
And that brings me to what I need to say:
This film should have included a trigger warning.
You gave us suicide. You gave us addiction. You gave us exploitation.
But the part that broke me-and that will break countless adoptees who watch this-came without a whisper of caution:
The portrayal of Rob's adoption trauma.
You showed the way he was abandoned, shaped, discarded, and ultimately destroyed by a system and a society that never saw the child behind the performance. And of course, as so often happens in real life-the adoptee is the one who dies in the end. The one who carries the most pain. The one who is never allowed to fully heal.
We live in an era where even fictional stories are prefaced with content warnings.
But this? This was a real story.
And you told it well. So well that it triggered something ancient and agonizing in me.
What I want the world to understand is this:
You think adopted children are "better off."
You think we're lucky.
You think we're saved.
But unless you've been through it, you'll never truly grasp what it feels like to be
removed from your roots
stripped of origin and story
used as proof of someone else's goodness
and then asked to smile for the camera and be grateful.
Rob was a brilliant, broken, beautiful soul who never got the closure he deserved.
He was a boy who wanted to be seen.
And he died trying.
So again, I say thank you.
Because you told his story.
You honored his pain.
And now, I will honor it too.
But let this be a reminder to Hollywood, to storytellers, to audiences:
Adoptees are not props.
We are not plot twists.
We are not here to be tragic and then disappear.
We are still here.
We are still carrying it.
And some of us-like Rob-don't survive it.
Let his story stay with you.
Because it will never leave me.
Sincerely,
Catherine
An adoptee
A witness
A survivor
And now-one voice louder.
