What do true crime series like Dahmer owe the victims?

True crime has always been complicated, morally speaking. At a minimum, it takes the real stories of victims, their families, and their killers and repackages them as entertainment for the public’s consumption.

Should we expect a person impacted by a crime to be okay with having their story trotted out for the general public? Does it matter if they aren’t? What about when the story leans heavily into the old ways of true crime storytelling — tabloidy, sensationalistic, glorifying the serial killer at the expense of his victims?

Netflix’s new series Dahmer — Monster: The Jeffrey Dahmer Story, created by Ryan Murphy and longtime collaborator Ian Brennan (Glee, The Politician), walks right into these questions with about as much subtlety as Jeffrey Dahmer trying to have a normal social interaction. While the docudrama has topped Netflix’s streaming charts in the five days since its release, it’s also prompted a wave of outrage on social media regarding the way it approaches its subject, fueled especially by some of Dahmer’s surviving victims and families.

Multiple family members have spoken out to make it clear that neither Netflix nor the creators consulted them or asked for their permission to use their stories in the 10-episode series. On Twitter, Eric Perry, the cousin of Dahmer’s first victim, Errol Lindsey, spoke briefly but compellingly, arguing that the new series is “retraumatizing [the family] over and over again, and for what? How many movies/shows/documentaries do we need?”

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