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Megan Hunt had a bad feeling, just not at first.
The Nebraska state senator had been approached in May about participating in a documentary titled It Takes a Village, which she was told would air in August and spotlight “issues facing children and parents in the trans community and how it relates to our future as a society,” according to emails shared with Rolling Stone. Hunt, who has a trans child and has advocated for trans rights in the state legislature, was on board.
But after growing suspicious and doing some research, Hunt discovered, just days before she was supposed to sit down for her interview, that the film was connected to right-wing influencer Robby Starbuck. She was only the latest member or ally of the trans community that right-wing activists had tried to persuade to take part in one of their projects by using vague descriptors, careful omissions, and other deceptive tactics.
Hunt was appalled that Starbuck was involved in the film, and she tweeted out a warning on Wednesday cautioning others to avoid participating. “If they have contacted you,” Hunt wrote, “please do not respond. You could be endangering yourself and we don’t need any more deceptive anti-trans films.” She described Starbuck as a “far-right freak show.”
Starbuck, a former music video producer and director, ran an unsuccessful bid for Congress in 2022. He was removed from Tennessee’s Republican primary ballot after failing to meet the qualification requirements for candidates. Like many right-wing commentators, he posts frequently about gender identity. Earlier this month, Starbuck made headlines over a dispute with actress Megan Fox, who accused him of directing harassment against her sons for dressing too feminine.
“The new trans ‘health care’ industry is so disgusting,” Starbuck tweeted last week. “You aren’t kind by affirming the delusions of people battling mental illness. You’re driving them deeper into delusions.” In April, Starbuck tweeted at Elon Musk that he was “making a documentary” and requested to interview the Twitter owner.
In an email to Rolling Stone, Starbuck confirmed that he is “currently involved in a documentary, hosting part of it,” adding that “while it touches on trans issues, it is not solely about trans issues.”
Hunt was tipped off to Starbuck’s involvement in the film by a Tumblr post from trans activist Eli Erlick. In February 2022, Erlick exposed how the right-wing website The Daily Wire used deceptive tactics to attempt to recruit transgender people, including her, into participating in the anti-trans film What Is a Woman? Walsh’s production team used pseudonyms, and had created a shield organization titled The Gender Unity Project to mask the project’s association with The Daily Wire. The film premiered in June 2022 and was reaired for free on Twitter earlier this month to great fanfare from the right.
Erlick was immediately suspicious when she was contacted in May about participating in It Takes a Village. “A person named Morgan K. reached out to me,” Erlick told Rolling Stone. “I am still dealing with backlash from exposing Matt Walsh, and so I’m pretty skeptical about documentaries that won’t even tell me who the producer is.”
Emails provided to Rolling Stone by Elrick show the request came from a woman named Morgan Kelly. “We want to present the real story of the battles trans youth face and the activism surrounding it. We also touch on the drag issue and how schools are adapting to demands for more inclusion,” Kelly wrote in an email.
When Erlick pressed for more details, Kelly made the documentary sound inclusive and positive. “We have lots of trans youth and their parents who are showing and discussing their experiences. We’ll also have doctors that they’ve seen and drag queens,” Kelly wrote.
Kelly wouldn’t provide the name of the production company working on the film, citing a nondisclosure agreement, and wrote that she couldn’t say anything about the documentary’s distribution other than that it’s with “one of the major streaming services.” She did provide Erlick with the name of the director who is allegedly working on the film, Matt Rodgers. (Rodgers did not respond to a request for comment from Rolling Stone.)
Starbuck’s involvement was revealed by accident. While Kelly used a generic email address containing the name of the film to contact Erlick, the Calendly invite to schedule an interview came from an address associated with Starbuck’s personal domain, the same one as his campaign website.
Erlick declined to participate. Starbuck had accused her last August of leading a “drug trafficking ring,” flagging her to Alabama’s attorney general after she announced she would help provide hormonal medication to transgender individuals in states where gender-affirming medical care had been banned.
Sen. Hunt was approached about the new documentary on May 22, the same day as Erlick. She was initially unfazed by the interview request from Kelly. Hunt had recently been the subject of heavy press attention over her and her colleagues’ filibuster against anti-trans bills in the Nebraska legislature, and was inundated with media requests. “I was getting probably 30 or 40 different press requests a day when I got the email,” she says. “I was saying yes to as much as I could in terms of interviews and things like that.”
Hunt and Kelly quickly agreed on a mid-June interview date, and Kelly offered to fly Hunt out to Nashville for filming. When Kelly mentioned that the filmmakers would be spending time with families affected by anti-trans legislation recently passed in Tennessee, Hunt offered to bring her 13-year-old son — who is transgender — along with her.
As the interview date drew closer, Hunt grew apprehensive. “I was just literally having a bad feeling of ‘Is this legit, like? Is this something safe?’” she says, noting her concern was more acute now that she had volunteered to involve her son. “As a mom, you’re just a little bit extra careful about stuff like that.”
She started Googling, but didn’t find much. She looked up the name of the documentary, added modifiers like “transgender” and the name of the woman who contacted her, but could find no trace of the film or its production. “I thought maybe I would see an IMDb page that’s like pre-production or, you know, someone talking about it in an industry magazine. I mean, if it’s a legitimate documentary there’s going to be information about it somewhere.”
The only thing she found was Erlick’s blog. “I read what she had to say about it and it was like, ‘Huh, this sounds like pretty much the same thing,’” Hunt says. “Then I went to look at the email and sure enough, the calendar invite was coming from that Robby Starbuck URL … and then I was just like, ‘OK, fuck off.’”
“Morgan, please tell me who the director is for this film and who is funding it?” Hunt wrote to Kelly on June 13. “Lol no need to respond to my previous question — I am certainly canceling,” she added in a follow-up minutes later.
In response, Kelly sent back a long reply attempting to salvage the situation. ”I’m assuming your email is about Robby Starbuck’s involvement,” she wrote, claiming that Starbuck was “only half of the documentary hosting team.” Kelly asserted that an unnamed woman participating in the documentary would be “representing a different view from Robby’s.”
“You’re out of your fucking mind if you think I’m doing anything involving him,” Hunt replied.
Kelly did not respond to multiple requests for comment from Rolling Stone.
On June 13, the day Hunt called off her interview, Danielle Aceino received an email from a woman named Megan Cole. Cole asked Aceino if her family, including her 10-year-old non-binary child, would be willing to participate in a documentary titled Identity Rising. Aceino was already cautious about requests of this nature; her family had been subjected to an intense harassment campaign in 2022 by prominent right-wing figures including Matt Walsh and Libs of TikTok, and she felt something about the message was off.
“I went back and found Eli’s post,” Aceino tells Rolling Stone. “I recognized similar language, and then once I looked up the phone number I saw that it was based in Tennessee, Nashville area. So those are the things that kind of gave me a clue.”
While the email came from a different sender, its language was virtually identical to the messages sent to Hunt and Erlick, touting “an award winning director who’s making this documentary their next project for release in August.” Aceino requested more information on the project, and was ghosted.
Rolling Stone called the number Cole provided in her email to Aceino. She hung up when she was informed she was speaking to Rolling Stone.
Starbuck declined to confirm if Kelly or Cole are employees of his, although he did confirm Kelly’s contention that a woman with a different viewpoint from his is participating in the documentary. “We will have diverse viewpoints represented,” Starbuck wrote. “The two activists posting about this project on social media have wildly misrepresented the subject matter.”
Erin Reed, an independent journalist covering transgender issues, says the vague nature of outreach emails is intentional. “This is one of the right’s favorite tactics,” she says. “The idea is to lure in unsuspecting advocates, allies, providers, anybody that is on the side of safeguarding transgender rights, and to essentially trick them into an interview.”
“We saw this in Planned Parenthood with the fetal tissue recording from Project Veritas, which later turned out to be heavily edited,” Reed adds. “I’ve seen repeated instances of transgender people being targeted by these scam documentaries that are designed to interview as many trans people as possible, try to edit it down to one particular out of context clip, or to find one person that says the thing that is, you know, not right, and then amplify that.”
Reed cautions individuals approached with offers to participate in documentaries to be extremely careful. “Keep your wits about you and make sure that you do your double due diligence,” she says. “There are a lot of people that are trying to take advantage of trans people to score political points.”
Starbuck insists the documentary is not the type of project that will involve any “unethical editing,” that no one “of either political side has been upset about their interview,” and that he is taking a “fair and honorable approach to each individual.” Starbuck also committed to releasing “all interviews in full to ensure fairness.” Meanwhile, he alleges that the “activists creating social media outrage” who won’t speak for the documentary “clearly don’t feel confident in their position.”
Hunt was miffed by the total lack of transparency about who was behind the documentary, and along with the other trans allies was understandably skeptical of anything resembling fairness given Starbuck’s very public role in the far right’s all-out assault on the rights and dignity of trans Americans. “They didn’t even tell me who it was,” she says, “and so in that way I do feel like they’re really being dishonest in an attempt to trick or trap trans people, or allies in the trans community, into putting themselves in a place of danger.”
This article was updated at 6:30 PM on June 16 to reflect that Starbuck was not served a legal notice by actress Megan Fox. Starbuck was sent a cease-and-desist by a photography agency regarding an image of Fox used in his social media post to the actress.
