The Cost of Losing "What Killed Michael Brown?"

How do nearly 1,500 reviews disappear?

Hi all,

Today marks seven years since I began filming What Killed Michael Brown?, a documentary that fearlessly dissected America’s racial fault lines. Since its release, it amassed nearly 1,500 Amazon Prime reviews and a 4.8-star rating — a clear mark of its resonance and place among upper-tier documentaries. Yet, when I visited the Amazon Prime page last June, only 17 reviews remained and the rating dropped to 4.5. Its hard-won credibility had been erased. What happened?

For those who have forgotten, Amazon initially banned our documentary in the wake of George Floyd’s death, when Black Lives Matter’s narrative held sway over public discourse. Only after a national outcry — sparked by the Wall Street Journal, Fox News and others like Hollywood in Toto — did Amazon relent and platform the film. We premiered to the number one spot for documentaries and stayed in the top ten for nearly two months. Each review generated more views.

Now, nearly 1,500 reviews and its accompanying 4.8-star rating have vanished. Since June, I have been working with Amazon’s help desk and my contact, “Mary,” has been as helpful as possible even though she admits this is not her area of expertise. I provided her with the screenshot below from 2022 that showed proof:

After some back-and-forth, she relayed the message from higher ups that the reviews were lost in a “merger,” and no recovery was possible. I responded with: didn’t the vaunted Amazon Web Services have redundancies that saved backups? Why did some reviews survive, especially the ones before 2023, if the merger supposedly erased the slate? I also relayed that my online search did not reveal other films experiencing the same issue. I requested to speak with someone directly responsible and “Mary” said she would try. That is where we stand.

In our review-driven world, a five-year old film with just 17 reviews lacks credibility, doomed by algorithms. Not only that, those missing reviews were my filmmaker’s resume, critical for establishing credibility and for raising funds for future projects. Amazon received 50% of every dollar that film made and it would seem that protecting the integrity of the film’s page would be a given — a trust between corporation and artist, if such a thing exists.

Above all, those reviews, many of them written from heart, gave visibility to a film that stands alone against a half-dozen other films pushing the false narratives that came out of Ferguson. If the reviews are not restored, will What Killed Michael Brown?” slip into irrelevance?

When my father and I decided to make this film in 2017, America was steeped in a relentless narrative of systemic racism. Since the killing of Trayvon Martin in 2012, bookstores lined their windows with titles on redlining, mass incarceration, and the New Jim Crow. Black Lives Matter signs dotted suburban lawns. Universities and corporations mandated racial sensitivity trainings and set up hotlines to report any hint of racism. Ibram X. Kendi’s National Book Award win amplified his decree: refusing to be antiracist was tantamount to being racist. In contrast, my father’s book, Shame, one of his finest, was published during this time and largely ignored, drowned out by the era’s new racial orthodoxy. There was no escaping the charge that America was, once again, systemically racist.

In a sense, our decision to make this film was our “screw you” to this orthodoxy. I remember telling my father how I was driving through Pomona College and had seen the oversized prints of the New York Times article on the Ferguson shooting plastered to the side of a building. Everything had been redacted in the article to leave only one impression: a white cop shot a black teenager with promise.

It wasn’t art; it was a mandate to conform. Universities, once hubs of debate, became echo chambers, drilling the narrative into students’ minds. The cancel culture of that time was swift and unforgiving. To doubt the narrative—however rooted in facts or reason—was to risk social crucifixion. Careers were obliterated, reputations torched, voices silenced for daring to ask: what actually happened? The pressure to comply, fueled by white guilt — the fear of being labeled a bigot — coerced millions into silent agreement. Truth was the enemy; ideology was king.

But we had no fear of making this film. Since the late 1980s, my family had faced one cancellation after another, and we became outsiders with nothing to lose. We poured our souls into this project, challenging the narrative from Ferguson’s fractured streets to Obama’s ideologically driven White House. The result was a film we believe delivers a definitive account of what killed Michael Brown—not a tidy fable, but a raw, unflinching reckoning with truth.

Most of all, we are proud that we released What Killed Michael Brown? in the frenzied aftermath of George Floyd’s death. While the ongoing hysteria fueled demands for simplistic verdicts on race and justice, our film stood as a quiet rebellion, a testament to the power of honest inquiry to loosen the stranglehold of ideological conformity. My father, a lone voice on nightly news, dared to call the charge of systemic racism a lie. The film went viral, resonating with countless viewers who flooded our inbox with gratitude. They thanked us not just for the film, but for emboldening them to stand firm in truth, to resist the suffocating tide of cancel culture. Today, that culture’s once-iron grip has weakened, thanks in part to those who drew courage from our work.

It was these same individuals—ordinary Americans seeking truth over ideology—who penned the heartfelt reviews that propelled the film to prominence. Their words were not mere ratings; they were declarations of defiance, amplifying a truth the gatekeepers sought to bury. So, the mysterious erasure of those reviews—reduced to a paltry 17 by last June—is no trivial matter. It’s a battle to keep the film’s voice alive in a culture that still seeks to silence dissent. To lose those reviews is to risk losing the chorus of voices that dared to speak, to question, to stand unbowed. And it is my hope that I will be able to resolve this issue with Amazon Prime.

All my best,

Eli