But did she actually say them?
On Monday, Carter’s legal team appealed her conviction and 15-month sentence to the U.S. Supreme Court, according toThe Washington Post. The appeal revisits their prior argument that Carter’s statements to Roy in thousands of texts and emails over two years — a handful of which propose suicide options along with Carter’s encouragement for Roy kill himself, as he vowed to do — amount to free speech and not a criminal act.
A Massachusetts state appeals court had earlier rejected that argument in upholding Carter’s conviction and sentence.
Charles Krupa/AP
The two Massachusetts teens lived an hour apart, and had crossed paths while on vacation with their respective families in Florida. Although Carter was nowhere near Roy at the time he died, her texts to his family and others in the hours before and after reveal her intent to mislead them about his actions and whereabouts, as she was in contact with him throughout.
Roy Family
Documentary director Erin Lee Carr‘s film offers deep profiles of the troubled teens, both of whom were on prescribed medication for depression and had attempted suicide earlier, as they are drawn together in a relationship lived almost entirely through social media toward its tragic end.
As for Carter’s statement in a text two months afterward to a friend that she’d been on the phone with Roy and told him to “get back in” his truck when he became scared that he might actually die, no other documentation backs it up, says Breggin.
Speaking to PEOPLE, he surmises that a distraught Carter may have fictively accepted the blame as a way to deal with her own grief.
“This was said in a state of morbid upset,” he says. “They promised to talk to each other after his death. He wrote in his suicide note that she was the only one who understood what he was going through.”
By the time Carter, now 22, typed that statement to her friend, Samantha Boardman, “she had dozens and dozens of times texted him in heaven,” says Breggin. “There’s no reason to believe that her statement wasn’t another aspect of her disturbed mind.”
Michelle Carter.AP/REX/Shutterstock
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“After (Carter) texted his mother and his mother says ‘I’m to blame,’ she writes back to his mother, ‘no, you’re not to blame.’ And then she writes Boardman, ‘I’m to blame,'” he says.
“He tells her he’s going to kill himself and there’s nothing she can do about it. She actually does try to do something about it,” urging him toward help after those initial written texts to her, he says.
“She is fighting him killing himself, because she thinks that’s her job in life, is to help people,” he says.
Roy’s response: “He tells her that is she ever tries to stop him again, he won’t talk to her,” he says.
The two-part HBO documentary filmI Love You, Now Die: The Commonwealth v. Michelle Carterdebuts July 9 and 10 (8 p.m. ET/7 p.m. CT).
If you or someone you know is considering suicide, please contact the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline at 1-800-273-TALK (8255), text “home” to the Crisis Text Line at 741-741 or go tosuicidepreventionlifeline.org.
source: people.com
