Is Anatomy of a Scandal based on a true story?
The MeToo legal drama is based on the bestselling book, inspired by two real-life British news stories.
Anatomy of a Scandal is Netflix’s latest political thriller, adapted from Sarah Vaughan’s best-selling book of the same name.
Coming to our screens courtesy of the creator of Big Little Lies, David E Kelley, the series focuses on an MP, James Whitehouse (Rupert Friend), who is accused of raping his aide, Olivia (Naomi Scott), who he was also having an affair with.
The Netflix series questions whether James is or isn’t guilty of the awful crime, with more and more details coming to light through flashbacks from his college years as the series progresses.
While the show was based on the fictional book of the same name, Vaughan’s bestseller was in fact inspired by two real-life British news stories.
Read on for everything you need to know about how Anatomy of a Scandal is rooted in real life.
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Is Anatomy of a Scandal based on a true story?
The book Anatomy of a Scandal – on which the Netflix series is based – was inspired by two real-life news stories that hit British newspaper headlines.
Speaking to The Guardian, author Sarah Vaughan cited both the 2004 sacking of Boris Johnson from the Conservative front-bench after lying about an extramarital affair, and the 2014 release of footballer Ched Evans after serving jail time for a rape conviction – the conviction was later quashed and he was found not guilty at a retrial.
Vaughan stressed that Boris Johnson is “not in any way James [the character played by Rupert Friend]", before adding: "It was his approach to the truth that interested me. As Theresa May put it in the Commons recently, either he ‘didn’t read the rules, or [he] didn’t understand them, or [he] didn’t think they applied to [him]’.”
Or, as James puts it in Anatomy of a Scandal: “I told the truth, near enough. Or the truth as I saw it.”
On her personal website, the author described how the book "draws on [her] experience as a political correspondent, court reporter, and student at Oxford to explore power, privilege, and consent".
In an interview with Exploring Exeter, she spoke of the Ched Evans case, which "merged" in her subconscious with her own "MeToo experiences" during her twenties, when she worked as a news reporter.
"I actually dreamed up the plot after being perturbed by coverage of a rape case," she said.
"It was back in November 2013, and the footballer Ched Evans was trying to appeal against his conviction for rape. I was upset by the way in which the alleged rape victim was depicted by commentators and started thinking about how horrific it must be to summon up the courage to come forward with a rape conviction and then have doubt cast on that in the papers and in court.
"I also started thinking about what we’d now call our #MeToo experiences, though we didn’t have that terminology at the time, and how I didn’t want my then-8-year-old daughter to have to experience some of the things I had as I learned to navigate sexual politics in my early to mid-twenties."
She continued: "The main plot points came to me in the dream, so I obviously merged concerns I’d had about power, perceptions of truth, privilege – all seen at Oxford and in Westminster – and consent."
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If you want to read Sarah Vaughan's Anatomy of a Scandal, head over to Amazon now.
