“Gaslit”: the series with Julia Roberts and Sean Penn about the woman who anticipated Watergate is now available

A new episode of this series will be enjoyed every Sunday. This is Gaslit, the fiction that can be seen through Starzplay directed by Matt Ross (Captain Fantastic) and which stars Julia Roberts (Homecoming) and Sean Penn (Mystic River) in the roles of Martha and John Mitchell, the Attorney General of President Richard Nixon.

This fiction is based on the Slate Slow Burn podcast created by Leon Neyfakh and basically tells the true story of Martha Mitchell, one of the protagonists of recent US history that was absolutely forgotten. A woman with a great personality, overwhelming and queen of Washington's elites, who never stayed silent and handled first-line information.

Bob Woodward, one of the journalists investigating the Watergate case, described Martha in his book All the President's Men (which he wrote with his colleague Carl Bernstein). He referred to it as “the Greek choir of the Watergate drama: the one that warns everyone who wanted to listen to it”. It's just that Mitchell was the first to slip the idea that the Nixon government was in an immense corruption web.

The series features Robbie Pickering as the showrunner and at the time of the launch of Gaslit's project, he commented: “Martha was the first and strongest voice, to rise up against the criminality of a corrupt presidential administration and was one of the most complex public martyrs of the time” . An accurate description of the life of this woman who was treated by politicians, the media and the high echelons of power of the time, as a deranged person who should receive special treatment.

John Mitchell, for his part, was serving as Attorney General of the presidency and was a trusted man of Nixon. The moment his wife puts him on alert about the president's participation in Watergate, the man finds himself at a crossroads between endorsing his wife's complaint, or on the contrary, exposing her and continuing to hold Nixon.

Martha wasn't just the “wife of”. She had a place earned within the inhabitants of Arkansas and knew how to surround herself with journalists and Hollywood stars as well. She was seen circulating on television talk shows of the time, in which she made clear her position as a republican woman who opposed the communist advance in her country. He was also the person who handled all the jet-setting gossip, some of them harmless, and others dangerous that could make more than one person tremble with power.

Mrs. Mitchell's fate would change forever after a robbery carried out at the Democratic National Committee offices in Washington in 1972, where a group of people looted recordings and documents key to the Nixon investigation. One of those arrested was Mrs. Mitchell's bodyguard, James McCord, who was rumored to be her lover.

After this event, the decline in Martha's life began when she was the subject of an organized smear campaign against her. She was accused of being a liar and ignorant and that none of her arguments could be taken as accurate. During the release of the series in the United States, Julia Roberts commented on her character and said: “I think (Martha) is the pit of the peach that nobody ever paid attention to: everyone ate the peach and threw the pit.” The cast is completed by Dan Stevens (Beauty and the Beast) as John Dean, Betty Gilpin (Glow) who plays Mo Dean and Darby Camp (Clifford, the big red dog) as Marty Mitchell, among others.

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