The Horrific Crimes That Inspired the Oscar-Nominated Film Women Talking

Women Talking may be the least flashy of the 10 movies nominated for Best Picture at the 2023 Oscars, but the punch it quietly packs will leave you as floored as any Navy flight sequence or 3-D underwater adventure.

Not least because the crimes that propel the titular conversation—which is, by turns, heartbreaking, disturbing, infuriating, darkly humorous and inspiring—are based on true events.

In 2009, an insular Mennonite colony in eastern Bolivia became international news when nine male members of the sect were accused—and eventually convicted—of systematically drugging and raping at least 130 girls and women from their own community between the ages of 8 and 60.

Also nominated for Best Adapted Screenplay for her treatment of Miriam Toews' 2018 novel of the same name, director Sarah Polley subtly alludes to the horrors that have brought a multigenerational group of mostly illiterate women (only the boys go to school here) into a barn to decide what their next move is: Stay and forgive, stay and fight, or leave the colony and the only life they've ever known.

Throughout, the cast—including Claire Foy, Jessie Buckley and Rooney Mara—commiserate, argue, trade barbs, make each other laugh and ultimately reveal themselves to be infinitely stronger than their oppressive surroundings would suggest. 

Toews (pronounced "taves"), who was raised in the Mennonite sect depicted in her book but left it behind as soon as she graduated high school, relished that the one theater in her hometown of Steinbach, Manitoba, was playing Women Talking.

"Many [in the audience] will know real victims of these crimes, or will be related to them in some way," the Canadian author told the Los Angeles Times. "There are stories of Mennonites going several times, groups of women, singing along to the hymns, giving the film standing ovations, and feeling that they are 'in the movie.'"

These are the true events that inspired Women Talking: 

What is the true crime story behind Women Talking?

Steinbach, Manitoba, is where the founders of Manitoba Colony, which was established in Bolivia in 1991, originally came from.

Between 2005 and 2009, at least 130 women and girls in the roughly 2,000-member community were attacked in their own homes, the perpetrators spraying cattle tranquilizer to knock out the entire household, according to multiple reports documenting the allegations and 2011 criminal trial.

Despite the physical evidence of trauma left behind, the victims tended to have no clear memories of what happened. When a few did report being attacked to the council of church ministers—the colony's all-male governing body—their concerns were explained away as a bad dream or, some suggested, a demon attack to punish them for their sins.

They were also met with counter-accusations, that they were lying to cover up adultery or just making it up entirely.

"It happened so many times, I lost count," Sara Guenter, who said she was assaulted repeatedly in her home, as were her two daughters, told Vice, which produced the 2013 documentary The Ghost Rapes of Bolivia. The girls woke up with dirt in their sheets and feeling pain "down there," she recalled. (Vice notes that the names of abuse and rape victims were changed at their request.)

Ashamed and assuming this was just occurring in their house, they didn't tell anyone at first. But once Guenter confided in her sisters, it wasn't a secret for long.

"No one believed her," former neighbor Peter Fehr told Vice. "We thought she was making it up to hide an affair."

But Guenter's story coming out also meant that more women in Manitoba Colony were speaking up about their own experiences of waking up in pain, with blood, dirt and fingerprints on their bodies, rope fibers still clinging to wrists and ankles. Some had vague memories of crying out before losing consciousness.

Helena Martens, a mother of 11, told Vice about being raped for the first of several times in 2008, waking up to "a man on top of me and others in the room, but I couldn't raise my arms in defense." When she came to, it was morning and she had a headache and dirty sheets.

And yet, spreading the word within the community didn't stop the attacks.

"We only knew that something strange was happening in the night," Manitoba Colony's former chief civic leader Abraham Wall Enns told Vice. "But we didn't know who was doing it, so how could we stop it?"

Authorities would ultimately list 130 victims, which, per Vice, meant at least one person from more than half the households in the colony was assaulted, but investigators speculated that the number was closer to 300.

Vice noted that none of the survivors who spoke to the publication—mostly in the language known as Low German, or Plattdeutsch—had ever been asked if they wanted to talk to a therapist. They were also unaware that Mennonites from other parts of the world had offered to send Low German-speaking counselors to Bolivia, but the male leaders of their community had refused on their behalf.

Vice and TIME also reported respective instances of mothers and daughters who were both raped but neither knew the other was a victim because they'd never discussed it.

An unnamed father of a girl who was 11 when she was raped told Vice that he and his wife had taken her to a hospital for treatment but never explained to her what happened. "It was better she just not know," he said.

How did the men who were assaulting the women of Manitoba Colony finally get caught?

A woman caught two men entering her house through a window in June 2009 and she called out for help. Community elders later told The Guardian that they had previously grown suspicious of one of the men in question because had been getting up late in the morning, which was unusual because work generally occupied the men in the colony from sun-up to sundown. 

Questioned by the council, they confessed to rape and named other men; ultimately seven more were taken into custody, including a veterinarian who had supplied the tranquilizer, taking a chemical used to anesthetize cows and rigging it into a spray to use on humans.

Once Bolivian police got involved, however, the accused recanted their admissions of guilt to Manitoba leaders. Their defense attorney later alleged they only confessed "under threat of lynching."

What happened in Manitoba Colony after news of the alleged rapes became known?

"This has changed us," Carlos Knodel—whose wife, mother, sister, two teenage cousins, an aunt and his pregnant sister-in-law were among the alleged victims—told The Guardian in 2009. "This has changed us forever."

His sister Ángelita, then 29, said, "I cannot remember a thing." All of the details, such as how the attackers subdued their victims, had not yet been confirmed at the time, but Knodel said he could smell the spray that was then-rumored to have been used. (The Guardian also noted that some names were changed in its report.)

"It used to give me a horrible headache, make me vomit, feel dizzy," he said. "It was very hard to wake up in the mornings."

Though forgiveness is a cornerstone of their religion, a strict Christian faith rooted in Protestantism, Knodel said it was beyond him in this case. 

"That is something not to be forgiven," he said. "The Bible says everything can be forgiven, but I don't think it is easy to forgive such a thing."

A girl's virginity before marriage was also considered sacrosanct.

Peter Neufelt, whose wife and two daughters were among the alleged victims, told The Guardian of his girls, "I hope they won't have problems in finding a husband. But I don't know. This is the first time something like this has happened. The ministers are still deciding what to do."

What happened to the Mennonite men accused of rape?

The accused were at first locked up in a warehouse for a few days while the council leaders discussed what to do. They considered building their own jail. But ultimately, the leaders decided to call in outside law enforcement—an extremely rare occurrence. The Bolivian government generally gave the Mennonite communities autonomy to carry out law and order as they saw fit, except when it came to murder.

"This was way too big to deal with," community elder Johann Klassen told The Guardian. "That is why we handed these people to the Bolivian authorities. We don't want them back." He echoed other men in the community when he said there had been rumors and a woman had come forward, "but no one believed her."

And not just the men.

"I didn't believe it," Liz Wall Enns, one of former civic leader Abraham Wall Enns' eight children, told Vice. "So I only got scared once they confessed. Then it became real."

Eight men were charged with rape, child abuse and forming a criminal gang. The veterinarian was charged as an accomplice and with providing assorted drugs, including Viagra, to the perpetrators.  

Santa Cruz prosecutor Eddie Perez told the Guardian that he was going to seek at least 15 years in prison for each defendant. "I feel I need to make every possible effort as the Mennonites are very concerned about these people being left free," he explained. "This is the first time they have come to us. They've been very cooperative."

Before trial, one of the nine defendants fled, reportedly to Paraguay, which like Bolivia has a large Mennonite community. The other eight, including the veterinarian, pleaded not guilty.

"It was very difficult to get [the survivors] to testify," Perez recalled to the BBC years later. "Many times the women said, 'No we don't want to,' and they'd start to cry. And I would say to them, 'But if you don't co-operate, I won't have any witnesses. So the men will be acquitted, and they'll return to the colony.' That would make the women and girls cry even more."

And the prosecutor acknowledged that there were likely many more survivors than the 130 on the record. 

"But some of those victims remained hidden because of cultural factors," he said. "They didn't go, or weren't taken by their parents, for a forensic examination. It's hard for a Mennonite woman to get married if she's had sexual relations. So, many parents preferred to keep quiet and say, 'Nothing happened in this house.'"

On Aug. 25, 2011, seven men charged with rape were found guilty and sentenced to 25 years in prison—five years less than the maximum sentence possible. The vet was also found guilty and sentenced to 12 years for his role in the attacks.

The convicted rapists remain locked up. Per the BBC, the vet was out on conditional release by May 2019, having served two-thirds of his sentence.

Asked about the prisoners who still maintained they were innocent and alleged they were coerced to confess, Perez told the BBC, "That was their version. But they wrote those confessions in their own language stating which houses they broke into and who they'd raped. And what they wrote coincided with the results of forensic examinations of the victims—those same girls and women were found to have been raped in the homes the men identified."

Where does Women Talking pick up from the true story of Manitoba Colony?

Women Talking imagines what it might have been like if the women of Manitoba Colony had collectively taken a stand and refused to forgive simply because their faith demanded it. Their rapists have been locked up, but they have no idea for how long, or whether they'll be prosecuted.

"I felt I had an obligation to write down hope for change for Mennonite girls and women," Toews told the New York Times when the book came out (and was instantly optioned by producer Frances McDormand, who also has a small but haunting role in the film). 

Growing up, Toews said, there was an "emphasis on shame and discipline and punishment and guilt that permeated the town. If you don't end up filled with self-loathing and/or guilt and/or inexplicable rage, living in that community, then you are not paying attention."