How FX's AKA Jane Rowe landed Norma McCorvey's deathbed confession that she was paid to be anti-abortion

The Daily Beast

British filmmaker Nick Sweeney, whose FX documentary premieres on Friday, says he earned McCorvey's trust after reaching out to her in April 2016. One month later, they started filming until she passed away in February 2017. "As soon as she became aware that I was uninvolved in the abortion debate, she was willing to meet up and talk with me," Sweeney tells The Daily Beast. "So I went down and we hung out a lot in Katy, Texas, where she was living. She was very open, and very different from what I expected her to be. I’d watched a lot of TV appearances and videos of her in the decades prior where she felt very on-script. With me, she was not like that. She felt very off-script. Also, I am gay myself, and not that these two things are related at all, but she did often say that I reminded her of her girlfriend Connie. In terms of gaining her trust, I think she was very relieved to be speaking to someone who was not involved in the debate and wasn’t from an organization. Throughout her life, I think people wanted Norma to meet their expectations of what Jane Roe was or should be, but she just wanted to be herself and tell her story." Sweeney adds: "I wasn’t aware of this when I first approached her, but her health was in decline, and I think she was very aware that she didn’t have a lot of time left, and was running out of time to set her story straight and to set the terms of her legacy in her own words. She felt like she had nothing to gain and nothing to lose at that point, and that’s why she wanted to do the documentary and say the things she did when she did. I think it had less to do with the election and more to do with her running out of time."