Some Even More Absurd News Surfaces About A&E’s Escaping The KKK

A&E’s attempts at documenting families both inside of and trying to escape from the KKK gets stranger and stranger. The most recent news that’s been released is that participants of the documentary were paid by the show’s producers to act even more racist than they were already acting when the cameras were rolling.

When A&E first announced its TV series Generation KKK, there was an uproar against the network, as the title of the show implied it might normalize racism and hatred within the Ku Klux Klan. In response to the uproar, the network changed the name of the show to “Escaping the KKK: A Documentary Series Exposing Hate in America” in hopes of being explicit enough to convey the network was documenting the lifestyle, not trying to normalize it.

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Mere hours after the first trailer for the series was released, it was revealed that producers of Escaping the KKK, according to a statement released by the network itself, paid participants a “nominal” fee for “access,” which goes against the network’s ethics. All signs pointed to this being the end of the controversy, but participants of the documentary recently spoke with Variety to reveal they were paid as much as hundreds of dollars a day to embellish their racism and hatred, resulting in more tension on camera between family members threatening to leave the hate group.

Variety interviewed participants in six different states to get to the bottom of the controversy, which revealed the narrative of family members turning on one another was more interesting than just documentation. Members of the hate group were told by the show’s producers that they were hoping to show the truth of what it’s really like to be in the organization and not make them out to be evil people. Participants were told what to say, how to act, and would often film interactions multiple times from multiple angles to get the most compelling footage.

One of the show’s participants even revealed that the production paid for supplies for one of the hate groups to build and burn a cross in order to create evocative imagery and that producers would stop him in the middle of an interview and ask him to replace his usage of “blacks” with racial slurs.

It looks as though A&E is trying to distance itself from the show as much as possible, releasing a statement saying, “We take these allegations very seriously and in partnership with A&E we will be looking into them fully.” The statement also implies the participants aren’t being truthful about their statements, adding, “We have been told that participants in the series have received threats and coerced into speaking out against the authenticity of the show.”

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[H/T Variety/The AV Club]