The Girl From Plainville is a biographical crime drama set to release on Hulu. The series focuses on the relationship between Michelle Carter and Conrad Roy that met a very tragic end.
The series stars Elle Fanning, Chloe Sevigny and was created by Liz Hannah and Patrick Macmanus. It is set to release on Hulu on 29 March 2022. It was first announced in 2019 and received a straight to series order in 2020.
Elle Fanning has taken on several roles as a child actress including playing the younger version of her sister Dakota Fanning’s character in the drama film I Am Sam (2001). In 2019, aged 21, Fanning became the youngest person to serve as a jury member at the Cannes Film Festival.
A truly horrifying tale of true love ending in the worst possible way, this series talks about some very serious topics such as depression and manipulation, but did all of this truly take place? Here is the answer to that.
The truth behind ‘The Girl From Plainville’
‘The Girl from Plainville’ is a dramatization of the events leading to the death of Conrad Roy and his girlfriend Michelle Carter’s conviction for involuntary manslaughter. Conrad Henri Roy III died by suicide at the age of 18 in the year 2014 and Carter was his girlfriend at the time.
The case was colloquially known as the ‘texting-suicide case’ as it involved scores of evidence in the form of text messages, emails and phone calls between Carter and Roy where she repeatedly encouraged Roy to kill himself. Roy had previously visited several mental health professionals and the two of them were on prescribed psychiatric medication.
Carter and Roy met each other in 2012 and met each other in person only a couple of times in the following two years. They mostly exchanged text messages and emails with each other. Roy struggled with social anxiety and depression for which he had seen several therapists and counsellors, including a cognitive behavioural therapist in the weeks prior to his death.
Roy died by suicide after poisoning himself with carbon monoxide fumes in his truck after Carter spent the previous couple of months enabling his thoughts of suicide because she wanted to ‘help him’. During their final phone call she had ordered Roy, after he had become scared, to go back inside his truck and go through with his suicide attempt.
On February 6, 2019, the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court ruled that Carter acted with criminal intent when she encouraged Roy into suicide, so her involuntary manslaughter conviction was ordered to stand and that Carter’s 15-month prison sentence would be enforced in the near future.
She began serving her sentence on 11 February 2019. On January 23, 2020, Carter was released early from prison more than three months before her sentence ended due to good conduct.
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