With the 2023 Truth Seekers Summit presented by Showtime taking place a day after former President Donald Trump was indicted for a third time, this time in an attempt to overturn the 2020 election, MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow set the tone of the event after receiving the Variety and Rolling Stone Truth Seekers Award, “The crisis we have right now in this work that we do is not a crisis about the truth,” she said in a sitdown with Variety’s Co-Editor-In-Chief Ramin Setoodeh. “The truth is the truth; the truth just exists. It’s the facts that are happening in the world; it never evolves. What evolves is whether or not people will believe it. If people believe the truth, their lives will probably be better for it. And if people don’t believe it, you can’t fix that.”
NEW YORK, NEW YORK – AUGUST 02: Ramin Setoodeh, Co-Editor-In-Chief, Variety, and Rachel Maddow (R) speak onstage during the Variety & Rolling Stone Truth Seekers Summit presented by SHOWTIME at Second Floor on August 02, 2023 in New York City. (Photo by Eugene Gologursky/Variety via Getty Images)
Variety via Getty Images
In the Chelsea neighborhood of New York City, hundreds of people in the fields of journalism and documentary filmmaking came together to honor those dedicated to seeking the truth, with over 700 people experiencing the Summit virtually. In a bit of harsh reality, political analyst and host of MSNBC’s The Mehdi Hasan Show, Mehdi Hasan, gave brutal honesty about government officials in a roundtable discussion moderated by Rolling Stone’s Editor-In-Chief Noah Shachtman with PBS NewsHour White House Correspondent Laura Barrón-López and ABC News Chief White House Correspondent Mary Bruce. “What being a political journalist exposes you to,” Hasan began. “You’re exposed to a lot of really incompetent people in positions of power, and it really changes the way you think about how the world works.” Afterward, The Daily Show correspondent Roy Wood Jr. discussed how he’s navigating during the SAG-AFTRA writers’ strike during his keynote conversation with Rolling Stone’s contributing editor, Alex Morris; he also poked fun at today’s social climate, quipping, “a good scandal would carry us for months.”
The event continued to hold riveting conversations with documentarian Dawn Porter about her docuseries Deadlocked: How America Shaped the Supreme Court, clinical psychologist and psychoanalyst Dr. Orna Guralnik about her experience on Showtime’s Couples Therapy, Sacha Jenkins about his doc All Up In The Biz, the collective of Sam Pollard (The League), Lisa Cortes (Little Richard: I Am Everything), Liz Garbus (Harry & Meghan), and Dan Cogan (Last Call: When A Serial Killer Stalked Queer New York) for the Summit’s Documentary Filmmaker Roundtable, the Art of Investigative Storytelling featuring Sarah Amos (The Secrets of Hillsong), Shannon Evangelista (The Curious Case of Natalia Grace), Mike Gasparo (Shiny Happy People: Duggar Family Secrets), Zach Heinzerling (Stolen Youth: Inside The Cult at Sarah Lawrence), Jehane Noujaim (The Vow), and Tracy Pattin (Variety Confidential), and Laverne Cox who expressed during her interview “the condition of truth is to allow suffering to speak.”
NEW YORK, NEW YORK – AUGUST 02: (L-R) Mary Bruce, Mehdi Hasan, Laura Barrón-López and Noah Shachtman speak onstage during the Variety & Rolling Stone Truth Seekers Summit presented by SHOWTIME at Second Floor on August 02, 2023 in New York City. (Photo by Eugene Gologursky/Variety via Getty Images)
Variety via Getty Images
Yet, the most moving segment during the Truth Seekers Summit was the closer look at the Innocence Project with its Founding Board Member Jason Flom. Sitting down with Variety’s Executive Editor Jem Aswad, the veteran music executive discussed his 30-plus-year work in prison reform and his multimedia platform Lava For Good, which includes his podcast, Wrongful Conviction, which has been instrumental in freeing wrongfully incarcerated people. “Nobody cares who signed Katy Perry, nobody cares who signed anybody,” Flom lamented. “But the legacy that means more to me is the legacy of having to be of service to help free some people from an otherwise impossible situation.” In attendance during his talk were two men who helped exonerate, Jon-Adrian Velazquez and Bruce Bryant, who he invited on stage to tell their story. “I’ve had a lot of number one records, but none of them is anything like as good as walking one person out of prison,” Flom said to a very moved crowd. “At the end of the day, it’s always about the human story. It’s all about the storytelling.”
NEW YORK, NEW YORK – AUGUST 02: (L-R) Jason Flom and Jem Aswad speak onstage during the Variety & Rolling Stone Truth Seekers Summit presented by SHOWTIME at Second Floor on August 02, 2023 in New York City. (Photo by Eugene Gologursky/Variety via Getty Images)
Variety via Getty Images