File-This March 8, 2011, file photo shows actor Ben Affleck testifying before the House Foreign Affairs, Africa, Global Health, and Human Rights Subcommittee hearing in Washington. Affleck requested that the PBS documentary series "Finding Your...
BOSTON (AP) — Ben Affleck requested that the PBS documentary series “Finding Your Roots” not reveal he had a slave-owning ancestor, according to emails published online by whistleblower site WikiLeaks, and the information never appeared on the program.
PBS and Harvard scholar Henry Louis Gates, host of the show that traces the ancestry of well-known guests, said in separate statements that they didn’t censor the slave-owner details. Instead, more interesting ancestors of the actor emerged and Gates chose to highlight them in October’s segment featuring Affleck, they said in the statements posted on the PBS website.
“For any guest, we always find far more stories about ancestors on their family trees than we ever possibly could use,” Gates said in an emailed statement to The Associated Press. He said finding slave-owning ancestors was very common in the series, and noted Ken Burns and Anderson Cooper were two guests with slave-owner relatives.
In Affleck’s case, “we decided to go with the story we used about his fascinating ancestor who became on occultist following the Civil War. This guy’s story was totally unusual: we had never discovered someone like him before,” he said.
Affleck’s rep did not immediately respond to an email request for comment Saturday. The award-winning actor and filmmaker (“Good Will Hunting” and “Argo”) has also organized humanitarian work in Africa.
The email chain between Gates and Sony Pictures co-chairman and chief executive Michael Lynton was part of a trove of hundreds of thousands of emails and documents from last year’s Sony hack that WikiLeaks put into a searchable online archive on Thursday.
In their email exchange, Gates asks Lynton for advice on how to handle Affleck’s request.
“Here’s my dilemma: confidentially, for the first time, one of our guests has asked us to edit out something about one of his ancestors–the fact that he owned slaves. Now, four or five of our guests this season descend from slave owners, including Ken Burns. We’ve never had anyone ever try to censor or edit what we found. He’s a megastar. What do we do?” Gates wrote on July 22, 2014.
Lynton replies that it all depends on who knows that the information was in the documentary already.
“I would take it out if no one knows, but if it gets out that you are editing the material based on this kind of sensitivity then it gets tricky. Again, all things being equal I would definitely take it out,” Lynton wrote that same day.
After going back and forth, the two seem to decide censoring the information is a bad idea, with Gates writing later on July 22 that if the public learned of it, “It would embarrass him and compromise our integrity. I think he is getting very bad advice” and adding: “Once we open the door to censorship, we lose control of the brand.”
Affleck is never mentioned in the exchange of emails between Gates and Lynton; instead he’s referred to as a “megastar” and “Batman.” He was filming “Batman v. Superman: Dawn of Justice” in Detroit at the time.
When the segment aired Oct. 14, Gates focused on the occultist, a Revolutionary War relative and Affleck’s mother, who was a “freedom rider” in 1964.
A PBS spokeswoman said in an emailed statement Saturday that PBS did not know of the exchanges between Gates, Sony and Affleck and wasn’t part of editorial decisions made by Gates and his producers.
“It is clear from the exchange how seriously Professor Gates takes editorial integrity,” PBS said in the statement posted on its website.
He realizes that being related to a slave owner does not make you a slave owner, right? I'd be more embarrassed to find out that I was distantly related to a Red Sox fans than slave owners. Hell, if I was his ancestor I would be mortified that my decedent would later star in the film Gigli.
I found a will of my great great great great grandfather, who died in the 1850's.. In it he was dividing his property and slaves to his many children. From what I saw he probably owned around 15 slaves. He did specify that slave families shouldnt be separated..
He seemed very fond of a slave he called 'Boney'. He stated that the child who received him must 're-buy' him and let him (Boney) keep the money spent for him.
I live in Georgia, where as everyone knows, was a big time slave holding state.
I'm black and there's a great chance that I have ancestors that were slave owners. It isn't a big deal. In fact, I, and many others, likely have ancestors that were rapists, murderers, abusive, violently insane. You can't control your ancestors.
smart man. he knew that revealing such a fact about his ancestry would lead to him inevitably being branded a racist, like i'm about to do now:
what a racist. whether he likes it or not, he has racist, xenophobic blood, stained for eternity with the bigotry of his primitive, neanderthal ancestors. so sad.
I can understand him not wanting this to be revealed since now days a lot of people act like people are personally responcible for crap their familes did 200 years before they were born.
It's sad that there are people in this world who would start hating on him just because of something out of his control to the point where they felt it was necessary to hide his past
Unless it turned out the ancestor in question was an exceptionally brutal or infamous of the kind, being born with a slave-owning ancestor in the US can't be that exceptional since the country was basically founded on it.
That said, one has to be careful about claiming ancestery to someone several generations in the past, because the futher you go back the more people are likely to share that ancestery with you. Like if we take an ancestor of the 4th generation behind yours/his, and we say the couple had three kids, and their kids also had three each, and then three to each of them and finally reaching your generation, you are looking at a 120 people sharing that one ancestor.
Yeah, most people are probably descended from slave owners if you go far enough back. I'd also like to point out that because humans reproduce sexually, if you go far enough back in time, you're probably descended from almost everyone.
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