Making a Murderer Creators: DA Who Accused Them of Bias Should Be ‘Embarrassed’

In an interview with TIME about their Netflix docuseries, Making a Murderer, filmmakers Laura Ricciardi and Moira Demos responded to accusations from one of their film’s subjects.

The true-crime series follows the case of Steven Avery, a Wisconsin man found guilty of murder in 2005. The district attorney from that trial, Ken Kratz, told the New York Times that Ricciardi and Demos left important pieces of evidence out of their film as part of their “agenda” to make Avery look innocent. The series “really presents misinformation,” he said.

“We reached out to Ken Kratz multiple times,” Ricciardi told TIME. “Initially in September of 2006 he did not respond directly to my letters. Instead, two months later, he tried to subpoena our footage. We hired an attorney, filed a motion and won.”

“It’s pretty interesting that today [Kratz] is trying to reuse the argument that he first raised in 2006, which is a losing argument for him, claiming that we were acting as an investigative arm of the defense,” Ricciardi said. “In my opinion that’s very unfair because we reached out to this person, asked him to participate in the series, he declined and is now disparaging our work as biased and one-sided.”

“I would say it should be embarrassing for him actually because the subpoena and all of the related documents are part of the case file, and anybody who is so inclined can go and read them,” Demos added. “They will see my initial letter to him as an exhibit in the case file. I had to file affidavits. And he made all these accusations about the series, just like he’s doing now, and the very same judge who presided over Halbach matter heard this and ruled in our favor.”

Later in the interview, Ricciardi called Kratz’s accusations “wild.”

“Moira and I had no stake in the outcome of the trial. We had no interest in whether or not Steven Avery was innocent,” she said. “We were there simply to document the story and look at the Halbach case not in isolation but in the context of 30 years.”

Read the full interview here.