The Staircase Editor Sophie Brunet on Her “Painful” Michael Peterson Years and HBO Max’s Series (2024)

The Staircase documentary editor Sophie Brunet never wanted to be a character in HBO Max’s adaptation.

The show’s creator, Antonio Campos, called her in 2020 with questions about the Peabody-winning docuseries, which chronicled the defense strategy of Michael Peterson after he was accused of murdering his wife, Kathleen, in 2001.

But Campos didn’t just ask about the making of The Staircase, which has been heralded as true-crime cinema—providing astonishing access into a fascinating trial that unfolded in a series of stranger-than-fiction story twists involving secret lovers and the late discovery of a missing suspected murder weapon. Campos wanted to know about a plot twist that proliferated offscreen—when Brunet and Peterson, the subject of The Staircase, engaged in a yearslong romance that largely overlapped with his time in prison. Brunet confirmed the relationship in a 2008 interview with the French newspaper Le Monde, and Peterson had written about it in his 2019 book, Behind the Staircase.

In an email to Vanity Fair, Brunet recalls her conversation with Campos: “I told him specifically that I could tell him, as a friend, some aspects of [the relationship], but that I did not want to be a character in his [project].”

Brunet had met Campos a number of times before, initially in Paris when the filmmaker was meeting with Jean-Xavier de Lestrade, the Academy Award–winning director of The Staircase docuseries, and again at Peterson’s 2011 hearing in Durham. A few years after Brunet helped edit 2013’s Palme d’Or–winning film, Blue is the Warmest Color, she says she reconnected with Campos on the film-festival circuit. By the time Campos called her in 2020, Brunet says she understood that de Lestrade trusted the American filmmaker. De Lestrade had shared his archives from the iconic crime documentary with him—letting Campos sift through hundreds of hours of raw footage for reference and research.

Some time after her conversation with Campos, Brunet got a phone call from de Lestrade with an update about Campos’s miniseries. Not only was Brunet a character, but the actor cast to play her, Oscar-winner Juliette Binoche, was eager to meet with her. “I was upset when I heard that I was going to be a character in the Antonio Campos series. I felt betrayed and I was angry with myself that I had trusted Antonio,” writes Brunet. By that point though, she didn’t feel like she could stop the momentum of the Hollywood adaptation, which now had not one, but two Oscar winners involved. “I did not feel that there was anything I could do to avoid being a character in Antonio’s [project].”

“I decided to make the best of it and meet with Juliette,” she writes, explaining that she and Binoche ended up hitting it off—a silver lining to a roller-coaster Staircase saga that preceded the adaptation ordeal. “I took this new friendship as a late gift, an unexpected happy ending to my painful story.”

Brunet had been editing films for about two decades when she began work on The Staircase. With the help of producer Allyson Luchak, Brunet’s longtime collaborator de Lestrade had secured unprecedented and astonishing access ahead of Peterson’s murder trial in Durham, North Carolina. The Paris-based Brunet was receiving hundreds of hours of raw footage showing Peterson in the aftermath of his wife’s death, which she began shaping into the docuseries that would become The Staircase.

According to Brunet, she finished her work on the eight original episodes of The Staircase without ever meeting or corresponding with Peterson. She says she was inspired to reach out to Peterson only after he was sentenced to life without the possibility of parole in October 2003. (Michael has been released from prison after being granted a new trial and submitting an Alford plea.)

“I never wanted to write him before that,” clarifies Brunet. “The sentence was shocking to me. In France there isn’t anything like life without parole—not to mention the death penalty. To me it was like putting someone alive in a coffin. I was affected by the cruelty and what I saw as a miscarriage of justice. So I decided to write Michael to offer to send him some books—which I did relentlessly while he was in jail.”

The fifth episode of HBO Max’s The Staircase, “The Beating Heart,” depicts Brunet editing footage of the original eight episodes while engaged in a romantic relationship with Peterson. But Brunet clarifies that she would never have crossed that line before her work on the documentary had concluded. “It was only because I was not the film editor anymore that I felt entitled to [reach out to him]. Otherwise, I would have found it improper.”

Peterson, who is 17 years older than Brunet, responded to the editor’s letters and began a steady correspondence—with Brunet writing from her home in Paris and Peterson writing from the correctional institution where he was serving out his sentence in North Carolina. Over the following months, the friendship escalated to an emotional affair. “I want to stress that I did not fall in love with Michael through the footage [I saw in] Paris, but through corresponding, during the time he was in prison and I was working on many other films with many other filmmakers,” adds Brunet. In his 2019 book Behind the Staircase, Peterson writes movingly of Brunet, describing her as “my only real friend in prison, the only one I confided in and revealed my fears to.” Brunet’s support and warmth gave Peterson hope. “I felt like a life preserver had been cast into the dark tumultuous sea swirling about me,” Peterson writes. “I clutched it. Suddenly, I had a life within life in prison.”

After a year of letter writing, Brunet traveled from Paris to North Carolina to meet Peterson for the first time in prison. “Attractive, intelligent, funny, fluent in English with the most charming accent, she put me at ease immediately with an amusing description of the Red Roof Motel in Rocky Mount where she was staying,” writes Peterson of the meeting. Brunet denies this memory, saying it wasn’t until a visit years later that she stayed at the motel. “You have to notice that being accurate is not Michael’s cup of tea,” she says with the benefit of hindsight. “It took me some time to understand that.”

After that meeting, Brunet traded hundreds of letters with Peterson, and flew to visit him three to four times a year, he writes in his book. She received phone calls from him via a company called Prison Calls Online, she adds. Believing that Peterson had not killed his wife, Kathleen, Brunet also made it her mission to prove Peterson innocent in her personal time—contributing thousands of her own dollars to Peterson’s legal fund, and championing a theory that an aggressive owl attack resulted in Kathleen’s scalp lacerations and fatal loss of blood.

“At first I just wanted to support and then to love Michael,” she explains. “After his appeals failed in 2008, I also became involved in his defense because I thought—and still do—that this theory is the only theory of Kathleen’s death that fits with all the evidence.”

In 2011, while still romantically involved with Peterson, Brunet was hired to return to The Staircase to edit two additional episodes that would follow the original eight. The new episodes, which featured prison interviews with Peterson, chronicled the 2011 hearing that led to his conviction being overturned. (Peterson was granted the hearing after a bloodstain analyst who testified for the prosecution was found to have falsely represented evidence in cases including Peterson’s.)

Brunet insists that she was able to compartmentalize her personal and professional lives—never bringing bias to the edit room. In “The Beating Heart,” HBO Max’s Sophie consciously cuts The Staircase to engineer empathy for Peterson in hopes of helping him win an appeal. But in reality, per producer Allyson Luchak, the filmmakers edited the documentary with the understanding that, per an agreement with Peterson’s defense attorney, David Rudolf, they could not release footage until after Peterson had exhausted his chances for appeal. (Later, after the documentary was finished, Rudolf decided to stop holding it up and let the team air the footage.)

“The best proof that I never used The Staircase to try and help Michael is this,” writes Brunet, “I worked on the owl theory for years, collecting dozens and dozens of accounts of owl attacks on people. But since it was never presented in court, we did not include it in the documentary.”

Peterson was released from prison on house arrest in late 2011—with Brunet continuing to periodically visit him in North Carolina. By that point, Peterson and Brunet had been in a romantic relationship for several years—and had spent much of that time holding on to a joint fantasy of a life together in Paris once Peterson was freed from prison. Peterson considered the move so seriously that he told his children he planned to move to France. But as Peterson got closer and closer to freedom, he realized how impractical this fantasy was. “The dream grew ugly tentacles: I was 73, didn’t speak French, couldn’t afford Paris, and had no friends there,” Peterson writes in his book.

Peterson also did not want to abandon his family all over again, this time for Paris instead of prison. He writes of this realization, “I could not love Sophie like I had loved [his first wife] Patty and Kathleen, not enough to give up my country, my children, and my grandchildren.”

As for Brunet, she discovered that “Michael was not the man he had pretended he wanted to be. Or he changed too much during the long justice process.” She is not bitter about their time together, though. “Today I feel incredibly lucky that I have a new very happy life in Paris,”she reasons. “Maybe getting out of my life was eventually the best gift Michael could give me.”

After their breakup, Brunet set her feelings aside to edit three more episodes of The Staircase chronicling the retrial.

“My relationship with Michael never affected my editing,” writes Brunet. “I never ever cut anything out that would be damaging for him. I have too big an opinion of my job to be even remotely tempted to do anything like that. And Jean would never let it happen anyway. It is his film and I respect that greatly.”

“And again: I had absolutely no dog in the fight as for the first eight episodes,” she reiterates. “As for the following ones, I think one can notice a great empathy for Michael’s family in them. But that was Jean’s point of view as well as mine. Whatever you think or believe about Michael, you can’t deny that the situation for his children was terrible and unfair. As for the last three episodes, I could not possibly be suspected of wanting to favor Michael, since we had broken up before I finished editing.”

Brunet says she initially did not want to go public with the relationship—and had she not, she likely wouldn’t be featured as a character in HBO Max’s version of The Staircase.

But years into Peterson’s prison sentence, Brunet says that Peterson convinced her to do an interview to help his case.

“Michael had wanted me to go public with it in 2008 after all his appeals had failed,” says The Staircase editor, explaining that the renowned French journalist Raphaëlle Bacqué had heard about the romance from a mutual friend and requested an interview with Brunet for Le Monde. “Michael and I discussed in letters whether I should do it. I was not keen to do it, but at that time I had great hopes about the owl theory and I finally agreed to talk to Raphaëlle. She then visited Michael in prison and wrote a great piece that presented both my involvement and the owl theory, including the presence of a feather entangled with Kathleen’s hair in her left hand.”

Continues Brunet, “I sacrificed my privacy at that time for the hope that the owl theory would eventually prove Michel’s innocence.”

Brunet did not realize at the time that by doing the interview, she was also qualifying the relationship as public domain.

Fast-forward about 12 years to Brunet discovering that she—so comfortable behind the scenes—was being thrust onscreen in HBO Max’s rendition of The Staircase. Brunet says that she was able to have a follow-up conversation with Campos before he began filming the series, during which he explained to her that his Staircase would be fictionalized, “a work of imagination.” According to Brunet, “Antonio had to make up many scenes that he could not have witnessed.” She made peace with her story being dramatized: “I think I can live with that,” she writes.

She cannot not, however, live with the way her career is suddenly being called into question because the HBO Max series has taken creative license—license that she, de Lestrade, and the rest of the original Staircase’s team argue, is not being responsibly disclosed to viewers. (The only mention that the series is fictionalized comes after the show’s full credits.)

“I just need to make sure that our professional behavior is not misrepresented,” she adds. “I did not put any bias in my editing of any of the episodes of Staircase. Jean-Xavier never asked Michael to rephrase a statement or give more emotion in a second take. He never asked for second take[s]. He wanted to come as close to the truth as possible.”

She has now seen the first four episodes of HBO Max’s The Staircase. The fourth episode, she says, was difficult to watch: “I was shocked to watch Kathleen endlessly dying.… So my thoughts go to the family—I mean both Michael’s and Kathleen's family—that they don’t watch it.”

She has not yet seen the rest of the series, but does take issue with one Sophie-related plot point in HBO Max’s version that Campos disclosed to her.

“I know, for instance—because Antonio told me so—that in the series, Sophie pushes Michael to take the Alford plea in order to start a new life. This is disturbing to me: I would never have done this. First because what was at stake was too serious for me to give any advice. I was not the one who could end up in jail for the rest of my life. And second because I felt, on the contrary, that Michael could and should fight to prove his innocence,” says Brunet. She adds, “I did not try and influence him this way either.”

In Behind the Staircase, Peterson suggests he broke Brunet’s heart—but reports that the breakup ended up being amiable. “We didn’t part bitterly: the long relationship—13 years—had a dignified death, a sheet discreetly pulled over its corpse,” he writes.

Brunet does not look back on her relationship with Peterson with negativity either. “I had great times,”she reasons. “I took care of someone. I learned many things about myself and about others. I made friends, I became familiar with many wonderful aspects of the U.S. But I did not reconcile with the American justice system or the department of corrections.”

And the editor understands that if she had to be depicted on an American television series against her wishes, she could do a lot worse than being portrayed by Juliette Binoche. “I know that I am in good hands with Juliette,” writes Brunet.

Brunet has not seen enough of HBO Max’s series to know whether Firth will be able to capture the full Peterson arc she witnessed—“how much Michael was hurt and damaged by his stay in prison, and how completely he was drained by the long justice process.”

But she has seen enough of Firth’s performance to offer these notes.

“Colin Firth is a great actor, but he doesn’t capture the energy and fantastic humor of his model,” explains Brunet. “He does convey some feeling of him though: a man who found himself lying too many times and sometimes loses track of his own truth.”

Brunet, too, suggests she hasn’t always been entirely forthcoming. “Many twists and turns happened that I did not tell Antonio about,” she says. She is an editor, after all.

Neither Campos’s representatives nor HBO Max responded to a request for comment.

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