What Ruth Bader Ginsburg Taught Us as We Documented Her Life’s Story
“Fight for the things that you care about, but do it in a way that will lead others to join you.”
by Betsy West and Julie Cohen
People often ask how we got Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg to cooperate with us on a documentary that would tell her momentous life story. In many ways, she was an unlikely subject.
When we approached her about the idea in 2015, she may have been known as the Notorious RBG, but she was in fact a notoriously soft-spoken, retiring, serious person. What’s more, as an associate justice of the U.S. Supreme Court, she was part of a club with strict rules governing public comments about matters that might come before her and her colleagues.
Her first response to us about the documentary idea was not exactly encouraging. “Not yet,” she said, a comment we tried to see as an invitation to approach her again. A few months later, we sent her a list of her colleagues and friends we would hope to interview. Again, she was reserved, “I would not be prepared to grant you an interview for at least two years,” she wrote. But then she went on to add a few names to our list of potential interviewees. We were on our way.
