Sophie Brunet and Michael Peterson Had the Unlikeliest of Courtships
On October 10, 2003, Michael Peterson was sentenced to life in prison without parole for the murder of his wife Kathleen Peterson, who had been found dead at the bottom of the staircase in their family home two years earlier. He was imprisoned at the Nash Correctional Institution in North Carolina, but has maintained his innocence from the inception of the investigation into him up until today. When Peterson was initially indicted for the crime, a French documentary crew headed by Jean-Xavier de Lestrade began filming, and in 2004, after his sentencing, an eight-episode docu-series on Peterson’s case was released. (Follow-up episodes were added in 2012, and then again in 2018, when U.S. Netflix released all 13 episodes as a whole package.) At some point around the premiere of the original documentary, an editor on the series, Sophie Brunet, sent Peterson a letter in prison. What began as a long-distance correspondence evolved into a roughly thirteen year relationship, which is shown in HBO Max’s new drama series The Staircase.
Sophie Brunet and Peterson dated for roughly 13 years, from 2004 to 2017. They began corresponding via letters while he was in prison, after he was found guilty. “I was affected by the cruelty [of his life sentence] and what I saw as a miscarriage of justice,” Brunet explained to Vanity Fair. “So I decided to write Michael to offer to send him some books—which I did relentlessly while he was in jail.”
In episode five of HBO Max’s drama series, Brunet is shown working on edits of the documentary while engaged in a relationship with Peterson. And the creators of the original documentary have come forward in recent days to express frustration with the falsification of the timeline. According to de Lestrade, Brunet, and others who were involved with the project, Brunet and Peterson did not begin corresponding until after she left the documentary project in 2004. “It was only because I was not the film editor anymore that I felt entitled to [reach out to him],” she said. “Otherwise, I would have found it improper.” Brunet would visit Peterson three to four times a year over the course of their relationship, and contributed to Peterson’s legal fund. In 2011, Brunet did edit the first two additional episodes while she was romantically involved with Peterson. “The best proof that I never used The Staircase to try and help Michael is this,” Brunet writes to Vanity Fair, “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.” To this day, Brunet believes that Kathleen Peterson died after an earlier owl attack created lacerations in her scalp.
Peterson was released in 2017 after he entered an Alford plea, and his relationship with Sophie came to an end shortly after, when he realized he could not leave his children again and relocate to Paris to be with her. Brunet edited the later episodes, which aired in 2018 on Netflix, after she and Peterson had broken up. That same year, de Lestrade told L’Express that Peterson and Brunet’s relationship “is one of the incredible things that happened during those 15 years,” he said. “Life is really full of surprises…But she never let her own feelings affect the course of editing.”
In an email to Vanity Fair after the HBO Max series premiered, Brunet wrote: “My relationship with Michael never affected my editing. 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.” Brunet even consulted with the HBO Max adaptation’s director Antonio Campos in 2020. “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].” de Lestrade has also expressed anger toward the HBO Max crew, with whom he shared his archival footage and research on the case. “I understand if you dramatize,” he told Vanity Fair. “But when you attack the credibility of my work, that’s really not acceptable to me.” He sent a letter to the creators of this week demanding that “the offending allegations be removed from episode five before it airs publicly” or that the series adds a note explaining that it is a fictionalized version of events.
Today, according to her IMDb page, Sophie Brunet is still working as a film and television editor. Though she is frustrated by the fictionalization of her journalistic sensibility, Brunet got to know actress Juliette Binoche (who portrays her in the HBO adaptation) throughout the development process. “I took this new friendship as a late gift, an unexpected happy ending to my painful story,” she said.
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