'The Truth About Jim' Is a Fascinating Account of Evil

By Alison Lanier | TV | February 24, 2024 |

By Alison Lanier | TV | February 24, 2024 |

In the same vein as Great Photo, Lovely Life, HBO’s new docu-series The Truth About Jim is an investigation by the younger generation into the terrors that stalked the older generation of their family. And like Great Photo, Lovely Life, that terror takes the form of an abusive patriarch. The main difference here is that the subject of the investigation, Jim Mordecai, is dead at the outset of the filmmaking, beyond the realm of consequences or confrontation. Which, honestly, I feel OK about, because living in a world with one less Jim Mordecai is fine by me.

While the series was directed by Skye Borgman (The Girl in the Picture, Abducted in Plain Sight), the woman spearheading this investigation is Sierra Barter, Jim’s step-granddaughter, whose grandmother married Jim when Sierra’s mother was actively being harassed and tormented by Jim as her high school teacher. Yeah, it’s not great in hindsight. But the levels of shame and denial that complicate the women’s relationship with one another is a difficult and complex subject.

Jim was, by all accounts, a monster. It’s hard to find a better word to fit him: he terrorized and assaulted young girls, roughly between the ages of twelve and nineteen, for decades, and inflicted horrific physical abuse toward his partners. As a high school teacher, he was a source of horror and humiliation. He married three times, and the web of children and spouses who survived him to talk about it on camera is staggering in their courage.

Sierra embarks on the two-year odyssey, interviewing and re-interviewing the web of family members—primarily a knot of steel-nerved women—about the terror that was Jim Mordecai and to unpack the power that he still seems to hold over their lives.

As stories of Jim accumulate and victims’ stories multiply, the unlikelihood that he stopped at his brutal and prolific sexual violence and never “graduated” to murder. All of the women of the family agree: they’d be shocked if he never killed anyone.

And oddly enough, a serial killer was active in the Santa Rosa area, by Jim’s cabin where he liked to try to assault underage girls, picking up hitchhiking girls and murdering them in exactly the way that Jim liked to threaten to murder his family. Clues accumulate. And things begin to line up in a disturbing way, though not nearly as concretely, to another serial killer in the area at the time: the Zodiac killer.

That link has been touted again and again in advertising for the series. The she thinks her step-grandpa was the Zodiac line is sure a snappy selling point for clickbait, but it’s far from the focus of the series. Rather Sierra is methodical in exploring the facts connecting her grandfather to the crimes of several serial murderers and accepting when things just don’t line up. Admittedly, many of these serial murders match behaviors ascribed to Jim with uncanny accuracy.

Another difference between Great Photo, Lovely Life and The Truth About Jim is the style of storytelling. Great Photo is about grappling with difficult truths and facing those revelations head on. The Truth About Jim is about patiently investigating the facts of the horrors that echo through the generations. This is not an exercise in subtlety by any means, and I suppose its directness is part of its mission: it says everything it means right out loud.

The Truth About Jim is a fascinating and disturbing true crime genre entry, with the story refreshingly in the hands of someone who was actually impacted by it. While rather flat and factual rather than soul-gazing, The Truth About Jim will satisfy any true crime enthusiast if not particularly stand out in terms of its storytelling chops.

The Truth About Jim is now streaming on Max.