Abducted in Plain Sight filmmaker Skye Borgman understands why audiences might want to scream at their televisions while streaming her true-crime documentary. The 91-minute film, originally released in 2017, has captivated an entirely new audience since premiering on Netflix this month. It chronicles the peculiar kidnapping case of Jan Broberg, an Idaho teenager who was abducted by her decades-older neighbor Robert Berchtold in the 1970s. But Berchtold—known as “B”—did not just kidnap Broberg once; he entrapped Jan’s religious parents in such a web of trust, shame, and complicity that he managed to convince the family to drop the most serious kidnapping charges against him, continue letting him spend disturbing amounts of time with their young daughter, and—in the most shocking twist of all—he eventually kidnapped her a second time.
“It is incredibly challenging to understand why and how these people went through this, but that’s part of the story,”explained Borgman to Vanity Fair, before admitting that even she became so incensed that she eventually had to take a break during the editing process.
“We spent so much time with them on the computer, going through what they had said, and [editing] things together,” Borgman continued. “There were times when the family was just so frustrating to me.” At one point, Borgman and her editor hit pause on the project for a solid six weeks. “It was the best thing that we could’ve done, because we were able to come back and feel everything we were supposed to feel,” she said.
It is important to remember that Jan’s kidnappings took place in a small town, decades before the Internet and true-crime television franchises turned Americans into armchair experts on such seedy subjects as pedophilia, Stockholm syndrome, and grooming. Borgman explained that the Broberg family’s faith, as members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, also gave them an extraordinary capacity for forgiveness—a subject Borgman would like to explore if she is able to pull together funding for a sequel to Abducted in Plain Sight.
Until then, Borgman shared even more shocking revelations about the Broberg family; Robert Berchtold’s alien-abduction grooming technique; and the effects the kidnapping has had on Jan as an adult.
Spoilers ahead for those who have not yet seen Abducted in Plain Sight.
This documentary was the first time Jan’s father, Bob, publicly confessed to having his own romantic entanglement with his daughter’s kidnapper.
Borgman first learned of Jan’s kidnapping through Stolen Innocence, a memoir Jan wrote with her mother, Mary Ann. But the first edition of the book left out several very pertinent details, such as the affairs both Jan’s mother and father had with Berchtold.
During the preliminary discussions the filmmaker had with Jan, Jan was “pretty forthcoming” about the affair her mother had with Berchtold. But the filmmaker didn’t know about Bob’s own “indiscretion” until she got ahold of F.B.I. documents and court transcripts.
“When we were going into the interview, I really wasn’t sure if I was going to ask him about it,” said Borgman, explaining that Bob volunteered details about the sexual act he performed on Berchtold. “I think Bob realized that it was a critical element to the story, and how [Berchtold] was able to get into their family this way so seamlessly,” said Borgman.
The “indiscretions” will be detailed in a new edition of the Brobergs’ memoir now that, according to Borgman, the family “really understand[s] the importance of how those two instances led to [Jan’s parents’] denial” of Berchtold’s relationship with Jan. Borgman explained that both Bob and Mary Ann were “so consumed with their own actions and their own trauma that they just didn’t pay attention [to their daughter’s relationship with Berchtold] the way that they were supposed to.”
Berchtold allegedly used his convoluted “alien-abduction” grooming narrative on multiple victims.
One jaw-dropping twist in Abducted in Plain Sight occurs during the first kidnapping, when Jan says that Berchtold used a cassette player to trick her—just 12 years old at the time—into believing that she had been kidnapped by aliens and that she could save her family only if she accepted a secret mission to procreate with Berchtold. During Vanity Fair’s conversation with Borgman, the filmmaker confessed that she initially had a hard time believing this element to Jan’s story.
“I constantly questioned if this had really happened,” said Borgman. “If this little box was next to Jan and if these alien voices were really playing through. I got to one point where I was like, ‘Well, maybe it doesn’t matter if it’s real. Maybe this is what Jan has had to tell herself to cope with the situation and get through it.’”
“Then, while we were working on the film, one of Berchtold’s other alleged victims reached out to us and told us a story about him using this alien psychology and saying, ‘You’re a princess from a different planet.’ He used this whole alien story on her, and that was the moment for me when I thought, ‘Oh my gosh, it’s real. He did it.’” (Neither this accuser nor the other alleged Berchtold victims that came forward wanted to revisit their ordeal on camera.)
Asked how Berchtold came up with this extravagant deception plan, Borgman said her only theory is that inspiration struck from the 70s zeitgeist. “This whole idea of science fiction was popular, and tape recorders had just come out. There were also a lot of newspaper articles about U.F.O.s and whether or not they were real.”
