Unbelievable on Netflix: The harrowing real-life story behind the true-crime series

With hard-hitting series such as Top Boy and The Spy dropping on Netflix this month, the streaming service has definitely given us a reason to clear our social diaries for the foreseeable future.

One of the latest shows to arrive on Netflix, a harrowing mini-series called Unbelievable, is a must-watch.

Based on the Pulitzer-Prize winning article An Unbelievable Story of Rape, Unbelievable tells the true story of an 18-year-old woman who reported a rape, but was met by a wave of disbelief from police and loved ones.

The official synopsis reads: “After a young woman is accused of lying about rape, two female detectives investigate a spate of eerily similar attacks.”

In the era of #MeToo and heightened discussions over how matters of rape and sexual assault are handled by the law and wider society, this series likely to ignite plenty of conversation.

Here’s everything we know so far about the new true crime series, Unbelievable...

Unbelievable will be available to watch on the streaming service from today – Friday 13 September.

Unbelievable is inspired by the true story of Marie, an 18-year old woman who in 2008 reported that she’d been bound by her own shoelaces and raped by a masked man at knifepoint.

As outlined in the hard-hitting article on The Marshall Project, the real-life Marie was a foster child who had been passed from various foster homes her entire life, having never been successfully adopted.

Marie then settled in Washington State with Shannon McQuery and her husband, before then moving in with Penny Cunningham, who worked as a children’s advocate in Lynnwood, Washington.

When she was 18, Marie moved into subsidised housing and lived alone. One night in Lynnwood, Marie was talking to her ex-boyfriend on the phone before going to sleep. When she woke up, she found a man had broken into her apartment and was standing over her with a knife. He then tied her up and proceeded to rape her for hours.

After cutting herself free, Marie called her former foster mother, Peggy, to explain what had happened. She also reported it to the police, who arrived at the scene and took official statements.

However, Shannon and Peggy began to think Marie was lying, describing her behaviour after the assault as “disorientating” and bizarre.

The police brought Marie in again for further questioning, and she was coerced into retracting her statement, saying she made it up due to “stress.” She was charged with falsifying a police report and charged $500 for court services.

Years later, in 2011, two female detectives called Stacy Galbraith and Edna Hendershot began to notice similarities between a series of other rapes, discovering that a serial rapist was breaking into homes and sexually assaulting women before taking photographs of his victims and forcing them to shower to remove evidence of his crimes.

Armed with brand new evidence, they eventually caught the rapist.

In December 2011, army veteran Marc O’Leary was found guilty of 28 counts of rape in Colorado to 327.5 years in prison.

Marie Adler is played by Booksmart’s Kaitlyn Dever, whilst Merritt Wever (Nurse Jackie) and Toni Colette (Little Miss Sunshine) star as detectives Karen DuVall and Grace Rasmussen.

Also making an appearance in the true-crime series is Elizabeth Marvel (House of Cards, Lincoln) and comedian Bridget Everett, who play Marie’s foster mothers.

Danielle Macdonald (Dumplin’) plays another victim of the serial rapist who attacks Marie.