Madeleine Sackler

Madeleine Sackler (born 1983) is an American filmmaker and Sackler family heiress. She received an Emmy Award in 2015 and was nominated for a second in 2020. She has received criticism for her family fortune, which derives mostly from the sale and manufacture of the highly addictive pharmaceutical opioid Oxycontin, the central drug in the opioid crisis.

The Sackler family, including Madeleine Sackler, is profiled in various media, including the documentary Crime of the Century on HBO and in the book Empire of Pain by Patrick Keefe. As outlined in the book, she has scrupulously denied her family’s role in one of America’s largest public health crises, which has claimed the lives of over 600,000 people.

Early life and education Sackler was born in 1983, and grew up in Greenwich, Connecticut. She went to public high school and attended Duke University. Sackler was a biopsychology major at Duke and considered going to med school. However, she was equally interested in reading, writing and photography. Sackler incorporated these interests into her time at Duke with a minor in English, a photography elective, and creating a documentary short as an independent study. Sackler has since filmed more documentaries, including Dangerous Acts Starring the Unstable Elements of Belarus and It's a Hard Truth Ain't It.

Sackler's films deal with themes such as public education, censorship and dictatorship, and incarceration and rehabilitation. The documentary highlighted the back-to-back National Championships the Duke University Blue Devils won in the 1991 and 1992 NCAA championships.

Dangerous Acts Starring the Unstable Elements of Belarus (2013) Dangerous Acts Starring the Unstable Elements of Belarus is an observational documentary directed by Sackler for HBO. Sackler began production on the film in Belarus in the summer of 2010. She gathered footage of Belarus Free Theatre, an underground theatre group that had been censored and deemed illegal by the Belarus government. Sackler and her production crew filmed in Pendleton Correctional Facility in Indiana. This is the first time that a fiction and non-fiction film have been filmed entirely inside a Level 4 prison.

Criticism After working with Sackler, actor Jeffrey Wright subsequently called Sackler's prison films "fundamentally flawed" due to her failure to acknowledge the Sackler family's own role in contributing to drug abuse in America while telling the inmates' stories. "hen you take that element of transparency out of the equation, when doing that hides the significance of your story as it relates to their stories, then there's something rotten that can't be expunged," he said.

New Yorker author Patrick Radden Keefe, in a biography of the Sackler family, observed that Sackler "was able to weigh in, sagely, on the plight of America's prison population without being asked to account for her own familial connection to one of the underlying drivers of that crisis." Vanity Fair described Sackler as being "known to brush off questions about the original source of her money". In an interview with The Guardian, artist Nan Goldin described Sackler's films as a form of "reputation washing", saying Sackler "presents herself as a social activist but she has been enriched through the addiction of hundreds of thousands of people.”