Fox News "The Story with Marth MacCallum" - Transcript Interview with Mike Lee

Interview

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Senator of Utah, Mike Lee, joins me now. Senator, good to have you with us today on this.

SEN. MIKE LEE (R-UT): Thank you.

MACCALLUM: I just want to read a quote from the director. Because everybody should, you know, watch this for themselves and see what they think about it. She says, she's Senegalese, and her name is Maimouna Doucoure. She said, I saw so many things and so many issues around me lived by young girls that I decided to make this film and sound an alarm and say we need to protect our children. It's bold, it's feminist but it's so important and necessary to create debate and try to find solutions, for me as artist, for politicians, and parents, it's a real issue. Your reaction?

LEE: Look, it's really cute, it's really fun and nice to be able to characterize it this way. And in fact, this isn't exposing child sexual exploitation. This film actually embodies that. It profits from it. It normalizes it and that's wrong.

Netflix needs to take it off of its platform and people shouldn't watch it. The fact is that children as young as 11, one of the actors portraying these 11-year-olds was actually 10 at the time it was filmed. We're made to act this out. This was itself an act of child sexual exploitation.

MACCALLUM: You know, it's trying to make a point about things like TikTok and the way that young girls are sexualized by social media by the things that they see everywhere they go and this is a young girl who is, from a conservative, Senegalese family and she breaks away from them and she wants to, you know, join this dance group.

And you know, it turns into them sort of looking at these videos of all these things they see online. And you know, I understand the desire to speak to the larger problem which I think every parent in America understands. The oversexualization of children in this country. And what they are exposed to on social media and the pressures on these young girls.

You know, but I'm not sure that this hits the mark with showing how gritty and ugly and awful that is. It glamorizes it to a great extent.

LEE: And I agree completely, Martha. That this is a problem. That it does need attention drawn to it. But, the way in which this draws attention to the problem is by glamorizing it, by normalizing it, and by profiting from it.

If you read the -- if you watch the movie, and you take the movie as a whole, what you'll see is that this is not something that's undertaken delicately. There are all kinds of assaults against children that are depicted in movies without highlighting them, without focusing on them obsessively without glamorizing or normalizing them. This movie doesn't do that. This movie is wrong. And it needs to be taken off of Netflix.

MACCALLUM: What is it that you think it could be potentially criminal?

LEE: Well, look, a movie like this doesn't make itself. These are not computer-generated images. Nor are they adult actors portraying minors. They had to use minors in order to produce this material. And they blatantly sexualized manner in which these little girls had to perform in order to do this itself makes the case. It does amount to child sexual exploitation on its face.

MACCALLUM: Senator Mike Lee, thank you very much. Good have you with us tonight, sir.

LEE: Thank you.

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