Southwest of Salem: The Story of the San Antonio Four

Directed by award-winning filmmaker and journalist Deborah Esquenazi, this emotional documentary first made its big splash earlier this year at the Tribeca Film Festival, garnering amazing reviews and audience accolades. It just won the coveted Outstanding Documentary Jury Award at the 2016 Frameline Film Festival in San Francisco.

This documentary highlights the ongoing injustice that  “The San Antonio Four,” Elizabeth Ramirez, Cassandra Rivera, Kristie Mayhugh, and Anna Vasquez, are still enduring. They are four Latina lesbians wrongfully convicted of gang-raping two little girls in San Antonio, Texas.

However, the evidence was never there. The two little girls, now adults, have come out to defend the ones they once accused. The San Antonio Four continues to fight against mythology, faux-science, homophobia, and the prosecutorial fervor in their continuous struggle for exoneration in this riveting ‘True Crime’ tale. The suffering, outlandish, and baseless accusations caught one man’s attention who helped to garner the support of the Innocent Project.

In 2012, writer Maurice Chammah’s New York Times coverage “ Fighting to Exonerate Texas Women Convicted of Child Sexual Assault” goes into details of the four women’s ordeal.  In February 2016, Texas-based Judge Pat Priest released the ruling that these women are entitled to new trials but not exoneration. The fight to free the innocent continues.