Jan Broberg‘s unbelievable true story is becoming a TV series.
The Act‘s Nick Antosca will script the limited series from UCP based on the life of Broberg, an actress who recurred on Everwood, who was abducted and sexually abused as a child by a family friend. The events were chronicled in Abducted in Plain Sight, a documentary currently on Netflix. Both Broberg and her mother Mary Ann Broberg will serve as producers on the series. Antosca is executive producing, Alex Hedlund is co-executive producer and Abducted in Plain Sight director Skye Borgman is consulting producer.
The untitled series will tell the story of the Broberg clan and Jan who was kidnapped multiple times over several years by an obsessed family friend. The family was unprepared and groomed by the neighbor who turned their daughter against them. The series will tell the story of how lives were altered and how they survived.
Mary Ann Broberg wrote a memoir about the events in Stolen Innocence: The Jan Broberg Story. The 2017 documentary Abducted in Plain Sight became a hit when it landed on Netflix in 2019.
“I’m actually incredibly grateful and humbled because the reason that you tell a story such as mine is that you really hope to help the most number of people possible. And there is no greater platform than actually being on Netflix,” Broberg, who is the executive director of the Center for the Arts at Kayenta, told E! News in February 2019. “It’s given me the opportunity to actually be able to talk about what happened and maybe help somebody else prevent it from happening to their own children…raise awareness, get our antennas up and start a conversation that maybe otherwise wouldn’t happen…”
Viewers were swift to judge Broberg’s parents, and in an interview with E! News, Broberg said forgiving them was part of the healing process—for all.
“I think part of my forgiving my parents was really to help them forgive themselves and to say you too were groomed and brainwashed,” she said. “And that’s the part that I don’t think people really understand. If it was easy to understand, they’d see it, and they don’t.”
Antosca’s The Act starred Patricia Arquette and Joey King as mother-daughter duo Dee Dee Blanchard and Gypsy Rose Blanchard. The true crime series was co-written by Michelle Dean, author of the article that inspired the series. The murder of Dee Dee Blanchard was also the subject of Mommy Dead and Dearest, an HBO documentary that explored the crime, Gypsy’s involvement and the suspected influence of Munchausen syndrome by proxy.
(E! and UCP are both part of the NBCUniversal family.)