After raising nearly $100,000 for the film, we were threatened with a lawsuit on the eve of releasing the film on a major digital-first video news company which at the time was the #1 performing brand in Facebook video metrics. Just as we were about to sign an exclusive distribution agreement that I initiated and negotiated, the Trump Organization threatened a lawsuit against anyone who distributed the film. The distributor got cold feet and backed out of the distribution deal.

Faced with seemingly no way to get our film out to the word, just weeks before the presidential general election, I recommended we stream it live on Facebook. This was a technical first – at that point no major feature film had ever been released on Facebook Live, which was really built for individuals to stream from their phones. But I knew that Facebook’s algorithms preference Live content over everything else, and this would be a way to reach a much larger audience than the filmmaker had garnered by “hacking” the viral way Facebook delivers this kind of content.