Plain Truth (film)

Plot summary

Katie (Alison Pill) is an 18-year-old girl who lives in a small Amish community in the Pennsylvania farm country. When a newborn baby is found dead, police suspect foul play, and Katie is accused of having given birth to the child, then taking its life due to her shame about the baby's illegitimacy. Katie protests her innocence on both charges, and Ellie Hathaway (Mariska Hargitay), a tough and well-respected attorney, is brought in to defend her in court. Eventually it is revealed that Katie had conceived the child by a young male academic student whom she had befriended while attending college and wearing regular civilian clothes, and that the child had been born extremely sickly due to Katie's lifetime practice of drinking unpasteurized milk. It is assumed by the jury and the townspeople in general, therefore, that the baby merely died naturally of its weakened condition shortly after birth, and so Katie is declared innocent of all wrongdoing. At the very end of the story, however, Katie's mother Sarah privately reveals to Ellie that she had known that Katie was pregnant and that she followed her to the pond the night that Katie went there and gave birth. Sarah shows Ellie the scissors that had been missing from her husband's barn since that night. The implication is that she used the scissors to cut the umbilical cord, that she suffocated the baby and disposed of the body in the pond. Though shocked and horrified at the gaunt older woman's admission, Ellie chooses not to reveal her knowledge to the police. The classic Picoult twist is that after all Ellie had been through trying to get the truth out of Katie, it seems as though Katie had been covering for her mother's murder of the baby all along.

Cast