JONES STRIKES BACK

I bumped back into Josh, and I said, 'If I were ever to make a movie about my life, I think I'd want to do it with you because you knew me before all of this, before I was this famous person, this whistleblower.' And so, after kicking it around for a few months, we started working on it."

The friends reconnected after the COVID outbreak. Fox brought Jones on as a COVID expert for his show "Staying Home with Josh Fox," which aired on TYT, an online news platform. Fox used his show to advocate for the U.S. to follow the lead of Australia and New Zealand and pay its citizens to stay home and avoid exposure to COVID. He remains outspoken in his criticism of how DeSantis, Donald Trump and other conservatives pushed to reopen during the early stages of the pandemic.

By Rick Outzen

Rebekah Jones refuses to go away quietly. The scientist and former congressional candidate has teamed up with an Emmy Award-winning and Academy Award-nominated filmmaker to tell her complicated story in a documentary titled, "Rebekah Jones: Whistleblower."

Filmmaker Josh Fox originally planned to film for two months on a budget of about $2 million. Instead, he spent nearly three years capturing Jones' turbulent life on film and has launched a Kickstarter campaign to finish the documentary. Final touches include editing, purchasing sound rights and color correcting.

"It's weird to have cameras in your face all the time, but I've embraced this fact that, no matter how much I tried, I was never going to be able to live this any way other than publicly," Jones said.

She challenged Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis about data reported during the COVID-19 pandemic so Floridians could make informed decisions about their health. She wasn't sure people would care to know the facts.

"I had no idea when I first came forward if the people of Florida would believe me or care, and they did," Jones told Inweekly. "This story is as much theirs as it's mine, and I'm going to live this as honestly as possible. And I think sometimes I underestimated how honest that would be."

Jones managed the Florida Department of Health COVID-19 dashboard until being fired in May 2020 after she asked her boss about how to claim whistleblower status. The state accused her of insubordination. She fired back that the department was downplaying the outbreak of the virus in rural counties by ordering her to remove key data from the dashboard.

Six months later, the Florida Department of Law Enforcement executed a search warrant and raided her home after suspecting her of accessing a state government messaging system to urge employees to speak out about COVID deaths. Jones caught the raid on her home camera sys- tem and posted the video on social media; more than 10 million Twitter users watched.

Charged with a felony, Jones later consented to a plea agreement that requires her to pay $200 a month to cover the $20,000 the state spent on the criminal investigation. She also agreed to attend mental health counseling monthly and perform 150 hours of community service.

Before the plea agreement, the state granted Jones whistleblower protection status while investigating her allegations. The Office of Inspector General ultimately found her claims to be unsubstantiated and exonerated the state health officials. The documentary captured the moment Jones learned of her whistleblower protection status.

"People who had money didn't have to risk their lives," Fox said. "It was primarily poor people and middle-class people who could not stay home, who had to go to work, who ended up getting COVID and dying. Those folks, like DeSantis and Donald Trump, were willing to sacrifice a million lives, and we have normalized 1.2 million COVID deaths in this country, which is a crime, which is a direct result of policy, just as climate change is the direct result of policy, just as the fact we have debt in this country and student debt is a direct result of policy."

He added, "Those 1.2 million COVID deaths are a direct result of policy, and it is policy that Rebekah Jones was standing up against."

FLAWED, IMPERFECT

Fox originally planned for the documentary to focus on reopening the American economy and what Jones revealed about the DeSantis administration. The story soon expanded with Jones mired in controversy.

He described her as "brash, bald, brazen, flawed, imperfect, emotional and shoot-from-thehip," but unfairly maligned by right-wing media outlets hellbent on discrediting her. Jones freely admits she is "flawed" and a "complicated story."

The smear campaign against Jones is covered in the film. Fox said he dealt with his share of personal attacks when he took on the oil industry, but those paled in comparison to the "sexist, misogynistic" harassment of Jones.

"They want to make you distracted with issues about her character, which may or may not be true because they're trying to distract from the very obvious crime of making Americans go to work and exposing them to deadly diseases," he said.

Fox described the film as a "litmus test." Viewers will be challenged with what and who they believe. He admitted that he and his crew questioned some of what Jones told them during the filming of the documentary. The filmmaker then specifically cited the 48 hours leading up to the congressional election that Jones lost to incumbent Matt Gaetz.

"What we captured on film is one of the craziest 48-hour periods I've ever been involved in, and it is truly bonkers," Fox said.

Fox puts Gaetz in the same company as DeSantis and Trump—men he detests for their political views on minorities, particularly the LGBTQ community. He said they are conveyers of brazen, harmful, bigoted behavior that deliberately divides the country and causes violence. He accused them of stochastic terrorism.

POP, POP, POP

"It's like when you do Jiffy Pop popcorn in a pan," Fox said. "You turn that heat up underneath it and you don't know which popcorn kernels are going to pop, but you know some of them are going to and they're going to start pop, pop, pop, pop, pop. Pop, what happened in Colorado Springs? Pop, what happened with shooting Jews in a Synagogue in Pittsburgh? Or pop, and you have people popping off because of what you said, your stochastic terrorism, which is the rhetoric that has been used by Matt Gaetz, has been used by DeSantis, has been used by Donald Trump, has been used by Marjorie Taylor Greene."

"I'm this central character, but everything that's happening around me is really what the story is about," Jones said. "We were filming at my mom's house in Mississippi when I got the email that I was receiving official legal whistleblower protection status, and that was just dumb luck. I had no idea that that was going to happen. I never thought that would happen, that the state would investigate itself and then grant me legal whistleblower protection."

Filmmakers by the dozens contacted Jones asking to tell her story. She opted for Fox, whom she befriended a decade earlier while reporting for the Syracuse University newspaper. Jones interviewed Fox for a story about his documentary, "Gasland," which received an Academy Award nomination.

"I had a lot of people trying to buy my life rights, which was a super strange thing," Jones said. "...My only point of reference from that was that 'Seinfeld' episode where Kramer sells his life rights and then he can't tell any of his stories. And

In April, the spotlight shone back on Jones after her 13-year-old son was arrested by the Santa Rosa County Sheriff's Office and accused of threatening to shoot up his former middle school.

Jones took to Twitter and tweeted, "My family is not safe. My son has been taken on the gov's orders, and I've had to send my husband and daughter out of state for their safety. THIS is the reality of living in DeSantis' Florida. There is no freedom here. Only retaliatory rule by a fascist who wishes to be king."

She said anyone who whistle blows will be scrutinized and their credibility attacked by whoever opposes what is uncovered. In her case, she riled up an entire political party.

"I felt like, at some point, I needed to say, we're never going to have the perfect whistleblower," Jones said. "And that's, in a way, what this film is about too, is there's no person who's so saintly, that if they came forward and told, during a political time, a truth that hurt a political party, that would be embraced by everyone. It doesn't exist, that person does not exist."

His anti-conservative stance partially explains why he repeatedly heard the words "too political" when he pitched the film to studio executives. Fox made about 60 pitches before opting for the Kickstarter campaign route and estimates the film will cost about $60,000 to finish.

Fox feels a sense of urgency to complete the film and expose DeSantis before the presidential election.

"We're hoping we find 600 people to give us $100 bucks or 60 people to give us $1,000 bucks or 60,000 people to give us $1," Fox said. "That's the math here, right? We think we can finish it for that money. It's very, very, very, very little money."

He continued, "This project has always been a labor of love and a labor of just necessity. It pissed me off so much to watch people have to die because Ron DeSantis and Donald Trump wanting to have a culture war in this country because that's how they get elected."

To donate to the "Rebekah Jones: Whistleblower" Kickstarter campaign, visit rb.gy/8jnuq. {in}