Publicist Kelly Dalton has been working with filmmakers her whole career, helping them share their stories and the personal connections they have to their films. As an awards specialist at Netflix for the past seven years, she’s worked on more than two dozen high-profile movies, including Marriage Story, The Irishman, The Lost Daughter, and Maestro. But now she’s leaving Netflix, with plans to tell her own story for the first time.
Dalton is exiting the streamer this week to start her own production company, called Higher Altitude Productions. She’s also writing a script based on the journey she undertook after being raped in college and spending more than a decade battling the resulting trauma. Until recently, she had only told close friends and family about that harrowing 2010 experience. But now she’s decided she’s ready to share her story in a film, mostly so she can explain the healing experience of a little-known process called restorative justice.
“There’s a significance to this moment for me,” she tells Vanity Fair. “Ever since I had experienced this trauma, it’s like there’s chains of shame around my feet and around my wrists, and every step I take in trying to work through it has been met with so much resistance. Sharing my story in this way is cutting those chains and releasing me of that, and choosing to love myself fully.”
Restorative justice, a concept coined in the 1970s, allows a victim to meet with their offender to express the real impact of the crime they endured. It’s a mediated meeting, often lasting an entire day, in which the victim is able to speak about their experience and hopefully find some closure. Dalton had never heard of the idea until a lawyer suggested it to her more than a decade after her assault.
“I don’t think I would’ve gotten that closure, in a way, and that acknowledgment and accountability of his actions, if I had chosen a different path,” she says. “But this is not me trying to convince people that restorative justice is the best option for them. Everyone deserves to choose how they want to heal through a trauma like this and to choose when they decide to heal through it.”
Dalton was assaulted by someone she knew well and considered a friend of her family. After she told her parents what had happened, she met with a legal team to explore what could be done. “They outlined the options. You could choose the criminal path, or you can choose to do nothing,” she says. Dalton, who grew up in Canada and still lived there at the time, was told that the legal process could take 18 to 24 months. She had recently been diagnosed with Lyme disease, which was causing her challenging health issues, and she was concerned that she wouldn’t have the physical or emotional stamina for a drawn-out criminal court experience.
She instead turned her attention to her health problems. As the years went on, she started building up her career—eventually joining the independent awards-consulting firm LTLA Communications in Los Angeles. She worked on films such as Spotlight and La La Land, then moved over to Netflix with the LTLA crew in 2018. But every year, she’d reach back out to her legal team to see if there was any other way to move forward with a case against her assailant. “I would challenge them like, ‘There has to be another option, because I’m suffocating in silence and I’m numbing myself emotionally,’” she says. “I was very disconnected and not living or feeling.”
When a lawyer first suggested restorative justice, Dalton read up on the process, coming to believe it might provide her with the healing she needed—even if there would be no legal ramifications for her assailant. “I was really committed to finding a way to hold him accountable and to share my voice and to try to take my power back without retraumatizing myself,” she says. She had her legal team send a letter over to her assailant, which requested his attendance at a restorative justice meeting and stated that Dalton might have to think seriously about filing criminal charges if he declined. He agreed to the meeting, and Dalton finally saw her assailant face-to-face for the first time in 12 years.
Dalton came into the meeting with her legal team and a prepared statement. But after reading her opening remarks, she asked her legal team to leave so that she could speak to him with just the mediator present. Their eight-hour conversation was off the record, but Dalton left with the closure she needed after the assailant took accountability for his actions. “It had such an impact on my life and changed my life, honestly, and gave me my power back and gave me my voice back in a way that I am so grateful for,” she says. Later that night, she got together with her family and close friends for a small dinner celebration in honor of the progress she’d made toward healing.
After that meeting in 2022, Dalton gradually began sharing her experience with more people in her life. She soon realized that many survivors had never heard of the process of restorative justice. With so few survivors successfully getting a conviction—according to RAINN, out of every 1,000 sexual assaults, 975 predators will walk free—Dalton wanted more people to know there was another path to closure. It may have taken her 15 years to find a level of peace that allows her to tell her story publicly to a larger audience, but now a door has opened for her to share it both in this article and in the script she’s currently writing. “There’s so much beauty in the experience that I’ve had, but it’s taken me a lot of time and a lot of tears and a lot of confusion and a lot of uncertainty,” she says, adding that her production company will focus on showcasing real, honest stories that resonate with people. “If sharing this helps one person feel connected and not alone, that matters and it helps.”
Revealing her story has also, it turns out, helped her in unexpected ways. She adds, “I learned through the process of sharing it that I actually feel so much strength and so much more power if I don’t give it the power to hide it.”
RAINN has resources for those affected by sexual assault. If you need support, please call the National Sexual Assault Hotline: 800-656-4673. It’s free, confidential, and available 24/7.
