Alanis Morissette blasts documentary Jagged as 'salacious'

Just hours before the HBO documentary Jagged was to premiere at the Toronto International Film Festival on Tuesday, Alanis Morissette criticized the film about her life as "reductive" and "salacious."

Morissette participated in the film, directed by Alison Klayman, sitting for lengthy interviews. But in a statement issued by her publicist, the Canadian musician said she would not be supporting the film, named after her breakthrough 1995 album, Jagged Little Pill.

"I agreed to participate in a piece about the celebration of Jagged Little Pill's 25th anniversary, and was interviewed during a very vulnerable time (while in the midst of my third postpartum depression during lockdown)," wrote Morissette. "I was lulled into a false sense of security and their salacious agenda became apparent immediately upon my seeing the first cut of the film. This is when I knew our visions were in fact painfully diverged. This was not the story I agreed to tell."

Morissette didn't specify her issues with Jagged, which is to premiere Nov. 19 on HBO. But its most sensitive material includes Morissette discussing sexual encounters when she was 15 that she calls statutory rape. The Washington Post earlier reported on that section of the film.

"It took me years in therapy to even admit there had been any kind of victimization on my part," Morissette says in the film. "I would always say I was consenting, and then I'd be reminded like, 'Hey, you were 15, you're not consenting at 15.' Now I'm like, 'Oh yeah, they're all pedophiles. It's all statutory rape."

Canada's age of consent is 16 years old. Morissette doesn't go into any detail on who the encounters were with.

Representatives for Klayman didn't immediately return requests for comment Tuesday. In an interview with Deadline Hollywood published Tuesday, Klayman, whose films include Ai Weiwei: Never Sorry and the Steve Bannon documentary Brink, lamented that Morissette wouldn't be there for the premiere.