Subjects who were to be featured in a now-scrapped A&E series about the KKK say producers paid them to stage scenes, cajoled them into using racial epithets, encouraged them to misrepresent their identities and even purchased the material to construct crosses to burn, Variety reports.
"We were betrayed by the producers and A&E," Richard Nichols, a member of a Klan cell called the Tennessee White Knights of the Invisible Empire, told the magazine . "It was all made up—pretty much everything we said and did was fake and because that is what the film people told us to do and say."
The show initially was going to be called "Generation KKK" and it was to have featured Klan members from throughout the South, including Georgia .
After criticism and talk of boycotting the network, A&E rebilled it as "Escaping the KKK: A Documentary Series Exposing Hate in America" and said it would enlist the help of civil-rights group Color of Change to "produce segments featuring civil-rights leaders to help provide context to the documentary."
Then the whole thing was called off.
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A&E hasn't responded to Variety's recent report other than to say the show's not happening and they're looking into what happened.
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