Apple TV+ shelves ‘The Savant,’ a Jessica Chastain thriller inspired by ADL’s secretive anti-extremism unit

Jessica Chastain in “The Savant.” Courtesy of Apple TV+

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(JTA) — Apple TV+ has delayed the release of “The Savant,” a show starring Jessica Chastain that puts a spotlight on the secretive division within the Anti-Defamation League charged with infiltrating online hate groups to stop real-world violence.

Originally set to begin streaming Friday, the series was postponed without an explanation, but the New York Times reported that the company hesitated to move forward with the premiere in the wake of Charlie Kirk’s assassination earlier this month and the charged political atmosphere that has followed.

The assassination took place the same day as a school shooting in Colorado allegedly by a gunman whose online activity had been flagged by an ADL extremism monitor — and as federal funding cuts have challenged the extremism monitoring sector.

In “The Savant,” Chastain stars in a role inspired by an anonymous ADL sleuth known as K who was profiled by Cosmopolitan magazine in a 2019 article titled “Is It Possible to Stop a Mass Shooting Before It Happens?”

The Jewish Telegraphic Agency learned from an ADL spokesperson that K is no longer employed by the organization. The spokesperson didn’t respond to questions about the circumstances of K’s departure or what she has done since.

Her Cosmopolitan profile ends with K describing profound burnout from tracking hate online.

“The euphoria among extremists right now is really depressing. I’ve never felt hopeless until the past 18 months,” K said at the time, adding that her work is “just a drop in the ocean. I’m stretched thin trying to stay on top of it all.”

Chastain, who is also an executive producer on “The Savant,” pushed back Wednesday on the decision to pause the show’s release.

“We are not aligned on the decision,” she wrote on Instagram, before citing violent incidents in the United States over the past five years — including the Gretchen Whitmer kidnapping plot, Jan. 6, hundreds of school shootings, and the assassination of Kirk.

“These incidents show a broader mindset that must be confronted,” she continued. “I’ve never shied away from difficult subjects, and while I wish this show wasn’t so relevant, unfortunately it is.”

On the same day that Kirk was killed earlier this month, a 16-year-old named Desmond Holly in Evergreen, Colorado, shot two high school classmates and took his own life. As it turned out, an investigator with the ADL’s Center on Extremism had been tracking Holly. The group didn’t know his identity or location at the time, but they had tipped off the FBI in July about particularly alarming internet activity that has now been tied to Holly.

The ADL regularly shares intelligence on extremist threats with law enforcement, but rarely makes details of its work public. That discretion is intentional, according to Oren Segal, a senior vice president who leads the group’s Center on Extremism.

“I’m not going to get into methods and tactics. We know that extremists read a lot of what we talk about, and I don’t want to give them any ideas,” Segal said in an interview.

The ADL’s insistence on confidentiality makes the story that inspired the Apple TV+ show all the more remarkable. Andrea Stanley, the journalist who wrote it, was granted access to the sleuth only after weeks of negotiation with the ADL, on the condition that she conceal critical details of K’s identity and methods. For 96 hours, Stanley disappeared: Not even her editor, husband, or mother knew where she was. She bought a ticket to an unnamed U.S. town without knowing K’s real name or having direct contact, relying only on the phone number of one of K’s handlers.

A television critic who previewed the series saidits plot is only loosely drawn from the real story. The trailer for the show, meanwhile, hints that the writers raised the stakes of the drama by having K’s targets uncover her identity.

Here’s what Segal was willing to disclose about the work of the Center on Extremism, which he called “the gold standard in combating extremism, antisemitism and hate.”

He described a team that counts between two and three dozen investigators and analysts. They come from diverse professional backgrounds but share a desire to “use their specific set of skills to help protect vulnerable communities.” While they are spread across different locations, the team is tightly coordinated and operates with a sense of urgency, often devoting “almost every waking hour” to tracking how bad actors recruit, radicalize and spread propaganda, Segal said.

He emphasized that ADL invests heavily in training, equipping staff not only in open-source intelligence techniques but also in proprietary tools the organization has developed in-house. Those tools, increasingly powered by artificial intelligence, have allowed the center to scale up dramatically, moving from a laborious, manual approach just a few years ago to an operation capable of scanning millions of posts each year. The automation, he explained, is crucial for distinguishing genuine threats from the vast background noise of online chatter.

“Back in the day — and I’ve been doing this for 20-something years — you had to go to a platform that might have bad actors, and literally scroll through it,” he said. “We’ve tried to automate some of this work so that we can deal with the massive volume of content online these days. So we’re seeing a lot more threats because there are a lot more of them, but, also, our tools are enabling us to see more than before.”

The closest Segal came to quantifying his team’s impact was in noting that, over the past several years, ADL investigators have supplied law enforcement with thousands of tips — enough to draw occasional public acknowledgment from the FBI in its press releases.

His team is increasingly focused on new and disturbing online spaces, such as gore forums that glorify violence and have been linked to several school shooters, including the one in Evergreen. To him, such forums represent a troubling shift in the extremist landscape, where ideology sometimes takes a backseat to violence for its own sake.

The federal government has recently begun using the label “nihilist violent extremism” as a catchall phrase to describe mass shootings and other spectacles of violence, including attacks that would have traditionally been categorized as right-wing or left-wing.

Segal initially balked at the move. “I was a little concerned that the ways of characterizing violent actors would all get subsumed into one, and then it’s hard to kind of understand what trends are, what types of extremism are increasing versus going down,” he said.

Now, Segal said he sees it as a useful framework if applied carefully.

“I actually do think there is this sort of embrace of nihilist violence, just for violence’s sake, that is a relatively accurate description for some of what we are seeing,” he said.

However it’s labeled, the rise in political and extremist violence comes as the federal government under Donald Trump has drastically reduced or eliminated funding for programs focused on detection and prevention of terrorim and other violent threats.

These programs pay for grants that have been credited with saving lives, including, for example, the security training that Rabbi Charlie Cytron-Walker drew upon in reacting to the armed assailant who appeared at his synagogue in Colleyville, Texas, in 2022.

Segal acknowledged the impact that the cuts are having.

“I know a lot of people in this field that I know are struggling because of funding that they relied on to do their work they no longer have,” he said.

Even with the challenges, Segal says he remains optimistic.

“Nobody sees stuff as bad as I see every single day,” he said, “and yet I believe our ability to have an impact means that ultimately we are going to be a safer community.”