Just Melvin: Just Evil, which premiered Sunday on HBO’s documentary series America Undercover, is a man’s startling attempt to take revenge on his grandfather, who sexually molested his nine daughters and stepchildren.
“I know my family’s not exactly normal,” says the filmmaker, James Ronald Whitney, with titanic understatement.
Molestation became a family tradition. It’s painful to listen to Melvin Just’s various offspring and stepchildren describe in rank detail what he did to them. It’s even more grueling to see them in childhood photographs, looking cute and innocent, though Just began having sex with them when some of them were toddlers. As adults, the ravages in them are apparent: they are suicidal, addicted to alcohol, drugs and cigarettes. Grandma Fay, Just’s former wife, is a bag of bones and can barely breathe, but she gamely smokes and drinks beer.
It’s hard to connect the clean-cut Whitney — who comes from Washington state — to his relatives. With his blond hair and smooth cheeks he looks like a cast member from The Partridge Family. He is an accomplished pianist and articulate: a stark contrast with one of his aunts, whose speech is so garbled that some of her interviews require subtitles.
But he, too, was molested as a child, by an uncle, and so was his mother, one of Just’s stepdaughters. She tells her grim story as she chops vegetables in her bright clean kitchen. Most of his other relatives live in cluttered trailers or pickup trucks.
The sick root of this family tree is Just, seen as an old man in a wheelchair, paralyzed by a stroke. Though he was imprisoned for eight years for his crimes, he denies them to his grandson’s camera.
It gets weirder and weirder. After denouncing Just, his children visit him at the nursing home, where they embrace him and tell him they love him. Elsewhere in this potent film, Grandma Fay recalls, “I was a punching bag to him,” but someone else describes him as “a sweetheart.” Some sweetheart.
