There's an Odd Connection to Glee in Suicide Text Case

Michelle Carter's "words alone" shouldn't be to blame for the death of Conrad Roy, who killed himself in 2014 after a then-17-year-old Carter sent him texts encouraging him to do so. That's the argument her lawyers are making in trying to get her case reviewed by the Supreme Court. But an odd aspect to those words is getting attention with the recent premiere of the two-part HBO documentary I Love You, Now Die: The Commonwealth v. Michelle Carter. The film surfaces the fact that the wording of a number of Carter's texts to Roy and to her friends were lifted verbatim from Glee.

• USA Today explains the timeline: Actress Lea Michele was in a relationship with Cory Monteith both on and off the show; he died of an accidental overdose in July 2013, and three months later, a tribute episode aired. That same month, October, was when Carter started sending Roy encouraging texts about him going to a better place and her learning to go on without him. It turns out some of those lines were Glee dialogue.
• I Love You director Erin Lee Carr tells USA Today that she wasn't the first to surface the Glee connection: Journalist Jesse Barron did so in a lengthy Esquire piece, but it "went under the radar for some weird reason," she says. Carr speculates that "when Lea Michele's boyfriend died, she was able to grieve, and everybody looked up to her and said, 'You're doing such a good job.' Potentially, I'm not certain, but what if Michelle Carter was like, 'Maybe that could be me.'"

• Boston.com shares one of the lines said by Michele's character that Carter texted in a nearly identical manner to a friend: "I just had it all planned out with Conrad. Now I have to do something different, maybe something better, I just don't think that that's possible. He was my person you know?"
• It's a quote that BuzzFeed actually flagged in a 2017 article that noted Roy's July 13, 2014, death came exactly one year after Monteith's July 13, 2013, death.
• Carr also spoke with Rolling Stone, which points out that Carter was effusive about Glee and Michele on Twitter as well. Carr says that the Glee details were "a part of the film where we reveal what really is going on inside Michelle's brain. She would say things to others that the actor Lea Michele had said in ... press interviews. I don't know, that's crazy to me. When I learned that, it really cemented that we were dealing with someone who has mental health struggles."
• Carr adds to USA Today that while "it really felt centered around Lea Michele," Carter also stole lines from Taylor Swift, the novel The Fault in Our Stars, and country music.
• A side fact from Boston.com: The documentary makers were the only ones who shot the courtroom proceedings.
• Fox News reports I Love You is just the latest in a string of true-crime films directed by Carr, who has also tackled the cases of New York City's cannibal cop, Gypsy Rose Blanchard, and Larry Nassar.

(More Michelle Carter stories.)