TRUE STORY...

Genie is the name used for a feral child discovered by California authorities on November 4, 1970 in the Los Angeles suburb of Temple City. Her real name is Susan Wiley. She was born in April of 1957 and was the fourth (and second surviving) child to unstable parents, Irene and Clark Wiley. An older brother, John, also lived in the home. Her mother was partially blind due to cataracts and a detached retina, and her father (who was 20 years the mother's senior) was mentally unbalanced due to depression over his mother's death from a hit-and-run accident.
At the age of 20 months, Genie was just beginning to learn how to speak when a doctor told her family that she seemed to be developmentally disabled and possibly mildly retarded. Her father took the opinion to extremes, believing that she was profoundly retarded, and subjected her to severe confinement and ritual ill-treatment in an attempt to "protect" her.
Genie had spent her life locked in her bedroom. During the day, she was tied to a child's potty chair in diapers; and most nights, she was then bound in a sleeping bag and placed in an enclosed crib with a metal lid to keep her shut inside. Her father would beat her every time she vocalized and he barked and growled at her like a dog in order to keep her quiet; he also rarely allowed his wife and son to leave the house or even to speak, and expressly forbade them from ever speaking to Genie. By the age of 13, Genie was almost entirely mute, commanding a vocabulary of only about 20 words and a few short phrases (nearly all negative) such as "stop it" and "no more."

Mockingbird Don't Sing is an American independent film which is based on the true story of Genie, a modern-day feral child. The film is told from the point of view of Dr. Susan Curtiss (whose fictitious name is Sandra Tannen), a professor of linguistics at Los Angeles. Although the film is based on a true story, all of the names are fictitious for legal reasons. The name "Genie" has been changed to "Katie". The film was released to US audiences on May 4, 2001.

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