David Broome recently detailed the battle between him and award-winning actor Sean Penn over the new Netflix documentary The Day I Met El Chapo to Entertainment Weekly.
The series chronicles Mexican telenovela star Kate del Castillo and Penn’s infamous 2015 meeting with the cartel kingpin, El Chapo (whose real name is Joaquin Guzman). This event may or may not have helped with the eventual capture of the drug lord.
The project first came on Broome’s radar in September 2016 when he met del Castillo and told him she had the desire to tell her story in a documentary form, EW writes.
Del Castillo tells a very different story than Penn told Rolling Stone, so there were aspects Broome wanted to get into the film, EW writes. Broome had a feeling Penn would not want the story to come out, but Broome still wanted to give him a chance to participate in the documentary, so Broome went to Penn after most of the shooting was done. But he never heard back. But two weeks from launch, Penn’s agents called saying he had to see the documentary. Broome told them that he can “see it on Oct. 20 when it comes out,” according to EW.
EW explains that the major point of contention is that the documentary suggests Penn alerted the Department of Justice that he was going to a secret location in Mexico to interview El Chapo. Penn denies this.
Broome said that nowhere in the documentary do they say Penn was working with the DOJ or anyone in the United States government. Del Castillo’s criminal lawyer, Harland Braun, says that he thinks Penn told someone, most likely his attorney, a former federal prosecutor, that he was going down, for safety. The lawyer may have told others.
Broome personally thinks, according to the interview with EW, that Penn is “concerned he was going to look like a jerk.” Broome said that there is nothing in the documentary that is “going to be the cause of Sean being in any kind of harm’s way.”
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