Imagine this: your mother, partner, sibling, child, or best friend is murdered. They die in an episode of unimaginable suffering—kidnapping, torture, mass shooting, serial killing, or even cannibalism. The life of your loved one is unjustly and irreversibly taken, leaving you with a permanent void and grief that lasts a lifetime.

But the most unbearable part isn’t just the loss. Over time, you discover that a multimillion-dollar production company will release a series based on the life of the criminal who destroyed your family. Your favorite actor publicly thanks the opportunity to play the killer. At the supermarket, you see magazines with photos of the aggressor and victim side by side. In a taxi, the driver listens to a true crime podcast narrating the murder in detail. Thanks to global means of communication, thousands of strangers debate the case without knowing your reality.

This is not fiction for many victims’ families. The growing trend of true crime content has created a real media dystopia, where family pain becomes profitable entertainment. The entertainment industry, from influencers to major media outlets, capitalizes on suffering, exploiting real tragedies to feed the curiosity of an audience consuming horror from the comfort of home.

Meanwhile, families, often migrants, face legal and funeral expenses and financial struggles without receiving compensation or recognition for the use of their loved one’s image and story. The dehumanization of these tragedies and the surrounding sensationalism demand an urgent ethical rethink of the audiovisual production model.

True crime should not remain a way for strangers to profit from others’ pain. It’s time to question how we consume this content and demand a more responsible, empathetic, and fair narrative.