Kelsi Gelle

Dr. Richard Schur

FUSE 102

14 May 2020

The Pelican Brief (1993)

In the movie The Pelican Brief, two Supreme Court justices were killed within hours of

each other. Tulane University law student Darby Shaw created “The Pelican Brief” when

researching Justice Rosenburg who was one of the justices killed. In the making of the brief,

Shaw uncovered a murder conspiracy of the justices and discovered they were not killed for

political motivations. She gives her brief to her professor and lover Thomas Callahan who ends

up giving a copy of the brief to a close friend named Gavin Verheek, who is an FBI lawyer. Not

long after this encounter, Callahan was blown up by a bomb in his car as Shaw and him were

going home after a date. Luckily, Shaw avoided the car bomb but was questioned after by two

men who did not appear to be cops. This was a clear sign to her that she was now a murder target

and that her brief was accurate.

Shaw hid out in hotel rooms and found out that her computer, disks, and files were all

taken from her home. While hiding out, she got in contact with a reporter from the Washington

Post named Gray Grantham, who believed her theory to be correct. Before Grantham knew about

Shaw, he received a call from an informant calling himself Garcia who claimed to know

information regarding the murders. While moving hotels and waiting for Grantham, Shaw ended

up moving hotels and contacted Verheek for help. He agreed to meet and discuss the case with

her but got killed before they could. A wanted terrorist named Khamel was hired to kill the two
justices and was also the one who killed Verheek. Khamel tried to pose as Verheek to meet Shaw

but got shot in the head by an unknown suspect.

Darby met Grantham in New York City where she explained her theory in vigorous detail

to him. She believed the murders of the justices were done by Victor Mattiece because both of

them favored environmentalism and Mattiece was a rich oil man looking to drill under a

Louisiana bayou known for its endangered species of pelican. He wanted to appoint new justices

who were in favor of anything besides environmental issues so he could drill there. Grantham

and Shaw found that Garcia- who previously called Grantham- was a man named Curtis Morgan,

a lawyer for the firm representing Mattiece. They track down a video made by Morgan where he

confirms Shaw’s murder conspiracy that Mattiece ordered the assassination of the justices. With

this evidence, Grantham wrote his story for the Washington Post and allowed the FBI to

comment on it. Agents came in to discuss a deal to keep the story out of the paper, so Shaw

wanted to be sent out of the country and left alone. This deal goes through but Grantham and

Shaw also published the paper for the whole country to see.

The movie The Pelican Brief depicts a clear conspiracy, as it is what the plot of the movie

forms around. Overtime, conspiracy theories have become a way of organizing and

understanding how the modern world works. People always have questions, and conspiracy

theories seem to consistently have the answers. To be considered a conspiracy theory, there must

be evidence supporting a claim to help make sense of events that do not seem clear. In this case,

Darby Shaw is questioning if the two justices’ murders were actually for political reasons or not.

So, she researches details surrounding the justices to find out that her theory was correct. This
follows the part of a conspiracy theory definition that there needs to be evidence to back up an

idea that claims is true. Shaw did that and formed a brief of her murder conspiracy.

Even though conspiracy theories include forming ways to understand specific events,

people like to fabricate and deny the truth to create false claims. With The Pelican Brief, there

were people working with the FBI that knew exactly who murdered the justices but wanted no

trace of it to be present. Shaw’s brief linked Mattiece to the murders and the FBI was not thrilled

about her having these details. Even though there was evidence based on research Shaw did, the

FBI agents did not want the information to go public to prove the conspiracy theory did happen.

They wanted the truth to disappear so the public could think the assassinations were based on

political factors rather than why Mattiece actually did it.

During the movie, there was also a lot of storytelling that took place for Shaw to pass on

her theory about the murders. She had to figure out who she could trust in order to keep her life

and could not expose her stories without knowing for sure who she was dealing with. Humans

have been curious creatures from the beginning, meaning it is in their nature to have answers to

big, unanswerable questions which, in this case, is about the brief Shaw created. FBI agents were

after her throughout the whole movie but Shaw never gave away her case to any of them. She

was aware of who she encountered and knew how to go about beginning the process of

developing an accurate story.

Storytelling is not always a positive factor, especially with how the evidence of the

justices’ murders got out. When Shaw and Grantham posted the story in the paper after making a

deal with the FBI agents, there was a divide created that impacted political figures. There were

leaders that resigned to get out of politics as soon as the evidence was publicly released, showing
they wanted nothing to do with the topic. While the action removed all the negative out of

politics and revealed what they realistically entail, a clear split between politics and society was

created by the published murder evidence. Shaw released her major findings of her murder

conspiracy theory to the public and made major storytelling “history” in the movie The Pelican

Brief.