Percy takes the essay home that evening and has his wife, Grace, read it aloud provocatively as a role play before the two engage in sex.

In court, Roger proposes that the accusations are in retaliation to Kimberly having been replaced in the school play after referring to her Jewish classmate Josh's lawyer father as a "money-grubbing shyster."

Kimberly then manipulates Josh with oral sex into convincing his father Larry, a renowned defense attorney, to defend Percy pro bono.

When Emily confronts her outside the courthouse, Kimberly reveals she filmed their sexual encounter, and uses it as blackmail to receive favorable press coverage.

Switching through channels, she watches snippets of an interview with a school shooter and news footage of Randa's suicide before returning to the soap opera.

Some of the topics that are commented on include racism, ignorance, discrimination, gender identity, homosexuality, intolerance, immigration, teenage behavior, suicide, parenting, deceit, narcissism and fascination with celebrity status and the entertainment industry.

"[4] Screenwriter Skander Halim developed the story based on a news article he read about an eighth-grade girl in his hometown of Ottawa, Ontario who accused her teacher of molesting her.

[4] After moving to Los Angeles and reading scripts for production companies several years later, Halim wrote the screenplay for the film, setting it in Beverly Hills.

"[9] While Stephen Holden of The New York Times praised the film: "An obscene, misanthropic go-for-broke satire, "Pretty Persuasion" is so gleefully nasty that the fact that it was even made and released is astonishing.

"[11] The Seattle Post-Intelligencer accused the film of being an "ugly, cheap attempt at satire",[12] and Slant magazine called it "a pretty unpersuasive lecture".

The site's consensus reads: "Pretty Persuasion aims for high satire but falls short of poignancy by depending on too much black humor, with too little redeeming humanity to provide balance".