Many people have argued that The Rachel Divide—Netflix's new documentary about Rachel Dolezal—should never have been released. This point hasn't just been made by thumb pundits on Twitter, but by people in the film itself, including some of her friends and family, who rightly point out that if the subject of the film wanted the controversy surrounding her to end, taking part in a film about her life is not exactly the best way to disappear.

But Rachel Dolezal does not want to disappear. She wants redemption. She wants to be back in the good graces of the black community, although I doubt this film is going to help her accomplish that. Dolezal has become such a punchline in American culture that it's easy to see her as simply a one-dimensional joke. But she, like all humans, is multi-layered, and where filmmakers Laura Brownson and Roger Ross Williams succeed is by helping the viewer understand what may have led to Dolezal's lies when her own explanations ("race is a social construct"; "white is a state of mind") are so unilluminating. They don't excuse her behavior, but they do help explain it.

Raised in Montana by fundamentalist Christians Larry and Ruthanne Dolezal—a couple who comes across as monstrously cruel in Rachel and her siblings' retelling—Rachel's parents believe that the Earth is 6,000 years old and listed one "Jesus Christ" as the attendant on their daughter's birth certificate. (Apparently a vivid imagination runs in the family.) Years after Rachel's birth, the couple adopted three black children from the U.S. and one from Haiti, because, they claim, they were "rescuing them from abortion." The parents had no connection to black culture nor their adopted children's past. As Esther, Rachel's sister, says, "They tried to raise us to be white. ... We were just white people with skin conditions."

In addition their complete lacking of cultural competency, the parents were terribly abusive to their kids, both physically and emotionally, according their adult children. Esther still has scars from her parents' beatings. "I don't hate anybody, but I do, let's say, have a deep disliking for Larry and Ruthanne," says Isaiah, Rachel's brother, whom she eventually adopted and raised on her own just to get him out of the Dolezal household. "It's the one job of a parent to give your child a childhood they don't have to recover from. If they have to, you done messed up. And that's something I had to do," he says.

The family has a biological son as well, Joshua Dolezal, and according to Rachel and her sister, he is the reason that Rachel was outed as fake black in the first place. Several years ago, Esther pressed charges against Joshua for sexual assault going back to her childhood, and Rachel planned to testify in court that Joshua had abused her, too.

"I was really the smoking gun for her case," she says, "because it was her word versus his word. He said he didn't do it. She said he did it. In the court of public opinion, me saying, 'And he did it to me too,' carried that weight in breaking that tie."

Joshua, now a writer and English professor at a private college in Iowa, was arrested and indicted on four charges of sexual assault in 2014, but while awaiting trial, he hired a private investigator to look into Rachel. It was that private investigator who tipped off media in Spokane that Rachel, the head of the local NAACP, was harboring a secret.

Now, it's possible Rachel's true ethnicity would have come out regardless: Plenty of people featured in the doc say there were questions surrounding Rachel before this all emerged, and although she denies it, there is some compelling evidence that Rachel sent herself anti-black hate mail in a deeply stupid effort to bring attention to racism in Spokane. But Joshua's attempt to discredit his sister worked: After Rachel's outing, everything she said became suspect, her credibility was shot, and the charges against him were eventually dropped. Esther never got her day in court.

Of course, none of this excuses Rachel's lies, and had Rachel not pretended to be black, perhaps Joshua would be sitting in jail at this moment. As the rest of the world seems to understand, you don't have to adopt a black identity to be an ally to black people. You don't have to be black to work with the NAACP or to raise black children or to believe that black lives matter. And by pretending to be black, Rachel's actions had a terrible and lasting impact on the actual black people in her life—not just her siblings, but her kids, who are the real victims in this whole sordid tale. Her two younger sons still live in Spokane, where everyone knows what their mom did. Her sons, it's clear from the film, just want this whole thing to go away. But the family's history of alleged abuse does complicate the narrative. Yes, Rachel may be a liar and a fraud, but is the reason we know she's a liar and a fraud because an alleged sexual abuser used her to save himself? An alleged abuser who is now walking free? Like everything about Rachel Dolezal, it's complicated, but this film—whether or not it should have ever been made—helps untangle both the motivation for—and the impact of—Rachel Dolezal's strange choices.