Filmmaker Confronts Sex Abuser Grandfather in HBO Documentary, Exposing Painful Family History (Exclusive)

Photojournalist Amanda Mustard tells PEOPLE she made the film for "survivors who have been through the messiness of this and know the complexity of it"

Photojournalist Amanda Mustard grew up hearing stories about her grandfather's "touchy feely" ways — “but nothing was very specific,” she tells PEOPLE.

“My family would kind of tell dark jokes about him behind his back, but nobody ever talked about it as this serious thing that really devastated the family and was at the core of why we were so dysfunctional and disjointed,” she says.

It wasn't until after her grandmother Salesta died in 2014 and she accompanied her mother to Florida to see her grandfather, Dr. William Flickinger, that the dark truth began to unspool. And what began as a family photojournalism project turned into the harrowing HBO documentary, Great Photo, Lovely Life, which is available to stream on HBO Max now.

Mustard's documentary chronicles her years-long investigation into her grandfather’s sexual abuse crimes that spanned decades and explores the devastation it wrought on his family members — his daughter and granddaughter were abused, and both participated in the documentary — as well as others.

“I had been telling stories of other people, other places around the world, and I was just like, ‘I want to know more about my own story,’” she says. “I always knew a little bit because it was just in the family culture, but it was my eye-opening moment of being like, ‘Wait, I don't think this is normal,’ that set me off on this.”

Mustard, 33, who co-directed the film with Rachel Beth Anderson, says she made the film for "survivors who have been through the messiness of this and know the complexity of it."

“I made this for them to feel seen," she says. "I did not make this for true crime buffs. I did not make this for people who want easy answers or to be told, ‘That's the bad guy, and these are the good guys.' That is not the reality of experiencing incest and child sex abuse. That's why I made this.”

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As part of the documentary, Mustard, who is herself a sexual abuse survivor, spoke to some of her grandfather's victims in an effort to “offer clarity and acknowledgement for the people that he hurt,” she says. “I wanted to have an understanding for myself of what the hell happened here. But acknowledgement was why I was interested.”

Mustard's grandfather, Flickinger, was a Pennsylvania chiropractor and father of three. His known trail of abuse, which included crimes on toddlers and adult women, began in the 1970s. He eventually lost his chiropractic license and moved to Florida, where he was convicted of statutory rape of a 12-year-old girl in 1992. He spent two years in prison and had to register as a sex offender.

He spent time as a traveling salesman with his wife Salesta, who eventually left him with the help of Mustard's mother after 56 years of marriage.

"[Mustard's mother] didn't want to see her mom subjected to his abuse anymore," says Mustard, who also has a five episode podcast called Trauma Town coming out in January. "And I am not sure if it was physical, but it was certainly emotional and mental. And physically she was so ill, and my mom could see it, and she was like, 'Alright, you have one shot. Do you want to get in the car right now? Are we going to go?' And I thought that was so ballsy. We called it the grandma heist. She just stole my grandma back. And it was a really amazing moment."

Salesta refused Flickinger's request to see her before she died.

"He was trying to come up and I was there for their last phone call where she was like, 'Don't come,'" says Mustard. "She sent him a letter saying, do not come up here. She really did in the last moments of her life, find the strength to be like, 'Get out of my life.'"

Flickinger was living in a retirement facility in Florida when he was interviewed by Mustard for the documentary.

“I honestly wasn't expecting much from him,” she says. “I'm not a doctor, he's never been diagnosed with anything, but I do think that there's some psychopathy at play. I think that there always was with him; it explains a lot more than just the abuse. I knew who he was. He doesn't have the capacity for empathy."

When addressing the abuse, "He was minimizing it," she says. "He acknowledged to a degree a little bit, but he didn't give anybody what they deserved at all."

“I would love to believe that there is a piece of him that feels bad,” she says. “And I mean, maybe it is in there. I think maybe it is not to the degree that I would hope, but where I kind of saw it was at the end [of the documentary] when I hug him and his response is, ‘Oh, you still want to hug me?’ In that statement to me was this acknowledgement that, 'I know who I am, and I know you know who I am.'”

“One of the reasons I think that was important to show is being related to somebody like this is complicated,” she added. “I don't have as many complex feelings as other people in my family have because of proximity. But it's one of the hardest things about being abused by someone in the family is just the mix of feelings that we have. And there's not a lot of space in society that allows for victims to express the love and the hatred and all of these things because it's inconvenient. And I think that is a huge disservice to survivors.”

Flickinger died alone in March of 2019 at the age of 86. Mustard says his body was donated to science.

“I was very relieved, but I was also really sad,” she says about his death. “There was a lot of grief. It wasn't mourning him. It was mourning a lack of justice. ... There's so much pain that you've caused, and then you just die alone in bed."

She adds, "I think that making this film and putting this out there and helping other people feel seen is more accountability than could have ever come from him spending a year and a half in prison in his 80s.”

Great Photo, Lovely Life is available to stream on HBO Max now.

If you or someone you know has been a victim of sexual abuse, text "STRENGTH" to the Crisis Text Line at 741-741 to be connected to a certified crisis counselor.

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