Maternal Instinct Director Explains Why Taylor Parker Wasn’t Included

Singer Duffy Set to Share Kidnapping, Sexual Assault Experience for the First Time in Documentary

Jessica Dimmock did not want to give Taylor Parker a platform.

The director for the hit Netflix documentary Maternal Instinct, which examines the 2020 murder of pregnant Reagan Simmons Hancock at the hands of Parker, recently shared why the production intentionally didn’t sit down with Parker.

“We decided not to interview Taylor,” Dimmock told Oxygen in an interview published June 18. “Obviously, Reagan and her family are the most severe and the biggest victims in this, but [there are] other people that she deceived, other people that she hurt along the way, coworkers, former friends.”

As the filmmaker put it, “It just felt like it really needed to be told from their perspective.”

Indeed, the documentary instead featured stitched-together pieces of Parker’s life—including text messages and videos as well as interviews with Hancock’s family members and Parker’s ex-boyfriend Wade Griffin—before her crime to tell her story without giving her agency over her victims.

“It felt like, you know, I think as a director, ‘What is she going to say?’” Dimmock posited. “From everything that I’ve read, from the way that the trial went, I don’t think she’s remorseful. There doesn’t really seem to be evidence that she’s remorseful. If she said she was remorseful, could I even believe her, and does that matter?”

Parker currently sits on death row in Texas for the fatal attack of Hancock in 2020, during which she cut the 21-year-old’s unborn baby from her womb in an attempt to claim the child as her own. (Hancock’s baby girl Braxlynn Sage Hancock ultimately died.)

Netflix

In telling Hancock’s story, Dimmock noted that Parker’s perspective wouldn’t have added a clearer picture.

“I just wasn’t sure that there was anything that she could say that would be additive, or that I could believe,” Dimmock detailed. “and it felt disrespectful to those that she hurt the most to include her take.”

Parker has not spoken out publicly since her conviction of capital murder in 2022. In response to the sentencing, Hancock’s family expressed relief.

“I’m overwhelmed with happiness it’s over,” Hancock’s sister Emily Simmons told KSLA News 12 at the time, “because she has been such a burden in our life for so long now that I haven’t been able to think about my sister without thinking about her.”

Maternal Instinct is now on Netflix. For more on the documentary and the case it dives into, keep reading…

(E! and Oxygen are both part of Versant Media.)

For the latest breaking news updates, click here to download the E! News App