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If you missed it at the Cleveland International Film Festival, the Mariska Hargitay-produced documentary I Am Evidence is now available on HBO On Demand, HBO Now, HBO Go and partners’ streaming platforms. It debuted Monday night on HBO. The film, which features Plain Dealer reporter Rachel Dissell, covers the scandalous backlogs of untested rape kits in multiple U.S. cities, including Los Angeles, Detroit and Cleveland. 

Co-directors Trish Adlesic and Geeta Gandbhir, producer Mariska Hargitay, and Wayne County, Michigan prosecutor Kym L. Worthy discuss what moved them to take on the rape kit backlog.

Mariska Hargitay’s role on top TV police drama Law & Order: Special Victims Unit has inspired her to pursue justice for rape victims.

There are more than 200,000 rape kits in this country that have never been tested. Never. Been. Tested. Victims have the courage to come forward “and then nothing is done about it. What are we saying?” Hargitay asks at the beginning of the new HBO documentary I Am Evidence, for which she is also a producer. “We’re saying you don’t matter.”

"I am a box on a shelf," says Ericka. And technically, she was right. Her name was written on a box containing the evidence from a violent sexual assault she reported well over a decade ago. Erika's box, along with thousands of other boxes containing untested rape kits, had been sequestered on a warehouse shelf undisturbed and left to wither and even expire without testing or prosecution—until Wayne County (Michigan) prosecutor Kym Worthy vowed to right this injustice.Now, after three years of filmmaking, this and other stories of sexual-assault survivors in other cities like Cleveland and Los Angeles have been crafted into I Am Evidence, a compelling piece of investigative filmmaking by acclaimed documentarians Trish Adlesic and Geeta Gandbhir.

Amid a current wave of coverage heightening awareness about sexual assault, the documentary focuses on a particular -- and particularly maddening -- aspect of law enforcement, with differing standards across cities regarding the processing of rape kits.

Many of those kits sit unprocessed, with officials pleading poverty or a shortage of man power. Yet because so many rapists are repeat offenders, that failure to act can mean allowing others to be victimized who might have been spared by a DNA match.

In the new HBO documentary I Am Evidence, Wayne County prosecutor Kym Worthy and actor and activist Mariska Hargitay take a walk by an abandoned Detroit warehouse, a tall, red building that's in the process of being torn down. But back in 2009, thousands of untested rape kits were discovered there, making it a glaring example of the backlog that has accumulated across the country.

Hargitay says that when she learned about the staggering number of untested rape kits—undeniable proof that women’s voices were being ignored—she was “mad, shocked, devastated, and simply outraged. I thought my head was going to explode. I couldn’t believe that people weren’t talking about it, that people didn’t know. . . . The fact that these kits weren’t tested means, to me, that [these authorities] are saying that women are not of value.”

"We are obviously in an unprecedented moment of cultural change on the issue of sexual violence. I am so deeply grateful for the courage of the women who have come forward, who have made the world pivot. And I will always look up to the heroes in this movement, like Gloria Steinem. This has been a truly awe-inspiring display of strength in numbers—and the strength of collective outrage has brought about this hard-won time of change. We must continue to move forward, fearlessly and relentlessly. I don’t want my kids to grow up in a victim-blaming culture."

Mariska Hargitay and Kym Worthy speak on The View