Flint Water Crisis Movie Goes Ahead Without Cher

Singer-actress Cher, who has used her celebrity to raise awareness of the Flint drinking-water crisis, has dropped out of a TV movie on the ordeal, according to reports from the entertainment industry. The 70-year-old Oscar-winning “Moonstruck Actress” was to have played the matriarch of a Flint family affected by high levels of lead in their tap water.

Cher has been a vocal critic of Michigan Gov. Rick Snyder and his administration’s handling of the manmade disaster, taking on the governor in a Twitter rant after he declared a state of emergency in Flint in January 2016, nearly two years after Flint residents began complaining about discolored, lead particle-filled tap water. Cher donated 180,000 bottles of water to Flint at the time, declaring, “This is a tragedy of staggering proportion and shocking that it’s happening in the middle of our country.”

“Flint,” the Sony Pictures Television movie for the Lifetime network, will go on despite Cher’s exit. Family commitments will keep her from flying to Toronto, where filming will begin next month, she said in a statement to The Hollywood Reporter.

“This has been a project so near and dear to my heart, and I was truly looking forward to helping tell this story,” Cher said in a statement. “Unfortunately, I will be unable to leave Los Angeles during the scheduled filming as I am dealing with a serious family issue that prevents me from going on location for the April filming.”

• See Also: Flint Water Crisis Critic Cher to Star in TV Movie About Ordeal

Cher had reached out to co-producers Craig Zadan and Neil Meron and asked to be part of the movie after they optioned the rights to “The Toxic Tap,” Time magazine’s Feb. 1, 2016, cover story.

The Flint movie will have a political slant, shedding light on what will be framed as a “toxic crime,” but it will also chronicle some of the human drama of the crisis.

Thirteen state and local officials, including two high-ranking emergency managers appointed by the governor to oversee Flint’s finances, have so far been charged in an ongoing criminal investigation of Flint’s water contamination.

Last week, Michigan’s top public health epidemiologist was ordered by a judge to apologize to residents of Flint for failing to disclose evidence that linked a deadly outbreak of Legionnaire’s disease to the city’s improperly treated water supply. A dozen people have died of Legionnaire’s disease, and nearly 100 have been sickened since 2014, the year the city began drawing its drinking water from the Flint River as part of a cost-saving move.

The consequences of lead poisoning can be serious and long lasting. Lead’s trail is virtually invisible, discoverable only through finger-prick blood test or when children begin showing signs of learning disabilities, reduced IQ, behavioral changes, antisocial behavior, anemia, hypertension, renal impairment, immunotoxicity and a plethora of other neurological and behavioral problems that are thought to be irreversible.

Michigan civil rights officials said in a blistering, 135-page report earlier this year that the Flint water crisis occurred as the result of “systemic racism” and represented a “complete failure of government.” The report, which delved into the history of race and racism in Flint, also called for changes in the state’s emergency manager law and more training on racial bias at all levels of state government.

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