No one’s quicker to admit that Presumed Innocent desperately needs updating than author Scott Turow himself. Thirty-four years ago, his original 1987 novel was adapted into a well-received film starring Harrison Ford. More recently, not one, not two, but three producers reached out to him within six weeks about bringing the book to the screen again. This time, the Chicago-based lawyer turned author reluctantly agreed that perhaps the world was ready for another Presumed Innocent—with one big caveat. “The first thing [one of the producers] said was, ‘This is going to have to be different from the book you wrote,’” Turow tells Vanity Fair. Unlike a more precious writer, he agreed wholeheartedly: “I said, ‘Yes, obviously, that’s taken for granted.’”

A quick synopsis: Rozat “Rusty” Sabich, the book’s lead and hero, narrates his plight as a wrongly accused man. The married Sabich has an affair with deputy prosecutor Carolyn Polhemus—his colleague and subordinate—who’s found raped and murdered at the beginning of the story. Readers soon learn more about the ambitious and conniving Carolyn; she dressed provocatively, slept around, and enjoyed kinky sex. She’d dumped poor Rusty shortly before being killed; Rusty, conflict of interest be damned, then takes charge of a murder investigation that quickly turns on him. Most everyone in the saga is crooked except clueless but innocent Rusty, who’s exonerated by the book’s ending, only to learn that he has been protected by a corrupt legal system—and that the real killer has been in front of his eyes the whole time.

Not unlike Basic Instinct or Fatal Attraction, which got its own reboot last year, Presumed Innocent has been reimagined for a new era of prestige TV perhaps precisely because the problematic original demands a do-over. “I think we’re revisiting these stories now because the culture’s ready to see them in new ways,” says Turow. Thirty-seven long years, which include two waves of feminism and the #MeToo movement, have thankfully brought big changes to the culture, as well as a new Presumed Innocent set in contemporary times. “But it couldn’t just be old wine in new bottles,” says Turow. “It had to be a new vintage in its own right.”

As Turow wrote it, the case against Rusty Sabich hinges upon a few key pieces of evidence: a beer glass with Rusty’s fingerprints, common carpet fibers found at the crime scene that match ones from Rusty’s house, and sperm from a man with type A blood—like Rusty’s—discovered inside Carolyn’s body. Phone records reveal that Rusty’s house has made several calls to Carolyn’s, though the defense maintains that they were all work-related. It’s suspicious—but Rusty is very lucky that he got into this predicament just before modern forensic evidence became commonplace in American courts. “Just because of the DNA, Rusty from the book would be dead meat,” says Turow.

“Besides the fact that there’s cameras at every street corner now, science and evidentiary fact-gathering has changed so much that we have to be so mindful about logistics,” adds writer and producer David E. Kelley. Case in point: In the 2024 version of Presumed Innocent, Rusty’s cheek is swabbed. His home and car are fully sampled. His saliva is found on Carolyn’s neck, his skin cells beneath her fingernails, and a sperm sample is unquestionably his. An ample email and text trail lets investigators know the nature of every conversation they’ve had. So while Rusty’s affair in 1987 benefits from plausible deniability, there’s no such luck for modern-day Rusty, portrayed in Apple TV’s version by Jake Gyllenhaal.

The 1990 film was the first in a string of “wrongly accused man” roles Harrison Ford would play throughout that decade. It was a major pivot. “In the late ’80s,” says Turow, “Harrison Ford was the most famous male movie star in the world.” He’d just completed the last of the Indiana Jones trilogy, which overlapped with his role as Han Solo in Star Wars, and Ford had secured status as a “sensitive version of the John Wayne male,” says Turow. It was very hard for viewers not to love him, even as an adulterous Rusty Sabich.

“In the book and the film,” explains executive producer Rachel Rusch Rich, “Rusty’s wife has already forgiven him for cheating, and she’s sort of a proxy for the audience. He’s Harrison Ford and all, so viewers were just supposed to let the infidelity go.” Blink while you’re watching the original film, and you’ll miss confirmation that Rusty’s wife, Barbara, knows definitively about her husband’s affair. “There are 150 lawyers down there,” she tells him at one point. “Couldn’t they find someone who didn’t fuck her to handle the case?”

In fact, with the exception of wife Barbara and dead Carolyn, women are almost conspicuously absent from the Presumed Innocent book and its film adaptation. “The book’s a creature of a particular cultural moment when the presence of women in the workplace was new and really being felt,” says Turow. The only woman in a male-dominated prosecutors office would automatically be othered and vilified. “For women, especially ambitious women, a direct pursuit of power was seen as impossible,” adds Turow. And so the original indulges in an old trope that we don’t see much these days: “The woman who’s seen as having slept her way to the top is not a familiar figure anymore,” says Turow. “I couldn’t write the book that way today.”

Thanks largely to Rich’s much-needed female perspective, the new version is less male-centric, and isn’t so quick to forgive Rusty. “Regardless of his guilt or innocence of the murder, this Rusty’s certainly guilty of other crimes,” she says. “We didn’t give our Rusty a free pass.” Dream sequences show their Rusty committing the murder—further blurring any easy distinction between innocence and guilt.

The new Presumed Innocent has also deliberately created a modern world and workplace where women are everywhere. Rusty’s male therapist has been recast as Dr. Liz Rush; his cocounsel and sitting judge are Black women; and Rusty has a teenage daughter to be accountable to. All this female presence reflects 37 years of progress, of course, but it also serves to tell a better story. “[These women] of course complicate things for Rusty, and the fact that they’ve known Carolyn as well adds layers,” says Rich. When he’s not surrounded by male peers whose behavior is comparatively worse, Rusty’s improprieties feel distinctly less forgivable.

Another interesting addition is the perspective of a lower-level employee who knew of Rusty and Carolyn’s affair. She testifies about the “incredibly embarrassing” moment of catching them kissing, overhearing a fight in the parking lot, and as she calls them, sensing “undercurrents” that something untoward was going on. “You didn’t approve of this relationship?” she’s asked. “It was unprofessional,” she replies. The woman serves as the lone voice suggesting how everyone else at the office might feel about an affair between a boss and a subordinate.

Unlike every other character in the new Presumed Innocent, Carolyn Polhemus gets a nicer treatment this time around. Rusty’s descriptions of her in the book are mostly physical and usually pejorative: Carolyn’s “a good-looking blond with big tits” with “red lipstick and painted nails.” The sex scenes are graphic. As the story unfolds, readers learn Carolyn was also sleeping with another lawyer and the judge.

Terms like slut shaming and victim blaming didn’t exist in 1987, but Turow says that even then he was very aware of stereotypes and double standards. “A man who slept with every woman he could was seen as some kind of conquistador, whereas a woman who did the same was seen as a slut.” If he could go back, would he write her any differently? “Of course, obviously. Yes.”

Producers have therefore made the biggest changes to poor dead Carolyn. “In the book, she’s very promiscuous, calculated, and politically motivated,” says Kelley. “She’s not that here, and she has a genuine interest in Rusty.” At the same time, modern Carolyn, played by Norwegian actress Renate Reinsve, has a pre-MeToo edge to her that further blurs boundaries. “I kinda miss the old days where if two consenting adults wanted to touch each other, they could just…touch,” she purrs as she reaches for Rusty’s groin beneath the table.

Viewers will not be left unsatisfied by the new version’s sex scenes, but this time around, the affair is as emotional as it is physical—and the repercussions have been amped accordingly. In this Presumed Innocent, the stakes and suspects are up, the time constructions are way down, and nobody is presumed anything anymore.

And speaking of presumptions, what about that infamous ending? Those familiar with the original surely remember its controversial and loaded conclusion, and whether the new version will stick to Turow’s twist now remains to be seen—to this writer and even to Turow himself. “I’ll be as surprised as anyone else,” says Turow, who hasn’t yet seen the finale. “Even I don’t know whodunnit.”