“Carol’s life today is no more secure or certain than it was inside the Brotherhood,” wrote Scott Farwell in 2017 about the former FBI informant.
In April 2017, Scott Farwell wrote more than 18,000 words about a woman named Carol Blevins. The seven-part series was published in the Dallas News and detailed Blevins’s time as an FBI informant, which resulted in 13 convictions for members of the Aryan Brotherhood of Texas (ABT). “She lived with the ABT, gathering information the Cold War way — by sleuthing, connecting dots, memorizing detail,” wrote Farwell.
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However, Blevins herself was certainly no saint. She was a lifelong drug addict committed to do whatever it took to get her next fix. The disease of addiction never let her go and was often fueled by her own mental illness. Eventually when she became an informant, it was partially due to threat of death by the ABT and partially due to a desire to be seen.
In February 2024, Deadline announced that Scarlett Johansson would be playing Blevins in a movie about her time as a snitch. Where is she now? Here’s what we know.
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Where is Carol Blevins now?
“I never decided to be a CI [confidential informant],” Blevins shared with Farwell. “I just kept getting involved in s—, and kept getting deeper and deeper.” As of the time of this writing, Blevins has kept out of the public eye since the 2017 profile in the Dallas News. While she was working with the FBI, Farwell said the ABT met her basic needs — and she considered drugs a basic need — while working with the feds gave her a purpose.
What she really wanted was to start over, and Blevins was hoping her deal with the FBI would give her that. It did not. By the end of the exhaustive retelling of Blevins’s journey from normal kid to informant, she is back in the Dallas area surviving on a “$737 disability check and charity from her dad,” Ike Blevins. Her father is equal parts proud of what she did, and terrified because it put his life and the lives of his family in danger.
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“I don’t think they set me up to fail,” she said. “They did what they could do for me. All they could do is throw me out there and hope that I could make it.” They started screening her calls, essentially cutting Blevins off. Her life ricocheted between living in fear that she might die at the hands of an ABT member, and smoking meth with people associated with them. At one point she was studying computer network administration at DeVry but it’s unclear if she kept that up.
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Months before the April 2017 piece in the Dallas News, Carol attempted to take her own life. “She emptied six prescription bottles, three handfuls of pills, and washed them down with Diet Coke,” Farwell wrote. Two days later she woke up and asked, “Why am I here?” Did she mean why was she on the floor of her one-bedroom apartment, or why was she still alive? Blevins didn’t say.
Scarlett Johansson is playing Carol Blevins in a movie about her time as a confidential informant.
According to Deadline, the movie will pull from the Dallas News piece and stars Scarlett Johansson as Blevins. Titled Featherwood after the ABT nickname for Blevins and women like her, the project already has buyers seeing awards potential. Johansson is a producer with with a script coming from “Ned Benson, writer-director on Searchlight’s upcoming movie The Greatest Hits, and a writer on Marvel’s Johansson starrer Black Widow,” per Deadline.
It seems rather dangerous to draw more attention to Blevins and her story. Here’s hoping she is taken care of both personally and financially. “I’m a good person, but people don’t see that,” Blevins said to Farwell in 2017. “People think my past is who I am, but my past made me who I am.” In a perfect world, this film will help people to see the real Carol Blevins.
Source: https://www.distractify.com/p/carol-blevins-now
