The FBI’s secret audiotapes of Martin Luther King Junior, revealing the civil rights leader’s adulteries, are at the heart of much of the controversy surrounding best picture nominee Selma. Ava DuVernay’s film suggests that President Lyndon Johnson in 1964 had them sent to King’s wife, Coretta Scott King — which Johnson loyalists fiercely denied. That suggestion was not contained in Paul Webb’s 2007 original screenplay, which DuVernay heavily rewrote. Chuck Fager, King’s colleague and Selma jail cellmate, said: “It probably was King on the tape.”
