Brad Pitt and his Oscar-winning production team from 12 Years a Slave are to make a new film about the notorious rape of a high school student that was exposed by the Anonymous hacker collective.
Movie industry website tracking-board.com reported that Pitt's production company, Plan B Entertainment, has purchased the rights to a Rolling Stone article called 'Anonymous vs Steubenville'.
The article profiles the online hacker Deric Lostutter who exposed the ring of cover-ups designed to protect several high school football stars who raped a 16-year-old girl.
Lostutter's actions resulted in criminal charges against school officials and the accused rapists.
But because he hacked into private computers to expose their misdeeds, Lostutter also faces up to 20 years in jail, compared to the one-year sentence facing the rapists.
The project is the first production for Pitt and his partner Jeremy Kleiner since they won an Oscar for 12 Years a Slave.
Plan B is also working on a sequel to the zombie film World War Z, a biopic of Marilyn Monroe and a movie based in the epicentre of the civil rights movement in Selma, Alabama.
