In 1919 the newly completed film "Ravished Armenia" was screened before an audience of New York philanthropists as part of a fund-raising campaign by the American Committee for Armenian and Assyrian Relief (ACASR.) The film was based on teenaged Armenian genocide survivor Aurora Mardiganian’s 1918 memoir of the same name, and was taken on a twenty-one city tour featuring a rotating cast of hired Aurora look-alikes as part of the ACASR’s fundraising campaign. In its depictions of ethnic violence and role in American philanthropic efforts, "Ravished Armenia" presents a compelling case study of early documentary film, representations of ethnicity, and depictions of trauma. The events depicted in "Ravished Armenia" are largely ahistorical and exploitative, filled with scandalous scenes of Armenian women tortured at the hands of orientalized Turks in manners unsubstantiated by historical record. Despite this, the film makes claims to authenticity through the use of an actual genocide survivor reenacting her own experiences and through an introductory title claiming verification of each scene by two noted diplomats. But who had authority in the representation of truth in Ravished Armenia? In this paper I argue that "Ravished Armenia" is representative of the many contesting claims of authenticity and truth surrounding the Armenian genocide immediately following the end of World War I, and that American philanthropic and diplomatic interests asserted a great deal of authority over how this event was represented and perceived throughout the world. As a young refugee Mardiganian’s narrative was easily manipulated by her American guardians, but when compared to literary accounts of ethnic violence in the Caucasus and Anatolia during this time period from both Armenian and Turkic sources, it becomes clear that the explicit depictions of violence and the othering of the aggressor present in the film were part of a broader trend in Caucasian discourse on ethnicity. This paper displays the clear link between the American production "Ravished Armenia" and Caucasian narratives on violence produced during the same time period, showing how in the period following World War I western diplomatic interests and emerging nationalist discourses throughout the colonized world influenced and informed each other.