Justine Sent 10,000 Letters To Convicted Female Killers In Prisons

In March 2019, journalist Justine van der Leun sat in a New York courtroom for the murder trial of Nicole Addimando. After years of abuse, Nikki had shot and killed the father of her two young children after he violently raped her. As the prosecution painted her as a “master manipulator”, Justine was left wondering: was this normal? Determined to find out, she surveyed 10,000 incarcerated women across 27 American states. More than 90 per cent of those who responded reported a history of abuse, and 28 per cent said their crime was a direct act of survival. Purchase Justine's book Unreasonable Women. https://fave.co/4B4FmEx To Help Tanisha visit Justine's website here. https://unreasonable-women.base44.app/stand-with-tanisha We want to hear from you! Take our quick 3-minute survey for your chance to win a $1,000 gift card. https://survey.alchemer.com/s3/8954679/HF-BUS-2026 GET IN TOUCH Follow us on Instagram and TikTok @truecrimeconversations https://www.instagram.com/truecrimeconversations/?hl=en Want us to cover a case on the podcast? Email us at [email protected] mailto:[email protected] or send us a voice note. https://help.mamamia.com.au/en-US/send-a-podcast-voice-note-467960 MAMAMIA OFFERS: Get access to Very Peri, Mamamia's exclusive perimenopause series, for just $59. 25 world-leading experts, over 20 on-demand sessions, available now. We’ve sorted through the noise so you don't have to. Go toveryperi.com.au http://veryperi.com.au/ today. You hot? Same. Make sure to leave us a rating and review on Apple & Spotify to let us know how you're liking the episodes. CREDITS Host & Executive Producer: Gemma Bath Guests: Justine van de Leun Produced by Ella Maitland Video Editor: Jacob Round Audio Design: Tegan Sadler Mamamia acknowledges the traditional owners of the land on which we have recorded this podcast. Become a Mamamia subscriber: https://www.mamamia.com.au/subscribe https://www.mamamia.com.au/subscribe See omnystudio.com/listener https://omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:03Gemma Bath?

  It's March 2019 and journalist Justine Van der Loon is sitting in the front row of a courtroom in New York for the trial of Nicole Addimando. She's been charged with murder. After years of abuse at the hands of the father of her two small kids, she shot and killed him after being violently raped. Justine watched as the prosecutor painted her as a master manipulator, even as a police officer testified that she'd been at high risk of being killed within her relationship. Watching it all play out, Justine felt shocked. Was this normal? This was the case that lit a fire in Justine. She started to dig into women's prisons.

• 0:46Gemma Bath?

  She wanted to know if Nikki was an anomaly, if there were more women like her sitting in cells. What she discovered was far more devastating than she could have ever imagined.

• 1:04Gemma Bath?

  I'm Gemma Bath and you're listening to True Crime Conversations, a podcast exploring the world's most notorious crimes by speaking to the people who know the most about them. Most incarcerated women remain largely unknown, their names replaced with inmate numbers and their personal histories obscured by their crimes. Justine was determined to change that. She wanted to know more about these women. She wanted to understand why they were inside. So she sent them letters. 10,000 women incarcerated across 60 facilities and 27 American states were sent to survey handcrafted by Justine. She got 1,005 responses.

• 1:49Gemma Bath?

  The results were astonishing. More than 90% reported a history of abuse across their lifetimes. 26% reported childhood sexual abuse. 38% had been in domestic violence relationships. 28% reported that their offence was a direct act of survival or committed under duress. Justine poured her findings into a book called Unreasonable Women: Stories of Criminalised Survival. In it, she focuses on the life and crimes of three women, Tanisha Williams, Gemma Heffernan and T.C. Brooks.

• 2:29Gemma Bath?

  Across seven years and 800 hours of interviews, Justine is a wealth of knowledge. We invited her onto the show to tell us everything. Justine, thank you for joining us on True Crime Conversations. I want to start with Nikki. When did you first come across her case and what made you want to cover her story?

• 2:56Speaker 01

  So Nikki Addimando, she's a young mom from upstate New York, a little city called Poughkeepsie. And in 2017, she shot her partner point blank in the head on the couch in their shared apartment where their two very small children were living with them, were asleep in a bedroom, gathered her kids, ran out the door, basically ended up flagging down a police officer and saying it was self-defense, it was self-defense. And from there, so much unraveled, but she was prosecuted for murder, she was held in jail and she was ultimately incarcerated for 19 years to life for what I believe was

• 3:36Speaker 01

  self-defense and what, you know, spoiler alert, but ultimately she appealed and got out. That story, the shooting happened in 2017, I came upon it in 2018. But I think I came upon it first through an organisation called Survived and Punished, which is an organisation in the US, they have local chapters and they deal with criminalised survival, which is women, mostly women, mostly women, who have been punished for actions they took to survive abuse or assault. Survived and Punished usually focuses on women of colour, does campaigns for them.

• 4:18Speaker 01

  And Nikki is a white woman, but they were amplifying her story. And so I started reading some news articles just about the story of this young woman and I became completely fascinated by the two different narratives. There was the narrative by the people who were supporting her, there was the narrative, well, there were many different narratives. There were people supporting her, there were the people who were completely against her in the town. There were the activists like Survived and Punished, who have like an ideology and an idea about these sorts of instances. There was the newspaper, there was the DA, there was, there were so many different versions

• 5:01Speaker 01

  and I just got super drawn into finding out what really was going on.

• 5:08Gemma Bath?

  Can you give the listeners a bit of an idea of what the relationship she was living in was actually like? Because some of the details in there are quite shocking.

• 5:20Speaker 01

  They're quite shocking. Now that I've been working on these stories for eight years now, they're, they're not that shocking to me because this happens to so many women. However, Nikki's case has some particularly strange details that I think are especially perverse. So her partner was a gymnastics coach named Chris in their small town. And, you know, according to Nikki, he, and other people saw evidence of this, that's sort of part of the story. They got together when they were really young.

• 6:05Speaker 01

  He started abusing her. He was sweet and patient at first, right? He was, and she really loved that. She had a history of sexual abuse, which is very common for women in prison and is common for people who get into abusive relationships later. And she, so she really like hated sex. And he was super patient with her and like took his time, you know, and she appreciated that. But somewhat early on, she, he, she told her mom, hey, I woke up and he was finishing inside me.

• 6:49Speaker 01

  Is that normal? And her mom, which is another part of the story and how she ended up in the situation, her mom just kind of was like, that's just men, you know? She was pretty like, she didn't have a lot of experience in the world. She was young when they got together, she was 19, I think she was 19, he was maybe like 20 or 21. And she just didn't, didn't quite know. But from there, little by little, and as she has said to me, like, yeah, if he did the things that he later did to me on our first date, I wouldn't have stayed with him. It was slow.

• 7:26Speaker 01

  So he began abusing her, he began, he was sexually violent with her. And then she got pregnant with their son and she was about to leave, trying to leave around that time. But when she was pregnant, he kind of said, listen, I'm so excited. It's all going to be great, I won't do anything to you anymore. And then he kept his word for the pregnancy. So she really wanted to be a mom, they got this little apartment, they painted it and she thought, okay, I have my, my boyfriend back, the sweet guy that I knew.

• 8:08Speaker 01

  Six weeks after she gave birth, you know how the doctors, I don't know if in Australia, like here it's six weeks after you can go back to having sex. Now, never met anyone personally who's been up for that.

• 8:24Gemma Bath?

  No, no, no.

• 8:25Speaker 01

  At six months. And she was no different for so many reasons. So he basically, according to her, he said, all right, you've done what you need to do. It's six weeks, time for, I get, I get mine now. And she said, like, no, you know, I can't, I'm not ready, I don't want to. He's, if I recall correctly, slammed her head against a door frame, raped her and said, you know, you're a good mom, but I have needs too. And from there, for years, things got way, way, way worse.

• 9:03Gemma Bath?

  Well, he was uploading videos, he was tying her up, it just kept escalating.

• 9:11Speaker 01

  So during, so that was her first child. He was increasingly abusive, she kept, she kept documentation and she wanted to leave him, she ended up getting pregnant again. I think this happens a lot to women. She didn't have like finance, she, he was kind of the breadwinner, but they didn't have very much money to begin with. She did not have financial stability because she had always really wanted to be a stay-at-home mom, like that was kind of her dream. She had a, she had an early childhood education degree, she was, she had always, she just loved, she just wanted to raise her children, that's what she wanted to do. She wanted to have her family.

• 9:53Speaker 01

  I'm, I'm, I'm trying to remember if this is exactly accurate, but I do believe she was thinking of leaving when she again got pregnant. And that time, you know, the violence like escalated so much. He was, at one point, he burned her vagina with spoons that he had lit over an open flame on the stove, because I don't remember what slight, how she slighted him. It seems like, you know, it seems like, I think people have theorised that he had become increasingly addicted to very violent pornography online.

• 10:38Speaker 01

  And I've looked through a lot of his search history and like, I'm, I'm like so naive about this kind of thing, or I was, that I remember going to like Pornhub, because Pornhub was one of the places that he was really passionate about. And I'd never been to Pornhub before. And I was like, what the? And I'm looking there and I said to my husband, did you know that if you go on the internet and you go to certain sites, you can find porn on anything for free? And he was like...

• 11:14Speaker 01

  Like that's the intern.

• 11:16Gemma Bath?

  Welcome.

• 11:18Speaker 01

  Welcome to the internet. He's like, you don't know that that's like, like forty five percent of, or ninety five percent of the internet. But I ended up like, looking at his searches, you know, and it was, it, it showed, you know, it came in these big files of discovery, but it was,

• 11:39Speaker 01

  it was videos that it is very unclear if this is with a consenting person or not. It is videos of violent sex, people being tied up, people being forced. And it seemed like he had like, a kind of compulsive, compulsive need to watch more and more of that. So, you know, people have theorized that like, it just needed to be more and more intense for him to be satisfied by it. And then he began to try his hand at making his own amateur porn, essentially sex trafficking her on the internet. I don't know if that means that you got money. I don't know

• 12:22Speaker 01

  if that, I don't know if he made any money, you know, he wasn't even have some popular channel. There were a couple of screenshots taken that I have seen, that I have looked at, of like, her bound, naked, bruised, and with captions like, four hours of toys and torture tonight, or, you know, bitch begging for mercy. You know,

• 12:49Speaker 01

  she was very scared to come forward because the particular cruelty to this kind of exploitation is that he, she was really scared, A, that these pictures were going to be seen, so that she would be, people would think she was a bad mom, like, people would think she was a slut, people would think she was bad, people would think she wanted it. And he told her, she has said, that he would, like, no one's gonna believe her, that she didn't want this.

• 13:22Speaker 01

  She's going to be, you know, he'll get the kids, like, it's gonna be, so she felt like she was trying to take some evidence. She was horrified, she was humiliated, she, like, she is, like, the last person who could bear the idea of, like, anyone even seeing her naked, and now there were these images of her online. And, yeah, so she was kind of gathering evidence, but also really lost as to how to bring that forward, and how to navigate even trying to get out of this thing. And she thought of this as kind of, it almost as a type of blackmail that he had against her. It was a really very violent and impossible situation that she found herself in.

• 14:07Gemma Bath?

  And the night that she shot him, he'd been violent with her.

• 14:12Speaker 01

  She was, the night that she shot him, so many things had happened in like, the time leading up to that. So Nikki had been trying to figure out how to get out. She understood that she was in a lot of danger. She had one friend who was trying to help her, she had a therapist who was trying to help her. She had been going to New York State trained sexual assault forensic examiner nurses, and she had files from that, that show her bruised, injured, you know, violated, like, it was very violent. But also, there was like, a weird thing, I mean, I guess it's not that weird, because it happens a lot, but it was

• 14:57Speaker 01

  like, every, other than these few people, everyone in the community was like, trying not to see what was happening. You know, and so I think it was just this weird experience for her of it being clearly happening, and there's so many images in which it's like, she has a bruise under a sunglasses, you know, and she's being seen by people, but they're not seeing her. So, but finally, around the time that this occurred,

• 15:28Speaker 01

  a mom at the gymnastics studio, who was also, I believe, a social worker, or something like that, had seen her and then had made a report to CPS, and that's Child Protective Services here. I guess maybe she was a mandated reporter, maybe she just saw the signs. And so she made a report that said that the mother is bruised, and she's, and that, one of the children is anxious, and she's concerned that they're witnessing domestic violence. So CPS opened a case. And the opening of that case, and their coming to the house, precipitated what ended up happening that evening. I don't know if it was the day or

• 16:11Speaker 01

  the day after, but within a day or so, that is what precipitated the shooting.

• 16:19Gemma Bath?

  Up next, Justine unpacks what happened in the courtroom during Nikki's trial.

• 16:25Gemma Bath?

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• 17:02Gemma Bath?

  We often hear that when a woman tries to leave, or says that she's leaving, it's often when she's most in danger. You went to the trial to cover it. With all of this background, and you're, you're sitting there, listening to the proceedings, what did you make of it, seeing the trial unfold?

• 17:26Speaker 01

  The trial was, I don't know that I've ever been to a full trial before. I had, like, convinced the judge to let me. I was a freelance reporter, but I, he was like, you can't sit and take notes. And I wrote a letter explaining why I should be able to. And he allowed me to, which perhaps he now regrets. He's no longer a judge. But he, so I, I went and I would, it was a very high profile in that town, and people were really divided. And Nikki had all of these supporters who knew about her case, a lot of domestic

• 18:07Speaker 01

  violence advocates, friends of hers, people who knew her. So they would dress in like, all purple, or they would wear purple shirts, that's the color of domestic violence awareness. His people, the people from the gymnastics studio, his family, these people who really denied that he could do anything, and really, you know, put forth the narrative that she was this, like, manipulative woman who had killed him in cold blood for absolutely no reason. And they would, we would all kind of like, so I would go take my little seat in the front, very near the witness box, and I would be, because of the way the judge wanted it, like, on the side with his people. So I could kind of hear them, like, whispering a little bit behind me. Her people were on the other side. It was a super, super tense

• 18:50Speaker 01

  environment. It was so heavy in the room. I believe it took almost a month. I went almost every day. What I knew, because I had a lot of, I hadn't, I hadn't really talked to her, I met her once really briefly, but she, her attorneys were saying, like, you cannot speak to media. But I had a lot of access through the people, like, her, you know, her, the people who, who were supporting her, other ways. So I had, like, so much information

• 19:27Speaker 01

  that I thought, like, okay, it's pretty kind of clear, right, that, that this was self-defense. And even if it's not clear that, according to the letter of the law, that's a self-defense, because I think that self-defense law is completely flawed, and doesn't have any space for women and survivors, and women and intimate partner, you know, in violent relationships. But even that, like, at least what was clear to me is that this woman had been so terribly abused, because she had so much evidence, like, more evidence than anyone could ever possibly have, so much documentation. So what was so bizarre in the trial was to see

• 20:07Speaker 01

  the prosecution basically negate all of that, to see them have so many different explanations for why it wasn't true. She wasn't abused, she liked it, she was into it, or she made it up, or she was a malingur, or she wanted attention, this was all part of her plan, she was a master manipulator, all of these kind of really, what seemed to me, outlandish narrative that they created. And then it had nothing to do with the facts that I was seeing. And to me, that was a very upside-down experience, very disorienting.

• 20:46Gemma Bath?

  Well, it was a jury trial, right? So how do you think the jury was convinced to find her guilty?

• 20:55Speaker 01

  Well, I talked to jurors, a bunch of them. And it still escapes me a little bit, how they were convinced. But I would say that after doing this work for my book, on other such cases, I think that, first of all, you know, her defense didn't know the level of misogyny that they were going to be up against. And so, yeah, sort of not. I mean, I, yes, because a woman ended up in prison for many years. But I, I do think that in these trials, the prosecution can be so venal. And they, they really know how

• 21:40Speaker 01

  to play on all of the biases that we have, unconscious or not. They, they kind of really knew how to spin a story. And then I would just say that I, I thought a lot about this when I was writing my book and looking at some of the different cases. I was, I was looking at jury selection processes for, you know, cases when a woman has acted in self-defense, for example. And I was just thinking, you know, I was reading the transcripts, and in them, the attorneys will ask the jurors,

• 22:17Speaker 01

  Have you ever been, you know, a victim of abuse or assault? And do you, and, and basically, so if you say yes, which so many people do, so many women especially do, because this is a central female experience, the experience of, you know, gender violence, then they will say like, you probably need to be struck from the jury because you can't uh decide in a, you know, unbiased way.

• 22:47Gemma Bath?

  Hmm.

• 22:48Speaker 01

  Nobody's asked, hey, have you ever beaten someone? Hey, have you ever raped someone? And I'm sure if they were, they would say no, because who's going to admit to that? So like, then you have this, I don't believe a jury of, of a woman's peers is there.

• 23:03Gemma Bath?

  Yeah.

• 23:03Speaker 01

  Because if she is somebody who's been violated, abused, assaulted, and her 12 jurors are people who have never experienced that, but maybe have done it, we don't know, you know? Who is deciding like her, her, like her guilt or her innocence? So I, I do, I did find like the jurors that I talked to later, they were, um, it was a, it was a female prosecutor, it was a female, you know, heavily female jury. And there was a bit of an attitude, one of them burst into tears. I think she had not wanted to do it and had felt a great deal of guilt. And she kind of shut the doors on me saying like, I cannot talk about this, I cannot.

• 23:47Speaker 01

  I think she was very, very guilty. I think she had been pressured perhaps.

• 23:51Gemma Bath?

  Yeah.

• 23:51Speaker 01

  Into, but other ones were like, sorry, like, sorry that you, you messed up your life. You know, sorry that you didn't do life right like I did. And I think that can be something that people feel. Like, you should have done it differently and now don't come crying that, you know? And you killed him. And, and a big issue with her case, and this is to be, to be totally frank, and, and this is something that happens in a lot of these similar cases. He was lying down and that was something that was very hard for people to get over. They would, they said, I think the, the prosecution argued that he had been asleep.

• 24:31Speaker 01

  Now, Nikki has, I think, been very honest about everything, like everything she has said, I have always found to be true. The fact is, there is no way to know if he was or was not asleep. She, she says he wasn't, she says he was lying down, he had just raped her. Um, he pulled, he pulled the gun, he planned to kill her and she got control of the gun. And when he said, um, according to her, he said, uh, you're not going to kill me, because he had so much control over her. He said, here's what's going to happen, you're going to give me the gun. I'm going to kill you, I'm going to kill myself and then your kids will have nothing. She was holding the gun. That's how, he was not scared, even when she was holding a gun.

• 25:12Speaker 01

  But when he said, her kids would have nothing, she shot him. And she always says he was lying on the couch. I think that that became like a big technical point on which to rest the case, which the jury could say, well, it wasn't self-defense because he was lying down. Okay, if he was standing up, she'd be dead. Like, she, she's, she's like five foot, five feet tall, she's like 100 pounds. What is she going, he wasn't a big guy, but like, he was very strong. And so it, it, to my mind, it can absolutely still be self-defense, especially in a situation like this, even if he's lying down.

• 25:57Speaker 01

  Because if he's not lying down, what woman is like fist fighting a guy?

• 26:01Gemma Bath?

  Hmm.

• 26:01Speaker 01

  Who's like, gonna go like in fisticuffs with some dude? Nobody who wants to live, you know, and it was his gun, his registered gun, his, his fingerprints.

• 26:12Gemma Bath?

  Well, she received 19 years to life.

• 26:18Gemma Bath?

  Would it be safe to say that this case lit a fire in you?

• 26:24Gemma Bath?

  Because reading your book, that's how it comes across. You can feel your, your anger and your passion.

• 26:33Gemma Bath?

  Because after this case, it, it was like you kind of found out and spoke to everyone you possibly could to try and find out, is this happening to more women across America? Are there more women like Nikki behind bars? What did you find?

• 26:51Speaker 01

  Yeah, I found that our prisons are absolutely full of Nickys stuffed with them, teeming with them. Um, Nikki is like criminalized survival 101, because she's very easy for average woman to see herself in Nikki. You know, preschool teacher, stay at home mom, white, middle class, small, sweet. You know, she kind of fits, she ticks the boxes of the perfect victim. But like this happened to her because she didn't die, you know? This, so how many other people is this happening to? Um, and I looked into that by calling around to experts. And I said, is this common?

• 27:32Speaker 01

  And every expert, formerly incarcerated women, attorneys, activists, people in this space, everyone said, yeah, it's common, it's been common for like hundreds of years, you know? And it has happened since 1855, when the first case of an enslaved woman who was uh, hanged for killing the man who purchased her when she was 14 years old and raped her until she was 19. So it has a long history, um, but uh, there was no real data showing how widespread it was. And I just really wanted to find that, I wanted to find how widespread it was. I suspected, you know, and anecdotally, I knew.

• 28:14Speaker 01

  But then, yeah, I went into this wild project and, and got a thousand letters from people saying, yep.

• 28:23Speaker 01

  You know, not all of them, but it's, it's very, very common what happened to Nikki.

• 28:27Gemma Bath?

  Yeah, so you basically created a survey. And over the course of three years, you sent 10,000 women in states all across America, a letter asking these questions about their imprisonment and how they ended up there.

• 28:48Gemma Bath?

  And I'm really interested in the fact that you only received 1,005 replies. I mean, that is a lot of replies, your mailbox was overflowing. But compared to how many you sent out, why do you think you only received that small portion of the 10,000 back?

• 29:09Speaker 01

  So I would think so as well, but actually in the world of data, it's like a hugely successful survey. Um, it's a hugely successful response rate. So that's just like how it is when you send, I, I worked with a Yale political science professor to help me make a very simple survey. So it was a letter with a survey, but it wasn't like a dear so and so, very specific letter. It was a form letter that I wrote, hand wrote like, dear Nikki, for example, and signed my name, added a crossword puzzle as a thank you, because I couldn't send stamps. Um, and then added the 16 point survey, um, and sent it to 10,000 women. I do not know how many people got it, because the, these are, um,

• 29:52Speaker 01

  prisons are kind of their own fiefdoms and you don't know what happens. For all I know, things got trashed, lost, whatever. Um, but

• 30:04Speaker 01

  you know, first of all, I would say that some people aren't going to answer, because like, who am I, just a random stranger writing, asking for the details of your life?

• 30:13Gemma Bath?

  Hmm.

• 30:13Speaker 01

  Other people are scared if they're in legal proceedings. Um, some, there's a lot of mental illness. Um, there's a lot of poverty and maybe even a stamp was too much. There's a lot of, um, you know, people don't necessarily have like the skills to even be writing. We have, I mean, the education level of people in our prisons, they're like our repositories for our social failings. So, but to a thousand, it turns out that a thousand out of 10,000 is a hugely, um, actually successful rate of return. So, you know, nine, who knows where 9,000 went, but 1,000 came back.

• 30:55Gemma Bath?

  What was it like for you to start receiving those replies and, and filtering through them? I can imagine over those years, it would become quite consuming. But what was it like reading these women's stories?

• 31:12Speaker 01

  So I, I think the first time I would go check my P O box and like, I sent them out. And then I thought like, because I'm going to write back. Because I, I didn't plan, by the way, I wasn't like, oh, I'm going to send 10,000 letters. I was like, I'm going to send letters as the states give me names, some states didn't give me names, um, of people incarcerated and murdered and manslaughter and hopefully they'll write back. It started reasonably, it ended up all consuming indeed. But so I remember sending like my first batch and then waiting and waiting and checking my P O box. And then they came, the first batch came in from Oregon Coffee Creek Correctional Facility. And it was like five letters and I was just like, I felt like a, um, like a, a war wife or something. You know, and you never get letters, like, right?

• 31:56Speaker 01

  You never get letters anymore. So, and, and you're not excited by it, but I was like, oh my God, it worked, like they're writing. And I, I, I ran home with these letters, I like opened them all and I, um, and they were amazing, immediately amazing. Immediately, uh, the very first ones were proving what I was, you know, my theory. And so, yeah, so it, you know, more and more came pouring in. It was, uh, I think I was sending a lot out during COVID. And so I actually had like a pretty good amount of time on my hands, um, to be sending these out. Um, although that didn't account for all of it. I will say that at a certain point, it got really overwhelming,

• 32:39Speaker 01

  because people didn't just fill out the survey and I'm grateful for that. But they wrote reams, I mean, some people just filled out the survey, but most people added more. And they really told their stories. And they were also terrible, like every story, you know, every story was like worse than the last. Every story had, not every story, but so many stories are the uncle that raped you, the, the stepdad, the sheriff in the town, um, the, the no food, the empty refrigerator, the lights are off, um, the kids at school make fun of you, you're alone, your boyfriend's friends all raped you, like, it was just this litany of like poverty and abuse and, um.

• 33:28Speaker 01

  At a certain point, there was a point in the middle where I felt I kind of got like, so I thought of it as really representative of mass incarceration. Because I think mass incarceration aims to totally dehumanize

• 33:47Speaker 01

  individuals and and to to kind of create a problem that's so large that you think, oh, forget it, you know, this is impossible. And even though it was a thousand, I was becoming a little numb to it and a little like another story. So I did have, and I have a chapter, like a portion of my book called Little Foxes, where I kind of grapple with all of the questions that this project brought up because

• 34:13Speaker 01

  while it's filled with Nickies, while the prisons are filled with Nickies, they're not filled with angels, they're not filled with innocents, you know, it's not filled, there are plenty of women who killed their children, who killed their children in terrible ways, you know? People who've done terrible things. And so their stories, and even people who have acted in self-defense and who have the horrible circumstances, have also had the agency to do these things. And so I had to also like grapple with all of that. It wasn't just a series of wrongful convictions and like, oh, this, it was much more systemic and nuanced than all of that. So, um, but I came back to like where I stood to begin with. It just was a bit of a journey.

• 34:57Gemma Bath?

  So would you say that it reiterated your fear or your belief that there was a large portion of women that were in prison in America for criminalized survival, as you call it?

• 35:12Speaker 01

  I never asked anybody, were you acting in self-defense? Were you acting to protect yourself? Because I maybe should have, because it would have made for a snappier survey. But my political science professor who helped make it was like, don't, you know, to make it as pure as you can, don't lead them.

• 35:30Gemma Bath?

  Yeah.

• 35:31Speaker 01

  Open-ended. So with an open-ended, you know, open-ended questions and my own, like, reading each of them and seeing, is this an act of protecting yourself or a loved one? Then it was, the the numbers worked out to at minimum thirty percent of women in prison in America for murder or manslaughter were protecting themselves or a loved one from abuse or assault, at minimum. I think that's an undercount because I didn't prime them. So they had to offer that up.

• 36:02Speaker 01

  But the majority had been abused in some way, you know, so the, almost everyone had been failed, so much mental illness, so many circumstances. And I remember when Nikki was in Bedford Hills Prison, and she and I were writing back and forth.

• 36:18Speaker 01

  Nikki came from just a regular suburban life. So it wasn't like she had engaged with people who had been in prison ever. And she landed there, and I think she was just quite shocked to see that, and she wrote, you know, I don't see monsters walking around. She said, I just see broken children in adults' bodies.

• 36:46Speaker 01

  I think that's, that's, that's what it is.

• 36:49Gemma Bath?

  And it's so sad. It really is. You know, thirty percent, that's a big number. Thirty percent of the women incarcerated.

• 36:58Speaker 01

  For murder and manslaughter. I mean, and for other, for other crimes, like drug crimes and stuff, there's often an element of abuse or trauma that plays into it. Not always, but quite often.

• 37:11Gemma Bath?

  There was one woman's reply to you that really stood out to me, and it was her explaining that one of the problems was that their stories often sounded, and I'm using quotation marks here, fantastic sounding. So like stranger than fiction, really bizarre, hard to believe. And, you know, we've, we've touched on some of that with Nikki's story, with the vagina and the hot spoons and things like that. They are fantastic sounding. Can you expand on what she meant by that? Did it hit a nerve with you as well, that explanation?

• 37:52Speaker 01

  I loved that quote. I loved what she said. And I, and I think other people have said similar things. Like, they've said, like,

• 38:00Speaker 01

  I know this all, everything I'm telling you is true. I know it doesn't sound so, but it is. And I think, I was talking to somebody else about this recently, that, you know, the Gisele Pelliko case?

• 38:12Gemma Bath?

  Yes.

• 38:13Speaker 01

  If you follow that.

• 38:15Speaker 01

  What if Gisele Pelliko just went to the cops on her own? There was no, there was no investigation by police. There was no folder on her husband's computer that was labeled abuse, that showed his video recordings, literally labeled abuse that showed his video recordings of dozens and dozens of men raping his drugged and unconscious wife. What if Gisele Pelliko just? And what if Gisele Pelliko wasn't as chic as she is? What if she was a different kind of woman? Maybe somebody a bit more on the margin, somebody who didn't have a great little bob, who didn't have a handbag, who wasn't a real estate agent. What if she went to authorities and said, hey, listen, listen what's been happening to me? Seventy men

• 38:59Gemma Bath?

  Yeah.

• 39:00Speaker 01

  from this town, from this region, normal men with jobs, come after work. My husband invites them on internet forums, called, without her consent. And then he drugs me, and then they rape me while he videotapes it. And then I wake up and I don't really know what happened, but I'm having some gynecological and memory problems. But like, I swear that's what happened. What if that? I don't believe. And, and then they were to look at the husband, and he was just like a retiree, whose children loved him with a long marriage. Like, I don't think that they would have believed her. I just, I personally think people would have thought, ma'am, like, you're gonna need to get some serious help.

• 39:43Speaker 01

  And so I think there's this particular cruelty to the bizarre ways in which people abuse other people, because it can be so weird that it sounds fantastical. It sounds fantastical. And furthermore, it also causes people often to have mental health complications from the trauma, and they become even less reliable. And usually it's committed, not, I mean, it's committed quite often to everybody, but often it's committed, you know, in secret and often to the most vulnerable people, to children, to, you know, people on the margins, or, I mean, it happens in, in all

• 40:27Speaker 01

  sorts of households. And so then those people are even less able to make an argument. And if it's committed by powerful men, then they're able to disappear it. So I think there's this like cruelty, like, if you look at the Epstein stuff, it sounds like a conspiracy theory.

• 40:42Gemma Bath?

  It does.

• 40:43Speaker 01

  Cooked up by cuckoo people. Um, you know, that's what it sounds like, but it's like, it's real.

• 40:50Gemma Bath?

  You're so right.

• 40:50Speaker 01

  It's just hard, it's hard to come to terms with that.

• 40:54Gemma Bath?

  You featured three women's stories in your book. Out of the a thousand replies, what made you pick those three, those three women and their stories? How did you pick those three women?

• 41:10Speaker 01

  So the book interweaves a lot of different stories and snippets from people's stories, but I did want to, couldn't tell a thousand stories, decided three would be enough.

• 41:22Speaker 01

  The first person, so Nikki's story kind of leads us in, but she's not actually a story that I focus in on deeply, because I did that in a podcast forum, an article. And then Nikki's sister, Michelle Horton, wrote a memoir about the experience with a lot of input from Nikki. I felt like that story, I, I'd done. I wanted to do others. The first person that I settled on was a woman named Tanisha Williams. She is a black mother of three from Michigan. And I got this letter from Tanisha early on in the process, and I remember it was like typed out, Tanisha had gone. Later, I found out, she went and got this contraband-proof typewriter that you have in prison, so it's like completely clear.

• 42:07Speaker 01

  Um, so it's this like giant clear typewriter where you can see everything, so you can't, I guess, smuggle stuff. She dragged it to her, uh, you know, her cell. And I sent her the, the letter. She didn't get it. Again, like, this is a, for example, she never got the letter. I did send it to her. She never received it. Someone down the hall got it and was like, I don't want to answer this. So she took it from them. So she responded and she wrote on the typewriter. And the thing that that stuck out to me was that she said, um, that what she'd done, she only did as a gun hung over her. And that it was a true injustice, that nobody basically saw the context. So I contacted her and I said, do you want to call me? I wrote her like an email through the email

• 42:52Speaker 01

  system. I said, would you like to call me? I'm interested in this story. And Tanisha's on the phone the next day. She's like, I am in. This is awesome. I am ready. That's like her.

• 43:02Speaker 01

  And her story is like amazing. She, um, basically, I won't go into it in full, but I'll just say that basically Tanisha was

• 43:12Speaker 01

  Dealing with like housing insecurity, ended up moving in with this guy who was extremely violent because he offered her a place to stay. After a lifetime of like, she just had no support in her life and she was only 19 years old. And he offered her a place to stay. And while she was in, and then he began to abuse her. He wasn't her boyfriend. He was just her roommate. And one night, he killed a man in the apartment. He attacked and brutally killed this young guy for reasons that remain totally mysterious. I just think he had like a psychotic episode or something. I mean, he was very, he had a lot of mental health problems. He had a lot of substance abuse problems. She was there. She came out. She saw what happened. She started to scream with the lungs. He pinned her against a wall, held her as tight as he could. She thought the wall was going to break. She thought

• 43:55Speaker 01

  her windpipe would snap. And she kind of said like, basically, he basically dropped her to the ground. And she said that she, he basically said, get down or lay down, which is to say, do what I say, or you'll also be lying down with this guy. So she did. She helped him. She taped the victim's like mouth up, even though he was dying already. And she did it while crying and whispering, I'm sorry, with a gun to her and two really large men in the room. She was 115 pounds, five foot seven, you know, 20 years old at that time. And later, she went forward to the police and told them everything that

• 44:38Speaker 01

  happened because the case went cold and she wanted to give peace to the victim's mother and the police. And in the end, she got 20 to 40 years. She was used as a prosecution witness. So she was a, an example of criminalized survival in that she was forced to do something. And she was a really perfect case in the sense that the state agreed with, like, there was no argument. All the documentation showed this is what happened. She was forced. She testified. They said she was great at testifying, all of that. And yet she got 20 to 40 years. And somebody that I spoke with said that this happens all the time. Black women are

• 45:18Speaker 01

  used to just to basically demonstrate that the justice system works and then are disposed of. And that's really what happened to her. So once I had Tanisha, that was one type of criminalized survival. Then I wanted to find somebody who had a straight self-defense claim, kind of like Nikki. Because Tanisha's was more that she had acted under duress and that she kind of had been blamed for a man's crime. I wanted another type of criminalized survival. So I had Gemma, Gemma Heffernan, who wrote me from Missouri, white woman from a military family. And she had basically had a really abusive husband. And after 10

• 45:59Speaker 01

  years of abuse, when she tried to leave, she couldn't leave. They had a, I mean, he just basically attacked her for hours. And in the end, she ended up getting control of the gun and she killed him. And so she was a, she was a good counter to Tanisha. She was like exemplifying how this happened. This can happen to people, like how this is a larger systemic issue. And after I had decided on them, there were some other people that I was thinking about doing. I came upon this letter from this woman in California named TC, who said, I killed my stepfather in an altercation. He basically raped me

• 46:39Speaker 01

  from the time I was four. And I was fighting back like, you know, for myself, for my mom. And then it said something like, it's not that simple. It's never that simple. You know, there's so much more to say. And I reached out to TC and TC was the third character. But they all were criminalized survivals, survivors, all in different states, Michigan, Missouri, California, and all with very distinct stories. But it, every story fit the pattern.

• 47:10Gemma Bath?

  And all with these enormous sentences. You know, as an Australian, it's quite shocking because here for murder, you get, you know, between 20 to 25 years, whereas these women are getting 40, 40 plus years. The other thing I noticed amongst these women is that they all had a history of sexual assault and often child sexual assault.

• 47:37Speaker 01

  I think that was, that was, I, it's not that I picked it, but I, it was. So the very like, before I even started this exact project, like I read this report called the Sexual Abuse Prison Pipeline. It's by Georgetown University, Human Rights for Girls and another organization. And once I told an interviewer this and they wrote me and said, we're three organizations, please remember, because we work together. And then I still forget the third. But nonetheless, it's a great report. And it, and it came out in 2015. And like, I think, or maybe 2016, and they did a most, a more recent one. And that report looks at the way in which many of the girls, and mostly black girls in America, funneled

• 48:17Speaker 01

  into the juvenile justice system, have severe sexual abuse backgrounds. And I was really interested in that idea of like, there's some, it wasn't exactly like a straight shot, but there is some element of, of being punished for that sexual abuse beyond just the sexual abuse as a punishment, larger punishments at hand. So I was quite interested in that. And I saw this, you know, and I saw it in Nikki's case. I saw if you trace back these lives of these women, it, it's so often, to the point that I would say almost always,

• 48:52Speaker 01

  starts very young with early violations and things kind of unravel from there. So I found it in so, so many of the cases. And it's just one of the most common things. And I think that there's such a, there's such a line from that trauma to getting into these relationships that are dangerous and brutal. From that trauma, unhealed, I would say, because nobody would healed from it. You know, nobody ever got the proper help at all. Often, they were just dismissed or disregarded, or it was allowed to happen, or they themselves were even punished for talking out about it. So it was really unhealed

• 49:34Speaker 01

  trauma. And it just followed them in their lives. It just followed them. It just went into their bones and they just were like, that was, you know, it, it made it very hard for them to navigate relationships in a healthy way.

• 49:54Gemma Bath?

  Coming up, Justine tells us about Barbara, TC's mother, who was also incarcerated. There was actually a fourth victim in these stories. Barbara, who was TC's mom, who was also incarcerated. Can you tell us her story and how she fits in?

• 50:15Speaker 01

  Yeah, Barbara, Mama Barbara, I think they call her. So Barbara, you know, a lot of these stories, when I, when I started doing, and I thought, okay, it's about these women in prison, criminalized survival. As I wrote the book, it became clear that these stories were really also the stories of mothers and daughters. That's what they, that was like, the secondary story was mothers and daughters. It was, you know, Gemma and her mother were involved in the crime that she was convicted of. Like, there was a lot going on with her and her mom, and what her mom didn't do, and what her mom did do. And that relationship was really complicated. The way that Nikki's mom approached men and abuse

• 50:59Speaker 01

  and sex and violence was formative to her, you know. And by the way, I'll just add that dads were absent. Dads, even if they were there, they were absent. So like, you know, I'm talking about moms fault flaws, but like, there's no dads here really like holding anything up at all. Moms are at least there, even if they're there in a damaging way. You know, and Tanisha's relationship with her mom was so painful and hard. And her mom had her own sexual abuse history that was extremely severe, and brought all of that to her mothering. But TC's story was just the most like intricate generational trauma situation because, so TC's mother, Barbara, was

• 51:50Speaker 01

  I think I looked, do you have the ACEs exam? Like the adverse childhood experiences? It's, we have it here. It's like a, it's a way to look, I guess it's a way to look at trauma. It looks at all of the like, things that make someone at high risk for

• 52:09Speaker 01

  having health complications and mental health complications later from these childhood experiences, the adverse childhood experiences. And I don't remember how many there are, but like Barbara had every single one when I looked at it. Everything that you could have, um, she had, she was, I believe, you know, it's unclear because she doesn't even know very much about like her early family history. But I believe that she was likely the product of the rape of her own mother. She gave Barbara up to a relative and her sister. And Barbara thought that these were her parents. And then, um, the father, the man she thought was her father began sexually abusing her.

• 52:50Speaker 01

  Because, you know, something about stepfathers and mothers boyfriends and men who are not your biological father, like it is, it is certainly not always the case at all. But I, that was the most common thing I saw.

• 53:05Gemma Bath?

  Really?

• 53:05Speaker 01

  In my research, as the most common abuser of children when they were young was mom's husband or boyfriend. And often I would see that it was, like in the case of what happened to TC, I think that mom can be targeted for her child.

• 53:24Speaker 01

  So Barbara was abused by her uncle, this guy. Um, and when she spoke up about how she didn't like it, her aunt, who she thought was her mom, just took her and dropped her at her mom's house and said, this is your real mom, get out. She was like 14, then she was abused by everyone in her, basically. She was just abused in foster care and, you know, her mom dropped her. She went to the police, she said, I'm being abused by my mom's, my mom's boyfriend. The police just popped her in foster care and there she was abused. Eighteen, she came out with a sixth grade reading level and there she met a man who she needed because she felt she needed, she didn't think she could get on in the world. He abused her, she escaped him, went to go drink at a bar one night

• 54:07Speaker 01

  and met TC's soon to be stepfather, who helped her get out of that relationship. I believe knowing that there were two little girls that she already had. And then, um, from the frying pan into the fire, as they say.

• 54:22Gemma Bath?

  And then he went on to abuse Barbara and TC. And TC's version of that night is that she killed him and her mum was not there. Her mum was at a different house. And yet Barbara still ended up in prison too. What do you think the version is?

• 54:44Speaker 01

  That's just like a complicated, that's actually a complicated section of the book that I get into. You know, that is her version, so I respect her version.

• 54:53Speaker 01

  They went to prison, in the same prison.

• 54:58Speaker 01

  They're never apart, joined at the hip. But in any case, I, whatever, you know, it's like,

• 55:07Speaker 01

  in a way, like who cares, like who cares? Who cares about the exact truth of that night? Is I, what I kind of came down to, the larger truths at play remain, which is that this man brutalized and tortured these women, who are, and one of them was just a girl at one point, for a lifetime. Um, and he wasn't stopping and.

• 55:30Gemma Bath?

  Yep.

• 55:31Speaker 01

  They stopped him or she stopped him, somebody, TC stopped him.

• 55:36Gemma Bath?

  What has happened since to the women in these stories? Because there is some good news, some of these women are out.

• 55:46Speaker 01

  TC and Gemma and Nikki are all free. Gemma because she served her time. TC because she and a fabulous, uh, public interest lawyer, pro bono lawyer, fought for her to get out after 32 years.

• 56:09Speaker 01

  And Nikki because again, a, a, this, a white shoe law firm came in and a new law was in place and they made an appeal and it was successful. But Tanisha remains in prison with very few avenues for freedom.

• 56:26Gemma Bath?

  And Barbara?

• 56:28Speaker 01

  Barbara was paroled, Barbara was like in a wheelchair and from the abuse that she had suffered. And, um, she, um, yeah, she was, she was paroled.

• 56:41Gemma Bath?

  Have the women read your book? What do they make of it, of seeing their stories in print?

• 56:48Speaker 01

  I was super nervous, I didn't let anyone like, I didn't give anyone,

• 56:53Speaker 01

  I didn't show them a manuscript, you know, I, I told them what it was. And I was very nervous, but I also was like, it's not publicity, like I'm doing this story. I'm trying to do the best that I can. Um, I'm very lucky, they, they loved it. Um, I think it was really hard for people to read. I don't know that anyone has like agreed entirely.

• 57:17Speaker 01

  Gemma's mom, Gemma's like, my mom says it has misinformation. I'm like, oh my God, what's the misinformation? And she's like, my dad joined the military at 20, not 23. I was like, okay. You know, I think, you know, of course there are things that people are annoyed about. No, everyone is so gracious to me, everyone has been so amazing. I have hung out with Nikki because we're in the same, you know, general area. I'm hoping to see her again this summer. I'm hoping our daughters can meet.

• 57:48Speaker 01

  You know, I'm hoping to go to California and CTC, um, and to Missouri at some point if I can. Um, but my main thing right now is I really want Tanisha, who read a copy of the book that my publisher very kindly had made so that it could go into her prison because she can't have a hard cover. So they made a soft cover for her.

• 58:08Gemma Bath?

  Wow.

• 58:08Speaker 01

  Um, but yeah, I mean, my, a big sort of focus of mine now is to see if we can make some headway in getting Tanisha free.

• 58:18Gemma Bath?

  Is it making noise in the places that it needs to? Are people taking notice? And is it having the kind of impact that you were hoping?

• 58:32Speaker 01

  I hope so, I think these things are very slow.

• 58:40Speaker 01

  This is like hundreds of years of a system designed this way.

• 58:47Speaker 01

  I think the reactions to the book have been super positive. And people have wanted to get involved, for example, in Tanisha's freedom, have, have been reaching out to her. We've been thinking about ways to support her clemency campaign.

• 59:03Speaker 01

  I'm hoping to go and speak on some laws that are coming into maybe that are some acts that might be signed into law in different states that might help on these issues. So I think it's,

• 59:18Speaker 01

  it never works on that nice quick timeline. It's incremental, but I'm hoping bit by bit, things can change. I have seen them change even in the time that I've been working on this. So I have to believe that they can, they're just not going to change as much as we want them to.

• 59:35Gemma Bath?

  And not, and not overnight.

• 59:37Speaker 01

  Bit by bit and not overnight, not at all.

• 59:40Gemma Bath?

  Well, Justine, thank you for your work. We're very lucky to have someone like you making so much noise about such an infuriating injustice that's happening in our world right now.

• 59:54Speaker 01

  I mean, everyone who read the book is like, I'm infuriated, but I'm so glad I read it. And also I, I, I tried not to make an eat your vegetables book. So I think it's actually quite propulsive and people do say that. They're like, I hated, I hated it, I couldn't stop, I was so angry. Um, but yeah, I think that's, that's okay. I mean, I think what somebody once said, like, some reviewer about something was like, that you could see that this lit a fire under her ass, which I was like, okay, you know, if it can do that, that's great, that's great.

• 1:00:24Gemma Bath?

  Has it made you angry though about the plight of women?

• 1:00:28Speaker 01

  I, I certainly operated from a place of deep rage a lot. Um, I think I've moved beyond it to just acceptance and awareness, um, and maybe just determination.

• 1:00:47Speaker 01

  But I think rage is great, I, I support all rageful people, you know?

• 1:00:51Gemma Bath?

  Here, here, thank you for joining us, Justine.

• 1:00:54Speaker 01

  Thank you Gemma, this was great.

• 1:00:58Gemma Bath?

  Thank you to Justine for joining us on this episode. You can find Justine's book in our show notes. Make sure you're following our show on Apple Podcasts and Spotify for updates on this story and all the stories we cover. Thanks so much for listening, I'll be back next week with another True Crime Conversation.