Megan Phelps-Roper discusses leaving the Westboro Baptist Church, interviewing J.K. Rowling and how social media amplifies our worst impulses

Louis is joined by writer, podcaster and subject of not one, not two, but three Louis Theroux documentaries, Megan Phelps-Roper. 25 years on from them meeting, the pair swap notes on Megan’s departure from the church, crossing paths with J. K. Rowling and how social media amplifies our worst impulses. Warnings: Strong language and adult themes. If you've been affected by the topics discussed in this episode, visit spotify.com/resources. Links/Attachments: The three video/audio extracts are from ‘The Most Hated Family in America’ (BBC) TV Show: Deadwood (2004-2006) https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0348914/ Podcast: The Witch Trials of J. K. Rowling (2023) https://open.spotify.com/show/0pOqilA3erTXXQ3cf422Ct Podcast: The Daily Podcast (2017-present) https://open.spotify.com/show/6wVeXmXdT9nh5QKiZxPSmy Book Series: Harry Potter, J. K. Rowling (1997-2007) https://www.bloomsbury.com/uk/discover/harry-potter/resources/series-overview/?srsltid=AYCX9vLX_rGZirNt8zcub_I762yQTqKsHXrX6pejimhQdlgtQZgLXYR4 Book: Kill All Normies, Angela Nagle (2017) https://www.collectiveinkbooks.com/zer0-books/our-books/kill-all-normies Podcast: Joe Rogan Experience #974 - Megan Phelps-Roper https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hOnefFVBEb0 Credits: Producer: Tom Fuller Senior Assistant Producer: Maisie Ellen Williams Junior Production Manager: Rosie Pender Production Executive: Francesca Bassett Original Music: Miguel D’Oliveira Video Editor: Scott Edwards Audio Editor: Tom Guest Series Producer: Millie Chu Executive Producer: Arron Fellows A Mindhouse Studios Production for Spotify. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

• 0:05Speaker 00

  Hello and welcome to another episode of the Louis Theroux Podcast.

• 0:16Speaker 00

  Today, I'm joined by author and podcaster Megan Phelps-Roper. An advocate for tolerance, Megan is a former member of the Westboro Baptist Church, a Christian sect widely regarded as a hate group and by some regarded as a cult. Founded by her grandfather Fred Phelps, the church gained notoriety for staging highly provocative public protests, in particular at soldiers' funerals, while promoting extreme views on the LGBTQ+ community. I first met Megan while filming my documentary, The Most Hated Family in America, released in 2007. I spent three weeks getting to know them, trying to understand them. And why they did the strange things that they did, which they still do, by the way, but more of that in the chat.

• 1:02Speaker 00

  I met her again for a follow-up film in 2011, when she was still a member, and then the next year, she left the church, going on to speak openly about her experience growing up in the family. In 2019, she released a memoir, Unfollow: A Journey From Hatred to Hope, which I highly recommend. She stepped into podcasting with a much-discussed series titled The Witch Trials of J.K. Rowling, for which she interviewed the Harry Potter author. It was a hit, I think, we talk about that in the chat. The reviews were, I think, mainly positive. It's a contentious subject, so, as you can imagine, not everyone was a fan. We recorded this interview in August this year at Spotify HQ. Megan joined me on a rare trip over to the UK.

• 1:46Speaker 00

  She'd recently released a new podcast called Bookkeeper, in which she returns to the Bible and the stories that shaped her, to ask which are worth keeping. We spoke for a few hours. Editor Tom had to hack it down. I'm sure there was a lot of good stuff we couldn't use, we wanted to keep it tight. But stick with the conversation, I really think it goes somewhere interesting. A quick warning, this conversation contains strong language, adult themes, and discussion of suicide. Two of Megan's brothers ended their lives after leaving Westboro, which is obviously a deeply distressing subject for Megan. But we talked about it. We also talked about much, much else. Besides, all of that, coming up.

• 2:45Speaker 00

  Welcome. This is funny, isn't it? This is an LTP first, because I've never interviewed an alumnus, an alumna, of one of my documentaries. That's not really the right word, but someone who's been in one of my documentaries. First time we filmed together, well, we were mainly filming at your house, and then we... You were a student at the time, studying law at the University of Kansas, and do you remember we walked around the campus? By now, the church members had learned a little about my life, and they knew that I'd had a child with my partner out of wedlock, a detail which seemed to put me in the firing line. Do you like going to the pickets?

• 3:21Speaker 01

  Yeah. Are you kidding?

• 3:23Speaker 00

  It must get kind of old, though.

• 3:25Speaker 01

  You don't get tired of all the sins, pursuing your sins and your lusts?

• 3:29Speaker 00

  Do I?

• 3:29Speaker 01

  It's like, I say you don't.

• 3:31Speaker 00

  Don't I?

• 3:31Speaker 01

  Because you keep doing it.

• 3:33Speaker 00

  Are you talking about me specifically?

• 3:35Speaker 01

  You or everybody else. You don't get tired of serving your lusts, I don't get tired of serving my God.

• 3:40Speaker 00

  So should I be killed for having extramarital intercourse?

• 3:45Speaker 01

  According to the Mosaic Code?

• 3:46Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 3:48Speaker 01

  Actually, I'm not sure, I think so. I think, I know adultery is.

• 3:51Speaker 00

  Wow.

• 3:52Speaker 01

  And homosexuality was.

• 3:53Speaker 00

  You want to see me killed for that?

• 3:55Speaker 01

  I want to tell you the truth.

• 3:59Speaker 00

  If I can continue the collegial metaphor, you're like my star pupil. Because when people say, are people capable of change? Do you ever see people? Or if they say, are there any people that you've made films about that you stay in touch with? You are Exhibit A.

• 4:15Speaker 01

  That's really cool.

• 4:16Speaker 00

  It's pretty cool. From my perspective, it's cool because it gives you grounds, gives me grounds for hope, and I can sort of, I can kind of impart an encouraging message that says, people are capable of change and growth, right? Which is actually not really always the case. For people who don't know, how would you describe the Westboro Baptist Church?

• 4:42Speaker 01

  It is a group that is almost entirely, you know, my immediate and extended family.

• 4:48Speaker 00

  About 70 people?

• 4:49Speaker 01

  About 70 people. And, yeah, they just really believe that their understanding of the Bible is the only acceptable, true, right version. And on that basis, everything else follows. So we would go, from the time I was five years old, and protest every single day in Topeka, Kansas. And then very quickly, that spread. We started to protest across the country. Initially, our targets were gay people and anybody who supported them. But that also, ultimately, like, everybody outside of our church was a target. Everybody else was doing wrong. And so, yeah, all of our, all of our faculties were, and our resources, all of our effort

• 5:33Speaker 01

  was toward understanding what we thought God required of us, and why everybody else was wrong, and chapter and verse, memorize it. That was our, that was our life.

• 5:46Speaker 00

  And you came to fame, the church came to fame, initially locally, from picketing a gay cruising spot at Gage Park, which was how your grandfather had first become fixated on what he perceived as kind of a local problem. And then it kind of built from there to pickets of soldiers, the funerals of soldiers killed in Afghanistan and Iraq. And then that gave the church massive nationwide and then international attention. Explain the logic of picketing the funerals.

• 6:19Speaker 01

  So my family would say that, you know, when people go to these funerals, they're, you know, thinking about death and heaven and hell and eternity. And it was our job to go and connect the dots. And for my family, the dots were very clear. The first one was your sin. So God, you know, has all these commandments, these, you know, things that you're supposed to follow, and you are not following them. You are supporting, you know, gay people, adultery, fornication.

• 6:50Speaker 01

  And so, we're supposed to connect the dot of your sin to your punishment. And the punishment is, in part, those fallen soldiers. And for us, again, those were intimately connected, they're, you know, immediately and, you know, fully intertwined and obvious that the sin is the cause of this punishment. And obviously, for most people, it's, they don't believe that. They don't, they don't see that connection. They see, you know, their family members went and fought, you know, for the freedoms that we were exercising. So for us to go there in those moments, when people were trying to mourn and say goodbye to these people that they love, obviously, you know, a massive amount of controversy and pain came from that.

• 7:32Speaker 00

  It's worth reminding ourselves of some of the spicy content, some of the provocative and actually hateful and horrible messaging of the signs, trigger warning, or just appropriate language warning, like, I'm gonna use the F-bomb.

• 7:50Speaker 00

  Because I just am, because it's, I think you need the full impact of the terms. The famous one is God Hates Fags.

• 8:00Speaker 00

  Fags Hate God is another one.

• 8:03Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 8:04Speaker 00

  AIDS Cures Fags, Fags Burn in Health, Thank God for Dead Soldiers, Fag Troops, Thank God for 9/11, Don't Pray for the USA.

• 8:14Speaker 00

  Why, that's a confusing one. Why not pray for the USA?

• 8:18Speaker 01

  God told the prophet Jeremiah, pray not for this people for their good. Like, I've already given them up. They are, I've already been fully turned over to their sin, and they love it, and they hate me and my message, and so therefore, pray not for this people.

• 8:33Speaker 00

  Just to state the obvious, and this is a theme that comes up a lot in, in your book, it's based on selective selection, well, it's based on a selective quotation from the Bible, right? I don't doubt you could find a passage in the Bible that said, do pray for people,

• 8:50Speaker 00

  you know, if you're worried about them, or, you know.

• 8:52Speaker 01

  Oh, for sure.

• 8:52Speaker 00

  You know what I mean?

• 8:53Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah, so it's not, I wouldn't say it's selective, because that makes it seem like, oh, they're picking and choosing which ones. They're doing what everybody is doing, which is like, they're interpreting.

• 9:01Speaker 00

  Right.

• 9:01Speaker 01

  They are trying to make all of the pieces fit together in a way that is cohesive and makes sense. So they're not trying to leave anything out.

• 9:09Speaker 00

  They're not actively attempting to distort or consciously mislead, but, but in order to create a coherent quilt of understanding and kind of practice, they are having to prioritize certain verses.

• 9:25Speaker 01

  Well, so when they look and they are comparing, you know, the times that we live in to the times of Jeremiah, they're saying, that verse applies, that idea applies. Whereas if you look at, you know, whatever, a passage where it says, you know, do pray for people, then they would say like, okay, well, this isn't those times. The US is not going to hear us. We know they won't hear us, because we've been preaching all these years and they don't hear us. So, so that's what I mean. Like, it's the only reason I'm like, quibbling with your word, like, selective, because for them, it's not selective, it's not like they're, they're casting some verses aside. It is a genuine effort to do the right thing. And that's, you know, for me, that's a hopeful thing.

• 10:08Speaker 01

  For me, the fact that, like, even Westboro is trying to do the right thing, like, that desire to do good is something that you can tap into. Like, if you can find a way, which is what people did with me. They were able to recognize that I had good intentions, I was trying to do the right thing, I just was coming from a framework that was so far from how most people see the world. And in tapping into the desire to do good and showing me a different way that was consistent enough, like, enabled to sort of help me find internal inconsistencies in my worldview that made me open to seeing things a different way, that absolutely changed my life.

• 10:43Speaker 00

  Just to, just to dwell in the, the kind of the hate, if that's the right term, for a second.

• 10:49Speaker 01

  Yes, let's dwell in the hate, please.

• 10:52Speaker 00

  Because the obvious thing to think about, and what I think most people's minds turn to is, well, how could you be comfortable inflicting pain in that way? Surely just at a human level, your response would be to feel bad. You know, and I reflect on the fact that when I first went to Westboro, on day two, we went on a picket of a funeral. And truthfully, it's got to be recalled that oftentimes, maybe usually, you were quite far back from the funeral. Like, there were various ordinances that prevented you from getting very close.

• 11:23Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 11:24Speaker 00

  So that I could imagine a lot of people came to the funerals and weren't aware. Or if they were aware, it was only because they were driving past the picket. But once they're at the funeral, it would be either drowned out or too far away. Nevertheless, when I was there, I remember a car came past that, you know, there were twenty or so of you and waving the placards. And a window came down and the woman driver was like, what are you doing? And then I think it was Margie's son, Jacob, said, well, we're picketing the funeral. She said, well, you know, why, why are you doing that? You know, this is her dad. This is the funeral for her dad, pointing to the woman next to her.

• 12:05Speaker 00

  And Jacob said, well, her father's in hell. And you just saw the girl in the passenger seat kind of crumple.

• 12:15Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 12:16Speaker 00

  In grief and upset and confusion. And then the window went back up and they drove off.

• 12:21Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 12:21Speaker 00

  And it was, it was like a vignette for how that pain is conveyed and experienced. And I just wonder whether, if that had been you or the people who were there, does that have any impact? To what extent, if any, are you ever aware of the pain that you're actually causing when you're on those pickets?

• 12:43Speaker 01

  Well, I mean, so that's, that's one example. I mean, the very first soldier's funeral protest that I went to was in Nebraska. And it was, this was before, it was early on, so it was before there were any ordinances. And we were directly across the street. And it was an extremely quiet, like residential neighborhood, like where this church was. And, you know, we start, you know, belting out these songs. And it's like echoing off of this church front.

• 13:09Speaker 00

  You would have been about fifteen?

• 13:10Speaker 01

  Um, I, no, I was nineteen.

• 13:12Speaker 00

  Nineteen?

• 13:13Speaker 01

  Yeah, when we started protesting the funerals, the soldiers' funerals. Which I should say, like, the funeral and sort of like celebration of death and tragedy, that was way before the soldiers' funerals protest. So, you know, it was something that I had, like, was just, I was born into it. Like, how, how we saw it as punishment from God, like just punishment from God. So, you know, and then, of course, all those years on the picket line, I was very used to dismissing whatever, you know, pain or frustration, you know, that, that people were experiencing. Like, we did that as a matter of course. But it was different. This was, it was a big change for us when we started protesting those funerals.

• 13:54Speaker 01

  Because it was visceral in a way that it hadn't been before. And so I remember going to my mom and, you know, asking, like, I need to understand why we're doing this. It was, I was genuinely wanting to make sure that we were following what the Bible said. Is this really what we're supposed to be doing? And so I think the answer to your question is, like, often we were not aware and or dismissive of the pain. But even when we were aware of it, we saw it as essentially, you know, this is collateral damage almost. It's like the pain that you're experiencing now, for us to come and tell you and warn you, do not follow this person to hell. You know, it's, it's just, it's something that has to happen in order, it's like,

• 14:39Speaker 01

  the pain you experience now is much less than what you would experience if you did follow them and ended up in hell yourself. So we really saw, I know it seems so wild to people to look at that, you know, story, for instance, that picture you just painted and think, how could these people possibly believe they're doing the right thing? And yet, there is a framework. And it's not, you know, it's not like they're just making this stuff up. Like, it's in this book that so many people claim to believe and that they believe is the, the literal infallible word of God. And they take it extraordinarily seriously. You know, I'm not a believer anymore, in part because I just, I can't,

• 15:20Speaker 01

  I can't reconcile some of these ideas with, in the Bible, with things that are good.

• 15:25Speaker 00

  Yeah, there's a lot of weird stuff in the Bible.

• 15:27Speaker 01

  I remember you saying that, actually, Liz. Your explanation for why Westboro is the way that it is. I think you said, like, essentially, Gramps was bad and the Bible is weird.

• 15:37Speaker 00

  Yeah, well, I probably stand by that. I don't know about bad, but angry, Gramps had anger issues.

• 15:42Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 15:42Speaker 00

  And in fact, it's probably worth reflecting on that for a second because so much of this comes from, is the trickle down of a single person's personality, that being Gramps, Fred Senior. And, you know, he was born in Mississippi, right? So, so he comes from an ultra-traditionalist milieu to begin with, raised in, in probably a form of Baptist teaching that wasn't that unusual, but nevertheless would strike us nowadays as

• 16:09Speaker 01

  Sure.

• 16:09Speaker 00

  extremely narrow-minded. And then, but that collides with, because the conventional wisdom has always been, oh, he's a closet case, like, oh, he must be, which is so basic and kind of, I don't know, just a reductive to say, like, oh, he, he preaches, and it's really offensive about, he seemed to be fixated on gay people. He must be gay. Like, I don't know about you, like, that was never my takeaway. Like, I don't think he was a closeted homosexual.

• 16:37Speaker 01

  No.

• 16:38Speaker 00

  I think he was genuinely angry. And I think, you know, in prepping for this, I realized for the first time, his mother died when he was five. He was given to an aunt to be, to be raised by, then returned to his father, who then remarried. I mean, it's a very chaotic, imagine losing your mom age five, right?

• 16:56Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 16:57Speaker 00

  For starters, it's going to, like, maybe this is armchair psychology, but nevertheless, I would think it would make you angry at the world confused. You'd lose your foundation.

• 17:07Speaker 01

  Yeah. But I mean, he was also really accomplished. I mean, he graduated school, he was valedictorian, I think he was sixteen, you know, top of the class. He was a Golden Gloves boxer, he's an Eagle Scout. Like, he, he wasn't, it wasn't just like his mom died and he just, you know, fell away into, you know, just became a...

• 17:22Speaker 00

  Well, into or what, though? Became a crazy ranting preacher. Like, he did eventually.

• 17:27Speaker 01

  I mean, at the time, at the time.

• 17:28Speaker 00

  All these things can be true.

• 17:30Speaker 01

  Yeah, understated.

• 17:30Speaker 00

  I used to joke, like, they're like the Kennedys of hate, like, about your family, like, an attractive, highly accomplished, tightly knit, ambitious

• 17:38Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 17:39Speaker 00

  family that kind of punched above its weight, headline-wise, influence-wise.

• 17:43Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 17:43Speaker 00

  But instead of being dedicated to politics and, you know, the Democrat Party, became avid, avid picketers and, and kind of promoters of God's supposed wrath against a fallen America. But so on Gramps, it felt like, for whatever reason, he was a, I don't know if it was, he was an angry dude and temperamentally just volatile, anger-prone, controlling. I know you, you had and have, I'm sure, a lot of love for him. But also in your book, you detail how he was physically abusive to his wife, your grandma.

• 18:24Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 18:25Speaker 00

  Physically abusive to his children.

• 18:29Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 18:30Speaker 00

  So there's a lot going on.

• 18:32Speaker 01

  Yeah, there is. And there really wasn't anybody to restrain him, you know? Well, that, that's, I think, ultimately what it comes down to. When I think about how, you know, obviously for, the other thing was that you're kind of missing from this narrative is the civil rights work that he did.

• 18:50Speaker 00

  Right.

• 18:51Speaker 01

  Which he spent decades before, before the picketing started. And I think if he hadn't lost his license to practice law, he, that would have continued, the civil rights work. I think, I didn't realize this until I was writing my book, but the timeline is, was kind of wild to realize, like, months after he lost his license to practice law, he, that incident took place in Gage Park. And the protesting started shortly thereafter.

• 19:18Speaker 00

  So there was almost like, it replaced...

• 19:21Speaker 01

  It's like there was an absence, this vacuum in his life of meaning. Yeah. And when you said earlier, just to connect the other dot, about, like, why we were so focused, why Gramps was so focused on gay people, they would always say, it's because you're so focused on gay people. Gay rights was really coming to the fore in, in those moments. You know, groups like ACT UP and, you know, the AIDS crisis and all these things were, were very, you know, commonly talked about and written about in, in the media. And so there was something that they felt like they had to respond to. Like, this is a crisis of our times that we need to fight back against. So, yeah.

• 19:57Speaker 00

  And so, just, I don't feel like we're playing all the old hits. And maybe that's fine. Why, because the other question would be like, what, but why do you have to use the word fag? Like, why not just say it in a nicer way? You know what I mean? It doesn't say in the Bible, like, be rude. You know what I mean?

• 20:19Speaker 00

  Maybe it does, somewhere it probably does, but.

• 20:22Speaker 01

  Well, they would say, so at the very beginning, like the very first, like, big sign said, "God hates gays."

• 20:27Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 20:28Speaker 01

  And they very quickly.

• 20:29Speaker 00

  Which, it's also offensive, but maybe slightly better.

• 20:35Speaker 01

  Oh, well, so, so they would say gay is a misnomer. Gay means happy. And these people are not happy. They commit suicide at, you know, disproportionate rates, and God hates them, and, you know, this is not a happy lifestyle.

• 20:47Speaker 01

  And so the word fag, honestly, of course, it has.

• 20:50Speaker 00

  He's gonna say, you're gonna do the thing about, "Oh, he said it was an elegant metaphor."

• 20:54Speaker 01

  A one hundred percent, yeah.

• 20:55Speaker 00

  It also means sticks, bundles of wood, and they're, and for burning.

• 20:58Speaker 01

  Kindling, yes.

• 20:59Speaker 00

  And the kindling, and then God's gonna stoke the fires of hell.

• 21:02Speaker 01

  Yes, and they, they stoke the fires of God's wrath. They burn in their lust one toward another, according to Romans 1. We are playing all the hits.

• 21:11Speaker 01

  It's just, it's so funny to me, because I haven't thought about or talked about some of this stuff for so long, and it's just right there, just like comes. I mean, it's, it's because, you know, you can't spend all those years talking about something, but yes.

• 21:21Speaker 00

  What about fag Sweden was a popular sign?

• 21:25Speaker 01

  This is actually one of the funniest parts of my book to write, because our, the way that we went after Sweden, and like, of course, you showed this in your film, how funny it was that we ended up protesting a hardware store that sold Swedish vacuum cleaners, because we couldn't actually go to Sweden to protest.

• 21:40Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 21:40Speaker 01

  And so we turned on, you know.

• 21:43Speaker 00

  It's been confusing for the hardware store owners. They must have been like, "What the?"

• 21:47Speaker 01

  We protested an alcohol distributor who sold, whose wares included absolute vodka, like, a local performance of a Swedish chamber orchestra.

• 21:56Speaker 00

  Is absolute a Swedish vodka?

• 21:58Speaker 01

  I think so.

• 21:59Speaker 00

  Did not know that.

• 22:01Speaker 01

  This is, I mean, it's so funny, like, this is what I was told. I guess I haven't independently confirmed.

• 22:06Speaker 00

  And the reasoning was because Sweden had imprisoned a.

• 22:10Speaker 01

  A man for preaching, yeah.

• 22:12Speaker 00

  For preaching against homosexuality.

• 22:13Speaker 01

  Right.

• 22:14Speaker 02

  Noah, do you know what fag troops are?

• 22:17Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 22:17Speaker 02

  What?

• 22:19Speaker 03

  It's this nation of these fags. It is the nation of fags. That's what fag troops mean.

• 22:26Speaker 02

  It is a nation of fags, that's right.

• 22:28Speaker 00

  Wait, wait, wait, you're not gonna let them get away with that, are you?

• 22:32Speaker 03

  Fag soldiers!

• 22:34Speaker 02

  Okay, fag soldiers.

• 22:35Speaker 00

  I'm sort of glad that they don't understand it better.

• 22:38Speaker 02

  Well, you understand, Noah, do you know what else you could be besides a fag to be in trouble with God and be included in that sign? If you're not just a fag, but what else, abroad?

• 22:52Speaker 03

  And Swedish and, and soldiers and.

• 23:00Speaker 02

  But what are you if you're not a practicing fag? What are you? What if you support fags? What does that make you?

• 23:08Speaker 03

  You're a dyke?

• 23:10Speaker 00

  Your grandfather, Gramps Fred Senior, also commented, quote, "The king of Sweden looks like an anal copulator, and his grinning kids look slutty and gay."

• 23:22Speaker 01

  Which became a saying in my family. We would say, "That's slutty and gay," whatever, like, I'm laughing because it's, it's, there's so much. There were, there were moments for sure when we were aware of the, you know, extremeness and absurdity, yes.

• 23:37Speaker 00

  Absurdity.

• 23:37Speaker 01

  Yeah, so we would say, like, it was cold outside, and we're like, like, "God hates winter," that kind of thing. Like, we would, you know, tongue in cheek use these things, including phrases like, "Slutty and gay."

• 23:50Speaker 00

  This is a quote from your book, "By age eleven, I was standing on the picket line, exultantly repeating the words I'd heard from Gramps, quote, 'Two whores in a week!' I fancied myself cutely counterculture to be reveling in the deaths of two widely beloved women, though I had little knowledge of either, Mother Teresa or Diana, princess of Wales."

• 24:11Speaker 00

  Diana.

• 24:14Speaker 00

  I mean, I would never use that term. She was beloved and, you know, life ended tragically. Nevertheless.

• 24:24Speaker 00

  I mean, I've been regretting starting down this conversational path. Why Mother Teresa?

• 24:30Speaker 01

  I mean, she was Catholic, and she, and Catholics have all kinds of problems, according to the church, though.

• 24:35Speaker 00

  I don't think anyone ever called her a whore, though, do you?

• 24:37Speaker 01

  Well, they, they would, spirit, okay, it's like, it's this, it's both physical, like, sexual whoredom and also spiritual whoredom.

• 24:43Speaker 00

  But she wasn't sexually.

• 24:45Speaker 01

  No, no, no, but it's this.

• 24:46Speaker 00

  A whore, though, was she?

• 24:46Speaker 01

  It's this, I have no idea. I don't know.

• 24:49Speaker 00

  I don't think so.

• 24:50Speaker 01

  But spiritual whoredom is what they were talking about. Like, she's worshiping false gods and encouraging other people to. So they would say that, oh, they, they worship Mary, Catholics worship Mary, they worship these saints, these are, you know, human beings, they don't deserve your, you know, reverence in this way, or whatever. Like, so, and of course, all of the false doctrines that Catholics have, according to West Brom. This is why they would call her a whore.

• 25:13Speaker 00

  Just staying with this placards for a second, because we've given a kind of biblical rationale for it, but there's also a sort of sociological lens which would say that Gramps loved attention, and he loved the headlines. And it wasn't just like he liked to upset people. I think probably he did, quite. But he also liked commanding, you know, just, so having a public ministry, and that must be intoxicating, not that different from. Well, in a way, it's the, it's the DNA for what became large parts of the internet, trolling people, which tends to mean cynically saying things you don't believe.

• 25:50Speaker 00

  But in this context, really means putting a message that's so provocative that you do still believe, but is designed to get a reaction and go viral. In a sense, your family went viral before viral was a thing.

• 26:04Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 26:05Speaker 00

  Uh, in the news cycle, right?

• 26:06Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 26:07Speaker 00

  And that, that was a feedback loop of affirmation for both your grandfather and the family in general, that you, you thought, "We're doing the right thing, because everyone can't stop talking about how much they hate us." And just to reflect also, my documentary,

• 26:23Speaker 00

  it was one of the most pleasant, weird word to use, but certainly most enjoyable documentaries I made, in part because I had no anxiety about how you guys would feel afterwards, really, because you regarded me as a hellbound sinner, and you knew that I regarded you as hopelessly misguided, and that when we called it "The Most Hated Family in America," I remember your mom saying, like, "That was perfect."

• 26:51Speaker 01

  So great, yeah.

• 26:51Speaker 00

  Yeah, that was exactly right. Like, "Yeah, we are the most hated family in America."

• 26:56Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 26:56Speaker 00

  And, and then suggesting, "You should make a follow-up called 'The Most Hated Family in the World,'" but.

• 27:03Speaker 01

  I forgot about that.

• 27:03Speaker 00

  It was a perfect alignment of, you know, "You're going to hell." "No, you're going to hell." You know, we can agree, kind of.

• 27:11Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 27:12Speaker 00

  Like, "You're the worst person," like, like Steve saying to me when I came back, he said, um, he said, "You're one of the chief workers of iniquity in the whole history of man. You're right up there with Pontius Pilate," about me.

• 27:27Speaker 01

  Yeah, I remember that.

• 27:28Speaker 00

  Because I had taken the one ministry that was preaching the true word of God in the world, and tried to make them look ridiculous, which made me the worst, kind of the worst, one of the worst people in history.

• 27:40Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 27:41Speaker 00

  Anyway, that was a long rambling.

• 27:43Speaker 01

  But there's so many things you said that I, I'm ready to.

• 27:46Speaker 00

  Well, the thing I was thinking about, so, I think if you wanted to understand it as a sort of sociological matter, you'd say, like, "Oh, they were drunk on the attention of the world saying, 'We hate you,' and that became very affirming, paradoxically."

• 27:59Speaker 01

  So, it, it's really interesting, though, because once again, it all comes back to the Bible. So, you know, I remember this reporter, I was sitting in on an interview that my, my Gramps was giving with a, like, a reporter from Oklahoma or something. She'd come from Oklahoma, because we were gonna protest there. She's sitting in the office across from my Gramps, and she said, "Some people would say that you're just doing this for attention." And, I wrote this in my book, so like, he looks at her like she was uncommonly dense, and said, "Of course I'm doing this to get their attention."

• 28:31Speaker 01

  If, how can I preach to these people if I don't have their attention? So one hundred percent, it was an attention-getting, you know, these were attention-getting tactics. And like you said, it was absolutely, you know, the background of this was the 24-hour news cycle, and the fact that if you just say these, you know, three to five words, you know, very provocative words on a picket sign, you will get massive amounts of attention. And we had that reinforced everywhere we went, every little town that we went to. You know, many news articles, you know, would get written, you know, people are writing letters to the editor, they're planning counter protests. Sometimes we would not go protest in a place, because it had already been completely saturated with our message before we even went there. All we had to do was say we were going there, put out a news release, that my Gramps could do, all you had to do is swap out the location,

• 29:16Speaker 01

  leave everything else on the news release the same, and get massive amounts of attention for this message that we thought was what, you know, Gramps would say, this, it's what people need more than they need water, water to drink, food to eat, or air to breathe. So, yes, absolutely, it was about getting attention, but it was for the message. And the part about being hated, like reveling in being hated, one hundred percent, because Jesus said, "Blessed are you when men will hate you and revile you and say all manner of evil against you falsely, for my name's sake." It says, "Woe unto you when men will speak well of you," because that's what their fathers did to the false prophets. So the fact that we were hated was evidence that God was with us.

• 29:58Speaker 01

  So, the attention was affirming, the hatred was affirming, and of course, Gramps saw himself in, like, think about, like, you know, the prophets, like, he saw himself, like, like Isaiah or Jeremiah, you know, these people who, like, God was speaking to them and through them, and he saw himself in that way. So, all of the attention just absolutely fed into this image that he had of himself as this incredibly important, you know, speaker of truth to the entire world. I went to deliver some papers to him, and he was in the kitchen, and there's always, like, stacks of Bibles everywhere. And he's like, "Ask me if I could pick up this Bible and read from," I think it was Matthew 5. So I opened it up, and I start reading, and I get to this passage about

• 30:42Speaker 01

  praying for your enemies. And I was like,

• 30:46Speaker 01

  "What does that mean?"

• 30:49Speaker 01

  And he said, well, it doesn't say to pray for their good.

• 30:54Speaker 01

  And like in the context, that's absolutely what it means. And so like, I take this and I'm like, and I finished whatever he asked me to do. And then I go back home and I run into my dad, who's like coming home from work. And I was like, can you talk to me for a second?

• 31:06Speaker 00

  How old are you at this point?

• 31:08Speaker 01

  Has probably, I mean, twenty twenty one. Um, but so and I I say this to my dad and I I read the passage and he goes, tell me exactly what it says. And I read it to him and he goes, that's not what that means. Like clearly that means to pray for their good. And I was like, okay, good. Um, but then the moment it occurred to me that we might be not just wrong about like one or two, like small doctrinal issues, but broadly wrong. All of those moments where of like moments like that of like deep questioning, um, or like things that hadn't sat right with me, but I couldn't quite put my finger on why, or let myself pursue it. I just felt like I was assaulted by every one of those moments that I had ever had.

• 31:52Speaker 00

  Well, that brings us to how you came to leave and the fact that, and this is all brilliantly recounted in your book, that you were a very valued member of the church and a kind of a golden child. And as you, as you write, when you said goodbye to Gramps, he said, I, I thought we had a jewel.

• 32:12Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 32:13Speaker 00

  In this one.

• 32:14Speaker 01

  I thought we had a jewel here.

• 32:15Speaker 00

  I thought we had a jewel here, meaning you. You leave with Grace, your sister. She's the younger sister. She was kind of on her third strike. So she'd been excluded, but the feeling is like you

• 32:25Speaker 01

  No, she was close to it. Yeah, she wasn't not quite. Yeah.

• 32:27Speaker 00

  Getting close. So she's sort of excluded or semi, and then you are there saying like, I'm going to. And they're like, no, you don't have to go. You know, when I reread parts of your book for this, it struck me how many parts of the puzzler are to do with how you came to leave. And part of it is interactions on Twitter. Twitter became like Palantir, the seeing stone in the Lord of the Rings. You were looking out into the world, but the world was also kind of looking into you and influencing how you thought about things. You were sitting with aspects of inconsistencies in some of the teachings that people had raised. There was also a texting relationship going on with a mysterious

• 33:07Speaker 00

  man. Spoiler alert, he went on to become your husband. But there's also in the backdrop, a a displacement of your mum from a position of authority in the church, a kind of, she's humiliated. And that when I went, one of the striking aspects of how Westbury was set up, that was on paper, a very patriarchal institution. But as your dad, as your grandpa faded, increasingly your mum and your aunt Margie were kind of stepping into the role of organizers. And although they wouldn't preach from the pulpit, because that was forbidden, they kind of came across as the key people at the church. And along with that was this younger generation of girls, yourself, Jael, Libby, your sister, Becca. And

• 33:54Speaker 00

  so there was this heavy feminine thing going on, which made it really interesting as a kind of subject of a documentary. So what I should say, like, you'd lost a little bit of your position of privilege at the church. And that's, but definitely your mum and dad had been completely sidelined.

• 34:12Speaker 01

  So it's a few things. So first of all, I actually was elevated in in a way when my mum was sidelined, because some of the work, quite a bit of the work that she did, fell to me. And I did not want that. I was not, you know, trying to, I never thought about it in terms of like power and influence. That wasn't the, what it did, though, like the conversations on Twitter, a big part of the reason they were so influential is, yes, it was making me question the doctrines. But what it also did, like, from the first time, I realized, wow, the church could be wrong about something. And my view could be right. Which is so funny, because even saying that now still

• 34:53Speaker 01

  sounds like extraordinarily arrogant, like to my ear. But I was able to see something that I thought they had missed. And so when I see them judging my mum and my sister, the way that I had seen them judge so many other people in the church over the years, I had many times had feelings of,

• 35:15Speaker 01

  are they right about this person? Like, I'm not living in this person's house. Like, they seem very sure about this. And I would always take the fact that my judgment didn't align with theirs as like, oh, I'm just not spiritual enough to discern, like, clearly, there's something happening here that I'm missing. Because their descriptions of this person and my interactions with them do not line up. And so I would just, I would, I basically took away two things, like, one, I'm clearly missing something here. And, you know, I'm, I'm just not smart enough, not spiritual enough to understand what it is. And two, I just can never allow myself to get in that position. Those are the two main things I took away. When it started happening to my mum and my sister,

• 35:56Speaker 01

  these people who live in my house and who I know way better than what these, you know, the men who are judging them and who are making all these accusations against them. The fact that I had this little bit of confidence in my own understanding and my own discernment that came from those conversations on Twitter, that was what allowed me to think in my own mind, they're just wrong about her. They're just like.

• 36:21Speaker 00

  They accused her of being kind of sharp, of being overly, what, acerbic?

• 36:26Speaker 01

  Yeah, basically. I mean, like, and, and yes, like, I mean, I worked extraordinarily close with my mother. And she was a horrible, horrible micromanager. It made a lot of things very difficult in our relationship.

• 36:38Speaker 00

  And anger prone at times?

• 36:39Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 36:39Speaker 00

  Erratic, a bit inconsistent?

• 36:41Speaker 01

  Yes, absolutely. You know, very sharp. Like, she could eviscerate someone. She could eviscerate me. Like, so I was not unaware of her flaws. But the, like, they went to such an extreme. I could go into detail, but it's going to sound just ridiculous, but.

• 36:58Speaker 00

  For what reason? Why would they do that?

• 37:01Speaker 01

  To make them understand our way or the highway. Like, you just have to.

• 37:05Speaker 00

  Biblical? Because obviously the Bible itself is kind of patriarchal.

• 37:09Speaker 01

  We are in charge. Yeah.

• 37:10Speaker 00

  So were they doing it in good faith? Or do you think behind it was kind of guys just trying to do a power grab?

• 37:16Speaker 01

  I mean, I think I would say in good faith. I mean, I think they, they thought that you're exactly what you're saying here. Like, men are supposed to be the head of the church. Shirley is not a man. She should not have this influence. I wrote this in my book, too. You know, I didn't realize this until I was writing it. So much of her power, if you want to call it that, of her influence, was the fact that she would see things that needed to be done, and she would pick it up and run with it. She, it was not a matter of like, I'm trying to be in charge here. I'm trying to be in control. It's, no one else is doing this, and it needs to be done. And so she would just, so what she did, and the position that she ended up in, that they later saw as unbiblical,

• 37:57Speaker 01

  it was because they weren't, they weren't the ones picking up, you know, picking up the oar and, you know, going for it. But anyways, to get back to your point, though, it, for me, it had nothing to do with, like, oh, I'm losing my power. Again, like, in many ways, I was gaining, I don't even like to think about it in these terms. It was more for me, the fact that I had some confidence in my own understanding and my own judgment, and that I could look at my mum and my sister and recognize, yes, they have their flaws, and yes, they've made mistakes, but they don't deserve to be cut down in this way. So yeah, for me, it was much, it wasn't about power. It was about, we are not living according to these standards that you have taught me all these years are,

• 38:41Speaker 01

  are unquestionable.

• 38:44Speaker 00

  I think the important takeaway for me is that it wasn't like a momentary thing or a single decision. It was a process and it unfolds. And you, you, you write about it very clearly and intelligently, that it was, it was a series of moments and a kind of, and then a period of kind of inhabiting almost two realities, and, and, and both of them are horrific. One is that you're going to hell and, and you made a terrible mistake. And the other is that you are, you've inflicted pain for years and years because, you know, leading this life of, of a kind of confused and

• 39:24Speaker 00

  dangerous misguided Christianity. And so both of them are horrific. But then what happens is, you leave. And, and I think the, the other part of the equation that people don't always grapple with is how difficult it is when you leave, that then you're having to piece your life back together, or a new life. And you've lost contact with anyone that was in, that is in the church? Your family said, unless you repent and, you know, they sort of left the door open a bit. But for a lot of people who leave, the door isn't even open. Or, and that you have no contact, like it's a total cutoff. And then what do you do? Who, who are you in touch with? What does

• 40:06Speaker 00

  that look like? And, and then there's a kind of carryover from the psychology that you've been indoctrinated in. Can you talk about that a little bit? And to put the kind of, the basic question would be like, oh, well, you leave and isn't that kind of basically like liberation?

• 40:22Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 40:22Speaker 00

  And free? And then you get to have fun and party and be free and not worry about going to hell?

• 40:28Speaker 01

  Yeah. Yeah, it's not like that at all. Like, I remember, I remember talking to people who had been out for years, and realizing, oh, my God, they still think they're going to hell. Like, if I still believed that, like, at that point, I, I mean, and I, it's not that I didn't have moments for a while after I left, where, you know, I would, I suddenly think like, oh, like, God's going to give me cancer, or like, my car's going to run off the road here, or like, you know, like very visceral moments.

• 40:58Speaker 00

  Intrusive thoughts?

• 40:59Speaker 01

  Very intrusive thoughts, absolutely.

• 41:01Speaker 00

  But what's the hardest part? So to get your head around, some people still carry the belief, they still think they're going to hell. For you, what was, what were the challenges of starting the new life?

• 41:12Speaker 01

  I had no, so many challenges. But a major one was, I had no experience making decisions for myself. Decision making was a muscle that had completely atrophied from disuse. I never, I didn't know, I had no connection in the world, no reason to be anywhere. And so I had no idea where to go. I, I was so confused. How do people decide where to live or what kind of work to do? You know, my first instinct was literally to move half an hour away and get a job at a law office. And I'm so glad I did not do that. Because Grace's instinct was to go as far away as possible. I think she actually wanted to go to France. And I was like, we're going to be, we're going to be totally broke if we, if we go to France.

• 41:57Speaker 00

  You'd saved a bit of money, right?

• 41:59Speaker 01

  Some, but not, not that much. Like, it basically got us through that first year. And I had a car, like, that I, you know, I had bought a couple of years earlier. So. Um, but we were doing all kinds of things, um, and just going places and visiting people, meeting people.

• 42:18Speaker 00

  Decompressing, and this again is in the book, you're reading, do you kind of figuring out?

• 42:22Speaker 01

  We ran away to South Dakota to read books.

• 42:24Speaker 00

  You went to, uh, South Dakota?

• 42:26Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 42:26Speaker 00

  Deadwood.

• 42:26Speaker 01

  Deadwood, yeah.

• 42:27Speaker 00

  Why Deadwood?

• 42:29Speaker 01

  My brother Sam had been a fan of the TV series.

• 42:31Speaker 00

  That's quite weird to go to a place just because you'd seen a TV show about it.

• 42:34Speaker 01

  We had, but this is to highlight, I hadn't actually seen the series at that point either. It was just Sam was a fan of the show. We were, I was looking for someplace that we could do in a day's drive and Deadwood was 12 hours from where we were. Um, and my friend, a new friend, had, um, told me about Airbnb. And so when I searched Deadwood on Airbnb, the first, the very first, um, listing that came up was this attic room, like a big attic room in this old Victorian house. And I showed her to Grace and, and we were like, oh my gosh, this is the place. We're gonna run, we were running away to read books for a month in, um, imitating, um, David Foster Wallace, who had taken a year out of school to go and read books. He was a bus driver or something. It's like, we don't have a year. We have a

• 43:15Speaker 01

  month between Grace's fall and spring semesters. So we'll go to South Dakota to read books. You know, with, I, I'm very grateful to my sister because her instinct to not just do the obvious, close, safe thing, um, that was like, really started to propel me to like, recognize like, the world is so much bigger than what I ever understood. And it's just not what we were taught. I think for me, one of the things that was so hopeful was, you know, we, we had, you know, the sign, the world is doomed and the matching website, theworldisdoomed.com and God hates the world and all of these terrible things that we believed about everyone else and their intentions and how horrible they were. And over and

• 43:57Speaker 01

  over again, I kept meeting wonderful people who were clearly trying to do the right thing and realizing that like, there was good in the world, um, was amazing. And then, you know, at first I thought, well, I'm just gonna have to, there's no way I can ever account for the life that I lived at Westboro. I'm just gonna have to go away and change my name and just like completely start over. Like I was gonna go by my legal first name and part of my last name and just whatever, do that. Um, it eventually, pretty quickly became clear that was not possible, obviously in the age of the internet and also not desirable. Because I realized in part, like, you know, my name means something that I don't believe

• 44:42Speaker 01

  anymore. And if I don't believe it, I have a responsibility to, to do something different. And so, yeah, that eventually started this, um, this conversation. I, I wrote a, um, essentially a, an open letter apologizing, like I didn't know what I was gonna do or how I was going to try, try to do good in the world, but, um, it seemed important to say that I had left and explain part of why. And I literally just posted on Twitter, I said, hi, because I hadn't tweeted in months. I said, hi, and I put a link to that. And I didn't expect it. I thought, you know, just the people that followed me might see it or whatever. And it became this really huge story that got so much attention and

• 45:27Speaker 01

  so much. And it, that really surprised me. Um, but it also really surprised me how kind people were and how understanding. And then the work really began, you know, I, I, I started writing and speaking and volunteering and, and all these, you know, many places that, that offered the chance to, to do that. Um, and it was, it was incredible. And also at the same time, trying to like, build a normal life.

• 46:10Speaker 00

  This episode is brought to you by Experian, the UK's most trusted credit score. Throughout my career, I've interviewed people from all walks of life, from everyday folk to Hollywood stars, and each one of them has their own unique story and goals, just like you and me. And that's no different to our financial stories. And with the expenses of summer behind us, now is the perfect time to take stock of your story by checking your Experian credit score. I know it's something that's easy to put off, but just in a few minutes, you could better understand your score, learn how to improve it and feel confident for your next financial move. That means you can start getting set and feeling confident

• 46:51Speaker 00

  for what's next, be it a new car, a new home, or maybe a copy of Got to Get Through This. That's my memoir, available at all good bookshops. Download the free Experian app and better your story today. For most trusted, visit experian.co.uk/claims.

• 47:22Speaker 00

  You know, you mentioned, I guess there were five, of the 11 of you, five left, that's right.

• 47:26Speaker 01

  Six now.

• 47:27Speaker 00

  Six left.

• 47:27Speaker 01

  Mm-hmm.

• 47:29Speaker 00

  Um, your oldest brother, Josh, who'd left before I arrived.

• 47:34Speaker 01

  Uh, he's the second, actually.

• 47:35Speaker 00

  Second oldest.

• 47:36Speaker 01

  So Sam is still there.

• 47:37Speaker 00

  Second oldest. Your youngest brother, what's his name?

• 47:40Speaker 01

  Luke.

• 47:41Speaker 00

  Luke.

• 47:42Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 47:42Speaker 00

  When did he leave?

• 47:43Speaker 01

  Last year.

• 47:44Speaker 00

  Last year.

• 47:44Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 47:46Speaker 00

  Grace, who you leave with in the book, but also Zach and Noah, both of whom left and then went on to take their own lives. And, uh, both of them are in that first film I made. Um, and in fact, Noah, people may remember as the child who's carrying the fag Sweden placard.

• 48:06Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 48:07Speaker 00

  Kind of confusedly attempting to explain the logic of it. And then in the second one, he's talking about a prophecy that will mean that the church may be moving to the Middle East and living in pink caves. Uh, like just exquisitely lovable, talkative.

• 48:22Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 48:22Speaker 00

  Humorous, full of life. Uh, in the third one, he's much more subdued and it would have been a year before he probably ended up leaving. Having, you know, having known Noah a little bit, I guess one thing to reflect on is that it was kind of a little bit strange. It turned out like I had figured in his, the way he saw the world somewhat, like that, I think you related to me that, um, well, do you want, that when you left, he said something to you about me?

• 48:54Speaker 01

  Yes. So you're talking about the day that I left the church. Um, so I was packing and crying and my family members were coming to talk to me, trying to talk me out of it. And Noah, um, Noah texted me and for years, I mean, if it was like eight and a half years or something after I left, that he left. And that was the last message he sent to me. But one of the things in his message was, um, if you do leave, don't talk to Louis. He's evil, basically.

• 49:27Speaker 01

  Basically.

• 49:28Speaker 00

  I mean, I shouldn't laugh.

• 49:28Speaker 01

  Uh, but it is that that's, he was 13 at the time.

• 49:32Speaker 00

  Right. He would have been 13.

• 49:33Speaker 01

  He was 13, yeah. He, he, I, I just, I love Noah. I was, I was, um, he was born the day before my 13th birthday and he was very much my little guy, you know?

• 49:45Speaker 00

  And when I, when I, I did my first documentary when I left, and I can't remember if this is in the film or not, but he made a little booklet.

• 49:51Speaker 01

  Yeah, I think it's at the end. I think it's in the credits.

• 49:53Speaker 00

  Saying, don't be a snake.

• 49:54Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 49:54Speaker 00

  Um, don't be a fag, don't join the army.

• 49:58Speaker 04

  You can do it for me.

• 49:59Speaker 03

  Your uncle lets you have it so you can carry it around, so you can know all the rules of a brain god. Don't tell people, don't marry two people, don't lie. Um, almost, I think everyone lies. Some in their life, maybe when they're a kid. Don't act like a snake. What's practically Louis does. Actually, all of these Louis does.

• 50:25Speaker 00

  What does that mean, act like a snake?

• 50:27Speaker 03

  Can't remember.

• 50:30Speaker 03

  Hey, you've been saying, don't act like- No, Noah, don't say that.

• 50:35Speaker 00

  You've been saying I act like a snake?

• 50:37Speaker 03

  No, you clarify for him. Yeah. Don't act like a snake and then says, don't be sneaky. Yes.

• 50:43Speaker 01

  Yeah, you, you knew him as this like very sweet.

• 50:46Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 50:46Speaker 01

  And-

• 50:47Speaker 00

  Garrulous, sort of irrepressible. I mean, it's what, as a journalist visiting to the church, like you, visiting the church, you, you were, you kind of became aware that this, that, that, that the family members were sort of starved of outside companionship.

• 51:01Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 51:02Speaker 00

  And so that you, not that they saw you as a friend when you were coming, but they were just grateful to, to be able to kind of-

• 51:08Speaker 01

  It was fun.

• 51:08Speaker 00

  Talk to someone without getting in trouble and find out about someone from the UK and who worked in TV. And, and for a younger person, like a friendly face from the outside world, obviously made an impression. But then evidently he, later on, he came to see me as something else. What do you think was?

• 51:25Speaker 01

  Well, I mean, I mean, he, basically, I mean, he, the way that he, he told me the story, and I mean, I, I don't want to like go into all the details, but basically there came a moment when he was like nine years old, where he just started to take on what the church believed about humans in general, in, and him in particular, which is, you know, humans are naturally purely evil and there is nothing good in you and, you know, you should be ashamed of yourself. And yeah, so he just took on an extraordinary amount of shame. And you can see it. Anybody who knew him can look back at him, like in your films and see him as a child and how like, he was so at ease in the world. He was so

• 52:10Speaker 01

  talkative. He was so happy. He was so sure of himself. And then after this, this moment when he was nine, um, um, he did the opposite. Like he, he was, he became like sort of quiet and withdrawn. And, and it was, it was a, it was a process. It was not like an overnight thing, but it was, it was for sure a process. Um, and that eventually derailed his life and, uh, took it, you know?

• 52:40Speaker 01

  Sorry.

• 52:45Speaker 00

  I mean, just to be

• 52:46Speaker 01

  And I just want to say, like, the amazing thing to me about Noah is that when he left, and I would talk to him about things, like, he, I always loved his mind. And I should say, like, nine months before he left, he was sending me anonymous messages on Instagram about, like, things I had said, like theological points that I had disputes with the church about. And after the second message, I looked at my husband and said, "I think this is my brother Noah." And then nine months later, or so, when he, he sent me a message on that same thread and said, "This is your brother Noah, and I have just left the church."

• 53:29Speaker 01

  And I was, I immediately burst into tears, and I was like, I was like, "Would you believe me if I told you that I knew it was you?" And then I asked him for his phone number, and it was the same number. So when I texted him, the first thing that came up was that message where he told me not to talk to you, from the day that I had left the church. But I started talking to him, and he was in law school at the time, and he just, the reason I knew it was him is he just had this incredibly interesting mind, and I always loved it. It was so smart and so thoughtful. And I would talk to him about everything, so I had conversations with him about this shame thing. And what amazed me so much is that he did not feel that way about other people.

• 54:10Speaker 01

  He could see, he was able to let Westboro's judgments of other people go and see them like as interesting, you know, people, human beings who are trying to do the right thing and, and, and just worth thinking about and being kind to and whatever. But he just, he could not get there with himself. He had so deeply internalized it. And again, I don't want to, like, go into too much detail or anything, but, you know, I just saw things after he died, things that he had written, where he just, he says it so plainly and so clearly that there's no doubt in my mind that our upbringing just played a huge role in

• 54:52Speaker 01

  the things that triggered him to take his own life, because he just, he just couldn't get past it.

• 54:59Speaker 00

  It wasn't the case that having left, he could see rationally, "Well, this is incorrect. I shouldn't punish myself." That, "These are intrusive thoughts. It's my mind playing tricks on me based on programming I've had growing up." And I'm saying really basic, but that would be the, you, you, you would hope that leaving would be the beginning of taking a kind of view of yourself, right?

• 55:25Speaker 01

  Yeah, and like I said, he did that with other people, so he was clearly capable of it in general, but he could not extend grace to himself. He just couldn't. And it, it was one of those things where, you know, he would, he had,

• 55:41Speaker 01

  he had this list of things, that, like, incidents that he would come back to, and he told me them multiple times, like, we, and over the course of, you know, because it was three years almost to the day

• 55:54Speaker 01

  after he left the church, that he did it. And, uh,

• 56:00Speaker 01

  so we went through that list so many times, and they were such small, like, tiny things that he thought that he did wrong. And when I say small, I mean, again, I don't want to go into detail, but like, objectively, the, the smallest, the smallest kinds of missteps that we would, all of us make 20 times a day, and he just could not, he could not let them go.

• 56:22Speaker 00

  And without, if he, if he hadn't grown up in Westboro, your strong feeling is it would have been a different situation. It would have been a different outcome.

• 56:31Speaker 01

  I, I do, absolutely. Yeah, it's absolutely devastating. Noah was only 24.

• 56:39Speaker 01

  He was only 24 when he took his own life, and he had so, like I told you, like, he, he just was a wonderful person. He cared about other people, and

• 56:53Speaker 01

  when you see that version of him in your films, like, as a child, that like, unbridled version of himself, he, at one point, he, he told me he would look at that version of himself, and he hated himself. It made him hate himself. Because like, how could he possibly have felt this way when he clearly is just a terrible person? And I just, I was gonna say,

• 57:14Speaker 00

  It's confusing.

• 57:14Speaker 01

  Yeah, I just, I, I, I wrapped my arms around him.

• 57:18Speaker 00

  He hated the what? The easiness and the happiness that he had at the time?

• 57:22Speaker 01

  Because how dare he? How dare, like, I, again, it's,

• 57:26Speaker 00

  It's so confusing.

• 57:27Speaker 01

  I know.

• 57:31Speaker 00

  Is there anything you'd like to say about Zach? Zach took his life the following year, wasn't it?

• 57:36Speaker 01

  Um, yeah, it's a little more. It was last July, a year ago, a little, just over a year ago now. Yeah, Zach had bipolar disorder, and he spoke very publicly about, about that, and

• 57:53Speaker 00

  He'd been out for quite a while.

• 57:54Speaker 01

  He had, and he had, like, and again, he was very public about this, so I don't,

• 58:00Speaker 01

  I don't think it's wrong to talk about it, but he said, um, yeah, he, he attempted. He attempted suicide multiple times, starting, because like, we, we didn't discover that he had bipolar disorder until shortly after he left.

• 58:14Speaker 01

  And, you know, he eventually, like, you know, he, he continued to, he was a nurse. He, he had also, you know, great aspirations, like, he was, really wanted to do good in the world and help people, and he did. I, I hear from people who, who have also been suicidal and,

• 58:33Speaker 01

  yeah, and so I know he helped a lot of people too, but yeah, ultimately, like, he just, you know, I was very close with Zach. I think I was closer to him than anybody else in our family, just partly because, like, I knew that he,

• 58:46Speaker 01

  he just would, you know, bipolar, like, you have these cycles, so he would have these intense highs, and that made the lows that much lower. And so anytime he was in that, you know, mode, like, when, when the fall came,

• 58:59Speaker 01

  you know, I would be on the phone and texting him and, you know, trying to, and last summer, it was just one of those moments came, and I didn't know it, and he didn't, he didn't reach out. And so there was, there was nothing anybody could do.

• 59:13Speaker 00

  Do you think the upbringing played a role? Or it's hard, just hard to say?

• 59:17Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, it's, it's hard to say, like, I mean, I, again, like, with bipolar, it's, it's,

• 59:23Speaker 00

  Anyone, that can happen to anyone.

• 59:24Speaker 01

  It really can happen to anyone, and, and the, what, what eventually, like, you know, I'm, I'm a very rational, like, logical, logically minded person, and so I would try to talk to Zach, and it's like, "Well, Zach, well, here's why this doesn't make sense." You know, like, in both directions, both the, like, sort of delusionally positive things that he believed he could accomplish, and the delusionally, I mean, I, I don't say that dismissively, I'm not trying to, I just mean, like, he would believe things that, to my mind, were so clearly so far outside of the realm of possibility or, or just accuracy,

• 59:57Speaker 01

  both positively and negatively, depending on where in the cycle he was. And I realized at a certain point, he could be in the most perfect situation in the world. Like, imagine the most perfect situation you could have someone in, and it would not matter what the facts were, because the, whatever it is, and the brain chemistry or whatever, is going to interpret those facts in a way that is either very positive or very negative. The, the, the logic is secondary to the feeling. In other words, that was my experience with Zach.

• 1:00:29Speaker 01

  Yeah, so, so I do think with Zach, it almost certainly would have happened one way or the other. But the fact that Noah took his own life, that, that really derailed my life. I would say for like a year and a half, maybe. The, the, it took me a year, like, it took me less than a day to write the first letter that I wrote to my parents, which was, you know, I was writing, um, writing to them on our drive to Kansas. We were going to my cousin's wedding. I was supposed to see Noah at this wedding that weekend, and, you know, the letter was just

• 1:01:11Speaker 01

  remembering Noah and how much we all loved him and how devastated I knew that my parents were. And sort of doing the opposite

• 1:01:20Speaker 01

  to them as we did when we went to people in their moments of grief. It was grieving with them. And I left the letter in the door at my house, because when they, my mom and my brother saw me, they ran away. But then it took me a year to write the second letter, because I felt like I had an obligation to say something to them that was essentially like, "You should do something differently." You should, that's, I mean, that's, that's the thrust of it, is like, there are things you can and should do differently. I know you're trying to do what the Bible says, but here's why I think you're wrong, and here's where I think you've gone amiss. But it's very hard to say, "You need to do things differently. You should do things differently",

• 1:02:03Speaker 01

  without saying, "This happened because of you. This is your fault."

• 1:02:08Speaker 00

  Do you have any contact with your mom and dad?

• 1:02:11Speaker 01

  No, I mean, I, it's almost, for years and years, it's been almost entirely one-sided. Like, it's, it's me, um, Um, reaching out to them, you know, again, part of the reason I don't blame my mom and my family at the church in the way that so many people do. You made the distinction earlier about like, you know, Westboro, something that you're born into. You didn't make the distinction with my mom's generation, but a lot of people do. They see like, oh, you were adults when the protesting started, da, da, da. But all of the constraints, all of the control that my grandfather exerted over my mom and her siblings, that was already solidly in place long before the picketing started.

• 1:02:55Speaker 01

  The sense of, of, of shame and the, and submission, like you have to submit yourself to your father and to God and to the church, like all of that was there. It's very hard for me to blame the people who were raised there any more than I can blame the version of myself who was raised there. So for me, it's, it's not about blame or shame. It's about change and how best that can happen.

• 1:03:23Speaker 00

  How's your energy?

• 1:03:24Speaker 01

  I'm good.

• 1:03:25Speaker 00

  Are you all right?

• 1:03:25Speaker 01

  I'm good, yeah.

• 1:03:26Speaker 00

  You know, we should talk about, are you okay to talk about witch trials for a second?

• 1:03:30Speaker 01

  Sure.

• 1:03:31Speaker 00

  I mean, so you've, you've carved out this career as a, as a broadcaster, a podcaster, advocate for understanding, reaching across ideological boundaries. You had a hit podcast about J K Rowling, the witch trials of J K Rowling, that kind of went through her journey, uh, the fact that she was, there were campaigns against her from the Christian right accusing her of, I don't know, sorcery or, or, or.

• 1:03:59Speaker 01

  Promoting witchcraft.

• 1:04:00Speaker 00

  Promoting witchcraft.

• 1:04:01Speaker 01

  Demonic activity.

• 1:04:02Speaker 00

  And then later on, there was, uh, more controversy related to, uh, her views, which were characterized as gender critical.

• 1:04:10Speaker 01

  Anti, anti-trans, is right.

• 1:04:11Speaker 00

  Anti-trans.

• 1:04:12Speaker 01

  So many people don't like, it's a minefield.

• 1:04:15Speaker 00

  Terminological minefield.

• 1:04:17Speaker 01

  It's absolutely because any, it was one of the things we experienced making the show is that every, almost any description of anything that's happening, like immediately puts you on one side or the other, depending on how you do it. And also just the confusion of terms, the fact that gender critical is the opposite of like critical gender theory.

• 1:04:37Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 1:04:38Speaker 01

  It's like there's, there's just.

• 1:04:38Speaker 00

  I don't, I don't, the term gender critical, I'm not a huge fan of.

• 1:04:43Speaker 01

  I don't think there's just, you know, no clear.

• 1:04:45Speaker 00

  I find it a confusing.

• 1:04:47Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:04:47Speaker 00

  Sort of quasi-scientific. Uh, this was in 2023, it was a six-part audio documentary.

• 1:04:54Speaker 01

  Seven part.

• 1:04:55Speaker 00

  Seven, because actually there was an additional one. Thank you.

• 1:05:01Speaker 00

  It's a spicy topic to take on, like I think kudos for even going there, first of all. And then the fact that you made what I view as a compelling and a very fair-minded documentary series is all bonus points.

• 1:05:17Speaker 00

  And also because J K Rowling, Joanne, I don't know her, but I think her first name is Joanne, hasn't done a lot of speaking on other people's platforms. Obviously she's been active on what is now X. So what brought you to make it? And, um, and then how, how did you get J K Rowling on board?

• 1:05:38Speaker 01

  Okay, so my friend, Andy Mills, who is now.

• 1:05:41Speaker 00

  Partner in crime.

• 1:05:42Speaker 01

  Now is my, yeah, my colleague.

• 1:05:44Speaker 00

  Podcast godfather.

• 1:05:45Speaker 01

  Yes, he's incredible. He, um, co-created the daily podcast.

• 1:05:49Speaker 00

  The New York Times podcast. And he kind of created a grammar for it that's become.

• 1:05:53Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:05:54Speaker 00

  Very widely copied.

• 1:05:55Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 1:05:56Speaker 00

  It's a conversational style, isn't it?

• 1:05:59Speaker 01

  Yes, I mean, he, he just is a brilliant broadcaster. He's a brilliant storyteller, um, but he called me one day, um, and it was, actually I can tell you it was March 1st of 2021. And wow, that seems like, cause it, it took a while. But he just was telling me about this idea he had for a podcast and he had pitched it at the New York Times and it had been rejected. It was not the moment, um, for it, apparently. And it was the witch trials of J K Rowling. And it was this idea that you just said, it's like, well, she has drawn the ire, um, of both the right and the left in these two, um, what you could describe as witch hunts.

• 1:06:38Speaker 01

  And I had forgotten, like Westboro had not, we were huge fans. My dad is the one who is an, my dad is an elder in the church and he brought me those, um, the first book. And he was like, he will love this book. His boss had given it to him.

• 1:06:50Speaker 00

  He's quite an eclectic reader, your dad.

• 1:06:52Speaker 01

  Yeah, well, we, um, you know, we were just, we were a big fan. So we had not participated in the backlash from the right. And so as soon as I got off the phone with Andy, I was just, I was just really interested in the subject. And so I went and started looking it up and I started finding, you know, old, like there were films made by the Christian right, like these people who were deeply offended and they had these incredible accusations against Rowling about the kind of person she was and she maybe a secret Nazi and just all kinds of, it was like very fascinating, like look at the late nineties, um, fundamentalist Christianity in the U S. Yeah, we, we started doing all this research and realizing like how much Rowling's story

• 1:07:35Speaker 01

  is both singular in the sense that, you know, she's written these incredible books, um, that have touched so many people's lives in so many different ways. But also her story is the story of many women, women who have suffered, you know, poverty the way that Rowling did, um, as a new mother, you know, um, domestic violence, sexual assault as she wrote about in, in 2020. And these are the, the realities of many, many, many women around the world. And also just the way that her story intersected with both like the 24 hour news cycle in the nineties and then the social media and how like just all these trends and, um, yeah. And we realized after a while, like we can't tell this story without Rowling's voice.

• 1:08:20Speaker 01

  And so like seven or eight months, maybe into this research that I was doing part-time,

• 1:08:27Speaker 01

  I wrote her a letter and like some weeks passed and eventually I, I heard back. And the short version is you said, how did I get her on board? I mean, I wrote her this letter asking for her to take part in this conversation and sort of essentially laying out my background and what we hope to accomplish. And a friend of hers had been at an event that you and I did, um, for my book in London. And she had received my book as a gift.

• 1:08:58Speaker 00

  Really?

• 1:08:58Speaker 01

  Um, yeah.

• 1:09:00Speaker 00

  And so she read it?

• 1:09:01Speaker 01

  Signed, yeah. Yeah, and she had, I'm sorry, yeah, she had read, he'd read my book.

• 1:09:05Speaker 00

  And she liked it?

• 1:09:06Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 1:09:07Speaker 00

  So what, one of my takeaways from listening to the series was how online, there's an episode earlier when you're talking to her and she's, she's got this familiarity with the world of online influencers and she's talking about Milo Yiannopoulos and barely figures from the alt-right and people weaponizing free speech to promote hateful content. And I, I was really striking how engaged she is, maybe it shouldn't be, that she's very, very curious about these, this sort of the culture wars even prior to her speaking out, right?

• 1:09:42Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, I, I think she, like many people, is very interested in how what is happening online is influencing real life. And sort of the trends and the things that like, social media, I think often amplifies some of our worst impulses and incentivizes extremes, just like with my family, right? It's because the louder you are, the more extreme you are, the louder your voice is because more people are paying attention to it because it's outrageous, because it's provocative.

• 1:10:11Speaker 00

  It gets amplified, it goes, it gets retweeted, it gets more engagement. Outrage is apparently the, the biggest driver of engagement.

• 1:10:17Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:10:18Speaker 00

  Online or one of them.

• 1:10:19Speaker 01

  Yeah, and then there's this, there's this thing that we covered in episode three of Witch Trials where, um, I interviewed this internet researcher named Angela Nagle and she described these sort of like reinforcing cultures, opposing cultures on, the two examples that she used were Tumblr on the left and 4chan on the right. And sort of the visibility, like the people like on Tumblr see what's happening on 4chan and they think, oh my God, those people exist in the world? They have to be opposed and sort of pushes them further to the left and the same thing with people on the right. So they see the like sort of, you know, extreme sensitivity of places like Tumblr and they're like, you know, they, is the, they did the exact opposite. It's this extreme anti-sensitivity, they're going to say the most offensive things.

• 1:11:05Speaker 01

  And so, yeah, there's just, there's all these dynamics and they're incredibly fascinating. So it doesn't surprise me at all that Rowling would be interested in them.

• 1:11:13Speaker 00

  Shout out Angela Nagle and her book, Kill All Normies.

• 1:11:16Speaker 01

  Which is so good.

• 1:11:16Speaker 00

  Which was a very early text, um, that's basically about, uh, exactly, exactly as you say, so internet, um, confirmation bias and, and echo chambers. The podcast was relatively, it was a big hit, like that's the main thing I want to say. And like I said, everyone was listening to it. The podcast was relatively well-reviewed. Ready for, this sounds like a godsmack. Although The Guardian argued it was undermined by Meghan's quote, mushy Christian desire to be as kind and even-handed as possible.

• 1:11:48Speaker 01

  Is that a Christian thing or a journalistic thing? I, in general?

• 1:11:52Speaker 00

  You're asking me?

• 1:11:53Speaker 01

  I'm just saying.

• 1:11:54Speaker 00

  I, I can't speak for The Guardian.

• 1:11:56Speaker 01

  I'm just saying.

• 1:11:56Speaker 00

  It also sparked plenty of discourse. The Washington Post argued it was an exhausting listen. I mean.

• 1:12:04Speaker 01

  I, I think so many people came to it thinking that it was a debate.

• 1:12:09Speaker 00

  On the left and the right, some people thought it was too accepting of various, uh, trans perspectives and others thought it was kind of platforming J K R in a irresponsible way.

• 1:12:20Speaker 01

  So many people like, I think, came to the show thinking that it was a debate, like it, it's not a debate and it, if you judge it as a debate between these two sides, like that's not what it is though. It, it is a narrative, um, about the way that, um, I mean, partly on how the way that the internet has changed. It's sort of using Rowling's story as a lens to examine these profound changes that society has gone through over the last like 30 years. That's really what it's doing. And it's, yeah, I'm, I'm incredibly proud of it.

• 1:12:49Speaker 00

  As you should be.

• 1:12:50Speaker 01

  I see, I mean, I, I see that, um, criticism, what was the second, oh, platforming J K Rowling.

• 1:12:56Speaker 00

  Go on.

• 1:12:57Speaker 01

  I'm definitely not platforming J K Rowling. J K Rowling is definitely platforming me, just by the way. But again.

• 1:13:04Speaker 00

  She's platforming you.

• 1:13:05Speaker 01

  I just mean, like, like, so first, we couldn't have made this show without her, first of all. And also, I am like, she has her own platform. She does not need a champion. She does not want one. Like, I think some people might think like, oh, she only agreed to do it because you were nice to her or whatever. They wanted the strongest possible arguments on the other side. Like, again, she does not need a champion. She is her own champion, as you can see.

• 1:13:29Speaker 00

  She's a loud voice.

• 1:13:30Speaker 01

  How she represents herself. Yeah, absolutely. She does not need me to platform her. My goal, and one of the things that I wrote in that letter to her, was taking that conversation off of social media where it's happening and it's going to continue happening, but trying to give it context and space and to have people, like, from various perspectives, share this, like, what are the strongest arguments on, and, you know, and to cover them as extensively as we could in a way that helps people understand where they're coming from and what is at stake for the people in this conversation. Because I think, yeah, it's, it's, it's, it can be very obvious to you what's at stake on your side, but maybe not as obvious what's, it's easier to dismiss, obviously, other people's experiences when you don't really understand them, which

• 1:14:15Speaker 01

  is why we included, there's many reasons to include Natalie and Noah in episode six.

• 1:14:20Speaker 00

  Natalie spoke out and said she regretted taking part. Did you know that?

• 1:14:24Speaker 01

  I did know that.

• 1:14:25Speaker 00

  Shall I read this out?

• 1:14:26Speaker 01

  This was before, she, she disavowed the podcast before a single episode aired. Yes.

• 1:14:34Speaker 00

  Uh, I'll read this out. This is, this is before she'd heard it.

• 1:14:37Speaker 01

  Well, I don't know what you're about to read. I'm just saying.

• 1:14:39Speaker 00

  Meghan spoke to J K Rowling about me, and I thought it seemed only right to speak to me about J K R. This is what was pitched to me. I took the bait and consented to a pretty miserable three-hour interrogation about my transition, as well as the usual, quote, "concerns about trans rights."

• 1:14:55Speaker 01

  Man, so many things to say. She's brilliant, and you can go and look at her YouTube. Like, she made, she had made a, a video about, a video, meaning a long video essay. She makes these long video essays, one about J K Rowling and one about cancel culture. And so as someone who came to the story, like, both as recognizing the dangers and pitfalls and sort of ugliness of canceling someone, and knowing that people do it with all good intention. I mean, similar to Westboro. Like, they come to this, like, the way that Natalie put it was, "You're trashing someone, but you feel righteous." I think that's how she put it, something like that. And so.

• 1:15:37Speaker 00

  Talking, what she was speaking about, how she reacted to J K Rowling?

• 1:15:42Speaker 01

  So this, there was two separate videos. So I think that one, that quote, or paraphrase, is from the cancel culture video, but she made another one about Rowling. And so as someone who was both critical, both of Rowling and of cancel culture, I thought she was an incredibly interesting person to talk to, and I did go to Rowling with some of the things that came from her video. And we played, I think we played some of her video in, in the series, or referenced it at least. So absolutely, we wanted to go and talk to her. Like, she has an incredibly interesting perspective, and I, I hate the fact that she thought that the interview was miserable, because I thought it was incredibly fascinating.

• 1:16:20Speaker 01

  And I was very grateful to Natalie for sitting down with me. And we tried very hard to present her argument accurately, of course, but, you know, she's incredibly intelligent and, and we heard from many people, I don't know if it's any consolation to her, but we heard from so many people who walked away from that, very persuaded, like, to see that side of the argument in ways that they never had before because of her experience and because of Noah's experience, young trans boy named Noah.

• 1:16:53Speaker 00

  Someone on the team was saying, "Well, it would have been a less polar, it wasn't polarizing, but some people took against Witch Trials of J K Rowling, possibly because they heard the title and thought, you've decided that this was a witch trial."

• 1:17:04Speaker 01

  Okay, so this is, I'm, I'm really glad you brought it back to this, because we cast about for a long time for a different title. And the reason we ultimately settled on it is because the language of witch hunting came up on both sides. So, yes, for sure, Rowling's side sees themselves as the subject of a witch hunt. They see themselves as, like, like, the word "turf," which is, you know.

• 1:17:28Speaker 00

  Trans exclusionary.

• 1:17:30Speaker 01

  Radical feminist. Yes. They see that as, like, just a new version of the word witch or bitch. And so they, for sure, see themselves as, you know, being targets of a witch hunt. But so do people on the other side. And, like, it was very interesting to realize.

• 1:17:48Speaker 00

  They, yeah, on the other side, they see themselves as being witch hunted as well?

• 1:17:51Speaker 01

  Absolutely, absolutely. Because they, like, they are being targeted. Like, so they are, it's just a very small portion of the population that is transgender, and they are getting inordinate, you know, hatred and cruelty and opposition, they feel, right? So, and they, they.

• 1:18:05Speaker 00

  So in that framing, the grammar is, is also like, "Oh, she's leading a witch trial."

• 1:18:11Speaker 01

  Yes. So the, the title, "The Witch Trials of J K Rowling," she could be either the subject or the prosecutor.

• 1:18:17Speaker 00

  Finder, the prosecutor general.

• 1:18:19Speaker 01

  Absolutely. And so realizing that it was actually ambiguous, and the fact that, again, just the fact that the witch hunting, we, we talked to a, a witch expert, so it's a woman who wrote a book on the Salem witch trials. It is a, a theme sort of throughout the series. We talked about it at the top of episode seven, I think, especially. But, but anyway, yeah, like, it is an ambiguous title. So people come to it thinking, like, oh, for sure, they're on Rowling's side. But obviously, we can point out and hope that they hear that the other side is also represented in very, I think, very compelling terms. I, I found both Natalie and Noah extremely compelling.

• 1:18:59Speaker 00

  Did you feel by the end, you basically, did you feel by the end, you sort of agreed with J K Rowling, or is it more complicated than that?

• 1:19:07Speaker 01

  Um, I think it's complicated. I think there's just a lot that, I'm, I'm very, like, I remember I was talking to Joe Rogan on his show, and I said, "There's two things that people have a hard time saying. I messed up, and I don't know." And I'm very comfortable now saying, "I don't know." I think there's a lot of things that we don't know about a lot of things. And, I mean, related to the subject of sex and gender. And I don't have to, I don't have to take a position on all these policy issues. I can, I can inhabit the role of a journalist and say, like, "I'm trying to understand people on all sides," and let that, let that be that.

• 1:19:47Speaker 00

  What, when you move through the world, and you, if you have people, you're explaining to people what your story is, if they don't know, what do you think is the most common misconception? What do you find yourself having to explain over and over again about Westboro?

• 1:20:02Speaker 01

  I, I think some people, like, think that they're just, I mean, they think they're just bad people. And, you know, for me, like, that's a big part of the story, maybe the biggest part of the story, is like, they're, they're, I don't think they're bad people. I think they're doing bad things because they have been indoctrinated, the way I was indoctrinated. And, and so it's in, like, once again, like, the fact that they have good intentions is the thing that, for me, is, is hopeful. I think that's the biggest misconception, though.

• 1:20:30Speaker 00

  Yeah, it's not intrinsic. It, it's something that, it was an effect that was wrought by the circumstances.

• 1:20:36Speaker 01

  And that the circumstances can change. And that's, for me, like, that's really what it comes down to. The circumstances, for me, changed. And, yeah, it's just an incredibly hopeful thing.

• 1:20:48Speaker 00

  And if you, if they are watching or listening, your brother Sam, your sister Becca, still there, Isaiah's still there, Gabe is still there. Those are the siblings, not to mention your uncles, aunts, cousins, and your mum and dad. What would you say to them?

• 1:21:08Speaker 01

  That I love them unconditionally, and that I am here for them, and that if they, you know, I, I'm not trying to tell people, you know, how to live or what to do, but if they did feel compelled to leave, that I'm here, and that I will do everything in my power to help them. That the world is not what we were taught it was, that there is a lot of good and a lot of hope, and that I deeply wish for them to experience it, because I can't even tell you how much my life has changed in positive ways in the absence of that church.

• 1:21:58Speaker 00

  Welcome back. Thank you for listening. I hope you found that interesting. Massive, massive thanks to Meghan for coming by and talking so openly and sensitively and thoughtfully. A lot of people talk about the need for empathy, the need to be less tribal. That's easier to say than to do. Meghan is modeling a kind of compassionate attitude, not least with respect to her own family and the way she's kept the door open or attempted to, trying to communicate with family members, show them that she's still there for them when needed. For me, it's been an extraordinary experience, being a very small part of that whole story and, and seeing Meghan and her transformation over the course of nearly 20

• 1:22:42Speaker 00

  years, 2007, when I first visited. And obviously, yeah, check out those documentaries, if you haven't seen them. They're all, they're all on iPlayer. The first one, I sometimes say about my documentaries that, they're like my children. I don't have favorites, but that's one of my favorites. Because of the extraordinary immersion and, and, and the combination of

• 1:23:10Speaker 00

  sort of positive and negative values, like, they were very hospitable and kind to me. When I stayed, we would go, we went ice skating or rollerblading and ate Chinese food. And then they were spewing hatred on the pickets and, and the incongruity of, of those different modes. And the way in which I, you know, I could see that in other settings, they would have grown up to be positive people. Felt like a life lesson, or, you know, in indoctrination.

• 1:23:40Speaker 00

  When I last checked, Westboro was still doing pickets, but they had kind of toned it down a bit. Some of the language a bit, was a little bit moderated. Mainly, my mind goes to what Shirley and, and Brent, Meghan's parents, must be going through, like, the idea of your children, one after another, leaving. I think she, we talked in the chat, how many has she got, have they got left? Four or five still in the church? But, but two of them actually, having ended their lives, it's, it's, it's a mind-boggling thing to consider.

• 1:24:21Speaker 00

  I think that might be it for now. If you've been affected by the topics discussed in this episode, Spotify do have a website for information and resources. Visit spotify.com/resources. That's it for this episode. Thanks for tuning in, and I hope to see you next week. Come back.