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"content": "\u003cp>LOS ANGELES — Robert Durst, the wealthy New York real estate heir and failed fugitive who was dogged for decades with suspicion in the disappearance and deaths of those around him before he was convicted of killing his best friend and sentenced to life in prison, has died. He was 78.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Durst died in a state prison hospital facility in Stockton, his attorney Chip Lewis said. He said it was from natural causes due to a number of health issues.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[aside postid='arts_12300484']Durst was convicted in September of shooting Susan Berman at point-blank range in 2000 at her Los Angeles home. He was sentenced to life Oct. 14. Two days later, \u003ca href=\"https://www.npr.org/2021/10/16/1046786931/robert-durst-covid-19\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">he was hospitalized with COVID-19\u003c/a>, his trial attorney Dick DeGuerin said.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Durst had long been suspected of killing his wife, Kathie, who went missing in 1982 and has been declared legally dead. He was finally \u003ca href=\"https://www.npr.org/2021/11/01/1051278966/robert-durst-indicted-1982-murder-wife-kathie\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">indicted in November for second-degree murder in her death\u003c/a>.\u003c/p>\n\u003ch3>The twists of the cases against him\u003c/h3>\n\u003cp>Prosecutors in Los Angeles presented evidence Durst silenced Berman because she helped him cover up Kathie’s killing and was about to talk to investigators. They also argued he killed a Texas man who discovered his identity when he was living secretly in Galveston after Berman’s killing. Durst was acquitted of murder in that case in 2003, after testifying he shot him in self-defense.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[ad fullwidth]\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Durst discussed the cases and made several damning statements including a stunning confession during an unguarded moment in \u003ca href=\"https://www.npr.org/2021/09/17/1038465926/robert-durst-convicted-of-murder-in-best-friends-killing\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">the six-part HBO documentary series \u003cem>The Jinx: The Life and Deaths of Robert Durst.\u003c/em>\u003c/a>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8ZabDYB7ijM\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The show made his name known to a new generation and brought renewed scrutiny and suspicion from authorities. He was arrested in Berman’s killing the night before the final episode, which closed with him mumbling to himself in a bathroom while still wearing a hot mic saying: “You’re caught! What the hell did I do? Killed them all, of course.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The quotes were later revealed to have been manipulated for dramatic effect but the production—done with Durst’s cooperation against the advice from his lawyer and friends—dredged up new evidence including an envelope that connected Durst to the scene of Berman’s killing as well as incriminating statements he made.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Police had received a note directing them to Berman’s home with only the word “CADAVER” written in block letters.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>In interviews given between 2010 and 2015, Durst told the makers of the \u003cem>The Jinx\u003c/em> that he didn’t write the note, but whoever did had killed her.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“You’re writing a note to the police that only the killer could have written,” Durst said.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>His defense lawyers conceded in the run-up to trial that Durst had written the note, and prosecutors said it amounted to a confession.\u003c/p>\n\u003ch3>How the trial unfolded\u003c/h3>\n\u003cp>Clips from \u003cem>The Jinx\u003c/em>, and from the 2010 movie \u003cem>All Good Things\u003c/em> in which Ryan Gosling played a fictionalized version of Durst, had starring roles at trial.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6rTd81E226U\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>As did Durst himself. His attorneys again took the risk of putting him on the stand for what turned out to be about three weeks of testimony. It didn’t work as it had in Texas.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Under devastating cross-examination by prosecutor John Lewin, Durst admitted he lied under oath in the past and would do it again to get out of trouble.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“‘Did you kill Susan Berman?’ is strictly a hypothetical,” Durst said from the stand. “I did not kill Susan Berman. But if I had, I would lie about it.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The jury promptly returned a guilty verdict.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>It long appeared he would avoid any such convictions.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Durst went on the run in late 2000 after New York authorities reopened an investigation into his wife’s disappearance, renting a modest apartment in Galveston and disguising himself as a mute woman.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>In 2001, the body parts of a neighbor, Morris Black, began washing up in Galveston Bay.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[aside postid='pop_97139']Arrested in the killing, Durst jumped bail. He was arrested for shoplifting a sandwich six weeks later in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, where he had gone to college. Police found $37,000 cash and two handguns in his car.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>He would testify that Black had pulled a gun on him and died when the weapon went off during a struggle. He told jurors in detail how he bought tools and dismembered and disposed of Black’s body. He was acquitted of murder. He pleaded guilty to violating his bail, and to evidence tampering for the dismemberment. He served three years in prison.\u003c/p>\n\u003ch3>Durst’s health issues\u003c/h3>\n\u003cp>Durst had bladder cancer and his health deteriorated during the Berman trial. He was escorted into court in a wheelchair wearing prison attire each day because his attorneys said he was unable to change into a suit. But the judge declined further delays after a 14-month pause during the coronavirus pandemic.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>DeGuerin said Durst was “very, very sick” at his sentencing hearing and it was the worst he looked in the 20 years he spent representing him.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Durst entered the courtroom with wide-eyed vacant stare. Near the end of the hearing after Berman’s loved ones told the judge how her death upended their lives, Durst coughed hard and then appeared to struggle to breathe. His chest heaved and he pulled his mask down below his mouth and began to gulp for air.\u003c/p>\n\u003ch3>The heir’s upbringing\u003c/h3>\n\u003cp>The son of real estate magnate Seymour Durst, Robert Durst was born April 12, 1943, and grew up in Scarsdale, New York. He would later say that at age 7, he witnessed his mother’s death in a fall from their home.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[aside postid='pop_109009']He graduated with an economics degree in 1965 from Lehigh University, where he played lacrosse. He entered a doctoral program at the University of California, Los Angeles, where he met Berman, but dropped out and returned to New York in 1969.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>He became a developer in the family business, but his father passed him over to make his younger brother, and rival, Douglas the head of the Durst Organization in 1992.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>In 1971, Robert Durst met Kathie McCormack, and the two married on his 30th birthday in 1973.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>In January 1982, his wife was a student in her final year at medical school when she disappeared. She had shown up unexpectedly at a friend’s dinner party in Newtown, Connecticut, then left after a call from her husband to return to their home in South Salem, New York.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Robert Durst told police he last saw her when he put her on a train to stay at their apartment in Manhattan because she had classes the next day.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>He would divorce her eight years later, claiming spousal abandonment, and in 2017, at her family’s request, she was declared legally dead.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Robert Durst is survived by his second wife Debrah Charatan, whom he married in 2000. He had no children.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Under California law, a conviction is vacated if a defendant dies while the case is under appeal, said Laurie Levenson, a law professor at Loyola Law School.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[ad floatright]\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Lewis said an appeal was filed for Durst.\u003c/p>\n\u003cdiv class=\"fullattribution\">\u003cem>Copyright 2022 NPR. To see more, \u003ca href=\"https://www.npr.org\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">visit NPR\u003c/a>.\u003cimg decoding=\"async\" src=\"https://www.google-analytics.com/__utm.gif?utmac=UA-5828686-4&utmdt=Robert+Durst%2C+real+estate+heir%2C+dies+in+prison+at+78&utme=8(APIKey)9(MDAxOTAwOTE4MDEyMTkxMDAzNjczZDljZA004)\">\u003c/em>\u003c/div>\n\n",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003cp>LOS ANGELES — Robert Durst, the wealthy New York real estate heir and failed fugitive who was dogged for decades with suspicion in the disappearance and deaths of those around him before he was convicted of killing his best friend and sentenced to life in prison, has died. He was 78.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Durst died in a state prison hospital facility in Stockton, his attorney Chip Lewis said. He said it was from natural causes due to a number of health issues.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>Durst was convicted in September of shooting Susan Berman at point-blank range in 2000 at her Los Angeles home. He was sentenced to life Oct. 14. Two days later, \u003ca href=\"https://www.npr.org/2021/10/16/1046786931/robert-durst-covid-19\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">he was hospitalized with COVID-19\u003c/a>, his trial attorney Dick DeGuerin said.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Durst had long been suspected of killing his wife, Kathie, who went missing in 1982 and has been declared legally dead. He was finally \u003ca href=\"https://www.npr.org/2021/11/01/1051278966/robert-durst-indicted-1982-murder-wife-kathie\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">indicted in November for second-degree murder in her death\u003c/a>.\u003c/p>\n\u003ch3>The twists of the cases against him\u003c/h3>\n\u003cp>Prosecutors in Los Angeles presented evidence Durst silenced Berman because she helped him cover up Kathie’s killing and was about to talk to investigators. They also argued he killed a Texas man who discovered his identity when he was living secretly in Galveston after Berman’s killing. Durst was acquitted of murder in that case in 2003, after testifying he shot him in self-defense.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Durst discussed the cases and made several damning statements including a stunning confession during an unguarded moment in \u003ca href=\"https://www.npr.org/2021/09/17/1038465926/robert-durst-convicted-of-murder-in-best-friends-killing\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">the six-part HBO documentary series \u003cem>The Jinx: The Life and Deaths of Robert Durst.\u003c/em>\u003c/a>\u003c/p>\u003c/p>\u003cp>\u003cspan class='utils-parseShortcode-shortcodes-__youtubeShortcode__embedYoutube'>\n \u003cspan class='utils-parseShortcode-shortcodes-__youtubeShortcode__embedYoutubeInside'>\n \u003ciframe\n loading='lazy'\n class='utils-parseShortcode-shortcodes-__youtubeShortcode__youtubePlayer'\n type='text/html'\n src='//www.youtube.com/embed/8ZabDYB7ijM'\n title='//www.youtube.com/embed/8ZabDYB7ijM'\n allowfullscreen='true'\n style='border:0;'>\u003c/iframe>\n \u003c/span>\n \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\u003cp>\u003cp>The show made his name known to a new generation and brought renewed scrutiny and suspicion from authorities. He was arrested in Berman’s killing the night before the final episode, which closed with him mumbling to himself in a bathroom while still wearing a hot mic saying: “You’re caught! What the hell did I do? Killed them all, of course.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The quotes were later revealed to have been manipulated for dramatic effect but the production—done with Durst’s cooperation against the advice from his lawyer and friends—dredged up new evidence including an envelope that connected Durst to the scene of Berman’s killing as well as incriminating statements he made.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Police had received a note directing them to Berman’s home with only the word “CADAVER” written in block letters.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>In interviews given between 2010 and 2015, Durst told the makers of the \u003cem>The Jinx\u003c/em> that he didn’t write the note, but whoever did had killed her.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“You’re writing a note to the police that only the killer could have written,” Durst said.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>His defense lawyers conceded in the run-up to trial that Durst had written the note, and prosecutors said it amounted to a confession.\u003c/p>\n\u003ch3>How the trial unfolded\u003c/h3>\n\u003cp>Clips from \u003cem>The Jinx\u003c/em>, and from the 2010 movie \u003cem>All Good Things\u003c/em> in which Ryan Gosling played a fictionalized version of Durst, had starring roles at trial.\u003c/p>\u003c/p>\u003cp>\u003cspan class='utils-parseShortcode-shortcodes-__youtubeShortcode__embedYoutube'>\n \u003cspan class='utils-parseShortcode-shortcodes-__youtubeShortcode__embedYoutubeInside'>\n \u003ciframe\n loading='lazy'\n class='utils-parseShortcode-shortcodes-__youtubeShortcode__youtubePlayer'\n type='text/html'\n src='//www.youtube.com/embed/6rTd81E226U'\n title='//www.youtube.com/embed/6rTd81E226U'\n allowfullscreen='true'\n style='border:0;'>\u003c/iframe>\n \u003c/span>\n \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\u003cp>\u003cp>As did Durst himself. His attorneys again took the risk of putting him on the stand for what turned out to be about three weeks of testimony. It didn’t work as it had in Texas.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Under devastating cross-examination by prosecutor John Lewin, Durst admitted he lied under oath in the past and would do it again to get out of trouble.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“‘Did you kill Susan Berman?’ is strictly a hypothetical,” Durst said from the stand. “I did not kill Susan Berman. But if I had, I would lie about it.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The jury promptly returned a guilty verdict.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>It long appeared he would avoid any such convictions.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Durst went on the run in late 2000 after New York authorities reopened an investigation into his wife’s disappearance, renting a modest apartment in Galveston and disguising himself as a mute woman.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>In 2001, the body parts of a neighbor, Morris Black, began washing up in Galveston Bay.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>Arrested in the killing, Durst jumped bail. He was arrested for shoplifting a sandwich six weeks later in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, where he had gone to college. Police found $37,000 cash and two handguns in his car.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>He would testify that Black had pulled a gun on him and died when the weapon went off during a struggle. He told jurors in detail how he bought tools and dismembered and disposed of Black’s body. He was acquitted of murder. He pleaded guilty to violating his bail, and to evidence tampering for the dismemberment. He served three years in prison.\u003c/p>\n\u003ch3>Durst’s health issues\u003c/h3>\n\u003cp>Durst had bladder cancer and his health deteriorated during the Berman trial. He was escorted into court in a wheelchair wearing prison attire each day because his attorneys said he was unable to change into a suit. But the judge declined further delays after a 14-month pause during the coronavirus pandemic.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>DeGuerin said Durst was “very, very sick” at his sentencing hearing and it was the worst he looked in the 20 years he spent representing him.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Durst entered the courtroom with wide-eyed vacant stare. Near the end of the hearing after Berman’s loved ones told the judge how her death upended their lives, Durst coughed hard and then appeared to struggle to breathe. His chest heaved and he pulled his mask down below his mouth and began to gulp for air.\u003c/p>\n\u003ch3>The heir’s upbringing\u003c/h3>\n\u003cp>The son of real estate magnate Seymour Durst, Robert Durst was born April 12, 1943, and grew up in Scarsdale, New York. He would later say that at age 7, he witnessed his mother’s death in a fall from their home.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>He graduated with an economics degree in 1965 from Lehigh University, where he played lacrosse. He entered a doctoral program at the University of California, Los Angeles, where he met Berman, but dropped out and returned to New York in 1969.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>He became a developer in the family business, but his father passed him over to make his younger brother, and rival, Douglas the head of the Durst Organization in 1992.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>In 1971, Robert Durst met Kathie McCormack, and the two married on his 30th birthday in 1973.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>In January 1982, his wife was a student in her final year at medical school when she disappeared. She had shown up unexpectedly at a friend’s dinner party in Newtown, Connecticut, then left after a call from her husband to return to their home in South Salem, New York.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Robert Durst told police he last saw her when he put her on a train to stay at their apartment in Manhattan because she had classes the next day.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>He would divorce her eight years later, claiming spousal abandonment, and in 2017, at her family’s request, she was declared legally dead.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Robert Durst is survived by his second wife Debrah Charatan, whom he married in 2000. He had no children.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Under California law, a conviction is vacated if a defendant dies while the case is under appeal, said Laurie Levenson, a law professor at Loyola Law School.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Lewis said an appeal was filed for Durst.\u003c/p>\n\u003cdiv class=\"fullattribution\">\u003cem>Copyright 2022 NPR. To see more, \u003ca href=\"https://www.npr.org\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">visit NPR\u003c/a>.\u003cimg decoding=\"async\" src=\"https://www.google-analytics.com/__utm.gif?utmac=UA-5828686-4&utmdt=Robert+Durst%2C+real+estate+heir%2C+dies+in+prison+at+78&utme=8(APIKey)9(MDAxOTAwOTE4MDEyMTkxMDAzNjczZDljZA004)\">\u003c/em>\u003c/div>\n\n\u003c/div>\u003c/p>",
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"title": "Is 'Dopesick' a True Story? Experts and the Show's Creators Sort Fact From Fiction",
"headTitle": "Is ‘Dopesick’ a True Story? Experts and the Show’s Creators Sort Fact From Fiction | KQED",
"content": "\u003cp>\u003cem>Editor’s note: This story contains quotes and information originally discussed during a Twitter Spaces event hosted by NPR TV critic Eric Deggans and featuring NPR addiction correspondent Brian Mann, ‘Dopesick’ book author Beth Macy, ‘Dopesick’ series creator/showrunner Danny Strong and more. \u003c/em>\u003ca href=\"https://twitter.com/NPR\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">\u003cem>\u003cstrong>Follow NPR on Twitter\u003c/strong>\u003c/em>\u003c/a>\u003cem>, and \u003c/em>\u003ca href=\"https://www.npr.org/series/1049705109/the-opioid-crisis\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">\u003cem>\u003cstrong>read more of NPR’s addiction coverage here.\u003c/strong>\u003c/em>\u003c/a> \u003cem>This story contains spoilers about events depicted in Hulu’s limited series.\u003c/em>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Hulu’s \u003cem>Dopesick\u003c/em> depicts the start of the opioid addiction crisis in the U.S. and some of the people it has affected. NPR TV critic Eric Deggans and NPR addiction correspondent Brian Mann spoke with \u003cem>Dopesick\u003c/em> author Beth Macy and \u003cem>Dopesick\u003c/em> series creator/showrunner Danny Strong to discuss the show and just how real it is.\u003c/p>\n\u003ch3>Is \u003cem>Dopesick\u003c/em> a true story?\u003c/h3>\n\u003cp>Mostly. Hulu’s limited series is based in part on material from the nonfiction book \u003ca href=\"https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2018/08/21/640530842/dispatches-from-a-dopesick-america\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">\u003cem>Dopesick: Dealers, Doctors and the Drug Company that Addicted America\u003c/em>\u003c/a> by journalist Beth Macy, who has written extensively about the opioid crisis in Appalachia.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[aside postid='arts_13904635']As Macy was considering offers around Hollywood, executive producer Danny Strong had already set up his own opioid addiction project at 20th Television. They had a fateful meeting in Chicago, and decided to work together to add authenticity to Strong’s scripts.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>While developing the show, they did extensive research to give the series a feeling of authenticity. They brought in people from small towns and with opioid abuse disorder. They consulted a doctor who had been addicted to OxyContin who revealed the horrors he suffered.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[ad fullwidth]\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“Because we were documenting the crimes of Purdue Pharma, the show needed to feel as real as possible,” Macy said. Anything that didn’t feel real wouldn’t fly.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>But Strong says several characters in \u003cem>Dopesick\u003c/em> are fictionalized—their character arcs assembled from the stories of a few different people.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d6c-YlETtl4\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>When it comes to members of the Sackler family who own and control OxyContin manufacturer Purdue Pharma, the series takes a strong position. They’re often shown as callous villains with little regard for patients who become addicted or communities devastated by the disease.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Hulu’s \u003cem>Dopesick\u003c/em> also portrays a law enforcement and regulatory system struggling to hold the Sacklers and Purdue Pharma accountable, overwhelmed by their financial, legal and lobbying resources.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The Sacklers, however, maintain they did nothing wrong. Brian Mann, NPR’s addiction correspondent, said the TV show streamlines the real-life story in ways that can make for more effective TV drama.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“I think that a storyline like \u003cem>Dopesick\u003c/em> in the somewhat fictionalized narrative can bring a kind of moral throughline that often feels pretty satisfying,” added Mann.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“I’ve been in West Virginia, Ohio, communities that have been devastated by this public health crisis and it seems unlikely that corporations or their leaders involved in the opioid business will be held accountable,” Mann added.\u003c/p>\n\u003ch3>Is Michael Keaton’s character based on a real doctor?\u003c/h3>\n\u003cp>Michael Keaton plays Dr. Samuel Finnix, a dedicated doctor in a small Virginia mining town who was persuaded by a Purdue Pharma salesman to prescribe OxyContin for his patients. As they grew addicted, Finnix developed his own dependence on the drug, beginning an odyssey through addiction and recovery that mirrored his patients’ journey.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Keaton’s character doesn’t exist in the real world, but many doctors like him helped shape Finnix’s story.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“If I made these characters composite characters, I [could] get way more of these anecdotes into these arcs with fewer characters and get more truthful stories into the show,” Strong said. “By fictionalizing, I wouldn’t be stuck to the truth of one person’s life. I could use as many anecdotes as I wanted. I could achieve a more universal truth; a higher truth.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_13906026\" class=\"wp-caption aligncenter\" style=\"max-width: 800px\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-medium wp-image-13906026\" src=\"https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/2/2021/11/dope_103_gp-0177rt-b7826ed30b078d7677dbab4cab3853d98b87e0d2-800x600.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"800\" height=\"600\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2021/11/dope_103_gp-0177rt-b7826ed30b078d7677dbab4cab3853d98b87e0d2-800x600.jpg 800w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2021/11/dope_103_gp-0177rt-b7826ed30b078d7677dbab4cab3853d98b87e0d2-1020x765.jpg 1020w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2021/11/dope_103_gp-0177rt-b7826ed30b078d7677dbab4cab3853d98b87e0d2-160x120.jpg 160w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2021/11/dope_103_gp-0177rt-b7826ed30b078d7677dbab4cab3853d98b87e0d2-768x576.jpg 768w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2021/11/dope_103_gp-0177rt-b7826ed30b078d7677dbab4cab3853d98b87e0d2-1536x1152.jpg 1536w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2021/11/dope_103_gp-0177rt-b7826ed30b078d7677dbab4cab3853d98b87e0d2-2048x1536.jpg 2048w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2021/11/dope_103_gp-0177rt-b7826ed30b078d7677dbab4cab3853d98b87e0d2-1920x1440.jpg 1920w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 800px) 100vw, 800px\">\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">Michael Keaton plays Dr. Samuel Finnix, a dedicated doctor in a small Virginia mining town who was persuaded by a Purdue Pharma salesman to prescribe OxyContin for his patients. \u003ccite>(Gene Page/Hulu)\u003c/cite>\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003ch3>What is Richard Sackler really like?\u003c/h3>\n\u003cp>In \u003ca href=\"https://www.npr.org/2021/10/14/1045904277/hulu-dopesick-michael-keaton-purdue-pharma-opioid\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">his review \u003c/a>of \u003cem>Dopesick\u003c/em>, NPR TV critic Eric Deggans wrote that Michael Stuhlbarg, who plays Purdue Pharma’s former President Richard Sackler, has “the creepy intensity of a Bond villain.” Stuhlbarg plays Sackler as a ruthless leader with few social skills intent on boosting OxyContin sales regardless of the collateral damage. Is he really like that?\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[aside postid='pop_107245']Macy and Strong dug through the books written about the Sacklers and interviewed former employees to understand what Richard Sackler was like.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>But even Strong admits he’s a bit of a mystery.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“It’s challenging to figure out,” Strong said. “What is truly making this person tick?”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Mann said as a journalist, he wasn’t in a place where he knows what’s in Sackler’s heart. He noted that, even though other executives and the company itself \u003ca href=\"https://www.npr.org/2020/11/25/938801514/critics-want-sacklers-to-face-criminal-charges-for-role-in-opioid-crisis\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">have pleaded guilty to crimes\u003c/a>, the Sacklers individually haven’t been charged with breaking any laws.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“What I can say is that Richard Sackler and Purdue Pharma were very, very effective at turning this company into a turbocharged marketer,” Mann said.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Strong said he was surprised by what happened after the company and some executives pleaded guilty.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“Do they offer any solutions to what has occurred? No. They actually sell harder and push harder,” he added. “And there are anecdotes of Richard Sackler literally calling sales reps and saying, ‘You have to push even harder. You have to sell, sell, sell.’ ”\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_13906027\" class=\"wp-caption aligncenter\" style=\"max-width: 800px\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-medium wp-image-13906027\" src=\"https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/2/2021/11/dope_106_gp-0992rt-1d71e5bc774e84e55d73c9c6229944cd44feba8e-800x600.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"800\" height=\"600\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2021/11/dope_106_gp-0992rt-1d71e5bc774e84e55d73c9c6229944cd44feba8e-800x600.jpg 800w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2021/11/dope_106_gp-0992rt-1d71e5bc774e84e55d73c9c6229944cd44feba8e-1020x765.jpg 1020w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2021/11/dope_106_gp-0992rt-1d71e5bc774e84e55d73c9c6229944cd44feba8e-160x120.jpg 160w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2021/11/dope_106_gp-0992rt-1d71e5bc774e84e55d73c9c6229944cd44feba8e-768x576.jpg 768w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2021/11/dope_106_gp-0992rt-1d71e5bc774e84e55d73c9c6229944cd44feba8e-1536x1152.jpg 1536w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2021/11/dope_106_gp-0992rt-1d71e5bc774e84e55d73c9c6229944cd44feba8e-2048x1536.jpg 2048w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2021/11/dope_106_gp-0992rt-1d71e5bc774e84e55d73c9c6229944cd44feba8e-1920x1440.jpg 1920w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 800px) 100vw, 800px\">\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">NPR TV critic Eric Deggans wrote that Michael Stuhlbarg, who plays Purdue Pharma’s former President Richard Sackler, has “the creepy intensity of a Bond villain.” \u003ccite>(Gene Page/Hulu)\u003c/cite>\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003ch3>Does it portray Appalachia accurately?\u003c/h3>\n\u003cp>Macy, who wrote the book \u003cem>Dopesick\u003c/em>, is a longtime newspaper writer in Roanoke, VA. She’s spent many years covering the stories and people of Appalachia; accurately depicting these small towns, the people and the culture was a priority for her in working on the TV series.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“Appalachia has just been dumped on for over a century to be honest, and I just wanted to make sure that we treated as accurately and with humanity,” Macy said. “Appalachians are real people, and they’ve suffered more than the average Americans.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[aside postid='arts_13068138']Strong followed Macy’s suggestion to hire Robert Gipe, a graphic novelist who lives in eastern Kentucky, as a consultant. She says Gipe vetted every single detail.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“We wanted the viewer to come away with the story of what really happened out there,” Macy said. “So many people haven’t been to these small communities that have just been decimated.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“The portrayal of Appalachia was a huge priority for me,” Strong said. “I know how much backlash there has been over [other] projects… I came into this knowing this is very sensitive and that I’m going to need to get this right.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_13906029\" class=\"wp-caption aligncenter\" style=\"max-width: 800px\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-medium wp-image-13906029\" src=\"https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/2/2021/11/ds_101_ap_01552rt-f6dd80fa559c08cf74b3ccb1995e4c314fe17b75-800x600.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"800\" height=\"600\">\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">Rosario Dawson plays a DEA agent on a frustrating mission in ‘Dopesick.’ \u003ccite>(Antony Platt/Hulu)\u003c/cite>\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003ch3>Where race fits into the story\u003c/h3>\n\u003cp>NPR’s Deggans noted that, because \u003cem>Dopesick\u003c/em> focuses on rural, predominantly white communities, the show doesn’t talk about race very much. Which means the series’ sympathetic portrayals of those struggling with addiction mostly feature white people.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“Folks who have been involved with these issues have always worried about certain types of people who struggle with substance use disorder getting more sympathy from the general public,” Deggans said, referencing a dynamic where non-white people suffering from addiction face more punitive attitudes from the general public.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Carlton Hall—a consultant and expert on addiction prevention—said it’s an ongoing issue.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[aside postid='news_11752071']“The reality is that there have been massive deaths associated with opioids and heroin for a very, very, very, long time in Black and brown communities around the country,” Hall said. “Yet, it was dealt with from a mostly a criminal justice and punitive standpoint rather than the public health approach, which is what we have learned to do now.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003ca href=\"https://www.npr.org/2021/06/19/1008304465/revisiting-two-cities-at-the-front-line-of-the-war-on-drugs\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">NPR’s reporting has found\u003c/a> the public response in Black urban communities struggling with the opioid epidemic has often differed from the response in small white towns like the ones portrayed in \u003cem>Dopesick\u003c/em>.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Black Americans with addiction face higher rates of incarceration and have often been denied access to treatment and health care. During the pandemic, \u003ca href=\"https://www.npr.org/2021/03/03/970964576/drug-overdose-deaths-surge-among-black-americans-during-pandemic\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">overdose deaths have surged among people of color\u003c/a>.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“It was not spoken of, and therefore overlooked, so there has been a bit of a racial component to this,” Hall said.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“While we’re talking about opioids, the country has more than an opioid problem,” Hall added. “It has an addiction problem, and that is touching every race, every community, and those communities have been treated differently and are now we’re beginning to look at that and try to apply a different approaches, which I have some hope for.”\u003c/p>\n\u003chr>\n\u003cp>[ad floatright]\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cem>Arielle Retting and Emily Alfin Johnson adapted this story for the web.\u003c/em>\u003c/p>\n\u003cdiv class=\"fullattribution\">\u003cem>Copyright 2021 NPR. To see more, \u003ca href=\"https://www.npr.org\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">visit NPR\u003c/a>.\u003cimg decoding=\"async\" src=\"https://www.google-analytics.com/__utm.gif?utmac=UA-5828686-4&utmdt=Is+%27Dopesick%27+a+true+story%3F+Experts+and+the+show%27s+creators+sort+fact+from+fiction&utme=8(APIKey)9(MDAxOTAwOTE4MDEyMTkxMDAzNjczZDljZA004)\">\u003c/em>\u003c/div>\n\n",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003cp>\u003cem>Editor’s note: This story contains quotes and information originally discussed during a Twitter Spaces event hosted by NPR TV critic Eric Deggans and featuring NPR addiction correspondent Brian Mann, ‘Dopesick’ book author Beth Macy, ‘Dopesick’ series creator/showrunner Danny Strong and more. \u003c/em>\u003ca href=\"https://twitter.com/NPR\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">\u003cem>\u003cstrong>Follow NPR on Twitter\u003c/strong>\u003c/em>\u003c/a>\u003cem>, and \u003c/em>\u003ca href=\"https://www.npr.org/series/1049705109/the-opioid-crisis\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">\u003cem>\u003cstrong>read more of NPR’s addiction coverage here.\u003c/strong>\u003c/em>\u003c/a> \u003cem>This story contains spoilers about events depicted in Hulu’s limited series.\u003c/em>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Hulu’s \u003cem>Dopesick\u003c/em> depicts the start of the opioid addiction crisis in the U.S. and some of the people it has affected. NPR TV critic Eric Deggans and NPR addiction correspondent Brian Mann spoke with \u003cem>Dopesick\u003c/em> author Beth Macy and \u003cem>Dopesick\u003c/em> series creator/showrunner Danny Strong to discuss the show and just how real it is.\u003c/p>\n\u003ch3>Is \u003cem>Dopesick\u003c/em> a true story?\u003c/h3>\n\u003cp>Mostly. Hulu’s limited series is based in part on material from the nonfiction book \u003ca href=\"https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2018/08/21/640530842/dispatches-from-a-dopesick-america\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">\u003cem>Dopesick: Dealers, Doctors and the Drug Company that Addicted America\u003c/em>\u003c/a> by journalist Beth Macy, who has written extensively about the opioid crisis in Appalachia.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>As Macy was considering offers around Hollywood, executive producer Danny Strong had already set up his own opioid addiction project at 20th Television. They had a fateful meeting in Chicago, and decided to work together to add authenticity to Strong’s scripts.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>While developing the show, they did extensive research to give the series a feeling of authenticity. They brought in people from small towns and with opioid abuse disorder. They consulted a doctor who had been addicted to OxyContin who revealed the horrors he suffered.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“Because we were documenting the crimes of Purdue Pharma, the show needed to feel as real as possible,” Macy said. Anything that didn’t feel real wouldn’t fly.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>But Strong says several characters in \u003cem>Dopesick\u003c/em> are fictionalized—their character arcs assembled from the stories of a few different people.\u003c/p>\u003c/p>\u003cp>\u003cspan class='utils-parseShortcode-shortcodes-__youtubeShortcode__embedYoutube'>\n \u003cspan class='utils-parseShortcode-shortcodes-__youtubeShortcode__embedYoutubeInside'>\n \u003ciframe\n loading='lazy'\n class='utils-parseShortcode-shortcodes-__youtubeShortcode__youtubePlayer'\n type='text/html'\n src='//www.youtube.com/embed/d6c-YlETtl4'\n title='//www.youtube.com/embed/d6c-YlETtl4'\n allowfullscreen='true'\n style='border:0;'>\u003c/iframe>\n \u003c/span>\n \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\u003cp>\u003cp>When it comes to members of the Sackler family who own and control OxyContin manufacturer Purdue Pharma, the series takes a strong position. They’re often shown as callous villains with little regard for patients who become addicted or communities devastated by the disease.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Hulu’s \u003cem>Dopesick\u003c/em> also portrays a law enforcement and regulatory system struggling to hold the Sacklers and Purdue Pharma accountable, overwhelmed by their financial, legal and lobbying resources.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The Sacklers, however, maintain they did nothing wrong. Brian Mann, NPR’s addiction correspondent, said the TV show streamlines the real-life story in ways that can make for more effective TV drama.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“I think that a storyline like \u003cem>Dopesick\u003c/em> in the somewhat fictionalized narrative can bring a kind of moral throughline that often feels pretty satisfying,” added Mann.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“I’ve been in West Virginia, Ohio, communities that have been devastated by this public health crisis and it seems unlikely that corporations or their leaders involved in the opioid business will be held accountable,” Mann added.\u003c/p>\n\u003ch3>Is Michael Keaton’s character based on a real doctor?\u003c/h3>\n\u003cp>Michael Keaton plays Dr. Samuel Finnix, a dedicated doctor in a small Virginia mining town who was persuaded by a Purdue Pharma salesman to prescribe OxyContin for his patients. As they grew addicted, Finnix developed his own dependence on the drug, beginning an odyssey through addiction and recovery that mirrored his patients’ journey.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Keaton’s character doesn’t exist in the real world, but many doctors like him helped shape Finnix’s story.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“If I made these characters composite characters, I [could] get way more of these anecdotes into these arcs with fewer characters and get more truthful stories into the show,” Strong said. “By fictionalizing, I wouldn’t be stuck to the truth of one person’s life. I could use as many anecdotes as I wanted. I could achieve a more universal truth; a higher truth.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_13906026\" class=\"wp-caption aligncenter\" style=\"max-width: 800px\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-medium wp-image-13906026\" src=\"https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/2/2021/11/dope_103_gp-0177rt-b7826ed30b078d7677dbab4cab3853d98b87e0d2-800x600.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"800\" height=\"600\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2021/11/dope_103_gp-0177rt-b7826ed30b078d7677dbab4cab3853d98b87e0d2-800x600.jpg 800w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2021/11/dope_103_gp-0177rt-b7826ed30b078d7677dbab4cab3853d98b87e0d2-1020x765.jpg 1020w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2021/11/dope_103_gp-0177rt-b7826ed30b078d7677dbab4cab3853d98b87e0d2-160x120.jpg 160w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2021/11/dope_103_gp-0177rt-b7826ed30b078d7677dbab4cab3853d98b87e0d2-768x576.jpg 768w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2021/11/dope_103_gp-0177rt-b7826ed30b078d7677dbab4cab3853d98b87e0d2-1536x1152.jpg 1536w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2021/11/dope_103_gp-0177rt-b7826ed30b078d7677dbab4cab3853d98b87e0d2-2048x1536.jpg 2048w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2021/11/dope_103_gp-0177rt-b7826ed30b078d7677dbab4cab3853d98b87e0d2-1920x1440.jpg 1920w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 800px) 100vw, 800px\">\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">Michael Keaton plays Dr. Samuel Finnix, a dedicated doctor in a small Virginia mining town who was persuaded by a Purdue Pharma salesman to prescribe OxyContin for his patients. \u003ccite>(Gene Page/Hulu)\u003c/cite>\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003ch3>What is Richard Sackler really like?\u003c/h3>\n\u003cp>In \u003ca href=\"https://www.npr.org/2021/10/14/1045904277/hulu-dopesick-michael-keaton-purdue-pharma-opioid\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">his review \u003c/a>of \u003cem>Dopesick\u003c/em>, NPR TV critic Eric Deggans wrote that Michael Stuhlbarg, who plays Purdue Pharma’s former President Richard Sackler, has “the creepy intensity of a Bond villain.” Stuhlbarg plays Sackler as a ruthless leader with few social skills intent on boosting OxyContin sales regardless of the collateral damage. Is he really like that?\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>Macy and Strong dug through the books written about the Sacklers and interviewed former employees to understand what Richard Sackler was like.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>But even Strong admits he’s a bit of a mystery.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“It’s challenging to figure out,” Strong said. “What is truly making this person tick?”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Mann said as a journalist, he wasn’t in a place where he knows what’s in Sackler’s heart. He noted that, even though other executives and the company itself \u003ca href=\"https://www.npr.org/2020/11/25/938801514/critics-want-sacklers-to-face-criminal-charges-for-role-in-opioid-crisis\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">have pleaded guilty to crimes\u003c/a>, the Sacklers individually haven’t been charged with breaking any laws.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“What I can say is that Richard Sackler and Purdue Pharma were very, very effective at turning this company into a turbocharged marketer,” Mann said.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Strong said he was surprised by what happened after the company and some executives pleaded guilty.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“Do they offer any solutions to what has occurred? No. They actually sell harder and push harder,” he added. “And there are anecdotes of Richard Sackler literally calling sales reps and saying, ‘You have to push even harder. You have to sell, sell, sell.’ ”\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_13906027\" class=\"wp-caption aligncenter\" style=\"max-width: 800px\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-medium wp-image-13906027\" src=\"https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/2/2021/11/dope_106_gp-0992rt-1d71e5bc774e84e55d73c9c6229944cd44feba8e-800x600.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"800\" height=\"600\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2021/11/dope_106_gp-0992rt-1d71e5bc774e84e55d73c9c6229944cd44feba8e-800x600.jpg 800w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2021/11/dope_106_gp-0992rt-1d71e5bc774e84e55d73c9c6229944cd44feba8e-1020x765.jpg 1020w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2021/11/dope_106_gp-0992rt-1d71e5bc774e84e55d73c9c6229944cd44feba8e-160x120.jpg 160w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2021/11/dope_106_gp-0992rt-1d71e5bc774e84e55d73c9c6229944cd44feba8e-768x576.jpg 768w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2021/11/dope_106_gp-0992rt-1d71e5bc774e84e55d73c9c6229944cd44feba8e-1536x1152.jpg 1536w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2021/11/dope_106_gp-0992rt-1d71e5bc774e84e55d73c9c6229944cd44feba8e-2048x1536.jpg 2048w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2021/11/dope_106_gp-0992rt-1d71e5bc774e84e55d73c9c6229944cd44feba8e-1920x1440.jpg 1920w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 800px) 100vw, 800px\">\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">NPR TV critic Eric Deggans wrote that Michael Stuhlbarg, who plays Purdue Pharma’s former President Richard Sackler, has “the creepy intensity of a Bond villain.” \u003ccite>(Gene Page/Hulu)\u003c/cite>\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003ch3>Does it portray Appalachia accurately?\u003c/h3>\n\u003cp>Macy, who wrote the book \u003cem>Dopesick\u003c/em>, is a longtime newspaper writer in Roanoke, VA. She’s spent many years covering the stories and people of Appalachia; accurately depicting these small towns, the people and the culture was a priority for her in working on the TV series.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“Appalachia has just been dumped on for over a century to be honest, and I just wanted to make sure that we treated as accurately and with humanity,” Macy said. “Appalachians are real people, and they’ve suffered more than the average Americans.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>Strong followed Macy’s suggestion to hire Robert Gipe, a graphic novelist who lives in eastern Kentucky, as a consultant. She says Gipe vetted every single detail.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“We wanted the viewer to come away with the story of what really happened out there,” Macy said. “So many people haven’t been to these small communities that have just been decimated.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“The portrayal of Appalachia was a huge priority for me,” Strong said. “I know how much backlash there has been over [other] projects… I came into this knowing this is very sensitive and that I’m going to need to get this right.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_13906029\" class=\"wp-caption aligncenter\" style=\"max-width: 800px\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-medium wp-image-13906029\" src=\"https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/2/2021/11/ds_101_ap_01552rt-f6dd80fa559c08cf74b3ccb1995e4c314fe17b75-800x600.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"800\" height=\"600\">\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">Rosario Dawson plays a DEA agent on a frustrating mission in ‘Dopesick.’ \u003ccite>(Antony Platt/Hulu)\u003c/cite>\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003ch3>Where race fits into the story\u003c/h3>\n\u003cp>NPR’s Deggans noted that, because \u003cem>Dopesick\u003c/em> focuses on rural, predominantly white communities, the show doesn’t talk about race very much. Which means the series’ sympathetic portrayals of those struggling with addiction mostly feature white people.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“Folks who have been involved with these issues have always worried about certain types of people who struggle with substance use disorder getting more sympathy from the general public,” Deggans said, referencing a dynamic where non-white people suffering from addiction face more punitive attitudes from the general public.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Carlton Hall—a consultant and expert on addiction prevention—said it’s an ongoing issue.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>“The reality is that there have been massive deaths associated with opioids and heroin for a very, very, very, long time in Black and brown communities around the country,” Hall said. “Yet, it was dealt with from a mostly a criminal justice and punitive standpoint rather than the public health approach, which is what we have learned to do now.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003ca href=\"https://www.npr.org/2021/06/19/1008304465/revisiting-two-cities-at-the-front-line-of-the-war-on-drugs\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">NPR’s reporting has found\u003c/a> the public response in Black urban communities struggling with the opioid epidemic has often differed from the response in small white towns like the ones portrayed in \u003cem>Dopesick\u003c/em>.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Black Americans with addiction face higher rates of incarceration and have often been denied access to treatment and health care. During the pandemic, \u003ca href=\"https://www.npr.org/2021/03/03/970964576/drug-overdose-deaths-surge-among-black-americans-during-pandemic\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">overdose deaths have surged among people of color\u003c/a>.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“It was not spoken of, and therefore overlooked, so there has been a bit of a racial component to this,” Hall said.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“While we’re talking about opioids, the country has more than an opioid problem,” Hall added. “It has an addiction problem, and that is touching every race, every community, and those communities have been treated differently and are now we’re beginning to look at that and try to apply a different approaches, which I have some hope for.”\u003c/p>\n\u003chr>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cem>Arielle Retting and Emily Alfin Johnson adapted this story for the web.\u003c/em>\u003c/p>\n\u003cdiv class=\"fullattribution\">\u003cem>Copyright 2021 NPR. To see more, \u003ca href=\"https://www.npr.org\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">visit NPR\u003c/a>.\u003cimg decoding=\"async\" src=\"https://www.google-analytics.com/__utm.gif?utmac=UA-5828686-4&utmdt=Is+%27Dopesick%27+a+true+story%3F+Experts+and+the+show%27s+creators+sort+fact+from+fiction&utme=8(APIKey)9(MDAxOTAwOTE4MDEyMTkxMDAzNjczZDljZA004)\">\u003c/em>\u003c/div>\n\n\u003c/div>\u003c/p>",
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"title": "‘What Happened, Brittany Murphy?’ is a Cautionary Tale of Love and Trust",
"headTitle": "‘What Happened, Brittany Murphy?’ is a Cautionary Tale of Love and Trust | KQED",
"content": "\u003cp>What you get out of \u003cem>What Happened, Brittany Murphy?\u003c/em> depends entirely on how big a fan you are of the actress. The biggest fans—the ones who know her movies by heart, the ones who still pay her tribute annually, the ones who have long questioned the circumstances of her death—won’t learn a huge amount. But for folks who fell in love with Murphy in \u003cem>Clueless\u003c/em>, cheered her on in \u003cem>8 Mile\u003c/em>, and then wrote off her death as just another Hollywood tragedy, \u003cem>What Happened\u003c/em> is an emotional, often confounding, rollercoaster.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Crucially, at the end of this two-part documentary, viewers will be no clearer about why Brittany Murphy died. Of course, we’ve known since her 2009 passing that the cause of death was a combination of pneumonia, anemia and “multiple drug intoxication.” The reasons for her not receiving—or seeking out—medical assistance in the days before her death, however, remain incredibly murky. What is clear from various testimonies is that she almost certainly could have been saved had she made it to a hospital in time. \u003cem>What Happened\u003c/em> also manages to vividly paint a picture of the perfect storm that Murphy found herself in at the time of her death. Her physical and mental health were suffering, as was her career—the result of an overbearing husband and lack of real emotional support.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OaQvsFIB4Uw\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cem>What Happened\u003c/em> subjects Murphy’s husband Simon Monjack to intense scrutiny—and rightfully so. He is shown to be a pathological liar, a controlling partner, and a man who responded to his wife’s death in a variety of deeply inappropriate ways. Among other things, in the months after Murphy’s death, he posed for portraits with Murphy’s mother Sharon in a manner that made them look like a couple. He walked a reporter from \u003cem>People\u003c/em> magazine through Murphy’s scene of death in her cluttered bathroom, down to the exact position she was found in. He set up a website asking for financial contributions, then quickly took it down when people started asking questions. Various bombshell revelations about his past and the depth of his deceptions drop throughout the documentary.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[aside postid='arts_13903795']It’s impossible not to draw parallels—especially so soon after \u003cem>Britney vs Spears\u003c/em>, \u003cem>Controlling Britney Spears\u003c/em> and \u003cem>Framing Britney Spears\u003c/em>—between the way Jamie Spears treated his daughter and the way Monjack treated his wife. The financial benefits of Monjack marrying Murphy were huge—he is accused in the film of spending $3 million of her money in just three years. Like Spears, Murphy was also kept isolated by her male guardian, and became woefully reliant on him. Unlike Spears, Murphy never managed to navigate a path out. In a strange coincidence, Murphy died in a house that Spears sold to her in 2003.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[ad fullwidth]\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The other main object of scrutiny in \u003cem>What Happened\u003c/em> is the Hollywood system that subjects women to grotesquely restrictive beauty standards. Murphy is shown transforming from an excited wunderkind into a joyful teen starlet, and then an insecure woman, forced to alter her body, her hair and her style to appease casting agents. The film presents the tabloid press as complicit in this. It is remarkable to see a contrite Perez Hilton, looking back with regret at how his website mocked and dehumanized vulnerable celebrities, including Murphy, in the first decade of the 2000s.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cem>What Happened\u003c/em> also, thankfully, finds time to remind viewers just how enormously talented Murphy was—making Hollywood’s focus on her appearance even more galling. In particular, clips of Murphy in \u003cem>Girl, Interrupted\u003c/em> hammer home her acting chops—and what we lost when she died.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[aside postid='arts_13903591']At the center of \u003cem>What Happened, Brittany Murphy?\u003c/em> is the codependent triumvirate of Brittany Murphy, Simon Monjack and Sharon Murphy. It’s fascinating and uncomfortable to witness their strange dynamic playing out in the documentary. Private photos Monjack took of Murphy at home are nothing less than chilling. It’s not a spoiler to say there isn’t a happy ending for any one of the three. \u003c/p>\n\u003cp>At its core, \u003cem>What Happened, Brittany Murphy?\u003c/em> is about wish fulfillment. It’s about what happens when unsuspecting people believe too much in fairytales. One gets the sense that Sharon and Brittany believed in—and craved—their own happily-ever-after so much, they didn’t stop to question who was offering it to them.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>As the documentary points out, the strangeness of Murphy’s death is already a well-worn topic online, particularly among true crime vloggers. The value of \u003cem>What Happened, Brittany Murphy?\u003c/em> is in its ability to also remind you of her humanity, her talent, and just how tragic the end of her life was. It also serves as a reminder that good people don’t always get what they want or what they need. And that, sometimes, the very people assigned to protect them are the ones that ultimately do the most harm.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"aligncenter size-medium wp-image-12127869\" src=\"https://ww2.kqed.org/arts/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2016/09/Q.Logo_.Break_-800x78.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"800\" height=\"78\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2016/09/Q.Logo_.Break_.jpg 800w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2016/09/Q.Logo_.Break_-400x39.jpg 400w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2016/09/Q.Logo_.Break_-768x75.jpg 768w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 800px) 100vw, 800px\">\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cem>‘What Happened, Brittany Murphy?’ begins streaming Thursday, Oct. 14, on HBO Max. \u003ca href=\"https://www.hbomax.com/coming-soon/what-happened-brittany-murphy\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">Details here\u003c/a>.\u003c/em>\u003c/p>\n\n",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003cp>What you get out of \u003cem>What Happened, Brittany Murphy?\u003c/em> depends entirely on how big a fan you are of the actress. The biggest fans—the ones who know her movies by heart, the ones who still pay her tribute annually, the ones who have long questioned the circumstances of her death—won’t learn a huge amount. But for folks who fell in love with Murphy in \u003cem>Clueless\u003c/em>, cheered her on in \u003cem>8 Mile\u003c/em>, and then wrote off her death as just another Hollywood tragedy, \u003cem>What Happened\u003c/em> is an emotional, often confounding, rollercoaster.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Crucially, at the end of this two-part documentary, viewers will be no clearer about why Brittany Murphy died. Of course, we’ve known since her 2009 passing that the cause of death was a combination of pneumonia, anemia and “multiple drug intoxication.” The reasons for her not receiving—or seeking out—medical assistance in the days before her death, however, remain incredibly murky. What is clear from various testimonies is that she almost certainly could have been saved had she made it to a hospital in time. \u003cem>What Happened\u003c/em> also manages to vividly paint a picture of the perfect storm that Murphy found herself in at the time of her death. Her physical and mental health were suffering, as was her career—the result of an overbearing husband and lack of real emotional support.\u003c/p>\u003c/p>\u003cp>\u003cspan class='utils-parseShortcode-shortcodes-__youtubeShortcode__embedYoutube'>\n \u003cspan class='utils-parseShortcode-shortcodes-__youtubeShortcode__embedYoutubeInside'>\n \u003ciframe\n loading='lazy'\n class='utils-parseShortcode-shortcodes-__youtubeShortcode__youtubePlayer'\n type='text/html'\n src='//www.youtube.com/embed/OaQvsFIB4Uw'\n title='//www.youtube.com/embed/OaQvsFIB4Uw'\n allowfullscreen='true'\n style='border:0;'>\u003c/iframe>\n \u003c/span>\n \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\u003cp>\u003cp>\u003cem>What Happened\u003c/em> subjects Murphy’s husband Simon Monjack to intense scrutiny—and rightfully so. He is shown to be a pathological liar, a controlling partner, and a man who responded to his wife’s death in a variety of deeply inappropriate ways. Among other things, in the months after Murphy’s death, he posed for portraits with Murphy’s mother Sharon in a manner that made them look like a couple. He walked a reporter from \u003cem>People\u003c/em> magazine through Murphy’s scene of death in her cluttered bathroom, down to the exact position she was found in. He set up a website asking for financial contributions, then quickly took it down when people started asking questions. Various bombshell revelations about his past and the depth of his deceptions drop throughout the documentary.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The other main object of scrutiny in \u003cem>What Happened\u003c/em> is the Hollywood system that subjects women to grotesquely restrictive beauty standards. Murphy is shown transforming from an excited wunderkind into a joyful teen starlet, and then an insecure woman, forced to alter her body, her hair and her style to appease casting agents. The film presents the tabloid press as complicit in this. It is remarkable to see a contrite Perez Hilton, looking back with regret at how his website mocked and dehumanized vulnerable celebrities, including Murphy, in the first decade of the 2000s.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cem>What Happened\u003c/em> also, thankfully, finds time to remind viewers just how enormously talented Murphy was—making Hollywood’s focus on her appearance even more galling. In particular, clips of Murphy in \u003cem>Girl, Interrupted\u003c/em> hammer home her acting chops—and what we lost when she died.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>At the center of \u003cem>What Happened, Brittany Murphy?\u003c/em> is the codependent triumvirate of Brittany Murphy, Simon Monjack and Sharon Murphy. It’s fascinating and uncomfortable to witness their strange dynamic playing out in the documentary. Private photos Monjack took of Murphy at home are nothing less than chilling. It’s not a spoiler to say there isn’t a happy ending for any one of the three. \u003c/p>\n\u003cp>At its core, \u003cem>What Happened, Brittany Murphy?\u003c/em> is about wish fulfillment. It’s about what happens when unsuspecting people believe too much in fairytales. One gets the sense that Sharon and Brittany believed in—and craved—their own happily-ever-after so much, they didn’t stop to question who was offering it to them.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>As the documentary points out, the strangeness of Murphy’s death is already a well-worn topic online, particularly among true crime vloggers. The value of \u003cem>What Happened, Brittany Murphy?\u003c/em> is in its ability to also remind you of her humanity, her talent, and just how tragic the end of her life was. It also serves as a reminder that good people don’t always get what they want or what they need. And that, sometimes, the very people assigned to protect them are the ones that ultimately do the most harm.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"aligncenter size-medium wp-image-12127869\" src=\"https://ww2.kqed.org/arts/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2016/09/Q.Logo_.Break_-800x78.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"800\" height=\"78\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2016/09/Q.Logo_.Break_.jpg 800w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2016/09/Q.Logo_.Break_-400x39.jpg 400w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2016/09/Q.Logo_.Break_-768x75.jpg 768w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 800px) 100vw, 800px\">\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cem>‘What Happened, Brittany Murphy?’ begins streaming Thursday, Oct. 14, on HBO Max. \u003ca href=\"https://www.hbomax.com/coming-soon/what-happened-brittany-murphy\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">Details here\u003c/a>.\u003c/em>\u003c/p>\n\n\u003c/div>\u003c/p>",
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"title": "Amanda Knox: 'Stillwater' Movie Repeats 'Fiction' Pushed By Italian Prosecutor",
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"content": "\u003cp>Amanda Knox—who once spent almost four years in an Italian prison for murder—was long ago exonerated by Italy’s highest court, which ruled that “\u003ca href=\"https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2015/sep/07/amanda-knox-acquitted-because-of-stunning-flaws-in-investigation\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">stunning flaws\u003c/a>” in the police investigation had inappropriately led to Knox’s conviction for the murder of her roommate, British exchange student Meredith Kercher.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>It’s been 10 years since Knox was freed from that Italian prison. But, despite attempts to move on with her life, the \u003ca href=\"https://www.vanityfair.com/hollywood/2021/07/stillwater-movie-matt-damon-amanda-knox\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">“Amanda Knox saga”\u003c/a> continues to follow her. The new film \u003cem>Stillwater\u003c/em>, which fictionalizes elements of her story, has prompted Knox to speak out about how it feels to lose control of her own narrative.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“Whenever I encounter the world, I am constantly in conversation with a horrendous thing that happened, that I had no control over, that I had no agency,” Knox told NPR’s Sarah McCammon in an interview on \u003cem>All Things Considered\u003c/em>. “And the identity of Amanda Knox is always, always, always viewed through that lens.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[aside postid='pop_103508']In the case of \u003cem>Stillwater\u003c/em>, directed by Tom McCarthy and starring Matt Damon, the Knox-inspired character is reimagined as Allison, a college student abroad who is convicted of murdering—and indirectly responsible for the death of—her roommate who is also her lover. The choices made to establish Allison’s character are reminiscent of how Italian prosecutors had \u003ca href=\"https://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2013/03/26/175336714/italian-court-orders-retrial-for-amanda-knox\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">presented their case against Knox\u003c/a> when they called Kercher a victim of a drug-fueled sex game gone wrong.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“As a storyteller, I firmly believe that art is very much entitled to take from reality, and in fact it always does,” Knox said. “That doesn’t excuse the kinds of ethical considerations in choosing what stories we tell and how we tell them.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[ad fullwidth]\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>McCarthy told \u003ca href=\"https://www.vanityfair.com/hollywood/2021/07/stillwater-movie-matt-damon-amanda-knox\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">\u003cem>Vanity Fair\u003c/em>\u003c/a> that he was directly inspired by the Knox story, and couldn’t help but imagine what it would be like to be in Knox’s shoes.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Knox’s story, the director and co-writer said, ultimately became a jumping off point for the movie.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“We decided, ‘Hey, let’s leave the Amanda Knox case behind,'” McCarthy told the magazine. “But let me take this piece of the story—an American woman studying abroad involved in some kind of sensational crime and she ends up in jail—and fictionalize everything around it.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9cq1lPPeMUY\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>But Knox says that McCarthy didn’t completely fictionalize everything; he simply “chose to explicitly repeat the fiction that was invented by my prosecutor.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Nor did McCarthy “do the empathy and effort to reach out” to understand how his re-telling might impact her, she said.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“My story is not the sordid trial and saga and the murder, but it is the experience of a person who is swept up in something way bigger than herself that she had nothing to do with, who survives a very harsh prison environment and then who enters into a world that has pre-defined her based on a false premise,” Knox said. “That’s an interesting story. And it’s not the story that \u003cem>Stillwater\u003c/em> told.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>After the publication of the \u003cem>Vanity Fair\u003c/em> story last week, Knox criticized the film, \u003ca href=\"https://twitter.com/amandaknox/status/1420871392266911746?s=20\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">in a Twitter thread \u003c/a>and in an \u003ca href=\"https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2021/07/amanda-knox-stillwater-matt-damon/619628/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">\u003cem>Atlantic \u003c/em>essay\u003c/a>, for profiting off of her name and likeness without her permission.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>https://twitter.com/amandaknox/status/1420871392266911746?s=20\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Representatives for McCarthy have yet to respond to NPR’s request for comment. In an interview with \u003ca href=\"https://variety.com/2021/film/features/stillwater-tom-mccarthy-matt-damon-amanda-knox-1235036649/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">\u003cem>Variety\u003c/em>\u003c/a>, McCarthy said he empathizes with Knox and what she went through. “She has platforms to speak her truth and engage with the media and she is exercising her absolute right to do so,” McCarthy said. “But, by her own account, she has not seen \u003cem>Stillwater\u003c/em> and what she seems to be raising feels very removed from the film we actually made. \u003cem>Stillwater\u003c/em> is a work of fiction and not about her life experience.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>In 2008, the Perugia resident Rudy Guede was sentenced to 16 years in prison for Kercher’s murder. Last year, \u003ca href=\"https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/dec/04/meredith-kerchers-killer-to-complete-sentence-doing-community-service\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">a court said\u003c/a> he could finish the rest of his sentence by doing community service.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cem>Tyler Bartlam and Natalie Friedman Winston produced and edited the audio version of this story.\u003c/em>\u003c/p>\n\u003cdiv class=\"fullattribution\">\u003cem>Copyright 2021 NPR. To see more, visit \u003ca href=\"https://www.npr.org\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">NPR\u003c/a>.\u003cimg decoding=\"async\" src=\"https://www.google-analytics.com/__utm.gif?utmac=UA-5828686-4&utmdt=Amanda+Knox%3A+%27Stillwater%27+Movie+Repeats+%27Fiction%27+Pushed+By+Italian+Prosecutor&utme=8(APIKey)9(MDAxOTAwOTE4MDEyMTkxMDAzNjczZDljZA004)\">\u003c/em>\u003c/div>\n\n",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003cp>Amanda Knox—who once spent almost four years in an Italian prison for murder—was long ago exonerated by Italy’s highest court, which ruled that “\u003ca href=\"https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2015/sep/07/amanda-knox-acquitted-because-of-stunning-flaws-in-investigation\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">stunning flaws\u003c/a>” in the police investigation had inappropriately led to Knox’s conviction for the murder of her roommate, British exchange student Meredith Kercher.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>It’s been 10 years since Knox was freed from that Italian prison. But, despite attempts to move on with her life, the \u003ca href=\"https://www.vanityfair.com/hollywood/2021/07/stillwater-movie-matt-damon-amanda-knox\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">“Amanda Knox saga”\u003c/a> continues to follow her. The new film \u003cem>Stillwater\u003c/em>, which fictionalizes elements of her story, has prompted Knox to speak out about how it feels to lose control of her own narrative.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“Whenever I encounter the world, I am constantly in conversation with a horrendous thing that happened, that I had no control over, that I had no agency,” Knox told NPR’s Sarah McCammon in an interview on \u003cem>All Things Considered\u003c/em>. “And the identity of Amanda Knox is always, always, always viewed through that lens.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>In the case of \u003cem>Stillwater\u003c/em>, directed by Tom McCarthy and starring Matt Damon, the Knox-inspired character is reimagined as Allison, a college student abroad who is convicted of murdering—and indirectly responsible for the death of—her roommate who is also her lover. The choices made to establish Allison’s character are reminiscent of how Italian prosecutors had \u003ca href=\"https://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2013/03/26/175336714/italian-court-orders-retrial-for-amanda-knox\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">presented their case against Knox\u003c/a> when they called Kercher a victim of a drug-fueled sex game gone wrong.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“As a storyteller, I firmly believe that art is very much entitled to take from reality, and in fact it always does,” Knox said. “That doesn’t excuse the kinds of ethical considerations in choosing what stories we tell and how we tell them.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>McCarthy told \u003ca href=\"https://www.vanityfair.com/hollywood/2021/07/stillwater-movie-matt-damon-amanda-knox\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">\u003cem>Vanity Fair\u003c/em>\u003c/a> that he was directly inspired by the Knox story, and couldn’t help but imagine what it would be like to be in Knox’s shoes.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Knox’s story, the director and co-writer said, ultimately became a jumping off point for the movie.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“We decided, ‘Hey, let’s leave the Amanda Knox case behind,'” McCarthy told the magazine. “But let me take this piece of the story—an American woman studying abroad involved in some kind of sensational crime and she ends up in jail—and fictionalize everything around it.”\u003c/p>\u003c/p>\u003cp>\u003cspan class='utils-parseShortcode-shortcodes-__youtubeShortcode__embedYoutube'>\n \u003cspan class='utils-parseShortcode-shortcodes-__youtubeShortcode__embedYoutubeInside'>\n \u003ciframe\n loading='lazy'\n class='utils-parseShortcode-shortcodes-__youtubeShortcode__youtubePlayer'\n type='text/html'\n src='//www.youtube.com/embed/9cq1lPPeMUY'\n title='//www.youtube.com/embed/9cq1lPPeMUY'\n allowfullscreen='true'\n style='border:0;'>\u003c/iframe>\n \u003c/span>\n \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\u003cp>\u003cp>But Knox says that McCarthy didn’t completely fictionalize everything; he simply “chose to explicitly repeat the fiction that was invented by my prosecutor.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Nor did McCarthy “do the empathy and effort to reach out” to understand how his re-telling might impact her, she said.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“My story is not the sordid trial and saga and the murder, but it is the experience of a person who is swept up in something way bigger than herself that she had nothing to do with, who survives a very harsh prison environment and then who enters into a world that has pre-defined her based on a false premise,” Knox said. “That’s an interesting story. And it’s not the story that \u003cem>Stillwater\u003c/em> told.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>After the publication of the \u003cem>Vanity Fair\u003c/em> story last week, Knox criticized the film, \u003ca href=\"https://twitter.com/amandaknox/status/1420871392266911746?s=20\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">in a Twitter thread \u003c/a>and in an \u003ca href=\"https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2021/07/amanda-knox-stillwater-matt-damon/619628/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">\u003cem>Atlantic \u003c/em>essay\u003c/a>, for profiting off of her name and likeness without her permission.\u003c/p>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\n\u003cp>Representatives for McCarthy have yet to respond to NPR’s request for comment. In an interview with \u003ca href=\"https://variety.com/2021/film/features/stillwater-tom-mccarthy-matt-damon-amanda-knox-1235036649/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">\u003cem>Variety\u003c/em>\u003c/a>, McCarthy said he empathizes with Knox and what she went through. “She has platforms to speak her truth and engage with the media and she is exercising her absolute right to do so,” McCarthy said. “But, by her own account, she has not seen \u003cem>Stillwater\u003c/em> and what she seems to be raising feels very removed from the film we actually made. \u003cem>Stillwater\u003c/em> is a work of fiction and not about her life experience.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>In 2008, the Perugia resident Rudy Guede was sentenced to 16 years in prison for Kercher’s murder. Last year, \u003ca href=\"https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/dec/04/meredith-kerchers-killer-to-complete-sentence-doing-community-service\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">a court said\u003c/a> he could finish the rest of his sentence by doing community service.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cem>Tyler Bartlam and Natalie Friedman Winston produced and edited the audio version of this story.\u003c/em>\u003c/p>\n\u003cdiv class=\"fullattribution\">\u003cem>Copyright 2021 NPR. To see more, visit \u003ca href=\"https://www.npr.org\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">NPR\u003c/a>.\u003cimg decoding=\"async\" src=\"https://www.google-analytics.com/__utm.gif?utmac=UA-5828686-4&utmdt=Amanda+Knox%3A+%27Stillwater%27+Movie+Repeats+%27Fiction%27+Pushed+By+Italian+Prosecutor&utme=8(APIKey)9(MDAxOTAwOTE4MDEyMTkxMDAzNjczZDljZA004)\">\u003c/em>\u003c/div>\n\n\u003c/div>\u003c/p>",
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"title": "A Botched Execution Leads to a Search For Answers in 'Two Truths and a Lie'",
"headTitle": "A Botched Execution Leads to a Search For Answers in ‘Two Truths and a Lie’ | KQED",
"content": "\u003cp>I’m obsessed with tales of obsession. Chances are, you are too, judging by the unflagging popularity of true crime stories presented in podcasts, documentaries, movies and books.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>What sets Ellen McGarrahan’s just-published true crime book, \u003cem>Two Truths and a Lie,\u003c/em> above so many others I’ve read is the moral gravity of her presence on the page and the hollow-voiced lyricism of her writing style.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-full wp-image-13893255 alignright\" src=\"https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/2/2021/02/Screen-Shot-2021-02-24-at-11.15.47-AM.png\" alt=\"\" width=\"299\" height=\"399\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2021/02/Screen-Shot-2021-02-24-at-11.15.47-AM.png 299w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2021/02/Screen-Shot-2021-02-24-at-11.15.47-AM-160x214.png 160w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 299px) 100vw, 299px\">McGarrahan earned both qualities the hard way. Long ago, when she was a young reporter for \u003cem>The Miami Herald\u003c/em>, McGarrahan witnessed an execution gone wrong and she reported on the case and the executed man—a convicted murderer—by relying on, as she says, “the state’s version of events as the truth.” \u003cem>Two Truths and a Lie\u003c/em> delves deep into McGarrahan’s more than two-decade-long odyssey to rectify that mistake.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cem>Two Truths and A Lie\u003c/em> opens in May of 1990 at a prison in Florida where McGarrahan has gathered with other reporters to witness the death by electrocution of Jesse Tafero for the murder of two police officers at a Florida rest stop in 1976. McGarrahan volunteered to be there because she wanted to prove herself. She was then the only woman in the \u003cem>Herald\u003c/em>‘s state capital bureau and she was young. “Five years earlier I’d been deconstructing \u003cem>The Executioner’s Song\u003c/em> in literature class at Yale,” she writes.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>But nothing McGarrahan read could have prepared her for the grotesque reality of the execution that followed. Because of an electrical malfunction, Tafero’s head caught on fire. Months afterwards, a reporter friend advises the shaken McGarrahan to “Go see another one. … That’ll get it out of your mind.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[ad fullwidth]\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Instead, McGarrahan questions the point of journalism—her dream career—and takes off for California where she works on home construction sites. “In my tile work at the time,” she recalls, “I was setting a lot of limestone—countertops, walls, floors—and I kept noticing the fossils, tiny living creatures embedded in the stone, frozen forever exactly as they were when disaster hit. I thought, That’s me.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Then, one evening McGarrahan returns home from work and turns on her TV to hear Barbara Walters announce that new evidence suggests that Tafero may have been innocent. Soon after, Fate intervenes to prompt McGarrahan—at the age of 32—to interview for a job as a private investigator.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>McGarrahan doesn’t tell the head of the detective agency about the Tafero case. Nevertheless, when he hires her, the boss shrewdly says, “You are motivated by guilt, which means you will never stop till the job is done.” McGarrahan tells us her career as an investigator eventually brought her “full circle, to the mystery I’d tried so hard to leave behind.” [aside postid='arts_13884137']\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>You’ll notice I’m barely saying anything about that mystery: the question of who murdered those two police officers at that highway rest stop in 1976. Tafero was sleeping in a car at that rest stop, along with his girlfriend, her 9-year-old son, their baby daughter, and another man. One of the officers went to check on them and within minutes, both officers were shot dead.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Like Tafero’s execution, the murder scene—as McGarrahan imagines it—haunts her. She finally allows herself three months to work on the case full time and her investigation spans continents. That’s all I’m going to say because the experience of inhabiting that investigation with McGarrahan is so intense readers should experience it for themselves.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>For me, the even deeper draw here is McGarrahan’s struggle to come to terms with the evil she was drawn into as a young reporter. Here she is speaking of the blur of stories which gives her book its title:\u003c/p>\n\u003cblockquote>\u003cp>“There’s an old party game called Two Truths and a Lie. Maybe you’ve played it. Someone stands up and says a few things about herself, the more outlandish the better. The trick is in guessing which parts are made up and which are true, and the goal of the game is to get you believing something that never happened. … As played among friends over a few drinks, it’s harmless fun. But add an electric chair and put that game on the internet, and there’s a price to be paid. … [By] the listeners. The families. The witnesses. I was trapped in that game for twenty-five-years. I paid the price too.”\u003c/p>\u003c/blockquote>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Maybe that statement sounds a little self-aggrandizing, but once you read McGarrahan’s pensive book, you’ll understand how restrained she is in assessing the damage done.\u003c/p>\n\u003cdiv class=\"fullattribution\">\u003cem>Copyright 2021 Fresh Air. To see more, visit \u003ca href=\"http://www.npr.org/programs/fresh-air/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">Fresh Air\u003c/a>.\u003cimg decoding=\"async\" src=\"https://www.google-analytics.com/__utm.gif?utmac=UA-5828686-4&utmdt=A+Botched+Execution+Leads+To+A+Search+For+Answers+In+%27Two+Truths+And+A+Lie%27+&utme=8(APIKey)9(MDAxOTAwOTE4MDEyMTkxMDAzNjczZDljZA004)\">\u003c/em>\u003c/div>\n\n",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003cp>I’m obsessed with tales of obsession. Chances are, you are too, judging by the unflagging popularity of true crime stories presented in podcasts, documentaries, movies and books.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>What sets Ellen McGarrahan’s just-published true crime book, \u003cem>Two Truths and a Lie,\u003c/em> above so many others I’ve read is the moral gravity of her presence on the page and the hollow-voiced lyricism of her writing style.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-full wp-image-13893255 alignright\" src=\"https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/2/2021/02/Screen-Shot-2021-02-24-at-11.15.47-AM.png\" alt=\"\" width=\"299\" height=\"399\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2021/02/Screen-Shot-2021-02-24-at-11.15.47-AM.png 299w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2021/02/Screen-Shot-2021-02-24-at-11.15.47-AM-160x214.png 160w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 299px) 100vw, 299px\">McGarrahan earned both qualities the hard way. Long ago, when she was a young reporter for \u003cem>The Miami Herald\u003c/em>, McGarrahan witnessed an execution gone wrong and she reported on the case and the executed man—a convicted murderer—by relying on, as she says, “the state’s version of events as the truth.” \u003cem>Two Truths and a Lie\u003c/em> delves deep into McGarrahan’s more than two-decade-long odyssey to rectify that mistake.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cem>Two Truths and A Lie\u003c/em> opens in May of 1990 at a prison in Florida where McGarrahan has gathered with other reporters to witness the death by electrocution of Jesse Tafero for the murder of two police officers at a Florida rest stop in 1976. McGarrahan volunteered to be there because she wanted to prove herself. She was then the only woman in the \u003cem>Herald\u003c/em>‘s state capital bureau and she was young. “Five years earlier I’d been deconstructing \u003cem>The Executioner’s Song\u003c/em> in literature class at Yale,” she writes.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>But nothing McGarrahan read could have prepared her for the grotesque reality of the execution that followed. Because of an electrical malfunction, Tafero’s head caught on fire. Months afterwards, a reporter friend advises the shaken McGarrahan to “Go see another one. … That’ll get it out of your mind.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Instead, McGarrahan questions the point of journalism—her dream career—and takes off for California where she works on home construction sites. “In my tile work at the time,” she recalls, “I was setting a lot of limestone—countertops, walls, floors—and I kept noticing the fossils, tiny living creatures embedded in the stone, frozen forever exactly as they were when disaster hit. I thought, That’s me.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Then, one evening McGarrahan returns home from work and turns on her TV to hear Barbara Walters announce that new evidence suggests that Tafero may have been innocent. Soon after, Fate intervenes to prompt McGarrahan—at the age of 32—to interview for a job as a private investigator.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>McGarrahan doesn’t tell the head of the detective agency about the Tafero case. Nevertheless, when he hires her, the boss shrewdly says, “You are motivated by guilt, which means you will never stop till the job is done.” McGarrahan tells us her career as an investigator eventually brought her “full circle, to the mystery I’d tried so hard to leave behind.” \u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>You’ll notice I’m barely saying anything about that mystery: the question of who murdered those two police officers at that highway rest stop in 1976. Tafero was sleeping in a car at that rest stop, along with his girlfriend, her 9-year-old son, their baby daughter, and another man. One of the officers went to check on them and within minutes, both officers were shot dead.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Like Tafero’s execution, the murder scene—as McGarrahan imagines it—haunts her. She finally allows herself three months to work on the case full time and her investigation spans continents. That’s all I’m going to say because the experience of inhabiting that investigation with McGarrahan is so intense readers should experience it for themselves.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>For me, the even deeper draw here is McGarrahan’s struggle to come to terms with the evil she was drawn into as a young reporter. Here she is speaking of the blur of stories which gives her book its title:\u003c/p>\n\u003cblockquote>\u003cp>“There’s an old party game called Two Truths and a Lie. Maybe you’ve played it. Someone stands up and says a few things about herself, the more outlandish the better. The trick is in guessing which parts are made up and which are true, and the goal of the game is to get you believing something that never happened. … As played among friends over a few drinks, it’s harmless fun. But add an electric chair and put that game on the internet, and there’s a price to be paid. … [By] the listeners. The families. The witnesses. I was trapped in that game for twenty-five-years. I paid the price too.”\u003c/p>\u003c/blockquote>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Maybe that statement sounds a little self-aggrandizing, but once you read McGarrahan’s pensive book, you’ll understand how restrained she is in assessing the damage done.\u003c/p>\n\u003cdiv class=\"fullattribution\">\u003cem>Copyright 2021 Fresh Air. To see more, visit \u003ca href=\"http://www.npr.org/programs/fresh-air/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">Fresh Air\u003c/a>.\u003cimg decoding=\"async\" src=\"https://www.google-analytics.com/__utm.gif?utmac=UA-5828686-4&utmdt=A+Botched+Execution+Leads+To+A+Search+For+Answers+In+%27Two+Truths+And+A+Lie%27+&utme=8(APIKey)9(MDAxOTAwOTE4MDEyMTkxMDAzNjczZDljZA004)\">\u003c/em>\u003c/div>\n\n\u003c/div>\u003c/p>",
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"content": "\u003cp>Combining tales of true crime with makeup tutorials is not a format that should work. At all. In theory, the makeup part could trivialize the suffering of the people in the true crime story. And the true crime story could, in theory, be too dark and distracting to pay any attention to the makeup tutorial. But somehow, when \u003ca href=\"https://twitter.com/BaileySarian\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">Bailey Sarian\u003c/a> does it—puts on a full face, while recounting real-life horrors—it doesn’t just make perfect sense, it’s compulsive viewing.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Sarian’s \u003cem>Murder, Mystery & Makeup\u003c/em> series is already enormously popular. On YouTube, the 31-year-old has almost 4 million subscribers, but her most successful videos rack up even more views than that. As far as content goes, she talks about everything from the most famous serial killers to obscure little murder mysteries most people have never heard of.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P6z_WJgajSg\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Sarian, previously an employee of both Sephora and Urban Decay, started out on YouTube in 2013, doing traditional makeup tutorials. Six years later, when she asked her subscribers if they’d like her to talk about news items in her videos, the response was overwhelmingly positive. And she quickly realized that true crime was what viewers wanted to see her talk about most of all. [aside postid='pop_97139']\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The key to Sarian’s success is that everything she does on camera—the makeup, the story-telling, the engaging but empathetic demeanor—appears effortless. In fact, watching her videos feels a bit like getting ready for a night out with your favorite chatty girlfriend. And since so many of us haven’t shared that ritual with anyone since the pandemic started, right now, Sarian’s channel is a strange source of comfort, even when she’s talking about incredibly dark events.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[ad fullwidth]\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The very first episode of \u003cem>Murder, Mystery & Makeup \u003c/em>concerned Chris Watts, who was convicted in 2018 of murdering his pregnant wife, Shanann, and their two daughters, Bella and Celeste. And even Sarian seemed skeptical about the new format at the start of her video.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UbnulKZg3L8\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Last year, the Los Angeles resident \u003ca href=\"https://www.allure.com/story/bailey-sarian-murder-mystery-makeup-interview\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">told \u003cem>Allure\u003c/em>\u003c/a>: “I’ve heard from people before they started to watch that automatically they thought, ‘Oh my God, this is the most disrespectful trash I [will] ever see. But then they watch, and they’re like, ‘Oh, okay. I get what she was trying to do.’ I don’t ever want to come across as disrespectful toward the victims.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cem>Bailey Sarian posts episodes of \u003c/em>Murder, Mystery & Makeup \u003cem>to \u003ca href=\"https://www.youtube.com/c/makeupbyBAILEYSARIAN\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">her YouTube channel\u003c/a> most Mondays. \u003c/em>\u003c/p>\n\n",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003cp>Combining tales of true crime with makeup tutorials is not a format that should work. At all. In theory, the makeup part could trivialize the suffering of the people in the true crime story. And the true crime story could, in theory, be too dark and distracting to pay any attention to the makeup tutorial. But somehow, when \u003ca href=\"https://twitter.com/BaileySarian\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">Bailey Sarian\u003c/a> does it—puts on a full face, while recounting real-life horrors—it doesn’t just make perfect sense, it’s compulsive viewing.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Sarian’s \u003cem>Murder, Mystery & Makeup\u003c/em> series is already enormously popular. On YouTube, the 31-year-old has almost 4 million subscribers, but her most successful videos rack up even more views than that. As far as content goes, she talks about everything from the most famous serial killers to obscure little murder mysteries most people have never heard of.\u003c/p>\u003c/p>\u003cp>\u003cspan class='utils-parseShortcode-shortcodes-__youtubeShortcode__embedYoutube'>\n \u003cspan class='utils-parseShortcode-shortcodes-__youtubeShortcode__embedYoutubeInside'>\n \u003ciframe\n loading='lazy'\n class='utils-parseShortcode-shortcodes-__youtubeShortcode__youtubePlayer'\n type='text/html'\n src='//www.youtube.com/embed/P6z_WJgajSg'\n title='//www.youtube.com/embed/P6z_WJgajSg'\n allowfullscreen='true'\n style='border:0;'>\u003c/iframe>\n \u003c/span>\n \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\u003cp>\u003cp>Sarian, previously an employee of both Sephora and Urban Decay, started out on YouTube in 2013, doing traditional makeup tutorials. Six years later, when she asked her subscribers if they’d like her to talk about news items in her videos, the response was overwhelmingly positive. And she quickly realized that true crime was what viewers wanted to see her talk about most of all. \u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"title": "True Crime Stories and the Obsession With Them Form 'Unspeakable Acts'",
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"content": "\u003cp>\u003cem>Unspeakable Acts\u003c/em>, edited by author, editor and critic Sarah Weinman, works as both a superb collection of true crime writing and a text that looks at the nuances of our collective obsession with horrific murders, con men and serial killers in a historical and cultural context.\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_13884143\" class=\"wp-caption alignright\" style=\"max-width: 305px\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-full wp-image-13884143\" src=\"https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/2/2020/07/Screen-Shot-2020-07-30-at-12.35.30-PM.png\" alt=\"'Unspeakable Acts: True Tales of Crime, Murder, Deceit, and Obsession,' edited by Sarah Weinman.\" width=\"305\" height=\"448\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2020/07/Screen-Shot-2020-07-30-at-12.35.30-PM.png 305w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2020/07/Screen-Shot-2020-07-30-at-12.35.30-PM-160x235.png 160w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 305px) 100vw, 305px\">\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">‘Unspeakable Acts: True Tales of Crime, Murder, Deceit, and Obsession,’ edited by Sarah Weinman. \u003ccite>(Ecco)\u003c/cite>\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>Those looking for titillating, gruesome chronicles of human depravity will find much to like here—and those who want great, smart writing and outstanding research that unveils things we would rather not look at under a microscope will be equally satisfied.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>That \u003cem>Unspeakable Acts\u003c/em> is more than a collection of true crime stories is clear from the introduction, where Weinman states:\u003c/p>\n\u003cblockquote>\u003cp>“The fascination with murder and illegality is a perennial one, because the shock of the deed creates a schism between order and chaos. We wish for justice, but even when we get it, the result rings somewhat hollow.”\u003c/p>\u003c/blockquote>\n\u003cp>In the pages that follow, the search for answers is one of many cohesive elements that make this nonfiction anthology one of the best true crime books of the year. The other three main elements—great writing, meticulous research and fearless engagement with the psychological, cultural and emotional aftermaths of extreme violence and murder—make this anthology inhabit an interstitial space between personal writing and academic analysis.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>There are recent cases here, like that of Dee Dee and Gypsy Rose Blanchard, a mother-daughter duo that lied about Gypsy’s health issues for years and tricked a lot of people in the process before it all ended in murder (Gypsy pled guilty to second-degree murder and was sentenced to 10 years in prison in 2016). There are also older cases. For example, one of the standouts in the book is Sarah Marshall’s “The End of Evil,” which takes a personal look at Ted Bundy through the lens of a woman who wants to understand the serial killer and looks for answers while deconstruction psychological profiling as well as psychopathy as something that equals “pure evil.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[ad fullwidth]\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Another highlight is Alex Mar’s “Out Came the Girls: Adolescent Girlhood, the Occult, and the Slender Man Phenomenon.” Originally published in the \u003cem>Virginia Quarterly Review\u003c/em> in 2017, this essay deserves its own review. It looks at the Slender Man stabbings of 2014, when Anissa Weier and Morgan Geyser, two 12-year-old girls, lured a friend into the woods and stabbed her 19 times. While Mar explores the myths and evidence of the case, she also focuses on how adolescence is a strange time for girls and how psychological, emotional and physical changes affect young women in various ways. Her writing on this is sharp and noteworthy:\u003c/p>\n\u003cblockquote>\u003cp>“To be an adolescent girl is, for many, to view yourself as desperately set apart, powerfully misunderstood. A special alien, terrible and extraordinary. The flood of new hormones, shot from the glands into the bloodstream; the first charged touches, with a boy or a girl; the first years of bleeding in secret; the startling feeling that your body is suddenly hard to contain and, by extension, so are you.”\u003c/p>\u003c/blockquote>\n\u003cp>While \u003cem>Unspeakable Acts\u003c/em> is informative and engaging, it is also a wonderfully uncomfortable read because it brings real horror to your doorstep—it brings evidence that shows your neighbor could be a killer, your friends can stab you, and your partner could have a different name and another family or partner elsewhere. In Karen K. Ho’s “Jennifer Pan’s Revenge,” parental pressure leads to chaos and murder. In Rachel Monroe’s “The Perfect Man Who Wasn’t,” we are shown how con men can weasel their way into the lives of people and win over their trust, and their hearts, while draining their bank accounts and racking up credit card debt. These stories reveal the possible presence of the terrifying in everyday life and illuminate a devastating truth: Dark deeds are done not by monsters, but by people who look like everyone you know. [aside postid='pop_109009']\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Alice Bolin echoes Weinman’s thoughts in the first paragraph of “The Ethical Dilemma of Highbrow True Crime” when she says, “People love true stories about murder and other brands of brutality and grift, and they have gorged on them particularly since the beginning of modern journalism.” Bolin explores the aesthetic differences between highbrow and lowbrow true-crime programs and documentaries, revealing in the process how voyeurism plays a huge role in the popularity of the genre today.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>From classics of true-crime reporting to newer pieces that redefine the genre, \u003cem>Unspeakable Acts\u003c/em> offers more than 400 pages of unnerving, immersive true-crime writing from some of the most talented writers in the field. There is plenty of blood and viciousness in its pages, but there are also heavy doses of hope and heart, of humanity and searching for answers. Yes, this is creepy and pulpy at times, but it ultimately morphs into a mirror that shows us scary things—and uncovers why we are drawn to them so strongly.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cem>Gabino Iglesias is an author, book reviewer and professor living in Austin, Texas. Find him on Twitter at\u003c/em> \u003ca href=\"https://twitter.com/Gabino_Iglesias\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">@Gabino_Iglesias\u003c/a>.\u003c/p>\n\u003cdiv class=\"fullattribution\">\u003cem>Copyright 2020 NPR. To see more, visit \u003ca href=\"https://www.npr.org\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">NPR\u003c/a>.\u003cimg decoding=\"async\" src=\"https://www.google-analytics.com/__utm.gif?utmac=UA-5828686-4&utmdt=True+Crime+Stories+And+The+Obsession+With+Them+Form+%27Unspeakable+Acts%27&utme=8(APIKey)9(MDAxOTAwOTE4MDEyMTkxMDAzNjczZDljZA004)\">\u003c/em>\u003c/div>\n\n",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003cp>\u003cem>Unspeakable Acts\u003c/em>, edited by author, editor and critic Sarah Weinman, works as both a superb collection of true crime writing and a text that looks at the nuances of our collective obsession with horrific murders, con men and serial killers in a historical and cultural context.\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_13884143\" class=\"wp-caption alignright\" style=\"max-width: 305px\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-full wp-image-13884143\" src=\"https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/2/2020/07/Screen-Shot-2020-07-30-at-12.35.30-PM.png\" alt=\"'Unspeakable Acts: True Tales of Crime, Murder, Deceit, and Obsession,' edited by Sarah Weinman.\" width=\"305\" height=\"448\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2020/07/Screen-Shot-2020-07-30-at-12.35.30-PM.png 305w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2020/07/Screen-Shot-2020-07-30-at-12.35.30-PM-160x235.png 160w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 305px) 100vw, 305px\">\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">‘Unspeakable Acts: True Tales of Crime, Murder, Deceit, and Obsession,’ edited by Sarah Weinman. \u003ccite>(Ecco)\u003c/cite>\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>Those looking for titillating, gruesome chronicles of human depravity will find much to like here—and those who want great, smart writing and outstanding research that unveils things we would rather not look at under a microscope will be equally satisfied.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>That \u003cem>Unspeakable Acts\u003c/em> is more than a collection of true crime stories is clear from the introduction, where Weinman states:\u003c/p>\n\u003cblockquote>\u003cp>“The fascination with murder and illegality is a perennial one, because the shock of the deed creates a schism between order and chaos. We wish for justice, but even when we get it, the result rings somewhat hollow.”\u003c/p>\u003c/blockquote>\n\u003cp>In the pages that follow, the search for answers is one of many cohesive elements that make this nonfiction anthology one of the best true crime books of the year. The other three main elements—great writing, meticulous research and fearless engagement with the psychological, cultural and emotional aftermaths of extreme violence and murder—make this anthology inhabit an interstitial space between personal writing and academic analysis.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>There are recent cases here, like that of Dee Dee and Gypsy Rose Blanchard, a mother-daughter duo that lied about Gypsy’s health issues for years and tricked a lot of people in the process before it all ended in murder (Gypsy pled guilty to second-degree murder and was sentenced to 10 years in prison in 2016). There are also older cases. For example, one of the standouts in the book is Sarah Marshall’s “The End of Evil,” which takes a personal look at Ted Bundy through the lens of a woman who wants to understand the serial killer and looks for answers while deconstruction psychological profiling as well as psychopathy as something that equals “pure evil.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Another highlight is Alex Mar’s “Out Came the Girls: Adolescent Girlhood, the Occult, and the Slender Man Phenomenon.” Originally published in the \u003cem>Virginia Quarterly Review\u003c/em> in 2017, this essay deserves its own review. It looks at the Slender Man stabbings of 2014, when Anissa Weier and Morgan Geyser, two 12-year-old girls, lured a friend into the woods and stabbed her 19 times. While Mar explores the myths and evidence of the case, she also focuses on how adolescence is a strange time for girls and how psychological, emotional and physical changes affect young women in various ways. Her writing on this is sharp and noteworthy:\u003c/p>\n\u003cblockquote>\u003cp>“To be an adolescent girl is, for many, to view yourself as desperately set apart, powerfully misunderstood. A special alien, terrible and extraordinary. The flood of new hormones, shot from the glands into the bloodstream; the first charged touches, with a boy or a girl; the first years of bleeding in secret; the startling feeling that your body is suddenly hard to contain and, by extension, so are you.”\u003c/p>\u003c/blockquote>\n\u003cp>While \u003cem>Unspeakable Acts\u003c/em> is informative and engaging, it is also a wonderfully uncomfortable read because it brings real horror to your doorstep—it brings evidence that shows your neighbor could be a killer, your friends can stab you, and your partner could have a different name and another family or partner elsewhere. In Karen K. Ho’s “Jennifer Pan’s Revenge,” parental pressure leads to chaos and murder. In Rachel Monroe’s “The Perfect Man Who Wasn’t,” we are shown how con men can weasel their way into the lives of people and win over their trust, and their hearts, while draining their bank accounts and racking up credit card debt. These stories reveal the possible presence of the terrifying in everyday life and illuminate a devastating truth: Dark deeds are done not by monsters, but by people who look like everyone you know. \u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Alice Bolin echoes Weinman’s thoughts in the first paragraph of “The Ethical Dilemma of Highbrow True Crime” when she says, “People love true stories about murder and other brands of brutality and grift, and they have gorged on them particularly since the beginning of modern journalism.” Bolin explores the aesthetic differences between highbrow and lowbrow true-crime programs and documentaries, revealing in the process how voyeurism plays a huge role in the popularity of the genre today.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>From classics of true-crime reporting to newer pieces that redefine the genre, \u003cem>Unspeakable Acts\u003c/em> offers more than 400 pages of unnerving, immersive true-crime writing from some of the most talented writers in the field. There is plenty of blood and viciousness in its pages, but there are also heavy doses of hope and heart, of humanity and searching for answers. Yes, this is creepy and pulpy at times, but it ultimately morphs into a mirror that shows us scary things—and uncovers why we are drawn to them so strongly.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cem>Gabino Iglesias is an author, book reviewer and professor living in Austin, Texas. Find him on Twitter at\u003c/em> \u003ca href=\"https://twitter.com/Gabino_Iglesias\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">@Gabino_Iglesias\u003c/a>.\u003c/p>\n\u003cdiv class=\"fullattribution\">\u003cem>Copyright 2020 NPR. To see more, visit \u003ca href=\"https://www.npr.org\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">NPR\u003c/a>.\u003cimg decoding=\"async\" src=\"https://www.google-analytics.com/__utm.gif?utmac=UA-5828686-4&utmdt=True+Crime+Stories+And+The+Obsession+With+Them+Form+%27Unspeakable+Acts%27&utme=8(APIKey)9(MDAxOTAwOTE4MDEyMTkxMDAzNjczZDljZA004)\">\u003c/em>\u003c/div>\n\n\u003c/div>\u003c/p>",
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"title": "Two Young Women Were Murdered in 1980, 'Rainbow Girl' Tells Their Story",
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"content": "\u003cp>In the final pages of \u003cem>The Third Rainbow Girl—\u003c/em>a new book about the aftermath of the murders of two young women who were hitchhiking in West Virginia in 1980—author Emma Copley Eisenberg interviews a friend of the victims. Elizabeth Johndrow parted company with her friends a day before they were murdered; she’s the “third rainbow girl” of the title.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Eisenberg asks Johndrow, now in her 50s, why she and so many other young women hitchhiked back then. Johndrow says:\u003c/p>\n\u003cblockquote>\u003cp>Well, there was adventure to it … [H]itchhiking was like falling forward into the universe that you wanted …\u003c/p>\u003c/blockquote>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_13874425\" class=\"wp-caption alignright\" style=\"max-width: 303px\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-full wp-image-13874425\" src=\"https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/2/2020/02/Screen-Shot-2020-02-05-at-11.19.17-AM.png\" alt=\"'The Third Rainbow Girl: The Long Life of a Double Murder in Appalachia,' by Emma Copley Eisenberg.\" width=\"303\" height=\"455\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2020/02/Screen-Shot-2020-02-05-at-11.19.17-AM.png 303w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2020/02/Screen-Shot-2020-02-05-at-11.19.17-AM-160x240.png 160w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 303px) 100vw, 303px\">\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">‘The Third Rainbow Girl:\u003cbr>The Long Life of a Double Murder in Appalachia,’\u003cbr>by Emma Copley Eisenberg.\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>\u003cem>The Third Rainbow Girl\u003c/em> is a haunting and hard-to-characterize book about restless women and the things that await them on the road. At its simplest, it’s a true crime story about the still-unresolved murders of Vicki Durian, 26, and Nancy Santomero, 19.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Durian and Santomero had been hitchhiking from Arizona to the Rainbow Gathering—an counterculture peace festival held in the Monongahela National Forest in West Virginia. On the evening of June 25, 1980, their bodies were found in an isolated clearing in Pocahontas County, south of the festival. They had been shot at close range, and there were no signs of sexual assault.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The conventional wisdom was that the killer or killers had to be local—someone who knew that clearing. Twelve years later, seven local men—farmers, mechanics, timber haulers—were charged. The charges were dropped because of improper police procedure.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[ad fullwidth]\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>In another twist, the investigation focused in on one local farmer, Jacob Beard, reputed to be a mean drunk. Beard was convicted, but then released from prison six years later when a serial killer, \u003ca href=\"https://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2013/11/20/246297720/white-supremacist-murderer-who-shot-larry-flynt-is-executed\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">Joseph Paul Franklin\u003c/a>, confessed to the murders. Franklin was the man who shot and paralyzed \u003cem>Hustler \u003c/em>publisher Larry Flynt and, because he was already on death row for other murders, he was never tried for the so-called Rainbow killings. Case closed. Sort of.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Eisenberg dives deep here into the backstories of the victims, investigators and suspects, as well as the cultural “backstory” of Appalachia itself. Because she lived and worked with teenage girls in Pocahontas County on and off for several years but isn’t a native, she’s suited to the insider-outsider reporter role.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The Pocahontas County that Eisenberg evokes is a singular place; for one thing, it sits within the\u003ca href=\"https://www.npr.org/sections/alltechconsidered/2013/10/08/218976699/enter-the-quiet-zone-where-cell-service-wi-fi-are-banned\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"> National Radio Quiet Zone\u003c/a>—a region where cellphone signals and Wi-Fi are severely restricted in order not to interfere with a giant mountaintop telescope that listens for signals from space.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Life in a place like Pocahontas County, Eisenberg writes, “demanded that women and girls be powerful in the ways that more urban places I’ve lived have not.” And, yet, Eisenberg also acknowledges, that it’s a place, like the rest of America, where “misogyny is in the groundwater.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Eisenberg is also fascinated by how prefabricated stories, myths, even fairy tales shape what’s considered to be truth. She chips away at the “hick monster story” that prevailed at the first trial of the local men, which painted them as backwoods predators hunting down loose hippie chicks from the city.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>She’s also aware of the enduring lure of what the late Gwen Ifill is credited with calling the “missing white woman syndrome,” whereby foul play involving white women—especially if they’re pretty—stokes up public interest, while the same fate befalling women of color does not.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Eisenberg ruminates over the press coverage of the crime and how the fact that neither Vicki nor Nancy were considered pretty complicated the “damsels in distress” narrative and, perhaps, explained why the case never rose to a national obsession.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>But there’s a deeper dimension to \u003cem>The Third Rainbow Girl \u003c/em>that gives it its contemplative power. Eisenberg intertwines her own raw story about coming-into-womanhood into the true crime narrative. I said earlier that “the third Rainbow Girl” was the one who lived, Elizabeth Johndrow. But Eisenberg, herself, is also very much “the third Rainbow Girl” here. She, too, felt the call of the wild, living among strangers, drinking too much, taking risks. “The spring I was to graduate college,” Eisenberg says, “there rose up in me the desire to drop so hard out of my life that I could hear my life trying to get in touch.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>That un-nameable desire to travel a different path led Eisenberg to Pocahontas County and, ultimately, to write this evocative story of two other restless young women—sisters of the road—who passed through decades earlier and, sadly, never left.\u003c/p>\n\u003cdiv class=\"fullattribution\">\u003cem>Copyright 2020 Fresh Air. To see more, visit \u003ca href=\"http://www.npr.org/programs/fresh-air/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">Fresh Air\u003c/a>.\u003cimg decoding=\"async\" src=\"https://www.google-analytics.com/__utm.gif?utmac=UA-5828686-4&utmdt=2+Young+Women+Were+Murdered+In+1980%2C+%27Rainbow+Girl%27+Tells+Their+Story&utme=8(APIKey)9(MDAxOTAwOTE4MDEyMTkxMDAzNjczZDljZA004)\">\u003c/em>\u003c/div>\n\n",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003cp>In the final pages of \u003cem>The Third Rainbow Girl—\u003c/em>a new book about the aftermath of the murders of two young women who were hitchhiking in West Virginia in 1980—author Emma Copley Eisenberg interviews a friend of the victims. Elizabeth Johndrow parted company with her friends a day before they were murdered; she’s the “third rainbow girl” of the title.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Eisenberg asks Johndrow, now in her 50s, why she and so many other young women hitchhiked back then. Johndrow says:\u003c/p>\n\u003cblockquote>\u003cp>Well, there was adventure to it … [H]itchhiking was like falling forward into the universe that you wanted …\u003c/p>\u003c/blockquote>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_13874425\" class=\"wp-caption alignright\" style=\"max-width: 303px\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-full wp-image-13874425\" src=\"https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/2/2020/02/Screen-Shot-2020-02-05-at-11.19.17-AM.png\" alt=\"'The Third Rainbow Girl: The Long Life of a Double Murder in Appalachia,' by Emma Copley Eisenberg.\" width=\"303\" height=\"455\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2020/02/Screen-Shot-2020-02-05-at-11.19.17-AM.png 303w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2020/02/Screen-Shot-2020-02-05-at-11.19.17-AM-160x240.png 160w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 303px) 100vw, 303px\">\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">‘The Third Rainbow Girl:\u003cbr>The Long Life of a Double Murder in Appalachia,’\u003cbr>by Emma Copley Eisenberg.\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>\u003cem>The Third Rainbow Girl\u003c/em> is a haunting and hard-to-characterize book about restless women and the things that await them on the road. At its simplest, it’s a true crime story about the still-unresolved murders of Vicki Durian, 26, and Nancy Santomero, 19.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Durian and Santomero had been hitchhiking from Arizona to the Rainbow Gathering—an counterculture peace festival held in the Monongahela National Forest in West Virginia. On the evening of June 25, 1980, their bodies were found in an isolated clearing in Pocahontas County, south of the festival. They had been shot at close range, and there were no signs of sexual assault.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The conventional wisdom was that the killer or killers had to be local—someone who knew that clearing. Twelve years later, seven local men—farmers, mechanics, timber haulers—were charged. The charges were dropped because of improper police procedure.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>In another twist, the investigation focused in on one local farmer, Jacob Beard, reputed to be a mean drunk. Beard was convicted, but then released from prison six years later when a serial killer, \u003ca href=\"https://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2013/11/20/246297720/white-supremacist-murderer-who-shot-larry-flynt-is-executed\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">Joseph Paul Franklin\u003c/a>, confessed to the murders. Franklin was the man who shot and paralyzed \u003cem>Hustler \u003c/em>publisher Larry Flynt and, because he was already on death row for other murders, he was never tried for the so-called Rainbow killings. Case closed. Sort of.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Eisenberg dives deep here into the backstories of the victims, investigators and suspects, as well as the cultural “backstory” of Appalachia itself. Because she lived and worked with teenage girls in Pocahontas County on and off for several years but isn’t a native, she’s suited to the insider-outsider reporter role.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The Pocahontas County that Eisenberg evokes is a singular place; for one thing, it sits within the\u003ca href=\"https://www.npr.org/sections/alltechconsidered/2013/10/08/218976699/enter-the-quiet-zone-where-cell-service-wi-fi-are-banned\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"> National Radio Quiet Zone\u003c/a>—a region where cellphone signals and Wi-Fi are severely restricted in order not to interfere with a giant mountaintop telescope that listens for signals from space.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Life in a place like Pocahontas County, Eisenberg writes, “demanded that women and girls be powerful in the ways that more urban places I’ve lived have not.” And, yet, Eisenberg also acknowledges, that it’s a place, like the rest of America, where “misogyny is in the groundwater.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Eisenberg is also fascinated by how prefabricated stories, myths, even fairy tales shape what’s considered to be truth. She chips away at the “hick monster story” that prevailed at the first trial of the local men, which painted them as backwoods predators hunting down loose hippie chicks from the city.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>She’s also aware of the enduring lure of what the late Gwen Ifill is credited with calling the “missing white woman syndrome,” whereby foul play involving white women—especially if they’re pretty—stokes up public interest, while the same fate befalling women of color does not.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Eisenberg ruminates over the press coverage of the crime and how the fact that neither Vicki nor Nancy were considered pretty complicated the “damsels in distress” narrative and, perhaps, explained why the case never rose to a national obsession.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>But there’s a deeper dimension to \u003cem>The Third Rainbow Girl \u003c/em>that gives it its contemplative power. Eisenberg intertwines her own raw story about coming-into-womanhood into the true crime narrative. I said earlier that “the third Rainbow Girl” was the one who lived, Elizabeth Johndrow. But Eisenberg, herself, is also very much “the third Rainbow Girl” here. She, too, felt the call of the wild, living among strangers, drinking too much, taking risks. “The spring I was to graduate college,” Eisenberg says, “there rose up in me the desire to drop so hard out of my life that I could hear my life trying to get in touch.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>That un-nameable desire to travel a different path led Eisenberg to Pocahontas County and, ultimately, to write this evocative story of two other restless young women—sisters of the road—who passed through decades earlier and, sadly, never left.\u003c/p>\n\u003cdiv class=\"fullattribution\">\u003cem>Copyright 2020 Fresh Air. To see more, visit \u003ca href=\"http://www.npr.org/programs/fresh-air/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">Fresh Air\u003c/a>.\u003cimg decoding=\"async\" src=\"https://www.google-analytics.com/__utm.gif?utmac=UA-5828686-4&utmdt=2+Young+Women+Were+Murdered+In+1980%2C+%27Rainbow+Girl%27+Tells+Their+Story&utme=8(APIKey)9(MDAxOTAwOTE4MDEyMTkxMDAzNjczZDljZA004)\">\u003c/em>\u003c/div>\n\n\u003c/div>\u003c/p>",
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"content": "\u003cp>A few months ago, I watched a chilling film, \u003ca href=\"https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jmnuC7tn9D4\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">\u003cem>My Friend Dahmer\u003c/em>\u003c/a>, based on a graphic memoir written by a high school friend(ish) of infamous serial killer Jeffrey Dahmer.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>While IMDB’s logline for the film reads, “A young Jeffrey Dahmer struggles to belong in high school,” I saw it more as an attempt to contextualize Dahmer. It showed his chaotic family life, the masculinity he was expected to perform yet couldn’t, his social ineptness, and the disturbing ways his instincts were and weren’t validated.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The film seemed to be asking the unanswerable question: What if? What if he had been able to come out to his family? What if someone had noticed his inability to connect with people and had tried to reach him? What if he was steered toward nurturing his anatomical interests? Could he have been a pathologist? A medical examiner?\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The other unanswerable question—the one that might be going through many readers’ minds—is: Who cares?! He deliberately preyed on a vulnerable population, mostly young gay men of color. He killed a bunch of people!\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>I was so disturbed by my empathy for him—for how he was portrayed in the film, anyway—that I brought it up to my therapist. Her take? That I might be drawn to his overt cruelty, his capacity for violence, because I am incapable of it myself.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[ad fullwidth]\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>In a new, necessary and brilliant book, \u003cem>Savage Appetites: Four True Stories of Women, Crime, and Obsession,\u003c/em> journalist Rachel Monroe writes: “Most of the explanations I read for why women are drawn to true crime ended up feeling reductive and unsatisfying.” The explanations she had seen were that the interest was voyeuristic or feminist or self-preserving and practical. “By presuming that women’s dark thoughts were merely pragmatic, those thoughts were drained of their menace,” she adds. “A different, more alarming hypothesis was the one I tended to prefer: perhaps we liked creepy stories because something creepy was in us.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The stories that are well-known, that get rehashed over and over again, are largely about white male perpetrators and white, middle-class, female victims, even though, as Monroe reminds us, “the people who are disproportionately at risk of homicide” are actually “sex workers, the homeless, young men of color, trans women” and, in fact, “the people who [are] most likely to be harmed by violent crime [are] young black men from low-income neighborhoods.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>So why do we find true crime fascinating? How are we relating to it? Who is telling what stories and why? Monroe doesn’t have one distinct answer for us—nor, I suspect, does she believe there is one—but she showcases several women, each with a different relationship to the genre. Frances Glessner Lee, considered by some the “mother of forensic science,” is the first; second is Alisa Statman who, whether in good faith or not, inserted herself into the lives and stories of Sharon Tate’s family; third is Lorri Davis, who ended up marrying and helping to free Damien Echols, who spent years on death row after what is widely believed to be his wrongful conviction for the murder of three small boys in West Memphis; and, finally, Lindsay Souvannarath, sentenced to life in prison in Canada after she and another young adult she had met online planned to vaguely emulate the Columbine shooters by wreaking havoc in a mall in Halifax (they never got that far).\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Monroe treats each individual narrative with nuance, empathy and transparency, allowing both the protagonists and their supporting cast to remain complex. She delves into the social and political ramifications of each narrative, making accessible and visible what so often gets overlooked in these stories because it’s too complicated to put into a headline or summary.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Monroe’s book is a pleasure to read because it is smart, well-researched and well-written—beautifully, really, as each of the four long chapters takes the form of a braided essay that links two and sometimes three distinct stories together, showcasing Monroe’s own obsessions alongside those of the real-life characters she explores.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>But more than that, \u003cem>Savage Appetites \u003c/em>is important because it refuses to sit inside binaries of good vs. evil, victim vs. perpetrator, innocent victim vs. mastermind criminal. It doesn’t give us easy answers for why women are the main consumers of true crime narratives, because there aren’t any because women as a category are not monolith and because it’s complicated and nuanced and different for everyone. The book is important also because I suspect there are more than a few of us who, like Monroe herself, feel conflicted about their desire to consume stories of murder and mayhem and wonder what it reflects about the world around us and ourselves.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>While Monroe has the role of journalist here, probing the history, motives and psyches of her subjects, she also interrogates herself by weaving her stories into those of others. So it’s not without doing the work herself that she urges us not to turn off our brains in the pursuit of true crime’s anesthetizing effect: “We can use [sensational crime stories] as opportunities to be more honest about our appetites—and curious about them too.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Looking away from a problem doesn’t make it go away, her narratives show us, and looking at the problem directly doesn’t mean easily or quickly solving it. But looking and looking and continuing to look until the layers begin to peel back and reveal the issues at the core of such stories—the systemic inequalities, the co-option of certain stories for political gain, the rhetoric used to make some victims more real than others—that’s the important work that we, and true crime, can do.\u003c/p>\n\u003chr>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cem>Ilana Masad is an Israeli-American fiction writer, critic, and founder/host of the podcast \u003c/em>The Other Stories\u003cem>. Her debut novel, \u003c/em>All My Mother’s Lovers\u003cem>, is forthcoming from Dutton in 2020.\u003c/em>\u003c/p>\n\u003cdiv class=\"fullattribution\">\u003cem>Copyright 2019 NPR. To see more, visit \u003ca href=\"https://www.npr.org\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">NPR\u003c/a>.\u003cimg decoding=\"async\" src=\"https://www.google-analytics.com/__utm.gif?utmac=UA-5828686-4&utmdt=Why+Do+We+Find+True+Crime+Fascinating%3F+%27Savage+Appetites%27+Looks+For+An+Answer&utme=8(APIKey)9(MDAxOTAwOTE4MDEyMTkxMDAzNjczZDljZA004)\">\u003c/em>\u003c/div>\n\n",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003cp>A few months ago, I watched a chilling film, \u003ca href=\"https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jmnuC7tn9D4\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">\u003cem>My Friend Dahmer\u003c/em>\u003c/a>, based on a graphic memoir written by a high school friend(ish) of infamous serial killer Jeffrey Dahmer.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>While IMDB’s logline for the film reads, “A young Jeffrey Dahmer struggles to belong in high school,” I saw it more as an attempt to contextualize Dahmer. It showed his chaotic family life, the masculinity he was expected to perform yet couldn’t, his social ineptness, and the disturbing ways his instincts were and weren’t validated.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The film seemed to be asking the unanswerable question: What if? What if he had been able to come out to his family? What if someone had noticed his inability to connect with people and had tried to reach him? What if he was steered toward nurturing his anatomical interests? Could he have been a pathologist? A medical examiner?\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The other unanswerable question—the one that might be going through many readers’ minds—is: Who cares?! He deliberately preyed on a vulnerable population, mostly young gay men of color. He killed a bunch of people!\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>I was so disturbed by my empathy for him—for how he was portrayed in the film, anyway—that I brought it up to my therapist. Her take? That I might be drawn to his overt cruelty, his capacity for violence, because I am incapable of it myself.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>In a new, necessary and brilliant book, \u003cem>Savage Appetites: Four True Stories of Women, Crime, and Obsession,\u003c/em> journalist Rachel Monroe writes: “Most of the explanations I read for why women are drawn to true crime ended up feeling reductive and unsatisfying.” The explanations she had seen were that the interest was voyeuristic or feminist or self-preserving and practical. “By presuming that women’s dark thoughts were merely pragmatic, those thoughts were drained of their menace,” she adds. “A different, more alarming hypothesis was the one I tended to prefer: perhaps we liked creepy stories because something creepy was in us.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The stories that are well-known, that get rehashed over and over again, are largely about white male perpetrators and white, middle-class, female victims, even though, as Monroe reminds us, “the people who are disproportionately at risk of homicide” are actually “sex workers, the homeless, young men of color, trans women” and, in fact, “the people who [are] most likely to be harmed by violent crime [are] young black men from low-income neighborhoods.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>So why do we find true crime fascinating? How are we relating to it? Who is telling what stories and why? Monroe doesn’t have one distinct answer for us—nor, I suspect, does she believe there is one—but she showcases several women, each with a different relationship to the genre. Frances Glessner Lee, considered by some the “mother of forensic science,” is the first; second is Alisa Statman who, whether in good faith or not, inserted herself into the lives and stories of Sharon Tate’s family; third is Lorri Davis, who ended up marrying and helping to free Damien Echols, who spent years on death row after what is widely believed to be his wrongful conviction for the murder of three small boys in West Memphis; and, finally, Lindsay Souvannarath, sentenced to life in prison in Canada after she and another young adult she had met online planned to vaguely emulate the Columbine shooters by wreaking havoc in a mall in Halifax (they never got that far).\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Monroe treats each individual narrative with nuance, empathy and transparency, allowing both the protagonists and their supporting cast to remain complex. She delves into the social and political ramifications of each narrative, making accessible and visible what so often gets overlooked in these stories because it’s too complicated to put into a headline or summary.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Monroe’s book is a pleasure to read because it is smart, well-researched and well-written—beautifully, really, as each of the four long chapters takes the form of a braided essay that links two and sometimes three distinct stories together, showcasing Monroe’s own obsessions alongside those of the real-life characters she explores.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>But more than that, \u003cem>Savage Appetites \u003c/em>is important because it refuses to sit inside binaries of good vs. evil, victim vs. perpetrator, innocent victim vs. mastermind criminal. It doesn’t give us easy answers for why women are the main consumers of true crime narratives, because there aren’t any because women as a category are not monolith and because it’s complicated and nuanced and different for everyone. The book is important also because I suspect there are more than a few of us who, like Monroe herself, feel conflicted about their desire to consume stories of murder and mayhem and wonder what it reflects about the world around us and ourselves.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>While Monroe has the role of journalist here, probing the history, motives and psyches of her subjects, she also interrogates herself by weaving her stories into those of others. So it’s not without doing the work herself that she urges us not to turn off our brains in the pursuit of true crime’s anesthetizing effect: “We can use [sensational crime stories] as opportunities to be more honest about our appetites—and curious about them too.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Looking away from a problem doesn’t make it go away, her narratives show us, and looking at the problem directly doesn’t mean easily or quickly solving it. But looking and looking and continuing to look until the layers begin to peel back and reveal the issues at the core of such stories—the systemic inequalities, the co-option of certain stories for political gain, the rhetoric used to make some victims more real than others—that’s the important work that we, and true crime, can do.\u003c/p>\n\u003chr>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cem>Ilana Masad is an Israeli-American fiction writer, critic, and founder/host of the podcast \u003c/em>The Other Stories\u003cem>. Her debut novel, \u003c/em>All My Mother’s Lovers\u003cem>, is forthcoming from Dutton in 2020.\u003c/em>\u003c/p>\n\u003cdiv class=\"fullattribution\">\u003cem>Copyright 2019 NPR. To see more, visit \u003ca href=\"https://www.npr.org\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">NPR\u003c/a>.\u003cimg decoding=\"async\" src=\"https://www.google-analytics.com/__utm.gif?utmac=UA-5828686-4&utmdt=Why+Do+We+Find+True+Crime+Fascinating%3F+%27Savage+Appetites%27+Looks+For+An+Answer&utme=8(APIKey)9(MDAxOTAwOTE4MDEyMTkxMDAzNjczZDljZA004)\">\u003c/em>\u003c/div>\n\n\u003c/div>\u003c/p>",
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"tagline": "The flip side of gentrification, told through one town",
"info": "Gentrification is changing cities across America, forcing people from neighborhoods they have long called home. Call them the displaced. Now those priced out of the Bay Area are looking for a better life in an unlikely place. American Suburb follows this migration to one California town along the Delta, 45 miles from San Francisco. But is this once sleepy suburb ready for them?",
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"tagline": "Exploring the Bay Area, one question at a time",
"info": "KQED’s new podcast, Bay Curious, gets to the bottom of the mysteries — both profound and peculiar — that give the Bay Area its unique identity. And we’ll do it with your help! You ask the questions. You decide what Bay Curious investigates. And you join us on the journey to find the answers.",
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"order": 8
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},
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"info": "\u003cem>Code Switch\u003c/em>, which listeners will hear in the first part of the hour, has fearless and much-needed conversations about race. Hosted by journalists of color, the show tackles the subject of race head-on, exploring how it impacts every part of society — from politics and pop culture to history, sports and more.\u003cbr />\u003cbr />\u003cem>Life Kit\u003c/em>, which will be in the second part of the hour, guides you through spaces and feelings no one prepares you for — from finances to mental health, from workplace microaggressions to imposter syndrome, from relationships to parenting. The show features experts with real world experience and shares their knowledge. Because everyone needs a little help being human.\u003cbr />\u003cbr />\u003ca href=\"https://www.npr.org/podcasts/510312/codeswitch\">\u003cem>Code Switch\u003c/em> offical site and podcast\u003c/a>\u003cbr />\u003ca href=\"https://www.npr.org/lifekit\">\u003cem>Life Kit\u003c/em> offical site and podcast\u003c/a>\u003cbr />",
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"title": "Commonwealth Club of California Podcast",
"info": "The Commonwealth Club of California is the nation's oldest and largest public affairs forum. As a non-partisan forum, The Club brings to the public airwaves diverse viewpoints on important topics. The Club's weekly radio broadcast - the oldest in the U.S., dating back to 1924 - is carried across the nation on public radio stations and is now podcasting. Our website archive features audio of our recent programs, as well as selected speeches from our long and distinguished history. This podcast feed is usually updated twice a week and is always un-edited.",
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"source": "Commonwealth Club of California"
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"info": "KQED’s live call-in program discussing local, state, national and international issues, as well as in-depth interviews.",
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"order": 9
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"hidden-brain": {
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"airtime": "SUN 7pm-8pm",
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"airtime": "SUN 7:30pm-8pm",
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"info": "What kind of no sabo word is Hyphenación? For us, it’s about living within a hyphenation. Like being a third-gen Mexican-American from the Texas border now living that Bay Area Chicano life. Like Xorje! Each week we bring together a couple of hyphenated Latinos to talk all about personal life choices: family, careers, relationships, belonging … everything is on the table. ",
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"title": "The Political Mind of Jerry Brown",
"tagline": "Lessons from a lifetime in politics",
"info": "The Political Mind of Jerry Brown brings listeners the wisdom of the former Governor, Mayor, and presidential candidate. Scott Shafer interviewed Brown for more than 40 hours, covering the former governor's life and half-century in the political game – and Brown has some lessons he'd like to share. ",
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"order": 18
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"id": "latino-usa",
"title": "Latino USA",
"airtime": "MON 1am-2am, SUN 6pm-7pm",
"info": "Latino USA, the radio journal of news and culture, is the only national, English-language radio program produced from a Latino perspective.",
"imageSrc": "https://ww2.kqed.org/radio/wp-content/uploads/sites/50/2018/04/latinoUsa.jpg",
"officialWebsiteLink": "http://latinousa.org/",
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},
"link": "/radio/program/latino-usa",
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"rss": "https://feeds.npr.org/510016/podcast.xml"
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},
"marketplace": {
"id": "marketplace",
"title": "Marketplace",
"info": "Our flagship program, helmed by Kai Ryssdal, examines what the day in money delivered, through stories, conversations, newsworthy numbers and more. Updated Monday through Friday at about 3:30 p.m. PT.",
"airtime": "MON-FRI 4pm-4:30pm, MON-WED 6:30pm-7pm",
"imageSrc": "https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/04/Marketplace-Podcast-Tile-360x360-1.jpg",
"officialWebsiteLink": "https://www.marketplace.org/",
"meta": {
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"source": "American Public Media"
},
"link": "/radio/program/marketplace",
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"rss": "https://feeds.publicradio.org/public_feeds/marketplace-pm/rss/rss"
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},
"masters-of-scale": {
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"title": "Masters of Scale",
"info": "Masters of Scale is an original podcast in which LinkedIn co-founder and Greylock Partner Reid Hoffman sets out to describe and prove theories that explain how great entrepreneurs take their companies from zero to a gazillion in ingenious fashion.",
"airtime": "Every other Wednesday June 12 through October 16 at 8pm (repeats Thursdays at 2am)",
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"officialWebsiteLink": "https://mastersofscale.com/",
"meta": {
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"source": "WaitWhat"
},
"link": "/radio/program/masters-of-scale",
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"rss": "https://rss.art19.com/masters-of-scale"
}
},
"mindshift": {
"id": "mindshift",
"title": "MindShift",
"tagline": "A podcast about the future of learning and how we raise our kids",
"info": "The MindShift podcast explores the innovations in education that are shaping how kids learn. Hosts Ki Sung and Katrina Schwartz introduce listeners to educators, researchers, parents and students who are developing effective ways to improve how kids learn. We cover topics like how fed-up administrators are developing surprising tactics to deal with classroom disruptions; how listening to podcasts are helping kids develop reading skills; the consequences of overparenting; and why interdisciplinary learning can engage students on all ends of the traditional achievement spectrum. This podcast is part of the MindShift education site, a division of KQED News. KQED is an NPR/PBS member station based in San Francisco. You can also visit the MindShift website for episodes and supplemental blog posts or tweet us \u003ca href=\"https://twitter.com/MindShiftKQED\">@MindShiftKQED\u003c/a> or visit us at \u003ca href=\"/mindshift\">MindShift.KQED.org\u003c/a>",
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