Celisia Stanton (16:40)
Yeah, well, I'm glad that, you know, it's felt sort of diverse to you. I think for me, from the very beginning, I always wanted true, truer crime to be a true crime podcast. Meaning, like, you know, I didn't want it to be the social justice podcast. I didn't want it to be the history podcast or the true crime podcast with that black host. Like, I wanted it to be a true crime podcast. And so that meant telling all different types of true crime stories, ones that are covered a lot, ones that aren't, ones that kind of are traditionally not seen as true crime. So I have kind of several categories I sort of think of that most of our episodes fit into. One would be like, infamous cases. So these are stories that people probably already know. Right? Like in. In season one, we did Jonestown. You know, a lot of people have heard of that story or feel very familiar with it, or at least they've heard the line like, don't drink the Kool Aid. But most people don't know that the majority of the folks who died in Jonestown were black folks and particularly black women. That Jim Jones was this person who really had. Was sort of fighting for racial and class equity, or at least that's how he portrayed himself, right? And that People's Temple, the group associated with Jonestown, was, you know, to the people in it, they felt like it was a civil rights organization or, you know, black power organization, you know, like all at different times. And. And so, you know, know, that's one type of story I like to tell, but then also I like to do stories that are kind of typically considered historical. Like that you normally get the history treatment. So in season, in this newest season, we put an episode on the untold story of the Martin Luther King assassination. And that was interesting because, like, in the creation of that episode, I asked a lot of people in my life, or you know, just people I would meet, like, what do you know about this case? Like, what do you know about Martin Luther King's assassination? And mostly people were like, I honestly realize, I don't know very much, or maybe they kind of know, oh yeah, like he was killed on a balcony, you know, by some assassin who went to prison or something. And, and some of that's true. Like he was killed at L Lorraine Motel in Memphis, Tennessee by an, you know, a single bullet. The man who ultimately pled guilty and would take responsibility for that was named James Earl Ray. And he was sentenced to 99 years in prison. But turns out, you know, the King family actually believed that, you know, James Earl Ray was set up, that there was this broader conspiracy to kill King. And in fact, they believed that the US government was a part of it, that the, the FBI in particular might have had a hand in his death. And in 1999, they sued the US government and several other entity entities saying. Alleging that exact thing. And they won that trial. And that's crazy, cuz, like, nobody knows that that was 1999. It wasn't that long ago, you know. And so, you know, these stories that I think typically we just kind of think of them as we would read in our history books. You know, like history buffs would be into it. I was like, what would it look like if we gave those stories the true crime treatment, you know, and like, allowed a new audience to kind of engage with them. In season one, we also did the Tulsa race massacre, so kind of a similar thing there. And then, you know, I like to do, like I said before, true crime stories that are a little bit more typical or familiar to people. We did Lauren McCluskey, which is an episode that you guys have talked about on your podcast. Just, you know, this is a case that I've heard covered on a few different other shows, but like other true crime shows. But what I. What really stood stood out to me about Lauren's case was like, you know, we kind of feel like all the systems in our society are set up to protect somebody like Lauren. You know, this beautiful white woman, young, you know, living in Utah. And she was still failed by these systems, right? She was still killed by an ex boyfriend, despite repeated appeals to police and housing authorities. And just like the university that she went to for help, nobody helped her. And he kind of just leaves you wondering, like, if somebody like Lauren isn't safe. You know, she represents so many other young women just like her, and young women who, you know, maybe don't look like her, whose stories never get told. And then the last kind of story, I like to try to do our stories which kind of blur the lines of culpability. You kind of wonder, well, who is the victim and who is the perpetrator. And I think that's the whole point of truer crime, right, is to. To tell stories that are a little bit more like what crime actually looks like in our society. So one of the cases that we did this season, which you guys also talked about on your podcast, was Alice Sebold and, and Anthony Broadwater. Alice Sebold being the author of the Lovely Bones, who was brutally attacked when she was in college. And she wrote this first book before she wrote the Lovely Bones, called Lucky, all about this attack and then the subsequent trial where her rapist was convicted. And that man was Anthony Broadway Broadwater. Turned out, though, that Anthony Broadwater was wrongfully convicted, that she had accidentally misidentified him. A super common phenomenon, especially when you're trying to identify somebody cross racially, which is what was happening in this case. And so it's. It's a story where, you know, Anthony spent 16 and a half years in prison for this crime he didn't commit. It impacted the whole rest of his life as well, even once he. He had gotten out. And Alice, you know, her life was so, you know, impacted by the. What had happened to her. And then she had built this whole career sort of speaking out on these issues of sexual assault before Me too, like when it was like, not okay to talk about that, those things. She went on Oprah and wrote these op. Eds and really was a voice for. For women at the time and in the future. And yet who is the victim? Who is, who is the perpetrator? Right. It's. It's unclear and it's messy. And I think that's what crime usually looks like when we kind of look a little deeper. So all types of stories, I think that anybody who comes to check out the show will probably find something that would interest them for sure.
