The Alabama Murders - Part 6: The Porterfield Sessions

Summary

Podcast Summary: Revisionist History – The Alabama Murders, Part 6: The Porterfield Sessions

Date: October 30, 2025
Host: Malcolm Gladwell
Production: Pushkin Industries
Guest: Dr. Kate Porterfield, Trauma Psychologist

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Episode Overview

This episode focuses on the aftermath of a botched execution attempt on Kenny Smith, one of the central figures in the series’ exploration of the Elizabeth Sennett murder case. Malcolm Gladwell examines Smith through the therapeutic lens of Dr. Kate Porterfield, who specializes in trauma, torture survivors, and death row cases. The episode dives into both Smith’s psychological suffering after his failed execution and the ripple effects of trauma across families and generations. Central to the discussion are questions about how institutions, through their attempts to resolve suffering and crime, may instead deepen harm.

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Key Discussion Points and Insights

1. The Aftermath of Kenny Smith’s Botched Execution

[02:01 – 05:42]

• Dr. Kate Porterfield recounts how she was contacted by Smith’s lawyers days after the failed execution to assess his mental state.
• Smith, who had survived over 34 years on death row, was described as "very institutionalized" and emotionally stable, but deeply shaken:

  “I'm very institutionalized… I've been through a lot, but I'm actually pretty stable. And he said, but I'm… I'm falling apart right now from what happened.”
  (Kate Porterfield, 04:40)

• Her sessions with Smith aimed to document the psychological trauma he suffered for legal proceedings and to understand who he was as a person.

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2. The Trauma of Mock and Botched Executions

[07:14 – 10:25]

• Porterfield reflects on her experience treating torture survivors subjected to mock executions.

  “It is its own unimaginable horror that leaves a really, really bad... physiological imprint.” (Kate Porterfield, 07:14)

• She draws parallels between this and Smith's ordeal, but notes Smith’s experience was, in some respects, even more severe because it was not a bluff; the state truly intended to kill him, but failed in the attempt.
• Smith was forced to endure repeated needle insertions and undignified procedures by guards he knew, then was tipped upside-down on a gurney in a desperate effort to find a usable vein.

  “I don't imagine that a person who's doing that and witnessing it can walk away from that unscathed themselves.”
  (Kate Porterfield, 11:22)

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3. The Execution Chamber: Disorientation and Meaning-Making

[11:52 – 14:14]

• Smith tried to maintain composure by mentally rehearsing his last words to the victim’s family and his own relatives:

  “Turn to the right, to the victim’s family and apologize. Turn to the left. Tell my family I love ‘em.”
  (Kate Porterfield, 12:05)

• Emotional confusion followed when a member of the execution team told Smith, "It's over, and I'll be praying for you," a disconcerting mix of violence and compassion.

  “These kinds of moments for Kenny were just. What's the word? Unmanageable... he couldn't grasp it and he couldn't deal with it after.”
  (Kate Porterfield, 12:59)

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4. Smith’s Family History of Trauma and Violence

[17:10 – 21:00]

• The episode pivots to Smith’s family, particularly accounts from his mother Linda and brother Joey, illuminating the violent and abusive household in which Kenny was raised.
• Linda recounts abuse from Kenny’s father, Gene, who would routinely beat her, sometimes in front of the children or at her workplace.

  “He would just hit me in the head. And I've still got a scar right there where he threw a bottle at me…”
  (Linda Smith, 18:57)

• Kenny, even as a young boy, tried to comfort his mother after beatings.

  “He would... hug me and... just tell me, you know, everything would be okay.”
  (Linda Smith, 20:23)

• Kenny took on a caretaker role, cleaning up after his mother’s alcoholic binges as young as eight or nine.

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5. Generational Suffering and the Limits of "Unconditional Love"

[26:06 – 30:59]

• Porterfield discusses the concept of children’s unconditional love for abusive parents, citing memoirist Katherine Harrison:

  “Children have an unconditional... love of the parent.”
  (Kate Porterfield, 27:16)

• Porterfield reflects on the perpetuation of trauma, particularly sexual abuse, across generations in the families of her clients.
• She stresses that many violent offenders were themselves deeply hurt as children, often never having told anyone about their abuse:

  “He was a little boy who had happened to him. He was really, really harmed.”
  (Kate Porterfield, 29:45)

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6. Trauma, Justice, and the "Bad Guy" Fallacy

[31:52 – 32:35]

• Porterfield underscores society’s desire to separate people neatly into victims or perpetrators:

  “The area that I think we're woefully missing, especially in criminal justice, is seeing that people who... do bad things are usually... themselves having suffered really bad harm...”
  (Kate Porterfield, 31:52)

• She argues that trauma is not just a background detail but a driving engine behind much criminal behavior, including acts as severe as murder.

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7. Returning to Love: Kenny Smith’s "Goodbyes"

[33:03 – 34:59]

• When first meeting Porterfield after the failed execution, Kenny focused on describing the love and support he received from family during his last goodbyes, rather than the horror of the execution attempt:

  “He wanted to talk... about how beautiful his goodbyes were and the love he received from his family as he was going into the execution. That's what he wanted to start with.”
  (Kate Porterfield, 33:03)

• She initially thought he was avoiding trauma, but later understood he was also anchoring himself in love as a coping strategy.

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8. The Long Shadow of State Violence

[35:32 – 36:26]

• Smith suffered from nightmares, exhaustion, and depression—classic symptoms of PTSD—after the botched execution.

  “He was just having severe nightmares of being executed over and over... exhausted... had a lot of images coming back to him... and then he got depressed...”
  (Kate Porterfield, 35:32)

9. The Looming Second Execution Attempt

[36:26 – 38:04]

• The episode closes on the impending second execution attempt, hinting at the continued emotional devastation for Smith and his family.

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• The unmanageability of trauma:

  “So this collision of people trying to kill you... and then someone bringing God in and saying this sort of generous thing, ‘I’ll be praying for you.’ It was like the word unmanageable is what I keep coming up with.”
  (Kate Porterfield, 13:13)

• On childhood trauma:

  “No one bothered to ask him until she did.”
  (Gladwell, 30:17)

• On goodbyes and love against horror:

  “Watching someone only start from a place of love after something so horrible was… I had never seen that before.”
  (Kate Porterfield, 34:18)

• On trauma and punishment:

  “People who do things that are against the law or even violent or even murder are usually and... frequently doing that themselves, having suffered really bad harm...”
  (Kate Porterfield, 31:52)

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Important Segment Timestamps

• 02:01 – 05:42: Initial background on Porterfield and Smith’s first conversations
• 07:14 – 10:25: Effects of mock execution and Smith’s botched execution described
• 11:52 – 14:14: Smith’s coping mechanisms and the confusing experience with the execution team
• 17:10 – 21:00: Childhood abuse and family hardship detailed by Smith’s mother Linda
• 26:20 – 27:24: Discussion of unconditional love from children to parents, even in abusive situations
• 29:45 – 30:59: Connection between hurt children and adult perpetrators
• 33:03 – 34:59: The power of focusing on “goodbye” and love as therapeutic anchor
• 35:32 – 36:26: Symptoms of PTSD and depression post-botched execution
• 36:26 – 38:04: The coming second execution attempt is introduced

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Takeaways

• The episode reveals how the criminal justice system’s efforts to administer justice frequently result in new, compounding trauma for both victims and perpetrators.
• Kenny Smith’s story complicates the usual narrative of “bad guy” and “victim,” illustrating how generational trauma and state violence intersect.
• Dr. Kate Porterfield’s clinical and personal insights highlight the deep, often invisible wounds that fuel cycles of violence—and the vital importance of recognizing humanity even in those who have done great harm.

---

Next Episode: The series finale promises to investigate the controversial use of nitrogen gas as a new execution method and its aftermath for all involved.

Transcript

[Kate Porterfield]

This is an iHeart podcast.

[Malcolm Gladwell]

In today's super competitive business environment, the edge goes to those who push harder, move faster, and level up every tool in their arsenal. T Mobile knows all about that. They're now the best network, according to the Experts@ookla Speedtest. And they're using that network to launch Super Mobile. The first and only business plan to combine intelligent performance, built in security and seamless satellite coverage. That's your business. Supercharged. Learn [e-mail] seamless coverage with compatible devices in most outdoor areas in the US where you can see the sky. Best business plan based on a combination of advanced network performance coverage layers and security features. Best network based on analysis by Ookla of Speed Test Intelligence Data 1H 2025.

[Jonathan Goldstein]

I'm Jonathan Goldstein, and on the new season of Heavyweight. I help a centenarian mend a broken heart.

[Linda Smith]

How can a 101-year-old woman fall in love again?

[Jonathan Goldstein]

And I help a man atone for an armed robbery he committed at 14 years old.

[Kate Porterfield]

And so I pointed the gun at him and said, this isn't a joke. And he got down. And I remember feeling kind of a surge of like, okay, this is Power Pl.

[Jonathan Goldstein]

My old friend Gregor and his brother try to solve my problems through hypnotism.

[Malcolm Gladwell]

We could give you a whole brand new thing where you're like super charming.

[Kate Porterfield]

All the time, being more able to look people in the eye, not always hide behind a microphone.

[Jonathan Goldstein]

Listen to Heavyweight wherever you get your podcasts.

[Malcolm Gladwell]

Pushkin.

[Kate Porterfield]

Previously on Revisionist History. He was taken out of his cell thinking that his execution was imminent, strapped to a gurney. And he's asking, you know, the corrections officers who are with him, what's going on?

[Malcolm Gladwell]

You know, an anesthesiologist in good standing is not going to spend their Wednesdays over at the, you know, state corrections sticking IVs in people for execution. It's not something that we do.

[Kate Porterfield]

Because a cold blooded convicted killer complains.

[Malcolm Gladwell]

About the prodding and poking of a small IV line, really potting and poking with a needle.

[Kate Porterfield]

After three and a half or four hours being strapped to a gurney.

[Malcolm Gladwell]

You.

[Kate Porterfield]

Know, he was unable to stand, walk, unbutton his shirt, you know, change his clothes, do any of that without assistance. They attempted to kill him. On November 17, his lawyers called me, I think 10 days later. I didn't know them, they didn't know me. And they said, you know, we have a client who's had this thing happen. He's really struggling. Would you take a look at him and talk to him.

[Malcolm Gladwell]

In the months after his botched execution, Kenny Smith had a confidant. Kate Porterfield. A psychologist who specializes in trauma. She has consulted on dozens of death row cases in her career. Spent a lot of time at the US Military prison at Guantanamo Bay. Worked for years treating patients at the clinic for torture victims at Bellevue Hospital in Manhattan. A very good friend of mine, Steven, knows her well and told me one day, you have to meet my friend Kate. She has the strangest job in America. So I called her up, and we began to talk with no real plan or agenda. And in one of our conversations, she told me about a case that I'd never heard about before and a person she'd been asked to evaluate who had affected her deeply. Kenny Smith. That's how I learned about the murder of Elizabeth Sennett. Everything in this series began with my conversations with Kate Porterfield. So tell me about your first visit with Kenny.

[Kate Porterfield]

So my first contact with him was a call. Actually. It was remarkably pleasant. Kenny was a very resilient man. He was. You know, he had been on death row for 34 years. This was a man used to living on death row and used to being in prison. And one of the things he said to me is, you know, he used to call me Doc. He'd say, doc, I am very institutionalized. I know how to do this. I've made a life here. I have a very good set of friends here, and I have really good relationships on the outside. He had been married. He had children from before he went in, and he had relationships with his children. So he said to me, I'm very institutionalized. I've been through a lot, but I'm actually pretty stable. And he said, but I'm. I'm falling apart right now from what happened. I mean, I think what now, what I think is he was signaling to me, I'm pretty sturdy, but this really messed me up.

[Malcolm Gladwell]

Kate Porterfield would end up spending many hours with Kenny Smith over the next year, talking to him on the phone, visiting him at home in prison, trying to understand what happened to him in that execution chamber on the night of November 17, 2022, trying to figure out how damaged he'd been by the experience, writing an assessment of his condition that could be used by his legal team in court, and most of all, just trying to understand who he was. My name is Malcolm Gladwell. You're listening to the Alabama Murders. In this installment, I want to look at Kenny Smith through the eyes of Kate Porterfield to see the Kenny Smith that she saw in those many Encounters between the end of 2022 and the long winter of 2023. This is episode six, the Porterfield SE. In my third conversation with Kate Porterfield, well before we got to Kenny Smith, she told me about a patient she'd seen many years ago, an older man. This is when she was working at the torture clinic at Bellevue. He was a refugee from a war torn country. He'd been imprisoned, tortured, and at one point he'd been subjected to a mock execution. He had been made to believe by his captors that he was about to die.

[Kate Porterfield]

So this was probably the first person I ever worked with who had had a mock execution. And it is its own unimaginable horror that leaves a really, really bad physical, physiological, rather imprint.

[Malcolm Gladwell]

Her goal was to gently push him back towards his traumatic experience to better understand and to help him.

[Kate Porterfield]

He was very rigid and he would sit just really tightly wound in the sessions, really gripping the chair and I. He didn't want to go there.

[Malcolm Gladwell]

It took a very long time to draw him out. She would go on to work with five or six other patients who had gone through something similar. A gun they thought was loaded, put to their head, only to realize it was empty. Being held underwater almost long enough, and even in one case, being left in a cage with a lion. She came to believe that this kind of experience deserved its own category. Why is a mock execution uniquely damaging?

[Kate Porterfield]

Let me say it this way, when someone says you're about to die, you know, you're terrified and, and terror doesn't even capture right? You're, you're, you know, most people lose control in some part of their body, maybe their bladder or bowel. You know, there's usually incredible exclaiming of horror. You know, it's not good to think you're about to die. I mean, I've seen six people or whatever try to describe it to me, and they all fall apart. It's like I've never had someone say it the first time and not really fall apart, like collapse and different ways. I had a guy who had been kidnapped and the, the soldiers came in and said, if we don't get the ransom, we're gonna kill you. And then they came in the next day and they had a gun and they put it to his head. This man was the most put together, disciplined, kind of controlled guy. And when he tried to tell that moment, he just fell down in his chair and grabbed his head and he was like, my head's hurting, my head's hurting. I can't, I can't. There's just this incredible physiological, you know, probably hormonal dump into his system of the same thing that happened, you know, when the mock execution took place. So essentially, what trauma does is it becomes imprinted in your body, and your memory banks are then linked and hooked up with the fear reaction. So that's the problem. It's a bad linkage. And so when you think about being told, I'm about to kill you, and then you try to tell it, your body just goes. It goes right into that state of terror.

[Malcolm Gladwell]

This is the first thing that Kate Porterfield saw when she sat down with Kenny Smith, that he was in that special category. But his experience, in some ways, was even more overwhelming. This was not a mock execution. It was a botched execution, meaning it wasn't a trick. They were actually intending to execute Kenny. They just didn't manage to pull it off. And Kate wasn't treating someone years after it had occurred with Kenny Smith, this had just happened.

[Kate Porterfield]

This was different. You know, this was this very orchestrated, slow, systematic process being done by these guys all in this room who he knew. Guys who had been his guards for, like, some of them, some of them he knew, some he didn't. But, you know, guys he's known for a lot of years, trying to kill him. Very hard to wrap your brain around.

[Malcolm Gladwell]

How did the guards react?

[Kate Porterfield]

You know, I think that he believed they got very rattled, and he watched it on their faces, but no one could do anything. And it's a scary narrative then, of what people will do with orders. Right? Like, I mean, there was a point after all these poking of him with needles going around his feet, his arms, where they took the gurney and inverted it upwards with his feet up and left him there for. I have to look, But I think it was upwards of 20 minutes, 30 minutes. They came back in and they Trying.

[Malcolm Gladwell]

To get blood to flow to.

[Kate Porterfield]

Yes. So then they started poking on his collarbone. So they took this man, they tipped him upside down so that the blood would rush to a part of his body. They came back in, they injected him with something which he believes and we believe was probably a painkiller. And then they started going on his neck, you know, around his collarbone. I mean, I'm sorry, but I don't imagine that a person who's doing that and witnessing it can walk away from that unscathed themselves.

[Malcolm Gladwell]

Kenny wanted to apologize to the Senate family and say goodbye to his own family, but he was all alone with the execution team. He thought they were killing him before the witnesses could get there.

[Kate Porterfield]

And he said One of the ways he stayed calm when there was all that dead time was he would say to himself, turn to the right, to the victim's family and apologize. Turn to the left. Tell my family I love him. So he had this little practice. To the right. I'm sorry, to the left. I love you. And he said that kind of helped him pass the time, which also was, like, remarkable to me. He was thinking, thinking about how you're managing, like, how you're gonna choreograph this. They come back in, they begin to untie the tourniquet on his arm, and they say, it's over now. And then one of the people on the team who he didn't know, says to him, it's over, and I'll be praying for you. So these kinds of moments for Kenny were just. What's the word? Unmanageable. Afterwards, they were unmanageable moments with other humans.

[Malcolm Gladwell]

One minute they were trying to kill him, then they weren't trying to kill him.

[Kate Porterfield]

It's very confusing. And then the man, you know, references God. Kenny's, you know, most core faith, right, was. Is his belief in God and his belief that because of his faith, you know, he had really been saved. I'm not talking about saved in the execution. I'm saying saved as a man, you know, his faith saved him. So this collision of people trying to kill you, your body being in something that we don't really understand unless you've had. Unless you thought you were gonna die. And then someone bringing God in and saying this sort of generous thing, I'm gonna pray for you. It was like the word unmanageable is what I keep coming up with. He couldn't grasp it and he couldn't deal with it after. I mean, there were many things that made him distress, but that was one. You know, the warden taking his head and saying, this is what's best for you was another.

[Malcolm Gladwell]

Kate Porterfield would end up having 17 marathon phone sessions with Kenny Smith, and she would twice fly down to Alabama to meet with him in person. And after he had told her the story of what happened on November 17, he told her the story of his life in the years leading up to the murder of Elizabeth Sennett. That's after the break. In today's super competitive business environment, the edge goes to those who push harder, move faster, and level up every tool in their arsenal. T Mobile knows all about that. They're now the best network, according to the experts at OOKLA Speed Test. And they're using that network to launch Super Mobile the first and only business plan to combine intelligent performance, built in security and seamless satellite coverage. With Super Mobile, your performance, security and coverage are supercharged. With a network that adapts in real time, your business stays operating at peak capacity and even in times of high demand. With built in security on the first nationwide 5G advanced network, you keep private data private for you, your team, your clients. And with seamless coverage from the world's largest satellite to mobile constellation, your whole team can text and stay updated even when they're off the grid. That's your business. Supercharged. Learn [e-mail] Seamless coverage with compatible devices in most outdoor areas in the US where you can see the sky. Best business plan based on a combination of advanced network performance, coverage layers and security features. Best Network based on analysis by Ookla of Speedtest Intelligence data 1H 2025 I'm.

[Jonathan Goldstein]

Jonathan Goldstein and on the new season of Heavyweight, I help a centenarian mend a broken heart.

[Linda Smith]

How can 101-year-old woman fall in love again?

[Jonathan Goldstein]

And I help a man atone for an armed robbery he committed at 14 years old.

[Kate Porterfield]

And so I pointed the gun at him and said, this isn't a joke. And he got down. And I remember feeling kind of a surge of like, okay, this is power.

[Jonathan Goldstein]

Plus, my old friend Gregor and his brother tried to solve my problems through hypnotism.

[Malcolm Gladwell]

We could give you a whole brand new thing where you're like super charming.

[Kate Porterfield]

All the time, being more able to look people in the eye, not always hide behind a microphone.

[Jonathan Goldstein]

Listen to Heavyweight wherever you get your podcasts.

[Malcolm Gladwell]

Kenny Smith's full name was Kenneth Eugene Smith. Both Kenny and his brother Joey were named for their father, a truck driver named Wesley Eugene Smith.

[Kate Porterfield]

Did you ever regret naming the matter?

[Linda Smith]

I did.

[Malcolm Gladwell]

Linda Smith, Kenny Smith's mom, still lives in the Shoals. She spoke with Lee Hedgepeth, a local reporter who knew Kenny well and covered his case.

[Kate Porterfield]

Has he passed now? Gene?

[Linda Smith]

Oh, yes. Yeah, he. I think he was 45 when he passed.

[Malcolm Gladwell]

Linda and Jean had five children together in quick succession. Kenny was the eldest.

[Linda Smith]

He didn't really want a child at that at that point.

[Kate Porterfield]

Why do you think that was?

[Linda Smith]

I just, I don't know. I guess he wouldn't through with his wild oats, I guess so.

[Kate Porterfield]

Tell me about the wild oats.

[Linda Smith]

Not too much of a drinker, more of like pills Back then it was kind of uppers and downers.

[Malcolm Gladwell]

Gene was on the road a lot. He had another relationship. Linda says it was with an Underage girl. Gene got her pregnant, but he still came around to see Linda. To sleep with her or just to hit her?

[Linda Smith]

Oh, yeah, he always did that. Just about.

[Kate Porterfield]

When did it start?

[Linda Smith]

I mean, not when we first started dating. It started. I guess it started after Kenny was born. You know what I think is he was doing stuff and he was thinking I was, you know.

[Malcolm Gladwell]

Right.

[Linda Smith]

He was jealous. Yeah.

[Malcolm Gladwell]

And.

[Linda Smith]

But I wasn't, you know, I had a kid to raise. I mean, he would just hit me in the head. And I've still got a scar right there where he threw a bottle at me. And right here. It may have been gone now, but it would just, you know, hit me, knock me in the floor, slapped me. Well, see, like I said, he thought that I was, you know, out doing stuff and partying and like I said, which I wasn't.

[Kate Porterfield]

And can you recall, like, for example, the incident with the bottle? Can you tell me what happened then?

[Malcolm Gladwell]

Do you remember?

[Linda Smith]

Yeah, I mean, I. I mean, I didn't know he was coming in at night, which. It didn't matter, but I was at home, you know, and a friend of mine from work was just there with me. And Kenny was there, and he just came in and he was just in a rage that night.

[Kate Porterfield]

Do you remember what Kenny's reaction would be when that's happening? How old is Kenny around this time.

[Linda Smith]

And around that time? He's probably three or four. I mean, it was run. Get up on the couch and sit him and Joey and just, you know.

[Kate Porterfield]

Do you remember anything that Kenny ever said to you either when the abuse was happening or afterward?

[Linda Smith]

Yeah, I mean, he would. I mean, you know, and hug me and, you know, I guess you don't. I guess they just tell me, you know, everything would be okay.

[Malcolm Gladwell]

Kenny would draw pictures and give them to his mom. At Kenny's sentencing hearing, a series of witnesses testified about Jean's abuse. One was a woman who worked as a waitress with Linda. Gene would come into the restaurant when Linda was working. This is what she said. Well, he would take what money Linda had made in tips. And if she did not make what he thought he needed, she would get slapped and beat around right in the restaurant. He would walk in and he would tell her he needed to talk to her. Well, she would walk off into a private place with him, which was around the corner in the hall. And the next thing you know, you would hear this commotion, and he would be beating her. He would slap her and he would hit her with his fist. I have seen him back her up in a corner and just beating her. And I have seen her when her pocket would be torn on the uniform where he had taken the money out of it. And how often would he come around? Well, at least two to three times a week that happened. He always made a point to hit her around the eyes. The fifth of the children Linda and Jean had together was Michael, who died a few hours after birth. His lungs never developed. In testimony, Kenny's brother Joey said, quote, well, he blamed mother for it and said it was her fault. And pretty soon, you know, she felt bad, even kind of accepted the blame and started drinking real heavy. Does your mom drink now today? No. Kenny, Joey said in his testimony, was the one taking care of her. He would be in there with a cold rag on her head, cleaning up the vomit out of the floor when she missed the commode and trying to wrestle her up out of the floor to get her in the bed because she was a big woman. How old do you think Kenny was the first time that you saw him picking your mama up and talking to her and wiping her? How old do you think he was? Probably eight or nine. Did there ever come a time when you saw your brother turn to drinking? Oh, yes. Do you remember how old he was? He was 16. Did there ever come a time when you saw your brother start to drink too much? Yes. Kenny met a woman. They had a child together, Michael, named for Kenny's brother who died. They moved to a house in Florence. And one day a friend of his from high school asked him if he wanted a little quick money roughing someone up. And off he and John Parker went in Parker's Pontiac Grand Prix with a hunting knife and a fifth of Wild Turkey on the console between them to do what he had seen people do a hundred times in his life. In today's super competitive business environment, the edge goes to those who push harder, move faster, and level up every tool in their arsenal. T Mobile knows all about that. They're now the best network according to the experts at an OOKLA speed test. And they're using that network to launch Super Mobile. The first and only business plan to combine intelligent performance, built in security and seamless satellite coverage. With Super Mobile, your performance, security and coverage are supercharged. With a network that adapts in real time, your business stays operating at peak capacity even in times of high demand. With built in security. On the first nationwide 5G advanced network, you keep private data private for you, your team, your clients. And with seamless coverage from the world's largest satellite to mobile Constellation Your whole team can text and stay updated even when they're off the grid. That's your business. Supercharged. Learn [e-mail] seamless coverage with compatible devices in most outdoor areas in the US where you can see the sky. Best business plan based on a combination of advanced network performance, coverage layers and security features. Best network based on analysis By Ookla of Speedtest Intelligence Data1h 2025 I'm Jonathan.

[Jonathan Goldstein]

Goldstein, and on the new season of Heavyweight, I help a centenarian mend a broken heart.

[Linda Smith]

How can 101-year-old woman fall in love again?

[Jonathan Goldstein]

And I help a man atonement for an armed robbery he committed at 14 years old.

[Kate Porterfield]

And so I pointed the gun at him and said, this isn't a joke. And he got down. And I remember feeling kind of a surge of like, okay, this is power.

[Jonathan Goldstein]

Plus, my old friend Gregor and his brother tried to solve my problems through hypnotism.

[Malcolm Gladwell]

We could give you a whole brand new thing where you're like, super charming.

[Kate Porterfield]

All the time, being more able to look people in the eye, not always hide behind a microphone.

[Jonathan Goldstein]

Listen to Heavyweight wherever you get your podcasts.

[Malcolm Gladwell]

Kate Porterfield and I sometimes digressed into more personal subjects. We talked a lot about our kids and parenting, what she had learned as a mother of three daughters. And there was something she said at one point that I can't stop thinking about.

[Kate Porterfield]

You know Katherine Harrison, you know who that is? She's a great writer. Yeah. And she. She wrote this incredible memoir about her life with her father who had disappeared and then got involved with her in incredibly inappropriate way. And it was a beautiful, very painful memoir, very brave. And she has a line in there. I'm gonna get it wrong, but where she says, we think that parenting is about unconditional love. And what we mean by that is that the parents have unconditional love towards the children. But what you learn as you grow and as you have kids is that actually the unconditional love is coming from the child to the parent. And I will say I see that all the time in my patients who got abused as children, which is they love their parents. They're hungry for their parents. They yearn for the memory of their parent to be the good parts. And it doesn't matter that the parents did terrible things to them.

[Malcolm Gladwell]

It doesn't matter.

[Kate Porterfield]

No, I mean, it matters to who they've become. But in their sense of self.

[Malcolm Gladwell]

Oh, I see.

[Kate Porterfield]

They yearn for that parent. Children have an unconditional. My point is, children have an unconditional love of the parent.

[Malcolm Gladwell]

When Kate Porterfield was just out of college, she'd been attacked by a stranger. He took her by surprise and beat her up. She suffered from what she now realizes was ptsd. It took her years to recover. That experience was one of the reasons she developed such an interest in treating trauma. She had no connection to her attacker, though. No reason to return to him. It was possible to understand ultimately, that this was just a case of being in the wrong place at the wrong time. But what if he wasn't a stranger? What if you loved your attacker? And what if your love was so powerful and instinctual that you couldn't help yourself, that you kept coming back again and again, hoping things might be different? I think that's another kind of suffering that deserves its own category.

[Kate Porterfield]

I can't tell you how many of the moms of my clients were sexually abused. I can't tell you. It's incredible, you know, and you just go. It's just perpetrating and perpetrating and perpetrating through generations.

[Malcolm Gladwell]

I'm curious about what it is you said that dealing with these repeated cases of people who had been through this kind of childhood experience taught you a lot. I want to put my finger on what it taught you.

[Kate Porterfield]

I understood child development. I trained in child psychology, and I was pretty good on it. But when you see it go wrong, you really then understand what it takes for it to go right. And so watching again and again, men, grown men sitting across from me covered with tattoos, guys who had killed a couple people, maybe crying, watching these men sobbing when they recounted being eight years old and being. Here's one, and I'll frame carefully. But, you know, raped at age 8 multiple times by an older family member and this, you know, person who had committed homicides, no question, sobbing talking about it. That was so powerful for me in getting me to understand that this guy sitting across from me who is quote, unquote, scary to everybody in the world. And he looks scary, right? He is a hurt person. If you go all the way back, he's a hurt little boy. And he's now got warrior. He's got warrior shit all over himself, Right. He's got armor. He's got tattoos all over his face. He's so badass. And he hurts people, right? And it all. If you can kind of back channel it and go back in time, he was a little boy who had happened to him. He was really, really harmed.

[Malcolm Gladwell]

In this hypothetical, semi. Hypothetical case of the guy with the tattoos.

[Kate Porterfield]

Yeah.

[Malcolm Gladwell]

How often in his life do you think he talked about that childhood abuse to somebody?

[Kate Porterfield]

Never. He had never. Never talked about it.

[Malcolm Gladwell]

More to the point, no one bothered to ask him until she did.

[Kate Porterfield]

And then I went and visited his family and interviewed all these relatives. It was 100% known. Everybody knew this older relative sexually abused kids in the family and particularly had done so with this. With this child. Nothing ever done. Imagine no treatment, no assessment, no law enforcement, nothing. Now imagine what that does to that kid. Think about the growing sense of yourself, I'm gonna get hurt by this person. Everyone's gonna know. People are terrifying. They hurt you, and there's no recourse ever anywhere.

[Malcolm Gladwell]

The waitress who worked with Kenny's mother remembered this detail about Kenny's interactions with his dad at the trial. She said, you did not see him go to Gene or like, you know, like a child usually runs up to his daddy and approaches him, that he was glad to see him or that his daddy was glad to see him. At first, when I read that, I thought she meant that the tragedy of Kenny and Gene was that Kenny didn't want to run up and hug his father. But after talking to Kate Porterfield, I realized, no, it's much worse. It's that he wanted to run up and hug his father, but understood even at that age, that that was impossible. Kenny Smith's crime was not committed in isolation. It was a violent act that came at the end of a long cascade.

[Kate Porterfield]

We like people to either be victims or bad guys, right? And so victims are people that things happen to, and people who do bad things are just people who do bad things. And the area that I think we're woefully missing, especially in criminal justice, is seeing that people who do things that are against the law or even violent or even murder are usually and. Or frequently doing that themselves. Having suffered really bad harm, hurt, maltreatment, abuse, violence, people have a hard time recognizing that a lot of bad behaviors come out of trauma, too.

[Malcolm Gladwell]

At the very beginning of this series, I played an excerpt of part of my conversation with Kate Porterfield. It was about the first time she saw Kenny Smith in person at Holman Prison In December of 2022, about a month after the botched execution. And now I want to play it again, because now I think it will make more sense. It will be easier to see why this case, out of the many Kate Porterfield has done, affected her so deeply.

[Kate Porterfield]

When I first went to see Kenny, he wanted to talk for the first probably two hours of our visit about how beautiful his goodbyes were and the Love he received from his family as he was going into the execution. That's what he wanted to start with. And I found this so powerful and also fascinating, honestly, as a clinician, because what I first thought was, oh, he's avoiding, right? He can't talk about the execution. He spent a lot of time telling me the story of everything else. The goodbyes, the phone calls, the last meal, what people said to him. I mean, he went through each family member, his grandson, his mom. So he told me all about his last visit with her and saying goodbye to her, her walking out of the visiting room and turning back to him, you know, and it was all about love. He talked to me about love for probably two, two and a half hours. So he really kind of got me. He made me really pause and think a lot. Kenny Smith. Because watching someone only start from a place of love after something so horrible was. I had never seen that before.

[Malcolm Gladwell]

You don't think he was avoiding the subject?

[Kate Porterfield]

Well, I think he was in a way. I think both were true. And I would and I ultimately, we got to know each other well. And I could tease him a little and say, you know, you got the gift of gab, Kenny. You're really good at keeping me off the stuff. That. And he would just laugh and say, oh, yeah, I don't want to go there. I don't want to go there, doc. And he would say, I get nauseous, I start sweating. I can't do it. Don't make me do it, doc. So, like, we got to a place where we knew what avoidance was, But I don't think that's the whole ball game. I think what really happened is that I got to have this time with this man who thought he was about to die and had a pre death experience of intense love.

[Malcolm Gladwell]

There's a famous quote from the art critic John Ruskin. Hundreds of people can talk for one who can think, but thousands can think for one who can see. After a lifetime working with people who had suffered great trauma, Kate Porterfield was the one who could see. And what she saw was a very different version of Kenny Smith. Someone in pain over what had happened and what was to come.

[Kate Porterfield]

And he was just having severe nightmares of being executed over and over. So he was really tormented at night, then during the day he'd be exhausted, he had a ton of nausea, and he had a lot of images coming back to him over and over again. And then on top of that starts the meaning making. And the meaning making started to really be dark after, you know, several weeks, he started to really think about what had happened, that these people who he knew had done it to him. How could people do this to other people? You know, he started to get really. And then he got depressed. He just got full on depressed. He was actually doing pretty, pretty much post traumatic stress symptoms at first, and then he moved into depression in the spring and then that kind of worsened for a while and then he sort of came out of the depression and then the second execution came up.

[Malcolm Gladwell]

The second execution, the state of Alabama wasn't finished with Kenny Smith. Coming up on the series finale of the Alabama Murders.

[Linda Smith]

He said, well, mom, they're coming to get me. And, you know, we said our goodbyes and, you know, the last thing he said was, I love you, mom. I've had to go.

[Malcolm Gladwell]

So the theory was that because nitrogen gas was not noxious, it could be given to someone as a kind of, you know, method of gas execution that would not be so troubling to them because they would breathe it and not know it and that they would then lose consciousness and die.

[Kate Porterfield]

I'm not a medical person. I can't opine on the. On what happened. The only one who can tell us if he experienced pain is not here to describe it. But what I observed anyhow did not look like what Alabama had advertised.

[Malcolm Gladwell]

Revisionist History is produced by Lucy Sullivan, Ben Nadaff Haffrey and Nina Byrd Lawrence. Additional reporting by Ben Nadaff Haffrey and Lee Hedgepeth. Our editor is Karen Shakurji. Fact checking by Kate Furby. Our executive producer is Jacob Smith. Production and support from Luke Lamond. Engineering by Nina Byrd Lawrence. Original scoring by Luis Guerra with Paul Brainard and Jimmy Bott. Sound design and additional music by Jake Gorski. I'm Malcolm Gladm. You can get this entire season now ad free by subscribing to Revisionist History on Pushkin Plus. Sign up on the show page on Apple Podcasts or@Pushkin. Pushkin plus subscribers can access ad free episodes, full audiobooks, exclusive binges, and bonus content for all Pushkin shows.

[Jonathan Goldstein]

I'm Jonathan Goldstein, and on the new season of Heavyweight, I help a centenarian mend a broken heart.

[Linda Smith]

How can a 101-year-old woman fall in love again?

[Jonathan Goldstein]

And I help a man atone for an armed robbery he committed at 14 years old.

[Kate Porterfield]

And so I pointed the gun at him and said, this isn't a joke. And he got down. And I remember feeling kind of a surge of like, okay, this is power.

[Jonathan Goldstein]

Plus, my old friend Gregor and his brother try to solve my problems through hypnotism.

[Malcolm Gladwell]

We could give you a whole brand new thing where you're, like, super charming.

[Kate Porterfield]

All the time, being more able to look people in the eye, not always hide behind a microphone.

[Jonathan Goldstein]

Listen to Heavyweight wherever you get your podcasts.

[Kate Porterfield]

This is an iHeart podcast.