Update and Jennifer Thompson ReRelease

Summary

The Knife: A True Crime Podcast

Episode: Update and Jennifer Thompson ReRelease
Date: January 15, 2026
Hosts: Hannah Smith & Patia Eaton
Guest: Jennifer Thompson, Founder of Healing Justice Project

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Overview

This episode of The Knife starts with an important update about a delayed episode involving a partially wrongful conviction and why it was ethically withheld. The main focus quickly shifts to a re-release of an earlier, highly impactful interview with Jennifer Thompson, a survivor of a violent assault whose mistaken eyewitness identification resulted in a wrongful conviction. The discussion covers Jennifer's harrowing personal story, the failures of the criminal justice system, the trauma of being both a crime victim and an accidental participant in a wrongful conviction, and the evolution of her healing and advocacy through the founding of the Healing Justice Project.

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Episode Highlights

I. Podcast Update: Withdrawing an Episode for Ethical Reasons

Timestamps: 01:10–07:18

• Reason for Withholding New Episode: The hosts explain they had planned to release a new story about a man partially wrongfully convicted, but chose not to air it after his parole was granted, to avoid potentially jeopardizing his freedom or causing further harm to the victim’s family.

  • "Some things are more important than podcasting" – Patia Eaton (05:21)
  • The episode, recorded partly to raise awareness and support, could now have an adverse effect.

• Ethical Commitment:

  • "Our show... it's entertainment, but we've always wanted it to be more than that... We really like to highlight cases where there's an injustice in hopes that that injustice could be righted." – Hannah Smith (05:44)

• Decision: Instead, they re-release the Jennifer Thompson episode, noting its ongoing relevance, especially for new listeners.

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II. Jennifer Thompson’s Story: First-Person Account of Trauma, Misidentification, and Healing

Timestamps: 07:24–75:14

Introduction to Jennifer Thompson

• Jennifer is the founder of Healing Justice Project and co-author of "Picking Cotton," her memoir with Ronald Cotton.
• Reflects on her upbringing in segregated North Carolina, the assumed fairness of the system, and her later disillusionment.
  • "So many of us, particularly people that are white, we grow up and we're given certain things almost as a birthright..." – Jennifer Thompson (09:40)

The Crime and Initial Aftermath

Timestamps: 14:00–24:52

• At age 22 (in 1984), Jennifer was attacked and raped in her apartment. She describes the terrifying ordeal, her efforts to survive, and her attempts to commit the details of her attacker to memory.
  • Memorable Quote: "I remember thinking about what it would feel like to die, and I remember wondering how much it will hurt..." – Jennifer Thompson (17:17, 23:55)
• She managed to escape by outsmarting her attacker and alerting neighbors.
• Immediately subjected to the trauma of medical exams and the burdensome reporting process to law enforcement.
  • "It's like – my body was the crime scene and that's where the evidence is." – Jennifer Thompson (25:44)

The Identification Process & Wrongful Conviction

Timestamps: 25:39–38:12

• Jennifer recounts providing a police sketch using an "identikit," the lineup procedures, and the pressure to help apprehend the perpetrator.
  • She identifies Ronald Cotton in photo and physical lineups, largely due to subconscious memory contamination and suggestive police feedback:
    • "My memory was now gone... the original memory was gone. And what is now in place of it is a composite sketch image." (33:35)
• Law enforcement, after her identification, immediately affirmed her choice, deepening her (misplaced) confidence.
  • "Honestly, it was the first time I could take a deep breath..." (30:22)
• The trial is traumatic; Jennifer testifies at length, is questioned and blamed, and Ronald Cotton is sentenced to life plus 54 years.

Life as a Survivor & The Appeal

Timestamps: 38:12–44:36

• Post-trial, Jennifer experiences profound grief and isolation, as support fades but her trauma lingers.
• In 1987, the conviction is appealed, introducing possible reasonable doubt, but at a retrial, Jennifer again identifies Ronald and he's re-convicted, now with two life sentences.

The Exoneration

Timestamps: 44:36–52:59

• In 1995, advancing DNA technology leads to retesting. Jennifer, initially assured this will confirm Ronald’s guilt, gives a new blood sample.
• DNA evidence implicates Bobby Poole, not Ronald. Poole finally confesses after six hours of interrogation.
• Jennifer expresses devastation:
  • Memorable Quote: "Honestly, I don't know that I did. ... There's the Disbelief. There's the anger, there's the fear, there's the confusion. I felt paralyzed." – Jennifer Thompson (48:21)

Understanding Memory & Blame

Timestamps: 52:59–61:38

• Media attention explodes. Jennifer is cast publicly as the person who got it wrong, subject both to blame and erasure of her survival.
• She agrees to be part of a "Frontline" documentary, after learning Ronald will also participate. Eventually, they meet:
  • They bond over shared trauma and the recognition that both the crime and the system failed them, with only the true perpetrator “winning.”
• Jennifer learns that the original witness placing Ronald at the scene was coerced; systemic racism and police misconduct were factors.
  • "She had been given a typed statement from another police officer to call in in exchange for drug charges... to be dropped." (64:14)

Healing, Advocacy & Change

Timestamps: 61:38–75:14

• Jennifer co-authors "Picking Cotton" with Ronald Cotton, publicly speaking out about witness misidentification and the failings of the justice system.
• She describes ongoing blame from the public and system, but ultimately learns to reject it:
  • "That's traumatic. And I didn't know that I didn't have to carry that, that I could deny that. That say, that's not true and that's not right. And here's why." (61:38)
• She founds Healing Justice Project to address the needs of both exonerees and crime survivors, creating opportunities for restorative dialogue and community healing.
  • "If we don't feel like we belong, there's no way we can heal. We can't heal in isolation. ... We heal in community." (73:33)

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Key Insights & Discussion Points

• Unreliability of Eyewitness Identification: Trauma and contaminated police processes can irrevocably alter memory.
• Systemic Issues: Confirmation bias, lack of procedural safeguards, and outright misconduct contribute to wrongful convictions.
  • "He had a cop that told him, one of these days I'm going to get you... And that was the cop that put him in the crosshairs." (64:35)
• The Compounded Trauma for Victims and Exonerees: Both face years of pain, marginalization, and public misunderstanding.
  • "No crime victim and no crime survivor... wants an innocent person to go to prison ever." (66:46)
• Reform and Hope: The story prompted real changes in North Carolina's lineup procedures, including double-blind lineups.
• Restorative Justice & Community: Healing often comes from shared understanding, support, and systemic change. The Healing Justice Project embodies this ethos.

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Notable Quotes by Timestamp

• "Some things are more important than podcasting."
  — Patia Eaton (05:21)

• "I remember thinking about what it would feel like to die, and I remember wondering how much it will hurt."
  — Jennifer Thompson (17:17)

• "My memory was now gone. The original memory was gone. And what is now in place of it is a composite sketch image."
  — Jennifer Thompson (33:35)

• "We heal in community. And we heal when we're heard. We can heal when we can see each other."
  — Jennifer Thompson (73:33)

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Resource Highlights

• Book: Picking Cotton: Our Memoir of Injustice and Redemption (Jennifer Thompson & Ronald Cotton) – Offers dual perspective on the case and aftermath.
• Healing Justice Project: Provides retreats, peer support, and community for both crime victims and exonerees (healingjusticeproject.org).
• Eyewitness Misidentification: Noted as a factor in 63% of DNA exonerations investigated by the Innocence Project.

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Concluding Reflections

Hannah and Patia echo the episode’s driving message: real lives are behind the headlines, and the ripple effects of crime—and wrongful justice—are profound. The responsibility to do no harm, create space for healing, and work for systemic change permeates this emotional, impactful episode.

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Listen if you:

• Want an unflinching, empathetic look at wrongful convictions, memory, crime victim trauma, and restorative justice.
• Value deep storytelling that goes beyond the “punchy headlines”—and an exploration of difficult but necessary conversations.

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End with actionable advice and hope:

• "If you or someone you know has been affected by wrongful conviction—whether as a survivor or someone exonerated—there is hope and a healing community. Reach out. You are not alone."

Transcript

[Jennifer Thompson]

This is exactly right.

[Katie Whelan]

If you're feeling exhausted, puffy, anxious, foggy, gaining weight, or just not like yourself, you're not imagining it. Women in their 30s, 40s, and 50s are experiencing massive hormonal shifts, and no one is explaining what's actually happening. I'm Katie Whelan, co founder of joy. I built JOY because I lived this. The fatigue, the mood swings, the weight changes, the confusion. Your symptoms are biological, not personal, and AI generated lab reports won't fix them. Every Joy Lab includes a visit with a licensed clinician who specializes in women's hormones and connects every biomarker to how you feel. Energy metabolism, mood, sleep, skin weight, everything. Then we personalize real solutions. Hormone therapy, peptide therapy, supplements, and lifestyle protocols. Get [e-mail] today. This month, new customers get 50% off labs, and you can add our estrogen face cream for just $1 with clinician approval. Use promo code [e-mail] this story contains.

[Patia Eaton]

Adult content and language. Listener discretion is advised.

[Hannah Smith]

The claims and opinions in this podcast are those of the speaker and do not necessarily represent the knife or exactly right Media. Hi, Patia.

[Patia Eaton]

Hey, Hannah.

[Hannah Smith]

Well, it has been a week.

[Patia Eaton]

It has been a week, and it has been a morning.

[Hannah Smith]

It really has. We have an update for you. To start it off, I'll just say we had an episode that was gonna come out this week. We were really excited about it. We worked really hard on it and felt really strongly about it, but we have hit a major roadblock.

[Patia Eaton]

Yeah. So what happened is we were working on a, you know, I guess you call it like a partially wrongful conviction story. A man who, in his early 20s, in the 1990s, was. Was convicted on multiple charges, one of those including the murder of a young woman. And it was he and his friend who were both charged with the murder, among other charges related to what happened that night.

[Katie Whelan]

Mm.

[Patia Eaton]

And so in 2002, it came out that the person who he was with that night took full responsibility for the murder, which is what had been his story all along.

[Hannah Smith]

Right.

[Patia Eaton]

And then in 2008, there was an evidentiary hearing where he went on record and said it. And so since 2008, this person who we were doing this story about, who.

[Hannah Smith]

Was convicted of first degree murder and had always said, you know, admitted that he was there, but that he actually didn't participate in the murder at all, tried to stop it, and he'd been claiming his innocence in that regard, but had been convicted and was serving a sentence of 82 years.

[Patia Eaton]

Yeah. And so he got a lot of support following this person coming out, taking full responsibility for her death, not for what took place after, but for her death. And he finally, after five parole hearings yesterday, was granted parole.

[Hannah Smith]

We actually did the interview in December of 2025 and have been working on it. And, you know, at that point, part of the reason for doing the story was to raise awareness of his case. Like we've done other wrongful conviction stories in the past. There was a lot of, from our perspective, a lot of evidence that this man was wrongful, convicted, and had already served 31 years in prison. But it's really hard to get someone out of the prison system once they're in it, even when you have really compelling information that shows that they were wrongfully convicted. And so we spoke with one of the members of his team about his case in hopes that it would help to raise more awareness. Right. So we did all this work, and then literally, the week that it's supposed to come out, he gets a parole hearing, which amazing, incredible for him. Right. And you attended the parole hearing?

[Patia Eaton]

Yeah, I attended. Virtually. There were five people on the parole board. Three gave him yeses and two were nos. And the two people who dissented or said no felt really strongly about it. And one of those reasons, understandably, is that this has caused the victim's family immeasurable pain, you know, a loss that cannot be undone. And so, because this person who has been in prison has gotten a lot of support, an unfortunate fallout of that is that sometimes his supporters had reached out to her family and caused the victim's family. The victim's family, and caused her additional distress. And so.

[Hannah Smith]

Which we didn't know was happening, and.

[Patia Eaton]

We certainly didn't reach out.

[Hannah Smith]

Certainly not and would not ever agree.

[Patia Eaton]

With that, because, you know, she is at the center of the story. She is the person whose life was taken. And so, you know, it was said at the parole hearing and afterward privately that any mention of her could jeopardize.

[Hannah Smith]

His parole in the press.

[Patia Eaton]

Yeah.

[Hannah Smith]

And since we interviewed one of his supporters, us airing the episode with her, talking about this case could actually jeopardize this man's parole. Right.

[Patia Eaton]

And, you know, some things are more important than podcasting, and so Hannah and I are aligned on that. It wasn't the right decision to air the episode this week, and we feel really strongly about people who are either wrongfully convicted or have done their time and deserve to be paroled. And so we're going to run another episode.

[Hannah Smith]

Yeah. And I just want to Say, like our show, ultimately, we're not ignorant to the fact that this is entertainment, but we've always also wanted it to be more than that, which is why we do the research and try to present information to people and be educational as well. We also really like to highlight cases where there's an injustice in hopes that that injustice could be righted. And when we first recorded the episode, it felt like that. It felt like this feels really good to get this information out there. At this point. Releasing it would really just do the opposite of that. And so it goes against our personal ethics and the ethics of the show, even though it's a bummer because we love the episode and we're hopeful that maybe as time goes by, it could resolve, that we would safely be able to put it out. That is our hope. But for now, we're gonna hold off.

[Patia Eaton]

Yes. And you know, just to add to that, it's like, you know, we're working on the true crime space, but we have this mission driven perspective on true crime. And when we're telling stories, we look for those opportunities where they exist. And sometimes that requires flexibility. And so here we are.

[Hannah Smith]

And so, like you said, we decided that we're gonna re release an older episode. It feels appropriate. It is also a story about a wrongful conviction. It was an early episode and it is an interview with Jennifer Thompson. It's honestly one of my favorites.

[Patia Eaton]

It's an incredible story and we have so many new listeners since we aired that episode that I'm hopeful it will be an exciting listen for everyone who sticks with us.

[Hannah Smith]

Yeah. And we will be back next week with a brand new episode.

[Patia Eaton]

Thanks for being here.

[Jennifer Thompson]

I remember thinking about what it would feel like to die. And I remember wondering how much it will hurt.

[Hannah Smith]

Welcome to the Knife. I'm Hannah Smith.

[Patia Eaton]

I'm Patia Eaton. This week we speak with Jennifer Thompson. Jennifer is the founder of Healing Justice Project, an organization that addresses the harm caused by wrongful convictions.

[Hannah Smith]

Jennifer's life changed forever when, at 22 years old, she became the victim of a violent crime. But a decade later, what happened to Jennifer would make headlines for a reason so unexpected, it changed the course of her life forever. Now, over 30 years later, she joins us to reflect on what happened and how everything went so wrong.

[Patia Eaton]

Our conversation with Jennifer took place on February 21, 2025. Let's get into the interview.

[Hannah Smith]

Hi, Jennifer. Thank you so much for joining us on the podcast.

[Jennifer Thompson]

Thank you for having me.

[Hannah Smith]

We've been really excited about this interview, so let's just jump Right into it. Why don't you give the audience a short intro into who you are?

[Jennifer Thompson]

Well, I am a wife. I am a mother of triplets. I'm the grandmother to five amazing grandchildren. I'm the co author to the book Picking Cotton, our memoir of injustice and redemption. The founder of Healing Justice Project, which is a national organization dedicated to helping all of those who have been impacted by wrongful convictions kind of navigate the healing space. Born and raised in North Carolina, and I was born in 1962. So I grew up in really, the segregated south half of our town was, you know, wealthy and white. And the other half the town, literally across train tracks, were poor and black. Winston Salem is a town where R.J. reynolds Tobacco Company was founded. Haines Hosiery was founded. So it's like enormous wealth but also enormous poverty. And that was where I was raised. That's where I was born. It's how I grew up. I often tell people that you don't really notice things that are wrong until you're removed from it. So the waters that I was swimming in as a child were segregation. I grew up in a white, relatively privileged home. So many of us, particularly people that are white, we grow up and we're given certain things almost as a birthright, you know, that the criminal justice system works, and it's effective and it's fair, and it's equal, and it's impartial, and it's, you know, it's balanced. And that was certainly the way I was brought up. I was brought up to believe that we had the greatest criminal justice system in the world, that if you ended up in an orange jumpsuit behind a defense table, you were absolutely guilty of a crime, you're a criminal, you deserved whatever punishment the system meted out to you. And if you sat the prosecutor side of the table, you were a victim. And it was clear and it was. It was clean within my family structure, I knew from a very young age that I didn't belong. I ended up at elon College in 1983. I felt like I had found my footing, maybe for the first time really ever. And I was also dating, you know, what would have been a very respectable young man. And in my family's eyes, that was important, right? Women were to marry a respectable man. And he checked all the boxes. And so 1983, I was in a really great place in my life. I had everything that I had hoped I would have. My goals were to finish college and then to go on and get a master's and become a Physical therapist. July of 1984. July 28th was a very hot day. I mean, July in the south, the humidity is unfathomable. So my boyfriend and I, our plan was to go play tennis. And I was a tennis player. I played on the tennis team in high school. I played a year at Elon College on tennis, at the tennis team. And his family was a member of the Burlington Country Club. So we were to go play tennis and we did. And the rest of the day was kind of, you know, a typical 22 year old college student day. He took me back home later that afternoon to my apartment and he was going to go home and take a shower and then we were going to meet up for dinner and then go to a summer party at one of his friend's houses. So he picked me up probably around 6 o' clock and took me to a Chinese food buffet because I had a very high metabolism in those days and I ate just really unbelievable amounts of food at any given sitting. And so nobody in their right mind would have ever taken me to an a la carte restaurant. He always took me to a buffet because it was, you know, for 2.99 or 3.99 I could eat as much as I wanted to eat, which I did. I sat down and began to consume just vast amounts of sodium laced products. But because I'd been dehydrated earlier in the day, it hit really hard and I came down with a massive headache, just massive. And I told him that there was just no way I could go to this party, that I was sick and I needed to go home. He took me back to my apartment probably around 8 o', clock, gave me some water, brought me some aspirin. And my last memories that night were him standing near me, kind of rubbing my back just to make sure that I wasn't going to be, you know, violently sick. And that was my last memory of him that night. The police reports the following day would show that he left sometime between 9 and 9:30pm But I had gone to sleep and so I did not hear him leave, didn't hear anything at all. I lived in an old complex and none of these apartments had central air. They all had those window boxes for air conditioning. The window unit in my bedroom was at my headboard. So when it would come on at night, like you could not hear anything. Therefore I did not hear him leave. But I also didn't hear police sirens that were all throughout my apartment complex at midnight. They were searching for a man who had attempted to break into My neighbor's apartment across the parking lot. He had broken the kitchen door window. And she fortunately happened to be awake at the time, watching television. And when she heard the glass break, she looked into the kitchen and saw a hand reaching, trying to unlock her door. And she called the police. He heard her call the police. And she told the police officers that he had on a white knit glove and a dark blue shirt with three white stripes on his biceps. But he took off running before they could get him. And so I didn't hear anything at all until around 3 o' clock in the morning when I heard something like feet shuffling on my carpet in my bedroom. Now, I lived alone, so hearing movement in your bedroom is alarming. But you know, when you're in that space of awake but not really awake, you think you might have heard something, but you're not positive you heard it. Do you go back to sleep or do you wake up and try to identify a noise? Right. Which is really frightening, particularly for women that are living alone. And so when I opened my eyes, I looked to the left side of my mattress and saw the top of someone's head. And I could see him moving. And my first thought and my first impulse was to believe this was probably my boyfriend, that he had fallen asleep on my floor. He was trying not to wake me as he was leaving to go home. I didn't know what time it was at that point, but when I thought about it, I realized that it could not be my boyfriend. He didn't stay the night with me. He never did, because his mother lived about a mile and a half, two miles from where my apartment was. And she was very, very intentional about where he was at all times. So I knew that it wasn't my boyfriend. And that's when I said, who is that? Who's there?

[Hannah Smith]

We're going to take a quick break. We'll be right back.

[Katie Whelan]

If you're feeling exhausted, puffy, anxious, foggy, gaining weight, or just not like yourself, you're not imagining it. Women in their 30s, 40s, and 50s are experiencing massive hormonal shifts, and no one is explaining what's actually happening. I'm Katie Whelan, co founder of joy. I built JOY because I lived this. The fatigue, the mood swings, the weight changes, the confusion. Your symptoms are biological, not personal, and AI generated lab reports won't fix them. Every Joy lab includes a visit with a licensed clinician who specializes in women's hormones and connects every biomarker to how you feel. Energy metabolism, mood, sleep, skin weight, everything. Then we Personalize Real solutions. Hormone therapy, peptide therapy, supplements, and lifestyle protocols. Get [e-mail] today. This month, new customers get 50% off labs, and you can add our estrogen face cream for just $1 with clinician approval. Use promo code [e-mail].

[Jennifer Thompson]

Very quickly, a man jumped up. Up on my bed. I screamed, and he straddled my body with his legs and put a knife to my left side of my throat and covered my mouth with a glove and told me to shut up or he would kill me.

[Hannah Smith]

So terrifying.

[Jennifer Thompson]

Yeah, it is terrifying. And I. I think it's important for people to understand what happens with trauma and memory, because I think human beings just instinctively think that they would never make certain mistakes. Right. Human beings instinctively will say, I would never falsely confess, but if you've never been in a position of being threatened and coerced and tortured, you actually don't know what you would do. The same applies for the ability to kind of make an eyewitness identification. Everybody thinks that, you know, well, I know what I saw, but you don't know what you would do. If you're wondering if you're going to be murdered, it's about 20 minutes total. Throughout the whole entire event, what was.

[Hannah Smith]

Going through your mind? Was it just, I got to survive this?

[Jennifer Thompson]

You know, there's a couple things that went through my mind. I mean, the initial thing, obviously, that went through my mind was, I'm in a lot of danger. It's 1984. There's no cell phones. There was no house alarms. I didn't own a gun. He's on top of me. I can smell alcohol. I knew he'd probably been using drugs. There's a knife. I'm small. He's probably done this before. So for me, the first thing that went through my mind was do not physically fight because you're going to die. And I remember thinking about what it would feel like to die, and I remember wondering how much it will hurt, and is it going to be a quick death or will it be a slow death, and will it take a long time before I die? And then you think about the people that you love and what their experience is going to be like to have to come and look at your body and identify it. Those are the things initially that went through my body. But then I hate bullies, and I've never backed down from a bully. And I remember kind of like pivoting and thinking, there's a chance I'm going to die. But it won't be on my back. If there is a way to survive it, I'm going to figure it out. And so that's when I began to like really calculate and think. And so I remember thinking to myself like Jennifer, you're smart, you've not been drinking, you've not been using drugs, you know, you're a straigh, you've got a good memory. So for me, staying alive was equated to pay attention to this person, figure out what he looks like, listen to everything he says, try to pick up on a lisp or some type of speech that you know is just different. I remember thinking, look for things he can't change later. Look for scars, tattoos or, you know, missing teeth or something that he couldn't change later on. And those were the things that initially I started paying attention to. It was at the point when he tried to kiss me that I was going to vomit and I didn't want to throw up and choke on it because I was on my back. So I turned my head and that would actually end up saving my life that night. When he said, relax, I'm not going to hurt you. And I don't know why I said it, but I said I can't. I'm afraid of knives. I have a phobia, an actual phobia of knives. And if you'll just get off of me and take the knife to the front door and walk down the steps and drop it on my car, I'll let you come back in. And for whatever reason the power dynamics just shifted right there. So I was able to get him off of me. I was able to grab a blanket off the edge of my bed, wrap it around myself because I knew that the police were going to ask me certain questions. They were going to ask me how tall he was and how much did he weigh. And so I had to figure out how tall he was by me being close enough to him to figure out the difference between a five foot one person and him. And so I was able to kind of figure that out. And I was able to look at his clothing because I knew that again the police were going to ask me those questions. He had on dark blue canvas shoes that slipped on your feet, there were no shoelaces. He had on khaki colored army fatigue pants. He had on a dark blue shirt with three white stripes on the biceps and he had white gloves on his hands. He was African American, he was in his early 20s. He had short close cropped hair. He had a pencil thin mustache like Every single thing that I could remember that night meant I was going to live. And over the next few minutes, he pretended to drop the knife out of the front door. He came back in and grabbed me and tried to pull me back into the bedroom. And I told him I had to go to the bathroom first because my plan was for him to go to the car and I was going to lock the door and then call the police, but he had already cut my phone lines earlier. And so when that plan didn't work, I said, I have to go to the bathroom. And I had to rethink, like, what's my next plan? I thought maybe I could, you know, crawl out of the bathroom window. But it was small and it was a drop all the way down to the basement, which is where the laundry room was. If I dropped, I would probably break my legs. And then I remembered him saying he had come through the back door where the kitchen was, and I needed to get to that back door because his way in was going to be my way out. And I told him I needed a drink of water and he told me to make him a drink and we were going to have a party. So I told him I'd make him a drink. And as I walked past him, he was bending down to my stereo, turning it on, trying to find 98.7 Kiss FM because he thought we were going to have a party. But again, as I walked by him, the light coming off of the stereo illuminated his profile. And again, it was just another image that I could kind of glean as I went into the kitchen. And so I started making noise with water running and ice cubes hitting the sink and cabinet doors shutting as I started opening up the back door. And I just pulled my blanket tight and I ran.

[Hannah Smith]

On July 28, 1984, a strange man broke into Jennifer's home while she was asleep. He attacked and raped her. Jennifer managed to escape, running out of the back door of her home with a blanket wrapped around her.

[Jennifer Thompson]

It's about 3:30 in the morning and it's pitch black, but it's also raining now, and so it was slippery. I thought I could go next door to my neighbor and he would save me. As I was banging on the door, not realizing he was gone, the attacker came through my back door coming after me. And I knew I'd made him angry. So I did the only thing that, to me that made any sense, which was to run towards light. And I found a carport light on in someone's house that I just ran towards. I Didn't know who lived there. But as I was banging on the back door screaming that I'd been raped and to please, please let me in, the neighbors were home. It happened to be a professor on campus who recognized me and she told her husband to let me in. And they did, and I fainted and they called the police. And the next thing I knew, you know, I was being taken to the hospital for a rape kit.

[Hannah Smith]

Wow, thank you for walking us through that. It's such a harrowing story that you lived through. And it strikes me just how you were taking meticulous mental notes about everything, fearing for your life, and also at the same time having a plan, what am I going to do once I get away? It's not like, okay, the story's over, you're fine. Obviously this is the beginning of a huge, years long situation for you that will involve law enforcement, the legal system. There's so many people that experience sexual assault and are hesitant to make reports, as you know, because of the situation that you're put in too, where you're having to retell your story. Can you talk just a little bit about that first experience of having to tell your story to law enforcement? And how was that for you?

[Jennifer Thompson]

It's really complicated and it's incredibly traumatic. I mean, you've just survived this trauma. Your body's traumatized, your brain's traumatized. You're going into the hospital to have evidence collected on your body and in your body. Right. It's like, my body was the crime scene and that's where the evidence is. And depending on where you go, depends on how you're going to be treated as an assault survivor. This is 1984. There were no such things as sane nurses. And so the doctor who came in to collect the identification, the pubic hair combings, the cheek swab, your vaginal swab, your nail clippings, like all the stuff that he's supposed to do. Was clearly annoyed and did not want to be in a hospital collecting evidence off of another rape survivor, particularly a college girl. And so he haphazardly did that. But that would also be the location where I knew and realized that the person who had raped me had gone on within less than an hour and raped another woman less than a mile from my home. And when he had crawled through her den window when she was sleeping and bit her and slapped her and punched her and then raped her because I could hear her down the hall crying. It was also that moment, right, where I really realized that we had a serial rapist in the community that women were not safe. And my hatred was palatable. I could, like, literally taste it in the back of my throat how much I hated this person and wanted him to die for what he had done to me and this other woman, knowing that he was going to do it again. And so from there, I was taken to the police station and began to give descriptions of what this person looked like. And as I was giving the description, the detective got a phone call from, I'm not sure who. And then he looked at me and he said, at the hospital, did they give you a penicillin shot? And I said, no. Did they give you the morning after pill? And I said, no. And so we realized that they had done an incomplete rape kit. So I was taken back out to a second hospital to have a second rape kit collected. You just can't imagine, like, the amount of trauma my body is now storing. And so after the second rape kit, again, I go back to the police station. It's now been, what, three or four hours since I almost died. And now I'm being asked, you know, the questions like, how tall was he? How much did he weigh? What was his hair? And it was so clear to the police that I had paid very good attention. They asked if I could do a composite sketch. The second woman had been beaten, and so she couldn't give us clearer description. So I felt like a lot of weight and pressure on me to help the police figure out who this person was. And at the time, they used something called an identikit, which was just a big plastic file box that had tabs of every part of your face. And so the police would pick up a drawing of the shape of a person's face. Is it this face? And I was like, no, it's more triangular. And then you pick up the second part. Is it more like this face? And same for your eyebrows and your eyes and your eyelashes and your lips and your nose and your chin and your cheeks and your ears and everything that makes up her face. So you go through these little tabs. And when he was finished, he said, is this like the man who raped you? And I said, yes. And so that composite sketch went in the newspaper, and the police station started receiving just numerous phone calls. But the most important call, a woman called in and said that she had seen a guy named Ronald Cotton wearing the exact clothing that had been described outside of my apartment on a bike at 3am on July 29, same exact time that I had been raped. So three days after my Assault. I was called into the police station to do a photographic lineup, and they would show me what they refer to as a six pack, which is three photos on top, three photos on the bottom, and ask me to take my time. I don't feel compelled. But if you see him, pick up the photograph and initial the back. And I did. I took my time, but I picked up photograph number three and initialed the back. And they looked at me and they said, that's who we thought it was.

[Hannah Smith]

Oh, wow.

[Jennifer Thompson]

The photograph belonged to Ronald Cotton.

[Hannah Smith]

So you basically were shown six photographs, right? Picked someone out and then got immediate encouragement from law enforcement. They said, well, yeah, that's the guy we thought it was.

[Patia Eaton]

When they said, that's the guy we thought it was. How did you feel in that moment.

[Jennifer Thompson]

When they said that's who we thought it was? Honestly, it was the first time I could take a deep breath since the time of the assault. It's called confirmation. I felt like I had done it right. I felt like I had been a good survivor. I felt like I'd been helpful. I felt like the women in Burlington, North Carolina would be safe again. It was a huge moment for me. And then about five or six days after the photographic lineup, I was called again to come back to the police station. They wanted me to do a physical lineup. And what I didn't know at the time was that the room that they would have normally done the physical lineup in, which is that room you see in cop shows, right, where there's that one way glass and there's the lineup, but your identity's protected. That room was being renovated in the police department, so I was taken to an abandoned schoolhouse to the second floor. And I was taken into this abandoned school room where the only thing between me and the lineup was a folding picnic table. So seven men are marched in front of me holding numbers. And I was terrified because I thought, what happens if I don't get this one right?

[Hannah Smith]

Right?

[Jennifer Thompson]

Does he walk? Does he go free? Is he gonna come back and kill me? Because it's broad daylight, there's lights in this room, like, I'm not protected. It was extremely traumatic. So as I looked through the seven men in the lineup, I honestly, I narrowed it down to number four and five. And as I started, you know, looking between four and five, I remember thinking, well, no, it's number five. And that's what I wrote down on a piece of paper. And again, the police officers looked at me and said, great job. That's who you picked out in the photograph. And that was a huge relief. That would have been, you know, middle of August. So he would, of course, be arrested, held over for what they call probable cause, and we would await trial.

[Patia Eaton]

When you were in that second now photo lineup, do you recall in that moment if maybe you were consciously or subconsciously looking to match to the man in the photo that you had picked out previously, or recalling the memory of the assault?

[Jennifer Thompson]

Great question. I've worked in this for a long time now, so I actually understand what happened to my mind. You know, I had a very clear picture of who had done this to me after the assault. But what happens? And it happens to anybody who is in a place of trauma, like I was, and then you're brought through, like what we call contaminated processes. So as I'm doing that identikit, and I'm looking through the different eyelashes and the eyebrows and the lips and the noses, my memory at that moment starts becoming contaminated. Because the reality is the person who had assaulted me hours before, his eyebrows are not in that box. His lips are not in that box. His cheeks and chin, that's not in that box. You have 75 eyebrows to choose from. There's millions of eyebrows in the world. Right. And human beings are not capable of compartmentalizing the human face. So we look at your face in totality. I mean, unless you have some very strange eyebrow, Right. You really can't memorize that. And so by the time I was finished with the composite sketch and they asked me, was this the man who attacked you? My memory was now gone. The original memory was gone. And what is now in place of it is a composite sketch image. So that when I go to the photographic lineup, when I'm actually, actually looking to match up, and it's all completely subconscious, no one knows they're doing this, is you're trying to find the closest photograph to my last memory, which is a composite sketch. Therefore, Ronald Cotton's photograph, which was three years old in that lineup, was the closest photograph to the composite sketch. Our brains are malleable and we are so prone to suggestion. And so things can go into our memory that wasn't there before, but now it's a permanent fixture in our brain.

[Hannah Smith]

Yeah. So then when you go into the physical lineup, when you see six men in person, are you then trying to match to the composite sketch or even to Ronald Cotton's three year old photo? Is your mind now using those as references?

[Jennifer Thompson]

It is. It's scanning all of that. Right. You're scanning your memory bank. And what my memory was Saying was, oh, my God, that number five looks like I recognize him. Like, I'll never forget that face. And of course I recognize him. I had picked his photograph out of a lineup the week before. But you don't know that. It's just the way our brains work. It's not an intentional thing, not from the victim's perspective. It may be intentional from a police officer's perspective, but you don't know you're doing that. And so when I picked out Ronald in the physical lineup and again was given confirmation, which is huge, Ronald Cotton is now a permanent fixture in my mind.

[Patia Eaton]

I'm wondering also during these two instances of choosing a photo and then a person that you're standing in front of, what knowledge did you have in that moment of the woman who called in and identified Ronald as having been wearing those clothes at your apartment at 3am was that also playing a role in this confirmation you were getting?

[Jennifer Thompson]

Yes, I was told about the phone call. I was told that Ronald had just been released that spring out of prison after doing 18 months for attempted sexual assault. I was told pretty much everything leading up to trial.

[Hannah Smith]

Each time Jennifer picked Ronald Cotton out of a lineup, she received confirmation from law enforcement that she'd chosen their suspect. Additionally, Ronald Cotton was the only person who appeared in both the photo and in person lineups. There was also the woman who called and reported seeing Ronald Cotton outside of Jennifer's apartment the night of the attack, wearing the same clothes, the white gloves that Jennifer remembered her attacker wearing. Jennifer felt confident that Ronald Cotton was the man who raped her.

[Jennifer Thompson]

The trial was in January of 1985. It would last two weeks. I would testify for two and a half days. Again, you know, when you think about the process and what was happening, it's all trauma. My body was just registering trauma after trauma. Testifying was horrible. You know, you're having to repeat every graphic thing that was done to your body in front of strangers, in front of your family. You're being blamed for the rape to begin with. It's just what defense attorneys do. I was told what did I think would happen when you're a single woman living alone and you go to bed in your underwear. Didn't I know that that's how rapes happen? You know, it was apparently important for the jury to know that I was an aerobics instructor, that somehow being an aerobics instructor was like tantalizing for the entire world. So it's all this stuff that was being said the same time. You know, I'm having to look at the defendant. I'm looking at his family. I get up to go to the bathroom, and his sister's in the bathroom. It's really frightening. You don't know what's going to happen. So after the two weeks of trial, the jury came back with guilty on all counts. And Ronald was sentenced to life in 54 years.

[Hannah Smith]

And what did it feel like when you heard that sentence?

[Jennifer Thompson]

You know, there's a huge relief. You feel like the system works. Like you feel validated, right? This is system I've been told my whole life works. And that was confirmation that there is justice for crime victims and survivors. And what you don't realize is the narrative and the pats on the backs that you get of this is closure. You get to move on. You can put this behind you, move forward. It doesn't work. It just doesn't work at all. And I think people don't really understand that after trial, it's kind of like after a death, right? And everybody's brought you the casserole. People just go back to their own lives. And you're sitting there and you're thinking, yeah, but for the rest of my life, I'm still going to be grieving. They just think that you're going to be able to start your life again and carry on as if you're not grieving. The loss of what I had and who I had been and what I wanted to return to, like that part of my life was just completely over. And I was left just in this space alone to try to figure out what's next. And it was really terrible.

[Hannah Smith]

How are things with your family? Did they go to the trial? What was that support system like at the time for you?

[Jennifer Thompson]

The truth is, when you are a victim of a violent crime, there's not enough support in the world. So the people who are around you think they're supporting you, and maybe they're doing the best they can. But unless you've lived it, if you've never been in it, you can't really understand what I needed. Tomato soup and grilled cheese sandwich wasn't going to cut it. And I also think that people still don't understand the violent nature of sexual assault and what that does to the survivor and to the victims of rape. I think people just think that you're okay. You're not dead, right, Jennifer? Nobody shot you, so you're okay, right? Jennifer? I was young. I was 22 years old. My family didn't want to talk to me about it. Like, no one wants to sit down and talk to you and say, how are you feeling? What's happening inside of your body? And so no. No one asked me questions about it. And my boyfriend was just like, yeah, I can't deal with you. It's just too much for me. And friends just don't come over because you cry a lot and all the time. So you're really left in this grief. Because that's what it is. It's grief. You're left in that grief alone. I didn't do it well. I just numbed with whatever I could get my hands on to numb so that I couldn't feel my skin. Of course, I had to move apartments and I had to do that alone. I did graduate, but for the first time, I made a B. That sounds, you know, crazy, but I wanted to be a straight A student. And I made my first B, which meant I wasn't going to graduate with a 4.0, which was my goal. And I wasn't going to graduate summa cum laude or a valedictorian, which was my goal. But I graduated, and I didn't go back to school because I just. I couldn't. I couldn't go to bed at night because I was so afraid. So the only thing I knew to do was to just drink, like, large amounts of alcohol and snort cocaine up my nose, which meant I couldn't wake up in the morning. So I was missing work and I was missing class, and I was a disaster. So I moved. I just left North Carolina, and I met another person. I fell in love with him. I came back a year later, back to North Carolina, got a job in a bank. And the summer of 1987, I received a call from the investigator who had been in charge of the original investigation, Mike Gaulden, and said that the Appellate Court of North Carolina had overturned the decision and that we would have to go back for a second trial. And I didn't understand any of this. Because nobody tells you this is a victim, right? Nobody tells you that as soon as the trial's over and the convictions happened and the sentencing takes place, that the defendant automatically has an appeal. You just think that it's over. So I didn't understand this appellate process. But the appellate courts had said that the jury should have known about the second victim. Because the first trial was only me. And that if the courts had known, if the jury had known there was a second victim who had not made an identification, then that would have called into question my identification. Ronald Cotton had been in Central prison in Raleigh, North Carolina, since 1985, and had been proclaiming his innocence. And not just his innocence, but that he believed that there was a man that was serving time in the same prison, in the same dormitory and worked in the same kitchen that had actually committed the crime. A man named Bobby pool. So in 1987, during the second trial, they introduced this person, Bobby Poole, into the trial and brought him in to court under voir dire. So they dismissed the jury and asked Bobby Poole if he had committed this crime. And of course, he denied it. They asked him if he had been bragging about committing this crime, and he denied ever saying anything about it. Then they asked both myself and the second survivor if we recognized him. And both of us said no, we did not recognize him. And did we recognize anyone in the courtroom that had committed the crimes? Both of us pointed out Ronald Cotton. And so in the second trial, Ronald would now be found guilty of both first degree rapes. And this time, Ronald would be sentenced re sentenced to two life sentences and 30 years in prison, which meant he would absolutely die in prison.

[Hannah Smith]

Did it feel final at that point to you?

[Jennifer Thompson]

Yeah, I thought it was final, but of course I thought it was final the first time. Most of us don't know the legal process, and because they always tell you this word, closure, now you really get closure, which I really wish people would stop using that word because there is no such thing as closure. I thought this was going to be it. Like, we're done now. I get to move on and do my life now, right?

[Patia Eaton]

We're going to take a quick break. We'll be right back.

[Jennifer Thompson]

I got married. I got pregnant. I had triplets in the spring of 1990. And honestly, the triplets were my reason to not die every single day. And it gave me a task, it gave me a job, it gave me structure. Because you're a mom. You can't die now. There's these three little people who need you. And I really loved that part of my life of being a young mother to these incredible babies. And life took on a pattern. The rape was never far from my mind or my spirit. It was always there. But, you know, triplets keep you busy. So that's how I was busy. And then the spring of 1995 happened. I got the phone call again from Mike Gaulden. It's now been almost 11 years. And he calls me and says, hey, like, I need to come and see you. I'm bringing the assistant district attorney of Alamance county with me. And I was like, okay, you know, that's fine. They came to my house and started telling me about the fact that Ronald was still saying he was innocent, but they assured me that he was not. And they were like, we know we've got the right guy, we know he did it, but they want to have this DNA test. This is North Carolina, this is 1995. DNA was really a very new piece of investigation. Very few people were talking about it. The only thing I had ever heard about DNA other than through my science classes was O.J. simpson.

[Hannah Smith]

DNA testing has been admissible in court since 1987. But the first time that most Americans were introduced to the idea of DNA playing a role in the criminal justice system was in 1995 during the highly televised O.J. simpson trial.

[Jennifer Thompson]

So they said that North Carolina didn't have any statutes to allow this DNA test to go through, but if the court ordered it, my blood sample from 11 years ago had now disintegrated and now I would have to give a new blood sample. And I just looked at them and I said, look, I have five year old triplets. I cannot go through another court anything like I just can't. And I said at some point this has to be over. We're going to go to the doctor right now and he's going to give you my blood and you're going to run that test because this has to be done. And they agreed like it has to be done. So I went to the doctor and I had my doctor, my doctor draw my blood and give it to them. And it went down I40, headed to Raleigh, North Carolina, to the state Bureau of Investigations crime lab. That would be March of 95. And I will tell you in truth, in all honesty, I didn't really worry about it because I had been assured that it would come back and conclusively point to the fact that it had been Ronald all along. And then they called me the first week of June and stood in my kitchen and said that the DNA did not belong to Ronald Cotton, that it did belong to Bobby Poole.

[Hannah Smith]

Bobby Poole's DNA matched blood collected from Mary Reynolds home, the second victim who was attacked the same night as Jennifer. Investigators confronted Bobby Poole with the results of the DNA test and he confessed to raping both Mary Reynolds and Jennifer Thompson.

[Patia Eaton]

I mean, how did you even take that information in? What did you think?

[Jennifer Thompson]

Honestly, I don't know that I did. I know that I fell and I know that I screamed and cried for a long time. There were so many emotions that were happening that it's hard to kind of sparse out. There's the Disbelief. There's the anger, there's the fear, there's the confusion. I felt paralyzed. I felt isolated. I felt fearful. I felt everything you can possibly imagine. I don't understand this. I don't understand, like, how did this happen? I remember Mike Gaulden and Rob Johnson, who was the ada, look at me and say, we're going to get Ronald out of prison as quickly as we can. We don't want him to spend another day in prison. He doesn't and shouldn't be. But they also told me that before they would even deliver this news to me, they made sure that they got a confession from Bobby Poole, which for them was really important. And they said it took six hours for him to finally say, okay, fine, I did that to these women. And they didn't just do it to us. Like, you know, it would come to light that he had committed 24 more violent crimes before he was ever apprehended, six of which would be first degree rapes. And one of the rapes he committed, he went back and raped the woman a second time. And so there's a lot of things that you're now having to reconcile. That Ronald Cotton was in prison for 11 years for something he never did, and that Bobby Poole was not apprehended when he should have been, and that all these other people were harmed because the system failed. But what isn't being told to me is that the system failed me, too. But that wasn't the story that the public heard for the next few years.

[Hannah Smith]

Current research on eyewitness identification shows that when victims are presented with a police lineup, the overwhelming majority of people will choose someone from that lineup, regardless of if the actual perpetrator is present. If the perpetrator is not in the lineup, they will choose the person who looks most similar to their memory of the perpetrator. All of this happens subconsciously. It's important to note that Bobby Poole's photo was not part of the initial photo lineup that Jennifer was shown. He was also not at the physical lineup. Jennifer IDD Ronald Cotton twice before the trial, during the trial, and then again in 1987 when he was retried. Bobby Poole, her actual rapist, was there in 1987 at the retrial in the courtroom with Jennifer, but she did not recognize him. Her brain had replaced any memory of Bobby Poole's face with Ronald Cotton's.

[Patia Eaton]

The story that came out over the course of the years that followed did not reflect that you were also a victim of this system. Did you have any preparation or warning from the ADA or the law enforcement you were working with. Like, there's going to be media coverage about this.

[Jennifer Thompson]

I was told there would be media coverage. Again, you know, this is 1995. Ronald was the 23rd person, I believe, in the United States to have been exonerated using DNA. He was the first person in the state of North Carolina to be exonerated through DNA. But it was the first time that a DNA test had also revealed the actual perpetrator. So it was an enormous story across the country, and it was being covered by every newscast that you can possibly imagine. And so I was told that there was going to be a lot of coverage, that they would try to protect my name because, you know, I'd been married since then. But at this point, nobody understood what was happening to crime victims and survivors from these cases. I was really left on my own to try to navigate the next few years of false narratives that were going to be coming out. So what I decided to do at that time was, in many ways, to just erase myself from the world and to make myself as microscopically tiny so that the world couldn't find me. And I did a really good job, I have to say. Like, I really kind of, like, disappeared for the next year until somebody found me.

[Hannah Smith]

Who found you?

[Jennifer Thompson]

What had happened was there was a producer with Frontline who wanted to do a documentary about eyewitness identification and the fallibility of human memory. And this person contacted Barry Scheck. And Barry Scheck was like, there's this story out of North Carolina if you can find the girl. So people started trying to find the girl, and eventually they did. It was really scary because I was getting phone calls from people that I knew that said, yeah, I've got this phone call today, and somebody said, you know this girl named Jennifer Thompson? And it's Jennifer Thompson, Jennifer Canino. And so people were calling me, and that scared me. But eventually, Ben Loderman, who was the producer, contacted me, flew down from Boston, sat with me in my house, and said, this is what I'm going to do. I would really love for you to tell your story. And of course, my first impulse was, like, oh, hell, no. No way. No way I'm going to do this. My kids now are six, and people are gonna try to find me and kill me. Then he said, well, I've talked to Ronald, and he's going to tell his story. And I knew very quickly that no one could tell my story but me, because you're not allowed to tell my story. I lived it. So I agreed to tell it under the understanding that Ronald stay in Burlington and I was in Winston Salem and that we weren't gonna meet. And he agreed. And so over the next six months, as he put together this documentary titled what Jennifer Saw, the crew would say to me, like, oh, you know, we were with Ron yesterday. He's such a nice guy. He's, like, really chill. He's really lovely. He's very forgiving. And I was like, yeah, there's no way that can be true. The guy spent 11 years in prison for something he didn't do. There's just no way. The documentary aired in February of 97, and I remember watching it the next morning, and I heard myself say that I know that he's innocent, but I still see him in my nightmares. And that. That's when it clicked for me about this is a permanent face in my brain, and it shouldn't be there. Bobby Poole should be there, but why can't I see him in my brain? Because I can't. So I called Mike Gaulden, and I said, can you set up a meeting? I don't even want to know where I'm meeting, because every journalist in the country was now trying to find me. When I tell you every journalist in the country was trying to find me, I mean, everybody. So they set it up, a private meeting. And I met Ronald in April of 97, not far from where I'd been raped 13 years before. We started to cry and talk about what had happened to the two of us. We got to ask each other questions that only the other person knew the answers to. And we spent the next two hours just crying and talking and holding each other's hands and sharing about what those years had been like for ourselves, for our families. And what we realized at the end of those two hours is that. That we had a lot of shared trauma because the system had failed us. And that at the intersection of all of that trauma was Bobby Poole, who had caused every single bit of it. Bobby Poole had done so much violence, and it hurt so many women. But he also sat back and knew that Ronald was going to prison for what he had done to all of us. And so that was where Ron and I were able to begin this healing process with each other, understanding that the system had failed us and our families and that Bobby Poole had been the perpetrator of all of it.

[Hannah Smith]

When you met Ronald for the first time, you know, how was he different than what you had maybe feared or imagined he might be like?

[Jennifer Thompson]

Well, in my head, of Course, he was just this terrible, violent monster. In reality, he was incredibly gentle and soft spoken. He was huge. Like, that was the other thing. Like, he was enormous. He's like 6 foot 4, I'm 5 foot 1. Like, he was like this big, huge person in my life. And yet he was very soft spoken and very gentle and kind and funny and safe. Like, I immediately felt safe with him. It was a complete and utter shift. And we immediately became friends that day. Like, we parted in each other's arms, sharing each other's contact information and promising that, like, we had lived this journey, we had survived this thing together, and this was our story.

[Hannah Smith]

It sounds like you really did become friends with him. You both were really going through it in different ways in different scenarios, right? Over those 11 years, you talked about having your children and that being something that helped you want to live. You were so tormented. Was this helpful in any kind of way to move toward healing for you and how.

[Jennifer Thompson]

If so, I think it was helpful on many, many levels. So, yes, it was very helpful in the healing process because Ronald was probably the only person who could understand in this weird way what I had gone through. Because both of us had lost, Both of us could not return to the former person that we were before. Both of us grieved. And so we had these shared experiences, different but shared experiences. And that was really healing for me and for him. The other thing that I think it did for me is it sent me on a quest, on mini quests. One of the quests I went on was to understand the criminal justice system and the legal system and how it actually works and who it actually works for and who does it actually fail and fail often. So that forced me to really look back on my childhood and my life of growing up in the segregated south and that kind of birthright of thinking that the system was the best in the world and it was effective and it worked. And that completely shifted everything for me. And I began to question everything. It wasn't just like criminal justice system processes, but environmental justice and economic justice. It really started me thinking and studying and understanding and pulling back layers and asking the deep, really hard questions, which I hope I never stop asking those questions. The other thing that it did for me was to begin to understand memory and trauma and how those two work and how often the system can get it wrong, and when it gets it wrong, how many people are being harmed by it. Like, it really got me thinking about our brains and how trauma works and doesn't work and how what we can encode and what we can't encode, under what circumstances. So I've done a lot of work in that area and then on policy and legislation. So that's taken me in lots of different areas to kind of help improve our system. But. But then the other thing it did was really help me understand restorative justice and how healing happens and how healing often doesn't happen because we don't give space for it.

[Hannah Smith]

Did you experience people blaming you and how did you come to understand how to sort that all in your head and where to place the blame?

[Jennifer Thompson]

It was an easy assigning of blame, right? It was like the quick answer was like the very quick and easy scapegoat for all of this. So I was very much blamed for. Well, I still am, let's just be clear. Like, I'm still being blamed. I won't allow it anymore. That's the difference. I allowed the blame to take place for gosh, the good 12, 15 years after Ronald and I met, because I didn't have a different language and because the system was very happy to allow me to carry the bag of blame. And so, yeah, the general public wanted to blame me. The criminal justice system was happy for me to accept the blame.

[Hannah Smith]

Over the following years, Jennifer and Ronald gave many talks together and were interviewed dozens of times. They would eventually go on to co author a book, picking cotton, in 2009. Jennifer writes in that book about the overwhelming guilt she felt for misidentifying Ronald. She also notes that that guilt did not assuage the trauma she was already experiencing from being violently attacked in her home, age 22. But suddenly, in the public's eye, she was no longer a victim.

[Jennifer Thompson]

The blame could look as innocuous as Ron and I standing on a stage and somebody throws her hand up and says, wow, Ron, man, you're like, Jesus Christ. You're just like Jesus. Like, how do you stand next to her and be her friend and forgive her? And for a long time I was like, I guess I'm just going to have to take this. I now push back on that a lot. But that's the innocuous stuff, right? The more in my face, violent blame would be the death threats, men saying things to me about rape. Such as one man looked at me and said, you know, I gotta say, like, at least the son of a bitch that raped you had good taste. Those were the things I've heard for decades. And that's traumatic. And I didn't know that I didn't have to carry that, that I could deny that. That say, that's not true and that's not right. And here's why. And you know, somebody listening to this podcast, I will promise you there will be somebody listening to this podcast that's going to want to comment at the end of this and say, you know, Jennifer should die. Jennifer should go to prison. Because this person is not going to think deep enough and far enough to say, wow, like, if I was being raped and almost murdered, you know, what would I do? What would I say to my mother if this was her story? Like, what would I say to my daughter if this was my daughter's story? Would I blame my daughter? No, you wouldn't blame your daughter. I would hope you wouldn't blame your daughter.

[Hannah Smith]

Yeah. Then your story gets lost in the fray. Because thinking back about, like, how from the moment that, you know, you didn't know his name yet, but Bobby Poole was in your apartment, the police even called you, like, the perfect victim because you were so. You were doing your very best the whole time you were studying him, you were planning on, how do I get justice? Not just for yourself at first it was, but then also for other victims as well. Then you were getting confirmation the whole time. And so when you really stop and think about it, it's like, what did people want you to do differently? There was nothing you could have done differently.

[Patia Eaton]

The woman who called and identified Ronald as being in front of your apartment complex at around three in the morning, wearing the same clothing, you know, your trauma and the ability of your memory to be so manipulated by the way the system was operating. As you're telling me that, I'm like, I get that. That makes total sense. Her recollection of that is escaping me. Did you ever learn anything about what gave her that level of conviction to call and say that?

[Jennifer Thompson]

Yeah. And I really appreciate you asking that question because Ron and I did not understand this until the book was published. And this woman came to visit Ronald and said that she had been given a typed statement from another police officer to call in in exchange for drug charges against she and her son to be dropped.

[Hannah Smith]

Oh, my gosh.

[Patia Eaton]

That's mind blowing. It's actually worse than anything I thought you were going to say.

[Jennifer Thompson]

Yep, yep. And neither one of us knew about that phone call, obviously. And the police officer who gave her the typed statement was not Mike Gaulden. It was another police officer who had just always had it against Ronald. He'd always hated Ronald. And Ron talked about, like, when he, I don't know how old he was. He was probably around 12. This particular officer said to him, one of these days I'm going to get you. And they said, you think you're a tough? I'm not going to use the word. Going around dating white women. And he said, but I'm going to get your ass one day. And that was the cop.

[Patia Eaton]

Oh, my gosh.

[Jennifer Thompson]

Yeah. And you know, when we tell that story, and people will often ask me about that call because that call was really important. It's what put Ron in the crosshairs. When we tell people that, people always have the shock and awe. Right. It's like, oh, my God. I cannot tell you how many of these stories have something like that built in. There's like this bad actor. And so again, it's like this kind of knee jerk reaction to blame people. Yeah. There are people that should be blamed. Absolutely. But it is not crime victims and survivors.

[Hannah Smith]

We've all seen the news stories of someone being exonerated walking down the steps of a courthouse, finally free. It is beyond horrifying that any innocent person is sent to prison, losing potentially years of their life for something they didn't do. And exonerations become a celebration that justice has finally prevailed. But the harm of wrongful convictions runs deep. There's no getting those years in prison back. And what we often don't think about is the ripple effect of this kind of system failure. There is the original crime victim often still waiting for justice. Jennifer has worked with people who were victims of violent crimes who believed that their perpetrators had been caught. And then years later, the case is reopened and still unsolved.

[Jennifer Thompson]

No crime victim and no crime survivor, no murder victim, family member, wants an innocent person to go to prison ever.

[Hannah Smith]

Right.

[Jennifer Thompson]

Like we want the person who violently removed our family members from this earth. We want the person who violated our bodies and left us for dead somewhere. We want that person to be apprehended and go into prison. We don't want an innocent person to go to prison. But for some reason that gets lost in the conversation. Right? And I think there's certain words that every victim and crime survivor from these cases that I've worked with will tell you. They feel isolated, they feel marginalized, they feel unnoticed. There was no one there for them at the time of the crime. There was no one there for them during the trial. There was no one there for them during the exoneration. These are consistent themes that we see with every victim and survivor. Because when an exoneration happens and you pick up the newspaper or you listen to the story on the news, what you don't hear about is who the victims and survivors were. It's only about the exonerate. And that is not to say that the exonerated person, that their story should not be highlighted because it's horrific. And what was done to them and what those years look like is absolutely not okay. They suffered decades, decades of being separated from their families, of watching their children grow up without them, of people dying and they couldn't be there to grieve them. They were physically assaulted in prison. They come out with absolutely no resources. Their families are broken. The system failed them. That's absolutely across the board. Yes. And the victims and survivors, many of them, their children grew up without them because they can't function. People are brutally kidnapped and tortured and murdered. And that these families have to reconcile that the last moments that their child, their wife, their brother, their mother on this earth was torture. And then the system comes behind it and says, oh, by the way, the person we thought that did this to you or your family member didn't, and we have no interest in closing the case ever. And so you're never going to know. Or if you're a rape survivor, they come back and say, oh, and by the way, we know who did it to you, but the statute of limitations have taken place. And the guy who raped you and sodomized you lives an hour down the road, but we can't prosecute him because you live in a state that has a statute of limitations. So, sorry. That's what people need to understand. The system, when it fails and a wrongful conviction fails all of us, it's not just me and Ronald, but the community got failed. It was failed. And the only person who wins in any of these cases is the perpetrator. There are no winners. And so when I would meet with crime victims and survivors, that was really kind of where we all were. It was this place of the system failed us, and now the system wants to blame us. And then we hear exoneries, of course, being blamed. We have a lot of people that'll look at me and say, yeah, but, you know, the guy was like, he was using drugs and he was in the bad part of town. It's like, that doesn't mean that innocent people should go to prison. I mean, it was 1984, and best practices back then were archaic. I often, when I do speeches, I will tell people that, you know, the medical profession is always updating, right? It's always trying to get better processes, better procedures, and to cut down on, you know, infections and Whatever. But the criminal justice system hasn't caught up like that. And so often ask an audience, if somebody came to you and said, you have to have open heart surgery, I can do it like we did in 1937, or I can do it like we do now in 2025, which would you choose? I would imagine close to 100% of people are going to say, oh, can we do it like, you know now? Yeah, we know now. But our legal system still operates and in a very, very old fashioned, archaic wild west. I'm the marshal of don't tell me what to do way. And I travel and I do a lot of legislation in different states and in different jurisdictions. And I will tell you that there are police departments in this country today that just refuse to do best practices as it relates to eyewitness identification procedures, which we have. We know better ways to do it. It's just like, don't tell me what to do. It's about closing the case. And listen, there's a lot of people that will say, well, listen, the guy's a bad guy. He was a bad guy. And it's like, okay, he might have been a bad guy, but don't we want the right bad guy? I mean, that's really important.

[Hannah Smith]

Yeah, it is an interesting part, and it's covered in the book that Ronald did have a criminal history. And so some people could look at him and say, oh, that's a bad guy. But there were so many factors, obviously, that played into that, that you also described sort of the environment of the place where also he grew up, and being a black kid and then a black man in that environment not really being set up to succeed. And it's so clear, based on who he became, that he's a wonderful guy. So, you know, it just adds another layer of complication. And it always just reminds. It reminds me of what you said earlier, where you were like, the general public likes to have an easy person to blame or an easy answer. Things are so one way or the other. And it's like, that's just really not often how real life is.

[Jennifer Thompson]

It's often very, very gray. And I think most of us want to believe that if I lived in this certain circumstance, that I wouldn't behave that way. But you don't know that. And the other part of, at least my experience is that we live in a very disposable society where we just want to toss people away and not look at them. And prison has done that for us. It's created a huge problem in this country where we have systematically put, you know, entire groups of people in certain buckets. There's a reason why prisons are not beside country clubs and golf courses, because what you don't see doesn't exist. And so for people that look like me, that makes us feel better about the world we live in. But I will tell you that I've met many, many, many, many hundreds and hundreds of people that have been locked away behind bars, many of them innocent, but some of them not. And we have wasted tremendous talent and intellect and gifts and creativity by just blanket putting people in prison. And we've certainly not created a safer world to live in.

[Hannah Smith]

What is the mission of Healing Justice? What kind of work do you do?

[Jennifer Thompson]

Well, healing justice, we're 10 years old this year, and really, it was born from this place where I had already experienced and where I was around communities of victims and survivors and exonerees. And I kept hearing about these terrible stories of the aftermath, right? Like, after the exoneration happens, everybody thinks that the exoneree is going to get $10 million or the case is gonna be solved, and that's simply not true. So I started Healing justice in an attempt to try to bring people together who had been equally hurt and harmed into a space to use restorative justice principles to help us all talk about what had happened so we could engage in healing. And so we really do kind of two things. I mean, our two big missions are to address the harm caused by wrongful convictions and to help educate the system in ways that we can do, particularly by crime victims and survivors and what that looks like. The other part of the work we do is bringing directly impacted individuals together to create connections and community and help people engage in what healing looks like. So we do that different ways. We do that through peer support. We do that through our healing retreats. We do that through listening sessions. And it's in the space of community that belonging starts happening. And belonging is where we can create the healing. If we don't feel like we belong, there's no way we can heal. We can't heal in isolation. There's just no way. We heal in community. And we heal when we're heard. We can heal when we can see each other.

[Hannah Smith]

I am so glad that Jennifer came on our podcast and told us her.

[Patia Eaton]

Story that was so powerful because it impacted her life in so many ways. And then she sort of turned that situation on its head to do a lot of good. Which brings us to Healing Justice Project. The Healing Justice Project provides crime victims and Exonerees with resources and community for healing.

[Hannah Smith]

Yeah. You can Visit [e-mail] and they also hold these retreats in which crime victims and exonerees are able to come together, meet each other, and heal together is kind of how Jennifer would describe it. There's a video on their website from one of these retreats. It's really powerful to watch. I think that one of the things that really stood out to me in Jennifer's interview is talking about how being a crime victim and going through this experience of a wrongful conviction, it really left her feeling alone and. And, like, pitted her against Ronald Cotton in a way. Once they met each other, she really felt like there was community that started to be built and healing from that. And so she took that inspiration and used it to create these retreats where she brings crime victims and exonerees together. Not usually from the same case, but she said that it really helps for people to talk to someone, for someone maybe whose family member was murdered, to be able to speak with an exoneree who was wrongfully convicted for murder. And so she facilitates those conversations. And I think that's just really unique and cool. It's a powerful video.

[Patia Eaton]

Yeah. And it really speaks to. You know, in the interview, Jennifer said, when the system fails to convict the right person, then they fail everyone involved.

[Hannah Smith]

Yeah. And then I have to mention. So Jennifer and Ronald Cotton co authored a book. She mentions it in the interview. It's called Picking Our Memoir of Injustice and Redemption. And it's really good. We wanted to speak with Ronald. He is spending time with his family and did not want to do an interview, which we totally understand. But half of the book is written from Jennifer's perspective, and then half of it is written from Ronald's perspective. So there's a whole other part of this story in the book that, if you wanted to hear it, definitely go check it out. There's obviously so much in here from Ronald's perspective that we can't cover. People should just read the book. But one of the stories floored me. He was in North Carolina Central Prison, and he talks about being mistaken for this other guy, Bobby Poole. Like, even the guards called him Poole. Hey, Poole. And he was like, that's not me. So he meets this guy, Bobby Poole, in prison, who we now know is the actual assailant of Jennifer's. And Ronald sees him and says that he looks like the sketch, the original sketch, and kind of looks like Ronald as well. And he confronts him. And then at some Point Ronald's sister comes to visit him, and he said that he had this creepy interaction where Bobby Poole came up to him afterward and was like, hey, can I get your sister's address so I can write her? And quick thinking as he was, he was like, you know, she probably wouldn't write you, but what I can do is we could take a picture together and I could send it to her and maybe she'll wanna write you. So he said, For $2, you could get, like a Polaroid picture in the book. It shows the Polaroid picture of Ronald Cotton and Bobby Poole. And then, of course, he didn't send it to his sister. He sent it to his attorney. He was sentenced in January of 1985 to life in prison plus 50 years. He meets Bobby Poole in 1986 and takes this photo in September of 1986 and sends it to his attorney. But he still spends, you know, nine more years in prison before he's exonerated. And the whole time he was like, I know, it's this guy, Bobby Poole. And he was right.

[Patia Eaton]

That is unimaginable.

[Hannah Smith]

It's a really good book. Jennifer and Ronald both talk in the book about a lot of their activism that they have done together over the years, speaking at different events and working together to try to raise awareness about wrongful convictions.

[Patia Eaton]

Right. Because there are a lot of people in prison proclaiming their innocence. And now, having gone through this experience, they're making sure those people have a voice. According to the Innocence project, they have 203 clients that have been exonerated by DNA evidence. And 63% of wrongful convictions that they've worked on involved eyewitness misidentification, which is exactly how Ronald Cotton ended up in prison.

[Hannah Smith]

That's a staggering percentage. 63% involved eyewitness misidentification. And yet, from everything that we've learned, it makes sense. So the lead detective, Mike Gaulden, who Jennifer spoke about, he actually went on to transform the way that North Carolina approaches lineups and was really influential in instituting double blind procedures so that the lead investigators in the case are no longer the people who are there with a eyewitness making the identifications.

[Patia Eaton]

Oh, it's like, now it has to be a more unbiased person being the middleman there. That's great.

[Hannah Smith]

Yeah. So that you don't have that situation where someone is giving that confirmation and saying, yes, that's our suspect.

[Patia Eaton]

Right. And reaffirming it.

[Hannah Smith]

Yeah.

[Patia Eaton]

Because then she went on to misidentify him again because of that. Yeah.

[Hannah Smith]

The fact that, like, she identified him again in court and then again at the retrial when Bobby Poole was actually there, she didn't recognize him. That just says so much about what our brains and memory does, that there's so much that's unreliable, really, about eyewitness identification.

[Patia Eaton]

You know, Jennifer had this added pressure because the other victim, who we now know to be Bobby Poole, said, no, I cannot provide eyewitness testimony. She was unable to say what he looked like. And so Jennifer was being reaffirmed by investigators and also the this idea that she was helping the other victim.

[Hannah Smith]

Yeah. Well, thanks for listening and we will be back next week for an off record.

[Patia Eaton]

If you have a story for us, we would love to hear it. Our email is thenifexactlyrightmedia.com or you can follow us on Instagram henifpodcast or bluesky at the Knife Podcast.

[Hannah Smith]

This has been an exactly right production, hosted and produced by me, Hannah Smith.

[Patia Eaton]

And me, Patience Eaton. Our producers are Tom Breyfogel and Alexa Samarosi.

[Hannah Smith]

This episode was mixed by Tom Breifogel.

[Patia Eaton]

Our associate producer is Christina Chamberlain.

[Hannah Smith]

Our theme music is by Birds in the Airport.

[Patia Eaton]

Artwork by Vanessa Lilac.

[Hannah Smith]

Executive produced by Karen Kilgariff, Georgia Hardstark and Danielle Kramer.