Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] Speaker A: You.
[00:00:05] Speaker B: Before we dive into today's conversation, I want to take a moment to thank this episode's sponsor, Audible.
[00:00:11] Speaker A: You know how much I love a good story.
[00:00:13] Speaker B: I write them, I read them, and sometimes when I can't sit down long enough to open a book, I listen to them. Lately, I've been listening to Audible while I walk, travel, or even sometimes while cooking dinner. There's something about hearing a story perform that makes it come alive in a different way.
I just finished.
[00:00:29] Speaker A: Okay.
[00:00:30] Speaker B: Julie Chan Is Dead by Lian Zhang, an Alice Feeney book, Blue, Beautiful, Ugly, and the latest Linley book by Elizabeth George.
[00:00:41] Speaker A: So I'm gonna be honest. This is how I do it.
[00:00:44] Speaker B: I get a book both on Kindle and on Audible, and I go back and forth listening to both. So when I'm driving in the car or with my son at some activity, I will listen to audiobooks. And then when I'm home, I read them on Kindle. And Audible makes it easy to switch back and forth in the app.
Honestly, I do it every time.
[00:01:07] Speaker A: I just.
[00:01:08] Speaker B: I want to keep the book going while I'm driving.
[00:01:11] Speaker A: And so I just switch. Switch to the audiobook.
[00:01:15] Speaker B: And then when I get home, I switch back to the Kindle because honestly, I can read faster than I can listen.
Anyway. The best part is that with Audible, you get a 30 day free trial. You can start listening today. You get one audiobook you can keep forever even if you cancel. So if you've been wanting to read more stories that pull you in, won't let go, including my own Casey Court series, which are all available on audible, go to audible.com the link is in the show notes or in the alternative ebooks buzz Audible.
[00:01:46] Speaker A: Hi, and welcome to the Politics of Justice. It's me, Amy Austin. I was too ambitious. I thought I was just gonna, like, breeze through this book, discuss all of these issues.
Yeah, okay. So that didn't work out. Moving on. So I left off. I only did chapters one and two, but I did give a little bit of background about what's going on. We're now in chapter three. It's Claire Henshaw's first chapter. The first two are Casey chapters. She is one of the three point of view characters in this book.
And I think I mentioned previously that the way.
How can I say this? The way she entered the Casey Court universe is that she was a law clerk for Sheila Harrison Grant and she referred Sheila to Casey.
Okay, well, I was gonna say, we know how that turned out, except for the bad behavior of Sheila Harrison Grant. Bad. Okay.
She absconded.
And it's a thing. She absconded. She's a judge. This judge, as we talked about in at least the judge in real life that sort of inspired this book, also absconded. Apparently, judges know to get away from the long arm of the law.
It's a trick. Okay, moving on. So Claire Henshaw, she.
Unfortunately, because Sheila Harrison Grant left the jurisdiction in there for her job as a federal judge, it was actually never confirmed. So it just ended. Her term ended, and they would have appointed somebody else.
Hopefully. There's a lot of vacancies for a while with congressional inaction being a huge problem.
All that said, the.
All that said, Claire did lose her job.
So as we meet her now. Well, let's just get into it. Let's get into it.
So when we meet Claire, she's standing on her front steps waiting for the father of her son.
Long story short, she.
I want you to remember that as a law clerk, she would have been an attorney.
So she's standing there, she's waiting for her baby daddy. He rolls up in a black Nissan, and the highlight is, my baby got that unsure look he had whenever his father and I were within 5ft of each other.
Silently, I try to assure him that his parents would not fight. Today, I promised myself this morning in the shower there'd be none of the usual drama that accompanied our handovers.
So I wrote a little note. So I'm one of those people who.
My parents got divorced, actually, when they got divorced and when they broke up, two different things. Let's just say my parents broke up in the 70s.
And additionally, I come from a generation of people where the women left early. Man left early.
So they got divorced in the 1970s.
So back then, there were these every other weekend arrangements with dads.
And handovers were rough.
They were rough for me, and they were rough for my friends. And this is like, something we talk about.
So the note says, while I remember that uneasy feeling Luke probably has from my own childhood, I've seen this look on adult friends because their separated, divorced parents are in the same room, and it's like dynamite. The dynamic doesn't change, despite years apart, which is so interesting. But I've been to, well, weddings, I guess, mainly weddings. And there's really not another occasion where everybody is there. I mean, there are, but weddings, you're, like, squeezed in tight.
I mean, maybe now weddings have much bigger venues and grander budgets. But in the mid-90s, when.
Or mid-90s, late-90s, when my friends were getting married, we were all tight rooms with divorced parents, and it was uncomfortable. And I just wanted to highlight that discomfort.
The thing that I do want to point out, it's not that that discomfort.
The discomfort, I think is unfortunate for the child, but I don't know a way for people to cure that dynamic, especially when people are upset that women leave the majority of marriages and men often remain quite upset about that.
And there's nothing to be done about people inability to get over their upset, I guess.
So. Let's see here.
So she puts him in the car with his dad. His dad has a new woman friend, one she's never seen before, and it makes her nervous. But the reason they have her ex is picking up her son is because every. I don't know, once a month, let's say that says one Sunday a month. I don't know. She works at this place called the UAMA Center.
And. And this is actually something I think is important. And I knew people who did it. I did it occasionally, but not in a.
I think not in a structured way.
But lawyers often give do, like little seminars or give advice to, like, groups of people who can. Will never be able to hire their own lawyers within a system.
So in these cases, like, this is especially true for, like in Cuyahoga county for juvenile court.
So women would lose their children, whether it's like foster care or in that situation, or they were unmarried and they had to manage like custody hearings and visitation, all of that on their own without lawyers, because if they were not poor enough, there was nobody appointed. And lawyers are very expensive, especially given how juvenile court, how slow it is, your lawyer could be there four or five hours every time you go in. And that's a lot to pay for everybody sitting around.
So I did this a couple times, and I knew people who did this. They gave like, general, like, sort of advice. And so Claire is part of her job at the center. I don't know if she does some kind of nonprofit work. I have to try to remember. I read it and I still remember. But as part of her job, she holds like a Saturday, the Sunday circle. I'm sure the circle has a name, but she holds a circle where people can sort of vent their feelings. Because another thing that. That I actually noticed while practicing law that was problematic for the way that law is built, is that people wanted to sit down and discuss their feelings. My ex didn't do this. You know, his in law, my ex in laws are doing that. There's like all these issues, and I'm not saying Those issues are not relevant. They're not important.
The court doesn't care.
And as an attorney and not a counselor, there really wasn't a good mechanism for holding all those feelings. I mean, you're not paying somebody like several hundred dollars an hour.
You're not paying a lawyer for therapy. They're not qualified to do so in most cases.
So she sort of proposes this, and I think she probably recognizes this from her own need as a way for people to sort of process this, get through their feelings, and then when they're in court, actually deal with like, what is really happening.
I say all this. That's the background and sort of my personal feelings about this.
But we'll move on. So she's sitting in this room. They're mostly women of color because that's, well, in at least majority of the people in the system.
So she was trying to broach this idea of having these women work together or at least not tear each other down. And the highlighted quote is, nothing decimated the black female community quicker than divide and conquer. My group was not going to descend into a rowdy episode of Maury Povich on my watch. Oh my God. I just found out Rory Fovich was on like 20, 30 years. I thought literally was on like two years.
Wait, it's not still on? No. I saw an interview that Maury Povich and Josh Johnson, which actually I'll just link in the show notes. Josh Johnson is my favorite comedian. Every Tuesday he comes out my new favorite comedian. It'll be somebody else next week, don't worry.
But every Tuesday at 6:00pm, I think this time 9:00pm Eastern time, he comes up with a set, a brand new 45 minute to hour long set that is fascinating because he weaves storytelling with current events.
Wait a second.
I just. As I said that out loud, I realized that what I'm talking about now is weaving storytelling with current events.
Okay, so that's why he appeals to me. So if you like my content, you'll love Josh Johnson. Look, millions of people love him.
It's not just that.
So the, the note says there's a period of time when I was home during the day, likely when I was studying for the bar that Maury Povich was on round the clock. I was embarrassed that the talk show had turned into a circus like spectacle with black women never knowing who the fathers of their babies were.
Got a lot of feelings about this. Like, as I'm watching, I rarely watch stuff. But during the pandemic, I got sucked into Love is Blind. And so I've been watching every subsequent season.
Now I'm actually watching them in real time.
This is like the first or second season. I've actually watched as they come out. I don't have people have the patience for waiting weeks. I just rather binge it all one time and be done.
That said, I do have a belief that there's a lot of entertainment that sort of prays on black women as objects of scorn or humor or. I don't even know how to say it.
So, like, Maury Povich is one. I could not.
I've seen like three or four episodes, which. Why, I guess I thought it was on two years and it just was embarrassing. It's like I slept with 10 guys. I don't know who my baby daddy is. And coming on the heels of this sort of like Reaganomics welfare queen Bill Clinton, end welfare as we know it, like, spectrum, it just felt like another way to discuss how black women are to. To amplify the stereotypes of black women. I'll just say that I'm not going to get into what the stereotypes.
So that said, I have the same feeling about Love is Blind. And maybe it's true of dating shows in general, which is why there's all these people. I'm finding that black women who watch the Bachelor and I watched like the first season 9,000 years ago, and they had the angry black woman stereotype from one of. From the contestants. And I was like, done.
But I'm watching Lois blind and we're getting the same problem. So what am I saying?
So the next thing that happens is. So she's having this group, and then one of the moms says, because they're talking about the judges in juvenile court, and one of them says, everybody's saying that if you do right by Judge Brody, he'll do right and you can get your kids back.
So this is like sort of. I. I don't even know if I knew the name of this back then, but this is sort of a.
An example of like the Whisper Network. And like, I think about this when cases like Harvey Weinstein are talked about or like Charlie Rhodes are talked about.
And when in my life there people call it gossip. I mean, this is like a thing about normal gossip that I really appreciate that gossip is. Well, sometimes gossip is fun, but sometimes gossip is a way to transmit information that you otherwise can't really talk about.
So in this instance is the first time that Claire Henshaw is hearing that there's a judge who may do favors for litigants if they do. And I put those favors because like, I don't say like coerced sex or co sexual contact is a favor, but if you do a favor for them.
And I appreciate that the rumors are out there so that people can make decisions in a system that may not protect them if they were to make allegations or refuse to deal with somebody without like confirming it. Well, how do you know that he really does that he hasn't done it to you? Okay, you know, so the rumors already did it to 10 people. So as a woman, knowing that there may. There is not likely to be any consequences for men in these situations as we're looking at right now, then you have to decide how or I was a woman and other women I know had to decide how to navigate a situation where there's a bad actor and you have to work around them.
But I appreciate, I appreciate that.
So she, Claire's like, what is happening? She's like trying to have this group and she's like trying to do this thing. I could just, I just see it because I've seen people do this. It's like the well meaning like non profit thing. If we can just get these people together and we can like build a community and yada yada. But she said the sheer audacity of the allegation shocked me. My legal experience may have been limited to years of an anonymous document review. Working for now disgraced federal judge and serving as a legal outreach director at uama. That's her job. But surely no judge would have the nerve to do what Rhonda was saying. What I do is, look, I'm gonna. I appreciate her naivete, but she's a young one. She's a young one.
She not yet at a big age.
So the note is I found the shock factor of behavior like those in power is part of the reason the behavior continues. It's implausible or unbelievable to many.
Leave that right there. Moving on.
So she's in this group and then she is.
I don't know. I highlighted this and I'll figure out right now because there's a note. But she was talking about a woman named Rhonda and she said she'd just as easily cut you up as kiss you. So I was shocked to see your chin tremble for a second.
Actually, I know what I think now, but I don't. I'm interested to see what the notes said. Actually.
[00:16:39] Speaker B: Let's.
[00:16:39] Speaker A: Let's try it. The reason I think I would have highlighted it is because I would have wanted to point out the juxtaposition of the society we live in that always sees black women as tough and hard and resilient. But underneath, that is not necessarily true.
Let's see what I wrote.
Oh. Whenever I've met women like this in life, I've always thought about them as really tough. After seeing a woman like this in a reality show recently, a friend said that she sees just the opposite vulnerability.
Oh, I remember the show. I must have done these notes during co. No, during COVID I remember I watched a show called Couples Therapy. There's four seasons. I think I've seen three. I watched a show called Couples Therapy on Showtime. Showtime doesn't exist anymore, so I don't even know where it is.
About.
I remember during COVID So during. When I got the second shot, not only did my arm hurt, but I was, like, out of commission for the day. Since the first shot only made my arm hurt, I did not realize the second shot was going to put me out of commission. I think I was on the couch for, like, 12 hours, like, in a catatonic state. It was pretty awful. So I think I was texting a friend, and I was like, this Covid. This, like, second round of the COVID shots really put me out. What am I going to do? And she's like, watch Couples Therapy.
So I believe I watched the first season. There's this woman there, and I don't want to mischaracterize it, but my best recollection is there's a woman there. I believe she's Puerto Rican.
And she is, like, spends a lot of time in this, like. In these, like, like, reality show therapy sessions, talking tough and being tough.
And I really appreciated that she was, like, holding her boundaries and, like, being really, like, outspoken in what she wanted.
And then, like, afterwards, I'm texting my friend. I'm like, I really enjoyed the show. You know, yada. We discussed characters, the characters as portrayed and edited in this reality show.
And she said to me, well, that's interesting that you see her as tough. She's like. I see her as really vulnerable with, like, a sheen on top to try to protect the vulnerability.
And I had to pause and reflect because I do think what she said is true. And I was too busy being wowed by the veneer to see what was underneath, which is why attorneys are not qualified for therapy.
Moving on.
Because I didn't see that. I don't know. That's not my thing. Moving on. So at the end of the chapter, basically, this is the book takes place. I think in 2003, she opens her flip phone, and she's got an emergency message from her ex, who's named Darius, and her son's actually named Darius Gaines Jr. Or whatever. She hates the name. I'm sure that's in the book somewhere.
But because she calls her son Luke, maybe it's his middle name. I'd have to really think about that. I.
I probably did it because I knew a lot of women of my grandmother's and mother's generation who named their kids whatever their husband's name was, Junior, but they hated the name. And from the moment that child was born, called them by a different name.
But that's probably why I included it. I just. It was always intriguing that that kind of thing happened. Moving on. So we're in chapter four now, and this is the first chapter with Miles Siegel. So he's the third point of view character in this book.
So Miles is.
Well, as you'll learn, I think at this point, he's an assistant US Attorney and living his life in Cleveland. I believe he's from Philadelphia. So it's September 21, 2003, and Miles is on the phone with his parents.
And his parents, he's. Okay, this is before video.
So he's imagining what they're like sitting in their house, which he says is all leather, which kind of makes me laugh. He said my parents has to be summed up in two words. Animal, hide. So he's on the phone with his parents, and he's imagining them in their environment, and they've called him to see how he's doing. But in reality, they're just talking to each other with him as, like, the conduit on the phone, which I just. I did it because I. I found it kind of humorous when I was in college, and people would call their families, and the family dynamic, like, just took right over in the phone call. And often this is when we had.
There were no cell phones when I was in school, and for the first year or two, there was only a payphone in the hallway.
And so you could listen to people's conversations or their side of the conversation. And it was always intriguing to me that often they weren't talking or they were serving the same role they had in the family as peacemaker or whatever. So it wasn't sort of a call of like, how are you doing in college? And how are your classes? Or whatever. And it became this sort of conversation where it just became like, the family, like, talking. I'm not saying it's bad or good. I Just found it kind of interesting.
So basically his family sort of asking about Claire. So at this point we learned that Miles is dating Claire he's been seeing for a few months. But he's hesitant because he's not ready to take on a ready made family because she's a single mom. Getting a lot of thoughts about that, but it is what it is.
And well, so his mother is like, is she not good in bed? Because his mother doesn't apparently have appropriate boundaries.
So she's talking about his parents and he's just like trying to get off the call because he knows that they want him to settle down and he doesn't want to have the conversations about this woman or any other woman or dating and all of that.
So while he's on the thing, he gets a. He's on. He's on a landline and he gets a call waiting beep.
I don't even know if those exist anymore. Like, my phone seems to show something else going on.
But he switched over. But her mother.
Before my mother could launch into our usual diatribe about the inherent rudeness of call waiting, I did hate call waiting. That's. That, that, that's a me thing. I don't know about the character. That's a me thing.
Because people do the beep and then they would click off, right? Like you're like doc. And they would click right off and then they'd have to decide whether you were more important or the other call was more important.
So she, he answers the phone, it's Claire.
And he's surprised because, like, he had to, like, because it's like he's not expecting a.
From a Sunday on her on a Sunday, to be honest. Like, he knows she's with her son, so he's sort of, you know, doing his thing.
And he gets off with his parents who are back in conversation and tries to attend to Claire.
So all he figures out is that she's at the hospital.
And he's like freaking out because he has no idea like, what's going on.
So when he finally like gets to the hospital, he's like, what happens? Because she looks, you know, fine, ish. She's crying but not like bleeding and injured. And he said, oh, is it Luke? And he said he's bewildered by tears because he never knew what to do with women cried. I never know why men don't know what to do because women don't have this problem.
So he says, it felt someone awkward. I put my arm around clear shoulders and answered my question. She Nodded. And he's like, is her father Darius here? So, I mean, I am trying to embody the discomfort that Miles feels about dating somebody with a baby and then also, like, navigating this, like, baby daddy thing.
And Miles in this book, he's black, but he comes from, like, a family that's fairly, like, well off.
So at some point I talk about his mother's job and his dad jobs, and they're all doing great, great.
And so while he and Claire have a similar education, they are not. Let me just say this. I'm going to be honest. Like, they're not in the same class. Like, I would normally would not talk about classes. She. They're not in the same class. So he has like, these professional parents who have money. She has parents who are like, her mom's a teacher or dad's a teacher. Forget what the other one does. So they too have like, professional jobs, which were like government jobs, which is like, like everything good, roof over your head, able to buy a house and all of that, but not necessarily the same prestige. I guess it's just like somebody. I'm trying to think in la, like, you know, like, one person's parents are like a movie direct, like movie director or something, and then the other person's parents, like, work for the post office.
And so the kids are like, you know, have the same, like, level of education, especially like if they meet in college or something, but their backgrounds are different.
And I would say this, and maybe this comes up later. Claire acutely feels this as well, because she was fully expecting to go to law school and do better than her parents and be in the Miles like class. And instead she's in the class of people that she was trying to avoid, which is unmarried black women, mothers who are heavily stigmatized in today's society.
So anyway, we're at the hospital and she's freaking out because Luke, her son, Darius Gaines Jr. Whatever, broke his arm.
And we find out that Darius has a girl or girlfriend, a woman that he's spend time with. And he left Darius or Luke, he left Luke with this woman without, like, mentioning this to Claire. And I guess if nothing had happened, she would never have known.
But now, you know, Darius wasn't there, Luke broke his arm, and she's like, freaking out because she is now convinced that her baby daddy cannot care for her child.
And she's looking at that in one sense and then looking at Miles in another sense. And there's a huge juxtaposition between these two men in her lives.
So.
And Then she also walks in on Miles, and he's, like, doing.
He's drawing on a cast. He's drawing SpongeBob SquarePants characters or rugrats characters. I'm so sorry. I probably had to look this up. I don't know who these are.
So, anyway, he's putting it on the cast. And so you get this sense of Claire walking in, knowing that she wants better and Miles represents better.
And Miles looking at this because she says to him, I think you'd make a really great dag. Not like this trifling Darius.
And he's like, I like her. He's like, I wanted to go to dinner, a movie, hookup, and then moving myself up, back to career ladder, but I wasn't ready to be anyone's daddy. I couldn't tell her that now, but I knew I shouldn't wait long. So, of course, he's put himself in the good guy bond where he knows that he doesn't want to be with her and he thinks that the time is not convenient and therefore would be happy to, well, to be honest, waste her time. But since I like him as a character, maybe I won't say it that way, but that's true. He's more than willing to waste her time while he figures out a nice way to back out of their arrangement because he realizes that it is not for him.
And I like all I can do now is Miles is fine as a character for the most part. Maybe. I don't know. We'll see later. But I can only feel for Claire because on the one hand, she's in a world that she didn't want to be in, and she's found I don't make him like a life raft or something, but she's found a person, she thinks, who could love her and build the kind of life that she always imagined for herself. And he's already got a foot out the door.
So, again, I'm not running through the chapters like I thought, but we are up to chapter four in Ransomed, and you're getting a good lay of the land. So, you know, now that there's a new judge, Casey has, like, a great referral, so she may be in front of him.
Claire knows there's a whisper network about this guy. And then she's also facing an ex she feels is negligent in the care of her son and a current boyfriend. She hopes that's going to save them all.
Sa.
Sam.
