Hey, humans. How's it going? Susan Ruth here.
Thanks for listening to another episode
of Hey, Human podcast.
This is episode 451,
and my guest is Anna Rose Moore.
She's an actress, writer, director, prison activist, and
documentarian.
I met her recently, and we chatted about
her project that she's been working on over
the last couple years and it exposes the
horrific abuses inside of women's prison.
It's a trigger warning on this one for
sexual assault and abuse and so take care
of yourself as you listen.
Check out heyhumanpodcast.com
for links and to learn more about my
guests and the show. Rate, review, and subscribe
to Hey Human Podcast on Apple, iHeart, and
Spotify podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts.
And thank you for listening. Be well.
Be loved.
Take care of yourself, and here we go.
Anna Rose Moore, welcome to Hey Human. Thank
you so much, Susan.
I
am so appreciative
to be here. I'm so, so grateful.
It was my pleasure. We met through Vanessa
at Charles' birthday. No. That was such a
special night. I just felt like
I was connecting with so many wonderful, beautiful
people, and,
I was I felt like I was on
a high after that night where we met.
Yeah. Everybody was really neat. I I
am never surprised at the quality of human
I meet through Charles and now through Vanessa.
She as well has really great friends. Yeah.
Yeah. Yeah.
Tell me a little bit about yourself,
and where did you grow up? What shaped
you as a person and lead you toward
what we're really gonna talk about, the meat
of the conversation?
I grew up in Anaberg, Michigan.
It's a college town, as a lot of
people know, and it's very
liberal. And there's, like, lots of because of
the university,
there's a lot lot of different cultural influences.
It's a really unique
place to grow up, and I am
so grateful that I had that childhood. I
really, really loved
getting to
being from there, and the people
it's such an amazing community, and people are
engaged in art and activism,
and it really is a place that, like,
everybody
is hooked into the community.
And that's not something you get everywhere.
It was just it was just such a
special, magical experience to
grow up there. I really liked it. I'm
also
Jewish.
That is an identity
that I hold, and being
from
Ann Arbor, while it didn't have
a small Jewish population, it wasn't like being
from
Western,
Michigan, where it's like a bigger
community. I didn't, I always felt like an
outsider,
if that kind of makes sense. I always
felt a little
different. Raised vegetarian, so just like different things
that, you know, maybe now they don't, they
don't sound weird being from LA, living in
LA,
but I think my experience growing up was
like, I'm a little different. And like,
how
I don't know how people respond to me
or where my place is in the world.
Dad moved away
to Minnesota when I was five, and so
every about every other month, I would get
on a plane by myself
and,
and fly to Minnesota.
So that was also
something
that really shaped me was I had
four families
and four really wonderful, loving parents that are
just my best friends. And he moved to
be with my stepmom in Minnesota. And
so kind of
being able to feel
that I had a place and a sense
of belonging in all of these places and
maybe being highly adaptable was something, a skill
that I learned from that experience. And
adaptable was something, a skill that I learned
from that experience of having to, you
know, join new families around the age of,
like, five and six.
So they were never married. They were on
and off until after about a maybe a
year and a half, but they never lived
together. So I don't really have that experience
of having two parents in the same house.
Were you raised culturally Jewish or religiously Jewish
or both?
Both. But I would say that it wasn't,
like, when we say religious and I are
you Jewish?
I I am. Yeah. Well, my father's Jewish,
but my mother's Episcopalian,
so technically not Jewish. But
historically in the family was raised
observing
Jewish tradition as well as Christian
tradition.
Christmas,
Monica,
yada yada. Yes.
Yes.
I did a lot of that too. So
my my dad and mom are Jewish,
and, my stepdad's Jewish. My stepmom is not.
So that was really exciting for me when
she came into the family and I finally
got to start dating Christmas.
Yes. So it was like, I was like,
okay. All right. You'll, you can stay. And
when you said, was it religious?
I think
I don't want to speak for
the Jews as a whole, but I think
a lot of Jews that are not
Orthodox
would say like
that even if you are observant,
they don't really, we don't really feel religious,
so I
was raised
relatively
observant
by my mom. My stepdad was is Jewish,
but really kind of
I didn't want anything to do with religion.
We were observant,
but it never
it was never about, like, what you believe.
It's it was more about rituals
and culture and heritage and finding that through
celebrating holidays.
Right. Growing up, you were had this
external understanding, and it sounds like internal understanding
of a of a wide
variety of humanity.
Is that what drew you
toward activism? I I suppose is a good
word for it, for prison reform and what
goes on in prisons.
Absolutely.
So
my my mom and stepdad
are activists, have always been activists, and my
stepdad,
he's a civil rights attorney.
And so their worlds,
growing up, I was they weren't the type
of parents that would hang out with your
friend's parents.
They really had their own community, and that
was a lot of, like, leftist
lawyers. There's something called the National Lawyers Guild,
which
started
in an answer to the National Bar Association,
which didn't allow
Jews and blacks.
There was a time when it was like,
they're very hard or prohibitive
for
Jewish people or black people to enter the
American Bar
Association. So a group of people created the
National
Lawyers Guild and, it's a group of progressive
lawyers.
Probably every lawyer that is a part of
the ACLU is in
the National Lawyers Guild. That's how my parents,
my my stepdad and mom
met each other, which was actually happened before
I was born. My stepdad,
though he wasn't with my mom at the
time, was at the hospital the day I
was born. Oh, that's interesting.
Yeah. Yeah. But their
activism was just like always going on
in, in my home, outside of my home,
people were always living with us,
strangers,
friends, family, activists,
like, people engaged in different things, those morals
and values kind of permeated every aspect
of
of whatever we did and who we were
in conversation with and where we were going.
Like,
for example,
when I was eight years old, my parents
flew me flew us all to Washington, DC
to March for gay marriage rights,
and this was just like this this was
a very normal thing. That's a great upbringing.
That's so wonderful.
Yeah. And really, I I kind of realize
now that it it's probably not a very
super typical, so I am I'm very grateful
for it. And that was kind of the
lens that I saw
everything in. I was an I was an
actor. Like, when I was four, I decided
I wanna be an actor. Like, this is
this is, like,
this is my plan for myself.
And my and they were very supportive. I
don't know why, but they were very supportive
of that.
And
as
I kind of came into myself,
I
went to University of Michigan, then I went
to New York and studied, and then I
came to,
and then I came to LA
to
pursue acting, and it just was not
it wasn't going the way that I thought
it was gonna go. The mission I had
in my head
turns out not only is it hard to
get
auditions, it's hard to get roles, and not
only is it like, when you do get
the roles that what I was
getting at the time, they weren't fulfilling
and they were
for
it felt like a version and this is
to go back to kind of always feeling
like a little bit of an outsider it
felt like I was trying to be the
version
of what I thought
Hollywood, the director, the script wanted me to
be, and I never felt like I fit.
And I think looking back, you know, I
call myself a recovering actor.
I started
well, first I became a pop singer for
a bit.
So it took a left turn because I
wanted to perform and I wasn't getting the
opportunity. And I have a background in in
vocal performance and it just
met a producer and
there were some pop tracks and I realized
pretty quickly that I could write pop songs
fairly easily. So
I started doing that and was, like, doing
all the gay clubs in West Hollywood
and
music videos and had a little group.
It was a lot of fun. I made
no money and actually
got scammed out of money.
That's about right. Yeah. Welcome to the music
industry. Yeah.
Tale as old as time. Tale as old
as time. So,
yeah, the music industry is brutal. It's brutal.
Went back to acting and then started getting
work
and more and more, and that was exciting.
And then I wanted to beef up my
reel,
so I wrote a short film with my
friend so that we could get
more content for our auditioning reels.
And I joined a writers group
to workshop this short film. And when I
got there and, like, the first day, and
I shared
I shared my script and people read it
out loud, and I was just like, oh,
this,
this is it. This is the thing. Like,
I could have control over my own storytelling.
I
am not a pawn
in somebody else's vision.
I have agency
and I'm valued for something other than the
exterior.
And that was a big turning point for
me.
And, but I
thought that
and this happens to still be true that
I
was gonna go into writing
as
a comedy writer. That was who I was
gonna be. I was excited to do comedy,
but then we had this challenge to
write a feature film in a month, but
you had months to prepare for it. This
is in the writers group.
And this thing kept nagging me, this story,
and I couldn't let go of it.
And
what it was
was a case that my stepdad had in
the nineties. It was a class action lawsuit
where 800 women prisoners sued the state of
Michigan
because they were being sexually abused and raped
by their prison guards on a daily basis.
And the state,
in order to get the lawsuit dismissed,
got the legislature to change
the civil rights law regarding what a human
is in Michigan,
saying that under this new law, you are
that prisoners
are no longer human and therefore
not entitled to human rights.
Therefore you cannot bring this lawsuit under a
human rights violation.
Wow. So these women
yes. It's like, it was already bad, but
then it became so much worse.
And
these women and their lawyers
had to fight for thirteen years, all while
most of them are still behind bars, getting
retaliated against for being a part of this
lawsuit. They finally appealed this to the Supreme
Court of Michigan,
where it was held
for five years within this thirteen year time
span. In 02/2008,
the Supreme Court ruled in their favor and
reversed this law, which gave them their day
in court. They got their day in court
and they won the largest settlement in Michigan
history,
removed all men from contact positions.
So this doesn't happen anymore in Michigan.
So this was something that
you know, happened for, it went on for
thirteen years. This was the backdrop of my
childhood
pretty much the whole time growing up. So
I knew about this case and I knew
it was important and I knew it was
a landmark victory,
but I didn't know anything.
And when I started
digging and doing the research,
I I mean, I would spend days and
days just
sobbing
and pouring over research or interviewing people, and
it was so painful as just somebody learning
about it, let alone those who experienced it.
So this was something that I wanted to
do, and I went to my mentor and
I said, I think I want to write
this. And he's like, you've never written a
screen guide of a feature film. Why don't
you start with something simple, like a rom
com, something that doesn't have to involve research?
And I think I didn't really,
there was a part of me that, you
know, maybe
at that time,
like didn't,
I hadn't been valued for my intellect
since maybe college. And
I don't know if I really believed in
myself, but there was this thing that said,
I just have to do this. I have
to do this. And I was going back
and forth
and I was actually
on a plane next to Ed Solomon,
who wrote Laverne and Shirley and Men in
Black.
And I didn't know who he was, but
I ended up telling him like, I was
thinking about doing this, and I didn't I
had no business writing this. I'd never written
before. And he was just like, you have
to do it. Do this. Don't do the
rom com.
So literally a day after that, I was
like, okay, I'm gonna do this.
And it was the hardest thing I'd ever
done. And
I wrote this feature film
and
I had no ego because this is not
what my training was in. So I would
get notes and I would just do another
draft and another draft. And
that script
won the GLAAD list and the and the
Athena list, and then it was optioned by
Ben Stiller's company,
Red Hour Films, subsequently went on to be
optioned by re optioned at Trevor Noah's company,
Day Zero.
Currently, actually have it have the script back
because it went into many forms and COVID
happened, and it never went out.
So I have a wonderful I can't tell
you who, but I have a wonderful actress
attached right now. But because it went through
so many
ups and downs and almost for so many
years, I decided that I needed to make
the documentary
of
of get this story out.
So the film
is a story about the case, but the
documentary
is the story
about the process
of
your experience making the movie, or how did
where did those two things
align?
No. The the documentary
is is about the case and the trial
and all of the people that were impacted
and and lived it. The film follows
is also about the the case and the
trial, but
follows a specific
path. You know, a a film could only
be so long and, it has to include,
you know, tr traditional story beats and character
arcs. So I wasn't able to tell
the full, full story
in a feature.
So by doing this, I'm able to give
voice to the people that lived it. But
going back a little bit, when I first
started
researching and writing
the feature, it was like the first time
ever in my life where I felt like
there was a confluence
of
every,
all of my lived experiences
and my identity, like,
because I was finally doing something
impactful and I think I felt
like my art, my
being an actress and a singer, like,
you know, it felt so minimal compared to
what my parents were doing
and had done and like,
just didn't feel
that, like at least the types of projects
that I was involved
in, the storytelling,
you know, when you're auditioning for like Bikini
Girl number two,
it's hard to feel
a deep sense of purpose.
So
this is the first time that I felt
purpose.
The acting industry
really
yeah. It was brutal. It was brutal.
And I I actually
one of the last films I did, I
I got a role in a Liam a
Liam Neeson movie, and I had a whole
scene, just me and him.
I flew to Atlanta. We shot the thing.
He was a dream. It was so sweet.
And then it got cut.
And it was just like, okay.
That really, that was one of, one of
the many things that filled the deal. And
I was just like, I'm just going to
be focusing on writing
and, and then over COVID. And so I,
so I've been writing, I have been writing
primarily comedies, but this was the first feature
that I wrote.
And then over the pandemic, I had two
babies. After my second was born, I was
feeling this
loss of identity
and lack of control.
And I had never admitted to anybody
that I wanted to direct.
I think that was the same thing with
writing. I just like, I didn't see a
lot of examples
of
female
writers on the scripts that I was given.
There's just not that many. That's why it's
so important for women to do it. Even
I had
preconceived notions
of I I think I had bias against
myself
to enter into writing to begin with, and
then directing is, like, a whole other level
because
you just have to
bring so much confidence
to the space, and you can't really have
any self doubt when you're when you're doing
that. And I so I never admitted that
I wanted to direct,
and I called up a producer friend of
mine,
and I said I kinda, like, whispered it
to her, like, I think I wanna direct.
And I have this short film
that is,
a part of a broader film that I
wrote.
What do you think? And so she was
like, send me the pages. And she got
back to me and she was like, this
is the funniest 10 pages I've ever read.
Like, let's do it. And we didn't know
how we were gonna do it, how we
were gonna raise the money,
who was gonna shoot it, whatever. And I
said, let's put a date on the books
two months out,
and we
everything came together. It was, like, the most
magical experience ever. Everything came together. It was
so empowering. Charles Pappert, our mutual friend,
was the director of photography,
and we just started this we met through
this project and started this beautiful friendship, but
we were so in sync. Charles, for those
who don't know, is,
shot all of Key and Peele. He worked
on Crazy Ex Girlfriend Mindy Project and got
a start in Steadicam
on The West Wing and,
American History X.
He's just like this
Yeah. He's great. He's a great guy. Industry
titan and he's so smart. And so having
somebody like that who just
has so much more experience than I do,
being able to be on a team with
him and know and know that he's not
gonna let me fail. We can do this
together. And we were just, like, very much
had the same sensibilities of how we wanted
the project to go.
And one other part about that
is, there was a sex scene
in that short that I shot, and I
actually acted in this short.
And I brought on an intimacy coordinator. I
really wanted to do everything right, everything that
wasn't done when I was
in the acting space.
And I had a wonderful costar who was
just
so easy and brilliant to work with.
But
I remember
getting to,
first of all,
decide
what I wanted to wear for the sex
scene. I got I kept a bra on.
I had just had a baby drop a
few months prior, so, you know, I got
to decide what the shot was going to
be and how much of my body was
going to show. And in the middle of
the scene, getting to
yell cut
and work with my scene partner
was the most empowering experience of my life.
So coming off of that project,
I could start to see myself differently
and start to, to
embody this new person that I was becoming.
I no longer like,
trying
to
play the role of arm candy in something.
I'm now directing. So who is this person?
Because of that experience,
I was able
to
start to envision
the idea of directing the documentary
of that feature that we talked about. Because
for so many years,
people I would tell people about the story
and they would say, that should be a
documentary. You should make a documentary. And I
was like, no, no, no. I'm not a
documentarian.
I like, I'm just gonna do it this
way. This is the path sometimes it takes
seeing to to
seeing is believing and stepping into that role
and starting to see myself differently.
I
was able to then see that I could
I could make a documentary.
It's interesting to me
your story of finding your voice and where
you find your comfort
and having people around you believing in you
and giving you that confidence
till you could believe in yourself, which is
it's it's an important
I think it's important that people around us
lift us up until we figure out how
to lift ourselves up. Right? That's part of
growing up. It's part of the process. Absolutely.
Did you interview
the people who were still incarcerated, or had
you interviewed people that had been in that
lawsuit and then gotten out of prison? My
my stepdad was, co lead counsel, and the
other lead counsel on the case is this
incredible attorney named Deborah LaBelle.
And
she had two trials before they reached a
settlement. They did two trials back to back,
each one existing of 10
plaintiffs.
Many of them were incarcerated at the time
and some of them were out.
And she
said that she vowed
to her clients that
she wouldn't stop for as long as it
took, and she would make sure that every
single one of them was released.
And
about four months ago,
the last person
was released.
My experience with talking to people who are
incarcerated,
and, you know, it's been a a small
handful, but
there is that sense that they have of
not only extraordinary boredom, but feeling as if
they don't have a voice and struggling to
find that,
especially those who have been abused, which have
been the focus of the ones I've spoken
with for the most part. People who have
suffered
at the hands of
guards.
And it's
Yeah. It is
a lot.
It's an everyday occurrence,
and it's an there's more of the bad
guys, I think, in there,
on the side of the guards, on the
good guys' side
than not. At least that's what it seems
like
with all the research I've done and the
people I've spoken with, including
ex wardens and several lawyers. It's a problem.
I talk to a lot of people who
are
incarcerated now who
have, you know, their their cell phones
inside,
which I know you're not supposed to have.
So Wow. Yeah.
I mean, they get sold those phones by
the guards who then raid them and steal
the phones back and then sell them to
them again. It's a huge moneymaker for the
guards.
You know what I mean? Like, there's a
lot. It's just bad. And I don't I
don't wanna dominate this conversation because it's about
you. But that being
said, when you talk to these women
Yeah. And you are helping them find their
voice, and I just I think it's an
interesting parallel
of those who have helped you find yours.
Mhmm. And then in turn,
you could have you could have taken that
newfound
understanding of yourself and done anything. But what
did you do? You turned toward those
who didn't have a voice and helped them
find their voice. That's massive.
Working on this project is
the the first time and continues to be
the thing that is like this I feel
like this is what I was quite here
for.
And I've always
I've been working on this project,
not the documentary, but I started writing this
about twelve years ago. So
this has been
this big part of my life that is
just like, like, I I know I was
put here to get this story out, and,
you know, I cannot wait for Hollywood to
figure out this version of it so I
can go I can go make it. But
to your point about talking to
people who
have experienced so much trauma
and so much pain and are literally
the most marginalized
of our society,
it's really difficult. And
my intention in this process, and I'm about
a third of the way through filming this
documentary
half the way,
I'm trying to do my best to approach
this with the utmost care and knowing that
I'm gonna make missteps. This is not something
I've done before.
I am not
a psychologist.
I am not
I'm trying to educate myself through this process
about trauma. I've been
in contact with one of the women who
was a plaintiff in this case. We've been
having a lot of discussions
because there are people who are on the
fence. There are people who are really
enthusiastic about being part
of this documentary
and wanting to share their story and take
ownership, and there are people
who, you know, have been burned over and
over and over again and understandably
are on the fence or don't wanna be
part of this. And I understand that too,
and I'm
and and they're also trying to help me
understand,
like, how trauma exists in the in the
body for a lifetime
given what you've been through.
During my interviews
with
the the former plaintiffs,
I
have brought in and will continue to bring
in trauma counselors.
We will
pay to bring in a support person for
for
a support person for you of your choosing.
If you don't wanna bring your own
therapist or counselor,
there will be one
there. And
I also
because everything was recorded on,
because there's a video recording of the entire
trial
of all of their testimony,
where they painstakingly
went through every single thing that happened to
them, which is really awful,
I, approaching this,
I decided that I don't wanna ask anybody
to relive
anything
specifically,
unless they want to, but it's not going
to be a question of mine because I
already have that video footage. Did you interview
any of the defense
or any of the people who
have been
convicted of the crime? And are they
incarcerated now?
There were a few who got convicted. I
think a lot of them are out. I
think a lot of them weren't convicted.
In my experience, they get placed into other
prisons to do the same thing over again
or given promotions.
Oh my god. No. It's really it's
it went I mean,
like I said, like, this doesn't happen in
Michigan women's prisons
anymore, but this still happens. Every day. And
that's why it's important to tell this story
because these women,
they're the heroes of this story. They decided
to stay with this case
despite retaliation
for years and years and years when nobody
was believing them.
And they were told nobody's gonna ever believe
you. You're gonna go through this whole trial,
a six week trial.
You're gonna have to relive every traumatic moment,
not just in prison, but before you got
to prison, or what happened to you before.
And then you're gonna be on the sand,
and people are gonna ask what you did
to get into prison to try to paint
you as
as as the sum total of that
experience. Human, I think, is the To dehumanize.
Dehumanize. There's this conception that, well, you shouldn't
do crimes in order to get in prison,
but prison is filled with bright, articulate people.
It's filled with people who are uneducated
and,
did not see another option other than to
do criminal activity in order to try and
survive.
There are plenty of women who are incarcerated
because they fought back against their abuser.
Yes.
There's a lot of these things.
And the majority of women are actually
imprisoned for crimes that
as accessories to crimes that men committed.
And,
and, you know, some of these women,
it,
like, they should have never been in prison
to begin with. Given their, given their crimes,
like the crimes, like, should never, if they
had a better lawyer, if they,
you know, if if they were from an
affluent family,
they would never have gone to prison, but
they weren't. Right. Right. The the central thesis
was
we sentence people to prison in this country.
We do not sentence people to be raped.
That is right.
Or beaten or whatever other kinds of tortures
that will befall them. And that's that's a
whole other part to the documentary
of, like like, this system is so broken.
What are we doing? What are we how
are we serving the general population
to put people away and then torture them
so so that by the time they come
out, they have such compounding trauma
that they can't live productive lives.
Or they, or even if they aren't like
many of these women went on to get
multiple master's degrees and are doing so, so
well, but you still have this background of
trauma
that you that it's very, very difficult unless
you have
so many tools
to get out from under. So did you
and did you not get a chance to
talk to any of the defendants?
So they weren't the defendants were the state
of Michigan.
The warden, I I called her. I talked
to her on the phone, and she had
no interest in talking to me. Female warden.
The female warden. Yes. Oh, and the female
warden,
she is a very fascinating
person.
She was also threatened by the guards,
ended up getting a gun
to protect herself. She was I think during
the trial when she was gonna go testify,
on behalf of the state,
she was on her way home and was
run off the highway
by one of the guards. So
she was very much complicit in that she
turned a blind eye and she knew what
was going on and she did nothing, nothing,
nothing.
At the same time,
she's the warden and
she has a gun to protect herself from
the guards that are raping these women. I
cold called the
attorney for the state
who was in
every
single day of
two trials and all of the deposition videos
that I have.
And he said,
you know,
I wasn't really that involved in that
lawsuit.
I just mostly filed some paperwork. And it
was just like, really? Because
I'm watching
eighty five hours of footage of you.
So it's interesting,
either it was a lie or in order
to
protect himself emotionally, his brain
shut out some things,
some bad things.
I'm gonna keep trying
to get some of these people
on the phone,
in person for interviews.
You know? It's it's it's shameful.
Have you felt
in jeopardy at all? Has anyone threatened you?
No.
No. Well, no. You know, it's been
so many years.
I I know that the attorneys were especially
the female attorney, she was threatened during the
during the trial a number of times. Her
family was threatened.
Her car was keyed.
She was
molested
during a pat down on the way into
the prison.
She and my stepdad were
put into a cell,
and they locked the cell for hours just
as a joke, or to intimidation,
maybe.
There's so many interesting
pieces
to this story.
One
that I was excited to talk about was
the judge. This trial
completely changed his life and what he did
thereafter.
It was such a painful experience for everyone
involved.
Obviously the most painful for the women that
had to relive,
come and relive their experiences and hear that,
oh, I'm not the only one. This is
like,
I'm now having to hear my friends' experiences.
But
the judge
was
just so changed by this,
I think politically
and spiritually.
And he
said he would come home
he couldn't show emotion.
And he would come home at night and
I got to interview his wife as well.
And he would curl up into a fetal
position
and cry until he fell asleep and she
had to hold him every night of the
trial.
And
after the trial, he said, this
there has to be a better way. We
cannot conduct
our legal system
like this.
So he started to
seek out and educate himself on indigenous practices
with as it pertains to
trials and courts. And so he became friendly
with some tribal court justices
in Michigan
and started learning about the circle.
It wouldn't necessarily be the trial that took
place during the Neal versus MDOC,
the Michigan Department of Corrections, but
for, like, for those women who got to
prison in the first place,
it would
or men or whoever commits a crime, you
come to a healing circle in a courtroom.
And
you have
the person who committed the alleged crime and
the victim,
and you have a meal together
before,
and you're able to go around and say
how this affected you, how
it impacted you,
and what you
want to do going forward.
And you're both able the person who committed
the crime is able to bring people from
their life to
talk about who they are in their community
and what the loss of them would do
to their community
and how they're going to support this person
in doing better
and not
committing further crimes.
It's very interesting. His courtroom now, we actually
filmed the day before he retired, so everything
came down, like the night
the second our cameras stopped rolling. Everything came
down off the walls, but
for the last
fifteen years, this courtroom has been now set
up as a circle. There's no hierarchy. He's
not sitting
up where the judge sits. There's no box
for a test testimony.
Everybody's equal and
everybody
comes and and sees each other as humans.
Because he he saw this experience
and this way of dehumanizing
people in the court system,
and he wanted a change. So
another thing that came out of the determination
of
these women, these plaintiffs,
to come and tell their story and to
go through that horror,
it changed
something,
at least for this person and everybody who
came through his court afterwards. That's a big
deal. Yeah. Yeah. It's a big deal. They,
they, they changed
everything
for women prisoners in Michigan that came after
them.
And they changed a fundamental part of this
courthouse.
Knowing the story and being intimate with it
and being in so much awe of
the women that stood up for themselves and
for other women and for their lawyers. It's
so
important
that I help get this out there so
that it not only
can
motivate
or inspire
another
woman,
incarcerated
woman or formerly incarcerated woman or man, but
anyone who is feeling like they don't have
a voice
and they are marginalized and there is nobody's
gonna believe them,
These
people
did it, and it took
a long time,
but it was a watershed moment and a
landmark case. And it was,
in my opinion, one of the most major
civil rights victories
in our court system
in this century.
Tell people how they can watch
the documentary. How what's your process of finishing
it up?
Tell them how to find you, to follow
your career and what you're doing. Yeah.
AnnaRose official,
on Instagram. That's probably the easiest way.
You can you can watch my my short
film
there.
It's a comedy, so
it's literally
think about this tone and go to the
opposite.
But the documentary, I'll be updating my page
with information about the documentary.
We'll be going back to Michigan and doing
some more interviews. I think it's gonna be
a process,
the biggest process we're gonna be fundraising
soon. I have a sizzle reel that will
come out
probably in the next couple weeks or month,
and I'm not sure if I'm gonna share
that publicly.
It's more for for internal fundraising.
We we have to raise a little bit
more money.
And then the biggest chance challenge is going
to be working with
the people who lived this experience and bringing
them into the process
in a way where, you know, they
feel
respected
and where they feel like they have control
over the way that they're they wanna tell
their story, and those who don't wanna participate,
you know, I I
will do everything in my power to make
sure that they are not a part of
the documentary,
because I don't want to for some people,
they
not for many people, this even though it
is an overwhelmingly
positive story, this is justice. This is real,
real justice that happened, which doesn't happen often.
It's still
part of a story that
has so much pain.
In my research
currently about trauma. Just being reminded of that
can can sometimes be really harmful.
It's a dance.
I've had to get a therapist
to kinda help me navigate this too. It's
pretty emotional and
hard. Have you ever heard of a sin
eater? No. Tell me.
The concept of a sin eater is,
I'm not sure which
culture started it. It it it's probably Gaelic
or something. It seems like a Gaelic thing,
but I might be wrong. But the idea
is that there's a person that is brought
in
to the bedside of someone who's dying,
and they
basically eat the sin, absolve the the person
of
whatever might keep them from their great reward,
as you might say.
They're called sin eaters. And in a way
Wow.
You're you're like a
you've, like, transmuted
the sin of the violence against women into
something
more powerful.
It's into
the soul, the the the zeitgeist soul.
Because I think that through healing of others,
we too are healed.
And
when there's such great atrocities
happening
en masse,
it ripples out energetically.
Whatever
exists around the prisons where these things happen
or in the families or it's all it's
exponential.
And so by telling this story
and in some way releasing
this pain
and allowing others to carry some of the
burden of it, the viewers.
Right?
I think that it is it is creates
a really healing
thing.
Thank you for teaching me about that. I
that true it's my sincere
hope that
the only reason I want to put this
out there and to elevate these voices
is
for good and to
inspire, like I said, anyone
to rise up against what
those that are oppressing them and also to
give light to
you and I know our prison system is
so fucked up on so many levels. And
I think
when we
typically think about an incarcerated person,
the picture that a lot of people have
in their head is of a man.
And which is fine.
Men are incarcerated and men don't deserve any
of the atrocities committed against them in prisons.
But
I think
what if collectively we were thinking about these
mothers
getting taken, these daughters, these sisters who are
being
raped by men in
prisons and, and watched. They're not just that,
but
they have
no sense of
self or privacy when they're being dressed, when
they're dressing and undressing, they're being watched by
men. They were in Michigan
up until this case happened.
When they're showering, they're being watched
by men.
Open door.
Men had to
do 20 pat downs a day. They got
to decide who and when they could break
you up in the middle of the night.
And there was no training for these pop
bombs, so they were just
groping,
putting their fingers in places that they should
not have been.
Such a deeply traumatic
environment.
And
I'm just hoping
to add another layer to how we collectively
understand what is going on in our prison
system. You're bearing witness, and therefore, we will
bear witness.
When I was interviewing
one of the plaintiffs,
in November in Michigan,
Such an incredibly
strong
person. These
these women, I'm in awe of them, and
I I think, you know, knowing so much
about them and researching them for so long
and getting to interview them,
sometimes I I,
you know, feel like
like I'm knit next to a celebrity.
Because for me, I've been living with this
story for so long,
and I'm intimidated.
But she's still
powerful and just she knows herself so well.
And she said,
After a painful interview
that was so beautifully done,
she said,
I wasn't gonna come today.
I was really debating,
and
I was on the fence, and my daughter
said, my 14 year old daughter said,
mom,
you gotta go tell your story.
She said, I am here because I want
her to know how to stand up for
herself.
I am so proud of what we did.
Nobody thought we were gonna win. Nobody believed
us.
I am so proud.
We changed the system.
So
hearing that
after, after that interview, I was like, okay,
this is, this is I'm on the right
course. This is the right thing. This is
my sign.
Yeah.
I get emotional too.
Oh, it's tough out there. We are in
a crisis of humanity, and it's good to
know that there are still people fighting,
you know, for the right Yeah. For the
right thing and on the right side. I
don't know what the great cosmic plan is,
but I do think there's a reason that
you sat on a plane next to someone
that told you to do a thing, and
that that thing begat another thing, and then
that thing begat another thing. There are no
accidents.
Those women
incarcerated
going through that hell
experienced something that I would not wish on
my worst enemy, and yet because of their
endurance
of that,
they changed everything.
And I can't
maybe that's this little naivete of hoping that
if there is a greater power, which I
believe in,
that Yeah. We suffer on Earth
in order to be of service to our
fellow
human.
Because I can't otherwise make any kind of
sense of it. Why do children and why
do people you know what I mean? I
I don't get there's no other thing.
And I'd like to say God can be
a real dick,
but at the same time, I think it's
more like God gave us free will and
we're we can be a real dick. But
that in our suffering,
good things can still happen. I I choose
to believe that in order to survive
just in general. You know?
I yeah. I I really can relate. I
think,
about a year ago
with everything going on in the world, I
was in a dark place, and I started
that's when I started to
find more spirituality,
which I hadn't really been
open to before.
But,
yeah, I I I agree with you, and
I think,
like, in the current reality of what we're
seeing happen, play out in our country, like,
part of me looking at this story, for
example, and, like, everything that
you uncovered in your work,
talking with people and researching,
like, you and I know how fucked up
the prison system is. Like, our systems right
now are getting fucked up, but things have
been fucked up. They've been fucked up, and
they make people a whole lot of money.
There are certain you know, the prison industrial
complex, the privatization
of our prison
has
created this
just
devil
that feeds on others pain
and is hopeful for recidivism.
That it doesn't want to make people better.
It's turning people into more of a monstrosity
of themselves in in order to ensure that
should
they get out,
they'll be back within no time.
That's the reality. We're taking away so many
vital
community members.
And each
person that you remove, it's like, you know,
each person of the universe,
you remove all of these people and you
just strip these communities
of what they need. Like, you're wondering why
a community
isn't
like, you've taken so many people out of
this community. Fathers were taken.
And that's the other thing too is that,
And mothers.
And mothers, for sure. If the money that
was
invested in drug rehabilitation
and education
I mean, this is also a tale of
us all the time. We know what will
work,
and yet it makes far more money for
certain people to not
make those things happen. And so
here we are.
I think that there is also a sense
of, oh, that happens to them
and not me.
But eventually,
the powers that be run out of them
and will come for the me.
And that's something to be really aware of.
Yeah. And I think what what you're doing,
you're uplifting
humanity
through your podcast.
And, like, we find the things we can
do
in this moment.
Yes.
And and
that's all, like
It's exhausting work. It is. It's exhausting work,
but it's all like, I I feel
at least I'm doing this one thing. Yeah.
And at least here's a story of, like,
it was so dark,
and now it's not as dark. And maybe
that can be applied to other places in
the world, you know?
Yes.
Absolutely.
The the pinprick
and the blackness
lets in a whole lot of light.
Yeah. Yeah. Thank you.
Thank you so much. I really thank you
thank you for bringing me on. Absolutely. It's
my honor. Such an honor. Thank you for
being on the planet and for
seeing
humans
as humanity.
I think that's a rare quality anymore.
So I appreciate it, and I see that
in you.
Well, I
thank you
for saying thank you for that. I appreciate
that. And I I do. And I I
think that's why I wanted to be an
artist to begin with is I I
I feel
pain of other people
and, wanna,
I wanna take that pain away, but also
want other people to,
like,
back to when I was doing the research
initially, I was like, if I can get
my audience
to feel
even 10% of what I am feeling right
now,
I think it can move the needle.
And I think I would have done my
job
because this is like this, this is earth
shattering. Everybody needs to know about this. This
needs to be in the history book,
what these women were able to accomplish and
what they went through. If just one person
either changes their mind about something
or goes out and does something in response
that is uplifting to the world at large,
we've done a great
we've done great.
Make sure that you take care of yourself
as well. I know you said you have
a therapist, which is good, but it's hard
to be a container
of this magnitude
without causing damage.
So
be kind to yourself
also.
Thank you for that. I really appreciate that,
Susan. I, I've been reaching out to other
documentarians
and realizing that
no matter what the scope of the project
or what the project involves,
that
they
maybe it's not this kind of pain that
you're absorbing,
but
there there is a lot of pain and
you are
Yeah.
You are holding it and you're a receptacle
for it. So that's been helpful just to
have people to talk to. You get it.
It can be, I understand.
I think it's I hope it's worth it.
I think it is. I know we just
met. I I'm very proud of you.
I really appreciate you giving me the opportunity
to be here and giving this story the
platform,
truly. It's my honor. Thank you. Of course.
Thank you for being on the show, and
thank you for listening, everybody.
And please keep me
abreast of everything, and I wish you just
continued success.
Thank you so much.
Bye.
Great. Review and subscribe to Hey Human podcast
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