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Exploring issues relevant to law students and the law at large. Stare Indecisis is a student-led podcast at the University of Victoria Faculty of Law affiliated with its law journal, Appeal: Review of Current Law and Law Reform published by the Appeal Publishing Society.
Produced on the unceded Coast Salish territories of the Lekwungen, Songhees, Esquimalt and W̱SÁNEĆ peoples.
Hosts: Sarah Lachance (she/her), Camille O’Sullivan (she/her), Vinson Shih (he/him)
Tom Ndekezi 00:00
Just a warning that today's episode discusses murder, domestic violence and intimate partner violence. Please take care of yourself accordingly. Tom Ndekezi, here, producer of the starry decisis podcast. Before we begin, I would just like to acknowledge that this podcast was recorded on the traditional territory of the lekwungen the songhees Esquimalt Saanich peoples, the original inhabitants of this land whose historical relationships with the land continued to this day. Today's podcast discusses the relationship between popular media storytelling and the law was touched on the episode is important to address directly how the media has been complicit in advancing oppressive colonial narratives about racialized people in general. And indigenous people in particular, false characterizations of indigenous people were you centuries ago to justify Manifest Destiny and the expansion of the colonial project and are still used today in discussions about the conditions of indigenous communities, the child welfare system, and the epidemic of missing and murdered indigenous women. This pattern of erasure omission, decentering. And stereotyping in the media has oftentimes been intentional and malicious weed starting decisis acknowledge our role as storytellers and members of the media and aspired to tell stories that are thoughtful, meaningful and equitable. While we may not always execute that goal perfectly, it is our hope that this podcast embodies a spirit of reconciliation and truth telling. For more resources, please check out the links in the show notes. Thanks for listening.
Tom Ndekezi 01:59
You've listened to podcasts for a while. There's a good chance you've heard this before.
Tom Ndekezi 02:15
Those of you don't recognize it. It's the theme song for Syria and investigative podcast that was first released in 2014. If you've never heard of Syria before, it's kind of the mother pod hosted by the journalist Sarah Kay neg cereal is one of the first podcasts to weaponize that nasally bullishness and hipster quirkiness that built empires like NPR and This American Life. Think urbane New York based journalist talking about the secret history of tote bags while plucking strings play softly in the background. It's pretty much what I tried to do on this podcast but with a bigger budget. The subject matters cereal though is a lot more grim and in part responsible for launching the modern True Crime boom. The first season of cereal revisits the murder of Haman Lee, a Korean American high school student who was killed in Baltimore, Maryland in 1999. The podcast specifically revisits the investigation, arrest and conviction of Lee's ex boyfriend at the time, Adnan Sian side was the prime suspect was eventually sentenced to life in prison for him in these murder. As the podcast revisits the case, however, Kenny begins to discover a series of critical mistakes by sides defense lawyer, inconsistent testimonies and unreliable key witness and the possible effects of anti Muslim prejudice working against side. caning ultimately refrains from stating conclusively whether she thinks SCI Ed is in fact guilty. But despite serious lack of closure, audiences ate it up. Cereal quickly shot to the top of the iTunes charts and stayed there for months. The first season broke and set multiple download records, and today is credited by many is kicking off the modern podcast Renaissance. Since the release of cereal, there's also been a boom in true crime entertainment more generally, all the way from podcast to shows like making a murderer and Tiger King. Barely a few months can go by now that the latest Docu series about some long forgotten cold case, or a headline grabbing killing spree from the 60s and 70s. Weirdly enough, a lot of this fixation on True Crime has come at a time when we become increasingly aware of the problems with fixating on criminal behavior. many news organizations, for example, have adopted the practice of not reporting the names or photos of domestic terrorists in an effort to discourage copycat attacks. There's also a growing awareness of how true crime entertainment might even celebrate the man responsible for the crimes, while ignoring their victims who are often female, queer, and or racialized. This past Halloween, for example, several stories reported about men inspired by a recent Netflix series to dress up as Jeffrey Dahmer, a serial killer in the 1980s who targeted queer black men. There's also the question of the victims families and friends who are often re traumatized by these Media depictions that are created without their consent or involvement. For example, during the height of the cereal craze, Haman, Lee's brother made a long Reddit post where he shared the trauma of having a sister's murder broadcast to the world. Other families of victims have told stories of pleading with producers not to broadcast the stories of their loved ones murderers to millions of people, only to have them do exactly that. Recent years have also seen the reemergence of another kind of true crime spectacle, courtroom dramas. There's no better example of this and the recent Amber herd and Johnny Depp defamation trial, which dominated social media in the summer of 2022. While the actual subject matter involves grim and often graphic depictions of domestic violence and abuse, the footage from the courtroom was shared all over Instagram and Tiktok. Often as a punchline to jokes, or a way to encourage engagement. Canadian courtrooms don't typically allow the same kind of access to video cameras or broadcasting crews. But that doesn't mean Canadians haven't managed to get equally caught up in trials like DEP heard Kyle Rittenhouse or OJ Simpson just to name a few. Turning back to serial, all those released almost 10 years ago. The podcast was back in the headlines in September 2022. After the latest update and then side story.
Unknown Speaker 06:15
After 23 years in prison ad Nan saya the convicted murderer made famous after the hit series. The podcast called Serial chronicles his case, he walked out of a Baltimore courthouse today.
Tom Ndekezi 06:33
23 years after being found guilty of first degree murder, Adnan Syed walked out of a Baltimore prison to a waiting crowd of family friends and as weird as it is to say fans now say it wasn't quite a free man. A judge simply vacated a sentence after Baltimore City Attorney revisited the case and found several issues with the way the original trial was conducted. As well as DNA evidence that pointed to his innocence. Prosecutors are given the opportunity to pursue a new trial which they declined. Although Lee's family issued an appeal the decision that is said to be ruled on the next few months. For many watching however, the image of a free SCI Ed was a triumph for serial and the true crime boom it helps create. For others, it was a painful reminder of the murder of a high school student and the closure denied to a grieving family. While on one hand, the exposure brought by serial to the problem with science murder conviction likely played a large part in securing his release. It's not clear if that was the creator's intentions in creating the show. There's also the question whether stories like science are anomalies, or justify the rest of the true crime, genre, warts and all. To learn more about this, I spoke with Rebecca Johnson, a professor at the UVic Faculty of Law, and an associate director of the indigenous Law Research Unit. Much of Professor Johnson's research focuses on law and film with a specific focus on depictions of same sex families colonialism, prison, violence, and Inuit cinema. I spoke with her about the rise of true crime entertainment, its impacts on victims and families, and how it might change the way the legal system operates going forward. Here's some of our conversation. I guess kind of getting my first question is, is Do you maybe have a sense of why there has been such a such an explosion in interest in that kind of true crime entertainment? Because I think when you look back, you know, there's always been there's always been legal dramas, whether it's like To Kill a Mockingbird, or a time to kill things like that. But there seems to be something like a new wave in the last decade, do you maybe have a sense of why we've seen that?
Rebecca Johnson 08:43
Yeah, there's, I like your raising of the question of genre. Because there are these different genres that we we fall into societally. So for example, the true even in our conversation here, so much that happens in popular culture focuses on law as primarily criminal law. So when we're in a law school, we know that that's one course out of a series of things. But when we had to the sort of arena of popular culture frequently, people want to think about criminal law and crime. And then we do have these two directions, the we'll call it the sort of spectacular show trials of our time. And these show trials, we can go back in history and see the ways in which these kinds of questions have the big, usually involving very public figures that that become part of the popular imagination, though they did that in former times through newspapers, but still like that, that parallel of watching the train wreck unfold in front of us is one thing. And then there was this archival, looking to the past, as a way of finding the truth of things. As you were By talking one thing I'm kind of struck by so currently it's all murder, killing, murder, murder, murder, killing, killing? Yeah. So, so the those stories are doing a couple of things. One is, I think, why are they? Why? Why are they so compelling? I think because they just like inject right into our amygdala. So we just like, put in the feed, and they are gripping, they're compelling. They terrify they horrify, they keep us it's part of the, the horror genre, right for us as humans. And you can find these kinds of accounts of the horrific things go back through history. So stories of, you know, mystery, war, Detective SNESs, trauma, you know, they, they flip, they slide backwards, and they then speak to our particular time, like what the fears of the moment are, they do tend to also kind of replicate certain kinds of patterns in our society of presuming who is vulnerable, and who is dangerous for us. So there's something else that they also do that we don't talk about as much. But that is the ways in which they program us to continue to really have an effect laden feelings about vulnerability and risk. So they both are entertainment. But they also really reinforce certain kinds of social patterns in ways that pattern us to see risk and danger and vulnerability in the world. So often, when I think about these shows, I like now this is now the law, we'll talk law for a second. In some ways, what they purport to be is about law. They tell us, they're about law, but they're really about something else. So they're fitting or filling into these other kinds of narratives of threat and danger. But then, they're always fantastical, kind of like man bites dog or supers like. So I'm not saying that people like that don't exist in the world. But the focus is on something very, very specific in particular. Yeah. So for me, what's sometimes interesting to ask is, if I'm saying to you, well, I don't think that's really about law. I think it's about something else. I think it's about creating a risk society or a fearful society. That leads us to think we need protection that we need policing that we need forensics, that we need people to help us sort out these terrifying things so that we can sleep safely at night. So the the, the messaging is really one that creates in our imagine our Imaginarium. Call it the belief that we really live in a fraught, fearful, dangerous world full of people who can't be trusted, where people who look like friends are actually enemies, where you can't rely on anyone where you're constantly at risk, and where we're kind of vibrating with the need to have closure protection from a terrifying world around us. Right? And that somehow, science or like this, science will save us maybe, or the one super detective who actually breaks the rules in order to solve the crime will save us like the renegade kind of law, man. Yeah, law, man. Right. context. So we've got that. So is that law? Or are we making law through? Is that an argument about law? So I don't want to go we're being we're, you know, it's like the Hypno Toad from Futurama on our head, making us think things out about it. Yes, it's an argument about the universe. And it invites us to try that argument on and think about it, to have the pleasures and the enjoyment of trying it on. And because of the power of music and visual imagery, and narrative storytelling, production, you get to feel it. Right. So it's not that we just think it in our heads. It's that the visual cuts, the music, the amplification, the scare, we get to feel that we've lived in that world with, you know, in our bodies. So, so I love those shows. I watched those shows, I asked those questions about those shows, what do they invite us to feel about the universe we live in? If we really want to think about what are the laws of the world we live in? We might look to other genres that are less obvious, like law is most powerful where it's not telling us it's law. So rather than looking to where the felt the team tells us this is about law. What about look Getting to those places where law is just operating as the water in the background in which other things happen. Like, what are the series and the programs where we begin to hear the answers to the question, what does it mean to be reasonable? What are the best interests of a child? What are obligations that we owe to each other? Yeah. So, you know, as we're thinking about law films, it can be fun to look also to the side, and other things to start to try and see the waters that we're swimming in, as well as just this focus on law as if it's primarily a matter of detective forensics in crime, or what happens in a courtroom. Particularly since we know most Law never happened. Never no one gets to a courtroom.
Tom Ndekezi 15:46
Yes, just it's just an exchange of documents. Or,
Rebecca Johnson 15:51
or we never get to documents because we know how to be lawful, and the ways we actually treat each other, tell us a bit more about what our expectations are about what law actually is. So
Tom Ndekezi 16:05
yeah, you said a lot that I'm interested in looking a little deeper into. But I think going back even to the true crime, true crime, entertainment, I thought, it's really interesting how you mentioned it, how you describe it as almost an extension of the horror genre. And just being this thing that you said, just injects right into the amygdala, right into those fear systems, and that those really primal, those really primal senses that we have. And so from there, I'm wondering, do you think then that consumers of true crime, entertainment, are actually able to grasp the reality of what they're watching? Or is it still, in some sense very much entertainment, it's, I think, even comparing it to horror movies, I find there's two different types of horror movie watchers. There's the people who see the ridiculousness of it all of you know, spirits and ghosts and monsters, and no matter how good the visual effects are, can kind of laugh their way through it. And just realize it's not real. And then there's other people, me included. Now, I'm definitely in the second group where our disbelief is completely suspended. And we're absolutely terrified. And everything we see, just because we can't make that disconnect. And so I wonder what's true crime entertainment? Do you think that consumers are able to really understand that what they're what they're taking in and what they're watching? is real, at least to some extent.
Rebecca Johnson 17:41
Yeah, yeah. These are all this is why I think well, and film is so fun to understand as a form of legal theory, because you're asking all the theory questions like what is real? What's not. I often though, like, throwing my brother in law, Eric, under the bus, right? In the movie, Titanic, you know, when the ship was going down, Eric got so visually seasick from the action of the boat that he threw up in the movie theater. So bit of a trauma for the people ahead of him as well. Yeah. But, but then it asks me the question, why do we assume it's not real. So this is part of what makes the world of art such a powerful site for persuasion, because our visual field of our eyes are taking in data. And the difference between, you know, touching my camera here, the difference between an actual touch and a visual touch, our eyes don't process, our eyes only process the visual stimuli. So you get one layer of sensory input from the eyeballs, you get other layers of sensory input from your ears. So when those musical pieces come and give you a big bang, of experience, you can say it's not real, but it is real for your body. So your body has had a visceral experience of something, and then your brain is trying to, you know, narratively piece things together. But it doesn't change the fact that your eyes and your ears are linked deeper into your effect system than than the brain is in that way. So So I guess this question you pose, do people know the difference? Yes, we know the difference, especially as we talked about it, but it's at our peril that we ignore that we've had a bodily experience. And then the question is, in what ways do we take up what we learned from those bodily experiences?
Tom Ndekezi 19:52
It's Yeah, it's interesting when you mentioned that, I know when when you first mentioned that I was, it started making me wonder if If the prevalence of like you're saying these stories of threat and danger and fear and harm, almost do have the effect of struggle, this word can, like, conserve it tising? Or like, or, or Yeah, like, or just making the audience is, you know, more hostile, and more fearful and like you said, and more receptive even to, to aggressive uses of state force and you know, policing, like the idea of like, the streets or the streets are riddled with crime, and we need to do something, because you'd never know around any corner where there might be another serial killer. Yeah, like, it kind of made me start wondering, okay, what are the how might this even be translating into the way we view our world politically? As opposed to, you know, just as just as content we've consumed?
Rebecca Johnson 20:56
Yeah. I just finished reviewing like a, someone's PhD that's coming out soon on women in policing and BC, one of the pieces of data that she's only worked with, she's worked with women in leadership positions in policing. So there's the, there's the people that she's been speaking with. But the data, for example, shows that for police in BC, there's 800 positions allocated that are designated as kind of gang unit related positions. There are a seven, I'm going to give you 11, because it's a bigger number probably think that number. Seven positions that are designated as domestic violence coordinators. So now within the police, we train up 800 to do gang material, and 11 or seven to do domestic violence. But we know we had 114,000 instances of domestic violence in BC in the year she's looking at. So what's up, then in terms of the focus on kind of creating these 800 gang positions and training people to be gang responsive? means that you look for gangs in the world, you look for this kind of violence, you train for it, you see it, you deploy your resources in that way. I doubt that there were 114,000. Gang.
Tom Ndekezi 22:30
Yeah, I dug
Rebecca Johnson 22:33
in that way, right. But it justifies a different kind of budgetary expense. If you say gang, then if you say domestic violence, which is going to point you in the direction of a narrative that says, How do we support families? How do we address the causes of violence within intimate relations? How do we train people to know how to respond? How do we take a more health and holistic kind of legal response? If our focus, and every story we see in the media that if you know if it bleeds it leads, increases our impulse to say we need those policing resources, right? Just Tom King, the novelist would say, you know, be careful with the stories you tell. Right, and with the stories you consume, not because you shouldn't tell them but we should be reflective around. It's it's important to be reflective of around how thinking about our stories might help us ensure that we don't take our entertainments directly to our political choices, or our ideas about distributing resources or how we build structures or institutions of law. Many places for people to do this work so and stories can really give us a way into some big picture thinking.
Tom Ndekezi 23:55
Yeah, there's something you mentioned before, and I think you've touched on it, in that, in that answer, just talking about how a lot of times True Crime entertainment can reinforce these ideas of who is who is the threat and who is at harm and who is at risk. And 111 bit of research I've seen come up a lot when just looking into looking into true crime is the prevalence of women as consumers of true crime entertainment, I think I saw a study where it said about 73% of true crime podcast listeners are women. And so I was wondering, do you do you maybe have any thoughts on maybe why we see so many women especially being interested in true crime?
Rebecca Johnson 24:42
Or there's some really, so I haven't seen the data it'd be real I love I don't usually confess this to everyone but my favorite course in university was actually multivariate data analysis. So I love data. So
Tom Ndekezi 24:59
your friends yeah.
Rebecca Johnson 25:02
especially in last, exactly. So, but I'll share with you kind of a side a sideline, you know, side by side play, here's another piece of data that's relevant to this data. So back in the day of video, Blockbuster, you know, all video movies, it was very easy to kind of track video rentals. So there's a great book by a woman named Carol clover, called men, women and chainsaws. And it's a book that focuses just on the horror genre, on who rents the movies, the demographic of those people. And what we learned from asking about a place where there was some really gendered distribution. So it turned out at the time, that the consumers for horror films were like, in the 90s, like super high rental rates way above, you know, evening out even taking into account if your parents are rent, you know, all that kind of stuff was young men from like 14 to 23, or something. So just demographic of, of male consumption of that genre. So as you were talking about, you know, women, I wonder if there's any literature out there also looking at if it's true that women are like that, I mean, part of it might be, who knows? Who knows what the rationales are. But I wonder if there's something as well here about proximity and distance in the genre?
Tom Ndekezi 26:35
No, yeah. It's it's interesting that you gave that example of, even with young men and horror movies, I think even the study I was reading, it's titled captured by true crime. Why are women drawn to tales of rape, murder and serial killers, just from 2010. But I think something really interesting. That was echoed in that in that paper is they found that generally men were more interested in violent genres. So like you said, like the chainsaw killers, and almost like these comical depictions of violence, whereas women were disproportionately drawn to, for lack of a better term, more realistic forms of violence, like things that do we do see regularly, day to day, whether it's like, you know, physical sexual abuse or, or intimate partner violence, those types of stories were, are very real. Whereas, you know, something like, a guy with a chainsaw and a hockey mask running through the city isn't really something that you're going to regularly encounter. Yeah. So yeah, it's a very interesting distinction there between the things that that men and women at least were drawn to in that study.
Rebecca Johnson 27:44
Yeah, there's a nowadays you're saying that there's an interesting piece of data that I use in criminal law that looks at like old data is sometimes helpful to help us see a pattern in the present. But it was just like it's Glasgow, in the 70s, reported assaults to police. But the data is disaggregated in ways that make it really visible that men and women experience very, both experienced lots of violence in their lives, but in very different ways. So men are most likely to be assaulted by someone who is not part of the family is a stranger to them in a public setting. So that is the way in which men experienced violence, women are most likely to experience violence from an intimate partner. So you've got violence and violence, but the the ways in which that violence is it is experienced chain, it's gonna require different responses, maybe different sets of fears, and maybe difference. That's of cultural products that help one process, kind of the reality of the fears that we have about how we experience violence in our lives in different ways. And stories, maybe importantly, tell us something about how we process fear. Right.
Tom Ndekezi 29:05
I think I'm kind of going on to my next question. We've talked a little bit I think about some of the dangers of true crime entertainment, like you said before the stereotyping that can result from it or the sensationalizing. But I was wondering, can True Crime entertainment be a good thing? Specifically, can it be something that is used to increase accountability in the justice system? One example I think of recently, I don't know if you're following the story of Adam inside. He was the subject of the first season of the Serial podcast that was really popular maybe 10 years ago at this point, or at least five or six, seven years ago. Were in the series they're investigating a murder that he'd been convicted of and you know, some of the inconsistencies there and seeing whether or not he had actually done it. And obviously blows up becomes this huge podcast. And then justice last year, the District of Maryland, they revisited his his case, they saw all these inconsistencies in the investigation, they vacated a sentence, which was a big story. And I think a lot of people celebrated that as like, Oh, look at this instance of this thing that we were all consuming as entertainment actually resulting in you know, possibly innocent man being freed. And I was wondering is, is that is that the kind of thing that we can look to as, as an example of the benefits of this kind of true crime entertainment? Or is that really just an anomaly? Which I guess maybe covers up the, the actual problems with the genre?
Rebecca Johnson 30:48
Yeah, I love the I mean, there's, I always want to go back towards. So I wonder if sometimes if, like true crime, entertainment, true crime, what's the difference between something that's designed to entertain us and something that's designed to educate us?
Tom Ndekezi 31:10
That's the difference between reporting and entertainment, true crime reporting and
Rebecca Johnson 31:16
tween telling, discussing, revealing, interrogate, got a lot of verbs that might help us think about kind of what's on the go, is our assumption that if we learn, it's painful, and if it's fun, that it must be entertainment to not learning? So there's also like, how do we sort those things out as well as like, the truth flood? How much of it is true? And how much of it is changed in order to, you know, make it more entertaining? And can our entertainments actually do the hard work of changing laws so that we don't really have to do the hard work? So we can just do it through entertainment? Like, these are big? These are big questions. They're big questions. One piece that is sometimes interesting, again, to me is, so if we think documentary versus fiction, so, you know, the podcast examples you're giving, in some ways are like, an attempt to, to tell a story, a truthful story through documentary, so and then if that documentary changes enough people's understanding that it leads to change. That's one argument like, that's why we do documentaries in order to kind of tell about the world in ways that will hopefully change people's hearts change people's politics, change their actions, the documentary versus entertainment, which is like a commercial commodity.
Tom Ndekezi 32:49
Yeah, yeah. Yeah. Do you think that makes a big difference? The particular approach like even something like cereal, I think, to its credit, it's a very journalistic and very responsibly reported podcast. And maybe it's not so surprising that it would have that result, whereas maybe you contrast it with something, which was a good show, but like Tiger King, which was very much just about like, the entertainment value, and just seeing like, Oh, look at these ridiculous people who also happen to be committing very serious crimes. Yeah, and you don't really see the same, the same results coming out of that. One thing, I guess, kind of going back to something we would started this whole conversation, even with the DEP and Amber, her trial, which we just saw in summer 2022. I know, you talked about how, you know the things like the editing, the cuts, the music, that you've seen a lot of true crime entertain, that can kind of help the content, maybe bypass our, our cortex, and just, you know, like you said, I like that image or just get plugged straight into the amygdala, just straight into those primal systems. And so I was wondering, in the cases where, you know, we're watching these ongoing, these ongoing legal, these ongoing, legal dramas, like let's say, in the depth heard situation, or OJ Simpson back in the day or the Kyle Rittenhouse trial of a few years ago, where you don't really see that same production value, but you still see all of that attention being being put on the what what makes those cases so compelling. Yeah,
Rebecca Johnson 34:26
no, I think I think actually, there were huge production values. If I think about the experience of watching now because it wasn't that people just sat and watched what they watched was the Redux. What they watched was all the reporting on it. What they watched was twitter feed on it. What they watched was the clips analysis by the psycho by here's the truth person who can tell if someone's telling truth or lying by looking at it. Look at how her eye twitched here, like there was, I bet I'm not really a betting woman, I bet that, that people watched more of the segments that were selected from it than the full stream. And I'm very sure that those segments that were put out, were watched with more, were watched more frequently than just the straight stream. So I think that you also see then the production and the reproduction through all of the material that came in after not just the straight feed, you know, and even with the straight feed, these are actors. And I don't mean that in a negative way, I'm just saying they're trained. They're trained presentation professionals as well doing their work of, of curating. And the lawyers are curating through how they change the questions through the direction you go in. Nobody's telling a full narrative story. Things are being told in fragment. I think we learn a lot from of course, it's not the same production value. But does that make it more true?
Tom Ndekezi 36:06
Yeah, I guess I'm even wondering about what makes even the source the source material so compelling, because I do agree with what you're saying about a lot of us were work I definitely was consuming the clips and things just on Instagram, and those were to an extent produced. But I guess I'm even curious about even even the source material and what what makes it that that so compelling? Was it just the fact that it was real?
Rebecca Johnson 36:33
Yeah, you know, okay, so my best friend in grad school, I was doing my PhD on childcare and tax treatment of women as business owners and she was writing on slasher stalker films, and, and harassment law. So he had to watch all of this horizontal that she'd never seen in order to make sense of what she wanted to do. And so I spent a lot of time preferring to work on her thesis rather than mine. Tax, but hardly what she was she was taking movie Fatal Attraction. With Glenn Close as the stalker who so for you guys are to you who are so young, that movie fatal attraction when it came out, had Glenn Close as the stalker stalking our Michael. That was, what's that guy's name Michael Douglas. So what we know about stalking as a phenomenon is that within our societies, primarily, women are stalked by former partners. So we know this to be true from the data. But fatal attraction has a woman stalking a man. And around the time Fatal Attraction came out, there was a very famous case where a man stalks and kills a famous woman, actor, actress. So after Fatal Attraction comes out, there's a huge public pressure to create the first anti stalking legislation in the US so so we have this interesting phenomena. manaan, where a movie that is completely not realistic to women's experiences of stalking, nonetheless creates the public pressure that then creates legislation that addresses stalking, might have been better legislation, had the legislators not been so worried about the possibility that a one night stand with a crazy woman would lead them to have to possibly defend their family to the death, right. So the power of that cultural moment, which was man bites dog. Yeah. But the man bites dog was so powerfully it so powerfully spoke to legislators who were still the time, like, primarily male, that it did actually push the tipping point over into making legislative reform. But the the narrative story wasn't a conventional one. So I wonder about that with some of these stories, and especially on the depth heard thing, you know, it's like a tale of or constructed as like the line woman who's after the guy. And here's the example of why we need to be really careful about women's claims of violence, because look, she's a liar. So so everything about that thing was designed to put us straight back into large scale gender, politics and kind of a push back. Of course, men and women can be violent, of course, men and women can do harm to each other. But why? So how this trial was like a perfect storm of reactionary politics, against kind of whatever the cultural moment is, in ways that allowed for, for some pretty complex cated social conversations being negotiated through a context that is like, in some ways, who cares about either of them? Ya know, they're both pretty violent and related to telling us something about Star culture and about really complicated gender politics. And they're not the people where we want to design our questions about how to actually think about social harm and the ways people really are in the world. But the displacement kind of created something you can walk away from.
Tom Ndekezi 40:33
Yeah. But I think like looking forward into the future, I'm wondering, how do you see the prevalence of, of, of true crime entertainment, affecting even day to day legal proceedings in the future? I know, there's some articles which I've which I've read, which are raised concerns about the ideas of jurors coming into the courtroom already with, with these preset notions of what the proceedings look like, it's kind of even, I guess, even the whole, you know, the whole theory of why they won't allow law students to be jurors, because, you know, we walk in there, and we think we know what's going on. It's like, Oh, I've seen this before. And I just wonder, even in the way that that, you know, day to day legal proceedings are conducted, do you see the prevalence of of this type of media affecting that? And ultimately, do you see that affecting it in in a good, bad, good, bad way? Or, or maybe not in a significant way at all?
Rebecca Johnson 41:33
Yeah, I think I like your question. I am less worried myself about whether or not these the ways that the true crime dramas present the law will affect jurors than I am worried about our social narratives that are rooted in racism, colonialism, patriarchy, trans exclusionary, class, poverty based narratives, I think those have an impact on jurors, because those are the powerful narratives that we don't even know that we know. So we look at people and make decisions based on what we see about who is or isn't trustworthy, who is or isn't more likely to do things. So, you know, when we saw like the Gerald Stanley trial, the Barton trial, those things are jury trials, where jurors saw certain people as more worthy of our time and attention and other people as the world's natural victims, or as the world's natural threatening people. So I think those social predators is not if we consume or don't consume certain stories, but how we talk to each other about what we learn from what we consume, so that we think about public legal education as part of changing the narratives and the stories so we can re interrogate and ask about the worlds that we construct through our decisions. Like, you know, I just have to go back to some of the high profile police involved deaths we've seen over the years. If someone looks to the universe and sees a threat, then they'll act on the basis of it. But we can't easily change this without better conversations that encourage us to, to really think about the world we make. I don't feel pessimistic, I feel hopeful that humans as we are social creatures, and the more we remember, to not just watch and listen, but to talk with each other, and to interrogate why we might want to change some of our pleasures or retake them up or shift them otherwise, I think we are, you know, entities in the universe that have the capacity to have our stories help us build other worlds.
Tom Ndekezi 44:05
Yeah, yeah. And I guess even the challenge for people creating that entertainment, especially if they're coming from, you know, maybe a good faith place would be to try Korea entertainment that, you know, encourages those discussions of those conversations, rather than, you know, what we've seen of just entertainment that reinforces stereotypes and reinforces fears.
Rebecca Johnson 44:27
And for us as viewers. Maybe the thing isn't to tell people what they can and can't make, but maybe it's for us to engage in sustained campaigns of mockery and derision or interrogation or questioning or putting it on the table. Why something does more than one thing at the same time. Where intention is that the questions social conversation
Tom Ndekezi 45:00
and thanks for listening to this week's episode of starting spaces. Starting decisis is made possible by the appeal Law Journal. See if you want to 1.9 FM take care
Transcribed by https://otter.ai