00:00:00
This is exactly right. Isn't some far off concept? It's already here. Next starts now.
00:00:33
Hyundai, an official partner of FIFA. Goodbye. When a charming neurosurgeon rode into Frontier Town
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selling a persona of confidence and care, patients trusted him. He wore cowboy boots in the operating room
00:00:45
and became sought after by patients. He promised to heal them. Instead, he left a trail of broken bodies.
00:00:51
This is a story of greed, betrayal, and a fight for justice. Listen to Dr. Death the Cowboy wherever you get your podcasts
00:00:58
or binge the entire series right now only with Audible. Goodbye. What's up, y'all?
00:01:04
Summer's got a different tempo. Everything's a little looser, brighter. One plan turns into another.
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You hear something, you stay a little longer. Next thing you know, you're somewhere you didn't plan to be.
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It's those in-between moments. That's where the ideas hit. Conversations stretch out.
00:01:20
Little memories sneak up on you. Sometimes it's just about what's in your hand. That color.
00:01:27
That chill. The new Tropical Butterfly Refresher from Starbucks. Guava and passion fruit flavors with mango pineapple flavored pearls.
00:01:36
Yeah, that feels like summer before you even taste it. Funny how one small stop becomes the best part of the day.
00:01:43
Start your summer rhythm with Starbucks. Try the new Tropical Butterfly Refresher from Starbucks.
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My favorite murder. Hello and welcome to My Favorite Murder. That is Georgia Hardstar.
00:02:13
That's Karen Kilgariff. We can overlap because we're in the same room. This isn't on video, so we can actually hit our microphones together.
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It's my passion since the first episode, hitting my microphone with my own hand.
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You've gotten pro. I mean, flawless. Thank you. It's like they had to take the microphones, lock them down and be like, you know what? We'll hold it for you.
00:02:39
There's never been a person in the history of microphones who's been passed a microphone or sat in front of a microphone and hasn't wanted to adjust it. It doesn't fucking matter.
00:02:47
It's true. You're going to touch it. You have to and you think you're touching it to like point it closer to you.
00:02:52
Yeah. When you are working with us, you know that that's part of the job is that we're going to fucking touch everything.
00:02:57
Touch it. You're allowed to. Touch it. That's your right. Yeah. How's it going? Pretty good.
00:03:03
How was your weekend? Good. Do you remember? I'm a little hungover today. Okay. I got to admit, because I had one of those brunches that turns into when did it get dark?
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Oh, damn. Yeah. Wait, can I just ask, so did you roll out and then straight to another bar?
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Did you pretend you were going to do something else? Yeah. Yeah, it was me and my friend Crystal.
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And then we met these other lovely gals and had like a nice brunch in the valley.
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And then afterwards I was like, should we get? We were both like, should we get one more?
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Just Crystal and I. And then fucking. And then cut to me. You fist fighting in a parking lot?
00:03:42
No, cut to me yelling at the Uber driver that he's not Russian. You're making it up.
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I know you're fucking fake. No, I shouldn't even say that. Like you're from Orange County and I can tell.
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You accused the Uber driver of faking his accent. I did. I did. Well, the odds. Now, listener, that might sound problematic in some way.
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You're trying to put that together. It does. I know it does. But let me tell you this. After living in Los Angeles for 30 years, that shit happens all the time.
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It's actors. Sure. Actors abound. I still need to know. I need to track this guy down and be like, tell me the truth.
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Because he was like cracking up by the end of it. And I could tell he was about to crack and tell me that he was fricking from Huntington Beach or something.
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Now, do you understand that about yourself, that you have reading skills about other people?
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Mostly from Orange, only from Orange County. Like, I can tell who is from Orange County.
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I did my time. I did 18 years. And I can tell off the fucking snap of a bat that someone's from Orange County.
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But you're just going to keep it in just that column? That's all I mean. That's the only place.
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It's like when you're young and you do this habit and it keeps you safe. Yes. And so you continue to do it in adulthood.
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me knowing if someone's from Orange County keeps me safe. That's right. So I continue to do it.
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And when you learn that someone, when your instincts tell you, your developed instincts tell you that someone's from Orange County,
00:05:04
does that mean you're going to zip it? Does that mean you're going to reach toward them?
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What is that information? It depends on the person, but I think I'm going to reach toward them
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and like jostle some information out of them that I don't know what it is yet. And so why do you hate Russian people as a whole?
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I'm Jewish and I'm Russian. We're Russian. It's a self-loathing issue. It's got to be.
00:05:24
I mean, it's complicated. I get it. But that means when I laid down to take a nap today and there was an earthquake, I was like, please not right now.
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I was so like, fuck, I hope this isn't a big one. Did you feel it? No, I did not.
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What was the number? Like 4.9. Sorry, my big brag is that my house is built on granite.
00:05:43
I never feel that. How? Yeah. Okay. It's one of my many big brags. You talk about that a lot.
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You know, it's kind of your thing. I know. I'm like, me at a cocktail party? It's like, shut.
00:05:54
Jesus Karen Granite again No one cares about your geology inspection The surveyor came out everybody I yell at the top of my lungs That amazing All right
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Well, my whole house rattles. It's just like... You might be on silt. I'll come take a look.
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Would you? Yeah. Would you? You might be at risk of liquefaction. Shit. Shit. Did you ever hear about that?
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When the ground turns to liquid? Yeah, during an earthquake. That's like in San Francisco, it does that, right?
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And also my old house. Oh, cool. In Burbank. Oh. They were like, yep, everything's good and we're ready to go.
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We have to warn you about this one thing. If there's a big enough earthquake, the ground under this house turns to liquid and sinkhole Saturday.
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Then you're in your own sinkhole Saturday story. I'm the star of my own making. What's up with you?
00:06:43
What did you? I did a lot of couch rotting this weekend. For some reason, I'm always like I have plans, but my plans only ever involve buying like makeup.
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So I'm like, well, just don't, you don't need to go do that. You're fine. Yeah. You have plenty of whatever you think you need.
00:06:59
Yeah, yeah, yeah. Like you want to have to try this new one thing. I think so because I try to start with the plan of I'm going to go to the farmer's market.
00:07:06
Oh, yeah. Oh, that's lovely and darling. And then suddenly you're in Sephora. Yeah, because I don't, that's not real.
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That's not an honest plan if I'm going to be honest. Like I can more likely if like a friend was in town or.
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It's a fantasy. It's a fantasy. say it's more like almost like a datey thing of like let's go down to the farmer's market.
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We all have those Saturday fantasies of like we should do something. Yeah. Go to the. But it's
00:07:29
never a good idea. Go to the nursery and get a plant that you're in a pot in a pot you already
00:07:33
have. And then it's like 95 degrees out and traffic everywhere. And you're like why am I out on a
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Saturday. For real. With my clothes sticking to me. And and simultaneously acting like a fraud.
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Yeah. Where it's like no one's buying this that I'm at the farmer's market. I think you have to
00:07:50
do that sometimes though just to appreciate staying home and not feel guilty about it.
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Yeah. You know? Every weekend. We always do. Every. I power through it every weekend.
00:07:58
But while I was doing that, thank God, there's a new series on Netflix. Oh my God.
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Okay. I have a different one. Oh, okay. Mine's on Hulu. It would have been fun if it could have been the same one.
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I don't know how to pronounce this correctly, which is embarrassing because it's a very
00:08:11
old, it's a medieval story. I believe it's called The Decameron. Okay. But I don't know.
00:08:20
My apologies if it's something else, but it's essentially a medieval black comedy, sex comedy.
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It's a real story. It's one of the first stories that was written in vernacular Italian instead of Latin.
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So like everybody got to read it instead of just people who could speak Latin from long ago.
00:08:40
And it's about all these rich people that escaped to a villa in the countryside of Italy to get away from the black death.
00:08:48
Ooh, is it a comedy? Yes. Okay. Oh, I like it. Yes. And so, Zosia Mamet. Yeah. Did I pronounce it correctly?
00:08:57
I think you did. She's in it. She's great. Our friend Tony Hale is in it. Oh, Tony Hale.
00:09:02
So good. There's all kinds of people. Okay. So funny. Some British, some American.
00:09:09
It's all happening. It's so great. The costumes, the setting, it's so satisfying.
00:09:16
That sounds good. Because you know what I feel like I need all the time? I get like sad that I can't watch Veep again.
00:09:23
Yeah. Blank. Yes. You know? So we need another one like that. Anything with Tony Hale.
00:09:28
Yeah. Tony Hale is just whatever he's in. Truly. At first I was like, who's that guy?
00:09:32
And then I was like, oh, it's our Tony Hale with kind of long medieval hair. You know.
00:09:38
You know I love a good plague storyline. I mean, what's better? Okay. Mine is a docuseries on Hulu.
00:09:46
Okay. So it's about true crime. We did an ad for it, and this is not an ad. I genuinely fucking loved it.
00:09:52
It's called Mastermind, and it's about Dr. Anne Burgess, who is like one of her and Anne Rule.
00:09:59
It's like heroes of true crime. Yeah. What a fucking amazing woman. And she's still alive, like in her 90s doing it, like fucking doing research.
00:10:09
And she's amazing. Like, I just, she's, I'm in awe of her. She's such a badass. I have to watch that.
00:10:14
somebody asked me if I had seen it. And when I said no, they were like, how have you not seen it?
00:10:19
I was just like, I'm so sorry. I do apologize. Yeah. Because it's with the TV show that we
00:10:26
watched. What was it called? Mindhunter. She's portrayed in that. Yes. And so it tells her real
00:10:31
story, which is just like unreal. Like this woman is a trailblazer. Such an incredible woman.
00:10:38
I just can't imagine trying to go into meeting after meeting. There's only, it's a sea of men trying to explain to people like that rape is a serious crime.
00:10:51
They didn't even take rape seriously. Like, yeah, in the 70s or so or the 60s and 70s and the FBI trying to convince these seasoned agents to take this stuff seriously.
00:11:02
and like shocking the idea of interviewing the victims to find out more information and to find
00:11:07
out what makes these people tick. It's like, she's just, I mean, yeah. So mastermind Hulu.
00:11:14
Mastermind on Hulu. You've got to watch it. And Dr. Anne Burgess. Burgess. And like her husband, they're like both in their 90s and they're like still alive. Like,
00:11:23
I mean, I'm in love with them. I want them to be my grandparents. I just pulled out a pen to write on my phone. What in the fuck is wrong with me?
00:11:31
Don't do that. Like, let me grab this over here. You know what? I'm going to definitely watch that within the week between this episode and next.
00:11:40
And then I will report back to you. Please. Should we get into the business? Yeah.
00:11:44
Hey, we have a podcast network, if you can believe it. It's called Exactly Right Media.
00:11:49
We're sitting in their offices, our offices, at this very moment. They letting us sit in their offices They are Here some highlights Let do it Well just so you know there a new episode of My Favorite Murder Animated It up on YouTube right now It youtube slash exactly right media
00:12:09
So it's the network's YouTube account. It's called Notre Dame and it comes from Minnesota 279.
00:12:16
I know that's the piece of information everyone's waiting for. Sure, they gotta know.
00:12:20
Where did this come from? Of course, it's created by our beloved Nick Terry. So good.
00:12:26
Please don't miss these. Did you see the last one in Crack That? There is a, like, blinking, you'll miss it.
00:12:31
Like, I had to watch it three times to even see this little bit of information. The fucking Swiss cheese pervert makes the quickest, like, quickest little.
00:12:40
Nope. Yep. Everyone check it out and see if you can find. Easter eggs. It's an Easter egg.
00:12:45
It's so good. I love it. I fucking love those. And then Kara Klink, co-host of That's Messed Up and SVU podcast, joins Roz on Ghosted by Roz Hernandez.
00:12:54
They talk about ghosts and a death-sensing cat. Oh, yeah. I bet that's a fun convo.
00:12:59
Yeah. The two of them. Well, any convo with both of them is the best. And then actor and comedian Gil Ozeri hops in the car with Chris and our own Karen Kilgariff.
00:13:08
That's right. This week on Do You Need a Ride? Together, they spend quality time in a drive-thru ordering milkshakes.
00:13:14
Aw. We have the most wholesome experience at the Foster's Freeze in Glendale. Yeah.
00:13:21
Because we didn't realize that was a drive-through. I didn't either. I love Foster's Freeze.
00:13:26
I know. It was really, it was a delicious, delicious episode. And the hits keep on coming in the MFM merch store.
00:13:34
In addition to the Crows t-shirts that came out last week, you will find there's a new
00:13:39
Murderino hat, a wine glass. There's some cute koozies for your summer beverages.
00:13:45
Go take a look at the new Murderino line. You might really like it. There's some new fun merch that we are making that, you know, just please keep on top of it.
00:13:53
Yeah, we appreciate it. Myfavoritemurder.com. And then, yeah, and then you'll have a koozie.
00:14:00
Also, just so you know, we are now putting out a third episode every week of My Favorite Murder.
00:14:07
This is the Rewind episodes where Karen and I go back, listen to our beginnings and what could have been our endings.
00:14:14
We came very close many times. Yes, happily they're not. And we just chat about them and we replay the old episodes, listen to them, do case updates, talk about what our lives were like at the time.
00:14:24
I mean, it's pretty fun. So Rewind with Karen and Georgia. Please check those out and make sure you rate, review, subscribe if you can.
00:14:31
Yeah, because it's like almost like a whole new show. It is. So your support, of course, means the world to us, but also really matters when it comes to like those numbers and stuff.
00:14:39
It does. So thanks for that interaction because so far it's going great. So far, such nice reviews and such nice interactions about it.
00:14:48
So thank you for that. Yes. Hey, everyone. It's Cal Penn. I'm the host of Earsay, the Audible and iHeart Audiobook Club.
00:14:58
This week on the podcast, I am sitting down with Ray Porter, the narrator of Andy Weir's audiobook Project Hail Mary, massive sci-fi adventure about survival and science and what happens when you wake up alone very far from Earth.
00:15:15
I really had to make a decision because I caught myself getting that frog in my throat and starting to get teary as I'm narrating some of these sections.
00:15:22
And it's like, okay, yo, yo, yo, is this indulgent? And I really thought about it.
00:15:26
I was like, no, at this point, it would kind of be betraying the trust the author and the listener have in telling this story if I don't go through it.
00:15:35
But there's places in this book that deeply emotionally affected me. And I left it on the mic.
00:15:41
That's great. Because it served the story. People will say like, oh, my God, I cried at the end.
00:15:46
It's like, yeah, dude, me too. Listen to Earsay, the Audible and iHeart Audiobook Club
00:15:51
on the iHeartRadio app or wherever you get your podcasts. The following ad is sponsored by Pets Best Insurance Services.
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Pets age 0 to 10. Let's talk about modern home shopping. It's sort of become a fun side hobby,
00:17:00
right? Scrolling listings at night, dreaming about kitchens you've never seen, or backyards you
00:17:05
haven't even stepped foot in. All from the comfort of pretty much anywhere. Redfin knows a lot of
00:17:11
people like you want to own, but are stuck in this browsing mode loop. That's where Redfin flips the
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landing it, that's where Redfin comes in. Redfin has over 2,200 agents with local expertise.
00:17:36
And Redfin agents close twice as many deals as other agents. That means they want to help you
00:17:41
win, not just window shop. Redfin is built to help you go from just looking to wait. This could
00:17:47
actually be home. So become the newest neighbor on the block. Visit redfin.com to start finding
00:17:53
and start owning That redfin So I think most people understand this but unlike speaking of Rewind unlike in the early days when you and I would show up with say a legal pad we had jotted down some ideas on top of before we took to our microphones unwittingly informing tens of people incorrectly about true crime
00:18:17
These days, we have researchers, and our stories are prepped months in advance, which is great.
00:18:25
So nice. It's so nice. We discuss these cases. We go over the stories. We pick them.
00:18:31
Yep. Everybody's involved. Well, you can tell that this story and the instincts behind it are from a little while ago.
00:18:41
So this story begins in New York City in the early 1800s. My favorite. Sure. The words I'm waiting to hear at all times.
00:18:48
That's when, of course, immigrants were flooding through Ellis Island, moving into New York City, and then out into the rest of America, doing whatever they could to stake their claim in the gold rush of the American dream.
00:19:03
What a time to be alive. What a time to be on the Lower East Side in an apartment with 29 other people.
00:19:10
Oh, the smell. I mean, they got through it. We've told so many of these historic stories that I keep thinking back to.
00:19:16
There was one where it was like a mother. It was they lived in a tenement. And remember, they used to put chalk and stuff in the milk so it wouldn't spoil as soon.
00:19:28
It was like lime and chalk or something horrifying where it's like the things that were happening.
00:19:35
Yeah. Shit was not great. It was not great. So at this time, a working class immigrant beat the odds, even though they were heavily stacked against her, and would go on to become one of the wealthiest New Yorkers of her day in a matter of years.
00:19:51
What's most remarkable about this is she did it and the fight she fought for women's basic reproductive rights.
00:20:00
So this is the story of the rise and the downfall of an infamous, interesting, and complicated 19th century woman, Madam Rostel.
00:20:09
Ooh, I don't know this one, I don't think. I had never heard of her before. Okay, cool.
00:20:13
So the main source of today's story is Jennifer Wright's book, Madam Rostel, The Life, Death, and Resurrection of Old New York's Most Fabulous, Fearless, and Infamous Abortionist.
00:20:24
Wow. And the rest of the sources are in our show notes. So we start in 1812, which is the year that a woman named Anne Trow is born in a small idyllic town of Painswick, England.
00:20:38
She grows up in a lower class household. When she's 15 years old, she becomes what they called back then a maid of all work, which means that she does things like emptying chamber pots, cleaning rugs, serving food.
00:20:55
She gets a job with a local middle class butcher and his family. So that's what she's doing.
00:21:00
But coming into the workforce like this makes Anne suddenly realize her status as a member of the working class and the hard truce that she's going to have to deal with as a woman in the working class.
00:21:14
Yeah. Like the risk of sexual assault at the hands of her male employers. Historian Jennifer Wright notes, quote,
00:21:22
if well off, men could assault household maids with little or no repercussions, and they would.
00:21:28
Absolutely. So all of that kind of chasing the maid around the dinner table, cutesiness that happened later on was a very real and consistent threat
00:21:38
that there was no justice on the other side of it. If it happened, it was your problem.
00:21:43
If it happened and you got pregnant from it, all the worse for you. Yeah. The end. So maybe to mitigate that risk, Anne gets married and leaves the workforce one year after joining it. She's 16 years old and she marries a tailor named Henry Summer. Unfortunately, Henry has a serious drinking problem and he barely earns enough for the couple to live on. But Anne is extremely enterprising. So she learns how to sew and mend clothing and she just starts finishing Henry's work.
00:22:14
Wow. Yeah. So she's her own little elf that comes in overnight and finishes the work for her.
00:22:21
So she basically has to take over his business. But pretty soon she's earned enough money to keep the household afloat.
00:22:27
And by 1830, she has a baby daughter named Caroline that she also has to provide for.
00:22:34
So she's still in her late teens. And she decides if she's going to be the breadwinner for her family, she wants to do it in a place where she can make real money.
00:22:43
So she sets her sights on the United States and all its promises of wealth. So in 1831, the Summer family boards a ship to New York City.
00:22:53
And like many immigrant families, the Summers land in lower Manhattan in what was known as the Five Points neighborhood.
00:23:01
So here's what Jennifer Wright has to say about that. She says, quote, the streets where she was living were not exactly paved with gold.
00:23:09
if the streets of five points were paved with anything it was vomit and horseshit the stench
00:23:15
alone was brutal and the insect problem was notable oh my god can you imagine i mean yeah i know
00:23:23
it's so intense so if you've ever seen the scorsese movie the gangs of new york so good
00:23:28
that i believe was taking place in five points yeah five points gang right yeah so the streets
00:23:35
in that neighborhood are crowded, constant gang violence, like constant. Disease is rampant. And
00:23:41
especially among immigrants, job competition is fierce. Most families of the Five Points
00:23:47
neighborhood struggle to keep food on the table. There's incredible suffering. And it's only
00:23:52
compounded when women find that they have unwanted pregnancies. And suddenly, that
00:24:00
family has yet another mouth to feed. So it's a serious issue, obviously. I mean, it always has
00:24:05
been a serious issue. But of course, especially when people are living in poverty, they can't get
00:24:11
out of poverty. That problem just compounds itself. And even though Henry is still drinking heavily,
00:24:16
he does find work at a tailor shop and continues picking up seamstress jobs. But she does those
00:24:23
jobs at home so she can take care of her daughter. They talk about one day saving enough money to
00:24:28
escape the neighborhood completely so they can give baby Caroline a brighter future in a nicer
00:24:34
part of the city. But then in August of 1833, just two years after they arrive in the United States,
00:24:42
Henry dies of typhoid fever. Oh, shit. So now 21-year-old Anne, 21 years old with a baby,
00:24:50
suddenly left in the Five Points neighborhood, basically the worst slum in the city to fend
00:24:57
for herself. So Anne obviously continues doing her seamstress work. She also tries to find
00:25:03
supplemental work doing people's laundry. She's barely scraping by. She knows she needs to find
00:25:09
better options for herself and her daughter. And of course, the 1830s aren't exactly a cakewalk for
00:25:15
women entering the workforce. And on top of that, Anne's a single mother. So those employment
00:25:21
options almost completely disappear. For the poorest New Yorkers like Anne, child care almost
00:25:28
doesn't exist. Mothers are expected to keep their children close to them, but families looking for
00:25:34
domestic workers like maids aren't going to hire someone that has their daughter at their house
00:25:39
with them. Jennifer Wright notes, quote, a maid with a child would typically find her baby unwanted
00:25:45
in the family's home and would have to send her child away to be cared for by baby farmers who
00:25:50
would take in children and raise them for a fee. Damn. And Maren notes here for me, as the name might imply, baby farmers were not exactly great
00:26:00
caregivers. They notoriously mistreated young children. There are many reported instances of babies and children being severely neglected or even
00:26:09
killed in the care of baby farmers. And needless to say, it wasn't an option any mother wanted to choose.
00:26:17
Wow. Horrifying. Horrifying. There's another option, and it's getting a job in a textile factory that's also available to women at that time.
00:26:26
Brutal hours would leave Anne with almost no time to care for her daughter. Then the pay she would make wouldn't even cover her own living expenses, let alone her child's.
00:26:35
So not even worth it. And of course, there's always sex work, which is very lucrative depending on the clientele and the location of the brothel.
00:26:43
and it offers women more control over their schedules and maybe even enough money to actually hire childcare.
00:26:50
And that is probably why it was such a crowded field at this time. According to the New York Times, in the early 19th century,
00:27:00
when the city's population is just 250,000 people, there are 10,000 sex workers.
00:27:05
Wow. Yeah. So it's an option. And obviously there's risks like disease, male violence, but of course the risk of pregnancy that then starts us all back to where we began.
00:27:20
So Anne is trying to navigate her next steps. And she meets a man named Charles Lohman, described as a, quote, easygoing immigrant from Russia.
00:27:29
So you're not going to like this part. And you're going to get real fired up. Is he, though?
00:27:33
How do we know? How do we know for sure? Does he have a chain wallet? He's a chain wallet.
00:27:38
I'm going to fucking say it. No. And you're going to know for a fact. I'm going to know.
00:27:41
So he works as a printer for the New York Herald. And soon after they meet, they fall in love.
00:27:48
They eventually marry. Charles is very well educated. He's intellectual. He likes to spend time with other, quote, radical philosophers and free thinkers who congregate in downtown bookstores.
00:28:00
Cute. It's like the upside of New York at this time where it's like there are people who are like, okay, now we got to change this.
00:28:08
now we got to be progressive and think smarter. So Charles is specifically interested in the issue of using birth control to stem over population,
00:28:17
which is a conversation that seems directly inspired by the ultra crowded conditions of neighborhoods like the Five Points.
00:28:25
By the time Anne meets Charles, she also cares a lot about this issue, obviously, as a woman living in poverty,
00:28:34
seeing what she's seeing around her. She's a working class mother. She knows how consequential motherhood can be.
00:28:41
And she also can see the huge potential profit in providing prevention from unwanted pregnancies and options for women as they are in that situation.
00:28:52
You've got to find a need and fill it. And also the 30,000 children living on the streets of Manhattan at the time.
00:29:00
Oh, my God. 30,000 children living on the streets, 250,000 people living in the city total.
00:29:07
Yeah. That's wild. Yeah. That's how we got the musical Annie. Yeah. And it ain't like that.
00:29:14
And it ain't like that. At least they lived in an orphanage. Sure. So this is when Anne develops a very consequential friendship with the druggist who lives on her street.
00:29:25
He's essentially a snake oil salesman peddling tonics that promise all sorts of cures.
00:29:30
And before long, Anne starts making these supplements herself. herself, the most popular of them are the ones that people buy to end unwanted pregnancies.
00:29:41
I don't know. It's an interesting, you know, later she's going to be vilified for it, of course,
00:29:46
because the morality gets slapped onto what is essentially women's right to make medical choices
00:29:52
for themselves But to be very clear and not to like try to make her a clean and clear hero Anne pills and tinctures are extremely dangerous cocktails of things like penny royal queen Anne lace and turpentine
00:30:06
Whoa. Which a journalist named Moira Dunnigan notes are, quote, little more than glorified poisons designed to make a woman so ill that she would miscarry.
00:30:17
So it's not like she's providing, you know, a perfect medicine and, you know, fighting it.
00:30:23
I mean, but that's how desperate women are. They probably know that and they're still like, but this is the only option.
00:30:29
Entirely. It truly is the only option. And the next paragraph is essentially, this is the landscape of women's reproductive care in the 1800s.
00:30:40
No woman, no matter their marital status or their social or financial class, has control over whether or not they have a baby.
00:30:48
And there's a huge stigma around male doctors who study gynecology and obstetrics.
00:30:54
And there's no women doctors. And it won't be till 1849 when Elizabeth Blackwell, who was the first woman to ever earn an MD, actually does that and bursts into the entirely male-dominated field.
00:31:09
I mean, can you imagine? The chutzpah. All of this is to say, at the time the medical establishment's understanding of women's health is bad at best and totally loaded with misogyny.
00:31:23
Yeah. So there is this huge gap in healthcare, and it's filled by midwives, and for hundreds of years.
00:31:32
They're always women, so as you'd expect, male doctors consider midwives to be outside of the realm of actual medicine.
00:31:39
But for hundreds of years, midwives were the only health care providers for pregnant women going through the sometimes traumatic and sometimes deadly process of both pregnancy and childbirth.
00:31:53
And midwives also provide abortions. As Moira Donegan points out, by the 1830s, midwives have, quote, long performed abortions with the same regularity with which they attended births.
00:32:04
Wow. And abortion was not necessarily understood as different from birth control.
00:32:09
Oh, I didn't know that. So there is no debate at this time in the United States about abortion.
00:32:17
That's all medical care. It's not especially moralized or overtly political, but that changes sometime around 1820 when more and more states start to pass laws criminalizing abortion.
00:32:29
And some of that is due to fear-mongering from white Protestants who claim that Irish immigrants will, quote, take over the United States.
00:32:37
hmm so i don't get the logic there that's because it doesn't make sense yeah i'm trying to make
00:32:44
sense of morality because in the 18 you know in the early 1800s irish people were the bad
00:32:54
immigrants that people are talking about today when they're like those people are coming over
00:32:59
our border yeah it was just the that's the great irony of when irish descendants are racist like
00:33:07
that because they literally just fucking got here. Absolutely. And most of us just fucking got here.
00:33:13
As an Irish person yourself with a bi-Irish background, right? Yes. Yes. We're all over
00:33:18
the place. Have you heard of me? My people are from Ireland. But also very recently. Very recently.
00:33:24
Yeah. I mean, that makes total sense. And silly me trying to like make sense of judgment, being judgmental. Well, and also this idea that I think what they were trying to say is
00:33:35
no white Protestant should be getting an abortion when these Irish are coming over here and reproducing like crazy.
00:33:43
Right, right. It's all the same. Like the racism stays the same. It's racism Mad Libs.
00:33:49
And then it's just different, you know, it's different enemies slotted in. Yeah, to match with your views.
00:33:57
Your hate of the day. Yeah, your hate. And to keep the working classes fighting with each other instead of the revolution.
00:34:05
So in the late 1820s, New York passes its first state laws criminalizing abortion.
00:34:11
These classify an early abortion as a misdemeanor. So back then, they used to talk about a thing called the quickening, which is essentially when women could feel the fetus move inside her.
00:34:23
And they had decided then that anything that happens before the quickening is a misdemeanor and after the quickening is a felony.
00:34:31
It sounds like a horror movie. Yes. The quickening. The quickening. I bet you it has been.
00:34:36
I bet you're right. Okay. So on average, medically, that happens around the fourth or fifth month of pregnancy.
00:34:43
So these laws make abortion punishable by a maximum prison sentence of a year and up to a $100 fine, which is worth around $1,800 today's money.
00:34:54
So even though if you did get arrested for it, you would pay very severely. That's a lot of money.
00:35:01
No one's really reporting anybody breaking these laws to authorities. And as Jennifer Wright mentions on the History Extra podcast, she says, quote,
00:35:11
these laws had more to do with the women's health, that these would be very dangerous procedures after five months into pregnancy.
00:35:17
It was more about that than it was about the belief that a fetus has personhood from the time of conception.
00:35:23
So this at the time was actually more protective of the mother. And so this is when Anne Lohman makes the decision to start advertising her midwife services in newspapers like the New York Sun.
00:35:37
But she doesn't want to post under her own name, so she creates an alter ego. So her husband Charles helps her make these ads, and Anne decides to call herself a physician.
00:35:48
She claims to be Paris and she says that she the granddaughter of a world French midwife whose last name is Ristelle So it true that Anne grandmother last name was Ristelle but we don know that she was a midwife Unclear We also know Anne almost certainly did not train
00:36:09
in France to become a midwife. But at the time, Paris is known to be the forefront of medicine
00:36:15
and obviously very cosmopolitan. So the backstory gives Anne both an allure and a respectability
00:36:22
that she doesn't really have. So despite the fact that she has a British accent,
00:36:27
Anne adopts the French surname and is now known as Madame Ristel. And once she makes this kind of marketing decision,
00:36:35
her life will never be the same. So the first ad for Madame Ristel runs on March 18th, 1839,
00:36:41
and it does not explicitly advertise for abortions or for contraception. You basically have to read between the lines.
00:36:48
So this is what the ad says. Okay. All caps, two married women, period. And then sentence case.
00:37:20
resulting to thousands by the adoption of means prescribed by her, has opened an office where
00:37:25
married females can obtain the desired information. Okay. I hear you. So kind of vague. Yeah, but not
00:37:32
super. I wouldn't be drawn to that ad, right? If you didn't, like to married women, you'd be like,
00:37:39
that's not me moving on. Yeah. So it's kind of well put together, I think. But over time,
00:37:45
the ad runs on the front page of New York newspapers, and Madame Rostel gets bolder
00:37:51
in her text. So there's a bunch of people, of course, most of them men, who think these ads
00:37:57
are vulgar and offensive, but Madame Rostel is ready to fire back at the detractors in her next
00:38:04
new ad. Meanwhile, the ads are undeniably drawing women to Rostel's office in Manhattan,
00:38:12
A typical visit, which she offers on a sliding scale, depending how much money the patient has, might go something like this.
00:38:18
Madame Rostel greets her patient at the front door, leads them to a medical room downstairs in a basement,
00:38:25
where she inspects the patient's body for signs of quickening. Basically, maybe has a test for fetal movement.
00:38:31
If she determines that the patient is in the early stage of pregnancy, she'll prescribe a combination of the herbs.
00:38:39
she would reassure the patient that these herbs almost always result in the termination of the pregnancy.
00:38:45
But if they don't, the patient can always come back to discuss other options. Now, by other options, she means a surgical abortion.
00:38:55
And Jennifer Wright reports that Ristel learned how to perform surgical abortions,
00:39:01
and this part is disturbing, using a piece of broken whale bone. Yikes. So it sounds unsafe.
00:39:11
It sounds risky. But also I think it points to if you push midwives all the way out of the medical community completely, that's just the result of people making do.
00:39:25
Yeah. It doesn't get safer when you ban. No. It gets more dangerous, obviously. That's the whole fucking point.
00:39:30
That's the whole idea. It doesn't solve any problems. It doesn't. It just kills women.
00:39:36
She also offers her patients that if they are past that point, they can stay at her boarding house and she'll look after them through childbirth and for a fee, will then adopt their babies out or send the babies to almshouses, which is like a poor house, which is not good, obviously.
00:39:58
Actually, Marin makes a note saying, almshouses were horrible places for babies to end up,
00:40:03
but this was the fate for many babies born to unwed mothers in this era. The New York Times reports that as many as 90% of babies sent to the almshouses died.
00:40:14
Holy shit. So it's just prolonging the death of the baby anyway. It's important to note,
00:40:21
Madam Rostel is not the only midwife or abortion provider operating in New York at this time, obviously.
00:40:27
she's undeniably the most sought after because she's the boldest one to actually be that public
00:40:33
about it. Because medications and surgical procedures for abortion at this time are crude,
00:40:40
many women die while receiving care or in childbirth. Yet as far as anyone knows,
00:40:47
Madame Ristel never loses a single patient. So of all the kind of snake oil salesmanship that she
00:40:55
started out in, she is actually providing a real medical service that is absolutely needed and is
00:41:03
life-saving. She's also building a thriving mail order business where she sells her birth control
00:41:08
pills and abortive supplements to women across the country. And these clearly have a solid success
00:41:14
rate because a publication called Distillations Magazine reports, quote, her business became
00:41:20
profitable so quickly that she had to warn patients against fraudulent copycats placing
00:41:26
similar ads. Damn. Yeah. How did this like 21-year-old widow woman who immigrated just
00:41:34
become so business savvy and smart? I mean, it's really amazing. Yeah, because, well, it's that
00:41:41
kind of thing where it's like, imagine all the people born into poverty who were brilliant and
00:41:46
Right. Opportunities. a year conceptually. I don't think, I bet you she learned some hard truths about reality and those,
00:42:02
and then she started going, well, if this is the way it is, then I'm not going to stand on ceremony
00:42:07
for what happens at the other end of unwelcome advances or rape or just premarital sex that,
00:42:16
you know, people would want to take back if they could. There's no reason to act like there's a
00:42:24
this is the only place where any kind of morality question comes in. Hey, everyone. It's Cal Penn, host of Earsay, the Audible and iHeart audiobook club.
00:42:37
This week on the podcast, I'm sitting down with Divergent author Veronica Roth to talk about her sprawling new novel, Seek the Traitor's Son.
00:42:45
It's a sci-fi fantasy epic about two protagonists on opposite sides of a war and a prophecy neither of them wanted.
00:42:52
My first book was Divergent. And when that came out, like, because it was so popular, I think it attracted like mostly positivity, but the negativity I sucked in like a sponge.
00:43:02
And I think it was like critiques of things I liked when I was like, you know, I was 23 and I wrote this book and it had all my like dorky little cheesy or maybe unrealistic loves in it.
00:43:14
And I started to feel a lot of shame about those things. And so for the rest of my career, I steered away from those little things that like make you feel pleasure when you read.
00:43:27
But I also was like saying no to these parts of myself that I then was like, screw it.
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So that's this book. Listen to Earsay, the Audible and iHeart Audiobook Club on the iHeartRadio app or wherever you get your podcasts.
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00:45:46
So as her services become popular, Madame Ristel cannot avoid controversy, of course.
00:45:53
One story that comes out in 1846 is about a woman she boarded from Philadelphia named Mary
00:46:00
Applegate, who became pregnant by the son of her employer. The son's name is Augustus Edwards. It's
00:46:07
unclear if their relationship is consensual or if the pregnancy is a result of sexual assault.
00:46:13
Either way, Augustus is the one paying to have Mary checked into Madam Rostell's boarding house,
00:46:18
and she ends up having the baby, delivering a healthy baby girl. But after she recovers
00:46:25
from the birth, Mary then learns Augustus also paid Rostelle to adopt the baby out.
00:46:32
Okay. So she goes all the way through actually having this baby and then the baby's gone,
00:46:37
like taken from her. So Mary's devastated by this news. She desperately tries to find her daughter,
00:46:43
but no one, including Madame Rostelle, knows where the baby ended up. Wow. So the newspapers hear about this and they go with this story and hordes of angry people show
00:46:55
up to Madame Ristel's office in protest. The idea that that baby got taken away and it was just like,
00:47:02
don't worry about it too bad, is like unconscionable. Mary Applegate spends the rest of
00:47:09
her life searching for her daughter and never finds her. Horrible. And no charges are ever
00:47:14
brought against anyone in that case, including against Madame Ristel for giving the child away.
00:47:20
But this entire situation reveals one of Madame Rostel's biggest, I guess, character flaws.
00:47:28
And Jennifer Wright is the one who points this out and notes it. She says, Madame Rostel believed she was smarter than most of the people around her.
00:47:37
Although some who fancy themselves to be intellectually superior are narcissistic, that's not true of everyone who holds this belief.
00:47:44
A person may simply be acknowledging reality, and in the case of Rustelle, a woman who ran an underground birth control empire and performed successful operations time after time without any formal medical school training, it could have ventilated.
00:48:00
very well been true. Right. However, that sense of superiority defined her treatment of her patients as well as of
00:48:08
her adversaries. And given that she felt she was smarter, she also felt entitled to make decisions for them
00:48:15
just as men in their lives often did. Yeah, that's a really interesting point. Yeah, she's using her own morality at this point to like decide what happens.
00:48:26
And just that idea that this would be better, so I've chosen for you is wild. So, of course, what happened to Mary Applegate and her baby makes Madame Ristel a villain in the mind of many New Yorkers, especially as sexual politics in New York City start to shift.
00:48:45
And the shift happens for a bunch of reasons. Of course, the fear of immigrants taking over the country that we talked about, men becoming more outspoken about so-called feminine virtue and motherhood, and the simplest reason, which is male doctors basically being infuriated that midwives are cutting into the profits and becoming wealthy and basically replacing OBGYNs.
00:49:10
So the New York state legislature starts ramping up abortion restrictions. And in the mid 1840s, new laws pass that up the penalty against abortion providers to a year in jail and a thousand dollar fine.
00:49:24
So much money. You're in debt for the rest of your life. Right. That's what it is.
00:49:27
Completely. And the women seeking abortions can be given a thousand dollar fine and three to 12 months in jail.
00:49:35
What's a thousand dollars? Forty thousand dollars. Can you, that's, that is debt for the rest of your entire fucking life.
00:49:42
Yeah. And you probably have other children that you need to feed. And the debt is, probably has interest or somebody is like coming and knocking.
00:49:49
Yeah. Yeah. Wow. Now, again, these laws aren't widely enforced, but as the arguably most famous abortion provider in the United States at the time, Madame Rostel has a huge target on her back now.
00:50:03
She's arrested a few times. She always manages to bail herself out. and escape the most serious charges because she's now rich.
00:50:10
So she can be cleared of it. But that's up until 1847 when she's 35 years old. She's been providing abortions for just under a decade and contraception,
00:50:22
which is equally as problematic for people at the time. And then Madame Rostel is convicted on criminal abortion charges
00:50:30
and she's sentenced to a year in prison on Blackwell's Island. Oh, wow. Which is where the psychiatric hospital was, where Nellie Bly went in as the intrepid undercover reporter.
00:50:43
That's that whole story. So there was also a prison on Blackwell's Island. Wow. And that's where Madame Rostel was sent.
00:50:50
It's a sentence she can't get out of, but she does the mafia thing where she basically serves her time in luxury.
00:50:58
She gets special meals. She has frequent visitors. What are you saying about the mafia?
00:51:03
I'm so sorry. She does it like the very rich that go to white collar prisons, maybe.
00:51:08
So after she's released from serving that, she gets right back to work. She is promised to stop performing surgical abortions, but her contraception medicines and her mail order medicine is still a booming business.
00:51:24
Now it's the 1860s. Madame Ristel is in her early 50s and, of course, living a completely different life than when she first emigrated to America.
00:51:34
She has amassed a fortune that she before could only have dreamt about. So she moves her family to one of the most expensive parts of New York City, and she does it in her characteristically bold way.
00:51:48
She outbids the Archbishop of St. Patrick's Cathedral for the property across the street on Fifth Avenue in Midtown Manhattan.
00:51:57
Damn. And there she builds herself a mansion where she lives and operates like her office is out of.
00:52:04
Wow. Straight up Gilded Age mansion. I feel like by this point, this woman has such an incredible fuck you, seriously fuck you attitude.
00:52:14
Yeah. Yeah. You don't get to that place without a bit of a go fuck yourself attitude.
00:52:18
I mean, right. And also, like if she never lost a patient, that means her care and her attention to detail and her knowing what these women like went through, what they need, what they want was very real and very effective.
00:52:38
I don't know. I just think that that part is interesting. Yeah. And important. There's something there.
00:52:43
Yeah. Nobody is being kind of like pushed out the door and left to their own devices, which it seems like was everything else in every other part of society.
00:52:53
So the problem is that public opinion on Madame Rostel is souring quickly because she's still ostentatious.
00:53:01
She's obsessed with money. And, of course, she's the absolute antithesis of the ideal Victorian woman, which, of course, was conjured up by Victorian men, which is you're quiet.
00:53:13
But proper mothers, you know, the Madonna whore situation, I think, is probably starting up around this time.
00:53:20
And another quote from Distillations magazine, they point out, quote, Madame Rostel had become the face of abortion in the United States.
00:53:28
And by extension, women's interference in the male dominated medical establishment.
00:53:33
OK. Doctors, journalists and religious activists were vocal about their distaste for her and her business.
00:53:39
Yeah, God forbid a woman fucking becomes successful at something that they're trying to be successful at.
00:53:45
Well, and also it's something that is absolutely necessary. It's necessary and they're not providing any of it.
00:53:52
She was blackmailed threatened shamed harassed and was always one misstep away from facing the unyielding horrors of the law End quote So alongside increasingly rigid thoughts on gender roles
00:54:05
in 1869, New York lawmakers repeal the existing abortion laws and pass stricter ones.
00:54:12
They ban abortion at any stage of pregnancy. And then a couple years later, in 1872,
00:54:19
New York passes another law that outlines felony charges against both abortion providers
00:54:24
and the women who are seeking abortions. Wow. But Madame Rostel continues her work despite all of this,
00:54:30
knowing the risks, knowing her reputation is getting worse by the minute, knowing like so bad that at this point she is included in, quote,
00:54:42
several guidebooks to the city, one of which dubbed her the wickedest woman in New York.
00:54:48
Oh, my God. So essentially it's like there's all these villains in New York and you can, I guess, get a tour guide to walk through a map.
00:54:55
It's like star maps of like evil people in New York. And she was one of them. Wow.
00:55:00
But Madame Rostell's biggest adversary in this era is a man named Anthony Comstock,
00:55:04
who is a puritanical Christian man around 30 years her junior. In the 1860s, Comstock begins his now famous crusade
00:55:14
against American sinfulness. Okay, leave us alone. Truly. He becomes a kind of a celebrity in the ultra-religious circle.
00:55:22
Then he begins to gain serious political influence. So by 1873, after he lobbies Congress extensively, the so-called Comstock Act becomes federal law.
00:55:34
And it makes it illegal to send anything obscene through the mail, which is as vague as it sounds.
00:55:41
So it's reported that things like anatomy textbooks and prints of the birth of Venus are confiscated because of the Comstock Act.
00:55:49
Think of the children. But this law, the children love the books. This law also encompasses Madam Rostell's advertisements and any printed instructions on how to use her medication as well as any of her mail order services.
00:56:09
Leave the post office out of this, please. Yeah. You know? But that's how they do it.
00:56:13
And I believe recently they have tried to re-invoke the Comstock Act for in these abortion bans that have been happening state by state.
00:56:22
Yeah. So Anthony Comstock soon makes it his personal mission to go after Madame Ristel and her practice.
00:56:28
In 1878, he goes to an appointment in disguise under the false pretense that he and his wife have more children than they can afford.
00:56:37
And now they need to end an unwanted pregnancy. Like just using that cover story and then going through with that just shows because the cover story is the reality of some people's lives.
00:56:49
and to be like, I'm going to get her with this story. Instead of being like, oh, wow, this is actually a story of people's actual lives.
00:56:57
You know what I mean? That is sending people into abject poverty of which I'm not sure.
00:57:04
I don't know anything about Anthony Comstock, but I bet he and his wife didn't live in the Five Points neighborhood.
00:57:10
In the tenement. They didn't have their sour milk, have chalk and lime put into it
00:57:15
so that they could just sell it off the back of a truck. Like, it's that thing of people who don't know and don't care about the people whose lives they're affecting coming in and saying, I demand for my own moral purposes that you do this.
00:57:29
That you do what I think is correct and what I think is right, even though I have no understanding of your circumstances.
00:57:34
And I'm not going to try to. Nope. Because whatever it is, it's probably your fault.
00:57:38
Yeah, exactly. If you don't have money, you're lazy. Yeah. If you haven't pulled yourself up by the bootstraps, it's because you've chosen not to.
00:57:45
Not because you don't have boots. Right. Right. Not because you've been fined for these arbitrary fucking laws and you're in debt now because you're also in debt because you have to go to check cashing places and they charge you so much fucking money that you'll never be able to catch the fuck up.
00:58:00
For real. But I think, first of all, we're most certainly preaching to the converted.
00:58:06
But I do think it's kind of the refocus of this conversation, which is instead of going in there and lying about being in this position that you don't care about that people are in, you clearly don't care.
00:58:18
Why don't you go look into what those people who are in that position actually need?
00:58:22
Because there's huge neighborhoods of them all over this city. Totally. You can help those people in those circumstances.
00:58:28
Yeah. So Madame Rostel sells him medication to induce an abortion. He goes out, finds a police officer, brings that police officer back, and has him arrest Madame Rostel.
00:58:42
She is handed criminal charges and given a court date. I'm not a little bitch. When she's made aware of Comstock's charade, she's furious, and she goes to the press telling them, quote,
00:58:52
he in this nasty detective business there are a number of little doctors who are in the same
00:58:59
business behind him they think if they can get me in trouble and out of the way they can make a
00:59:05
fortune so this arrest deeply affects madam rostell her husband charles has recently passed away
00:59:14
and she's still in mourning so now she basically after the arrest she's completely resigned her
00:59:21
employees later report that she would be pacing around the house saying things like, quote,
00:59:27
why do they persecute me so? I have done nothing to harm anyone. So then on the evening of April 1st,
00:59:33
1878, the day before her trial is set to begin, 66-year-old Madame Ristel is found dead in her
00:59:41
bathtub with her throat slashed. Holy shit. Her death is quickly ruled a suicide. When Anthony
00:59:47
Comstock finds out about Madame Ristel's death, he thinks it's an April Fool's joke,
00:59:51
And when he assured that she is actually dead he tells a reporter that it is quote a bloody ending to a bloody life Wow End quote So Madame Ristel leaves her vast fortune to her family Caroline and Caroline two children
01:00:10
who were Madame Ristel's beloved grandchildren, inherit somewhere between $600,000 and $1.5 million.
01:00:18
Holy shit. Do you want to guess how much that is? $1.5 million in the late 1800s.
01:00:25
is $15 million? Between $23 and $60 million. Holy shit. Here's what's interesting.
01:00:33
Jennifer Wright shares a theory that has been gaining traction since the 1870s after Ristel died
01:00:40
that suggests the body found in Madame Ristel's bathtub wasn't her. That instead, basically,
01:00:49
she could have sourced a lookalike body through her powerful political connections,
01:00:54
even like the coroner. And like medical connections, yeah. And basically placed that there and then-
01:01:00
Later date. Later dazed it. Stage drone death, fled America- I believe it. Returned to Europe and spent the rest of her life there
01:01:09
free from the harassment and the bullshit that she dealt with here. And- Holy shit.
01:01:15
Madame Rostel's finest jewelry was all missing from her house when they found her.
01:01:21
Her family members, who didn't seem to be outwardly grief-stricken over her death, started making trips to Europe every three months.
01:01:29
Well, wouldn't you if you had fucking 60 million? Absolutely. Like, that actually is no proof at all.
01:01:35
And as one detective told the Boston Globe, quote, how ridiculous it seems for a woman who knew medicine and surgery thoroughly to kill herself in such a brutal manner.
01:01:45
It is hardly in accord with what I've seen of her character. Yeah, she probably knew a tea that would just lights out.
01:01:52
Correct. Yeah. Correct. Even Anthony Comstock wondered about the possibility of Madame Ristel faking her own death, telling reporters that he feared she pulled, quote, some trickery.
01:02:06
Oh, please, I want to know. We may never know the truth. Come on, deathbed confession.
01:02:11
It's very possible that she also died by suicide, that the mental anguish of her trying to do this and run it as a business.
01:02:19
Yeah. And she knew things were not going to go well from then on. Right. Because in her lifetime, they were changing and restricting abortion to a degree that was new to her.
01:02:31
So she was probably feeling very negative about the whole situation. But at the end of the day, she was an outspoken advocate for family planning and very vocal about the impact forced pregnancies had on women's lives.
01:02:48
So obviously, we're telling this story because abortion access continues to be under attack across the United States with more states passing anti-abortion legislation following the overturning of Roe v. Wade in 2022.
01:03:03
Right now, 27 U.S. states limit access to abortions based on how far along a pregnant person is, with some bans starting as early as six weeks, which oftentimes people don't even know they're pregnant.
01:03:15
Absolutely not. 14 of these states have gone even further and enacted bans on the procedure at any point in a pregnancy.
01:03:24
Without understanding any nuance of a person's life and what's going on with their health and their body and their mind.
01:03:31
Like, I mean, obviously, why would they give a fuck? They don't care. They don't care.
01:03:36
They don't care of the true death that their supposed pro-life stance is actually making happen.
01:03:45
Right. And speaking of, the website for the National Institute of Health states that maternal death rates in abortion restriction states are 62% higher than in states with greater abortion access.
01:03:59
That's mind-boggling. So according to Dr. Suzanne Bell of Johns Hopkins University, quote, being denied an abortion comes with substantial health risks, especially for vulnerable groups.
01:04:12
The risk of maternal death is 15 times higher for carrying a pregnancy to term than it is for abortion.
01:04:18
And pregnancy-related complications are between two and more than 25 times higher for pregnancies ending in birth compared to abortion.
01:04:28
So that kind of fantasy that it is so unsafe or it puts women at risk or any of those things, as opposed to just being a medical step that might need to be taken at some point is propaganda.
01:04:42
Dr. Bell adds, quote, I want to emphasize that abortion is health care. Recent state restrictions coupled with ongoing efforts to curtail access to medication abortion pills nationwide are an attempt to interfere with the delivery of evidence based health care.
01:04:58
And control pregnant people's bodies with harmful consequences for individuals and population health.
01:05:06
End quote. And what Dr. Bell said right there sounds very similar to what Madame Rostel was saying way back in the 1800s, two centuries ago.
01:05:17
And as Jennifer Wright notes, quote, Anne, who is Madame Rostel, Anne had the strange fortune to live during a period of great change regarding sexual attitudes.
01:05:28
In modern times, we're sometimes guilty of assuming that one sexual ideology dominated a previous century, thinking everyone from the 19th century was prudish, for instance.
01:05:39
Or else we theorize that all of history is one long, uninterrupted upward trajectory from utmost prudery to utter hedonism.
01:05:49
In truth, dominant attitudes regarding sex shift decade to decade. Yeah. So the fact that that is true can give us a little bit of hope because it an election year because there are many people especially many women who are mobilized to swing this pendulum away from the current extremist positions that have erupted in this country
01:06:18
and many people understand how important it is to protect the right to have bodily autonomy
01:06:24
and safety and medical privacy. Like this is standard shit. This is what the men get.
01:06:33
Yeah. We should get it too. It's also very important to note that those 19th century
01:06:38
abortion laws that I was talking about for New York state were rolled back. Today,
01:06:43
abortion is not only legal there, but it is a protected right in the state of New York.
01:06:48
And that was the story of Madame Rostel, maybe the most famous abortion provider and abortion advocate in American history.
01:06:55
How have we never heard of her? Because it's about abortion. Taboo. Yeah. That's incredible.
01:07:03
Ten grand at Planned Parenthood, for sure. For sure. Right? Yep. I feel like I'm thinking about my relationship to Planned Parenthood since I was 14 and got lucky enough to have a mom who understood that I needed to be on the pill.
01:07:17
And so I never... Well, it's services that you didn't even have to think about at that time.
01:07:23
Thank God, yeah. I didn't either. None of my friends did. It was our medical right.
01:07:28
Yeah, it was a given that if you needed it and you had, you know, a family that was our mother that was open-minded.
01:07:34
But that's so many people don't have access to that. And I think part of the reason I don't want kids, like one of the many reasons is I don't want to become, I don't want my body to become this conversation that other people get to have about it.
01:07:47
You know, the autonomy that I have. I have some bad news. What? It's happening right now.
01:07:53
It's just your body is everybody's body. And that is kind of the offense. I think that is what's so infuriating is if this was about a function of men's bodies, it would be disgusting that anyone would be suggesting it.
01:08:07
But there are all these weird people, as we've begun to discuss, that want in on your doctor's appointment, on your children's doctor's appointments.
01:08:18
They want in on all these areas they do not belong in. They don't belong there. They are not qualified to be there.
01:08:26
Their opinions are not relevant in those rooms. And it shouldn't be happening. And it's based on their personal beliefs, which we are not trying to take away from.
01:08:34
They can have theirs. We have ours. Yours does not get to determine our education, our bodies, our health care, our lives.
01:08:46
I mean, how is that not so fucking clear? The thing that I love about the Church of Satan, and I know that's going to sound a little out of left field.
01:08:54
We've talked about them. But that's their whole thing. Yeah. Is they're basically saying, oh, okay, well, if the Protestants get to make this decision, then so does the Church of Satan.
01:09:03
And when you say it that way, you go, what? What? Are you crazy? Yeah. Because it puts into context what we're actually talking about here, which is no church of any kind should be involved in when I go to see the doctor and need to talk to them about something.
01:09:16
Totally. Totally. I love shouting into your face about a thing that we agree on and everyone else agrees.
01:09:23
All of us. But you know what? I do feel a little glimmer. Last week I said I didn't yet, but I do feel a little glimmer of hope starting to happen.
01:09:31
You should. I do. So. Because if nothing else, it's separate from, and I think people are really getting this, like anything could happen going forward.
01:09:41
And we know something is going to happen that's going to be news that breaks that tells us that this is not a perfect person.
01:09:48
Yeah. That this is not the best candidate that you could ever imagine in your life.
01:09:54
Of course, there's going to be political things. There's going to be personal things.
01:09:57
It's going to happen. But the glimmer of hope is feeling the feeling that all the other women and a lot of men feel in this country where they go, we're not being taken over by right wing fascists.
01:10:12
There's all kinds of people who are willing to give their money, their time, their brains, their care to make sure it doesn't happen because we don't want it.
01:10:20
And it isn't the majority. Yeah. Hell yeah. All right. Well, then, you know what?
01:10:25
Enough said. Yeah. We've said it. It's how people feel. So should we actually close this episode out on that note?
01:10:31
Yes. And I'll do my story next week. Yes, we're done. That's a whole episode. We did it.
01:10:36
We did that. And if you don't have the money right now, you can also find out how to volunteer to be an escort for people who are going into a clinic.
01:10:46
There's lots of other ways to support and give your energy to such a worthy cause.
01:10:52
those abortion clinic escorts are some of the bravest most generous and kind of like those
01:11:00
people are they're dedicating their time in a way that really is important that kind of like
01:11:05
you are not alone right and also we're going to fight for you yeah that is such an incredible
01:11:10
donation if you don't have money and you do have time consider doing that because i think it really
01:11:18
makes a difference in people's lives. It's like they're doing, some would say, the Lord's work. Except we wouldn't say that because it's not fucking relevant.
01:11:30
I've had a can of wine on a hangover. That was an incredible story. I did not know that.
01:11:37
What a wild ride. Good job. So true. Thank you, Maren McGlashan, my researcher who wrote that up
01:11:44
for me and Alejandra and Hannah, who also were in the discussion of doing this story and how we start
01:11:52
telling these stories that are very important to be talking about, to know the history of, and to be bringing
01:12:00
Like the history of that where it's like they've been messing with these laws for a while and it is in an answer to culture.
01:12:06
Yeah. So let's codify so that isn't what people get to mess around with anymore.
01:12:12
Totally. All right. Well, great job. Thank you guys for listening, for being here with us.
01:12:17
We appreciate you. And stay sexy. And don't get murdered. Goodbye. Elvis, do you want a cookie?
01:12:30
This has been an Exactly Right production. Our senior producer is Alejandra Keck.
01:12:36
Our managing producer is Hannah Kyle Creighton. Our editor is Aristotle Acevedo.
01:12:41
This episode was mixed by Liana Squalache. Our researchers are Maren McClashen and Allie Elkin.
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Email your hometowns to myfavoritemurder at gmail.com. Follow the show on Instagram and Facebook at myfavoritemurder and Twitter at myfavemurder.
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