The following is a rushed transcript and may contain errors. A proofread version will be made available as soon as possible.

Mansa Musa:

Welcome to this edition of Rattling the Bars. I’m your host Mansa Musa. I remember when I was locked up in prison, one of the most celebrity cases that came out in Nebraska was Nebraska versus Greenho. And in Nebraska versus Greenho, it was a case that dealt specifically with parole. But when it dealt with parole, it dealt with mandatory language. In Nebraska, it said that if a person does A, B, C, D, E, F, G, they will be paroled. And so when a person came up to be paroled because they did A, B, C, D, E, F, G, the department of correction in Nebraska denied them parole. The Supreme Court ultimately waived in on say that this particular rule was law and therefore it was mandatory and had to force the Lord and person should be let it go. I found myself here in 2024. That was sometime in 1980 something I found myself here in 2025 revisiting Nebraska prison system.

But unlike the mandatory language of greenhouse, I’m dealing with a situation today where the only thing the person is guilty of is thinking. Imagine that. Imagine that you’ll being punished because of what you think and that because of what you think you’re placed in maximum security prison, you’re being denied access to your loved ones and more importantly, you’re being held over life sentence without parole in this environment. Join me today is Julie Montpetit. Julie is the wife of Nicholas Ely and Nicholas is in the Nebraska Department of Corrections serving the license our pro. Welcome to Rallying the Bars. Julie,

Julie Montpetit:

Thank you so much for having me. I’m very excited to get the opportunity to meet you

Mansa Musa:

And you seen how I open up. So now first let’s talk about your husband, Nicholas and what’s going on at this particular time before we going to, while we here having this conversation, how is he doing and what’s his situation right now?

Julie Montpetit:

He’s doing okay. So he’s being held right now in a special management unit at Nebraska in a unit called 3 84 where he is held 21 hours a day in his cell by himself and then three hours a day he gets out with a group of 30 people where he gets to shower and cook and whatnot. Given the situation that we’re dealing with and have been dealing with, it has very much taken a toll on his mental health and his dissociation and just hopelessness has really been hard on him. He has made comments that he wishes he would take the hole over this, that this has been the hardest year of his life.

Mansa Musa:

Alright, so let’s talk about that because as you just described, his current situation that we need to educate our audience on just why he find himself in this position or why y’all find yourselves in this position. So according to information that was reported is that you create this podcast and the purpose of the podcast was to talk about relationships, women, the relationship that men and women have in prison. It would be a woman that’s have a loved one that’s locked up or a man that has a loved one locked up. Talk about how their relationships evolved, evolve, and how they maintain it through artists conditions. And at some point he came on your podcast, talk about that, just pick it up from right there.

Julie Montpetit:

So we decided to, a friend of mine and myself decided to start a podcast because really the relationship that me and Nick have is one of the healthiest relationships I’ve ever had. And yet there’s such a stigma on these relationships, especially people like met while incarcerated that have reached out and met them while they’re incarcerated. And I decided to start this podcast with a friend of mine. She ended up not being able to do it and Nicholas was like, you have to do this. This is so necessary. You need to be able to speak to other women and humanize the population that are incarcerated because they are so much more than what is portrayed in the media and what people think. And I was nervous and he was like, I’m like, will you do it with me? And he was like, yeah, I could do it.

I’ll do it with you. So he is on the first episode of the podcast and it is our love story. We talk about how we met and the circumstances on his end versus my end. And it’s just a really great opener of getting to know me and Nicholas as a couple. And it was released last year in November and we recorded it, I edited it and I put it out. And that day I get messages from people of loved ones that are in the same unit as Nicholas and they’re messaging me saying He’s been taken, they took all his stuff, we don’t know where he is, we don’t know why. And it turns out it was because of this podcast. They were upset about it.

Mansa Musa:

Okay, so let’s talk about the podcast. So now in terms of the podcast, how did he record? How did y’all record it? He recorded on telephone.

Julie Montpetit:

Yeah, it’s not a video, it’s just on the phone. Regular recording. They’re recording our conversation. I recorded our conversation and just edited that. So it was just, we didn’t think anything of it. We didn’t think, because there’s so many podcasts that feature people that are incarcerated, we didn’t know that it even could be a potential problem.

Mansa Musa:

Right. And did they ever, so they retaliated against him according to what you’re saying, this is a retaliation against him for participating in this podcast. And so did the institution ever give you any notice as to why or did he receive any type of disciplinary infraction as to why? Nothing.

Julie Montpetit:

No, he never received any kind of writeup for it. He never received any misconduct reports. They threatened him a few times. So someone said they were going to throw him in the hole. They said that their legal team would be contacting us. They said that it was a common sense policy. So that’s what we broke was the common sense policy. When we asked for further information, we got silence for months. This happened in November. I got cut off from him from the phone and messaging in November of last year. And then from video in January and we weren’t getting responses. We were like, what did we break? What rule did we break? Can you give us the policy? Can you have a conversation with us? I’m open to whatever you need to do. He was on one episode and that’s it. And we just want to have a conversation with you because we’re sorry if we did something wrong. Can you just point us in the right direction of what we did wrong and how we can fix this?

Mansa Musa:

So basically y’all never got no official report as to how y’all violated the rules and regulations of Nebraska Department of Correction.

Julie Montpetit:

So once in February when I was trying to get married to him and they were banning me from seeing him after the visit, keep in mind in his facility, he only gets two hours of in-person visits per month. So on that two hour visit, we were going to get married and they had denied us in December and then we tried again in February. They approved the wedding, but they denied the visit. And I said, why are you denying the visit? Why are you blocking my visitation with my husband? And they said, well, there was a letter that you received. I said, I never received a letter. What are you talking about? Can you give it to me? And they sent me a letter dated December 17th stating three things on that letter. So this is now February and I’ve had visits with him on video in January. And this letter was dated in December. And these

Mansa Musa:

Are three reasons. The reason, if you can remember,

Julie Montpetit:

Yeah, it was unauthorized business, enterprise, unauthorized phone communication, and one other one. I forgot what the third one was.

Mansa Musa:

Okay, well, okay, so what is they alleging is the unauthorized business first? What are they saying? What are they saying constitute an unauthorized business on his part? It got to be on in order for it to be a violation, it got to be something that he did or something that you did that violated the rules as it relates to them telling a visitor can’t bring no contraband and can’t bring no money and can’t bring no. Right. So something like that then it would have collateral effect. So what is the unauthorized business as it relates to him?

Julie Montpetit:

I wish I could tell you because whenever we ask for clarification, they won’t tell us. So I assumed that it was because of my podcast, which is not making any money, money and it is under my name. So he has nothing to do with it. It’s completely separate and there’s nothing to do with him. So he wasn’t paid to be on the podcast. There was no exchange of money, there was no contract. He was my boyfriend at the time. So I provided without them asking, I provided my proof of the ownership of the company and how I’m the sole proprietor and they just won’t answer. So as soon as I start pushing and asking what’s the policy, how long am I banned, anything like that, it’s automatic silence. I just don’t get a reply. I don’t get a phone call

Mansa Musa:

Back. And what did they say is the unauthorized, how did they justify them using this term? Unauthorized use of the phone. Because they say the business not allowed the business. And then they say, how was it that he used the phone or what they saying how he used the phone to violate the rules of the institution. It got to be him. It can’t be if I call you and you say, you cuss me out, they can’t charge me before you cussing me out. The only thing they can say is what I’m saying. They can say something about, well just tell your people stop cussing or whatever. But it is my phone call. So what did they say about him using the phone? Because all this is got to be around him doing something. If the band coming about, so what did they say about the phone?

Julie Montpetit:

So it was funny because a normal phone communication, if you do a three-way, that’s something that you’re not allowed to do. Exactly.

So this was not a three-way, but for an example, if you have a phone communication issue or misconduct report around it, the first misconduct is a seven day ban. So when I got this letter in February and it said phone communication, we were like, well what phone? It wasn’t a three-way. So what other phone communication is there? A policy that says that I can’t record a phone call Again, we got silence. And then he wrote a kite to the person who’s in charge of phones and said, well this says seven days and it’s been three months. So then they told him, well we took off her phone, we took it off the block. So then he tried to use my phone and it didn’t work. So then he went back and said, why isn’t the phone working? And they said, the warden has a special block on your wife’s phone number and only he can remove it. And we said, well why can you remove it silent? And as I’m speaking this to you, it almost felt like there has to be more to this story as I’m telling people.

Mansa Musa:

And

Julie Montpetit:

People are assuming there has to be more to the story. You had to have done something.

Mansa Musa:

Right, exactly.

Julie Montpetit:

So that’s why we filed the lawsuit because we really weren’t getting answers and we didn’t know what to do because we really were being honest. We really were telling the truth and we really were not getting any answers for what we did wrong and how we can fix it.

Mansa Musa:

So let’s pick up there where you say y’all filed the lawsuit because we recognize now that at no time, according to your information, at no time was he given a no of infraction as to rule what rule he violated. Therefore allowing them to say, well this is the rule you violated. Take him to a hurry, let him represent himself on it and then make the determination he wasn’t giving none of that,

Speaker 3:

Nothing.

Mansa Musa:

But they took a punitive action regardless of what they alleged. Alright, so you say that led y’all to him to file a lawsuit. Talk about the lawsuit.

Julie Montpetit:

Yeah, so we, as you know in the prison system, there’s a grievance procedure. You have to file kites and you grieve and you go to different levels of grievances. We were not getting responses from any of these grievances, they were ignoring them. So at this point, Nicholas’s mental health is really declining. He feels very helpless. He doesn’t know what he’s doing wrong, he’s trying to do the right thing and be the rehabilitated person that he is and continue to be. And this is really hard on him because he’s like, as soon as I start doing good, whenever I was causing trouble, I wasn’t getting in this much trouble. I wasn’t being retaliated against like this. And then all of a sudden I’m good and then all these guys around me are laughing at me because I’m doing good now and I’m being retaliated again. So we really thought, what can we do? And he was like, I have to file a lawsuit that’s left. We’ve tried the grievances, we’ve gone all the way up, we haven’t heard anything, so let’s do it. So we really, him and I have very little background in law. He has a history obviously from fighting his case for so many years. But we used a lot of chat GPT and learned how to file a civil suit. So that’s what we ended up doing.

Mansa Musa:

So now in terms of the, y’all got a hearing coming up this month, October?

Julie Montpetit:

Yes. As of right now we have, so we filed the preliminary injunction hearing for a hearing. So basically that would allow me to have access to him again until pending the finishing of the lawsuit. We were hoping that at least if we went to this hearing, if it was denied, at least they would have to show why. So we would get some answers because we don’t have any answers, we have nothing to go on. It’s been silenced.

Mansa Musa:

Right. And for the benefit of our audience, an injunction is when you file a civil litigation, you file an injunction to ask the court to have the parties ceased doing what they’re doing until the hearing is held and issuing an injunction, stopping the behavior’s being inflicted on the plaintiffs in this case. Talk about, let’s go back to how this all came about because the name of y’all podcast is what?

Julie Montpetit:

More than an inmate’s girlfriend.

Mansa Musa:

Alright, so your story has got a sub note to it or a subtext to it more than an inmate’s girlfriend with trauma or tragedy. But talk about why did you come to this space where you felt as though it was important to create this kind of podcast? Because most podcasts in prison or relative to telling the prison story, it’s either talking about the conditions or the prison or it’s talking about unpacking the crime that a person who committed a person is innocent. It goes into the space of trying to help establish a case of exoneration. But in your case, y’all put a podcast together that specifically talk about the human side, for lack of better word, a prison.

Speaker 3:

And

Mansa Musa:

How did y’all come about that?

Julie Montpetit:

So I had built friendships with different people that were in the prison wives community and there was so much stigma on us as prison wives or prison girlfriends because of the relationships that we’re in. People assume and think that we are crazy, that we’re desperate, that we don’t think that we can have a relationship in the real world, that there’s something wrong with us, that we have mental health issues or whatever. And that’s the reason why we seek out relationships with those that are incarcerated when oftentimes these things happen out of the blue. In my case, I was looking for life’s bigger questions and that’s how I met Nicholas. So I was looking to learn from someone who I thought had a lot of time on their hands and could do the readings that I always wanted to do and I ended up falling in love with this person and we had a very healthy relationship.

So when I start getting into the community and I see that there’s so much negativity about it, there’s so much hate. We thought we need to change this around and how do we do that? We should start a podcast. But also we wanted to be able to contribute to prison reform and we thought in our own way if we could show people that it’s not what it seems and that the guys that are incarcerated aren’t these evil people that deserve all these sentences that they’re giving, which is what I assumed before meeting Nick. If we could do our part in showing that there’s so much more to the prison community and the people that are incarcerated, what better way to do that than through their loved one? Because

Mansa Musa:

Go ahead. Yeah,

Julie Montpetit:

Because we love this person. So why do we love this person despite their crime? So that’s what we started. So we started interviewing different women and different family members about what’s happening, why they love the person that they love, and it gives a unique perspective that we hope will soften people’s hearts to the idea of maybe we got it wrong, maybe we are over sentencing, maybe we aren’t putting enough time into rehabilitation and reentry. Why is this happening? And I feel that having a woman speak about it and speak about why she loves a man or why she loves a brother really gives a unique perspective. And I think it has opened the eyes of a lot of people that otherwise might not have thought the way we did.

Mansa Musa:

And from your experience in dealing with Nicholas and the other women that have loved ones that’s in prison, what would you tell policy makers, people that’s in a position to give pass laws for conjugal visit pass laws that would allow people to have more access to their loved one? What would you tell them about this if they was to ask you why you are married to a man that has life without a parole and it is just a supermax, what would you tell them about that to make them understand the social value of this type of relationship?

Julie Montpetit:

It’s incredible and I have been able to witness other people that Nick is surrounded by, not only Nicholas and myself, our relationship, but it’s incredible what a healthy relationship can do to someone who is incarcerated. And not only that, just having someone care, for lack of a better word, even myself, reaching out to different people that are incarcerated, just having that connection with them and speaking to them, their ability to do good, to change for the positive, to believe in themselves again, to want to be a contributing member of society again, society. It’s incredible how quickly that changes. There are people that are incarcerated that are stuck like how many people are stuck in the system since they were teenagers, Nicholas being one of them. And if you give the opportunity for that connection, it’s incredible what it does. And any person that you would talk to who’s serving long sentences will tell you that a healthy loving relationship will make them treat others better.

They’re less likely to cause problems in the prison, they’re more likely to contribute to positivity and rehabilitation, more likely to contribute to programs. And it’s so fast. I’m not saying that it’s going to take that you have to watch it over years. If lawmakers just spent 20 minutes talking to someone who has a loved one and is married and has a healthy relationship, that they’re able to see that person regularly, they become, they’re different right away. So I would urge lawmakers to just spend the time. We spend so much time judging others when really we don’t understand their stories, we don’t know their stories, and you learn it and we learn the impact of having someone who cares behind them. There’s so many men behind bars that could just be such wonderful contributing members of society if they’re given them the right tools.

Mansa Musa:

And you know what Julie? I’m going push even further on that. I just is my mantra. It’s called Crime and Punishment. You commit a crime, the punishment is the sentence that you receive. The goal and obligation of the institution beyond that point is just what you just said is to put a person in a space where they have hope, where they readjust or adjust to return to society and be make a contribution. You just really gave an outline of how the system supposed to act and supposedly

Be in terms of creating an environment where a person would feel like once they got in that system that they got the tools and the resources to help them change their thinking and prepare them to return society. And you even made the case where how important it is to have a family involved in that process, right? So I think that going forward people need to recognize that when we talk about family and family reunification or we talk about loved ones and the impact that loved ones have, Nicholas is who he is today and has the attitude that he has today is because of you. Because it is not so much not wanting to let you down, but he got hope. He sees somebody that he got in his life that he want to be a part of beyond the wall and that he know that he got to stay focused on that but stand the reason that they don’t want ’em to do that. And so we ask that people really look at this situation because at the end of the day, only thing he guilty of is trying to be a human being. But as we close out, tell our audience where you at right now and how y’all getting along. What’s your communication with Nicholas? Are you still being subjected to the same restrictions or has it changed and how can they support you?

Julie Montpetit:

It hasn’t changed at this point. We have very limited communication. A lot of what we do is between family and friends to communicate. I don’t think that the prison realized how deep our relationship was and how deep our commitment is. I think they thought that we would leave, that I would leave, that I would get scared and leave. But I will never and I won’t and I will continue fighting for my husband to have access. I am not looking to cause problems. I am very much just looking to continue building the relationship with my husband. And I also want people to know that if they’re in similar situations, we all need to take stands like this. We all need to fight back because so many times we’re given short end of the sticks and we’re told things that we’re not allowed to do or we’re taken from our loved ones because they’re incarcerated, but they still have constitutional rights, they still have the right to you. So don’t be afraid to fight back when you think that you’ve been wronged by the prison system because it’s so important that more of us are doing this so that they’re held accountable just like they expect our loved ones to be held accountable.

Mansa Musa:

Right. Julie, you rattling bars today. I can spill the tremble from the bars being rattled and it’s important and I appreciate you coming on and being honest because I told you I did a lot of time in this space. I seen family members I seen, it’s a unique culture that comes with prison. You see people, family members coming, you get the same visits the same time. They get it. You become vicariously. You become an extended family member because you know the guy, then he introduced you to his wife. You see the children grow up. They be calling me uncle something and this person I just met while I was in prison. But the uniqueness of it is that we find the sensitivity and the humanity that we find in this environment is beyond the imagination of people like the Department of Corrections are talking heads because they can’t see beyond the fact that they look at crime and punishment. Look at the punishment is how much I punish you while you in prison. They don’t look at the punishment being the time that I was given. They look at the punishment being that wherever I’m at I can be treated any kind of way they them possible. In this case,

Restricting your visits for sole reason of you just being what they do every day or what they should be doing, loving their loved ones. So thank you Julie. We ask that you stay strong. You in our prayers, you in our spirit. We definitely appreciate you fighting back and advocating that family members establish that attitude that this is the only abnormal thing about this is that you treating it abnormal. It’s not abnormal otherwise. It’s the way they treating it as being abnormal. Not the relationship is abnormal, but the fact that the system can’t recognize that we are human beings and that we should be treated as such. Thank you very much, Julie for coming on today and we look forward to much success with the lawsuit. Hopefully that we can, you can get this situation reversed with Nicholas in terms of his sentence and hopefully you can get this reversed in terms of the restrictions and the limitations on your visits.

Julie Montpetit:

Thank you so much. I appreciate the opportunity and I will continue fighting the good fight to get access to my husband, but also help do my part in prison reform so that we can all live in a better world, for lack better. So thank you so

Mansa Musa:

Much. You’re welcome. And we mind our orders. Julie gave a complete outline on how prison reform should look. She said in articulating the relationships and how the importance of family reunification and family having access to their loved ones, but more importantly, the impact that family have on changing the thinking of their loved ones, which ultimately changing the environ prison environment, which makes the prison environ more safe or healthy relationships transfers into how the prison is operated. When you don’t have a family assets, when people don’t have family assets, when people have restricted limitations on their visits, when people have locked up behind the door all day long, you treat ’em like animals. They going to come out like animals. When you give ’em hope and have them thinking that if long as you stay this course, there’s a prospect of possibility you will get out of prison, then they going to operate like that.

We ask our audience that you look at this, what Julie say, and you ask yourself if somebody came to your house and told you, say from this point on, your husband is going to be locked in the closet and you can’t go to the closet, open the door for ’em, let ’em out. Or your wife is going to be locked in the basement and you can’t go to the basement, open the basement door. And the only reason why they tell you these things is because you dead to communicate with them in a normal manner. And you ask yourself if that happened, what would you think? How would you feel? What you think that somebody is restricting you and treating you in human? Or would you feel as though it’s just normal? We ask that you look at this particular episode and really evaluate what is humanity when it comes to allowing prisoners to have access to their family? Where is the security threat in that we ask you to continue to support rallying the bars and the real news Because guess what? We’re actually the real news.