radiofree.asia

Category: News & Politics

  • Alabama’s Threats to Prosecute Abortion Helpers

    In August 2022, Alabama Attorney General Steve Marshall made a guest appearance on a local conservative talk radio show. It was two months after the US Supreme Court had overturned Roe v. Wade, and abortion was now illegal in Alabama. And Marshall addressed rumors that he planned to prosecute anyone helping people get abortions out of state.  

    “If someone was promoting themselves out as a funder of abortion out of state,” Marshall explained to the host, “then that is potentially criminally actionable for us.” 

    This particular threat launched an epic legal battle with implications for some of the most basic American rights: the right to travel, the right to free speech, the right to give and receive help. 

    This week on Reveal, reporter Nina Martin spends time with abortion rights groups in Alabama, following how they’ve adapted to one of the nation’s strictest anti-abortion policies—and evolved their definition of help.

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    This post was originally published on Reveal.

  • In Fallujah, We Destroyed Parts of Ourselves

    It’s been just over 20 years since the Battle of Fallujah, a bloody campaign in a destructive Iraq War that we now know was based on a lie. 

    But back then, in the wake of 9/11, the battlefield was filled with troops who believed in serving and defending the country against terrorism. 

    “Going to Fallujah was the most horrific experience of our lives,” said Mike Ergo, a team leader for the US Marines Alpha Company, 1st Battalion. “And it was also, for myself, the most alive I’ve ever felt.”

    This week on Reveal, we’re partnering with the nonprofit newsroom The War Horse to join Ergo’s unit as they reunite and try to make sense of what they did and what was done to them. Together, they remember Bradley Faircloth, the 20-year-old lance corporal from their unit who lost his life, and unpack the mental and emotional battles that continue for them today.

    This episode originally aired in January 2025.

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    This post was originally published on Reveal.

  • Teaching Kids to Read: How One School District Gets It Right

    The schools in Steubenville, Ohio, are doing something unusual—in fact, it’s almost unheard of. In a country where nearly 40 percent of fourth graders struggle to read at even a basic level, Steubenville has succeeded in teaching virtually all of its students to read well. 

    According to data from the Educational Opportunity Project at Stanford University, Steubenville has routinely scored in the top 10 percent or better of schools nationwide for third grade reading, sometimes scoring as high as the top 1 percent.

    In study after study for decades, researchers have found that districts serving low-income families almost always have lower test scores than districts in more affluent places. Yet Steubenville bucks that trend.

    “It was astonishing to me how amazing that elementary school was,” said Karin Chenoweth, who wrote about Steubenville in her book How It’s Being Done: Urgent Lessons From Unexpected Schools.

    This week on Reveal, reporter Emily Hanford shares the latest from the hit APM Reports podcast Sold a Story. We’ll learn how Steubenville became a model of reading success—and how a new law in Ohio put it all at risk. 

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    This post was originally published on Reveal.

  • How Police Guns End Up in the Hands of Criminals

    When the Stanislaus County Sheriff’s Department in California wanted to purchase new firearms, it sold its used ones to help cover the cost. The old guns went to a distributor, which then turned around and sold them to the public. One of those guns—a Glock pistol—found its way to Indianapolis. 

    That Glock was involved in the killing of Maria Leslie’s grandson, and the fact that it once belonged to law enforcement makes her loss sting even more. 

    “My grandson was in his own apartment complex. He lived there,” Leslie said. “He should not have been murdered there, especially with a gun that traces back all the way to the California police department’s coffers.”

    This week on Reveal, in a collaboration with The Trace and CBS News, reporter Alain Stephens examines a common practice for police departments—trading in their old weapons rather than destroying them—and how it’s led to tens of thousands of old cop guns ending up in the hands of criminals.  

    This is an update of an episode first aired in July 2024. Since then, more than a dozen law enforcement agencies have stopped reselling their used firearms or are reviewing their policies.  

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    This post was originally published on Reveal.

  • Trump’s Deportation Black Hole

    On March 15th, federal agents rounded up more than 230 Venezuelan nationals who were then deported to El Salvador and locked up in the country’s notorious mega-prison. The Trump administration said the men belonged to a violent Venezuelan gang, but presented no evidence, and there were no court hearings in which the men could contest the allegations. 

    Nearly a month later, families of the Venezuelan men say they have heard nothing about their fate. It’s as if they disappeared. 

    “We’re living in a world where you can just be rounded up with no hearing, not even an administrative hearing, nothing,” says immigration attorney Joseph Giardina. “Why couldn’t you have let their cases be adjudicated? There’s no logical answer other than a publicity stunt.” 

    This week on Reveal, Mother Jones reporters Isabela Dias and Noah Lanard speak to the families and lawyers of 10 men now imprisoned at the Terrorism Confinement Center, known as CECOT. They vehemently deny allegations that the men are members of the Tren de Aragua criminal organization, and several provided evidence to support that. 

    To learn more about the Trump administration’s arrangement with the government of El Salvador, host Al Letson speaks with Carlos Dada, co-founder and director of El Faro, the Salvadaron investigative news outlet. Dada says that in addition to foreign nationals, the agreement also allows for American citizens convicted of crimes to be imprisoned in El Salvador. 

    As the Trump administration also targets international students who have spoken out about Israel’s war in Gaza, Reveal’s Najib Aminy reports on pro-Israel groups that are claiming to have shared lists of student protestors with the White House, and then taking credit when some of those young people are targeted for deportation.

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    This post was originally published on Reveal.

  • The Churn

    Adam Aurand spent nearly a decade of his life stuck in a loop: emergency rooms, psychiatric hospitals, jails, prison, and the streets in and around Seattle. 

    During that time, he picked up diagnoses of schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, and schizoaffective disorder. He also used opioids and methamphetamine.

    Aurand’s life is an example of what happens to many people who experience psychosis in the US: a perpetual shuffle from one place to the next for visits lasting hours or days or weeks, none of them leading to longer-lasting support.

    This week on Reveal, reporters who made the podcast Lost Patients, by KUOW and the Seattle Times, try to answer a question: Why do America’s systems for treating serious mental illness break down in this way? 

    The answer took them from the present-day streets of Seattle to decades into America’s past.

    You can find Lost Patients wherever you get your podcasts:

    NPR: https://www.npr.org/podcasts/510377/lost-patients

    Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/lost-patients/id1733735613 

    Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/1avleoc5U4DA7U37GFPzIH 

    This is an update of an episode that originally aired in July 2024. 

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    This post was originally published on Reveal.

  • She Launched “The Daily Show.” Now She’s Fighting Red State Abortion Bans.

    The Daily Show co-creator Lizz Winstead’s path to advocacy was a curvy one. She started out as a comedian, first as a stand-up and then working on The Daily Show. In the early 2000s, she co-founded Air America Radio, which was designed to be a counterweight to the popularity of radio personalities on the right.

    Today, as producer of the Feminist Buzzkills podcast and founder of Abortion Access Front, she’s weaving together politics and comedy to educate people about abortion laws and give them the tools to fight. 

    Thank you to Abortion Access Front for the use of its video “I’m Just a Pill” at the beginning of our episode. 

    Credits | Producer: Josh Sanburn | Editor: Kara McGuirk-Allison | Theme music: Fernando Arruda and Jim Briggs | Production manager: Zulema Cobb | Digital producer: Nikki Frick | Interim executive producers: Brett Myers and Taki Telonidis | Host: Al Letson

    Listen: The Post-Roe Health Care Crisis (Reveal)

    Read: Planning for the Worst in Trump’s Next Term: Prepare, Don’t Panic, and Don’t Comply in Advance (Mother Jones)

    Read: The Forgotten—and Incredibly Important—History of the Abortion Pill (Mother Jones)

    Watch: I’m Just a Pill (Abortion Access Front via YouTube)

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    This post was originally published on Reveal.

  • The Strike That Broke a Supermax Prison

    At 18, Jack Morris was convicted of murdering a man in South Los Angeles and sent to prison for life. It was 1979, and America was entering the era of mass incarceration, with tough sentencing laws ballooning the criminal justice system. As California’s prison population surged, so did prison violence. 

    “You learn that in order to survive, you yourself then have to become predatorial,” Morris says.  “And then, you then expose somebody else to that, and it’s a vicious cycle.”

    When California started aggressively targeting prison gangs, Morris was accused of associating with one of the groups. The punishment was severe: He was sent to a special supermax unit at the state’s highest-security prison, Pelican Bay. 

    The facility was designed to isolate men deemed the “worst of the worst.” Like Morris, most lived in near-total isolation. No phone calls, no meaningful physical contact with another human, no educational classes, no glimpses of the outside world. The only regular time out of a cell was for a shower and solo exercise in another concrete room.

    Decades later, prisoners at Pelican Bay, including Morris, started a dialogue through coded messages and other covert communication. They decided to protest long-term solitary confinement by organizing a hunger strike. It would become the largest in US history and helped push California to implement reforms.

    This week on Reveal, we team up with the PBS film The Strike to tell the inside story of a group of men who overcame bitter divisions and harsh conditions to build an improbable prison resistance movement.

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    This post was originally published on Reveal.

  • The Deputies Who Tortured a Mississippi County

    When Andrea Dettore-Murphy first moved to Rankin County, Mississippi, she didn’t believe the stories she heard about how brutal the sheriff’s department could be when pursuing suspected drug crimes. 

    But in 2018, she learned the hard way that the rumors were true when a group of sheriff’s deputies raided the home of her friend Rick Loveday and beat him relentlessly while she watched. 

    A few years later, Dettore-Murphy says deputies put her through another haunting incident with her friend Robert Grozier. Dettore-Murphy was just the latest in a long line of people who said they witnessed or experienced torture by a small group of deputies, some of whom called themselves the “Goon Squad.” 

    For nearly two decades, the deputies roamed Rankin County at night, beating, tasing, and choking suspects in drug crimes until they admitted to buying or selling illegal substances. Their reign of terror continued unabated until 2023, when the deputies were finally exposed.

    “Rankin County has always been notorious,” says Garry Curro, one the Goon Squad’s many alleged victims. “They don’t follow the laws of the land. They make their own laws.”

    This week on Reveal, reporters Brian Howey and Nate Rosenfield with Mississippi Today and the New York Times investigate the Goon Squad, whose members have allegedly tortured at least 22 people since the early 2000s. 

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    This post was originally published on Reveal.

  • Bird Flu, Measles, and Trump’s Ticking Time Bomb

    This month marks the five-year anniversary of the Covid-19 pandemic, which has killed 1.2 million people in the US alone. While life has returned to normal for most Americans, the threats to our health haven’t disappeared.
    On this week’s episode of More To The Story, infectious disease epidemiologist Jessica Malaty Rivera talks with host Al Letson about the collision course between the Trump administration’s health priorities and our developing public health emergencies, including the spread of bird flu and the ongoing measles outbreaks. We’ve not only failed to learn our lessons from the pandemic, she argues, but we also might be stumbling into the next one.

    Donate today at Revealnews.org/moreSubscribe to our weekly newsletter at Revealnews.org/weeklyFollow us on Instagram @revealnews

    Producer: Josh Sanburn | Editor: Kara McGuirk-Allison | Theme music: Fernando Arruda and Jim Briggs | Digital producers: Nikki Frick and Artis Curiskis | Interim executive producers: Taki Telonidis and Brett Myers | Host: Al Letson

    Listen: The Covid Tracking Project (Reveal)


    Read: Avian Flu Could Define Trump’s Second Presidency (Mother Jones)

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    This post was originally published on Reveal.

  • The Plague in the Shadows

    Decades before Covid-19, the AIDS epidemic tore through communities in the US and around the world. It has killed some 40 million people and continues to take lives today. 

    But early on, research and public policy focused on AIDS as a gay men’s disease, overlooking other vulnerable groups—including communities of color and women. 

    “We literally had to convince the federal government that there were women getting HIV,” says activist Maxine Wolfe. “We actually had to develop treatment and research agendas that were about women.”

    This week on Reveal, reporters Kai Wright and Lizzy Ratner from the podcast Blindspot: The Plague in the Shadows take us back to the first years of the HIV epidemic in New York City. 

    One of the most influential activists for women with AIDS was Katrina Haslip, a prisoner at a maximum-security prison in upstate New York. In the 1980s, Haslip and other incarcerated women started a support group to educate each other about HIV and AIDS.

    Haslip took her activism beyond prison walls after her release in 1990, even meeting with leaders of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. One of the main goals was to change the definition of AIDS, which at the time excluded many symptoms that appeared in HIV-positive women. This meant that women with AIDS often did not qualify for government benefits such as Medicaid and disability insurance. 

    The podcast series Blindspot: The Plague in the Shadows is a co-production of The History Channel and WNYC Studios. 

    This is an update of an episode that originally aired in February 2024.

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    This post was originally published on Reveal.

  • An Atrocity of War Goes Unpunished

    In November 2005, a group of US Marines killed 24 civilians in Haditha, Iraq. The case against them became one of the most high-profile war crimes prosecutions in US history—but then it fell apart. Only one Marine went to trial for the killings, and all he received was a slap on the wrist. Even his own defense attorney found the outcome shocking. 

    “It’s meaningless,” said attorney Haytham Faraj. “The government decided not to hold anybody accountable. I mean, I don’t know, I don’t know how else to put it.”

    The Haditha massacre, as it came to be known, is the subject of the current season of The New Yorker’s In the Dark podcast and this week’s episode of Reveal. Reporter Madeleine Baran and her team spent four years looking into what happened at Haditha and why no one was held accountable. They also uncovered a previously unreported killing that happened that same day, a 25th victim whose story had never before been told. 

    Photos from this story, as well as a searchable database of military war crimes, can be found at newyorker.com/season-3.

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    This post was originally published on Reveal.

  • A Decade of Reveal

    This week on Reveal, we celebrate our 10-year anniversary with a look back at some of our favorite stories, from investigations into water shortages in drought-prone California to labor abuses in the Dominican Republic. And we interview the journalists behind the reporting to explain what happened after the stories aired.  

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    This post was originally published on Reveal.

  • More To The Story with Al Letson

    From the unflinching investigative team behind Reveal comes a new weekly podcast that delivers More To The Story. Every Wednesday, Peabody Award-winning journalist Al Letson sits down with the people at the heart of our changing world for candid—sometimes uncomfortable—conversations that make you rethink your entire newsfeed. Whether he’s sounding the alarm about the future of democracy, grappling with the shifting dynamics of political power, or debating big cultural moments, Al always brings his unfiltered curiosity to topics and perspectives that go too often ignored. Because, as Al reminds us every week on Reveal, when you take the time to listen, there’s always More To The Story. Find it in your Reveal feed beginning March 5, 2025.

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    This post was originally published on Reveal.

  • 40 Acres and a Lie Part 3

    The loss of land for Black Americans started with the government’s betrayal of its “40 acres” promise to formerly enslaved people—and it has continued over decades. 


    Today, researchers are unearthing the details of Black land loss long after emancipation. 


    “They lost land due to racial intimidation, where they were forced off their land (to) take flight in the middle of the night and resettle someplace else,” said Karcheik Sims-Alvarado, an assistant professor of Africana studies at Morehouse College. “They lost it through overtaxation. They lost it through eminent domain…There’s all these different ways that African Americans acquired and lost land.”


    It’s an examination of American history happening at the state, city, even county level as local government task forces are on truth-finding missions. Across the country, government officials ask: Can we repair a wealth gap for Black Americans that is rooted in slavery? And how?


    This week on Reveal, in honor of Black History Month, we explore the long-delayed fight for reparations.


    This is an update of an episode that originally aired in June 2024.

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    This post was originally published on Reveal.

  • 40 Acres and a Lie Part 2

    Skidaway Island, Georgia, is home today to a luxurious community that the mostly White residents consider paradise: waterfront views, live oaks and marsh grass alongside golf courses, swimming pools, and other amenities. 

    In 1865, the island was a thriving Black community, started by freedmen who were given land by the government under the 40 acres program. They farmed, created a system of government, and turned former cotton plantations into a Black American success story.

    But it wouldn’t last. Within two years, the government took that land back from the freedmen and returned it to the former enslavers. 

    Today, 40 acres in The Landings development are worth at least $20 million. The history of that land is largely absent from day-to-day life. But over a two-and-a-half-year investigation, journalists at the Center for Public Integrity unearthed records that prove that dozens of freed people had, and lost, titles to tracts at what’s now The Landings. 

    “You could feel chills to know that they had it and then they just pulled the rug from under them, so to speak,” said Linda Brown, one of the few Black residents at The Landings.

    This week on Reveal, with the Center for Public Integrity and in honor of Black History Month, we also show a descendant her ancestor’s title for a plot of land that is now becoming another exclusive gated community. And we look at how buried documents like these Reconstruction-era land titles are part of the long game toward reparations.  

    This is an update of an episode that originally aired in June 2024.

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    This post was originally published on Reveal.

  • 40 Acres and a Lie Part 1

    Our historical investigation found 1,250 formerly enslaved Black Americans who were given land—only to see it returned to their enslavers.

    This is an update of an episode that originally aired in June 2024. 

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    This post was originally published on Reveal.

  • Immigrants on the Line

    Mackenson Remy didn’t plan to bypass security when he drove into the parking lot of a factory in Greeley, Colorado. He’d never been there before. All he knew was this place had jobs…lots of jobs. 


    Remy is originally from Haiti, and in 2023, he’d been making TikTok videos about job openings in the area for his few followers, mostly other Haitians.


    What Remy didn’t know was that he had stumbled onto a meatpacking plant owned by the largest meat producer in the world, JBS. The video he made outside the facility went viral, and hundreds of Haitians moved for jobs at the plant. 


    But less than a year later, Remy—and JBS—were accused of human trafficking and exploitation by the union representing workers at the plant. 


    “This is America. I was hoping America to be better than back home,” says Tchelly Moise, a Haitian immigrant and union rep. “Someone needs to be held accountable for this, because this is not okay anywhere.” 


    This week on Reveal, reporter Ted Genoways with the Food & Environment Reporting Network looks into JBS’ long reliance on immigrant labor for this work—and its track record of not treating those workers well. The difference this time is those same workers are now targets of President Donald Trump’s mass deportation agenda.

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    This post was originally published on Reveal.

  • After the Crash

    A police officer chased a Native teen to his death. Days later, the police force shut down without explanation.

    In 2020, Blossom Old Bull was raising three teenagers on the Crow Indian Reservation in Montana. Her youngest son, Braven Glenn, was 17, a good student, dedicated to his basketball team.

    That November, Old Bull got a call saying Glenn was killed in a police car chase that resulted in a head-on collision with a train. Desperate for details about the accident, she went to the police station, only to find it had shut down without any notice.  

    “The doors were locked. It looked like it wasn’t in operation anymore—like they just upped and left,” Old Bull said. “It’s, like, there was a life taken, and you guys just closed everything down without giving the family any answers?”

    This kicks off a yearslong search to find out what happened to Glenn and how a police force could disappear overnight without explanation. This week on Reveal, Mother Jones reporter Samantha Michaels’ investigation into the crash is at once an examination of a mother’s journey to uncover the details of her son’s final moments and a sweeping look at a broken system of tribal policing.

    This is an update of an episode that originally aired in April 2024. 

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    This post was originally published on Reveal.

  • In Fallujah, We Destroyed Parts of Ourselves

    It’s been 20 years since the Battle of Fallujah, a bloody campaign in a destructive Iraq War that we now know was based on a lie. 

    But back then, in the wake of 9/11, the battlefield was filled with troops who believed in serving and defending the country against terrorism. 

    “Going to Fallujah was the most horrific experience of our lives,” said Mike Ergo, a team leader for the US Marines Alpha Company, 1st Battalion. “And it was also, for myself, the most alive I’ve ever felt.”

    This week on Reveal, we’re partnering with the nonprofit newsroom The War Horse to join Ergo’s unit as they reunite and try to make sense of what they did and what was done to them. Together, they remember Bradley Faircloth, the 20-year-old lance corporal from their unit who lost his life, and unpack the mental and emotional battles that continue for them today.

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    This post was originally published on Reveal.

  • All the President’s Pardons

    President Joe Biden’s pardon of his son and President-elect Donald Trump’s pledge to set free people who stormed the Capitol on January 6, 2021, bring back memories of what’s considered the most controversial pardon ever: Gerald Ford’s pardon of Richard Nixon. Ford’s pardon of the former president in 1974 sparked outrage among politicians and the American people. 

    “I had a visceral feeling that the public animosity to Mr. Nixon was so great that there would be a lack of understanding, and the truth is that’s the way it turned out,” Ford said in an interview broadcast for the first time on Reveal. “The public and many leaders, including dear friends, didn’t understand it at the time.”

    This week on Reveal, we look at the politics of pardons and discover that beyond those that make headlines, there is a backlog of thousands of people who’ve waited years—even decades—for presidents to make a decision about their petitions for clemency. 

    This is an update of an episode that originally aired in July 2019. 

    This post was originally published on Reveal.

  • Fortress Europe: The Fight for Refugees in Greece

    In 2015, hundreds of thousands of people fleeing war and repression were trying to reach safe havens in Europe. From his home in Norway, Tommy Olsen decided to travel to Greece, a major gateway for migrants and refugees. He joined hundreds of volunteers  helping the new arrivals and later created an NGO, the Aegean Boat Report, which monitors the plight of asylum seekers in Europe.


    Today, Olsen is a wanted man in Greece, caught up in a crackdown on refugees and people trying to defend their right to asylum.


    “I didn’t know what I walked into,” Olsen says.


    Mary Lawlor, the UN special rapporteur on human rights defenders, has condemned Greece’s harsh migration policies and the way its government is targeting activists like Olsen. But she says Europe as a whole is also to blame.


    “The whole notion of migration is a dirty word now,” she says. “The whole notion of refugees is a dirty word now.”


    This week on Reveal, reporters Dinah Rothenberg and Viola Funk from the Berlin podcast studio ACB Stories take us to Greece, where refugees and human rights defenders face legal and sometimes physical attacks from authorities trying to seal the country’s borders.

    This post was originally published on Reveal.

  • Take No Prisoners

    It was their first day in battle and the two best friends had just switched places. Bob Fordyce rested while Frank Hartzell crawled down into the shallow foxhole, taking his turn chipping away at the frozen ground. Just then, German artillery fire began falling all around them. With his body plastered to the ground, Hartzell could feel shrapnel dent his helmet. When the explosions finished, he picked himself up to find that his best friend had just been killed in the blur of combat. 

    “When you’re actually in it, it’s very chaotic,” Hartzell said. 

    The following day, New Year’s Day 1945, Hartzell batted Nazi soldiers for control of the Belgian town of Chenogne. In the aftermath, American soldiers gunned down dozens of unarmed German prisoners of war in a field, a clear violation of the Geneva Convention. 

    “I remember we had been given orders, take no prisoners,” Hartzell said. “When I walked past the field on the left, there were these dead bodies. I knew what they were. I knew they were dead Germans.” News of the massacre reached General George S. Patton, but no investigation followed.

    This week on Reveal, reporter Chris Harland-Dunaway investigates why the soldiers who committed the massacre at Chenogne were never held accountable.

    This is an update of an episode that originally aired in July 2018. 

    This post was originally published on Reveal.

  • A Whistleblower in New Folsom Prison

    When Valentino Rodriguez started his job at a high-security prison in Sacramento, California, informally known as New Folsom, he thought he was entering a brotherhood of correctional officers who hold each other to a high standard of conduct.


    Five years later, Rodriguez would be found dead in his home. His unexpected passing  would raise questions from his family and the FBI. 


    Before he died, Rodriguez was promoted to an elite unit investigating crimes in the prison. His parents and his widow say he had been hoping for the position for a long time. 


    But once inside the unit, the job consumed him. From day one, his fellow officers began to undermine and harass him. Stressed and fed up with how he was being treated, Rodriguez reached a breaking point. 


    He left the prison, but his experiences there still haunted him—so he went in for a meeting with the warden. He didn’t know it would be his last.


    This week on Reveal, we partner with KQED reporters Sukey Lewis and Julie Small and the On Our Watch podcast to explore what this correctional officer’s story shows about how the second-largest prison system in the country is failing to protect the people who live and work inside it.


    This is an update of an episode that originally aired in March 2024. Listen to the whole On Our Watch series here.


    This post was originally published on Reveal.

  • The Racist Hoax That Changed Boston

    Note: This episode contains descriptions of violence and suicide and may not be appropriate for all listeners. 


    In 1989, Chuck Stuart called 911 on his car phone to report a shooting. 


    He said he and his wife were leaving a birthing class at a Boston hospital when a man forced him to drive into the mixed-race Mission Hill neighborhood and shot them both. Stuart’s wife, Carol, was seven months pregnant. She would die that night, hours after her son was delivered by cesarean section, and days later, her son would die, too.


    Stuart said he saw the man who did it: a Black man in a tracksuit. 


    Within hours, the killing had the city in a panic, and Boston police were tearing through Mission Hill looking for a suspect.  


    For a whole generation of Black men in Mission Hill who were subjected to frisks and strip searches, this investigation shaped their relationship with police. And it changed the way Boston viewed itself when the story took a dramatic turn and the true killer was revealed.


    This week on Reveal, in partnership with columnist Adrian Walker of the Boston Globe and the Murder in Boston podcast, we bring you the untold story of the Stuart murder: one that exposed truths about race and crime that few White people in power wanted to confront.  


    To hear more of the Boston Globe’s investigation, listen to the 10-part podcast Murder in Boston. The HBO documentary series Murder in Boston: Roots, Rampage, and Reckoning is available to stream on Max. 


    This is an update of a show that originally aired in May 2024.

    This post was originally published on Reveal.

  • Buried Secrets: America’s Indian Boarding Schools Part 2

    Chief Red Cloud was a Lakota leader in the late 1800s, when the conflict between the US government and Native Americans was intense, and he was the tribal chief when the Catholic church built a boarding school on the Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota. Generations of children were traumatized by their experience at the school, whose mission was to strip them of their language and culture.


    Red Cloud’s descendant Dusty Lee Nelson and other members of the community are seeking reparations from the church. “In my heart, in my soul, I feel like the best thing that they can do is to exit the reservation, return all property, and pay us,” Nelson said.


    In the second half of Reveal’s two-part collaboration with ICT (formerly Indian Country Today), members of the Pine Ridge community put pressure on the Catholic church to share information about the boarding school it ran on the reservation.


    ICT reporter Mary Annette Pember, a citizen of the Red Cliff Band of Ojibwe, travels to the archives of the Bureau of Catholic Indian Missions. She discovers that many records are redacted or off-limits, but then comes across a diary written by nuns. Buried in the diary entries is information about the school’s finances, the massacre at Wounded Knee, and children who died at the school more than a century ago. 


    This is a rebroadcast of an episode that originally aired in October 2022. 

    This post was originally published on Reveal.

  • Buried Secrets: America’s Indian Boarding Schools Part 1

    In the early 1990s, Justin Pourier was a maintenance man at Red Cloud Indian School, a Catholic school on the Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota. One day, he says he stumbled upon small graves in the school’s basement. For nearly 30 years, Pourier would be haunted by what he saw and told no one except his wife. 

    “Those are Native children down there…hopefully their spirit was able to travel on to whatever is beyond this world,” Pourier says. In 2022, he urged school officials to search the basement for the graves.

    The hunt for unmarked graves of Native children isn’t happening just at Red Cloud, now called Maȟpíya Lúta. It’s one of more than 400 Indian boarding schools across the country that were part of a program designed by the federal government to “kill the Indian and save the man”—those were the actual words of one of the architects of the plan to destroy Native culture. In a historic first this fall, President Joe Biden apologized to Native Americans on behalf of the United States for the country’s past Indian boarding school policies.

    This week on Reveal, in a two-part collaboration with ICT (formerly Indian Country Today), we expose the painful legacy of boarding schools for Native children with ICT reporter Mary Annette Pember, a citizen of the Red Cliff Band of Ojibwe. She’s been writing about these schools for more than two decades. 

    This is a rebroadcast of an episode that originally aired in October 2022. 

    This post was originally published on Reveal.

  • The Many Contradictions of a Trump Victory

    As Donald Trump prepares to enter the White House for a second term, the reasons people voted him into office are becoming more clear. 

    For Micki Witthoeft, it’s cause for celebration. Her daughter, Ashli Babitt, was shot and killed by a police officer after storming the US Capitol on January 6, 2021. Today, Witthoeft is confident Trump will stand by his word and pardon everyone involved. 

    “He said his administration’s going to be one on ‘promises made and promises kept,’ ” she said. “I felt like he was talking right to me.”

    But it’s not the same sentiment for all voters. This week on Reveal, we look at the many contradictions behind Trump’s victory, with stories from hosts Hanna Rosin and Lauren Ober of the new podcast from The Atlantic, We Live Here Now; Mother Jones reporter Tim Murphy; and Reveal producer Najib Aminy. We delve into January 6ers seeking pardons, “messy middle” voters who split their ballots, and members of the Uncommitted movement who wouldn’t vote for Kamala Harris despite being opposed to Trump. 

    This post was originally published on Reveal.

  • From Victim to Suspect

    Nicole Chase was a young mom with a daughter to support when she took a job at a restaurant in Canton, Connecticut. She liked the work and was good at her job. But the place turned out to be more like a frat house than a quaint roadside sandwich spot. And the crude behavior kept escalating—until one day she says her boss went too far. 

    Chase turned to the local police for help, but what happened next further complicated her life. Her quest for justice triggered a legal battle that dragged on for years, eventually reaching the US Supreme Court.

    “This man has caused me to lose so much money that I had to move out of my place,” Chase says. “I went to a doctor, I had to get put on more medicine for my PTSD and my anxiety attacks and all that. My whole life has been flipped upside down.” 

    Reveal reporter Rachel de Leon spent years taking a close look at cases across the country in which people reported sexual assaults to police, only to find themselves investigated. In this hour, we explore one case and hear how police interrogated an alleged perpetrator, an alleged victim, and each other. 

    De Leon’s investigation is also the subject of the documentary Victim/Suspect, streaming on Netflix, which won the 2024 Emmy Award for outstanding documentary research.

    This is an update of an episode that originally aired in March 2023. 

    This post was originally published on Reveal.

  • How Donald Trump Won the Presidency, Again

    Donald Trump defeated Kamala Harris on Tuesday night to become only the second president in US history to win two nonconsecutive terms. (The last one? Grover Cleveland in 1892.) Trump won the presidency following one of the most tumultuous election years in modern US history—one that included an incumbent president pulling out of his  reelection bid, the vice president becoming the Democratic nominee a few short months before Election Day, and two assassination attempts on Trump.


    A majority of voters elected Trump to return to the White House following a campaign often filled with violent rhetoric, misinformation, and disparaging comments about women, immigrants, and people of color. Harris was unable to build a coalition to defeat Trump, losing both the Electoral College and the popular vote after a campaign that initially energized Democrats around the country after President Joe Biden dropped out of the race.


    “America has never had a Black woman governor,” says Mother Jones editorial director Jamilah King. “So the fact that America’s never had a Black woman president is not surprising. I don’t think we as a country were quite ready for it.”


    In this Reveal podcast extra, host Al Letson sits down with King, as well as Mother Jones’ David Corn and Ari Berman, to break down how Trump won, why Harris’ campaign faltered, and where the nation goes from here.

    Listen: Red, Black, and Blue (Reveal)


    Read: America Meets Its Judgment Day (Mother Jones)


    Read: Republicans Defeat Ohio Anti-Gerrymandering Initiative With Brazen Anti-Democratic Tactics (Mother Jones)


    Read: Trump Wins the White House in a Political Comeback Rooted in Appeals to Frustrated Voters (Associated Press)

    This post was originally published on Reveal.