Angry Planet - Vanessa Guillén and the Importance of Speaking Up

Episode Date: October 15, 2025

Listen to this episode commercial free at https://angryplanetpod.comThe episode is about Vanessa Guillén, a US soldier who was murdered at Fort Hood in 2020. She also experienced sexual harassment while in the military. I spoke with ABC Special Correspondent John Quiñones about his new podcast, Vanished. It’s a good podcast that covers Guillén’s case in-depth and highlights the reforms the Pentagon instituted after.We recorded the show on September 30, Guillén’s birthday. That morning, Secretary of War Pete Hegseth delivered a long speech about his own military reforms. Many of the changes Hegseth has pushed through conflict with the changes that Guillén’s death ushered in.As such, I thought it was important to get John’s reaction to Hegseth’s speech. Before we began recording,I told him I planned to ask him about this and he agreed to talk about it.When I asked the question during recording, a public relations person from ABC jumped on the line and asked me to stop talking about Hegseth. I pushed back, but not hard enough.The next day, ABC PR reached out via email to ask if I would cut this moment from the show.I will not. It’s included here in full. Further, I want to take a moment at the top to highlight the reasons why I brought up Hegseth’s speech. There’s a lot to it and, honestly, it demands its own episode. Here are Hegseth’s thoughts on toxic leaders.“Today, at my direction, we’re undertaking a full review of the Department’s Definitions of so-called toxic leadership, bullying and hazing, to empower leaders to enforce standards without fear of retribution or second guessing. Of course, you can’t do, like nasty bullying and hazing. We’re talking about words like bullying and hazing and toxic. They’ve been weaponized and bastardized inside our formations, undercutting commanders and NCOs. No more. Setting, achieving, and maintaining high standards is what you all do. And if that makes me toxic, then so be it.”Guillén’s case also changed the way the Army investigates sexual harassment. Here are the secretary’s thoughts on the current state of official internal military investigations:“We are overhauling an inspector-general process, the IG that has been weaponized, putting complainers, ideologues and poor performers in the driver’s seat. We’re doing the same with the Equal Opportunity and Military Equal Opportunity policies, the EO and MEO, at our department. No more frivolous complaints, no more anonymous complaints, no more repeat complaints, no more smearing reputations, no more endless waiting, no more legal limbo, no more side-tracking careers, no more walking on eggshells. “Of course, being a racist has been illegal in our formation since 1948. The same goes for sexual harassment. Both are wrong and illegal. Those kinds of infractions will be ruthlessly enforced.”After the speech, Hegseth signed 11 memos that detailed these changes. I’ll link them in the show notes. The memos say that the military’s definition of “harassment” is overly broad, calls for the end of “anonymous complaints”—something Hegesth also said in his speech, and asks that investigations be completed quickly with the assistance of artificial intelligence.I believe that is all important context for this episode. I also believe that Hegseth’s speech and the policy directives represent a regression in the American armed services. I will not pretend otherwise.Listen to the All-New ‘Vanished: What Happened to Vanessa’ PodcastSupport this show http://supporter.acast.com/warcollege. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Love this podcast. Support this show through the ACAST supporter feature. It's up to you how much you give, and there's no regular commitment. Just click the link in the show description to support now. Hey there, Angry Planet listeners, Matthew here. We've got a very special episode for you today that you could have heard weeks earlier if you'd only signed up at Angry PlanetPod.com, where you can get all of the mainline episodes commercial free and early.

Again, that's at Angry PlanetPod.com. I think you'll enjoy what we've got here. Here we go. Hey there, Angry Planet listeners, Matthew here. I want to take a minute at the top of the show because something strange happened during the recording. This episode is about Vanessa Guyen, a U.S. soldier who was murdered at Fort Hood in 2020. She also experienced sexual harassment while in the military. I spoke with ABC Special Correspondent John Cignonis about his new podcast, Vanished.

It's a good podcast that covers Guyan's case in depth and highlights the reforms the Pentagon instituted after. We recorded the show on September 30th. Gugian's birthday. In that morning, Secretary of War, Pete Hegseth delivered a long speech about his own military reforms. Many of the changes Hegseth has pushed through, I feel, conflict with the changes that Gugian's death ushered in. And as such, I thought it was important to get John's reaction to Hegseth's speech. Before we began recording, I told him I plan to ask him about this, and he agreed to talk about it. When I asked the question during recording, a public relations person from ABC jumped on the line and asked me to stop talking.

talking about HegSeth. I pushed back, but not hard enough. The next day, ABCPR reached out via email to ask if I would cut this moment from the show. I will not. It is included here in full. I'm also dropping the paywall on this episode. I think it's important that everyone hears this, and I beg the indulgence of Angry Planet's paying subscribers. Further, I want to take a moment at the top to highlight the reasons why I brought up Hexeth's speech. There's a lot to it, and honestly, it does demand. and its own episode. But first, let's focus on Guyin. You'll hear John mention that Guyan's case forced the army to change the way it deals with toxic leaders. Here are Hegsseth's thoughts on the same subject. The definition of toxic has been turned upside down, and we're correcting that. That's why today at my direction, we're undertaking a full review of the department's definitions of so-called toxic leadership, bullying and hazing, to empower leaders to enforce standards without fear of retribution or second-guessing. Of course, you can't do like nasty bullying and hazing.

We're talking about words like bullying and hazing and toxic. They've been weaponized and bastardized inside our formations, undercutting commanders and NCOs. No more. Setting, achieving, and maintaining high standards is what you all do. And if that makes me toxic, then so be it. I will also point out that the Army website for the People First initiative that John mentions is no longer active. Gugian's case also changed the way the Army investigates sexual harassment. Here are the Secretary's thoughts on the current state of official

internal military investigations. Today at my direction, I'm issuing new policies that will overhaul the IG, EO, and MEO processes. I call it the no more walking on eggshells policy. We are liberating commanders and NCOs. We are liberating you. We are overhauling an inspector general process, the IG, that has been weaponized, putting complainers, ideologues, and poor performers in the driver's seat. We're doing the same with the equal opportunity and military equal opportunity policies, the EO and MEO at our department. No more frivolous complaints. No more anonymous complaints, no more repeat complainants, no more smearing reputations, no more endless waiting, no more legal limbo, no more sidetracking careers, no more walking on eggshells.

Of course, being a racist has been illegal in our formation since 1948. The same goes for sexual harassment. Both are wrong and illegal. Those kinds of infractions will be ruthlessly. enforced. Oh, after the speech, Hegseh signed 11 memos that detailed these changes. I'll link them in the show notes. The memos say that the military's definition of harassment is overly broad, calls for the end of anonymous complaints, something Hegsaith also said in his speech, and asks that investigations be completed quickly with the assistance of artificial intelligence. I believe that this is all important context for

this episode. I also believe that Hegsa's speech, and the policy directives represent a regression in the American Armed Services, and I will not pretend otherwise. Hello out there, and welcome to another conversation about conflict on an angry planet. I am Matthew Galt. I have a very special guest with me today. Maybe one of the biggest gifts I think we've ever had on the show before. It is ABC Special Correspondent John Cognos, sir.

How are you doing today? Oh, pleasure being with you, Matthew. you. So we're having you on the show today because you have gotten into, like so many others, you're breaking into my space, you're getting into the podcast game. This is the very first one I've done. So I'm a little late to the party. But it's hard work. I don't know how you guys do it. Television is much easier, I think. You've got to be, there's something about, like, the theater of the mind aspect. When you lose that visual component, I think people don't always like think about what goes into that, right?

Yeah, yeah. You can use descriptive words because you have to. You don't have the video to back you up. So it's a challenge, but I've had a good time doing this particular one, especially. Yeah, so tell me about the show. It's called Vanished. And it focuses on one specific case, a case that we have talked about on this show before. But can you kind of give me the pitch?

Well, it's a story that's very special to me, very close to my heart, because it's a tragedy that happened just a couple of hours from my hometown of San Antonio, Texas, that happened on a military base at Fort Hood. On the morning of April 22, 2020, a 20-year-old Mexican-American soldier, private first class, Vanessa Guillen. She simply disappears while working in an arms room on the base. That morning at around 9 a.m., Vanessa texted her boyfriend, Juan Cruz, back in Houston, about three hours away in her hometown. And she just sent him one quick text, a short message saying, I have to work in a few minutes. That was the last message she sent to him or her family that forever. Never again. That was the very last one. But as I was missing then after that for four weeks,

upon weeks, her family, you know, pleading, her Mexican-American family, her mom doesn't even speak English. Gloria Guianne, but her sisters, her father, pleading, demanding answers from the military, right? On this one of the biggest military bases in the country saying, how could this happen within the gates of Fort Hood? The Guyan family starts organizing protests and marches because they have no one else to turn to it. They seem to be ignored for weeks upon weeks. And that's when I came upon the story. I also live in Texas. There were so many commonalities, you know.

Her family was very familiar to me. She reminded me in my family. So the family, then, they have no choice but to start protesting and organizing these marches. And leading the charge was her mother, Gloria, and the sisters, Myra and Lupe. And then the story just blows up on social media. I first heard about her disappearance, Vanessa's disappearance, when the actress Samahayet joined the cause. And she posted a picture to her millions of followers.

with the hashtag, Bring Us Back Vanessa, vowing to keep posting different pictures of this young woman until Vanessa was found. So I then started doing some research and reporting, and we wound up doing two 2020 documentaries on Vanessa. And in my interviews with her family early on, they told me that shortly after she was assigned to Fort Hood, they saw a marked change in Vanessa.

She seemed worried and depressed. she wasn't eating right, she was losing weight. And then she finally, they kept asking her what's wrong. And she didn't want to say anything. But finally she confides in her mother. And she tells her that she was being sexually harassed by a higher up on the base. Back to the search, it continues for more than two months with no sign of Vanessa. And then finally, heartbreakingly, her remains are discovered more than two months after she was last seen.

her body was dismembered, it was burned, and then buried in three different makeshift graves, 20 miles from Fort Hood by the Leon River. And then the questions erupted, who did this? How could they have done it? How did this happen? And why did it take two months to find a missing soldier? Well, that was the big question, huh, to everyone. They just, admittedly, the military says they sort of bungled the case.

It turns out that a fellow soldier, the last man person, the last person seen with her, a specialist first class, Aaron Robinson, in the end, he was working with her in that arms room. They were labeling weapons and her jobs to catalog weapons. but he had, after he last saw her, he had an alibi. So they didn't look at him until many weeks later. And that was the problem. And they couldn't find her either. They were just dumbfounded at what had happened to her. There was no surveillance cameras in that area where she disappeared.

And then they were misled by two other soldiers who thought they had seen her in the afternoon. It turns out it was the wrong person. They hadn't seen her. She actually disappeared in the morning. So there were many missteps along the way until they caught up with that soldier's girlfriend who fessed up. One of the things I really like about the show is that there's a lot of bad true crime podcasts out there. But yours is there's so many, there's so much primary documentation. there's so many interviews.

You had been investigating the case right at the very beginning and had like unprecedented access to this family. And there is just so much there you were able to get everyone to kind of talk to you. How important was it to kind of, to center her family as a huge part of this story? It was hard to ignore them because they were so passionate and just, wouldn't give up. And that's really the story, the story of the Guyan family, who wouldn't give up seeking justice. So we were able to get to know them. I mean, part of the thing, Matt, was that I was able to talk to them in Spanish, right? So I went to visited the Guyan family

in their home in Houston. The mom only spoke, you know, Spanish, as I mentioned, the sister spoke English very well. But I think I got to know them very well and they started trusting me. And that's why we had pretty good access to everything they were doing. I remember going into their home in the barrio on the east side of Houston, much like the west side of San Antonio where I grew up. I grew up, you know, very poor. My dad was a janitor. My mom used to clean houses on the rich part of town. I walk into Mrs. Guienne's house and I smell tortillas being cooked, right? And they invite me to lunch even as they were going through this heartache. And then I noticed that in the living room they have this beautiful altar,

a tribute to the Virgin of Guadalupe. And my mom had the same altar, you know, when I was growing up in our house in San Antonio. She was praying the rosary every night, you know, praying that her daughter would be found. So there were a lot of, I connected quickly with the family, and that helped, I think, in telling the story and being able to get access to them that maybe no one else was getting. Also, a lot of people didn't care about the story, certainly not at the network level, and not much of the national coverage. The local stations were reporting it, but we were the first ones really to jump on it and do a two-hour documentary and then another documentary on it. Yeah, when it was initially going on, we had two different people on, and they were both from local papers.

And they were the ones that were really following the story and kind of knew the ins and outs of it. And we kind of had a broader discussion about Fort Hood, which is like its whole own kind of subcategory and background of this. Yeah, that was bizarre. I mean, we found out, soon after we started that there were all these questions about, what was happening at Fort Hood. There was an alarming number of soldier deaths on the base, including death by suicide. We discovered that in the year 2020,

the same year that Vanessa went missing, 13 Fort Hood soldiers died by suicide. And that included the case of a young man by the name of Elder Fernandez, who killed himself after reporting sexual abuse to his command. The Army later said that it could not, substantiate his allegations. But then we started finding out that in the four years before Vanessa disappeared, more Fort Hood soldiers died in homicides than in battle.

And then we found out that in the year 2020, the same year Vanessa went missing, there were at least 28, 28 Fort Hood soldiers who died, vanished, and in one case turned up dead after going missing. So that, you know, something was going on on that base that was really frightening. Well, in fact, you recount this in the show, they found remains, well, that they initially thought were Vanessa's and then turned out to be one of the soldiers you just mentioned, right? Fernandez. Fernandez, yes. And they only found him because they were looking for Vanessa.

And you can imagine how his family felt. And the connection the two families then made with each other, yeah, I mean, nothing happened. they found his and initially they thought it might be him. It might be Vanessa. I'm sorry. It might be Vanessa. And then they went to the White House. The family goes to try to talk to Congress and their representatives.

And they do get a meeting with President Trump. And it was while there in Washington that they get word that other remains had been found. And this time it was indeed Vanessa. It is so startling to me that, and Stark, that. the military, a specific base would be missing so many people and go looking for one person and then find another. Yeah. And initially, can you tell me about initially for, he was kind of written off, right?

He was just classified as AWOL. Exactly. Exactly. And that happened quite frequently. It's the way they handled some of these cases where they presumed that they had left on their own volition. And they thought that, I mean, that maybe he had done the same thing. And his family was at a loss. They were convinced that he wouldn't just have left on his own. And how could he be gone for so long? And so that's how they, they, you might say, wrote him off

initially. It's only after the search of Vanessa that they found him. But he wasn't the only one that had disappeared like that and had been classified as AWOL. Another aspect of the story I found really fascinating, and it's in this first episode, is how quickly her family realized that something was wrong. I mean, it was almost like to the minute because she kind of goes in communicato and then that's when they all just know somehow. Yeah, because they knew her so well. It's a very tight-knit family.

So when they didn't hear back from her, as soon as the boyfriend starts texting her, the sister starts texting her, then the mom says she's frantic. They knew something was wrong. And that's when Myra, the older sister, decides, I'm going down there. And she drives with a boyfriend and another sister three hours through the night through a storm. It was a very stormy night that could hardly see the road going down to Fort Hood that particular night. And they get there like midnight and they try to get to the gates of Fort Hood. And the person in charge who's leading the investigation at that point says, I can't meet with you. He was asleep.

So she was told the sister to get a hotel room and spend the night in Fort Hood and come back the next morning. imagine how they felt. I wouldn't have been able to sleep. Yeah, and I don't think they did. Right early the next morning they show up again and that's when they meet with some of the officials, including as it turns out, the man who was accused of killing Vanessa, he was there too because he was among the last people who see her. And it struck Myra that this soldier, Aaron Robinson, kept laughing and giggling throughout their meeting. And Myra, the sister's like, what are you? She said to herself, you know, why?

What's wrong with this guy? Why is he doing that? It turns out, his girlfriend later, of course, testified that she, he had killed her, put her in a tough box, this big old, you know, plastic box that's used to carry all kinds of equipment, loaded up into the, into his truck, and then took her out to the Leon River, where she was buried. and dismembered. And he brought along his girlfriend. He was living with this woman, Cecily Aguilar.

She finally broke down and confessed that she also took part in some of the dismemberment of the body. She was sentenced to eventually the 30 years in prison where she is still to this day. So who is Robinson in what was his relationship to Vanessa? Why did this happen? He worked. with her as far, you know, the family still doesn't know, and none of us really know why he killed her, because there were only two people in that room and one of them is dead, but actually

both of them are dead. You know, as it turns out, Aaron Robinson, when the authority started moving in on him and questioning him and they found the remains, he took off, which is hard to believe. He was not in custody, but he was being questioned, and he manages to leave the room that he's being questioned in and jumps in his car and takes off and then he takes off on foot and he knows the jig is up so he winds up shooting himself he somehow had gotten a hold of a gun so we never know we never heard why he did it and we never heard he was never charged that's why they then turned to his girlfriend but he was a he was a soldier who had spent time in the middle east he was slightly her superior,

he was a private first class, and they were together in that room, and God knows what happened. But later, I mean, the only thing we have to go on is what the girlfriend says. She claims that he told her that Vanessa had seen a picture of him and his girlfriend on his cell phone.

And he was afraid that Vanessa was going to tell authorities that this man was having an affair, because it turns out his girlfriend, Aguilar, Cecily Aguilar, was married to another soldier. So, as you know, it's illegal in the military to be having an affair with another soldier's wife. So she claimed that he said to her, I thought Vanessa was going to tell on me and she was going to blow the whistle on us. So I killed her.

And he says he struck her. with a hammer and put her in this tough box and he carried it to his vehicle and then took off and took 30 miles out or 20 or 30 miles out to the Leon River. And that's when he called his girlfriend and told her, you need to help me bury her and make sure that no one ever knows that she's there. So they went through this long process of, you know, made two visits out to those makeshift graves. They got cement. They got, you know, hairnets, and they got, they got, they got gloves and she admits that she took

part in burying Vanessa's body in three different places but again no one knew about it no one found her for months and how did authorities make the connection after they found the bodies cell phone pings

the location of his cell phone Aaron Robinson's phone he had claimed that the night that this happened he went home to his girlfriend and stayed there all night. Well, they started looking at where his cell phone had pinged, and it had pinged in that area near the Leon River mysteriously for several spots along the Leon River at different times of the night. And that's how they found out that he was lying.

When they questioned him, he then said, whoa, the girlfriend also said, we, we, we went out for a walk. We took a drive. Sometimes late at night when we couldn't sleep, we went stargazing. They also found that he had been calling his girlfriend several times on, you know, these cell phones, the data is, you know, amazing. He had been calling her several times that night and they asked her, well, if he's with you that night, why, why is he calling you? And some of these calls went on for several minutes. She then, they're just caught up in their lives. You know, One line leads to another. She said, well, I had lost my cell phone.

So he was calling it inside our home in our apartment to try to find it. Well, that didn't pass mustard. And then, again, the pinging of the phone near that location led authorities to, after he killed himself, then turned to the girlfriend and really start pressing her. Actually, they started questioning her before he killed himself. They called her. and she knew the jig was up also. So she then participates in getting him, trying to get him to talk. The authorities tell her, call him and tell him you're going to turn yourself in.

So she says to Aaron Robinson, I'm going to tell the truth. I'm going to tell them what happened. And he was freaking out. And that's when he committed suicide. Has there ever been... an investigation or an explanation from the military. Does I assume that they were, like CID was in charge of the case, I assume? Yeah.

They were, but, you know, they just couldn't wrap their arms around exactly what was happened. They, uh, happening. They, um, everyone that we talk to in the, in the podcast will tell you just about everyone that, They really, you know, dropped the ball on this one. They, they try to, to question him. But the fact that he, you know, died by suicide, just that, all they had was the girlfriend then, and that's all they could go on. But why did they, why did they not arrest him? How was he able to get gun, you know, knowing what they knew.

He was the last one to have seen her. Yeah, so, it's just so inconceivable to me if your law enforcement, that you've got the last person who saw her, you've got this new testimony from the girlfriend, and you know that he's a member of the military that has access to firearms. Yeah. Like, this should have been,

you should have been able to handle this a little bit more smoothly. It's just, but like the way the military justice breaks down, and that's part of what the story is about, is that maybe the military isn't always great at policing itself, especially in court hood. Yeah. And certainly not then and five years ago and at that particular base. Things have changed.

They changed a year after they found her body. And I went to the Pentagon. I spoke to the Secretary of the Army, Ryan McCarthy. And he just about admitted that, you know, things were a mess. He came down to Fort Hood and they promised to make all these changes. And to be fair, they have. I mean, since the Vanessa Guillen case, the military has undergone significant reforms. Who knows how long they'll hold up.

But most notable among them, an act called the I Am Vanessa Guillen Act was signed into law in the year 2021. And that act now criminalizes sexual harassment. It wasn't a crime before this, but sexual harassment is now a crime. And it also moved the prosecution of these sexual assault and harassment cases outside of the military's chain of command. It now requires an independent civilian investigation. And it provides protections against retaliation for victims, right? Now you can't retaliate against a victim. And beyond the legislative changes, the Army has also implemented something they call a people-first task force.

and it addresses any toxic command climate at any base, and it tries to improve safety and justice. And then finally, another thing the military did, new protocols were established to prioritize and indeed investigate missing soldiers, which, as you know, as we've talked about, is so different from the initial slow, painstakingly slow response the military had

in Vanessa's disdain. disappearance. So it's very clear that she did not die in vain. Tell me a little bit more about how she kind of becomes a rallying point for these reforms. That was amazing. Again, thanks to social media. I mean, when Salma Hayek posted a picture of her, vowing to post a new picture every day as long as she remained missing, it went to global. I mean, it literally just like spread like wildfire. The battle cry was I am Vanessa Guillen and other women and other men for that matter and other gay men came out of the woodwork and started saying, I am. I also was harassed and assaulted. And so suddenly they were getting

millions of followers all over the world. And that I think that kind of pressure is what forced the military to finally take more action. And it was kind of at this cultural moment where people were really paying attention to this. You know, it was 2020 and she ended up, she was a mural. Yes, that's the other thing. Yeah, she really became a symbol. She really did. There were murals all over Texas in Wichita, Kansas, and Wichita, Kansas, and

Washington, D.C. and California, it was really touching. You couldn't go into the gates of Ford Hood without seeing her big mural there and a big portrait of Vanessa everywhere you went. So they were just unyielding and how they kept demanding for answers. And the little sister, Lupe, I'll never forget her cries for justice. I mean, she, there were chilling the way she, she would say, how could this happen on a military base? You have to find her. How could this happen? And she just kept it up.

She and her mom, Gloria, and her father, Rogelio, and Myra. And we will hear, by the way, in the new podcast in this six-part series, Myra, we re-interview her about what has happened to her life and the life of the family. Believe it or not, the only one tried in this. this case was indeed Cecily Aguilar, the woman who pled guilty to taking part as an accessory to murder and got those 30 years in prison. She, after she was sentenced a couple of years ago, apologized profusely to the family and wanted to, the mother wanted to talk to Cecily, Vanessa's mom, Gloria.

and she did. And they tell me in this new interview that I do with Myra Howe Cessaly apologized to her mom profusely and then tried to apologize to the rest of them, but the rest of the family wouldn't hear of it. They obviously are upset that she didn't speak up sooner. There was those two horrific months of not knowing what had happened to her sister. So they are not so willing to forgive. But the mother who's very Catholic, very religious, has.

She fell upon ill health lately, but she's getting better now. Myra, the older sister and Lupe, the two of them, led the charge. Myra was thinking of running for political office as a congressperson from Texas. She has since decided she may not want to do this now because she has a baby boy. And she's maybe down the road. the young girl Lupe, who's 21 now. By the way, Vanessa would have been 26 years old today. September 30th was her birthday.

She would have been 26. The younger sister Lupe was around the media so much with all these marches and all these protests that she has decided that she's going to maybe go into journalism. She was on the cameras and the light so much. She had also thought about becoming a lawyer. to try to seek justice in cases like this. Yeah, it is this horrible event that shapes the rest of your life, right? Yeah, forever.

They're still very passionate, but they're very proud of the I Am Vanessa Guillen Act, which changed things for others, thanks to the legacy of their sister. What do we know, we haven't gotten to the specifics of this, this, well, what do we know about her own sexual harassment case? And she told the family, like, where was it in terms of, like, the military investigation at the time of her death? There wasn't much at all. She told her mom, and the mom angrily said, I'm going to go find this person.

I'm going to the base. What do you mean, you can't, you know, Ken, and she kept telling her mom, look, mom, this is the military. It doesn't work this way like it does in civilian life. There are ways to get at this, but you just can't barge into Fort Hood. And the mom was just beside herself. But she wanted so badly to get justice and finally complain to someone, but her life was taken before she could get to it. Vanessa. And do we know, was it Robinson or was it?

a superior? No, they think it was someone else, that it was not Robinson, as it turns out. So tell me about this act. How does it come to be who suggests it like, how does it move forward? They went to the White House. They met with Trump, the president, and he promised to get to the bottom of it. They had legislators from Texas, a congresswoman by the name of Sylvia Garcia, who worked really hard in this case and they were just relentless. They didn't get, you know, everything they wanted in the act, but they got a good bunch of it. It was finally signed into law by, ironically, the Biden administration, because that was the year after, after Biden was in office then in 2021.

But it established some protocols that the family was pretty happy with. I mean, in the end, they would have wanted. it to get more. But it was just pressure, pressure on Congress, pressure on the White House, and these protests and marches that kept going on and on and on spearheaded by these three, three women, the mom and the two sisters, who just wouldn't give up. And eventually it came to be. And when you think about it, it was just a year later that it became lost. It didn't take all that long. Well, there had been a building, I think, about this. Vesda's case was not the first one.

I think it was just one of the most public and the family fought so hard. And the details of it were so horrific. But sexual harassment and assault in the military, in the American military, has been a problem for a long time. And it's one that they were kind of not addressing properly, I think most people would say, right? Yeah. No, we spoke to our, our. our reporter at the Pentagon for ABC who's been there decades, Louis Martinez, who tells us about as much that very little had been done in the past until Vanessa's case finally broke

the dam on this. And can you talk, I know we touched on it a little bit, but like what was status quo before this law? How were these things investigated? Well, it was very easy to label someone, for example, as AWOL, first of all. They just wrote them off. If a soldier disappeared, they would classify him as having gone absent without leave. And they wouldn't search for him or her.

That's one. Sexual harassment wasn't a crime. So if somebody complained, there really wasn't much that could be done in those cases. harassment and assault was overseen or investigated by the military. It's chain of command. And some might argue that there was a vested interest there and that they really did need an independent panel to look into these cases, which they now have.

And, you know, people who were retaliated, against, had no recourse. That's changed. And then, you know, there's this whole people's first task force, which starts to address the broader climate of toxicity in the military and tries to improve safety and justice for every member of the military. That's new. And then these protocols that were established to prioritize the cases where someone has gone missing. That didn't exist. So those are the things that have come to be that didn't exist prior to this. So, as you said, it's September 30th.

I would be remiss if I didn't mention, you know, we're having this conversation and I was thinking about this more. I was thinking about this act and your podcast and Vanessa's case this morning as I was watching Pete Hegseth's Secretary of War deliver an hour-long speech about the way that the Trump administration plans to change the military. Did you happen to see the speech or at least catch the highlights? And I'm wondering what your thoughts are.

So it seems like the American military is this massive... Sorry? Hey, so sorry, this is Amanda from PR. If we could just keep it on to Vanessa case, that would be best. I don't want kind of current events to cloud what we're trying to do with the podcast. I think that this is pretty germane to Vanessa's case, though. This is a change of the – this could be backsliding. Some of this hard-fought stuff, he's talking about, you know, changing.

I think overall, we want to just keep this focus specifically on the podcast, her legacy, and kind of the awareness that we're hoping to bring to that, if you don't mind. Okay. Yeah, I understand. I mean, yeah, because it can be perceived. We don't know yet. We don't know what's going to happen. We don't.

We don't. We don't know what's going to happen, but I don't have a good feeling. Yeah. How much time did you spend at Fort Hood and like how did you how did you feel about it when you were there? It was hard to get into the base without permission. So we did not spend a lot of time inside the base at all. It was outside the gates and then the visit to the family in Houston and then finally a trip to the Pentagon. But not much on the base itself, you know.

Obviously, it's a military base. It's tough to get into. You can't go in there with cameras. And initially, that's what worried us about the story. It was that we wouldn't be able to get much, much video, or too many interviews, or anyone to talk to us, because it happened within the confines of Fort Hood. As it turns out, though, the family was so welcoming and so, you know, willing to give us full access. that most of my reporting was outside, outside the base.

It wasn't on, you know, inside. What do you think about, this is something that we talked about at the time when this was happening with some of the local reporters, is that there is kind of a bad culture at Fort Hood specifically. And I know that that is something the Army has tried to address since this case. Like, what do you make of that? Yeah, things were, I mean, there's no denying. Even the Secretary of the Army admitted it back. then that things were, you know, troublesome on the base.

It's within, you know, this town of Kaleen, Texas, everything, they have bowling alleys. It's the military base itself is larger than the island of Manhattan. They have like seven schools on the base. So much of that community depends on what happens on Fort Hood. And, you know, the military had a strong, foothold in that community. And there are those who will argue that they just about

could get away with about anything. You know, with if something happened, if a crime happened within the confines of the base, no one else could could, you know, investigate the case of Fernandez, elder Fernandez

who went missing after being sexually harassed. Again, no one paid attention to that. But then there were all these other cases of soldiers disappearing and dying by suicide, that it was really troublesome. It was a strange place to be in. The few times that I was able to be there, it was a little bit eerie, I got to say. What was eerie about it?

Just the fact that the military was in so much control of that community that that community of Killeen depended so much on Ford Hood the the presence just made you feel like

there was not much you could even the police department seemed to kowtow to the military police so I think that was it just not knowing that it felt different than any other community.

Yeah, it's this strange little city. Have you been there? Yeah, yeah, yeah. I'm from Texas, too. Oh, okay. I'm from the suburbs outside of Dallas. Okay. So, yes, I've been to Colleen,

and it is like, it's this strange little city, I say little city, and you kind of know what I mean as a Texas person. Like, it's north of 100,000 people. That is the main industry, is the military and everything kind of feeds into that. It's like every little piece of it is this,

it's almost like this service economy that serves this base that's got like a population of, I think it's like 20,000, 25,000 people. And so everything kind of runs around that base. And if something, the community is very invested in making sure that Fort Hood is happy and stable. And the community is willing to tolerate a level of, unpleasantness around the base that I think that a lot of other places would not would not countenance. Yeah. Yeah, it's that kind of place. I grew up in San Antonio, which is two or three hours south of there.

I'd never see anything like this. San Antonio is a big military town. There's like five military bases in San Antonio. But somehow, maybe because San Antonio is such a much bigger city, you didn't feel the presence as much as you did. at Fort Hood. It's bigger. There's other things going on in San Antonio. There's a diverse mix of people. And it has its own kind of suburbs around it. And it's connected to other metro areas.

And like, Colleen is kind of feels separate and apart, right? Yeah. If you want to get somewhere else, you've got to go down the highway for a while. That's right. There's no bigger city. The closest big city is Austin.

And then Dallas to the north. The family did file a $35 million dollar loss. suit against the military, but they have since dropped it. It's so difficult to win a case against the U.S. military that they decided not to proceed with it. My hope now is that the listeners will learn from what happened to Vanessa and speak up, and that, you know, they learn from the example of her beautiful family, the Guienne's, you know, which is the example that you got to speak up when you witness an injustice, that you've got to demand answers, sound the alarm, because in the end, silence is complicity, you know?

I think that's a pretty good message for us to end on, don't you? Yes, thank you so much, Matthew. Absolutely, thank you so much for coming on the show. Shining a light on this. Yes, I hope the podcast resonates. We get much deeper in it that we did even with two 2020. documentaries. There's so much more information. There's six parts to it. I'm really proud of this one. And there's three parts out now. And where can people go if they want to listen to the show?

Anywhere you can get your podcasts. It's called Vanished. What Happened to Vanessa. And it's produced by 2020 and ABC Audio. Thank you so much, sir. All right, Matthew, thank you. All right. That's all for this episode of Angry Planet. As always, Angry Planet is me, Matthew Gould, Jason Fields, and Kevin O'Dell. It was created by my myself and Jason Fields. If you like the show, angry planetpod.com, sign up. Get commercial free early access

to all the mainline episodes. We will be back again soon with another conversation about conflict on an angry planet. Stay safe until then.