Focus: Adults in the Room - Adults in the Room Live: A behind-the-scenes look at an investigation 25 years in the making

Episode Date: June 29, 2026

The team behind Adults in the Room is hard at work on an Epilogue episode, set to release later this summer. In the meantime, the team recently gathered for a live event to discuss behind-the-scenes moments and decisions from the series—including interviews that didn't make it into the final episodes, the continued challenges of addressing grooming and childhood sexual abuse, and audience questions. KUOW's Libby Denkmann was joined by Ella Hushagen, host Isolde Raftery, producer Alec Cowan, and editor Jeannie Yandel.  Get in touch with the team by email at [e-mail]. Support KUOW and projects like this by donating at kuow.org/donate/focus. Adults in the Room is part of FOCUS, a dedicated documentary channel from KUOW Public Radio in Seattle, a proud member of the NPR Network. Thank you to everyone who made this event possible, including Ella Hushagen, host Libby Denkmann, producers Alec Cowan and Hans Twite, editor Jeannie Yandel, event manager Charlotte Duren, and marketing associate Carina Bolaños Lewen.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

I'm Chris Morgan, host of the wild. Over the last 35 years, I've worked in the wildest places on Earth, tracking tigers in Siberia, filming orangutans in Borneo, following humpback whales, migrating jaguars, iridescent hummingbirds, and learning from the people devoted to protecting them. These stories changed how I see the world. I think they'll do the same for you.

The Wild with Chris Morgan, available wherever you get your podcasts. Focus. in Seattle. Hey there, it's a Zolder Raftery. In the month since our last episode dropped, the Adults in the Room team has been hard at work on an epilogue episode, set to release later this summer. But we wanted to share this in the meantime.

It's from our focus, Adults in the Room live event on June 18th at the Seattle Central Library. We gave some behind-the-scenes glimpses into the making of the show, and we answered audience. questions. First step, you'll hear from our moderator, our KUOW colleague, Libby Denkman. Hi, everybody. I am not part of the KOW Adults in the Room team, but I've been observing them for many months. I am their colleague, Libby Dankman. I host a show called Soundside on KUW. Thank you.

And welcome to Focus, Adults in the Room, the live show back in 1999, student journalists at Garfield High School in Seattle heard a rumor. It was about a beloved science teacher who ran a popular outdoors program. According to the rumor, he was sexually abusing students. When the students reported the allegations, chaos unfolded, and not long after, the teacher died by suicide. The KOW-W-focused podcast, Adults in the Room, starts with a simple premise. What actually happened? Was the teacher guilty, or were the student journalists, in part, response to the for his death. The show also takes us beyond that central mystery to questions of institutional responsibility, the impacts of shame, and what healing from abuse really means.

I'm excited to get to talk to the KOW team behind adults in the room, and we will also be asking your questions. I think you already heard that you're going to have some note cards available. You can write your question and your name down on the card, and KW folks will be coming by to collect those during the event. So I want to welcome the team now. First off is Alder Raftery, managing editor of KUOW, and a host of adults in the room. Jeannie Yandel, special projects editor at KUOW,

Alec Cowan, senior podcast producer at KUOW, and Ella Hoosthaghan, Isola's childhood friend, and today an attorney. And of course, listeners know that Isola and Ella are two of the students who first heard about and reported allegations against Tom Hudson, and then three decades later, they re-reported the story to understand what really happened. We should note that we are missing one member of the adults in the room team. Will James is spending time with his new baby, so he wasn't able to be here. The baby's really cute, though.

So I think he made the right choice. So everybody, I just want to start with, how are you doing? Let's get a temperature check. I mean, now that the show is out in the world, I saw you all working hard on it. I, you know, say I saw you, but you were really just shut away in studios oftentimes and on intense phone calls and working so hard for so long. How does it feel that the show is actually out in the world now? It feels awesome.

I mean, I think the reception was so special. I mean, you all. But also, I think we didn't know how it was going to feel. I think we worried a little bit about our own, I mean, not to get dark right away, but like our own mental health. It was like, how bad is this going to be? And then the reception was so positive and people really heard it and understood it. And so that's been incredibly cool.

Anybody else want to share how they're feeling about having the show out there? It's great, and also it's not over yet. We keep thinking that we've done the final episode and we have been wrong every time. So we're working on one more episode right now that will come out at some point this summer, but it has been, it has shown me what a small town Seattle is. Nearly every person I talk to has some connection to this story, either through Garfield, through friends that they know, through their own outdoors activities. I'm not from here, and so that's been really pretty remarkable.

Yeah. I think it started more conversations than any podcasts I've ever seen, especially locally here in Seattle, like every group of people I spend time with. When they hear I work at KOWW, they bring up adults in the room, which I think is powerful. So first off, I want to start out with Ella and Azolda, because obviously the premise was that you were looking back at what happened in 99. You were right in the middle of the Tom Hudson story in many ways. knowing what you know now after this series has come out, how do you feel looking back at the decisions that you made when you were just teenagers? I mean, I think, you know, we knew that there was more. We could always tell there was just so much more to the story than ever became public at that time. And both of us had like just this deep desire to find out. there's just this sort of feeling of like, gosh, it just never made sense.

And the story was rewritten so tidily, so quickly in that time. I think we felt like we wanted to get more of the real story. And we were really curious about how our peers, you know, as time passed, like, how did our peers view what had happened? And that was one of the most gratifying parts was just being able to reconnect with people and hear, them with the benefit of time, with the benefit of experience, maybe with, you know, the experience of becoming a parent themselves or an educator or both, see how they had kind of metabolized the experience for themselves and thought about it differently. I just, I'm so floored. I'm very honored to be on the stage as like part of the KUOW team because I don't work

at KUW. I was part of the team as much as I was, you know, texting franticly. with a soul that like, oh my gosh, okay, yeah, I really like that and, you know, trying to help out where I could, but yeah. Yeah, I mean, you asked like how we reflect on ourselves back then. I mean, I give a lot of grace to us at that time and also to all the students at the time. I've actually had a few people apologize to me, and I'm like, you were a child. Like, you should not have to apologize. Like, don't, that's not how I see it. You know, we weren't acting as adults.

But I feel like we did all the right things. We reported to grown-ups. That's what you are supposed to do when you think something bad is happening. And the problem is the adults did not report. Many adults still don't report when they see bad things happening or misconduct happening. One of the things I will say is that I was very conscious, and I think you were to, Ella, in the beginning of the fact that we decided, we were going to dig into a very traumatic time for our peers.

And we kind of didn't let them decide that they got to do it. So it sort of felt like we weren't asking for consent. We just went ahead and did it. And I am so grateful to my classmates for saying, okay, we're on board and the amount of community that came around. And a lot of people who actually acted as sort of social worker slash therapist, I know Rosie Bancroft is here, I have to give Rosie a massive shout-out.

But people who really held up our classmates and supported everybody, that was incredible for deciding, okay, we're doing this, we're all going to, we're on board. That was, because nobody had to do that. Everybody could have said, no, we're not telling the story now. You don't get to decide that for us. Do you feel like you achieved what you set out to find

when you started the project during the pandemic? Oh my God. How are you looking at me? I'm just, the next episode is going to blow everybody's minds. So, yeah, unfortunately, yes. The best case scenario would have been that we are terrible gossips and no abuse happened. That was, that would have been fantastic. That is, of course, not even close to what happened.

Yeah. So for the full team, I mean, this is obviously such a complicated series. You're diving into incredibly difficult moments. These things happened 25, 26 years ago. You're relying on memory, which can be dicey. You're relying on documentation that you can actually find or that Azola happened to have still. Ella did.

Ella had the documentation still. Keep everything. That's the lesson. So how did you sort through all of the information for the series and decide, I mean, even just how you wanted to present it, like the order that you were going to tell this story in? Yeah. I mean, we spent almost two years working on this. So we had many, many, many, many conversations about the order, and it changed many times. there's

we have I think there will be an image here shortly of a couple of the whiteboards where we ripped apart parts of the whole series or a particular episode and there's also

a board that I made that basically looks like a bunch of post-it notes for episode by episode act by act like each theme for each act for each episode and then so we could make sure that things connected throughout, so we weren't just doing like single chapters.

The initial pitch for this was more than 20 pages long because we tried to figure out exactly what order everything would go in then. Azolda and I have talked a lot about how much we both love watching television, and I actually really think that that helped with figuring that out. TV is great if you want to be a storyteller. But like for structure and story, for structure, for art, for figuring out

where themes go and all of that stuff. I mean, we read a ton of fiction and we watch a lot of TV. Heck yeah. And you love soap operas. I grew up on soap operas, which helps in this job. It helps.

At the beginning, Geney made me watch the movie Ratatouille. So there were a lot of moments like that where it was like, okay, we gotta get back like to understand story arc. I will say I come from a very print, traditional mainstream journalism background, which is really just put the facts out there.

And Alec and Jeannie, I mean, I feel like these became symbiotic, the three of us, which is why I was so intent, like you guys have to be on stage too because it like became this mind meld. But we spent a huge amount of time, honestly just talking all the time. But I, yeah, so what I was saying is I come from this print background, but I don't come from radio storytelling. And these two, you guys basically excavated my brain.

I mean, you would just interview me for hours. And then we would just go through and write scripts. And we tried so many different ways of telling the story. it was pretty cool and pretty draining and took a lot of time. We knew that this question was going to come up, actually, and all three of us were like, I don't remember how we did that. Because we had so many conversations about it

and reworked things so many times. Yeah, we'd frequently, I think there were a few times we'd have these whiteboard brain sessions. There's a certain kind of like energy to those when you get out of it. I mean, one, two hours long, you're scrapping different pieces putting this year. It's like a jigsaw puzzle.

And there's a moment when it starts to really feel like it all fits together, and that's where the story is. And then you realize that by the end, you didn't have three characters who were totally essential, that later Zolda somehow miraculously found and dug up, and it's almost bananas to think that this story could have been any way different than it actually ended up being. This middle whiteboard was earlier in the series.

This, I think, is after we had kind of the... the drafts for episodes one through three ready and we're planning for four through seven. It's very hard to read this. This is what a brainstorm looks like in real life. And you'll notice that there are some key characters missing. For example, in episode six, there's no mention of Jason Fox, of course, who was the boy in the photograph, who was the central character of that episode. As old at that point, I don't even know if you were potentially chasing finding Jason

at that point. But again, it's one of those things where it's wild, how different that timeline looks of this series, how different characters were in different places, and even how little we knew at that point while thinking we had it figured out. I wanted to ask about that, actually, because there are a number of pieces of tape that you're just like, how did you get this? I mean, you know, audio from the REI event, audio from Tom Hudson's funeral, when, you know, the kids were all talking about him, the RAI event.

if you remember is when people were kind of doing the retrospective of what had happened on Mount Olympus, when Hudson had fallen into the crevasse. Was it a crevasse that he fell into? This is a point of discussion, actually. Unclear. He fell into a thing, and the kids had to save him. A hole in the ice. Yeah.

I've since been told it was a burg-scroant. Yes. We've heard it's called a moat. We've heard it's called a crevasse. We've heard it's called a burg-scrooned. I actually made the team T-shirts that say Berg-scrooned on them because we had so many conversations. about what to call this hole. My husband is a climber, and he pulled out his climbing book

and was like, became really adamant. Like, Levi has not been like really intense about this podcast, but on this one point, he was like, it's a burkscrew. And so, yeah, so then we just, that's how we wrote it. We were like, we don't know what it is. So the point of the question. I know, sorry.

Was I was hoping to hear, how did you get that tape? I mean, what did you think? And why? did all these people hold on to that tape? I mean, the Cheryl Chow audio that was like a connection through Tim Matsui and I mean, why did people hang on to it for so long? Okay, I think everybody knew

this was a very important story that had to be told. So John Bancroft, who was here today, held on to so many records, notes, handwritten notes, the REI video that John took himself bravely, even though everybody else was like not, you know, everybody else basically just bowed down to Tom Hudson. He knew something was off and he took this video and then

held on to it. And John, I think you held on to it because you knew this was an important document, right? I mean, you had it organized. When I went to your house, everything was perfectly organized. And I thought, this is someone who knew somebody someday would tell this story. Wow. Same with Tim Matsui. He held onto that tape because he knew it was really important. So it wasn't, yeah, the audio of Cheryl Chow. So I would love to say like God bless hoarders, but it wasn't that.

It was people knew this was important. These were important documents. And now the memorial tape was in somebody's basement and they found it. Now, we've been working on this. I mean, Ella and I started talking about this six years ago. So there's been time for people to be like, Azolda and Al have been talking about this. So as they're cleaning out their basements, they find stuff too. One of the most important pieces, though, is Ella was a prolific journaler and kept all, I mean, you kept everything.

Yes, and I also printed out for some reason the emails between Azolda and I, you don't print emails. But in 1999, you do. So I had like a stack of emails that we had swapped back and forth when we were seniors in high school. And she was at the library and I was on my little home computer and kept him in a box. And then they were very helpful. A lot of these documents don't, you know, you don't hear them in the podcast. But they were very helpful, I think, in terms of recreating the timeline and just putting together all the different pieces. And okay, we can see from this, you know,

diary or this email, this is when this happened. It was, you know, it was, I think kids today don't have as much. Everything's digital, right? And I think in some ways that you don't have the same kinds of records that we had. Ella, I don't know if Azola ever told you this, but I actually used your journal entries and the emails to fact-check the memories that you shared with us, Azolda, for this. It was incredibly useful. Yeah, it was, it was great. Also, it's very strange to hand over your diaries from high school to your team and you're like, uh-huh. I think I was a little bit selective. I don't think I scanned every diary entry. Yeah, that's a level of trust. I don't know. So every time a podcast gets made, there's always the darlings that

have to end up on the cutting room floor, the pieces of tape that creators really wanted to include, but for whatever reason, they couldn't do it. So we are. are going to share some of those with you tonight. And I know Isolda, Alec, and Jeannie each have a piece of tape that they're going to, we're going to listen to that didn't make it in the show, and then you're going to talk about them. Do you want to do any preamble, or are we just going to go right to the tape and then talk after? I think I'm the first one. Yeah, Izold are the first one.

So this is Rosie Bancroft telling me about, so the podcast is really focused on Ella and me and the Fallout. out. But Rosie, who was in post-84, also experienced a huge amount of blowback. And I was unfortunately not able to put that in the podcast. So I really wanted to use this voice memo that Rosie sent me. I was driving and I listened to it. And it was so powerful. And I wanted to figure out how to use it. So when this opportunity came up, it was like, yes, we get to use this, this piece of audio from Rosie. This was about two weeks after he died. and I was at school in the gym.

I don't know if it was lunch or after school or something, but kids were just kind of playing around. And this kid had just dunked a basketball and was like hanging from the rim. And, you know, this was the late 90s. He was like sagging his pants and they were kind of coming down around his butt. And the teacher was like, you know,

you dress like that in prison, you're going to get yourself raped. And then he like turns, to me and goes, don't tell anybody I said that or I'm going to get fired and kill myself too. I was like, what in earth? So as old, that's a teacher who said that in front of students and Rosie is relaying that that memory. I, Rosie was there in the gym.

Yeah. The students were playing basketball. This teacher was pretty well liked, turned to Rosie and said this, which I think, you know, right after the death of this, of Tom Hudson, I think, really made Rosie feel super targeted and, like, see, this is what you did. Yeah. Why did you want to include that? Like, what did that say in your opinion about what was happening at that time? And what was okay to say to students at that time?

I mean, I think to me it spoke to just how teachers felt very free blaming students for the death. of a teacher, which is absurd. And it was just this free, totally casual thing, you would say to someone. It was just, I think that was what was going on, is these teachers were really, they were hurting, and they blamed us, right? That's a big part of the podcast. Alec, you had a piece of tape also that didn't make it in the show that you wanted to share. Do you want to do any introduction?

The only preamble is this is after Azolda and I's interview with Eddie Hill, the detective, in 1999. The context of this, it's a little dynamic. We're basically walking out from the living complex where we interviewed him. So this is after you interviewed him? Yes, we're walking out the door after the interview. Okay. Not report the danger.

I'm not to blame. Do you know how weird that is? Describe to me how weird it is. I always thought, for the last 25 years, I thought I set the ball in motion for all this chaos. Like, people spending their 20s in therapy. I'm not saying I caused any of it, but I, like, pushed the boulder. And it turns out I didn't.

I had it all wrong. So, this is, like, oh, okay. Yeah, all right. And this is after Eddie Hill had basically revealed that there had been another student who had approached him and said that Tom Hudson had made boys uncomfortable. And so you at that point, sorry, Alec, go ahead. Yeah, I can tell a story. That's all right. No, this is actually, so I was the last addition to the adults in the room team.

I worked on Soundside for a number of years before transitioning over the podcast team. And this was maybe my second week working with you guys. Bombshell, 25-year reveal, right in our first interview together. You know, I think I chose this for a few reasons. I mean, it's, there are so few moments in this series when Uzalda doesn't get to be the stone-cold narrator and gets to express herself and show that emotion. I mean, you think you can, the audio speaks for itself.

You can hear just the kind of complicated, all sorts of feelings bubbling up and just trying to understand this like 25-year mystery almost. mystery almost and you're role in it. And of course, we know that even outside of the boy you talked to Eddie Hill, that there were other people raising all sorts of warning flags to school officials, all at the same

time. And, you know, there's so, there may be three episodes we tried to put this in. But it speaks I think to kind of one of the central complexities of this series, which is where how far your story and Ella's

story go in this? And when we pick it up with the other people, present in the series and how much your story is a piece of it and when it starts to move away from it, which is in episode five after this conversation, this interview with Eddie Hill. And it's a conversation we had all the way through the end. I mean, our final episode, episode seven, looked very different maybe three weeks before we ended up getting in... Three days. Something like that, yeah. Flashbacks.

So yeah, and again, it was this great moment of just feeling an emotion from you that, you know, I think is valuable. Jeannie, you have a piece of tape. Can you set us up? Yeah. So one of the other kind of central complexities of this series is truly what were the adults doing? Like, where were they? And one of the actually, actually, Actually, Ella's dad, John Hushagen, was present along with Ella's mom during this. And Zolda interviewed Ella's dad, John, and we didn't get to, we tried really hard to include this, and we just couldn't. So I chose something from that interview that has stuck with me for months now.

We didn't say, oh, don't say anything, you know, make waves. Make waves. Make many waves as you need to make. And you may not win the first time, but you've got to keep doing it. You've got to keep speaking out. Otherwise, it looks like acceptance. So to set the table here a little bit, Mr. Hoosagin talked about how the family would have dinner together every night and just talk about their days. and this is one of the conversations they kept having was, you know, Ella asking, I'm talking as though you're not here.

You know, like, am I doing the right thing here? Are we doing the right thing? And these adults said, hell yeah, you're doing the right thing. Can I add to that? Yeah, I mean, the other thing is, you know, there's so many pieces of the story, but part of the story is that I had first brought the information that I had heard. about Tom Hudson to our journalism teacher because he was the adult in that room, right? It just made the most sense. I learned about it in the context of the journalism, in the paper and the journalism class, and we brought it to him. And he did not act on it. And then the teacher was nonetheless, even though he thought he sort of had the situation

under control, Tom Hudson was placed on leave. And so put two and two together, you know, who leaked this information. It came back certainly to me and also to Azola and also to Rosie. And he tried to have us removed from the high school newspaper. He tried to fire us, you know, which you can't do because it's a class. And I just, and then I went and talked to him like, hey, this doesn't make any sense. And he made this comment to me about, well, you know, it's all gray. it's not black and white and you don't understand and there's you know what about the girls who rub

their tits on me and that was like my oh shit moment like i i need to leave this room now um and i just my dad and my mom were really had my back in a big way in that in that experience and they my dad wrote you know one of his very famous john husk in letters to the principal probably to the school district and I think I was like you know I'm 17 I was like a little bit mortified like I got it but actually I did need my parents to support me in that so I think in some ways that's what that quote brings up for me is just no no no that's not okay and we're your parents and we're here and we're going to like advocate for you and it was it meant a lot it mattered a lot round of applause for the who'soggin letters after a quick break we'll hear from the team about why we believed it

important to dive into a story from 25 years ago today and how we went about reporting. The midterm elections are drawing near, meaning fact-based reporting is more important than ever. I'm Libby Dankman, host of Soundside, where we bring you news and conversation rooted in the Pacific Northwest. We dealt beyond the headlines to bring you different perspectives on stories that impact your life right here in Washington State, and we're easy to find, Monday through Thursday at noon and 8 p.m. on KU.O.W. 94-9 FM. Or you can listen anytime on the KUOW app or wherever you get your podcasts. You know, one of the responses that I've heard you've gotten for the show is why dredge this up now? Like, this happened more than two decades ago. Some people have asked why would you tarnish Tom Hudson's legacy?

because he did have this amazing outdoor program. He made a difference in a lot of kids' lives. So my question to you all is, why do this now? The reason changed throughout production. So in the beginning, curiosity, kind of clearing our names. I don't know, part of me is like nobody was thinking about us. Why were we like, we're going to clear our names. Nobody was thinking about us.

Nobody was worried about us at all. I think that's right. But we were constant, I think for us, this was like this strange, unresolved issue from our past. And we, you know, we graduated high school. We went off to college in other states. We tried to leave it behind, but it sort of dogged us in this way. And every time we were together, we could be like backpacking in a beautiful, you know, mountain range in Southern California.

And we would be rehashing the same events. Just the two of us, though, without any additional information. Well, that was really weird and crazy, right? We weren't crazy. That was crazy. right? And it was this constant conversation. And then I think for me, you know, in the pandemic, I was visiting with my brother and sister-in-law and they were, you know, my brother had strangely never really heard the whole story. He was very young when this all happened. And in the retelling,

I felt like my whole body respond. Like I'm like, my hands are shaking and my breath was short and my heart was pounding. And I was like, gosh, this still lives. in me. And I wonder how it lives in our peers and other people who went through much worse. Like there must be a lot of this unresolved tension, trauma, confusion. I mean, gaslighting really messes you with you. And it was sort of this community gaslighting. Like, no, the lights are not blinking. It's you. You're crazy. And I think it, to me, it merited revisiting to really sort of understand better what actually happened. And I was really. really interested in what different, you know, what our peers would say.

And also the adults who now, you know, have also had the benefit of time to think about it differently. Many of whom wouldn't talk to us, which is something I wonder about still. I think a lot of, I think a lot of the adults, I was hoping, I was actually hoping a lot of the adults who at the time blamed us would have, I don't know, maybe be able to apologize or have come to Jesus moments or reflect on it differently, but I unfortunately didn't get much of that. Did you get any of that? Yeah.

For me, the first three episodes were pretty uncomfortable because I was such a central character, and I became a lot more comfortable when I could say the reason for doing this story was sort of like journalism and pivoting to actually finding out what happened. And once we figured out that it was not, not just what we thought it was, that there had been abuse of all kinds, but that it actually was much, much, much worse.

And as soon as we started figuring that out, it kind of became this mission to share this story. And also, I would say, people really wanted us to tell their stories, and it felt really good to people. And so that became a driving. Once I could become a journalist again, then that was my driving motivation. And then as time went on, even more so, and we realized, wait, this is in present day.

As the e-mails started pouring in, I mean hundreds, I don't know of thousands, but it was a lot of emails of people saying, this is happening present day, I reported it. This teacher has been put on leave three times. He's still back in the classroom. Tell me what to do. How do I file public records requests? And I went, oh, my God, this isn't 99. This is 2025, 2026.

And that for me became sort of the call. It suddenly felt like this story was very present and not just our little story from back in the day. Can I ask about some of those conversations that you had with survivors, or maybe they wouldn't all consider themselves survivors, but Jason and Ocean and Jonathan, I mean, those conversations are incredibly emotional,

difficult for them, how do you prepare to do that in a sensitive way and in a way that, you know, is able to get at what happened without basically re-traumatizing people? I have been interviewing survivors or victims, but people have different names for how they, some people say, I'm a victim, I'm not surviving. Other people say survivor for most of my career at this point. I would say when I go into a big interview like this, I open my heart up more than with anything. I feel I'm actually the most present I am in any part of my life. Like I am most myself when I am in those interviews.

I tend to meditate before I go in. I just feel like I open my heart all the way up, and I am completely locked in. This is best practice. I feel like there's probably some people in the room being like, she interviewed me once, and it was a mess. But I just, I need to be careful here. But best practice is I feel like I do go in

and it's like deep inhale, I lock in. And when the interview is done, I need to sleep. It is, I am exhausted. These are like interviews that last hours. and it feels like my life's purpose. It feels really, really special. And so I also, like, I will often match my breath to theirs. I slow down my breathing.

And the whole point is to get them to feel like I am not judging them at any point. Because you have to understand with people who have gone through sexual abuse but also childhood sexual abuse, the shame is so intense, and they are watching you like a hawk for any judgment. And the minute there's a fleck of, huh, even perceived, the lights are out. They are done talking to you. And so that is really, really important with those interviews, for me anyway. Isolda, you're the journalist in this situation, but you're also part of the story. I mean, you and Ella's story is really the inciting incident for the podcast.

What was the challenge of that? Like, how did you deal with the challenge of that to be both reporting the story and part of it? I feel like this is for you guys. How did Zolda deal with the challenge of that, Jeannie and Alec? Oh, man. Well, sometimes we would just. just talk about all kinds of other things. I don't even know how to answer that question. It was a very...

You were incredibly open during this whole process. So I don't even... I feel like you want me to dunk on you and I don't know what to say. I think you did an incredible job. No, I want you to say nice things. Yes. Because Zola did an incredible job. But she, I mean, was very graceful, like, would be honest when she needed a break. You know, sometimes we could tell a little bit. Like, you know, if it was kind of hard to get you to focus, it was like, okay, maybe we're done for now. But, you know, you, I mean, you would, when you thought of new things, when you, when something occurred to you, you immediately, like, you would text me. Like, you know, it was a, it was, you were, you were here for it. There were times, though, when I'd be talking and, oh, well,

here's something that didn't make it into the podcast, and we really wanted it, too. So two weeks after Tom Hudson was placed on leave, a fire was set to his office by an angry student who, from what I understood, I was not able to find this student. I wanted to find the student. I still want to find the student. I will not be looked. Don't worry. If you know the student who set the fire. Do you know? Are you in the crowd? Talk to me after. As old as email address is. Wait, but how do you know it was an angry student? We've had other contemporaneous accounts. Yeah, that's right. folks telling us. That's right.

We're not just spreading, like spilling tea. Like there were other contemporaneous people who were telling us. People told us. Yeah, who this person was, why they did what they did. So Tom Hudson pissed off this kid. We don't know why. He set fire to the office. Anyway, you guys didn't know that.

And I was just like, oh, yeah, blah, blah, blah. And then there was the fire. And you guys were like, what? Stop telling us things that might need to be in the podcast. So were a lot of moments like that. The number of times, Zolda had this just incredibly revelatory, detail. I mean, for all the episodes, you know, we number them, each kind of iterative draft just to clean it up. Each episode probably has 10 drafts, I would say. You know, the number of

times were eight drafts, nine drafts deep, and Azolda's like, oh yeah, this thing happened. Here's this random thing that is just like such a perfect detail, and we're like, why have you been hoarding this? And you're like, oh, I just don't think people care about me. Like, I don't think they care about that. And we're like, Azilda, you're hosting the podcast. That's right. you would get up and leave the room and then come back and be like, all right. I was like, I think I forgot about that on purpose. Yeah, that's right. That happened. But I do think, you know, it's both the thing that is most difficult about this podcast and I think the thing that makes it very unique. And certainly what we've heard from listeners is as old as centrality in it, just like

the fact that she is not outside the story but within it. I mean, it's hard to fathom the amount of interview hours that would have gone into interviewing Azoldo, for example, to get the level of detail that we have had she not been part of it? I mean, years of interviews. At this point, there's probably more. So it's, you know, it's, I think the thing that really sets this series apart is the fact that Azola is such a strong character and that she was able to offer all these vulnerable details. And we're grateful to have been able to share those with her. Ella, for you, what was it like to have your high school story on this kind of a platform? I mean, it was originally my idea, but I don't think I ever really thought that it would become,

I liked the idea of making a podcast because at the time, I was listening to a lot of podcasts that do sort of a deep dive on something from our past and then reexamine it. and I think it's a really interesting, I think people love that kind of stuff I do. And I didn't really ever imagine that it would become what it became. I definitely didn't imagine that it would have such long legs, right? Like I get texts from, I live in L.A. and I get texts from people who say, oh, someone else sent me the podcast, and then I was like, oh, my God, I know, Ella.

So I just know that this has really touched a nerve with people. or, you know, I don't know what the right expression is. It's a story that is very specific, very specific to the time and the location, but it's also very universal, as Azola says, a lot of people experienced and continue to experience things like it. So I just think it's really powerful, and I'm glad. I'm really grateful that the story was able to become this podcast and that it's been so impactful. It is really vulnerable to be part of something like so public and handover diary entries and all of that. But, you know, I think the fact that it's had such a big impact, I just feel really grateful.

Let's get to the, I mean, the title is adults in the room. Can we talk about those people that were in the room 25, 26 years ago? I mean, we've talked, you heard from students at the time. You've talked and interviewed them and you heard them in the podcast. What about the adults from back then? I mean, what have you heard from them? And I think further, what have you learned about how adults should be present in acting in these situations? You want me?

Okay. So, you know, when we started the podcast, the other thing that I did was go to therapy because I needed to go to therapy to process some of this. And I remember one of the things I talked about in therapy was like, I'm a mom, and it gives me, I feel really scared, like, that I have to send my kids out into spaces where there are unsafe adults who may want to hurt them. And I don't know how to talk to them and I don't know how to protect them. And this experience obviously brought up a lot of that, like, what do we do? And I think what I learned and I have continued to sort of see, actually, as we've made the podcast, is to teach your kids.

It's such a basic thing that they can learn even when they're really small to trust that feeling that you get when you're uncomfortable. Trust that feeling and know that they're going to be safe telling you if they had that feeling, even if it's with someone that they really love and that you really love and is close with your family. if they don't feel safe and they don't feel comfortable, that's important information for them to have. And you don't have to get into graphic details with your small children just to communicate that,

that your actual inner feelings are really important information for you. And I think what was interesting about talking to our friends and peers and then going out into the beginning to talk to people about this experience through the podcast was seeing where there were students who had, that feeling about Tom Hudson, right? They went and they had they were pressured to take a shower and they were like, what? This is not cool. I don't feel safe. I don't feel good here. And they distance themselves. And while I think in a perfect world, it would be great if that were also actionable, you know, conversations at the dinner table with parents and there were things happening.

But in terms of that student safety, they kept themselves safe by trusting themselves. and that's huge. I thought that was really, really valuable for me to learn. It just strikes me that, like, three of the four of you are parents yourselves, and I wonder, it must make it so much more high stakes

when you're reporting on a story like this, when you are sending your kid out into the world, just like Ella just said, Jeannie, you're nodding. Yeah. I mean, one of the things, and this kind of goes, to like, why do this now that I keep thinking about, and not just as a parent, but just as a person,

is, like, how many times have I made the wrong call? How many times have I assumed something about someone because I knew them in another context? I mean, that's a lot of what this is. I don't, I don't, I don't, I'm not really interested in painting any of the adults who didn't take action as the bad guys here because I mean any one of us could make the wrong call. And so for me, I am thinking about checking myself. Like, what am I not paying attention to? Like, what am I, in this, you know, this isn't about me sort of, you know, looking at my kids' private stuff or anything.

She's here. I will not be doing that, I promise. but it really is about, you know, what I assume is fine. I'm asking myself a lot more questions about why I'm making those assumptions and how I know that those assumptions are correct. It is really, really hard to look at somebody and say, oh, Jesus, I think they're really capable of something awful. But this is frighteningly common.

It's extraordinarily common. And so I kind of think we're missing something, and I would like to build the skill to get better. Isolda and Ella, I mean, this is an intimate window into something that is a very Seattle story. It's a Seattle high school story. But it's found this national audience. It's resonated with a lot of people far outside of our city.

Why do you think that it's struck? such a chord with people, not just those who are in the Garfield community? Marshall, I'm about to call you out. Marshall's our chief content officer. When Marshall greenlit this, he was like, this is crazy. This has never happened to anyone ever before. And I was like, I'm not going to tell him it has, because then he might not greenlight this.

So I was just like, that's right. This is very special. It's just us. And I like serious, Marshall should probably be on stage with us. Come on down, no, I'm just kidding. Marshall is like a master storyteller and has like line edited us and is like not nice about it. He's like really intense and it's the best thing ever because he knows we can do better. And he's like, do better, like basically.

Anyway. But why? Why is this, did this hit a court? Because it's happening so much. And like all the emails we got were not just like, yes, there were priests and Boy Scouts and teachers, but, you know, people just have this. Oh, I knew somebody. And a lot of the emails were, I was nearly victimized and I got out of it somehow.

A lot of people had a weird dodge a bullet emails. And a lot of people were like, I think I saw something at my school. I think this was happening. I'm weirded out. A lot of people also recognized, like, oh, you know, the experience with our journalism teacher, David Eric, who, I mean, relentless sexual harassment. I mean, yeah, relentless.

He, a lot of people wrote to all of us saying, I saw that happening, I experienced that too, but I didn't realize that's what I was experiencing, so that really resonated with people. So I think it's just the universality of this really hit home. This isn't really your question, but my favorite emails came from other female reporters across the country who, so at one point I called this

the Bureau of Men behaving badly. And I started hearing from women at all the networks. I'm not even kidding, like New York Times, the Epstein reporters, And they were like, I'm, I also work for the Bureau of Men Be behaving badly. And I was like, oh, oh, my God. Like, we need a reunion. And, like, people have been talking about, like, should we all get together?

Like, how much fun would that be? That would be so fun. I do think, though, that a big part of this, I'm really glad you said that, is that I think everybody has the experience of telling yourself that something isn't that big of a deal. You know, I mean, we're talking about people who didn't see something that was a really big deal. but also people who experience that, I mean, we do this all the time. We try and tell ourselves it's not that big of a deal. It's not that big of a deal.

Regardless of sort of the severity of what occurred. And that's, I mean, I think that is the central complexity of this. We talked about this a lot. You know, there were times when you would talk about what Dave Eric said to you, said to Ella, and, you know, kind of like laugh it off almost. I think we... That's a tough thing. This was actually the biggest tension between you.

and me is I would say it's what we experienced was no big deal it's fine it's fine and then you I mean that's when you would walk out of the room you'd be like stop it it's not okay if this happened to my daughter I would be really angry but I think I murder yeah I think we kind of I don't you were more aware of it but I was kind of like I gaslit myself in a way I didn't want to admit that it was bad I think that's common. People were nodding when I was talking about that. I think that's very common. I have one question that I want to get to, Isolda,

before we turn to some audience questions, what is your advice for people who believe that their kid might be being groomed and you want to find out information, say, you know, if a teacher had a previous investigation or anything like that? Because I know that's a question you're getting a lot from people who are writing in.

So I want Ella to answer this too. Ella is an attorney who has worked in this realm too. I would say start documenting yourself. Write it down. Write down everything. You'll forget real soon. In a Google Doc, email it to somebody you love, if that's the first step you can take.

Because just reporting it can feel too big. But if you document and it's a diary, that's like that's evidence that counts as evidence the second thing I would do is start making public records requests you can make public records requests under an anonymous name if you don't want it to come from you because you're afraid your kid will be retaliated against and it kind of wakes the school district up like why are people filing public records requests or get somebody a friend to file the requests and I would just say like start collecting documents start talking to people it is really hard to be a whistleblower. There are people in this very audience who have done a lot of work to get rid of predatory teachers from our school system,

and I hate that they have to call themselves whistleblowers. It should just be doing your job. But that's what we're seeing a lot of... So these people go to... It's bad for their careers to call people out. It's actually much better for you if you do nothing.

It's not good for the kids, but it's better for your career if you just shut up. So, yeah, I would say for parents, for teachers, it's really important to just document yourself and then start requesting public records. You have no idea how much is hiding in those public records. It's pretty impressive because a lot of teachers have actually been put on leave. Seattle Public Schools and other school districts have what's called progressive discipline where they will do some really awful things. They'll touch a kid. In one case, I know of a teacher straddled a kid, grabbed a kid's thigh. Those teachers are on leave for 20 days and then they're back in the classroom.

And regardless of what you think of it, if you're requesting those records, you yourself can start building a case. After a final break, the adults in the room team will answer audience questions about the series. Some of the world's biggest companies have brought jobs and wealth. to the Seattle region. That growth has come with some real pains, too. There are these hotspots. Seattle has the potential to be one of those. Tech people are getting replaced by AI, and you can't replace us with AI yet.

I'm Monica Nicholsberg. And I'm Joshua McNichols. We host Booming, a podcast about the economic forces shaping our lives here in the Pacific Northwest. We get into the stories that hit your wallet and our region. Listen now on the KUOW app or wherever you listen. This is an audience question. when approaching a story like this, how do you avoid sensationalizing it?

I think that story, quote unquote, is often too synonymous with entertainment, and folks may go into the podcast wanting to be entertained. How did you think about that? Okay, I have been telling these stories for a long time, and it felt like nobody heard them. And when we started making this podcast, once we kind of got greenlit by K-O-W,

I wanted it to be part true crime, part memoir, kind of audiobook vibes. I really, really, really wanted people to hear it, and I thought we have to tell it like a story. Not sensationalize it, but tell it like a story, because telling it in journalism was not resonating. Like, our stories don't win awards ever. Like, it just feels sometimes like you're shouting,

into the abyss and nobody cares. And this is the first time in 22 years of this kind of work that I felt someone finally went, oh my God, why hasn't anybody been doing stories about this? And I'm like, oh my God, we all have been. And I think it is thanks to a lot of the Epstein coverage, Julie Kay Brown, all the New York Times folks, like people have been doing so much really good work with Me Too. So it's like it's all come together. But telling this like a good yarn was actually part of the plan.

And I, you know, that question of how do you not sensationalize something as though it's a binary? I don't necessarily know actually how to answer that question, but I will say that when, if something feels Ugi, that's the best word I can come up with, it's time to back away. And also, I mean, we spent a lot of time talking about the people at the center of this, the survivors, like all of these kids who went through this. And it was really, really important to present them as complex creatures, right? And I think if you are able to talk about humans as complex, it

reduces the likelihood that you're going to have some weird sensationalistic, kind of, you know, slick storytelling. I feel like sensationalism is easy. It's easy. There are a lot of commercial radio calls it dazzling details. There are a lot of moments in this that feel like dazzling details.

And if you're driving for those details, that is a way to sensationalize a story. And we did not do that. Another thing we did, so it was like fact checking overboard. So in journalism, you're really not supposed

to let the sources read what you've written before it publishes. I would say by the time I would put up the story, the script on a Zoom, and I would read through it and usually go through two fact checks, sometimes three with folks. and any time something hit them is off, they would say it.

Because at that point, I had a pretty good relationship with them. And also, like, they're just really awesome dudes who just were really. But so there were quite a few moments. I don't know. Jonathan, are you here? Hi. Hi. I'm so excited to see you.

Jonathan, like, Jonathan and I had so many conversations about, like, no, you need. to put this in and like Jonathan would text me a lot after the fact and be like no I thought about this and like kind of it felt very collaborative you're in the audience so you can't say it wasn't but it felt like a very collaborative experience and like extremely cool and I'm going to keep doing that where like I just want people to be part of the not the whole writing process but like the end stage yeah we don't get to own the story yeah it's not ours we just don't I don't think. Maybe my bosses disagree, but I don't think we do.

They're too far back. Should have gotten here earlier. Okay, so the next question from an audience member, will your series address the institutional failure of the district HR beyond the last episode aired with Superintendent Sheldoner? No. No. No. I mean, through journalism, like K-O-W Public Radio, yes. We have an amazing education reporter, and she and I were talking about that.

I'm also trying to convince another reporter who is here tonight to do this work a little bit more. Ashley, I think you're here. I am like, I hope. Ashley's going to kill me after this. But yeah, so we hope, but not in the podcast. I mean, one of the things that the superintendent said was that by September, he wants to have this new department where parents and kids can go. He said, I'm not even sure if I would know where to go right now within Seattle public schools to report something.

And so he said he wanted that by the start of the new school year. So, you know, that is something that journalists can report on and hold him accountable for. that's also something people who have kids in the district can hold him accountable for. You know, so even though we're not doing it in the podcast, like, that should not be over. That should not be over. Did you attempt or consider talking to teacher unions? We did talk about it. On tape, you mean?

Yeah, like on the record. I mean, to be really honest, and we did speak to a couple of people who were part of the teachers' union off-rector. To be honest, it was such a struggle to get anyone from the school district to respond to us. We were so heavily focused on that, that our ability to also really thoroughly go after the union was, you know, we were just really heavily focused on being able to talk to the superintendent. So, yeah, our off-record folks who helped us, thank you very much. I feel deeply for Tom Hudson's wife and family. Did you try to reach out to them? I have been in touch with Tom Hudson's widow for more than a year.

And she declined to be part of this. She allowed me to do a fact check with her. For the final episode. Yeah, for this upcoming episode. And, you know, gave a comment for that episode. and I think that's really all I'm going to say about that, but she's always been very responsive and very, very gracious. Recently, Lincoln High School parents came together

to passionately fight for the building of their football field. They rallied together and made change occur. How do we get Seattle Public Schools parents equally engaged in the continuing mismanagement of abuse or corruption within SPS? A lot of people have just said, like, how do I, what should I do? What's my role in this? And I actually asked Ella this once, and you texted back. People need to just email their school board members and say, have you listened to adults in the room?

And what are you going to do about it? That's a pretty simple call to action. In all of this, I felt like people were trying to answer how to solve this. guess what that's not us there are people who like study this stuff like go do make them do it this question is about

the fact that the story is about suicide in some ways and blame related to suicide this question asker says do you see any change in attitudes about suicide any recognition that no one person

or event causes a death by suicide would you still be blamed in 2026. I think, you know, one thing that's that didn't make the podcast that I think is worth noting is that there were adults at Garfield saying it's no one's fault that another adult decided to take his own life. It's no one's fault. I mean, I recall that the Seattle Times spoke with a social worker who'd been dispatched to the school. And she was saying, wow, I'm very alarmed that the narrative is this this investigation, this process took his life. That is, in fact, very dangerous because it can lead to more suicides. I mean, people can, when they feel

that they're responsible, it's just a dangerous narrative. And she's quoted to saying that a friend of a good friend of ours mom also wrote a letter to the editor saying, you know, this suicide is a very, you know, devastating choice that a person makes. It's never another person's fault. So I think that that was out there. It was hard to internalize with all the other noise. And I think that, I think that, yes, understanding around mental health and suicide

has changed and evolved and gotten more sophisticated just as our understanding of sexual harassment, sexual assault, you know, has evolved and gotten more sophisticated. That doesn't mean that it couldn't happen again. I think it's just when people are so devastated, they sometimes do these really destructive things. So I don't know, but I hope that it wouldn't happen again. This person asks a really interesting question. On the subject of Tom, how have your definitions of perpetrator and victim changed through the work on the podcast? Boy, that's an interesting question.

I don't really think about people as... I mean, I don't know if I would use the word victim anymore, honestly, after working on this podcast. Yeah, I feel like, I mean, Survivor, I guess, we really talked a lot about, you know, what words were we using to describe... to describe Jason, to describe Ocean, to describe Jonathan. And I hope this doesn't sound too Pollyanna, but, like, people are so much more than the abuse that they survived.

And that was very clear after the people that we've spoken with for me. So I don't really know. what to say about perpetrator, but I can speak on this? Yeah, please do. I do think one of the things that Azulah and I had many conversations about, but is not a

theme of the podcast, is that like when we have these ideas about who a perpetrator is and who a victim is, we can sometimes miss sexual abuse because a person in your community who's doing these incredible things

really amazing. outdoor education program, helping students build leadership skills that they still today feel like, wow, I'm really, I really benefited from that part. The rest was all harm, right? But that I think can can make it confusing to try to figure out, you know, when you think of a perpetrator as like a monster, we see this play out all the time. Oh, that person, no, that they were a wonderful member of, you know, wonderful doctor, whatever. And it can make the gaslighting, the community gaslighting that follows someone reporting abuse more likely to happen, I think.

Thank you, Katie, for this question I'm about to read. Throughout listening, I kept reflecting on how this story is also about the 90s themselves. Looking back now, what feels most different to you about the ways kids, adults, and institutions understood power and boundaries, compared to today. That's a really good question, Katie, thank you. I think at Garfield, our whole ethos, and it was a wonderful ethos,

which is that it's such a cool, special school. And so that allowed us to look past a lot of things because it's Garfield, it's special, we're special. And that allowed a lot of blurring of boundaries. I think that's still happening, today. I do think in the 90s there was a lot of language kids just didn't have back then the Me Too movement that the actual word grooming. I mean nobody used the word grooming back then. However, like I have heard from quite a few high schoolers who have told me stories of,

oh, I have this teacher. He's always alone with girls in his classroom. That's kind of weird, right? And I'm like, what is it? Like, what is happening? So I think with a lot of students, and this is actually something Alec noticed for the present-day stories, like cases, is that a lot of the kids who have been groomed, they believe that the perpetrator, that in many cases the teacher, is their boyfriend or girlfriend.

So they don't actually view it as their abuser. So how do you break through when someone thinks it's their super special relationship with a teacher? So is that the 90s? That's where I'm kind of like a little cautious. Like, yes, this is a story about the 90s, but it is very present day. Ella feels things are, Ella thinks I'm a little bit of a pessimist in this. I do think that, I think that teenagers are, they're working toward becoming adults.

So when an adult offers them, here's an opportunity to be more like an adult in this way that's really inappropriate. It can be very powerful. that can feel really compelling to teenagers in any era, right? I think that's why this can happen. They're a vulnerable group in that way. But I do think that people today are better equipped to recognize and identify when things are starting to really go haywire with a teacher or an adult figure in their life, a coach. I think that when we were publishing the series of articles about our principal having sex with a cheerleader,

one of the stories that we ran was what are the rules? We had no idea. Like we went and had a reporter go and like pull district policy to explain what the rules were and they weren't very clear. You didn't know that that was wrong at the time? I think we knew that was wrong, but like what short of that, right? It wasn't wrong. Well, it wasn't, he was allowed to do it. Yeah.

It wasn't illegal. I mean, it was wrong. We were sort of like. Well, not okay. But it was not illegal. Where is the line? What is the, what are the policies? We had no idea.

It would be illegal today. Yes. Yes. The law changed in 2010 or 2009. But I don't think we were even curious about what the law was. We just wanted to know, what does the district say? And no one had trained us. And I think now students get information from the school district.

I think Title IX requires them to give students information about, here are our policies, here's how you can report. And that is the change. Whether or not students avail themselves of those policies is another question, and that's more complicated to get there. But I do think kids today are more savvy. I think they're better equipped than we were. We're winding down.

I've got a couple more questions. Isola and Ella first. How do you feel that this story changed you and working on this podcast changed you? And do you feel that you found closure on your own part in the story? This changed me at a cellular level. I didn't realize how scared I was of everybody in my class.

I really thought everybody hated me Talk about making myself the center of the story. Nobody was thinking about me. But kind of an example is at the very beginning, I was not able to contact my journalism advisor, David Eric. I made the producers handle that. I was just so scared. I'd actually seen him on a bus.

We were all headed to see Louis C.K., which is like totally ironic. And there he was. and I was with my husband. I made us get off the bus because I was so freaked out. But I'm just not scared. I'm not scared of the story anymore.

So that has been incredible closure. I mean, it has been, there have been, wouldn't you say ups and downs? It's been like emotionally hard, but very, very cool. And the amount of community that I've seen form around it, and I haven't really been a part of that community.

I really wanted to let people have community without me. I think what I've heard it's been hard also, but very, very special, especially for a lot of survivors who have found each other, even those who are not on the podcast. That's been really cool to hear about. I think for me, you know, I felt a lot of guilt, whether or not that was appropriate and I felt a lot of doubt about the actions that we had taken. And this is where, you know, our personalities are just different. So I had this sort of like, I'm still scared. But I feel like what was helpful for me and I did get some closure was just having the

conversations with the other students who were involved and hearing from them directly about, you know, no, there was not this. sense of like, you know, you did this and it was wrong. It was more just like, this was a devastating thing that happened. And we were all kind of caught up in it. And that gave me a huge amount of closure. I also think it did help me to sort of integrate this experience into my life. Like, understand it as part of becoming who I am, right? Like being able to go through that and know that it was super hard. And then I was okay on the other side of it. And I, and I was okay on the other side of it. I can, you know, be a good advocate today, in part because I have this understanding of, like,

that experience of feeling so doubted and gaslit. So, yeah, I think it was, like, hugely helpful for me. In the beginning, my husband told me he really wanted me to get a therapist to process this. And I think there was a lot of concern about mental health, like how this was going to go. what I didn't realize is that it was going to be like 18 months of just talking about it with you guys, which was like kind of therapy. I mean, just like that was suddenly it became my job was to process it. And to have you guys especially immerse yourselves and believe the story and to be constantly like, that's crazy. That happened. That was so bad.

It was so validating, just constant validation of how bad it was, how bad it was for the survivors. And then the amount of empathy, this is like the most professional team I've ever been a part of. It's like been so kind. There's been so much grace. And you guys just really felt for them like the amount of like we had them in our hearts just for 18 months. We've been thinking about them and how they. So that's been incredibly cool as well to like be part of this team where we processed it together. And it was your story as much as it was ours, you know?

Can you guys share your takeaways now that the show is out in the world, Alec and Jeannie? It's still not over, so I'm not sure if I actually have processed. I know we're going to get to that. We're going to talk about the next episode that is coming in just a second. But in the meantime. Yeah, I mean, the week after episode seven came out, you know, we were in this production sprint for so long. I think all of us just totally crashed. And it did take a while for us to, I think, get back in the groove of things and to begin

and picking things back up. I mean, it's definitely the most difficult thing I think I've ever worked on. It's been the most rewarding thing I've ever worked on in the same token. So it's like, you know, we're, it's kind of jazz, you know, we're just kind of going with it as we figure things out.

This might embarrass you a little, but I was deeply grateful for the moments when you did say that it was hard because I think that there is, certainly in this profession, I think that whether it's true or not, I think that we all have this idea that we need to be stronger than the material

in order to keep doing the work. And I'm not crying, by the way, I just am Flemmy, sorry. And during COVID, I made KU-O-W bring trainers in to talk about complex secondary trauma which is a thing journalists can experience from telling hard story after hard story after hard story

I basically did it because that was something I was experiencing and I was like I need to talk about this and we're not why and I realized through this that there is a

deeply humane way to do work that is hard and tell stories that are difficult and that's that's where my that's that's just where my brain and that's where I'm headed from now on professionally is there is there is a humane way that will not destroy your mental health so that was like our mission for this and that's like my personal mission for my profession from here on out for the rest of my career um Ella and Azola, any final takeaways?

We're going to get to episode eight in just a second, but anything else you want to add? I have nothing else to say. Okay, let's get to episode eight then. You teased to the end of episode seven that there might be some more material coming. I think I can speak for all of us that we are interested in what you have coming out. what can you tell us about what's next is olda oh my gosh um episode eight focuses on one individual's story um dating back to the 1980s it involves tom hudson and how he died and that's all i'm going to say good job

I could see you thinking yeah that was good very restrained I feel like Jeannie was watching really closely to see and we will be waiting and watching the feed for when that's going to come out can we have another round of applause for this team's work

that's so sweet that was a recording of our focus adults in the room live event from June 18th, the Seattle Central Library. We edited it for link and clarity. Adults in the Room is a part of Focus, a dedicated documentary channel from KUOWW Public Radio in Seattle,

a proud member of the NPR Network. Thank you to everyone who made this event possible, including Ella Hussagen, host Libby Denkman, producers Alec Cowan and Hans Dwight, editor Junie Yandel, event manager Charlotte Duran and marketing associate Karina Bolanos-Luwen.

I'm Azolterra. Thank you all so much for listening and caring about this story. We'll be back with more soon. The midterm elections are drawing near, meaning fact-based reporting is more important than ever. I'm Libby Dankman, host of SoundSide,

where we bring you news and conversation rooted in the Pacific Northwest. We dealt beyond the headlines to bring you different perspectives, on stories that impact your life right here in Washington State. And we're easy to find Monday through Thursday at noon and 8 p.m. On KUOW 949 FM. Or you can listen anytime on the KUOW app or wherever you get your podcasts.