My Favorite Murder with Karen Kilgariff and Georgia Hardstark - 189 - What Wonderful Luck!

Episode Date: September 26, 2019

Karen and Georgia cover the alleged real life story of The Orphan and the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

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To my favorite murder. That's Georgia Hardstar. That's Karen Kilgareff. And this is a true crime podcast with comedy elements. That's exactly right. Boom, boom, boom. That's all our branding. You go first this week?

You want to get right into it? No. Oh, how are you? I don't have anything else. I'm great. How are you? Good. Good.

Yeah. We're back in school, basically. Yeah. We're back in the old doing episodes. We don't have to be on tour so we can focus on doing episodes. And still, yesterday I canceled because I was like, coming out tomorrow, I don't feel like it today. But the thing, that's the beauty of being your own boss, is we can do whatever the fuck

we want to a point. To a point. And then Steven's like, you make it so that I need eight hours to edit this show. So please. Can I have? Please, can I please? If you don't mind, what do you have this week, anything going on? Personally?

I don't know. I didn't write anything to do. I totally forgot. I don't, things are very easy breezy right now. Everything's just kind of chill. There's really nothing, there's nothing pressing. I'm trying to be not on Twitter that much because I'm not sure if you know this, but there's a massive meltdown happening in our country right now.

Oh, I know that. I thought it was on Twitter only. No, no. I'm just getting kind of mainlining it on Twitter and it's not healthy for you. But it's nice to know that an impeachment inquiry is beginning. It is. That's good, but it feels a little bit like when you've been beaten up on the playground all through lunch and then the bell rings and then the teacher comes out and you're

like, okay, well, both my legs are broken. So I'm glad that you stopped this. So you're cautiously optimistic is what you're saying? I don't even know what to be anymore. I don't know. I don't even. I feel like I need to dig underground and just start tunneling. Oh, well, I made the terrible mistake of going to see the new Rambo movie.

It was a mistake. Vince went to and I was like, no, thank you. Yeah. It was, well, Rambo, Last Blood, I have to say the first Rambo movie, but way back in the 80s was a really good movie and very interesting and it was about something. What I didn't know because we were basically picking, my friend and I were picking between, it was like whichever movies were at the time we were at the theater, the way we like to do it.

Wave. Yeah. I'm just an adventure and film and I love movies, so it kind of didn't matter, but it was like that. It was just like something kind of heavy and maybe even foreign or Rambo, Last Blood. So I was like, look, this will be at the very least funny and crazy, if not terrible, like whatever. What I didn't know is that apparently Sly Stallone is a big MAGA guy and it's very racist

against Mexican people. Oh, shit. But in the movie, because in all those movies, people of color are killed constantly. Right. So you're just like, oh, I see. Yeah. I see this. This isn't great.

Based upon my standards of being a human, this isn't something I'm supposed to... It's like maybe there was a time where we could all pretend that this was just entertainment. Not in this day and age, but the one thing, and I tweeted this, was that do you watch SpongeBob SquarePants enough to know that there was one episode where Squidward became handsome? No. Okay, so he becomes handsome. I mean, I don't even...

So hilarious. I'm just a fan. And his face as he is handsome Squidward is exactly, exactly Sylvester Stallone. His face in this movie. I love it. And it made me laugh the entire time. I was basically watching a different movie because of what it was going on in my brain. That's great.

It's great when you rank and entertain you, even though you're just like sitting through 85 minutes according to events of just trash. It was garbage. It was, it was not so, but and it would have, it was a light enjoying not so garbage experience until people were like, don't you know what his politics are? And then I was like, oh God, damn it. Can we have one? Can't we, can't I freely and lightly hate one thing?

Can I have one action star that doesn't make me? Speaking of fan cults, sure, we have a fan cult and we are giving away one ticket to our Santa Barbara weekend, my favorite weekend.com, check that out. Yeah. It doesn't have anything to do with a fan cult. You don't have to be in the fan cult. No, it's anyone's chance. I think it's going to be a really good weekend.

It's going to be an amazing weekend and you get put up in a nice hotel. I know I feel like I'm putting this, I'm fucking hammering this, but my dad on the phone the other day said, so what's this about the karaoke at the weekend? I swear to God, he brought it up. So what? I don't know. He wants to do it. Well, he absolutely should.

Yeah. Do you want him to host it? No. Unless he wants to. Absolutely not. What song do you think Marty would sing? Oh, God. I mean, what's his, what's his area?

Okay. You mean the poppers? No. Well, maybe pointer sisters, for sure. I did not expect you to say that at all. Oh, you know what? Some people. Marty's singing, I'm so excited, is the funniest idea in my mind.

So Marty's stoked about karaoke. Well, then we all should get stoked about karaoke. Absolutely. Oh my God. Yeah. No one is allowed to take video of my dad doing karaoke. Oh, all cameras are going to be collected at the beginning of the weekend and put in weird techno bags that apparently block your waves, your sound waves.

Yeah. And we'll send you a little thumb drive of the weekend. That's right. We'll capture it for you the way we would like it to be captured. Don't worry. Don't worry at all. Everybody gets a burner phone in case of an emergency. Right.

Or a drug deal. But other than that, it's a lockdown. It's just like in high school when you do a lockdown, spend the night. That's going to be great. We're going to be forced you to have fun. Amazing. Wait, let's do some exactly right. Yeah.

Network stuff. Some programming. We're excited for Murder Squad this coming week on Monday, September 30th. They are putting out this really important, awesome episode. They're focusing on four cases of missing and murdered Indigenous women as well as the whole epidemic of it. One, in some counties, Native American women are killed at a rate of 10 times the national average.

So it's really... I mean, it's really... It's so long overdue and it's so cool. They're focusing on four cases, but they're talking to... They're really doing a deep dive in the way that they know how to. It's important. Emily Washington's going to be on it with them. So check that out.

This podcast will kill you. Their last episode was about Lyme. And I personally think everyone has Lyme disease, so I think you should totally listen to it and see if it sounds like you. Check it out. I mean, it's important work. Also, well, the percast. That's right.

Stephen went to CatCon? No, no, I went to the Catcade. It's an arcade. Excuse me. Karen does not. I was half listening. No, it's a cat shelter, but with an arcade. So if you don't want coffee, if you don't want to try and have a latte and adopt a

kitten, you can just play like Miss Pac-Ban or something like that. Oh. And then there's Cats Around. What city was that in? In Chicago. Amazing. Did they have an Instagram account? I'm sure.

Yeah, the Catcade. Great. It sounds like my, how I want my home to look. So in the background is like Pac-Man dying as you're talking and, yeah, looking and wanting to adopt a kitten. Perfection. Perfection. And the following, of course, or last season was about Shaikimi of Pate, so check that

out. It's also really important. Yeah. Yeah. So much good stuff and so much great content coming. We have some shows in the pipeline that we are so excited to get to share with you. Like on a network, new shows, you guys. They will be rolling out soon.

It takes much longer than we knew and we anticipated in any way, but it's good because it's like, you know, they got to set up all the business, they got to set up all the ads that all gets taken care of. But when it does, we're going to roll out some hits for you guys. I think you're going to be very excited. We're definitely very excited. Yeah. So make sure you subscribe to all the exactly right shows and network and shit and keep an

eye out for new stuff. Yeah. I mean, we'll be screaming it at you, so you don't really need to keep an eye out. We're not going to let it go. No. It's going to be something that we hound you about. Yeah. Just like, it's the Marty with karaoke is how we're going to be about the new shows coming

up on exactly right. I have a book recommendation. Do it. Should I say it for the end? No, really just give it, you're all right now. I just found this book and I'm almost done listening to it. It was one of those books that I like clean the house double time because I wanted to listen to it.

Oh, nice. It's so good. It's called The Mars Room by Rachel Kushner. I just randomly found it at my bookstore, but I've been listening to it. And it's about a girl who gets like a 20 something year old normal girl who gets life sentence for two life sentences for a crime. She committed and it's all these stories around it and I can't fucking stop listening to it.

Is it a novel or is it real? It's a novel. Okay. And it's like this, her story about what happened and then the person who happened to story and then the cop story and then this, it's just like fucking great. Do you have the author's name? It's The Mars Room by Rachel Kushner. Oh, so sorry.

Rachel Kushner. Yeah. The Mars Room. Check it out. Awesome. It's set in San Francisco where she lives. And that's where it all begins. Wow.

It's fucking good. It's set in San Francisco. Yeah. And in prison. Which is like the crazy fucking details you want to know about to get a lot of those. I love it. All the books that I've been reading, I read, you know what I've been doing is I binge the end to like the last four episodes of Succession, then I fell asleep and it played again.

So then I had dreams that I was on vacation with the Succession family. And I think Kendall Roy and I were making out at one point because you were. Because I keep thinking about him and I keep thinking I see that actor in, I keep thinking I see that actor on traffic, which is a very odd feeling. He's got a very LA actor face, like the normal guy actor face. He is resting, he is resting bitch face like he is judging you and hates you, which is very appealing to me. It's great for the role.

Yeah. Hopefully he doesn't have that in everyday life. You know, a while ago I thought I saw him when we were eating at the restaurant down the street. Oh. And I was. And you didn't, with me? Yes.

And you didn't say anything? I think I did say something at the time, but this was literally three, it was the first season. It was like the beginning of the first season. Oh, okay. I was so hurt just now. But no, no, no. It was a while ago.

I'll remind you of it. Okay. I wish you would. I'll remind you. Yeah, that's my version of her eating. No, it's so good. What about the show? Unbelievable.

Are you watching that yet? Not yet. Okay. That's the one with Merritt Weaver, right? Yeah. It's really hard to watch. Because it's the one. It's about rape, right?

Yeah. And it's like, for anyone who has any sexual assault, you know, background, it's really triggering. So I've been going really slowly with it and watching like one, half an episode at a time every couple of days. It's like kind of hard to watch. But I guess that towards the end, it gets like powerful and awesome and amazing. The one clip, a bunch of people tweeted it at me of just like, because they know I love

Merritt Weaver. Yeah. But there was one clip just of her in a restaurant where a guy was staring at her and then she stands up and pulls her jacket back and did you see that? And the gun showing? Yeah. Her gun and badge and then his whole thing changes and then she just goes and stands behind him for like three seconds.

And I love power moves like that so much. I need to get to that spot because like I'm the first episode, it's really fucking rough you guys. I'm sure. So we'll all get through it together slowly. Yeah. And then we'll talk about it. But here it's just incredible.

And it's Toni Collette also, right? Yes. Yeah. She's in it too, right? Yes. I mean, what more do you want? Yeah. Stop it.

Awesome. I'm going to watch that. Okay. But first I have to watch all of Miss Marple for some reason. Do you watch that? Yeah. It's my weird, especially the first season of Miss Marple, it was very like 80s British television or 90s whenever they made it.

You're a Tucci girl. Oh, it's so. Throwing through. Who's that, right? I thought he was in it. Don't you see him in it? That's the other. You're thinking of Poirot with the mustache.

No. I'm not thinking of. I'm not confused. You're thinking of Poirot with the mustache or the guy you're thinking of, I'm not confusing Mrs. Maple and Poirot, Marple. No. That's Mrs. Maisel. You're thinking.

Oh. What are you talking about? He's so cute. Miss Marple. Got it. No, I got it. I'm here now. I'm here now.

Miss Marple is an old show that is the most obscure for the very obscure. Yeah. Okay. It's bold British TV, but I love Stanley Tucci's dinner, right? Yeah. He's very young. A 12 year old Stanley Tucci appeared. Oh, man.

Although, did you see our friend Dave Holmes tweeted an old Levi's ad that Stanley Tucci was in from the 80s? No. Did you see that? No. And it's when he had a little more hair, even though no judgment. Love the bald. Love it all.

He is so nuts hot in this 501's ad. Tucci? The Tooch. Let's see Steven. Steven will bring it up. It's crazy. People retweeted on Twitter and everyone's just like, oh my God. That's really quite something.

Remember the exclamation perfume ad? Yes. Make a statement without saying a word. Exclamation. Well, I can't see his face, but hot damn. Oh, there. That's the bar went away. Let's check that shit out.

I'm sorry. Hello. What, Tucci? Hello. Hi. You'll later see me in a devil where it's Prada. And Mrs. Marple Maisel. And Mrs. Marple Maisel time.

Oh, shit. He's hot. He's hot. Now that we've objectified a man properly, God, that felt good. It does feel good to get it, you know, out there. To give it to him. Yeah. Every time you objectify a man, a woman gets her wings.

The dark things got wings. And there we go. And here we are. We're out of background. I realized I didn't mention your podcast and I'm sorry. Oh, that's okay. I didn't either. Poor Chris Fairbanks.

I know, really. We're doing a... A hated man. We are doing an episode, so we record this Friday. Yeah. We're talking about Do You Need A Ride, of course. Yeah. Do You Need A Ride, the mobile podcast, unlike any other, where Chris and I and Stephen drive

around Los Angeles, usually with us, sometimes with a guest, this Friday, we're waiting for Chris's permission. I was like, Stephen, text Chris really quick and see if he's okay and then we'll announce it. He said yes. Yeah, he said yes. He's good. Oh, good.

It's okay. Then yes. Stephen, feel free to interrupt when you have texts from Chris. So, we're going to do a Q&A and basically just drive around and answer listeners' questions. That's fun. Yeah. I've already seen a couple. A lot of people want to know if they can date Chris or if he would date a listener.

Wow. I think there's going to be a lot of that kind of fun time stuff. Well, now I need a two-man to find out, don't I? See who Chris picks as his wife. Oh, I'm the friends that dated Chris. I can tell you stories. No, I would never use an angel. Looking for a better cooking routine?

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Oh, no, you're first. What am I doing? Yeah. Back off because it's my turn to talk. Okay. I did a thing this week that I am so excited about. Oh my God. Because you know what it is?

It's breaking news. I'm about to give you. No, you're not. I'm going to give you a news report. And all of this, I will preface this by saying, first of all, here are the sources. The Washington Post, The Daily Mail, The New York Post, Elle Magazine Online. All the greats. All the greats that you go to for your news.

Daily. But this story was broken by local Indian news station, a WISH, channel eight. Oh, that good old ISH. WISH. WISH. Wish. Wish. Oh, I got it.

I bet they do something like that in their ads. WISH. Yeah. It's a story that a listener tweeted at me and said, could you do a deep dive on this? The answer is always no. That's virtually impossible, but I will retell you the story based on what other people have said. That's what this podcast is.

We are as shallow as they come. That was Samantha Fong is the person who tweeted and asked for that. Thank you, Samantha. She tweeted at Sam Fong with three G's on Twitter and then she sent me this article, which was from The Daily Mail, which is where most of the quotes and most of the one side of the story is from because one person talked to The Daily Mail and this is fucking nuts. I know the answer is no, but I'll ask you anyway. Did you ever see the horror movie, The Orphan?

No. Which one's that? That's the one where a couple adopts a little girl and then her behavior becomes odd and erratic and slowly but surely they find out that she's actually a grown woman posing as a child. Well, it's happened in real life. Are you ready for the alleged real life story of The Orphan? Yeah.

I'm scared. All alleged. The majority of this, and I'm going to say it the whole time, the majority of this is very one-sided. The actual not child, adult, adoptee, doesn't have a say. So this could be very biased and very skewed and we want to start to say that from the beginning. Okay.

Or she's a baby and can't speak. She's a legend and when this all starts, let me just get into it. You know what? Get into it. That's the story and paint you the picture because I truly, even just as this story broke when WISH broke this story, the first portion of it was plenty because they broke the story on September 11th and it was that a couple had been accused of abandoning their adopted daughter by leaving her in an apartment they'd rented for her in Lafayette while they moved

to Canada. Okay. That's happy. So that was the breaking story. And people are like, what the fuck? Well, since then it's developed into what one can only call a bizarre case of they said, she said, and also almost exactly the plot of the movie, The Orphan. So let's start.

In the early 2000s, Michael and Christine Barnett are living in Westfield, Indiana with their three sons. They run a successful daycare and they're experienced foster parents. Their oldest son, Jake, was diagnosed with autism when he was two years old. And he was told by doctors that he may never talk or have normal social interactions. I think they told that to him, like the two-year-old, you're never going to talk with their waving their finger in his face. Well, so Christine, of course, this might be considered devastating news to some people.

Christine takes Jake home, she starts homeschooling him, tutoring him herself. And very soon, Christine and her husband discover that Jake is incredibly smart. So much so, his genius is so profound that he publishes his first academic paper at the age of 12. What? Yes. So he's a genius. During 2012, 60 Minutes did a story about him and the family.

By age 15, he enrolled in Purdue to study physics. Holy shit. So he is like the doogie-houser of physics, incredibly intelligent. So in this 60 Minutes news segment, you can see that the Barnett family has grown by one member because their newly adopted daughter, Natalia Grace, is sitting there at the kitchen table with everybody when they take the shot of the family eating dinner. Okay. So here's how that went down.

Christine wanted a larger family, but she found out she could no longer have children. Her husband at the time, Michael, looked into adoption. And in May of 2010, they find out that there is a six-year-old Ukrainian-born child in Florida named Natalia Grace, who had been given up by her adoptive parents. Basically they're notified that this is an emergency adoption and that they can come down and basically get all the paperwork done immediately. They can adopt this child because she's in a crisis situation. Christine told the Daily Mail that, quote, at the time, she felt that if she had the

ability to help another person in the world, then she wanted to do it. So they fly down to Florida, they sign the paperwork, they adopt Natalia, and they welcome her into the family. They actually, they stay in Florida for a couple days just to let her acclimate to the fact that she is now with a new family and they take her out and they do kind of family outings and they get ice cream and they go to the beach and they go to Disney World. And the only background information Christine and Michael claimed that they knew at the time of the adoption was that according to her birth certificate, Natalia was born in

Ukraine on September 4, 2003, that she'd been in the US for two years and that she had been suddenly given up by her adoptive parents for undisclosed reasons. Christine tells the Daily Mail that upon adopting Natalia, that they learned that the child has a bone growth disorder called, and I'm going to get this wrong, spondyloepedema fizzial dysplasia. Great job. I mean, who knows? Who knows?

Nobody knows. But essentially it causes, it's a version, it's a subset of dwarfism, causes short stature, skeletal abnormalities, and problems with vision. So basically they find out that she can't walk because of this disorder and they're like fine, so when they go out to all these places and are kind of doing stuff around Florida, they just carry her everywhere. So the day they go to the beach, they get down near the water and they're putting all their stuff down and the boys have gone down as the water and they tell Natalia if she

has to wait a second because the parents are trying to get their stuff together before they bring her down into the water, Natalia jumps up and runs down into the water herself. So that started the burnets and it would be just the first of many surprises. Christine also claims that later she was giving Natalia a bath when, quote, I noticed that she had full pubic hair. I was so shocked. I had just been told she was a six-year-old. It was very apparent that she wasn't and Natalia also had all of her adult teeth.

Christine claims Natalia was not interested in dolls or toys and that she preferred hanging out with teenage girls and had a very mature vocabulary, did not have a Ukrainian accent and in fact that Christine claims she invited a friend over who was from the Ukraine and or just Ukraine, I'm not sure which one is the correct way to say it, but she had her friend come over to speak Ukrainian to Natalia and Natalia didn't understand anything the woman was saying and when the woman was asking her about her homeland, she couldn't describe where she was from in any way. Christine told the Daily Mail, at the time I ran a little school and I remembered Natalia

saying to me, these children are exhausting. I don't know how you do it with a cigarette in one hand and a martini in the other. This child is supposed to be six, so we've all known precocious children. That's always a possibility. I'm going to try to also devil's advocate for Natalia since she is absolutely voiceless in her story and we do not know. We can't tell. Maybe she's really smart, maybe the bone issue that she had is the reason she had adult teeth,

maybe she had to be smart, maybe blah, blah, blah. We don't know. Explain the pubic hair. Thank you. Yeah. Also, Christine found a bloody clothing in Natalia's trash which led her to believe Natalia was trying to conceal the fact that she had her period. All these things are adding up for Christine.

She believed that Natalia was actually a teenager, but she said, I didn't have any regrets. This is what I wanted to do. I felt an overwhelming love for her and I still wanted to take care of her. At the end of 2010, Christine talked to the family physician and asked if there's any way they can determine Natalia's actual age. The doctor orders a bone density test and according to Christine's statement to the Daily Mail, the results of this test determine Natalia to not be six years old, but to be at least 14 years old.

Then Christine and Michael just start treating, dressing and acting like Natalia is a 14-year-old. Sure. She needs a house and a family still. Right. Exactly. She's a teenager. Then they allege that the teenager's behavior became erratic. Christine says that Natalia exhibited odd, sometimes violent behavior.

She claims she witnessed Natalia attack a baby. She saw it on the baby monitor while she was out of the room. Oh my God. She said that Natalia became smearing bodily fluid on walls and making death threats and hearing voices. Thank you. At this point, the Barnets, according to them, seek psychiatric help for Natalia at St. Vincent Indianapolis Stress Center, where Natalia is admitted on several different occasions,

sometimes for weeks at a time. This is obviously another part of the story that the Barnets didn't know and that was not disclosed to them that maybe this child had mental illness of some kind. When she gets out, the behavior continues, it worsens, and the violence continues. Christine claims that she caught Natalia pouring bleach into her coffee, into Christine's coffee. Wow. And she threatened to stab her parents in their sleep.

She, Christine, claimed that they woke up with the child standing over them. And it all came to a head on a birthday outing in 2012, when Natalia allegedly tried to push Christine into an electric fence. Oh my God. Now, growing up on a farm, I've touched electric fences a lot, and it's not a great experience, although I don't know if it can kill you. I think like an electrified fence, maybe, but not just like one for a basic cattle? Yeah, maybe it's just I'm talking about the ones I've experienced.

Obviously, it scared her enough that she thought it was an attempt on her life. Like the ones in prison and the ones in a cow pasture, probably in different levels. Different voltage. That's right. Perhaps. There you go. But this action prompts the Barnets to admit Natalia to a state-run psychiatric unit claiming that she poses a threat to others, which, if all that happened, makes sense.

But while Natalia is in this hospital, she admits to one specialist who saw Natalia in January of 2012 that she's actually 18 years old. Oh, shit. And the Daily Mail claims to have the paperwork that confirms that statement that was provided to them by Christine Barnett, but it hasn't been made public, so it's still hearsay. The most concrete statement that's currently on record comes from the Barnett's primary care physician, Andrew McLaren, who says in a March 2012 letter that Natalia's 2003 birth certificate is clearly inaccurate and that Natalia has, quote, made a career out of pretending

to be a child. Creepy. So in June of 2012, with the backing of several medical specialists, the Barnets successfully get the Marion County Superior Court of Indianapolis to get Natalia's birth certificate revised. So based on the medical evidence, they determined Natalia was actually born in September of 1989. Holy shit. And that changes her age from 8 to 22.

Oh, my God. So according to the Daily Mail, medical staff at Indianapolis' LaRueque Carter Hospital claim that Natalia, quote, described to them, so this was when she was in one of the psychiatric stays that she had. She described to them how she tried to kill family members and had no remorse about it. And she allegedly told them that it was, quote, fun. So on August of 2012, Natalia is discharged from the psychiatric hospital. And because she's now legally an adult, she is housed in an apartment under the care of

Indiana State health care provider, Aspire, Indiana. So that must be some like a halfway house for people who have mental illness and might need a little extra help, right, sounds like. I would imagine that's my editorializing. According to Christine, the barnets also help Natalia get a social security number, apply for benefits, including food stamps, and get an ID. But Natalia allegedly causes so many problems at this new apartment that she gets evicted. The Barnets claim that they stepped in once again, renting Natalia another apartment in

Lafayette and working out a plan to help Natalia earn her high school diploma and study so she can study cosmetology. So they're still helping her and everything. Yes. Wow, these are, okay. According to them, they're with her all the way. Christine tells the Daily Mail that she co-signed the lease and paid rent upfront for a year. She says, I did everything you would do when you send a child off to college.

I helped her with groceries. I bought furniture at Target for her. I was optimistic. She had a concrete plan for her life. She was on food stamps. She had a social security income for the rest of her things. She had demonstrated she was able to live. So in 2013, despite this kind of chaotic situation with Natalia, Christine Barnet finishes writing

a parenting book about her experience with Jake called The Spark, A Mother's Story of Nurturing Genius and Autism, which actually went on to be critically acclaimed, which is also kind of amazing that she got that done basically simultaneously. But it doesn't mean that she's telling the truth. Okay. Okay. Confident that Natalia can now fend for herself the Barnet's move to Canada so that Jake can attend the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics in Waterloo, Ontario.

So they move up there and leave Natalia in her Lafayette apartment. So at this point, according to Christine, Natalia cuts off communication with the Barnet's. Christine tells the Daily Mail, she suspects Natalia may have gone off her medication, was possibly working on conning another family, according to Christine, into thinking that she's a child so she can get adopted and taken care of again. Christine states, quote, she discontinued communication with me. What I did get was a letter in the mail stating that she had changed Michael from the beneficiary on her social security income to someone else, which means Michael's not the parent anymore

and someone else is stepping in. Other than that, according to Christine, I'll say it again, no other communication has been made with Natalia. So in 2014, Michael and Christine Barnet get divorced, Michael remarries and moves back to Indiana. Neither he nor Christine claim to have any further communications with Natalia. And then on September 11th of 2019, this year, Daily Mail TV gets ahold of an affidavit of probable cause stating that an expert-led bone density test conducted on Natalia by

Dr. Riggs of the Peyton Manning Children's Hospital in June of 2010 determined Natalia to actually have been eight years old at the time of the test. What? Okay. So that test comes in and that, so basically the Daily Mail gets the test proven she was a child. So if that is true, that would mean Natalia actually was a legal child when the Barnets moved to Canada in 2013, making the move an illegal abandonment of their adopted child.

So as a result, the Tippecanoe County Sheriff's Department issues a warrant for the arrests of Christine and Michael Barnet. So this same affidavit states that Natalia told police in 2014 she had been quote, left alone when the Barnets moved to Canada in 2013. So the police do not move to question Michael Barnet about the potential abandonment until September 5th, 2019, a full five years after Natalia allegedly spoke with authorities. Okay. Why?

We don't know. Okay. And also this affidavit claims that Michael made a statement on that same day, September 5th, saying that he knew all along Natalia was actually underage when they moved to Canada and states that Michael told police Christine coached Natalia to convince others that she was older than she actually was. No. So Michael's lawyer, however, says that Michael never made this statement.

So this is the, this couldn't be more confusing. It couldn't be more. That's the answer. Back and forth. Okay. Tell me more. The lawyer tells the Daily Mail quote, the police affidavit is not true. Michael never said he knew Natalia was a child.

Police knocked on Michael's door and he spoke to them for three hours without an attorney present. The statements he gave were clearly taken out of context. My client and I have absolutely no idea why the district attorney has chosen to level these accusations against my client and Christine. The affidavit has been very selective in the medical reports that it has chosen to cite. So it sounds like it's only citing the one. And there's two other ones that say she's older.

Minimum. Yeah. That's just what these newspapers have gotten a hold of. So sometime during the week of September 10th, an arrest warrant is issued for the Barnets and they're being charged with felony neglect. So on September 18th, Michael Barnet surrenders himself to authorities and Christine follows suit the next day. Michael is released shortly thereafter on $5,000 bail and Christine is released on $5,500

bail. The case is ongoing, but Christine adamantly proclaims her innocence publicly and to media outlets like obviously the Daily Mail and so does Michael via his attorney. And at the time of this recording, no one knows where Natalia is. Attempts to track her down have been unsuccessful. Holy shit. And that is this fucking breaking news story that is happening right now. Oh my God.

And it's a total, it's basically this really over the top hard to believe choice number one, which is a 22 year old is posing as a six year old to get people to adopt her and take care of her because she is mentally ill in some way. Or a family adopted a six year old and then couldn't deal and rented her an apartment when she was like maybe somehow proof she was weird. The numbers are weird. The numbers are like eight or 14 or is she older than that? So if she was eight, like when she was eight, they were like, I, we suspect she's older

than eight. So can you do a test? And they're like, she's definitely older than 14. So she's, so according to that one medical report, she's never in this whole case, according to that one doctor, been younger than 14. She's always at least been a teenager, but it would make it not illegal that they left her behind. But if it wasn't the case, right, because that was a couple years later, but she may

have still been, she may not have been 18, but it's all very vague. Yeah. So it's just like we don't know. And the other, the, to me, the very interesting thing is, does the divorce come into place somehow? Oh yeah. Is someone, because up until that point, Christine Burnett was the, how she was known basically in the public eye was this unbelievable mother who had, who had basically tutored

and homeschooled her son and exposed his genius and basically wrote a book about how if your child is diagnosed with autism, that's not necessarily a bad thing, which inspired tons of people and meant the world to tons of people. And that same person is this person who's like being charged with felony neglect and would just leave a needy child on her own. Well, we don't know. We know the very basics of someone. We know the basics, and we just know like this is still like a breaking story.

Oh my God. But how crazy. It's crazy and creepy, and I want to know the answer. I need to know. Yeah. So much more. Let's keep it going. You guys, we'll text all of you the article that breaks when we find out.

We're all going to be breaking this together as a family. By speculation. By speculation. Let's, I mean, yeah, it's, it's fascinating. Yeah, that's great. Go on. Crazy. Yeah.

I'm, I'm current. That's like that. We don't do that ever. Oh, and sorry. This is, and I just remembered this because this just happened today. Yeah. Our friend Malachi, Dr. Malachi Love Robinson got out of jail today. That's right.

He got. A couple episodes back. Yes. So that people kept tagging us. He's, he's out and onto a better life. Well, I hope, I hope he does good things. I hope he does good things. I hope Natalia's safe.

Me too. Okay. And it isn't the extremely creepy A or B or either way, it's sucks either way. It's awful. Yeah. This week, I'm going to do the triangle short waist factory fire. I know girl. I know.

Oh. Amazing. Have we never done this before? It's too horrible to do it a live show. You know what? That's what it is. The first time we did a New York show, I thought of it and I was just like, yeah, it's not. That's a tough one.

And there are, yeah. But it's so, what a great timely. It's an incredible story. I, of course, learned so much more about it than I had ever even known and the details are fascinating. There's a hundred fucking million places you can find out more about this. I found out from historydoctor.net, history.com. A podcast called This Day in History Class, the National Museum of American History website.

And then there's two really good documentaries about it. One is, I think, where I first found out about it, the American Experience episode, which is a fucking incredible show on PBS. You guys watch them all. And then there's another one you can find on YouTube called Triangle, Remembering the Fire. Oh yeah. And it's really good and there's like a ton of footage and photos and awful fucking shit

you can see from this, like more than I ever knew. So here we are. It's the early 1900s. What's up? There we go. Was it the turn of the century? It's the turn of the century. Oh, it's the turn of the century.

Ah. Okay. In the background. The Triangle Shirt Waste Factory is located on the top three floors of a building called the Ash Building, A-S-C-H. It's one of the city's newest skyscrapers. It's ten fucking floors. Like that's the time of the year.

People would walk up to it and just scream because it was so high. What? That's right. So it's like it's pretty new building and modern. It's not like one of those shitty tenements that people had to work. It's on the corner of Green Street and Washington Place in New York City. So it's Greenwich Village and it's like a block away from Washington Square Park, which is the beautiful park.

The Triangle Shirt Waste Factory employed mostly women and those women were young immigrants, mostly Italian and Jewish. Nearly all the workers were basically teenage girls who didn't speak any English, who worked 12 hours a day, six days a week, it was cramped lines of sewing machines. You know all those black and white photos you see of like women at their sewing machines with their fucking head down and sewing and shit. And it's just like hundreds to a room. It's that.

The work was repetitive and monotonous and the conditions remained so that the most output could be done for the least amount of money. Of course. And if you're wondering what a shirt waste is, what a weird word. Okay. It's basically a woman's blouse. The style is a feminine version of a men's button down shirt. It's like Seinfeld's puffy shirt, you know.

Yep. And it's a little tiny waist and then the white billowing shirt that came out of it in the Victorian era. Kind of like with the Coca-Cola lady from the old Coca-Cola ads. Exactly. A Gibson girl shirt. A Gibson girl shirt, exactly. It's a staple of the ladies wardrobe at the time and the style also symbolizes female

independence. And that's because they didn't have to wear dresses anymore anymore. Like wearing a shirt and a skirt was like a big fucking deal. Oh, yeah. Okay. That makes sense. Right? It's like, oh, we're like, we're workers.

We get a wear instead of pants, a skirt. Yeah. It's not the same. So it symbolizes female independence and the new woman combining new and old fashions. It becomes hugely popular. There's like 500 factories that make them in New York City at this time and symbolizes the working woman wearing fashionable short waist becomes an iconic image of the women's rights movement.

Oh, yeah. So all those picketers and shit. Yeah. So because of their popularity and the demand is so high, it also, it totally changes the nature of work itself, the short waist too, because of their popularity. It's kind of like how Ford did with his cars in the, what's it called, line? Assembly. Assembly line.

It's similar to that. So the production of short waist is a super competitive industry. So many garments are produced in what's called the sweating system, aka the definition is a system of employing labor for long hours at low wages and often unsafe or unsanitary conditions, aka sweatshops. So in the triangle, it was supposed to be a nicer place to work than the actual sweatshops, because it was such a huge company, but it was still kind of, you know, strict and not a fun place to work.

They were still exploiting their workers. Exactly. So the way it worked was that, so the business owner, so whoever owned the triangle short waist factory, which we'll get into, they, like those owners would then get subcontractors to hire people and those subcontractors only got a certain amount of money from the business owners. So they only had a certain amount of money to pay the women and they just cut corners and tried to get a profit as much as they could.

So it was just really shitty and they can pay whatever they want. So they get low wages to make the most profit. And then to be competitive in the industry, owners cut prices on everything and it leads to low wages for the workers. There's no fucking standard minimum wage that doesn't happen until 1938. Is that crazy? Wow. So, and this is a time, of course, when like, you know, the government doesn't feel like

it should meddle in what's going on with business owners because they were these bourgeois fucking titans of industry and they were like, they clearly know what they're doing. Let's not police them. Let's them do whatever they fucking want, kind of like now. But yeah, it's the seeds of now. Exactly. It's the reason now is so problematic because they started it and it was like, they have the everyone's best interest in mind and it's like, let them do their thing.

They actually don't. A lot of them are sociopaths. Exactly. So, they were, yeah, they were like, they're making the country successful, let them do whatever the fuck they want, which is not how you can't, people aren't going to police themselves, unfortunately. No, especially when it comes to money and desperation. Because it's like, well, if this is a cut I get, then yeah, I need it more and more

and more. And you can, I think that's where a lot of that kind of like, you can rationalize your othering of people where it's like, oh, it's just these immigrant women. So, who cares what happens to them? Right. Yeah. Greed. Corporate greed.

Yeah. So, American industrialization begins in the 1920s, primarily in the textile industry. And by the 1850s, over a thousand factories are operating, manufacturing. It was like a machine and the immigrants and poor people were making the machine go, but you know, they were fucking screwed. The working conditions were often dangerous and unsanitary. There was crazy supervision and safety was not a matter of concern, of course. And so, workers often suffered serious and even fatal accidents because the main goal

was just to churn out as much product in the shortest amount of time and you're working with these fucking machines, you know, and doing the same thing over and over and working long hours so you're tired, it's just, you know, bad fucking thing. And there's no like, I'm old enough that there used to be a PSA that they ran on television about how you have to wear safety goggles. I swear to God. And it was the weird, I just remember watching it and just being like, who is this for? This is so weird.

Yeah. But it's like that thing where like OSHA standards of safety and like you can't put people at risk. Right. It's a very important thing because of this stuff. And then when they do get hurt, there's no workers' compensation, there's no such thing you get fired on your fucks. Yeah.

It's just really, it was really ugly. There's also child labor in the United States. It didn't go away until well into the 20th century as well. It's like... It's crazy. It's just crazy. But at this point in time, there's a growing movement that coincided with all of this called industrial feminism and that's a combination of unionism and working class activism.

So there's of course the more well to do women who are doing activism and who are fighting for suffrage rights. But then there were these women who were these immigrants and they were the working class and they were trying to unionize as well and get rights, which is really amazing. Yeah. Very cool. Yeah. These women fought to unionize and for union standards such as shorter hours, higher wages,

safer working conditions, but they also wanted to be able to enrich their lives with access to education and culture. So they're like, we're working in 16 hours a day. We have no life. We want to enrich our lives and the way to do that is education and any of that. So Pauline Newman, she's a founder of the International Ladies Garment Workers Union and a former child laborer herself wrote a series of essays that were published in the New York, Yiddish language newspapers and they described the factories like this, quote, most of the so-called factories

were located in old wooden walk-ups with rickety stairs splintered in sagging floors. The few windows were never washed and their broken panes were mended with cardboard. In the winter, a stove stood in the middle of the floor. There was no drinking water available, dirt, smells and vermin were such a part of the surroundings as were the machines and workers. So if you can imagine that triangles like a step up from that doesn't mean very much. They're like, hey, we got water. Right.

Yeah. So many strikes at a time led by the International Ladies Garment Workers Union in 1909. There's one demanding higher pay and shorter, more predictable hours and it becomes known as the uprising of 20,000. Wow. Yeah. 20,000 people walked out and it starts at the Triangle Factory. Whoa.

So like they were big organizers there. The participants are mainly young immigrant girls who didn't even speak English yet, a lot of them and they absolutely didn't have the right to vote yet, but yet they still fucking did this. Yes. They're about 500 short waste factories at the time and many of the smaller ones immediately folded to the demands of their workers because they needed to keep up with them. Hell yeah.

The workers have the power. That's right. Rise up. They're like, come back. Rise up. But the owners of the Triangle Short Waste Factory, Max Blank and Isaac Harris, who were known as the short waste kings, because this is one of the top fucking short waste factories in New York, made millions off the new short waste trend.

They had already made millions and they had been immigrants themselves and they are one of the few manufacturers who resisted unionization. They were like staunchly against it, of course, because they're business owners and it's going to get fucked with their bottom line because you have to force people to do it. That's right. Unfortunately. So instead they paid local thugs to attack the women and they paid off police to imprison the striking women.

They paid off politicians to look the other way. They just fucking went all out on these women and there's photos of them fighting the police in the street and it's insane. Jesus Christ. One of the founders of the union, Claire Lemlic, she's arrested and has six of her ribs broken by company guards and city police and yet she keeps on marching in the picket line. Hell yeah. It's like this is just the story of incredible women.

Well, and also because this is their lives. When you're the short waste king, you're just sitting there eating your salmon pate and going, no, they don't get to have that. It's like, it can't be this way. And his family had butlers and the governess so they paid. As the strike goes on for months, though, the women, mostly female workers of the triangle short waste factory, they don't give up their fight and they start to impress the people of the city.

They're like, well, these fucking ladies have tenacity. This is pretty badass. Their conditions must be really bad if they're going to fight this hard. And so the ladies of the triangle leave the largest single work stoppage in the city's history. Yes. Yeah. So one of the things they're fighting for is safe working environment and the danger

of fire in factories like the triangle short waste is well known at the time but there's so many high levels of corruption in both the garment industry and city government that no useful precautions are taken to prevent fires. I think there were buckets of water on the ground and that was it to throw out fire that's started. Thanks. Thanks guys. Thanks for the buckets of water.

Thank you. Blank and Harris. There's mice swimming in it. So. Blank and Harris already have suspicious fire history background. The triangle factory had two fires and back in 1902 and their diamond waste company factory had had fires as well. And it seems like they deliberately torched their factories before business hours in order

to collect the fire insurance, which was a lot of fucking money at the time, which wasn't also a not uncommon practice back then in the early 20th century. And perhaps for this reason, Blank and Harris refused to install sprinkler systems in their factories because they were like. Because they wouldn't be able to get their insurance money. Yeah. If they start to start a fire and burn it down, yeah, it's not going to work. So they were there were sprinkler systems at the time and they refused to take other

safety measures in case in case they need to burn their shops down again. So on top of that, Blank and Harris, yeah, real, insightful. So the time the women are working like, you know, nine hours a day on weekdays plus seven hours on Saturdays and then one day off for their 52 hours of work a week, they earned a total of something between $7 and $12 a week, which is the equivalent of $191 to $327 a week in current currency. Jesus. That's so like, can you imagine today we're making $191 a week?

I mean. It's hand to mouth. There's nothing you can do. Yeah. And you're expending all of your like life energy just to get the basic survival to not like to keep your head above water. Yeah. That's like second job territory.

So then you're fucking exhausted. Right. Yeah. A lot of people do it. I know. To this day. I know. Yeah.

So finally, with the lucrative holiday season coming up, the deal is made in which the women's demands like safer working environment are mostly ignored. They get a few concessions like a little bit of higher pay, but that's it. They just have to go back to work. So on the afternoon of March 25th, 1911, almost closing time on a Saturday, there's about 500 workers at the triangle factory. It's the top three floors. So it's eight, nine and 10.

And then a fire starts on the eighth floor at around 440 p.m. So it's the fires thought to have started in a rag bin likely caused by someone either extinguishing a match or cigarette just kind of tossing it in a fucking clothing factory. Like even the air has particles of cloth. Yeah, really? You know? So it's probably cigarettes. Smoking wasn't allowed there at the time, but they had ways of sneaking them.

But it's possible that one of the engines on the sewing machine sparks and caught it on fire as well. So it's, you know, you can't really pinpoint it. The building has an internal switchboard. So the operator calls up to the 10th floor and is like, yo, there's a fucking fire here. Get out. And the 10th floor employees, including one of the owners, Max Blank, who was there and two of his daughters who were aged four and 12, they had happened to stop by to see him

with their governess. And they were on the 10th floor. So they all run up to the roof. It's about 60 to 80 people who go to the roof. So for some reason, though, no one warns the nearly 300 triangle girls, which is what they were called, at the sewing machines on the ninth floor. So they call it to the 10th. I think the eighth must know no one tells the girls on the ninth floor.

Trying to survive a yet a love it's the first warning of the fire. The ninth floor is the fire itself. And there's some, I mean, I know I hate reenactments, but the American experience episode and the triangle running the fire have some like, it's, it's really intense. Yeah. So the pretty quickly, the fire spreads. The building has four elevators with access to the factory floors, but only one that's fully operational.

Yeah. And in fucking crazy, like a heroic feat, the workers of the two, two elevator workers went up and down as many times as possible, trying to save as many women as they could. So there was like room for 12 at a time on the elevator, but they like crammed in as many as possible, went back up and down three times. And finally the cables weren't working anymore and they couldn't go back up. They saved so many lives that day. There's two stairways down to the street.

And one is where they enter and exit every day. But the, the other one is locked one of the exits because one of the owners was paranoid about workers theft. So they'd look in their pocketbooks every day when they were on their way out, which you can like get a scrap of fucking cloth, fold my shirt up real small, tiny, when you, if you worked there, you would fucking hate shirt waste shirt. Oh yeah. You'd never want to wear them.

You'd be like, take that off. You'd blow your nose at the end of the day and it'd be like tiny shirt wastes horrifying. So one of those is locked, the other one opens like in word, which is not good. The fire escape is so narrow that it would have taken hours for all the workers to use it even in the best circumstances. So workers inside of course fucking panic. They're pushing, they run to the exits all at once. A manager tries to use the fire hose to extinguish the flames, but it, the hose is rotted and

it's valve is rested shut. So even the precautions didn't fucking work. And that's like 300 women fucking losing their shit. One of the women is talking about leaping from sewing machine table to sewing machine table like that time and have big skirts and shit just trying to get away from the fire. Oh my God. It's terrifying. Oh, because it's coming up underneath.

Yeah. Oh God. So meanwhile, back on the roof, the 10th floor, 60 to 80 people on the roof. So the adjacent building is part of New York University. So there's like the law professor and his students hear the screams, they see the fire. And they, the building's a little higher than the ash building. So the students grab ladders and lower them down and everyone on the roof manages to survive. No way.

Yeah. That gave me weird chills. Because you're not supposed to go to the roof in a fire and like normally that wouldn't be the way out. No. Cause they all survived. Cause, and well, and also I just thought about whatever the distance was, however, however close or far those two buildings were, you're climbing across a ladder, 10 stories up.

That must have been. Please hold onto this. Please hold this. Okay. Yeah. But the people on the ninth floor, of course, are not so lucky. The shop floor is completely packed with selling machines. There are about 300 machines on the floor.

For those who can't make it to the roof or to the elevators, they flee down the stairwells, but they run into locked doors and end up swallowed by flames. So it's just women fighting at a locked door, which is just a fucking horrifying imagine to imagine. But by the time the firefighters arrive, women are standing on the window ledges or are seen pressing against the windows on the ninth floor. The firefighters get out their ladders and reel them up and they only go as high as the sixth or seventh floor.

No. I know. It's just like one thing after another of like ways they could have been saved and weren't. So okay, in this point, it's a Saturday afternoon. It's a beautiful day. It's right by Washington Square Park. It's in the shopping district. People are shopping, people are out picnicking and they see the smoke and thousands of people

are now watching this happen. Oh, no. Yeah. It's like, I think maybe one of the reasons that people probably all knew someone who saw it and could testify to what a fucking horrible nightmare it was to watch. And then people start to jump from the windows. William Gunn Shepard, a reporter at the scene, wrote, I learned a new sound that day, a sound more horrible than description can picture the thought of a speeding living body on a

stone sidewalk. Oh, God. I mean, and in one of the documentaries, they're like, people thought they were throwing like their belongings out and cloth bundles out and then they realized it was people. Oh. And this is a time that everything is so proper, you know, I'm sure people hadn't seen anything like this before. No.

Even imagined something like this before. No. So a man and woman are seen kissing in the window before they both jump to their deaths. And clutch each other as they jump together. Some of them are even holding their pocketbooks when they jump, which just for some reason to me just like gives me chills. I know. Well, what?

Yeah. Grab your pocketbook. It's just it. Well, it's a piece of yourself. Yeah. It's all your stuff. It has your idea in it. Yeah.

But also it's just like that you would be in such a panic. Yeah. It's horrible. It's horrible. Um, bodies of jumpers fall on the fire hoses, making it difficult to fight the fire and a life net is unfurl to catch jumpers, but three girls jump at the same time ripping it. Oh, nothing is fucking working and everyone is helpless.

Yeah. And it's it's horrifying to the crowd. Okay. So it's a single fire escape. They were supposed to put in a third stairwell, but they like bribe city officials to just have a fire escape instead of the ash building. So it was flimsy. It was poorly anchored and it might have been broken before the fire.

And it twists and collapses from the heat and spills about 20 victims, nearly 100 feet to their death. I know. I'm sorry. I mean, um, and the remainder just wait until smoke and fire overcome them. It's a horrifying fucking thing. Within 18 minutes, it's all over. Whoa.

Yeah. The fire is out. Well, because it was like a tinder box. It just went up. Yeah. Yeah. 49 workers are burned to death or died by smoke suffocation. 36 are dead in the elevator shaft because they were jumping onto the cables trying to ride

the elevator. No. 58 die from jumping to the sidewalks. This brings a total of dead. 58. I know. This and there's fucking photos of it in these documentaries. This brings a total of dead to 146 23 men and 123 are women.

Most of the victims are women and girls age 14 to 23. The victims of the victims whose ages are known. So the New York Times reports that the city coroner when he got there was so overwhelmed that he sobbed among the bodies being laid out at the scene and hardened firefighters and cops needed to step away. Yeah, they did. I know. Many of the bodies are, this is so fucked up.

Many of the bodies are charred beyond recognition. So they do a lineup of bodies that need to be identified at the pier near the East River so people can come identify their loved ones. And so thousands of people line up to walk through this fucking horrible thing and find their loved ones. Okay. You ready to start crying? Yeah.

I already am crying. One mother is only able to identify her daughter because of the stitching on her stocking. And another woman recognizes her mother only by the braid in her hair that she had braided that morning. Ugh. I know. Jesus. I know.

It's like life fucking matters. Yeah. You asshole. Yeah. You have pockets and make sure that people have a livable fucking life. Yeah. And can feed their families and don't have to put their fucking eight-year-old children to work so that, I mean.

So that you can have fucking six yachts. Yeah. What is wrong with you? Yeah. Don't need six fucking yachts. You don't need a horse ranch. No. You don't need several vacation homes.

You need better fucking karma, dude. Yeah. You need to, you need to. Oh. God damn it. Yep. Sorry. So fifth, 1911, 400,000 mourners lined the sidewalks of New York.

They did a, I know, the unions got together and did a funeral procession. So they were really pissed off because the city wanted to do a whole funeral and bury the seven unidentified women. But the unions were like, fuck you. You're the reason this fucking happened. Yeah. Yes, they did this, they had one funeral procession with an empty horse-drawn hearse go by and 400,000 mourners came out to watch it go by.

The realization that the very thing, the triangle women, that they had just been watching them bravely strike for and didn't get, the safety, safe working conditions is what led to their death of so many doesn't go unnoticed and people are up in fucking arms about this whole experience. Yeah. And it turns this, you know, flips a switch in a lot of people's consciousness in the country. Well, yeah, because it turns it from a concept that's happening to them to, oh, this is what

this is really about. It's worst fucking case scenario and they forced it to happen. And it's the people who were saying, this is not okay. This is going to happen. This is going to happen. And they weren't respected enough to be listened to. Right. And it happened.

Yeah. You know? Immediately after the fire, triangle owners, Blank and Harris, declare in interviews that their building was fireproof and that it had just been approved by the Department of Building. Guys. You guys. Yet the call for bringing, the call for bringing people, those responsible to justice and it reports that the doors, they reported the doors of the factory were locked.

Yet the call, everyone was like, you got to bring these fucking people to justice. There were like, you know, all these newspaper articles about it. Yes. And there were, then reports that the door was locked from the inside means that the district attorney's office seeks an indictment against the owners. Good. Thankfully. Get ready to be disappointed.

Of course. On December 27th, 23 days after the trial starts, a jury acquits Blank and Harris of any wrongdoing. The task of the jurors is just to determine whether the owners knew that the doors were locked at the time of the fire. But despite extensive testimony from the workers sitting at the owners had locked the door to prevent theft, the attorneys of the business owners who were, of course, high fucking powered, high priced attorneys were able to convince the jury that they didn't know, grieving families and much of the public were fucking pissed and felt like justice hadn't been done.

Like these two guys were villainized, like they, you know, rightfully so. They were villains. Yeah, because they were villains. Because that's the other thing that people always forget is that that's the other side of it. Right. If you don't give people their, the basic human working conditions, it makes you the bad guy.

Yeah. You are the bad guy. Yeah. 23 individual civil suits are brought against the owners of the ash building on March 11th, 1914. So, so three years after the fire, they, Harris and Blank settle and they pay $70 per life lost, $75, which is around $2,000 today. So each family who lost someone and of course many lost siblings and mothers and one guy

buried his, his wife and three daughters. Oh, shit. They each get about $2,000 in today's money and that's just a fraction of the 400 per death that Blank and Harris were paid by their insurer. So they made money off of this fucking fire. No. They made a lot of money. They paid 75 bucks and they got $400 per person.

Burn in hell. That's right. Um, Harris and Blank continue their defiant attitude toward the authorities. Just a few days after the fire, um, the new premises of their factory is found not to be fireproof, no fire escapes and no adequate exits. So they're just like doing it around town. In August of 1913, Max Blank is charged with locking one of the doors in his factory during working hours and brought to court.

He's fined $20. It's about 550 today and the judge apologizes to him for the imposition. You pussy. They were just in the businessman's pockets. 100%. You know? Yes. Crooked, crooked, crooked.

Crooked. After the triangle fire, the Americans, there are some good that comes out of this, of course. Okay, good. I know. Because there's a lot of ass. There's a lot of ass. It's fucking horrible. After the triangle fire, the American Society of Safety Professionals was founded in New

York City on October 14th, 1911. The fire helped unite organized labor and reform minded politicians and the workers union set up a march on April 5th, um, on Fifth Avenue to protest the conditions that had led to the fire. It was attended by 80,000 people. Fuck yeah. Right. There's enough public support for the new workman's compensation that's been previously

struck down and it's amended and enacted in 1913. So this leads to a fucking shit ton of reforms and even, you know, the whispers of which we can still feel today in our ear. In addition, the state of New York creates a factory investigating commission to study safety, sanitation, wages, hours, and child labor in like sweatshops. Frances Perkins, who of course becomes the first female secretary of labor under FDR and it actually happened to be present that day in that she was at the park and like saw what happened.

Oh no. Yeah. She and Pauline Newman are hired as investigators on the committee and over the years following the fire, New York adopts 36 of the commission's recommendations into law and the Sullivan Huey fire prevention law passed that October and is known as being crucial in preventing similar fires in the future. 100 years later, six victims still had remained unidentified until a historian named Michael Hirsch researches their identities for four years using old newspaper articles just like

cross-checking and shit and is able to identify each of them by name. Wow. And those women now are buried in a large marble slab featuring a kneeling woman, not in it, you know. Right. Right. Every year on May day, there's a commemoration at the Ash building in New York, which is now called the Brown building.

It's owned by NYU. And remember the Triangle Fire Coalition organizes events to commemorate the fire and bring awareness to the needs of workers today. In 2011, in honor of the fire's 100th anniversary, the coalition establishes the goal of the permanent memorial to honor the memory of those who died from the fire, to affirm the dignity of all workers, to value women's work, to remember the movement for worker safety and social justice stirred by tragedy and to inspire future generations of activists. And that is the Triangle Shirt Waste Factory fire of 1911.

Unbelievable. That was great. Thank you. That was very moving. Thank you. I'm so mad. I'm mad too. Let's be activists.

Want to? I mean, but here's what's beautiful about it. Because I think that people can be passive if it's like, that's not my job. My job's hard enough. I can't worry about those striking women who are, but when tragedy strikes like that, when things like that happen to your fellow man, it wipes away all that kind of like not my problem and those aren't my people. And suddenly it's like, it could be anybody and it could be me.

And it was the, it's so hard to see, and I don't know if they publish any in the newspapers across the country, but there were, you know, there were faces of people lying on the ground and, you know, and they said like in every neighborhood in New York, someone had to attend multiple, people had to attend multiple funerals, like it just hit everyone hard. And the fact that they had just been fucking in the streets, you know, protesting the treatment that they were getting and they didn't get what they asked for, which was safety. And that's, that would kill them. It's so tragic.

Right. And in some ways, you could kind of connect it where it's just like they were killed by their bosses because of it's not, not directly, but indirectly, and it might as well be directly because they couldn't even, it wasn't, it was so bad that like they were trapped. It was a true fire trap. What about that motherfucker that just got off the roof? Yeah. Like he was there and he knew exactly what happened.

He witnessed it. He was in the midst of it. And in his mind, he's like, well, my daughters are here and I need to save them. And all these women here are people's daughters too. Yeah. And you're just letting it go out. Yeah. Yeah.

It's pretty horrifying. But good things came out of it. Yes. I guess. Well, they do. Because here's the thing. It's, that's the importance of unions. You know, it's like you need unions to protect workers because you can't rely on people who,

who make money off of those workers. Right. They'll always pick themselves. Yeah. They'll always pick their own lives. They'll always pick their own comfort over some stranger that's making them money. That's right. They are superior to because they're in the position of making more money just based solely

on that. Yeah. No. Wow. Cool. Great job. Thank you. That was really cool.

Thank you. I'm glad. I'm glad. I remember like starting to read about that story and immediately being like, I don't think I'll do this one. I know. I don't know why. I just suddenly had this morning.

The morning I woke up and I was like, not this morning obviously, and I was like, I want to do this triangle. And then I was like, what am I fucking doing? Yeah. No, I'm glad you did. It's really important for people to know. It's also that kind of thing when you're like, this was industrialized feminism where I'm like, wait, what?

There's so much I don't know about any of that stuff. Yeah. It's pretty crazy. Like in the short waste itself, being a symbol of feminism in a way. Yeah. Amazing. Yeah. Great job.

Thank you. You too. What is your fucking hooray? Or do you want me to go first? I mean, look at my piece of paper. Oh, just the word hooray. Oh, yeah. That's all he wrote.

Mine's really dumb and simple. Okay. There's a big giant spider outside my window and I love, and I'm proud of her. And I love watching her build her web and she's one of the humongous things I've ever fucking seen. How big? Show me with your hand. She's fat and that's, she's like that.

Oh my God. Like a silver dollar? I don't know. Is that legs included? Legs? With legs like that. Jesus Christ. She's enormous.

And I, and I, can I tell you something girls, don't tell anyone. I found two little centipedes in my house so far that Dottie's been fucking playing. Oh no. So I'm like, spider, can you come back and come in and get these centipedes out of here, please? I love it. Yeah. You know, it's bugs.

Yeah, bugs are key and spiders are very important growing up my aunt Jean. I remember freaking out because I saw a spider and she was like, oh no, no, that's our friend. Yeah. She'll keep all the flies out. She'll keep all the fungus, always every fucking spider that she's ever seen. It's Charlotte. Don't hurt it. She says every fucking is Charlotte's web, every spider.

My old roommate used to live up in Auburn and we were up there visiting her family and they lived, their house was out in the middle of the woods. Yeah. And we're standing on the porch and we're all standing there and then we all turn around and look near the front door and there is a full on tarantula climbing up the front of there. And then suddenly I was like, couldn't breathe. No.

And her mom turns around and goes, what wonderful luck. Oh, what a nice one. She was a total nature lady. That's terrifying. Everyone in Australia is rolling their eyes at us right now. I know. I have in my bed right now. They're like, our spiders kill you with a knife.

Right. They look at you. Yeah. And then they stab you. They go like this with one leg across their throat. They threaten you emotionally and then they stab you. And they make fun of your hair. And they flip on a switch blade.

They comb their own hair and then they stab you. That's right. Well, then I guess mine, I can just be as simple as to say, I got a massage. Oh, yeah. Because it's been a long time and it was a gift certificate from last Christmas that Danielle gave us. That's right. And I found it and was like, oh, I haven't done anything like this in a long time.

I'm obsessed with this place. The Now. The Now in LA. It's the best. It's really good. And at first when I walked in, there were a lot of crystals. Yeah. There's a lot of crystals and bath shit.

There was a lot of, it was very, as I call it, woo-woo. Uh-huh. And everyone was being real quiet, which makes me uncomfortable. I'm a volume person. But I was like, shut up. You don't know. Right. And give it over.

And I got the best massage therapist. Sorry. The best massage therapist. And it was the best massage I was so relaxed that when I left, I went out and bought a deck of moon cards. No, you didn't. Yes, I did. What the fuck are moon cards?

Moon cards are like women's tarot cards. It was. Will you read me my moon card? I need those. Yes, I will do. Next time I'll do a moon card reading for you. I would love that. Yeah.

Let's make a video of it. Okay. Yeah, we'll do that online. Fan cult. It's really, I really like it. But anyway. That's great. It was just a good feeling.

I remember my therapist tells me this all the time that, what does she call it? Skin starvation. If you don't get touched enough, if you're on your own a lot, make sure you get massages or something because it's very important for human beings to have their skin touch. That's beautiful. It like releases certain chemicals, dopamine thing, it's all that, whatever, whatever. But it's really important for you and it's easy to forget because if you're, if it just doesn't happen, it doesn't happen.

And then when it does, you're like, oh my God, yes, I need to be back in this mode. That's a great point. Yeah. It's self care. Do it for you. It's self care. There was a, the reductorist had a tweet this week and it was, lady just keeps calling things self care and sees what sticks, calls everything she does self care.

I love it. Follow reductorist. They're hilarious. Thanks for listening guys. Yes. Thanks for all your support. Yeah. We appreciate you so much.

You make our skin starvation go away. That's right. Emotionally. You make our endorphins tingle. That's right. Stay sexy. And don't get murdered. Goodbye.

Elvis, do you want a cookie? Okay.