Noble Blood - The Sheika Kept Prisoner (with Heidi Blake)

Episode Date: February 13, 2024

In 2018, Sheika Latifa bint Mohammed Al Maktoum, the daughter of the ruler of Dubai, attempted a daring escape to international waters, away from what she characterized as a dangerous and oppresive life among her family. She was captured and brought back to the United Arab Emirates, and though there have been public statements saying she is safe and content, her wellbeing has become a matter of international concern. Dana is joined by New Yorker staff writer Heidi Blake.Support Noble Blood:— Bonus episodes, stickers, and scripts on Patreon— Noble Blood merch— Order Dana's book, 'Anatomy: A Love Story' and its sequel 'Immortality: A Love Story'See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

This is an I-heart podcast. Guaranteed Human. Will Ferrell's Big Money Players and IHart Podcast presents soccer moms. So I'm Leanne. Yeah. This is my best friend, Janet. Hey. And we have been joined at the hips since high school.

Absolutely. A redacted amount of years later, we're still joined at the hip. Just a little bit bigger hips. This is a podcast. We're recording it as we tailgate our youth soccer games in the back of my Honda Odyssey. With all the snacks and drinks. Why did you get hard seltzer instead of beer? Oh, they hit a bogo. Well, then you got it. Listen to soccer moms on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Welcome to Noble Blood, a production of IHeart Radio and Grimm and Mild from Aaron Manky. Listener discretion advised. Curled inside the empty spare tire compartment inside the trunk of an Audi, beneath several blue bags of heavy IKEA furniture, a 32-year-old woman named Latifah, held her breath. She was attempting to sneak across the border from the United Arab Emirates to Oman, where, hopefully, she would make it onto the boat that would bring her to international waters where she hoped she would be free. Latifah's full name was Shika Latifah bin Muhammad bin Rashid al-Makhtum, and she was the daughter of the ruling emir of Dubai, Sheikh Mohammed. For, you Years, Latifah had been studying and cultivating relationships with people who could help her

escape her repressive home. She even trained in extreme sports so that she would be ready for whatever she needed to do. That was how Latifah had met a woman named Tina Yehayanan, a Finnish woman living in Dubai who gave Latifah private capoeira lessons. Tina was the one driving the Audi across the border, she would stay with Latifah every step on the journey to freedom. Thankfully, a guard waved the car across the border into Oman without looking in the spare tire compartment. But the journey was far from over. Latifah had made arrangements for a yacht that could bring them to India, where, hopefully, with the help of a fake passport, she could fly to the United States and claim asylum. But first, she needed to get 16 miles offshore to meet the yacht.

There was another contact who gave Latifah and Tina a ride in his dingy, and though a storm pressed toward them on the horizon, and locals warned the man not to go out in his small boat, Latifah had come too far to turn back. Their tiny boat pressed forward through violent waves, but still Still, it couldn't make it all the way to the yacht. And so Latifah's next contact, a former French naval officer who had once escaped Dubai himself, where he was charged with embezzlement, rode from the yacht with another crew member to the dinghy on jet skis. Latifah and Tina both fell into the water several times, but eventually they managed to make it onto the back of the jet skis and then safely to the yacht. The yacht was filthy and teeming with cockroaches, but they were finally in international waters.

And when Latifah slept on the deck, she could see the stars. But freedom wouldn't last long. They noticed a ship was trailing them when they were about 30 miles off the coast of India. The next night, Latifah heard gunshots and boots on the deck. Commandos tied Latifian. Latifah up and injected her with tranquilizers before flying her back to the place she had already risked everything to try to escape. But that wouldn't be the end of Latifah's story. She had already risked everything to try to get away, and now she wanted the world to know what she was going through.

Latifah's escape attempt and its aftermath received international attention when it occurred in 2018 I'm thrilled to be talking with New Yorker staff writer Heidi Blake, who wrote about Latifah in an incredible article in May of 2003, and who's revisited the story and the story of other royal women who have attempted to escape the restrictive lives they were born into in the UAE for the New Yorker's narrative podcast series, The Runaway Princesses. I'm Dana Schwartz, and this is Noble Blood. Heidi, thank you so much for being here. Thank you so much for having me. I thought your piece last spring in The New Yorker was just so extraordinary,

and you've continued writing about Latifah and the women like her. But before we get into Latifah's 2018 escape attempt, can we go back a little bit? And can you just tell me a bit? Latifah's father is Sheikh Mohammed. What sort of power does he have? What sort of his political position in the United Arab Emirates? So Sheikh Mohammed is the ruler of Dubai and he's also the prime minister of the United Arab Emirates,

which is a major strategic ally to Western governments. And so Sheikh Mohammed is in this interesting position because he wields absolute power at home and he also has a huge amount of power and influence on the world stage. And he's a big ally of the US and of the UK. He's actually in the UK. He's Britain's biggest private landowner. He's the owner of the world. biggest thoroughbred race-horsing team, which in the UK is a big deal because the late Queen of

England was a huge horse racing fan, and he had cultivated this very valuable friendship with her through their shared love of horse racing. And so those things really play out in this story. He has this extraordinary degree of power and influence around the world, and particularly in the UK, as well as inside Dubai. It seems like in recent years, the United Arabemirits has sort of been making a public push saying that there. advocating for the rights of women. Can you tell us a little bit, though, about what the conditions are for women, some of the truth to that sort of PR blitz, and then what the conditions were for royal women? Yeah, that's absolutely right. And it's one of the things about the story that I

sort of found most striking, really, is that Sheikh Mohammed has been at pains to position himself on the world stage as a champion of women's rights within the Middle East. He's bowed to remove all of the hurdles that women face in the UAE. And he's passed a number of seemingly progressive laws, guaranteeing women, for example, equal pay for equal work. He's appointed nine women to cabinet positions in the UAE's government. And many of those initiatives are spearheaded by one of his daughters. And so he has actually kind of wheeled out his own female family members as sort of emblems of his commitment to female advancement. And that has won him a lot of Florida's in the West. He's been sort of praised for his progressive stance. But actually,

what I found when I began to report on this is that women in Dubai's royal family occupy this sort of impossible dual role, where they're on the one hand held up as sort of symbols of Sheikh Mohammed's, you know, great beneficence towards women, but actually also are expected to occupy very tightly defined roles. And if they step outside of that, they can be brutally be punished. And the sort of importance for Sheikh Mohammed in maintaining the sort of illusion of absolute power is, it's essential to him, basically, to make sure that women and his family do not step out of line are not seen to be challenging his authority. And it's sort of politically dangerous for him, if that is the case. And so when women have challenged him, the consequences for

them have been absolutely dire. One detail just early on in your piece, almost as coloring, but that I found so incredibly striking was that Latifah was when she was an infant was given to another of Shig Muhammad's wives sort of as a gift as an offering almost to raise. Yeah, it's extraordinary. I mean, she has six wives and around 30 children. And it's kind of fascinating the way that these kids are almost sort of a commodity. And so Latifah and her brother were both removed from their natural mother as infants and given as a gift to Sheikh Mohammed's childless sister, who by Latifah's account, because I sort of piece this together from Latifah's own writings over the course of about a decade where she really documented what her early life had been like.

By her description, her aunt sort of almost collected stray children in her palace. And so Latifah was raised among dozens of other kids who her aunt seemed to sort of want to own, but then who were kept confined to their bedrooms and not able to go out and to play and lived really very sort of miserable and straightened lives. And she wrote really movingly about just spending days at the window kind of watching the world go by outside. And one image that just really stuck with me was she wrote about how she would dream over and over again that she was flying a kite so huge it would carry her into the sky

because she was just desperate to get away. And that was a preoccupation which really defined most of her childhood and then also her adult life. So let's fast forward to Latifah's 2018 escape attempt. What were those preparations like for her? Obviously, her father has so much power. So it was an incredibly dangerous prospect for her. Right, exactly. And she knew what the stakes were because she'd seen what happened to other women in the royal family who tried to escape.

So her own sister Shamsa, 20 years earlier, had tried to run away on a trip to the UK and had since been captured and imprisoned and held under heavy sedation in the palace. Her aunt Boucher had been kidnapped from Britain after antagonising Dubai's ruler and had been brought back to Dubai where she died suspiciously. And so Latifah sort of knew what the risks were. She herself had previously tried to escape to get help for her sister Shamsa and had been captured and imprisoned for years. beaten so badly that all the bones and her feet had been broken during prolonged torture sessions. So she knew that the risks were huge, but she wrote again and again to her supporters that she was prepared to countenance death. She was so determined to get away. She said it's freedom or death and nothing in between. So her determination is one of the things that's so

striking in the sort of letters and messages and writings that I got hold of. And she actually spent seven years planning her second escape attempt. And she planned it in extraordinary detail. She recruited a team to help her two martial arts instructors and a former French naval officer who was to captain the yacht that she escaped on. And they spent years deliberating over how she would get out of Dubai and over the border into Oman, which was where she was going to escape onto this yacht. They spent years practicing her doing an underwater swim using an underwater scooter and a scuba rebreather to try and get over the border that way and ultimately decided that was too risky. And so eventually they decided to smuggle her over the border into

Oman and the boot of a car before she used a dinghy and then jet skis to get onto this yacht that she used to make her getaway. So yeah, it was an escape attempt of just extraordinary daring. Obviously, as your story tells when she was about 30 miles off the coast of India, commandos stormed the yacht and Latifah was captured. What went wrong in the escape? Well, I guess there were sort of a variety of things that led up to Latifah's capture. But ultimately, I think you sort of realize, when you look into this, that when you're up against Sheikh Mohammed, no one really has a chance.

And, you know, his global power extends so widely that really, I think, you know, in retrospect, Latifah's hope that she was going to be able to get away was pretty fanciful. So her father had managed to intercept her communications from on board the yacht and was able to pinpoint exactly where she was. He'd issued red notices through Interpol, the International Policing Agency, accusing the people who were helping her of having her kidnapped to enlist. the support of international police forces. And he had then put in a call to his friend and ally, the Prime Minister of India, Noranda Modi, and persuaded Modi to send armed commandos to storm the yacht off the coast of India and catch Latipa in exchange for an arms dealer who was based in Dubai,

who Narenda Modi wanted extradicing back to India. And so this whole kind of deal was stitched up between two world leaders and Latifah was captured and dragged away back to Dubai just around a week after it's setting off. When she was tranquilized and brought back to Dubai, what do we know about her treatment? Well, so she went dark for a long time after the yacht that she was on was stormed, and her friends and supporters had no idea what had happened to her. Her friend Tina just describes seeing Latifah being dragged off the side of the boat, shouting, shoot me now, don't take me back.

And then they heard nothing from her for about a year. Only after a year had gone by, did Latifah supporters get a message from a woman who was attending to Latifah where she was being held. And then they kind of began this extraordinary correspondence where Latifah was being held in prison, but had a secret line of communication via this maid back to her friends who were based in the UK and was able to document exactly what had happened to her. And she described being dragged off this boat, tranquilized, thrown into a desert prison, where she came under concerted pressure to recant a testimony that she'd published online, accusing her father of all sorts of crimes during her escape, and to kind of tell the world that she was fine and that she was living freely in Dubai

and that she was not, you know, that she no longer wished to leave the country. And she resisted that for years during this imprisonment. She absolutely refused to cooperate with that. But eventually in these letters and messages, videos that she was sharing with her supporters, you kind of see her willpower begin to ebb away. She talks about how she's being guarded around the clock. She's not being allowed to open the window. She feels she's dying a very slow death by suffocation.

Her father's guards are increasingly appearing accompanied accompanied by a psychiatrist who's putting pressure on her, sort of ramping up the psychological pressure on her to crack. They're telling her she'll never see the sunlight again. She lives constantly in fear of being killed by her father's guards. And I think ultimately you begin to see just the cumulative pressure become too much for her to bear. In recent years, there have been public appearances of Latifah out in the world. And two UN human rights watch officials have met with her publicly. how much credence do you give to those meetings of the UN?

Well, yeah, I mean, it's interesting the sort of the way this story sort of resolved itself in the end is that after, you know, decades of absolutely refusing to countenance that she would ever accept a life in Dubai under her father's control. And, you know, saying again and again, I will never accept that. And I will always be imprisoned as long as I'm here. and I will never be free until I'm outside Dubai. Latifah suddenly lost all contact with her supporters and then soon after started appearing in what appeared to be kind of carefully stage-managed social media photographs. And then ultimately had these meetings with UN human rights officials. And they're sort of complicated because it happened in two stages.

So one of those took place during her imprisonment. She was photographed with Mary Robinson, who was the former UN Human Rights Commissioner and who released a statement afterwards with photographs of Latifah and said to the media that Latifah was mentally ill, regretted her attempt to escape and was now safe in the loving care of her family.

Mary Robinson subsequently retracted that and said she'd been horribly tricked into saying those things after videos of Latifah appeared in which she accused her father of holding her hostage and said she was a prisoner. But then after she, a second time, lost contact with her supporters and then started to appear in these social media posts.

She met with Michelle Bachelet, who is Mary Robinson's successor as your own human rights commissioner, who released a statement to say that Latifah had assured her that she was well and living as she wishes to and just wished to be left alone to live her life in peace. I spoke to Michelle Bachelet after that statement, and she acknowledged to me that while she'd said that, actually she was far from convinced that Latifah was actually safe and well, and couldn't rule out that Latifah had come to this meeting with her under duress and who'd been put under pressure to say those things.

It's certainly hard for me, having spent many months, kind of immersed in Latifah's writings and the recordings that she left behind, and just those sort of decades of determination on her part, never to give in, never to surrender, never to accept a life under her father's control. it's very hard to imagine that she has suddenly of her own free will completely reversed course and all of that and decided that she really does just want to live in Dubai. I think clearly the stance that she has now taken is at least a product of years of torture, imprisonment and abuse and an extreme duress.

And of course it's possible that she's being outright coerced and is being threatened, to saying these things. I think given what we know about the way Sheikh Mohammed has treated his daughters and other women in the family, nothing is off limits in terms of what he would be willing to do to crush their rebellions and to bring them to heal. And so I don't think anyone should rest assured that Latifah is well and is living freely. Will Ferrell's Big Money Players and IHeart Podcast presents soccer moms. So I'm Leanne.

Yeah. This is my best friend Janet. Hey. And we have been joined. the hips since high school. Absolutely. Now a redacted amount of years later. We're still joined at the hip.

Just a little bit bigger hips, wider. This is a podcast. We're recording it as we tailgate our youth soccer games in the back of my Honda Odyssey. With all the snacks and drink. Sidebar. Why did you get hard seltzer instead of beer? Oh, they had a bogo. Well, then you got it.

Do you want a white color or something here? Just hit it. Oh, what are y'all doing? Microphones? Are you making a rap album? Oh, I would. How would buy it? Cut through the defense like a hot knife through sponge cake.

That sounds delicious. Oh, you're lucky I'm not a drug addict. You're lucky I'm not an alcoholic. You're lucky I'm not a killer. I love this team and I'm really trying to be a figure in their lives that they can rely on. Oh. Listen to soccer moms on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Will Ferrell's Big Money Players and IHart Podcasts,

soccer moms. So I'm Leanne. This is my best friend Janet. And we have been joined at the hips since high school. Absolutely. Now a redacted amount of years later. We're still joined at the hip. Just a little bit bigger hips. Wider. This is a podcast. We're recording it as we tailgate our youth soccer games

in the back of my Honda Odyssey. With all the snacks and drink. Sidebar. Why did you get hard seltzer instead of beer? Oh, they had a bogo. Well, then you got it. Do you want a white collar or something here? Just hit it. What are y'all doing? Microphones? Are you making a wrap? Alba.

Oh, I would. Come on. Could you move? I would buy it. Cuts through the defense like a hot knife through sponge cake. That sounds delicious. Oh, you're lucky. I'm not a drug addict.

You're lucky I'm not an alcoholic. You are. I'm not a killer. I love this team, and I'm really trying to be a figure in their lives that they can rely on. Oh. Oh. Listen to soccer moms on the Iheart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you can. get your podcasts.

One thing that is just very clear in your story is that Latifah's family is just incredibly powerful and I will say frightening. Were you nervous at all investigating and publishing your story? I think I was certainly conscious that Sheikh Mohammed's government has no compunction about sort of digital surveillance on journalists and things like that. You know, one of the things that came out in the cause of a court battle, between Sheikh Mohammed and his youngest wife, Princess Haya, who's another princess who ran away from him to the UK seeking protection,

was that Sheikh Mohammed had used his, you know, his intelligence agencies had hacked Haya's phone and the phones of her lawyers and various supporters with the Pegasus, Israeli spyware, and that subsequently some supporters of Latif has found that Pegasus was also on their phones. And so I was conscious that that sort of thing was certainly a possibility, if not a likelihood, and was therefore sort of careful about digital security to the extent that any of us really can be these days. But, you know, it's, yeah, I mean, I think beyond that, I just feel incredibly lucky to live in a country where for all Britain's many failings, I think, you know, it's a pretty safe place to go about your work as a journalist. I think it would have been quite a different thing traveling to Dubai and doing reporting there because I think there are real risks to journalists in that region.

But I'm lucky to operate in a pretty safe country for this kind of work. And so I wasn't too nervous for my sort of physical safety, but certainly, yeah, conscious of the kind of digital security side of things. You alluded to Princess Haya, who, as you said, was Sheikh Mohammed's youngest wife, was involved in a court battle and ultimately was able to win a settlement and win custody of their children to live in England. Can you speak a little bit about her experience? Yeah, Princess Hire's case is a really interesting one

because she is kind of the one who got away. I mean, literally the one who got away. I think that that is really due entirely to her independent status as the daughter of the former King of Jordan, a member of the Jordanian royal family, and a woman who, unlike other women in Sheikh Mohammed's family, she had a considerable amount of power and status in her own right. And, you know, while UAE is an important ally to Western governments, so is Jordan. That comes with a certain

inviolability, I think, that wasn't there for Sheikh Mohammed's own children. So when Princess Haya ran away to the UK in 2019 with her two young children, she was actually afforded the diplomatic position at the Jordanian embassy, which gave her immunity and protection. She was then able, sort of under that cover to apply to the courts for court protection. Her children were made wards of the court in the UK, which meant they couldn't be removed from the country without court permission. And she was then able to bring a claim against Sheikh Mohammed in the British courts, which actually provided a forum for a lot of the evidence of his abuse of his daughters to come out because she cited his abuse of both Latifah and her sister Shamsa as evidence of the

threat that Sheikh Mohammed posed to her and to her own children. And so those matters were adjudicated in a British court, the judge held a kind of fact-finding process and ultimately ruled that indeed Sheikh Mohammed had kidnapped and imprisoned Shamsa and Latifah. And so that was kind of an extraordinary development in this story, this moment where one of these women was actually able to get out and get the truth out there. And it was kind of interesting because Haya had played a pretty ambiguous role in all of this up until that point because she had been the person who arranged this lunch between Latifah and Mary Robinson. the product of which were these photographs and then the statement by Mary Robinson that Latifah was mentally unwell and basically shouldn't be believed.

And Haya had sort of therefore been part of this propaganda campaign by Sheikh Mohammed's government to try to dispel international concern about Latifah. And then shortly afterwards actually ran away herself and said, help me, I'm in danger and actually by way of proof, look what he's doing to Latifah. And so, you know, she kind of, there was this extraordinary reversal on her part. And so, yeah, she's a fascinating character in all of this. And she's still living in the UK. She actually won the biggest divorce settlement in British legal history against Sheikh Mohammed. And, yeah, really sort of delivered a pretty resounding blow to his reputation in this court action that she was able to bring and all of the appalling abuses that it brought to light. Latifah's sister Shamsa, as you alluded to, had also attempted to escape when she was in England and she was unsuccessful and wasn't able to claim asylum in England.

Can you briefly just walk us through sort of what Shamsa's escape attempt had been like? Yeah, absolutely. I mean, so Chansy's escape is really the sort of inciting incident that set off a whole chain of events here that ultimately ended up with Latifah repeatedly trying to escape herself. because Lativa's escape attempts were to try to get help for Shamsa. And Shamsa had clashed with Sheikh Mohammed increasingly as she kind of grew older as a teenager. She wanted to study. She wanted to travel. She wants to go to university.

She didn't want to wear the abyss. She wanted to be able to drive. She wanted, you know, those sorts of freedoms that women in the West enjoy. and she was denied all of that and increasingly sort of had this strained relationship with her father and so ultimately decided when she was in her late teens that she would run away and she waited till she and some other members of the family

had travelled to Sheikh Mohammed's summer house in the UK she was staying there with the entourage and she waited till after dark one night and then slipped away and managed to find a race rover that had been left unattended in the grounds and she drove it out to the perimeter of the estate, dumped the car and slipped through a gate on foot and dumped her mobile phone and then just sort of disappeared into the night. And it was it was weeks before she was tracked down.

She managed to kind of stay on the run, find friends to stay with. And she actually managed to contact an immigration lawyer, a guy called Paul Simon, and ask him to help her get asylum in the UK. She kind of walked into the office of this small-time lawyer and said, I'm a runaway princess from the Dubai royal family, please can he help me, which must have been a pretty extraordinary walk-in. But he basically advised her that he wasn't going to be able to help her because she didn't have a passport. She'd left that behind at the house.

And so she was sort of out on her own. And in her desperation, she turned to one of her father's guards in the UK, a guy who she had sort of come to trust over the course of her summers there and asked him to help her. and instead of helping her, he lured her into a kidnapping. She was then dragged back to her father's estate and put on a helicopter and then a private jet back to Dubai where she was held for decades under heavy sedation and under constant guard. And as far as we know, still is being held following that attempt all those years ago.

I was about to say we've gotten the. sort of heavily manicured photos on social media of Latifah, but is there any evidence that Shamsa is alive? No, Shamsa really has sort of disappeared without trace. The last I can pinpoint Shamsa's whereabouts is that there is an extraordinary record that Latifah created of a meeting between the two sisters, which was in the summer of 2019, in their father's desert compound. and they were actually both summoned to meet Sheikh Mohammed

because they'd been called to testify in Princess Haya's case in London and he wanted to make sure that they didn't do this. And so he summoned them both to ask them to provide a statement saying they didn't wish to testify. When they refused to comply, he just wrote to the court on their behalf and said my daughters have no wish to have any part in this. But Shamsun Atifah had this private moment together. And it's one of the things we've just released

a podcast series about this story and one of the things for me that's sort of most compelling is to hear these extraordinary tapes that the Tifa made during her imprisonment and some of these tapes after the meeting with Shamsara are some of the most haunting for me because just the raw pain and emotion in her voice as she describes this moment of seeing her sister who she just adored and who she'd fought for and she'd tried twice to escape for to try and get help she'd risked her life for in this coming, this brief coming together of these two women before they were wrenched apart again. It's just absolutely heartrending. And after that, we have no record of what happened to Shamsa. None of the royal insiders I spoke with were able

to shed any light on where she was or knew where she was. And when I spoke with Michelle Bashaday, the former human rights commissioner who met with Latifah, she said that something that had really struck her was that Latifah was reasonably composed during their meeting. But when she asked about Shamsa, Latifah had become suddenly very firm and had said, no, I will not discuss my sister. I'm here to talk about myself and I will not answer questions about her. And it seemed odd that she was, there was such a hard line there. Like there was just something there that the Tifa was absolutely not going to go near. And so, you know, one dreads to think what Chamsa's situation might be.

Certainly for the decades since she attempted to escape as a teenager, it has been absolutely dire. And one thing that I found uniquely heartbreaking and a little frightening that you detailed in your investigation was how when English detective inspectors were trying to look into this case, they were fairly continually stymied by higher up saying it's none of our concern. Was that for political reasons? Yeah, I mean, that was one of the sort of real central mysteries of all of this was sort of what happens to these attempts by the police to investigate. You know, in Chans's case, she showed extraordinary resourcefulness as an 18-year-old on the

run and that she managed to instruct this lawyer to act for her. And then having been kidnapped, she managed to get hold of a phone and get a message to her lawyer saying that she wanted the police to be involved. And her lawyer then decided to ignore this and do nothing about it. She then, after another six months of imprisonment, managed again to get a message to her lawyer. And this time, the police, you know, the police were notified that she was alleging that she'd been kidnapped from the UK. And there was a detective who attempted to investigate, but he described how he just was sort of blocked at, you know, every turn and ultimately was told that he wasn't going to be allowed to travel to Dubai to try to investigate Shamsan's situation. And so he decided to

kind of step away from the case. And, you know, he certainly felt clearly that that was politically motivated. You know, he said to me, because you're a rich and powerful enough person, you can break any law you like in our country and get away with it. And that that had always really frustrated him. And that was something I heard from multiple police officers and also former government officials I spoke to that the relationship with the UAE was just too strategically important for the government to compromise, you know, over the individual fate of one or two or three princesses. And they just weren't prepared to go to the map for these women. They kind of viewed it as a private family matter.

And officials I spoke to were pretty, you know, pretty confident that these sorts of things, you know, blow over. And that they knew that one of them said that, you know, when these sorts of things blew up, with these members of Sheikh Mohammed's family, you know, they felt fairly confident it would be a 48 hour wonder and then everybody would move on and forget. And I think that's right. You know, I think they did get away with allowing this to happen. And Sheikh Mohammed continues to enjoy a very cordial relationship with the British government and, you know, is esteemed on the world stage as a, you know, a progressive leader in the Middle East. And despite all of this,

that continues to be the case. Well, that is a lot to think about. Heidi Blake, to read more, read her incredible investigative reporting in The New Yorker and listen to the New Yorker's brand new podcast series, The Runaway Princesses. Thank you so much for being here. Thank you so much, Dana. This is a real pleasure. Noble Blood is a production of IHeart Radio and Grim and Mild from Aaron Manky. Noble Blood is created and hosted by me, Dana Schwartz, with additional record. writing and researching by Hannah Johnston, Hannah Zwick, Mira Hayward, Courtney Sender, and Lori Goodman. The show is edited and produced by Noami Griffin and Rima Il K. Ali, with supervising producer Josh Thane and executive producers Aaron Manky, Alex Williams, and Matt Frederick.

For more podcasts from IHeartRadio, visit the IHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows. Will Ferrell's Big Money Players and IHeart Podcast presents soccer moms. So I'm Leanne. This is my best friend, Janet. Hey. And we have been joined at the hips since high school. Absolutely. A redacted amount of years later,

we're still joined at the hip. Just a little bit bigger hips. This is a podcast we're recording it as we tailgate our youth soccer games in the back of my Honda Odyssey. With all the snacks and drinks. Why did you get hard seltzer instead of beer? Oh, they hit a bogo. Well, then you got them. Listen to soccer moms on the

IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. This is an IHeart podcast, guaranteed human.