The MeidasTouch Podcast - Special Edition: Rachel Meiselas Interviews Manhattan DA Candidate Lucy Lang

Episode Date: June 16, 2021

On today's SPECIAL EDITION of The MeidasTouch Podcast, the brothers' younger sister, Rachel Meiselas, takes over! On this episode, Rachel sits down 1-on-1 with Lucy Lang. Lucy is running for District Attorney of Manhattan, and if elected, she will become the first female to ever hold the office. Rachel and Lucy talk about Lucy's platform, which focuses on ensuring that everyone touched by the criminal justice system is treated with dignity. As the leader of a national criminal justice reform organization and former assistant district attorney, Lucy has always recognized that the role of the District Attorney encompasses much more than prosecution; it requires deep consideration of communities, prevention, and rehabilitation. This is an empowering conversation that you won't want to miss! You can follow Rachel Meiselas on Twitter @RachelMeiselas Learn more about Lucy Lang's campaign at votelucylang.com. --- Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/meidastouch/message Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/meidastouch/support Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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Welcome to the Midas Touch podcast, special edition. Ben Micellis joined by Jordy Micellis. There's no Brett Micellis here, but we have two very special guests, a special co-host and a special guest. Well, I will pass the mic to our special co-host to give the introduction of this very special Midas Touch podcast edition. Who do we have? Hello, my name is Rachel Mycelis, and today I'm taking over the Midas Touch podcast. I'm the younger sister of the Midas Touch brothers. Proud sister, very proud. And today I am joined with Lucy Lang, who is running for the position of Manhattan District Attorney. This election is obviously so important because if Lucy wins, it will be the first time that Manhattan has ever had a female district attorney, which is amazing. So Lucy, how are you doing today? It's a pleasure. I'm doing so well. Thanks so much for having me, Rachel. I am thrilled to be with the Mycelis

family again, but especially to be with, dare I say, the best Mycelis. Thanks for having me on. I'm so excited that we were able to kidnap the podcast and go a little rogue for the ladies. Yes. Okay. So let's just get right into it. I'm just curious, when did you first get interested in law and what law school did you go to? I went to Columbia Law School right out of college. And I went to law school because I wanted to be in a position to have an impact in the world around me. And I could see that people who were making decisions tended to be people who were lawyers. So it seemed like the right path into making positive social impact in my community. You were a former assistant district attorney.

And I'm just curious, at what point did you decide that you want to commit yourself to public service? I think in some way I always knew that I wanted to work in the public sector. And I think back to when I was a little kid in Greenwich Village, my mom was student teaching at PS3 downtown. And there was a kid, I had to go to school with her one day while my daycare was closed and I was three or four. There was a kid in the back of their classroom with his head down on his desk asleep. And I overheard my mom ask the primary teacher, should I wake him up?

And the teacher said, I just let him sleep because I never know what happened to him last night at home. And as a little kid overhearing this, I was totally stunned to realize that in my own neighborhood, there were other kids who had such a different experience that they might be allowed to sleep through school. And so there was this sort of early sense of the world outside myself wanting to understand other people's stories that led me to law school, then to the district attorney's office, where I served as an assistant DA for many years, handling violent crimes, including homicides, domestic violence, and gun crime, and ultimately where I built a first-of-its-kind college and prison program to bring

assistant DAs inside New York's prisons. And then most recently, I ran a national non-profit working with district attorneys around the country on implementing reforms designed to dismantle mass incarceration and reckon with racial injustice while still prioritizing public safety. Yeah, that's obviously so important, especially in today's age. You mentioned gun control and all those different issues that obviously held such an important, you know, conversation that needs to be made in today's age. So it's amazing that you're, you know, pursuing this. And obviously, speaking of social and political reform, you were involved in, you know, the Inside Criminal Justice Initiative. Why is it so important to you to try to fix the criminal

justice system? So the initiative that you mentioned is the college and prison class that I built. And it came, and this is really comes back to the fact, Rachel, that criminal justice reform is a woman's issue. Criminal justice, of course, is a racial justice issue. It has disparate, we know that the system has historically and continues to have disparate impact on black and brown communities in particular, but so often women end up bearing the brunt of the consequences of people being removed

from their communities. Women are victimized often at rates higher than men. And so it should be of concern to all women to address issues that are facing the criminal justice system right now. So obviously, being a woman, you are about to hope if you win the election, you will become obviously the first female district attorney. What do you think, if anything, do you think being a woman brings to this specific job? So many of the women, of the people who have guided the way I think about the need for social justice reform have been women, and in particular, often have been moms. And there's a woman in particular who I think of often who really inspired my

decision to build the college and prison class I described, which brings ADAs, prosecutors, into prisons to work alongside folks like the folks they prosecute inside New York's prisons. And it was a case in which two masked gunmen came out from behind parked cars on a snowy Super Bowl Sunday and opened fire, hitting five people and killing one who was the father of a three-year-old child. And I may have told this story to your brothers at one point, but it was a devastating investigation that involved piecing together complex circumstantial evidence from Instagram and surveillance footage and cell site tracking data. And ultimately, we were able to identify the two men who had committed this murder. And I became close to the mother of the young man who had been killed. And when I called her the morning after a jury returned a guilty verdict against the

men who had murdered her son, I asked her how she felt. And she said, I slept all night for the first time since my son was killed. But when I woke up, all I could think about were the moms of those two boys. And I was so floored by this incredible compassion she had for other mothers on the other side of the courtroom, that I was inspired to figure out ways that the system can recognize the humanity of everyone it touches, that the system can seek to emulate some of the compassion that that mother exhibited. So to be a woman seeking a chief law enforcement job means bringing a very different lens, arguably a more compassionate lens, to a position at a time when we need to have compassion and recognize people's dignity more than ever.

So speaking of that compassionate lens that you hope to bring if you get elected, obviously there's going to be backlash from so many people in this world. Everyone has something to say about everything. And with that comes a lot of challenges. How do you plan on addressing these challenges while remaining that compassionate sort of side? It's so interesting that you asked that one week before the election, because I've been thinking about how politics itself can make people really hard. And that I have found that I have to stay very

grounded in the good things in my life, the good things that are happening in the campaign, because it's really easy to see what is bad and ugly in the world when you're in a political race. And so I come back to the fact of my children being awesome and healthy and very engaged in the process. I come back to the fact that I have so many advisors to the campaign who have been through the system themselves, who inspire the daily work and remind me of how critical transformative change is. And that's kind of what keeps me trucking through, especially in this final week. So continuing kind of towards a more pro-feminism side, because we women are taking over this podcast today. You wrote a book titled March On about the 1915 Women's March. What drew you to write this, you know, pro-feminism book?

And is it that same motivation that really inspired you to run for this district attorney position? Sure. Like so many other stories in American history, women's stories are often silenced or shunted aside. And what I found as we were getting close to the centennial of the passage of the 19th Amendment, which gave women the right to vote, was that there was no age appropriate text to help me explain to my kids, who at the time were probably three and four, about why this was such an important occasion. So I wrote a children's book, my sister, who is an artist and arts educator, illustrated the book. And the idea is to be able to give parents a tool to talk to their kids about what it means to vote, to march, to be civically engaged, and why it's so important to hold those rights dear because they really were hard fought to win.

And of course, women were deprived of the right to vote from the founding of the Republic until just 100 years ago. And I think it's also important to note that so many Americans are still deprived of their right to vote. In fact, I spent a last Friday protesting outside of the Metropolitan Detention Center here in Manhattan, which is one of the city correctional facilities, protesting the fact that the New York City Department of Corrections denied my request to come into New York City jails to campaign with potential voters who are behind bars. So these are people who are detained pre-trial, who have the right to vote, and in my view, have the right to know who they're voting for. And I, as a candidate, should have the ability to reach them and share information

about my candidacy and hear from them their concerns about the district attorney's office. These are the people who are most directly impacted by the decisions of the next district attorney. And I was denied permission to enter the city jails to share that information with them. So it is really important to remind those of us who do exercise our right to vote how hard won it was, and the fact that so many Americans still lack that right or lack full access to information to be able to exercise it in the most educated way possible. So would you say that exercising these rights is your ultimate career goal if you get elected for the district attorney position? What is your ultimate career goal, if that is not the ultimate, I guess you could say? My years teaching in New York's prisons have illuminated for me

the crisis levels of mass incarceration in this country. And I believe it is totally possible to solve mass incarceration in my lifetime and am committed to pulling the levers in the district attorney's office that will work to disentangle the structures that have led to mass incarceration. So that is very much top of mind as a goal for the DA's office and calling for the end's office and calling upon,

calling for the end of felon disenfranchisement, calling to be able to campaign with incarcerated voters. All of those are ways to better equip more people to advocate for the kind of transformational change that the country really needs to move into the next generation. So I understand that you ended up working with our current district attorney, Cyrus Vance Jr. And obviously, you guys have done great things together for social, political change,

obviously, with the criminal justice system. You have done a lot as an individual as well. However, you're on record in the New York Times for saying that the office wasn't necessarily keeping pace with the changing world in general. If you become the new district attorney, what is your plan to make that change? Well, Rachel, I have set forth more than 27 comprehensive policy plans that are available on my website, which is votelucylang.com. And all of those plans were built in collaboration with communities, especially communities most impacted. They include everything from a plan to prioritize gun violence cases and seek to stem the tide of cyclical gun violence, which we've

seen increasing here in New York City, to better addressing cyber crimes, which sadly have also risen during the pandemic, and which particularly victimize vulnerable New Yorkers. So there are a whole range of office priorities that I intend to pursue as district attorney, but all of them are committed to these, this core issue of dismantling mass incarceration, addressing racial injustice, and addressing violent crime and crimes that victimized New Yorkers. So speaking of violent crimes, you as an individual, you're endorsed by many of the women who were victimized by Harvey Weinstein. What is it like to be supported by these women? And how do you plan on improving the system so that something like this could be prevented in the future? I have learned so much from working with survivors of sexual violence,

including those brave women who spoke out in opposition to Harvey Weinstein. And amongst the things that I have learned is how much the system failed them over and over again, and in fact, in many instances, re-traumatized them. I learned from them about the diversity of ways in which people respond to trauma. And the criminal justice system is built to respond to things, generally speaking, in kind of one way. And there's a presumption that if someone is victimized and doesn't report it immediately or behaves in a way that is inconsistent with how another victim might have behaved, that they're not being truthful. And really, nothing could be further than the truth. People manifest their trauma in wildly divergent ways.

And we need to build a system that recognizes that and that prioritizes the needs of survivors. So an example that a survivor gave gave me was that when she was being interviewed by prosecutors who were investigating her abuser, she they came from out of town to meet with her and because they didn't have an office, she went to their hotel room to conduct the interview. And as soon as she went into the hotel room, she had a panic attack because her victimization had occurred in a hotel room. And the prosecutors and other investigators had not even thought to ask her where she wanted to meet, whether she would be comfortable meeting under those circumstances. And it's that kind of presumption that prosecutors know best, that police know best, that results in re-traumatization of survivors. And I'm intending to build a survivor-centered in the investigations into in the past into Trump and the Trump administration.

So a bit obviously on a different note. And those were closed in a certain regard. It seems that there is a two tiered justice system where the rich and powerful have intimidated these prosecutors. Would you have been intimidated if you were in this position that they were in? And would you have shut these investigations down as well like the prior prosecutors have? Rachel, you come by the hard-hitting questions. Honestly, I feel like being cross-examined by Ben and Popak. It's important that the next district attorney not say anything on the campaign trail that would suggest anything other than total impartiality with respect to all the cases that are pending in front of the office. And in fact, some of my opponents in the race have arguably

put themselves in a difficult position with respect to continuing particular high-profile high profile cases. My own experience handling large scale complex cases makes me well suited to continue all of the large scale investigations that are going on in that office right now. And the senior advisor to my campaign is the former assistant district attorney who handled an earlier investigation into the Trump organization that was subsequently shut down. And I saw what he went through during the course of that investigation. And my own view is that that investigation should not have been shut down. And I am the person in the DA race who is best suited to take on all of the cases pending before that office from the very first day in office. So moving over back kind of to that feminism sort of side of it, as someone like myself who was interested in politics in the future, you're obviously a big role model to young women everywhere running for this incredible position. And if elected, you become obviously the first female district attorney in Manhattan. What is a piece of advice you would

give to women like myself who want to take on these leadership positions in a world where men usually hold these roles? In terms of advice to women seeking to do hard things, it would be kind of trite to say, you say, stay strong, develop a thick skin. All of those things I think are true, but perhaps more importantly is to maintain a heart through it all. And this kind of goes back to where we started the conversation. It's so important to be grateful, to surround yourself by people you love, who support you, to make sure that you build a mission-driven team. I'm really lucky to be supported by people who deeply believe in the kind of change that we're intending to make. And so from the amazing field organizers who are out right now at the

early polling sites across Manhattan, talking about our message to voters, to my campaign treasurer, to my five and seven year old child, everyone around me understands that we're in this together. And that makes all the difference that I work with people who I love and admire who share my commitment to issues. So that would be my advice to young women to keep yourselves full of joy and goodness and surrounded by people who bring those things into your orbit, even when the going gets tough. And to end off this interview, this amazing interview, why is this election for district attorney and your candidacy that stresses that compassion with reform so important for me and my peers, as well as just people in general? There should arguably be nothing more pressing

to young people in this country than the fact that we have 2.2 million people behind bars, that these are painters, philosophers, scholars, musicians, and we are wasting a generation. And we have done it before. We know what the consequences are. And we know that it exacerbates racial disparities in the country. We know that it is, in fact, a part of the long legacy of slavery in this country. in which everyone has the opportunity to thrive, to discover their inner artist, to discover their inner political official. And it matters not just as a matter of human dignity, which it does, but also as a matter of public safety. We are all safer. Our communities are

all healthier when we give people the tools and support that they need to thrive. So I'm thrilled to have a group of young people who support my campaign and an advisory council. We have one week to go until the primary and hopefully then have until November for the general, but I invite folks to follow me at Lucy Lang NYC. If you're in New York and able to volunteer in person on the campaign trail, please send me an email or reach out through my website, votelucylang.com. And if you're interested in volunteering or interning remotely, we're having people phone bank and text bank all day, every day, and we welcome all of your support and participation. So please reach out. Remember to vote if you're old enough to vote. And thank you so much, Rachel, for your smart questions and for

helping me take over. Thank you so much. It was a pleasure speaking to you. Pleasure speaking with you. Keep kicking ass. So that was Rachel Mycelis, special guest host of the Midas Touch podcast with Lucy Lang. Lucy, Rachel brought the heat for that interview, huh? No joke. You didn't tell me that she was going to go down that road. Well, thank you, Lucy and Rachel. Jordi and I are so proud of you. You did an incredible job.

Lucy, thank you for the interview. Jordi, any final words? Honestly, I think I lost my job here. So I'm going to start thinking about what else I'm going to do because Rachel just kicked butt. Yep. Sure did. It's a family affair in the Mycelis family. And I'll take it away from here. Shout out to the Midas Mighty. Thank you for listening to this special edition. I'm Ben. You heard Jordi Mycelis, who no longer has a job with Midas Touch and our new favorite sibling, Rachel Mycelis. We'll see you next time. Thank you very much.