Aliza Kaplan

From the day after she was arrested... There was this narrative and her side was never told. Until now. The story that the state has, why is it the right one?

In this case, she was made out to be the mastermind or something, you know. She planned all of this when she was 15 years old and they were 19 and 22. She was the manipulator. She was the manipulator, right? And that this was all because of her relationship with an older man.

She was sexually abused, emotionally abused, and physically abused.

Her father would grab at her breasts. He told her to give in to him. He would masturbate on top of her when he thought she was sleeping.

He pushed her downstairs, called her whore, idiot, stupid, slut-shamed her. And he would hit me up against the wall and he would call me those names. And then when he would get drunk, it would all get worse.

I see a teenager who would do anything to survive and to protect her sisters.

What do you say to that? Yeah. Well, they were younger, right? This is actually very common in families where there's abuse, that there's one child who takes on the majority of it and want to protect the others and the family.

Yeah, and I think, you know, those are things that Ellen will live with for the rest of her life. And she clearly understands how much damage she has caused her sister.

She asked to not talk. She said, I want to remain silent, right? She was there for 10 hours straight.

And look, police have their jobs to do, I get it. I just think the rules are really different when you have a kid. And in that, she looks like a kid. She's acting like a kid. She's in fear like a kid would be.

A grown man reaching over to a 15-year-old girl who was so vulnerable, no matter what her text messages said, no matter what her involvement was, I don't even understand how you don't look at that as him being the controller.

I run the Criminal Justice Reform Clinic. We are looking at Ellen's case, mostly because we believe that she has an excessive sentence. And what is her sentence? 25 years.

She was 15. He was 22. And her sentence is so much bigger than his.

I want to be very clear, she was involved. She participated. She was a co-conspirator. No doubt, right? She takes full accountability for her role in this crime.

Which, by the way, is not that easy to do when you're in prison. She's really incredible.