Hallie Rubenhold

Yes, absolutely.

I mean, I've been trolled, I receive...

Messages telling me I'm a liar, telling me that the people are using my book as loo roll, you know, just, you know, telling me, you know what you've done and you're a liar.

It's just unbelievable.

And I just think there's such a sense of ownership over these women's lives.

It's extraordinary.

You know, this idea that in the 21st century, there is a group of people who,

who feel that they own the truth.

And how dare anybody, how dare some outsider, some interloper, some woman stand up for these women and try to get to the bottom of decades of mythology and cut through that and tell a true story.

Exactly.

I mean, I think the way I have always seen their place in the traditional Ripper narrative is their stories begin with their deaths.

and my story starts with their life, we're simply not going to solve this murder.

And I think it's time to turn away from the murder itself.

And if we're interested in justice for the victims, start looking at their lives.

And the realization I came to is that in this kind of pseudo-discipline of Ripperology, there are no fixed hard facts with the exception that everybody can agree on one thing.

And that is that all the women were prostitutes.

And that kind of underpins ripperology.

And by kicking that stool over, I have potentially destabilized a lot of people's hobbies.

You know, this is this sort of thing that, you know, a lot of men come home from work and sit down with their folders for kind of decades and try to figure out who the ripper was.

And their theories are all based on this idea that Jack the Ripper killed prostitutes.