Pagan Kennedy
speaker
63 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Jan 2025
last heard Jan 2025
Pagan Kennedy’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
Oh, thank you so much for having me on.
Well, that actually did begin with the backlogs because in 2018, when I fell down this rabbit hole, the rape kit backlog was very much in the news. There were, of course, almost half a million kits that hadn't been processed, and this had become a major scandal. And I suddenly, you know, I'd been hearing about the kit my whole adult life, I think.
And just like everybody else, I was very aware of it. And I think like everybody else or lots of other people, I couldn't really, I didn't know much about it. And the more I thought about it, the more kind of amazing it seemed to me because there are just so many things in this world that that seemed to be designed to allow sexual assault to happen.
You know, more and more parts of the internet, unfortunately, but just so many things, or date rape drugs, or some of the way cars work and things like that. But I couldn't really think of a lot of things that had been designed or created to back up the story of a survivor and to actually prove that an assault had happened. And so I really wondered, how did this come to be?
And that sent me to Wikipedia, where at that time it said that Louis Vitullo was the inventor of this kit. But he had died. He was already dead and had been dead for a while. And as I kind of searched around a little more, I kept seeing the name Marty Goddard as somebody who had been involved or helped him or something.
And so I originally became really interested in her because I just thought, well, it looks like she's still alive. I can't find an obituary. So I really need to speak to her because I want to hear if she's the one living person who can tell me that story. I want to hear it.
Yes. So I originally found out about this because in my search for her, I turned up two very long oral history interviews where she was telling her story. And she always began her – she began her story – in a hotline for what they called runaway teenagers back in the 1970s. And she was volunteering at this place called Metro Help in Chicago, answering the phones.
And as she answered the phones, I mean, the story kind of going then was kids were running away because they wanted to be hippies and they wanted excitement and adventure and all that.
Right. And that was so the way people thought of it then. But as she heard the stories of these kids, they were running away from abuse. And then she would try to help them and find out they had been put in a juvenile hall or something where they would then be vulnerable to further sexual assault. So she was very, very upset about that issue.
And it's interesting because in the early 70s, people didn't distinguish the way we do now in the same way between we think of child sexual abuse and adult sexual abuse. We kind of put them in, make them separate, but it was much more connected in people's minds then. And so she was just generally looking at, okay, if what I'm seeing is correct, I'm seeing this hidden epidemic
of what she would call incest, of generally fathers or uncles abusing kids. There must be so many perpetrators out there. Why are we not catching them? What is going wrong? So that's what opened up the question for her.
Yes, exactly. Well, first of all, marital rape was legal in all 50 states in the early 1970s. And, you know, it's so bizarre because I was a little kid back then, so I lived through this period. But as I looked through newspaper articles and videos and all sorts of archival material, I was just shocked again and again at how...
And the way sexual assault was talked about and the victim blaming, that was just crazy. I mean, I found a New York Times article from the early 70s, and the title was Little Ladies of the Night. And the reporter talked about the problem of these women. teenage, I mean, young, 12, 13, 14-year-old quote-unquote prostitutes in midtown Manhattan and how these children were the problem.
It's exactly like that. And that character in Taxi Driver, she's treated like You know, she's this canny, wise adult almost. And these are kids. And there's no sort of thought of, well, how did these kids get there? What happened? Who's profiting off of them? You know, all the questions we'd ask now. And policing then...
Another shocking thing was I found quotes from a police handbook in Chicago in the early 70s. And the instructions to police for when somebody accuses assault were that many women who accuse men of assault are lying. They're just trying to get revenge on a cheating boyfriend. So you don't really have to pay attention.
And it was completely up to the discretion of the police officer or the people in the hospital whether they even listened to the accuser. So if somebody is, say, is a sex worker or just is disheveled or whatever, for whatever reason, they could just completely write them off.
So, yeah, in the early 70s, she began interviewing. She was put on a rape task force. There was finally a recognition that there was a real problem in Chicago. So she was on the Citizens Committee in this rape task force. And that gave her entree to talk to anybody she wanted to talk to, as she tells it. So she went into the crime lab. She... interviewed everybody there. She went to hospitals.
She talked to administrators, nurses, everybody. And what she was trying to do was get so deep in the weeds that she understood the problem of evidence either not being collected or thrown out. So why were police or hospital workers not bothering to listen to somebody who accused rape?
But then this other problem that she noticed was that the people in the crime lab would just, they'd get the bag from the hospital after the victim was examined, and then they'd just throw it in the trash. Why were they doing that? Well, she found out that According to the people in the crime lab, the hospital workers didn't know what they were doing.
And they collected the slides and the swabs the wrong way. And in their haste to treat the person who'd been attacked, they might rip open their clothes to help them. But then they were ruining all this evidence because the clothes themselves were evidence. And so they felt that the people in the hospital—
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