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
had they blamed it on the people in the hospital for contaminating all the evidence, so they'd throw it out. And it became pretty clear that what you needed to do was create a kind of a universal language that was spoken by both the people in the hospital, the nurses who were examining the people who came in after a sexual assault, as well as
the people in the crime labs and the police officers, so that they all had the same way of thinking about creating a chain of evidence and creating uncontaminated good evidence. So that was where the idea of the rape kit came in.
So Marty Goddard was running this nonprofit, and she trademarked, under her nonprofit, trademarked the kit as the Vitulo kit. And it became known as that for a long time. And, you know, I've talked to people who worked with her, and they're generally of the opinion that she had to do a lot to...
work with the police department and all the different men who were in charge of allowing this system to be built. And so she had to smooth a lot of feathers. And part of that would be putting, you know, that it would be very helpful to have this kit known as the Vitulo kit and look very much, have the imprimatur of the police department And have a man's name on it, essentially.
Yes, absolutely. And she was, you know, I don't think she was interested in taking credit for She was just really interested in getting it done. But, you know, so much of the research I did when I looked at all the newspapers from the time, you know, all the reporters were going to Marty Goddard to talk about, oh, this new system.
And as it began, it spread to New York and it started to go nationally and they would always get quotes from her. And she's very much interested.
the person if you were a reporter who knew what was going on and would give you a good salty quote you know about what was happening but also she was very much kind of had her hands in every piece of it from the funding to working with the hospitals and working with rape crisis centers and all of that you know part of what you're setting up here and laying out in this book
Yes, absolutely. You know, this was very much on my mind. I'm really interested in the politics of invention and design. I worked for a couple of years as what I called the who made that guy at the New York Times Magazine. And my job was every week to tell the backstory of an ordinary object. So I was... spent so much time hunting down the people who had actually originated ideas.
And what I learned from that was that the people who are at the forefront of the problem are often the ones who are best fit to solve it. So, you know, rock climbers invent really good rock climbing gear. People who with, you know, low vision are really good at inventing things that are audio-based. A lot of our audio technology came from people who had vision problems. It makes sense.
Things like that, yeah. And I've always been obsessed with the wheelchair ramp because... It's an invention. It's an idea that obviously makes buildings accessible to many more people. But it's also when you see, if you're able-bodied and you see a wheelchair ramp, it sends a message about who matters and who doesn't.
You know, who matters, who's allowed to be in the building, who should be in the building, who's important. And I think that, you know, design and the designs, the stuff all around us is always sending us those messages about who's important, who should matter, who could matter. And unfortunately, too often, I think they send the wrong messages.
But I was really interested in the rape kit because... As a system, as an evidence collection method, it's really brilliant, but it also sends a signal that we can solve sexual assault cases, that there can be evidence, that it's not all just a he said, she said. And if you're not able to get the evidence, maybe you're just not working hard enough.
It's really, really similar. It still looks a lot like that. But as I investigated and talked to people, I became a lot more aware of the problems that do need to be solved and the fact that, you know, this kit was designed in the 70s in a completely analog era when people were, you know, talking on rotary phones and DNA identification and the Internet didn't exist.
So I would love to see survivors and nurses and lawyers and technologists and everybody coming together to really talk about how we could make the kit now much more resilient, what we could do with all these new tools we have. There's so much evidence now that's digital. Like, how could that be brought together with the biological evidence?
The interesting thing about the rape kit, as we talked about before, it's often sort of just not looked at. You know, and I just, if there's one thing I can do, I want readers to think about it and look at it and wonder how it could be better.
Sure. So Marty Goddard, in her various interviews, talks about how she... went around to the usual sources of money, which would be, you know, the fancy funding groups where people meet up in golf clubs, I suppose, or country clubs. And, you know, it's all very well-heeled. And, you know, back then, you did not say the word rape in polite society.
And so none of those groups wanted anything to do with this. So she really had trouble finding a funder. And there was a woman she had met when she was volunteering at the hotline named Margaret Standish, who's now Margaret Pokorny. And Margaret was working for the Playboy Foundation then, and so offered up the idea that you should try to apply, see whether Hugh Hefner's foundation will fund you.
Because oddly enough, Hefner was funding, he was very much about sexual liberation and even women's empowerment. And in the end, that's where she got her first funding from.
Exactly. I mean, I think, you know, but to his credit, he was funding a lot of women's rights groups and pushing for women's health initiatives. But yes, it did very much fit into his soft core porn empire to enable women to be, you know, sexually liberated and out there as swinging singles.
Yeah, so it was, you know, by the end of the 70s, the... There was a wide swath of hospitals that were offering these rape kits with the forensic exam. And then Marty Goddard began going to New York and helping the police department in New York to set up their own program. And then later in the 80s, this is where I think she really began to burn out in a lot of ways.
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