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
She was traveling all around the country and Guiding people in best practices about how to set up really good evidence systems. So she was just all over the place. And I think that was sort of the beginning of the end for her.
Yeah, actually, it was Cynthia Gary who was, you know, Marty's collaborator in the early days who made me think about that first. And Cynthia pointed out that the whole point of this project was to have a survivor experience. You know, stand up and tell her story, but be backed up in a courtroom and be believed.
And she would be backed up by a person, a nurse or doctor in a white lab coat and a kit with seals on it that looked super official. And so there was a kind of theater element to showing the jury that you had collected evidence. Evidence could be semen or blood or pictures of the wounds. And you'd done it very, very carefully.
And it couldn't be faked because there was so much suspicion that the survivor would be lying. So it was very much about that, about sort of, you know, at a time when juries would be very oriented against an accuser, showing that there was a whole group of experts who were behind her.
Yeah. So there were limited things you could do. You could look at somebody's blood type. Obviously, that would rule out some people, but it wouldn't be very precise at all. There was sometimes some particular protein or something particular to one person that you might be able to really narrow down the field in terms of looking at semen or blood.
But a lot of it would be looking at the survivor's body of what bruises did she have and her clothes. They were collecting whatever they could off of her body that might connect it to a scene of the crime. And they were pretty much flying blind, but trying to work with what they had
She was, from day one, she was very clear that part of the point of this was to clear the names of men who were falsely accused. And in the 80s, when she was sort of beginning to leave the stage, that was something she was outspoken about. But I would say that this is something that I feel people aren't aware enough of, that one of the things that's really important
about building and protecting a rape kit evidence system is the fact that so many exonerations can come from this system. And I even found an interesting report recently showing that possibly the reason why false accusations against black and brown men has plummeted recently is because of the use of rape kits, and especially because we've now processed so many of the backlogged kits.
And so the point was made that, you know, even before the trial, if you have the DNA, if somebody is falsely accused, you can just overturn that very quickly if you have strong evidence or DNA evidence showing that Somebody else's DNA in the kit. So this is not even relevant, you know. So that's really important.
Yes. Well, I will say that thanks to wonderful groups like Joyful Heart that did the End the Backlog project and many survivors and prosecutors like Kim Worthy and all kinds of people who worked tirelessly to raise this issue of the backlogs back. That problem, it's not solved, but it's a lot better.
Through the last 10 or so years, there's been enormous funding to pay for the DNA in the kits to be processed, and it has really given us a lot of new data. So that's wonderful. I think there's, from the people I talk to and doing a lot of research here,
It's also really clear that we have a problem of access, that there are still just too few people who have been through something terrible who feel like they can submit evidence. So I think that's something we really need to think about and work on.
We became aware of, yes, exactly, of that backlog in Detroit in the 2010s because of amazing activists in that city who brought this to attention. And there were Thousands of these kits that were warehoused in this structure that if you saw the video of them finding it and it looks like a parking garage and there was like pigeons flying around and stuff.
But what's really depressing is that almost as soon as the rape kit system existed, the there were backlogs. Or I should say, as soon as DNA identification became possible, there were backlogs because it was expensive to do especially in the early 1990s, if you think about how expensive that would be. And so almost immediately, it was in the news. I found the news stories.
But it wasn't really on anybody's radar that immediately there were backlogged kits and untested kits. And people who were very upset about that, you know, often people who were detectives or worked in crime labs were trying to raise this issue, but it just didn't get any traction, I think, until Kim Worthy and other people in Detroit really made it an issue. Prosecutor Kim Worthy. Yes.
Yes. So when I went back to write the book, I really was wrestling with whether I should talk about what had happened to me. And, you know, I was just in two separate incidents when I was a child. I was molested and I struggled with that because I felt like what happened to me was like the normal amount of sexual assault. I mean, it was like what it wasn't extraordinary.
And there's so many survivors involved. who have been through so much worse. And I didn't even think of myself as a survivor, really. It just, you know, it seemed to me like I was, you know, I didn't deserve that label. But as I thought more about it, as I was telling the story, I kept realizing that as I'm telling the story of Marty Goddard's Marching into the police department or whatever.
I'm a little kid at that time and I'm grappling with what has happened to me and unable to tell the adults because it's a time when it's very clear you can't tell, you shouldn't tell because what happened, even if the adults are trying their best, they're not going to be able to hear it.
So I thought that I would weave in my own story just a bit to just be another thread that really gets across what that time was like. And what's amazing looking back is I realize I don't think I really knew that sexual assault was a crime until I got to college in the 1980s. And we were all talking about it then.
And so I think my experience stands in for the experience of so many other people who something happens to you when you're very young and you think it's all your fault. But then as an adult, you find out, oh, this was a crime and that person was a criminal in the eyes of the law. And that actually, I feel like that's so important. I mean, it's such a small thing to ask for, but it's so important.
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