Sarah Stillman
speaker
394 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Jul 2026
last heard 28 Jul
Sarah Stillman’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Jul 2026 with 1.
Appearances
Honestly, I got my reporting start when I was at the Yale gym my senior year of college and I was trying to think about what I was going to do my senior essay about and they had Fox News playing on the TV but without the volume on because I was an anthropology and ethnicity race and migration major
And there's a news story in Florida about this young girl who went missing named Jessica Lunsford.
And this was in the Nancy Grace era when there was nonstop coverage of missing and murdered white women and girls.
And there was all this coverage basically about how this young girl had gone missing in Florida and hundreds of people had come to try to find her.
And I saw the little ticker tape at the bottom of the screen said a body found in the lake was not Jessica.
And that was like the good news.
And there was a celebratory press conference like, yay, the body wasn't Jessica.
Of course, that raised some big questions for me.
Like, who is this other body?
And I was so lucky that I was taking an investigative reporting class that was teaching me about public records.
And so I went back to my dorm room.
I called the sheriff's office.
I said, what was the name of the body in the lake that was not Jessica?
They told me her name was Donna Jelaine Cook and I did a quick public record search and found this was a young woman who'd been convicted multiple times of sex work related charges starting when she was really young.
So my college project, my senior project was going down to Florida trying to find who knew this young woman.
And ultimately what I learned is that she had been convicted.
working for the police as a confidential informant because she had some mental disabilities and mental health issues that were preventing her.
She didn't have the money to pay off the fees and fines she'd gotten.
And so she basically agreed to do this really dangerous work of serving as a confidential informant for the police and then started getting death threats from someone who she had essentially ratted out and wound up dead soon thereafter.
And so that really became my first journalistic inquiry is like trying to tell not only this young woman's story, but also like, how did we get a world where we have like the Jessica's and the not Jessica's?
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