Susannah Cahalan
speaker
31 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Apr 2025
last heard Apr 2025
Susannah Cahalan’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
She got married at 17, a very abusive relationship, left that husband, went off to New York, started modeling, no high school degree, and started to experiment with psychedelic drugs that were becoming very popular at the time and were not yet illegal. And in that, she really found that altered state, that connection with the kind of other world that she had found when she was eight years old.
I had to learn to like him because I had to see it through her eyes. But I understand what you're saying completely.
Yeah, I mean, he completely used her, especially when he escaped from prison. She masterminds that escape. She oversees it. She kind of gives up everything in her life for him, her identity, really. And at some point she decides it's too much and she leaves him and he gets arrested and he decides to cooperate with the federal government.
And at that point, he actually hands over these letters, these love letters that they'd exchanged where they'd also talking code about the escape to basically hand her over to the federal government and try to kind of get them to kind of focus on her so that he could get off. He could get some time off of his jail sentence. And that was really an ultimate betrayal there.
She was underground for 25 years. And she was living, you know, basically at the poverty line. She somehow still filed her taxes at various points. So I could see that she made about $12,000 a year running it in. Don't fuck with the IRS. Yeah, seriously. You can run from the feds, but not the IRS. With her fake name, she filed her taxes. And, you know, she really...
And, you know, she was terrified of breaking the law in any way. I mean, she drove like 15 miles an hour everywhere. She was constantly looking at people thinking they recognized her. Imagine being that seen all the time, but also being completely unseen because no one really knows who you are. So it was a state of like being hypervigilant, but also invisible. And it was stressful.
It was stressful. And, and also, I mean, she couldn't, she had no money and she was under, underground. She didn't have health, healthcare. So she couldn't go to a dentist, you know, and she died very young. She died at 66. And I think a great deal of that is due to the lack of healthcare and also the massive amounts of stress she was under when she was underground.
That's beautiful. And I think that's so true. And I think, you know, she developed this armor around herself and she was a very open, we talk about openness, like she's you know, she was extremely open and the psychedelics opened her up even further.
And when her husband turned on her, when the world really turned on her, she developed this armor as a way of protecting herself, but it wasn't a natural state. And I think in some ways it was very difficult for her to maintain that distance from people, but she, It had calloused over to the point where she really kind of forgot that magical quality that really defines her in her earlier years.
She kind of had to let that go, which is very tragic.
I am so proud of you and so excited for you.
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