LEMON DROP | The American Prison System is Modern Slavery with Fox & Rob Richardson
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Who are Fox and Rob Richardson and why is their story significant?
Hello, everyone. Welcome to a very special edition of the Don Lemon Show. Today, I'm chatting with a pair of particularly inspiring people. They have been a couple. Their name is Fox and Rob Rich. They've been a couple for 38 years. They survived 21 of those years as an incarcerated family. Wait till you hear their story. It's fascinating. In 1997, Rob, a first-time offender in Louisiana, was sentenced to 61 years in prison as a result of an absurd crime. Overzealous prosecution. In the years to follow, Fox spearheaded a valiant campaign to secure her husband's freedom, a goal she achieved in the summer of 2018. And in the years since, they have worked as powerful advocates for prison reform. In 2020, they were the subjects of the Oscar-nominated documentary, Time.
named one of Barack Obama's favorite films of the year. And now, Fox and Rob are back with a sequel, Time 2, Unfinished Business. Hi, how are you guys doing? Hey. We are with D. Don Lemon. Life just can't get better. Thank you so much for joining us. It's indeed an honor to have both of you on. Rob, I just provided the audience with this brief context of your life. And I mean, it's been fascinating. I know it's been tough, but I'm sure the folks at home want to know. Talk to us about your time behind bars, how it affected your family. 21 years. That's a long time, man.
Yes, indeed. Ken, thank you enough for having us on the show and being able to to share our story, because the injustice that happened to us, we find we found that far too many times. It's not just a rare thing that happened or an unusual thing that happened, but it happens more frequently than not. For those that are listening for the first time as a couple, Fox and I are known as a as Fox and Rob.
How did Rob Richardson receive a 61-year sentence and what was the family’s immediate impact?
And we're a formerly incarcerated couple who spent more than 21 years behind bars before receiving clemency in 2018. Probably one of the biggest takeaways that we had from that experience is knowing that to be free is to free others. That being said, 1997, our family, Fox and I were high school sweethearts. We met in 1987 and decided to exchange nuptials 10 years later after an on-again, off-again relationship. Began to pursue what we thought was the American dream. And that was opening up our city, Shreveport, its first hip hop clothing store. We ran off to Florida and eloped and got married in a little wedding chapel, came back a few days later. started what would become our family's first business.
And the investor pulled out on us. And in a lapse in judgment, as people become desperate, people have a tendency to do desperate things. And we made a desperate attempt to regain financial solvency by robbing a bank in an effort to save our business. And it didn't work.
And it wasn't just our business as well, Don. It was all the things. I just lost my job. The brand new house that we had bought, if it was a car, we call it a lemon, no pun intended, but it had a crack foundation. The first rain came in and literally took off the roof with some damages that we were not financially prepared to take care of. And so when you just put that witch's brood together, it can create problems. quite a commotion in one's spirit. And if you lose sight of what is really important in life, because what's really important, we already had, and that was family. And so on that doom day, dark day, we traded in what we already had for something that we thought would make what we had better.
And we would spend the next 30 years of our life trying to tell people, one, this is not the road to take. If you are black and in America, you cannot afford to commit a crime because the statistics, the studies, all of the research has shown that you will not be treated fair and impartially, that you will not be treated as your white counterparts when they go before the system. And so with that understanding, it has become a mission of ours to understand that one, we must work to liberate other people, to reclaim our loved ones from this system of 2.3 million people being behind bars, the world's largest incarcerator, and being able to spread that message by using media.
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