On May 31st, 2014, Morgan Geyser stabbed her onetime best friend Bella Leutner nineteen times, while her new best friend, Anissa Weier, looked on. All three girls were twelve years old. Geyser was living with schizophrenia, and Weier had introduced her to the crowd-sourced internet phantasm known as Slenderman, who first appeared on Something Awful, the message board at the root of chan culture. Together, Geyser and Weier came to believe that Slenderman was demanding a sacrifice in exchange for his protection. Their crime, at once naïve and brutal, sparked a moral panic. Author Kathleen Hale joins Matthew to discuss her reporting on this story in her riveting and compassionate new book, Slenderman: Online Obsession, Mental Illness, and the Violent Crime of Two Midwestern Girls.Slenderman is brimming with tenderness for these girls, who are all creative, confused, scared, and ultimately bound to each other through social contagion and mental illness. Hale's writing is accessible but elliptical as it uncovers jagged details, but never easy answers, about a world that predicts our own. On this podcast we spend a lot of time on the virtual demons that animate conspirituality and QAnon, driving some devotees to violence. Hale's work is good medicine for those who know that internet chaos and mental precarity will remain locked in feedback loops for the foreseeable future. Her meticulous investigation—enriched by hours spent interviewing Morgan Geyser—shows that the road to understanding is always paved with empathy. Show Notes Slenderman — Kathleen HaleAm I being catfished? An author confronts her number one online critic | Books | The Guardian Folklore, Horror Stories, and the Slender Man: The Development of an Internet MythologyThe Slender Man Wiki | Fandom
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Hello everyone, Matthew here with episode 119, We Are Slender Man, featuring an interview with author Kathleen Hale.
Derek, Julian, and I tweet individually under our own names.
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Kathleen Hale has a riveting new book out.
It's called Slender Man, Online Obsession, Mental Illness, and the Violent Crime of Two Midwestern Girls.
Previously, Hale published two young adult novels in the murder mystery genre.
One is called No One Else Can Have You, and the follow-up was Nothing Bad Is Going to Happen.
She also published a collection of essays called Kathleen Hale is a Crazy Stalker, which contains an infamous personal essay first published in The Guardian in 2014, which attracted a wave of online shaming that pushed Hale offline, but also into the arms of the Slenderman mystery.
We spoke about those origins off the top when I sat down with her for a wide-ranging interview, but before we roll that for you, I'm going to open with a review of this book and some stage setting for what Hale has accomplished in it.
But first, a small sketch of how this story fits into our beat here at Conspirituality Podcast.
Internally here, for a while, we've been using the term online religion to describe the ecstasies, rituals, and abuses of conspirituality.
The religion part of the definition is easy enough to understand.
The people we study adopt faith claims.
They have a view of salvation that depends on an anxious alchemy of worldly danger and divine grace.
But it's the online part of the definition that really boots the system up to its full chaotic potential.
Virtual spaces intensify the affects, aesthetics, and real-world impacts of both terror and devotion, because they are limitless, frictionless.
Gamification encourages a kind of stochastic citizenship in which everyone seeks to be the center of an explosive story of salvation.
However, in an online religion, your co-faithful can feel both extremely close by virtue of your shared mission, but also very far away in terms of who will have your back in the real world.
Your skill for connecting the dots can be co-opted and rewarded, but your social and emotional vulnerabilities can be weaponized against you.
And as we've seen with QAnon, figments of the imagination become ghosts in the machine that drive people so mad at home that their rage spills out into the street.
We started this project in 2020, when so much of this momentum was cruising towards a peak that we're still waiting for.
But years before we caught this wave, or really, being older Gen Xers, before we even knew that it was there, Online fervors were already curdling in the ancient social media spaces of 2chan, 4chan, wizard-chan, tumblr, and one of the oldest message boards of all, Something Awful, where a key part of the story that Kathleen Hale writes about begins.
As she explains in the book and in our interview, Slenderman first appeared in 2009 on Something Awful as part of an online art contest.
And I'm just going to put a pin in here to remind you that this is the message board at the center of Dale Buran's study of how the memosphere that came to drive Chan culture and then QAnon evolved.
We talked to Buran about all of this in episode 62.
And just to throw in another link, QAnon reporter Mike Rothschild, our guest in episode 57, noted that some people have dubbed QAnon as Slenderman for Boomers.
But back to 2009.
For this contest, A something awful user named Eric Knudsen created photorealistic scenes of children in playgrounds with a tall faceless spectral figure in the background.
Creepypasta.com, which is a horror fiction sharing board founded in 2008, is where Slenderman became a recurring character.
And it hosts the following description, which was later quoted by the psychiatrist appointed by the court to inform the case at the center of Hale's book.
The Slender Man is a being, male in appearance, who looks like a man with extremely long slender arms and legs.
He also appears to have four to eight long black tentacles that protrude from his back, though different photographs and enthusiasts disagree on this fact, and therefore it is theorized that he can contract these tentacles at will.
He is described as wearing a black suit, strikingly similar to the visage of the notorious Men in Black, and, as the name suggests, appears very thin and able to stretch his limbs and torso to inhuman lengths in order to induce fear and ensnare his prey.
Once his arms are outstretched, his victims are put into something of a hypnotized state where they are utterly helpless to stop themselves from walking into them.
It is often thought, as well, that he enjoys stalking people who become overly paranoid about his existence, purposely giving them glimpses of himself in order to further frighten them.
Now, one very important visual aspect left out by this description is that in place of facial features, we see a smooth, rounded, pale surface, almost like the blank face of a wooden or plastic model that an artist would use for learning how to draw figures.
Now in a book called Folklore, Horror Stories, and the Slender Man, The Development of an Internet Mythology, authors Shira Chess and Eric Newsom sum up the uncanny impact of this image in a really nice way.
They write, Though the Slender Man stories do not normally contain what might be thought of as gore or body horror, through this facelessness we approach some measure of abject horror, a condition often linked with the uncanny.
The facelessness of the Slender Man makes those that experience it acutely aware of their own eyes, mouth, and other features.
Julia Kristeva defines the abject as those elements that we encounter that cause a breakdown in understanding the boundaries of our inner selves and our outer corporeal mortal bodies.
Seeing a corpse reminds us of our own mortality.
Seeing the spilled bodily fluids of others reminds us of the tenuousness of our own bodily intactness.
The abject arouses repulsion, as in these moments too much attention is drawn to our flesh and bones' physicality and concepts of inner self are fractured and disordered.
Yet, Kristeva writes, we are drawn to it.
Quote, One thus understands why so many victims of the abject are its fascinated victims, if not its submissive and willing ones.
Unquote.
We seek out stories like those of the Slenderman because the horrors contained within them make us aware of our own anxieties, the conflicts of our own inner selves, our own mortality.
Now, Chess and Newsom also point out that Slenderman has a long imaginal history with a lot of familiars.
Knudsen, the artist, said he was inspired by the Tall Man from the 1979 film Phantasm.
Slenderman also harkens back to the Gentleman who appeared in Buffy the Vampire Slayer and To the Men in Black.
I look at him and see the invisible man of H.G.
Wells, and Kathleen Hale traces him back to the Pied Piper, given his impact on children.
And on that note, Slenderman, in his own wiki, has a dedicated tab called Relationship to Children, which explains this eerie ambivalence.
Because on one hand, he seems to seek friendship, and may only be able to find it in children who, unlike adults, he can get to trust him.
But on the other hand, he may choose children because he can take longer to nurture their fear, stalking them for years before attacking them as adults.
He's said to brainwash children, to recruit them as proxies for his nefarious deeds, but the caveat is that no one really knows why or what for.
Now, when Chess and Newsome describe Slender Man as being seductive to the conflicts of our own inner selves, they pave the way to understanding the mental health landscape of the Slender Man stabbing, which occurred in May of 2014 in a forest close to Waukesha, Wisconsin.
The main perpetrator, and the focus of Hale's book, is Morgan Geyser, whose own inner selves had been amplified from early childhood by the clinical schizophrenia she likely inherited from her father.
Using extensive interviews and transcripts from court testimony and police interrogations, Hale reports that up until the age of 12, Geyser's inner selves were mostly benign.
They formed a kind of hallucinated Greek chorus that would keep her company.
They would comfort and encourage her, sometimes even protect her.
For instance, Maggie was a girl who was smart and savvy and did her best to keep Morgan out of trouble.
Hale also reports on a boy named Sev, quote, who resembled an anime character, with dark bangs swooping across huge, opalescent gray eyes.
When Morgan pressed her hand against Sev's chest, she felt his heartbeat.
Sometimes he slept in her bed, and Morgan woke up with his drool in her hair.
Morgan's mental landscape made her a loner, except for one classmate, Bella Leutner, who kindly accepted Morgan's alters as part of their friendship circle.
But this was also happening at the cusp of teenagehood, with more intense social and academic pressures, and with Morgan's growing awareness that she was not like other girls.
And while Bella was empathetic, she was also fairly straight-laced in personality terms.
She was neurotypical.
And it wasn't until Morgan met Anissa Ware that she felt she had a friend who mirrored and encouraged her own strangeness.
A friend who didn't merely tolerate her.
Anissa, who'd come through a period of family separation and stress, introduced Morgan to the escapism of an online site called Creepypasta, a fan fiction site.
And there they read and shared their favorite twisted stories, becoming increasingly interested in Slenderman together, in a way that's best summed up in a caption that Anissa found under one of the more famous Slenderman images.
Slender Man's persistence, silence, and outstretched arms horrified and comforted us at the same time." Now, for those of you who have heard us speak about disorganized attachment in relation to undue influence and cultic dynamics, that's about as succinct a description as you'll get.
So, is Slenderman a cult leader?
Did Anissa recruit Morgan?
It's nothing so crude as that.
He was a picture on the internet around which they could spin stories that they could bond over.
But those stories, and the internet more broadly, put Morgan and Anissa into a zone in which safety and terror were hopelessly confused, and they are by no means alone in that.
And here's the part of the story where the sense of things starts to break down in ways that can only be understood by squinting hard at a confluence of online, fantastical, hallucinatory, and paranoid worlds.
The girls, Anissa seemingly driven by morbid enthusiasm and Morgan driven by a need to make sense of her increasingly chaotic inner world, came to believe that Slenderman was both a danger and a source of protection for them.
They began to think of him as constantly surveilling them, assessing them.
So they begin to co-create a story together about earning his favor and protection through sacrifice.
Somehow they decide, through perhaps the unspoken triangulated jealousies of tween friendship, that that sacrifice should be offered by killing Bella Leutner.
They then, this is hard to believe, plan it all out, down to the last detail over months.
But that plan, which included a 300-mile escape hike through the wilderness to Slenderman's imagined mansion in a national forest, equipped only with maxipads, matches, and granola bars, didn't unfold as they expected.
So, I'll let you read how Hale deftly and empathetically walks through that sequence of events.
In our interview, she describes foraging for the little details that would humanize this story, and it shows.
Walking beside her as the reader, I felt like she was carrying a magnifying glass, but also something like a post-hoc rescue kit.
I envisioned it containing more snacks, pajamas, lip balm, graphic novels and chewing gum, maybe stuffed animals.
Things that would comfort these children who were walking off the edge of the world, where Morgan would wield a knife, egged on by Anissa, where Bella would land in the ICU, and Morgan and Anissa would land in jail, prosecuted, absurdly and cruelly, as adults.
Hale's book is brimming with care and tenderness for all of these girls who are creative, confused, scared, and ultimately bound to each other through social contagion and mental illness.
And it's hard to emphasize how lucid the writing is on this.
Hale is acceptable, but elliptical.
She uncovers jagged details, but never easy answers.
It's written in an episodic style that both drives forward but also gives space to breathe, and I actually wondered several times in the middle of reading it whether it was too good, whether Hale couldn't resist fulfilling the rhythmic demands of the young adult fiction she knows so well.
So in the interview I asked about this, and she spoke at length about making the shift to a reality of transcripts and court documents.
And the book also silently carries the weight of the backstory of a writer who stays in the shadows, but also researches through her own shadows.
Because, as I hinted at at the top, Hale came to The Slender Man Stabbing with more than really sharp writing chops and a hometown knowledge of Wisconsin where she grew up.
As I mentioned, she came with her own history of online chaos and shame.
And so, as we discuss in the opening of our interview, Hale heard about the tragedy just months before confessing in a personal essay in The Guardian that she had stalked an anonymous reviewer on Goodreads who had panned her first novel.
And the way she tracks her own spiral and vague plan for retribution in that essay kind of predicts the close attention she would later pay to the events leading up to the assault on Bella Lloydner.
Of course, Hale's story did not end in blood or tragedy.
She pulled herself back from an in-person confrontation and settled for an awkward phone call.
But her article, which was meant to be an exploration of online obsession, outraged the tightly-knit Goodreads ecosystem and led to an online backlash.
And in the wake of it all, Hale was hospitalized in a state psychiatric facility.
She had to leave online life to search for relief and also anonymity.
And with the Slender Man stabbing, she plunged into a story that wouldn't be about her, at least not directly.
And I think if there's lemonade in Hale's cancellation, maybe it came from the fact that she was largely offline throughout the Trump years.
Chatting after our interview, she said that leaving social media had been so good for her mental health, but also for her work.
It also meant that she largely missed the QAnon phase of internet chaos, which I imagine helped her keep her eyes on a more human and manageable story.
And Hale layers that story like an onion.
In one layer, the stabbing was driven by an online obsession.
But deeper than that, it was driven by mental precarity, amplified between Morgan and Anissa in what Anissa's defense team would suggest was a kind of folie a deux.
But the crime at the center of this book, emerging from an online and psychiatric netherworld, is also an entry point into Hale's broader cultural commentary.
In it, she shows an America that scapegoats its children, and abandons every value except retribution.
While Bella struggles to recover from 19 stab wounds, Morgan and Anissa are dragged into a brick-and-mortar version of the Slender Man Mansion, where the state of Wisconsin, governed by super-predator laws dating back to the 1990s, is going to prosecute them as adults.
They are interrogated without lawyers or family support by cops who have no experience with mental health issues and little with children.
They're deprived of acutely needed medication for dangerously long periods of time.
They are denied schooling.
In jail, Morgan decompensates.
And in court, she is presented with an ableist double bind.
On one hand, prosecutors tell her that her psychiatric condition is no excuse for that day's crime.
But on the other hand, they tell her it is real enough that it should condemn her to prison for life.
The elected judge, who seems to continually forget that prosecuting the girls as adults ignores their basic needs, is there to restore a kind of order, which is not really order at all.
So what Hale manages to document is not the culpability of two 12-year-olds who lost their minds one morning in violence, but social and legal frameworks that will do anything to simplify tragedies down to the level of dime store novels, to scapegoat the weirdos, to blame screentime or the internet, when the internet only really reflects the carceral and surveillance state.
It's a culture that believes that relief comes only through punishment.
And this is not an easy mirror to look into.
When Hale first pitched the seed of this story to The Guardian, they turned it down, worried that readers would not take kindly to a book that empathized with attempted murderers, even if they were children with brains barely formed.
And some of that same response is visible today on Goodreads, with some reviewers already saying that focusing on Morgan's mental health and the legal system somehow denigrates the suffering of Bella Leutner and her family.
But I don't see that at all.
The Leutners declined to speak with Hale for the book, but she nonetheless portrayed Bella's trauma, her slow recovery, and her family's support through an upward arc into a more hopeful future with meticulous care.
And a key thing that stood out in the interview for me was Hale describing her process of achieving both compassion and dispassion.
She describes drafting the book three times, in part so that she could wear away her own need to find a villain.
It would be a very different world if this process were available to the courts.
But it is available to us, every day, as we consider the crimes and misdemeanors of individuals and the cultures that make them.
Because we know that as time goes on, internet chaos and mental precarity will remain locked in feedback loops.
The murders and riots precipitated when brain worms like QAnon intersect with immiserated populations will continue.
In this world, the story of Morgan, Anissa, and Bella holds microcosmic and prophetic power, and Hale has served it up in a heart-shaped box for slow and lucid contemplation.
Kathleen Hale, welcome to Conspirituality Podcasts.
Thank you so much for having me.
I wanted to start by seeing if we can share an old home moment, because you grew up close to Waukesha, where the events of Slender Man unfold.
I didn't grow up in Wisconsin, exactly, but I was born again in Wisconsin, because I was in a New Age cult there from 1996 to 1999.
Yeah, it was in Wisconsin Dells, which you probably know.
I had the weirdest trip to Wisconsin Dells.
I used to go there growing up, obviously on vacation because it's an enormous water park, the world's largest outdoor water park.
But I went there later when I was a writer because I wanted to write a story set there and I went during the off-season and during the off-season it's like a couple thousand people live there.
Right.
And you have in the winter all of these like rides and giant panda statues covered in snow and it's the most eerie kind of winter landscape I've ever I'd ever seen.
And in those winters of the couple thousand people, for a number of years, about 500 of them belonged to a cult called Endeavor Academy.
And that's where I was.
And in fact, our group provided a lot of the service workforce for the vacation economy Yeah, so who knows?
I might have served you a milkshake somewhere, and I'm glad I didn't recruit you.
It was a very strange, strange history.
You know, in my pre-recorded lead-in to this interview, I'm offering a really robust outline of what you've accomplished in this timely and very interesting book, so I'm not going to make you do the 101.
And I want to plunge into its really rich themes, because they're core to our podcast beat, especially as related to our coverage of violent incidents related to the QAnon conspiracy theory.
But I want to kind of stay in this personal history positionality zone for a bit, or where we come from as writers and investigators, because part of what we do here on the pod is that, you know, with two of us ourselves being cult survivors, And investigating a lot of cults in the age of COVID, you know, we have to sort out the personal from the professional and, you know, sometimes see where we can't.
So, I just wanted to open by asking about the resonance between Slenderman, which is partly about, as the subtitle has it, online obsession.
And the tangle that, for better or worse, you have been previously known for.
So Sachi Kuhl in BuzzFeed in 2019 called the story Kathleen Hale vs. Goodreads.
And it's a really complex story and I don't want to litigate it or get into the weeds, but the thumbnail is that it revolves around your 2014 article in The Guardian in which you regretfully discussed stalking an anonymous reviewer on Goodreads who you felt unfairly panned your first novel.
And it got to the point of you finding out their identity and getting as far as their front door before pulling yourself back.
And this essay attracted a lot of attention.
Anne Rice took note.
John Mulaney commented on it.
Neil Gaiman took notice.
And that confession, and what some saw as unresolved details within it, It precipitated this wave of online opprobrium that got you booted from Goodreads, it pushed you off of social media, and it contributed to really high levels of stress, as you describe in some other materials.
So I just want to acknowledge that the publication of Slender Man is like a comeback event for you in some ways.
Perhaps it's a change of channel.
But I think it's also rooted in the same time period, the same kind of personal gravitas, because Morgan Geyser stabs Bella Leutner in May of 2014, and you immediately start looking into it.
The Guardian article comes out in October.
And so, by my understanding of the timeline, you're in the initial stages of researching this story about online terror while going through a kind of online chaos.
And in the press package, you describe a subsequent hospitalization that enlightened you to the mental health care disaster that Swallowed up, Morgan and Anissa Ware, your subjects.
So I just want to start by asking, how did life events and the Slenderman story influence each other, for good or ill or both?
I think probably subconsciously they were inextricably entwined.
Consciously, I think that I was seeking out a story that was so very much not about me.
People ask if I'm embarrassed by writing The article that got me cancelled if I'm embarrassed by that piece.
And what I would say is that I'm embarrassed by all the pieces that I wrote about myself online during a time when It was very difficult to get paid for writing internet pieces and the sort of way to market oneself as a woman especially was to join this sort of confessional essay craze where you just open up
Your entire personal life to the internet.
And what happened after I was cancelled and sort of went offline and checked myself in briefly to a psychiatric hospital, I was there for two weeks because I could not escape the counter-stalking that ensued as people wanted to punish me for admitting that I had Internet stalked my Goodreads critic.
It opened my eyes also to just the inequities in our mental health care system.
I had extremely good health insurance at the time through the Writers Guild.
And I also knew the intricacies of the law.
And so I knew I wanted to stay.
I wanted to stay in the hospital because I wanted to be safe.
I wanted to stay there until I felt safe with myself again.
And so after 72 hours, if you don't have health insurance, the price jumps to $2,000 a day for a public hospital in the United States, the one I was at.
And I knew that because of my insurance that it wouldn't cost cents every day I had to say, yes, I'm a danger to myself and others.
Yes, I'm a danger to myself and others.
And so by the end of two weeks, it cost me $150 total.
But if you don't know those rules, if you don't know that you have to say those words, that secret code, To get into the resort of mental health care that we have in this country.
And if you don't have health insurance, and if you don't have specialized health insurance, because most health insurance plans in the US, they don't cover mental health care.
Mental health care is considered like adjacent to medical treatment by a lot of health care providers or a lot of health insurance providers, excuse me.
And I just happened to be part of the Writers Guild and they take for granted that we as writers are going to have mental lapses and so it's really baked into our primary care.
And I came out of there feeling extraordinarily lucky to have been in the situation that I was in, in terms of being able to pay for the care that I received.
And I think it definitely, as I started to report on Morgan's case, it drew me towards the story in a different way because I saw her illness as an illness and I was beginning to understand how far we are as a culture from being able to acknowledge mental illnesses as illnesses.
And when I started covering her case in earnest, which was in 2017, and I started talking to her mother, I was a new mom myself.
And that gave my attachment to the story a completely different level.
I have found, just anecdotally, that when people listen to me talk about this story, or when they talk about this story online, and they are parents, they tend to think, oh my god, what if something like this happened to my child?
As in, what if my child were stabbed?
And of course, I was horrified by Bella's attack.
But I came to the story with a different perspective, which is, what if something like this happened to my child?
I mean, what if my child was sick and I didn't know it and they acted out of confusion and fear in a violent way and I lost them and I had to watch my government punish them And withhold treatment from them, withhold medication.
And so I didn't understand for a little while that that was a unique perspective on the story.
To me, it was so obvious.
And what happened was then I, after I started talking to Angie, I pitched yet another piece to The Guardian, interestingly.
And it was this piece.
It was this book.
It was a piece of this book.
And they were all over it, given my access.
But when they saw that the perspective on the story that I was taking was the quote-unquote villain's perspective, they didn't want to publish it because they were afraid of getting attacked on Twitter.
And I think once I realized how controversial compassionate true crime storytelling would be, it drove me even closer to To this piece and to wanting to talk about this piece and tell it in a real, full, true way.
Well, I thank you for your patience with that question.
You know, I'm asking because the reporting that you had to file for Slenderman is just so complex, so disturbing, so delicate.
You know, it requires enormous clarity, good boundaries, you know, hyper-vigilant ethics, but it sounded like you were able to ground yourself in several ways in preparing to write this book and gaining trust with your sources.
But I did want to ask on that note whether the Geysers or other sources in Wisconsin at the time were aware of this online situation, and if so, did they care about it?
They were absolutely aware.
And you know, like as I was saying before, I thought that by telling this story, I would get a break from writing about myself.
Right.
And I had vowed never to do it again.
But of course, all the pieces of my past, all of the writing about myself, everything I had been through was what was connecting me to the story.
So it was, it was, it was, it could never have come from a non-personal place, even if the story was not about me.
When I talked to Angie, part of what I think drew us together and instigated a sort of
journalistic trust and reciprocity with us was that I understood a fraction of what she had been through being attacked online for being the mother of the quote-unquote Slenderman Stabber and so I had I don't think a lot of other people had empathy for her because the idea is like Well, it's your kid.
It's your fault.
You deserve, you deserve, and also like, if you don't want to see this, don't read it.
And so she was on top of dealing with losing with her daughter, she was dealing with a ton of hate mail, and she was drawn to the comment sections of these articles about Morgan.
And she was looking for someone to, just one commenter to stand up for her.
Just like one kind voice in the crowd.
And so she was engaged in this sort of masochistic, obsessive reading cycle.
And I could empathize with that too.
And so, to my surprise, my cancellation, it didn't get in the way of trust between my sources and myself.
It sounds like with Angie it actually opened a door.
Yeah, it did.
The other question I have about your closeness to the story has to do with your background in fiction.
And I actually considered postponing this interview until I had read your young adult novels, but I also wanted to get this out in a timely manner because, you know, it's launched and in the world now.
But I was able to see that the 2014 book that started all of this, No One Can Have You, Now, it takes 17 chapters in Slenderman for you to build to the point where a cyclist finds Peyton Leutner barely alive off the side of a rural road in Wisconsin.
now now it takes 17 chapters in slender man for you to build to the point where a cyclist finds peyton leutner barely alive off the side of a rural road in wisconsin so did you enter this story with some kind of sense of deja vu
and how did you switch modes from young adult murder mystery to investigating a real young adult attempted murder and its consequences Well, I had to switch modes in one sentence because I wasn't going to be allowed to write young adult fiction anymore.
I wrote No One Else Can Have You in 2000.
10.
And rewrote it over the course of several years.
And I think that when I started writing Slender Man, I felt not so much a sense of deja vu as a sense of coming home.
Like, this is This is the kind of writing that I want to be doing.
This is the kind of writing that I've always wanted to be doing.
And I didn't know it.
And I sort of bounced around between market trends and when I started writing YA fiction.
I mean, the kinds of fiction I was already writing lent themselves to YA.
I had always liked writing from a kid's point of view in college.
But that was also, you know, the writing trend at the time.
Everybody was writing YA in the 2010 times and then I went to confessional essays and then I sort of bounced into into true crime and it just felt so it felt so right.
I had this like real sense of gratitude that these people were opening their lives to me and it seemed to make my job so easy like these people Just by living their lives have written the heart of this story for me and all I have to do is to unfold it and put the details in order, in emotional order.
And it was a huge transition for me because having written fiction and then written about journalism that was largely centered around myself as a character, I was now not in the story and I could not exaggerate even a little bit as one does in fiction when, you know, I couldn't make anything up.
I had to Maintain credibility and I had to speak factually and still try to infuse the story with emotion without inserting myself into the story.
You write in your author's note in the beginning that you were able to interview Morgan Geyser in person for 18 hours and I think more by phone, is that right?
Yeah.
And you learned an immense amount about her internal world, but you weren't able to interview Anissa Ware, and you explain in that note that you reconstructed her internal processes from public records and transcripts and whatnot.
Reading the book, however, it feels like you had equal access to them both.
So, unless that transparency note was there, the reader wouldn't know that you had access to one and not the other.
And so, I wanted to ask you about, you know, being a fiction writer, entering into this new mode and carrying the burden of rich imaginative powers.
You know, it sounds like you really did have to give yourself new guardrails for this process while reconstructing her experience.
Was that difficult?
Yes, it was very difficult.
The reason that it took me five years to write is not because I was like walking around every day for five years interviewing people and then inputting it into the book as I went.
It's because I rewrote the book Three times, and each draft was very different, and they were all working toward a compassionate, dispassionate account, full account of the crime.
So earlier drafts were a bit more experimental in terms of the structure, like jumping around in time, and they also sort of We're reaching around for somebody to blame in a story for what had happened post-arrest, not for the crime.
And what I realized as I drafted these things that were not working is that there was no villain in this story and I needed to stop looking for one in terms of what happened after Morgan's arrest.
And then the other thing is that it needed to be told in consecutive order because the story itself was so unbelievable that it needed to be structured in a simple way.
But the most fun part for me, I mean for lack of a better word, it's not a very happy, sunny, fun story, but was taking these details that I had Foraged from these interviews with Morgan, her family, and also from the immense amount of court documents that I went through.
And putting them into a timeline so that they helped amplify and texturize the story that I knew was already there.
Now, to that point, you had a lot of contact with Morgan.
You weren't able to interview Anissa.
I guess the test of how you got those internal Motivations and Thoughts Right is hearing feedback from them about how the book is.
Do you know whether either of them have read it?
I don't know about Anissa because I'm not in touch with her unfortunately.
Morgan does not want to read the book and I don't want her to read the book and that's just because for Morgan she was in a state of psychosis leading up to the stabbing and then remained in an escalating state of psychosis for 19 months even though she had post-arrest a schizophrenia diagnosis.
I mean, it's hard for anyone who doesn't have schizophrenia to understand what psychosis feels like, but it's very bad for your brain.
You can imagine that if I'm in this room right now surrounded by hallucinations who are talking to me, I'm not going to have a lot of self-awareness.
Also, there's a lot of negative symptoms around schizophrenia that just basically Take away your emotions.
So all there's room for is this like fire of voices and faces.
And so when she was finally administered antipsychotics, it was like waking up from a dream.
And she finally understood what she had done and that she had done it for no reason.
And she missed Bella terribly.
And in her mind, it was like they had just been friends, you know, even though it was More than a year ago or whatever.
She didn't remember very much from sixth grade and that's when she slid into her first suicidal depression.
And so at this point, it's like she feels so much remorse and hates herself so much for what she did that Revisiting the crime by reading my book, I think, would be dangerous for her physical safety because she has a tendency toward suicidal depression and suicidal ideation.
And so I would never want her to read this book because the first chunk of it is a minute-by-minute retelling of the crime.
Which could be extremely dangerous to her psyche.
And I'm not sure that it would be great for Anissa or for Peyton to read that either.
Even though they all come across as strong, resilient, young women who have their individual character arcs within the book.
And each of them grows in incredible ways through this experience.
And in spite of it, but I don't think I would pick it, I don't think I would put it on their reading list necessarily.
You were very deliberate about finishing their arcs, all of them really, on an upward plane, on a plane towards some kind of empowerment given the limitations of their situations.
But it really strikes me as like an incredible, I don't know if risk is the right word, but like it's an amazing choice for a writer to make to be able to recount a story like this and know that the subjects probably shouldn't read it.
And my question specifically around Morgan, with regards to how you sort this out for yourself, is that, you know, when someone, I mean, she's currently medicated for schizophrenic psychosis and doing well on it.
And she has spoken with you about her memories, but she's done it from what is essentially prison.
And so, I guess my question is the extent to which she can approve in an informed way With regard to how these really intimate struggles are going to be in print for posterity.
Like, if this is a book that she probably doesn't want to read, how is she, or were you able to have an open conversation with her about its value in the world, nonetheless?
Yeah, so I didn't need to, I didn't need to like, Pitch the book to Morgan.
I was introduced to Morgan by her mom, who knew what I was doing and had read a portion of it in its original iteration as an article.
And Angie saw that my perspective on the case was different.
And Morgan began to call me from the locked psychiatric ward where she still lives.
And so we were talking on the phone, and she knew that I was writing a book about it.
And we mostly talked about her writing, because she's a prolific writer.
But when we started meeting in person, I was always very aware of the fact that she was 15, turning 16 years old, and has schizophrenia.
And I wanted to be very sure and very certain that she understood what was going on even though, you know, she was lucid and very, very smart and understood a lot of things.
So I would ask her, you know, that I'm writing a book about you, right?
And she always understood.
So I was reassured that she knew what was happening and I didn't feel As though I was exploiting her.
She told me, you know, I said, you understand that I'm writing a book about you?
And she said, yeah, if anyone was going to do it, I would want it to be you.
So she did have an understanding of the fact that that's what I was doing.
And we've talked about it since.
Her not wanting to read the book is not a product of her being surprised that it's happening.
Her not wanting to read the book is rooted in her own self-awareness around her triggers and her mental health issues.
And I really respect that, that she has learned to know herself in that way and understands what she can handle and what she cannot.
So I wanted to return to what you said about rewriting the book three times.
And you described each pass as an attempt to further humanize all of the subjects, but also to erode the specter of the villain, which would be a staple archetype in something like a young adult novel.
And that brings me to Slenderman himself.
Who is he, and is he the villain?
So Slender Man is a character who emerged from a 2009 Photoshop contest online.
People were trying to make scary pictures and he was featured in the two winning photos.
They both pictured children playing in the foreground and then a lanky figure watching them from afar.
And they were really, really good Photoshop.
It was a really good Photoshop job and the photos are very cool and worth looking at.
And what ended up happening is as the internet developed and you began to see little enclaves for creative writing, for fan fiction, for horror message boards,
People began getting together on a site called creepypasta.com, among other places, it's not the only place like this, and writing fan fiction about these crowdsourced characters and Slenderman began to show up in these stories because people really liked these photos of him and they began making their own photos and writing their own urban legends about him.
And so the discourse around him grew, but not to the extent that you would imagine when reading the articles about this stabbing.
He was actually a bit of a fringe character on this site.
And he was also very much a PG, PG-13 kind of character, as are most of the characters on Creepypasta.
The stories themselves are very tame, and many of them are clearly written by children.
But of course, after the crime occurred, Creepypasta was painted as sort of like a satanic cult.
And Slenderman himself was He was elevated to this guru-like figure, when in reality he was nothing grander than the star of old-fashioned urban legends that you or I might have told around a campfire instead of online.
That's extraordinary to think about that in order to kind of look for a villain this relatively benign but sort of disturbing figure, imaginative figure, has to become larger than what he was.
But I wanted to ask about his layered meanings as well that might be sort of beyond the, I don't know, like the vocab level of the readers of Creepypasta, but I'm wondering if these Kind of influences are present, because as soon as Morgan and Anissa enter the Wisconsin justice system,
where they are absurdly prosecuted as adults.
It's almost as if they're entering something that children might be aware of as being part of the outside world, that perhaps there are brick-and-mortar versions of these online labyrinths that they are creating for themselves.
So did you start to see a parallel between the bizarro world of creepypasta and the Kafka-esque world of the courts?
I did in the sense that the laws that were positioned to come crashing down on Morgan and Anissa were based around and inspired by this super predator theory in the 90s and
It has turned out that the so-called super predator is as fictional as Slenderman doesn't exist and so these laws themselves are based on a fake theory that was long ago debunked and
That part of it was very surreal and felt very like through the looking glass that we were sitting around and watching these girls get prosecuted as adults in a system that had been built upon theories, science that was as fake as anything on Creepypasta.
And as far as that world that they were creating or engaging with, there are other sort of intuitions that I think might come forward through a character like Slenderman.
You point out, I think, in the book that there are aesthetic relationships between him and Agent Smith in The Matrix, or I think you reference Men in Black as well.
And so it seems that Slenderman also becomes an archetype for maybe the police state, or even surveillance capitalism.
Something or somebody who's always watching, always reaching into private spaces with many arms and tentacles.
Is that fair?
Yeah, I think that Slenderman represents a lot of different things to a lot of different people, and I could definitely see that.
Being in one interpretation, I think it's really smart.
I think the more ancient parallel is that he's really just the newest sort of iteration of the Pied Piper of Hamelin, both in terms of the mythology that's been built around him online and also In terms of how Morgan and Anissa saw him or wanted to see him.
One of the things that makes this book such a compelling read is that it normalizes, and I would say almost naturalizes, Morgan's clinical schizophrenia.
And in an interview that's included in the press kit, you say that in the text, quote, I treat her hallucinations as living, breathing people because that's what they are to her.
And perhaps in seeing things from her perspective, people will understand that this crime was committed by a person and not a monster.
And that brings me to the moment of the stabbing itself that you describe, because you report that at least in that moment and over the prior day leading up to the attack in the forest, it's not actually Morgan's hallucinations that are mainly pushing her over the edge and into physical violence.
Rather, it's this kind of long, entangled planning process that was co-created with Anissa, and that Morgan, in her social isolation, is depending on Anissa for a kind of self-worth and validation.
So, in some ways, Slenderman hovers in the background as a hallucination for Morgan, but without Anissa giving her explicit and urgent encouragement at the scene of the crime, It feels like it might not have happened.
Do you think that that's fair?
I think it's absolutely fair to say that on the day of the crime and leading up to the crime, the voice that was encouraging Morgan to do this was not a voice in her head and it was not a visual hallucination.
It was Anissa's voice.
Morgan had, and still has, a debilitating disability.
And before Anissa came along, Bella had basically become Morgan's babysitter.
And was doing a very caring job of keeping her out of trouble at school and helping her fly under the radar.
And she also, you can imagine, you know, at the age of 9, 10, 11, it's a very loving gesture to pretend to hear and see someone else's imaginary friends.
And she did that for Morgan as well.
She pretended to see and hear Morgan's hallucinations.
Of course, he didn't know that that's what they were.
And when Anissa came along, she really wanted to take over, I think, Morgan's, she wanted to take over the role of Morgan's caretaker.
A number of times that they were out and about around their neighborhood, one in particular where she really made excuses for Morgan's behavior, pretending to be her sister.
Don't worry about her.
I've got her because Morgan was behaving in a bizarre way because Morgan was very confused and having trouble keeping things together.
And so leading up to the crime and on the day of the crime, Anissa was sort of Morgan's translator for whatever reason they had concocted.
Around needing to stab Bella, and Morgan said multiple times during her interrogation that Anissa had made it seem necessary.
And so she sort of distilled all the things that they had been finding and talking about online and helped Morgan make sense of them.
And unfortunately, in the end, she was encouraging her to do something that was going to change all three girls' lives forever, for the worse.
So what we have then is a court system that, in a very ableist way, is attributing Morgan's violence to her psychosis, when even if she does suffer from psychotic episodes, there's no prior evidence that that has led to violence.
And that what is closer to the truth is that there's a kind of internet-driven social contagion.
Is that fair, do you think?
I think that when we're talking about Morgan's schizophrenia in the context of Slender Man, one of the most important things to remember is that Slender Man was not Morgan's hallucination.
He reminded her of Something she had seen in the mirror when she was five years old, something that was very scary.
But other than that, her hallucinations were very, very positive presences in her life, which is something that you don't really hear about when people discuss schizophrenia.
When you discuss schizophrenia, you often hear or think about Demons in people's heads, devils standing behind them, God talking in their ear, telling them to do terrible things.
But for Morgan, her hallucinations were kind, encouraging, wanted her to be a good person.
That was really nice of you, Morgan.
They would say, you're such a good friend, Morgan, you know, when she did something nice.
And it just happened that she was sort of devolving into her first experience with full-blown psychosis.
She was introduced to Slenderman by Anissa, and she confided in Anissa that Slenderman reminded her of this figure she'd seen in the mirror.
And Anissa, unfortunately, helped Morgan to make sense of that in a way that was very destructive.
But yes, the ableist discourse in the courtroom cannot be overstated in this case.
Morgan's petitions for release from hospital have been doomed because, despite the fact that her doctors have all testified that she should be out of there, it doesn't matter.
It's up to the judge on her case, the elected judge.
And the argument from the prosecution is this circular argument that you cannot You can't fight with it, which is that she will always have schizophrenia.
That is a fact.
And their argument is that because she will always have schizophrenia, she will always be dangerous.
And so then you get into this territory where you need to pick apart that aspect of it, which is incredibly hard in a society that can barely talk about mental illness at all.
And in terms of schizophrenia, schizophrenia is a mental illness that is really demonized.
I don't think I came across it in the book, but I'm wondering if the defense ever challenged the prosecution to make a causal case that connected psychosis to the attack, because the circular argument is built on that flaw, isn't it?
It is.
It's really surreal to watch these arguments unfold because on one hand the prosecution is basically arguing that mental illness doesn't exist or shouldn't be accounted for in this case.
Right, right.
And at the same time, they're using the fact of Morgan's mental illness as reason to keep her locked up.
So it just spins and spins and spins.
Yeah, you know, that really drives home the paradox of at first arguing against the ruling of not guilty by reason of insanity, but then pointing out that, of course, well, you know, the subject is insane and so they can't be trusted.
That's kind of incredible.
Yeah, when it served their purposes, they would acknowledge that she had schizophrenia, but only in order to argue that she should be locked up for the rest of her life.
To your point about finding villains, which is what the sort of legal framework seems to be designed to do, There don't seem to be any tools for investigating or prosecuting or just sort of understanding this very complex set of social circumstances.
It seems at best the legal system will express, you know, a limited, as you're saying, empathy for the person that it pathologizes, but that The primary task is to locate blame in one single place, as if, you know, there's a single crime, it must have a single cause.
So is that part of what you were trying to unpack?
Yeah, I was trying to unpack this idea that I found that so many of us take for granted in the United States, which is that when someone commits a heinous, unforgivable crime, they should be punished forever. unforgivable crime, they should be punished forever.
Every single day, in every single way, until they die.
Even outside of this case, you see that all the time.
For instance, felons in our country, when they have served their time, they cannot do anything to make money.
They can't work.
It affects everything.
And so the recidivism rate is very high because in order to make money, many former inmates commit new crimes and then they go back.
So that's one thing.
You're just not allowed to move on.
There's no idea.
We've completely tossed out the idea of rehabilitation.
The prison system is completely built around punishment.
The prisons are overcrowded.
There are number one public mental health care resource.
And in Morgan's case, you know, you saw that punishment aspect, that emphasis on this person must suffer and suffer and suffer played out in real time.
First with the adult prosecution, which is, you know, we prosecute children as adults in this country and that shouldn't happen at all, but we just sort of take for granted that it does.
And then with the withholding of medication, everyone seemed just sort of resigned to the fact that Morgan would remain in psychosis until if, if she were found not guilty by reason of insanity, maybe then she would receive emergency medical treatment.
And there just was no impetus behind getting her basic human care.
And I felt like that linked up with our country's need to see criminals criminalized in order to feel like justice had been served.
It's a nation obsessed with Christianity and completely bereft of forgiveness.
Yeah, ironically for such a Christian nation, we do not forgive people's trespasses.
One other aspect of the way in which you normalize Morgan's experience, and I think this feels increasingly familiar in a world made more fragmented and perhaps schizophrenic by social media and the conspiracy theories that it drives, is that, you know, with
Slenderman, we also have a parallel in, let's say, Q of QAnon.
Different genre, different age group, different target demographic, they have different agendas, but they operate in similar ways in the sense that they are online avatars with deep archetypal power that can drive in real life action.
So I'm wondering if you were also sort of chewing on that, because this book seems to have a kind of predictive power now.
I don't know enough about QAnon to speculate about the connections between this case and that, but I definitely, I felt the power of the internet in every sense of this case, but surprisingly Slenderman's power seemed very minor and weak compared to the power of commenters in certain sections of coverage of this case, like Anissa's live trial.
Comments under articles about the adult prosecution and just people saying that that wasn't enough, that what they wanted for these girls was the death penalty.
And what I found that I was looking at in those comment sections were voters.
These are voters in Judge Boren's Electorate and these are the voices of the people who maintain his authority and they do not seem to know that the death penalty has been outlawed for Oh my, such a long time in Wisconsin.
But they want these girls to die.
They want them to... It's not enough that Morgan and Nisa were facing 100 years in adult prison.
People online wanted them to die.
And so I sort of was very, very aware at all times of the fact that the power that the internet holds and what these people were communicating and to whom.
And it's not just It's not just a separate reality.
The internet is not a separate reality.
We live in multiple realities now, seamlessly.
And we can't dismiss the stuff that we see, the discourse we see unfolding online.
And I think we need to switch our attention from demonizing screen time for children You know?
And really start to think about what the opinions are that are circulating and what that means for our communities.
It's really salient in my own life because I am in that Gen X position of being fairly stressed on a daily basis about the difference between, are my children engaging with screens or are they engaging with content?
And yeah, I'm starting to get a little bit more relaxed or at least integrated about that.
Demonizing the technology itself is a real bypass with regard to why the technology exists and what needs it's actually fulfilling.
And speaking of that, you know, you do this great job of turning a spotlight onto You know these internet spaces that these girls are using and That's really important.
I think because recently there's been so much attention paid to young men on reddit on the Chan boards Dale Buran was a recent guest of ours and his book has been a real guidepost for us It's called it came from something awful and it's about how
You know, Chan culture and various, you know, message board environments created the memosphere that actually propelled the, you know, kind of deconstruction of democracy over the last eight years or so.
But it seems that if Girls like Morgan and Anissa, and of course now we're talking eight years ago, ten years ago, if they want to carve out their own online spaces apart from misogyny, let's say, they're still going to face their own challenges.
And so I'm wondering what your read is on how girls who are now their age are finding their own spaces online.
Gosh, you know, it's such a good question.
I'm not really sure just because it's not, it's not my field of expertise.
But there is a great, there's a great book about girls and the internet by Nancy Jo Sales called American Girls.
And it just talks about how difficult it is to, to be a digital native and be growing up with Such interconnectedness and then especially like, you know, girls and boys and trading pictures and all of that stuff.
But for Morgan and Anissa, the internet was really like their tin can telephone.
And I think something that it drove home for me is that the relationships that we have that exist online don't always translate well into real life interactions.
Morgan and Anissa were incredibly close via email.
They drew closeness with each other from these internet horror stories, but
In the flesh, they were less compatible and so I thought a lot about them sitting in their respective condo units across the same condo complex and just communicating at night via email and writing about these stories and how it assuaged their loneliness but was the building block to a friendship that maybe should never have happened.
It's somewhat nostalgic, but I distrust that response to think about how a relationship formed through this tin can network seems to be different from, you know, I can feel this kind of like Conservative response, which is that, oh, you know, well, back in the 70s, we played outside.
And that's how we, you know, that's the only way we would have known each other.
And so we would have known that, you know, a certain, you know, I don't know that that there wouldn't have been it's like the video game problem of You know, does violence on screens translate into violence in real life?
I can feel this sense that, you know, there will be some people older than me or my age who will say, you know, this wouldn't have happened back then because
We wouldn't, because those girls would have been playing or knowing each other in a reality-based environment, you know, in which physical actions had consequences and in which, you know, the fantasy of actually killing somebody couldn't kind of get unleashed from this virtual environment into the real world so easily.
But I don't know.
I don't know if there's any merit to that at all.
I think it's actually patently false.
Blaming new media in this case, blaming screens, would allow a parent like you or I to be like, okay, now we can control, we can make sure this doesn't happen to our kids because we'll limit screen time, we'll this and that, we'll demonize it in our conversations.
But you look all the way back to 1924 with the Leopold and Loeb case in Chicago.
Which was another case of child-on-child violence, and that was blamed on detective novels.
So there's always going to be some new fangled form of entertainment that confuses older generations and makes them defensive about their lack of knowledge on the subject.
And is easily blamed and easily made into a scapegoat when horrifying things happen.
And that's just, we have such a rich history of blaming new media for child on child violence.
Columbine's another example.
Marilyn Manson, video games, as you said.
And in fact, of course Slenderman in this case was not the cause, he was a symptom of something else that was going on.
And if the girls had not had access to him, I think that they would have invented another magical framework through which to channel their fear and confusion and lead them down the wrong, they would have led themselves down the wrong path one way or another.
So has this case provoked any legislative interest in amending the laws that defined it, such as whether 12-year-olds are going to be scrutinized as adults?
Yeah, oh my gosh.
In Wisconsin, children as young as 10 are prosecuted in adult court in cases of violent crime.
10 years old.
And you and I have kids and we know how young that is.
We know how young 12 is.
We know how young 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20, 21, 22 is.
And the brain science is like very clear.
And I know that science unfortunately has become such a politicized word, but it, I, so I won't even get into it because it's, it's like, who am I, who am I convincing?
But the, so the legislature that prosecutes children as adults in places like Wisconsin was set up in the 1990s.
Because of John DiLulio Jr.' 's theory about super predators, which was a racially coded word for young people growing up in quote-unquote urban areas who were raised in quote-unquote moral poverty and were becoming quote-unquote kitty criminals or wolf packs.
He referred to them as animals.
And he was a Christian fundamentalist and he worked, he was a professor, a sociology professor at Princeton at the time.
And he came out with this theory and right away all these laws were built to prosecute children more harshly because it was decided that they shouldn't be treated like children because they weren't children.
They were monsters.
They were super predators.
And this got support from Democrats and Republicans.
Hillary Clinton supported it.
It's now associated with Republicans because they are the ones who will not change these laws.
But Hillary Clinton, Joe Biden, it was a bipartisan issue.
Everyone was really excited to come down hard on kids.
And just a few years after this legislation was passed across the nation, John Delilio Jr.
came out and was like, I made it all up.
Sorry.
Actually, he never said sorry, but, um, and he, nothing happened to him.
He went on to work for the Bush White House.
And the laws set up in service in his theory persist to this day and it has become almost impossible to dismantle them because tough on crime laws are so, so politicized and so wrapped up in the GOP mission.
And so I would be incredibly surprised if this book moved the dial at all, especially somewhere like Wisconsin.
I did a ton of research on juvenile justice laws And interviewed a ton of juvenile justice advocates and they all agreed that although they have had a lot of success raising the minimum age in other states in the United States, Wisconsin, for some reason, is a tough spot and they have just been unable to move the dial even a little bit, even a little bit there.
I mean, You would think that right now we would possibly be able to come together across party lines to agree that 10-year-olds should not be sent to adult prison, but even that is, it's just a non-starter and we can't even have the conversation.
It's taken me till this moment to think about our nine-year-old becoming ten in October and then suddenly being adult criminally responsible for something ill-considered or indoctrinated that he did.
Yeah, it's unimaginable actually.
Yeah.
Maybe we can imagine a much better world in which there's room for mature and empathetic legal response to something like this.
Can you walk me through what would ideally have happened following the arrest of Morgan and Anissa?
Yeah, definitely.
In an ideal world, in a different country, you know, in a country that we might consider one of our peers, for instance, after Morgan and Anissa committed this awful crime, what would have happened was instead of being shepherded into separate interrogation rooms and interrogated without a parent or an advocate of any kind present, they would have immediately
Have a responsible adult assigned to them to sit with them and they would not be interviewed by themselves as children.
That would be step one.
And then they would never have been charged in an adult court.
Their case, they would have gone to a juvenile detention center, which they did, but because they were considered adults in Wisconsin, They didn't receive the juvenile resources that were available to them at the juvenile detention center.
So in an ideal world, they would have had a responsible adult or a legal advocate in their interview, and then they would have gone to the juvenile detention center where they would have been assigned a social worker, and that social worker would have made sure that they were provided with all of the medical, including psychiatric,
Care that they needed and also that they had the resources the rehabilitative resources and the therapeutic resources That that they desperately needed and then they would have progressed into the juvenile justice system where they could that where they would have been quote-unquote sentenced to to a period of time in a juvenile prison and
But they would have been released when they reached the age of 17 or 18.
Juvenile justice advocates all agree that it should be 18, just given the other laws that we have in the country around adulthood and what that looks like.
And they would have gotten out, but they would have been provided with resources and oversight until the age of 25, potentially.
And so that would have allowed them to serve out their time in a place that was geared toward children and After leaving that place, they would have had resources provided to them that would help integrate them back into the community, and they would have received medical care, and they would have received therapy, and they would have had help.
And ostensibly, to be released at 18, they would have also been able to complete high school.
Yes.
Within.
And, of course, all of that is contingent on You know, consistent monitoring, and I imagine that if their behaviors are stable, then that's good.
If their behaviors decline, or if there are things that are worrying, or if the psychiatrists report, well, you know, I'm concerned about this or that, then that would be entered into a court record, because there would be a series of hearings about You know, okay, are they ready for release?
Are they not?
Are we still happy with all of this?
It's not like the option that Judge Bowren did not take is somehow unmonitored or volatile or something like that.
Absolutely not.
I mean, if anything, it's the more individuated the care is, the more oversight there is.
Like kids like this just get lost in prison.
And I'm so glad that you brought up education.
Because, you know, I...
In a juvenile justice system, they do receive, they go to school.
That is, they go to school.
And without taking into consideration whether that schooling is any good, there is school and that is mandatory because they are children.
Right.
And Morgan stopped receiving an education at the age of 15.
Her quote-unquote schooling at Winnebago consisted of maybe, if the teacher showed up at all, 90 minutes per week and she was not educated.
She was given an iPad with games, with educational games.
And so her education, I mean, really her education stopped at the age of 12 because she was in psychosis.
And I just, I can't imagine that she learned anything during that time.
In fact, she lost the ability to read and do basic math.
There was huge cognitive decline centered around the psychosis itself.
And so that's what we do to kids who are shepherded into the adult justice system, is we take away their education.
And then when and if they do get out of prison, they have no education.
They're not only a felon, but they have no education.
Whereas if they go into the juvenile system, they receive a high school education, And when they get out, their record is wiped so that they can actually go and get a job at Home Depot, at wherever.
They can go out into the world and begin to make some money and start over.
And for adult felons, there is no starting over.
So we're basically sentencing children to the same terrible, terrible life that we sentence our adult inmates.
You know, I know that you went through thousands of pages of court transcripts.
I don't know if this made it into the book because I can't recall it.
But did Morgan's defense argue for the necessity for her to continue to receive education as well as proper medical care?
Yeah, they did.
And Judge Boren's response was like, well, somebody should do some somebody teach her something.
Somebody.
Yeah, she should have an education.
She should have medical care.
He never.
Stopped to consider.
I don't even know.
It seemed like he didn't even understand the laws that he was working within.
Right.
Because at every turn, he upheld her adult status.
But he also, during the moments that her defense team would bring up her lack of education in this system or the fact that she was still unmedicated, he would sort of bristle and be like, well, somebody should take care of that.
Not realizing that because of her adult status, which he has had upheld, she didn't have access to those interventions.
On some level, he's unaware of the cruelty of his domain.
Yeah, totally.
Nonetheless, without the education and its opportunities, you report that Morgan has been writing a lot?
Yeah.
That she's shared that with you?
Are you able to say anything about that or is that private?
I mean, no, I can talk about it.
She gave me permission to use her writing and things in the book.
Morgan is an artist.
She has an artist's spirit and she cannot stop making things.
She cannot stop.
She has written Like five or six novels.
She writes short stories.
Her work is fascinating.
It's something that's interesting about Morgan's writing is that all of her protagonists are boys and they're all in some kind of dystopian reality.
And often they are in a testing facility.
Wow.
A sort of medical environment.
Yeah.
Wow.
And they often have fathers who pass down to them some kind of unwanted burden.
Right.
And so it's very easy to read into that, right?
And to say, Morgan inherited her schizophrenia from her father, and now as a result, she's in this arcane facility.
And so she does explore, she explores her personal reality through fiction, but she had told me that the reason that her protagonists are all boys is because she needs that separation.
If it were a girl, it's just too close to the bone, it cuts too close.
And so it's interesting that, to me, that all of her protagonists are boys.
Does she have aspirations for other people to read her books?
I think that Morgan's aspirations are pretty limited, given everything that's happened to her.
What she has learned is that nothing good will ever happen, and so I think she keeps her hopes and dreams pretty Low.
But yeah, she writes young adult fiction.
She writes a lot of it.
And her friend in the hospital, Katie, is always telling her, which I think is very sweet and tender, that her books are going to be bestsellers and everyone's going to love them.
Hey, everybody.
You know, sometimes the ends of interviews are a little bit funny.
Kathleen really found the perfect place to land on this topic of Morgan's own writing and imagination, but I didn't hear it clearly enough in the moment, so I breezed over that into the next question, but the question wasn't that important.
And then I said so out loud, but then I forgot to close out because we were suddenly chatting about Wisconsin and young adult fiction and I pressed stop.
And anyway, I don't have a proper goodbye here, so I'll do it now.
Thanks, Kathleen, for your time.
Thanks for a brilliant book.
I hope it goes far.
And listeners, thank you for your attention and your feedback, which is always welcome.
