Speaker 1: Pushkin from Pushkin Industries. This is Deep Background, the show
Speaker 1: where we explore the stories behind the stories in the news.
Speaker 1: I'm Noah Feldman. Today we speak to a globally best
Speaker 1: selling novelist who has a special knack for angering the
Speaker 1: Turkish government. Her name is Elif Shafak. In two thousand
Speaker 1: and six, at the height of her fame, she was
Speaker 1: charged with insulting Turkishness because one of the characters in
Speaker 1: her novel The Bastard of Istanbul, referred to the murder
Speaker 1: of Armenians during World War One as a genocide. That
Speaker 1: case was eventually dismissed, but last year Turkish authorities began
Speaker 1: a new investigation into her past work for what they
Speaker 1: called quote crimes of obscenity. One thing that the Turkish
Speaker 1: authorities have not been able to do, however, is to
Speaker 1: keep Turkish readers and readers all over the world from
Speaker 1: devouring Elif's books. The government also hasn't been able to
Speaker 1: keep critics around the world from praising Eliaf's books either.
Speaker 1: Her most recent novel, Ten Minutes thirty eight Seconds in
Speaker 1: This Strange World was shortlisted for the twenty nineteen Booker Prize.
Speaker 1: The novel is about a prostitute named to Quila Leila,
Speaker 1: and it begins at the end of her story with
Speaker 1: her body found in a dumpster. A Leif joined me
Speaker 1: from London, where she now lives, to talk to me
Speaker 1: about that new book and much more. Let me begin
Speaker 1: by asking a little bit about your process of writing.
Speaker 1: This is your eleventh novel, and you did something rather
Speaker 1: extraordinary and among writers, which is that you wrote many
Speaker 1: of your first novels in Turkish, your first language, and
Speaker 1: then you switched to writing in English. And as I
Speaker 1: was thinking about it, I thought, that's even harder than
Speaker 1: what Joseph Conrad did, because he, of course spoke Polish
Speaker 1: as his first language, and then he started but when
Speaker 1: he started writing novels, he started writting them in English.
Speaker 1: What you have done is more like what Nabokov did,
Speaker 1: writing many of his novels first in Russian and then
Speaker 1: turning to writing novels in English. What moved you to
Speaker 1: make that transition? And then I'd love to hear about
Speaker 1: some of the challenges and gifts that derive from that.
Speaker 1: I appreciate it. It is a challenge, and the master
Speaker 1: want to be honest, because I did not grow up
Speaker 1: in a bilingual environment, and I started learning English at
Speaker 1: the age of ten in Spain in Madrid, so at
Speaker 1: the time Spanish was my second language and English became
Speaker 1: my third. Turkish is my mother tongue, and of course,
Speaker 1: to me, English is an acquired language, which means I'm
Speaker 1: an outsider in this language, and I'm an immigrant, you know,
Speaker 1: a latecomer. And I think, like all immigrants know, there's
Speaker 1: always a gap between the mind and the tongue. When
Speaker 1: you're an immigrant, you always try to say more, but
Speaker 1: in a way you end up saying less. Maybe you
Speaker 1: want to crack better jokes, but there's always is a gap.
Speaker 1: And I think that gap can be quite intimidating. But
Speaker 1: if we learn not to be intimidated by that, I
Speaker 1: think it can also be very inspiring. In a nutshell,
Speaker 1: I think I'm someone who loves languages plural. I love letters.
Speaker 1: To me, it's almost magical, the very fact that with
Speaker 1: a very limited number of letters we can create endless meanings.
Speaker 1: I love that. I adore that I wrote my earlier
Speaker 1: novels all in Turkish first, and then about fifteen years
Speaker 1: ago now I switched to writing in English first, and
Speaker 1: at the time in Turkey there was a big backlash.
Speaker 1: People criticize me a lot, especially nationalists, saying she now
Speaker 1: cannot be a Turkish author because you know, they accuse
Speaker 1: me of practically abundaning my mother tongue. And I think
Speaker 1: that's one of the many problems with nationalism. It's always
Speaker 1: an either or thing for them, Whereas I believe you
Speaker 1: can if you can dream in more than one language,
Speaker 1: you can write fiction more than one language. So all
Speaker 1: I can say over the years is that I found
Speaker 1: the possibility of writing in another language freeing. To me.
Speaker 1: It's freedom, and I needed that. Writing in Turkish can
Speaker 1: be quite heavy, and I needed a bit of cognitive distance.
Speaker 1: Writing in English gave me that sense of freedom overall.
Speaker 1: If my writing has melancholy, sadness, longing, and sorrow, I
Speaker 1: find these things much easier to express in Turkish. But
Speaker 1: when it comes to humor and irony and maybe satire,
Speaker 1: I find these things much easier in English. Well, this
Speaker 1: new novel has both. It has melancholy and it has longing,
Speaker 1: and it has humor and satire. And it strikes me
Speaker 1: that it must have been particularly challenging to write a novel,
Speaker 1: all of the action of which takes place in Turkey,
Speaker 1: in Turkish, in the English language. In other words, there
Speaker 1: must have been some degree of internal thought of translation
Speaker 1: on your part as you imagined what your characters might
Speaker 1: have said. Since you know the characters, presumably in your imagination,
Speaker 1: we're saying these words originally in Turkish. All the things
Speaker 1: I do not translate in my head, because for me,
Speaker 1: language is a bit like a zone, you know, a
Speaker 1: different zone space I enter in, and so when I
Speaker 1: am in that space, I'm in that space. I do
Speaker 1: not translate in my head, which doesn't mean I don't
Speaker 1: make mistakes. I will always make mistakes or mispronounced words,
Speaker 1: but I'm in that space, and to me, that's very
Speaker 1: important to follow the flow, the rhythm of that language.
Speaker 1: And in a way, maybe when I'm a little bit
Speaker 1: distant from the Turkish language, maybe I can take a
Speaker 1: closer look at my motherland. It's a bit like if
Speaker 1: when you want to see a painting better, you don't
Speaker 1: get nearer, you just sometimes need to take a step back.
Speaker 1: And that space in between, that cognitive distance or linguistic distance,
Speaker 1: if you will, I found it in a paradoxical way,
Speaker 1: maybe it brings me closer to Turkey. In fact, I
Speaker 1: want to ask you a little bit about national allegory.
Speaker 1: There are moments reading the novel when I thought of,
Speaker 1: you know, the protagonist's father's gradual move towards greater religious observance,
Speaker 1: and the components of hypocrisy that the novel draws attention
Speaker 1: to in that in that process where I wondered if
Speaker 1: those could be read as engage with or in criticism
Speaker 1: of changes and developments that have taken place in Turkey
Speaker 1: in recent decades. I think that's correct, because what we've
Speaker 1: seen in Turkey is a slide backwards, first a gradual one,
Speaker 1: and then speeding up, I think, with a bewildering speed.
Speaker 1: We've seen a decline. By that, I mean as we've
Speaker 1: lost democracy, we've also seen a rise in nationalism, religiosity definitely,
Speaker 1: fundamentalism of all kinds, authoritarianism certainly. But when these things happen,
Speaker 1: I think women need to be more worried because alongside
Speaker 1: we've seen an increase in patriarchy, we've seen an increase
Speaker 1: in sexism, and also we've seen an increasing in homophobia
Speaker 1: and transphobia. In my opinion, it's this is not a
Speaker 1: coincidence because wherever we see an increasingbltranationalism. Any kind of
Speaker 1: extremist narrative will always go hand in hand with some
Speaker 1: kind of misogyny an intolerance towards particularly minorities. What happens
Speaker 1: in countries where democracy is shattered to pieces is diversity
Speaker 1: also is never appreciated. You know, I come from a
Speaker 1: country or diversity. It has never been appreciated properly. But
Speaker 1: we've completely lost our respect towards diversity. As a result,
Speaker 1: the public space becomes more and more intolerant, and then
Speaker 1: it becomes very difficult to be different. If you are
Speaker 1: different for whatever reason. This could be the color of
Speaker 1: your skin, how you look, it could be your sexual identity,
Speaker 1: it could be your political views for whatever reason. If
Speaker 1: you are deemed to be different in the eyes of
Speaker 1: the society, than your life is going to be very difficult.
Speaker 1: So I think it became more and more difficult to
Speaker 1: be the other in a country like Turkey that has
Speaker 1: been going backwards very fast. You talk a great deal
Speaker 1: about education in the first part of the novel, because
Speaker 1: the protagonist Tequila Leila, when she's a young girl, does
Speaker 1: go to school, does learn to read, unlike her her
Speaker 1: actual mother. Yet there is a moment where she rebels
Speaker 1: against education and where she says, I don't care about it.
Speaker 1: I'm paraphrasing, but it was something like I don't care
Speaker 1: about all this crap and that the word jumps off
Speaker 1: the page, and I was struck by it, and it
Speaker 1: was a very powerful moment for me because it was
Speaker 1: the moment when, you know, one could sense that education
Speaker 1: would not be liberating for this character. Yes, I'm a
Speaker 1: big believer in particularly girls education. At the same time,
Speaker 1: I want to explore this what do we mean by education,
Speaker 1: because sometimes education can be quite nationalistic, it can be
Speaker 1: very religious, particularly the context that I'm describing in the novel.
Speaker 1: She grows up in a polygamous family, so it's a
Speaker 1: family with one father and two mothers without quite knowing
Speaker 1: which one of these two women is her biological mother.
Speaker 1: And the kind of education that her father is trying
Speaker 1: to give her is extremely patriarchal and very religious. So
Speaker 1: there's a part of her that reacts to all that
Speaker 1: heritage and is longing for freedom. And that's not an
Speaker 1: easy thing because it's a society that doesn't allow that
Speaker 1: kind of behavior, particularly when you're a young girl. So
Speaker 1: I also want to show those layers. At the end
Speaker 1: of the day, I'm a big believer in books. Maybe
Speaker 1: I make a distinction between information, knowledge, and wisdom, and
Speaker 1: I think they're very different things, particularly the age we're
Speaker 1: living in. I believe we have too much information, a
Speaker 1: lot of information, let alone misinformation, and that's an obstacle
Speaker 1: in front of knowledge because knowledge requires us to slow down,
Speaker 1: and knowledge requires in depth analysis. It requires books, you know.
Speaker 1: And then there's wisdom, which is something else wholl together,
Speaker 1: and I believe that requires bringing the mind and the
Speaker 1: heart together. It requires empathy, emotional intelligence, and therefore it
Speaker 1: requires stories. So one of the questions that I ask
Speaker 1: myself is how can we change the ratio? Because we
Speaker 1: have too much information in this stage, less knowledge, and
Speaker 1: even less wisdom. How can we change that and have
Speaker 1: aim for less information, more knowledge, and much more wisdom.
Speaker 1: And that's especially challenging because sometimes the flow of information
Speaker 1: seems as though it will envelop us, and yet if
Speaker 1: we don't follow it, there's the possibility of losing the
Speaker 1: thread I mean, and therefore being unable to make the
Speaker 1: kinds of judgments that would be would be required. I mean,
Speaker 1: if one thinks of the Brexit debates or the debates
Speaker 1: over the impeachment of Donald Trump. Without the basic information,
Speaker 1: and of course the information, as you say, is contested
Speaker 1: and is met with misinformation. But without the basic information,
Speaker 1: it can become impossible to engage at all. I mean,
Speaker 1: one would like to achieve knowledge on these topics, of course,
Speaker 1: if such a thing is even possible. But they have
Speaker 1: a kind of you know, flowing like a river or feeling.
Speaker 1: And if you don't, if you don't keep drinking from
Speaker 1: the river, the river will just wash over you. Or
Speaker 1: maybe maybe the metaphors you have to just try to
Speaker 1: keep your head above the water as the river washes
Speaker 1: over you, or else you'll drown. Yeah, And I think
Speaker 1: that's a wonderful metaphor and so true. Because we cannot
Speaker 1: digest this much information, it doesn't stay with us. So
Speaker 1: all we're trying to do is just somehow management to sink.
Speaker 1: But that is not enough. So maybe this much information
Speaker 1: is really giving us the illusion that we know something
Speaker 1: about the subject. And maybe it's better if we don't
Speaker 1: know it. Just it's better to say, you know, I
Speaker 1: don't know. I'm still working on it. We forgot to
Speaker 1: say I don't know. In the stage, because if you
Speaker 1: ask me something and I don't know the answer, all
Speaker 1: I have to do is google it, and in the
Speaker 1: next five seconds or a couple of minutes, I have
Speaker 1: the illusion that I can give you an answer about
Speaker 1: that subject. But that's not knowledge. So I think we
Speaker 1: need to differentiate these things and be honest that we
Speaker 1: cannot process this much information. It doesn't stay with us.
Speaker 1: And to me, it's incredibly important. Two things to slow
Speaker 1: down because constantly we're in a hurry. And also loneliness,
Speaker 1: some kind of maybe intellectual loneliness is important because constantly
Speaker 1: we're in the company of each other. It affects us,
Speaker 1: we think in collective identities. When we are reading a novel,
Speaker 1: we are alone. Walter ban I mean he used to
Speaker 1: call the novel the loneliest form of art, and I
Speaker 1: love that description. You know, the writers alone when she
Speaker 1: or he is writing, but also the readers alone when
Speaker 1: she or he is reading, and we need to go
Speaker 1: into that inner space. That solitude has a peaceful energy,
Speaker 1: and I think that's incredibly important in this fast moving
Speaker 1: age of constant information. Loneliness, the writer's loneliness, the reader's
Speaker 1: loneliness are enhanced. I think by a sense of distance.
Speaker 1: And I thought of that very much in reading your novel,
Speaker 1: because the city of Istanbul is a character in the novel,
Speaker 1: a very vibrant and rich character, and it's also a
Speaker 1: city from which you are now at some real geographical distance.
Speaker 1: And I wondered if perhaps there's an introduction to talking
Speaker 1: about that a little bit. You'd be willing to read
Speaker 1: out a passage from from your novel. It's the chapter
Speaker 1: that's called this Manic Old City. Istanbul was an illusion,
Speaker 1: a magician's trick gone wrong. Istambul was a dream that
Speaker 1: existed solely in the minds of hushish eaters. In truth,
Speaker 1: there was no Istambul. There were multiple istambules, struggling, competing, clashing,
Speaker 1: each perceiving that in the end only one could survive.
Speaker 1: There was, for instance, an ancient Estambul, designed to be
Speaker 1: crossed on foot or by boat. The city of itinerant dervishes,
Speaker 1: fortune tellers, matchmakers, seafarers, cotton fluffers, rug beaters, and porters
Speaker 1: with wicker baskets on their backs. There was modern essemble,
Speaker 1: an urban sprawl, overrun with cars and motorcycles whizzing back
Speaker 1: and forth. Construction trucks laden with building materials for more
Speaker 1: shopping centers, skyscrapers, industrial sites. Imperial istambul versus plea in
Speaker 1: Istanbul global istambul versus parochial Istanbul, cosmopolitan istambul versus philistine
Speaker 1: Istanbul heretical istambul versus pious istambul, matro istambul versus a
Speaker 1: feminine istambul that adopted aphrodite, goddess of desire and also
Speaker 1: of strife, as its symbol and protector. Then there was
Speaker 1: the Istanbul of those who had left long ago, sailing
Speaker 1: to far away ports. For them, the city would always
Speaker 1: be a metropolis made of memories, myths, and messianic longings,
Speaker 1: forever elusive, like a lover's face receding in the mist.
Speaker 1: All these istambuls lived and breathe inside one another, like
Speaker 1: Matroshka dolls that had come to life. Extraordinary. That image
Speaker 1: of the city elusive like a lover's face receding the mist,
Speaker 1: calls to my mind medieval Attoman and Persian poetry in
Speaker 1: which the lover is always just about present and then
Speaker 1: evanesces and disappears into the distance. Yeah, exactly, always illusive. Indeed, Istanbul,
Speaker 1: which is a city with which you clearly have a
Speaker 1: very deep relationship, but from which you are now at
Speaker 1: a distance. As you were writing about the city, how
Speaker 1: did you think of that that distance. I think it's emotionally,
Speaker 1: to be honest, heart for me, because I love Istanbul
Speaker 1: and I feel very attached to the city, the people,
Speaker 1: it's culture, it's history, so that that connection is very personal. Nonetheless,
Speaker 1: I think wherever I go, I feel like I carry
Speaker 1: Istanbul with me. My relationship with the city is quite emotional,
Speaker 1: of course, but at the same time, I'm someone who
Speaker 1: believes in multiple belongings. Over the years, I've become a Londoner,
Speaker 1: I've become a British citizen. And to what Teresa Made,
Speaker 1: the previous Prime Minister, has been telling us, I would
Speaker 1: like to think of myself as a citizen of the world,
Speaker 1: because she said, if you're a citizen of the world,
Speaker 1: it means you're a citizen of nowhere. I think she
Speaker 1: was wrong. If you're a citizen of the world, it
Speaker 1: doesn't mean that you have no sense of belonging, that
Speaker 1: you're floating in the air aimlessly. I think a citizen
Speaker 1: of humanity means you do care about multiple things, multiple identities,
Speaker 1: multiple belongings at the same time, so you can be
Speaker 1: very attached to a place, but at the same time
Speaker 1: very much attached to or connected with your fellow human
Speaker 1: beings all around the world. I want to defend that
Speaker 1: kind of combination of local and universal at the same time.
Speaker 1: When you were writing this novel, it was at a
Speaker 1: time in your life where you can't visit Istanable, you
Speaker 1: can't go back to Turkey. I'm wondering, for a person
Speaker 1: who embraces multiple identities as you've just described, is it
Speaker 1: possible for a citizen of the world to feel herself
Speaker 1: to be an exiled right? I mean, one cannot be
Speaker 1: truly exiled from the world, but one can be exiled
Speaker 1: from from someplace. Is that a phrase that you hear
Speaker 1: and think to yourself, that is that's not me. I'm
Speaker 1: not an exiled writer because I'm at home in many places.
Speaker 1: Where do you think to yourself, Yes, I am at
Speaker 1: the stage of my life where that might be a
Speaker 1: fair description of me. I think what you've expressed is
Speaker 1: so true, because, on the one hand, I feel like
Speaker 1: you can't be exiled from the world, or from humanity,
Speaker 1: or from storyland. Storyland is my homeland is my motherland,
Speaker 1: and I won't be exiled from there. But at the
Speaker 1: same time, of course, there's an emotional pain, and I
Speaker 1: have to be honest about that that accompanies me, because
Speaker 1: I do know that I'm not able to go at
Speaker 1: the moment. So, yes, exile is a word that I
Speaker 1: take seriously, and I do think about a lot. To
Speaker 1: be honest. This is a little bit oblique to the
Speaker 1: question of exile, but it goes back to the point
Speaker 1: that you made in describing the novel of your fascination
Speaker 1: with the scientific studies that suggests that sometimes the brain
Speaker 1: can continue to live on for some time after the
Speaker 1: body dies, or after the heart dies at least. Yeah,
Speaker 1: as I read the novel, I kept thinking to myself,
Speaker 1: as a matter of genre, is this a novel of
Speaker 1: magical realism or is it a novel of realist realism.
Speaker 1: On the one hand, as you say, it's it's not
Speaker 1: the case that there couldn't be anything in the mind
Speaker 1: after the body dies. Of course, on the other hand,
Speaker 1: one could hardly communicate the details of that of that story.
Speaker 1: So there's something magical in that sense about it. And
Speaker 1: although it's not the kind of magical realist novel in
Speaker 1: which you know, trees begin to cry in the kind
Speaker 1: of classic Marquez sort of mold. It is a novel
Speaker 1: which shares, at least it seemed to this reader some
Speaker 1: rhythms and some connections with the great tradition of magical realism. Yes,
Speaker 1: I understand, and I think the reason why I hesitate
Speaker 1: slightly is because in my mind, I don't make these distinctions.
Speaker 1: You know, I don't believe in categories. I don't even
Speaker 1: know how to categorize or explain my own work, and
Speaker 1: I feel more free when I don't put it in
Speaker 1: a certain genre. So maybe there's a part of me
Speaker 1: that resists that. But that said, of course, I the
Speaker 1: writer's privilege. For certain, it's the writer's privilege to reject
Speaker 1: being boxed into any genre. Naturally, we try, you know.
Speaker 1: But what you said made me remember maybe a moment
Speaker 1: in time when I was in my grandmother's house in Ankara.
Speaker 1: This was a very patriarchal, very conservative neighborhood, and I'm
Speaker 1: talking about late nineteen seventies. This was a time of
Speaker 1: extreme political violence in Turkey. And there is a moment
Speaker 1: when I remember I was sitting by the window and
Speaker 1: thinking about the world outside the window, which was full
Speaker 1: of political clashes, bombs exploding, students were being gone down
Speaker 1: every day, people would die on the streets and inside
Speaker 1: the house. In my grandmother's house, it was somehow full
Speaker 1: of you know, maybe you call it superstitions. It was
Speaker 1: a very irrational world. And she would melt lead, she
Speaker 1: had her own coffee cup reading, she would have her
Speaker 1: magic charms towards of the evil spirits, and people would
Speaker 1: come to her, and in a way, she was a
Speaker 1: bit like an oral storyteller. Maybe there's a part of
Speaker 1: me that remembers that moment, you know, that wants to
Speaker 1: be able to write about what's happening outside the window
Speaker 1: and therefore ask political questions about the world we're living
Speaker 1: in and in its inequalities and injustices. But at the
Speaker 1: same time, there's also a part of me that is
Speaker 1: still tuned into that world that I found inside the house,
Speaker 1: which is maybe magical or superstitious or spiritual, whatever we
Speaker 1: call it, but definitely a very irrational world. I have
Speaker 1: never looked down upon oral culture, women's culture. And the
Speaker 1: reason why I'm saying this is because in Turkey usually
Speaker 1: intellectuals do not respect that area much because it's regarded
Speaker 1: as the domain of ignorant women. But either because of
Speaker 1: my own upbringing or my personality, I've always been interested
Speaker 1: in that world as much as I've been interested in
Speaker 1: academia and knowledge and the intellect. So maybe there's a
Speaker 1: part of me that wants to bridge written culture with
Speaker 1: oral culture in some way. Your protagonist, Tequila Leila, could
Speaker 1: not be more different from you. She's isolated, and she
Speaker 1: is repressed, and she is she's impoverished, she's unable to
Speaker 1: move and be global. She's stuck on many, many dimensions.
Speaker 1: But in another way, she's also the victim of concerted
Speaker 1: efforts really throughout her life to marginalize her and to
Speaker 1: criticize her, and to deny her her capacity to genuinely
Speaker 1: express herself. And I wondered writing this novel at a
Speaker 1: time where, for what looked from the outside like essentially
Speaker 1: political reasons, criticism from nationalists, you are unable to be
Speaker 1: in Turkey, whether you have some identification with the protagonist
Speaker 1: on that dimension, in the sense of being targeted and
Speaker 1: unfairly on the false with the false idea that somehow
Speaker 1: your truths are things that the public can't bear to
Speaker 1: hear or can't tolerate hearing. I think this feeling of
Speaker 1: being the other, if you will, that's something that I
Speaker 1: unfamiliar with, and I've felt like the other myself for
Speaker 1: different reasons throughout my life, and I think I always
Speaker 1: feel closer to people who've been pushed to the periphery,
Speaker 1: to the margins. It comes naturally to me, and maybe
Speaker 1: it's visible in all my work. One of the things
Speaker 1: that happened over the years is, you know, when I
Speaker 1: wrote the story of an Armenian family, people said, oh,
Speaker 1: she must be an Armenian herself. And then if there's
Speaker 1: a Jewish character in my books, they said, oh, she's
Speaker 1: a secret Jew, because in Turkey we have this. It's
Speaker 1: a country of in many ways, conspiracy theories unfortunately, so
Speaker 1: everything has to be secret, right, And then they said, oh,
Speaker 1: she's a secret Kurd, She's a secret this. But the
Speaker 1: underlying message is if it's not your story, why would
Speaker 1: you write it? You know, if you're an Armenian yourself,
Speaker 1: why would you care? Why would you write about Armenians?
Speaker 1: And that's the mentality that I want to challenge. Of course,
Speaker 1: at the end of the day, everything that we write
Speaker 1: as novelists. They have autobiographical echoes, certainly, But the reason
Speaker 1: why I love literature so much is because I can
Speaker 1: be anyone. You can't be anyone. You know, there's freedom.
Speaker 1: As long as you feel it in your heart and
Speaker 1: follow the story and really put effort in it, we
Speaker 1: can write anything and everything. I leave Shafak, thank you.
Speaker 1: I will look forward to learning more from you in
Speaker 1: the future, and I imagine that I'm joined by many
Speaker 1: others in that respect. Thank you so much for the conversation.
Speaker 1: I appreciate it so much. Thank you. The name of a.
Speaker 1: Leif Shafak's latest novel is ten minutes, thirty eight seconds
Speaker 1: In This Strange World. We'll be back with this week's
Speaker 1: playback in just a moment. Now for our playback, John Dunning,
Speaker 1: Miriam Haley, Jessica Man, Annabella Shora, Charole Wolf, Lauren Young,
Speaker 1: Meghan Hast, Joan Bluzi Orbone. Eight women who have changed
Speaker 1: the course of history in the fight against sexual violence.
Speaker 1: That's Manhattan District Attorney Cyrus Vans Junior, whose office prosecuted
Speaker 1: the case against tarwe Weinstein, speaking at a press conference
Speaker 1: right after the verdict was announced. If you heard that verdict. Briefly,
Speaker 1: you might have been a little bit confused because it
Speaker 1: sounds like it was a split verdict. On the one hand,
Speaker 1: Weinstein was convicted of two charges of rape, and those
Speaker 1: were the primary charges against him. Yet it's also true
Speaker 1: that Weinstein was acquitted on three other charges, including two
Speaker 1: of the most serious charges against him, charges that he
Speaker 1: was a sexual predator. After all, you might say to yourself,
Speaker 1: Weinstein obviously was a sexual predator, So maybe this isn't
Speaker 1: really that much of a win for the prosecutors or
Speaker 1: for the me too movement. Well, the honest truth is,
Speaker 1: if you go behind the scenes of this case and
Speaker 1: look at the prosecutor strategy, you'll see that it was
Speaker 1: a win for the prosecutors even though Weinstein was cleared
Speaker 1: of two of the most serious charges. And here's why. Ordinarily,
Speaker 1: in a criminal case, we do not allow evidence to
Speaker 1: be introduced of any bad acts that the defendant committed
Speaker 1: outside of the context of the specific charges brought against him.
Speaker 1: And there's a reason for that. We don't want to
Speaker 1: raise to convict people because they think they're just lousy,
Speaker 1: or because we think they're bad on general principles, or
Speaker 1: because they think that they're guilty of some other conduct
Speaker 1: other than conduct with which they are literally being charged.
Speaker 1: But there are exceptions. One is, if the prosecutors can
Speaker 1: introduce a pattern of prior conduct, they can get other
Speaker 1: bad acts admitted that happened actually in the Weinstein trial,
Speaker 1: and it's one of the reasons that several other witnesses
Speaker 1: three whose names have not been made public were introduced
Speaker 1: in order to testify to other bad acts of Weinstein's.
Speaker 1: But another way for prosecutors to introduce prior evidence of
Speaker 1: bad action in a criminal trial in the New York
Speaker 1: States system is to charge the defendant with being a
Speaker 1: sexual predator, and that charge is what allowed the prosecution
Speaker 1: to introduce the testimony of the actress Annabelle Ashura, who
Speaker 1: testified that more than twenty five years ago, Harvey Weinstein
Speaker 1: raped her. Now, on the surface, the fact that Weinstein
Speaker 1: was not convicted of being a sexual predator might make
Speaker 1: you think that the jury didn't believe Shura. That's not
Speaker 1: necessarily the case. It's entirely possible that the jury believed
Speaker 1: her but thought there wasn't beyond a reasonable doubt evidence
Speaker 1: of that charge, and that as a consequence, it strengthened
Speaker 1: their judgment that Weinstein was in fact guilty of the
Speaker 1: basic rapes with which he was charged. That's especially probable
Speaker 1: because those rapes involved situations in which it's often very
Speaker 1: difficult for prosecutors to get convictions, namely, no physical evidence
Speaker 1: and an ongoing professional, social, and even sexual relationship between
Speaker 1: the perpetrator and the victims after the crimes alleged, at
Speaker 1: least according to Weinstein's lawyers. Furthermore, to the extent the
Speaker 1: jury may actually have been engaged in an internal compromise,
Speaker 1: The fact that there were more serious charges that it
Speaker 1: could choose not to find Weinstein guilty of may have
Speaker 1: actually driven the jury in the direction of finding Weinstein
Speaker 1: guilty on the underlying charges of rape. Of course, we
Speaker 1: don't like to think the juries are horse training behind
Speaker 1: the scenes, but we understand that in reality they sometimes are.
Speaker 1: So that's another reason to think that the prosecutor's decision
Speaker 1: to introduce the charge against Weinstein of being a sexual
Speaker 1: predator actually contributed to his eventual conviction on the underlying
Speaker 1: rape charges, notwithstanding his acquittal on the sexual predation charges.
Speaker 1: The upshot here is at the legal system as like
Speaker 1: a lot of other complicated systems in the world. Sometimes
Speaker 1: to understand what's really going on, you've got to get
Speaker 1: behind the scenes. Deep Background is brought to you by
Speaker 1: Pushkin Industries. Our producer is Lydia gene Coott, with studio
Speaker 1: recording by Joseph Fridman and mastering by Jason Gambrel and
Speaker 1: Jason Roskowski. Our showrunner is Sophie mckibbn. Our theme music
Speaker 1: composed by Luis Garat special thanks to the Pushkin Brass,
Speaker 1: Malcolm Gladwell, Jacob Weissberg, and Mia Lobel. I'm Noah Feldman.
Speaker 1: You can follow me on Twitter at Noah R. Feldman.
Speaker 1: This is Deep Background