November 2, 2021 • 28 mins
Ashley Judd joins Jason to share her journey from actor to activist and the importance of empowering women and girls all over the world.
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Speaker 1 (00:01):
Hi. If you remember last season of Righteous Convictions with
Jason Flamm, It's the podcast where I speak with some
of today's most prominent and active agents of change, people
who see the wrong in the world and are driven
to make it right. You'll definitely know our guest today
from her storied acting career, but her activism, educational excellence,
and the impact she has had globally is something even
(00:24):
more to be admired. Everything from poverty eradication to GDP
to the transmission rates of HIV are predicated by bodily
autonomy and control of our reproductive lives. You know, if
I can't control if and when a mail has access
to me sexually, I really don't have much of a chance.
(00:48):
Her dedication to the global cause of empowering women and
girls over their own destinies is just as impactful and
inspiring as her own story of vulnerability and triumph. Actually,
Judd right now out on Righteous Convictions. Welcome back to
(01:17):
Righteous Convictions with Jason Plant. This is the podcast where
I have the privilege of interviewing some of the people
who I most admire, people who are doing righteous things
in the world for no reason except that they can.
And today I have the absolute joy of speaking with
somebody who I admire as a Thespian, but even more
(01:37):
so as a humanitarian and as a human being. And
I am referring to the one and only Ashley Judd.
Thank you so much for that kind introduction. Thank you well.
I meant every word of it. And you know you've had,
from what I can tell, such a rich life. I
guess you probably fulfilled whatever your goals were when you
were in acting school and working as a hostess at
(01:58):
the Ivy. From what I just it's like, it's it's
almost a classic American dream thing right there. You go
to l A. Let's talk about that before we get
at the mediterran stuff. I gotta know, because it's it's
almost an impossible dream. But you made it happen, would
you do? How did it happen? Oh my gosh. Yes,
that's a good story. So you know the reason I
(02:19):
wanted to work at the Ivy restaurant on Robertson it
was because they had a lot of flowers. You know,
it was a pretty place to be. And I'm ultimately
a child of Appalachia and I grew up spending a
lot of time in the Woods and the wilderness and
Los Angeles. It's a big old city and I was
able to go there some when I was a teenager.
(02:40):
You know, in my family, my mother and sister were
the juds, and we would go to that restaurant, and
I just thought it was a beautiful country looking place.
And so I had a frame of reference when I
showed up in Los Angeles to study at Playhouse West
with Bob Carnegie, and I needed to support myself somehow.
And then, of course, you know, my first movie was
Ruby Imparative Ice, which is a great feminist independent film
(03:04):
that won the Sundance Film Festival. And so I both
worked really hard, and I had very auspicious circumstances. And
I just want to say about my Ruby im Paradise audition.
You know that script. When I read it, I just
wept the entire time I was reading that film. I
identified so profoundly with the character. And when I was
(03:26):
driving over to read for Victor Nunia as the writer director,
I I was so overcome with this depth of need
to convey to him the level at which I understood
his movie. And I was just choked with emotion, and
that's all I was able to say to him, was
I understand your film. And it was between me and
I think Mary Louise Parker, who was a much more
(03:47):
established actor at the time, you know, and she had
done both independent and commercial movies, and and thank god
he just went with his gun and he cast me
in that film, because it absolutely changed my life. It's
a lot of serendipity in that story, right, I mean,
just all the planets aligned and you were in the
right place at the right time, with the right degree
of talent obviously, and then from there, well everybody knows
(04:10):
you went on to make so many films that have
become an important part of the American pop culture landscape.
And I think you became really sort of an American treasure,
you know, for the roles that you play, but but
then moreover for the person that you have become, or
maybe you always were. Somewhere along the way. You became
a leading advocate for a number of causes. But was
(04:33):
there like an Aha moment where you sort of found
your calling so to speak? M M. I appreciate the question,
and I should say, you know, when I was explaining
to someone who was close to my family in I
was going to Hollywood. I was also describing the social
(04:53):
justice work that I was going to do when I
arrived in l A. I was saying, you know, I'm
gonna I'm gonna help protect people who need to go
to planned parenthood to get a whole woman care and
need access to family planning in safe and legal abortion.
And I was listing all these things that I was
going to be involved with. Was just be a continuation
of my work at the University of Kentucky. Is an activist,
(05:16):
and this man said to me, or are you going
to be an actor? You're going to save the world.
And of course that's such a binaryan and such a
reflection of that black or white thinking that a person,
and particularly a woman must have an either or kind
of life. And in my insides, I just knew, well,
why can't I do both? So I always had it
(05:41):
in me that I would need to be a whole person.
And coming from the coal fields of eastern Kentucky where
there was just extraordinary both environmental exploitation and labor exploitation,
I think it's in my DNA. And then obviously the
sex and gender oppression that comes with all of that.
It was just the water that I swam in. And then,
of course, the really pivotal thing that happened to me
(06:04):
was I was molested for the first time that I
remember when I was seven years old, by an old
man in our community. And I immediately went to the
two first adults I came upon, and I explained exactly
what had happened to me, and they denied my reality.
They said, oh, he's a nice old man. That's not
what he meant. And you know, that sort of patriarchal
(06:26):
denial of my experience of my body and denying the
violation that I, on such a visceral and cellular level
knew had occurred to me was so formative. And it's
important that I say the first time I remember, because
I also was assaulted in a kam Art when I
had on my my green and gold cheerleader uniform from
(06:47):
Northside Junior High and my mom was there and this
man apparently like grabbed me and was trying to drag
me toward an exit. Who knows what his intentions from
you were, and I was I. I screamed and I yelled,
and I wriggled out from underneath him, and my mom
press charges. There's a police record of this. I have
no conscious memory of that assault. I have no memory
(07:10):
of it. And so there may have been other things
that happened to me because I was a very unsupervised
child because of the circumstances of my parents divorce, and
I lived alone for two years as a child. UM
when the judge went on the road, Mom left me,
and then I went to live with my dad the
next year, and he was deep in the throes of
serious addiction, and he left the state to go practice
(07:31):
his addiction, and he left me alone for a year.
And there was no intervening neighbor, no friends, parents, no
school teacher, no guidance counselor, no social worker, no entity
of the state, no community watch person who interfered on
my behalf. I'm a three time RAF survivor. And again
I say, that's you know what I remember, because there
(07:53):
may have been other incidents that, for reasons of the
brilliance of the brain and trauma management, that I have
simply blocked out. UM. And one of those rapes resulted
in pregnancy. And you know what I discovered about that
is that the rapist had paternity rights in the states
where both the rape occurred and where he was a resident.
(08:14):
And so all of these things absolutely formed me to
care so much about the bodily integrity and autonomy of
girls and women, for the kids who are here and
have no advocate, you know, who are suffering. I think it.
It absolutely made me who and what I am, and
I always have to make sure that I add this part.
(08:35):
You know, my parents and I today have a beautiful, tender,
whole relationships. Those relationships have healed. But my parents just
weren't able to care for me properly when I was
growing up. Is the plain old fact of the matter.
And what it has done has given me a heart
and a passion and a and a ferocity to care
(08:57):
for those who are needy, vulner bull and defenseless. The
(09:18):
essential building block of a fair and free, democratic society
and the indicator of peace, is how a society treats
it's girls and women. There are powerful studies that show
that a society's proclivity for war and violence can be
(09:41):
directly measured by intimate partner violence and in general, it's
violence towards it's female members, and everything from poverty eradication
to g d P to the transmission rates of HIV
are predicated by empowering girls and women to be full
(10:04):
actors and have full agency and full participation in the social, political, cultural,
educational aspects of society. And that starts with bodily autonomy
and control of our reproductive lives. You know, if I
can't control if and when a male has access to
(10:28):
me sexually, I really don't have much of a chance
of staying in school, learning a trade, being able to
earn an income, controlling that income. And if I dedicated
to my children, to the health care of my family,
to contributing to you know, the education of my children,
(10:50):
helping make decisions about the ages at which the girls
and the family will and will not marry, having influence
over you know, how the boys treat the girls in
the family, all of that stuff, and so it really
comes down to the empowerment of girls. And then also
you know, attitudes that boys have towards girls and creating
better norms that reduce harm and reform toxic masculinity. And
(11:15):
so that's my bottom line. And when Population Services International
first reached out to me about working with them, is
what they were going to call their the global Ambassador.
You know, I basically wrote them back it was very funny,
and you know, I was so serious and I am
you know, I kind of unabashed about that this sort
of two page, single spaced feminist tone because I wanted
(11:38):
to know what their values were and if we were congruent.
Is something that my first women studies teacher, Professor Jeanine Blackwell,
would have been so proud of. And they wrote me
back yes, for a feminist agency, and you know, and
that's and that's my criteria and so everything that I
do really boils down to that. So that's how you
began your work with Youth AIDS through Population So this
(12:00):
is international, right, So that is what really took you
to some of the most impoverished corners of the world,
visiting slums, hospitals, bravos, clinics and everything in between. Can
you tell us about some of your work. I love
this work so much, and part of what is so
meaningful to me is that there's just a lot of love.
(12:21):
You know, I'm I'm a person who likes Jesus. I
think that he was a great radical, you know, who
came to be with the disenfranchised and the poor and
the rejected, who sought to upend empire and came from
a great wisdom tradition, and that's kind of how I
regard him, and I try to see the universal Christ
(12:42):
and everyone. And I've been to a lot of trash
heaps and then with generations of women who picked trash,
and whether it's separating the different pieces of a ballpoint
pen or an old fashioned kind of telephone and stripping
the different kinds of wires, or you know, taking apart
(13:06):
electronics or sitting on tires, and you know, just spending
a day on a on a stinky, heaving, rotting trash
heap and sorting through garbage and the grandmother just loving,
loving on me and caressing me and my resting my
(13:28):
head on her shoulder, and the power of the nurturing
that happens and the bonds that are formed, And knowing
that I can't make promises to people. I'll probably never
see them again and they'll never see me, and we
won't keep up with each other, but this ineffable, transcendent
love that happens is real and I and I carry
(13:51):
their stories with me and I tell their stories, and
somehow they have appreciated that I'm there and that they
have been seen and witnessed and validated and their experience.
That's something that I learned from Bob Keegan at the
Harvard Graduate School of Education. He said, you know, when
I really see someone, when I really really see them,
I am recruited to their welfare in a way that
(14:12):
is inexorable and unforgettable. Wow. Say that again, when I
really see someone, I am recruited to their welfare in
a way that is inexorable and unforgettable. Wow. I mean, so,
that beautiful and profound bit of prose brings us right
(14:33):
to the next stop on your journey. So, while immersing
yourself in this work and some of the most poverty
stricken parts of the world, as well as continuing your
acting career, at some point you decided to find time
to go to the freaking Harvard right to get your
master's degree in public administration. I mean, I've done a
(14:56):
one word question for you. How so I always intended
to go to graduate school, you know, when I went
to Hollywood in n I never lost the interest. You know,
And as we sort of started this podcast, I had
never thought I had to be this binary either or
type of woman, and I felt I could live a
whole life and have my whole story and all my interests,
and so I just decided it was time to go
(15:18):
to graduate school. And I went to see this professor
at Vanderbilt because I just assumed I would go to
Vanderbilt because it's close to where my home is in Tennessee.
And I explained to him the things in which I
was interested, and he'd done his due diligence and had
some ideas for me. And at the end of our conversation,
he said, why aren't you going to Harvard And excuse
my language, but I said, why don't I bought a
rocket ship up my ass and go to the mood.
(15:42):
I've never heard that. It was great. I'm going to
steal that. And then he explained to me why I
should be going to the Harvard Kennedy School of Government.
And I went home and I called Professor Carroll Lee Flinders,
who's this comparative lit scholar, and she said, well, you
need to look at the women in Public Policy program
at the Kennedy School, which I immediately did, and I
(16:02):
started to cry. I started to cry, and I said,
these are my people. So I went to Harvard and
I just loved it so much, and I chose to take,
you know, more classes than were suggested and to focus
on my relationships with faculty, and I crossed registered at
the Law School where I took gender violence, law and
(16:22):
Social Justice and the paper I wrote there when the
Dean Scholar Award, and I became great friends with my professor,
Diane Rosenfeld, and I took Health and Human Rights, which
was so suitable for all the work I had done
internationally with Sophia Greskin at the School of Public Health.
And then I met Bob Keegan at the Graduate School
of Education, who's a great buddy now. And I mean,
(16:43):
I just had such a rich experience and my co
work represented like a hundred ten countries and it was
just the best. And then I became leader in residence
at the Women in Public Policy Program and my partners
on faculty at Human Evolutionary Biology, and now we have
a search camp in the Congo where we study Bona Bows,
who are matriarchal and egalitarian, and life is just incredible.
(17:08):
You ended up putting a rocket ship in your brain
going to Congo. And while in Congo, you worked with
the Enough Project, which is an organization that works to
support peace and crimes against humanity and eventually in two
thousand sixteen, you began working with the United Nations Population
Fund or u n f p A, which supports women's
(17:31):
sexual and reproductive health throughout the world. Yes, I love
my work with with you n f PA, the United
Nations Agency for Reproductive Health and Rights. And you know
what we do at you n f p A is
help empower girls and women to plan and space the
births of their children, access to voluntary family planning choices
(17:54):
and try to help ensure that youth have safe childhoods
and can grow up to be empowered adults who have
agency over their lives. And you know that work has
taken me to eastern Ukraine and the war zone and
too Bangladesh to work with in the refugee camps there
(18:16):
and South Sudan. I mean I got to help deliver
a baby in a refugee camp in South Sudan. I
mean just I've done Acro Yoga and Turkey with Syrian refugees,
and spent time and Azrak and Sautary refugee camps in
Jordan's and just extraordinary adventures where my heart has been
(18:36):
broken into a million pieces. And I've been both been
able to give love and receive love and return. But
really see the power and the value of these grassroots
programs that allow women to reclaim little bits of their souls.
You know, obviously there's a lot of gender based violence
work that helps women with psych social support and gives
(18:59):
them a little bit of a safe place, whether it's
just a break from the searing heat and dirt and
the relentlessness of being on the run, to information about
preventing themselves from being prostituted, or looking for the signs
that their girls are about to be trafficked, you know,
in safe birth kits, which allow women to have a
(19:22):
hygienic pad, a razor blade, sterile gloves, and a bar
of soap so that they can try to give birth
in the most unsanitary conditions with a modicum of dignity.
And it's just powerful work, and I'm so blessed that
I'm given the opportunity to partake in it. You Know,
(19:55):
one of the questions we get all the time through
social media is how can I help? You know, maybe
I don't have a ton of money or a lot
of free time, but there's got to be something I
can do. What advice do you have for our listeners. Well,
I love that question, and you mentioned trauma earlier, and
(20:17):
you know, the first thing that I really needed to
do was the work on myself, because trauma not transformed
as trauma I will transfer. And when I take radical
responsibility for myself and my own healing, then I'm better
able to take part in responsible healing in the world.
(20:38):
And so I really need to start with my own journey.
And sometimes that's taking a look at my origin story
where I still may have some unresolved grief or pain
from my childhood. It might be finding a twelve step
program that's appropriate for me, or finding a social worker
(20:59):
or a trauma informed, evidence based therapist with whom I
can have a bit of a healing journey. And that
may sound indulgent and like it's not helping the world,
but when I start to heal my own consciousness, that
absolutely contributes to the healing in my relationships and ultimately
(21:19):
the world is about relationships. And then that also helps
me identify where I am most hurt, where I'm most angry,
and that is where I'm going to leverage the greatest good,
Because where I am the most vulnerable and wounded I
think is the space where I can have the greatest
(21:40):
stamina and be the most fierce and have the greatest
interest in passion for being transformative in the world. And
you know, there's so much that can be done on
a community basis, and in terms of national organizations, I
really like Supermajority. I think that they give individuals really
(22:03):
good training and skills and opportunities at the community level.
I do all kinds of stuff with super Majority, both
from the perspective of Ashley jud and then I'm also
on their website is just an alias, and I'm like, Okay,
sure I can go to somebody's house in my neighborhood
this week, or i can make organizing calls. And I've
got this software on my computer too, you know, phone bank,
(22:24):
and just like a quote unquote regular person participate in
their activities. But that's you know, And I don't want
to give too many ideas because I don't want to
dissipate away from this idea that taking radical responsibility for
self is the essential starting place. But it really is,
because too often we want to jump into you know,
the wider pool and go and save somebody else, when
(22:45):
the first person we need to really take a look
at saving is ourselves. That's what they say in the
twelve step programs, right, and I've I've intended a couple
of them, and what they say is just like they
said on the airplane, you gotta put the oxygen mask
on yourself first, right before you can help your kids
or anybody else. I mean, I take really good care
of myself because I want to show up in my power,
(23:07):
not in my trauma. Right, And so sometimes taking care
of yourself is that it means you could call it selfish,
but it can be the best thing that you do
for others. Okay, So we have two traditions here, which
are the final two questions that I always enjoy asking
our wonderful guests. The first one is if you had
(23:27):
a magic wand and could fix one thing, what would
it be. I do think that empowering girls and women
completely would change so much, and I would simultaneously improve
boys and men's attitudes towards girls and women, because that
would need simultaneously to be fully adjusted. I mean, it
(23:48):
would it would fix climate, It would just it would
change everything. It would change everything. Amen to that, And
now a closing of our show is called words of wisdom.
This is This is this segment where I first of all,
thank you again for taking your time from your crazy
schedule and being here with us to inspire me and
(24:10):
everyone else. And then I turned my microphone off and
kicked back in my chair with my headphones on and
just listen to anything else you might want to share.
You know. Well, something that we haven't talked about yet
is how I made my decision to be The New
York Times is named source in their investigative report about
Harvey Weinstein. I think that I always knew that I
(24:35):
would be Jodie Cant and Megan Twoey's name source in
their investigative report. But I still wanted to do due
diligence because I wanted to be able to look back
on my process and know that my process had integrity
and then I had been thoughtful and thorough. And I
think that the moral of that story is that I
always like to ask of myself the harder thing, and
(24:58):
that I have the desire to be a woman of
integrity who lives up to the highest calling of myself.
And so what I did when it came down to
the deadline was I just put on my sneakers, laced
them up, and I went for a run on a
beautiful world road and Middle Tennessee, and I prayed. And
(25:21):
as I was running, I realized, I've already made the
most important decision that I'll ever make in my life,
which is, you know, I've turned my will on my
life over to the care of some sort of loving
higher power. And I think that, you know, life is hard,
life is painful, it's often unfair. But there's essentially something
good that is helping me try to find peace in
(25:46):
the midst of the pain in the world, whether it's
sitting with trash pickers in India, or seeing a bullet
hole in a bombed out house in eastern Ukraine where
a mama bird has made her nest and she's eating
her babies, or you know, sitting with an exploited woman
in Congo who's deaf and in a brothel, and I
(26:11):
can't even communicate with the other sex slaves who are
there because they don't have a common sign language with
which to try to express themselves to each other, you know,
But there's something good that's binding us together in this
common desire to make life not just bearable, but somehow connected,
and so I was running and I thought, you know,
I've already made the most important decision I'll ever make,
(26:33):
and whatever happens is a long game. And you know,
it's like Albert Einstein said, you have to make up
my mind. The universe is either friendly or unfriendly, and
I think it's friendly. And so I called Jody back
and I said, I'm prepared to be you know, your
named source, and this investigation. I think it's the right
thing to do as a woman, and it's the right
thing to do as a Christian. And so that's something
(26:53):
that I would share. The other thing I would say
is just about you know, I think we're all looking
for a little wisdom in life. And I don't think
that wisdom is this esoteric, ritualistic knowledge that's transmitted behind
closed doors by initiated people. I think that wisdom is
more caught than taught, and it's about knowing with more
(27:13):
of ourselves, and knowing more deeply with these carved out
parts of ourselves. And that's why it's important to have,
you know, some kind of quiet time every day and
a little bit of a spiritual book to read, or
something something that expresses my highest values and aspirations and
a journaling practice and some kind of self reflection or meditation.
(27:37):
And this doesn't have to be some gymnastic thirty minutes,
but just some some quiet time every day to be
grounded and centered and to try to connect with with
something sweet because the world is a hot mess and
life can be very tough, but I need to know
that I'm cared for in order to genuinely be able
(27:59):
to care for people. Thank you for listening to Righteous
Convictions with Jason Flom. Tune in next week when we
speak with hip hop icon Darryl dmc McDaniels and the
(28:20):
creative mentor at Road Recovery Static. I'd like to thank
our production team Connor Hall, Jeff Clyburne and Kevin Wardis.
The music in this production was supplied by three time
OSCAR nominated composer Jay Ralph. Follow us on Instagram at
Wrongful Conviction, on Twitter at Wrong Conviction and on Facebook
at Wrongful Conviction Podcast. Righteous Convictions with Jason Flam is
(28:43):
a production of Lava for Good Podcasts and association with
Signal Company Number one
Hi. If you remember last season of Righteous Convictions with
Jason Flamm, It's the podcast where I speak with some
of today's most prominent and active agents of change, people
who see the wrong in the world and are driven
to make it right. You'll definitely know our guest today
from her storied acting career, but her activism, educational excellence,
and the impact she has had globally is something even
(00:24):
more to be admired. Everything from poverty eradication to GDP
to the transmission rates of HIV are predicated by bodily
autonomy and control of our reproductive lives. You know, if
I can't control if and when a mail has access
to me sexually, I really don't have much of a chance.
(00:48):
Her dedication to the global cause of empowering women and
girls over their own destinies is just as impactful and
inspiring as her own story of vulnerability and triumph. Actually,
Judd right now out on Righteous Convictions. Welcome back to
(01:17):
Righteous Convictions with Jason Plant. This is the podcast where
I have the privilege of interviewing some of the people
who I most admire, people who are doing righteous things
in the world for no reason except that they can.
And today I have the absolute joy of speaking with
somebody who I admire as a Thespian, but even more
(01:37):
so as a humanitarian and as a human being. And
I am referring to the one and only Ashley Judd.
Thank you so much for that kind introduction. Thank you well.
I meant every word of it. And you know you've had,
from what I can tell, such a rich life. I
guess you probably fulfilled whatever your goals were when you
were in acting school and working as a hostess at
(01:58):
the Ivy. From what I just it's like, it's it's
almost a classic American dream thing right there. You go
to l A. Let's talk about that before we get
at the mediterran stuff. I gotta know, because it's it's
almost an impossible dream. But you made it happen, would
you do? How did it happen? Oh my gosh. Yes,
that's a good story. So you know the reason I
(02:19):
wanted to work at the Ivy restaurant on Robertson it
was because they had a lot of flowers. You know,
it was a pretty place to be. And I'm ultimately
a child of Appalachia and I grew up spending a
lot of time in the Woods and the wilderness and
Los Angeles. It's a big old city and I was
able to go there some when I was a teenager.
(02:40):
You know, in my family, my mother and sister were
the juds, and we would go to that restaurant, and
I just thought it was a beautiful country looking place.
And so I had a frame of reference when I
showed up in Los Angeles to study at Playhouse West
with Bob Carnegie, and I needed to support myself somehow.
And then, of course, you know, my first movie was
Ruby Imparative Ice, which is a great feminist independent film
(03:04):
that won the Sundance Film Festival. And so I both
worked really hard, and I had very auspicious circumstances. And
I just want to say about my Ruby im Paradise audition.
You know that script. When I read it, I just
wept the entire time I was reading that film. I
identified so profoundly with the character. And when I was
(03:26):
driving over to read for Victor Nunia as the writer director,
I I was so overcome with this depth of need
to convey to him the level at which I understood
his movie. And I was just choked with emotion, and
that's all I was able to say to him, was
I understand your film. And it was between me and
I think Mary Louise Parker, who was a much more
(03:47):
established actor at the time, you know, and she had
done both independent and commercial movies, and and thank god
he just went with his gun and he cast me
in that film, because it absolutely changed my life. It's
a lot of serendipity in that story, right, I mean,
just all the planets aligned and you were in the
right place at the right time, with the right degree
of talent obviously, and then from there, well everybody knows
(04:10):
you went on to make so many films that have
become an important part of the American pop culture landscape.
And I think you became really sort of an American treasure,
you know, for the roles that you play, but but
then moreover for the person that you have become, or
maybe you always were. Somewhere along the way. You became
a leading advocate for a number of causes. But was
(04:33):
there like an Aha moment where you sort of found
your calling so to speak? M M. I appreciate the question,
and I should say, you know, when I was explaining
to someone who was close to my family in I
was going to Hollywood. I was also describing the social
(04:53):
justice work that I was going to do when I
arrived in l A. I was saying, you know, I'm
gonna I'm gonna help protect people who need to go
to planned parenthood to get a whole woman care and
need access to family planning in safe and legal abortion.
And I was listing all these things that I was
going to be involved with. Was just be a continuation
of my work at the University of Kentucky. Is an activist,
(05:16):
and this man said to me, or are you going
to be an actor? You're going to save the world.
And of course that's such a binaryan and such a
reflection of that black or white thinking that a person,
and particularly a woman must have an either or kind
of life. And in my insides, I just knew, well,
why can't I do both? So I always had it
(05:41):
in me that I would need to be a whole person.
And coming from the coal fields of eastern Kentucky where
there was just extraordinary both environmental exploitation and labor exploitation,
I think it's in my DNA. And then obviously the
sex and gender oppression that comes with all of that.
It was just the water that I swam in. And then,
of course, the really pivotal thing that happened to me
(06:04):
was I was molested for the first time that I
remember when I was seven years old, by an old
man in our community. And I immediately went to the
two first adults I came upon, and I explained exactly
what had happened to me, and they denied my reality.
They said, oh, he's a nice old man. That's not
what he meant. And you know, that sort of patriarchal
(06:26):
denial of my experience of my body and denying the
violation that I, on such a visceral and cellular level
knew had occurred to me was so formative. And it's
important that I say the first time I remember, because
I also was assaulted in a kam Art when I
had on my my green and gold cheerleader uniform from
(06:47):
Northside Junior High and my mom was there and this
man apparently like grabbed me and was trying to drag
me toward an exit. Who knows what his intentions from
you were, and I was I. I screamed and I yelled,
and I wriggled out from underneath him, and my mom
press charges. There's a police record of this. I have
no conscious memory of that assault. I have no memory
(07:10):
of it. And so there may have been other things
that happened to me because I was a very unsupervised
child because of the circumstances of my parents divorce, and
I lived alone for two years as a child. UM
when the judge went on the road, Mom left me,
and then I went to live with my dad the
next year, and he was deep in the throes of
serious addiction, and he left the state to go practice
(07:31):
his addiction, and he left me alone for a year.
And there was no intervening neighbor, no friends, parents, no
school teacher, no guidance counselor, no social worker, no entity
of the state, no community watch person who interfered on
my behalf. I'm a three time RAF survivor. And again
I say, that's you know what I remember, because there
(07:53):
may have been other incidents that, for reasons of the
brilliance of the brain and trauma management, that I have
simply blocked out. UM. And one of those rapes resulted
in pregnancy. And you know what I discovered about that
is that the rapist had paternity rights in the states
where both the rape occurred and where he was a resident.
(08:14):
And so all of these things absolutely formed me to
care so much about the bodily integrity and autonomy of
girls and women, for the kids who are here and
have no advocate, you know, who are suffering. I think it.
It absolutely made me who and what I am, and
I always have to make sure that I add this part.
(08:35):
You know, my parents and I today have a beautiful, tender,
whole relationships. Those relationships have healed. But my parents just
weren't able to care for me properly when I was
growing up. Is the plain old fact of the matter.
And what it has done has given me a heart
and a passion and a and a ferocity to care
(08:57):
for those who are needy, vulner bull and defenseless. The
(09:18):
essential building block of a fair and free, democratic society
and the indicator of peace, is how a society treats
it's girls and women. There are powerful studies that show
that a society's proclivity for war and violence can be
(09:41):
directly measured by intimate partner violence and in general, it's
violence towards it's female members, and everything from poverty eradication
to g d P to the transmission rates of HIV
are predicated by empowering girls and women to be full
(10:04):
actors and have full agency and full participation in the social, political, cultural,
educational aspects of society. And that starts with bodily autonomy
and control of our reproductive lives. You know, if I
can't control if and when a male has access to
(10:28):
me sexually, I really don't have much of a chance
of staying in school, learning a trade, being able to
earn an income, controlling that income. And if I dedicated
to my children, to the health care of my family,
to contributing to you know, the education of my children,
(10:50):
helping make decisions about the ages at which the girls
and the family will and will not marry, having influence
over you know, how the boys treat the girls in
the family, all of that stuff, and so it really
comes down to the empowerment of girls. And then also
you know, attitudes that boys have towards girls and creating
better norms that reduce harm and reform toxic masculinity. And
(11:15):
so that's my bottom line. And when Population Services International
first reached out to me about working with them, is
what they were going to call their the global Ambassador.
You know, I basically wrote them back it was very funny,
and you know, I was so serious and I am
you know, I kind of unabashed about that this sort
of two page, single spaced feminist tone because I wanted
(11:38):
to know what their values were and if we were congruent.
Is something that my first women studies teacher, Professor Jeanine Blackwell,
would have been so proud of. And they wrote me
back yes, for a feminist agency, and you know, and
that's and that's my criteria and so everything that I
do really boils down to that. So that's how you
began your work with Youth AIDS through Population So this
(12:00):
is international, right, So that is what really took you
to some of the most impoverished corners of the world,
visiting slums, hospitals, bravos, clinics and everything in between. Can
you tell us about some of your work. I love
this work so much, and part of what is so
meaningful to me is that there's just a lot of love.
(12:21):
You know, I'm I'm a person who likes Jesus. I
think that he was a great radical, you know, who
came to be with the disenfranchised and the poor and
the rejected, who sought to upend empire and came from
a great wisdom tradition, and that's kind of how I
regard him, and I try to see the universal Christ
(12:42):
and everyone. And I've been to a lot of trash
heaps and then with generations of women who picked trash,
and whether it's separating the different pieces of a ballpoint
pen or an old fashioned kind of telephone and stripping
the different kinds of wires, or you know, taking apart
(13:06):
electronics or sitting on tires, and you know, just spending
a day on a on a stinky, heaving, rotting trash
heap and sorting through garbage and the grandmother just loving,
loving on me and caressing me and my resting my
(13:28):
head on her shoulder, and the power of the nurturing
that happens and the bonds that are formed, And knowing
that I can't make promises to people. I'll probably never
see them again and they'll never see me, and we
won't keep up with each other, but this ineffable, transcendent
love that happens is real and I and I carry
(13:51):
their stories with me and I tell their stories, and
somehow they have appreciated that I'm there and that they
have been seen and witnessed and validated and their experience.
That's something that I learned from Bob Keegan at the
Harvard Graduate School of Education. He said, you know, when
I really see someone, when I really really see them,
I am recruited to their welfare in a way that
(14:12):
is inexorable and unforgettable. Wow. Say that again, when I
really see someone, I am recruited to their welfare in
a way that is inexorable and unforgettable. Wow. I mean, so,
that beautiful and profound bit of prose brings us right
(14:33):
to the next stop on your journey. So, while immersing
yourself in this work and some of the most poverty
stricken parts of the world, as well as continuing your
acting career, at some point you decided to find time
to go to the freaking Harvard right to get your
master's degree in public administration. I mean, I've done a
(14:56):
one word question for you. How so I always intended
to go to graduate school, you know, when I went
to Hollywood in n I never lost the interest. You know,
And as we sort of started this podcast, I had
never thought I had to be this binary either or
type of woman, and I felt I could live a
whole life and have my whole story and all my interests,
and so I just decided it was time to go
(15:18):
to graduate school. And I went to see this professor
at Vanderbilt because I just assumed I would go to
Vanderbilt because it's close to where my home is in Tennessee.
And I explained to him the things in which I
was interested, and he'd done his due diligence and had
some ideas for me. And at the end of our conversation,
he said, why aren't you going to Harvard And excuse
my language, but I said, why don't I bought a
rocket ship up my ass and go to the mood.
(15:42):
I've never heard that. It was great. I'm going to
steal that. And then he explained to me why I
should be going to the Harvard Kennedy School of Government.
And I went home and I called Professor Carroll Lee Flinders,
who's this comparative lit scholar, and she said, well, you
need to look at the women in Public Policy program
at the Kennedy School, which I immediately did, and I
(16:02):
started to cry. I started to cry, and I said,
these are my people. So I went to Harvard and
I just loved it so much, and I chose to take,
you know, more classes than were suggested and to focus
on my relationships with faculty, and I crossed registered at
the Law School where I took gender violence, law and
(16:22):
Social Justice and the paper I wrote there when the
Dean Scholar Award, and I became great friends with my professor,
Diane Rosenfeld, and I took Health and Human Rights, which
was so suitable for all the work I had done
internationally with Sophia Greskin at the School of Public Health.
And then I met Bob Keegan at the Graduate School
of Education, who's a great buddy now. And I mean,
(16:43):
I just had such a rich experience and my co
work represented like a hundred ten countries and it was
just the best. And then I became leader in residence
at the Women in Public Policy Program and my partners
on faculty at Human Evolutionary Biology, and now we have
a search camp in the Congo where we study Bona Bows,
who are matriarchal and egalitarian, and life is just incredible.
(17:08):
You ended up putting a rocket ship in your brain
going to Congo. And while in Congo, you worked with
the Enough Project, which is an organization that works to
support peace and crimes against humanity and eventually in two
thousand sixteen, you began working with the United Nations Population
Fund or u n f p A, which supports women's
(17:31):
sexual and reproductive health throughout the world. Yes, I love
my work with with you n f PA, the United
Nations Agency for Reproductive Health and Rights. And you know
what we do at you n f p A is
help empower girls and women to plan and space the
births of their children, access to voluntary family planning choices
(17:54):
and try to help ensure that youth have safe childhoods
and can grow up to be empowered adults who have
agency over their lives. And you know that work has
taken me to eastern Ukraine and the war zone and
too Bangladesh to work with in the refugee camps there
(18:16):
and South Sudan. I mean I got to help deliver
a baby in a refugee camp in South Sudan. I
mean just I've done Acro Yoga and Turkey with Syrian refugees,
and spent time and Azrak and Sautary refugee camps in
Jordan's and just extraordinary adventures where my heart has been
(18:36):
broken into a million pieces. And I've been both been
able to give love and receive love and return. But
really see the power and the value of these grassroots
programs that allow women to reclaim little bits of their souls.
You know, obviously there's a lot of gender based violence
work that helps women with psych social support and gives
(18:59):
them a little bit of a safe place, whether it's
just a break from the searing heat and dirt and
the relentlessness of being on the run, to information about
preventing themselves from being prostituted, or looking for the signs
that their girls are about to be trafficked, you know,
in safe birth kits, which allow women to have a
(19:22):
hygienic pad, a razor blade, sterile gloves, and a bar
of soap so that they can try to give birth
in the most unsanitary conditions with a modicum of dignity.
And it's just powerful work, and I'm so blessed that
I'm given the opportunity to partake in it. You Know,
(19:55):
one of the questions we get all the time through
social media is how can I help? You know, maybe
I don't have a ton of money or a lot
of free time, but there's got to be something I
can do. What advice do you have for our listeners. Well,
I love that question, and you mentioned trauma earlier, and
(20:17):
you know, the first thing that I really needed to
do was the work on myself, because trauma not transformed
as trauma I will transfer. And when I take radical
responsibility for myself and my own healing, then I'm better
able to take part in responsible healing in the world.
(20:38):
And so I really need to start with my own journey.
And sometimes that's taking a look at my origin story
where I still may have some unresolved grief or pain
from my childhood. It might be finding a twelve step
program that's appropriate for me, or finding a social worker
(20:59):
or a trauma informed, evidence based therapist with whom I
can have a bit of a healing journey. And that
may sound indulgent and like it's not helping the world,
but when I start to heal my own consciousness, that
absolutely contributes to the healing in my relationships and ultimately
(21:19):
the world is about relationships. And then that also helps
me identify where I am most hurt, where I'm most angry,
and that is where I'm going to leverage the greatest good,
Because where I am the most vulnerable and wounded I
think is the space where I can have the greatest
(21:40):
stamina and be the most fierce and have the greatest
interest in passion for being transformative in the world. And
you know, there's so much that can be done on
a community basis, and in terms of national organizations, I
really like Supermajority. I think that they give individuals really
(22:03):
good training and skills and opportunities at the community level.
I do all kinds of stuff with super Majority, both
from the perspective of Ashley jud and then I'm also
on their website is just an alias, and I'm like, Okay,
sure I can go to somebody's house in my neighborhood
this week, or i can make organizing calls. And I've
got this software on my computer too, you know, phone bank,
(22:24):
and just like a quote unquote regular person participate in
their activities. But that's you know, And I don't want
to give too many ideas because I don't want to
dissipate away from this idea that taking radical responsibility for
self is the essential starting place. But it really is,
because too often we want to jump into you know,
the wider pool and go and save somebody else, when
(22:45):
the first person we need to really take a look
at saving is ourselves. That's what they say in the
twelve step programs, right, and I've I've intended a couple
of them, and what they say is just like they
said on the airplane, you gotta put the oxygen mask
on yourself first, right before you can help your kids
or anybody else. I mean, I take really good care
of myself because I want to show up in my power,
(23:07):
not in my trauma. Right, And so sometimes taking care
of yourself is that it means you could call it selfish,
but it can be the best thing that you do
for others. Okay, So we have two traditions here, which
are the final two questions that I always enjoy asking
our wonderful guests. The first one is if you had
(23:27):
a magic wand and could fix one thing, what would
it be. I do think that empowering girls and women
completely would change so much, and I would simultaneously improve
boys and men's attitudes towards girls and women, because that
would need simultaneously to be fully adjusted. I mean, it
(23:48):
would it would fix climate, It would just it would
change everything. It would change everything. Amen to that, And
now a closing of our show is called words of wisdom.
This is This is this segment where I first of all,
thank you again for taking your time from your crazy
schedule and being here with us to inspire me and
(24:10):
everyone else. And then I turned my microphone off and
kicked back in my chair with my headphones on and
just listen to anything else you might want to share.
You know. Well, something that we haven't talked about yet
is how I made my decision to be The New
York Times is named source in their investigative report about
Harvey Weinstein. I think that I always knew that I
(24:35):
would be Jodie Cant and Megan Twoey's name source in
their investigative report. But I still wanted to do due
diligence because I wanted to be able to look back
on my process and know that my process had integrity
and then I had been thoughtful and thorough. And I
think that the moral of that story is that I
always like to ask of myself the harder thing, and
(24:58):
that I have the desire to be a woman of
integrity who lives up to the highest calling of myself.
And so what I did when it came down to
the deadline was I just put on my sneakers, laced
them up, and I went for a run on a
beautiful world road and Middle Tennessee, and I prayed. And
(25:21):
as I was running, I realized, I've already made the
most important decision that I'll ever make in my life,
which is, you know, I've turned my will on my
life over to the care of some sort of loving
higher power. And I think that, you know, life is hard,
life is painful, it's often unfair. But there's essentially something
good that is helping me try to find peace in
(25:46):
the midst of the pain in the world, whether it's
sitting with trash pickers in India, or seeing a bullet
hole in a bombed out house in eastern Ukraine where
a mama bird has made her nest and she's eating
her babies, or you know, sitting with an exploited woman
in Congo who's deaf and in a brothel, and I
(26:11):
can't even communicate with the other sex slaves who are
there because they don't have a common sign language with
which to try to express themselves to each other, you know,
But there's something good that's binding us together in this
common desire to make life not just bearable, but somehow connected,
and so I was running and I thought, you know,
I've already made the most important decision I'll ever make,
(26:33):
and whatever happens is a long game. And you know,
it's like Albert Einstein said, you have to make up
my mind. The universe is either friendly or unfriendly, and
I think it's friendly. And so I called Jody back
and I said, I'm prepared to be you know, your
named source, and this investigation. I think it's the right
thing to do as a woman, and it's the right
thing to do as a Christian. And so that's something
(26:53):
that I would share. The other thing I would say
is just about you know, I think we're all looking
for a little wisdom in life. And I don't think
that wisdom is this esoteric, ritualistic knowledge that's transmitted behind
closed doors by initiated people. I think that wisdom is
more caught than taught, and it's about knowing with more
(27:13):
of ourselves, and knowing more deeply with these carved out
parts of ourselves. And that's why it's important to have,
you know, some kind of quiet time every day and
a little bit of a spiritual book to read, or
something something that expresses my highest values and aspirations and
a journaling practice and some kind of self reflection or meditation.
(27:37):
And this doesn't have to be some gymnastic thirty minutes,
but just some some quiet time every day to be
grounded and centered and to try to connect with with
something sweet because the world is a hot mess and
life can be very tough, but I need to know
that I'm cared for in order to genuinely be able
(27:59):
to care for people. Thank you for listening to Righteous
Convictions with Jason Flom. Tune in next week when we
speak with hip hop icon Darryl dmc McDaniels and the
(28:20):
creative mentor at Road Recovery Static. I'd like to thank
our production team Connor Hall, Jeff Clyburne and Kevin Wardis.
The music in this production was supplied by three time
OSCAR nominated composer Jay Ralph. Follow us on Instagram at
Wrongful Conviction, on Twitter at Wrong Conviction and on Facebook
at Wrongful Conviction Podcast. Righteous Convictions with Jason Flam is
(28:43):
a production of Lava for Good Podcasts and association with
Signal Company Number one
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