August 4, 2021 • 48 mins
“Imagine at the age of 16 being sex-trafficked by a pimp named Kutthroat.” That was how the meme about Cyntoia Brown started. Cyntoia herself couldn’t believe it when she heard Kim Kardashian was tweeting about her. After a lifetime of being thought of as a bad kid—people were suddenly on her side?
Cyntoia’s Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/cyntoiabrownofficial/?hl=en
Falicia Blakely episode: https://www.criminalbroads.com/episodes/2018/11/28/episode-14-teenager-in-love-falicia-blakely
Support the podcast by supporting its sponsors! Go to dameproducts.com/criminalbroads for 15% off sitewide, and modernfertility.com/criminalbroads for $20 off your fertility test. Or become a patron at patreon.com/criminalbroads.
Follow on Instagram: Instagram.com/criminalbroads
Find sources here: criminalbroads.com/sources/episode66
Music: Matthew Noble and Stereodog Productions (Dan Pierson & Peter Manheim). Intro and conclusion: “Guilty” by Richard A. Whiting, Harry Akst, and Gus Kahn, sung by Anna Telfer. Ad break: “The Great One Step” by Victor Dance Orchestra, via Free Music Archive, licensed under Public Domain Mark 1.0.
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Mark as Played
Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:00):
Is it a sin?
Speaker 2 (00:03):
Is it a crime?
Speaker 1 (00:04):
I'm loving you, dear like I do. If it's a crime,
then I'm guilty, guilty of loving you.
Speaker 3 (00:20):
Hello, Welcome to Criminal Broad's a true crime podcast about
wild women on the wrong side of the law. Today
we're getting into the case of Sintoya Brown, who you
may remember as the young girl that Kim Kardashian tweeted about.
Speaker 2 (00:35):
But we'll get into all of that later.
Speaker 3 (00:37):
First, though, I have some news for you all, and
I must say it is a bit sad. This is
going to be the last month of Criminal Broads, at
least for the time being. I'm not canceling the podcast.
I'm not shutting it down forever. I'm not deleting every
episode and flouncing off in a huff, but I am
taking some time away from it. And I know so
(01:00):
many of you really like the podcast, and it breaks
my heart to I feel like I'm abandoning you.
Speaker 2 (01:04):
But let me just explain.
Speaker 3 (01:06):
I am first and foremost a writer, as maybe you
know if you know anything about me, and when I
am writing something that's not a podcast, not something audio,
but something online or in print, it takes a long
time and I ideally get a nice chunk of time
to do that. I don't know if you remember, but
(01:26):
a couple episodes ago, I told you about this piece
I wrote for the American Bar Association Journal on the
lawyer who's representing a mother of an alleged victim of
John Wayne Gacy. That piece was so fulfilling for me
to write, and it took months months between pitching the
idea and seeing the idea in print. It was actually
(01:47):
the cover story of that.
Speaker 2 (01:48):
Month's at a journal.
Speaker 3 (01:51):
I probably worked on it on and off for about
two months, and then there was a revision and the
piece was about four thousand words. One of my Criminal
Broad's podcast episodes is usually five six thousand words. Last week,
the Massy episode was eight thousand words. And I write
that in a week, and.
Speaker 2 (02:11):
I can do it.
Speaker 3 (02:12):
I mean, I've been doing it all year. I think
it's been great practice, and proud of the episodes I've
put out. But that is not how I like to work. Ideally,
that's too fast. I can't write and research with the
care that I would prefer to, and I.
Speaker 2 (02:30):
Care so much about the research.
Speaker 3 (02:32):
I love when you guys write in saying you learned
something new from an episode. Like you thought you knew
everything about the case, and then you learn something new
that's from the research. I promise I'm not just making
up things to surprise you.
Speaker 2 (02:43):
You know that's from the research.
Speaker 3 (02:44):
But there's really only so much research you can do
in a week and then also write, edit, and record
the podcast. When I think about my future as a writer,
I don't want to be cranking out these very long
scripts once a week. It's just not going to be
the quality that I ideally want in my future. So
(03:05):
I'm stepping back. I'm going to turn more to writing writing,
not podcast script writing. So I will still be around.
If you still want to read my writings on true crime,
you'll still be able to. But that's what I'm doing,
and I might bring back Criminal Broads in the future
in a different format, like maybe some shorter seasons.
Speaker 2 (03:26):
We'll see.
Speaker 3 (03:26):
I don't want to promise anything anyway. Thanks for listening
to this me ramble about this, But I will have
another month together and then I'll tell you how you
can get in touch with me, you know, forever and ever.
Like I said, I'm not going anywhere. Okay, Thank you
so much for all the support and kind messages. You've
sent me over the years of this podcast. It really
(03:47):
means a lot to me. All right, let's get into
the case. This is a pretty recent case. You may
know the name Sintoya Brown. It may trigger a vague
like huh in your memory, and the action take place
pretty much all through the two thousands that we've all
lived through.
Speaker 2 (04:04):
So buckle up your.
Speaker 3 (04:05):
Seatbelts and we're going to go back to Tennessee starting
in the nineteen nineties.
Speaker 2 (04:11):
See you there. For Cintoya Brown, life was.
Speaker 3 (04:31):
Good in the early nineteen nineties in Clarksville, Tennessee. She
was a little princess who loved and was beloved.
Speaker 2 (04:39):
By her parents.
Speaker 3 (04:40):
She was their baby. Her two siblings were already out
of the house, so whatever baby Cintoya wanted she got.
She and her mom were the best of friends. They'd
go to church and then go to the buffet at
the local steakhouse, where Sintoya ate like a queen. Yes,
life was good back then, at least what she could
remember of it. She didn't have a memory of the
(05:03):
time that she was kidnapped at just a few months old.
She obviously didn't remember her time in Utero, surrounded by
Jack Daniels and crack cocaine. She couldn't feel the repercussions
of her birthright yet she was happy. And then she
started kindergarten and she noticed something that made her do
a double take. All of her classmates were the same
(05:27):
color as their parents, but she wasn't. Her parents had
dark skin, but her skin was lighter. She asked her
mom what was going on. Her mom told her that
she was adopted. Her biological mother, Gina, was a white woman.
Her biological father was a black man. Gina had given
(05:48):
birth to Cintoya when she was only sixteen. During that pregnancy,
Gina drank heavily and tried crack cocaine for the first time.
Gina would give her daughter up and then later come
by and kidnap her, taking her into crack houses and
god knows where else. Of course, Sintoya's mom didn't tell
her any of that.
Speaker 2 (06:07):
Just then.
Speaker 3 (06:08):
She merely said that being mixed race like Cintoya was
was nothing to be ashamed of. She said, that makes
you special, just like Mariah Carey. But as Cintoya grew older,
she felt herself changing, and she could never really explain
why it was like her biological heritage was simmering in
(06:29):
the background of her being conspiring against her. She found
it hard to control her impulses, hard to explain why
she was so quick to anger, so willing to do well,
really dumb things. Part of it was that kids were
always making fun of her. In her school full of
black kids, a lot of people bullied Centtoya by calling
her white, which enraged her. She felt like she didn't
(06:52):
belong anywhere, so she started acting out, just little things
at first, like shoplifting a necklace from Walmart. She memorized
her dad credit card number and started buying porn online
she stole from a family friend. Her behavior grew worse
and worse by little increments, until she was kicked out
of the gifted program at school, which had been an
(07:12):
honor that her mom was so proud of. That only
fed into Cintoya's sense that she didn't belong anywhere, and worse,
that she didn't deserve to belong anywhere, that she was
no good. One day, she stole a bottle of caffeine
pills from her brother in law, and she went around
school showing them off, feeling like a real badass. Suddenly,
(07:35):
she found herself in the principal's office. We do not
tolerate selling drugs here, he told her. Just like that,
she was expelled from sixth grade. It would be years,
over a decade until Cintoya could change the path that
she was on. With this expulsion, she was sent to
(07:55):
an alternative school, and every point of contact she had
with these just made her actions worse. Her friends got
tougher and meaner, her attitude got more and more nihilistic.
Every decision seemed to lead to a worse one. Every
authority figure seemed to view her through a lens of disdain. Worse,
(08:15):
she viewed herself with disdain. Why should she change? She
was a bad kid, she thought. So she went to
the alternative school, and the friends she made there got
her throne into juvenile detention on a breaking and entering charge,
and that led to her spending some time in a
psychiatric facility. It was amazing how quickly you could spiral
(08:37):
once the system got its hooks in you, once you
had a black mark on your record. Then she was
on probation, and by the time she was finally allowed
back at her original school, she was a different girl.
She had to sit behind a screen in class so
that the other kids couldn't see her, presumably so that
her evil nature wouldn't rub off on them. One day,
(08:57):
she came into the classroom and found her teacher going
through her purse. When Cintoya snatched the purse away. Outraged
at the invasion of her privacy, the teacher pressed charges
against her for assault. Bam more juvenile detention. Now in
the custody of the state, she met kids who were
far more serious than any of the quote unquote bad
(09:19):
kids she'd known before. These were kids who sold krack,
who had boyfriends in their thirties who'd killed people. She
learned to live among them by fighting at the drop
of a hat. She also made plans to escape, which
she did twice, each time a family member turned her back.
In her third escape attempt got her sent to an
(09:41):
even higher security facility. All of this and she was
still only thirteen years old. Even though she was young,
(10:01):
Cintoya was no stranger to sex. Later, she would admit
that her view of sex was completely warped. Her obsessive
porn watching had taught her that it was totally normal
for women to walk into rooms and have sex with
whatever strangers they found there. And that's how her first
sexual encounter went. She lost her virginity at age twelve
(10:22):
to a much older stranger who offered to let her
use his phone. In her mind at the time, that
encounter was just how things were done. That was sex.
I didn't even understand why I did it, she wrote later.
Another thing that numbed her to sex was that she
was used to men eyeing her up and down like
(10:42):
she was a piece of meat. Once a family friend
referred to her as one of those young girls who
developed in all the right places, and she slammed a
truck door on his leg. She was feisty like that,
but she also grew numb to men's predatory behavior. After
her first escape attempt, the guy who'd driven her getaway
(11:04):
car took her into a bedroom and pulled out a
condom without saying anything. She just thought to herself, well,
I guess I owe him, and so she paid.
Speaker 2 (11:16):
After she was.
Speaker 3 (11:16):
Finally released from state custody, she went home to live
with her mom again. Her mom was overjoyed to have
her little girl back, but Sintoya was discovering the painful
truth you could never go home again. Her parents had
divorced while she was locked up, and now she found
it impossible to adjust back to normal life. After all,
(11:37):
she was no longer a normal kid. In her mind.
She was a street smart adult who didn't need rules.
She skipped school and smoked weed all day. She got
into fights with anyone who looked sideways at her, and
before long she was planning yet another escape attempt. She
ran away age fifteen and started living with some friends
(11:57):
she'd made while stuck in the system. These were girls
who spent all their money on weed and almost never
bought food, and Cintoya lost so much weight while living
with them that her clothes started hanging off her. Her
friends introduced her to their way of thinking, which was
never sleep with a man unless he pays you. But
Cintoya couldn't bring herself to actually ask anyone for money
(12:18):
because her mom had always told her that she should
never ask for a dime, so she'd tell these men's
sob stories instead. They would inevitably hand her a wat
of cash. Still, she found this unsatisfying kind of demeaning,
and so to make her own money, she started helping
her friend's boyfriend sell crack cocaine. She would skim a
little bit off the top when he inevitably didn't pay
(12:40):
her what he'd promised her. This wasn't rock bottom for her,
but at the time it felt like rock bottom, and
eventually she made her way back home. At home, she
marveled at all the fresh fruit her mother kept in
the fridge. She hadn't had anything as luxurious as a
piece of fresh fruit in ages, and then she ran
(13:03):
away again. She just didn't think of herself as someone
who deserved to live in a nice house with a
loving mother. She didn't think she could live that life,
so she called her mom from a greyhound station and
told her that she was leaving. To this day, I'm
still haunted by the sound of Mommy's voice shattering into
a million pieces as she begged me to stay, she
(13:24):
wrote later in her autobiography. I could hear her heart
breaking through the payphone. If I could go back, I
would run back to Mommy's house right then and there.
I would stop believing I was too far gone to
save and let Mommy take care of me. Cintoya didn't
know it, maybe her mother suspected it, but this escape
(13:46):
attempt would be the one that doomed her. One day,
she got a call from her friend's boyfriend, the one
who sold crack. He told her that he'd pay her
five thousand dollars to come down to Florida with him
on a drug run. Instead, he took her to a
hotel room on false pretenses, spiked her drink, and raped
(14:08):
her for the next two days as she drifted in
and out of consciousness. When she realized what had happened
to her, she felt disgusted and furious and disgusting and
broken and so Not long after that, when Cintoya met
a man who went by the name Cutthroat, A man
(14:31):
who actually seemed interested in her, who asked her questions
instead of blabbing on about himself, who wasn't drugging and
raping her right off the bat, who seemed kind despite
his ominous nickname. She thought, this guy is so different
than every other guy I've ever known. He might be
(14:53):
the one. Let's take a quick break to hear from
(15:22):
this episode's sponsors. Our first sponsor is Neutrifile. All right, guys,
hold my hands, let's hold hands, and let's chant together.
I want great hair. I want great hair. Don't we
all want lush, beautiful hair? That sort of looks like
we have extensions, but like it's natural. Okay, the changes
in your body postpartum can take a toll on your hair.
(15:44):
And keep listening even if you're not postpartum. But it's
a cliche, a sad cliche that women who give birth
sometimes experience excessive shedding of hair afterwards. So enter neutrifile.
Neutrafoil's goal is to empower women to embrace the beauty
of their hair growth recovery with neutrafhol poostpartum by targeting
the root causes of thinning hair. It's breastfeeding friendly Obgyn.
(16:06):
Developed one hundred percent drug free. This is not some
weird gas station hair growth supplement. Okay, this is classy.
This is science backed. Healthier hair growth takes time, so
in three to six months after taking your neutrapol you'll
begin to see thicker, stronger hair that looks I'll say,
like you could be an Instagram hair model. You can
(16:27):
grow stronger, healthier hair and support this show by going
to neutrophol dot com and using the promo code broads
to save fifteen dollars off your first month's subscription. This
is their best offer anywhere and It's only available to
US customers for a limited time, plus free shipping on
every order. Get fifteen dollars off at neutrofol dot com
spelled nut r afol dot com promo code broads. Our
(16:52):
second sponsor speaking of babies, is Modern Fertility. Do you
have any big plans for your future? Are you starting
to ask yourself questions like should I maybe at some
point have one of those chubby, squirming, cute little things
with their eyes squinched shut that looks like dumplings and photos.
I'm talking about babies, and if you're thinking about one,
(17:15):
consider taking the Modern Fertility Hormone Test. It's a simple,
at home fingerprick that unlocks tons of insights into your
reproductive health. We're talking egg count, we're talking menopause timing,
we're talking about egg freezing, IVF, possible outcomes for those things,
things that.
Speaker 2 (17:30):
Are helpful to know if kids are in your future.
Speaker 3 (17:33):
It's easy and affordable, and you'll get your personalized test
results within ten days after you mail it in with
a prepaid label. Obviously you're not paying with stamps here.
It's also cheaper than traditional testing with your doctor, which
can cost over one thousand dollars, but Modern Fertility gets
you the same info at one hundred and fifty nine
dollars plus twenty eight dollars off if you use my code.
(17:53):
Let's get into that code right now. Modern Fertility is
offering our listeners twenty dollars off the test when you
go to modern fertility dots slash criminal brods. That means
your test will cost one hundred and thirty nine dollars
instead of the several hundred or even thousand plus dollars
it could cost it a doctor's office. Get twenty percent
off your fertility test when you go to modernfertility dot
(18:14):
com slash criminal brods modernfertility dot com slash criminal brods.
(18:44):
The first time Satoya and Cutthroat drove around in his car,
she felt like she could talk to him forever. Never
mind that he kept snorting vasine up his nose, which
she later found was laced with cocaine. He seemed so kind,
never mind that when they got a room at a
cheap hotel, he offered her her first hit of cocaine.
It made her feel so good. Unfortunately, it also made
(19:08):
her want to get more and more of it. The
cocaine and this meant that she rubbed elbows with guys
who treated her worse than ever before. One day, she
was assaulted by two separate men, one who had given
her some cocaine and then raped her when she fell asleep,
and another who was a friend of Cutthroats. That guy
had picked her up, pretending like he was sent there
(19:30):
by Cut and then raped her. It was a horrific
twenty four hours. I felt like somebody had hung a
sign on me announcing my body was rape for the taking,
she wrote. My body felt numb, detached, like it didn't
belong to me. But at least Cut wasn't like those guys.
He was different right. When Kot found out that one
(19:54):
of his best friends had raped Cintoya, he blamed not
the friend but Sa. He started talking NonStop about how
she was such a slut, but that was okay because
he liked sluts. With this new narrative of his that
she was a slut, he started behaving differently towards her.
(20:14):
He would pressure her into stealing money from other guys
by promising sex. She would have to pretend like she
was going to have sex with them, ask for the
money upfront, and then escape Before long, he was pressuring
her to actually have sex with these men. Once, using
a gun, he forced her to have sex with one
of his friends, a favor between bros. Another time, he
(20:38):
forced her to write a demeaning document about all the
ways that she was a slut and all the rules
for being a slut that she had to follow. Sintoya
didn't know the word grooming back then. She didn't know
the word trafficking, or at least she didn't know that
it could apply to someone like her, and it never
crossed her mind that Cut was true treating her not
(21:01):
like a boyfriend but like a pimp. She just kept
telling herself that once they had enough money, they'd get
out of these cheap hotel rooms, they'd make a better
life for themselves, and he'd treat her nicely. Once again,
when Cut told her that she wasn't allowed to wear
clothes in their hotel room anymore, When he forced her
to have sex with him at the drop of a hat,
(21:22):
when he pointed a loaded gun at her over and
over again, when he punched her in the face, when
he dragged her around by the hair, when he choked
her until she blacked out. She told herself that every
relationship went through rough patches. The night that he choked
her was August six, two thousand and four. When she
(21:42):
came to he kicked her and told her to get
outside and earn some money. She got dressed, she put
his gun in her purse, like she always did when
she was soliciting, and she went outside. She was crying, despairing.
She was walking through the parking lot of Sonic Drive
Through when a forty three year old man pulled up
(22:03):
next to her. His name was Johnny Allen. He was
a real estate agent. He was engaged. He asked her
if she needed a ride and if she was hungry.
She thought wildly that maybe this man wasn't trying to
buy sex from her, Maybe he actually cared about her.
Maybe he could see that she was upset, maybe he
(22:24):
was going to help her. When he asked her if
she was okay, she explained her whole situation to him,
that she was stuck in a hotel room with a
man who beat and raped her, that she didn't know
how to escape, where to go next. Johnny asked her
where she was from, and she told him and then
waited for him to say that he would help her. Well,
(22:45):
he said, are you.
Speaker 2 (22:47):
Up for any action?
Speaker 3 (22:51):
He took her back to his house, where he told
her that he was in the military, that he used
to be a sharpshooter, and that he had plenty of guns.
He showed her some of his rifles. His behavior was
creeping her out. She felt like he was going to
do something bad to her. They got into bed together,
(23:11):
but he kept getting out of bed, which made her nervous.
What was he planning?
Speaker 2 (23:18):
At first?
Speaker 1 (23:18):
He was just stroking me, but then it's like he
just grabbed me like and into my legs, like he
just grabbed it real hard, and he just gave me
this look. It was like a very fierce look, and
then it just sent these chills up my spine. I'm
thinking he's gonna hit me or do something like it.
Speaker 2 (23:35):
But then he rolls over and reaches like he's reaching
to the side of the bed of something. So I'm thinking, oh,
he's not gonna hit me.
Speaker 1 (23:42):
He's finna get a gun.
Speaker 2 (23:44):
And what did you do at that time?
Speaker 1 (23:45):
I just grabbed the gun and I shot him.
Speaker 3 (23:50):
Sinoya claims not to remember what exactly happened that night.
In her memoir, she says that in her memory, the
murder is like a movie out of order. She says
that when she fired Cut's gun, she didn't really understand
what she'd done. She stayed in the house for three
more hours until she finally realized that Johnny Allen was dead,
(24:12):
really dead. He was bloody and slumped over in his
own bed. She raced back to Cut and their lonely
hotel room, and they turned on the TV. And it
wasn't long before the murder was all over the local
news and the cops were pounding on their hotel room door, screaming,
don't move. Before Sintoya's trial could start, one vital question
(24:46):
had to be answered. Would she be tried as a
juvenile or as an adult. She was only sixteen, but
she'd committed a serious crime, and murder sometimes got juveniles
transferred to adult court, where the consequences were far more dire.
She tried to make herself look nice for the hearing
that would determine the rest of her life. She braided
(25:06):
her hair into pigtails and then tied each one with
a bit of latex from an old glove. She looked
about thirteen years old. In jail, she'd been praying desperately
to be tried in juvenile court as pieces of the
Christianity of her youth came flooding back to her. But
the pigtails and the prayers didn't work. She was going
(25:27):
to be tried as an adult. Her lawyer was weeping
when she told Cintoya the news, and Cintoya later wrote,
God hadn't heard me at all. If her transfer hearing
hadn't gone well, her trial would be even worse. She
prepared for it like a maniac, reading as many law
books as she could get her hands on, coming up
(25:48):
with different legal arguments that her lawyers dismissed as nonsense.
She was behaving kind of erratically because she was on
all sorts of psychotropic drugs, sometimes three kinds at once.
She couldn't stay awake. She obsessed over one thing after another.
She cut off her hair and shaved her eyebrows so
that she wouldn't feel like a sexual person anymore. As
(26:09):
she was waiting for trial, she opened a newspaper one
day and read that cut had been killed, shot in
the chest, the stomach, and the face. She was devastated.
It would take her a long time to come to
the realization that what he had done to her was wrong,
that it wasn't love, it was abuse. For a long time, though,
(26:30):
she clung to the narrative that he had been the
one despite it all. After two years of waiting for it,
her trial arrived. In the courtroom, she was painted as
a cold blooded killer, a robber who'd killed an innocent
man just to rifle through his stuff. The da played
a phone call she'd made to her mother from jail.
(26:50):
In it, her mother cries that she just wants Sintoya
to have a normal life, and Centoya, also crying, responds,
I'm not going to have an adult life. I killed somebody.
I executed him. The jury took that statement at face value.
When they came filing back into the courtroom to read
their verdict, one of them caught her eye and shook
(27:12):
his head just slightly. She knew in that moment that
her sentence would be life. Prison actually wasn't that bad.
Compared to all the other various facilities that Cintoya had
(27:35):
spent time in over the last four years. She'd been
in many a depressing cell, but her cell at the
Tennessee Prison for Women was, in her opinion, kind of cozy.
She had a TV, a fan she could buy ramen
noodles from the commissary, she could smoke cigarettes, she could
make an appointment to get her hair done. Still, it
was prison. She got in trouble for every little thing.
(27:58):
The guards were extremely strict, and she was struggling with
her old demon impulse control. She didn't yet have the
vocabulary to explain why she struggled with the things she
struggled with. She just knew that she couldn't stop fighting
making trouble. Before long, she was thrown into maximum security
for a year, where she spent so much time in
(28:19):
shackles that she still has scars on the backs of
her ankles to this day. She lost her mind in
there temporarily, and once she became convinced that she'd lost
one hundred pounds in two days, she screamed at the
guards to help her, sure that something had gone terribly wrong.
She would swing from one extreme to another in prison,
(28:41):
fighting and making trouble, and then resolving to turn her
life around. Often she resolved this because of her mom,
who was the one constant thing in her life and
who visited her every two weeks like clockwork. When her
mom was diagnosed with breast cancer, Cintoya was determined that
this was it, this was the time she'd really improve.
She got out of MAX two months early for good behavior.
(29:04):
She started exercising, tried to walk the straight and narrow almost.
She spent some time illegally selling tobacco and got out
of the biz right before the whole thing was discovered
and the ringleader was sent to MAX. But most importantly,
she was accepted into college. It was a college program
called the Lipscomb Initiative for Education or Life. Lipscombe was
(29:25):
a private Christian university and they had this program where
incarcerated students were allowed to take classes right alongside the
free students. Sintoya walked into the classroom ready for everyone
to judge her, for the Christians in the classroom to
act all holier than thou, but she ended up loving it.
She found the community very healing, and she loved what
(29:45):
she was learning in her criminal justice class about things
like restorative justice and peacemaking. She was also starting to
learn something about herself. Even though she'd always thought of
herself as someone who had no purpose, who is just
a failure and a broken thing thing, she was becoming
a little bit of an activist. When she saw something wrong,
(30:06):
she would do anything to make it right. Other people's
injustices really fired her up, and people like teachers and
authority figures were starting to ask her opinion on criminal
justice matters on issues with girls just like her. People
wanted to hear what she had to say. Hmm, maybe
there was a future there for her. In the meantime,
(30:30):
she was losing all of her appeals. Even when a
prestigious lawyer took on her case pro bono, and when
doctors testified at a hearing that she was mentally impaired
because of all the drinking that her birth mother did
and that this meant she couldn't control her behavior. Even
all of that didn't sway the criminal justice system in
her favor. On paper, she was a teenage killer, nothing more,
(30:52):
not a domestic abuse victim, not someone who suffered from
fetal alcohol spectrum disorder, and certainly not a victim of
sex trafficking. Sintoya herself barely knew that these terms applied
to her life. Judges and prosecutors certainly didn't, But hearing
herself described at that hearing as someone with tons of
(31:12):
mental problems who suffered from fetal alcohol spectrum disorder. This
was extremely scarring for Cintoya. She hadn't expected those diagnoses,
and she sat there as doctors droned on and on
about how messed up she was. She felt horrible afterward.
In a desperate attempt to make herself feel better, she
made a doomed decision. She started a relationship with a guard.
(31:38):
This was, of course, strictly forbidden. When their love letters
to each other were discovered, she was temporarily transferred to
a different prison in Memphis, away from her friends, from
her education, from her mom. In Memphis, she had a
lot of time on her hands, and it was there
that she kept remembering the idea of God. There was
(32:00):
never a come to Jesus moment. It was more like
a slow, strange trickle, and I mean strange. She started
having dreams, dreams about dogs. Memphis used to have a
puppy program, but then it got taken away, but the
prison always swirled with rumors that it would come back,
because those ladies loved their puppies. First, Centoya dreamed that
(32:22):
the program would be reinstalled, and then it was then
she dreamed that a specific kind of dog would show
up at the program, a white dog with black spots,
a nod on his head, and a pink tip on
his tail. A few days later, that exact puppy showed up.
She had two more dreams like this, dreams that came
(32:42):
true exactly, and it was so weird and notable that
she kept trying to interpret it.
Speaker 2 (32:49):
What did this mean?
Speaker 3 (32:51):
She remembered the story of Joseph in the Bible. He
had strange skills with dreams too. He was locked up too.
There thinking about all of this. Joseph had been locked
up for a purpose. Was it possible that she had
a purpose too, That her life wasn't just a series
(33:11):
of random cruel events, That she wasn't a worthless, no
good human, but that she had purpose and worth. She
started thinking back on her life. If she hadn't been
in prison when cut was murdered, she might have been
killed right next to him. If her case hadn't gotten
the attention that it did, she wouldn't be receiving all
(33:34):
the letters she received from young kids who were lost
and sad and looking to her for help. Joseph said, famously,
what man intended for evil, God intended for good? Was
it possible that Centoya herself could do good. Many of
the letters she received were basically tinder profiles from men
(33:56):
who saw her face on TV and got a crush
on her. She laughed at these with her friends, but
nothing ever came of them. Then one day she got
a letter that stood out. This man had burned the
edges of his paper so it looked kind of vintage.
The letter was straightforward and kind, with no hint of
sex or predatory behavior in it, and the writer had
(34:16):
included some photos of himself. Cintoya and her friend screamed
when they saw the photos. It could not be denied.
This guy was one of the hottest men they had
ever seen. The handsome letter writer was a man named
(34:51):
Jamie Long, and he was writing to Cintoya to say
that he was sure her story would have a happy ending.
God was going to overturn her sentence, he said. He
was the sort of Christian who, to be honest, sounds
kind of crazy to most other people. Like Centtoya, he
had premonitions, He felt God talking to him, and he
was convinced that she was getting out of there. The
(35:13):
two wrote back and forth, back and forth. Jamie had
a rough background too, along with an almost literal come
to Jesus moment where he turned his car around and
changed his life. When he decided to come up from
Texas where he lived to visit Centtoya. Centoya prepped for
the visit like she was getting ready for prom in person.
(35:34):
He was swooningly handsome, and she had butterflies the whole time,
But he didn't kiss her when he said goodbye, and
he didn't give her any romantic signals, and she left
the visit feeling totally confused. As it turned out, Jamie
was just trying to get his own butterflies under control.
They wrote back and forth more and spoke on the
phone constantly, and finally, in one letter he admitted it
(35:57):
I love you. Sintoya reminded him that she might never
get out of prison, they might never be able to
be together, but Jamie insisted that she was getting out.
He was so convinced of this that he actually moved
to Nashville and bought a house and told her that
he planned to take her there as his wife. Sintoya
(36:18):
spent long hours dreaming of that sort of life, to
have a house to be with him. One of her
dreams involved cleaning products. She fantasized about owning her own
cleaning products and scrubbing her own counters until they shined.
That was freedom to her, to have power over her
own space, to make it sparkle and smell nice. In
(36:43):
twenty fifteen, when Sintoya was twenty seven years old and
had been behind bars for eleven years, she got her
associate's degree in Liberal arts from Lipscomb University. She was
only supposed to invite four people, but she invited everyone
she knew, a huge cake with seven different colors of frosting.
She painted her nails with Lipscomb's colors purple and gold.
(37:07):
A decade ago, she had thought of herself as nothing,
as worthless, as a bad girl with impulse control issues
who was destined for nothing more than a cold bed
in a cell somewhere. And now she knew that she
was so much more valuable than that. She got up
on stage to accept her degree, and she looked down
into the audience at her mom, who had tears streaming
(37:28):
down her face. Cintoya pointed at her mom, this is
for you, she said, her voice cracked. Everything good that
I've done is for you. And then one day someone
(38:04):
told Cintoya that the rapper Ti had posted about her
on social media. Cintoya was baffled. How in the world
did Ti know her name? Okay, so she'd just done
a TV interview, but it wasn't supposed to be a
huge thing. She had started this project designed to educate
young girls about sex trafficking. When she was a young girl,
(38:27):
she thought sex trafficking was when you got shoved into
a truck by a bunch of foreign men and driven
across a border into a strange land. She didn't know
that your quote unquote boyfriend could sex traffic you right
from your own hotel room. But now she knew, and
she wanted other girls to learn that before it was
too late for them. So she'd started this initiative called Glitter,
(38:47):
and she'd done an interview to publicize it. And during
the interview, her lawyer had briefly mentioned that they were
going to ask the governor of Tennessee for clemency. They'd
used up all of Cintoya's appeals, so clemency was their
lafeast option, and somehow that interview went viral. Suddenly she
was a meme. There was a photo of her at sixteen,
(39:09):
her hair in those infamous pigtails circulating around social media
along with this text. Imagine at the age of sixteen
being sex trafficked by a pimp named Cutthroat. After days
of being repeatedly drugged and raped by different men, you
were purchased by a forty three year old child predator
who took you to his home to use you for sex.
(39:30):
You ended up finding enough courage to fight back and
shoot and kill him. You're arrested as a result, tried
and convicted as an adult, and sentenced to life in prison.
This is the story of Cintoya Brown. She will be
eligible for parole when she is sixty nine years old.
Hashtag free Cintoya Brown. Rihanna posted about her. Lebron James
(39:53):
posted about her. Snoop Dog posted about her. Kim Kardashian
posted about her, saying that she was having her own
lawyers look into the case. The attention grew and grew,
and Centoya felt sick. She knew that with a clemency petition,
you don't want a lot of attention. With attention come
the haters, people who come out of the woodwork to argue, wait, no,
(40:15):
she's a murderer. Keep her locked up for life. The
only thing that kept her calm during this heady, terrifying
wave of attention was Jamie. They prayed together on the
phone as she tried to keep a level head. She
wasn't even sure she'd get a hearing to argue for clemency.
Most people didn't get one of those. Only two percent
(40:37):
of clemency applications ever reached that stage. But on May
twenty third, twenty eighteen, she finally got that longed foe hearing.
Speaker 2 (40:45):
She walked into a.
Speaker 3 (40:46):
Room to see that the board who would be listening
to her was all white, but one of them seemed
to wink at her. It was a sign of hope,
a far cry from the man on the jury who'd
shaken his head just before that jury found her guilty.
We are here with a story of transformation, said Centoya's lawyer.
(41:08):
This is a story, a record story of transformation in
the life of a wasted child who has become a beautiful, intelligent, caring,
educated woman who can make things better in this world.
Tears filled Cintoya's eyes as witness after witness got up
and testified about the woman she'd become. She herself spoke,
(41:31):
apologizing in a broken voice for the hurt she'd caused,
asking humbly for mercy. I just wanted to say thank
you first. I know a lot of people get to
see you, but I have prayed for a very long time.
Speaker 2 (41:49):
To meet you.
Speaker 3 (41:53):
The board was split, too voted to grant her request,
but too voted to deny it. The other two voted
to make her eligible for parole after serving twenty five
years instead of fifty, which was her original sentence, but
the only vote that really counted was the Governor of
Tennessee's For seven months after the hearing, Cintoya returned to
(42:15):
her life of waiting, of praying with Jamie, of trying
to be level headed about the whole thing and not
get her hopes up. But she dreamed that she was
walking without shackles or handcuffs in a yellow dress, and
she thought to herself, I'm getting out. I'm getting out
in the summer. And then she got the news she
(42:36):
was getting out. Her release date was set for August of.
Speaker 2 (42:39):
Twenty nineteen, but she and Jamie couldn't wait.
Speaker 3 (42:42):
They got married over the phone, using some legal loophole
that Cintoya had researched obsessively. Jamie prepared their house for her.
As the months turned into weeks and then days, and
then one night, just after one am, the guards came
to wake her and she walked out of those prison
doors for the very last time. She had to leave
(43:03):
in the middle of the night to avoid the media
who were all camped around the prison expecting her to
leave in the morning. She got into a car with Jamie,
who was waiting for her, and he took her home.
The house that he'd bought for them was beautiful. It
was full of fresh fruit and groceries and all the
beauty products she'd ever mentioned that she liked, and a
(43:25):
closet full of shoes and clothes just her size. She
looked around in every corner, and then she pulled herself
a bath a bath. She soaked in the tub and
thought about how she was going to wake up the
next day and clean the whole house. And she wasn't
just going to clean, of course, she was going to
(43:46):
become a voice for all the women just like her
who were still locked up, whose sentences were crippling them,
who were painted as cold blooded killers and not victims
of abuse or sex trafficking. Women just like her, except
without the celebrities tweeting about them. She would become their voice,
and in the following years, Cintoya Brown would do just that.
(44:09):
She would go on a national speaking tour, would write
a memoir, would think about law school, would advocate for change.
She had a bright future ahead of her, the type
of future that her mom envisioned for her when she
was just a little girl going to that academically gifted
program in her school. Yes, she had a lot to do,
(44:30):
but first she was going to lay there and so
her scarred ankles in the bubble bath and taste freedom.
(45:00):
Thanks for listening, everyone, I hope you enjoyed Centoya's story.
Many of those details were taken from her memoir Free Centoya,
which you can read if you want to know more
about her life. You can also follow her and her
husband Jamie Long on Instagram if you want to see
how handsome he is. And it is cute and sweet
(45:21):
to see them living their lives. I mean, I'm not
gonna say they're living normal lives because they're famous now,
so they're sort of like influencery, but they're still living
their lives and enjoying things like they just didn't add
about some sort of food.
Speaker 2 (45:35):
It's just like warms my heart.
Speaker 3 (45:37):
To see Centoya get to take pleasure in these things
like food and like do an ad for food and
hopefully get paid for that. It just is nice to see.
So check them out on Instagram. Also important to note
that I have done an episode, Episode fifteen of this
podcast from a zillion years ago is about a pretty
(46:00):
darn similar case. It's the episode on Felicia Blakely. Some
of you have probably listened to it, some of you haven't.
Is a very similar case, very similar. She was sixteen
years old when she met this guy who she thought
was her boyfriend. He totally groomed her, brainwashed her, manipulated her,
abused her, and forced her to kill several people. She
(46:23):
was sent to prison for life, just like Centtoya, a
lot of similarities. She's also a young black woman like Centtoya.
Now she's I think in her thirties, but was a
teenager when she was arrested. Anyway, her case has gotten
some attention. There's a book on it, a movie on it,
but definitely not the Kim Kardashian, Snoop dogg Lebron James
Rihanna level of attention that Cintoya's got. It's just notable
(46:47):
the difference in these cases, and it almost seems like
a I don't want to say the word crap shoot
because that's such an ugly word. What's a better word
for that, But it almost seems like a crap shoot,
like which cases happened to get the attention and maybe
the public pressure that leads to clemency and which don't.
It's very sad and makes me kind of feel claustrophobic
when I think about so.
Speaker 2 (47:07):
I don't have an easy solution there.
Speaker 3 (47:08):
But if you want to hear the story of Felicia
Blakelee and look for the similarities and maybe the ways
it's different than Sintoya's story, check out episode fifteen Teenager
and Love. You also will hear from Felicia on that episode.
All right, I will let you go. I will see
you here next week. We're doing a case that I
haven't decided on yet. I have a couple options. Sometimes
(47:29):
I go back and forth until the last minute.
Speaker 2 (47:31):
But it'll be a good one.
Speaker 3 (47:31):
I promise you. I'll see you here next week. Hope
you're having a lovely summer. I hope you get a
chance to eat a very ripe tomato, sprinkled with salt
and pepper, and put on a piece of white bread
with a little shmear of mayonnaise or butter. However you
do your tomato sandwiches, I hope you do one, unless
you hate tomatoes, in which case I hope you find
(47:52):
a slice of some sort of pie or pastry made
with stone fruit that's also seasonal. We're a really perfectly
boiled ear of corn. Oh my gosh, I think I'm hungry.
All right, talk to you next week.
Speaker 2 (48:02):
Bye. Maybe I'm wrong.
Speaker 1 (48:06):
Maybe i'm wrong loving you deal like I do.
Speaker 3 (48:15):
If it's a crime, then I'm guilty, guilty of loving you.
Is it a sin?
Speaker 2 (00:03):
Is it a crime?
Speaker 1 (00:04):
I'm loving you, dear like I do. If it's a crime,
then I'm guilty, guilty of loving you.
Speaker 3 (00:20):
Hello, Welcome to Criminal Broad's a true crime podcast about
wild women on the wrong side of the law. Today
we're getting into the case of Sintoya Brown, who you
may remember as the young girl that Kim Kardashian tweeted about.
Speaker 2 (00:35):
But we'll get into all of that later.
Speaker 3 (00:37):
First, though, I have some news for you all, and
I must say it is a bit sad. This is
going to be the last month of Criminal Broads, at
least for the time being. I'm not canceling the podcast.
I'm not shutting it down forever. I'm not deleting every
episode and flouncing off in a huff, but I am
taking some time away from it. And I know so
(01:00):
many of you really like the podcast, and it breaks
my heart to I feel like I'm abandoning you.
Speaker 2 (01:04):
But let me just explain.
Speaker 3 (01:06):
I am first and foremost a writer, as maybe you
know if you know anything about me, and when I
am writing something that's not a podcast, not something audio,
but something online or in print, it takes a long
time and I ideally get a nice chunk of time
to do that. I don't know if you remember, but
(01:26):
a couple episodes ago, I told you about this piece
I wrote for the American Bar Association Journal on the
lawyer who's representing a mother of an alleged victim of
John Wayne Gacy. That piece was so fulfilling for me
to write, and it took months months between pitching the
idea and seeing the idea in print. It was actually
(01:47):
the cover story of that.
Speaker 2 (01:48):
Month's at a journal.
Speaker 3 (01:51):
I probably worked on it on and off for about
two months, and then there was a revision and the
piece was about four thousand words. One of my Criminal
Broad's podcast episodes is usually five six thousand words. Last week,
the Massy episode was eight thousand words. And I write
that in a week, and.
Speaker 2 (02:11):
I can do it.
Speaker 3 (02:12):
I mean, I've been doing it all year. I think
it's been great practice, and proud of the episodes I've
put out. But that is not how I like to work. Ideally,
that's too fast. I can't write and research with the
care that I would prefer to, and I.
Speaker 2 (02:30):
Care so much about the research.
Speaker 3 (02:32):
I love when you guys write in saying you learned
something new from an episode. Like you thought you knew
everything about the case, and then you learn something new
that's from the research. I promise I'm not just making
up things to surprise you.
Speaker 2 (02:43):
You know that's from the research.
Speaker 3 (02:44):
But there's really only so much research you can do
in a week and then also write, edit, and record
the podcast. When I think about my future as a writer,
I don't want to be cranking out these very long
scripts once a week. It's just not going to be
the quality that I ideally want in my future. So
(03:05):
I'm stepping back. I'm going to turn more to writing writing,
not podcast script writing. So I will still be around.
If you still want to read my writings on true crime,
you'll still be able to. But that's what I'm doing,
and I might bring back Criminal Broads in the future
in a different format, like maybe some shorter seasons.
Speaker 2 (03:26):
We'll see.
Speaker 3 (03:26):
I don't want to promise anything anyway. Thanks for listening
to this me ramble about this, But I will have
another month together and then I'll tell you how you
can get in touch with me, you know, forever and ever.
Like I said, I'm not going anywhere. Okay, Thank you
so much for all the support and kind messages. You've
sent me over the years of this podcast. It really
(03:47):
means a lot to me. All right, let's get into
the case. This is a pretty recent case. You may
know the name Sintoya Brown. It may trigger a vague
like huh in your memory, and the action take place
pretty much all through the two thousands that we've all
lived through.
Speaker 2 (04:04):
So buckle up your.
Speaker 3 (04:05):
Seatbelts and we're going to go back to Tennessee starting
in the nineteen nineties.
Speaker 2 (04:11):
See you there. For Cintoya Brown, life was.
Speaker 3 (04:31):
Good in the early nineteen nineties in Clarksville, Tennessee. She
was a little princess who loved and was beloved.
Speaker 2 (04:39):
By her parents.
Speaker 3 (04:40):
She was their baby. Her two siblings were already out
of the house, so whatever baby Cintoya wanted she got.
She and her mom were the best of friends. They'd
go to church and then go to the buffet at
the local steakhouse, where Sintoya ate like a queen. Yes,
life was good back then, at least what she could
remember of it. She didn't have a memory of the
(05:03):
time that she was kidnapped at just a few months old.
She obviously didn't remember her time in Utero, surrounded by
Jack Daniels and crack cocaine. She couldn't feel the repercussions
of her birthright yet she was happy. And then she
started kindergarten and she noticed something that made her do
a double take. All of her classmates were the same
(05:27):
color as their parents, but she wasn't. Her parents had
dark skin, but her skin was lighter. She asked her
mom what was going on. Her mom told her that
she was adopted. Her biological mother, Gina, was a white woman.
Her biological father was a black man. Gina had given
(05:48):
birth to Cintoya when she was only sixteen. During that pregnancy,
Gina drank heavily and tried crack cocaine for the first time.
Gina would give her daughter up and then later come
by and kidnap her, taking her into crack houses and
god knows where else. Of course, Sintoya's mom didn't tell
her any of that.
Speaker 2 (06:07):
Just then.
Speaker 3 (06:08):
She merely said that being mixed race like Cintoya was
was nothing to be ashamed of. She said, that makes
you special, just like Mariah Carey. But as Cintoya grew older,
she felt herself changing, and she could never really explain
why it was like her biological heritage was simmering in
(06:29):
the background of her being conspiring against her. She found
it hard to control her impulses, hard to explain why
she was so quick to anger, so willing to do well,
really dumb things. Part of it was that kids were
always making fun of her. In her school full of
black kids, a lot of people bullied Centtoya by calling
her white, which enraged her. She felt like she didn't
(06:52):
belong anywhere, so she started acting out, just little things
at first, like shoplifting a necklace from Walmart. She memorized
her dad credit card number and started buying porn online
she stole from a family friend. Her behavior grew worse
and worse by little increments, until she was kicked out
of the gifted program at school, which had been an
(07:12):
honor that her mom was so proud of. That only
fed into Cintoya's sense that she didn't belong anywhere, and worse,
that she didn't deserve to belong anywhere, that she was
no good. One day, she stole a bottle of caffeine
pills from her brother in law, and she went around
school showing them off, feeling like a real badass. Suddenly,
(07:35):
she found herself in the principal's office. We do not
tolerate selling drugs here, he told her. Just like that,
she was expelled from sixth grade. It would be years,
over a decade until Cintoya could change the path that
she was on. With this expulsion, she was sent to
(07:55):
an alternative school, and every point of contact she had
with these just made her actions worse. Her friends got
tougher and meaner, her attitude got more and more nihilistic.
Every decision seemed to lead to a worse one. Every
authority figure seemed to view her through a lens of disdain. Worse,
(08:15):
she viewed herself with disdain. Why should she change? She
was a bad kid, she thought. So she went to
the alternative school, and the friends she made there got
her throne into juvenile detention on a breaking and entering charge,
and that led to her spending some time in a
psychiatric facility. It was amazing how quickly you could spiral
(08:37):
once the system got its hooks in you, once you
had a black mark on your record. Then she was
on probation, and by the time she was finally allowed
back at her original school, she was a different girl.
She had to sit behind a screen in class so
that the other kids couldn't see her, presumably so that
her evil nature wouldn't rub off on them. One day,
(08:57):
she came into the classroom and found her teacher going
through her purse. When Cintoya snatched the purse away. Outraged
at the invasion of her privacy, the teacher pressed charges
against her for assault. Bam more juvenile detention. Now in
the custody of the state, she met kids who were
far more serious than any of the quote unquote bad
(09:19):
kids she'd known before. These were kids who sold krack,
who had boyfriends in their thirties who'd killed people. She
learned to live among them by fighting at the drop
of a hat. She also made plans to escape, which
she did twice, each time a family member turned her back.
In her third escape attempt got her sent to an
(09:41):
even higher security facility. All of this and she was
still only thirteen years old. Even though she was young,
(10:01):
Cintoya was no stranger to sex. Later, she would admit
that her view of sex was completely warped. Her obsessive
porn watching had taught her that it was totally normal
for women to walk into rooms and have sex with
whatever strangers they found there. And that's how her first
sexual encounter went. She lost her virginity at age twelve
(10:22):
to a much older stranger who offered to let her
use his phone. In her mind at the time, that
encounter was just how things were done. That was sex.
I didn't even understand why I did it, she wrote later.
Another thing that numbed her to sex was that she
was used to men eyeing her up and down like
(10:42):
she was a piece of meat. Once a family friend
referred to her as one of those young girls who
developed in all the right places, and she slammed a
truck door on his leg. She was feisty like that,
but she also grew numb to men's predatory behavior. After
her first escape attempt, the guy who'd driven her getaway
(11:04):
car took her into a bedroom and pulled out a
condom without saying anything. She just thought to herself, well,
I guess I owe him, and so she paid.
Speaker 2 (11:16):
After she was.
Speaker 3 (11:16):
Finally released from state custody, she went home to live
with her mom again. Her mom was overjoyed to have
her little girl back, but Sintoya was discovering the painful
truth you could never go home again. Her parents had
divorced while she was locked up, and now she found
it impossible to adjust back to normal life. After all,
(11:37):
she was no longer a normal kid. In her mind.
She was a street smart adult who didn't need rules.
She skipped school and smoked weed all day. She got
into fights with anyone who looked sideways at her, and
before long she was planning yet another escape attempt. She
ran away age fifteen and started living with some friends
(11:57):
she'd made while stuck in the system. These were girls
who spent all their money on weed and almost never
bought food, and Cintoya lost so much weight while living
with them that her clothes started hanging off her. Her
friends introduced her to their way of thinking, which was
never sleep with a man unless he pays you. But
Cintoya couldn't bring herself to actually ask anyone for money
(12:18):
because her mom had always told her that she should
never ask for a dime, so she'd tell these men's
sob stories instead. They would inevitably hand her a wat
of cash. Still, she found this unsatisfying kind of demeaning,
and so to make her own money, she started helping
her friend's boyfriend sell crack cocaine. She would skim a
little bit off the top when he inevitably didn't pay
(12:40):
her what he'd promised her. This wasn't rock bottom for her,
but at the time it felt like rock bottom, and
eventually she made her way back home. At home, she
marveled at all the fresh fruit her mother kept in
the fridge. She hadn't had anything as luxurious as a
piece of fresh fruit in ages, and then she ran
(13:03):
away again. She just didn't think of herself as someone
who deserved to live in a nice house with a
loving mother. She didn't think she could live that life,
so she called her mom from a greyhound station and
told her that she was leaving. To this day, I'm
still haunted by the sound of Mommy's voice shattering into
a million pieces as she begged me to stay, she
(13:24):
wrote later in her autobiography. I could hear her heart
breaking through the payphone. If I could go back, I
would run back to Mommy's house right then and there.
I would stop believing I was too far gone to
save and let Mommy take care of me. Cintoya didn't
know it, maybe her mother suspected it, but this escape
(13:46):
attempt would be the one that doomed her. One day,
she got a call from her friend's boyfriend, the one
who sold crack. He told her that he'd pay her
five thousand dollars to come down to Florida with him
on a drug run. Instead, he took her to a
hotel room on false pretenses, spiked her drink, and raped
(14:08):
her for the next two days as she drifted in
and out of consciousness. When she realized what had happened
to her, she felt disgusted and furious and disgusting and
broken and so Not long after that, when Cintoya met
a man who went by the name Cutthroat, A man
(14:31):
who actually seemed interested in her, who asked her questions
instead of blabbing on about himself, who wasn't drugging and
raping her right off the bat, who seemed kind despite
his ominous nickname. She thought, this guy is so different
than every other guy I've ever known. He might be
(14:53):
the one. Let's take a quick break to hear from
(15:22):
this episode's sponsors. Our first sponsor is Neutrifile. All right, guys,
hold my hands, let's hold hands, and let's chant together.
I want great hair. I want great hair. Don't we
all want lush, beautiful hair? That sort of looks like
we have extensions, but like it's natural. Okay, the changes
in your body postpartum can take a toll on your hair.
(15:44):
And keep listening even if you're not postpartum. But it's
a cliche, a sad cliche that women who give birth
sometimes experience excessive shedding of hair afterwards. So enter neutrifile.
Neutrafoil's goal is to empower women to embrace the beauty
of their hair growth recovery with neutrafhol poostpartum by targeting
the root causes of thinning hair. It's breastfeeding friendly Obgyn.
(16:06):
Developed one hundred percent drug free. This is not some
weird gas station hair growth supplement. Okay, this is classy.
This is science backed. Healthier hair growth takes time, so
in three to six months after taking your neutrapol you'll
begin to see thicker, stronger hair that looks I'll say,
like you could be an Instagram hair model. You can
(16:27):
grow stronger, healthier hair and support this show by going
to neutrophol dot com and using the promo code broads
to save fifteen dollars off your first month's subscription. This
is their best offer anywhere and It's only available to
US customers for a limited time, plus free shipping on
every order. Get fifteen dollars off at neutrofol dot com
spelled nut r afol dot com promo code broads. Our
(16:52):
second sponsor speaking of babies, is Modern Fertility. Do you
have any big plans for your future? Are you starting
to ask yourself questions like should I maybe at some
point have one of those chubby, squirming, cute little things
with their eyes squinched shut that looks like dumplings and photos.
I'm talking about babies, and if you're thinking about one,
(17:15):
consider taking the Modern Fertility Hormone Test. It's a simple,
at home fingerprick that unlocks tons of insights into your
reproductive health. We're talking egg count, we're talking menopause timing,
we're talking about egg freezing, IVF, possible outcomes for those things,
things that.
Speaker 2 (17:30):
Are helpful to know if kids are in your future.
Speaker 3 (17:33):
It's easy and affordable, and you'll get your personalized test
results within ten days after you mail it in with
a prepaid label. Obviously you're not paying with stamps here.
It's also cheaper than traditional testing with your doctor, which
can cost over one thousand dollars, but Modern Fertility gets
you the same info at one hundred and fifty nine
dollars plus twenty eight dollars off if you use my code.
(17:53):
Let's get into that code right now. Modern Fertility is
offering our listeners twenty dollars off the test when you
go to modern fertility dots slash criminal brods. That means
your test will cost one hundred and thirty nine dollars
instead of the several hundred or even thousand plus dollars
it could cost it a doctor's office. Get twenty percent
off your fertility test when you go to modernfertility dot
(18:14):
com slash criminal brods modernfertility dot com slash criminal brods.
(18:44):
The first time Satoya and Cutthroat drove around in his car,
she felt like she could talk to him forever. Never
mind that he kept snorting vasine up his nose, which
she later found was laced with cocaine. He seemed so kind,
never mind that when they got a room at a
cheap hotel, he offered her her first hit of cocaine.
It made her feel so good. Unfortunately, it also made
(19:08):
her want to get more and more of it. The
cocaine and this meant that she rubbed elbows with guys
who treated her worse than ever before. One day, she
was assaulted by two separate men, one who had given
her some cocaine and then raped her when she fell asleep,
and another who was a friend of Cutthroats. That guy
had picked her up, pretending like he was sent there
(19:30):
by Cut and then raped her. It was a horrific
twenty four hours. I felt like somebody had hung a
sign on me announcing my body was rape for the taking,
she wrote. My body felt numb, detached, like it didn't
belong to me. But at least Cut wasn't like those guys.
He was different right. When Kot found out that one
(19:54):
of his best friends had raped Cintoya, he blamed not
the friend but Sa. He started talking NonStop about how
she was such a slut, but that was okay because
he liked sluts. With this new narrative of his that
she was a slut, he started behaving differently towards her.
(20:14):
He would pressure her into stealing money from other guys
by promising sex. She would have to pretend like she
was going to have sex with them, ask for the
money upfront, and then escape Before long, he was pressuring
her to actually have sex with these men. Once, using
a gun, he forced her to have sex with one
of his friends, a favor between bros. Another time, he
(20:38):
forced her to write a demeaning document about all the
ways that she was a slut and all the rules
for being a slut that she had to follow. Sintoya
didn't know the word grooming back then. She didn't know
the word trafficking, or at least she didn't know that
it could apply to someone like her, and it never
crossed her mind that Cut was true treating her not
(21:01):
like a boyfriend but like a pimp. She just kept
telling herself that once they had enough money, they'd get
out of these cheap hotel rooms, they'd make a better
life for themselves, and he'd treat her nicely. Once again,
when Cut told her that she wasn't allowed to wear
clothes in their hotel room anymore, When he forced her
to have sex with him at the drop of a hat,
(21:22):
when he pointed a loaded gun at her over and
over again, when he punched her in the face, when
he dragged her around by the hair, when he choked
her until she blacked out. She told herself that every
relationship went through rough patches. The night that he choked
her was August six, two thousand and four. When she
(21:42):
came to he kicked her and told her to get
outside and earn some money. She got dressed, she put
his gun in her purse, like she always did when
she was soliciting, and she went outside. She was crying, despairing.
She was walking through the parking lot of Sonic Drive
Through when a forty three year old man pulled up
(22:03):
next to her. His name was Johnny Allen. He was
a real estate agent. He was engaged. He asked her
if she needed a ride and if she was hungry.
She thought wildly that maybe this man wasn't trying to
buy sex from her, Maybe he actually cared about her.
Maybe he could see that she was upset, maybe he
(22:24):
was going to help her. When he asked her if
she was okay, she explained her whole situation to him,
that she was stuck in a hotel room with a
man who beat and raped her, that she didn't know
how to escape, where to go next. Johnny asked her
where she was from, and she told him and then
waited for him to say that he would help her. Well,
(22:45):
he said, are you.
Speaker 2 (22:47):
Up for any action?
Speaker 3 (22:51):
He took her back to his house, where he told
her that he was in the military, that he used
to be a sharpshooter, and that he had plenty of guns.
He showed her some of his rifles. His behavior was
creeping her out. She felt like he was going to
do something bad to her. They got into bed together,
(23:11):
but he kept getting out of bed, which made her nervous.
What was he planning?
Speaker 2 (23:18):
At first?
Speaker 1 (23:18):
He was just stroking me, but then it's like he
just grabbed me like and into my legs, like he
just grabbed it real hard, and he just gave me
this look. It was like a very fierce look, and
then it just sent these chills up my spine. I'm
thinking he's gonna hit me or do something like it.
Speaker 2 (23:35):
But then he rolls over and reaches like he's reaching
to the side of the bed of something. So I'm thinking, oh,
he's not gonna hit me.
Speaker 1 (23:42):
He's finna get a gun.
Speaker 2 (23:44):
And what did you do at that time?
Speaker 1 (23:45):
I just grabbed the gun and I shot him.
Speaker 3 (23:50):
Sinoya claims not to remember what exactly happened that night.
In her memoir, she says that in her memory, the
murder is like a movie out of order. She says
that when she fired Cut's gun, she didn't really understand
what she'd done. She stayed in the house for three
more hours until she finally realized that Johnny Allen was dead,
(24:12):
really dead. He was bloody and slumped over in his
own bed. She raced back to Cut and their lonely
hotel room, and they turned on the TV. And it
wasn't long before the murder was all over the local
news and the cops were pounding on their hotel room door, screaming,
don't move. Before Sintoya's trial could start, one vital question
(24:46):
had to be answered. Would she be tried as a
juvenile or as an adult. She was only sixteen, but
she'd committed a serious crime, and murder sometimes got juveniles
transferred to adult court, where the consequences were far more dire.
She tried to make herself look nice for the hearing
that would determine the rest of her life. She braided
(25:06):
her hair into pigtails and then tied each one with
a bit of latex from an old glove. She looked
about thirteen years old. In jail, she'd been praying desperately
to be tried in juvenile court as pieces of the
Christianity of her youth came flooding back to her. But
the pigtails and the prayers didn't work. She was going
(25:27):
to be tried as an adult. Her lawyer was weeping
when she told Cintoya the news, and Cintoya later wrote,
God hadn't heard me at all. If her transfer hearing
hadn't gone well, her trial would be even worse. She
prepared for it like a maniac, reading as many law
books as she could get her hands on, coming up
(25:48):
with different legal arguments that her lawyers dismissed as nonsense.
She was behaving kind of erratically because she was on
all sorts of psychotropic drugs, sometimes three kinds at once.
She couldn't stay awake. She obsessed over one thing after another.
She cut off her hair and shaved her eyebrows so
that she wouldn't feel like a sexual person anymore. As
(26:09):
she was waiting for trial, she opened a newspaper one
day and read that cut had been killed, shot in
the chest, the stomach, and the face. She was devastated.
It would take her a long time to come to
the realization that what he had done to her was wrong,
that it wasn't love, it was abuse. For a long time, though,
(26:30):
she clung to the narrative that he had been the
one despite it all. After two years of waiting for it,
her trial arrived. In the courtroom, she was painted as
a cold blooded killer, a robber who'd killed an innocent
man just to rifle through his stuff. The da played
a phone call she'd made to her mother from jail.
(26:50):
In it, her mother cries that she just wants Sintoya
to have a normal life, and Centoya, also crying, responds,
I'm not going to have an adult life. I killed somebody.
I executed him. The jury took that statement at face value.
When they came filing back into the courtroom to read
their verdict, one of them caught her eye and shook
(27:12):
his head just slightly. She knew in that moment that
her sentence would be life. Prison actually wasn't that bad.
Compared to all the other various facilities that Cintoya had
(27:35):
spent time in over the last four years. She'd been
in many a depressing cell, but her cell at the
Tennessee Prison for Women was, in her opinion, kind of cozy.
She had a TV, a fan she could buy ramen
noodles from the commissary, she could smoke cigarettes, she could
make an appointment to get her hair done. Still, it
was prison. She got in trouble for every little thing.
(27:58):
The guards were extremely strict, and she was struggling with
her old demon impulse control. She didn't yet have the
vocabulary to explain why she struggled with the things she
struggled with. She just knew that she couldn't stop fighting
making trouble. Before long, she was thrown into maximum security
for a year, where she spent so much time in
(28:19):
shackles that she still has scars on the backs of
her ankles to this day. She lost her mind in
there temporarily, and once she became convinced that she'd lost
one hundred pounds in two days, she screamed at the
guards to help her, sure that something had gone terribly wrong.
She would swing from one extreme to another in prison,
(28:41):
fighting and making trouble, and then resolving to turn her
life around. Often she resolved this because of her mom,
who was the one constant thing in her life and
who visited her every two weeks like clockwork. When her
mom was diagnosed with breast cancer, Cintoya was determined that
this was it, this was the time she'd really improve.
She got out of MAX two months early for good behavior.
(29:04):
She started exercising, tried to walk the straight and narrow almost.
She spent some time illegally selling tobacco and got out
of the biz right before the whole thing was discovered
and the ringleader was sent to MAX. But most importantly,
she was accepted into college. It was a college program
called the Lipscomb Initiative for Education or Life. Lipscombe was
(29:25):
a private Christian university and they had this program where
incarcerated students were allowed to take classes right alongside the
free students. Sintoya walked into the classroom ready for everyone
to judge her, for the Christians in the classroom to
act all holier than thou, but she ended up loving it.
She found the community very healing, and she loved what
(29:45):
she was learning in her criminal justice class about things
like restorative justice and peacemaking. She was also starting to
learn something about herself. Even though she'd always thought of
herself as someone who had no purpose, who is just
a failure and a broken thing thing, she was becoming
a little bit of an activist. When she saw something wrong,
(30:06):
she would do anything to make it right. Other people's
injustices really fired her up, and people like teachers and
authority figures were starting to ask her opinion on criminal
justice matters on issues with girls just like her. People
wanted to hear what she had to say. Hmm, maybe
there was a future there for her. In the meantime,
(30:30):
she was losing all of her appeals. Even when a
prestigious lawyer took on her case pro bono, and when
doctors testified at a hearing that she was mentally impaired
because of all the drinking that her birth mother did
and that this meant she couldn't control her behavior. Even
all of that didn't sway the criminal justice system in
her favor. On paper, she was a teenage killer, nothing more,
(30:52):
not a domestic abuse victim, not someone who suffered from
fetal alcohol spectrum disorder, and certainly not a victim of
sex trafficking. Sintoya herself barely knew that these terms applied
to her life. Judges and prosecutors certainly didn't, But hearing
herself described at that hearing as someone with tons of
(31:12):
mental problems who suffered from fetal alcohol spectrum disorder. This
was extremely scarring for Cintoya. She hadn't expected those diagnoses,
and she sat there as doctors droned on and on
about how messed up she was. She felt horrible afterward.
In a desperate attempt to make herself feel better, she
made a doomed decision. She started a relationship with a guard.
(31:38):
This was, of course, strictly forbidden. When their love letters
to each other were discovered, she was temporarily transferred to
a different prison in Memphis, away from her friends, from
her education, from her mom. In Memphis, she had a
lot of time on her hands, and it was there
that she kept remembering the idea of God. There was
(32:00):
never a come to Jesus moment. It was more like
a slow, strange trickle, and I mean strange. She started
having dreams, dreams about dogs. Memphis used to have a
puppy program, but then it got taken away, but the
prison always swirled with rumors that it would come back,
because those ladies loved their puppies. First, Centoya dreamed that
(32:22):
the program would be reinstalled, and then it was then
she dreamed that a specific kind of dog would show
up at the program, a white dog with black spots,
a nod on his head, and a pink tip on
his tail. A few days later, that exact puppy showed up.
She had two more dreams like this, dreams that came
(32:42):
true exactly, and it was so weird and notable that
she kept trying to interpret it.
Speaker 2 (32:49):
What did this mean?
Speaker 3 (32:51):
She remembered the story of Joseph in the Bible. He
had strange skills with dreams too. He was locked up too.
There thinking about all of this. Joseph had been locked
up for a purpose. Was it possible that she had
a purpose too, That her life wasn't just a series
(33:11):
of random cruel events, That she wasn't a worthless, no
good human, but that she had purpose and worth. She
started thinking back on her life. If she hadn't been
in prison when cut was murdered, she might have been
killed right next to him. If her case hadn't gotten
the attention that it did, she wouldn't be receiving all
(33:34):
the letters she received from young kids who were lost
and sad and looking to her for help. Joseph said, famously,
what man intended for evil, God intended for good? Was
it possible that Centoya herself could do good. Many of
the letters she received were basically tinder profiles from men
(33:56):
who saw her face on TV and got a crush
on her. She laughed at these with her friends, but
nothing ever came of them. Then one day she got
a letter that stood out. This man had burned the
edges of his paper so it looked kind of vintage.
The letter was straightforward and kind, with no hint of
sex or predatory behavior in it, and the writer had
(34:16):
included some photos of himself. Cintoya and her friend screamed
when they saw the photos. It could not be denied.
This guy was one of the hottest men they had
ever seen. The handsome letter writer was a man named
(34:51):
Jamie Long, and he was writing to Cintoya to say
that he was sure her story would have a happy ending.
God was going to overturn her sentence, he said. He
was the sort of Christian who, to be honest, sounds
kind of crazy to most other people. Like Centtoya, he
had premonitions, He felt God talking to him, and he
was convinced that she was getting out of there. The
(35:13):
two wrote back and forth, back and forth. Jamie had
a rough background too, along with an almost literal come
to Jesus moment where he turned his car around and
changed his life. When he decided to come up from
Texas where he lived to visit Centtoya. Centoya prepped for
the visit like she was getting ready for prom in person.
(35:34):
He was swooningly handsome, and she had butterflies the whole time,
But he didn't kiss her when he said goodbye, and
he didn't give her any romantic signals, and she left
the visit feeling totally confused. As it turned out, Jamie
was just trying to get his own butterflies under control.
They wrote back and forth more and spoke on the
phone constantly, and finally, in one letter he admitted it
(35:57):
I love you. Sintoya reminded him that she might never
get out of prison, they might never be able to
be together, but Jamie insisted that she was getting out.
He was so convinced of this that he actually moved
to Nashville and bought a house and told her that
he planned to take her there as his wife. Sintoya
(36:18):
spent long hours dreaming of that sort of life, to
have a house to be with him. One of her
dreams involved cleaning products. She fantasized about owning her own
cleaning products and scrubbing her own counters until they shined.
That was freedom to her, to have power over her
own space, to make it sparkle and smell nice. In
(36:43):
twenty fifteen, when Sintoya was twenty seven years old and
had been behind bars for eleven years, she got her
associate's degree in Liberal arts from Lipscomb University. She was
only supposed to invite four people, but she invited everyone
she knew, a huge cake with seven different colors of frosting.
She painted her nails with Lipscomb's colors purple and gold.
(37:07):
A decade ago, she had thought of herself as nothing,
as worthless, as a bad girl with impulse control issues
who was destined for nothing more than a cold bed
in a cell somewhere. And now she knew that she
was so much more valuable than that. She got up
on stage to accept her degree, and she looked down
into the audience at her mom, who had tears streaming
(37:28):
down her face. Cintoya pointed at her mom, this is
for you, she said, her voice cracked. Everything good that
I've done is for you. And then one day someone
(38:04):
told Cintoya that the rapper Ti had posted about her
on social media. Cintoya was baffled. How in the world
did Ti know her name? Okay, so she'd just done
a TV interview, but it wasn't supposed to be a
huge thing. She had started this project designed to educate
young girls about sex trafficking. When she was a young girl,
(38:27):
she thought sex trafficking was when you got shoved into
a truck by a bunch of foreign men and driven
across a border into a strange land. She didn't know
that your quote unquote boyfriend could sex traffic you right
from your own hotel room. But now she knew, and
she wanted other girls to learn that before it was
too late for them. So she'd started this initiative called Glitter,
(38:47):
and she'd done an interview to publicize it. And during
the interview, her lawyer had briefly mentioned that they were
going to ask the governor of Tennessee for clemency. They'd
used up all of Cintoya's appeals, so clemency was their
lafeast option, and somehow that interview went viral. Suddenly she
was a meme. There was a photo of her at sixteen,
(39:09):
her hair in those infamous pigtails circulating around social media
along with this text. Imagine at the age of sixteen
being sex trafficked by a pimp named Cutthroat. After days
of being repeatedly drugged and raped by different men, you
were purchased by a forty three year old child predator
who took you to his home to use you for sex.
(39:30):
You ended up finding enough courage to fight back and
shoot and kill him. You're arrested as a result, tried
and convicted as an adult, and sentenced to life in prison.
This is the story of Cintoya Brown. She will be
eligible for parole when she is sixty nine years old.
Hashtag free Cintoya Brown. Rihanna posted about her. Lebron James
(39:53):
posted about her. Snoop Dog posted about her. Kim Kardashian
posted about her, saying that she was having her own
lawyers look into the case. The attention grew and grew,
and Centoya felt sick. She knew that with a clemency petition,
you don't want a lot of attention. With attention come
the haters, people who come out of the woodwork to argue, wait, no,
(40:15):
she's a murderer. Keep her locked up for life. The
only thing that kept her calm during this heady, terrifying
wave of attention was Jamie. They prayed together on the
phone as she tried to keep a level head. She
wasn't even sure she'd get a hearing to argue for clemency.
Most people didn't get one of those. Only two percent
(40:37):
of clemency applications ever reached that stage. But on May
twenty third, twenty eighteen, she finally got that longed foe hearing.
Speaker 2 (40:45):
She walked into a.
Speaker 3 (40:46):
Room to see that the board who would be listening
to her was all white, but one of them seemed
to wink at her. It was a sign of hope,
a far cry from the man on the jury who'd
shaken his head just before that jury found her guilty.
We are here with a story of transformation, said Centoya's lawyer.
(41:08):
This is a story, a record story of transformation in
the life of a wasted child who has become a beautiful, intelligent, caring,
educated woman who can make things better in this world.
Tears filled Cintoya's eyes as witness after witness got up
and testified about the woman she'd become. She herself spoke,
(41:31):
apologizing in a broken voice for the hurt she'd caused,
asking humbly for mercy. I just wanted to say thank
you first. I know a lot of people get to
see you, but I have prayed for a very long time.
Speaker 2 (41:49):
To meet you.
Speaker 3 (41:53):
The board was split, too voted to grant her request,
but too voted to deny it. The other two voted
to make her eligible for parole after serving twenty five
years instead of fifty, which was her original sentence, but
the only vote that really counted was the Governor of
Tennessee's For seven months after the hearing, Cintoya returned to
(42:15):
her life of waiting, of praying with Jamie, of trying
to be level headed about the whole thing and not
get her hopes up. But she dreamed that she was
walking without shackles or handcuffs in a yellow dress, and
she thought to herself, I'm getting out. I'm getting out
in the summer. And then she got the news she
(42:36):
was getting out. Her release date was set for August of.
Speaker 2 (42:39):
Twenty nineteen, but she and Jamie couldn't wait.
Speaker 3 (42:42):
They got married over the phone, using some legal loophole
that Cintoya had researched obsessively. Jamie prepared their house for her.
As the months turned into weeks and then days, and
then one night, just after one am, the guards came
to wake her and she walked out of those prison
doors for the very last time. She had to leave
(43:03):
in the middle of the night to avoid the media
who were all camped around the prison expecting her to
leave in the morning. She got into a car with Jamie,
who was waiting for her, and he took her home.
The house that he'd bought for them was beautiful. It
was full of fresh fruit and groceries and all the
beauty products she'd ever mentioned that she liked, and a
(43:25):
closet full of shoes and clothes just her size. She
looked around in every corner, and then she pulled herself
a bath a bath. She soaked in the tub and
thought about how she was going to wake up the
next day and clean the whole house. And she wasn't
just going to clean, of course, she was going to
(43:46):
become a voice for all the women just like her
who were still locked up, whose sentences were crippling them,
who were painted as cold blooded killers and not victims
of abuse or sex trafficking. Women just like her, except
without the celebrities tweeting about them. She would become their voice,
and in the following years, Cintoya Brown would do just that.
(44:09):
She would go on a national speaking tour, would write
a memoir, would think about law school, would advocate for change.
She had a bright future ahead of her, the type
of future that her mom envisioned for her when she
was just a little girl going to that academically gifted
program in her school. Yes, she had a lot to do,
(44:30):
but first she was going to lay there and so
her scarred ankles in the bubble bath and taste freedom.
(45:00):
Thanks for listening, everyone, I hope you enjoyed Centoya's story.
Many of those details were taken from her memoir Free Centoya,
which you can read if you want to know more
about her life. You can also follow her and her
husband Jamie Long on Instagram if you want to see
how handsome he is. And it is cute and sweet
(45:21):
to see them living their lives. I mean, I'm not
gonna say they're living normal lives because they're famous now,
so they're sort of like influencery, but they're still living
their lives and enjoying things like they just didn't add
about some sort of food.
Speaker 2 (45:35):
It's just like warms my heart.
Speaker 3 (45:37):
To see Centoya get to take pleasure in these things
like food and like do an ad for food and
hopefully get paid for that. It just is nice to see.
So check them out on Instagram. Also important to note
that I have done an episode, Episode fifteen of this
podcast from a zillion years ago is about a pretty
(46:00):
darn similar case. It's the episode on Felicia Blakely. Some
of you have probably listened to it, some of you haven't.
Is a very similar case, very similar. She was sixteen
years old when she met this guy who she thought
was her boyfriend. He totally groomed her, brainwashed her, manipulated her,
abused her, and forced her to kill several people. She
(46:23):
was sent to prison for life, just like Centtoya, a
lot of similarities. She's also a young black woman like Centtoya.
Now she's I think in her thirties, but was a
teenager when she was arrested. Anyway, her case has gotten
some attention. There's a book on it, a movie on it,
but definitely not the Kim Kardashian, Snoop dogg Lebron James
Rihanna level of attention that Cintoya's got. It's just notable
(46:47):
the difference in these cases, and it almost seems like
a I don't want to say the word crap shoot
because that's such an ugly word. What's a better word
for that, But it almost seems like a crap shoot,
like which cases happened to get the attention and maybe
the public pressure that leads to clemency and which don't.
It's very sad and makes me kind of feel claustrophobic
when I think about so.
Speaker 2 (47:07):
I don't have an easy solution there.
Speaker 3 (47:08):
But if you want to hear the story of Felicia
Blakelee and look for the similarities and maybe the ways
it's different than Sintoya's story, check out episode fifteen Teenager
and Love. You also will hear from Felicia on that episode.
All right, I will let you go. I will see
you here next week. We're doing a case that I
haven't decided on yet. I have a couple options. Sometimes
(47:29):
I go back and forth until the last minute.
Speaker 2 (47:31):
But it'll be a good one.
Speaker 3 (47:31):
I promise you. I'll see you here next week. Hope
you're having a lovely summer. I hope you get a
chance to eat a very ripe tomato, sprinkled with salt
and pepper, and put on a piece of white bread
with a little shmear of mayonnaise or butter. However you
do your tomato sandwiches, I hope you do one, unless
you hate tomatoes, in which case I hope you find
(47:52):
a slice of some sort of pie or pastry made
with stone fruit that's also seasonal. We're a really perfectly
boiled ear of corn. Oh my gosh, I think I'm hungry.
All right, talk to you next week.
Speaker 2 (48:02):
Bye. Maybe I'm wrong.
Speaker 1 (48:06):
Maybe i'm wrong loving you deal like I do.
Speaker 3 (48:15):
If it's a crime, then I'm guilty, guilty of loving you.
Popular Podcasts
Dateline NBC
Current and classic episodes, featuring compelling true-crime mysteries, powerful documentaries and in-depth investigations. Follow now to get the latest episodes of Dateline NBC completely free, or subscribe to Dateline Premium for ad-free listening and exclusive bonus content: DatelinePremium.com
Are You A Charlotte?
In 1997, actress Kristin Davis’ life was forever changed when she took on the role of Charlotte York in Sex and the City. As we watched Carrie, Samantha, Miranda and Charlotte navigate relationships in NYC, the show helped push once unacceptable conversation topics out of the shadows and altered the narrative around women and sex. We all saw ourselves in them as they searched for fulfillment in life, sex and friendships. Now, Kristin Davis wants to connect with you, the fans, and share untold stories and all the behind the scenes. Together, with Kristin and special guests, what will begin with Sex and the City will evolve into talks about themes that are still so relevant today. "Are you a Charlotte?" is much more than just rewatching this beloved show, it brings the past and the present together as we talk with heart, humor and of course some optimism.
Stuff You Should Know
If you've ever wanted to know about champagne, satanism, the Stonewall Uprising, chaos theory, LSD, El Nino, true crime and Rosa Parks, then look no further. Josh and Chuck have you covered.