Hey, girlfriends, it's me Anna. I wanted to give your heads up. This episode takes place within Reiker's Island Jail, so we'll obviously be speaking a lot about.
The prison system.
Plusa's going to be talk about addiction, and there's lots of references to violence, including domestic abuse.
But I'll also get.
To introduce you to some incredible women who formed a sisterhood while locked up and who helped Kelly become the woman she is today. If you're affected by any of the themes around domestic and gendered violence in this show, reach out to our charity partner No More. There are domestic violence charity with a lot of great resources to help you or your loved ones. You can search No More dot org and we've put a link to their website in the episode description. There's also going to be
some bad language, so let's go. It's a swelteringly hot day in early July twenty ten. Kelly Hannatt has just arrived at the infamous Riker's Island Jail. She's been taken into a unit called pretty Uninspiringly New Admissions.
This is where you.
Wait around while you and a busload of other detainees are processed. It's not a comfortable place to be even at the best of times, and this month temperatures are reaching as high as one hundred degrees fahrenheit For the non Americans in the room, that's nearly forty degrees celsius at the time. Rikers also doesn't have any air conditioning, so you're just cattle in a hot tin can.
I couldn't take it. And this one piece paper suit covered my footing and I had no shoes on.
Remember that bloodstained suit Kelly was wearing. She still got that on.
It was so hot. I ripped the shoe part and rolled it up now on barefoot. In II Grews Island Inn Intake, which is the philbies place that I know of in the world.
From Intake, where all new arrivals go, Kelly is taken through a series of invasive medical tests, blood tests, mental health assessments, drug checks. Then she's issued with a kind of jail starter pack, some clothes, two towels, two sheets, toothpaste, and a toothbrush, a single green cup, plus something called state soap, whatever the fuck that means. After getting her supplies, Kelly spat out into the general population a sixty person unit.
As she walks through a communal area lined by cells, she can tell that everyone's looking her up and down.
Oh, I stayed on me for two reasons. I was white and the paper suit. Now I know that African Americans are true. You did very unfairly in the justice system. So it made sense when I went in there and there are sixty cells, and fifty nine of them are African American and then there is me. So people started talking to me, you're blondie, your white girl, and I said, nah, no, we're not doing that. I have a name, I'm not a punk. You're not going to push me around in here.
Other than rejecting some new unwanted nicknames. Kelly keeps her head down for the first couple of weeks. She's got a plan.
Just watch and watch and watch, get a feel for absolutely everybody. But while I was watching, I was definitely sick.
Kelly's been an opoid addict for a decade and it's been on and off methadone for most of that time. Right now, she's going through something called administrative detox. It's the fastest detox that you can put a person through legally.
When they're called methodon. A few times I had to crawl on my hands and knees, and one captain when he saw me, he said, you see, I hope you remember this for the rest of your life. This is what drugs do you.
During this time, Kelly's barely able to speak, throwing up and worse. Kelly's very religious, the Catholic girl through and through, and a dedicated disciple of Saint Terrez, whose signature token is a rose.
Kelly's been praying to her since she was four years old, and.
I imagine she spent these early weeks of detox doing the same. She's always relied on Saint Terrez to get her through the worst. But right now there's someone else by her side too. Kelly's being nursed by a woman, a fellow inmate, someone she's never met before.
This lady, she was maybe a couple of years older than me. And when I was feeling a little bit better and I could speak, I said, thank you so much.
She gives this woman a hug and I.
Said, why do you smell like roses? She said, ah, these are my rosary beads. I got these from the Vatican. They made of rosewood.
The woman takes the beads off and places them around Kelly's neck.
I said, what is your name? She says Teresa, and I said, really, it's amazing. I feel that that was my guardian angel I feel that God sent Saint Terre's to tell me that everything was going to be okay.
It's just as well, because Kelly's gonna need all the help she can get, divine or otherwise if she's going to survive here in Rikers, let's alone prove.
That she's not a murderer. I'm Annisonfield and from the teams at.
Novel and iHeart Podcasts, this is the Girlfriend's Gaolhouse.
Lawyer, Episode four, The Shorties.
At first, Kelly keeps her distance from the other inmates, but pretty soon it becomes clear that to get by and here, she's going to need some friends.
Enter Angelica.
Our sisterhood called ourselves the Sholdies.
Angelica isn't actually her real name, but it's what we're going to call her.
Going to Core, it is the time where men and women are brought back together, right because we're very very separate quarters, and so we don't see each other until it's time to go to court.
The way the guys speak to you. They go you show it. You showed it with the blonde here, showed it, showed it with a gray shirt, or showed it with the black pants. You show, they give me your numbers. So we started this show. We started calling ourselves to show this and this is when I formed a family in Rikers.
We're gonna find lightness and everything. I mean, I think it's part of the human condition. As terrible as an experience is, in order to survive it, you find some beauty somewhere. You find something amusing somewhere.
Kelly finds her little pocket of joy at the same place she found it before. Present on the dance floor, drop the big kel.
Mice for my.
Walk and on and dance like in the open in the huge recreational room. I wanted to feel happiness, and that's what made me happy. So I danced and other people started dancing again. We started what they call a battle. One person will go and then the next person goes, and then by whatever you hear of the crowd scream like yo, she got sunned, that's who wins. Then the officers were calling other officers to come watch this, and they said, you gotta see the way this white girl
is sunning everybody. Yeah, I won the battle. They were like yo, white girl could get down, and they took me in as their own.
Which included sharing the most sacred secret recipe, DIY beauty tips.
How do we straighten hair without a flat iron? Well, we had a nice hot pot, which is kind of like a long tea kettle if you want, and we went unplug it and like wrap hair around it and brush it. Or in Kelly's skide, she liked her hair curly, so she would make rollers out of newspapers or tissue. She's kind of like roll her hair tied a little not go to sleep and there you go, curly soup. And for lipstick, for example, we had these little packs of almost like kool aid with the crystals, a little
bit to your lips. There you go, No smuch, lipstick.
What about foundation or eyeshadow or a scar? My scar must be hard.
So mascara was made with toothpaste and the ink from a pen. Now, thinking back at it, probably not the best thing for your eyes, but don't get your eyes wet and you're fine, right, And it worked just like mscara, and it got to the point where officers were like, you guys have makeup in yourselves. Were like no, They're like, oh, here go these Building eight girls. You know, because we were always tipped up as.
The shortiest bond.
Over time, Kelly tells them about her case and everyone kind of shrugs it off.
All of us were like, why are you here. Kelly's innocent.
They can all tell and it's just a matter of time before a jury will see that too.
We just knew, Oh, you're gonna go home, you know. This is just it's unfortunately it is taking this long.
At one point early in Kelly's detention, her brother Ronnie comes to pay her a visit. The visitors area is one depressing room split into two by a row of booths that go down the middle. Glass separates the prisoners and the visitors.
Over the two way telephones.
Kelly and Ronnie are having a heated exchange. Kelly's been offered a plea deal ten years in prison. Her co defendant, an ex boyfriend, Tommy Donovan, the man Kelly says is solely responsible for Angel Vargas's murder, has already taken the deal he was offered.
He'll take a plea from manslaughter for fifteen years, and the deal was as long as he states that I helped him. Those were the conditions.
But Kelly's not budgeting.
I'm not guilty. I'm not taking a plea. I plan on taking this to trial.
Don't go to trial. Please, don't go to trial.
Ronnie. I can't say the words that I did something I didn't do.
I was getting so frustrated.
Ronnie was so scared to lose me that he was telling me to take the plea. I screamed it out.
Do you think that everybody that's shit? Do you think they all did it?
And everybody that was there that was shaking their heads like he's right.
Kelly's in a unit of sixty, but Ryker's Island houses around six hundred women in total. Their charges range from things like simple drug possession all the way up to murder. They come from different places, but there's one thing so many of them seem to have in common.
Very few people wake up one morning you say I'm gonna hurt somebody today. Right, there's a whole story before you get.
To that moment.
One after another, those stories eventually blend in together.
Is that a woman calls an ear for the messbality.
I have a domestic violence.
Case, domestic violence survivor fighting off their attacker, and things like that.
He came up behind me and put me in an awful chocoal in trying to kill me the first time I fell.
Back where I ended up killing him.
Next thing I know, I was being arrested for a murder in a first degree.
This isn't unique to Rikers.
Studies showed that more than seventy percent of incarcerated women say there've been victims of domestic abuse, and obviously this is in addition to the poverty and racial abuse many have experienced. When Kelly looked around the visiting room that day and looked around the jailhouse in the days after, she wouldn't have just seen a room full of potential criminals, but a room full of women like her. All Kelly can hope is that the next chapter of her life
includes a not guilty verdict. But it's a not hill battle, and the odds are seriously stacked against her. Because that plea deal that her ex boyfriend Tommy took, the one where he agreed to testify against her. It means that now she's facing even greater charges than him, and if Kelly can't convince a jury that she's a victim too, she could spend the rest of her life in prison. About three weeks after arriving at Riker's, Kelly is still
getting her daily dose of Methadone. One day she gets talking to the woman in charge of the detox program, Miss Cruise.
She goes, Harnett, you need to start it with this methodone shit. You need to get the hell off of it, and you need to get your ast to that law library. That's what you need to do. You need to get your head in those books, seriously, Kelly. And when she got me, Kelly, it was like humanizing me. She said, you gotta start finding your case. So I said to myself, all right, she go to the law library. See what happens.
The next day at twelve thirty pm sharp, Kelly's outside the law library. She's waiting at the locked blue door, peering in through the window, and.
The officer opens the door, checks the list. They're very used to nobody's showing up. They're still used to getting those hours free and they could just go and hang out with their friends. So I was cramping their style.
The law library is divided into two main sections, separated by a big divider with windows. As you walk through, you'll see a load of computers and then row after row of bookcases. But to get to that part, you first have to pass the officer's desk, which sits directly across from a bunch of old typewriters and some of the dustiest, oldest law books in the library.
He was really pissed off the guard that somebody was coming in. He said to me, anytime you want to leave, you leave early. And I was like, there's no way I'm moving early. What am I going back to? Really? What am I going back to?
There is one person happy to see Kelly in the law library.
The paralegal that was there, an older man. His name was Fernando Contreras. What an amazing man. I mean, he was so great with me. He gave me so much hope.
Kelly picks up her first book.
McKinney's Consolidated Law, that's the binding authority for New York State. I started reading it and nothing made sense to me. Literally, at first, they look like hieroglyphics. It was like a complete foreign language, and I didn't understand how people could possibly go in there and understand anything. And I said, Okay, Kelly, the only way that you could learn to love this is if you're good at it. Everyone loves something that they're good at. So start reading things over and over
and over until you practically memorize them. When you practically memorize them, you're going to become good at it. When you're good at it and you master it, you're going to love it. I was studying for sixteen hours a day. I was reading CPL seven ten, twenty thirty seven, forty and so forth, Brady violations, Rosario violations.
One day, during one of Kelly's hieroglyphic translations, another inmate comes to join her.
Her name is Peaches.
Peaches became a really good friend of mine. She had such an amazing personality. She was such a good person. She was just so genuine, and I would help her a little bit with her reading. And then it became like a potential assistance for legal work. Because I'm just getting started, so I didn't know if I would ever have the capability to help myself or anyone else.
But the more Kelly reads and then rereads, the more things start to fall into place.
By the third time I read it, I couldn't believe that. I felt like they look like hieroglyphics because I'm totally understanding this now, and I'm picking up the wording even if a case is unfavorable. I'm learning how to write the way that they write.
She's not just regurgitating a bunch of jargon. Kelly starts crafting legally sound arguments.
They became the love of my life. I started filing dismissals and a dateming for people at Rikers Island.
Kelly's not only helping individuals with their own cases, She's fighting for all of her Rikers Island sisters.
We took them to court for taking our flip flops away. We took them to court for searches like they were doing excessive searches on a specific unit because it was so small, and we took them to court for that. They stayed away for about eight months.
After that, Kelly's reputation eventually starts spreading around the prison. It even reaches a recently arrived inmate who will call Tash. She's been jailed in Rikers following a lifetime of abuse after witnessing her boyfriend murder someone everyone who makes Tasha tells her the same thing.
You need to go toward the Kelly. So I'm like, well, who's Kelly? But she works in a lot of library.
By this point, Kelly's in high demand. There's a long line of women who want her services. Tasha comes back again and again.
Eventually I asked her one day, I said, excuse me, your name Kelly. She looked at me, she smiled with the most beautiful and smiler ever gotten. Then she said yes. I said, can you please help me? And I just started crying. I sat down and she was like, well, tell me what's going on. So I told her a little bit about the case. And she went and she found this paperworking that pertment. She put it out and she gave it to me. She was like, I want you to read this and write down whatever you feel
fits in your crown. Eventually, no, I will continue to go back.
I was giving a lot of people hope, and they were telling me that thank you so much for you giving us so much shop. All of a sudden, the little library started getting packed and like mister Brown wasn't happy about that. Mister Brown was the officer. He goes, oh god, her net Jahau lawyer.
Of course, life isn't all roses for Kelly inside, even with Saint Z watching over her. Kelly spent the last few months fighting for her fellow inmates, but her trial is coming up she needs to go back to fighting her own corner. Unfortunately for Kelly, though, that's not the only fight she needs to be prepared for, because while the Shortys have her back, Kelly's also.
Made some dangerous enemies.
It's always an uncomfortable experience running into your ex's x.
Now imagine running into them in jail when.
Neither of you can get away, which is exactly what happens to Kelly. She's trapped in Rikers with Tommy Donovan's ex girlfriend, who Kelly says is inside for selling drugs. And the worst part of all of this is that Tommy's ex she has serious beef with Kelly.
I asked her why she's like you stole my men. I had a fistfight with her literally every single solitary day, every day, to the point where one day I said I want to have a peaceful day today. So I was five point thirty, it was breakfast time. I pounded on her door and She's like what who's there? And I was like, it's Kelly. Get up, let's go. So we get it out of the way. So she comes out like hair all crazy.
I said, come on, She said, where are we going?
I said, to the staircase where there's no cameras and listen. My brother told me to fight. And you know, for a white blonde girl like people get shocked at my strength. It's not something I'm proud of. I'm a lady. However, if you're going to touch me, you are going to get a receipt. So yeah, I kind of beat the hell out of her on the staircase, but I didn't start the fight. She kept hitting me first every day.
This went on for forty five to sixty days, so I was like, okay, so it's a one to day thing, so I'm just going to get her first. But I would never be like a dirty person and like hit her when she's not looking like she would to me.
This isn't the only fight Kelly was getting in.
They have these girls that we call bubble now. Bubble leuts are the girls that hang around the officer's bubble and flirt with them all day long, and you get really pissed off because you're like, you can't get your door open, you can't do this, you can't do that. You need toilet paper, and they're just flirting and flirting, and for I want to just say, listen, just put the floating on hold. Can you just give me some toilet paper? Please? I just use the bathroom and you
have to wait. Flirting, flirting, flirting.
Kelly asks if she can get past to use the shower because one of the bubblets is standing in her way.
She told me I couldn't use the shower, and I said, ex use me. The last time I checked. You're an inmate here, just like me. And she said you can't use it, and I said, I'm using it.
Kelly breezes passed and steps into the shower.
Bad move. I feel someone rebb meat and yank, like instant whiplish. Right now. I see people running in one held one arm in back of me. When I went to hit her, the girl cault my hand and hold it back. They pull it like a crucifixion because it's like one arm here, one arm here, you can't use it. And then the girl who was flirting, she just starts punching me in the face. Punch, punch, punch, punch, punch. Now I'm trying to kick her. Somebody else spares my leg.
Now each person has a limb. I'm up in the air with the girl punching me over and over and over repeatedly. Right the girl who was holding my right arm, she said, stop, you're gonna cure. That's when I got scared. If her co conspirator is telling her to stop, this must look really bad. And then Peaches comes running in.
In addition to being Kelly's on a official law library assistant, Peaches is a big, friendly, giant type of woman.
She's also not someone you fuck with.
She said, you FM bitches, put her the f down before I f and kill all of you. And she put me down, all right. She actually threw me down into another shower. Pes Kels, get up, now, get a few shots in, and I did. I just started willing boom.
Boom boom, boom boom.
This is not something I'm proud of. I just want to put on the record. However, this was the survival of the fittest, and like only the strong survive, so if it got out there that I took this, it would never stop so I knew I had to do some type of damage to make it visible to other people. I did a lot more than I intended I'm doing. I put her on a wheelchair so permanently. No, no, no, no, I think she was really trying to milk it. Honestly,
she told everyone, Yo, that white bitch is crazy. Say the fuck away from her.
Like the other times Kelly's told me she's gotten into scraps, Kelly was quick to add that she's not proud of how this bust up went down, but she's also kind of laughing it off. And while she might not have started this fight, she sure finished it. I know my discomfort has showed me up as a real soft handed Lily Liver journalist, and believe me, I am trying my best not to be. But here's the thing. Firstly, I'm still shaking off my preconceived notions of how I would
expect a victim like Kelly to behave. And also because I reckon if I was facing an accusation of murder, I wouldn't be so open about sharing a story where I kick the shit out of someone to the point of them needing a wheelchair temporarily or not. I care about Kelly, and I kind of want to tell her to edit herself in these moments because it doesn't look good.
But I actually think, in a weird way, Kelly telling me this shows that she's not holding back or shying away from some of the less sympathetic parts of her story. The bottom line is, jail is a rough place, and, like Kelly says, only the strong survive. Whenever she's not fighting her exes X in the stairwell or a few pissed off bubblettes in the shower, Kelly's in the law library, fighting her case, maybe a few dance battles in between.
Her life goes on like this for some time, which won't be a surprise to anyone who has experience of the justice system. It moves very slowly. It's May twenty thirteen. Kelly's trial date, after years of delays, is set to begin in the next few months.
Kelly's been poring over all the.
Documents from her case, arming herself as best she can for the fight ahead.
When she gets some news.
Her lawyer has received a letter, a letter that could change everything, A letter from her ex boyfriend Tommy Donovan.
Dear mister Ebstein, as you're already acquainted with me, I will get to the point my memory is clear and my intentions now true.
On the next episode of The Girlfriend's Geilhouse Lawyer, Kelly's case goes to trial.
The trial was awful. They called Judge Lasak mister murder. They got into an altercation with mister Vargas. Hi, I'm the killer. That's the likely motive for what happened. Did I pull that out of the air. No, I've pulled that out of the evidence. They came back with the unanimous verdict. I couldn't believe it.
The Girlfriend's Jailhouse Lawyer is produced by Novel for iHeart Podcasts. For more from Novel, visit novel dot Audio. The show is hosted by me Anna Sinfield and is written and produced by me and Lee Meyer, with additional production from Jako Taivich and Michael Jinno.
Our assistant producer is Madeline Park. The editors are Georgia Moody and me Anason.
Production management from Serie Houston, Joe Savage and Charlotte Wolfe.
Our fact checker is Daniel Suleiman.
Sound design, mixing and scoring by Daniel Kempson and Nicholas Alexander. Music supervision by me Alis Infield, Lee Meyer and Nicholas Alexander. Original music composed by Nicholas Alexander, Daniel Kempson and Louisa Gerstein. Story development by Nell Gray Andrews and Willard Foxton. Creative director of Novel, Max O'Brien and Craig Strachan are executive producers for novel, and Katrina Norvell and Nicki Eator are the executive producers for iHeart Podcasts, and the marketing lead
is Alison Cantor. Thanks also to Carrie Lieberman and the whole team at WME