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The Surburban Mom Experiences a Horrific Prison Journey, Lynn Espejo · Nightmare Success In and Out

• 0:00
  What happens when your worst fear becomes your reality?
• 0:03
  Hi, I'm Brent Cassidy. Welcome to the Nightmare Success
• 0:06
  In and Out podcast, where we explore how to overcome your
• 0:09
  fears and nightmares that set yourself free.
• 0:12
  We're going to be exploring this topic with guys that was in
• 0:15
  Leavenworth with and others who survived their own nightmare.
• 0:19
  These stories can be inspiring, sometimes.
• 0:22
  Sad. There's some humor, but
• 0:24
  hopefully you can come away with a nugget of something that'll
• 0:27
  help you knock down some of the prisons you've built up in your
• 0:30
  own mind. Night.
• 0:31
  We should test listeners where you come for what happens when
• 0:34
  you work through it becomes the reality.
• 0:35
  How do you pass 5 Overcome 50 Self free.
• 0:40
  Well, I've got the girl next door that went to prison.
• 0:44
  I just told her that I this is I I'm about halfway through.
• 0:48
  It's Lynn SPSSPOS. Am I pronouncing that right?
• 0:54
  Espeo. Espeo espeo.
• 0:57
  Is that right? I I always am bad with names.
• 1:00
  But espeo. So in her book, her book is
• 1:05
  titled Inside the Walls and Beyond my journey through the
• 1:09
  Federal Inn for, for instance, around the justice system.
• 1:13
  And when I say this to the girl next door, this is the girl.
• 1:16
  If you read her book, I'm about halfway through this.
• 1:19
  Fascinating. Just you know, you, you it's a
• 1:22
  page Turner book and it's it's a non fiction book, which is a
• 1:25
  page Turner book. And she was working in an office
• 1:31
  with doctors. She was the clinic administrator
• 1:36
  and she's, if you all the way up to this point, this is a good
• 1:41
  person that's just working like everybody else's and doing their
• 1:45
  thing. And she's working with these
• 1:47
  doctors and they're all arguing and doing and whatever.
• 1:49
  And she's all part in that, you know, soap opera drama of the
• 1:53
  craziness of this doctor's office.
• 1:57
  But the great thing about Lennon and what I've learned talking
• 2:02
  with her is she is such a voice, impactful voice was changed for
• 2:08
  the impacted. That's the impacted people.
• 2:12
  There's some crazy stuff that I want to get into.
• 2:15
  One of the them is is that she in her transfer she's trying to
• 2:20
  get closer to home and of course they sent her further away from
• 2:24
  home. But during that instead of just
• 2:26
  giving her a furlough if she was in a the lowest security
• 2:29
  prisons. He ended up into the whole con
• 2:31
  air experience of of flying to Oklahoma and the transfer and he
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  gets put into solitary confinement for 100 days in the
• 2:41
  men's wing. In the men's wing, 100 days of
• 2:44
  style check. If I we were just talking about
• 2:46
  it's just like I was in for like 6 or 7 hours and my Pansy felt
• 2:51
  thought I was in for two years but she was in for 100 days and
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  we'll get into that. And I the other thing is if you
• 3:00
  wanted something just this is a quick read.
• 3:02
  My friend Walt Pablo wrote a really great article in Forge
• 3:07
  magazine. You can get it online and it's
• 3:10
  called Inmate on home Confinement spoke out on Bureau
• 3:14
  of Prisons policy and ended up back in prison.
• 3:18
  And this that's a quick fast. I mean you get a real read of of
• 3:23
  what we're talking about with Lynn and and how she just he
• 3:27
  might be scared. I don't know.
• 3:29
  I don't see it from where her actions are and what he did and
• 3:32
  how he does it still does it. That's a strong voice and and
• 3:36
  just doesn't back down. That's what I love about her.
• 3:39
  Before we get into that and unpack all that, I want to
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  success. Thank you.
• 4:26
  Welcome in Lynn. How are you?
• 4:29
  Good, Brent. Thanks for having me on.
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  So Lynn I and the other thing, Lynn's been such a hope to me
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  because I love when somebody is connected and she's connected
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  and she's given me some great people to talk to that the
• 4:46
  listeners out there going to be able to listen to in the coming
• 4:49
  weeks and she's it's been a great help.
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  But lend your book. I feel like I've been living
• 4:55
  inside your head here the last few days.
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  I think I got your book on Sunday and and it's it just, you
• 5:04
  know sometimes when somebody writes a book you you don't
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  really you see it from a distance, your book, you you
• 5:09
  really are walking beside you. You're like literally in your
• 5:14
  space in your head as you tell it.
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  And I I encourage people to to get on Amazon and get this book
• 5:20
  again it's inside the walls and beyond and it's it's it's it's a
• 5:25
  good one. It should be a movie.
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  I have a copy of it right here, Brent.
• 5:31
  There it is, everybody. That's what it looks like.
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  That's what I've got down there in my office.
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  I've been reading and let. I'm really proud of it too
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  because it's self. Well, you should be.
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  Self edited, self published I mean.
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  You did the whole thing. Figure out how to even get it to
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  upload on Amazon. Well it's it's a great book you
• 5:52
  should be proud of it to to let everybody kind of get back into
• 5:57
  your world and introduce to you. Can you let us know, Lynn Lake,
• 6:03
  in your world growing up, what was your life like as a kid?
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  Because I know you had grew up on a farm and can you let us
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  into all that? Yeah, I think I just grew up
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  middle class and just normal. My parents did get divorced when
• 6:19
  I was younger, and my grandparents did end up raising
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  me. But I feel like I just had a
• 6:26
  normal life. I went to a small public school.
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  I was popular. I was, you know, a cheerleader,
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  majorette in all the clubs, homecoming courts, you name it.
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  Just average person, had many friends, grew up in a time where
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  we didn't have computers or any of that.
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  So a lot of outside time. You know, I talked about in my
• 6:48
  book how I used to pretend to be Jan Brady and ride my bike and.
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  I thought it was funny in your book that you said Jan Brady to
• 6:58
  the Marcia Brady because you know, Marcia was the oldest and
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  those guys and then Jan was Marcia, Marcia, Marcia and
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  everybody wants to be Marcia, no, you.
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  Did if I was Jan I I, you know I guess I related maybe to her.
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  But yeah I had. I had the same bike with the
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  banana seed and you know just just screw up really at the time
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  in what seemed like a boring life.
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  But looking back, really just, you know, Southern.
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  All towns live in the all American world.
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  And your. Grandparents that took care of
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  you. Yes, my grandparents raised me
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  and my sister and I. We that we were one year apart
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  to the day we had the same birthday and so we grew up
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  fairly. How crazy is?
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  That I know. And we grew up fairly close, of
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  course, you know, always celebrating birthdays.
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  My joke to her has always been I asked for a monkey on my first
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  birthday and I got you. But.
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  And it's true we did ask for one, so it's you know, but we
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  grew up close and had this a lot, mainly the the same
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  friends, you know, we did a lot of stuff together.
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  My summers were you know, cheerleading camp, majorette
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  camp, several church camps just always busy.
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  I I think what I think about is a normal, just childhood.
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  I feel like, you know, until I turned 15.
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  My dad did commit suicide when I was 15, and I don't.
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  I've not often opened up about that, but I did open up about it
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  in my book, and at the time, I don't think I realized how much
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  that really was going to set something for the rest of my
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  life. Not not having my father, even
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  though my grandparents raised us, I was very close with my
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  dad. And so that was a, I think
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  something that maybe haunted me, that I never realized until
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  later, when I started working with women with traumas.
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  And then I started going, oh wait, yeah.
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  You and your. Sister Trauma.
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  Did you? I know that would be a heck of a
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  trauma, being close with your sister and only being in your
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  apart. Did you guys lean on each other
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  when that happened? Or was it more like, we're all
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  so busy, we're just moving on, We're just.
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  Well, you know, I think I was in high school.
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  I think I was in the 10th grade. I may have been in the 11th.
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  And so honestly, life was busy back then.
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  I again, I did not realize until years later like when you don't
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  have your dad to walk you down the aisle or you you know things
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  like during my indictment for instance, I was like I wish I
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  had my fault, you know, things that happened when you I think
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  later that maybe was something that I looked at and was like
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  wow, this affected me more than I thought.
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  And then of course, you know, especially when I went on to get
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  my counseling degree and started going through a lot of trauma
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  related classes, it all kind of came back too.
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  But I just well. I think that's interesting too
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  then because you were in the accounting, but then you got a
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  master's degree and the world that had nothing to do with
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  accounting. And I mean, you don't really see
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  that very often where you know one's very clean, well, it's
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  math related. And the other is the whole
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  mental thinking therapy. You know, feel stuff.
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  Well, you know, after I married my husband that I'm currently
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  married to, I was previously married and we were divorced.
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  And then, you know, some years later, I remarried and we ended
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  up getting custody of his two sons and I helped him raise
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  them. They were very young when we got
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  custody of them through a very traumatic situation that I won't
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  get into on your podcast for, just just out of courtesy to not
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  tell their business to the world.
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  But, you know, watching them go through what they went through
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  and that season of life made me want to get a counseling degree
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  because I wanted to help other children going through those
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  types of situations. However, I ended up learning
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  that I really, that counseling degree I really don't help
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  children with. I really help women that's been
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  traumatized. And I think, I think I was what
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  drew you in. Prison Lynn, what drew you
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  before you got there? What year are you into the
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  accounting world? Now my undergrad was accounting
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  and finance so. What drew you there?
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  What? How did you get in that world?
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  You know, my first major when I first went to college was pre
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  law and I want to be an attorney.
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  But then I I got married. I got married and we had our son
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  and we had moved out to California.
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  My first husband was in the military, so he was in the
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  Marines. So we we lived in California
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  until he got out. And then we moved back to
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  Arkansas because he's also from Arkansas.
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  But when we lived in El Dorado, small town in South Arkansas,
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  and Murphy Oil was the big employer there, and I had been
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  the general manager of an oil company there, that ended up
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  closing. So I was sitting there with no
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  job, and I was like, well, good time to go back to college and
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  finish my degree. But I knew it wasn't practical
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  being married and living somewhere.
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  There wasn't a law school that I was going to go to law school at
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  that point. So that dream had kind of
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  passed. And so I was like, what can I
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  do? Oh, well, Murphy Oil hires tons
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  of accountants. I'll just go get an accounting
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  degree. OK.
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  It wasn't like I really wanted to be any practical.
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  It was practical. And so I went back to college
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  and I ended up getting a double BBA in accounting and finance.
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  During my last year of college my husband decided he didn't
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  want to be married any longer and so we ended up going through
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  a divorce. And I like to say he was the
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  mailman that delivered, just not at home 'cause if I found out he
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  had quite a few deliveries that weren't mail related on his mail
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  route. So anyway, we we ended up
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  divorced and and I have no hard feelings towards him.
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  So let me just say that I think me going back to college and
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  being someone who all I cared about was making straight A's
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  and I was just like getting our small child going and putting
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  him to bed. And then I would stay up all
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  night long, sometimes studying. In fact, I would let other
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  people in class come to my house and we would stay up all night,
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  you know, sometimes especially in the harder level classes.
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  So I like I think I said it this way in my in my book was we
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  became two ships that passed in the night.
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  We were just roommates anymore, so we ended up divorced.
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  And so I finished my counting degree.
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  I went to work for Lockheed Martin on the PAC 3 missile
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  program, which at the time was a secure program you couldn't talk
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  about working on, and no one knew about it.
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  But it was. You had a.
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  Certain amount of clearance for. That yes.
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  And so I was a cost accountant for that.
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  But I didn't heal very well from the divorce.
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  I didn't like being in the same small town and it was just hard
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  for me to move on because I'm not the one that wanted the
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  divorce. So I picked up and moved a
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  couple hours away from there to where I live now and that's How
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  I Met my current husband. He is ACPA and we had things in
• 14:41
  common and so he told me he'd help me get a job and so I
• 14:46
  didn't realize he really wasn't trying to help me, he was trying
• 14:48
  to date me. But that's a whole another
• 14:50
  story. But anyway, so we started out
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  being friends and ended up falling in love and getting
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  married. And you know, the rest is
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  history. I guess he sure has lived
• 15:00
  through my nightmare of. Well that's and he has and he's
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  been a big part of it. Yeah.
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  And so I'm trying to remember time sequence and when you
• 15:12
  because the kids were all around and and then how did you end up
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  at the doctor's clinic? Well, so I after I married
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  Poncho, I had just been working some accounting jobs like
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  controller type jobs. And so after I married him, he
• 15:30
  worked at ACPA firm and I was just there one day and they were
• 15:34
  like needing people and they're like why don't you come to
• 15:37
  workforce. So I went and started working
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  where he did. I moved over to a different firm
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  after that and that's where I met one of the doctors.
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  I was his accountant and he talked me in to coming to work
• 15:54
  for a clinic. He had just joined the practice
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  and it was him and seven other doctors at the time I joined and
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  so I really wasn't looking for a job, but they wanted me to come
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  be their administrator at the time.
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  This is so ironic. They were accusing their current
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  administrator administrator wrongdoing, What?
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  He said. In the book, it could, it could
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  have been a red flag. Yeah I had a lot of red flags
• 16:20
  with them that I ignored. But anyway they they offered me
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  25,000 more a year than I was making in public accounting.
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  You know I saw saw that and thought OK I I'm you know but
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  immediately I got there and I was so used to like general
• 16:37
  manager of law company cost to count it for Lockheed Martin.
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  You know public accounting structured jobs where adults act
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  like adults. OK and so I go I go to this
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  doctor's office and I I, I quickly learn that I felt like I
• 16:56
  was more like the head ringmaster at a circus and and
• 17:01
  so it it was the craziest situation none of them got
• 17:07
  along. I mean, they, you know, how I
• 17:09
  got the job was they were voting out their executive board and
• 17:14
  getting rid of their current office manager.
• 17:16
  That they were, you know, accusing wrongdoing and going to
• 17:21
  bring me in the back door. And, you know, it was such a
• 17:24
  fiasco. I should have.
• 17:25
  I should have ran for the hills. But instead I took the job and
• 17:30
  oh, the rest is history. But you.
• 17:32
  Know, let's talk. Let's talk about the history of
• 17:35
  it. Because the things started
• 17:37
  getting weird and can you kind of lead us into how your world
• 17:43
  kind of went like, well, I guess I could do that.
• 17:47
  And then it kind of just continued to to get into more of
• 17:52
  a strange area for you to have this deliberation with yourself.
• 18:00
  Dilemma of first of all, should I stay or should I go?
• 18:05
  And should I be even doing this for the guy for extra stuff on
• 18:09
  the side and being reimbursed and all that?
• 18:11
  But I how in your mind? What were you thinking?
• 18:15
  So you know, like I said, we had a lot going on personally.
• 18:19
  We were in and out of court Custody battle went on for years
• 18:22
  and years and years. And you know, we had a lot of
• 18:28
  chaos going on in our own life, to be honest.
• 18:32
  And so I went to work for these doctors and one doctor in
• 18:36
  particular, and I did give them different names in my book.
• 18:41
  And I I will tell tell your listeners the ones that may not
• 18:44
  read my book, that's not because I'm protecting them.
• 18:47
  I just said, you know, this is my story and you're not going to
• 18:51
  have a starting role in it. So I gave them them names
• 18:55
  honestly. I tried to pick names that went
• 18:57
  along with their personality and I know you know that from
• 18:59
  reading about them thus far. But the one that that I named
• 19:05
  Butch Swan in my book he was an older gentleman very very
• 19:09
  talented as far as manipulation goes.
• 19:14
  But I, he and I kind of got close at first he was I felt
• 19:19
  like a father figure. He even told me, you know, made
• 19:21
  me believe that. And like I said, I didn't often
• 19:25
  confide in people about my dad's suicide, but I did confide in
• 19:29
  him and he he took full advantage of that.
• 19:31
  Looking back, after I, I got my masters in clinical and mental
• 19:35
  health counseling, I did realize that he groomed me.
• 19:39
  That's the term for it. It's called grooming.
• 19:41
  And he groomed me into believing that we were almost family and
• 19:47
  that he was on my side and he was there for me and he gave me
• 19:51
  a lot of special things as he was the president of the
• 19:54
  executive board. When they when they voted out
• 19:57
  the other people, they voted their self in and hired me.
• 20:00
  He became the president. When he became the president, he
• 20:04
  was my boss. He was the person over me.
• 20:07
  The other doctors did not want to be bothered with day-to-day
• 20:10
  things. It's unless.
• 20:12
  Unless they got their, you know, a little feather up there behind
• 20:15
  or something. Then they would throw a little
• 20:16
  fit like they often did, cussing each other, arguing what have
• 20:21
  you. But otherwise they really just
• 20:23
  didn't want to be bothered with the day-to-day business.
• 20:26
  So when I came there, it's so hard for me to call him by
• 20:31
  something else. Doctor Swan, that I named him in
• 20:33
  my book he he started grooming me right away.
• 20:37
  I look back and see did not, you know again didn't recognize it
• 20:40
  at the moment. So he started right away asking
• 20:44
  me to charge things. Him and all the doctors actually
• 20:47
  they didn't have a credit card for the business so they had at
• 20:50
  would ask me to get things on my personal credit card and I would
• 20:54
  be reimbursed. Not a problem.
• 20:56
  Most of it was business related, occasionally some personal
• 20:59
  stuff. But he started getting me to do
• 21:03
  a lot of personal stuff, and as time went on, it got bigger,
• 21:07
  bigger, bigger, more and more. Until I had a spreadsheet.
• 21:10
  I had to keep a spreadsheet of what he owed me and it.
• 21:13
  It get. Reimbursed one point, I even had
• 21:15
  to start charging him interest and So what he would do, It was
• 21:20
  my job every two weeks to give the doctors their settlement
• 21:24
  statements is what it was called.
• 21:26
  It was basically a breakdown of their bills.
• 21:28
  We kept everything in QuickBooks.
• 21:30
  They shared some expenses. A lot of expenses they had were
• 21:34
  just to their own practice. So my job was to compile all
• 21:39
  that. I didn't have any part of
• 21:43
  getting those bills, you know, I was just the person that
• 21:47
  compiled them, put them together, collected checks, put
• 21:51
  them into the bank account. That was a zero, mind you, 0
• 21:54
  balance bank account, meaning it was an operational account that
• 21:58
  once they put money in there, I paid their payroll, I paid their
• 22:02
  bills, paid the payroll taxes, and then theoretically at the
• 22:06
  end of the month that should have went back to 0.
• 22:08
  Now obviously because of the way checks clear and timing, it
• 22:13
  didn't necessarily go to 0, but theoretically there was no extra
• 22:18
  money in there, none of their revenues, nothing, nothing went
• 22:22
  in there but what they really owed to someone else.
• 22:26
  So during that time, you know, I can paw the bills.
• 22:31
  I would give it to them, they'd write the check.
• 22:32
  It was just a set up system that I didn't set up.
• 22:35
  It was there when I got there. But what Doctor Swan started
• 22:39
  doing, he started taking full advantage of me charging things
• 22:44
  and the the things he charged were personal.
• 22:48
  He, I won't, you know, tell the whole story in my book.
• 22:51
  But he had a secret life and he was living it up at his lake
• 22:56
  house with his secret life people.
• 22:57
  And, you know, a lot of the things I was charging were
• 23:00
  secret life things, but honestly, I didn't really care
• 23:05
  coming from a public accounting. You know, we saw people that
• 23:09
  tried to sneak personal things in their business.
• 23:11
  And, you know, I wasn't his accountant.
• 23:14
  You know, I was someone working in his office, well, for a
• 23:18
  corporation that he was paying into for his bills.
• 23:22
  And I had a lot going on personally, and I really just
• 23:25
  didn't care what he did. I'm not a judgmental person.
• 23:28
  I've never been. I've always been very open and
• 23:31
  had people that all walks the life that I was friendly with.
• 23:35
  And I think that's probably one of the reasons I really survived
• 23:37
  prison was, you know, I just don't judge people.
• 23:41
  I take people for who they are and I try to love them where
• 23:43
  they're at. And so, you know, I, it was easy
• 23:47
  for me with things going on in my life.
• 23:50
  And he made it easy, too, because he let me come to work
• 23:53
  at six and leave at 3:00 so I could go pick up the kids and,
• 23:57
  you know, take them to their sporting events or whatever they
• 23:59
  had, do homework with them, cook dinner.
• 24:01
  Lifestyle. Benefits he did, he he made it
• 24:04
  and and and at some point in the grooming he also started telling
• 24:09
  me the other doctors were against me and he was helping me
• 24:11
  keep my job. So he planted seeds of, I guess,
• 24:16
  distrust. He planted seeds of, oh, I'm
• 24:20
  your hero here. You know, again, when you look
• 24:23
  at something in hindsight and from a different lens and a
• 24:27
  different season in your life, you can certainly see more clear
• 24:32
  things that at the moment I took for granted and just really
• 24:38
  honestly didn't think about to be, just to be honest, Brent, I
• 24:41
  just didn't think about it. I didn't care what he did, but
• 24:45
  as time went on, I bought more and more things for him.
• 24:48
  He got slower to paying me for one.
• 24:50
  He would always put the money. It was so weird though.
• 24:52
  He would put the money in the account with each settlement
• 24:56
  statement, but he would not pay me until he wanted to pay me all
• 25:02
  at one time. Well, I looked back later after
• 25:04
  my criminal case and I'm like, oh wait, duh.
• 25:08
  He had me plug in this stuff to drug expense in the long run.
• 25:11
  Well, his CPA wasn't going to go for small reimbursements because
• 25:16
  drugs cost a lot of money. So he had this all figured out
• 25:22
  from the very beginning. And he liked to brag that he had
• 25:27
  gotten his last CPA in a lot of trouble.
• 25:31
  And that guy almost lost his CPA license and had to pay a bunch
• 25:34
  of back taxes for him and things because this doctor didn't
• 25:38
  follow his taxes for five years and then went and blamed it on
• 25:41
  his CPA. Now I don't know about you, but
• 25:45
  your CPA does not file your taxes without your permission,
• 25:48
  your signature, you reviewing them.
• 25:51
  So you know you have to take information to your CPA for them
• 25:56
  to even file your taxes. But somehow with all his power,
• 26:01
  he got this CPA in trouble. And again another red flag when
• 26:05
  he would tell me these stories. I should have, you know, exited
• 26:08
  stage left. But instead I stayed.
• 26:11
  And mainly because honestly, I'm a creature of habit.
• 26:16
  I did not want to have to change jobs.
• 26:17
  I didn't want to have to go look for a job.
• 26:19
  I didn't want to have to start over, you know all the excuses I
• 26:25
  told myself, but at. The end of the next progression?
• 26:30
  Well, at the end. Of the first year he came to me.
• 26:33
  You know, I've just been putting him to whatever he told me to,
• 26:37
  but he came to me and had me reclassify him to drug expense.
• 26:41
  That's the dilemma you referred to earlier.
• 26:46
  At the time. I sit there for, you know, for
• 26:50
  days, honestly. But I didn't know what to do.
• 26:53
  I I my conscience I mean. For those listening that they
• 26:58
  are watching the the doctor was basically saying there's all
• 27:02
  these personal things that I have I want to reclassify for as
• 27:07
  as drugs that were bought, brought in, bought and so that
• 27:11
  that doesn't look like anything but just part of the business.
• 27:15
  Right. And so my, I went back and forth
• 27:19
  with myself for a while. Like I literally, I I honestly
• 27:24
  my book I refer to it is getting off of God's plan on the man's
• 27:27
  plan you did and and on to Doctor Swan's plan truthfully.
• 27:31
  And you know in the in the end I just told myself you know I'm
• 27:36
  not his accountant. I'm not going to be doing his
• 27:38
  taxes. They're going to probably go
• 27:40
  over this and reclassify stuff like.
• 27:43
  Usually. Rationalize and I'm not hit the
• 27:46
  police. I'm not the counting police here
• 27:48
  and I'm it's not my business what he does.
• 27:52
  But as we know that's that's wrong because it ended up
• 27:55
  getting me in federal prison, not him.
• 27:57
  And and so you know, looking back, that was probably really
• 28:03
  where I think I made a grave error in judgement and that cost
• 28:10
  me big even even though I didn't do what the government said I
• 28:13
  did. And I did not end up getting
• 28:16
  paid any extra for doing anything for him because he
• 28:22
  later lied to save his own self. And and I talk about that in my
• 28:27
  book, how he he didn't even really want to be on the witness
• 28:31
  stand at trial when I went to trial.
• 28:33
  I mean he literally tried everything to obeyed questions.
• 28:37
  He got caught lying on the stand.
• 28:41
  He never came and gave a witness impact statement against me.
• 28:44
  So you know, if I'd really done all this he was certainly been
• 28:47
  in court that day when I was sentenced giving this witness
• 28:50
  impact statement. But he didn't do any of those
• 28:53
  things. He it was obvious he did not
• 28:55
  want to be there. I'll never forget the The other
• 28:59
  doctor sued my husband and I, by the way, during my first
• 29:02
  indictment. And I'll never forget during the
• 29:05
  depositions in that case that they later dropped when they
• 29:08
  didn't want to answer discovery questions about all their
• 29:12
  Medicare fraud and all the other frauds they had committed.
• 29:15
  And and what really happened, you know, with me charging
• 29:18
  things, they dismissed that lawsuit against us because they
• 29:22
  didn't want to answer, you know, interrupt.
• 29:24
  That doesn't happen very often, by the way.
• 29:26
  That's that's not a common thing.
• 29:28
  You were indicted. I think it was like in 2012
• 29:31
  eleven by the way 11 and the and you were just explaining what we
• 29:38
  got on you know this guy because I think you were you had left
• 29:43
  the clinic doctors clinic within a year that you'd been away and
• 29:49
  and and and it's another job at that point.
• 29:52
  But it was getting, you know it was.
• 29:54
  And then it was a while. Then you get a letter in the
• 29:56
  mail. Oh.
• 29:57
  Yes, I got a letter in the mail from Tree pre trial Services,
• 30:00
  which is the US Probation office telling me that three days prior
• 30:04
  to that I had actually been indicted in the Eastern District
• 30:07
  of Arkansas and. What are they saying you're
• 30:09
  charged? With they don't tell you, they
• 30:11
  just tell you to call their office and make an appointment
• 30:13
  to come in to get on pre trial basically probation as you know
• 30:17
  from going through the federal system.
• 30:19
  And I, I don't know if your listeners know, when you're
• 30:22
  under federal indictment, your rights are highly restricted.
• 30:27
  You're literally probation for a crime you've not been convicted
• 30:30
  of yet. So you have to turn in your
• 30:32
  passport. You have to report, you know, I
• 30:36
  had to report once a a month in line.
• 30:38
  They can come to your house, they can go through your things.
• 30:41
  I mean, they don't normally do that, 'cause I wasn't a drug
• 30:44
  user or any doing anything on pretrial that would bring
• 30:48
  attention for them to think they needed to come to my house.
• 30:51
  But you know, they did occasionally, but for the most
• 30:54
  part, I just reported once a month and that was it.
• 30:57
  But you are restricted and some people even have travel
• 31:02
  restrictions now. Mine was I just couldn't leave
• 31:04
  the country. I could go anywhere in the
• 31:06
  United States, but I've known people that keep their district.
• 31:10
  In the Eastern District of Missouri.
• 31:12
  And I've I've heard of a lot of people that couldn't leave their
• 31:14
  district without permission. I didn't have that restriction.
• 31:18
  But at any rate, you know, you're you get this letter in
• 31:22
  the mail and you're like I've never had any besides family
• 31:25
  Court. You know, I'm not Privy to all
• 31:28
  this. And so I get this letter and the
• 31:31
  only thing I need to do was to go call the person, the
• 31:34
  attorney, and and I'll back up for a minute as you've already
• 31:38
  read my book. The reason I left their
• 31:41
  employment, and the reason I do believe they started accusing me
• 31:44
  of wrongdoing, was I was assaulted by one of the doctors
• 31:49
  during my tenure with them. And when I started putting
• 31:52
  pressure on them to do something about him, little did I know he
• 31:58
  had done this to many other people.
• 31:59
  I had no idea at the time. That came out years later and
• 32:03
  that was really shocking to me but that he had gotten by with
• 32:10
  it for so long and they took up for him and he is the only
• 32:13
  doctor that ended up in federal prison.
• 32:15
  Of course nothing to do with my case.
• 32:16
  He he put illegal drugs on the street and ended up in federal
• 32:20
  prison. His self.
• 32:21
  They. Didn't listen to you, Len.
• 32:23
  They They stood for him. Yes.
• 32:25
  And and there was a detective involved and he knew they were
• 32:28
  lying. And the Arkansas business paper
• 32:31
  made a whole big, you know, was reporting on it.
• 32:34
  It was a big deal. And so this this came out though
• 32:39
  about him and other people between my first and 2nd
• 32:42
  indictment but before my first indictment he he did assault me.
• 32:49
  I I'll, I will tell your listeners, he did not rape me,
• 32:53
  but he did violate me physically in a way that was inappropriate
• 32:58
  by touching me physically. And during a treatment in his
• 33:02
  office he had been treating a torn rotator cup.
• 33:04
  I had and he briefly knocked me out and I don't even know if I
• 33:10
  even talk about the the extent in in my book.
• 33:13
  I think I'd just say because as you can tell I'm starting to get
• 33:17
  anxiety right now a little bit just talking about I still have
• 33:20
  trauma from that situation but I did wake up with him with his
• 33:25
  private parts rubbing my leg and his hand down my bra.
• 33:29
  So that's the first time I've ever publicly spoke that.
• 33:32
  So forgive me if I'm a little shook up right now, but I tried
• 33:37
  to get the doctors to do something and they wouldn't.
• 33:39
  So I hired an attorney because the last straw was I was
• 33:46
  cornered by him in an exam room. Another one of the doctors
• 33:49
  walked down the hallway that was very aware of what had happened
• 33:53
  and I yelled help me basically. I said please help me.
• 33:57
  And he basically said as he kept walking, you're on your own.
• 34:04
  And that day I went back to my office, they already had a nurse
• 34:07
  suing them for sexual harassment because of he.
• 34:11
  She had been his nurse. She said he felt of her breast
• 34:15
  and made comments. He had already made a lot of
• 34:18
  inappropriate comments to me. And by the way, he's the doctor
• 34:21
  that got me the job. He was the one.
• 34:22
  I was his accountant in public accounting and had brought me to
• 34:26
  that job. Right.
• 34:28
  And I overlooked. I look back to at his grooming
• 34:31
  by the way. I overlooked all the things he
• 34:35
  would say inappropriately to me for like, I guess I was over
• 34:40
  almost two years. I was.
• 34:43
  I was already three years into this job when he assaulted me.
• 34:48
  So I had overlooked for three years a lot of the he would try
• 34:52
  to like infringe on my personal space like coming around to my
• 34:55
  side the desk. He just he he asked me one time
• 35:00
  are those real. But he he said oh you've got a a
• 35:03
  nice rack are those real things of that nature that I just tried
• 35:08
  to laugh off along the way which honestly I don't I look back now
• 35:13
  and I think my life was so chaotic back there then how was
• 35:18
  I ever even letting this doctor treat me to start with.
• 35:21
  Like sometimes I look back at that that part of my life that
• 35:25
  season and I'm like, did I, did I really live that?
• 35:29
  Is that really my life? Like, because I I think about it
• 35:33
  now and I'm like I would never let a doctor treat me now that
• 35:38
  made inappropriate remarks and that and or had a nurse that was
• 35:42
  already, you know, suing him for harassment for making sexual
• 35:47
  remarks and touching her inappropriately during an exam.
• 35:50
  But yet here, here I was at this reason of my life just, I don't
• 35:56
  know. Just it it it is, it is what it
• 35:59
  is. I I have no words to explain.
• 36:01
  It happens though. I mean I don't think that's, I
• 36:03
  don't probably think that's very uncommon.
• 36:05
  That's how those things happen and people end up in those
• 36:07
  situations and they look back on.
• 36:09
  But how in the world that let that happen is because of the
• 36:11
  moment in time and the place somebody was in.
• 36:14
  Yeah. And and going back, Fast
• 36:16
  forward, you know, I'm trying to put pressure on them to do
• 36:19
  something which I try to get meetings for months.
• 36:22
  I I finally got an attorney. She was the one representing the
• 36:25
  nurse because I didn't know anybody else to call.
• 36:27
  And so and she ended up being my attorney that I called the day
• 36:30
  that I hit the floor, when she looked on Pacer and told me I've
• 36:33
  been indicted. That was the attorney, same
• 36:35
  attorney. But we finally got a meeting
• 36:37
  with the new executive board during this time.
• 36:42
  But for some reason they got it in their head that there was
• 36:47
  something fishy going on and he was getting advantage of them
• 36:51
  paying more bills than him. It was ludicrous.
• 36:54
  But at any rate they oust him as president.
• 36:58
  So same scenario that happened when I came to their their
• 37:01
  office, they did it all over again.
• 37:03
  They got behind closed doors against him this time.
• 37:06
  And you know, I talk about it in my book.
• 37:10
  I say they were having those same behind the closed doors
• 37:13
  meetings, only I wasn't proud of the meeting this time.
• 37:18
  I was one of the subjects of the meeting and so they wanted, I
• 37:22
  think to fire me. I think looking back at
• 37:24
  discovering my case, that's how it started, because I was coming
• 37:29
  to them, wanting them to do something about the doctor that
• 37:32
  assaulted me. And they had already had two
• 37:34
  doctors, two or three at this time.
• 37:37
  I think maybe we were down to three had left.
• 37:39
  So there was only five of them left.
• 37:40
  So their bills had gone up because they were splitting them
• 37:43
  eight ways. Now they're, you know, splitting
• 37:45
  them five ways. And so they didn't want to lose
• 37:48
  another doctor, even though he was a sexual predator,
• 37:51
  basically. So they decided I would go, I
• 37:56
  guess, and then they would get rid of the president who they
• 37:59
  thought was protecting me somehow.
• 38:01
  And so they oust him and set out I believe from looking at
• 38:07
  discovery on a plan to figure out how how they could fire me
• 38:10
  legally. So and you know Arkansas's an AT
• 38:13
  will state. I don't even know why they went
• 38:15
  through all that because all they had to do was fire me.
• 38:17
  But apparently they were getting this an employee, employer,
• 38:22
  attorney involved in all this. Well, they get to see in in the
• 38:26
  bank statement where he had reimbursed me.
• 38:31
  And so when we finally get this meeting with them, they start
• 38:35
  accusing me of wrongdoing. So I immediately tell them I
• 38:39
  think you should have an audit. We have ACPA already.
• 38:43
  I think he should do an audit. You know, I will fully
• 38:46
  cooperate. What do you want from me?
• 38:47
  I took them in my office. I showed them all my files, all
• 38:51
  the the the financials. I went and took them to this
• 38:54
  closet that we had. It was stacked to the ceiling
• 38:58
  branch with financial stuff. I never threw away stuff when I
• 39:01
  became their office manager. So it went back way before my
• 39:05
  tenure and we had moved a few months before that.
• 39:10
  We had moved. The billers and I had been on a
• 39:13
  separate floor, so the clinic was like on the 6th floor and we
• 39:16
  were on the third floor in this big office building.
• 39:19
  And so it's called the doctor's building.
• 39:21
  And so we had moved. They wanted to consolidate, so
• 39:24
  they had moved me up to the clinic and the billers up to the
• 39:28
  clinic into some other offices. And we had closed down that
• 39:31
  third floor. So I had had to move all those
• 39:33
  files. We got rid of a storage
• 39:35
  building. We moved them all upstairs and
• 39:37
  we put them in that office. So I got the key, I took it.
• 39:41
  I opened it. I showed them with my attorney
• 39:43
  present, their attorney, the, the new president and me walked
• 39:48
  over. I showed them all that prior to
• 39:53
  my first and we and we asked that they maintain, you know,
• 39:56
  maintain all those records and we wanted a copy of them because
• 39:59
  we saw they were falsely accusing me.
• 40:02
  So we wanted, you know, records. To prove.
• 40:06
  So Fast forward. You know, a good eight months
• 40:10
  after that is when I got the letter that I was indicted.
• 40:14
  So we went back and forth with them for a little bit.
• 40:16
  My my attorney did, And then we never heard anything.
• 40:21
  So in my mind, they got the audit.
• 40:24
  They saw that I was telling the truth.
• 40:26
  Nothing had happened. You know, I was being reimbursed
• 40:29
  for stuff I bought for him. He probably had come forward,
• 40:32
  told him the truth, everything was fine.
• 40:34
  I went on with my life, got the letter, and I'm like, Oh my God.
• 40:39
  At the time I was not being accused of stealing money from
• 40:43
  them though by the way they they were accused of me of again
• 40:46
  helping him have less bills and them have more.
• 40:49
  So this this inappropriate that I had you know taken money.
• 40:54
  They thought of that after the fact.
• 40:56
  So they I guess they never got the audit and they just ended up
• 41:01
  bringing some guy in to start doing my job.
• 41:04
  That was employment staffing guy.
• 41:06
  He was looking for them, someone to hire, and then he did my job
• 41:09
  for a while and I guess the reimbursements to me.
• 41:15
  By this time they had turned this over, had made a FBI
• 41:18
  complaint first. The FBI looked at it, refused to
• 41:21
  take. Yes, the FBI refused to take the
• 41:24
  case. So they took it to Little Rock
• 41:26
  PD. And there was a Secret Service
• 41:31
  back when President Obama appointed a task force to be
• 41:36
  with local police departments, and he put federal agents in
• 41:39
  local police departments. When he did that, a young police
• 41:45
  officer who had just become a Secret Service agent became on
• 41:49
  the task force with the Lorac PD, and he had been there
• 41:53
  roughly 2 months when my case came across his desk.
• 41:58
  He later admitted he did no research.
• 42:01
  He never looked at any invoices. At first they said I inflated
• 42:04
  invoices and then stole the money.
• 42:08
  He's he, he later admitted he never even saw an invoice.
• 42:10
  He never looked at a bank account, He never did anything.
• 42:13
  He took the doctor's word, went to the grand jury and indicted
• 42:16
  me. Well, he went with a prosecutor.
• 42:19
  He got the USA to do it. And So what they didn't know at
• 42:24
  the time was when those doctors knew I was going to be indicted.
• 42:28
  And I don't want to skirt over the thing where, you know, when
• 42:31
  you got that indictment, I mean, it was a huge promotional event
• 42:37
  and your husband was out of town and you told your husband.
• 42:41
  I mean, what were you guys thinking?
• 42:43
  Like, what was going through your mind?
• 42:45
  I. Was numb.
• 42:46
  I was. I remember.
• 42:49
  It's almost like I've almost shut that time out, Brent,
• 42:52
  because. I want to, I want to kind of
• 42:54
  explain to people because I've I'm a little bit sometimes I've
• 42:58
  I've when I read you know somebody's book and I I'm just,
• 43:01
  I don't want to skip over something because the $611,000
• 43:05
  sounds like a big number. But what it was is over a course
• 43:07
  of years and it was the reimbursement that you were
• 43:11
  doing with the doctors of paying on your credit card to come back
• 43:14
  what they were accusing you of was stealing.
• 43:17
  Well, he now said that because. And I later found this out
• 43:22
  through discovery too. You know, they had ousted him as
• 43:25
  the president and he was in the dark.
• 43:27
  He was still calling me, still want me to come to work for him.
• 43:30
  He was going to leave the practice like it was, you know,
• 43:33
  we were still in contact for a while.
• 43:35
  Finally he just quit calling one day and bugging me about coming
• 43:39
  back to work for him. And honestly, it was a sigh of
• 43:41
  relief because I knew he did not do some things right.
• 43:46
  All those doctors didn't, and I just didn't want part of that
• 43:48
  again. But I was, you know, trying to
• 43:51
  not be ugly because I still wanted, like, a reference from
• 43:55
  him. So you know, he was in the dark
• 43:59
  looking at the discovery. I realized by the time he found
• 44:04
  out there was a criminal investigation and the feds were
• 44:07
  involved, I he he couldn't come forward and tell the truth
• 44:13
  because he would he would have got in trouble for tax fraud.
• 44:16
  Brent. Right, for sure.
• 44:18
  And but the thing that I find, the whole thing gets very, I
• 44:25
  mean, it's fascinating because first of all, that first charge
• 44:29
  of yours gets dismissed. Yes.
• 44:31
  And that doesn't happen very often at all.
• 44:34
  I mean, you have to really dig deep to find charges that get
• 44:37
  dismissed. Oh, that person walked away?
• 44:40
  No, they then came back with a new charge.
• 44:44
  In that time period. How were?
• 44:46
  You living? How were you living at that time
• 44:49
  being, Oh my gosh, I got this thing dismissed.
• 44:53
  It was a federal indictment. I'm now in La La Land of that
• 44:58
  doesn't very happen very often at all.
• 45:00
  So how are you living your life? Are you looking over your
• 45:02
  shoulder or are you like, thank God I got away from all that and
• 45:06
  I'm moving forward with my life. Well, not at first.
• 45:08
  I wasn't looking over my shoulder.
• 45:10
  But after that indictment attention kept being brought to
• 45:13
  it because again this nurse was suing and other patients came
• 45:19
  forward and other nurses that he had that the doctor that
• 45:22
  assaulted me had had assaulted. So this detective got involved
• 45:26
  and was was a state detective and was investigating it and he
• 45:29
  was going over there. The doctors were taken up for
• 45:32
  the other doctor in line for him.
• 45:35
  You know, saying that basically that none of the stuff I that I
• 45:40
  said was true or I guess any of the other people there was even
• 45:43
  drug reps that came forward. He had locked them in on in in
• 45:47
  his office and talked, you know, terrible to them at times and
• 45:50
  like wouldn't let him out. That got scared and told stories
• 45:54
  about what he did. But at any rate I moved on.
• 45:59
  I got a job, you know, at some point.
• 46:04
  At some point I was out to lunch with a friend like almost a
• 46:08
  year. I think that it I had been
• 46:11
  unindicted. You know, like they had been
• 46:13
  dismissed. I'd moved on.
• 46:14
  It was almost a year later. My I see my old attorney, my
• 46:19
  attorney from that case, his number come up on my phone and
• 46:23
  the. So, Lynn, here's the thing.
• 46:26
  You Then with you're out to lunch, you get a phone call.
• 46:32
  It's your old attorney. You answer the call.
• 46:34
  What did she say? I get this phone call, I'm out
• 46:36
  to lunch with my friend, but at any rate, he called me.
• 46:44
  He had had a meeting shortly after my first indictment with
• 46:47
  Pat Harris, and he had showed him my side of the story.
• 46:51
  He had showed him everything, given the government, my case,
• 46:54
  my defense on a silver platter brand.
• 46:56
  OK, pretty. Much a proffer of everything.
• 46:58
  Well, not really though, because I wasn't there.
• 47:02
  My case was already dismissed, you know?
• 47:05
  I mean, I was no longer indicted.
• 47:07
  He was just showing Pat you know, the real criminals here is
• 47:11
  not my client. They're the they're the ones
• 47:13
  over there, you know, and so and and trying to get my, my civil
• 47:17
  money back, you know, at this time we still had that case
• 47:20
  pending. So he showed him everything, you
• 47:25
  know. And this is the one thing
• 47:28
  mistake the the flaw I believe that my attorney did make
• 47:32
  otherwise. He was such a great attorney for
• 47:34
  me. He came back on my second
• 47:36
  indictment for free. He didn't even charge me.
• 47:38
  He was so mad. I got indicted a second time and
• 47:41
  he knew I was innocent. And like this he did, he did
• 47:45
  tell the government what my defense would be, OK.
• 47:49
  He showed him in the civil case. We had managed to get one of the
• 47:53
  doctors that had left. We had managed to get a copy of
• 47:56
  his settlement statements and I had tied them all out.
• 48:00
  Tying out some accounting term for showing everything adds up
• 48:04
  and is correct. And I had showed my attorney how
• 48:07
  there was never a way I inflated anything.
• 48:10
  You know what they said in their first indictment?
• 48:13
  It it, it, it was not true and it couldn't have been true and
• 48:16
  and truthfully to get 600 and 1011 extra dollars in a 0
• 48:22
  balance account, there wasn't many ways in that set up.
• 48:25
  It could have happened. So inflation of invoices would
• 48:29
  have been you know a way for that to happen.
• 48:31
  Or you know, often times we see people that do steal money, they
• 48:36
  don't pay payroll taxes or they they they pay something over
• 48:40
  here and they don't pay here. But eventually it catches up,
• 48:44
  right? But mind you, I'd been gone a
• 48:47
  long time and no bill was unpaid.
• 48:50
  And they admitted this on the stand at trial.
• 48:51
  By the way, we eventually got to trial in my second indictment.
• 48:55
  The doctors even had to admit that when I left, there was
• 48:59
  nothing unpaid. They had no payroll taxes to
• 49:01
  catch up. They had no bills to catch up.
• 49:04
  Everything had been paid. So you know the the the question
• 49:09
  is, had a jury been able to understand where did that money
• 49:12
  come from? OK.
• 49:13
  It had to get in there somehow. Well, because Doctor Swan's
• 49:18
  settlement statements were were destroyed and he had been
• 49:21
  putting money in that you just there was no way to show it.
• 49:24
  No way. So and then the government did
• 49:27
  something else. I don't know if it was by design
• 49:30
  or stupidity, but by the time we got to the second indictment to
• 49:35
  trial and the judge had ruled, I could not tell the jury that
• 49:39
  they had destroyed all that evidence.
• 49:43
  They they said I could use the bank statements.
• 49:46
  But the problem was the federal government failed to get copies
• 49:51
  of deposit slips to show who deposited what money.
• 49:55
  OK. So when you've got eight
• 49:57
  separate entities depositing and then we're down to, you know, to
• 50:00
  to seven, then we're down to six and we're down to five, you.
• 50:03
  And then you don't even have any of the backup documentation to
• 50:06
  show, OK, his settlement statement was this amount.
• 50:10
  Here's a deposit for that amount.
• 50:12
  That must be his deposit. You have nothing to even back
• 50:14
  into a number. And you're a businessman.
• 50:16
  You understand where I'm coming from on that.
• 50:19
  But I had no way using bank statements to show anything.
• 50:24
  But again, federal judges don't always understand accounting
• 50:28
  either. And I think that's a big flaw in
• 50:30
  our system. And actually one of the reasons
• 50:33
  I often speak out and advocate for us to go to a, what I call a
• 50:38
  professional jury, meaning and I know I'm getting a little off
• 50:42
  track from what we're talking about.
• 50:44
  But I think it's important for people to consider that if we
• 50:49
  had professional jurors, jurors that aren't just coming off the
• 50:53
  street and and the government has the ability to vote off
• 50:56
  anybody that understands your case, which is what I saw them
• 50:58
  doing in my trial, They voted off anyone with accounting
• 51:02
  experience, finance, they built a house, anything that applied
• 51:05
  to me, they voted them off the jury and use their strikes to
• 51:09
  get them gone. But if we had a professional
• 51:11
  jury pool that understood drug amounts, if it's a drug case,
• 51:16
  understood conspiracy laws and understood how maybe that person
• 51:21
  really didn't do all that just because someone else on their
• 51:24
  case did it. You know, people that are
• 51:26
  serving sentences that can't get first step back because of
• 51:29
  certain drug crimes and gun charges that honestly don't even
• 51:33
  apply to them. They just apply to the
• 51:35
  conspiracy as a whole. Or in the case of white collar
• 51:38
  cases, if you had a jury that understood wire fraud, mail
• 51:42
  fraud, all the the catch all ones that they use, but also
• 51:46
  understood accounting, which is a majority of things that comes
• 51:50
  into play in most power cases. Even in insurance cases, that's
• 51:54
  that's what you're talking you're dealing with.
• 51:55
  So did you, did you feel like land when you got into that
• 51:59
  courtroom and and you saw the strikes go on?
• 52:02
  You know, very few people go to trial.
• 52:05
  I mean, you know, 97% of the people that get indicted plea
• 52:08
  bargain and then the others that go, you know, it's it's just a
• 52:12
  very, very small percentage, especially in federal cases.
• 52:14
  And Harley need them win. Oh no, I.
• 52:17
  Know that everyone's a. Trial lost.
• 52:19
  We we have a conviction rate that that rivals any of these
• 52:24
  countries that we say doesn't have a democracy.
• 52:26
  So the thing that I'm wondering is, is because I never went to
• 52:29
  trial, but I always wonder like when you walked in there and you
• 52:31
  saw this thing, 'cause you know you, you're you're walking in
• 52:38
  and and always you know you're everybody says that you're
• 52:42
  innocent till proven guilty. But when you walk into a trial
• 52:46
  in a courtroom, you have the USA versus you.
• 52:51
  So the USA is the good guy and regardless of you, you're the
• 52:55
  bad guy that has to prove that you're the good guy.
• 52:58
  So they ride down on the White Horse.
• 53:00
  And I'm wondering like with with the jury selection and
• 53:03
  everything that's going on, how were you feeling when you feel
• 53:05
  like this is, this is not, I'm not feeling good about this or
• 53:12
  did you think, no, I've got this?
• 53:13
  No, I I realized that my well in the interim, you know I had I
• 53:19
  had fired my first attorney the one that was working for free.
• 53:22
  He he was going through a bad divorce and just some other had
• 53:24
  some other issues going on and it had just become too much
• 53:30
  because I was having to be my own paralegal.
• 53:32
  A lot of the stuff we wrote, I was having to research the laws
• 53:35
  and find them and write it and you know it.
• 53:38
  It when a lot of attorneys don't go to trial.
• 53:41
  So you know, the fact that there aren't very many cases that go
• 53:44
  to trial means that a lot of attorneys, they will talk about
• 53:48
  going to trial, but actually doing the work that actually
• 53:50
  goes into preparing a case is humongous, especially in the
• 53:56
  federal system. So, well, actually, when they
• 53:59
  keep. Giving you the same discovery
• 54:00
  over and over like they did in my case, but they label it
• 54:03
  different. Like, you know, the government
• 54:05
  uses what's called Bates numbers and that's a a number for a
• 54:09
  document. But because my case went on, by
• 54:12
  the time I got to trial in 2017, my case had been ongoing for six
• 54:17
  years, off and on, you know, between the 1st and 2nd
• 54:19
  indictment. And we had gotten this discovery
• 54:22
  hundreds of times. In fact I was indicted the
• 54:25
  second time for they said I did all this stuff in QuickBooks
• 54:28
  that QuickBooks wouldn't even do first and foremost.
• 54:31
  But secondly we they they couldn't find the copy of
• 54:34
  QuickBooks. They and finally they found a
• 54:36
  copy but then they had to come over and hack into it.
• 54:41
  They gave us copies that people had worked in after I left the
• 54:43
  clinic like it was crazy. The the the the Secret Service
• 54:48
  was given the actual flash drive from from my computer before it
• 54:52
  was destroyed. He got it and he lost it.
• 54:57
  Well, I want to get inside your head at because this whole thing
• 55:01
  is going on. In this case, the jury comes out
• 55:06
  after the closing statements and you're sitting there just like
• 55:09
  you see in the movie. And what happened?
• 55:14
  Well, first of all, the AUSA gets to give the first opening
• 55:18
  statement to the jury and it it was, if I wouldn't have been the
• 55:23
  one on trial. It was so fascinating because
• 55:25
  she tells this story to the jury.
• 55:27
  Well, this is when they were actually, we were in Verdar and
• 55:30
  we were picking a jury. She tells the jury this story
• 55:33
  about Cheetos, and there's two children sitting at a table and
• 55:37
  they're eating Cheetos, or well, they're not supposed to eat the
• 55:40
  Cheetos. Their mom tells them do not eat
• 55:41
  the Cheetos and leaves the room. But the two kids eat the Cheetos
• 55:44
  anyway, right? Well, the mom comes back and the
• 55:48
  Cheetos have been eaten and one kid has Cheeto dust, you know,
• 55:52
  You know, Cheetos leave all that dust on your fingers, has Cheeto
• 55:55
  dust. And she asked the the people on
• 55:58
  the jury, that prospective jury, to raise their hand if they
• 56:02
  believe that the kid with the Cheeto dust is the guilty party
• 56:06
  for eating the Cheetos. OK, so all these people's hands
• 56:11
  go up, and there was a few that didn't.
• 56:13
  Well, the ones that didn't, they ask more questions too.
• 56:16
  Because see, the ones that didn't are free thinkers.
• 56:19
  They're outside the box. They're not going to just
• 56:21
  believe something just because you show them.
• 56:24
  Yeah. There, there could be another
• 56:25
  story. Absolutely.
• 56:26
  And those people were immediately voted off the jury.
• 56:29
  OK, so we finally everybody that said they had accounting
• 56:33
  experience, we we voted for them to stay on because I wanted
• 56:37
  people to understand my case, because I knew I was innocent.
• 56:40
  However, when we get back to find out who made it to the
• 56:42
  jury, mind you all those people had been exed off by the
• 56:45
  government. So I'm left with like a school
• 56:48
  teacher, housewife, like people that worked in Aeronomics.
• 56:52
  One of them did things that didn't apply to my case at all.
• 56:54
  So it's not a jury of your peers because those aren't my peers,
• 56:58
  because they don't know anything about accounting and my case is
• 57:01
  all about financial fraud. So the the we start the first
• 57:07
  day, the first day that happens, Bordar, they give the jury like
• 57:11
  some kind of little instruction things and then they let the USA
• 57:15
  have opening statements. So the AUSA gets up, she gives
• 57:19
  her opening statement, you know, the government packs the
• 57:24
  courtroom behind her. All these agents are sitting at
• 57:27
  the table with them already. You've got all the other AUSAS
• 57:31
  from their office because mind you, they don't go to trial
• 57:33
  much. So they'll just scheduled to
• 57:35
  come in there that day. They're all back there.
• 57:39
  I'm sitting there with a couple people on my side, so I don't
• 57:42
  know how that looks to a jury. Like they've got all the people
• 57:45
  in the world, you know, like a whole crowd.
• 57:47
  Plus not to mention local reporters.
• 57:49
  They get to come to tell their side of the story to the public
• 57:53
  while you're under trial, by the way.
• 57:55
  So she gets through with her opening statement and she walks
• 58:00
  back and high fives other a US as I'm sitting there honestly
• 58:07
  appalled. This is my government.
• 58:09
  This is my taxpayer dollars. No matter that I'm the one on
• 58:12
  trial. I pay for you to have that job
• 58:15
  and to be professional and you're the government for God's
• 58:19
  sake. And you can tell I'm getting a
• 58:21
  little angry here because sometimes when I talk about my
• 58:23
  case, I do still have that trauma that comes back and I do
• 58:27
  get a little angry. So I apologize to your listeners
• 58:30
  if I'm getting a little vocal here.
• 58:31
  But anyway, I look, I whisper to my attorney.
• 58:36
  I'm like, how can the judge allow that?
• 58:40
  Like, this is not a circus, this is not a basketball game.
• 58:44
  This is my life. Like, she's high fighting
• 58:48
  someone, but this is my life. He's like, just don't worry
• 58:55
  about it. That's what he tells me.
• 58:58
  Don't worry about. It How long?
• 58:59
  How long does this trial last? Eight days, which is a short
• 59:03
  trial, really. I'll ask.
• 59:04
  I'll ask you again, because after this eight days gone
• 59:09
  through this horrendous experience, the jury comes back
• 59:13
  in. Stand up, they say.
• 59:16
  Guilty. What?
• 59:19
  What's going through Lynn's? Mind.
• 59:21
  But I still somehow, in all my disbelief back then that trials
• 59:27
  were fair, that our system was a fair system, that innocent
• 59:32
  people did not go to prison. I guess somehow I convinced
• 59:37
  myself that the jury would see the truth in the end and I would
• 59:40
  just go home. But the day that I they came
• 59:44
  back in the the one juror she was crying, none of the rest of
• 59:48
  them would look at me and I took that as a bad, bad sign, I'll be
• 59:52
  honest, 611,000. So I had a 611,207 thousand for
• 59:58
  tax fraud they said was owed on that money.
• 1:00:00
  And then the money laundering charges just gets you extra time
• 1:00:03
  in prison. So that's why they added those.
• 1:00:06
  So they had to read off every count, you know, So count one
• 1:00:11
  wire fraud. Guilty.
• 1:00:13
  As soon as they said that, I laid my head down on the desk.
• 1:00:18
  I didn't cry. I had no emotion.
• 1:00:20
  I felt totally numb. I remember just feeling hot all
• 1:00:23
  over. I heard my husband crying behind
• 1:00:26
  me. I heard him sniffling and the
• 1:00:28
  attorney friend of ours that was sitting there with him who was
• 1:00:30
  just a personal friend of ours who was there that day.
• 1:00:33
  I could also see hear her crying because they were the two people
• 1:00:36
  directly right behind me in chairs in, you know, the little,
• 1:00:41
  I guess galley area, whatever you would call people that are
• 1:00:43
  spectators. They continued to read each
• 1:00:47
  count, each count. They said guilty.
• 1:00:51
  Then she dismissed the jury, thanked them for their service.
• 1:00:54
  They left and then I raised my head up and she told me
• 1:00:59
  basically she's going to let me stay out on on.
• 1:01:02
  I was out on my own recontinence.
• 1:01:03
  I didn't have a bond. Both times I was just left out.
• 1:01:06
  And which is? Fantastic, because a lot of
• 1:01:08
  people can get remanded. I've put that I've had here on
• 1:01:10
  the show and thought that they were going home and they were
• 1:01:15
  immediately. I've seen that with some people
• 1:01:18
  I've helped. I just saw that here this week
• 1:01:20
  with somebody that's on a a page that I get on and try to help
• 1:01:24
  people with. But at any rate, I was
• 1:01:27
  immediately told I had to go back up to the Marshall's
• 1:01:30
  office. So mind you, the the Marshall
• 1:01:32
  has taken my fingerprints, DNA and pictures.
• 1:01:35
  First indictment when I was indicted.
• 1:01:38
  The second time, when I was found guilty, I was indict.
• 1:01:45
  I mean, I was taken up again. They do the whole thing again.
• 1:01:48
  And when I was sentenced, they made me go back up there.
• 1:01:51
  I'm like, do y'all think this stuff's changing?
• 1:01:54
  Like, I don't. I mean, you know, whatever.
• 1:01:56
  I'm having to come up here. All these?
• 1:01:58
  How much? Time.
• 1:01:58
  Did you have one between the time?
• 1:02:03
  So I was found guilty on February the 8th of 2017 and I
• 1:02:10
  reported to FPC Bryant Federal Prison on February the 26th,
• 1:02:15
  2018 / a year later. So I, you know, she tells me go
• 1:02:23
  back up to the Marshall, we go back up there and then my
• 1:02:25
  husband and I start heading home.
• 1:02:28
  My husband's driving. You know, we're talk.
• 1:02:31
  I'm. I'm on the phone telling my
• 1:02:32
  mother and my sister. By the way, I just got found
• 1:02:34
  guilty of all counts. Like, I literally just got
• 1:02:36
  convicted of this crime. And they're like, Oh my God, you
• 1:02:39
  know, well, we're going to appeal.
• 1:02:42
  You know, you can appeal. You know, tell me stuff that I
• 1:02:44
  didn't care to hear at that moment.
• 1:02:46
  Because nothing mattered at that moment except for the fact that
• 1:02:49
  I had just got convicted of a crime I knew I hadn't committed.
• 1:02:52
  And I had fought for seven years and we had spent hundreds of
• 1:02:55
  thousands of dollars. And did the kids have a lot of
• 1:02:58
  questions, or did they just accept the situation as bad as
• 1:03:02
  it was, as horrible as it was? Is it?
• 1:03:04
  Is it, you know, we're going to get through it?
• 1:03:08
  I remember them just loving on me and telling me, you know,
• 1:03:12
  they were there for me and that they loved me.
• 1:03:15
  So yeah, it was a horrible day. And then I spent four days in
• 1:03:20
  bed wallowing in my pain, people calling me, wanting to bring
• 1:03:26
  food, wanting to talk to me. You know, I'm just like, yeah,
• 1:03:30
  no, you know, I really just want to be this person that's
• 1:03:34
  wallowing in my pain right now. I just need to do this.
• 1:03:38
  That's a weird time period for because I had two or three
• 1:03:41
  months and that's that's like a that dead period because you
• 1:03:44
  almost know once you know that you're going to prison you want
• 1:03:48
  to get in and get it over with you.
• 1:03:49
  You have this weird strange thing of you know, having this
• 1:03:54
  no man's land of of and the fear of going in.
• 1:03:58
  So that's a long time to wait, so.
• 1:04:00
  My attorney told me together character reference letters and
• 1:04:04
  because I didn't know what to say to people I just said can
• 1:04:08
  you write me a character reference letter.
• 1:04:10
  So I ended up amassing 165 character reference letters OK,
• 1:04:16
  which is unheard of and and my attorney only wanted 10 but you
• 1:04:20
  know I everybody that asked I just said you can write a letter
• 1:04:23
  if you want to. Mind you, not everybody that
• 1:04:25
  asked wrote a letter. I'd say probably, you know, a
• 1:04:28
  third of the people. 165 letters is a lot of letters.
• 1:04:31
  So but I was adamant that the judge would see all those
• 1:04:36
  because people took their time out of their life to write a
• 1:04:39
  letter for me who was convicted of a crime.
• 1:04:42
  And I felt it very important. And mind you, some of these
• 1:04:45
  people were people I'd known from college, high school.
• 1:04:48
  I'm, I'm in my 50s, so you know, I've known people a long time
• 1:04:53
  and so it's. A It's a strange thing to Len
• 1:04:56
  when you and I think you can only really go through it when
• 1:04:59
  somebody has this these character letters written when
• 1:05:02
  you're going to prison. It's almost like the Tom Sawyer
• 1:05:04
  thing where you're sitting at your own funeral and you really
• 1:05:07
  get to hear what people think of you or how you've had these
• 1:05:10
  different experiences in your life.
• 1:05:11
  And how that absolutely and and it's a strange very, very
• 1:05:16
  strange. And I took my letters with me to
• 1:05:18
  prison because I wanted to look at it when I had a bad day.
• 1:05:22
  So I've gathered all these letters.
• 1:05:26
  She talked about those letters. I can't tell you how many times.
• 1:05:30
  And she put off my sentencing at the end of that hearing that day
• 1:05:33
  and said she couldn't make a decision right then.
• 1:05:35
  She wanted to think about it longer.
• 1:05:38
  So two more months later it was set and she gave me a two level
• 1:05:44
  variance based on my character reference letters.
• 1:05:47
  Now my pastor came and spoke on my behalf.
• 1:05:49
  Several other people came and actually got on the stand and
• 1:05:52
  were witnesses for me at my sentencing.
• 1:05:57
  One had several good people come and speak on my behalf to tell
• 1:06:01
  the person I was. So I stood there.
• 1:06:06
  She gave me a two level variance.
• 1:06:08
  She only and I say only sentence me to 45 months.
• 1:06:13
  Now, understandably, to someone in your listening audience, 45
• 1:06:17
  months, they're like, Oh my God, what do you mean only?
• 1:06:21
  But when the government is trying to get 8 to 13 years and
• 1:06:24
  then you're really looking at more like 60 to 70 months and
• 1:06:27
  you get about half that time, honestly, it felt like only, you
• 1:06:33
  know, I mean, it did. And that was another surreal day
• 1:06:37
  of going back up to the Marshall's office and then
• 1:06:40
  driving home with my husband, seeing myself on the news that
• 1:06:43
  night. I want to take, I want to take a
• 1:06:45
  break right there because I want to get back.
• 1:06:47
  I want to get into your your next journey of going to
• 1:06:51
  prisons. Before we do that, before we do
• 1:06:53
  that, I want to recognize the I'm Your Success podcast is
• 1:06:58
  sponsored by the White Collar Support Group, the world's first
• 1:07:00
  support group devoted to people navigating the White Collar
• 1:07:04
  criminal justice system. And like I said, Len and I are
• 1:07:07
  both part of that White Collar support group.
• 1:07:09
  And I can tell you that there's a bunch of people who help each
• 1:07:12
  other through the criminal justice journey for free, for
• 1:07:15
  free. Whether you're just guarding
• 1:07:17
  your journey or you've made it through to the other side, this
• 1:07:19
  is a great space for you. You can join us on Zoom Monday,
• 1:07:23
  7:00 PM Eastern Time, 4:00 PM Pacific.
• 1:07:25
  Or information before information.
• 1:07:28
  Go to prisoners.org. That's prisoners.org.
• 1:07:31
  Start here. OK, so, Lynn, it all happens.
• 1:07:35
  You've gone through this whole journey.
• 1:07:38
  Now you get to go to prison, and you're voluntarily surrendering.
• 1:07:43
  Tell us. Walk us through that, that whole
• 1:07:47
  mind of the what happened? Well, the first thing I get from
• 1:07:52
  the US Marshals finally tells me to surrender to them.
• 1:07:55
  Well, I've done so much research for it.
• 1:07:57
  I knew better. I was like, Oh no, I'll be held
• 1:07:59
  in counties. I'll be moved around and and my
• 1:08:03
  security level will be higher just because I didn't walk in
• 1:08:06
  that door. And judges don't often know
• 1:08:08
  this. I think she thought she was
• 1:08:10
  maybe doing a favor by just, you know, me not having to pay to go
• 1:08:15
  all the way to Texas because I had asked at at trial or at a
• 1:08:19
  sentencing. She had asked where I wanted to
• 1:08:21
  go and I had done a lot of research.
• 1:08:23
  I just said Texas, you know, because I just thought it's it
• 1:08:26
  was one of the closer ones to women are housed really a lot
• 1:08:30
  further from home. I was 8 hours from my home.
• 1:08:33
  There's the other one closer was only 10 minutes and it it did
• 1:08:38
  you know after research and I felt like Texas would be more to
• 1:08:42
  do. It was a stand alone camp for
• 1:08:43
  one didn't have you know like men's facility attached or any
• 1:08:48
  of the higher like FCI or any higher level securities.
• 1:08:51
  It was just a stand alone camp and it looked like it had like a
• 1:08:54
  lot of things to do and I'm a person that stays busy and I
• 1:08:58
  like to stay busy so I knew time would pass slower if I wasn't
• 1:09:03
  busy so I decided to ask for taxes.
• 1:09:05
  So anyway we we went and filed a motion and she did corridor I
• 1:09:09
  could self surrender. So on the you know of course
• 1:09:13
  leading up to it is all torture to yourself.
• 1:09:16
  You're like you know I was blogging I was telling my story.
• 1:09:20
  I I was you know doing everything I could to prepare
• 1:09:24
  myself. It was.
• 1:09:26
  Something. You did.
• 1:09:27
  Throughout I did, I did. That blog really turned into way
• 1:09:31
  more than I ever thought it would.
• 1:09:32
  But we'll we we'll get to that in a minute.
• 1:09:35
  I guess so. Anyway, I, you know, I was, I
• 1:09:39
  was preparing, but I was very depressed.
• 1:09:41
  I'm gonna go LA. I stayed in bed a lot.
• 1:09:43
  We have. We had two little French
• 1:09:45
  Bulldogs at the time, and one of them, Olivia.
• 1:09:48
  She was very attached to me and it was nothing for me and her to
• 1:09:50
  be in bed most all day. I'm telling you, it was a bad
• 1:09:53
  time. Bad time.
• 1:09:55
  I looked back and looked at all the time I wasted doing that.
• 1:09:59
  And I and I tell people I help now.
• 1:10:01
  Don't Don't be. Don't be me, you know, and I
• 1:10:03
  hope my book, I do say at the beginning of it, it is kind of a
• 1:10:06
  cautionary tale because I don't want people to repeat my same
• 1:10:10
  journey and some of the things like for instance.
• 1:10:12
  One thing about going through one of these journeys is you can
• 1:10:15
  talk about the things and and when things happen and what you
• 1:10:18
  could have done or. I knew I had to report to prison
• 1:10:22
  the next day, so my husband and I flew on a plane to Bryan, TX.
• 1:10:27
  Well, we flew to College Station, where Texas A&M is.
• 1:10:30
  That's where the airport is. We caught an Uber that we had
• 1:10:34
  take us to a restaurant. We stayed there for a few hours
• 1:10:37
  and I couldn't take anymore. I'm like, I'm just ready to do
• 1:10:39
  it. I can't have this held over my
• 1:10:41
  head for another minute. I'm going to go self surrender
• 1:10:44
  two or three hours early. So we call another Uber.
• 1:10:48
  And that was another surreal ride.
• 1:10:51
  I almost put the guy's picture in my book because he let me
• 1:10:53
  take his picture and I told him I was going to put it in the
• 1:10:56
  book because he's asking us, wait, there's a prison here?
• 1:11:00
  I didn't know there was a prison here.
• 1:11:01
  We're like, yeah, there's there's a federal prison here.
• 1:11:04
  We. Had an Uber there.
• 1:11:05
  Oh yeah, we're in an Uber. And then he's like, well, do
• 1:11:08
  y'all work there. No, we don't work there.
• 1:11:11
  And then he's like, well, well, y'all going to visit somebody.
• 1:11:14
  So I finally have to tell him, no, dude, you're about to drop
• 1:11:18
  me off. I'm going to walk into that
• 1:11:20
  prison and self surrender and guess what?
• 1:11:21
  You're going to take my husband back to the airport and he's
• 1:11:24
  going to fly back to Arkansas by himself, OK.
• 1:11:26
  And we had flown because I did not want my husband on the road
• 1:11:30
  8 hours after dropping me off because I knew.
• 1:11:32
  And he told me he had a panic attack and a meltdown at the
• 1:11:35
  Houston airport halfway back home, you know.
• 1:11:38
  So I'm glad we did it that way. So he flew me.
• 1:11:41
  I had a one way ticket. He had a round trip, you know,
• 1:11:44
  and we we pull up to the prison and there's a phone out there.
• 1:11:48
  There's like, you know, the the arm is down.
• 1:11:51
  I see people in khakis working on flowers, and I assume that
• 1:11:54
  there there are other prisoners. But we pull up there in the Uber
• 1:11:58
  and the Uber guy picks up the phone and says I'm dropping
• 1:12:01
  someone off. And you know, of course this
• 1:12:03
  voice comes over the the phone yells at us back up in that
• 1:12:07
  space, You know, don't get out of the car, only the person
• 1:12:11
  coming in, get out. And you know, and I'm like.
• 1:12:15
  Oh, intimidating. So I give my my husband my phone
• 1:12:18
  and I had hadn't bought a purse because I didn't want him to
• 1:12:20
  have to carry a purse back on the airplane.
• 1:12:22
  But I brought like this tote bag that you could just fold up and
• 1:12:26
  stick in anything, you know, just one of those kind you get
• 1:12:28
  at a grocery store or something and at my phone and and I give
• 1:12:32
  it to him quickly. And so our goodbye was like.
• 1:12:37
  You know so. Quick I had him kiss him and and
• 1:12:39
  out the car I went, well then I made the fatal mistake.
• 1:12:43
  I tried to stop and talk to those people.
• 1:12:44
  They're working on flowers. Brian.
• 1:12:46
  Brian has a horticulture. And these people the it's the
• 1:12:50
  the prisoners that work it and they get a certificate, you know
• 1:12:55
  like a master gardener certificate but they keep the
• 1:12:57
  compound looking really pretty. Brian has has a compound
• 1:13:01
  equivalent to maybe a private college compound.
• 1:13:04
  It's it is a nice compound as far as trees and plants, but
• 1:13:08
  that's because there's what the cultures.
• 1:13:11
  Yeah. So I.
• 1:13:12
  All the prisoners are. Doing that, ask them questions
• 1:13:15
  because you know you want to know which you know.
• 1:13:17
  And this voice gets on the loudspeaker from up the hill and
• 1:13:20
  yells at me to get up there. So I go up.
• 1:13:23
  There she goes, where's your ID? Like, I I didn't bring anything.
• 1:13:29
  All I brought was a piece of paper that had my picture on it
• 1:13:31
  from the Marshall's office, telling me to be there that day.
• 1:13:34
  And so she starts quizzing me. What's your maiden name?
• 1:13:38
  What's your date of birth? You know what?
• 1:13:40
  All this stuff, you know, And I'm like thinking in my.
• 1:13:44
  Head rattled and I couldn't remember my Social Security
• 1:13:46
  number. That's how rattled I was, he
• 1:13:50
  said. Are you kidding me?
• 1:13:52
  He said. Are you kidding me?
• 1:13:53
  Are you are you are you messing with me?
• 1:13:55
  And I said I'm sorry. I say give me a second.
• 1:13:58
  And I I finally, but it was like I was just so rattled by
• 1:14:03
  standing in this cage and this person shouting down at me.
• 1:14:06
  Oh, I was. She was inside.
• 1:14:08
  There was a window. I'm standing outside and it's
• 1:14:12
  where you go to visitation, but there's a separate part that's
• 1:14:15
  like the operations office or whatever, where people, you
• 1:14:18
  know, there's always a guard up there.
• 1:14:20
  But at any rate she's yelling at these questions to me and and
• 1:14:25
  I'm thinking in my head and and it's comical now but at the time
• 1:14:29
  I was so disturbed by them like wait do people often self
• 1:14:32
  surrender to smells? Like, wait, you're telling me I
• 1:14:34
  could have paid somebody to come here and answer all these
• 1:14:37
  questions and it's like who knew, you know.
• 1:14:40
  And I'm thinking and then she tells me, orders me to sit down
• 1:14:43
  in this fold down chair like a little, you know, just metal
• 1:14:47
  chair and it had water in it. It had been raining that day and
• 1:14:52
  I'm like so I'm sitting on the edge of it trying to do what she
• 1:14:55
  said and you know not get wet and and so I'm sitting there And
• 1:15:01
  then the lady from R&D across the street comes over with her
• 1:15:05
  prisoner helper. And as she comes over and starts
• 1:15:10
  berating me with the same line of questioning again to me, to
• 1:15:13
  me to prove I'm actually who I say I am coming to prison, the,
• 1:15:17
  the prisoner behind her is going, she's mouthing to me.
• 1:15:23
  It's going to be OK And so at that point, tears.
• 1:15:26
  I'm trying to fight back tears, you know, this time because, you
• 1:15:29
  know, I'm trying to keep from getting wet.
• 1:15:32
  I'm being berated with questions.
• 1:15:34
  And my husband has of, you know, many, many years has just drove
• 1:15:38
  away, you know. And I don't know when I'm seeing
• 1:15:40
  him again and I'm walking into prison, obviously.
• 1:15:44
  So I'm very emotional. I start start fighting back
• 1:15:47
  tears and you know a few drop down but I was trying hard to be
• 1:15:51
  strong. We go across the way and you
• 1:15:56
  know you fill out paperwork saying who your family is and
• 1:15:58
  some of the just you know what glasses you brought have a
• 1:16:01
  wedding band for the the things. But then she took my Bible from
• 1:16:05
  me that I was told I could bring and that's when the floodgates
• 1:16:09
  open. And let me tell you I cried for
• 1:16:12
  hours after that. I mean in my picture on my ID,
• 1:16:15
  it's in my book. I'm so red eyed and just it's
• 1:16:18
  you know, and I I'll be honest, I cried off and off and on for
• 1:16:21
  several days when I first heard my husband's voice.
• 1:16:25
  You know, just. Yeah, 'cause your your emotions
• 1:16:28
  are right on your sleeve. Absolutely.
• 1:16:29
  Well, so within all this going on, you eventually get, you
• 1:16:34
  know, put into population. And I I think one of my biggest
• 1:16:38
  surprises was I I joke about this a lot that I thought, you
• 1:16:42
  know, staying at the gate of Leavenworth.
• 1:16:44
  I thought, well, let's see, I get stabbed and then maybe I get
• 1:16:49
  fight and then maybe I get raped.
• 1:16:52
  And what my biggest surprise was, is how many people wanted
• 1:16:57
  to help me get set up and. I had to walk.
• 1:17:02
  A shame because they give you a bed roll after you go through.
• 1:17:04
  Oh yeah, and you know, you do the dreaded strips.
• 1:17:07
  Everybody looks at you. You get your clothes and they're
• 1:17:10
  not the normal clothes. They're like some kind of
• 1:17:12
  temporary outfit and blue shoes. You go to medical, they stab
• 1:17:18
  your arm for a TB test that you got to come back for.
• 1:17:21
  And at this time I was still real leery of men.
• 1:17:25
  Absolutely. So you know, you get your bed
• 1:17:28
  roll and you're walking through the whole compound with it.
• 1:17:31
  And of course everybody's looking at the New Girl, 'cause
• 1:17:33
  you got the the, the blue temporary shoes on, you've got
• 1:17:36
  the the khaki scrub suit. That's not what you normally
• 1:17:39
  wear, although you do wear khaki men's outfit is that brand.
• 1:17:42
  They don't have the green ones like women wear.
• 1:17:44
  We had, we did have khakis, but it was the button up shirt, the
• 1:17:47
  T-shirt, the pants. And you had your own shoes or
• 1:17:51
  boots. But when you're a newbie, you've
• 1:17:53
  got on the B neck so big on me it looked like pajamas.
• 1:17:58
  I mean I was having to hold the pants up almost and you know,
• 1:18:02
  just had to roll them down at the top, trying to keep them on
• 1:18:05
  walking in these tennis shoes that had holes in them that were
• 1:18:08
  blue, that were all worn out. But they've been washed many
• 1:18:10
  times. Your toes are even hurting in
• 1:18:12
  them. And it was cold.
• 1:18:15
  No jacket, you know, So I'm walking through.
• 1:18:18
  But the one good thing about women's prisons, I don't know if
• 1:18:21
  all do it, but I know some do it.
• 1:18:23
  They have what's called a big sister program.
• 1:18:26
  So when you get there, you're took under the wing of somebody
• 1:18:30
  that's already been there for a minute.
• 1:18:31
  That's a big sister. There's like three or four of
• 1:18:33
  them in a unit, and so they show you how to make your bed.
• 1:18:37
  I had somebody come bring me shower shoes.
• 1:18:39
  Another person brought me a toothbrush.
• 1:18:42
  Or. Absolutely, absolutely.
• 1:18:45
  You don't want your feet on whatever's on them.
• 1:18:48
  OK. So anyway, people do what I call
• 1:18:52
  come to your rescue, and they're very kind.
• 1:18:55
  The very people that and I I wrote about this in my book as
• 1:18:59
  well. Go in there, I thought.
• 1:19:01
  How can I live with these criminals?
• 1:19:03
  These are criminals. What am I going to do?
• 1:19:06
  I've got to live for years with criminals.
• 1:19:09
  But it was these very criminals that came to my aid and made me
• 1:19:14
  feel OK, even though I was crying, even though I wasn't OK,
• 1:19:18
  but they came to my aid. And honestly, some of those
• 1:19:21
  women are still some of my best friends to this day.
• 1:19:24
  I started teaching classes in the unit on self esteem, value
• 1:19:29
  worth. I had my husband sent me in
• 1:19:31
  books that I could read stuff out of other people's stories to
• 1:19:34
  show women awesome, that they were valuable, that they were
• 1:19:40
  important, that the traumas they had been through did not define
• 1:19:44
  them, and that they were worthy of going back out and making a
• 1:19:47
  good life for their self cause. Many had just been beaten.
• 1:19:49
  Beaten down. They've been domestically a
• 1:19:52
  beaten. I had to fill you up Glen, you
• 1:19:54
  know doing something like that inside prison and making people
• 1:19:57
  feel a certain way about their self esteem and and hopefully
• 1:20:01
  trying to look at the positives that they can.
• 1:20:05
  Focus on to to try to enter back in into their world.
• 1:20:09
  One of the best times I had in prison was working in reentry.
• 1:20:12
  In fact, Elizabeth Holmes, I hear, has my job now that I had
• 1:20:15
  there. But.
• 1:20:17
  Well, you've been on TVA few times talking about that,
• 1:20:20
  Elizabeth. Holmes Yeah, I got hit up a lot
• 1:20:22
  when she was going there, but at any rate, I was making resumes,
• 1:20:28
  helping women, teaching them how to dress for success and things.
• 1:20:31
  That was. AI really enjoyed that time.
• 1:20:34
  I I really talk about it in my book, too.
• 1:20:36
  It was a time of healing for me, in a way.
• 1:20:38
  I started letting go of some of the anger I'd held on to, and it
• 1:20:41
  was. It was a good space for me
• 1:20:45
  during my time in prison, however.
• 1:20:49
  How did you, how did you end up in the hole in the shoe in in
• 1:20:53
  there? Oh, I got thrown at the camp.
• 1:20:56
  They had a shoe. Because I know you were in
• 1:20:58
  Oklahoma, but how did it happen to you in in the camp?
• 1:21:02
  Well, OK, so in Brian, you know, I like I said, my blog ended up
• 1:21:07
  turning into more. I left reentry and went to
• 1:21:11
  cosmetology class. I was one of the 25 women picked
• 1:21:15
  to go to cosmetology. And truthfully, I'll be honest,
• 1:21:18
  the the head of education wanted me out of education because they
• 1:21:20
  were doing so much corrupt things and I was too busy
• 1:21:22
  blogging about all the corruption there.
• 1:21:24
  And so I had been written a couple of false shots and beat
• 1:21:27
  em for writing blogs, and I went to cosmetology and shortly into
• 1:21:35
  cosmetology. When you're saying you're
• 1:21:37
  writing blogs, you weren't writing the blogs inside the
• 1:21:40
  prison for the your blogs were going outside into the world.
• 1:21:43
  Oh, they were being posted on my website, My blog exactly.
• 1:21:46
  And I was mailing them through core links to my friend Kathy
• 1:21:50
  who was posting them for me onto my blog.
• 1:21:55
  Now mind you, my blog started out away with me to be
• 1:21:58
  therapeutic. Talk about my case.
• 1:22:00
  Then I got to prison and I started talking about things
• 1:22:03
  like the food. Became an.
• 1:22:05
  Advocate. Just the atmosphere thing.
• 1:22:07
  Nothing to do with guards, nothing to do with, you know,
• 1:22:09
  just my journey. But at some point that turned
• 1:22:15
  and I began to be an advocate inside those walls and the
• 1:22:19
  turning point for me. I turned a blind eye to a lot of
• 1:22:23
  stuff along the way, but I I quit reentry to go to
• 1:22:27
  Cosmetology. I I was, you know, I interviewed
• 1:22:30
  and got picked and I got in class because I'm like I told
• 1:22:34
  you, I like to be busy. I've always had an interest in
• 1:22:37
  that, but I never went because I had other degrees.
• 1:22:39
  And you know, I never was going to practice it.
• 1:22:42
  But it was nice to have something to learn while there.
• 1:22:44
  So I got in Cosmetology and probably a month into that class
• 1:22:49
  I was faced with a huge dilemma, kind of sort of like the dilemma
• 1:22:53
  I was faced with with Doctor Swan in the QuickBooks.
• 1:22:57
  OK, so I was asked to to sign fraudulent paperwork that would
• 1:23:03
  have said I got hours that I have not got in for cosmetology
• 1:23:07
  class. And I told the lady, our
• 1:23:09
  teacher, our instructor, I said Miss Kersey, I can't do that.
• 1:23:17
  Do you not know what I'm here for?
• 1:23:19
  I'm already serving time for fraud that I didn't commit.
• 1:23:22
  I can't in good confidence sign this paperwork because #1, the
• 1:23:28
  federal prison is getting a grant for this program.
• 1:23:31
  That's why it's free to me, #2 you're uploading these hours to
• 1:23:35
  the state of Texas, to the Revenue or the Department of
• 1:23:40
  Labor and Revenue that in Texas. And I fear that's a state fraud
• 1:23:46
  and I'm not going to be part of that.
• 1:23:48
  I I can't in good conscience. What?
• 1:23:50
  Was her response. She told me, well, that's how
• 1:23:54
  this class works and you're going to have to do that.
• 1:23:57
  And I was like, so then I go back to the unit and we had
• 1:24:03
  gotten something when we started cosmetology class from the
• 1:24:06
  Department of Labor, Texas. And so I go and I read the whole
• 1:24:09
  thing again and I'm like, Nope, right here it says only hours
• 1:24:14
  that you're in class are supposed to be reported.
• 1:24:16
  So I knew I was right because I wanted to make sure I was even
• 1:24:19
  right. I thought, well, maybe in prison
• 1:24:20
  it's a little different or something.
• 1:24:22
  There you go, Prison. Yeah, I mean everything's
• 1:24:23
  different in prison. Why not that?
• 1:24:25
  So I go and find the head of education on the compound the
• 1:24:29
  next day. And I said, Miss Valentine, I
• 1:24:32
  need to talk to you about something here.
• 1:24:35
  I thought maybe she didn't know. I said, here's what I'm being
• 1:24:38
  asked to do, and I think this is fraud, she said.
• 1:24:44
  Well, I don't think you're cut out for these classes.
• 1:24:47
  I'm like, what? So less than a week later, maybe
• 1:24:52
  two days, I get called, she comes to my unit, I get called.
• 1:24:59
  Hey, Miss Valentine's here looking for you.
• 1:25:01
  She comes up to my room, I'm at my locker, and she tells me
• 1:25:04
  she's removed me from cosmetology because medical says
• 1:25:07
  that My torn rotator cuff. Mind you, this is now 2018.
• 1:25:11
  No, 2000. Yeah, 18.
• 1:25:15
  And I've had a torn rotator cuff since 2009.
• 1:25:17
  OK, so nine years into this rotator cuff, she all of a
• 1:25:21
  sudden says medical, says I'm not to raise my arm over my over
• 1:25:26
  my shoulder and do Cosmo. I'm like, yeah, how convenient.
• 1:25:31
  Y'all got together and tried to cook this little deal up and she
• 1:25:34
  tells me she's removed me. So the next day I go over to
• 1:25:38
  education after I thought about it that night and I told her,
• 1:25:43
  Miss Valentine, I'm going to give you a chance to put me back
• 1:25:45
  in my classes. But I'm going to tell you right
• 1:25:46
  now, if you do not, I will write this up using the administrative
• 1:25:52
  remedy, which is the grievance policy, you know, for four
• 1:25:55
  people in prison. And I will fight it all the way
• 1:25:58
  to DC and I'm going to expose the fraud here in Cosmo and I'm
• 1:26:03
  going to write it up and I will not back down.
• 1:26:07
  She goes do what you got to do because the thought is that no
• 1:26:14
  prisoner is going to do that because nobody wants that kind
• 1:26:18
  of retaliation. And and I went to the warden on
• 1:26:22
  what's called mainline which is you know it the noon Neil.
• 1:26:26
  And I told her you I I had been emailing her and she hadn't
• 1:26:30
  answered. And I said you need to put me
• 1:26:32
  back in my class before I go any further with this.
• 1:26:34
  Because not only am I going to write up the fraud going on in
• 1:26:39
  there but I've been turning a blind eye to a whole lot of
• 1:26:43
  things that y'all commit fraud. And So what I'm going to do is
• 1:26:49
  I'm going to start writing three things a day that y'all do wrong
• 1:26:52
  at this prison, and I'm going to make y'all fix every everything
• 1:26:55
  you do wrong here if you don't put me back in the class because
• 1:26:59
  I don't have anything else to do.
• 1:27:00
  And so I'm going to make good of my time.
• 1:27:02
  I'll be in the law library, I'm going to be learning policy, and
• 1:27:06
  it's not going to turn out well because I will write everything
• 1:27:10
  up and I'm serious. And she kind of dismissed me at
• 1:27:14
  first. But after a while, I kind of
• 1:27:17
  became their source for the bad doings on the compound, like
• 1:27:21
  with pre Violations, which is the Prison Rape Elimination Act.
• 1:27:25
  We're our chaplain and even our captain was having sex with
• 1:27:29
  inmates. And I kind of got respect from
• 1:27:32
  people who were actual staff there that did the right thing.
• 1:27:37
  They would come to me in private and go spejo.
• 1:27:41
  I didn't tell you this, but I am laughing.
• 1:27:44
  Oh my gosh, you keep doing what you're doing.
• 1:27:46
  Like, Oh my gosh, I beat 3 false shots.
• 1:27:48
  They wrote trying to make me quit.
• 1:27:50
  They threw me in there. Brian shoe multiple times, told
• 1:27:54
  me they were gonna ship me off the compound one time they even
• 1:27:57
  took me to medical, had them examine me to say and they were
• 1:28:00
  shipping me. Really trying to, you know, make
• 1:28:02
  me believe it, right. So they, you know, would put me
• 1:28:06
  in that shoe. I think they could hold you
• 1:28:07
  there like 3 hours or then they really take you to the real.
• 1:28:10
  Or when they they put you in the shoe because they were
• 1:28:14
  retaliating against. You.
• 1:28:16
  Yes, they were bullying. Me putting out information, yes.
• 1:28:18
  So. Let's let's go, let's go into
• 1:28:22
  because you you were not yet in COVID and that didn't happen.
• 1:28:29
  Because you had this whole other blog thing that happens when you
• 1:28:33
  get out, but when you start getting close to the door
• 1:28:38
  because you, you're thinking you're going to get a furlough
• 1:28:42
  to to go to another prison. Well, I.
• 1:28:46
  Don't get. Tired of the retaliation at
• 1:28:48
  Bryan and I told. You right, I understand.
• 1:28:49
  No, I understand. But how much time did you have
• 1:28:52
  left when you wanted to get closer to home?
• 1:28:55
  Well, I'd already been in prison for two months or two years, and
• 1:29:00
  I only had a few. I I was going that year to home
• 1:29:04
  confinement, probably in like maybe eight months, nine months,
• 1:29:08
  and I'd already had my home confinement stuff signed and
• 1:29:10
  everything. You know my halfway house home
• 1:29:12
  confinement. You're only months, You're only
• 1:29:14
  months away. They they tell you that they're
• 1:29:18
  going to grant you a transfer, but when do you find out that
• 1:29:23
  this transfer is further away from where you had asked?
• 1:29:28
  So they had agreed that I could furlough.
• 1:29:32
  So they think they're going to give you a little diesel therapy
• 1:29:35
  I got when you when you get the transfer.
• 1:29:39
  I just called on the loudspeaker.
• 1:29:41
  Do you have any idea? Because they usually don't tell
• 1:29:44
  you anything or what happened. They called me on the
• 1:29:46
  loudspeaker. I went over to the officer
• 1:29:49
  station, he said. Pack your bags.
• 1:29:52
  You're being transferred. Well, I had told them I had got
• 1:29:55
  them to agree. I could take a furlough
• 1:29:57
  transfer. It was 50 miles up the road.
• 1:29:59
  I wanted to go to Carswell. My friend Retta had left Brian
• 1:30:02
  and went to Carswell. And she wrote my husband a
• 1:30:04
  letter and said tell Lynn to come up here.
• 1:30:06
  It's it's so laid back. She needs some peace.
• 1:30:08
  Tell her to come up here. So I put in to go there and I
• 1:30:12
  made sure I could take a furlough.
• 1:30:14
  I didn't want to, you know, get shipped the other way, you know,
• 1:30:16
  because you might end up through counties and all kinds of
• 1:30:19
  things. So anyway, they agreed to it.
• 1:30:22
  However, the warden who had now become kind of I'd become
• 1:30:28
  someone that she trusted and knew I'd been telling the truth
• 1:30:30
  about a lot of stuff they she because I'd gotten back in
• 1:30:33
  Cosmo, by the way. I fought them and got back in
• 1:30:36
  the classes. But by now I'd become kind of
• 1:30:39
  trusted by some staff. And so she was going to let me
• 1:30:43
  go to Carswell, and she had actually agreed it would be that
• 1:30:46
  way. But she went on leave.
• 1:30:48
  And the captain, who was also having sex with inmates, and I
• 1:30:51
  was getting close on his tail about it, making reports.
• 1:30:54
  And he knew he was next, probably because I hadn't found
• 1:30:56
  out he was yet. I knew about the chaplain and
• 1:30:58
  others. But the last time I was in the
• 1:31:01
  shoe at Brian, he called me into his office and he was like, you
• 1:31:04
  need to stop this. You know, he was trying to.
• 1:31:06
  They were trying to intimidate me.
• 1:31:08
  There was a psychologist in there trying to intimidate me,
• 1:31:11
  trying to get me to none report, you know all this stuff.
• 1:31:14
  And I I held firm. I said I don't care.
• 1:31:17
  I'm you can say what you want. I'm still going to report this.
• 1:31:20
  And so he was in charge, and he. He's the one that sent you,
• 1:31:25
  Austin to Aliceville. Yes.
• 1:31:27
  So he made it to where I was going to Aliceville.
• 1:31:31
  So I had to pack my stuff up, get on a bus.
• 1:31:35
  They bus you to Houston. You catch Marshall Air Flight
• 1:31:37
  there, you're shackled, handcuffed, belly chained.
• 1:31:41
  It's freezing cold winter. You don't have a jacket.
• 1:31:43
  Everybody else is bundled up that like the Marshalls, you
• 1:31:46
  know, the VOP employees. And you're just like, who
• 1:31:49
  shaking on the tarmac and you're out there standing for, you
• 1:31:52
  know, probably 45 minutes before you get on the plane because the
• 1:31:56
  men are in the back of the plane, the women are in the
• 1:31:58
  front. So they have to make sure they
• 1:32:00
  orchestrate all backs. They don't want women walking by
• 1:32:02
  men, you know, to get on the plane because you know, there's
• 1:32:06
  some bad people on those planes. It's all levels of security.
• 1:32:09
  You know, there's murder. There's people that are serving
• 1:32:11
  life sometimes that are being moved around for some reason or
• 1:32:14
  another. And so they keep you, even
• 1:32:16
  though you may be sitting with the next to a murderer, that's a
• 1:32:19
  woman you're not going to be by. The men that have you know have
• 1:32:23
  done things and I'm sure for not only security reasons for
• 1:32:27
  probably sexual you know misconduct reasons and things
• 1:32:30
  but at any rate. So you get on the plane and
• 1:32:34
  you're shackled handcuffed and all that and you're flying.
• 1:32:36
  You know I'm I'm flying to Oklahoma.
• 1:32:39
  You fly in to what I I call the basement of the prison.
• 1:32:43
  You know, like the bowels of the prison just open up and take the
• 1:32:46
  the plane in and that's when the marshals get on the the the
• 1:32:52
  speaker and they say, you know, thanks for flying con air today,
• 1:32:56
  please come back soon. And you're like thinking so we
• 1:33:01
  get off and and you're up. Once you get into the transfer
• 1:33:05
  center, they take off the shackles, chains, belly chains,
• 1:33:07
  all that stuff. And they threw all the women in
• 1:33:09
  a holding cell. That was the nastiest thing I've
• 1:33:12
  ever seen, probably besides the county jail.
• 1:33:15
  So nasty. You didn't want to touch
• 1:33:17
  anything. It had a toilet in the middle.
• 1:33:19
  I mean open in view, no toilet paper, nothing to wash your
• 1:33:23
  hands with, you know, water but no soap, no nothing.
• 1:33:25
  And they just throw 13 women. They just keep getting off Con
• 1:33:29
  Air flights and getting in there with us and we're in that
• 1:33:33
  holding facility till like almost 2:00 in the morning
• 1:33:35
  because they check in 350 men ahead of us because men will
• 1:33:38
  riot. And well, you don't lock them up
• 1:33:40
  like that. You're you're doing something
• 1:33:42
  for them. They brought us food.
• 1:33:44
  We had no way to wash our hands. We had nothing to drink with.
• 1:33:46
  It brought us nothing to drink with baloney sandwiches.
• 1:33:50
  COVID hit and March the 13th 2020 hit and the entire BOP
• 1:33:55
  nationwide shut down and I was locked in a cell by myself.
• 1:34:00
  Now this was not the shoe I heard when you opened, when you
• 1:34:05
  opened. It was a cell.
• 1:34:07
  I did end up my last 14 days in the men's Max security shoe, but
• 1:34:12
  during my I I was in isolation because we weren't really
• 1:34:16
  getting out. And I was in the sale by myself
• 1:34:19
  for roughly 100 days. And during that 100 days, when I
• 1:34:26
  came home, my skin hung on my body.
• 1:34:29
  You don't get any movement. You're locked in.
• 1:34:31
  You have no I I had what was called a fluorescent pallor,
• 1:34:36
  which you're You look Gray. You look like a dead person.
• 1:34:39
  Like when I looked in the mirror, when my husband looked
• 1:34:41
  at me. I.
• 1:34:42
  Mean. Why right you're?
• 1:34:44
  I had a I had a friend of mine that was in for 16 months,
• 1:34:48
  county jail, never been outside and he looked.
• 1:34:50
  Right. And it's called.
• 1:34:51
  I looked it up when I got home. It's called fluorescent pallor.
• 1:34:54
  It has a name. And so I had no natural light
• 1:34:58
  for the whole 3 months I was in Oklahoma because.
• 1:35:01
  What was going through your mind?
• 1:35:05
  You know and. Then with and with COVID, did
• 1:35:07
  you think you were getting out or did you think you're getting
• 1:35:09
  released? Well, the CARES act wasn't to be
• 1:35:11
  at first when we first were locked down.
• 1:35:12
  I know, so so I mean what was the common like I've with COVID
• 1:35:17
  and all this stuff going on. What was what were people
• 1:35:19
  thinking? We didn't get masks until a
• 1:35:21
  couple of months in it, You know, like they we saw some
• 1:35:24
  guards wearing some masks. And I will say this, you know,
• 1:35:27
  another thing I laughed about in my book, I did see a couple of
• 1:35:30
  people that made a mask out of a sports bra.
• 1:35:32
  I was like, oh, that's ingenious.
• 1:35:33
  But I'm not sure that's really going to help you because it's
• 1:35:36
  that thing, protective. But I mean, you know, but you
• 1:35:38
  got to give people credit in prison.
• 1:35:40
  They make something out of nothing.
• 1:35:42
  I mean, I made an ice chest so I could get some ice slid under
• 1:35:46
  the door from people that were allowed out in the unit.
• 1:35:50
  I made an ice chest out of the sticky parts of women's hygiene
• 1:35:56
  pads, the Styrofoam containers. Our meals were brought in and a
• 1:36:01
  trash bag and I stuck it together, made a square and put,
• 1:36:05
  you know, had one of them was a lid and made-up.
• 1:36:07
  I made an ice chest for my room while I was in Oklahoma.
• 1:36:10
  So you do. You do things to survive and you
• 1:36:12
  figure it out, it's. Amazing what you can adapt to
• 1:36:16
  because you would never have thought that you'd be able to go
• 1:36:18
  to the Oklahoma transfer center, you'd be put in a on a cell by
• 1:36:22
  yourself and then eventually you'd be on the men's wing.
• 1:36:26
  When the. Yeah.
• 1:36:28
  When did you start thinking? Did you have any communication
• 1:36:32
  with anybody about what was going to happen then?
• 1:36:35
  Well, because I was a member of the Fam's e-mail.
• 1:36:41
  Brandon sample Oh, there's another guy I'm trying to think
• 1:36:46
  of his name. But there was like some some,
• 1:36:49
  some actual people that melts stuff into prisons you could
• 1:36:52
  sign up for. And I'd always been on that
• 1:36:55
  lease. Illegal was another one.
• 1:36:56
  And I saw that the CARES Act had been passed.
• 1:36:59
  And I'm like, I qualify for that.
• 1:37:02
  I'm almost home anyway. Like, you know, I was like, I
• 1:37:04
  got out 5 1/2 months early on it.
• 1:37:06
  But I, you know, I was almost to the end of my sentence.
• 1:37:09
  I'd already served the majority of it.
• 1:37:11
  And so I was shot free. I was low security.
• 1:37:15
  In fact, when I got to Oklahoma, the lady couldn't even believe I
• 1:37:18
  was there. She's like, why are you here?
• 1:37:20
  Wait, you rode Conair? I've never seen someone with two
• 1:37:24
  security points come to this facility like she was like,
• 1:37:27
  who'd you? She.
• 1:37:28
  This is her exact words. Who did you off?
• 1:37:30
  You know, like the B word, I'm not going to say it on your
• 1:37:33
  family show, but you know, she asked me who I ticked off,
• 1:37:36
  basically. And so, you know, I I was the
• 1:37:40
  policy girl, remember? So during the time we're locked
• 1:37:44
  down, the guards are leaving us and going to the men's facility
• 1:37:49
  and we have what's called panic buttons in those, those cells.
• 1:37:53
  And we had a lot of women that were real sick.
• 1:37:55
  We had women that repeatedly were having seizures.
• 1:37:58
  We had a pregnant woman that her placenta was detaching, and we
• 1:38:03
  had women that were old with heart conditions that were
• 1:38:06
  walking on walkers. So we had people that when that
• 1:38:09
  button would be pushed, it could have been a life and death
• 1:38:13
  situation. OK, sure.
• 1:38:15
  So that was my first thing I got a BP8 and wrote them up for.
• 1:38:19
  So I rode up the guard for leaving our unit for hours at a
• 1:38:23
  time, and I documented it. I had a clock outside my room I
• 1:38:28
  could see, and I documented how long he would go and leave and
• 1:38:32
  how long the button would be pushed.
• 1:38:33
  I didn't know how long he was gone, but I knew how long he
• 1:38:36
  wasn't there answering that button because he wasn't in the
• 1:38:38
  unit. You could hear him coming back
• 1:38:40
  in too, and then he'd go answer the button.
• 1:38:42
  But at one point I wrote him up. It was 56 minutes, so someone
• 1:38:48
  could have died in 56 minutes, mind you.
• 1:38:52
  So I wrote them up and Sia came to see me, which is the SIS is
• 1:38:59
  for investigation of prisoners investigate staff.
• 1:39:04
  So he they came and talked to me and had me sign an affidavit
• 1:39:08
  about it. I actually signed an affidavit
• 1:39:11
  about this guy leaving and he was under investigation and he
• 1:39:14
  would come give me some dirty looks, but I didn't care.
• 1:39:16
  But this time I'd already had so much retaliation.
• 1:39:19
  There was nothing they could do to me, you know, at Oklahoma to
• 1:39:22
  retaliate. So anyway, that was my first
• 1:39:25
  write up there. Then the second write up I did.
• 1:39:29
  We went weeks with no blankets, no sheets, no change of clothes.
• 1:39:33
  We were in the same outfit for weeks.
• 1:39:35
  I mean unhygienic things. I wrote them up, of course, that
• 1:39:38
  day. Here comes all the stuff I wrote
• 1:39:40
  them up for and we got that. And during this time, I was also
• 1:39:44
  called out by SIA. So people are seeing me
• 1:39:46
  constantly go out to talk to SIA because I had wallet, Brian
• 1:39:51
  reported to Senator Bozeman's office.
• 1:39:53
  And anybody else that would listen and.
• 1:39:55
  When did you find out if you were leaving Oklahoma?
• 1:39:58
  Well, they were letting men out on the cares, and I kept asking
• 1:40:03
  the staff that would come by occasionally, why are you not
• 1:40:07
  letting women out? We're all camp.
• 1:40:09
  Most of us are camp status. Most of us are in transfer to
• 1:40:12
  somewhere. Why are you not letting women
• 1:40:14
  out? And they're like, we just don't
• 1:40:15
  have the manpower to do that. Women are going to have to go to
• 1:40:17
  the next facility. I'm like, no, that's not what
• 1:40:21
  the law says. So, but Lynn, I don't even know
• 1:40:23
  like what does that mean because you're you're getting out on the
• 1:40:26
  CARES Act in Oklahoma. How did, how do you use your
• 1:40:30
  family, get notified, how do you leave?
• 1:40:32
  Like how are you released? How does that happen?
• 1:40:34
  There. So the the first time my husband
• 1:40:36
  came to pick me up the night before, the Marshall showed up
• 1:40:42
  and took me to the shoe. And they took me to the shoe and
• 1:40:46
  said I hadn't been quarantined correctly.
• 1:40:47
  Mind you had already been in a cell for 100 days by myself.
• 1:40:50
  OK, really? What more is there to
• 1:40:51
  quarantine? And I was.
• 1:40:54
  So my husband shows up and they had to tell him that they
• 1:40:56
  weren't letting me leave. So they told him they'd have to
• 1:40:59
  give him me another date and I'd have to let him know.
• 1:41:01
  So for two days I couldn't even call him because I'm in the shoe
• 1:41:04
  and they only bring a phone around every so many days.
• 1:41:07
  And it's a phone on this stand that rolls and they like hand
• 1:41:12
  you the receiver through the hole in the door.
• 1:41:14
  When I finally got my husband, two days after he had come and
• 1:41:19
  he told me what they said to him, you know that they had not
• 1:41:22
  quarantined us and all that. And so I got another date and
• 1:41:27
  I'll let him know be here On this date.
• 1:41:29
  And I asked and asked, I said, Are you sure this is the date I
• 1:41:32
  cannot have my husband drive 5 hours again be turned away.
• 1:41:37
  This is traumatizing to people. And they told me yes, that day
• 1:41:42
  came. Believe it or not, Brent, they
• 1:41:43
  turned my husband away again because I knew it was only 13
• 1:41:47
  days of quarantine. But I asked and asked Are you
• 1:41:50
  sure this is the date? This this is the date You're
• 1:41:54
  sure? May 27th?
• 1:41:55
  Yes. So when they didn't let him pick
• 1:41:59
  me up that time, I had already worked hard in Oklahoma to
• 1:42:02
  resolve the anger. I didn't want to go home, the
• 1:42:04
  angry person. I left and went to prison and
• 1:42:06
  that carried me through prison. How did you get how?
• 1:42:11
  How did you react to this? They told you that it was the
• 1:42:14
  date. What Anger came back over me?
• 1:42:17
  And I described in my book, I could literally feel it start at
• 1:42:20
  the top of my head hot and wash my entire body.
• 1:42:23
  And I started tearing up that cell.
• 1:42:27
  I was throwing everything off the bunk.
• 1:42:29
  I was throwing things. I was hollering and screaming.
• 1:42:32
  I'm about to tear this place up. I told him I'd be to follow a
• 1:42:36
  lawsuit. I've been in a shoe with men.
• 1:42:39
  I I know my rights. I know policy.
• 1:42:41
  Like I started going ballistic. You went, you threw a set, went
• 1:42:46
  angry. What happened?
• 1:42:48
  Did you get out the next day? The doctor came back.
• 1:42:51
  She goes, Missus Faho, I need you to calm down.
• 1:42:55
  And I need you to give me your husband's cell phone number.
• 1:42:59
  I want you to know I'm working. She was very calm.
• 1:43:03
  She said I'm working to get you out of here today.
• 1:43:07
  I'm aware of what's going on. I promise you.
• 1:43:10
  I'm advocating for you. This is not right and I'm doing
• 1:43:14
  everything I can, but I need you to remain calm.
• 1:43:18
  I gave her Poncho's cell phone number.
• 1:43:20
  I got my Bible out. I sit back down on that bunk.
• 1:43:23
  I picked everything up, put it back, sit back down.
• 1:43:26
  And I just started praying. God, I don't know what's about
• 1:43:29
  to happen, but please give me the peace I had before.
• 1:43:32
  I lost it again. And I just started praying and
• 1:43:36
  and just peace just washed over me.
• 1:43:38
  And not long after that, the person I knew to be the CMC, he
• 1:43:43
  came to my door and he told me gather your stuff.
• 1:43:47
  He didn't handcuff me. He didn't do anything.
• 1:43:49
  We got in an elevator. I knew I was going home.
• 1:43:52
  It was so surreal. And we went down to the bowels
• 1:43:55
  of the Oklahoma transfer center where I was given men's clothing
• 1:44:01
  and some knock off converse and then I was locked in the cells.
• 1:44:05
  So I about lost it again. But I have, I just kept praying.
• 1:44:07
  I just kept praying because they they had to give me a furlough
• 1:44:10
  that day. She got me a furlough that day.
• 1:44:13
  I went home on the furlough and then I had to report to the
• 1:44:15
  halfway house the next day to get orientation to get a ankle
• 1:44:19
  monitor put on and I was out on the cares that.
• 1:44:22
  What it feel like? Brent, When I got in that
• 1:44:26
  vehicle, much like when I went on my furlough, I got car sick.
• 1:44:32
  I was almost going to throw up. Of course he brought me my phone
• 1:44:36
  and I was on the phone almost the whole 5 hour drive from all
• 1:44:38
  the people wanting to talk to me.
• 1:44:40
  I many people had left Brian and gotten out of prison.
• 1:44:43
  They they were calling my husband, checking on me and
• 1:44:45
  wanting to talk to me. But we went to Starbucks.
• 1:44:48
  Just like when I took my furlough, I couldn't order.
• 1:44:50
  I didn't even know what I wanted.
• 1:44:51
  And I'm a Starbucks addict by the way.
• 1:44:53
  I go daily. People that know me know I'm a
• 1:44:55
  Starbucks girl, OK? And I couldn't, I couldn't order
• 1:45:01
  something. I just said order it.
• 1:45:02
  I don't care. Just get me something.
• 1:45:05
  I looked in the mirror and I'm like, holy crap what I look
• 1:45:11
  like. Luckily we had took a razor
• 1:45:13
  blade and cut the top off of the the white socks they give you
• 1:45:18
  the big tall white athletic socks.
• 1:45:20
  They give You Tube socks. And so I had a ponytail holder.
• 1:45:24
  I could put my hair up. I I looked at myself in the
• 1:45:27
  mirror and I went, what the crap?
• 1:45:29
  I just put my hair back up and went, Jesus, everybody's seen me
• 1:45:32
  today thinks what is going on. I immediately climbed in the
• 1:45:35
  back seat and changed clothes. He brought me the clothes I self
• 1:45:39
  surrendered to prison, the same clothes he had brought me when I
• 1:45:42
  had my furlough. Because when you're not at your
• 1:45:45
  home, you don't even know anything to tell your husband to
• 1:45:47
  bring you to wear. That's true, you know, like.
• 1:45:49
  And I knew that I had had it put in a box of mail back to him.
• 1:45:52
  When I self surrendered, he brought it to the furlough I'd
• 1:45:55
  worn it. Then he took it back home.
• 1:45:57
  I said, I don't know what you do with those clothes.
• 1:46:00
  He goes, they're in there. And the suit, you know, I never
• 1:46:02
  unpacked that suitcase I brought for you.
• 1:46:04
  I said, we'll go in there and wash them, bring those, you
• 1:46:06
  know. So he brought them.
• 1:46:07
  I climbed in the back seat. But as soon as he got out the
• 1:46:10
  gate, I said stop. And of course, I I hugged him,
• 1:46:13
  kissed him, touched his hair. But as we're driving home, every
• 1:46:16
  now and then I would just reach over there and touch his arm.
• 1:46:19
  I would touch his hair. It's like I'm in a vehicle.
• 1:46:22
  Our vehicle with my husband headed to our home.
• 1:46:26
  It was surreal. I mean, it was.
• 1:46:28
  I mean, I'd had that short furlough that day with him, but
• 1:46:31
  otherwise I had. I had had visits with him on
• 1:46:34
  hard plastic chairs, eating bad junk food.
• 1:46:36
  Oh yeah, they're different. Where they're yelling at you,
• 1:46:39
  you know, and and and all kinds of other people trying to visit
• 1:46:42
  with their family. But I'm one of the lucky.
• 1:46:46
  I want to get into because there's a lot of craziness that
• 1:46:49
  happened. You got home and and you you
• 1:46:53
  still you're you're in the halfway house home confinement
• 1:46:56
  deal and you're blogging, you're on podcast, your TV, all these
• 1:46:59
  things going on. And at a radio show of my own.
• 1:47:03
  On a radio show of your own and what happens?
• 1:47:10
  I put out a blog post around Christmas called The Grinch
• 1:47:14
  resides at FPC Brian. It was also.
• 1:47:18
  Retweeted by. Paper Carmen.
• 1:47:21
  Wore. This new black, and it went
• 1:47:23
  viral and I was advocating for the women that was at Bryan, I'd
• 1:47:27
  been advocating. For they got down everything,
• 1:47:29
  they just were. No.
• 1:47:31
  No. No, they couldn't have contact
• 1:47:34
  with their children on Christmas.
• 1:47:35
  They've already done them this way on Thanksgiving and they
• 1:47:37
  were doing it again. And the reason was they were mad
• 1:47:40
  at the the women at Bryan because they had COVID.
• 1:47:43
  Now, where do you think COVID came from?
• 1:47:45
  They had to come from the guards because they can't go anywhere.
• 1:47:47
  Exactly. And they hadn't had any visits,
• 1:47:49
  so they were mistreating them like they always do women.
• 1:47:52
  And so my whole article, I put it, I put it out and put it,
• 1:47:57
  tweeted it, put it on my blog. And at the time, I was writing
• 1:48:00
  for the Midnight report, and I put it out on it too.
• 1:48:03
  And I was making it very public. And it got, like you said,
• 1:48:06
  retweeted by Piper Kerman. And it of course ticked them off
• 1:48:12
  and they took action to retaliate.
• 1:48:14
  And so I got a call shortly after Christmas from the halfway
• 1:48:18
  house. Come to find out the SIS lady at
• 1:48:22
  Bryan, Miss Mitchell had contacted my future PO.
• 1:48:26
  She'd made it her her business to find out who who wasn't even
• 1:48:29
  my PO. Yet I was still on cares.
• 1:48:30
  That and she called her and my future PO had called the halfway
• 1:48:35
  house, but she had told them, like, I I don't see things she's
• 1:48:39
  done wrong. Like there's no rule that
• 1:48:41
  prevents her from what? You know, there's nothing.
• 1:48:43
  She's not done anything. And you know, I was on core
• 1:48:47
  lengths, talking to people I left behind, using my real name,
• 1:48:50
  my real e-mail address, nothing hidden.
• 1:48:52
  Nothing. You know, nothing.
• 1:48:54
  I thought I was doing nothing wrong.
• 1:48:55
  Absolutely. And so I got a call from my case
• 1:48:58
  manager. I'd gotten a new case manager.
• 1:49:00
  My old one had gone on maternity leave.
• 1:49:03
  She'd only briefly had me, but she knew my track record there.
• 1:49:06
  I'd I'd never not. They call me.
• 1:49:08
  I mean, I did everything I was supposed to.
• 1:49:09
  I'd never left my home and I wasn't supposed to, You know,
• 1:49:12
  whatever they told me to do, I'd always done and had been, you
• 1:49:16
  know, cordial to those people, Never had an issue.
• 1:49:18
  And I'd been on it for eight months, by the way.
• 1:49:20
  By now I'd been home eight months.
• 1:49:22
  And so she told me that there'd been a report that and she
• 1:49:27
  started asking me these things like, do you have a blog?
• 1:49:33
  I'm like, yes, I do. But I got written up for that in
• 1:49:36
  prison and I fought it. And region Legal agrees with me
• 1:49:38
  that I can block. So I'm letting you know that
• 1:49:40
  right up front that I've already been down this road.
• 1:49:42
  So she says, are you talking to inmates that are still in
• 1:49:48
  prison? I said absolutely.
• 1:49:50
  I said I'm using core links. And I also mailed in 35
• 1:49:53
  Christmas cards to brine, to women and to.
• 1:49:56
  And then I mailed some to other prisons that we got addresses of
• 1:49:59
  people. We had a Christmas card list.
• 1:50:00
  I was very honest. She said you can't do that.
• 1:50:05
  I said what policy is that? Where's the policy?
• 1:50:08
  She even told me I couldn't blog.
• 1:50:09
  I said where's that policy at? Show me the policy that says I
• 1:50:13
  can't do these things. She was well I just don't think
• 1:50:15
  you can. I said.
• 1:50:17
  But what policy prevents that? I said your your I knew their
• 1:50:22
  manual backwards and forwards. I quoted her her own manual.
• 1:50:25
  It said you may not contact someone that's in the halfway
• 1:50:28
  house with you or another inmate using your cell phone.
• 1:50:33
  I was using my computer to get straight on the VO P's e-mail
• 1:50:38
  system, core links. I was, and it said to text.
• 1:50:41
  By the way, I was not texting anybody.
• 1:50:43
  I was not talking to them on my phone.
• 1:50:45
  I was using their monitored e-mail system where they could
• 1:50:50
  read everything that was being said.
• 1:50:52
  And I quoted her policy. I said your policy says I cannot
• 1:50:56
  use my cell phone to communicate with anybody that's at the
• 1:50:58
  halfway house or that's still in prison to text them.
• 1:51:03
  I've not texted anybody. So what policy prevents me from
• 1:51:09
  having contact with the people I just served time with?
• 1:51:12
  And I'm still considered BOP property.
• 1:51:14
  I'm still, I'm still in the BOP. I'm just serving my time a
• 1:51:17
  different way. What policy?
• 1:51:19
  And she couldn't tell me one. So then I said, well, she said,
• 1:51:23
  but you can't talk to them anymore.
• 1:51:25
  I said, well, what about my radio show?
• 1:51:28
  She's like, what radio show? I said the one I do every
• 1:51:31
  Friday, every other Friday or every Friday on, you know, from
• 1:51:34
  my house on. And I have other prisoners,
• 1:51:37
  people that just got out of prison, come on it.
• 1:51:39
  And people call in from prison. She's like, oh, I don't think
• 1:51:42
  you can do that. And I said, well, that's not
• 1:51:45
  what policy says. And I quoted her the exact
• 1:51:47
  policy because I'm again, I'm the policy girl and I make sure
• 1:51:51
  if I'm going to do something, I'm not violating anything.
• 1:51:53
  So I looked up the media policy. I knew my rights and I quoted
• 1:51:56
  it. She goes, well, I'm, I'm going
• 1:51:58
  to have to get with Regent. I'm have to get with RM on that.
• 1:52:01
  So a few a week or so goes by and I can't do my radio show.
• 1:52:05
  And I'm like, I go in for my regular checking.
• 1:52:08
  I said, what'd you find out? Well, I haven't found out
• 1:52:10
  anything yet. I said, well, I've got a, I've
• 1:52:13
  got a radio show this Friday I plan on doing.
• 1:52:15
  I need to know. So still didn't find anything.
• 1:52:18
  A few days go by, I e-mail her and Carbon, the director of the
• 1:52:23
  halfway house. And I quote policy.
• 1:52:25
  I give them a copy of BOP's program statement on, you know,
• 1:52:28
  basically being on any kind of media and basically the only
• 1:52:34
  time permission is needed is if someone wants to come into a
• 1:52:37
  facility. OK.
• 1:52:39
  And then I also point out Michael Cohen got violated,
• 1:52:42
  violated and took back to prison from home confinement for this
• 1:52:47
  very thing. And the judge has already ruled
• 1:52:48
  that you cannot take someone's voice.
• 1:52:51
  And I quoted that case. Well, they sent that up to RRM.
• 1:52:56
  And Sean Smith, who is the RRM at Dallas, who is over this over
• 1:53:00
  Arkansas, Oklahoma, Louisiana and Texas.
• 1:53:03
  I think he, he told them no, under no uncertain terms can she
• 1:53:09
  do that radio show. So I emailed him back and said
• 1:53:13
  I'm going to do what you asked because you're point blank
• 1:53:15
  telling me. But just so you know, I need BP
• 1:53:19
  10 because that's where you start when you're at the Apple
• 1:53:21
  house and this is going to go to an 11 and I'm going to be
• 1:53:24
  falling and fighting this and and the person that promotes my
• 1:53:29
  radio show and that I do it on their platform will be going on
• 1:53:33
  my radio show tonight. It will move forward and he will
• 1:53:36
  be announcing why I'm not there. And so I was, you know, I fought
• 1:53:41
  back. This was on Friday, on Monday or
• 1:53:46
  Tuesday. Can't remember if it's Monday or
• 1:53:48
  Tuesday. It was on January the 12th of
• 1:53:51
  2021. I go to work at my church.
• 1:53:55
  I had two jobs. I was working for a lawyer
• 1:53:57
  friend and I was working at my church.
• 1:54:00
  I went to to work. I called in like I I was
• 1:54:03
  supposed to before I left my house, left my house on the
• 1:54:05
  ankle monitor, went to my church, called, let him know I
• 1:54:08
  was there. Mid morning, the director of the
• 1:54:10
  halfway house called me and he said I need you to report back
• 1:54:13
  here right now and you need to bring all your equipment for
• 1:54:15
  your ankle monitor. He said you as much as I don't
• 1:54:20
  want to tell you this, you're being violated.
• 1:54:21
  He said that came straight from region.
• 1:54:23
  It's out of our control. I have an incident report here.
• 1:54:26
  I have to serve on you and he goes, But I want you to know
• 1:54:29
  it's not the. We're not the ones doing this.
• 1:54:31
  You've been a model inmate. And I want you to know this is
• 1:54:33
  not us, but this is a direct order and I have to have you
• 1:54:37
  here within the hour. So I called Poncho.
• 1:54:40
  He was working next door. He his CPA firms next door to
• 1:54:43
  Cross street from our church. And I called him and I said,
• 1:54:47
  meet me at the house right now. I'm going home to take off all
• 1:54:49
  my jewelry, put on some old clothes, and you have to take me
• 1:54:53
  to the halfway house. I'm pretty sure that the US
• 1:54:56
  Marshall is about to pick me up. And I feel like I'll probably be
• 1:54:59
  taken first to Pulaski County Jail because I knew that was a
• 1:55:02
  holding facility, because I'd helped.
• 1:55:04
  I'd helped other people that had been in holding, you know, since
• 1:55:07
  I'd been home, And that's where they were.
• 1:55:09
  And he was like, you're joking, right?
• 1:55:11
  He really thought I was playing, Playing a prank.
• 1:55:13
  I said I wish I was, but I'm in my car right now driving home.
• 1:55:16
  So in my car in the meantime when I found out that from the
• 1:55:21
  halfway house I had called my PO, I'd got her name and called
• 1:55:23
  her because I didn't want her thinking I was some troublemaker
• 1:55:26
  out here. And she'd already come to my
• 1:55:27
  house and met me after that and told me no, if you've got
• 1:55:30
  something to expose, just to expose it.
• 1:55:32
  And I was like, I hit the jackpot.
• 1:55:33
  This woman is by policy like she is good.
• 1:55:38
  So I was really excited. I was getting her and she come
• 1:55:41
  introduced myself, you know me to her at my house and you know
• 1:55:45
  she'd she's she'd went to back for me already, basically
• 1:55:47
  running my PO. So I called her.
• 1:55:51
  I got home, I I went and unregistered myself for my
• 1:55:55
  classes. I was supposed to start class
• 1:55:57
  the very next day. We'd already paid for it.
• 1:55:59
  I was finishing my master's, had a class and internship, had
• 1:56:02
  already secured an internship. And so I was.
• 1:56:07
  I went and unregistered because I didn't want my husband.
• 1:56:09
  I mean, I knew I knew policy. I knew I was going to lose 30
• 1:56:12
  days good time. I'd already went, looked at the
• 1:56:14
  calendar, I was going to go either stay at the county or be
• 1:56:17
  shipped back through Oklahoma to Aliceville.
• 1:56:19
  And I would be there till possibly June, probably because
• 1:56:22
  my out date at that time was May.
• 1:56:24
  But I knew they would take 30 days of good time for 100 series
• 1:56:28
  shot or they wrote me a 300 series.
• 1:56:30
  But I knew I knew what they were going to do.
• 1:56:32
  I knew their playbook. They're as predictable as
• 1:56:35
  prosecutors. So anyway, I I knew and I had
• 1:56:38
  warned Poncho, and so I unregistered myself from
• 1:56:43
  college. I called the PO and told her
• 1:56:45
  what was going on. But what the BOP and the halfway
• 1:56:48
  house didn't know, because I had no reason to tell them, was on
• 1:56:51
  December the 2nd of that year, about a month and a half
• 1:56:55
  previous. I had filed a pro SE motion for
• 1:56:57
  compassionate release, and I had filed it.
• 1:57:00
  Number one, my mother's ill and I wanted to help take care of
• 1:57:03
  her. But #2?
• 1:57:05
  I had been asking for trauma counseling from what I went
• 1:57:08
  through at Oklahoma since I got to the halfway house for eight
• 1:57:12
  months and I had been they. Weren't aware of.
• 1:57:14
  They weren't aware of this. Oh, the BLP was aware because
• 1:57:17
  they had kept denying the counseling.
• 1:57:19
  They kept putting it off, so I had attached that as.
• 1:57:22
  They were. They were aware of your filing
• 1:57:23
  of the Compassionate. No, They were aware that I'd
• 1:57:26
  been asking for counselling and they hadn't got it for me.
• 1:57:28
  So I filed A compassionate release under several
• 1:57:32
  extraordinary and compelling reasons.
• 1:57:34
  Number one, I had not been given counselling and I was still
• 1:57:37
  suffering as someone with the mental health degree.
• 1:57:39
  Basically, I knew that I was suffering from traumas, PTSD,
• 1:57:43
  you know, and just trauma from prison, you know.
• 1:57:47
  And so I I also argued about my mother being sick, and I had not
• 1:57:52
  seen her since I'd been home. I could not go help her.
• 1:57:55
  She couldn't come to my house without approval to live here
• 1:57:58
  because she was not a resident that was approved to live here,
• 1:58:01
  you know, because you have to go through getting people approved
• 1:58:03
  for you to be on home confinement.
• 1:58:05
  And I argued also that I was about to start an internship
• 1:58:09
  wearing an ankle monitor. And how am I going to go work in
• 1:58:12
  a mental health facility and get my get my masters with wearing
• 1:58:16
  ankle monitor? Come on, you know, like, how is
• 1:58:19
  that going to work? And so I had followed that on
• 1:58:23
  December the 2nd of 2020 and it had not been ruled on yet.
• 1:58:29
  So I told my PO was aware. I told her I'd filed it and that
• 1:58:33
  I was hoping to, you know, finish my masters and all that
• 1:58:36
  and that I had signed up for classes.
• 1:58:37
  She even helped the the halfway house to approve me to go to
• 1:58:42
  those classes because even though they were going to be
• 1:58:45
  online, there may be sometimes I had to drive 2 hours to the
• 1:58:48
  college because my college was over 2 hours away and that would
• 1:58:52
  be something that was kind of tricky and I had to do an
• 1:58:56
  internship during the day is to graduate and that meant I had to
• 1:58:59
  go work somewhere all day at a mental health facility and go
• 1:59:03
  into like hospital, mental health hospitals and things.
• 1:59:06
  I'm a compassionate release. Do you get any information or is
• 1:59:12
  it just with the judge and the judge just hasn't until they
• 1:59:14
  rule? Well, the government gets to
• 1:59:16
  answer. They get to object, which they
• 1:59:20
  did, you know. I I understand that, but I'm
• 1:59:23
  saying you. No, no.
• 1:59:25
  You didn't know you. You didn't know what was going
• 1:59:28
  to happen. Well, she had it.
• 1:59:30
  She had it for a while. She had it.
• 1:59:32
  She had it for a while. Well, that day.
• 1:59:33
  Here's another thing I did, which I think escalated her to
• 1:59:37
  looking at it because the day that they told me I had to
• 1:59:40
  report, I also called and told them, hey, I have a
• 1:59:43
  compassionate release pending and I've seen no movement on it.
• 1:59:47
  And she's like, well, we'll, we'll get to it.
• 1:59:50
  And I said, OK, you know, I just wanted to check on it.
• 1:59:54
  And I called my PO too. And then she started asking
• 1:59:57
  questions of them as well because, you know, POS work for
• 2:00:00
  the judges. POS are part of the court
• 2:00:02
  system. They actually work for judge the
• 2:00:05
  judges. Right for the federal.
• 2:00:06
  Court they So did they come and pick you up, Lynn?
• 2:00:09
  No drive to. They made me drive over there.
• 2:00:12
  They served me with the incident report.
• 2:00:14
  They cut off my ankle monitor and they allowed.
• 2:00:17
  They kept telling. Us and your and your incident is
• 2:00:20
  emailing inmates. 396 violation of community program.
• 2:00:25
  It said that I had been talking to and it named some some
• 2:00:28
  inmates on core links, OK, And that they had been calling in to
• 2:00:31
  my radio show. He even had to put that in
• 2:00:33
  there. You know, there's the real dig
• 2:00:35
  right there. I was still advocating against
• 2:00:38
  the BOP is what it amounts to, but in any way.
• 2:00:42
  And I have the back, the back emails between me and them, you
• 2:00:45
  know that that prove what the real deal was.
• 2:00:48
  But at any rate, so they let me sit there with my husband.
• 2:00:53
  They tell him they, they keep profusely apologizing, Several
• 2:00:57
  staff members. Look, this is not our choice.
• 2:00:59
  If it was up to us, this will not be happening.
• 2:01:00
  You've been a model inmate. We're sorry, but you know, this
• 2:01:03
  is not us doing this. You're going.
• 2:01:05
  Into county. Jail.
• 2:01:07
  When the marshals come, they tell my husband he has to leave
• 2:01:11
  the marshals handcuffed. Belly chain, the whole thing
• 2:01:13
  again, just like Conair. I didn't even cry.
• 2:01:17
  Didn't even feel like crying. Brett By this time I'm so numb
• 2:01:19
  through this entire system that honestly I didn't cry when I
• 2:01:23
  went back to the county jail. But in a way I also saw it as a
• 2:01:28
  do over from God. I know that sounds a little
• 2:01:31
  crazy to people that may not, may not have a relationship with
• 2:01:34
  God. But to me, through my anger and
• 2:01:38
  through my time in prison, I had rejected God so many times when
• 2:01:43
  he convicted me. And I knew the right path.
• 2:01:45
  I've been in church my whole life, you know, I I knew I knew
• 2:01:49
  I was wrong. But I was so angry.
• 2:01:51
  I kept letting the devil, the anger get in my head.
• 2:01:53
  And and I had had gotten so far and I was like, you know, this
• 2:01:59
  isn't going to take me backwards.
• 2:02:01
  So I just prayed. I was like, God, I'm your
• 2:02:04
  willing servant. Here I am.
• 2:02:05
  I don't want to be here, but here I am.
• 2:02:07
  So I had peace about the situation.
• 2:02:09
  I got a Bible started reading at the county jail.
• 2:02:12
  But this, this Marshall that took me, we get in the car and I
• 2:02:15
  could see my husband down the street and I'm like, God, why is
• 2:02:17
  he watching me get come to a car like this?
• 2:02:19
  Why didn't he just drive on the way?
• 2:02:21
  But I guess he wanted just to make sure I was OK.
• 2:02:23
  But I could see his car sitting in a block or so down the
• 2:02:26
  street, you know, on public property.
• 2:02:28
  They couldn't make him leave that.
• 2:02:29
  So anyway, I go out to the county jail, but in the car, the
• 2:02:33
  Marshall says, what you do? Flunk.
• 2:02:35
  A drug scream. I just laughed.
• 2:02:37
  I was like, no Sir, I don't do drugs.
• 2:02:39
  He goes, we didn't look like the type he goes, but but that's
• 2:02:42
  usually what I take people back to prison for.
• 2:02:44
  What'd you do? So between the little bar things
• 2:02:48
  that he was talking to me through in the car, I just gave
• 2:02:50
  him the copy of the instant because I'd asked for it,
• 2:02:53
  because I wanted to take it with me because I was going to.
• 2:02:55
  I knew the process and I was going to fight it.
• 2:02:58
  And so I hand it to him. He read it.
• 2:03:00
  He goes, wait, what? He read it again.
• 2:03:02
  He said, wait, I'm taking you back to prison for emails.
• 2:03:07
  I was like, yes, Sir, he goes, I've never heard of such.
• 2:03:10
  What'd you really do? So then I told him about the
• 2:03:13
  radio show and all that. My blog.
• 2:03:15
  He wrote my blog down. He's like, I'm going to read
• 2:03:17
  this. This has got to be good.
• 2:03:18
  He goes, he goes, hey, he goes. Now you told me what you're
• 2:03:22
  really going back for. He goes, I knew there was more
• 2:03:24
  to it. And he stayed at the county jail
• 2:03:27
  with me and made sure I got processed in and talked to me
• 2:03:29
  and sit there and chatted me up until they put me in a holding
• 2:03:32
  cell. And you know, so I even gave him
• 2:03:35
  a shout out on my blog when I got back out out.
• 2:03:38
  The blog post is staycation at the county jail.
• 2:03:42
  But when I got back out of there, I said, hey, Mr. US
• 2:03:45
  Marshall, if you're if you're reading this, like you said, you
• 2:03:48
  know, here's your shout out basically because he, he really
• 2:03:52
  told me he was going to go read my blog.
• 2:03:54
  But anyway, I got booked in, got taken up to a women's quarantine
• 2:04:00
  unit because there they were. Also, you know, Covid's in full
• 2:04:03
  swing. So finally, you know, I'm.
• 2:04:06
  I'm taking it was freezing cold. I stayed most of the night in a
• 2:04:09
  holding cell, and I finally got up to the unit 2/3 4:00 in the
• 2:04:13
  morning. Who knows?
• 2:04:14
  I can't even remember. But so I knew policy and I knew
• 2:04:19
  the BLP had 14 days to bring me before what's called the DHOI
• 2:04:24
  had already had my community one because they they had me on a
• 2:04:29
  phone with the halfway house. Oh, five or six days in whenever
• 2:04:33
  you have to be teamed on a on an incident report what's called
• 2:04:36
  team at the halfway house. The halfway house has a staff
• 2:04:39
  that does it. You know, it's unit team when
• 2:04:41
  you're inside the prison. But it's called a community.
• 2:04:45
  It's in city UDC, it's CDC community team.
• 2:04:49
  But anyway, they had already called me and I'd already told
• 2:04:52
  them I'm not guilty and I'm gonna keep fighting this.
• 2:04:54
  And I I was quoting policy. I didn't even have policy with
• 2:04:57
  me, but I knew it so much. I was quoting it to them and I
• 2:05:00
  quoted them the 14 days and all this and I said I better have a
• 2:05:04
  hearing in 14 days or you know, y'all best not.
• 2:05:08
  They better let me out of here. So anyway, in the interim, the
• 2:05:12
  government got told well that this is the judge about a week
• 2:05:16
  into this, called the PO and said, hey, you need to prepare.
• 2:05:21
  I'm putting someone out on compassionate release and
• 2:05:25
  they're going to be, you know, coming under you.
• 2:05:26
  So the PO said, well, I need to advise you that this person
• 2:05:30
  sitting at the county jail and having been violated from the
• 2:05:34
  CARES Act, Can you imagine? The judge didn't know.
• 2:05:37
  So the judge at that. Could have been bad, which could
• 2:05:41
  have been bad. So the judge.
• 2:05:42
  Judge. Could have gone the other way.
• 2:05:44
  Well the judge at that point sent something over to the
• 2:05:46
  government and gave them I think 5 days.
• 2:05:49
  Three days, some I don't remember, but she gave them X
• 2:05:52
  amount of days to answer why I was violated and to give her
• 2:05:55
  some kind of proof of what I've done.
• 2:05:57
  So, you know, the government answered and told what a bad
• 2:06:02
  person I was and how I didn't deserve it and I needed to go
• 2:06:04
  right on back to prison. And all the things I'm
• 2:06:06
  complaining about, like needing counseling and wanting to finish
• 2:06:10
  my master's, well, none of that would be needed if I was back in
• 2:06:13
  prison. So, you know, like my whole
• 2:06:14
  arguments were just not even needed because I I needed to be
• 2:06:17
  back in prison. So anyway, from a county jail on
• 2:06:22
  a little pad that you can use there that you get 30 minutes
• 2:06:25
  on, I typed a response quoting policy, quoting everything and
• 2:06:30
  emailed it to my husband and had him copy paste and file it for
• 2:06:33
  me. So the judge.
• 2:06:34
  Oh, and not only did I tell her that also told her about my skin
• 2:06:39
  cancer they let me get. I told her about how I'd been
• 2:06:41
  retaliated on all through prison for speaking out, how I'd been
• 2:06:44
  shipped on Con Air perspella. I just spilled the whole beans
• 2:06:47
  like I just said. OK, you know what?
• 2:06:49
  I'm putting it all on record right now.
• 2:06:50
  I don't give a hoop. They're going to lie and say I
• 2:06:52
  did all that. I was a bad person.
• 2:06:54
  Prison. Let me just let you know, judge
• 2:06:56
  what really happened. And so I laid it all out there
• 2:06:59
  and I told her I currently had a spot on my chest that needed to
• 2:07:02
  go to the dermatologist. And they were telling me it'd be
• 2:07:04
  months. Not only that, it was going
• 2:07:06
  months where I could see a counselor in the county jail if
• 2:07:08
  if I ever got to see one. And I wrote all that, typed it
• 2:07:12
  all up, my husband went, took it to the courthouse and filed it
• 2:07:15
  for me. So she had my other side of it.
• 2:07:19
  Government, of course, answered. I'm a bad person.
• 2:07:21
  Threats to society needed to be right back where I was.
• 2:07:24
  And you know, you know, the the playbook they always say about
• 2:07:27
  everybody, it doesn't matter if you know they're going to say
• 2:07:30
  the same thing. You don't need to be out of
• 2:07:31
  prison. So that answer was sent to my
• 2:07:35
  husband, and he told me the PO sent it to me.
• 2:07:39
  He said, hey, you know, PO had been talking to him, keeping him
• 2:07:42
  abreast. What's going on?
• 2:07:43
  He said the judge ruled against you.
• 2:07:46
  I expected it. I was back there sitting there
• 2:07:48
  under violation. So I figured she would, you
• 2:07:51
  know, they're never going to believe you.
• 2:07:52
  They're going to believe the prosecutor.
• 2:07:54
  I'd seen it, my whole case. So I was, I was peaceful with
• 2:07:58
  it. I was like, OK, God, here we go.
• 2:08:00
  Obviously, Alice, Bill needs me to tear them up for something
• 2:08:02
  because I'd heard they were pretty much second to none next
• 2:08:05
  to Brian being mean to women and treating them bad.
• 2:08:07
  I said OK, on day 15, the the the staff announces to me to
• 2:08:14
  pack my stuff. I'm going home.
• 2:08:16
  So I think, OK, they dropped this crazy shot because they
• 2:08:20
  didn't go through with their 14 days.
• 2:08:22
  Because I knew day 14 had passed and this was day 15.
• 2:08:26
  I called my husband. He goes, no, the judge granted
• 2:08:29
  your compassionate release yesterday and gave them till
• 2:08:31
  3:00 today to let you out. But.
• 2:08:33
  She changed her mind. She.
• 2:08:34
  Didn't change her mind. My husband saw what the
• 2:08:37
  government answered and thought that was a that she, the judge,
• 2:08:40
  had filed that. Oh my God.
• 2:08:44
  All right, now that makes sense. Not it, however, she's not even
• 2:08:48
  ruled on. Yet she just hadn't ruled yet.
• 2:08:51
  But that PO. OK, I would.
• 2:08:53
  You would really have. You really have me confused.
• 2:08:55
  There, PO kept going over there. My I found this out later.
• 2:08:58
  She kept going over there saying, when are you going to
• 2:09:01
  rule on this? This lady is sitting in a county
• 2:09:03
  jail. So my wish for anybody that's
• 2:09:08
  going to prison or getting out of prison is that they could
• 2:09:11
  have Victoria Fits you. Oh.
• 2:09:14
  Yeah. She is an amazing person.
• 2:09:16
  She follows the law. She follows the rules.
• 2:09:18
  She wants people to be successful.
• 2:09:21
  She does, exactly. And that's A and that's a good
• 2:09:23
  point to make Lynn is that it's not 100% of everybody at any in
• 2:09:29
  any business or at any place. There are good people trying to
• 2:09:32
  do good things. Absolutely.
• 2:09:34
  And then there's bad apples and and you know that gets a black
• 2:09:37
  eye to everybody. So Lynn, I I know you survived
• 2:09:41
  all that I did. And you, you, you are back in
• 2:09:44
  the world of and you're still advocating.
• 2:09:48
  Graduate called my advisor got back in my classes after those
• 2:09:52
  two weeks. Graduated with my masters.
• 2:09:55
  I sit on the Federal Advisory Council for dream.org.
• 2:09:58
  I sit on which? Is an awesome organization.
• 2:10:01
  The big shout out to dream.org. I know some people on there and
• 2:10:05
  they Candy and Milton's been on this podcast.
• 2:10:08
  There's, there's, it's just a really great.
• 2:10:10
  Organization. It's.
• 2:10:10
  All about the right thing. I love Candia.
• 2:10:13
  He is a great guy doing great work.
• 2:10:16
  I sit on the Hills board at the University of Bronx Software
• 2:10:20
  Medical Science, which is a board that is a research board,
• 2:10:26
  and it's doing research on mental health issues inside the
• 2:10:29
  prison with incarcerated people. I love that.
• 2:10:31
  So I sit on that and I recently started working with the Remedy
• 2:10:35
  Project WHO, which is a project that is funded through grants
• 2:10:40
  that helps to people who are incarcerated with administrative
• 2:10:44
  remedies. Let that Oh.
• 2:10:45
  I love it. I love it.
• 2:10:47
  A seat at the table with Lynn. A seat at the table I got.
• 2:10:51
  I'll say, Lynn, I want to ask you this question because you've
• 2:10:54
  been through. I mean, this has been one hell
• 2:10:57
  of a journey that you've been through.
• 2:10:59
  And you survived. You made it to the other side
• 2:11:02
  and you adapted to all the different things that you went
• 2:11:04
  through. Stronger for us, stronger
• 2:11:07
  through the struggle. What do you think for the
• 2:11:10
  listeners out there? Is your biggest take away
• 2:11:12
  through all this stay. True to yourself.
• 2:11:16
  Yeah. Don't be unless they're really
• 2:11:20
  violating your rights. Just turn a blind eye to it and
• 2:11:28
  go all about your business. Try not to get angry, Try not to
• 2:11:48
  let this change who you are inside, because don't.
• 2:11:51
  Lose yourself, though, because don't become Prison Brat or
• 2:11:53
  Prison Lynn. Don't.
• 2:11:55
  Be me and just make the best. No, no, I I think though I I
• 2:12:00
  don't think that. You're gonna?
• 2:12:02
  I don't think, I don't think that you lost yourself.
• 2:12:05
  I don't think you you lost yourself in prison and you're
• 2:12:09
  using your journey to help people and there's so much
• 2:12:13
  appreciation for that because it's such an unknown thing.
• 2:12:16
  And any kind of piece that you can give somebody that's getting
• 2:12:19
  ready to start that journey or return home from that journey is
• 2:12:22
  is so much appreciate. I want to remind everybody to
• 2:12:26
  reach out, get your book inside the walls and and beyond.
• 2:12:31
  And as far as getting to Lynn, what's the best way to get to
• 2:12:35
  you, Lynn? You know, I'm real transparent
• 2:12:39
  with my phone number and e-mail. If you go on Amazon you can
• 2:12:43
  easily, you know, get my information.
• 2:12:47
  But I've run a page called, well, several pages on Facebook.
• 2:12:52
  I'll give you the links to post. You know, you can e-mail me
• 2:12:56
  through my blog and I can put that.
• 2:12:58
  In the show notes. I'll give you my e-mail.
• 2:13:00
  I mean, you know, I I I give away my cell phone number very
• 2:13:05
  easily and I you. Know it's a great, it's a great
• 2:13:07
  thing. Lynn, I I appreciate so much of
• 2:13:09
  you being on today and sharing your story.
• 2:13:12
  If and then if you go to find Lynn's book on Amazon, go ahead
• 2:13:16
  and find my book. I'm our success.
• 2:13:18
  They're both there. I'm reading it right now.
• 2:13:20
  It's a great book. Thank you, Lynn.
• 2:13:22
  I appreciate that. I appreciate that.
• 2:13:25
  Go to brickcassidy.com, my website, that's where the Ty not
• 2:13:30
  a DY. Keep up the shares, the follows,
• 2:13:33
  subscriptions, the likes, the comments, all that stuff.
• 2:13:36
  It's so great. I so much appreciate it as I
• 2:13:39
  used to say, say to people when I was writing my emails back and
• 2:13:42
  forth, encore legs from prison, stay strong.
• 2:13:45
  I'll do the same. Lynn, thanks so much.
• 2:13:47
  Appreciate. It.
• 2:13:48
  You're welcome, Brett. Thank you so much for for
• 2:13:50
  letting me come on and talk. I told you I'm not that
• 2:13:53
  interesting. I I the people I gave you names
• 2:13:55
  are way more interesting. But I appreciate.
• 2:13:57
  You've got a great story. Showcasing my story as well.
• 2:14:00
  Great story, Len. Appreciate it.
• 2:14:03
  Time our success in and out.