Erin Ajayi
Appearances
Nobody Should Believe Me
Answering Your Season 5 Questions
And can I just add, it's a very personal benefit to the advertisements industry. If we need to cut this out, we can. But actually, Lume deodorant, it's really good. I discovered that during the course of this season. I'm not even kidding. And I'm logging in from Texas where it's very warm and good deodorant really matters. And so I'm just... Personally, I benefited from the repetition.
Nobody Should Believe Me
Answering Your Season 5 Questions
We'll just cut this and slice it to Lumi.
Nobody Should Believe Me
Answering Your Season 5 Questions
But under the quince, I'm just saying it's very good deodorant. Yeah, it is.
Nobody Should Believe Me
Answering Your Season 5 Questions
Yeah, this is Erin again. And I think, you know, in the research process, I started with the memoir and trying to get to understand Sophie and where she came from and her background. So that's where I actually started with this story. And then later kind of went down the rabbit hole of the accusations and things like that.
Nobody Should Believe Me
Answering Your Season 5 Questions
But, you know, certainly I think anytime someone goes in to go to a different country in which they will be the minority race is going. It's it becomes an issue. Right. And I think an important element of investigation. And there are a lot of problematic issues. depictions of Zambia in Sophie's memoir.
Nobody Should Believe Me
Answering Your Season 5 Questions
I think the monolith that people have about the continent of Africa falls in line with a lot of what Sophie was writing. And so to bring that to light, I think was very important to call that out was really important. I often said several times throughout this process, if you heard Sophie tell it, she'd never met a
Nobody Should Believe Me
Answering Your Season 5 Questions
So just the way that the children and the people were depicted in her memoir, I felt was deeply unfair and inaccurate. And I think that that was the first call out. And certainly, I think when you use the lens of, you know, Sophie coming in as a young white missionary, right, to this poor, depraved black country, right?
Nobody Should Believe Me
Answering Your Season 5 Questions
It just, the dynamics there and a lot of the racist undertones, intentional or not, were there. And I think that they certainly deserve to be called out. And because her children came from this place that she very rarely talked about being beautiful or having any sort of beauty or redeeming qualities in.
Nobody Should Believe Me
Answering Your Season 5 Questions
For me, it led me to question and I guess be more sensitive to how she thinks of her daughters or the lens at which she views her daughters, right? And just that degree of sensitivity that we see when Emma's in gymnastics, right? And the degree of sensitivity to to seize experience in the medical system.
Nobody Should Believe Me
Answering Your Season 5 Questions
So, again, it's something that, you know, I would beg to say that race was an issue that Sophie brought up. And so we followed we followed that thread and pulled on it where it were needed.
Nobody Should Believe Me
Answering Your Season 5 Questions
Mariah, can I just read a quote from a listener that we got? And Nola, thank you for compiling all of this feedback for us. But one comment is the idea that you would do an international adoption and then immediately put one of those children in a super competitive environment where they are missing out on social and educational development in order to train all day is just bizarre.
Nobody Should Believe Me
Answering Your Season 5 Questions
And that was a comment from a listener. And I think, Brian, that absolutely underscores the point that you were just making.
Nobody Should Believe Me
Answering Your Season 5 Questions
I know one of the things that certainly I've learned from you, Andrea, and listening to the show is just this division that can be created between siblings, right? The sibling who is experiencing the Munchausen by proxy abuse, and then the sibling who is, you know, for all intents and purposes, kind of typical in their development. And so for me, I think what the
Nobody Should Believe Me
Answering Your Season 5 Questions
gymnastics kinds of, you know, M versus C kind of illustrated for me is you have one sister who is like the picture of, you know, great physical health so much that she can endure this level of, you know, high competitiveness and, you know, has to physically be, you know, great and excellent. And then on the other hand, you know, you have C who is, you know, plagued with all of these
Nobody Should Believe Me
Answering Your Season 5 Questions
Yes, Erin Ajayi. This was my first season with Nobody Should Believe Me as the researcher and fact checker. This was very cathartic for me. I've been transitioning from nonprofit administration and fundraising world. And so one of the things that really gripped me with this story in particular was just the undertones of a white saviorism and that being a theme of,
Nobody Should Believe Me
Answering Your Season 5 Questions
different ailments, particularly physical, right? And so what I read into that is, and kind of questioned as well, is was, you know, there's some intentional way of creating division, right, between those two pictures where you're perpetuating abuse on one of the children and then the other is, you know, again, involved in this highly competitive sport, right?
Nobody Should Believe Me
Answering Your Season 5 Questions
Um, the other thing that I'll note, too, that didn't, I don't we didn't mention it anywhere in the show, but it came up in the research is when I was looking back at it was a high school or no, it was a college newspaper.
Nobody Should Believe Me
Answering Your Season 5 Questions
um and it had covered our magazine and it had covered a lot of different students going through some clinic um and it named Sophie as an athletic training major um and we also knew from high school that she was involved in a variety of different sports golf at one point basketball soccer um and so and that she can she continued at least one of those sports on into college so it was just
Nobody Should Believe Me
Answering Your Season 5 Questions
Sophie's own background with kind of athletic training and understanding kind of like high competition and sports and things like that. I don't know. It just it was a it was a note that I took and certainly nothing that, you know, we could follow concretely.
Nobody Should Believe Me
Answering Your Season 5 Questions
But it was a note that I took in terms of how kind of Sophie's understanding of the physical body, the study of the physical body, how that then showed up in in the girls.
Nobody Should Believe Me
Answering Your Season 5 Questions
you know, Sophie going to do mission work and being coming out of the nonprofit field. There is a lot of that, particularly with donors, that notion of white saviorism and good-ish intent, but I really wanted to dive into that part of the story. And then also, too, my family's Nigerian, and so I think going into and exploring the cross-cultural ties with transracial and transnational adoption
Nobody Should Believe Me
Answering Your Season 5 Questions
um, was another thing that really, um, deeply interested me. Uh, and the final thing is I actually went to college in West Michigan. And so, uh, so understanding, um, white evangelicalism and, and where kind of Sophie came from and grew up, um, there were just a lot of, lots of cross-pollination, um, with experiences in my own life, um, that I could, um,
Nobody Should Believe Me
Answering Your Season 5 Questions
I think one of the things... Andrea, when you talked about when, especially with Chalice, but you've said this before, like there's something in your brain that breaks. Um, and that, um, that really stuck out to me because I think we could kind of see Chalice like slowly, like slowly getting to the light, not knowing that if, you know, she would come and come out publicly.
Nobody Should Believe Me
Answering Your Season 5 Questions
Um, but we certainly saw her own journey throughout the course of, um, the months that we were working on the show. But my hope is that, um, You know, thinking about kind of some of the background research that we were doing for this for this season, listening to the police interviews of the I think I remember the teachers, these teachers, the neighbors.
Nobody Should Believe Me
Answering Your Season 5 Questions
And other health care professionals are like therapists. Right. So listening to the police interviews and you we kind of were getting breadcrumbs of like something is off where people are like, this didn't quite feel right. This seemed unusual. Right. Um, and just noticing these behaviors. Right. And I think, you know, what they're going on is, is really based on gut. Right.
Nobody Should Believe Me
Answering Your Season 5 Questions
And as Nicole said, yeah, maybe this is some unsavory behavior. Um, but then to have kind of chalice go through that journey of like, okay, this is a lot that's based on intuition, but here are the facts that I see, right? And those are the things that cause the break.
Nobody Should Believe Me
Answering Your Season 5 Questions
My hope is that people will lean more into their intuition and be okay speaking up when they see that someone has bravely done it, knowing that, yeah, it can come at the sacrifice of your relationships with the adult who is abusing the child. But at the end of the day, it is about the child.
Nobody Should Believe Me
Answering Your Season 5 Questions
And I think landing on that and being able to end the season on that reminder, this is about the children who are victims of this abuse and nothing else should get in the way of that.
Nobody Should Believe Me
Answering Your Season 5 Questions
see and observe and unfortunately in a lot of ways relive, but hopefully bring to light a lot of problematic issues.
Nobody Should Believe Me
Answering Your Season 5 Questions
I think for me on a whole, one of the things that I really appreciated is I know that we just in looking through the comments, we had an attorney write in. We had people who folks who have fostered children or who have friends who have fostered kids. There were just all of these really.
Nobody Should Believe Me
Answering Your Season 5 Questions
great perspectives coming in from listeners on the show that I think adding their expertise, whether or not lending a correction for some reporting that we did or another angle or just kind of affirming what we had learned, it was just really nice and great to hear.
Nobody Should Believe Me
Answering Your Season 5 Questions
And so we love the great comments, but we also love the ones that make us think because I think that it only makes our reporting better It only widens our lenses. Someone wrote in about the hospice versus palliative care. And I know we're seeking an expert on this season to talk about the differences between the two.
Nobody Should Believe Me
Answering Your Season 5 Questions
So I think for the listeners, just to know that all of their feedback is taken in a way that we're thinking about how we use it and curating it moving forward in different seasons. And then I guess on a note of levity, there was someone who wrote in, they said, I'm a Canadian and do not understand your healthcare system. And I just wanna say, we don't either.
Nobody Should Believe Me
Answering Your Season 5 Questions
Yeah. Oh, God. The end. Yes, bleak. No renewal. After the pilot.
Nobody Should Believe Me
Answering Your Season 5 Questions
More bragging. No, vigorous nods all around. And also, Greta, you're just a phenomenal editor as well. So, yeah, truly.