Myrriah Gossett
Appearances
Nobody Should Believe Me
Answering Your Season 5 Questions
Yeah, it's got to happen. And like, you know, there's networks out there who put way more ads and on their shows than we ever do. And they put them in willy nilly places. So I like to think that we take good care to make sure they're at places where like an ad break should be. You know, it's not in the middle of sentence. Yeah. they're supposed to be. But yeah.
Nobody Should Believe Me
Answering Your Season 5 Questions
And if anyone's ever interested in the business of podcasting, it's wild out here. I mean, the fact that like, it's like, I'm like, Nicole has an incredible show. Why aren't these giant networks just like cutting her a big fat check to make her incredible show? This is insane to me. But yeah, it's wild out there, y'all.
Nobody Should Believe Me
Answering Your Season 5 Questions
And I can tell you, I've worked on really big network shows that have very large budgets. And they put just as many, if not more ads on their shows. And They have the backings of giant tech companies. And like Andrea said, we're a little indie show who is paying everyone their wages as instructed by Air Media. We follow all of our guides.
Nobody Should Believe Me
Answering Your Season 5 Questions
We pay everyone their correct rates for all the work that they do. And that is something we're proud to do. But it does take ad revenue to do.
Nobody Should Believe Me
Answering Your Season 5 Questions
I am also wearing a full Quince outfit head to toe.
Nobody Should Believe Me
Answering Your Season 5 Questions
I can also jump in, too. I think we told you what people thought about things, and we didn't ever put a value judgment on those things. I think we got a lot of feedback, especially around Dr. Turek's explanations of what these particular... And we want to be specific.
Nobody Should Believe Me
Answering Your Season 5 Questions
Dr. Turek did research about the actual churches that Sophie attended, not the larger branches of evangelical Christianity as a whole, although she's also an expert in that field, literally has a PhD in
Nobody Should Believe Me
Answering Your Season 5 Questions
And teaches about the use of religion and how it interacts specifically with the government, which we thought was a really great place to come from in this season, since we're talking about medical care, which is something that does have oversight issues. with government agencies that has oversight from boards. A lot of these hospitals are nonprofit. So there's a lot of like intersecting.
Nobody Should Believe Me
Answering Your Season 5 Questions
It's a government agency. Right. And so, which is what part of the reason we reached out to her. So, you know, we, she dug into these different particular churches and just made the statements of these are the beliefs of this church, which were things like they were anti-trans or they were
Nobody Should Believe Me
Answering Your Season 5 Questions
You know, were outspoken about particular topics in the zeitgeist of the news where they stood on different things happening in the news. And so, you know, just because all of those things were in a row, people who had big reactions to them didn't. Obviously, there's big reactions to have around a lot of these topics. These are big issues.
Nobody Should Believe Me
Answering Your Season 5 Questions
But they also, I think, were important to know where Sophie was coming from and how she was relating to her place in the world, how she viewed how she talked about adoption, how she talked about race in general, how she talked about politics and how that intersected with the care and the nonprofit she was working with. Anyway, it's a giant spider web of things.
Nobody Should Believe Me
Answering Your Season 5 Questions
And so like, we tried to make sure we're not like out here being like, all evangelicals are bad. We were saying, these particular churches have these particular views. And here's how they intersect with what's happening in the household that Sophie is bringing these children into and working within these systems to abuse these children. Yeah.
Nobody Should Believe Me
Answering Your Season 5 Questions
Interesting to me what people always assume is like gets dumped in the bucket of politics, because to me, most of this season was like, besides the mention of like the political leanings of pursuit, which is very apparent, it's on all their social media pages, they literally take out billboards in Andrea's town, like driving around, you can see them. So they are very vocal about what they believe.
Nobody Should Believe Me
Answering Your Season 5 Questions
And because of how much they were involved in the financials of this story, like all of Nicole's points, like it was also intertwined that to leave any of these things out about these places wouldn't be doing the story justice at all.
Nobody Should Believe Me
Answering Your Season 5 Questions
You'd be missing a huge, essentially other character in this story, which was Sophie's belief systems, which was so integral to how she justified so much of her actions, how she justified
Nobody Should Believe Me
Answering Your Season 5 Questions
the adoption of these girls in the first place, like so much of this was the driving motivating factor to, you know, not to put, you know, real people in the quote unquote, like title of a character, but we are telling a story, right? Like, and so in order to flesh out the character, you need the backstory. And that's so much of the backstory there.
Nobody Should Believe Me
Answering Your Season 5 Questions
Yeah, and just to like echo both Erin and Nicole, like the pattern is really what this show is so much about for us. And so it's never like, you know, we had a story we didn't even air from a person that we felt had like kind of more of a vendetta against Sophie than anything else. But it was sort of our first flag indicator, right?
Nobody Should Believe Me
Answering Your Season 5 Questions
Where we went, okay, this is obviously a point of contention that is happening specifically within, you know, it was around M's Gymnastics. And we were like, I don't know if we fully trust the recounting from this particular person, but it led us to be like, what else is there? And that's when we got corroborated stories from other people from the gymnastics community.
Nobody Should Believe Me
Answering Your Season 5 Questions
And then we, you know, to Aaron's point, like the way... spoke about the people of Zambia was just like the first of many alarms that went off because we did reach out to like reporters in Zambia and asked about like, we were like, hey, we think this is wrong.
Nobody Should Believe Me
Answering Your Season 5 Questions
Can you tell us a little bit about what your day to day life is like, like, tell us a bit more about your lived experience, not just what we're finding on the internet or in videos and like, these sort of easily, I don't know, uh, suede materials that are from a white perspective, especially. Like Nicole said, there's the red flags that come up and then there's the alarms that come up.
Nobody Should Believe Me
Answering Your Season 5 Questions
And so we tried to just say like, hey, here's the pattern of all of the red flags, which then sent up this alarm, which then was like, hey, Chad, you're a person who has this lived experience. You're also a person who does consulting for families that are in transracial adoptions and you actively talk about how to make these homes best for these children.
Nobody Should Believe Me
Answering Your Season 5 Questions
And so much of what he talked about was you have to raise a child to be prepared for their life as they are, not as how you think they're going to be. And so he made beautiful points about Like you have to actually prepare your child to be a black child living in America. And that does not always look the way that a white parent thinks it's going to look.
Nobody Should Believe Me
Answering Your Season 5 Questions
And so how do you build the community around your child to make sure that they're fully prepared for that? And based on the lack of community we really saw around these kids, we were very concerned. And that was a big part of the abuse flags that went up for us as we were investigating.
Nobody Should Believe Me
Answering Your Season 5 Questions
Yeah. So this is my second season working with Andrea. Nobody should believe me. And I'm so glad to still be on the team and to have worked with this amazing crew to have made this incredible season that was both heart-wrenching, intense, but also very, I think, editorially rewarding by the end of it. And I think this team really had a lot to do with that.
Nobody Should Believe Me
Answering Your Season 5 Questions
Um, and then I also edit, if y'all want some, some giggles, some ha ha's, some to he's after some, uh, really intense, nobody should believe me. I also, um, produce and sound design a show called one of us with Finn and Chris, uh, which is like a part improv part interview show. Andrea has been a guest on that show as well. It was bananas. We went into the fridge of the bear.
Nobody Should Believe Me
Answering Your Season 5 Questions
Yeah. And I, and I want to say too, like we, we talked a lot about sharing those pieces of M's journals because we did, you know, we, Sophie is under a microscope because of the case and the police investigations. And so we tried to be mindful of only sharing the things that we felt illustrated what we thought M might be going through within all of this. And to say that the
Nobody Should Believe Me
Answering Your Season 5 Questions
way this abuse can impact everyone around it is not just for the, you know, quote unquote primary victim. And that we hope that it was done with enough. It's something I still think about a lot.
Nobody Should Believe Me
Answering Your Season 5 Questions
So I hope we did it to the point where everyone was able to understand that the reason we shared the pieces that we shared and not in like direct quotes was because we wanted to represent M in a way that felt like she was not forgotten in the investigation of all of this.
Nobody Should Believe Me
Answering Your Season 5 Questions
It's a really silly good time. And then I also work currently work on the ACLU's podcast at Liberty with W. Kamau Powell. And so we're doing a bunch of know your insert rights here. So we just had an episode come out about the current state of disability rights. So definitely check that out.
Nobody Should Believe Me
Answering Your Season 5 Questions
Um, and also so appreciative of people who shared like the real stories of these kids and like how they are in their day to day life beyond like what's going on in their household that is out of their control.
Nobody Should Believe Me
Answering Your Season 5 Questions
Um, so, so appreciative to people like Chalice and the police tape we had from the neighbors and the many gymnastics parents who talked to us, um, and other people who, who spoke on background. So, um, um, to put that forward first. But yeah, the, I remember when we were doing the field reporting tour, there was a point where I was like, do we just need to do a whole season on gymnastics?
Nobody Should Believe Me
Answering Your Season 5 Questions
It was just so wild, like the way it was talked about. And I mean, I, there's been a ton of documentaries about how, I mean, any highly competitive, intense sports, uh, unfortunately does leave doors open for potential, um, I think, abuse when kids are put up to these performance goals that maybe they don't have for themselves anyway.
Nobody Should Believe Me
Answering Your Season 5 Questions
It's, yeah, sports and kids is a whole other rabbit hole to dive into. But to me, the most important to this particular case was, you know, to the point that Aaron made with that quote from the listener, it's very isolating, right? It's an individual sport, like there are team teams, right?
Nobody Should Believe Me
Answering Your Season 5 Questions
But it is so concretely based on your individual performance and the pressure that that can put on someone and the pressure on someone who's also still trying to like, learn to fit into a new cultural environment. Like, what a double whammy of a serving of things to get through in life at this point.
Nobody Should Believe Me
Answering Your Season 5 Questions
Like training for the Olympics, not just like go have fun and learn gymnastics. And then if this is something you're really into, let's step it up.
Nobody Should Believe Me
Answering Your Season 5 Questions
Yeah. I mean, I think for me, it was like the talking, having Chalice as like a person we could ask questions of and like gut check with, especially around, we had a lot of conversations about how can we do the least amount of harm. on this show.
Nobody Should Believe Me
Answering Your Season 5 Questions
Because it was one of the first seasons that, Andrea, as you mentioned, that we didn't have cooperation of either a survivor or a family member who was involved in a sort of wanting to tell this story. But we saw how it was important because it was talking about larger system failures, right?
Nobody Should Believe Me
Answering Your Season 5 Questions
And how this type of abuse is misunderstood specifically in the court systems, I think was like a big driver for this season. And so to have Chalice around to make sure, Not even to make sure, but just like in my mind, I kept being like, we're making the season for Chalice.
Nobody Should Believe Me
Answering Your Season 5 Questions
Like that was like a driving force was to be like, this is a person who has listened and has been had a revelation about a person who was so close to them and how hard that must have been for her to go through and to. Luckily, she does have a really lovely support system around her with her fiance and other mental health professionals in her sphere.
Nobody Should Believe Me
Answering Your Season 5 Questions
But I wanted to make sure she walked away listening to the season and was like, okay, I have made...
Nobody Should Believe Me
Answering Your Season 5 Questions
the correct decision because as we always say we literally go in and we're like what else could it be like through halfway through reporting i was like this kid might have ahc and there's all these other things on top of it that are kind of like you know abuse patterns munchausen by proxy behavior patterns but maybe they're you know it's always this like push pull and then there's eventually the like
Nobody Should Believe Me
Answering Your Season 5 Questions
big reveal aha moment that happens, unfortunately, because I would love to get to the bottom of a season and be like, you know what, this kid is really sick. Oh, my God. Like, let's talk about this. Like, that would be incredible, you know, but yeah.
Nobody Should Believe Me
Answering Your Season 5 Questions
a misunderstanding or, you know, failures of the medical system and trying to get that, you know, like I've been listening to a lot of Kate Downey's season of cramped. I don't know if y'all are listening to that show, but it's about her journey about period pain. And it's so fascinating.
Nobody Should Believe Me
Answering Your Season 5 Questions
And it is kind of delving into those like issues around the medical system, specifically around reproductive health. And so you're like, this is not, you know, these barrels are not that far apart from each other of the containers of what's happening in these broken ways that specifically United States healthcare system and the way that we investigate child abuse, right?
Nobody Should Believe Me
Answering Your Season 5 Questions
Like there's systemic failures across the board. But for Chalice, it was like a way for us to make sure in my mind that I had kind of a guiding North Star of like, I want to make sure Chalice feels by the end of this season
Nobody Should Believe Me
Answering Your Season 5 Questions
that her talking to us was not going to affect her life in a negative way moving forward, that she felt like she got to walk with us on this journey and have a sense of, I hate to use the word peace because it's not peace because it doesn't feel fully resolved, right? But at least has resources and tools to help her find other ways to help other people in her sphere or to
Nobody Should Believe Me
Answering Your Season 5 Questions
find ways to help the girls if at all possible, which, yeah, that was our hope at one point, which didn't quite come to fruition.
Nobody Should Believe Me
Answering Your Season 5 Questions
Yeah, I think I'm like a really micro level is being a safe adult for any kids that are in your orbit and in your community, because that is like step one of just like, if a kid feels like they can actually talk to you, that can be a really powerful tool for prevention of all kinds of
Nobody Should Believe Me
Answering Your Season 5 Questions
The second thing that I've been ruminating on a lot, especially going now working on season six is the importance of having child abuse pediatricians at local hospitals and having and really like if you have any.
Nobody Should Believe Me
Answering Your Season 5 Questions
Ways to volunteer at your hospital or you they have board meetings, anything like that to just really advocate to have a system in place at your local hospital and to make sure that there are people who are trained specifically to recognize this type of abuse, I think.
Nobody Should Believe Me
Answering Your Season 5 Questions
As Greta mentioned, there's an idea that is really rare, and I've said this multiple times when we interviewed Detective Michael from Texas. He gave us a stat that I, for my own mental health, had to immediately erase from my mind about how prevalent like child sexual abuse is now and how back in the 70s it was viewed as this thing that was very rare. It didn't happen. It was strangers.
Nobody Should Believe Me
Answering Your Season 5 Questions
And that is so not the case right now that we all are more aware of that. Right. And so he thinks where we were with the stats in the 70s around child sexual abuse is where We'll eventually get to when it comes to medical child abuse. And like when we talked to the child abuse pediatrician on the show this season, she mentioned, you know, it's her job to find that it's anything else.
Nobody Should Believe Me
Answering Your Season 5 Questions
Like that's her job as well. And she's like, and so often it's there's medical neglect, which is usually due to lack of resources, as Andrea mentioned. And then there's actual neglect. medical child abuse. And so you want someone who knows those differences and can discuss those nuances and say, hey, this isn't a parent that needs their kid taken away.
Nobody Should Believe Me
Answering Your Season 5 Questions
This is a parent that needs support and resources because they can't bring their kid to the doctor, right? Versus someone with factitious disorder who's using their kid as a part of their mental health disorder. So, yeah. So I think it's like you can advocate for better systems in place at your local hospitals to help recognize and flag this abuse when it's happening.
Nobody Should Believe Me
Answering Your Season 5 Questions
And then, yeah, be a safe adult for the kids in your community and around you.
Nobody Should Believe Me
Answering Your Season 5 Questions
Have you seen that meme that was like, why don't we ever get like, you know, there's a tradition of British television getting an American adaptation, but there's very rarely an American show that gets a British adaptation. And it was like the opening scene of Breaking Bad. And it was just them being like, yeah, here's your chemotherapy for your cancer. And then it was like full credits.
Nobody Should Believe Me
Answering Your Season 5 Questions
Yeah, I really agree. I feel like that was everything I would have wanted to say.
Nobody Should Believe Me
Answering Your Season 5 Questions
You can say as much as little as you want, Greta.
Nobody Should Believe Me
Answering Your Season 5 Questions
I can also just humble brag on you, Greta, because you do an incredible job of helping to really keep the process moving forward. Like you do such great work. I don't, it's like beyond what an, I'm so glad you've actually, so here's our other humble grab brag is that Greta is now producing our case files episodes for the week to week.
Nobody Should Believe Me
Answering Your Season 5 Questions
So, um, she's been promoted and moving on up because she's an incredible, uh, ear for story and cutting tape down and taking our monstrous three hour long sessions where we dive into other cases week to week and getting them down into manageable pieces. Um, as well as to help make sure that we are telling great stories during the documentary seasons as well. So Greta does a great job.
Nobody Should Believe Me
Answering Your Season 5 Questions
I've got to work with her on multiple projects, and I'm always so happy that we get to stay a happy little team. So that's my brags on Greta.