Content warning: gun violence, stalking, emotional, mental, and psychological abuse, violent threats, criminal threats, hate crimes, racism, antisemitism, transphobia, and homophobia.J.E. Reich is a journalist, editor, survivor, and victim advocate. They shared their story on Something Was Wrong season 6, episodes 5 and 6, which aired on December 6th and December 13th of 2020. The episodes discuss the impact of the devastating 2018 shooting at The Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, and the impact the hate crime had on J.E.’s community. The three episodes also bring awareness to the related, horrific stalking J.E. and their family would be subjected to in the years following. However, at the time of the episodes’ release, J.E. and their family had received no justice for the unending harassment and death threats ‘The Caller’ executed over those years. The Broken Cycle Media team is extremely grateful J.E. was willing to return today to share more of their journey to seek justice, and about the start of their consequent healing process.Something Was Wrong Season 6 E5, Massacre at the Tree of Life Synagogue | JE:https://wondery.com/shows/something-was-wrong/episode/10716-massacre-at-the-tree-of-life-synagogue-je/Something Was Wrong Season 6 E6, Panic Attack City | JE:https://wondery.com/shows/something-was-wrong/episode/10716-panic-attack-city-je/J.E.'s Instagram: http://www.instagram.com/jereichwritesFor more resources and a list of related non-profit organizations, please visit http://somethingwaswrong.com/resourcesSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.
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What Came Next is intended for mature audiences only. Episodes discuss topics that can be triggering, such as emotional, physical, and sexual violence, animal abuse, suicide, and murder. I am not a therapist, nor am I a doctor. If you're in need of support, please visit somethingwaswrong.com forward slash resources for a list of non-profit organizations that can help.
Opinions expressed by my guests on the show are their own and do not necessarily represent the views of myself or broken cycle media. Resources and source material are linked in the episode notes. Thank you so much for listening. As shared in Part 1 of their story, J.E. Reich is a journalist, editor, survivor, and victim advocate.
They shared their story on Something Was Wrong Season 6, Episodes 5 and 6, which aired on December 6th and December 13th of 2020. The episodes discuss the impact of the devastating 2018 shooting at the Tree of Life Synagogue in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, and the impact the hate crime had on J.E. 's community. The episodes also bring awareness to the related, horrific stalking J.E.
and their family would be subjected to in the years following. However, at the time of the episode's release, J.E. and their family had received no justice for the unending harassment and death threats the caller executed over those years. The Broken Cycle Media team is extremely grateful J.E.
was willing to return today to share more of their journey to seek justice and about the start of their consequent healing process.
The investigation was taken over by the Miami FBI field office. March 2023, she was eventually arrested. She pled guilty. My partner and I flew in before the sentencing hearing. On the floor of the courtroom where the proceedings would take place was where I was able to meet the FBI agents who led the case, including the one FBI agent who was my main liaison throughout the entire thing.
And we're talking years at this point, who had been so lovely and empathetic and also balance that perfectly with professionalism. She was and continues to be a very calming presence. I met her and the prosecutor and the assistant prosecutor for the first time in person. I looked up who they were. So I sort of had an idea of what they looked like.
But of course, when you meet somebody in person, it's different than just seeing a photograph on a webpage. There were a number of people who attended the hearing. I was surprised about how many people there were. I want to say it was a couple dozen people, probably more. There were only a handful of people, if that, on the defendant's side of the room, including her defense attorney.
There were enough people on our side of the room that some people who were there for us had to sit on the defense's side of the room. At least a couple were from the ADL who were instrumental in elevating this case to the FBI's attention. After all the legwork that I did and my mom did, they really brought it to their attention.
I have my own thoughts and feelings about the ADL, but I am grateful that they were instrumental in that.
And for those who are less familiar, that's the Anti-Defamation League?
Yeah, which is an organization. One of their main purposes is to essentially elevate cases like ours, bring attention to those cases to the public. So the district attorney for the Southern District of Florida was actually also present during the hearing, which I was very surprised about.
This case had a certain level of prominence within that district, but I had no idea that the actual district attorney would be there. It was also just weird to adhere to social niceties. I never thought that I'd have to be like, hi, how are you doing before I had to give a victim impact statement. It contributed to the surrealness of it all. My mom had sent her victim impact statement to me.
I love my mom and she is a good writer too, but it was filled with a lot of anger, justifiably so. I knew that if the last words that the judge would hear were filled with that kind of anger and rage, I was worried that it would lose its effectiveness in terms of what we wanted, which was a fair and just sentencing. So I asked specifically if I could read my victim impact statement last.
I knew that I'd be able to be a little more even keeled, that even though on paper I might not be considered a primary victim, I wanted the judge and those that were there to understand this targeted campaign that she had engineered for nearly five years. and the ways in which it made my life smaller, and how it nearly destroyed the person that I am and the person that I can be.
What was incredibly hard about hearing her victim impact statement was that my mom quoted a number of the threats that the caller had levied against me. She quoted word for word the awful things that the caller had said, the threats that she had made against me. My mom also quoted them with the exact same cadence that she did.
So it was incredibly jarring not just to have to relive those moments while sitting in the courtroom, but also hear them in my mother's voice. That wasn't something that she intended, but it's something that still echoes in my head. During this entire months-long discovery phase, I was told that I could give a victim impact statement. I very much wanted to.
What I mourn the most and what I'm trying to grapple my way back to is I stopped writing. Writing was always something that was such a core part of me. I'm trying to piece by piece start to write again. The first real thing that I wrote of some significance or substance, at least to me, was the victim impact statement.
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When you're reading a victim impact statement, most of it, if not all of it, you need to direct to the court. The printout that I have in front of me is the one that I actually read in court. I'm here in court today, here in front of you, to make my existence absolute. On paper, I'm victim number three, but I am not an abstract. I'm not an idea.
I'm a proud Jew, a proud queer person, and a proud transmasculine and non-binary person. I bleed. I cry. I have a name. And I am here today to prove, despite the defendant's best attempts, that she has not erased me. When the calls started, my bones were already riddled with grief. There were days it seemed I could hardly stand.
It had been a scant few months since the Tree of Life synagogue shooting on October 27th, 2018, the worst anti-Semitic massacre on American soil. This was my synagogue. I knew the victims. They were the parents and grandparents of middle school friends, the familiar faces that greeted me at shul. Later, I heard stories from survivors.
One, a family friend, told me that after he had hidden in a bathroom and waited until the wild and brittle sound of gunfire ceased, he stepped out into a bright space and saw Cecil Rosenthal adrift in a pool of blood. My stepfather and mother would most likely have been there, if not for certain mitigating circumstances.
My stepfather running an errand for his mother, if my mother hadn't been scheduled to work. If not for that, they would have died too. As a writer and as a journalist, I knew how to process my sharp, immediate grief by speaking to family, to friends, to activists at rallies, to mourners at vigils, reporting all I saw and heard in the desperate attempt to make sense out of something nonsensical.
I remember with acuity the way my shoes hit the pavement, as if the fury of that act could leave a lasting imprint that archaeologists would discover centuries from now, who would understand my vibrant pain by the mere measurement of my footsteps.
After that work was done, after the cameras left, after it was understood that the synagogue once called Tree of Life would never be Tree of Life ever again, I fell into a fugue. I think I slept, but I can't remember. Law swaddled me in the morning and choked me at night. And then the calls came. I tell you this all today, in court, to put you in my shoes.
To give you insight into how bent and nearly broken I already was before the defendant entered our lives. My life. And from where I stand, the four years she spent keeping us in a prison of her own making was nothing less than an act of torture. Whatever her defense argues, what she did or did not know, I will say here and now, she knew that we were victims of terror, survivors of loss.
She knew enough. When I picked up my mother's call on that day in February, here is what she told me. My stepfather had received an alarming number of phone calls and voicemails. My stepfather and my mother listened to these voicemails. There were two commonalities.
These voicemails espoused violent anti-Semitism, acute and unwavering, and these voicemails addressed me, first and foremost, by my first name. Not by my byline, J.E. Reich, but by my first name, J. Per the timeline of the public record, I can only surmise that the defendant read work of mine that had been published in the immediate aftermath of the Tree of Life shooting.
What I know is that the essay that Vanity Fair asked me to write, the article which was published on October 29th, 2018, identified my stepfather not by name, but by his past role as the executive director of Tree of Life, a role which he held for well over two decades. The defendant knew my name, my first name, before she left her first messages. In my purview, there is a clear through line.
She did her research. She knew who I was. She took steps in order to destroy one of the only things I can truly claim, my name. Here is an image that haunts me. The defendant left messages on my stepfather's old answering machine in his office, nearly identical to those on his personal cell phone. Messages that were all directed towards me.
I picture his old office at Tree of Life, months after the shooting, the building abandoned and riddled with bullet holes, enveloped in dust. The defendant's voice from the answering machine echoing past the room, through the halls, a malevolent ghost drawing out my name and punctuating it with Jaime, with kike, desecrating what was once a home and killing the dead over and over and over again.
and, in turn, trying to destroy my stepfather, my mother, me. When my mother told me about these calls, those bald-faced threats, though to call them threats disservices their scope, their lethal harm, their guarantees of violence, my life fell apart again, but not all at once. As soon as I knew of the calls, I contacted the police and urged my mother to do the same.
For a little over a week following that initial report, a 24-hour police detail was placed outside of my apartment. At one point, a police officer knocked on my door and told me he had seen a white van drive up and down my narrow street. I thought it was the caller. I thought it was her, the defendant.
I thought I was going to die, that I would peek through the blinds and a bullet would enter my eye and ricochet through my brain, that this is how I leave the world, in fragments. That incident was a turning point. This was now my world. I feared going outside. My hands trembled if I stood near the front door. My breath rattled and my ribs felt made of lead.
The windows and blinds were perpetually closed, the air stale and listless inside. Even before this, I knew safety was never a guarantee. It isn't when you're part of a minority or a marginalized group. I'm a member of three. But now, the idea of safety had dissipated. It is yet to return. This is the thing. It never got better. Not really.
That week or two of security, a police car blocked down the block, I knew I was more alone than ever, and it would be that way for the rest of my life. The next day and the day after that and onwards and ever was a simple square on a calendar in the exacting shape of pain. I stopped speaking to friends because the entirety of it all seemed so absurd.
It seemed like fiction or a deranged cry for attention. Who could believe something that seemed so awful and unthinkable even to me who was living through it? My life became smaller. I lost my job shortly after I told my then-editor I'd have to step away to speak to investigators about what was happening.
And even though I relayed it plainly, sapped of emotion or subjectivity, I imagined they thought it was something I must have made up. A ruse rife with high drama. My life became smaller. I called the detectives assigned to the case with persistence, begging for updates. My calls were rarely returned. I tried to find a therapist to speak to, but the waitlists were months long.
My days were spent in my apartment, almost exclusively, and my life became smaller. My then-partner left me, and I couldn't blame them because I was a shuddering mess. I stopped reading, I stopped writing, and my life became smaller. I hardly moved from one room to another. I had panic attacks every day. My world became the size of the bed or the couch I barely left.
My life became the smallest of all. Then, after months, the calls seemingly stopped. I approached this new reality tentatively. Could it be over? Really? Was that all there is? In that all-too-brief interim, I envisioned a life I could go back to.
The one I used to have, one released from fear and the burden of explaining everything that had happened before, in which I didn't shut myself off from everything and everyone. One in which I wasn't afraid to go outside. One in which I didn't hear the defendant's voice in my head, drawing out my name in a teasing terror.
One in which she would never deliver the buckshot or fatal stab she always, always promised. In that time, I met my current partner, who is with me here today in solidarity and strength, and most importantly, love. I secured a job in my field. For a time, I began to write again.
I found a therapist after months of waiting and had space to truly articulate the ways in which I'd been confined in a prison of someone else's making. I began to talk to others about it, to share my story. I thought I could achieve a semblance of safety, if not safety itself, but I was wrong. To describe this defendant's second wave of abuse would be a futile exercise.
The impact of the hundreds of calls she made, of her own calculated volition, achieved the desired effect. If there's a week where I only have one panic attack, an episode in which it feels like my lungs collapse, that my chest seizes, that I think I'm going to die, if there's only one that week, that's a miracle.
If there's a morning I wake up and, as I make my morning tea, don't wonder as to whether it's the last cup I'll ever make, it's a blessing. I am a person who, in this moment, feels as if I'll never experience the feeling of relief. I think back to the day in March 2023 that I was informed she was arrested and how the news left me empty and numb.
When I walk out of the courtroom today, I will hope for relief. I will hope for justice. But I am afraid that the defendant has left me bereft of anything but an innate sense of survival. I mourn what she's taken from me. I mourn the person I think I was supposed to be, who I could have been. I want to direct my comments here to the defendant.
I have compassion, but I want you to understand the grief that lives in my bones, in my marrow. I wish you rehabilitation and to receive care for your mental health, but that does not cure antisemitism or bigotry. What cures bigotry is empathy. I want you to carry the words I say today and never forget them, and to find a sense of empathy from your own experiences as a marginalized person.
I want you to understand that this is the grief you have caused, deliberately, with forethought, with something worse than malice. You stalked me. You stalked my mother and my stepfather. You called my stepfather hundreds of times and invoked my name in equal number. You threatened my life. You threatened my mother's life. You threatened my stepfather's life. You called me a hymie.
You called me a kike. You relished the idea of beating my genitals black and blue. You fantasized about torturing my grandmothers and those who died at Tree of Life. You fantasized about shoving objects inside of my mother. You fantasized about shoving objects inside of me in exacting, horrifying detail. You fantasized about sexually assaulting me.
You fantasized about beheading me upside my genitals, quote unquote. You fantasized about burning us all in ovens. You scattered your words, but your messages were clear. While this can't be proven in a court of law, the depths of your research are evident. You found my full name, not my byline, but my full actual name, and decided to make that knowledge a point of terror. You wanted me to know.
You tried to convince me you had the power to extinguish me. My personhood. My identity. My soul. My name. To take that from someone is an act of exacting calculated depravity. I am standing here today to tell the court that I am not an abstract. I am not a ghost. I am a person. My heart is beating in my ears. My name is not victim number three. My name is Jay. I am a trans person.
I am a queer person. I am a Jew. I am here today, alive. My name is mine. And no one will ever take that away from me.
I just really appreciate you being willing to share it with everybody. And I'm just so sorry for everything you went through. And it's incredibly resilient and brave what you did. Wow, you're so talented at writing and I can't wait for your book. I'm going to be the first person to buy a copy. Thank you again for reading it. It was very moving. Oh, thank you.
It takes me back there. It feels painful, but it feels like an act of reclamation. It's like setting a broken bone. With healing comes pain.
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After the victim impact statements concluded, the prosecution had put together this horrible montage of the worst things that the caller had said in the myriad messages that she had left. I think it went on for between five to eight minutes. I had to sit in the courtroom while she was there and listen to her words echo throughout the chamber. At one point, I put my hands over my ears.
I didn't even realize I had done it. I remember my partner's hand on my thigh. That was my focal point until it was over. What was also very jarring, but at the same time fascinating, was hearing the defense give a statement. The entire purpose of his statement was the defense team believed that she should receive a lesser sentence.
I kind of knew what his argument was going to be and what his statement would entail because I had received documentation from our attorneys regarding their argument. The foundation of his argument was a hodgepodge of her mental health, which correlation does not equal causation. I understand still why that was important for her attorney to bring up.
I know he was just doing his job, but he really towed the line. And at points, it did veer into excuse territory. What was also fascinating was that some of the claims that he made were factually false. I don't think it was on purpose and I don't think he was trying to pull the wool over anybody's eyes. He talked about a condition that she dealt with and the way he framed it.
The gist is horrible migraines can contribute to a deterioration of your mental health in a certain capacity, but it does not make you an anti-Semitic asshole. There was one point where he cited a medical incident that her mother had undergone. He framed it as something that's a chronic condition, when in actuality, it isn't.
Again, I don't think he was trying to mislead or manipulate anyone in the courtroom. I think he actually didn't realize that it wasn't a chronic condition. It felt a little insulting to pretend these things would cause somebody to enact such catastrophic harm on not just one person, but multiple people.
There was a data set that he had cobbled together, a little over a dozen cases, but we weren't given any context as to what those cases were. In the documents we received, there weren't even footnotes with which cases these were. They also spanned a number of states.
Obviously, I'm not diminishing how horrible those kinds of cases can be, but if they're only just tenuously connected and we don't understand the context of each of those individual cases, you can't really say, and they only received a 12-month sentence with time served. It was a weird reach.
He also invoked the Parkland shooting and what happened to the family or the parents of one of the kids who died. Basically, a guy had created a website that was meant to target the parents and family of one of the victims. He sent a number of messages via email to her parents and targeted them. So I could see how it was somewhat similar. The shooting at Parkland happened on February 14th, 2018.
And then the Tree of Life shooting happened on October 27th of the same year. It was hard to listen to that. The judge heard both statements from the prosecution and statements from the defense, then declared a recess, which wasn't super long. And this was a lovely act of kindness. As a transmasculine, non-binary person, I wanted to go to the bathroom.
During the recess, I was really worried about what bathroom to use. I don't pass as cis, which is not something that I particularly want for myself anyway. But it can make my life harder in certain ways. Like doing something as simple and gross and embarrassing in private as going to the bathroom. I just want to like pee and wash my hands and leave.
So in a state like Florida, I really have to worry about how I go about doing something as simple and stupid as that. I asked the FBI agent who had been my main point of contact where the bathroom was. She's obviously been to this courthouse multiple times. She directed me as to where they were. And she said, I want you to know we're in a federal building. So you use whatever bathroom you want.
You're going to be OK if somebody tries to mess with you. You come to me directly and I'll deal with it. But I just want to make sure that you feel as safe and comfortable as you possibly can while you're here, especially today. I have so much anxiety about doing something as human as going to the bathroom. It should be something that frankly is nobody's business.
Like, I don't want to know what you do in the bathroom either. But it was such a reassuring and wonderful moment.
Sometimes the simplest gestures carry the biggest weight.
They really do. After the recess concluded, we filed back into the courtroom and the caller was given a chance to give her own statement to the court. She looked so ordinary because she had loomed so large in my imagination.
Thank you so much for listening to today's episode. Next week on What Came Next...
In her prepared statement, she gave an apology to my mom and my stepdad and called them by name and did not mention me. The statement was only a few sentences long. I was situated in one of the front rows in the courtroom. I was to the right. She was on the left side of the room. I never got to really see her face. She never looked back towards our side of the room.
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A few miles from the glass spires of midtown Atlanta lies the South River Forest. In 2021 and 2022, the woods became a home to activists from all over the country who gathered to stop the nearby construction of a massive new police training facility, nicknamed Cop City.
At approximately 9 o'clock this morning, as law enforcement was moving through various sectors of the property, an individual, without warning, shot a Georgia State Patrol trooper.
This is We Came to the Forest, a story about resistance.
The abolitionist mission isn't done until every prison is empty and shut down.
Love and fellowship. It was probably the happiest of everybody in my life. And the lengths we'll go to protect the things we hold closest to our hearts. Follow We Came to the Forest on the Wondery app or wherever you get your podcasts. You can binge all episodes of We Came to the Forest early and ad-free right now by joining Wondery+.