I'm Ann Bocock and welcome to "Between The Covers."

My guest today is author Julia Dahl.

She's written three books in the Rebecca Roberts series "Conviction" "Run you down" and "Invisible City," which was a multi award-winning novel, and also a finalist for the Edgar Award.

Julia is a former crime reporter for "CBS" and the "New York Post" and her latest book "The Missing Hours" is a standalone.

It's a fast paced crime novel about sexual assault, privilege, justice and vengeance.

The "New York Times" called the "Missing Hours," a great reckoning with the moment we find ourselves in.

Julia, it's a pleasure to meet you, thank you for being here today.

Thank you for having me.

I can't wait to get into this book, so we're just gonna go for it right now.

This book... Well, first of all, I read it in one sitting and it kept me up and I'm gonna start with Claudia because here she is, she's a New York college student.

She wakes up to discover that she is the victim of a sexual assault.

Now, I'm gonna let you take it from here because we're not gonna spoil the plot.

But tell me who Claudia is.

So Claudia is a young woman, a very sort of New York, fabulous young woman.

She's about 19, she's wealthy, she's privileged.

Her parents are sort of famous and she's had a pretty easy life from the outside.

She's got a ton of social media followers, she's very beautiful, she's very... She's the kind of girl that's kind of easy to hate these days.

She posts pictures of herself in a bikini on Instagram and that kind of thing.

And she's a student at NYU, a freshmen, and basically she wakes up one morning and she is very hung over and she knows from what's going on with her body that she's been assaulted, but she has no idea what happens.

And the book is the story of her trying to figure out what happened and then trying to deal with it.

And really it's also the story of her family and her friends and sort of the ripple affects that this one act of violence on her has... Not just on her, but her friends, her family, her community, and the people who actually perpetrated the violence.

I have to say that Claudia is an interesting choice of victim because here is this, as you said, beautiful, wealthy girl that everyone knows.

She's not always likable, she certainly not always relatable, but then I started thinking, but she's still a victim.

So as an author was this tricky?

And I love that you did this because terrible things have happened to someone who mostly but would say is unsympathetic.

You did that on purpose, correct?

I did, I really did.

This book sort of comes out of a story I covered when I was a reporter at "CBS News" back in 2012, actually, out of Steubenville, Ohio long story short, it was a case out of Steubenville, Ohio where a young woman, a teenager high school student went to a party, was sexually assaulted.

She blacked out, drank too much blacked out, was sexually assaulted.

And the boys and some of the other people at the party took pictures and video of it.

And I covered that story and more than a year long sort of aftermath and court case, and I couldn't stop thinking about this young woman and what it must have been like for her to have this experience that she doesn't remember, but that all these other people have been privileged to.

They can see the pictures of her in the most humiliating, low moment of her life.

So the book in some ways starts with that.

That was the inspiration was I wanted to write about someone and what that would do to them and to their families.

But I also, after many years as a crime reporter, sort of understood the sad truth of the way the media and really society looks at victims of assault and sexual assault.

And that is that there was sort of the good clean victim, the housewives who gets kidnapped and killed.

She's gonna get the big Dateline special, but the single mom who, maybe has been homeless or has a drug problem.

If she disappears and gets kidnapped or murdered, she's not gonna be on "CBS News," frankly.

So I wanted to write about a young woman who wasn't that sympathetic, because I don't think you have to be a perfect person to A be safe in your own body and B get justice.

And I really wanted to challenge the reader to sort of look at Claudia and be like, yeah, there are a lot of things about Claudia I don't like that much, right.

But what happened to her was wrong.

And she still deserves justice because most people who are the victims of sexual assault, frankly often have been drinking or using some kind of drugs or not perfect, right.

But that doesn't mean that they deserved what happened to them.

So I really wanted to challenge readers to sort of face that.

And it did, it certainly did challenge our own biases as readers.

But the term that you just used, the journalistic one, I guess in the newsrooms, clean victim, that's that says a lot, if that's the way it's talked about.

So, its just one of those sorts of ugly things that happens, it's almost like reporter humor is a little like cop humor, gallows humor, doctor humor, right?

Where all day when I was a crime reporter, it was just bad news, after bad news, after bad news.

And you sometimes have to guard yourself against that.

And humor is one way you use it and or you do that.

And, editors would talk about, a clean victim, dirty victim, right.

And it's just it's so... and it really has ripple effects about in terms of who gets covered, who gets considered a real victim, as opposed to somebody who should have known better.

As long as there have been college campuses, honestly, there have been sexual assault on college campuses.

What makes this so much more horrendous is social media.

Social media is a life force with college age.

Anyone who has a teenager knows they spend their life on social media.

And this is a double assault because not only is Claudia assaulted, the crime is recorded and posted on social media.

I want you to talk about the impact of this in the story and why you chose social media really, as the glue that puts everything together here.

Yeah, I mean, I knew that if I was gonna tell this story, I mean, again, harking back to that story in 2012, what was so egregious about that assault in Ohio was not just that it was an assault, but that pictures were taken in spread around.

And again, that sense that she doesn't remember what happened, but there's images that the whole world can see.

And that idea I couldn't get out of my head, the idea that everywhere she went for the rest of her life, she would never know if someone she was meeting had seen her like that.

And the fear and the trauma that that... And it's like constantly being victimized.

And that's what that sort of social media and for Claudia, the threat that this video is gonna go viral is this, the fear of that is so acute it's like a constant trauma.

It's constantly being traumatized and that's just happening all the time.

I mean, I wrote so many stories when I was a reporter at CBS about what's called revenge porn, right.

And that's not even videos of assault, but intimate videos or pictures that maybe you took with your boyfriend, well, then you break up and he posts them online, right.

That's happening and that kind of... And what's interesting about that is that the law is having a hard time catching up with that.

Stuff is going on in our society around social media, that legislatures kind of don't know how to deal with yet.

And so, I remember reporting about people who would go to the police and say, "Look somebody's spreading this picture of me around."

And the police would say, "It's not illegal, there's nothing I can do about it."

And the trauma of that was something that I felt like if I'm gonna write a story about today and that I really like to write as sort of authentic and of now stories as I can, that social media had to be a part of it in part, because that's who Claudia is.

So many people her age exactly as you said, live online, they have entire worlds and personas online.

So having that turned back on her is something that's really that she has to deal with in a way that she really didn't understand before.

You also took a little jab act TV reality shows because Claudia was burned in the media for past behaviors.

So that was interesting and quite on target.

You write in this book from several different perspectives and men get a lot of space, which I thought was pretty interesting.

Was it a challenge for you to write from a male perspective?

Oh, that's such a great question.

It was actually in a way, I think the most fun for me, and I really wanted to write a couple pieces from the male perspective, because for me, a lot of this book was about the difficulty involved.

It actually came from a conversation I had with my husband years ago, where we were talking about just growing up and sort of what it was like when we were teenagers and discovering our sexuality and how to deal with men and women.

And I remember him saying to me that he as a teenager would be confused about what women, what girls wanted from him.

Because sometimes, he was told to be a gentleman, hold their hand, bring flowers, open the door.

But then a lot of the girls just really liked the bad boys who didn't treat them that well.

So he was confused about like, well what am I supposed to be for this, in order to get the girl and that stuck with me a lot.

And I really wanted to write about that kind of confusion that young men can have where the character of Trevor, who's sort of the friend in this, that kind of bumps into Claudia early in the book and tries to help her.

He has a good heart and he wants to help her.

He recognize this very clearly something is terrible has happened to her and he wants to be there for her, but at the same time, he really wants to hook up with her.

He can't help that he is attracted to her.

And I really wanted to explore that conflict within a young man, right.

Who's sort of coming into his own sexually and sees a woman who has put herself out there sexually.

What is she saying with that, and what is he hearing with that?

So I really wanted the male perspective, but I also really love a book where we get to hear from the bad guys, just as a lot of times I've always thought as a writer, that I want to write a book that I wanna read, right.

And one of the things I love about not a novel, especially if it's a mystery of thriller I write, is hearing from the bad guy.

And there are several bad guys in this book, but I wanted to give them a voice, not to excuse their behavior, but people who do bad things, aren't just born evil, right?

There's reasons that people end up making really terrible choices.

And I wanted to give at least a glimpse into sort of what created these people.

And I also really wanted to show how violence affects the perpetrators.

The guys who did this are not like just getting off scot-free even if they don't get to jail, what they've done will follow them and their families for a long time and I really wanted to explore that.

Oh, besides Trevor, you do have probably the worst father and son combo with Ridley and Chad, this is the worst side of privilege and money, and very well done, so thank you for that.

Most sexual assaults are never reported and Claudia is wise enough to know that even if it's reported, it's very unlikely they would ever be a conviction.

Tell me about the impact on her in this story, how that colors what she does?

Yeah, I mean, that's another thing that was really important to me in telling the story is that even Claudia who is wealthy and privileged and white and educated, even she knows that it is very unlikely she would get sort of quote, unquote justice for having been sexually assaulted when she was intoxicated.

She knew that so few people actually get justice for this crime that even with her privilege, nobody was gonna believe her.

And even if they believe that she didn't basically put herself in the position to allow this to happen, they wouldn't really care.

They would be like too bad.

And, she knows that, she's savvy enough to know that because I think sadly and terribly, a lot of young women know that today.

We know people, friends, relatives who have been sexually assaulted, and who've maybe attempted to go to the police or go to the school.

And they've been retraumatized by the way they were treated as if it was their fault.

What were you wearing?

how much did you drink?

Where did you go?

Why were you there alone?

She knows that that's gonna happen to her and she doesn't wanna subject yourself to it.

And so she kind of takes matters into her own hands.

And that was part of what I wanted to do with this book was take a woman who knew that she couldn't go to the authorities.

So what does she do?

And you have to read the book to find out what she does Dahl, you dedicated this book to your sister, and there is a very strong relationship in this book between Claudia and her sister.

And the bigger story is what happens when there is an assault, what happens to the whole family.

Tell me about that.

So and that's funny because of the book is so much about sexual assault and about privilege that a lot of times I don't end up getting to talk about the fact that it's also a book about sisters.

And what I wanted to do in this book with the sisterhood and with Claudia's family is to show that a lot of times with our family and people we love, we end up letting them down.

Claudia, basically, and you know this in the first two paragraphs or two chapters of the book, Claudia wakes up, she realizes something terrible has happened.

She lost her phone and basically what she misses is her sister giving birth.

They've been waiting and waiting, her sister's pregnant.

She was supposed to be there at the birth.

And she misses it because she was assaulted and lost her phone in the assault and her sister is angry.

Because she assumed... She doesn't know what happened, She assumed Claudia just went out and got drunk, lost her phone and she missed this most important moment of my life.

And because of that anger, and because she's sort of thinking about herself in that time, she misses that Claudia really needs her right now.

And Claudia sort of senses that and doesn't reach out.

And there's a lot of my books are about sort of the perils of misunderstanding and of lack of communication.

And in this book, the sisters sort of finally, they love each other but they have let each other down a lot.

And I want to, in this book to talk about sort of the idea of it being important to give the people you love a break sometimes, they're gonna screw up, they're gonna let you down, but give them a break.

Maybe something's going on you don't know.

And this is also, Claudia's family is really...

I mean, her parents were both sort of famous.

Her mother used to be a model, her father is a music producer.

They were rarely around when she was young.

So she really had... She and her sister had to raise themselves sort of, but I wanted to the impact of an assault like this on a family and how it can both tear them apart and bring them together.

So that sort of family unit was also something that I was interested in writing about.

That's I think what would hit me the most is that yes, this is book is a thriller it's crime fiction, but it's the story about the effect that violent crime has on the entire family, there is more than one victim.

You are writing from a college age point of view, and there is such crisp, authentic dialogue.

And the movements of the characters are what college kids do.

Now Granted, I guess you're getting a little help because you're also a professor of journalism at NYU.

So was that a plus for writing about college kids?

It's a good question, I actually started writing the book before I started teaching at NYU, but yes, and college looms pretty large in my psyche.

It was like for so many people was such a formative time.

And I remember, I think now I look at my students and they these seem so young, they're 18, 19 20.

And I thought I was a grown person then.

And, but I think back to some of the things I did, and there were times when I got way too drunk and couldn't get myself home, had I not had a trustworthy friend there or something.

And thinking back to that time and how many mistakes I made and then I look at my students now, and I think, especially with social media.

You make those mistakes and everybody knows, and that compounds things.

And I just, I can't say how thankful I am that Facebook was not around when I was 19, right.

But yeah, I feel like I've learned, I learned so much from my students.

Being a crime reporter for almost two decades can make you into a pretty cynical person, but starting the last couple of years as a college professor it has made me a much more hopeful person.

The students in my classes are amazing people.

They're so much more sort of open-minded and seem just much more interested in the world than I think I was at that time.

And I really feel almost like a hope for our world that these kids really might make it a little bit better.

I love that you used the word hopeful, and you are teaching journalism at NYU.

What do your students want to do in journalism?

Oh, what a good question.

They all, most of them are... they think of themselves as storytellers and they want to tell the stories of people that they feel like haven't had their stories told.

They come from all walks of life I have students from so many countries I can't even tell you.

And from people who, are first-generation Americans to people who've gone to fancy private schools, but they all feel like the media is sort of a mess right now, which I think it is, right.

And a lot of them wanna get back to basics, write their essays about things that they've done.

A lot of them are really interested in things like data visualization, not even a term I heard of 10 years ago, but sort of creating graphics to show how COVID is being experienced in different communities and what the latest census numbers show.

They're just really excited about the idea of telling people's stories.

And that's what I think of myself as, and that's what a lot of journalists I know think of themselves as, as a story-tellers and whether they're writers or filmmakers or audio producers.

It's all about trying to sort of shine a light on dark places and share that with the world.

Thank you for answering that and now you've given me hope.

So a double thank you on that.

Your previous books had Rebecca Roberts and you had a series of books with her in the Hasidic community.

And it's interesting, I don't know if this is a stretch on my part, but I see one parallel between those stories and this book, and that's because both the Orthodox community and Claudia choose to keep everything private.

Am I trying to find a thread here?

Can you buy that?

Totally, I have never not thought about that, but it's true and it's completely true, and I think for different reasons.

Well, maybe even for the same reason.

The Hasidic community keeping sort of bad things in the fold is in some ways, because it's one of the reasons the Hasidic community lives in this sort of cloistered world the way that they do is because they are literally trying to repopulate the 6 million Jews who were murdered in the Holocaust, right?

And so they want to have lots of children and they want to bring them up in a very Jewish tradition.

But there's this, and because of what happened in the Holocaust, the Hasidic community lives with a friend of mine who he grew up in that community, talked about a mass post-traumatic stress disorder.

That basically they're all living with this, the Holocaust has been something that they live every day.

This feeling that at any moment, our non-Jewish neighbors could turn on us and do what their German neighbors did to them.

And so there's a sense that we wanna keep anything bad away from other eyes, because we don't wanna give anybody any excuse to think more badly about us as Jews, right.

Understandable and I think for Claudia, she's a savvy young woman.

She gets that there are a lot of people out there who don't like her, right.

Who thinks she's...

I'm not gonna use the ugly word, but she thinks she's loose and flip.

And, she's one of those, like, reality TV show girls that you that's so easy to hate.

She's rich, she's skinny, she's wearing a bikini all the time, it's easy to not like her and she gets that.

She gets that if she says I was raped, most people are gonna be like, you asked for it.

And so she wants to keep it private because she realizes that people are not gonna look kindly on her if something bad happened to her and she also feels shame, she drank too much, way too much, so much that she blacked out.

Now, I don't think that that means that she deserve to be sexually assaulted, but a lot of people sort of think, well, what did she expect?

I mean, way too many people absolutely still think that, I know people who would shrug their shoulders and say, what did she expect?

Well, I don't think she expected to be raped and I don't think she should have expected that.

Well for your fans, tell me that there's going to be another Rebecca Roberts spoke in the works, perhaps.

There was not another Rebecca Roberts' book in the works.

Not yet, I think I will definitely write another Rebecca Roberts' book someday.

But as a writer, when you're writing a book, it's all day, every day, you're thinking about it all the time.

You're writing all the time, it's your whole brain, other than your family.

And I wrote about Rebecca for 10 years.

So I wanted to have other people in my brain, I was interested in other people.

And that's why I wrote the "Missing Hours" and the book I'm working on now, I am working on another book it should be out probably early 2024 maybe late next year but it does have a reporter in it.

It's a book about a small town.

It's about basically a young woman is found dead and it's a book about her family.

I think the tagline or the way we sold it, my agents sold it was that it's "Everything I Never Told You" meets town.

So it's sort of a family drama with murder.

But one of the main character is a reporter, a small town reporter.

So I'm getting back to writing about journalism because I love writing journalism.

Well, this book is the "Missing Hours," It's a dark thriller, and it has been a pleasure, Julia Dahl to get to know you and have you here.

Thank you so much.

Thank you.

I'm Ann Bocock, please connect with us.

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