Episode 13, epilogue: “Your questions answered”

JOSH BAKER:

Hello. Today we've got something different for you. We're going to answer questions that you've been sending us since the series finished, and to help me with this is Dr. Julia Shaw. She's a criminal psychologist and presenter of the awesome Bad People podcast on BBC Science, and Bad People is all about dissecting criminal cases that shock and intrigue us — cases like Sam's. So, this is I'm Not A Monster from BBC Panorama and FRONTLINE (PBS). I'm Josh Baker.

Julia, before we begin, do you want to tell us a little bit about yourself? Because I think when we hear the term "criminal psychologist," it's something we probably know as a phrase, but what actually is that? What does that involve?

JULIA SHAW:

It can involve very different things. So I have done some training specifically on the issue of memory and interviews and interrogations. So how to ask people the right questions that aren't leading or suggestive, for example.

JOSH BAKER:

You should be training me.

JULIA SHAW:

[Laughs] I often think this about journalists. [Laughs] So that's one option. Some people work directly with offenders or with people in prisons, for example. Other people, like myself, do more research. So as much as I work with the police occasionally, or military, to train them, I mostly do academic research and write about memory and false memory and why people do bad things.

JOSH BAKER:

I mean, that's kind of apt given the topic that we're covering, I think.

JULIA SHAW:

So I think it's really easy to "other" people and to pretend that we would never do the kinds of things that quote-unquote "bad people" or people we might label "evil" or "monsters" — I mean, your show, the whole title is sort of playing on this exact idea, right? It's I'm Not A Monster. But I'm sure lots of people think she is, or that people like Sam are. So I think that there is a lot to be said for thinking about why people do bad things and how those people can be ourselves.

JOSH BAKER:

I suppose actually as well, thinking about it with all of that and your background, you probably had a slightly different take on I'm Not A Monster, I'm guessing.

JULIA SHAW:

So I've actually listened to it a few times —

JOSH BAKER:

I'm honored. Thank you.

JULIA SHAW:

— [Laughs] and I think for me, the characters do paint a complicated picture of what happened, and I think that's quite realistic and quite rarely done. And so I like that you've introduced and talked to so many different kinds of people who don't tell a consistent story in some ways, because that is their reality. And that is — that's the person they knew, and that's the story they heard and that they experienced. And maybe there is some distortion going in there. Maybe intentional, maybe unintentional.

So I think that there's just a lot of things that this brings up in terms of so many people could potentially have seen some red flags and yet maybe didn't take steps when they could have, but also that lots of people just wouldn't have known. And so I think that that's just really interesting.

JOSH BAKER:

I think it's funny, isn't it? Because what you touched upon there is the sort of — the complexity of the contributors and the narrative, and I suppose for narrative that's a great thing, because it allows you to tell a compelling story. But I think the other side of it, when you were saying that, I sort of remembered my teammate Joe and I, the amount of head-desk moments where it's like, these stories don't make any sense journalistically, everyone's contradicting each other, how on earth are we going to find these facts? How on earth are we going to find the truth in this, because everyone is so inconsistent?

JULIA SHAW:

In cases that I work on as an expert witness, it's the same. It's like, I'm not looking for truth; I'm just looking for whether this evidence is high quality or low quality, and then accordingly, whether that person potentially should be convicted of a crime, for example. Looking at evidence. And that's what you do is you look at all the evidence and you realize [laughs] that it's really difficult to find the sense of truth.

JOSH BAKER:

I've gone massively off script here, haven't I? Or topic.

JULIA SHAW:

So have I. I mean, we haven't even really started, have we? OK. One of my big questions, and that a lot of listeners share with me, is, "What did you think of Sam?"

JOSH BAKER:

So I found Sam really intriguing. She's certainly a very captivating person to talk to. You can enjoy her company. You can enjoy being in her presence. But also, she is undoubtedly trying to deceive you a lot of the time. And she's doing it very politely and very entertainingly. And it's — I think it's like lying by omission as a concept, and that was very difficult to deal with. At times as well I had this other set of emotions, of being conscious that this was somebody that potentially knowingly took her children into an environment that would cause immense damage. So it's almost a reflection of Sam's personality, how I feel about her. It's the whole array of emotion and feeling.

JULIA SHAW:

So you say she was undoubtedly lying at times.

JOSH BAKER:

Yeah.

JULIA SHAW:

What gave you that feeling?

JOSH BAKER:

I don't know why this came into my head, but I remember when we were trawling through I don't even know how many pages of court documents, just endlessly trawling through them. And we came across — apparently Sam had said to the FBI that she was going to Morocco for knee surgery that was going to be performed by her father-in-law.

JULIA SHAW:

Who was not a surgeon, right?

JOSH BAKER:

No, he was an engineer. I just — I remember reading this, and it was very late, and we were very tired, and I just broke because it was just like, "Where are we at with these lies now?" They're so far and in every aspect of her life, like she's trying to reach and find something and just — yeah.

But what I typically try and do is interview somebody over the same set of questions over a longer period of time. And you start to see patterns emerge, like, OK, they are completely consistent here, but here we're getting new information, or here this doesn't match at all. And with Sam, the more I spoke to her, the more narratives developed, which again was interesting narratively, but journalistically, as a fact-checking thing, there's a reason this took four years to pull off.

The thing that I also had to be conscious of is that when I was interviewing Sam, this was being done under the supervision of her captors or her jailers, and that certainly has a bearing on what she can and can't say. So I know at one point she did want to tell me about her work for the FBI before she left, but she was fearful to do it in the environment she was in because she didn't want the Kurdish militia who were holding her to see her as a spy, because that would have been bad for her. But there's so many factors in there when you interview someone.

JULIA SHAW:

There are, and picking up on people's emotions and paying attention to their body language, in that sense, it makes a lot of sense. And making sure that you are sensitive to the circumstances and the environmental factors that we also often underplay or don't think about unless we're paying attention to it on purpose.

Let me read another comment from a listener. So this one's from Tom: "I was interested in my own reactions. Sam is in many ways a warm and likable person. My feeling was of somebody who reinvents herself for every person she meets. I didn't find her story about how she ended up in ISIS credible, but I do believe that she didn't make a fully formed decision about it either." What do you think about that?

JOSH BAKER:

I think that adaptability — able to read your circumstance, able to change, able to placate, able to be subservient, but also not so subservient that you can be dominated — probably kept them alive in Raqqa, because every conversation you have there could get you killed. So I think, yes, Sam is adaptable. Yes, Sam can change her personality to some degree — well, not necessarily her personality, but she can change her manner of being depending on the circumstance she's in. I think that's what I would say on that. What do you think?

JULIA SHAW:

I think there's a concept from sociology that applies here, which is that we all wear many masks, and I think which mask you're putting on at any given moment is context-dependent, and it depends on who you want to present yourself as or need to be in a certain situation. And with Sam, we see that as well, and it's maybe more extreme because her circumstances are more extreme than for most of us.

Another question that many of your listeners have been asking is how Matthew is doing. Are you still in touch with him and his dad?

JOSH BAKER:

I am. I spoke to his dad on Christmas Day, actually. Matthew is doing really well. He is massively into outdoor activities like his dad is, and last I heard he seems pretty happy. I know also a lot of people from tweets I've received want to know does he have contact with his siblings? He absolutely does. As far as I'm aware, I think he was staying with his grandfather and his siblings about three or four weeks ago. So they see each other semiregularly. Those kids are growing up really healthily as well. Got sent some pictures the other day. I have regular contact with most of the contributors in the series. So, yeah, no, they're doing really well.

JULIA SHAW:

And given that you obviously spent quite a lot of time talking to Sam and learning her story, are you still in touch? Do you know how she's doing?

JOSH BAKER:

After Sam was convicted she was transferred from the prison where I had very easy contact with her through I think it was two other prisons. And there was a period of "Which prison is she in? Where's she gone?" kind of thing and trying to work out where it was, because there's very little notice to her being transferred. And I briefly managed to exchange some messages with Sam, and she wanted to speak to me and I wanted to speak to her, but then she was transferred again before I got a chance to do that. So since she's been in the prison that she's currently held in, I've not been able to speak to her.

JULIA SHAW:

Do you know what the status is of her case at the moment?

JOSH BAKER:

So she, I think, will have probably at least three more years in prison. But my understanding is that she's having quite a tough time in prison.

JULIA SHAW:

In terms of the prosecutors, I thought it was really interesting that they basically said that her interest in or beliefs regarding ISIS kind of didn't matter and that what mattered is that she intentionally committed crimes, basically; that she knew what she was doing and that she did bad things. How do you feel about the question as to whether or not she believed in the ideology that ISIS was promoting?

JOSH BAKER:

I could not find any evidence that Sam ideologically supported ISIS, be that speaking to neighbors in Raqqa, be that speaking to the young people who were basically Sam's slaves. There is nothing to suggest that Sam subscribed to ISIS's extremist ideology.

There are other things in Sam's personality that could have taken her on this journey. We know that she has a long history of being a thrill-seeker, seeking out extreme events, extreme experiences. We know that she can be very materialistic. She likes money. She likes the things that come with that. And again, it comes back to Sam is just this very complex character that you can't put neatly into a box.

JULIA SHAW:

Do you think, however, that given the actions that she's pled guilty to, which would have or did support terrorism, do you think it matters that she didn't believe the ideology?

JOSH BAKER:

No. I think the other thing that's really important to remember is that ISIS did some absolutely abhorrent things. And on a personal level, you know, it has had a profound impact on me, spending time with people like Suad, the young girl who was held in slavery by Sam and Moussa, and others like her who really survived some horrific things. And also, you know, every day for the rest of my life I will have shrapnel working its way out of my body from an ISIS suicide bombing. So I'm very personally acquainted with what this organization did, and I never really forget that.

So I think undoubtedly Sam's actions, when you look at it in a legal setting, contributed to providing financial support and allowing people to join a group that committed genocide. And that has to be addressed, and it has been. What interests me more as a journalist or a storyteller is the "why." How did that happen? Why did that happen? And that's something that I don't think the legal context or the legal basis really factors as much as we are able to, perhaps, in our profession.

JULIA SHAW:

Yeah, I think that's right. Here's a comment from Melissa: "I'm curious to hear more about Sam. Toward the end we hear from Moussa's ex-girlfriends. They clearly state how abusive he was, whether it be emotionally, physically or both. I was once in an emotionally abusive relationship. I completely agree with these women, where Sam, being under Moussa's thumb, would absolutely go along with it. It's so hard to imagine going to Syria with my children, but I can completely empathize knowing the relationship she must have been in."

JOSH BAKER:

I think Sam's relationship with Moussa played a pivotal role. She was certainly in an abusive relationship. There is no doubt to me in my mind. I'm going to paraphrase here, but the judge clearly felt conflicted, because Sam had certainly broken the law and was guilty of some crimes, but he also simultaneously felt that if it wasn't for the actions of her husband, she wouldn't be in the courtroom. That was his feeling on the balance of all the evidence that he'd seen. I think what is difficult to excuse or comprehend is that she made a decision that fundamentally caused great harm to her children and put their lives at risk, and I think for a lot of people, that's where they start to lose empathy with Sam.

JULIA SHAW:

It is interesting how if you make a bad decision that affects just yourself, it's seen a certain way. And then as soon as you involve particularly vulnerable people like children, it just completely changes the equation from the outside, but maybe not from the inside. So I guess what I'm trying to say is that with or without a child, she may have made the same decision, but from the outside it looks worse because she had a child.

JOSH BAKER:

But I'm also curious to know what you make of Sam.

JULIA SHAW:

I don't know what I make of Sam. I think —

JOSH BAKER:

Are you saying you don't know because you don't want to answer, or —

JULIA SHAW:

I don't believe that she knew as little as she says about where she was going and who was going to be there. I believe that she was almost certainly pressured to go and probably miss-sold what that future would be like and that that had a profound influence on her decisions. I think that as much as intimate partner violence and pressure and coercion are important factors to consider, it's not enough to explain the behaviors and the crimes that she committed, and I think she is very much responsible for finding herself in the situation did.

And it feels like she had a lot of moments where she probably could have found an out and not gone. I mean, to go was much more difficult than to not go, and I think that matters. As in to go to another country, to lie to lots of people about where she was going, to take out money, to transfer things, to —that's a lot of work. You're doing a lot of actions. This isn't an inactive person who was taken somewhere. This is a lot of actions on her part as well, and that is harder to explain by a complete lack of agency and circumstance alone than inaction would have been.

JOSH BAKER:

It's a great summation.

JULIA SHAW:

Did you ever have ethical concerns about platforming Sam's version of the story?

JOSH BAKER:

Yeah, certainly there's a fine line to tread. I think one of the things that we don't do enough of as a society is listen to our monsters, if you will, or hear and try to learn and understand. And obviously that has to be done with a large amount of sifting through the bullshit, but there's something to be said for being able to just hear somebody. You don't have to agree with them, but just hear what they have to say and then go from there.

JULIA SHAW:

I think a lot of people would disagree with you.

JOSH BAKER:

They're welcome to.

JULIA SHAW:

So, another message from a listener. This one's from Henry, and Henry asks, "One thing that has stuck with me since the early episodes is Sam's response — her composure and attitude when talking to Josh about the extremely traumatic and stressful experiences she and her children went through. When describing her several weeks of torture while eight months' pregnant, being kept in a cell, watching her child being forced to build bombs, seeing young girls be repeatedly raped by her husband and living in a shower of bombs, she sounds calm and collected. There's no sense of distress, disbelief, pain or trauma in recalling those events. Have you consulted any experts on psychology or trauma to unpack Sam's attitude?"

JOSH BAKER:

There's multiple parts to the answer to that. I think if we don't see somebody breaking down and crying lots when they're talking about something traumatic, we tend to think, "Oh, what's going on here?" This doesn't fit with our preconceived ideas of how people talk about trauma, right? And I have no doubt in my mind when I covered some of these topics with Sam that she was upset, that she was hurting, that she was indeed traumatized. As we know, she was also at times trying to deceive me. That goes without saying. But I think it's a very difficult and dangerous thing to just judge somebody on the composure that they may have when talking about a traumatic event.

JULIA SHAW:

I think that everyone processes trauma very differently, of course, and some people might break down. And sometimes the same person can also have very different displays of emotion about the same story at different times to different people in different contexts.

JOSH BAKER:

That's a really good point.

JULIA SHAW:

And so I think expecting one person to be over it because they one time recall it calmly and then assuming that they must have been lying if they then break down the next time I think is also problematic. So I think we — there's phases of processing things, and we all go through our own journey. But I think you're absolutely right in terms of interpreting how people present in legal settings or in interviews. There is an expectation, which is completely unfounded, that people who are traumatized must constantly be crying and despairing. It's something we've actually covered on Bad People.

JOSH BAKER:

There was something else at the end of that question, wasn't there?

JULIA SHAW:

"Have you consulted any experts on psychology or trauma?"

JOSH BAKER:

Yeah. Obviously, the thing is about the story, it's not just Sam, is it? It's the children. It's all the people around it. The people from the Yazidi community in Iraq. I'm lucky that I have quite a lot of training in dealing with people with trauma. But even so, what we were very conscious of with this series was to get in a lot of independent voices. Now, that ranged from having an independent clinical psychologist who would look at things we were doing and determine where the boundaries were; a plethora of child safeguarding experts; or somebody that ran a domestic abuse charity.

And I suppose one of the things that we were most concerned about is a) whether it was right to interview Matthew, and if it was, how we would go about doing that in a way that would be safe for him. It sort of took place actually over more than a year of preparation for that interview, and constant review as to whether we were going to do it or not, with the family, with his father, with Matthew, but also, crucially, with an independent clinical psychologist — not only ahead of time, but afterwards, to see whether we could even broadcast it. So I think having those expert voices is in terms of training you how to do your job better, but also having that step back and that independent oversight is crucial.

JULIA SHAW:

In the last episode we heard from Iraq, how Ayham and Suad are doing, and some people wanted to know whether they're getting counseling and whether they've been welcomed back into their community or shunned.

JOSH BAKER:

So just to give some context. Ayham and Suad come from a religious community in Iraq known as Yazidis. In 2014, ISIS came to their hometown and basically committed what the U.N. has called a genocide, and they killed and enslaved thousands of people. And what there was a bit of was that some of these people, once the caliphate fell and they were being returned from Syria and they were coming back, there was some stigmatization that was going on in the community. Ayham and Suad don't appear to have faced that, but I think their ability to shape their own lives, to have proper assistance with overcoming what they've been through, is limited. There has been some help, but I don't think it's to a degree that we would recognize or even deem to be anywhere near sufficient. And that is just the stark reality of being in an environment like they're in.

JULIA SHAW:

It probably also feels different in a country where basically everybody is traumatized from extreme conflict situations and other situations, of course, as well, to say, "I need help" — I, as an individual — because really it's the whole country. And so I wonder if also there is not just stigma, but also a very different contextualization of your own suffering within the context of such widespread suffering, which is different in somewhere like the U.K.

JOSH BAKER:

Yeah. A friend of mine, Raya, who is Iraqi, I sort of started saying there's a mental health crisis in Iraq, and she said, "Stop yourself." The notion of a mental crisis does exist, but we're not even recognizing there's a crisis yet. Everyone kind of knows there's something under the surface within families, within people who — and this is the other thing I think of that's interesting about trauma, is that it's not just the people that experience the horrific thing that happens. It's then their partners or their kids, and it gets passed down generationally, right?

And her point to me was like, you can acknowledge there's a mental health crisis, but for me, that does almost too much, because that implies there's something being done about it. And she's like, "We're not even at that stage yet."

JULIA SHAW:

So, another question. Deborah asks, "When you were in Raqqa, I wanted to know more about the Syrians there, how they are coping in the aftermath of ISIS."

JOSH BAKER:

So Raqqa was obviously ISIS's de facto capital, if you will. And it's a city that was — I think it's fair to say it was completely obliterated in the fight to destroy ISIS. We're talking about more than 10,000 buildings bombed or destroyed. And it's quite hard to come back from that, because there was a civilian population inside the city while that was going on. Now, there is some rebuilding going on in Raqqa. It's not the Raqqa that I saw in 2017 anymore. It's changed a lot since then. But still, you see that destruction around you. The scars of war are still there for the population to live amongst. There is some positive. There is rebuilding going on. There is a big NGO presence there now, I believe, but it's  very far from what we would recognize as normality.

JULIA SHAW:

So another personal question related to this, actually, from a listener called Will: "Do you feel emotionally affected or haunted by what you have witnessed when working on the show, experiences with ISIS or witness stories?"

JOSH BAKER:

A hundred percent. You don't spend almost a decade working in conflict or war and not take on trauma, and anyone who says they don't is not being truthful. I found Suad's testimony to me incredibly traumatizing and difficult to deal with, and that's not to make it about me, because Suad is the person here that is the survivor, but to talk about the impact of it on me.

Prior to that, I had done a lot of interviews with survivors of sexual violence, particularly children, as well. There was something for me about Suad's interview, where essentially I would come to know a decent amount about the perpetrators. I would come to know the house where it took place, and I knew all the people around it and the people that witnessed it. That slowly started to disarm me mentally and pull down all these safeguards that I had as a way that I would normally conduct these interviews, where I can put up blocks and not let my mind run too far.

And with Suad's situation, I think because I knew so much about the surrounding situation of what happened to her, I found it immensely difficult to deal with. And that certainly I find to be a traumatizing experience. And then there are many others as well in a long time doing this. I think what I do do is I take mental health really seriously. I do seek therapy when I need it. Otherwise I'm going to be a mess.

JULIA SHAW:

Yeah. I think as people who deal with very difficult topics, you and I probably both have unexpected reactions, because most of the time we're dealing — we're used to dealing with difficult issues on a problem-solving level, the interesting facts, and you're trying to understand why and trying to empathize, which itself can be quite taxing. But it is a specific level that you need to work on in order to deal with atrocity on a regular basis.

JOSH BAKER:

Yeah. Yeah.

JULIA SHAW:

And some people can't do that, which is why they can't do these professions. And then other people stay there too much and can't dig enough into their empathy to make sure that they actually come back from that and they get quite cold. But I think that — I'm sure it's the same with you — is that I cannot tell you ahead of time what might affect me. So whether it's an interview I'm watching as an expert witness, whether it's a case I'm working on, whether it's something I'm working on for Bad People and it's a really horrible human rights abuse, I can't tell you which case is going to affect me and why ahead of time. I can tell you after. [Laughs]

JOSH BAKER:

Totally. I think, as well, the other thing that I try to remember with these environments, and I think it's a really important distinction, possibly just really important for me, is that nobody makes me go into these environments, right? It's a choice that I'm making. And that is a really important distinction from when you compare yourself to somebody like Suad, like Ayham, like Matthew, like his siblings. Actually, in Episode 11, which is probably one of the scariest things I've ever done, where I go back to Mosul, you see that contrast. I am confused about whether a young boy is alive or not, and I've spent years thinking about it, and I just — I need to go and find out. Genuinely, I can't keep having these thoughts. I need to just know one way or another.

JULIA SHAW:

So, to wrap up, let's have one last question, which is one that listeners have been asking, one that I have been wondering about, which you've answered part of already. Why do you think Sam went to Syria?

JOSH BAKER:

Oh, God, man. So many reasons, I think unsatisfactorily. I once asked Sam, "Do you think that you are ultimately the only person who's going to really know why you did this?" And she was just really blunt with me. She went, "Yes, absolutely." I was like, oh, OK. So I think I can speculate as to the factors that contributed to it. But I think the ultimate decision, Sam is the only person who knows that. And just to go a little bit further, and I know this kind of leans into more of your understanding of memory and the stuff that you do, is that I think after a point, Sam has possibly told herself so many stories that I don't know if she knows where the truth lies anymore.

JULIA SHAW:

Yeah. So that's a process called source confusion, where also we maybe don't remember anymore if it's something that we actually experienced, something we just imagined, something we were told by somebody else, maybe, to say, and we can definitely confuse real things that we experienced with things that we only thought about or imagined. And they can turn into false memories, or they can become confused, as you said. And so you no longer really know which one is the original and which one is a modification. You might even not have the original anymore.

So that's another interesting aspect about memory, is that we sort of assume that, with enough perhaps therapy or things, you can go back to some sort of sense of the origin memory, and that's just not the case. Our brains are really flexible and we're constantly overwriting our memories. We're not adding pieces. It's not like a filing cupboard where you have like a — you can go back to the original one. You're actually erasing it basically and writing a whole new one every single time you remember something and changing the physical structure of a memory in the brain. And so that just can get more and more distorted over time and more and more confused with other memories.

So you're absolutely right that that is a possibility that kept occurring to me, as well, while you were interviewing Sam, is, how much does she know at this point?

JOSH BAKER:

Mmm.

JULIA SHAW:

And maybe it's all a big mess in her mind as well.

JOSH BAKER:

However, one of the things I was most frustrated that I never got into the series was that I was able to talk to Sam's brother-in-law, a man called Abdelhadi. Now, he traveled to Syria with Sam and Moussa. He was certainly, when he was there, ideologically committed. When I spoke to Sam’s neighbors about him, they would describe him to me as a — "He was a really bad dude. He was not a good person."

And I managed to get in contact with him, and we have this WhatsApp chat, him trying to justify certain actions that ISIS had done. And obviously during the course of these chats I asked him, "Why did Sam come to Syria?" And he gave me three answers, and I guess I'll read them and the audience can take away from it what they will.

The first thing he said to me was, "Sam is an adult who is smart. Every capable adult is able to know where they are at all times, especially if they have Google Maps on their phones," which — [laughter] yeah, exactly, right? He's saying, "Look, dude, she had a smartphone. She knew where she was going." That's what I take from it, right?

He went on to say, "When you go to a country, you don't necessarily serve that country. You may want to go there just to live, especially if you were promised a good life," which I think speaks to that notion of the materialism that fits within Sam's personality, the desire for that notoriety and that fun life, basically. So that's what I read into that.

And the final one he sent me was probably the one that stuck with me the most. "I'm not sure why Sam did come with us. Maybe her husband lied to her, or maybe she was just too faithful to him." And perhaps the truth of this whole thing is somewhere in the middle of that.

JULIA SHAW:

Well, thank you so much for answering my question and the listeners' questions and for producing this fascinating series.

JOSH BAKER:

Thank you for coming on. I really appreciate it.

JULIA SHAW:

[Whispers] Tell people about Bad People.

JOSH BAKER:

[Whispers] Tell people about Bad People. What is it you would like me to say so you are completely happy?

JULIA SHAW:

Tell people to go listen.

JOSH BAKER:

I would urge our listeners to check out your podcast, Bad People, which is available on BBC Sounds or wherever you get your podcasts.

JULIA SHAW:

And we talk about lots of deep and dark cases, and I bring in scientific insights from research articles and really cool stuff that academics are doing to try and understand on a more scholarly level why these things are happening and how we can better understand them and the interesting ethical questions that these raise.