Nellie Bly: From 10 days in a mad house to 72 days around the world

[00:00:01] so, Adam, How does someone get themselves locked up in an asylum for the clinically insane?

[00:00:06] Adam Cox: Uh, you stand in front of a mirror mm-hmm. And you hold your eyes open and then you just run outside.

[00:00:11] Kyle Risi: Yes. Flailing in wide eyes.

[00:00:14] Adam Cox: And screaming.

[00:00:16] Kyle Risi: Well Nelly Bly is about to become one of the most celebrated stunt journalists of the 18 hundreds.

[00:00:22] She's gonna walk out into New York City and try to get herself committed

[00:00:27] Adam Cox: wow.

[00:00:28] Kyle Risi: Because for years, rumors had circulated [00:00:30] about the brutal conditions in the asylum but time and time again, these were just put down to the words of mad people ,

[00:00:35] Adam Cox: sure. And so Nelly is about to find out for herself firsthand

[00:00:40] Kyle Risi: which is a huge risk,

[00:00:41] right? Yeah, I was gonna say like how is she gonna get out of this

[00:00:45] but Adam, what Nelly is about to do is only the tip of the iceberg for what she achieves in her life.

[00:00:52] what have you achieved in your life?

[00:00:53] Adam Cox: I mean, today or,

[00:01:20] Kyle Risi: Welcome to the Compendium, an Assembly of fascinating things, a weekly variety podcast that gives you just enough information to stand your ground at any social [00:01:30] gathering.

[00:01:30] Adam Cox: We explore stories from the darker corners of true crime, their hidden gems of history, and the jaw dropping deeds of extraordinary people.

[00:01:37] Kyle Risi: I'm Kyle Reese, your Ring master for this week's episode.

[00:01:39] Adam Cox: And I'm Adam Cox, the in-house litigation lawyer for this week.

[00:01:43] A lot of the staff wanna sue.

[00:01:45] Kyle Risi: Yes. Specifically they wanna sue what? The clowns

[00:01:49] Adam Cox: to know the animals. Yeah.

[00:01:51] Kyle Risi: He bit me. No, I didn't,

[00:01:53] Adam Cox: you said that this would be a safe environment.

[00:01:55] Kyle Risi: So what are your KPIs, Adam?

[00:01:57] to keep, to keep the litigations low

[00:01:58] Adam Cox: pretty much. Yeah.

[00:01:59] Kyle Risi: [00:02:00] Yeah.

[00:02:00] Adam Cox: That's why we blackmailed the staff

[00:02:01] to have some dirt on them so they can't sue us.

[00:02:03] Kyle Risi: I see.

[00:02:04] So it was like we're going back to Soviet Union Russia kind of tactics where you get all your dirt on everyone. Everyone is informing on everyone else. The lines are informing on the elephants and Bearded ladies informing on

[00:02:15] Adam Cox: non bearded ladies.

[00:02:16] Kyle Risi: The non bearded ladies. Yeah, that's a stick on beard.

[00:02:20] There's some dirt fear.

[00:02:21] Adam Cox: Yeah.

[00:02:22] Kyle Risi: Guys, if you're new to the show and you wanna support us, then the absolute best way to support the show and enjoy some exclusive perks is to join [00:02:30] us over at Patreon because signing up will get you access to next week's episode a whole seven days early and it's completely free.

[00:02:38] Adam Cox: But for as little as $5 a month, you can become a fellow freak of the show, which will unlock our entire back catalog of our secret episodes.

[00:02:47] Kyle Risi: Mm-hmm. You gonna have to sign up to find out what they are.

[00:02:49] Adam Cox: Yeah.

[00:02:50] Kyle Risi: They're not on the main feed.

[00:02:51] Adam Cox: Yeah. So don't even look.

[00:02:52] Kyle Risi: Yeah, there. but Adam, let's be honest, right?

[00:02:56] The real reason to sign up as a Patreon is that [00:03:00] certified freaks and big top tier members get exclusive access to our compendium key chain and it's free. We'll send it to you in the post. We'll pay for the tariffs. We don't care. But it is the surefire way to guarantee that me and you, Adam and Kyle, are always there dangling near your crotch.

[00:03:18] What's wrong?

[00:03:19] Adam Cox: Just

[00:03:20] Kyle Risi: to tickle you this week. Did it

[00:03:21] Adam Cox: just, uh, you're very. Threatening.

[00:03:24] Kyle Risi: Oh, I was going for seductive. Oh,

[00:03:25] Adam Cox: okay.

[00:03:25] Kyle Risi: That's my sexy voice, that you recognize it.

[00:03:27] Adam Cox: [00:03:30] No.

[00:03:30] And lastly, guys, please follow us on your favorite podcast app and leave us a review. Your support helps others find us and keeps these amazing stories coming.

[00:03:38] Kyle Risi: Absolutely. I mean, the last week we only had what, six new reviews.

[00:03:42] Not many. Not many. I'm mad, But anyway, Adam, that is enough for housekeeping because today on the compendium, we are diving into an assembly of adventure, ambition, and a life that keeps pivoting so hard, it accidentally changes the [00:04:00] world.

[00:04:00] Adam Cox: I don't think you could have been more vague.

[00:04:02] Kyle Risi: but it's poetic, right? Is it What what a beautiful tagline for this week.

[00:04:05] Adam Cox: What

[00:04:06] Kyle Risi: Sometimes it's not always about giving you the information, it's about painting a beautiful, poignant picture

[00:04:11] Adam Cox: Okay, so what are you trying to paint for us?

[00:04:13] Kyle Risi: Okay, so, Adam, shut your eyes.

[00:04:15] Adam Cox: Okay.

[00:04:16] Kyle Risi: Imagine you are standing in front of the mirror

[00:04:20] Adam Cox: there. I'm,

[00:04:21] Kyle Risi: that's me, but wait, my eyes are closed. Yeah, it is late at night. It is also 1887, and you, Adam, [00:04:30] are in a workhouse for the Paul in the heart of New York City.

[00:04:34] Adam Cox: So probably stink a bit.

[00:04:35] Kyle Risi: you stink Anyway.

[00:04:36] Adam Cox: Yeah.

[00:04:36] Kyle Risi: Now the room is shadowy.

[00:04:38] It is lit by a single flickering gaslight. You can literally hear the hissing in the background. But Adam, you are not checking your hair. You're not fixing your pretty dress. You're actually widening your eyes. You are stretching them until they start to ache. You're doing everything you can to fight that urge to blink.

[00:04:59] Adam Cox: Well,

[00:04:59] Kyle Risi: [00:05:00] but Adam, the question is, why the fuck you doing this?

[00:05:03] Adam Cox: Why am I looking myself in the mirrors trying to stop myself from blinking

[00:05:06] Kyle Risi: Adam? This isn't a game because you are trying to make yourself look insane. You are training yourself for the performance of a lifetime because the woman that you are standing,

[00:05:20] Adam Cox: oh, I am a woman.

[00:05:21] Kyle Risi: Yes. Okay. Staring in the mirror. The one that you've just embodied. Uhhuh is a woman called Elizabeth Cochran.

[00:05:28] Now, you might not [00:05:30] recognize that name because to the world she's actually known as Nelly Bly. Have you heard of that name before?

[00:05:36] Adam Cox: Nelly Bly? Mm-hmm. I don't think I have,

[00:05:38] Kyle Risi: well, at this point, although she doesn't know it, Adam Nelly Bly is about to become one of the most celebrated stunt journalists of the 18 hundreds standing there in front of the mirror.

[00:05:49] Nelly isn't checking her smile. She is literally practicing madness because in a moment, she's gonna walk out into New York City and try to get herself [00:06:00] committed into one of the most notorious asylums for the clinically insane.

[00:06:05] Adam Cox: an asylum. Does she wanna interview someone?

[00:06:07] Kyle Risi: Adam, she wants to write an expose from the inside. She wants to put herself in the thick of it, because for years, rumors had circulated about the brutal conditions from the food, the staff, the cruelty, as well as the unnecessary treatments that were being inflicted on these patients.

[00:06:22] But the problem was most of the people saying these things were the patients themselves, right? Mm-hmm. Like once you are labeled a diagnosis of clinically [00:06:30] insane, it was easy to just dismiss their words.

[00:06:33] And so Nelly is about to find out for herself firsthand, which is a huge risk, right? Because remember, once you are in, you are in, like, once you've been declared clinically insane, you can't just walk out there once you're done, right?

[00:06:46] Adam Cox: Yeah, I was gonna say like how is she gonna get out of this

[00:06:49] Kyle Risi: Exactly. But Adam, what Nelly is about to do is only the tip of the iceberg for what she achieves in her life.

[00:06:55] So today on the compendium, I'm gonna tell you about the incredible [00:07:00] life of this woman that the world knows as Nelly Bly, a monumental figure of the 19th century and the lengths that she went to, not just to uncover the truth, but to prove that anything a man can do, she could do way better.

[00:07:13] I'm gonna tell you about how she broke out of the mold that was set for women during this period, how she transformed journalism and some of the incredible adventures that she embarked on in what is actually a very short life it is just incredible. Just how much she managed to fit in.

[00:07:29] Adam Cox: How [00:07:30] old was she then when she died?

[00:07:31] Kyle Risi: We'll get onto that later on.

[00:07:33] Adam Cox: Is this gonna make me feel sad about myself because I haven't achieved enough?

[00:07:35] Kyle Risi: Exactly. In fact, that's how I end the episode. Adam, what have you done? What have you achieved in your life?

[00:07:41] Adam Cox: I mean, today or,

[00:07:45] Kyle Risi: and I really love doing episodes like this about really great women of history, and I think it's because of the defiance and the tenacity that often comes with women of the early kind of centuries doing great things. Because with men, the patriarchy [00:08:00] is always on their side. They have very few barriers in their way.

[00:08:03] So when men achieve great things, is because often the path is left clear for them in the first place, right? Mm-hmm. But when a woman does it, it kind of hits really differently because so often they're not just fighting the challenge that's in front of them, and they're also fighting the rules that have been laid out for them.

[00:08:18] It makes me think if those barriers weren't there in the first place, what else could some of these great women have achieved in history?

[00:08:24] So, yeah. You know nothing about Nelly Bly.

[00:08:26] Adam Cox: Nothing.

[00:08:27] Kyle Risi: Let's start at the beginning, shall we?

[00:08:29] So, Nellie [00:08:30] Bly is actually born Elizabeth Jane Cochrane in Pennsylvania in 1864. Now, growing up, her family called her pinky because of the very elaborate pink outfits that her mother would usually dress her in.

[00:08:41] But Adam, don't let this fool you into thinking that Elizabeth is a very specific type of girl because she's not.

[00:08:46] Growing up, her family lived in a little Hamlet called Cochrane Mills just outside Pittsburgh.

[00:08:51] Now it's not a coincidence that she shares her surname with the town because the Hamlet is actually named after her family, because long before she was born, her father had established a mill in the area and [00:09:00] eventually an entire Hamlet ended up being built around it.

[00:09:03] So that kind of tells you a little bit something about kind of the family status in the community.

[00:09:07] Adam Cox: Okay. Kind of a big deal.

[00:09:08] Kyle Risi: She's a big deal. Yeah. But Adam.

[00:09:11] Turning point when Elizabeth is just six years old, her father dies unexpectedly, and as a result, he doesn't actually leave a will. It's a big rookie mistake, but again, it was quite unexpected.

[00:09:21] That means by law, the estate is required to be divided equally between Elizabeth and all of her siblings.

[00:09:27] Adam Cox: And how many siblings has she got?

[00:09:29] Kyle Risi: Exactly. The [00:09:30] problem is she's got 15 of them.

[00:09:31] Adam Cox: Oh my What? Yeah,

[00:09:32] Kyle Risi: he was

[00:09:32] Adam Cox: busy.

[00:09:33] Kyle Risi: He was, he had 10 kids with one woman and then ended up having five with a second.

[00:09:37] Adam Cox: Right.

[00:09:37] Kyle Risi: Elizabeth is the second marriage, so she's got like four other siblings. And so once everything is splits up, it isn't exactly life changing money. And for a young woman of the age, it also meant that her prospects of finding a husband aren't really that good as they could have been. Had her father been more prepared,

[00:09:52] Adam Cox: What would the father have done differently if it was split up across all 15 equally? Would she have got more, had there been a will?

[00:09:59] Kyle Risi: I think [00:10:00] what he would've done is he would've ensured, maybe the farm wasn't split up and gone to the boys because they can then generate income from that.

[00:10:06] Mm-hmm. Any savings or any money that they had would've been put aside for Elizabeth as a dowry or as a prospect for a future husband. So it wasn't well planned out. It wasn't, there was no strategy.

[00:10:17] Adam Cox: Mm-hmm.

[00:10:17] Kyle Risi: because of this, elizabeth's mother is forced to remarry Sadly, she doesn't marry very well because she ends up marrying a very abusive drunk. And so between the ages of nine and 14, for Elizabeth and the whole household, [00:10:30] it is defined by extreme instability and fear.

[00:10:34] Adam Cox: Mm-hmm.

[00:10:34] Kyle Risi: but in a strange kind of way, it's this situation that becomes a kind of a lesson for her that nobody was actually gonna come and rescue her. And that if she wanted a different outcome in her life, then she was going to have to rely entirely on herself.

[00:10:46] But living in rural Pennsylvania, especially in the late 18 hundreds, there aren't really many options for a young woman to take destiny into their own hands.

[00:10:53] Like I said, the best she could have hoped for was marrying a rich man, but without the financial prospect, it's unlikely that she would [00:11:00] marry very well.

[00:11:00] But there are other routes available to Elizabeth and increasingly more and more women at the time . And that was to become basically a working girl.

[00:11:08] But at the time, the system is set up specifically to benefit men. And while there were a few workplace rights legislators for workers, it was mostly a gray area when it came to women who very, very often would find themselves in a situation where they were being exploited because of the lack of legislation.

[00:11:24] Mm-hmm. But there are a few respectable professions available to women, particularly in [00:11:30] education. And so Elizabeth decides that she might try her hand at teaching. So at 15 she uses some of her inheritance and she enrolls in boarding school. But Adam, she massively underestimates how long that money's gonna last 'cause she has to drop out after a single term.

[00:11:45] Adam Cox: Oh, so that hasn't lasted that long at all?

[00:11:47] Kyle Risi: No. So she gets one semester at the school, basically.

[00:11:51] Adam Cox: Surely you'd look at your finances and go, how much is this gonna cost?

[00:11:54] Kyle Risi: Yeah, I have no idea why, she didn't plan on the money lasting longer. I don't get it. Mm. But [00:12:00] anyway, Adam, she's deflated to make matters worse, her mother's new marriage fails, and now the family is in an even worse position than there were before.

[00:12:07] So while she's working out what to do next, fate reaches out an opportunity, Adam, And actually it starts with a complaint.

[00:12:15] Adam Cox: She complains about something or someone complains about her.

[00:12:18] Kyle Risi: So one day she's leafing through the Pittsburgh dispatch, when she stumbles across a column written by a journalist called Erasmus Wilson.

[00:12:25] Great name. He's basically writing under the pseudonym of the Quiet Observer, [00:12:30] which is quite a common thing for people to do back then. And it's an article called, what Are Girls Good for?

[00:12:36] Adam Cox: Wow. That must have opened up a can of worms.

[00:12:38] Kyle Risi: Exactly. It's basically the same old argument that was going around at the time that a woman's proper place is guests

[00:12:45] Adam Cox: in the home.

[00:12:45] Kyle Risi: In the home raising children. Exactly. Doing domestic work, sewing, cooking, raising the children. He gets onto his soapbox about the supposedly concerning rise in the number of women that are stepping outta work during this period of time.

[00:12:56] Adam Cox: How dare they have a job

[00:12:58] Kyle Risi: in his words, he calls it a [00:13:00] monstrosity.

[00:13:00] Adam Cox: I can't imagine Elizabeth's gonna be the only person that writes in about this.

[00:13:04] Kyle Risi: it lands exactly as you'd expect. It does. Mm-hmm. The paper is inundated with tons of angry replies, mostly from women. In fact, you can probably safe to say probably all from women saying things like, given the economy, we don't exactly have much of a choice. Right?

[00:13:17] Adam Cox: Yeah.

[00:13:18] Kyle Risi: But also, fuck you.

[00:13:19] Adam Cox: Yeah.

[00:13:19] Kyle Risi: Or whatever the American Victorian equivalent was back then. Did they say fuck you back then?

[00:13:23] Adam Cox: Probably not. More like

[00:13:25] Kyle Risi: pedal sticks,

[00:13:26] Adam Cox: pedals.

[00:13:29] Kyle Risi: Damn you. I

[00:13:29] Adam Cox: [00:13:30] think they can be a little more aggressive than that.

[00:13:31] I feel like son of a bitch would've been a thing.

[00:13:33] Ah, thou son of a bitch,

[00:13:35] Kyle Risi: thou, that's how you say in the days of your, anyway, Elizabeth is one of those replies, and of course she's furious, Adam.

[00:13:42] She basically echoes a lot of what the other letters are saying that women who step out to work often do so outta necessity, especially when their social rights are very limited and obviously their prospects are even worse, right? Mm-hmm. Like if you do not have a decent dowry, and the, the pickings are slim out there 'cause every motherfucker is a drunk.

[00:13:59] If [00:14:00] that's the case, then the only option you have is to go out and work, right? Yeah.

[00:14:03] But she also pushes further, right? She's saying even if it wasn't a necessity. So what, like if a woman wants to work, she should be allowed to work.

[00:14:11] And so in her letter, she calls for legislation that specifically protects women in the workplace and even goes as far as suggesting that jobs be created for women specifically instead of society treating them like pariahs for even daring to exist outside of the home.

[00:14:25] Right.

[00:14:26] So it's a really impassioned letter and she signs [00:14:30] it. A lonely orphan girl, she doesn't use her own name and also she's an action orphan. Her mother is very much still alive. So it's kind of like the 18 hundreds equivalent of like MSN kind of email addresses, like hot tea with a body sixty9@hotmail.com.

[00:14:45] Adam Cox: That's the equivalent, I feel like she's trying to, I don't know, gain some kind of sympathy a little bit there.

[00:14:52] Kyle Risi: You've nailed it on the head. This is one of the things that she really pioneers, right? She brings a personality into the way that she writes. Mm-hmm. That is really [00:15:00] key In a time when that just wasn't a thing. Mm-hmm. Everything is very clinical, very factual, really boring.

[00:15:05] Adam Cox: There's an emotion behind this.

[00:15:07] Kyle Risi: Yeah. Like there is a figure there in just a few words. Lonely orphan girl. You can surmise a pretty clear picture.

[00:15:14] Adam Cox: Yeah.

[00:15:15] Kyle Risi: About the author.

[00:15:16] Adam Cox: Mm-hmm.

[00:15:16] Kyle Risi: Even if it's a lie,

[00:15:17] Adam Cox: that's a Okay.

[00:15:17] Kyle Risi: She's clearly a hottie with a body. 69.

[00:15:20] Adam Cox: She's got a point.

[00:15:21] Kyle Risi: so out of all the complaints that the Pittsburgh dispatch gets, hers stands out the most, and it's not even because it's very polished, it's actually the opposite.

[00:15:29] She doesn't use [00:15:30] any paragraphs. She very rarely uses any punctuation.

[00:15:33] But Adam, the point is, that it is raw. The editors describe it as. Kind of having spine and personality, especially in the way that she frames herself as that central character.

[00:15:42] So the editor of the Pittsburgh Dispatch, he's a guy called George Madden. He's determined to find out who this lonely orphan girl is. And so they decide to publish a letter and a call for the writer to come to their offices.

[00:15:54] And a few days later, that's exactly what she does

[00:15:57] To George Madden's delight, what she [00:16:00] writes translates face-to-face. And right there in the office, he offers her a job to write a few sample articles.

[00:16:06] Adam Cox: Oh, wow.

[00:16:07] Kyle Risi: Yeah. This is the thing. Elizabeth is often dubbed as this pioneer in this very male orientated space, which is often misrepresented as meaning. She was one of the first female journalists, but that's not quite accurate because by the late 18 hundreds, women were quite active in journalism.

[00:16:22] But the key difference was, is that they were expected to kind of stay in a very specific lane.

[00:16:26] Adam Cox: They had to write about certain topics, not about, I don't [00:16:30] know, challenging the status quo. I imagine it's more about, this is obviously stereotypical house stuff or

[00:16:35] Kyle Risi: Exactly, yes. Writing articles or as they call 'em, dispatchers for other women, basically. Mm-hmm. Usually society pages, gossip, etiquette, domestic advice. Do you know what I mean?

[00:16:45] Adam Cox: Mm-hmm.

[00:16:45] Kyle Risi: And of course, this is a direct symptom of misogyny, still deeply rooted in. The separation of roles defined by the patriarchy, there is this belief that women wouldn't be able to handle the pressure of serious stories like crimes or politics because either they wouldn't be able to understand the [00:17:00] nuance or be able to cope with an gnarly details when it came to kind of the gruesome crimes.

[00:17:04] And they also felt like if they went out into the streets, if they were interviewing anyone, people wouldn't want to tell them like, oh yeah, they got slit from it to ear because they wanna protect their feelings.

[00:17:14] Adam Cox: All the women would gasp and faint or whatever.

[00:17:15] Kyle Risi: Yeah. Like smelling salts, gasp.

[00:17:18] Adam Cox: that is crazy. I get that in today's world, there's still of elements of that, right?

[00:17:23] Kyle Risi: Yeah. There's still a glimmer of that around everywhere you look.

[00:17:26] Adam Cox: Yeah, exactly. But that's crazy to think just that they were treated [00:17:30] like that.

[00:17:30] Kyle Risi: Yes. And Adam, remember, this is quite a monumental period in history, right? We're just about to embark on the suffragette movement, mm-hmm. Women since the 1850s have been working in journalism. So there have been big strides, right? But there was still a lot of attitudes to dismantle at this period of time.

[00:17:46] Adam Cox: Mm-hmm.

[00:17:47] Kyle Risi: And very often when women did tackle these big stories, the papers would get a hell of a lot of complaints sent in because men just can't handle it. When a woman is, as they say, stepping outta their sphere, talking about things that they. Men [00:18:00] suspect that they don't necessarily understand.

[00:18:01] Adam Cox: Yeah. What do they know about these things? I'm not gonna listen to them.

[00:18:04] Kyle Risi: Exactly. So when it comes to Elizabeth as a pioneer in the world of journalism, is largely down to her refusal to stay in that lane, basically.

[00:18:12] And what is even more maddening to the men is that when she does break outta this sphere, it's often done in a way that surpasses the other male kind of journalists at the time. She's very good at it.

[00:18:22] Adam Cox: Because her news articles are signed off, I guess by Elizabeth, if she was to put a male name on there, right? Mm-hmm. They would probably not think [00:18:30] twice,

[00:18:30] Kyle Risi: Yeah, And what you tend to find is that it's this weird mix a lot of articles don't get signed off at all. They are completely anonymous men, female, whatever.

[00:18:39] There'll be some men that will sign their names to it, the more credible ones. Mm-hmm. But also when it comes to women, they will normally write under a pen name and we'll get onto that in just a second.

[00:18:47] I'll explain why. But Elizabeth is now got a job at the Pittsburgh dispatch and she's asked to write a few test articles for George where he asks her to expand on her initial complaint letter, which she titles the Girl [00:19:00] Puzzle, where she argues for women's work, rights. Mm-hmm. Basically in the workplace.

[00:19:03] George is super impressed by this and so he pays her for it. But then just be sure he wants us to do another dispatch this time on divorce reform. And she titles it. Mad Marriages where again, as I said, she calls for divorce reforms, drawing on her mother's kind of failed marriage. Which Adam is key. This is what she's pioneering, right?

[00:19:21] She's changing up how these stories are told in journalism, rather than being factual or clinical, she's drawing upon personal experience.

[00:19:28] Once again, George [00:19:30] is super impressed and so he hires her on the spot as a full-time journalist for $5 a week.

[00:19:36] Adam Cox: Good for her. I dunno if that's a good wage, but it's good that she has this job.

[00:19:40] Kyle Risi: I dunno if it's a good wage. Probably not.

[00:19:42] Adam Cox: I would assume that men are probably gonna get paid more than that

[00:19:45] Kyle Risi: for sure.

[00:19:45] But before she can start writing, she needs a pen name, which actually Adam is a way for progressive news agencies like the Pittsburgh Dispatch to kind of navigate the rampant sexism and the potential backlash against these women journalists, especially when they're operating kind of outside their sphere.

[00:19:59] 'cause she's [00:20:00] gonna be doing that quite a bit. So a lot of people think that Elizabeth chose her own pen name, but actually it's George who picks it.

[00:20:06] He actually does a quick whip around the office for ideas and someone suggests the name Nelly Bly from a popular song at the time is like a country folk Pittsburgh kind of rural song. And basically with no better options, that becomes her byline.

[00:20:19] Adam Cox: No better options. Yeah. Not that it's a terrible name, but I'm just what else was decided upon?

[00:20:24] Kyle Risi: Yeah, some put like a parking receipt in there. This is Nick's Spences, some

[00:20:29] Adam Cox: [00:20:30] cu.

[00:20:31] Kyle Risi: The only thing is they misspell the name right? The original song spells it with Y, but when they publish it, it's with an ie and by that point it's too late. 'cause they've already run her first article. So she's basically Nelly Bly with an ie.

[00:20:43] And in the same vein, in her early articles, they carry the same theme as her first letter, the realities of being a modern working girl, especially among factor workers.

[00:20:53] And she goes off and she starts writing exposes about the long hours, the extremely low pay, the lack of rights and [00:21:00] protections.

[00:21:00] Again, her writing isn't very elegant, Adam, but it is relatable and it's raw. Particularly, she's really good at getting down to eye level with the people she's writing about, rather than treating them like statistics or faceless kind of workforce people, she captures them as people writing about what they get up to outside of work, what they dream about, their friendships, and of course their romancers.

[00:21:22] It is difficult for us to appreciate the stark difference in the writing that she's starting to introduce because it's so commonplace for us today.

[00:21:29] [00:21:30] Someone actually describes it as instead of like painting in 2D, she's actually like building a scene with texture and light. And it's something that really stands out to the readers that are reading her work at the time.

[00:21:40] Adam Cox: Mm-hmm.

[00:21:41] Kyle Risi: However, factory owners, on the other hand, when they read these articles, they do not like it, and it's because our dispatchers are starting to threaten their reputations and honestly shine a light on their exploitation, especially towards these women.

[00:21:53] So the Pittsburgh dispatch start getting inundated with complaints again, justifying why a lot of these women wrote under these pseudonyms [00:22:00] because it kind of protects them, right?

[00:22:01] And typically a few complaints were not really anything to worry about, but these complaints were coming from the very people, the dispatch relied on for advertising revenue.

[00:22:09] And so to be safe, George moves her to the society sections and suggests that she starts writing about gardening,

[00:22:16] Adam Cox: really?

[00:22:16] So essentially their ad revenue is gonna drop. I guess these business owners are, are threatened. We're not gonna, put money into your newspaper, put it somewhere else

[00:22:24] Kyle Risi: and like, it's such a shame because you can see that the Pittsburgh dispatch are trying to be progressive. Georgia's [00:22:30] quite a progressive guy. Mm-hmm. He wants to give these women an opportunity.

[00:22:33] But the thing is though, when it comes to your bottom line, that trumps any kind of societal progression. Do you know what I mean?

[00:22:38] Adam Cox: Yeah. As much as he wants to do good, he's got a business to run.

[00:22:42] Kyle Risi: Exactly.

[00:22:43] Adam Cox: Which is not fair. But yeah,

[00:22:44] Kyle Risi: it's not, and we see that quite a lot today, especially with a lot of businesses kind of wanting to get involved in the pride movements around about June every year. But there have been a few instances where there's been a lot of backlash. Good examples are what happened with Gillette. Right? They kind of created that whole big campaign where they were [00:23:00] trying to hold men accountable for their behavior towards women. There was also the Bud Light, campaign where they had that trans person who was kind of advertising the beer, but that caused such a massive backlash that they instantly rewound a little bit.

[00:23:14] Do you know what I mean?

[00:23:14] Adam Cox: Kind of reverted back to what was safe grounds for them.

[00:23:17] Kyle Risi: Exactly. And it's because it ends up threatening their bottom line, right?

[00:23:21] Adam Cox: yeah, they've got answer to the shareholders. Right?

[00:23:22] Kyle Risi: Of course, Nelly is outraged,

[00:23:24] she doesn't want to be writing about gardening, but she decides that if she's going to be shoved into the [00:23:30] society pages fine. That is okay, but she's gonna do it on her own terms.

[00:23:34] And so she pitches an idea to George Madden to let her write about travel, and he agrees. But then Nelly goes, great. One problem. I'm not gonna be doing it from my desk. If I'm writing about a place I want to actually be in it. Which is a fair sentiment.

[00:23:49] Adam Cox: That is smart. Because essentially what she's negotiating is a bunch of jollies.

[00:23:56] Kyle Risi: What do you mean by jollies?

[00:23:57] Adam Cox: You go on a jolly, a nice little trip away and then [00:24:00] Yeah, I'll, I'll send you an article,

[00:24:01] Kyle Risi: And it's worth not taking that for granted either. Like traveling to a new country as a young working class woman in the 18 hundreds is a massive deal.. And so at 21 years old, she heads to Mexico for six months as a foreign correspondent.

[00:24:13] Adam Cox: Yeah. When you put it like that, I can't imagine, traveling back then was difficult anyway. So to be given that opportunity for them to say, yeah, that makes sense. You need to go live these experiences. She's done well for herself.

[00:24:25] Kyle Risi: She has, yes.

[00:24:27] And so she goes to Mexico where over the course of six [00:24:30] months, she files 26 dispatchers on Mexican culture. The food, what she sees, they're hugely popular. People are genuinely fascinated by what she sees. It gives them a sort of window into a world that most people just would never see.

[00:24:42] Adam Cox: Yeah.

[00:24:42] Kyle Risi: But while she's there, Nelly, as she always does, starts digging into the darker side of Mexico too, and she begins reporting on the rampant poverty across the country. She also becomes increasingly critical of the government, specifically the dictator at the time.

[00:24:58] He gets wind off some of the [00:25:00] articles that she's writing and he sends the authorities to basically threaten her with arrest.

[00:25:04] And as a result, she's forced to flee the country. So she's had a good run six months, right? In Mexico. She's now back in Pittsburgh and she's put back on the society pages.

[00:25:14] Adam Cox: Ah, so she's not gonna get another trip away?

[00:25:17] Kyle Risi: No, And so one day she just leaves a note on her desk and says, I'm off to New York. Look out for me.

[00:25:23] Adam Cox: And is she gonna report back or is she just No, I'm going to New York.

[00:25:26] Kyle Risi: No, she's just leaving. Yeah. No, she's not going to be a travel correspondent [00:25:30] in New York. No, she just quits. She packs up her stuff. She bundles her old mom into a train and they make a beeline for the city.

[00:25:36] Adam Cox: She bundles her mom into a train. Yeah, it feels like she's in some kind of luggage.

[00:25:40] Kyle Risi: She pretty much,

[00:25:41] And she is assuming that she's just gonna walk into a newspaper office in New York and just get a job.

[00:25:46] Adam Cox: I mean, there's probably more opportunity there, right? For someone like her.

[00:25:49] Kyle Risi: Yes. But it, doesn't work that way in New York, right? In New York newspaper districts, they're like a fortress. There's guards, receptionists, secretaries blocking anyone from even [00:26:00] coming close to an editor.

[00:26:01] It's literally like a gauntlet.

[00:26:03] So she comes up with a plan, which is very smart in my opinion.

[00:26:06] She decides that she's gonna pretend to write an article about how hard it is for women to get started in journalism in the city.

[00:26:12] So under that pretense, she secures a ton of interviews with various editors, and Adam, it works like a charm because she's playing into the thing that they love the most.

[00:26:22] Adam Cox: What? Themselves?

[00:26:23] Kyle Risi: Themselves. Their ego. They're like, oh, you wanna write an article about me? Sure, come on in.

[00:26:29] Adam Cox: But where [00:26:30] is she saying that she's writing for?

[00:26:32] Or does that really matter? She just calls him up and say, I'm doing an article, I wanna speak to you.

[00:26:36] Kyle Risi: So if you didn't catch that little detail earlier on, when she wrote that first article for George, remember he liked it. What did he do? He bought it.

[00:26:44] Adam Cox: Ah, okay.

[00:26:44] Kyle Risi: So she's like a freelance journalist.

[00:26:46] Adam Cox: I see.

[00:26:46] Kyle Risi: And when she's in their offices, she basically quizzes them about what they're looking for in a journalist.

[00:26:52] This basically gives her a playbook on how to get around all the different obstacles that she's coming up against.

[00:26:57] Adam Cox: That is so smart.

[00:26:57] Kyle Risi: But also Adam, she's really charming. [00:27:00] She's personable. So along the way she ends up filling up a Rolodex with a bunch of connections that's all gonna come in very handy later on.

[00:27:07] Eventually those connections get her into the offices of the New York world. At the time, they are like the biggest newspaper in the city, and it's owned by Joseph Puler as in the Pulitzer Prize.

[00:27:20] Adam Cox: Oh, okay.

[00:27:21] Kyle Risi: So he's a big deal.

[00:27:23] She pulls together everything she has learned from the previous editors, she's interviewed and she goes on the charm [00:27:30] offensive and by the end of that interview they offer her a job.

[00:27:33] Adam Cox: Well done her.

[00:27:35] Kyle Risi: Yeah. So she's smart. The way that she's managed to navigate the city and get an opportunity, in my opinion, is very clever.

[00:27:41] Adam Cox: Yeah. And she's built a load of contacts that she's now gonna be able to use in her job, I suspect.

[00:27:46] Kyle Risi: Exactly.

[00:27:47] So her first assignment was to go undercover in a mental as asylum and reports on the conditions that she finds inside.

[00:27:53] And as I mentioned at the top of the show, there were loads of rumors at the time circulating about the horrific conditions [00:28:00] being experienced by patients.

[00:28:01] But time and time again, these were just put down to the words of mad people, literally on account of the fact that they were clinically insane.

[00:28:08] And here's the thing though, like they were just rumors because every time authorities went to investigate, most of the time when they arrive, everything is just tickly boo.

[00:28:16] So the world wanted someone to go in covertly, unannounced, either to put the rumors to rest or to blow this story wide open.

[00:28:23] Adam Cox: Mm-hmm.

[00:28:24] Kyle Risi: Nelly doesn't even blink. She says yes immediately after all. Like she's desperate for work at this point. [00:28:30] Right.

[00:28:30] So the question is, Adam, how does someone get themselves locked up in an asylum for the clinically. Insane.

[00:28:36] And by the way, sorry, before you answer that question, I'm only using the language that was used throughout nelly's writing.

[00:28:43] Adam Cox: Okay. Of of yester year.

[00:28:45] Kyle Risi: Of yester year. The days of your, so Adam, I'll ask it again. How does someone get themselves locked up in an asylum for the clinically insane?

[00:28:53] Adam Cox: Uh, you stand in front of a mirror mm-hmm. And you hold your eyes open and then you just run outside.

[00:28:59] Kyle Risi: Yes. [00:29:00]

[00:29:00] Adam Cox: That's it. And that and that literally that's what she came up with.

[00:29:02] Kyle Risi: And she flail a little. Okay. Flailing. Flailing in wide eyes

[00:29:05] Adam Cox: and screaming.

[00:29:06] Kyle Risi: Yeah.

[00:29:07] Adam Cox: Right.

[00:29:07] Kyle Risi: That's the thing, right? We have this preconceived idea of what it means to be someone who is insane.

[00:29:12] Adam Cox: Mm-hmm.

[00:29:12] Kyle Risi: But that's not actually the truth, right? Because you don't wanna go overboard with it.

[00:29:16] The first thing to know is that Nelly is completely on her own. There's no secret back door. There's no insider willing to help validate a diagnosis or even to help get her out.

[00:29:25] Adam Cox: So is anyone at like the company she's working for helping her or coaching her? I

[00:29:28] Kyle Risi: just said no. [00:29:30] I just said no.

[00:29:32] Adam Cox: But I thought like, no, fair enough. Someone's not helping her to get in and diagnose, but is anyone coaching her? This is what you need to, Nope.

[00:29:39] Kyle Risi: She's on her own. Just like, if you want this job, go make this happen.

[00:29:43] Adam Cox: Wow.

[00:29:44] Kyle Risi: It's crazy. So the only way she's literally gonna get into this asylum is by generally getting herself committed.

[00:29:50] So that night she goes home, she starts practicing in the mirror on how to look insane. Like I said, she has this preconceived idea of what a mad person would be like, but [00:30:00] that in itself, she realizes far too over the top right. She has to find that balance where it wouldn't look like she was acting, but also not be so subtle that people would just have like pity on her.

[00:30:11] Adam Cox: Yeah. So she is she gonna cause some kind of scene? Mm-hmm. Then that's gonna, they're gonna call the police or something.

[00:30:17] Kyle Risi: Yeah. But, but again, she can't be too hysterical.

[00:30:21] Adam Cox: That's weird as it's interesting that she's rationalizing it going, no, that's too much. Bring it down a notch.

[00:30:26] Kyle Risi: Yes, exactly. Yeah. She's Coco Chanel before you leave the house, take one thing [00:30:30] off. When you're about to go to the silent before you go in, just take a little bit of crazy out.

[00:30:36] That's how the thing, you know. Right.

[00:30:37] Adam Cox: Okay.

[00:30:37] Kyle Risi: So she realizes actually that it's all about the vacant stare. It's not so much looking at people, but it's about kind of looking through them in a way. Okay. Like I'm looking behind you. It's literally in the focus of your eyes.

[00:30:50] She also reads a bunch of ghost stories so that she can bring that glimmer of terror to the foreground. Whenever she's in character.

[00:30:56] To hide her identity, she decides to put on a [00:31:00] slight Cuban accent. She also stops brushing her teeth. She stops washing her face. So she's got this greasy, disheveled look about her.

[00:31:07] She changes her name as well from Nelly Bly to Nelly Brown.

[00:31:10] Adam Cox: Okay.

[00:31:11] Kyle Risi: So not a huge change, but logistically it's her best option since all of her luggage is already monogram with NB

[00:31:17] Adam Cox: of. Right. Okay.

[00:31:18] Kyle Risi: So it's be easier than buying a load of new stuff basically.

[00:31:22] And then she channels her character arc. She was going to play a struggling New York working girl who was starting to unravel by the stresses of [00:31:30] surviving in the big city.

[00:31:31] And this character arc is deliberately playing into that biases of the men who will eventually diagnose her. They're already predisposed to assume that these types of women confuse and poor needed locking up for their own good. So she's becoming exactly the patient they're expecting to see in a way.

[00:31:48] Adam Cox: And does she know, the type of patients they already have in order to pull on or play this narrative?

[00:31:53] Kyle Risi: I think mostly she has spent a lot of time with these working girls. Mm-hmm. She knows how easily they unravel. [00:32:00] She also understands society especially during this period of time and what they do to these women.

[00:32:05] There are no kind of like welfare homes. There are like boarding houses where you can go, but there are mostly for working women who haven't fallen down that pit of insanity just yet.

[00:32:17] Right, right. But soon as you fall over that cliff, where do you put them?

[00:32:20] You can put them on the streets, but you can also just dump them in the asylum, which around about this time was very common to do. Like when someone was in inconvenience or they just weren't [00:32:30] wanted, it was off to the asylum for them.

[00:32:32] Adam Cox: Yeah. Rather than help them.

[00:32:33] Kyle Risi: Yeah, it is. It is a sad state of affairs.

[00:32:36] So next Nelly kisses her old mom goodbye.

[00:32:38] She checks herself into a temporary home for women at 84 Second Avenue. it's a charity dorm basically for women who are down on their luck.

[00:32:47] She pays 30 cents a night, and once she's in, she doesn't waste any time.

[00:32:50] She ends up sharing a room with like a other woman. when everyone is getting ready to go to bed, she refuses.

[00:32:57] She just sits on the edge of a mattress staring [00:33:00] into the void. She starts talking obsessively about a missing suitcase, and the other women are like, babe, it's, it's literally right there.

[00:33:08] And she's like, oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

[00:33:10] And then she will magically go back to staring off into the void. And then a few minutes later, she'll bring up the suitcase again. And they're like, for fuck's sake, understandably, these women are terrified by this point. When they ask if she's all right, she'll turn the tables on them and pretend that she's fine and start insisting that they're the crazy ones.

[00:33:28] Adam Cox: Yeah. Look after yourself.

[00:33:29] Kyle Risi: [00:33:30] Yeah. The general feeling in the house on this first night is that this bitch is gonna kill us in the middle of the night.

[00:33:35] Adam Cox: This is just acting. This is like living that person, right?

[00:33:38] Kyle Risi: Yeah. She's a method journalist. She's a stunt journalist, Adam. That's what this means. The links that someone will go to to get a scoop.

[00:33:45] Adam Cox: Yeah, no, like she hasn't got a nine to five where she can just go home and kick up her, take off her heels or whatever.

[00:33:50] Kyle Risi: No, she has to live it.

[00:33:51] Adam Cox: how long does she have to do this for?

[00:33:53] Kyle Risi: And when she needs a break, she'll just nip to the toilet and she'll be like, Ugh.

[00:33:58] Adam Cox: Checks her [00:34:00] phone.

[00:34:00] Kyle Risi: I'd be like, Nellie, are you there? She's like. There's cats in here. Help. That sort of thing.

[00:34:04] Adam Cox: Yeah. It's a like, I dunno, that's a, she's playing the long game to keep this up.

[00:34:09] Kyle Risi: Yes. Nelly says though, that one of the women in particular, a woman called Mrs. Kane is the only one who doesn't really squirm away from her while the others are freaking out, threatening to call the cops. She sits with her, she brushes her hair, she reassures us, we're gonna be okay.

[00:34:23] Nelly writes how one of the hardest parts of all of this was torturing the people who showed a genuine compassion in all of [00:34:30] this.

[00:34:30] Adam Cox: Yeah. 'cause she's duping them essentially.

[00:34:32] Kyle Risi: She is, yeah. Anyway, the next morning the police arrive.

[00:34:35] Adam Cox: Oh, so it didn't take long.

[00:34:36] Kyle Risi: No. And Nelly is taken to the Essex marker police court where she's brought before a judge.

[00:34:43] Unexpectedly. Though the judge is really sympathetic towards her. He doesn't see a mad woman. In fact, he sees the tragedy and he even compares her to his dead sister saying like he was positive that she was someone's darling, and so it isn't going to plan. The last thing he's thinking about is sending her [00:35:00] to an asylum or to be assessed.

[00:35:01] His first line of thinking is, let's find her family. I

[00:35:05] Adam Cox: mean, that is the right thing to do actually.

[00:35:07] Kyle Risi: Exactly. That is a nice thing to do. But then while he is like discussing it with the police and the other officials in the room, a reporter walks into the room, Nelly freaks out because if they recognize her, she risks blowing her cover.

[00:35:21] Ah. So what she does, and it's actually, it's the thing that saves this whole thing. She pulls her shawl over her head to cover her face, and then she starts acting like erratically. Like she's saying, I'm [00:35:30] afraid of reporters get away from me. And she starts freaking out.

[00:35:33] And by a stroke of luck, this is enough for that judge to be like, take it to be exact.

[00:35:38] Adam Cox: She's like, oh wait, this, this is gonna delay me going home today, so let me,

[00:35:42] Kyle Risi: yeah. I know she's someone's darling, but I've got sausage and maite.

[00:35:46] Adam Cox: Yeah.

[00:35:48] Kyle Risi: So she thinks she saved it.

[00:35:50] Adam Cox: And that is good. Yeah. Wow. I would love to have witnessed this, just open a fly on a wall of all these things that she was doing.

[00:35:56] Kyle Risi: Yes. But the thing is, has she saved it? Because [00:36:00] as reporters do they sense the story in this mad woman that was sitting in this courtroom.

[00:36:05] Adam Cox: Oh, so she's gonna be reported on herself?

[00:36:07] Kyle Risi: Yes. So she goes and she speaks to the arresting officers. They interview the judge, they follow up with what happens next at the hospital. And by the end of their day they have written an entire dispatch about this Cuban mad woman who has just been committed to the asylum.

[00:36:23] And it's an important part of the story that's going to really help to elevate her as a persona later on.

[00:36:29] Adam Cox: [00:36:30] Wow. So yeah, she's got her own story. I guess she didn't expect to be covered herself.

[00:36:33] Kyle Risi: Exactly. But it's so risky 'cause it could have blown her cover, right?

[00:36:36] Adam Cox: Yeah.

[00:36:37] Kyle Risi: So Nelly is taken to Bellevue Hospital where she's examined by a team of doctors experts who surely would be able to see through her act. Right.

[00:36:45] Adam Cox: I bet there's a bunch of men that are gonna go like, oh yeah, she's crazy.

[00:36:48] Kyle Risi: Yeah, for sure. The problem is they're already leaning into their biases even before she's arrived because of what they've been told about her. Right? She's been brought there as a crazy woman.

[00:36:57] They're told obviously, that she's been [00:37:00] exhibiting symptoms of amnesia, she's twitching, et cetera. So that's already formulated part of their decision.

[00:37:05] So every observation from here on out just reinforces this belief that she is mad.

[00:37:10] So they take a pulse, they look at her tongue, they do a basic eye test where they're shine a light in her eye, nearly stares into it, unblinking, and in the end they conclude that yes, her pupils are slightly dilated, which was proof of insanity, right?

[00:37:25] But to that, it turns out that Nelly is actually shortsighted, which apparently can have the same [00:37:30] effects on your pupils.

[00:37:31] She talks about how little Adam she has to do to show them that she was insane. In fact, in moments where she spoke sanely, answering their questions, the more they took this as proof of her insanity.

[00:37:42] So in the end, all the doctors agree in their words. She was positively demented and so she's committed to Blackwell Island asylum for the clinically insane.

[00:37:53] Now, today, Blackwell Island is known as Roosevelt Island, so it's in the middle of the river between Manhattan and Queens.

[00:37:59] It's kind [00:38:00] of goes under one of the bridges, I think maybe Williamsburg Bridge, I'm not quite sure, but it goes over it.

[00:38:05] Adam Cox: Oh, so it's not actually connected to mainland?

[00:38:07] Kyle Risi: No, it's literally in the middle and it's a long sausage shape kind of little island, and the very north tip is where Blackwell Island was.

[00:38:15] Adam Cox: I see.

[00:38:15] Kyle Risi: It's like Alcatraz. Basically. There's no easy escape, which I guess makes it even more terrifying.

[00:38:21] Once she arrives. She doesn't waste any time getting to work initially. She feels a lot of pressure to come across as mad, but very quickly, Adam, [00:38:30] she realizes that dropping the act completely goes unnoticed.

[00:38:34] So she's literally there with a notebook taking notes and people are just going. She's nuts.

[00:38:39] Adam Cox: Look at her. Take notes.

[00:38:40] Kyle Risi: Yeah.

[00:38:40] Adam Cox: Yeah.

[00:38:41] Kyle Risi: But is this dropping of her act, which does terrify her about how she's going to convince them that she wasn't insane when it comes time to going home. Going up to the receptionist and going, oh, by the way, I'm not actually insane. I'm actually a journalist and I'd like to go home. And they'll be like, of course you are [00:39:00] darling. Come on, take your meds. And then I take her away.

[00:39:03] Adam Cox: Yeah. Like had she thought of her exit plan from this?

[00:39:06] Kyle Risi: Well, the thing is though, the official plan is that after 10 days, someone from the New York world will send in a lawyer pos as a representative of friends who will take responsibility for her care.

[00:39:15] But honestly, Adam, they can't guarantee that will even work. Right. The asylum might not agree to release her.

[00:39:21] Remember, she's being diagnosed by doctors.

[00:39:24] Adam Cox: Yeah. But did they really diagnose her?

[00:39:26] Kyle Risi: Well, they have, and it is official. That diagnosis doesn't vanish after [00:39:30] 10 days, no matter how she ends up behaving. Or if someone comes along and goes, we'll, take care of her.

[00:39:34] Adam Cox: Mm-hmm.

[00:39:35] Kyle Risi: I don't know. But it's a risk, right?

[00:39:37] Yeah. Anyway, that's a bridge she decides to cross in 10 days time. For now, her job was to get to work reporting on the conditions inside this asylum.

[00:39:45] Adam Cox: Mm-hmm.

[00:39:46] Kyle Risi: Almost immediately, Nellie sees that all the rumors are true. The asylum is built to hold a thousand patients, but at the time, the place had been crammed with more than 1600 patients due to budget cuts. They were also operating severely understaffed as well, and I read [00:40:00] that they just had like 16 doctors on staff, which when you do the maths, that is roughly one doctor for every 100 patients that they had.

[00:40:06] Adam Cox: That is far too many. Sure.

[00:40:08] Kyle Risi: Yeah. It's not carers containment. Right?

[00:40:10] Adam Cox: Yeah. Yeah.

[00:40:10] Kyle Risi: She talks at length about obviously the food. First off just how rancid everything was. She finds a spider that's baked into some of the bread that she's been given. She also says it is so stale, you have to suck it like a rusk.

[00:40:26] She's given beef so old. She says it's basically leather. And then to [00:40:30] wash it all down, they're given this pinkish water that they were calling tea and she said that wasn't tea.

[00:40:36] Adam Cox: They just don't care about the hygiene or the welfare of these.

[00:40:38] Kyle Risi: Oh yeah. No, it is. It is rancid In there, she says bath bathtime is horrific. They don't have any heating, so obviously the baths are cold. Remember this is October.

[00:40:46] Adam Cox: Mm-hmm.

[00:40:47] Kyle Risi: Staffing shortages meant that everyone was washed together, so everyone's standing around naked. Mm-hmm. Like getting ready to be washed. The more able patients are forced to scrub the less capable ones. she says that for the challenging patients where undressing them [00:41:00] was just impossible.

[00:41:01] They were just bathed in their nightgowns and then forced sleep in ice cold cells dripping wet.

[00:41:06] She says that they don't change the water between baths either, which is something that we saw when we did the Jack the Ripper episode, where there'd be like 11 baths before the water would be changed.

[00:41:16] Mm-hmm. So rank then everyone was dried with the same wet towel that would just being used on patients with like really rancid open soils all over their bodies.

[00:41:25] Adam Cox: How is she not like flinching? I know she's obviously gotta fit in, right? But she must be [00:41:30] thinking, I don't wanna play along.

[00:41:31] Kyle Risi: No, I wouldn't want to. She talks about how everyone who complained or resisted, we either beaten by the attendants and nurses sometimes even threatened with sexual violence.

[00:41:40] She talks about how during the day there's just literally nothing to do. My patients are forced to sit on these benches. There was no speaking allowed. You weren't even allowed to move. You just had to sit there doing nothing. Just staring into the void often for stretches as long as 12 hours.

[00:41:55] Adam Cox: I mean, that's not gonna help anyone.

[00:41:56] Kyle Risi: No.

[00:41:56] Adam Cox: Whether you're sane or not.

[00:41:57] Kyle Risi: No, they couldn't even go to the toilet. They were just [00:42:00] expected to just go right there and then, and then at the end of the day, staff would just hose everything down so it would just probably stank.

[00:42:07] Mm-hmm.

[00:42:07] She says the most dangerous patients or the ones that misbehave the most were systematically tied together in one place. So they just spent all day together, the most dangerous patients, the ones that could bite you on your neck,

[00:42:17] Adam Cox: but keep them together.

[00:42:18] Kyle Risi: Yeah.

[00:42:19] Adam Cox: And they can fight out.

[00:42:19] Um, did she, I mean, you might come onto it, but like she obviously was speaking to some of the other inmates, I guess you could say, or patients rather, but it feels more like a prison.

[00:42:28] Did she kind of like [00:42:30] recognize that some of them were like her, and not really, certainly not clinically insane.

[00:42:35] Kyle Risi: Oh yeah, for sure. One of the things that brings her articles or this dispatch to life is the people that she ends up connecting with and the people she feels awful about the fact that she gets to leave after 10 days. Mm-hmm. And leaving these people that she cares about left inside.

[00:42:50] But many of the people in the East Asylum are not crazy.

[00:42:53] Adam Cox: Yeah.

[00:42:53] Kyle Risi: They are just poor and the city didn't know what to do with them. So this became the dumping ground, but having to exist [00:43:00] in those conditions for some ultimately is what drives them mad. Can you imagine sitting on a pew for 12 hours a day doing nothing that will drive you crazy? It honestly sounds like it's the lunatics that are running the asylum

[00:43:12] Adam Cox: Yeah. They don't know how to treat these people.

[00:43:14] Kyle Risi: it is horrific.

[00:43:15] Nelly's entire account is really interesting to read. It's called 10 Days in the Madhouse, and I'll explain to you how it's received and how it's published in just a second, but I'll leave a link to it in the show notes.

[00:43:24] Surprisingly for something that's written in the 18 hundreds, it's. Quite easy to read. But it is horrific, some [00:43:30] things that she goes through.

[00:43:31] But after 10 days as promised, the New York world do send in their lawyer and they do manage to get her released.

[00:43:37] So it's a bit of a relief. When she's out, she immediately writes up her entire expose. Like I said, it's titled 10 Days in a Madhouse.

[00:43:44] It is published very cleverly in two parts a week apart.

[00:43:49] The first part runs in the Sunday edition on the 9th of October, 1887, it recounts her preparation and her diagnosis and ends with her boarding the boat to the [00:44:00] asylum, leaving all the readers on like a cliffhanger.

[00:44:03] Adam Cox: She knows how to tell a good story.

[00:44:05] Kyle Risi: Yes, she does. So everyone is desperate to know exactly what happens next.

[00:44:09] And so over that week, the only thing that people can talk about. Is this story including the rival newspaper that printed the original story about Nelly Brown being committed in the first place.

[00:44:20] They basically just realized that they've been duped as part of another paper scoop, and now they just end up looking ridiculous.

[00:44:25] Adam Cox: Really? That's funny.

[00:44:26] Kyle Risi: And so they scramble to counter Nelly's expose, [00:44:30] calling into question the New York World's ethics about the lengths that they're willing to go to just to land a story.

[00:44:35] And for the public. As you can imagine, they've got their popcorn out or their pork scratchings, and they're watching all of this unfold, this kinda land back and forth, and this debate that is all revolving around this incredible story

[00:44:47] Adam Cox: Isn't that funny that they're criticizing them for the ethics that they would go to, but not actually criticizing the ethics of the institution that they're reporting on

[00:44:54] Kyle Risi: that? Sure, that's true.

[00:44:56] And so this entire story ends up taking on a life from their own. Yes, [00:45:00] it's the asylum expose, but underneath that is also a story about Nelly as a journalist herself, right?

[00:45:05] Someone who's already very investible but also her commitment to the craft and the ethical question hanging in the air, like, should she have done it this way? I say absolutely.

[00:45:16] I don't think it's an ethical question at all.

[00:45:18] Adam Cox: She went undercover, and that's what she did. She exposed it to hopefully get change. People start questioning how they're doing things.

[00:45:24] Kyle Risi: Exactly, because at the end of the day, they did send in auditors and they found nothing, and it's [00:45:30] because the asylum was pretty much covering their tracks. Yeah. So this is the only option available.

[00:45:34] When the second assortment comes out. The revelations are of course, horrifying. It confirms all the rumors, but also that they were way worse than people even imagine in the first place. The scale and the reach of this story forces the city to.

[00:45:47] Nelly ends up going before a grand jury to tell them everything. They're shocked. And so they send a team in for a surprise visit to see the conditions for themselves.

[00:45:56] But of course there is a twist because the asylum has been tipped off probably [00:46:00] from the article itself. So they knew this was coming, and so when auditors arrive, everything has been scrubbed.

[00:46:05] Patients are suddenly wearing better clothes, food is suddenly more appetizing.

[00:46:09] And that's because actually one of the things that Nelly points out in our article is such a weird thing to kind of pull upon is the lack of seasoning in the cooking.

[00:46:18] Adam Cox: Well now there's like salt and pepper everywhere.

[00:46:20] Kyle Risi: Yes. Yes. The asylum and like pulls in, the auditors into the kitchen. They're like, look how much salt we've got. There's literally piles and piles of them, like, I dunno what you're talking [00:46:30] about.

[00:46:30] Of course any patients that could corroborate Nelly's story are either hidden away or transferred to other wards.

[00:46:36] But Adam, in spite of their efforts to try and cover this up, and probably as a testament to Nelly's credibility, the grand jury, they believe every single word she says. They say that her account was far too detailed and far too consistent for it to not be true.

[00:46:50] Adam Cox: Yeah.

[00:46:50] Kyle Risi: As a result, the city, they inject the equivalent of $800,000 to improve the conditions of the asylum. They also implement thorough examinations to ensure that [00:47:00] only the seriously ill are ever committed, meaning that it can't be used as like a dumping ground for the inconvenient members of society any longer.

[00:47:07] Adam Cox: Good.

[00:47:08] Kyle Risi: Of course, they get rid of the most abusive, physicians and nurses that Nelly had identified in her testimony.

[00:47:15] And so because of her, a lot of really bad people end up losing their jobs and a lot of great improvements happen across the asylum.

[00:47:24] And out of all of this, Nelly cements herself as this great stunt reporter today. We call them investigative reporters [00:47:30] because over time the word stunt has kind of taken on this negative connotation of reporters doing these things as performances or spectacles, et cetera.

[00:47:37] Adam Cox: Mm-hmm.

[00:47:37] Kyle Risi: So this is also where we start to see a shift in the way journalists report on stories.

[00:47:42] Nelly proved that it's okay to connect with the subject matter to let your own voice come through, and it's an easy sell because it reflected directly on the bottom line for a lot of these newspapers. But the public was seeking out the newspapers where these journalists were writing like Nelly was writing.

[00:47:59] Adam Cox: I was gonna say, did [00:48:00] this create more jobs? Or these other newspapers now are like trying to find other Nellys for them to report.

[00:48:05] Kyle Risi: Exactly. There is now a million Nellys across the city. Every newspaper wants their own Nelly, basically. Yeah.

[00:48:11] But you also see a lot more journalists starting to put their own name to their work rather than just writing anonymously.

[00:48:16] But it has this also really interesting effect because once your name is attached to an article, the quality of that journalism skyrockets because it's now your reputation that has been measured against it.

[00:48:27] Do you understand what I mean?

[00:48:29] So it's [00:48:30] quite a transformative time for journalism and it all comes down to Nelly.

[00:48:34] So Nelly goes off to do a bunch more kind of exposes. One of them, she titles, trying to be a servant, where she goes in undercover looking for a job in domestic work through different employment agencies.

[00:48:46] And she ends up exposing a bunch of different scams designed to kind of fleece the pool. Like they will charge you $1 upfront just to be on their books, which for many people at the time is equivalent of a week's worth of food. Mm-hmm. So it is really exploitive.

[00:48:59] Then of [00:49:00] course if you are lucky enough to be then be shortlist and then presented for interview with a client.

[00:49:04] You of course, needed a reference. And time and time again, they would say that your references were not up to scratch, even if you did have one.

[00:49:11] And then they would say, for a fee, we would give you a reference. And then someone who doesn't even know them within vouch for their character, their skills or whatever.

[00:49:19] And so they're not just fleecing these poor women, they're also fleecing the clients as well by like lying to them about this cleaner's capabilities, when really they might even be like a killer.

[00:49:29] Adam Cox: [00:49:30] Yeah.

[00:49:30] Kyle Risi: She does another piece titled The White Slave,

[00:49:32] Adam Cox: okay.

[00:49:33] Kyle Risi: Where she exposes the brutal conditions of factual labor and how they exploited their workers.

[00:49:38] In particular, she focuses on this box making factor where she gets a job and you basically get employed on a two week trial basis without any pay. it's your opportunity to prove yourself right? To prove how good you are.

[00:49:51] But the problem is, is there's hundreds of them, so you all believe that you are competing for just a handful of jobs.

[00:49:56] So desperate to impress. You can imagine that the [00:50:00] productivity of those trial workers is just through the roof, which is exactly what the factory owners want.

[00:50:06] At the end of the two weeks though, they tell you that you didn't make it, and so you are sacked and then they just bring in the next batch.

[00:50:11] Adam Cox: I was gonna say it's just a conveyor belt of like free work, right?

[00:50:14] Kyle Risi: Yeah. A revolving door that exploits kind of people's desperation to find work.

[00:50:19] Adam Cox: That's terrible.

[00:50:20] Kyle Risi: It's awful. If you do make it and you do get hired, the economics of the job just do not add up because you are not paid by the hour.

[00:50:28] You're paid by your output. To [00:50:30] earn 50 cents. For example, you have to assemble a hundred boxes. They are candy boxes. Each box takes 16 very precise folds, which means if you don't make a mistake, then there's 1600 individual folds just to make $1.

[00:50:45] Adam Cox: That's a lot.

[00:50:46] Kyle Risi: It's a lot

[00:50:46] and remember, you're paid on the output, right? So if you fold 48 boxes, not 50, then you don't qualify for their 50 cents.

[00:50:53] Adam Cox: Uh, you have to hit the tiers essentially. Yes. Mm-hmm.

[00:50:55] Kyle Risi: Isn't that awful?

[00:50:56] Adam Cox: Yeah.

[00:50:57] Kyle Risi: And again, what rounds these stories out are the [00:51:00] firsthand accounts of the people living inside these systems, putting you next to the people being crushed by it. And that's what really ends up making people relate to her writing.

[00:51:09] Another notable expose does is a baby trafficking scam where she poses as a wanting mother looking to buy a baby.

[00:51:15] Adam Cox: Buying a baby.

[00:51:17] Kyle Risi: Yeah, I think it's like $10 that she can buy the baby for, I dunno if she actually buys the baby, but she certainly gets the opportunity to buy the baby

[00:51:23] Adam Cox: to prove that it's possible.

[00:51:24] Kyle Risi: Yeah. She also exposes a dating agency where people pay to scan through single profiles only [00:51:30] for them to be connected to other con artists ready to scam you. Or even worse,

[00:51:33] Adam Cox: do you know what she sounds like? Do you know BBC? I'm pretty sure BBC one, they used to have something called Rogue Traders where they'd go round and like bust. Mm-hmm. Like these corrupt businesses.

[00:51:42] Kyle Risi: Yeah. Yeah. I remember that.

[00:51:43] Adam Cox: If it was a different time, she would have her own TV show.

[00:51:45] Kyle Risi: Totally. All of her stuff that she's done, it could definitely be a film. Do you know what I mean? You can build a film around it.

[00:51:51] By this point in her career, she's a little bit of a celebrity and a massive, massive asset to the New York world.

[00:51:58] There's tons of rivalry amongst [00:52:00] other agencies at this point too. Literally, every newspaper in the city has her own female stunt reporter, which collectively become known as like the news girls.

[00:52:09] Adam Cox: Okay.

[00:52:10] Kyle Risi: So if the New York world was gonna stay ahead, they were going to need to keep coming up with new and interesting angles to maintain their readership because they carved themselves out a bit of a niche with Nellie as their famous stunt reporter.

[00:52:23] But now every motherfucker has one. This is when they get the idea to test the very famous novel by Jules [00:52:30] Verne Fillus fogs around the world in 80 days.

[00:52:33] Adam Cox: Oh, so they're gonna go round the world in a hot air balloon.

[00:52:36] Kyle Risi: not in a hot air balloon, unfortunately. '

[00:52:38] Adam Cox: cause they realized that's not possible.

[00:52:39] Kyle Risi: No. So really great angle.

[00:52:42] Better yet, could someone do it in less than 80 days? And better. Better yet, what if the person doing it was a woman?

[00:52:52] Adam Cox: Surely not,

[00:52:53] Kyle Risi: surely not. Scandal.

[00:52:55] Adam Cox: What? Whats if they also had a monkey with them?

[00:52:58] Kyle Risi: Adam,

[00:52:59] Adam Cox: what?

[00:52:59] Kyle Risi: Just [00:53:00] wait.

[00:53:00] Adam Cox: Oh, really? Yes,

[00:53:02] Kyle Risi: yes, yes. How did you know?

[00:53:04] Adam Cox: I generally just guessed that.

[00:53:06] Kyle Risi: Yeah, you'll see, you'll see.

[00:53:08] So of course they think Nelly is gonna be perfect for this, right? Uhhuh, she immediately says yes, but the rules are that she's completely on her own. She cannot have any help in this whatsoever, but she also has to move fast because the next ship leaving across the Atlantic leaves in just two days.

[00:53:24] So there's almost no time to prepare.

[00:53:26] So she starts to gather all her supplies. She thinks about what clothes she's [00:53:30] gonna need. Obviously she has to travel like, which is of immense fascination to the people reading the story, right?

[00:53:36] When people travel, especially women, they typically traveled with dozens and dozens of suitcases with an outfit for like every stop, right? But she takes just like a handful of things, like two suitcases, which in itself becomes an entire dispatch that people are deeply fascinated

[00:53:49] Adam Cox: by.

[00:53:49] What's in your suitcase?

[00:53:50] Kyle Risi: Yeah, like how could you travel? Like where's your day gloves, where's your night gloves? Where's your negotiating gloves? That type of thing. Right.

[00:53:57] Then she starts plotting out her route. The [00:54:00] plan is to travel from New York across the Atlantic to Europe, then through the Middle East, into Asia, and then make a way to Japan.

[00:54:07] From there, she'll then cross the Pacific to San Francisco, and then do like a victory lap overland, again, back to New York.

[00:54:14] No entourage, no chaperone, just on her own wits. That is the, that's the one rule that they have to stick to.

[00:54:20] And again, people are really fascinated because they're like, but how will she do it? She's a woman,

[00:54:25] Adam Cox: but so are they gonna like, um, give her enough money? I'm assuming they'll fund it and she just [00:54:30] has to find her way around buy tickets,

[00:54:32] Kyle Risi: I assume she's got like some sort an allowance.

[00:54:34] Adam Cox: Mm-hmm.

[00:54:35] Kyle Risi: And so on the 14th of November, 1889, she sets off across the Atlantic. Thousands of people come to see her off.

[00:54:43] The story is framed as this kind of modern adventure of a woman traveling fast alone with a clock ticking loudly in the background.

[00:54:51] It's a film, right? Mm-hmm. I can imagine this.

[00:54:53] She arrives in London just seven days later. She is. Completely seasick. [00:55:00] Like it's a moment where there's a serious question whether or not she'll even be able to keep going, but she is fine.

[00:55:05] From there, she gets to train to Paris where she actually meets Jewel Byrne himself, like the guy who wrote Felix Fogs around the world in 80 days. And I don't think he's very impressed because he is like, if you're doing it 79 days, I might clap with both hands.

[00:55:18] It's like, yes, Jules. That's how clapping works.

[00:55:21] Adam Cox: Yeah. How else do you get, oh no, actually I had a friend that could clap with one hand.

[00:55:24] Kyle Risi: Really?

[00:55:24] Adam Cox: Yeah. He'd be able to like properly shake his hand. He'd be able to clap with one hand.

[00:55:27] Kyle Risi: That's impressive.

[00:55:28] Adam Cox: Yeah.

[00:55:28] Kyle Risi: So do you think that's a [00:55:30] Jules bone meant?

[00:55:30] Adam Cox: Oh, I'm guessing so. That's the only logical explanation.

[00:55:34] Kyle Risi: I don't, I can't imagine Jules Bone trying to clap with one hand. Very serious, author there.

[00:55:38] So from Paris, she then continues through Europe and then on towards Egypt.

[00:55:42] Here's the thing, Adam. As soon as Nelly leaves New York City, a rival publication decides they're gonna send their own female stunt reporter, a journalist slash socialite named Elizabeth Westwood to race Nelly around the world, going in the opposite [00:56:00] direction.

[00:56:00] Ah, she is. And that publication is of all things Cosmopolitan Magazine.

[00:56:05] Adam Cox: Really?

[00:56:06] Kyle Risi: Yeah. So before it was like climax your way to Better Skin, it was now climax your way around the world in 80 positions.

[00:56:13] Adam Cox: I, I don't think they ever would've said that back

[00:56:16] Kyle Risi: then. But what I'm saying is that what a turnaround.

[00:56:18] Adam Cox: Yeah.

[00:56:18] Kyle Risi: Like going from like reporting on this to Yeah.

[00:56:21] Adam Cox: Other things.

[00:56:22] Kyle Risi: Yeah. Doggy style will never get you that promotion, that sort of thing.

[00:56:25] Adam Cox: I didn't realize Cosmopolitan has been going that long. Yeah.

[00:56:28] Kyle Risi: Crazy.

[00:56:29] Adam Cox: Yeah.

[00:56:29] Kyle Risi: [00:56:30] And so this story has now taken on a whole new dimension and the public are completely griped. Here's the thing, Adam Nelly has no idea that this is a head-to-head race.

[00:56:39] Adam Cox: She just knows that she needs to do it in like 80 days.

[00:56:41] Kyle Risi: Yeah, she doesn't find out until she's, halfway through her journey, and it's because she's moving so fast. It's almost impossible to get like a telegram to her. She's literally stopping for a couple days, filing a dispatch, and then she's gone again.

[00:56:52] It's not until she reaches Hong Kong. She's a raging, her onward journey to Japan. I think that someone in the office is like, [00:57:00] looks like you're gonna lose a race babe.

[00:57:01] And she's like, what are you talking about? And that's how she finds out that it is a race and that she's in fact behind.

[00:57:09] Adam Cox: Is she how far behind?

[00:57:10] Kyle Risi: Only by a couple days.

[00:57:11] But even missing a single connection could delay you by like an entire week.

[00:57:15] Adam Cox: Yeah.

[00:57:16] Kyle Risi: So yeah, it's not much. But if she misses this next connection, she's fucked.

[00:57:20] Adam Cox: Mm-hmm.

[00:57:21] Kyle Risi: But she's playing a call, right? She makes out as if it's not about winning, it's about making it in 80 days. But secretly knowing what we know about Nelly, she's [00:57:30] probably furious.

[00:57:31] Adam Cox: The thing is though, if it's the other, news publication and they print it first, well by the time that she prints her story, old news.

[00:57:38] Kyle Risi: Yeah, that's true.

[00:57:39] while she waits for her connections onwards to the next stop, she does get a chance to have a look around. And slowly, her luggage grows from like two suitcases to three suitcases. She's collecting a bunch of souvenirs. She's buying clothes. In fact, when she's in Hong Kong, she buys a monkey.

[00:57:57] Adam Cox: Soldier.

[00:57:58] Kyle Risi: Soldier. She names [00:58:00] him. McGinty.

[00:58:01] Adam Cox: McGinty.

[00:58:02] Kyle Risi: McGinty, yeah.

[00:58:03] Adam Cox: What kind of monkey?

[00:58:04] Kyle Risi: Oh, I don't know. A monkey. Monkey.

[00:58:05] Adam Cox: I'm guessing it's one that sits on your shoulder rather than like a gorilla that just

[00:58:10] Kyle Risi: Yes. Yes. He actually becomes a star of her dispatches from here on out. He accompanies her for the rest of the journey. In fact, at one point there is a massive concern from the public because he catches a goal and it's not quite clear if he's gonna make it. Poor McKenty. I know. Poor McKenty.

[00:58:26] But he does, and he actually ends up living with her back in New [00:58:30] York for like a number of years afterwards.

[00:58:32] Adam Cox: Well, before they realized, yeah.

[00:58:33] Wild animals shouldn't be pets.

[00:58:35] Kyle Risi: Ross's out there in the city raising monkeys. Why can't she?

[00:58:38] Adam Cox: That's true. That's very true.

[00:58:39] Kyle Risi: But the point is, is that this little monkey is one of those little details that makes this whole adventure really captivates for the people that are following this story. They get really invested in the character of herself and the characters that she meets, but then also the character of this monkey that she introduces into the story.

[00:58:54] Adam Cox: I think it'll be incredible to travel the world in 80 days.

[00:58:56] Kyle Risi: Mm-hmm.

[00:58:56] Adam Cox: Things that she's seen and done. Oh,

[00:58:58] Kyle Risi: the things she must have [00:59:00] seen.

[00:59:02] Adam Cox: Uh, yeah. How cool is that, that she's pioneering this kind of adventure?

[00:59:05] Kyle Risi: And remember as a woman as well, in the 18 hundreds at a time where women were, it was frowned upon for women to travel. Uns chaperone. She's doing this all on her own and on her own dime as well.

[00:59:14] Adam Cox: Yeah.

[00:59:15] Kyle Risi: So finally on the 21st of January, 1890, she makes it to San Francisco. She is two days behind schedule. So people following her, they're all on tender hooks, wondering whether or not she'll make it. But now that she was in North America, at least she was on [00:59:30] the home straight.

[00:59:30] Adam Cox: Mm-hmm.

[00:59:31] Kyle Risi: So this becomes sort of a victory lap for her because people line up at stations hoping to grab a glimpse of her and McGinty as they travel through.

[00:59:37] Meanwhile, Elizabeth traveling the other way around the world, she reaches the UK and is about to board a ship crossing the Atlantic.

[00:59:44] It looks like Nelly is going to win when suddenly a massive snowstorm hits the Midwest and suddenly it looks like she's not gonna make it at all so to avoid letting Elizabeth win, the New York world decides to intervene, Tutut, and they charge her a special train to get her [01:00:00] across the country and cosmopolitan.

[01:00:02] They are outraged, outraged by this. They release a bunch of scathing dispatchers, saying how they're not following the rules, et cetera, but people are like, listen, the New York world didn't make this a contest. You did?

[01:00:14] Adam Cox: Yeah.

[01:00:14] Kyle Risi: And we are the ones who are championing Nelly, not this other bitches trying to ride her coattails.

[01:00:19] So they're completely forgiven for it.

[01:00:21] Adam Cox: And she doesn't have a monkey.

[01:00:22] Kyle Risi: Exactly. Where's your monkey? And eventually on the 25th of January, 1890, nelly arrives back in New York [01:00:30] to a roaring crowd of people. She did it, Adam. Not only did she do it, she made it back in 72 days.

[01:00:36] Adam Cox: Oh,

[01:00:37] Kyle Risi: six hours and 11 minutes.

[01:00:39] Adam Cox: I would be calling up Jules Verne.

[01:00:41] Kyle Risi: Yeah.

[01:00:41] Adam Cox: Like

[01:00:42] Kyle Risi: that. DeMar Demanding he clap for you.

[01:00:44] Adam Cox: With both hands. Both hands. Jules.

[01:00:46] Kyle Risi: Yeah. So she's beaten Philia. Fog's record. Elizabeth doesn't make it back for another four days, but also there's no one there to see her back.

[01:00:53] Adam Cox: Oh. So yeah, you did it, but someone else did it before

[01:00:55] Kyle Risi: you. Yeah.

[01:00:55] No one cares actually. She's so embarrassed that she tries to actively distance [01:01:00] herself from the story for the rest of our career.

[01:01:01] Adam Cox: To be fair, that's a shame because what she did is we shouldn't be like tearing one person down.

[01:01:06] 'cause what she did was actually pretty impressive.

[01:01:08] Kyle Risi: It is, but it's also. There's an underhandedness there with Cosmopolitan Magazine trying to capitalize on something of another woman's success. Like she's taken this challenge, and they're trying to quash it. I don't know, there's just something distasteful about it for me.

[01:01:22] Adam Cox: The, yeah, I agree with the publication, but actually the fact that she's still managed to do it by herself. That should still be praised.

[01:01:28] Kyle Risi: Listen, Elizabeth is [01:01:30] fine. She's a socialist. She's very rich. Right. She didn't want to do the round the world because she had dinner plans the night that they wanted her to leave.

[01:01:37] Adam Cox: Really?

[01:01:37] Kyle Risi: Yes.

[01:01:38] Adam Cox: You're just making that

[01:01:39] Kyle Risi: up. No, I swear to God. So she agreed in the end.

[01:01:42] Adam Cox: Okay.

[01:01:42] Kyle Risi: So like, do I care? No. Nelly's the one who was like, I'm gonna do this.

[01:01:47] Adam Cox: I agree. Let's celebrate Nelly. But I'm just saying, Hey Elizabeth, well done to you.

[01:01:50] Kyle Risi: But at the end of the day, this is another massive success for Nelly. Before she was a celebrated journalist, but now she's like an outright celebrity. Do you know what I mean? Mm-hmm. And I can't understate how invested [01:02:00] people became in her success so much.

[01:02:02] So like they run a sweepstake where people guess how long it's gonna take for her to complete the trip around the world, down to the second it grows out of control. Adam, they receive like a hundred thousand entries. And I think the prices like an all expenses paid trip to Europe.

[01:02:17] They also sell a ton of merchandise, including signed photos, souvenirs. They even make a board game about her around the world trip.

[01:02:24] Adam Cox: That's cool.

[01:02:25] Kyle Risi: It is really cool. It looks at Trivial Pursuit, basically. And it's all driven by her [01:02:30] personality, her pluck, and her bravery.

[01:02:32] So, it's easy to see why this hits the cord. It does, because at this point the suffragette movement is now starting to really pick up steam.

[01:02:40] So there's a genuine appetite for women doing extraordinary things in a world where the notion is constantly challenged by what society deems as proper behavior for women.

[01:02:49] Adam Cox: Mm-hmm.

[01:02:49] Kyle Risi: And there's just Nelly, just unapologetically doing the impossible, which, not really impossible, but it's the impossible set by the standards. Do you know what I mean?

[01:02:57] Adam Cox: Yeah. And making it possible.

[01:02:58] Kyle Risi: Making it possible for other [01:03:00] women.

[01:03:00] Adam Cox: Mm-hmm.

[01:03:00] Kyle Risi: So the round the world in 72 days is sort of a dopamine overdose for her because where do you exactly go after this right now? What's the next big thing you do?

[01:03:09] Adam Cox: Yeah, it's too early for space.

[01:03:11] Kyle Risi: Of course, you want to keep doing bigger and bigger things, but the New York world, they want to keep her on a bit of a short leash. And so she starts to feel like she's not being given the recognition for everything that she's achieved.

[01:03:23] And so she leaves, she gives up journalism

[01:03:26] Adam Cox: and what does she do?

[01:03:27] Kyle Risi: So if someone suggests, might you try writing a [01:03:30] novel, which I, I get it. Everything that she's done would be a brilliant, a brilliant novel or a brilliant film.

[01:03:36] Adam Cox: But she's kind of, she's done the writing. Is she not wanting to do something different?

[01:03:41] Kyle Risi: She gives, she's given a massive cash advance, which is very attractive to her. So she decides to give this a go. Right? It's a couple of novels, but Adam, while she excels at everything she turns her hand to. It is very clear. She's not a very good novelist.

[01:03:53] Adam Cox: Yeah, fair enough.

[01:03:54] Kyle Risi: And it's because writing novels is a very different kettle of fish. Plus writing novels requires more [01:04:00] polish, which isn't really her bag.

[01:04:02] Adam Cox: She's got this kind of rawness and authenticity. Right?

[01:04:04] Kyle Risi: Yeah. It's all about her presence, her ability to open a window into real life, her connection to other people.

[01:04:10] Adam Cox: Mm-hmm.

[01:04:11] Kyle Risi: But don't feel bad for this failure because she does find this boring. She just doesn't have the patience for it. So it's not so much that she failed, it's that she just gave up on it.

[01:04:19] Adam Cox: Well, it doesn't sound like it was her passion.

[01:04:21] Kyle Risi: No, it wasn't really fulfilling her. Instead, she decides that she's going to head to Chicago, and this is where she meets a man named Robert [01:04:30] Livingston. Semen.

[01:04:31] Adam Cox: Semen.

[01:04:31] Kyle Risi: Yeah. Great name. Love it.

[01:04:33] Adam Cox: Mm-hmm.

[01:04:34] Kyle Risi: They meet and after two weeks they're married. So it's very controversial because at this point Nellie's 31 and he's 70.

[01:04:41] Adam Cox: Oh, okay.

[01:04:42] Kyle Risi: So he's also a very rich man as well. So people question whether or not this is a kind of a gold digger situation. Especially his kids are saying that because she is younger than all of them.

[01:04:52] Adam Cox: Oh, right. Okay. I mean, she didn't strike me as I imagine she's doing okay. So it's not like she has to do this.

[01:04:59] Kyle Risi: Yeah. She seems too [01:05:00] independent and too plucky.

[01:05:01] Adam Cox: Yeah.

[01:05:02] Kyle Risi: To be getting involved with a 7-year-old man,

[01:05:04] Adam Cox: or at least, yeah. For just for money. So she must have

[01:05:07] realized,

[01:05:07] Kyle Risi: oh yeah, no, I don't buy the gold digger aspect at all. But I do struggle with why she would marry someone like this when she's so plucky and so independent.

[01:05:14] And like I said, he's really rich. He's actually an industrialist. He owns a factory that makes things like milk cans, barrels, even kitchen sinks.

[01:05:21] So it's interesting because Nelly has committed her entire career to writing about the appalling worker conditions, and she has a chance to really bring [01:05:30] positive change in the very thing that she has been writing about.

[01:05:33] In fact, it's almost like a test case. She can now prove that it doesn't need to be this way.

[01:05:38] Adam Cox: Mm-hmm.

[01:05:38] Kyle Risi: She gets Robert to stop paying fairer wages. She also implements things like a library and a social club for the workers to use. All of this has this incredible effect because work morale and productivity as a result really improves.

[01:05:51] So she's like, take that man.

[01:05:53] Adam Cox: So she basically pioneered employee benefits

[01:05:56] Kyle Risi: possibly in a way.

[01:05:58] Adam Cox: Yeah.

[01:05:59] Kyle Risi: The marriage is [01:06:00] very unhappy. Robert is so paranoid that she's stepping out with other men, that he hires people to follow her.

[01:06:05] But Adam, she really isn't. She's just too busy. Like she's always out wanting to be in the thick of it. Meeting people, doing activism work. Remember she's doing a lot of stuff around the suffragette movement. At this time, she doesn't want to sit at home and have dinner.

[01:06:18] Adam Cox: Mm-hmm.

[01:06:18] Kyle Risi: But as soon as Robert realizes that she isn't cheating on him, that's when pretty much everything changes. And they really do fall deeply in love. Sadly, after nine years of marriage, Robert dies at the age of [01:06:30] 79.

[01:06:30] Adam Cox: mean, they still hits nine years together.

[01:06:31] Kyle Risi: They did? Yes. And they were very happy. So I'm really glad that she had that at least. And I think I read, he was like hit by a wagon or something and he doesn't end up recovering.

[01:06:40] Adam Cox: Oh.

[01:06:40] Kyle Risi: But she's really devastated. So feel for her

[01:06:43] Adam Cox: and that kind of shows. Yeah, that probably was, it was love, right?

[01:06:45] Kyle Risi: Well that she's devastated or that he was hit by a wagon, so in love and got hit by a wagon.

[01:06:50] Adam Cox: No, and the fact that whilst it was a very short romance to get married.

[01:06:53] Kyle Risi: Yeah,

[01:06:53] Adam Cox: it actually lasted, yeah, the distance

[01:06:56] Kyle Risi: after his death, she manages to outmaneuver the entire family. She inherits [01:07:00] literally most of the estate. And so she is like, sure I can run a factory.

[01:07:05] She transforms the company entirely. She rejuvenates the entire revenue stack. She secures a bunch of new clients. She even patents a bunch of new barrel making techniques, which I think is really impressive in herself.

[01:07:17] You can go on Wikipedia and you can see all the different patents that she's filed. I dunno what any of them mean or what they do,

[01:07:22] Adam Cox: but she did it.

[01:07:22] Kyle Risi: But she did it. Yeah, exactly.

[01:07:24] What she's doing here is the very thing that she's been trying to prove all along that you can have a fair [01:07:30] workplace and still have a profitable business.

[01:07:32] Because at the time, a lot of the pushback was like, yeah, sure, we can treat our work as fairer, but we will lose money as a result. And what she's proved is the exact opposite.

[01:07:41] Adam Cox: And probably profits then, I'm assuming.

[01:07:43] Kyle Risi: Exactly. So she does that for a while. Everything's going really brilliantly, but then money starts going missing from the company

[01:07:51] and as a result, she has to sell big chunks of the estate just to keep the factory afloat.

[01:07:55] And it turns out that when she brings the auditors in that one of her most trusted [01:08:00] executives, a man had been embezzling money from the business, the equivalent of 10 million pounds.

[01:08:05] Adam Cox: Wow.

[01:08:06] Kyle Risi: And by the time the scale of this corruption has finally been uncovered, the damage is already done. And yeah, there's just no way for them to recover and the factory goes outta business.

[01:08:15] Adam Cox: what,

[01:08:15] Kyle Risi: yeah. Isn't that awful?

[01:08:17] Adam Cox: The fact that what she did, and then it's just someone that screwed it up.

[01:08:20] Kyle Risi: Yeah. And as you can obviously imagine, there are some people that swing this to call this her failure. But really it wasn't, she'd done incredible things for this [01:08:30] factory. She proved the things that she'd dedicated her entire life towards. And yeah, sadly one man brought the entire thing down.

[01:08:36] Adam Cox: Was he arrested?

[01:08:37] Kyle Risi: Probably not.

[01:08:38] Adam Cox: screw him.

[01:08:39] Kyle Risi: He's a rich white man. Probably not.

[01:08:41] But what I did find really interesting is that a lot of her success in business actually comes from her leaning into her personal brand.

[01:08:47] Like she's so recognizable as a public figure that she starts putting her face on a lot of the company's products, which really creates this massive uptick in revenue. So she's sort of the early form of celebrity endorsement.

[01:08:59] Adam Cox: Ah.

[01:08:59] Kyle Risi: Which I [01:09:00] found that really fascinating.

[01:09:01] Adam Cox: Well, yeah. I guess she's pretty renowned, right?

[01:09:03] Kyle Risi: Renowned,

[01:09:04] Adam Cox: renowned,

[01:09:04] Kyle Risi: renowned,

[01:09:05] Adam Cox: yeah.

[01:09:06] Kyle Risi: After the collapse of the factory, she's now in her mid forties and she decides she's gonna go back to journalism because that's what she's really good at.

[01:09:13] Right.

[01:09:13] Adam Cox: She has done so much in her. I know.

[01:09:16] Kyle Risi: That's what I said at the beginning of the show.

[01:09:18] Adam Cox: Geez. I was thinking, oh, she must be like 60 now.

[01:09:20] Kyle Risi: Nope, she's 40.

[01:09:22] But there is a problem. Times have changed. Adam.

[01:09:25] Part of her appeal early in her career was the fact that she was young and spunky. Right? But [01:09:30] now she's hitting 40 and like, she was still celebrated for everything that she had done, but she didn't fit that niche anymore. That niche of kind of the news girls. Mm-hmm. In a way.

[01:09:38] And so when she realizes that it's a little bit of a below for her, but remember, she still has a credibility. She still has a reputation that she'd built in her youth.

[01:09:46] So she just now has to work out how she can repackage that into something different that is not quite news girls, but it's still appealing, but also can build out a niche that no one else is doing because it's so saturated Anyway. Why do you wanna be a young news girl? You don't,

[01:09:59] Adam Cox: she could be the [01:10:00] original Oprah.

[01:10:01] Kyle Risi: I said Moira Stewart, but, I figured our American listeners wouldn't know what we meant by that, but Yeah, she could. She's the original Oprah.

[01:10:07] Adam Cox: Mm-hmm.

[01:10:08] Kyle Risi: Yeah.

[01:10:08] Adam Cox: Yeah.

[01:10:09] Kyle Risi: You get a wagon. You get a wagon.

[01:10:11] Adam Cox: Yeah. Yeah. So what does she do?

[01:10:12] Kyle Risi: Okay, so she drops the whole kind of pluck and the precocious kind of aspects of What made her appealing to begin with. She's obviously now less driven by youthful curiosity and she becomes more serious, leaning, more into her credibility.

[01:10:26] And like I said, as you said, she becomes the first [01:10:30] Oprah around about this time, the First World War breaks out and like an absolute beast. She decides that she's gonna go off and report from the eastern front.

[01:10:39] Adam Cox: Wow.

[01:10:39] Kyle Risi: As we know, she's great at creating this visual window, so her reporting really stands out amongst many of the other reporters that are out there on the scene.

[01:10:48] She also becomes one of the first journalists to visit the war zone between Serbia and Austria, which is essentially ground zero for World War One, where all the actions happening.

[01:10:57] Mm-hmm. At one point she gets so [01:11:00] deep into it that she's arrested and accused of being a spy Adam.

[01:11:04] Adam Cox: Really?

[01:11:05] Kyle Risi: Like, if she was great at writing novels, this is one of those great stories that she'd be able to tell.

[01:11:10] Adam Cox: Yeah.

[01:11:11] Kyle Risi: She also heavily covers the Women's Suffrage Parade of 1913, where she writes the Super Super Bowl piece titled Suffragists are Men's Superiors. And in it Adam, she predicts it will be 1920 before women in the United States gets the right to vote.

[01:11:27] And that's exactly what happens.

[01:11:28] Adam Cox: She actually predicted the [01:11:30] year.

[01:11:30] Kyle Risi: Yeah. Isn't that crazy? But sadly, Adam, the great Netty Bly, she dies just two years later in 1922, she apparently contracts pneumonia and she dies she is 57 years old.

[01:11:42] Adam Cox: 57, yeah. So still pretty young in the grand scheme of things.

[01:11:45] Kyle Risi: Yeah. So she doesn't get a very long life, but damn,

[01:11:48] Adam Cox: what

[01:11:48] Kyle Risi: a life. She lived one field with enough adventure for multiple lifetimes.

[01:11:52] Adam Cox: Yeah.

[01:11:53] Kyle Risi: Of course she does leave behind this incredible legacy. People obviously have written children's books about her framing her as this [01:12:00] pioneer who forced away into a man's world and refused to kind of accept the limits that were placed on her.

[01:12:05] She obviously showed that women can play at a man's game, and 90% of the time when they do, they surpass men entirely.

[01:12:12] Adam Cox: Mm-hmm.

[01:12:12] Kyle Risi: But when you boil it down like we've covered so much, and that's only, like I said, the tip of the iceberg of the other things she's done. But when you boil it down, it's just ridiculous.

[01:12:22] She is a woman from a small hamlet in rural Pennsylvania. She breaks into journalism. She gets herself committed into a [01:12:30] madhouse. She exposes the injustices and exploitation of women all over

[01:12:34] Adam Cox: Mm-hmm.

[01:12:35] Kyle Risi: She circumnavigates the world. She becomes an industrialist. She reports on one of the worst wars in human history at the front line. And that's just the tip of the iceberg of the things that she's done. It's damn Adam,

[01:12:48] Adam Cox: all because she didn't wanna write about gardening.

[01:12:50] Kyle Risi: Yes. And what have you done today, Adam?

[01:12:53] Adam Cox: Yeah. It's quite crazy how her life just, yeah. That's the path it set her on. Yeah. It just led to one great thing after [01:13:00] another.

[01:13:00] Kyle Risi: And Adam, that is the story of Nelly Bly.

[01:13:03] Adam Cox: She impressive. Women never heard about her, but clearly she probably has done so much for people that they don't realize.

[01:13:11] Kyle Risi: Yes. Oh yeah, for sure. 100%. And that's the interesting thing about her story is a lot of the podcasts and a lot of the articles that are read out there, they typically focus on one aspect of a story.

[01:13:22] So for example, they might just focus just on the 10 days in the madhouse, right? Mm-hmm. But I think it does her story such a disservice [01:13:30] without mentioning the other things that she's done.

[01:13:32] Adam Cox: That was just a starting point.

[01:13:33] Kyle Risi: Yeah. And I get it. Like the 10 days in the madhouse obviously is the thing that kind of propels her career, but I honestly think you have to frame it amongst the other things that she's done.

[01:13:43] Adam Cox: Yeah. The fact that she was a businesswoman, she knew how to run a business. Yeah, she traveled the world.

[01:13:48] Kyle Risi: She was an activist.

[01:13:50] She

[01:13:51] Kyle Risi: had a monkey. Adventurous. She had a monkey. Yeah.

[01:13:52] Adam Cox: I don't know any other woman that had a monkey.

[01:13:54] Kyle Risi: Exactly.

[01:13:54] Adam Cox: So, yeah.

[01:13:56] Kyle Risi: Yeah. Do you think she ever spanked it?

[01:13:58] Adam Cox: That's why. Do you have to go there?

[01:13:59] Kyle Risi: I'm just [01:14:00] asking. I never really understood that term either, because it's not really a spanking action.

[01:14:04] Adam Cox: What?

[01:14:05] Kyle Risi: Spanking the monkey.

[01:14:06] Adam Cox: Oh, that's, are you? No.

[01:14:09] Kyle Risi: Right, Adam.

[01:14:10] Should we do some member shout outs?

[01:14:11] Adam Cox: Sure.

[01:14:13] Kyle Risi: As you guys all know, buy Now, HR have been hard at work assigning some real job roles to all of our certified freaks and our big top tier members.

[01:14:21] Adam Cox: The only problem is, while we know your job title, we don't actually know what your job entails.

[01:14:26] Kyle Risi: So when you hear your name, take no of your job title [01:14:30] and use the link in the show notes. Submit your job description to hr.

[01:14:34] Adam Cox: They want to know what your duties involve, who you report to in any major instance that have happened under your watch.

[01:14:41] Kyle Risi: Also tell us about your KPIs and how you're tracking against those. And of course, we'll be sure to read some of the best subscriptions in a future episode.

[01:14:48] Adam Cox: Okay. So this week a very big welcome to Mel Our Sideshow ‚Unexpected Bang Incident Recorder

[01:14:54] Kyle Risi: bang. Incident recorder. What does that mean?

[01:14:56] Adam Cox: Every time that someone bangs their knee, they write [01:15:00] it down.

[01:15:00] Kyle Risi: Thought you meant like a gun going off or something. That's good.

[01:15:03] Adam Cox: That's what, that's, that's what I interpreted.

[01:15:07] Kyle Risi: We have Iona Our Deputy Registrar of Unsanctioned Carousel Whinny Allocations.

[01:15:14] Adam Cox: Uhhuh Isla Our Snack Token Numerical Miscount Auditor.

[01:15:18] Kyle Risi: Oh. Important role. We have Lucy Mauviel Our Incident Recorder for Unauthorised Curtain Flourishes

[01:15:26] Adam Cox: and then Christina Our Assistant Archivist of [01:15:30] Unexplained Spotlight flickers.

[01:15:31] Kyle Risi: What was that? Who was a moth?

[01:15:34] We have Susan Ainslie Our Executive Authority on Catastrophic Tent-Opening Ceremonies.

[01:15:38] Adam Cox: Sometimes the show doesn't even go on.

[01:15:42] Kyle Risi: It doesn't. Sorry. We can't, we can't open the circus

[01:15:46] So guys, if you are a certified freak or a big top tier member and you didn't hear your job title, don't worry, Your role does exist somewhere in Sue's filing cabinet, and we'll read more of them in a future episode.

[01:15:59] [01:16:00] But if you want yours now, all you gotta do is just send us a message on Patreon or Instagram.

[01:16:04] We'll dig yours out so you can get cracking on your job descriptions.

[01:16:08] Adam Cox: Okay? So shall we run the outro this week?

[01:16:11] Kyle Risi: I think I'm ready to run the outro. No more gags. No more banter. No more insults.

[01:16:15] Adam Cox: No, I'm out.

[01:16:16] Kyle Risi: You're out of it. Okay.

[01:16:18] Well guys, that brings us to the end of another fascinating foray into the compendium, an assembly of fascinating things.

[01:16:25] Adam Cox: And if today's episode has sparked your curiosity, then please do us a favor and follow us on your [01:16:30] favorite podcast app. It truly makes a world of difference and helps more people like you discover the show

[01:16:36] Kyle Risi: and for our dedicated freaks out there. Don't forget that next week's episode is already waiting for you on our Patreon. And as always, it is completely free to access.

[01:16:44] Adam Cox: And of course, if you want even more, then join our certified Freaks Tier to unlock the entire archive. You get to delve into exclusive content and get a sneak peek at what's coming next.

[01:16:54] Kyle Risi: We drop new episodes every Tuesday and until then, remember,

[01:16:57] sometimes the bravest adventure is [01:17:00] walking into the dark on purpose just to bring a match back out.

[01:17:05] We'll see you next time.

[01:17:06] Adam Cox: See ya.

[01:17:06]