Hey, girlfriends, I just wanted to give you a heads up that this episode includes conversations about state violence and incarceration.

But around those you'll hear the twisty tale of how a group of artists protest against the Russian government.

Oh and also there's gonna be some swearing.

But you knew that already, didn't you.

Nadia is sitting in her Moscow flat playing the piano.

I'm a piano player.

It's difficult thing for Russian kids.

You either have to go to blair or to piano.

She's stuck playing this little tune over and over.

It was beautiful and really mystique.

I wrote a little draft and rose to my friends and quickly made a check in a couple of hours, and there's a punk prayer.

Punk prayer, a song of hope, anger and dreams of a better Russia.

And the friend she wrote that song for.

They're the ski mask wearing protest collective pussy Riot, created by Nadia.

The chorus goes, Britain, Mary, please become feminist.

And in the versus we talk about reproductive justice, we talk about the corruption in the church, and one of my favorite allignes, gay pride, is sent to Siberian in chuckles.

Nadia doesn't know it yet, but punk Prayer will be heard all around the world with some pretty damning consequences.

Eventually, in broken into prison.

She'll spend almost two years in a prison labor camp sow in police uniforms from dawn till dusk.

That's the price Nadia and her Pussy Right sisters will pay for challenging Russia's President Vladimir Putin, one of the most powerful, wealthy, and dangerous men on earth.

We're not professional criminals or anything like that.

Were just a bunch of artists who were doing our best.

But Punk Prayer will also launch Pussy Riot as the moral conscience of Putin's Russia, the front runners of a global feminist movement rallying together against Russian authoritarian power and their weapon art.

I'm Anisonfield and from the teams at Novel and iHeart Podcasts, this is the Girlfriend's Spotlight, where we tell stories of women women today.

Nadia Punk's the President.

The first time I saw Nadia Tolakanikov and Pussy Riot was on my very twenty twelve tumbler feed.

I thought it was a cool statement art, funny hats.

But it came and went like everything else on Tumblr.

And then there were the arrests, the courtroom dramas, political interference, and prison time.

Now Pussy Riot were making headlines and I was gripped.

But I never really learned how Nadia and the other women got there.

So let's start this story somewhere nice and picturesque, like Siberia in nineteen eighty nine, the year Nadia was born.

Siberia is a wonderful place and it has shape of huge pennis so I'm from head of it and my grandmother who would visit every summer vacation.

We've between the balls, and to get from one part of the dick to another you need to spend four hours in the plane.

Wow, that is a big dick.

I know.

No one can really impest me with the size of their thing.

After that, it's.

Not just Siberia's size that it's known for.

It's also defined by its weather.

It's a place where you have winter for nine months out a year.

It's Mine's forty degrees celsius plus really really heavy wing.

Polar winter brings its own heaviness on everyone's life.

So people find all sorts of escapes.

It could be drugs and sometimes hard drugs, or it could be bitter games.

And for me it was mostly books.

And my house was filled with art books on Potticelli and early Greek art, and I think it gave me radicalosing that probably otherwise would not emerge.

Wow, you had, like I, really kind of high brow early education in art.

You weren't reading normal kids books art.

He was my family in a package.

My dad and my mom are both very artistic people.

My mom and dad split when I was five, and she was responsible for feeding me and paying the bills.

My dad, with whom I stayed connected and really close.

He was a multimedia artist in the Soviet era, which also pushed him to the edge of society, but he gave me this passion to art.

By the early two thousands, Nadia had basically learned everything she needed from the grand masters of art.

It was time to look to the future.

It was a magical coincidence that this festival of contemporary art came to my home city.

I was around thirteen, and I was lucky enough to witness and a series of talks and exhibitions and performances of a few contemporary artists who became my guiding starts, and it started to model my life after them.

At sixteen, hungry to learn more, Nadia moved to the big city, Moscow, and there she started studying philosophy, but she was unimpressed by the art world.

What is so around me was mostly commercial art.

It's just way too boring.

Commercial art is by definition something that is useless.

But for me, my idea was to provide an alternative to the commercial art scene and hopefully started a movement.

And were you always interested in the sort of political sides of philosophy and art at that stage?

I think I arrived to my interest in politics through my interest in avant garde art and their world building ambitions, which was political in a way that they wanted to build me a society, and that sort of totality of art that wants to change life once and for all was really speaking to me.

And I wanted to see something like that around me among young hungry artists and wanted them to change the world.

I wanted them to change well, at least our government, which was at the time moving towards authoritarianism.

Nadia was only ten when Putin first became president and started centralizing power, Regional autonomy was reduced, media outlets were brought under state control, and over the years critics of the regime died under suspicious circumstances.

Slowly but surely, Russia became more authoritarian and more nationalists, two things that understandably have never sat comfortably with Nadia.

It's dangerous not just for Russian people, but also for people abroad, for neighboring countries.

Nadia believed in Russia, but not Putin's Russia.

She believed in culture and education, art, freedom.

She had to do something.

So in two thousand and seven, Nadia, together with the man who had become her husband and another couple, started a collective.

They planned to arrange protests all over Moscow.

So the choice of name was clear.

Viner By now means war in Russian.

It meant war against conservatives, our constitutions and the political order.

Vina did things like storming the Russian White House, which is the heavily guarded government headquarters in central Moscow, by jumping over the six meter fence and running for their lives through the grounds.

We were debating if we are going to be electrocuted once we reached the top, were shot that would not be fun, but it didn't happen, so all good and the ideas to show that resisting is indeed an option.

Imagine if a group of anarchists can really do this very radical action without ever getting caught, without going to jail, without getting arrested.

Then imagine what would happen if a million if people try to do the same and eventually will have real democracy.

Okay, a small goal.

Life for women and queer people in Putince Russia had arguably gotten worse.

Rights were rolled back, and patriarchal rhetoric seem to dominate politics and culture.

And so eventually four years in by now brought me to the need of struying something that will be feminist oriented, that will focus not just on achieving democracy, but also on protecting rights of queer people, on making sure that gender equality is achieved in my country.

And this how pursued was born.

Wow, and how did you come up with the name.

It's a great name.

This started from me and kat sitting in her apartment.

Kat is Yakatarina Samutzovich, who had also been part of Vina and had a pretty messy flat.

Neither a kut or her dad cared about cleaning stuff up.

If you open the fridge, you'd die from the smell.

It's September twenty eleven, six months before Putin, then Prime Minister is set to return for a third term as Russia's president.

Nadia, who's now in her early twenties, knows what this means.

More powerful one, less democratic freedoms, agency and rights for everyone else.

So she and Kat are into something they're calling punk feminism, and.

We'll look did this term broadly, and not just punk as music, but also really really bold and groundbreaking artistic move So we got truly inspired by the Red Girl movement.

The Right Goal movement was actually a pretty big inspiration for me too when I was in my early twenties.

It was this diy feminist music scene that was started in the Pacific Northwest in the early nineties, and I actually wrote one of my final music school essays about them.

After I was the only one who put my hand up when the lecturer asked if anyone would call themselves a feminist.

He said, watch out for this one, and everyone laughed at me.

I obviously had to go on a feminist rampage after that, and the Right Goal movement was the perfect outlet.

The people at the heart of it were angry but also playful.

They made scenes and sang punk songs about politics and sex and misogyny.

The genre's high Priestess, Kathleen Hannah from the Bamborkini Kill, had this famous slogan girls to the Front, meaning the girls stood at the front of shows while the dudes had to move to the back.

In short, right girl was the antithesis to my old lecturer and to Putin's Russia.

We started to joke around what would happen if Russia had their own Red Girl moment.

We thought that would be cool to record a song of a Russian version of Red Girls.

But we were visual artists, so me and Kat wanted to start a fake band and convince everyone this is an actual band.

This fake band would put on gorilla gigs to draw attention to the government's human rights violations and hypocrisy.

We just started to call it pussered to bring a derogatory term for a woman, for a girl that we are going to reclaim the same way that word bitch.

Queer punk was reclaimed.

Name sorted great and now everything else.

So what do we need?

What do bands do, and we cyclarless, watched some videos and we went on website where people sell used stuff in Russia.

We didn't have money at all, but we bought a guitar that didn't play, an electric guitar that used the props to create an image of a band.

They recalled their first song in Cat's Bathroom.

We didn't have smartphones at the time, so it was just a very cheap Olympus recorder, and we didn't have any knowledge on how to put songs together, so it was very ugly.

And that's punk.

That's the wonder you're doing it exactly how you should be.

We weren't even able to put together a loop like in a continuous fashion, so there was this little pause in between of the loops, so it would be like to do.

And that same page sounds like you're in jazz now what's going on?

That's very cool, but also, I mean, the sad fact is there's like nothing more punk band than being like a punk band who insists they're not a punk band, even if you weren't one, which is so cool.

You've gone through the looking glass.

Thank you.

On October one, twenty eleven, Nadia and Cat play the song they recorded during a presentation on punk feminism.

They say it's by a new Russian punk band called Pussy Riot, and they call the song kill the Sexist.

The sexist that they're referring to is not explicitly putin, but it is a comment on his ideology.

A Pussy Riot want to start making a noise about the imminent return to presidency that he's planning.

But they are just two people.

This fake punk band needs more members and fast.

We didn't have a lot of time.

Just felt like we have to work every single day and try to at least think that we have an actual movement because we didn't have any money, so we were mostly stealing stuff from supermarkets.

Yeah, we lived by shoplifting.

Then we started to work actually with our friends punk musicians, and you told them, just writing shitty like really quick in an hour and we'll screen something on top.

It was mostly mean kat as the core, but we were good at art propaganda.

We knew how to write press releases, how to context journalists like work close professional photographers and videographers and put together videos.

So it's a unheard of speed of production.

Would you be able to tell me about your very first protest that you guys did together.

The first batch of processed actions was called Free the Couplestones.

It was the end of October in Moscow.

It was already freezing cold.

I found to be outside, so we're decided to invade Masclow subway and we found places with this scaffolding being in the middle of the station and it looked just like the stage.

So we would climb on that little platform and packer a guitar that didn't play and connected the microphone that did work and make the action.

Wearing brightly colored mini dresses and ski masks to conceal their identities, Pussy Riots shout and dance on subway scaffolding and in crowded subway cars.

They warn that ballots will be used as toilet paper in the approaching elections.

And we did dozens of those in the subway and then compelled it altogether in one video.

Pussy Riots actions aren't designed to scare people.

Their tricksters inspiring hope.

What they're doing is fun but also dangerous because almost every single time they perform, they get arrested.

Imagine cops run to the base of this scaffolding and there's unless you learned how to fly.

There is no windows cape.

Some cops are nice, some cops are nut Some cops are you know, punting and dragging you around by your hair, And I was used to it.

I mean, did you not, after you realize that happened the first couple of times, did you not decide to like perform on the floor where you could could make a run for it.

That would not be beautiful.

I can't argue with that, but Putin did after the break a punk prayer.

In December twenty eleven, Putin's party United Russia won the parliamentary elections amid allegations of electoral fraud and a pre arranged role swap with the sitting president.

Tens of thousands of Russians took to the streets to protest.

They were the largest protests in Russia since the fall of the Soviet Union in the nineties.

Pussy Riot was there too.

They shouted lyrics like riot and Russia Putin chickened out.

You could find them screaming their protest songs in luxury boutiques and fashion shows.

A top expensive cars.

And they do behind it was Britain was throwing a lot of money to make people compliant to everything he does and momentum these places where it reached people in Moscow were hanging out to the time to warn them that one day their lives are going to get complicated because of Putain.

Next on their target list was the Russian Orthodox Church.

Nadia and Pussy Riot believed that the church's support of Putin created an unhealthy authoritarian relationship between church and state.

It lent us sort of moral and spiritual legitimacy to Putin as a divinely sanctioned leader.

So Pussy Riot came up with a way to draw attention to it.

It would be dangerous, lots of people would be appalled, but no one would be able to ignore it.

On the day of the performance set it's really called not Cozy Windy Gray.

A lot of participants said the day of the action that they aren't going to be able to join.

People felt uneasy.

It's February twenty first, twenty twelve, and Pussy Ryes are about to do a flashmob performance inside Moscow's Cathedral of Christ the Savior, right in front of the altar.

They're going to sing punk Prayer, which is the song you heard Nadia described at the start of the episode, the song that calls on the Virgin Mary to become a feminist and banish Putin.

We knew that we were touching topic that is potentially radioactive, but we believe that because we do a symbolic artistic protust, we don't punch from you one, we don't destroy anything.

We should be fine.

As a priest is literally offering sacraments to worshipers.

Five Pussy Riot members in their signature scheme, masks and colorful dresses sing kick and punch the air before the altar.

It happened all very quickly.

Forty seconds of performance.

We got pushed away by the guards really quickly.

They didn't make an attempt to arrest us, because I think it was more like, it's just a minor annoyance.

Who are this crazy girls jumping up and down?

And why did they do that?

They took our piece of equipment, like our little audio system they were very proud of.

So we were arguing with church security, the motherfuckers, give us back our equipment.

Pussy Riot don't get their equipment back.

And despite no arrests in the cathedral, Nadia knows things.

We were about to get serious.

She goes on the run, changing her location every day.

We didn't use our phones, it didn't use internet.

We were anxious and they're right to be.

The news of their protest was making its way to the President himself.

Putting personally gave an order to arrest us, and Putting gives an order if instead interpolice system Approssia is looking for you.

You don't know when the arrest is going to happen, so you almost wanted them to happen because at least it's some sort of clarity.

Notice the use of when, not if, because after a week of trying to outrun the authorities, the arrest does happen.

It was me and my husband at the time.

We went to by President for our daughter, who was about to turn four years old next day, and we got surrounded by around twenty people in playing clothes.

The Yelda gest They said, hangs against the wall.

They're very verbally abusive to me, and I think it came from from the fact that the Bernetta able to find us for a week.

So it was relief.

It was relief for me, it was relief for them.

Nadia and fellow Pussy Right members Katsumotovic and Maria ali Akina are all sent to a detention facility, to a white trial.

Once you're transport, there is not a joke anymore.

This how started protests ripple out from Moscow.

A YouTube video of punk Prayer goes viral.

At her Moscow concert, Madonna even don's a scheme mask and dedicates her song like a Virgin to Pussy Riot, and in late July the trial starts.

When it started, it became obvious it's very accusatory, and the tone of the judge and the tone of all the participants from from the government side was just so rude and so discriminatory to us.

They told us this feminism is by definitions hostile to the Orthodox religion, and Orthodox religion is a key ideological system for Russia.

So hence we are hostile not just to the religion but to the entirety of Russian and Russian people.

That we were told that we are paid by Hillary Clinton to destroy Russian They said that we cursed the entire country.

Thus we need to be burnt at the stake.

Some people say that we need to be whipped publicly under it's quat Oh my god, I've realized that there is nothing really here to lose.

We already we're really going to jail, that's for sure, and so we just turned it into a circus.

They're in a glass case, being infuriatingly positive and doing some devilish twitching.

Of course, it was a lot of fun.

Seriously.

In Nadia's closing statement, she describes pussy Riot as freer than the prosecution because quote, we can say what we want, while they can only say what political censorship allows.

Nadia, Kat and Maria are convicted of hooliganism motivated by religious hatred and sentenced to two years in prison.

And despite her tough exterior, Nadia's two.

Years in jail seemed like a lot because by that time I was in jail on for six months and it felt like eternity.

And imagine that I have to stay locked up three times is more, and then I'm going to be moved from Moscow to Pinal Colony, which basically Gulag labor camp.

That was terrifying.

Yeah, well tell me about that.

Tell me about your time in prison.

I went through twelve different fasodies.

I was not an easy prisoner, just demoralized.

I didn't feel like myself.

I forgot what I was before, I think was just deep, deep trauma that really destroys your image of yourself, your identity.

And I was forced to work all the time that I wasn't sleeping, I was performing different tasks, like I was sewing police uniforms.

Then I was digging trenches.

Then it was moving heavy giant stones around people colony.

That's how the Prussian prison authorities are controlling the prisoner.

They make sure that they are exhausted physically and emotionally to the point of turning into walking corpses.

And that's who I became in a labor camp.

Took me a year or two to realize that I'm still the same person who I was before jail, that I still have a voice to protest against the prison system they've started hunger strike.

Wrote an open letter protesting against the prison conditions.

A couple of weeks after I started my hunger strikes, I spent a month in different prison facilities and prison cars.

It was a long time, one month without any connection with my relatives or lawyers.

They thought by then that I'm probably dead, and I thought, who knows what's happening with me?

But ended up in Siberia which was Arden.

I ended up in Krasnajersko, which is the city that had visited every single summer.

This is the city where my grandmother lived, the city between the balls.

Just like the gay Pride parade, Nadia sang about in church, she too had been sent to Siberia in shackles.

No, I was delayed.

Well as the kind of the best thing that could ever happened to me, I came back.

Hum, yeah, in a way I'm sure you never expected.

No, you only get to know where you are once you're there.

Didn't transport you pretty much as a sack of potato.

But outside of the prison walls, Nadia is no sack of potatoes.

She's become a powerful symbol.

Amnesty International names her a prisoner of conscience.

Calls to free Pussy Riot echo around the world, along with a furious international debate about freedom of expression.

Then, finally, after eighteen graweling months in prison, on December twenty third, twenty thirteen, Nadia and Maria are released, early.

Two months before the end of my term.

Putin said it to sign an amnesty to release not all political prisoners, but just just a few of them.

And I think he targeted, specifically those who have been talked about the most.

Some people believe that Putin's amnesty is just some big propaganda stunt designed to bolster Russia's image before they host the twenty fourteen Winter Olympics.

But Putin isn't the only one planning for the games.

We got out and went right back into action.

We wrote a song Putin will teach You how to Love Them otter Land, and it was dedicated to political prisoners, those who remained jailed, and to corruption, to increasing authoritarianism in Russia.

Pussy Riot will be there at the games in Sachi with the newly released Nadia.

She's an international symbol of radical resistance now and everyone's waiting to see what she'll do next after the break.

All eyes on Nadia.

Oh Gotchachi, I've got you, gotcha, God you, I've got you.

In February twenty fourteen, only two months after Nadia was released from prison, Pussy Riot traveled to Soachi to protest the Olympic Games there.

Even before we jumped on the plane to go to so cheap starting through a mascow, we got followed by the cops constantly.

We were there targets number one at a time when we got released.

So every move, every step is being watched, every word has been listened.

I mean, after spending all of that time in the penal colonies, like having a really tough ride a bit, you know, it sounds like it was awful, but you're not afraid to be back out protesting doing more actions.

I was fair, I was shaking.

It was so scary for me to go back to jail, but it felt like we had to make this a statement.

Under an Olympic banner, armed with a plastic guitar, Pussy Rights sing their newest protest song, Putin Will Teach You How to Love the Motherland.

But mid song they're attacked, beaten and dragged by militiamen wielding whips and pepper spray.

Bloodied, yet defiant, they keep going.

We're getting arrested five times a day.

But we've realized it's almost impossible to do actions in the same style we've done before because we became so hyperfile as activists.

Wow, what was that like saying there?

When I mean, it just seems like you're being completely haunted by the police.

Pretty surreal, and you feel yourself like a paranoid but with one important note that you are actually being followed.

It's weird, but Nadia is not going to admit defeat.

There was a lot of stuff to be done in Russia.

We started a media project that's called Media Genre, and the idea behind it was to tell the people of Russia on what's happening in prisons, in police departments and tell about the most important political trials of the time.

Now it's the number one independent media outlets in Russia, which is truly incredible given that it is started by a bunch of punks.

But eventually you left Russia.

Could you tell me why and how that happened.

I think I would never leave it if I had to make a conscious decision to leave.

It was just a series of circumstances, a series of artists me and people who I cared about who got in the mix just because of me, just because they were working with me, and I felt like I'm responsible for that.

I felt very guilty.

So I felt like I need to move away, just take a step back, to protect people I love, and that pushed me to stay for some time out of Russia because I still wanted to create, or just didn't want to put people in dangerous situation.

By associating with.

Me outside of Russia, Nadia could use have reputations be even louder and without the police literally breathing down her neck.

In twenty twenty three, she put on her first solo gallery exhibition in la an immersive installation which she called Putin's Ashes.

Puttins Ashes is a response to Putin's full kill invasion to Ukraine.

For the first two months of the invasion, I could not think about making art.

I was doing everything they can to help with resources so to do actual help.

And then after a few months I felt I needed to make an artistic statement and it was a group of women from Blaruche, Ukraine and Russia.

We all came together to kurtz Puttin.

The ultimate art piece is the performance that is documented in video that's called Pussin's Ashes, accompanied with the song that I wrote.

In the piece, Nadia can be seen leading the women clad in fishnets and red Ski masks in a ritualistic ceremony to burn a large portrait of Putin and collect its ashes.

Putin didn't like it one bit.

My parents got visited by police and asked some questions.

Then there were a couple of searches at my friend's apartment who still lived in Russia into my ex mother in.

Law, Nadia was declared a foreign agent by the Russian court.

She was put on the country's most wanted criminal list.

Now I'm arrested in absentia, so I knew that if I go back to Russia, I'm going to be arrested immediately.

And even now I'm going to hear left Russia.

I feel uneasy about it.

The only meaningful connection that I've ever had in terms of my art and geography was the connection between me, my art and Russia.

I think I get it.

Your heart's still in Russia, right and your heart and your heart, I'm.

Very attached to the place.

I'm very attached to my language, and I was over much rather speaking version right now.

I never think that the smartest they're like, you know, the most talented or the most connected, definitely not the most powerful.

But I have this dedication and I always think, like, what if more talented musicians did, what did?

But I stick to this deary principle follow your dreams and then the consequences.

After years of imprisonment, harassment, and attacks, Nadi's commitment to see a better Russia without Putin has never waivered, and I just know she won't ever stop as long as he's in power.

It's nothing short of awe inspiring.

I can't believe I'm already saying this, But this is the last episode of the first season of The Girlfriend's Spotlight.

Thank you so much for listening, and if you haven't heard the other seven amazing stories, then do go back and listen, and if you like them, tell your friends.

We'll be back with more incredible stories of women winning soon, but in the meantime, coming up next on The Girlfriends, a brand new original limited series with Me Your Girl Annison Kelly Harnett spent over a decade in prison for a murder she says she didn't commit.

I'm one hundred percent innocent.

While behind bars, she learned the law from scratch.

He goes, Oh God, her knit Jahaus lawyer, and as she fought for herself, she also became a lifeline for the women locked up alongside her.

It was abba faith in God, but I had nothing but faith in home.

So many of these women had lived the same stories.

I said, Were you a victim of domestic violence since she was a Yeah.

But maybe Kelly could change the ending.

I said, how many people have gotten other incarcerated individuals out of here?

I'm going to be the first one to do that.

This is the story of Kelly Harnett, a woman who spent twelve years fighting not just for her own freedom, but her girlfriends too.

I think I have a mission from God to save souls fate getting people out of prison.

The Girlfriends Gelhouse Lawyer.

Listen from July fourteenth on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Hey, it's Anna.

You've reached the Girlfriend's hotline.

Leave your story after the tone.

Okay, I gotta go.

I love you.

So.

I have this friend who I've been friends with for almost nine ten years now, and although we've only actually lived in the same place for three of them, me and her have built this routine while living apart from each other, and it'll be that we'll wake up and we'll call each other, we'll eat our meals together.

There was a time where I was over at this guy's house that I was seeing and I think he went to peete and in that forty five seconds I managed to fit in a call just to update her about my whereabouts, I mean yesterday she gave me a tour of what was in her fridge.

I guess it sounds creepy in some sense, but I think it's a really just nice and stable and beautiful connection that has grown and somehow deepened in the distance and non in spite of it.

If you have your own story like the one you just heard, and you'd like the whole Girlfriend's Gang to hear it, then please send it to us.

You can record it as a voice memo under ninety seconds please and email it straight to the girlfriends at novel dot Audio.

Please don't include your name with keeping things a little anon.

We want stories like the time your friends still showed up to your kid's birthday party even though she was really seriously hungover, or the time she didn't get mad when you spilled a mug of coffee all over her white sofa, not the white sofa.

I want stories that are meaningful or silly.

I want big, I want small.

I'm desperate to hear them, so send them over.

This season, the Girlfriend's Spotlight is supporting the charity Womankind Worldwide.

They do amazing work to help women's rights organizations and movements to strengthen and grow.

If you'd like to find out more or donate to help them secure equal rights for women and girls across the globe, you can go to womankind dot org dot UK.

The Girlfriend's Spotlight is produced by Novel for iHeart Podcasts.

For more from Novel, visit novel dot audio.

The show is hosted by me Anna Sinfield.

This episode was written and produced by a Malia Sortland.

Our assistant producer is Lucy Carr.

Our researcher is Zayana Yusuf.

The editor is Hannah Marshall.

Max O'Brien and Craig Strachan are our executive producers.

Production management from Joe Savage, Sri Houston and Charlotte Wolf.

Sound design, mixing and scoring by Nicholas Alexander and Daniel Kempson.

Music supervision by Jako Taievich, Nicholas Alexander and Anna Sinfield.

Original music composed by Louisa Gerstein and Jemma Freeman.

The series artwork was designed by Christina Lemkool.

Willard Foxton is creative director of Development and Special Thanks to Katrina Norvel, Carrie Lieberman and will Pearson at iHeart Podcasts, as well as Carlie Frankel and the whole team at w M E