Re-listen to the best of The Girlfriends: Spotlight:

When Lu Ann Cooper was just fifteen years old, she was told to drop out of school and marry her first cousin. She would be his fourth wife. 

Lu Ann grew up inside the so-called Kingston Clan, a religious sect where, Lu Ann claims, every man is expected to have many wives, and every woman is expected to have many children. All with the aim of building up the Kingdom of God.

But one day, Lu Ann couldn't take it anymore. She decided she had to escape…

The foundation Lu Ann runs to support other people who have fled polygamy is Hope After Polygamy.

The Girlfriends: Spotlight is produced by Novel for iHeartPodcasts.

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Re-listen to the best of The Girlfriends: Spotlight:

Rose Brady’s job running Baltimore County’s SVU was a frustrating one. The sexual violence crimes she and her team were investigating were just the tip of the iceberg. Her department was sitting on thousands of unsolved rape cases, dating back decades - with little hope of ever finding the perpetrators.

That was until Rose made an incredible discovery: At a local hospital, a diligent forensic pathologist had kept in storage all the biological evidence from every rape exam he had ever performed. This could be the key to getting justice for hundreds of desperate women.

This is a story of hard work, dogged persistence and a series of incredible coincidences…

Rose has her own show with her daughter, Sam: Sgt. Brady's Crime Podcast (not affiliated with The Girlfriends: Spotlight): https://podfollow.com/1560081982

If you’ve been affected by sexual violence, there are organisations which can help. 

In the US: https://www.nsvrc.org/survivors

In the UK: https://survivorsnetwork.org.uk/get-help/ 

The Girlfriends: Spotlight is produced by Novel for iHeartPodcasts.

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In 1992, the Bombay Stock Exchange in India was skyrocketing. And at the centre of this chaotic, testosterone fuelled world was Harshad Meta: a man with aviator shades, a Lexus, and a reputation as a financial wizard. To millions, he was "The Big Bull," a self-made hero who promised wealth to anyone who followed his lead.

But Sucheta Dalal, one of the only female journalists covering the financial markets, wasn’t buying the hype. When she started digging into Harshad Meta, she uncovered something explosive. She had 24 hours to get to the bottom of it - with her career, and the fate of the Indian economy on the line.

This is the story of how one dogged journalist exposed a scam so big it sparked a financial revolution.

The Girlfriends: Spotlight is produced by Novel for iHeartPodcasts.

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Anna Rowe thought she’d found the perfect man: attentive, caring and totally devoted to his children. But Anna gradually started to suspect that things weren’t quite what they seemed… Her doubts led her to some late night dating app sleuthing.

What Anna discovers will unravel everything she thought she knew about love, trust, and the man she was madly in love with. And it will set her on a path to save thousands of women from romance fraud.

The Girlfriends: Spotlight is produced by Novel for iHeartPodcasts.

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On Valentine's Day 2000, Carolyn Moor's life changed forever when a hit-and-run accident killed her husband Chad. She was left a widow in her 30s - and with two young daughters to raise alone. And she discovered that when you’re a young widow, there’s not very much support - especially not the sort of support you need to get through the long years of grief-stricken child rearing. So, Carolyn founded The Modern Widows Club - dedicated to enabling women of all ages and backgrounds to embrace life after widowhood. She calls it ‘a wisterhood’.

Plus we hear from the nurse who witnessed Carolyn’s darkest moment, and used it to fight for positive change.

The Girlfriends: Spotlight is produced by Novel for iHeartPodcasts.

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The number 1 hit true crime series is back with more women fighting crime, battling injustice and seriously kicking ass.

In The Girlfriends: Spotlight, our global gang of girlfriends grew to include Pussy Riot’s punk icon and political prisoner Nadya Tolokonnikova, British Nigerian beauty queen and founder of Miss Trans Global, Miss saHHara and ‘The Erin Brockovich of East Africa’, environmental activist Phyllis Omido. Now host Anna Sinfield returns with more incredible stories. 

The Girlfriends: Spotlight is produced by Novel for iHeartPodcasts.
For more from Novel visit Novel.Audio

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When Morrell Andrews’s attacker was convicted of her sexual assault, she thought her fight was over. But it was just beginning. Because in Canada, where Morrell lives, ‘Publication Bans’ were enshrined in law. These bans meant that no one, including the survivor themselves, is allowed to publicly name the victim of a sexual offense. Effectively, if Morrell talked about her story in the press, or on her own social media - or even if she texted her friends or emailed her therapist about it - she could face a criminal conviction and a fine. 

Morrell wasn’t going to stand for that. With the support of a group of other survivors, she began an extraordinary legal and media battle to change the Canadian criminal code forever…

The Girlfriends: Spotlight is produced by Novel for iHeartPodcasts.

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In 2013, Rosamund Adoo-Kissi-Debrah’s nine-year-old daughter, Ella, died from a catastrophic asthma attack. Her death transformed her mum into a formidable campaigner. First, she fought to find out what had killed Ella - why had her previously healthy little girl suddenly developed breathing problems so bad they would become fatal? 

The answer lay very close to home - Ella, Rosamund and her siblings lived just off the busy South Circular Road, and the air pollution levels were dangerously high. Rosamund’s fight led to Ella becoming the first person in the world to have air pollution listed as a cause of death on her death certificate. Now Rosamund is one of the world’s leading campaigners to clean up dirty air globally.

In this episode, she’s joined by a very special guest: Anna’s mum, Rachel Sinfield. Rachel’s son, Kit, also died from an unexpected asthma attack, and she’s inspired by Rosamund’s work.

The Girlfriends: Spotlight is produced by Novel for iHeartPodcasts.

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Christmas Day, 1992. Sarajevo, Bosnia. War is ranging - Serb forces surround the city. For nearly four years, its people have endured daily shelling and sniper attacks, cut off from the rest of the world in the longest siege of a capital city in modern warfare. More than 11,000 people were killed. 1600 of them were children. 

And in the main hospital, a baby is born: Lejla Damon. Her mother didn’t want anything to do with her - if she held her, she said, she would strangle her.

Lejla was born of sexual violence used as a weapon of war. Her birth mother had been raped, repeatedly, by Serb soldiers in a concentration camp. And Lejla was just too closely linked to her attackers for her to bear.

Lejla was adopted by a British couple, and grew up in London. She felt alone in her earliest life experiences. But in adulthood, she’s found her Bosnian identity, and become an advocate for the countless other ‘invisible’ children around the world born of sexual violence used as a weapon of war.

The Girlfriends: Spotlight is produced by Novel for iHeartPodcasts.

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It’s the 1990s in San Francisco, and Antonia Crane is a dancer at the legendary peep show, the Lusty Lady. In the dressing room and the mirrored ‘Fishbowl’ where the dancers perform in six inch heels, a revolution is brewing. 

The dancers are sick of putting up with workplace injustices, or customers filming them without their consent. And they’re about to take on the system and fight to become one of the first unionised strip clubs in the United States.

Antonia Crane is an author, activist, sex worker and PhD candidate at USC. You can read more about her life in her memoir, ‘Spent’.

The other books mentioned in this episode are ‘Unequal Desires: Race and Erotic Capital in the Stripping Industry,’ by Professor Siobhan Brooks, another Lusty Lady alum; and ‘The Ethical Stripper’ by Stacey Clare. Antonia also recommends 'Neon Girls: A Stripper's Education in Protest and Power' by Dr. Jennifer Worley. 

The Girlfriends: Spotlight is produced by Novel for iHeartPodcasts.

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When the Taliban captured Herat City in August 2021, Tooba Sarwari had just one thing on her mind: cricket. Would she ever be able to play her beloved sport again? And more pressing, would the Taliban find the evidence of her and her team mates’ sporting achievements? If they did, it would surely spell the end for them and their families.

This is the story of how Tooba, and the other members of the Afghan Women’s Cricket Team, risked everything to flee Afghanistan and start a new life in Australia - with the help of some cricketing friends. And how once they were there, they began to rebuilt the team…

The Girlfriends: Spotlight is produced by Novel for iHeartPodcasts.

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