Episodes

A drifter. A pool hall. A prison cell. And the most consequential letter ever written in pencil on prison stationery. Garret Fisher closes the Fighting Back series with the one story in ten that ends with complete, unambiguous victory — and the one that keeps the whole series honest. Clarence Earl Gideon was a 51-year-old Florida drifter with an eighth-grade education and a long record of minor nonviolent offenses when he was charged with breaking into a pool hall in Panama City in 1961. He cou...

Oklahoma, 1974. A plutonium plant. A whistleblower. A meeting she never made. And documents no one has ever found. Garret Fisher covers the Karen Silkwood case — one of the most haunting whistleblower stories in American history, and the one that refuses to resolve into a clean ending. Silkwood was a lab technician at a Kerr-McGee plutonium plant in Crescent, Oklahoma, who became convinced the company was falsifying safety records and endangering its workers. She was elected to the union bargai...

2,600 lawsuits. $11 billion moved into private trusts. A bankruptcy designed as a shield. And a Supreme Court that said no. Garret Fisher concludes the Purdue Pharma story — covering the wave of lawsuits that broke against the company, the bankruptcy filing the Sacklers used to try to insulate their personal fortune from accountability, and the families of overdose victims who showed up to depositions of Sackler family members holding photographs of their dead children and refused to be treated...

They called it a miracle of pain management. Their own salespeople called it a drug. Their own documents called it a franchise. Garret Fisher opens the two-part Purdue Pharma story — the most destructive corporate drug case in American history. In 1996 the Sackler family's privately owned pharmaceutical company launched OxyContin with a marketing campaign built on a lie: that this powerful opioid was less addictive than existing painkillers because of its slow-release formula. Internal document...

The largest direct-action settlement in American history. And the town that won it is still dying. Garret Fisher concludes the Erin Brockovich story — covering the legal strategy that turned 634 plaintiffs into the most powerful class-action force...

No law degree. No formal training. Three kids, a borrowed car, and a town full of people dying of cancers nobody could explain. Garret Fisher kicks off week two of Fighting Back with one of the most iconic David vs. Goliath stories in American legal history — and one of the best arguments for why the civil justice system exists in the first place. Erin Brockovich was a twice-divorced single mother of three with $74 in her bank account when she stumbled onto a file that would change her life and...

A 79-year-old grandmother. Third-degree burns across 16 percent of her body. Eight days in the hospital. And a corporation that spent millions making her the punchline. Garret Fisher takes on one of the most successfully distorted stories in American legal history: Liebeck v. McDonald's Restaurants. Almost everything the public thinks it knows about this case is wrong — and that's not an accident. McDonald's coffee in 1992 was served 30 to 40 degrees hotter than any competitor, hot enough to ca...

The company knew. The scientists knew. The executives took precautions to protect themselves. And then they told two hundred young women the paint was perfectly safe. Garret Fisher covers one of the most infuriating corporate cover-up stories in American history: the Radium Girls of Orange, New Jersey. Beginning in 1917, young women at the United States Radium Corporation were instructed to point their paintbrushes with their lips before dipping them in radium-laced paint — lip, dip, paint, hun...

Garret Fisher concludes the Central Park Five story — picking up where Part 1 left off, inside the adult prisons where Korey Wise spent his twenties. In 2001, Wise crossed paths with Matias Reyes at Auburn Correctional Facility. Reyes confessed. DNA confirmed it. And then New York City spent years trying not to admit what two juries, a press corps, and a real estate developer with $85,000 to burn had done to five innocent kids. This is the story of the exoneration, the eleven-year fight for a se...

Garret Fisher opens the Fighting Back series — two weeks of David vs. Goliath while the production team vacations — with one of the most devastating wrongful conviction stories in American history. April 19, 1989. A woman is attacked in Central Park. Five Black and Latino teenagers aged 14 to 16 are hauled in for questioning with no lawyers, no sleep, and interrogations lasting up to 30 hours. By the time it was over, four of them had confessed to a crime the DNA evidence already proved they did...

Three trials. Three accused. Three different ways to dodge accountability. A socialite already serving life. A teenage gunman who took the stand in his own murder trial. A girlfriend recorded saying “I’m free” the day after her boyfriend’s...

Three stories where the people in charge stopped pretending. From Oakland to Hollywood Hills to Fort Worth, this is what privilege, predation, and pathology look like in the open. Day three of Musk versus Altman, and the world’s richest man finally meets a question he can’t bully. We bring you the cross-examination, the term sheet meltdown, and the Tesla AGI tweet that came back to bite him. Then to Hollywood, where the David case took a hard turn this week. The preliminary hearing was supposed...

Tanner Horner's defense plays the trauma card in Texas, four men face capital charges for a rapper's birthday ambush, and a Georgia father escapes execution for unspeakable crimes. Garret returns with three death penalty stories pulling the system in different directions. In Texas, Tanner Horner's defense team marches teachers, a former pastor, an ex-girlfriend, and brain scientists past the jury — every lever pulled for the man who admitted murdering seven-year-old Athena Strand. In Florida, o...

Two of the richest men on Earth, one charity, and a federal jury that has to figure out who’s lying. Garret Fisher delivers a special full-episode breakdown of the most consequential courtroom showdown in tech history. Elon Musk is suing OpenAI for...

The Hollywood murder case’s silent survivors finally speak, a British defendant tries his case on YouTube, and forty terabytes of digital evidence are still being sorted. Garret Fisher walks through three cases with court dates this week. Jake Reiner, the eldest son of the murdered Rob and Michele Reiner, has broken a four-month silence in a devastating Substack essay days before his brother Nick returns to court for a discovery hearing. Russell Brand, six months out from his October rape trial...

A teacher of the month, a Caltech engineer, a hotel room on the 10th floor — and the night gunfire reached the President's first Correspondents' Dinner. On Saturday, April 25th, the White House Correspondents' Dinner had barely begun when shots rang out near the magnetometers outside the Washington Hilton ballroom. President Trump, the First Lady, the Vice President, and members of the Cabinet were rushed to safety. A Secret Service agent took a round in his vest. The accused gunman: Cole Tomas...

Plus: a trial date for the Florida man who allegedly murdered a suicidal British woman he met online, and a Salvadoran housekeeper sues Kylie Jenner. Garret Fisher returns to the Athena Strand trial as the defense’s mitigation case opens in Fort Worth with testimony from Tanner Horner’s mother. Before that, jurors heard from Athena’s parents, the forensic DNA team, and the audio of her final moments. Then: the Los Angeles County Medical Examiner finally reveals the cause of death for 14-year-ol...

A Florida death row closes. A Virginia family dies in the basement. And a suburban serial killer finally tells his wife the truth.Garret Fisher brings you three hard stories. Florida executes Chadwick Willacy thirty-six years after he bound, strangled, and set fire to his neighbor Marlys Sather during a lunch-hour burglary. Former Virginia Lieutenant Governor Justin Fairfax shoots his estranged wife Cerina in the basement of their home and kills himself upstairs while their two teenage children...

Plus: four dead girls, a TikTok about wrestling, and a Bay Area town eating itself alive — one year after the fireball on Sir Francis Drake Boulevard. The d4vd case moves from arrest to formal charge: LA County DA Nathan Hochman announces first-degree murder with three special circumstances — lying in wait, murder for financial gain, and the killing of a witness. The death penalty is on the table. Then to Provo, Utah, where the prosecution rested in the Tracey Grist "family trap" trial and the ...

A surgeon who took out the wrong organ. An anchor's death his family never accepted. And four witnesses finally firing back at Karen Reed. A Florida surgeon is indicted for manslaughter after allegedly removing a seventy-year-old patient's liver instead of his spleen — and his lawyer says it's not the first wrong organ he's pulled out. Nearly five years after Birmingham anchor Christopher Sign was found hanged in his home office, his family still refuses to accept the suicide ruling — no full a...

Plus: the Athena Strand trial turns devastating as DNA evidence lands — and we meet Tracey Grist, the Utah mother who Googled a famous murder-for-hire before her son-in-law was lured to his death. Garret Fisher returns to the D4vd case months after it went quiet — and the quiet is over. LAPD Robbery-Homicide kicked open the gate of his Hollywood Hills mansion Thursday afternoon and arrested 21-year-old David Anthony Burke for the murder of 14-year-old Celeste Rivas Hernandez. He is being held w...

The internet's worst tourist gets six months of hard labor, a jury finally calls the concert giant what it is, and SantaCon's president had a very different charity in mind — himself. Garret Fisher has three stories that should make you feel something today. Johnny Somali — the livestreamer who mocked World War II's comfort women, harassed strangers across Asia, and showed up to court drunk in a MAGA hat — has been sentenced to six months of hard labor in South Korea. A New York jury has found ...

Plus: New rape testimony rocks the Athena Strand sentencing phase — and Sherrone Moore walks out of court a free man. She was eighteen months old when she fell into a well in Midland, Texas, and the whole world held its breath for fifty-eight hours. Baby Jessica became America's child. This week, Jessica McClure Morales — now forty years old — was arrested at her Midland home on domestic violence charges. We have the story. Then: the sentencing phase of the Tanner Horner trial has delivered its...

Plus: A Real Housewife caught shoplifting — for six months. And a cold case from Boca Raton that has never let go. A federal grand jury has indicted Anna Kepner's sixteen-year-old stepbrother as an adult on charges of first-degree murder and aggravated sexual abuse — five months after the Florida cheerleader was found dead beneath a bed on a Carnival cruise ship. We've followed this case since the beginning. Today, the indictment. Also: Real Housewives of Pretoria star Melany Viljoen and her hu...