I want to be like, ‘Why does that feel new to me? Why does that feel weird to me?’” “As a journalist, I don’t want to raise my eyebrows at that. “But as far as polyamory is concerned, or young people who have sex with multiple partners, I have heard of that, of course,” Harman says. I can’t believe that people still use that term. “You know, it’s the key parties, it’s the velvet couches. “The word itself sounds old and fusty and sort of dated,” she says. “Swingers” is a term that feels old-fashioned even to Harman, though ultimately, as she considered what it means today, it became the podcast’s title. Somewhere, as the case and story moved through the legal system, a counterargument arose in which Robicheaux and Riley were described as modern-day swingers, whose sexual encounters and drug use were consensual. Definitely felt like I was just keyholing into this thing as a voyeur, which all of us kind of were either, consciously or subconsciously, during COVID.” “It’s a weird experience and one that I was able to capture with audio. “I was on the East Coast in my husband’s parents’ house in rural Maryland, tuning into these hearings and getting permission to record them,” she says. Because courts were closed to the public and proceedings moved online, Harman says she was able to watch the back and forth of the case online from wherever she was at the moment. Reporting the podcast during the pandemic did come with a sliver of a silver lining. I can’t remember the other ones, but I did kind of a bar crawl, saw what that was like, and got a sense of the geography.” “I went to Woody’s and Sharkeez and the Cannery. So in October, in the lull before the winter surge of COVID-19, she headed for Newport Beach to check out the bar scene where the alleged crimes of the case had originated. Though her mother grew up in Los Angeles and vacationed on Balboa Peninsula in Newport Beach, Harman says she’d never been to Orange County except to visit a college boyfriend from La Habra. “Had I known how legally complicated this story was at the beginning, I probably would have never tried to report it. I was like, ‘Oh, wow, this was kind of a better story than I thought.’” “It was right at that key juncture in the story where it could go one way or another,” she says. Seven women are saying the same thing, and (the district attorney’s office) is trying to get rid of it.
“I picked it up right when Spitzer was like, ‘Yeah, we can’t prove this,’” Harman says. An Orange County Superior Court judge refused to let the district attorney drop the charges, and the prosecution was eventually transferred to the California Attorney General’s Office. In that same press conference, an attorney for one of the accusers asked Spitzer, “How is my client getting justice?” Spitzer’s reply aimed to discredit the victim’s accusation, as he told the woman’s attorney during the press conference that he knew things about “her veracity being completely besmirched.”īut the case didn’t go away. Spitzer apologized to Robicheaux and Riley. More than a year later, in February 2020, Spitzer announced he would seek to drop all charges for lack of evidence, claiming Rackauckus had mishandled the case in an effort to use its publicity to aid his campaign.
Rackauckus initially filed the case against Robicheaux and Riley in 2018 as he ran for re-election against challenger Todd Spitzer, who ultimately defeated him. The legal situation has been changeable, too.
Serial Stories Lady Swings trial#
Sexual assault is a traumatic topic, and then, too, no trial has yet been held the case remains open-ended for now as Robicheaux and Riley have been neither convicted nor acquitted. The story is a difficult one for a variety of reasons. Harman didn’t know it at the time, but as she started work on the podcast she was stepping into the case at its messiest point. Swingers,” premieres with two episodes on Monday, March 29, and then will arrive in weekly installments thereafter. What that process is like to retell your story over and over again and not have a resolution, and not know which way it’s going to go.” “And then other people come and they ask you to tell it again. Swingers,’ a high-profile Newport Beach rape case is explored by podcaster Justine Harman – Orange County Register