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Hi Revealer,
I’m Laura, a senior radio editor here at Reveal. I’ve worked in radio and podcasts for almost 20 years, but I’ve never worked at a place like Reveal. We spend months, and sometimes years, on stories. As a nonprofit, we have the freedom to do this level of in-depth reporting because of the generosity of our listeners and readers.
I hope you will consider making a donation to support our deep, factual storytelling.
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This year, I got to work on a story that was more ambitious than anything I’d done before, along with our amazing team of reporters, producers and composers: our first serialized investigation, American Rehab. The New Yorker recognized it as one of the top podcasts of 2020.
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Over eight chapters, we told the story of an exploitative treatment for drug addiction with roots in a 1960s cult called Synanon. When reporter Shoshana Walter first told me about her investigation into work-based rehabs, places that send people to work for no pay or just pennies on the dollar as “treatment,” I was hooked. Shoshana said the story would involve not only a cult, but The Salvation Army, an attempted assassination by rattlesnake, Ronald Reagan and the war on drugs. And she said she had plans to track the spread of work-based facilities across the country to figure out just how many people were being sent to work when what they really needed was evidence-based addiction treatment.
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After years of work and hundreds of phone calls, we discovered that a minimum of 60,000 people every year are being sent to work for no pay, sometimes for big corporations like Walmart and Exxon. They work at chemical plants and car washes, at university stadiums and dining halls, at hospitals and zoos and warehouses.
Once the series launched, the emails started pouring in. People wrote to say they now understood that their experience wasn’t an isolated incident, but part of a much larger phenomenon. To be able to offer this context directly to the people who needed it most was one of the biggest honors of my career. This is why I believe so much in the work Reveal does.
If you, too, believe in our work, I encourage you to become a member by making a donation today.
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Our work didn’t end with the publication of the report. We are determined to get our findings out there to people directly affected. We created a webpage on work-based rehabs and are working with the national Rehab Reporting Network to add new facilities to our directory – the first and only one of its kind in which families can search by state to see if a rehab they are considering uses unpaid work as treatment.
Citing our investigation, U.S. Senators Elizabeth Warren and Tammy Baldwin requested that the U.S. Government Accountability Office (GAO) investigate unpaid labor at rehabs that receive federal funding. GAO will begin that investigation in 2021. And don’t worry, our team will keep a close eye on how this unfolds and report back to you.
As a nonprofit, the generosity of our members empowers us to do this important work. I hope you will consider making a meaningful year-end donation today.
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Thank you,
Laura Starecheski
Senior Radio Editor
P.S. Here’s a limited time offer: If you start a new monthly donation of at least $11, or make a one-time donation of $33, we’ll send you a FACTS T-shirt!
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