#770 Imprisoned For Having HIV - Robert Suttle
Mental Illness Happy Hour
Paul Gilmartin
4.8 • 6.1K Ratings
🗓️ 17 October 2025
⏱️ 92 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Robert Suttle joins Paul to share his experience with the criminalization of HIV. He talks about the unexpected arrest related to his diagnosis, his experience in prison, and living with HIV in the modern day.
Links/Resources that Robert mentioned:
Elizabeth Taylor AIDS Foundation site: https://elizabethtayloraidsfoundation.org/
Elizabeth Taylor AIDS Foundation's HIV is Not a Crime initiative site: https://www.hivisnotacrime-etaf.org/
Robert Suttle's site: https://www.robertsuttle.com/
ETAF HIV is Not a Crime Roundtable Conversation with Don Lemon (featuring Robert): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_cC19N3_Irw
Video spotlight on Robert's story: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sw-ZvH-aI9Y
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Welcome to episode 770. |
| 0:03.0 | I don't know why I didn't say 770. |
| 0:05.9 | I like to mix it up. |
| 0:07.3 | I like to keep you off balance. |
| 0:09.1 | Welcome to episode 770 with my guest, Robert Suttle. |
| 0:13.3 | We're going to talk about, as I'm sure you can see from the title of this, |
| 0:18.5 | we're going to talk about the criminalization of HIV, which really |
| 0:21.4 | I had no idea that that was even a thing. |
| 0:27.6 | But I just finished like five minutes ago watching the HBO documentary, the Alabama |
| 0:34.0 | solution, which is about the, I don't even know where to begin, the abuses, |
| 0:41.3 | the horrendous conditions, the modern day slavery of the prison system. |
| 0:50.7 | The 13th Amendment is also a good, or maybe it's just called 13. |
| 0:57.5 | The documentary 13 is also really, really good. |
| 1:01.2 | I believe that's the name of it, but it's a reference to the 13th Amendment, which states that slavery is illegal unless somebody is incarcerated and then you can force them to do |
| 1:14.1 | whatever you want. And so if you haven't seen that, one of the things that is happening |
| 1:19.6 | nowadays, and this is unrelated to the interview with Robert, but I suppose just as a citizen, |
| 1:27.4 | I kind of wanted to spread the word about |
| 1:29.3 | this, but prisoners, I always had the idea that prisoners were merely used. Their work was, |
| 1:38.2 | you know, the typical you're breaking rocks or whatever, but that it was to maintain the prison, |
| 1:43.7 | to feed themselves, to wash their |
| 1:45.4 | clothes, et cetera. It turns out since prisons have been privatized and maybe even before they |
| 1:52.4 | began becoming privatized, the labor force in prisons are being lent out to corporations. |
... |
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