Hi, everybody. Welcome back to The Untold Story. I'm Martha McCallum. It's great to have you with us today. The story that we're here to discuss is one that has really been percolating for many years.

And it is the situation around Jimmy Lai. And I want to let you know that his situation is very dire at this point.

And his daughter, Claire, has become really his strongest voice while he sits in prison.

This is an untold story to many people. So I want to give you a little bit of background on what has

happened here. Jimmy Lai is 78 years old. He's a British citizen, media publisher, very successful man in Hong Kong, and he became the most prominent pro-democracy voice after Tiananmen Square when he started his Apple publications in Hong Kong.

So he's been advocating on behalf of freedom and democracy in the most forceful way

imaginable under Hong Kong's very draconian national security laws. He was imprisoned and now he is

awaiting his sentencing. He was found guilty in December of 2025 after spending several years already, five years of it in prison,

much of it in prolonged solitary confinement. His health has continued to deteriorate. The United

Nations has declared his detention arbitrary and has called for his immediate release. President

Donald Trump has repeatedly said that he is committed in his conversations

with President Xi of China to securing Jimmy Lai's release, and that position has been forcefully

echoed by Secretary of State Marco Rubio. And as I mentioned, Jimmy's daughter, Claire Lai,

has emerged as really one of the most prominent voices speaking on behalf of her father

as he is in prison and she joins me right now. Welcome, Claire. It's good to have you with us today.

Thank you so much for having me. Can you give us a little background on your father's emergence

as a pro-democracy voice in Hong Kong and why what happened at Tiananmen Square all those years ago

changed the course of his life? So actually, you know, my father, as a boy, he escaped communist

China. I mean, he was 12. And it's, you know, the history of Hong Kong, you can really see the landscape of the history in

Hong Kong and the granular details of my father's life whether it was when he was in in the

factory floors learning English or you know learning to read balance sheets as a boy or or and

really a lot of people had sort of um it was here

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