This is Anna. A couple of weeks ago, we did an episode with a woman we called Alice.

She talked about why she shoplifts and why she's not really afraid of getting caught.

I'm a white female, so, I mean, I feel like I would get off a lot easier than some other people would.

How does that feel to say out loud? It's kind of disgusting to me, but I mean, it's how the world is, so I sort of use it in my advantage.

We got a lot of responses to this episode, mostly negative. Oh, my God.

I was like, I was so appalled.

Hearing someone justify stealing upset a lot of you.

One of you commented, I'm not a violent person, but I fantasized about smacking her.

Someone else wrote, I've never been so angry listening to a podcast.

Kara, whose husband works in retail, sent in a voice memo.

I really wish that Alice could hear the anger and defeat from my husband when he tells me that his store was hit again.

It felt like there was more to talk about here.

So I reached back out to two listeners to hear why they reacted the way they did.

I called up Alyssa from Atlanta.

She'd written us an email saying she felt almost betrayed by the episode because she couldn't find a way to connect to Alice.

When I ended this episode, I really felt like I didn't understand why she was chosen

in particular to get to have such a large platform. Like what about her made her interesting,

or not interesting, but worthy? You know, why give a microphone to somebody who justifies her behavior by saying,

you know, I'm poor or I grew up poor?

Do you think we should have done this episode?

Oh, that's such a hard question for me.

Because something I've been thinking about is that if this were fiction, would I be interested?

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