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Hi, I'm Josh Levine, host of Slate's new podcast miniseries, The Queen.

I first heard Linda Taylor's name six years ago.

One of the first stories I read about her said she'd stolen $154,000 in welfare

money in a single year, that she drove a bunch of fancy cars and that she used 80 different

aliases. Another article said that Taylor, the quote, welfare queen, could change from black

to white to Latin with a mere change of a wig.

But while the myth of the welfare queen endured,

Linda Taylor herself vanished from our collective memory.

Almost 40 years after Taylor became known as the welfare queen,

I started investigating what she'd really done and what had happened to her.

On this podcast, I'm going to tell you what I've found.

I'll start with how the legend of Linda Taylor began.

She was being painted as this big-time crook,

and she was indicative of all black females who were on welfare.

I'll also get into who Taylor really was.

In some ways, she was a victim.

The great lesson of this for me is that people will come to their own conclusions

based on what their prejudices are.

But she was also a villain, a con artist, a kidnapper, and possibly even a murderer.

My grandfather was telling me that she had kidnapped me and they didn't know where I was.

He had me so scared that, because he said she was just evil.

...