S18 Ep21: Justine van der Leun - Unreasonable Women
Truth & Justice with Bob Ruff
Bob Ruff
4.5 • 7.8K Ratings
🗓️ 24 May 2026
⏱️ 46 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Justine, who wrote and hosted the Believe Her podcast, returns to the show to discuss her latest work. Justine is an award-winning independent journalist and author. Her latest book, Unreasonable Women, will be published in June 2026 by Ecco. Justine’s prior books include We Are Not Such Things, and her features have been published in the New York Review of Books, New York Magazine, Harper’s, the Guardian, VQR, and TheNew Republic, among others. Justine is also the host and co-producer of the investigative podcast Believe Her.
She has been honored with the James Aronson Award, the Sigma Delta Chi Award, the Gracie Award, the iHeart Radio Award, the Mike Berger Award, and the Ambie Award. Justine has received grants from the Pulitzer Center, Type Investigations, the International Women’s Media Foundation, and the Robert B. Silvers Foundation, and fellowships from New America, the Emerson Collective, the Sustainable Arts Foundation, the Logan Nonfiction Program, Type Media, and PEN America.
Unreasonable Women releases on June 2nd. Please consider pre-ordering the book HERE
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | From NBII Studios, this is Truth and Justice, a crowdsourced investigation in real time. |
| 0:19.3 | I'm Bob Ruff. |
| 0:35.0 | Thank you. crowdsourced investigation in real time. I'm Bob Ruff. Hello, everybody, and welcome back to truth and Justice for this week's Justice Warrior guests. |
| 0:40.8 | I have someone who, those of you have been listening for a long time, have heard before. |
| 0:43.9 | She was on True Crime binge with me several years ago when she released her podcast, Believe Her, |
| 0:49.0 | and she's back again today because she's continued her work as an investigative journalist |
| 0:53.1 | and is continuing to |
| 0:55.2 | work towards uncovering injustices. And this time she's doing it in the form of a book. She has a |
| 1:01.5 | brand new book coming out called Unreasonable Women that will be released on June 2nd. You can |
| 1:06.8 | pre-order it now. We'll tell you at the end of the show how to do that. But please welcome. |
| 1:10.7 | Well, I guess please, like there's an audience here. I would like to welcome Justine Vanderloon. How you doing, Justine? Thank you. Thank you, everyone. I'm great. How are you? Really good. I'm excited. I was lucky enough to get an advanced copy of the book, and I haven't had a whole lot of time, but I've gotten through most of part one. And so far, it's super, it was great as the, the book starts out right away |
| 1:30.3 | when I start reading it. And I far, it's super, it was great |
| 1:28.1 | as the, the book starts out right away when I start reading it. And I don't know where the other |
| 1:32.2 | cases are, because it's the, the subtitle is three stories of violence, imprisonment, an |
| 1:37.2 | extraordinary survival. And in part one, the parts I've read is there, start talking about a case of a |
| 1:42.9 | woman named Tanisha Williams, who's from Saginaw, Michigan, |
| 1:45.6 | which is, you know, I'm in Michigan, so that was super interesting. I guess I want to jump right into it. I'm going to kind of let you, when we do these, I usually let you kind of guide the conversation a little bit because I don't want to give too many spoilers away, but let people know. the basic concept of the book. |
| 1:59.7 | Let's start there. |
| 2:00.9 | What is it that you're |
| 2:02.5 | working towards exposing in this book? So, you know, the last time we spoke, it was about the |
| 2:08.8 | podcast, Believe Her, which focused on the case of Nikki Adamondo out of New York State. And she was |
| 2:14.2 | a young mom who basically defended herself against her abusive partner and was criminalized for that. And she was a young mom who basically defended herself against her abusive partner and was |
... |
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