A 21st Century Witch Hunt
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This podcast is supported by FX's English Teacher, a new comedy from executive producers of What We Do in the Shadows and Baskets. English Teacher follows Evan, a teacher in Austin, Texas, who learns if it's really possible to be your full self at your job, while often finding himself at the intersection of the personal, professional, and political aspects of working at a high school. FX's English Teacher premieres September 2nd on FX.

I'm Barry Weiss, and this is Honestly.

Today I'm talking to Maude Marin. For many years, Maude was a public defender with a nonprofit legal aid. She worked night shifts. She represented New Yorkers who couldn't afford a lawyer. After she became a parent of four and encountered the dysfunction of New York City's badly performing public school system, she joined her school board. And eventually, she decided to run for a seat on city council in lower Manhattan.

Maude is a lifelong Democrat, more than just a Democrat. She's politically quite to the left. She supported Bernie Sanders. In college, she was a pro-choice activist who worked with Planned Parenthood. In law school, she was a mentee of the prominent Black Panther Kathleen Cleaver, who became an associate law professor at Cardoza Law School. This is a woman who, by all accounts, should be looked to as a model of progressive politics.

And yet this woman, a woman who has spent her entire career defending the least fortunate citizens of New York City, almost all of them from minority backgrounds, this woman who uses her spare time advocating for better public schools, she is being painted as a racist segregationist, as a 21st century version of Bull Connor. How did this happen? Why is Maude Maron being lied about so flagrantly?

And why did she decide to sue Legal Aid, the institution to which she had dedicated her life? I imagine you've probably never heard of Maude Maron, or maybe you've never even heard of Legal Aid. But I think you will be shocked by Maude's story and deeply inspired by her courage and her decision not to back down in the face of lies. We're telling Maude's story to explain to people who she really is.

We're telling her story to celebrate her courage in standing up against the mob, something we desperately need more of. And we're telling her story to illustrate to you what a 21st century witch trial looks like. The first half of our conversation is about New York City. It's about the law and it's about education reform. All of these subjects put a target on Maude's back as someone who thought a little bit differently from the people around her.

In the second half, we turn to the campaign against her and to the heart of the matter. Why did this campaign of lies take fire? And why did her institution, a seemingly liberal one, collapse in the face of it? I am so grateful to Maude for speaking with me. We'll be back after this. Please stay with us.

Hey guys, Josh Hammer here, the host of America on Trial with Josh Hammer, a podcast for the First Podcast Network. Look, there are a lot of shows out there that are explaining the political news cycle, what's happening on the Hill, the this, the that.

There are no other shows that are cutting straight to the point when it comes to the unprecedented lawfare debilitating and affecting the 2024 presidential election. We do all of that every single day right here on America on Trial with Josh Hammer. Subscribe and download your episodes wherever you get your podcasts. It's America on Trial with Josh Hammer.

So, Maj, for people whose idea of a public defender is maybe like Atticus Finch or something, explain what a public defender does and who public defenders represent. Right. So public defenders everywhere represent poor people accused of crime. Right. So we have... Who can't afford a lawyer themselves. Right. So in...

The United States, Gideon v. Wainwright is the legal case that gives you the right to have a lawyer in a criminal case. So you don't have the right to have a lawyer if you're trying to sue your landlord or you're trying to, but if you're accused of a crime where your liberty is at jeopardy, where you could go to jail, you get a lawyer. In New York City, the way that works is if you commit a crime, you get arrested by the police generally and get brought to the precinct. And then within about 24 hours, you're supposed to see a judge.

the case that made it so that you had to see a judge within 24 hours was brought by the Legal Aid Society. It's, it's,

great work that the Legal Aid Society did to, because it used to be you could get arrested for jaywalking and spend 72 hours in a holding pen waiting to see a judge just to get out of jail. And the law now in New York is that they have 24 hours to get you before a judge for what's called an arraignment. And that's where you're informed of what you're being charged with. You get to meet your lawyer.

And the judge decides whether or not to set bail on your case. So that's where I meet my clients at arraignments. So the image that I have in my mind of a public defender or someone who works for legal aid is just like frenetic chaos, to be honest with you. Like people running into court, you might be representing, I don't know, a dozen people in a day. Yes.

Give us a sense of that. Like, so it's that you're, can you walk us through, I guess, like a day in the life of what it means to be a public defender? Well, I became a public defender in 1998 and there were really, really historically high caseloads at the time. So you went back and forth to court all the time. In Manhattan, it's 100 Center Street downtown. Like I said, you meet your clients at arraignments. So you work an arraignment shift sometimes.

And you could work the day shift, the night shift, or the lobster shift. What's the lobster shift? That's from, it no longer exists, but at the time when I started working, it was, I think it was 1 a.m. to 9 a.m. because the night shift was 5 p.m. to 1 a.m. and then 1 a.m. to 9 a.m. Why was it called the lobster shift? Yeah, I think because lobsters come out at night. Someone told me that and I believed it and never really questioned it further.

And I would work that lobster shift a lot because you got extra pay and you got two comp days. So it was for a young lawyer who didn't get paid a lot of money. That's pretty awesome. So who are these clients? Our clients are overwhelmingly young and minority in New York. When I started working, it was before the first wave of the reform of the Rockefeller drug laws, which were very draconian, harsh demands.

drug sentencing laws in New York City. So we represented lots and lots of young brown and black men accused of selling drugs, dealing drugs, possessing drugs. Of course,

there's a whole range of criminal offenses. So domestic violence cases, burglary cases, robbery cases. Also in New York City, what stands out to me over the years is the number of nonsense cases that you represent. So unlicensed general vending at the time, there was a steady stream of West African immigrants being arrested for selling fake Gucci belts and purses. And that, you know, so we have the interpreters,

that were always on standby were Spanish, Chinese, Mandarin, or Cantonese interpreters, and Wallaf. So we had, or in French, the West Africans would speak French or speak Wallaf or Ga. I represented a woman one time who was charged with unlicensed general vending for selling those mango slices that you get on the street. Oh my God, of course I know. And it's like a woman who's like four foot,

you know, and her whole entire enterprise is taken away from her and she's arrested and put through the system for selling mango slices. A lot of the work you did as a public defender, you know, you're doing it for, maybe you didn't even use these words at the time, but the words we would use now is just like the least privileged members of our society. And I know this is

this is like a kind of huge question, but how did it change you? Like, how did it change your perspective on American life? Yeah, I think you, when you're a public defender, you understand how poverty works better than a lot of other people. You know, it can be the same if you're a teacher or a doctor that works in a community hospital or facility where you really interact with people who live in deep poverty.

And for me, it's particularly revealing when you see kids, right? I worked on the juvenile justice team. You can wind up representing kids as young as 14, 15, 16 years old. And realizing how unbelievably alone some kids are in this city, right? To be 15 years old and in an arraignment and your lawyer saying to you, just give me the phone number of, this is back when people knew phone numbers, but just give me the phone number of

one person to call, you know, on your behalf. And there are some kids in the city who have no one, they have nobody to call. And so they're going through this system really on their own. You know, later in life, I got very involved in education conversations. And when people talk about changing admissions to solve for injustices, there's a certain population of kids in our city, that there's no admission system in the world is going to even come close to addressing what their concerns are.

Education and kids are a great segue to you having children. So you eventually take a break right from legal aid to have the first of your four children. Yes. Right. And so you have four kids in the span of a decade. And talk to me about how you decided where to send them to school and the decision really to raise them in New York. I lived in the East Village at the time. And you have two ways of getting information.

You look stuff up online and websites tell you what the test scores are of this school or that school and you talk to your friends.

And based on that very limited amount of information, we wound up moving to a school district that we thought had some great schools, sent our kids to a local elementary school, loved it, loved the community of parents that were there, was very happy there. And it's a K through five school. So our kids were there and they were super happy. And then it wasn't until you realize like, okay, there's the next step you have in New York City, which is totally different than the rest of the country, that

You have a situation where you apply into middle schools and into high schools. It's a hard process to navigate. And learning about it and seeing its deficits, there's good things about the system, but there's also things that really don't work well, is part of what got me involved in ultimately running for the school board here in New York. What year did you decide to run for the school board? That would have been around 2016. Okay.

So my eldest son was 10. And when you decided to run for the school board, what issue were you most passionate about solving? Why did you want to do that? Like you have so much going on in your life. You're working at legal aid. You have four children. Okay. And you're going to add this thing on top of it. Why would you possibly want to do that? As I started to learn about law,

how the decisions were being made. There are actually a lot of avenues for parents to participate in New York City. You can join your PTA, which most people know about. But in New York City schools, there's also something called an SLT, student leadership team. And parents and teachers and administrators are on that team together. Then there are these things, when I say the school board, I'm actually talking about something in New York called a community education council. And

New York is so big. It's the biggest school district in the country, approximately a million kids. And so we don't have just one board. We have districts and we have these education councils. So you have all these different avenues, which is both good, but it also makes it so that it's really hard to be heard as a parent or as a group of parents because there are just so many places to go.

And since I had a kid who was about to go into middle school, how that process worked was sort of of great interest to me. And there was a...

Greenwich Village Middle School, basically a new middle school that was coming to the neighborhood we live in, they were doing these things called envisioning sessions. So you could envision the school. Sounds like astrology. Yes, totally. Really what it is is a predetermined outcome and the envisioning session is the parent community moment that they use to pretend that they've listened to you. Understood. Who's doing the pretending? It is a collaboration between

the Department of Education and a group of activist parents who have a particular ideology that they want to advance. And the way it worked that I saw it starting to work and that I got frustrated with was they knew what they wanted.

and they had these sessions and they invited people to speak. I went to envisioning sessions where there were an endless number of Post-it notes and everyone was invited to write their hopes and dreams for their kids' education on Post-it notes, and you put them up on a wall, then you discuss. But at the end of the day, no matter how much you spoke up and how much you said,

The end result was we're going to have a school with no advanced accelerated academics where all the kids are together, where we won't even consider having advanced placement classes or regents classes because that's what everybody wants. And I thought, but that's not what everybody wants because I just heard people talk about the kind of education they want for their kids and the parents who wanted something different were being silenced. So just to put this sort of like as plainly as possible, um,

In New York City right now, and I don't think it's unique to New York, it's happening in San Francisco, it's happening all over California, which is where I'm currently living.

The sort of question about what should be going on in government-run schools, what should be going on in public schools around the country, and to what extent should parents have a say over that, and to what extent is the majority being silenced by a group of ideologues that are actually in the minority but are wielding an incredible amount of political power,

It sounds to me that that was sort of the thing you started encountering a little more than five years ago. And explain, Maude, to us the nature of both sides of that debate here in New York City. Because if you're reading the New York Times, right, the words that you're encountering are words that seem like they disappeared completely.

you know, with Jim Crow, words like segregation, words like integration. They're extremely loaded. Tell us what they're really describing and what those sides are.

So it's funny you mentioned California because there's a UCLA report that said New York City is the most segregated school system in the nation. It's not exactly true, but it has been repeated again and again and again to justify some of the changes that have happened in New York City. I think the simplest way, and this is oversimplifying, but just for our purposes, the simplest way is to say that

that in New York City there's been a debate that is sort of equity versus merit. And of course it shouldn't be that because...

However you define equity. Right. When you're saying equity here, you don't mean the dictionary definition of fairness. You mean equity in terms of equality of outcome between different groups, right? Well, yes. But I think the tricky part is equity gets used a lot and people generally think of it as some kind of fairness, as a good thing, right? As something that's positive. And so when they say you want to create more equity in school, most people say, yes, of course, we want more of that.

What it has translated into is an attack on merit and an attack on schools that do a really great job of educating kids who are ready to learn beyond grade level, kids who are really ready to have academic acceleration. Getting rid of that, which also conveniently hides some of the extreme gaps between groups of kids in New York City, has been the way in which

the ideologues, have tried to advance equity. And they do it wrapping themselves in a lot of self-righteousness and a lot of accusation towards anyone who disagrees with them. So let's do a case study, okay?

For those who haven't heard of it, Stuyvesant is one of the most famous high schools in New York City. It is a public school, but you get into the school based on a test. And it's historically been a school that has allowed minorities and especially new immigrants to kind of rise the ranks. Like the Stuyvesant graduates I know are some of the most impressive people I have ever met. Most of them came from immigrant or working class backgrounds.

Stuyvesant is something like more than 70% Asian American, and yet Stuyvesant regularly gets described as segregated. Can you explain that to me? Sure. Just to be clear, there's traditionally three schools, Stuyvesant, Bronx Science, and Brooklyn Tech, and Mayor Bloomberg added a few more schools, but Stuyvesant's probably the most famous one.

And the test has been around forever. These schools were created as essentially STEM schools, science, technology, engineering, and math schools. And so they tested kids who would do well in an environment that focused in that academic area.

And in the early 70s, amid some of the same kind of conversations we're having now about the racial makeup of who gets into those schools, they passed a state law called Hecht-Calandra to say, you got to keep that test. That test is how you should get into those schools. And it has been a hot button issue on and off over the years.

And it is very true that it has served immigrants well. People used to complain there were too many Jews in those schools post-World War II. Exactly. And then a school like Brooklyn Tech, which is the largest of the schools, was over 50% black and brown for 20 years. And, you know...

Jumaane Williams, who's the current public advocate of New York City, is a graduate from Brooklyn Tech at that time. You know, so he's an African-American man who went to a specialized high school when it was majority black and brown. His family are Caribbean immigrants. His mom attended that school and used it in exactly the way you describe, which is fuel for, you know, impressive and successful careers. So

How does the language, though, of segregation get used to describe what to most Americans would be an extraordinarily diverse high school? And it's not obviously just Stuyvesant. You see the same language in the case of Thomas Jefferson High School, a similar type of school in Virginia. Right.

When does that language start getting used? And who's responsible for it? Right. The language is deeply unfortunate. I mentioned that UCLA study. We had in New York something called the School Diversity Advisory Group. It was headed by Maya Wiley, who just ran for mayor.

And, you know, they had this formula that they used to propose, and it would say how many black children, Hispanic children, white children, and Asian students are in our public school system. So then they would say, you know, the school needs to, they want to create this sort of a racially balanced school. That needs to reflect the exact racial balance of the neighborhood. And then

But then they would expand. Then that was a domino effect because then it had to reflect the racial balance of the district and then ultimately the racial balance of the city. That's fairly impossible in New York City because we have. Why is that? Because the racial balance of Staten Island is very different than the racial balance of the Bronx. And if you look at a map and you look at New York City, we can't.

ship kids around different boroughs, across multiple bridges, through tunnels to get them to school to satisfy someone else's idea of equity, which is a racial balance that matches a city with a million public school students. It's not sensible. It doesn't work. And it certainly doesn't advance the

the goal of teaching kids how to read, which New York City public schools do an incredibly bad job of. Over 50% of kids in our public school system do not read, write, or do math on grade level.

as measured by the state tests that are given pre-COVID, were given every year in third, fourth, fifth, sixth, seventh, and eighth grade. So we have a good sample of how kids are doing, and it's not good. I have been following the education issue for many, many years. I wrote a good deal about school choice and the charter school movement when I worked at the Wall Street Journal. And it seemed to me that this is one of the earliest issues where I started to see the fissure of

between, let's say, the hard left or let's say maybe the progressive left and the liberal left. On the one hand, you had people who hear the statistics like what you're saying and basically say, this is unjust. The way that we make things more just is essentially by giving parents as many options as possible.

as possible, whether that's charter schools in some cases, whether that's school vouchers in other cases, but it's basically by empowering parents to give their kids a better shot and that there's absolutely nothing wrong with parents wanting the best for their children. And then on the other side of that divide was, and this was always weird to me because you think of progressive values as being about choice and empowerment.

the progressive left side of this debate was saying, no, somehow charter schools are not just bad. They, in a way, and this is when I started to hear this moralistic language that then became the language of segregation, that it is, that is white paternalism, these schools, and that eventually became they are actually segregationist. Like,

Is this the issue when you started to feel a little bit out of step with the people around you? Absolutely. And I'll say that we in New York have spent way too much time talking about the specialized high schools, but it's a really good example of the way the proposed solutions make things worse and don't actually deal with the real true crises in public education in New York City. So to back up for a moment...

I'll remind New Yorkers and everybody else that our current mayor, Bill de Blasio, wanted to run for president. And right before that ill-fated venture, he introduced the let's change how kids get into specialized high schools plan. And there was a big dog and pony show that went with it. They came to our school boards, to these community education councils with a PowerPoint that they walked parents through. But what their plan was was,

was to get rid of this test because it didn't produce the racial outcomes they wanted and to instead have 7% of each middle school have the ability to attend these schools, the top 7% of each middle school. It sounds at first blush sensible and fair, right?

But what it did was kick out 50% of the Asian kids who would ordinarily go there and send a fair number of black and brown kids to those schools. Now, if you can get past the fact that you're calling a plan successful because it gets rid of the Asian kids who are in your way, you know, you would think, oh, this is great. We can send black and brown students to Stuyvesant or to Bronx Science who haven't been there before.

But in order to celebrate that, in order to cheer that, you have to disregard the fact that if you do the numbers, a certain hundreds, there are two different numbers. The Wall Street Journal did some numbers and the IBO, the Independent Budget Office did some numbers. If you look at what that actually meant, you would be sending hundreds and hundreds of kids who were not grade level proficient in math to our most advanced STEM high schools. So...

what some people felt frustration with is those kids are going to need remedial help. There's no way you can get through a school like Stuyvesant if you're not grade level proficient in seventh or eighth grade math. I could not get through freshman year of math at Stuyvesant. I know that. So then you'd have a situation where you'd have to reduce some of the high level math course offerings so that you could introduce the remedial classes because you only have so many teachers and so many classes per students. So it would change the

the nature of the school, which would mean that for public school students more broadly, we wouldn't have schools like that. We wouldn't have schools where really students that were ready for that kind of accelerated education and academics, and you'd be setting a certain number of kids up for failure, right? And part of why that happens is because we have schools where kids...

are getting A's, they're getting great report cards, they're doing well, but when they take those state tests, you have schools where over 90% of the kids are not testing grade level proficient in math and reading. You have to solve for that in order to have high schools where kids from every zip code in every district can come together and do well together.

So just to be clear, like this has nothing to do with the ethnicity of individual students. It has to do with them. Yeah, sorry, go ahead. Any kid anywhere can take this test and do well. And historically, that has happened. There are complaints that it's not curriculum aligned. That's the most solvable thing. Just teach kids the amount of math that's on the test in the classroom. But instead, the...

Folks who like to use words like segregation and integration to describe the problems that they see in our school system, they're constantly arguing to reduce the level of academic rigor in schools. They would come back to what you just said and say, Maude, it's all well and good to say that everyone has access to this test, but you and I know that

in order to even know about the test, in order to prepare for the test, that you need to spend money to train kids for it, you need to have parents that are involved. And that in and of itself is somehow reflective of systematic racism or discrimination. What would you say to that? I just don't buy it.

I don't think it's a credible argument. We have kids whose parents don't speak English, who have been here for a short amount of time, who are sitting down and taking that test and doing great at it. And ultimately, I think we have to accept the fact that not every kid in every family that comes into a system comes from the same background. Of course, you're...

astronomically advantaged if you have two parents who love you and make sure you have warm food in your belly every night when you go to bed and read your books. That's the original privilege, right? That's it. That you can't really beat that for test prep. Like you can't beat the love of a stable home. Um, and kids of every color and every socioeconomic group have that. And there are so many kids who don't have that in the city. Um,

I just want to say one thing because this happens in the education conversation.

If you're just a realist and you look around, you can go into schools in the wealthiest neighborhoods and see fantastic schools with good PTAs, with good money, where kids are doing great. You go into our poorest neighborhoods and you see kids who are in a school where most of the kids aren't learning how to read. Like the injustice of it, the awfulness of it is something that I want to see fixed. I think lots of people want to see fixed, but...

The solutions that have been offered, I just think are the wrong ones. I don't think they're fixing things. I'll give you an example. If you would have asked me when I first became a public school parent, I would have said we have to fix the funding, right? Like it's not fair that the schools aren't fully funded. There's a whole history in New York that involves lawsuits. We are now awash in money. We're fully funded for the first time ever. We have federal money coming in. As it turns out,

Even before this federal money, New York City schools are funded at almost twice the national average per student. How much does New York City spend on average per student? $28,000. Wow. I mean, that's probably just gone up because of this federal money. So throwing money at the problem is not the answer, right? We know that. And I think ultimately...

We have to accept the fact that we can't adjust for all the variables that go into which kids are going to be successful. But we have to stop saying we're going to hold some kids back so that we can create this equality of outcome that you mentioned before in order to satisfy some people's notion of what equity is.

Do you also think that 20 years from now, people are going to look back on the way that Asian Americans are being talked about? I'm thinking now just not just of the way they're being talked about in the case of a school like Stuyvesant, but, you know, this ongoing lawsuit against Harvard and the discrimination against Asian Americans at Harvard. Do you think that we're going to remember that in the way that we remember like Ivy League quotas against Jews? I think it's the exact same thing.

Some of us don't need to wait 20 years to see it, right? Why are people so blind to that right now? I don't know. One of the first really contentious school board meetings we had is when I wrote a resolution opposing the mayor's plan to get rid of that specialized high school test. And a woman named Wei Hua Chin came and spoke. She is also a mom of four, but her kids have all, they went to Stuyvesant, they've graduated, they've moved on.

And she's been a really strong advocate in her community. And in her public comments, she said, what you call test prep, we call studying and we won't apologize for it. And it was really powerful and interesting. And it literally changed everything.

for me, the way I thought about that issue, because I thought the idea of test prep was often packaged with this idea of privilege, like, oh, white middle class kids can pay for a tutor or pay for tests, but poor kids can't. It's not fair. But the reality is a lot of the Asian kids who are studying and by Asian, it's not just Chinese kids, it's Bangladeshi kids and it's, you know, Korean students and it's this, you know, Asian covers 50% of the planet. So it's kind of a ridiculous category. Um,

But in New York, a school that's overwhelmingly Asian is very, very diverse in terms of cultures and languages. And the kids who are studying really hard to get into those schools are not a monolith of privilege by any stretch. The schools that have a lot of this academic success also have higher poverty rates than a school like Beacon High School in New York, which is very white and very wealthy.

and has the admissions method that we're supposed to think is more fair. It's the holistic admissions method. So you write an essay and you submit your grades and you do all this. Of course, it doesn't hurt if your parents famous, which is why they have a certain number of famous people at that school. You know, it's not it's subject to manipulation in a way that a test isn't. Well, I'm thinking now of of

the 14 and 15 and 16 year olds that you mentioned before that are floating around New York that sometimes didn't even have a number of a person to call. Like,

To that child, it's really hard to see how a test isn't more fair and gives them more of a shot, something they can control, than holistic admissions where they need to rely on getting things like recommendation letters from mentors that aren't even in their life. Right.

The reason that this education conversation is so relevant isn't just because I think both of us are extremely interested in it, but it's because it's the thing that puts the target on your back inside legal aid. Is that right? Correct. This sort of begins in 2019 with an investigation that happens inside legal aid. It's not a public story, but it's...

it's an investigation that's prompted by a group inside the organization called Black Attorneys of Legal Aid. What's the nature of the investigation? What's the nature of the complaint against you? I don't really know, so I can't answer you 100%. But just to make clear, Legal Aid, which is somewhat unusual for a law firm, is a unionized office. So Legal Aid lawyers are unionized. So Black Attorneys of Legal Aid is a caucus of the union that I've always been a part of.

And I knew that they had initiated an investigation into me from the head of the office, Tina Luongo, who I had worked with as we were both staff attorneys in Manhattan at the same time. And it's one of those things. I knew what it was from the very get go. There was no surprise. It was, we don't like your politics and we're going after you at work.

I spoke to one of your colleagues and he said there's no other word to describe what happened to Maude Marin other than McCarthyism. In other words, you were guilty of a thought crime or having the wrong politics in public and then that was used as a pretext to go after you. So they investigate you quietly at work, but my understanding is that

They discover nothing. They interview all of your supervisors. They look over your whole caseload and they decide you're cleared. Yes. And then you're also running for city council in lower Manhattan as a Democrat. Right. And, you know, does the investigation inside your work make you think, you know what, maybe I should like bow out of public life. Like maybe it's not the best idea for me to continue to

go out in public and talk about these issues? Like, what effect does that internal investigation have on you? Well, the really short answer to that is no. It definitely didn't make me want to bow out of the conversation. But it is awful, right, to have to live with it because I personally think racism is a horrible, horrible thing. And you see it's the manifestation of racist behavior and racist decisions is awful. And I just...

It's a terrible thing to call somebody, right? It's a really powerful thing, really awful thing to level at somebody. But just to back up for a second, one of the great things about being in a union is that you can take a year sabbatical from legal aid after a certain amount of time being there. And I had planned to take a year sabbatical prior to the primary. And the primary was last month, June of 21. So I had planned to go out on leave at legal aid in the summer of 2020.

This investigation was communicated to me at the end of 2019, and I actually met with my boss to go over it really in January. But while it was going on, we discussed the fact that I was running for office and that I was going to be requesting a leave. And my boss sort of suggested I take it a little earlier than I had planned. They didn't want to deal with it, right? Like they didn't want to deal with the lawyers who were complaining about me. They didn't want to deal with having to titrate this issue, right?

So I wound up going out on leave in January, and it was at that time that my boss communicated to me that they had investigated, they found nothing, and we were in the all clear. And then six months into that leave, I continued to serve on this education council that I'm on, and I wrote an op-ed. And I wrote the op-ed about a two-day anti-bias training that I had attended. It's called Courageous Conversations. And I was at the time the president of the school board for my local district, and

And I attended this training and I really was deeply troubled by it. And one of the things, or many things, but one of the things that really bothered me is the rules for speaking were you had to identify yourself by race and identify your children by race. So you were supposed to say things like, as a white woman with white children, or whatever you were, as a black woman with black children, or whatever your combination is, you

And you weren't supposed to speak unless you said that one right off the bat. I really have no patience for people telling me how I'm allowed to speak or what I'm allowed to say. But it's also, it was just kind of ugly. And this training was put on by who? The Department of Education, the New York City Department of Education. This was a government program. Absolutely. Okay, so you write this op-ed in July 2020 in the New York Post. And I just want to read the beginning of how it opened. Sure.

I am a mom, a public defender, an elected public school council member, and a city council candidate.

But at a city Department of Education anti-bias training, I was instructed to refer to myself as a white woman, as if my whole life reduces to my race. Those who oppose this ideology are shunned and humiliated, even as it does nothing to actually improve our broken schools. Though facing severe budget cuts, the Department of Education has spent more than $6 million for the training, which identifies qualities such as worship of the written word, individualism, and objectivity as white supremacy culture.

Was this the first time, Maude, in this training that you had run headlong into this ideology? No. Where had you encountered it before? Some of the folks who I sat on the school board with are really devotees of these concepts, of what Ibram Kendi calls anti-racism, what Robin DiAngelo calls white fragility, and what the New York City Department of Education has bought into Hook, Line, and Sinker.

Three days after you published that op-ed, things at work kind of blew up. So there had been this quiet investigation. You're cleared. But then you decide, I am not going to shut up about these issues. You publish this op-ed in the New York Post. And three days later, things at work really blow up. What happened? The caucus of my union that disagreed with me most vehemently on education issues said,

wrote a four-page letter, a screed, which didn't quote me anywhere and didn't actually bother to discuss the substantive differences they might have had with me, just name-called me and said, you know, that I was the worst person around. Let's read some of what they said. Maude Marin has no business having a career in public defense and we're ashamed that she works for the Legal Aid Society. Maude is a racist and openly so.

It said that you are a prominent opponent of equality and that you are a classic example of what 21st century racism looks like. Marin is one of many charlatans, they wrote, who took this job not out of a desire to make a difference, but for the purpose of self-imaging. She pretends to favor integration while fighting against it and denying the existence of racism and education. That was posted publicly on Twitter. Okay. That's when I learned your name. Mm-hmm.

How did seeing that in public from your colleagues make you feel? It was awful.

And it sort of takes your breath away a little bit to see how unhinged it was. I knew that there were people who thought if you disagree with me about the specialized high school test, I think you're a segregationist. I think you're a white supremacist, which I think is ridiculous and absurd, of course, but that's where the debate had gone. But that letter wasn't meant to just

air differences or start a debate, it's meant to kind of destroy somebody. That was the purpose. At that point, I was running for city council. I had started fundraising. And the idea was, we can't let this woman who we disagree with be successful. We can't let her have a successful run at city council. We have to destroy her reputation and her name and do it completely. Right.

This was an organization that you had been so devoted to. Yes. When the caucus put out that statement, did you imagine that the Legal Aid Society would come to your defense?

I had discussed that, actually, with Tina Luongo when we met in January. I had said to her, not about the letter, because I couldn't have anticipated that letter, but I had said to her what concerned me about this investigation that they did internally was that it would be leaked, meaning the fact of the investigation. Of course, there was nothing there. There's literally no there there.

But what I thought is that the folks who were so unhappy with my views would say, oh, she was investigated for not doing her job well or something. And then it would be pretext. Right. And then it would be out there. And we discussed the fact that legal aid would publicly state that there was no basis to those allegations and that I was an attorney in good standing, that I had an exemplary record at the Legal Aid Society. They didn't do that.

Instead, what they did was retweet that disgusting letter. I've spoken to a few of your colleagues now and some of your former supervisors. And the thing that struck me in talking to everyone was, I think, partially a sense of shame that people didn't stand up for you, but also a deep, deep sense of fear.

fear that what happened to you would happen to them. And that if they stood up for you, all of a sudden, they would have an asterisk next to their name too. What was your experience as this was happening with your longtime colleagues and friends inside the organization? Were they saying to you, Ma, this is terrible, but we can't speak up? What was going on?

My true close good friends reached out just to say, how are you doing? Like, what's going on with you? Are you okay? But people that I'd been colleagues with for a long time, people stayed quiet. People didn't want to talk about it, engage about it. People certainly weren't writing about it, posting about it, you know, on social media. It was sort of like, you're right, people are afraid.

In the aftermath of the group putting out that statement and Legal Aid retweeting it, there was no possible way that you could continue working at Legal Aid, right? Well, it wasn't just a letter from the union or the fact that Legal Aid retweeted it. Legal Aid released their own statement, which in some ways was more troubling. Why? Because the caucus of my union, there were a lot of hot-headed attorneys in that caucus who were

They think their view of how to fix schools, that their way is the right way, the morally correct way. And, you know, people who are young and a little self-righteous, I'm not justifying it, but you can just see the poor decision making going on in what they did. Legal Aid released a letter which hyperlinked to my op-ed. So they didn't say my name, but they made it very clear they were talking about me.

that was individually signed by 10 members of management, the top management of legal aid, saying that my perspective that I shared in the op-ed harmed black and brown clients, that it was disgusting. Wow. Yeah. And they said there was a mandate, and the mandate was to be anti-racist. And if someone hasn't heard that term before, it sounds good. Let's all be against racism. I certainly am.

But anti-racism is really a term of art in this equity conversation, and it's defined by Ibram Kendi. And I don't agree with it. I don't think that we can correct past discrimination with present discrimination, which is something that Ibram Kendi advocates for. Even if you accept his definitions and you like them and you think they're good, that's fine. You're an American. You have the right to do that. But other people are allowed to say, actually, I don't think that's a good way to

to fix things that currently ail our system. And anyone in their workplace should have the right to say, I read that book. I disagree. If I were an alien landing from another universe and I read about

Maude Marin's politics and her history, including like not just everything we've discussed, but you were a Bernie supporter in 2016. You thought Hillary was, you know, not progressive enough. You have a job representing the most underprivileged people in our society. You're on a school board where you're trying to fight for your vision of higher quality education.

And then somehow, none of that mattered. Somehow, you were still viewed by these people because you didn't buy into this racial essentialist vision of anti-racism.

Somehow you became the bad person. You became the racist. And you are being targeted by people who are obsessed with justice, ostensibly, and criminal justice reform. And all of a sudden, with you, because you disagree with them on any number of policy issues, you're being not just hounded inside your organization, but publicly smeared.

It seems to me that the word for this is it's like a witch trial. Did it feel that way inside of it? It felt like they were trying to bury me alive. And it definitely felt like I was really only a small part of the goal, an incidental part. It is really to silence everybody else. So let's explain how that works. Because when I talk about these issues, as you well know,

The response that I often get back from people is this. You're cherry picking. Sure, what happened in the case of Maude Marin or someone else that we could cite a dozen people is really unfortunate. But it's just one person. It's just a small organization. Who really cares about what happened to one white lawyer who has a good life at legal aid?

And I think what they're missing is the unbelievable downstream effects of the cancellation because the cancellation or the targeting or the witch trial, whatever we want to call it, although language feels a little bit bankrupt to me at this point, is...

That in targeting you, they're sending a message to everyone else that if you want to avoid the fate that we've just handed to Maude Marin, if you want to avoid having the R word attached to your name and, you know, the specter and the smell of all of these terrible evil ideas, then you're going to fall in line. Right.

That was what I heard when I spoke to your colleagues about your story. Just this unbelievable sense of fear that, God forbid, they would stick their neck out to defend you and they would be next. And really the only person who was willing to sort of use his name and go on the record was someone who had just retired and who had been at the organization for 40 years. Right.

And he was unbelievably outspoken in terms of how intolerable the atmosphere was. He said to me, it's a really impressive, oppressive environment for anyone who isn't radical, who doesn't share views like abolishing the police. He said to me that, you know, we talked about everything behind closed doors because it wasn't an environment where you could tell the truth out loud. That seems to me...

Yes. I would agree. Maude, I've spoken to a lot of people that have lived through what you're describing as the feeling of being buried alive. And I think it's a very human response when that happens to you to want to crawl into a hole or crawl into your bed and get under the covers, maybe with some pinot grigio and not come out for a really long time and certainly not continue to speak about it. That is not what you've decided to do. Right.

No, I go with Sancerre, not Pinot Grigio. You're a high class lady. Okay. So yeah, you know, it takes your breath away a little bit when people come for you like that. It overwhelms you. But I will also say that in addition to there being too many people who are silent, that is depressing and disheartening. There's also an extraordinary number of people who rally, right? Like there are

And not necessarily people you knew before. No, no, no, both. And that's what's really amazing is people reaching out who...

Some of my favorite letters that I get from folks are like, I'm a Republican and I don't think we agree on anything, but I really respect the fact that you're standing up for what you believe and not giving into this. And letters of support from people who aren't on your team in terms of politics, but who say that they know this is wrong and that this kind of stuff is really deeply un-American and it's not what we want to see. But, you know, even more locally...

Like I was on my school board, I would still show up. There were still public sessions that people would come to and there were sort of the mod haters would show up and constantly sling these words about segregation around. But I had people repeatedly thanked me for standing up, particularly some Asian American communities and immigrant communities who...

felt justifiably felt under siege by the Bill de Blasio administration and the New York City DOE because they were pushing a plan that said, if we kick 50% of your community out of here, we're going to celebrate it as a success. And for me, it was sometimes overwhelming to see people show up who, you know, moms who like didn't speak English that well, and they'd come and they'd thank me for speaking up on behalf of their community. And I'd think to myself, like,

If I were raising my kids in China and had to send my kids and navigate a school system where I didn't speak the language that well, where I was poor, and to show up in a public meeting and put yourself out there, it's not that easy. And so those folks, when they came and they spoke up on my behalf, it meant a lot. You're doing something extremely courageous by deciding to not go away.

and to sue an organization that you once loved. I'm really curious, Maude, about where that courage is coming from, because courage is something that's really hard and draining. Take your time. Give me a minute, because I've got to get my voice back. Take your time. A huge part of the answer to that question is,

Definitely going to try not to cry on this one. But a huge part of the answer to that question is my kids, right? Because, you know, I said to you before, Barry, like there's a huge part of me that would just like to walk away from this, right? Like I have a husband who loves me. I have four beautiful kids. I have lots of friends. And I'm a woman who, you know, can find ways to amuse myself and keep, you know, be happy.

There are communities of people that I love working with. There are just all sorts of ways to try to live a really good life. But, you know, I was really not a very public person prior to this happening. So if you Googled me, like the thing that came up were these awful things that people said about me. And I just felt like I'm not going to let them write my story, right? That's not my story. That's not who I am, you know?

I'd love to be able to say that to you without crying, but... There is nothing wrong with crying. I do it a lot. I cry in set movies. I cry all the time. I mean, I'm like a daily crier. It's nothing. For me, it was like...

I just didn't want them to write my story, right? Like this is not my story. It's not who I am. I'm someone who when I see injustice, I speak up. I much prefer to be speaking up on behalf of other people and defending other people. It's not really fun to defend yourself. And it's taxing and it's hard.

But I feel like both to fight for the kind of New York and America that I want my children to grow up in, I have to fight this fight. And also just to say, this is who your mom is, right? When this awful thing happens, you know, when I was working legally, especially my two eldest, because they're old enough to understand they're teenagers now.

They were proud of me, of what I did, of what I do. Like I would talk to them about the case. They would ask me questions about criminal law. And it's like I want there to be a legal aid society where people who have different opinions about how to fix our schools can work together. That's such a damn low bar. You know what I mean? That's a really low bar to clear. Oh, we have different ideas about how to fix schools.

failing schools, but we work together as public defenders. Why is that so hard? It's almost laughably basic. How do your kids understand, like I can imagine explaining to a five or six year old what a public defender does. How do your children understand what's happening to you right now and what this fight is about? Well, I will say, I think there's a certain amount of indoctrination going on in public schools across actually a fairly wide range of issues. And

But certainly the lack of diversity viewpoint, right? Like the Ibram Kendi, Robin DiAngelo view of the world is well accepted by a lot of teachers, a lot of administrators. And those who don't accept that, even those who strongly disagree with it, are the ones being silenced. So they're not speaking up. They're not saying, you know. It's exactly the dynamic inside an organization like Legal Aid, but in our public schools. Right.

And the downside of that for kids, for all kids, is that these ideas aren't being challenged. I'm not saying they should never be taught. Although White Fragility is a pretty bad book. I don't know that it should be taught. I mean, everyone should read Matt Taibbi's review of both of Robin DiAngelo's books. No, it's, and I actually handed it to my, my eldest boy to read that because it's just such a good, such a great review. Um,

But I did a few other things with my kids. I watched, we watched some family movies together. The documentary by Eli Steele called What Killed Michael Brown? Because I thought it was really fascinating. Beautifully done. Really deeply thoughtful. I thought I was, I was blown away by it. Right. I watched it twice because I watched it myself and then I thought I'm going to show this to my kids. Um,

And I had them watch the Evergreen series about what happened to Brett Weinstein. And just recently we watched a movie called Safe, a documentary called Safe Spaces. And so I just want them to know that there's a broader world of ideas out there that the sort of the safe spaces I'm going to get triggered world that is over prevalent inside their classroom right now is not the only point of view.

Do they understand that what you're doing is heroic? How do they understand what you're doing? I definitely don't think that's how they describe their mom. I think, you know, they're regular kids. They're teenagers. And my other son's, I have an 11-year-old and a 5-year-old son and two teenagers. They argue with me about cleaning their room. They argue about who loaded the dishwasher last night and who has to do it this night. Like, it's a very normal family life, but I...

I will say that like, so I'm suing Legal Aid Society, right, because of what they did. But I've also really been in a sort of pitched battle with the Department of Education. And in that, I'm very much not alone. I have an organization that I co-founded called Place NYC with a group of other parents to really advocate for

rigorous education for all kids and to make sure that all the kids in New York City have a really high quality education from K through eight and that we have high schools that meet the whole range of needs of kids in New York City. And there's a pretty broad range. And having that community of parents that I work with is sustaining. Like it's really is what makes me able to kind of keep going. Right. It's kind of like I think that if you're purged in a way from one group,

The only way to make that manageable is if you find another group. Right. A hundred percent. Yeah. This is not the first time that I have, and I'm going to get emotional now, where I have sat across from someone who is such a good person and is being pilloried for nothing. And that this machine of ideologues backed up by social media and the internet is

is just hammering and a hammering and a hammering at them. It frustrates me so much that there are still people who doubt the severity of what's happening and who I don't think can grasp what it is to be the subject of that. And one thing that

What's moving to me was that after I wrote the story about you, we heard from a lot of people who are in similar situations, including lawyers. And I just wanted to read one of them to you, whose name I'm leaving out, but was from a public defender in the Bronx. I read your article about Mon Marin with a sick sense of deja vu.

After eight years at the Bronx Defenders representing parents accused of abusing or neglecting their children, I was forced to resign after I politely objected to an incredibly anti-Israel office-wide email that was sent by management to 400 employees of the organization. I was told that I was a racist. I was told that I was worse than the dirt on the street and that my children, some of whom had served in the Israeli Defense Forces, were murderers and on and on and on.

After eight years of putting my heart and soul into my work, and after eight years of stellar performance reviews, I resigned in tears, and I'm now contemplating a lawsuit that in my wildest dreams I never imagined that I, a proud New York liberal who loved my work and never experienced anti-Semitism and who had never been called a racist, would be in this situation. This is another email that I got from another public defender in New York. I just read your article about Maude Marin. About 10 friends immediately sent it to me.

and tweeted about my similar experience. I am currently a civil liberties attorney in Washington, a job I obtained because I became so reviled at my job as a public defender in New York for holding views very similar to Marin's that I couldn't take it anymore. The things that went on in my office were insane, including hiring practices that are continuing today and are not only unethical but illegal. What is going on here? How do you understand? Because I think we both understand that what happened to you

while horrible, is so much bigger than you. How do you understand what's happening at Legal Aid, what's happening clearly in these other public defender offices, and what's the broader story that's going to be told about this and that is being told about this? If you could rewind, if I had a choice whether I was the one, I just learned from hearing you talk about the fact that other public defenders reached out to you

If we could have drawn straws of who had to be the person who was bringing this, I would have been hoping not to get the short straw. I wouldn't have chosen this. But I feel like it just became so clear to me that if I don't stand up, if I don't say this is really wrong and this isn't the way,

This isn't the way forward. This isn't the way an office should be run. This isn't the way workplaces should function. It's just going to keep happening. We need more people to stand up and we need not just as I'm doing now, but also people to say,

You know, I've heard about those courageous conversation workshops and I've looked into it. I've read it a little bit. I don't think that's the right one for our organization. Or to say, do we need an anti-bias training? Because actually, if you look into the research around that, it's lucrative if you're the one selling those products. But it turns out to not be particularly helpful to make workplaces function better or to make people work.

better able to communicate with one another. It actually introduces into workplace a lot of these trainings. It makes employees more suspicious of each other, less able to collaborate because they're less able to be honest. People live in fear of saying the wrong thing, of having an email that hasn't been worded perfectly, screenshotted. What you do is you hand a huge amount of power to the folks who are most at ease with

destroying other people, right? The person who's most ready to...

in someone's career has the most power in an office because they wield that power very lightly. There's a column that my old colleague at the Times, Michelle Goldberg, wrote, and we disagree about most things, but she talked about how there's always been a certain personality type on the political left that's attracted to it, and this is her speaking, this quote, because it gives cruelty the veneer of justice. Yes. What do you think of that? She hit the nail on the head.

It's completely right. And I think the other thing that's going on in this moment is that that person who revels in the cruelty is very backed up by a pretty broad army of people, some of whom are really well-intentioned, right? There are a lot of moms in the public school system who read White Fragility and thought, oh no, I have to be a better white person, right? And the impulse is

to see injustice and want to change it, that's certainly an impulse that I can relate to. So I think there are a lot of people who, some who have not thought too deeply about it and some who are just trying and getting it wrong, who are backing up these cancellations because they have really been misled and are really believing that this is somehow making things better.

I heard Glenn Greenwald on a podcast recently, again, someone I disagree with on a lot, but on certain issues we're very aligned these days. You know, he was talking about how progressivism, you know, that was the movement that was all about, you know, tolerance and liberation and, you know,

you know, the right and specifically the religious right was all about moral purity and rules. And that somehow those things seem to have flipped. Totally flipped. And it shocks the heck out of me. Like, how did I want, how did my team, how did lefties and progressives and Democrats become this intolerable, eat your own, sort of destroy somebody for having a slightly heterodox opinion about something? How did it happen?

but it has happened. And so the other label I would give myself is realist. And like, you have to not forgive that when you see it. Saying that you're going to chase people out of an organization or a workplace because they don't agree with the most left-leaning person in that workplace is intolerable. It's wrong. It's illegal. And it's also just immoral. One of the things that I find so

challenging about describing this movement and writing about it and chronicling it is that when you describe crazy, you sound crazy. Right.

when you're describing like, oh no, like that institution has been taken over by this ideology. It's a different thing than it was 10 years ago. People look at you like you have a third eye. Right. Do you find that? Totally and completely. Brett Weinstein may not be the person who coined this phrase, but he talks about like institutional capture, like this idea of capture. And it makes a lot of sense to me. He's the person I heard use the expression. And it's like,

Legal aid's been captured by this anti-racist movement. And just, I can't say it enough, I'm opposed to racism. Anti-racism in its most colloquial way is something that

I support. It's this term of art that... Well, they've stolen the language. They've stolen the language and it makes it really hard. And that's why people are fearful to speak out about things. And you're right. You do start to sound kind of paranoid and crazy when you talk about these things. And that's, you know, it's why we wind up in our echo chambers. I try to follow people on Twitter that I completely disagree with. So you've filed this suit against legal aid.

How do you imagine this playing out? I'm not entirely sure. I am a lawyer. I know how some of these things go. HR-type complaints tend to settle. But, you know, we filed the lawsuit just recently, but that's not where things start. You send a letter, they send a letter back to you, and there's a lot of sword rattling going on right now. My lawsuit isn't going to fix what happened. I don't get my career back. Okay.

So it's really just about standing up and saying, this is wrong, this shouldn't happen. And in a really small way, saying to other people, this is how you do it. Like you have to be willing to stand up and say, I know this is wrong and this shouldn't happen.

I saw the other day that you were reading the Rod Dreher book. I was just going to mention that to you. Live Not By Lies. Yeah. Because that book really moved me. Me too. And that book takes the name of the essay by Alexander Solzhenitsyn. I can never pronounce the name. By Alexander Solzhenitsyn, which we've discussed on this podcast before.

And the idea is, you know, to live in truth, to live not by lies. And by filing this lawsuit and by standing up and saying, no, I am not the things that you are saying that I am. And this is wrong. You're doing that. You are doing that. I read that book over Fourth of July weekend when it was like, I loved it. It's just really beautiful. And

You know, it's funny. I talked to you about the fact that in college I worked so much with Barnard Columbia Students for Choice that the author of that book is not pro-choice. And I read it. No, he is not. He is not. And the funny thing is I thought, well, I disagree with him fully and completely on that issue. But I see the beauty and the power of the story he told and the reporting he did and the message that he's sending. And I really think...

That's what we need to be able to do is say on this really important issue, reproductive freedom to me is an incredibly important issue. We disagree, but we can find so much common ground with people we disagree with on important things and treat each other respectfully and talk to each other because we're not going to solve the problems in our society unless we're able to do that. Maude, I cannot thank you enough. I'm so happy to know you.

And now I need to give you the hug that I've been wanting to do for two hours. Thank you so much. I really appreciate the story that you wrote. Now I'm hugging Bob. Thanks for listening. We'll see you again soon.