Dec 6, 2024
Transcript
LATIF NASSER: Quick warning: This episode has a lot of discussion of trauma and violence, including sexual violence and abusive relationships, and it may not be suitable for all listeners.
[RADIOLAB INTRO]
LATIF: Hey, I'm Latif Nasser. This is Radiolab. And today it is producer and reporter Sarah Qari's turn at the campfire to tell a story.
DAVID KING: All right.
SARAH QARI: Yes. And we are gonna kick it off with a story that I heard from a guy named David King.
DAVID KING: Okay. Yes. Yeah. My name is David King, and I'm a writer.
SARAH: And tell me, David, how did you get obsessed with this story? Like, where did you first hear about it?
DAVID KING: Well, I had the chance to live in Sweden in the '90s. And I used to walk past the square where the robbery took place every day on the way to the library—to the—like, the royal library—for another project. I always heard of it. It was a big deal in Sweden. But I had no idea how good the story was. I mean, it just had everything.
SARAH: So this story, it starts off with a robbery, one that maybe you've even heard of before, but it becomes so much more than that, because it would end up giving birth to an idea that lives in my head, in your head, in all of our heads, that has become kind of hard to shake loose.
DAVID KING: Oh yeah.
LATIF: Okay.
SARAH: But maybe I should just tell you the basic story first.
LATIF: Okay. Yeah. Okay, let's do that. Let's do that.
SARAH: Okay. So August of 1973.
DAVID KING: Thursday, August 23, 1973.
SARAH: In Stockholm, Sweden.
DAVID KING: Downtown Stockholm.
SARAH: In this sort of big square in the downtown. It's called Norrmalmstorg. It's got restaurants and shops and a big fancy bank.
DAVID KING: Sveriges Kreditbank. "Sverige" means Sweden. And on Thursday morning, the bank had just opened. A tall, muscular man enters the bank. He has a lady's wig on.
SARAH: Gray zippered sweatshirt.
DAVID KING: He has some makeup on.
SARAH: This kind of bronzing powder.
DAVID KING: A pair of tinted sunglasses. And all of a sudden, he rips out a submachine gun, fires in the air, says, "The party starts. Down on the floor."
SARAH: But instead of just grabbing the money in the bank and running out the door, this guy—his name is Jan-Erik Olsson—he starts taking hostages.
DAVID KING: They're all young.
SARAH: Ends up with three women and one man.
DAVID KING: And they were all bank employees. And he wants to use them as leverage for bargaining.
SARAH: And this is not something that really ever happened in Sweden at the time. So the police ...
DAVID KING: They arrive on the scene fast.
SARAH: All the police cars kind of pulled up.
DAVID KING: Right outside the building in the square.
SARAH: Start stationing snipers on buildings near the bank.
DAVID KING: On rooftops.
SARAH: And right away, alerts are going out on the newswire.
DAVID KING: The press is there really fast.
SARAH: All the major newspapers and TV and radio stations.
[ARCHIVE CLIP: [Journalists speaking Swedish.]]
SARAH: So Jan is in the lobby with the hostages, and he starts yelling his demands to the police.
DAVID KING: He wants three million Swedish kronas, which is a lot of money.
SARAH: Like, today it would be, like $5-million US. But the really crazy thing is that then he demands that the police bring him ...
DAVID KING: Clark Olofsson, Sweden's most notorious gangster.
LATIF: What?
SARAH: So Clark Olofsson ...
DAVID KING: Twenty-six years old. He's very handsome, very charismatic.
SARAH: He was famous for robbing banks and breaking out of prison, but he was also very charming and sort of a media darling.
DAVID KING: He had become something of a folk hero to Sweden at the time. And I mean, the fact—I saw this one list of the 10 most influential people in Sweden. Clark was one of them.
LATIF: Oh, wow!
SARAH: Yeah. So anyway, Jan ...
DAVID KING: He wants Clark released from prison and brought to the bank.
SARAH: And incredibly, the cops ...
DAVID KING: They actually release Clark. They actually do it. They actually bring him in.
SARAH: So some hours later, Clark is walking into the bank. And at this point, the media coverage just completely blows up.
[ARCHIVE CLIP: [Journalists speaking Swedish.]]
SARAH: It just becomes a huge national news story. All the stations ...
DAVID KING: Broadcasting live.
SARAH: Twenty-four hour coverage, live updates around the clock.
DAVID KING: At one point, you had about 70 percent of the entire country watching this.
SARAH: Oh, wow!
DAVID KING: Seventy percent. JFK assassination, the moon landing. I mean, this was up there in Sweden.
SARAH: So pretty much the entire country is following all the news of Jan's demands, all the moves the police are making. But pretty quickly, everyone's attention turns to the hostages.
DAVID KING: Yeah. The police start to see the hostages doing unexpected things.
SARAH: By this time, Jan and the hostages are sort of back in the bank vault, and the police have made their way into the lobby of the bank. And at a certain point, Jan lets the hostages go to the bathroom.
DAVID KING: And the hostages go to the bathroom.
SARAH: One by one, unaccompanied. They go down some stairs and around the corner, out of sight of Jan and Clark. And then they ...
DAVID KING: They go back to the vault.
SARAH: All the way back, walking right past a bunch of police officers.
DAVID KING: They could have run—they could have run out. They could have left. But instead, they go back to the gunman.
LATIF: Huh.
DAVID KING: Like, what? Why in the world? What's happening? What's going on here?
SARAH: And anytime they come out of the vault to talk to the police, their body language is kind of weird.
DAVID KING: That's right. And Clark comes out with the hostages. He has his arm around them. And one of the police chiefs thinks that they're frowning at him and there's a sense of hostility.
SARAH: But the stories about these hostages really start to blow up when Clark manages to find a phone and brings it back into the vault.
DAVID KING: Clark is calling his friends in the media, giving interviews during the crisis, which are being broadcast on radio.
SARAH: And at some point, the TV program Aktuellt manages to get one of the hostages, this young woman named Elisabeth, on the line. So they ask her, you know, "How are you doing? How are you holding up?" And she says, "You know ..."
DAVID KING: Says, "We're in good shape. We've been looked after. They've been real gentlemen toward us."
SARAH: And when the reporter is like, "So the four of you are just sitting there, hanging out?"
DAVID KING: Elisabeth corrects them, says, "No, we're not four. We're six."
SARAH: Then Radio Sweden gets an interview with another one of the hostages, Kristin Enmark.
[ARCHIVE CLIP, Radio Sweden: Kristin Enmark.]
DAVID KING: Kristin comes on the line.
[ARCHIVE CLIP, Kristin Enmark: [speaking Swedish]]
BROR JANSSON: We interview her. We were not sure what—what she was going to say.
SARAH: This is Bror Jansson. He was an editor at Radio Sweden at the time. And he told me that Kristin basically says ...
BROR JANSSON: She's more afraid of the police than she is of the robber or Clark Olofsson.
SARAH: "The police are the real danger here."
BROR JANSSON: That was extremely unexpected.
SARAH: Like, they're bad-mouthing the police?
BROR JANSSON: Who trusts a robber armed more than she trusts the police?
SARAH: And to the people listening to the interview it's just weird, because she just doesn't sound scared or distressed.
[ARCHIVE CLIP, Kristin Enmark: [speaking Swedish]]
BROR JANSSON: Not depressed or anything like that at all. She just sounded angry, actually.
SARAH: And so now everyone at home is glued to the news, trying to figure out what is going on with these women who seem to be siding with the gunmen.
DAVID KING: Again, if you weren't brought into the story yet, you have another reason to be glued to your television or your radio.
SARAH: And for six days, the hostage crisis carries on like this. There are reports that the hostages are helping Jan and Clark destroy security footage, that they are insisting to the police to let Jan and Clark go and that they want to go with them. And at the end of this whole thing, when the police finally get them all out of the vault—you can see this on video. They're all saying goodbye to each other like they're old friends.
DAVID KING: Yes, so there were hugs and kisses.
SARAH: And at one point the police are sort of forcing Clark down, and Kristin says ...
DAVID KING: "Don't hurt him! Don't hurt him!"
SARAH: And she turns to Clark and says, "We'll see each other again."
LATIF: Wow!
SARAH: So in the days that followed, what you had was all these articles and news reports trying to make sense of everything. And you get all these experts saying that what happened here is that these women, Elisabeth and Kristin in particular, had formed an attachment to their captors—to Jan and Clark—potentially even a romantic attachment. Basically, that they had developed what we all now know as Stockholm syndrome.
LATIF: I got it. Wow! So this is—this is the origin of that.
SARAH: Mm-hmm.
LATIF: This is where Stockholm syndrome comes from.
SARAH: Yes.
DAVID KING: I—I went in with the idea this is how it began. I thought that was going to be the story. But ...
SARAH: But ...
DAVID KING: I had no idea how much we had wrong with it.
SARAH: According to David King, who ended up writing a whole book about this called Six Days in August, when he dug into the details of the case, the whole story sort of got flipped on its head.
DAVID KING: I mean, from the beginning, in a way because again ...
SARAH: In particular, David says, what you see is the police, from the very beginning, had no idea what they were doing.
LARS-ERIK KARLSSON: This was the first time that something like this had ever happened.
SARAH: This is Lars-Erik.
LARS-ERIK KARLSSON: Lars-Erik Karlsson.
SARAH: He was one of the first police officers on the scene. And he's being translated here by reporter Alice Edwards.
LARS-ERIK KARLSSON: We had no experience negotiating these kinds of things.
SARAH: So pretty much right away, what they do is they bring in somebody to be their negotiator.
DAVID KING: Yes. The psychiatrist Nils Bejerot.
ÅSA MOBERG: The most famous psychiatrist of the time.
SARAH: This is a reporter who was covering the situation at the time.
ÅSA MOBERG: My name is Åsa Moberg, and I'm a writer and freelance journalist.
SARAH: And she told me that Nils Bejerot ...
ÅSA MOBERG: He was supposed to be the best negotiator with those people in the bank vault.
SARAH: So he was supposed to be talking to Jan and Clark, and then advising the police on what to do.
ÅSA MOBERG: But it doesn't always seem like it was very good advice.
SARAH: For example, when Jan asked for all that money, at first the police seemed to be trying to meet his demands.
DAVID KING: The police are scrambling to try to get this money.
SARAH: And Nils Bejerot actually walks in with the money, but it turns out to be sort of obvious that they're traceable bills.
LATIF: Oh.
SARAH: Which ends up making Jan, who already seems unstable, even more pissed off. And at the same time, they're escalating the situation by ...
DAVID KING: Coming down the staircase, coming in other entrances.
SARAH: Trying to sneak into the bank lobby.
LARS-ERIK KARLSSON: And we try to see what's happening.
DAVID KING: And trying to, you know, crawl into this scene so they could shoot him.
LARS-ERIK KARLSSON: Then Jan shoots at me.
SARAH: Whoa!
LARS-ERIK KARLSSON: Seven bullets, like a silhouette around my head.
SARAH: So Jan is really freaking out, ends up pulling the hostages back deeper into the bank. And when Jan demands that they bring Clark into the bank, well, they agree because ...
DAVID KING: They're hoping Clark could be a help. I mean, the police were kind of desperate.
SARAH: But instead, they just handed Jan a charming, media-savvy accomplice who knew what he was doing. And from there, it's just like misstep after misstep. I mean, at one point, when Jan and Clark and the hostages are in the vault, the police bring in beers, but then it's so obvious that the beers have been drugged that Jan catches it right away.
DAVID KING: He takes it and he just shakes it a little bit. There's a fizz. He realized these bottles have been opened.
LATIF: Oh, man!
SARAH: Which just made everything worse. Now inside the bank, from the hostages' point of view, of course at first they were terrified of Jan.
[ARCHIVE CLIP, Kristin Enmark: I thought he was—he was crazy. He was so nervous. It was very frightening for me.]
SARAH: So this is actually one of the hostages, Kristin Enmark, in an interview that she did with podcast host Terence Mickey. And she told him that while she was scared at first, once Clark showed up ...
[ARCHIVE CLIP, Kristin Enmark: The situation became totally different. He said, "You can't have the girls tied up like this." He was calming everything down, and Jan became very calm. So then I thought, "Wow, what's happening?"]
SARAH: So while the police are sneaking in and trying to shoot them or sending in drugged beers, it's just starting to feel like Jan and Clark are on their side.
DAVID KING: You know, the hostages want to call home. They want to call their family.
SARAH: Clark goes out, he finds the phone.
DAVID KING: Brings it back to the vault. Hostages can call home. Jan and Clark make it happen.
SARAH: Now at this point, Jan and Clark have demanded a car. And the police got them a car and agreed to let them drive away. And Jan and Clark are nervous, so Elisabeth and Kristin volunteer to go with them as collateral. And the cops are saying, "No, we can't do that. We can't let you go." But, you know, for Elisabeth and Kristin, they just want to get out of the bank. And this is where you get those phone calls where they're talking to the media, where you hear them saying, "These guys are being gentlemen," and they're more scared of the police than they are of Jan and Clark.
[ARCHIVE CLIP, Kristin Enmark: [speaking Swedish]]
SARAH: I mean, then maybe the craziest thing of all happens. Around this time, Clark has called in a favor from one of his journalist friends and manages to get connected to the prime minister of Sweden, Olof Palme. And so Kristin gets on the phone with him.
DAVID KING: Kristin is almost, like, begging him.
KRISTIN ENMARK: I said, "I want to go with these guys."
DAVID KING: "Let us go. We want to go."
SARAH: Olof Palme, meanwhile ...
DAVID KING: He'd been woken up from a nap.
SARAH: He listens to everything Kristin has to say, and he's like, "No."
DAVID KING: "We can't do that," he says. "You know, we have law and order." And Kristin is like, "You can tell me about law and order some other time."
SARAH: And then, according to Kristin, the prime minister says ...
KRISTIN ENMARK: "Wouldn't it feel good for you to die on your post?"
LATIF: What?
SARAH: Yeah.
LATIF: Why would he say that? What a tone deaf thing to say.
SARAH: Yeah.
DAVID KING: The authorities denied that that was said. It's not—it's not in the transcript, right? But part of the transcript is missing.
SARAH: Interesting.
DAVID KING: I think it happened. And I think I know exactly where it happened, because you can read the transcript, and all of a sudden you could hear Elisabeth saying something. "There are enough dead heroes out there." And it makes absolutely no sense.
SARAH: Yeah.
DAVID KING: Except this little spot, if you put it in ...
SARAH: Makes sense.
DAVID KING: If you insert that part where I think it is, then it makes sense. And Kristin said it, Jan said it, you know, Clark. They all heard it.
SARAH: Oh, wow. Okay.
DAVID KING: So ...
KRISTIN ENMARK: I was 23. [laughs] I had this very low status at the bank, of course.
SARAH: It's like one of those moments where just, like, all the blood drains out of you.
LATIF: Right. The person—the person who's supposed to be most in your corner is like, doesn't care whether you live or die.
KRISTIN ENMARK: When he said that, I thought, you don't understand nothing.
SARAH: Shortly after that, Nils Bejerot and the police make a decision that would turn this whole situation into a total nightmare scenario. They sneak up to the door of the vault and ...
KRISTIN ENMARK: I remember hearing the [claps], you know, and the door was shut.
SARAH: ... they lock Kristin and Elisabeth and the other hostages in there with Clark and Jan.
LATIF: So now they're trapped in a vault.
SARAH: Yeah.
KRISTIN ENMARK: If you excuse me. That's when the shit really hit the fan.
DAVID KING: They'd been calling him a monster. They called him a madman, and now they're locking the hostages up with him. If you back someone in a corner, they can become dangerous. And Jan said he felt like a rat caught in a trap.
LATIF: What was their—they just hadn't thought it out. They just were like, "Let's contain them. Let's trap them in the vault." Did they have a plan, trapping them in the vault?
SARAH: Well, it turns out it kind of was a little bit deliberate.
DAVID KING: Nils Bejerot realizes the more time these people spend together, the more likely—we hope—that they will start seeing each other as human beings. They will be less as objects, less as leverage points.
SARAH: It's as if his strategy—his actual, intentional strategy—was some version of, like, mutual Stockholm syndrome, and he's literally trying to create that attachment. And in some ways he does.
DAVID KING: The police had managed to bug the vault. I had access to the conversations that they had. They're talking about, you know, their hopes and their dreams and what's the meaning of life? A little philosophy. What books have you read? And talking like old friends.
SARAH: They start doing things to pass the time, like playing tic tac toe.
DAVID KING: They're even playing cards, playing poker. And they got a lot of money to play poker.
SARAH: They're in there now, and the vault is locked, so they don't have food. But ...
DAVID KING: Jan had saved some pears. And he pulled it out and split it up, divided it into six. And one of the hostages, or a couple of them noticed that he kept the smallest piece for himself.
SARAH: Hmm.
SARAH: Meanwhile the police ...
KRISTIN ENMARK: The police started drilling.
JAN-ERIK OLSSON: From above, we started to drill holes down into the concrete.
SARAH: This is Jan Olssen.
JAN-ERIK OLSSON: My full name is Jan-Erik Olsson.
LATIF: Wait, so the bank robber?
SARAH: No. Actually, Jan was a police officer on the scene who happens to have the same name.
JAN-ERIK OLSSON: Yes, it's a little embarrassing.
SARAH: But he told me that ...
JAN-ERIK OLSSON: The drilling was very loud. The entire building started to rumble. It must have been a horrible noise for the people inside the vault. I remember that there was some kind of scent, like a smell of something grinding hard against stone.
KRISTIN ENMARK: The light went out.
SARAH: The vault goes suddenly dark because the police have drilled through some electrical wiring.
DAVID KING: They're drilling and they're drilling. Jan's like, "Don't drill!" He has hostages underneath, you know, the falling concrete.
SARAH: He even strings up nooses and puts them around the hostages' necks as a threat.
DAVID KING: But they keep drilling.
KRISTIN ENMARK: Day and night for I don't know how many hours, how many days.
DAVID KING: So I mean, it was a nightmare—nightmare situation.
LATIF: Eesh!
SARAH: And then comes ...
DAVID KING: Gas through the holes.
SARAH: Tear gas.
JAN-ERIK OLSSON: And then something I'll never forget was the screams from below.
[ARCHIVE CLIP: [screaming]]
JAN-ERIK OLSSON: These violent screams.
DAVID KING: You can hear on the tape, the coughing, the choking.
JAN-ERIK OLSSON: Devoured by the gas.
DAVID KING: "Help! Help!" And it takes over 30 minutes.
SARAH: 30 minutes?
DAVID KING: Yeah.
SARAH: [gasps]
SARAH: After that, Jan finally suddenly surrenders. They all come out of the vault.
KRISTIN ENMARK: And when I looked out, I see these guys looking like Rambo.
SARAH: And the police are right there.
DAVID KING: No shirt on.
SARAH: Because they don't want to get tear gas stuck on their clothes.
LATIF: Weird!
SARAH: And, you know, this is that moment, where after going through all of that together, the hostages are hugging and saying goodbye to Clark and Jan. And so they drag them all out to the front of the bank where they have ambulances lined up with stretchers laid out. And ...
DAVID KING: The hostages were ordered to lie down on the stretcher.
KRISTIN ENMARK: And I refused. I wanted to walk out because I was so angry with the whole situation.
SARAH: At the end of it all the hostages all get taken to the hospital.
KRISTIN ENMARK: I read my journals from the hospital, and it was very emotional. It shows how scared I was when I came there, how I couldn't sleep, how I wanted someone to hold my hand. I was screaming.
SARAH: And a doctor walks into the room.
DAVID KING: And the first question that Kristin received was, "Are you in love with Clark?"
LATIF: Oh, weird!
DAVID KING: And Kristin is just flabbergasted by this. Like, what? The psychiatrist couldn't believe that she was not. Or—and the other thing, they couldn't believe that Jan and Clark had not made some sort of pass at them.
SARAH: And this story of this attachment, including the baseless rumors of romance, it continues along these lines, like, long after the fact. Like, when the case eventually gets to trial, there's a rumor about the hostages refusing to testify against Jan and Clark.
DAVID KING: They testified. I read it. I read the entire court transcript.
SARAH: There's a rumor that they got together and tried to raise money for the defense of either Jan or Clark. That also didn't happen.
LATIF: And they didn't do that.
SARAH: No.
DAVID KING: I've read PhD dissertations on this subject, and they'll confuse—they confuse Elisabeth and Kristin or Birgitta. I mean, a lot of basic details get bungled. I don't know. It's just amazing how something gets going and somebody quotes it and doesn't check, and it gets quoted again and again, and then you get this absurd monster in the end.
SARAH: Now I should say, like, during and right after the actual robbery, psychologists didn't really talk about what happened to these women as some kind of generalized disorder. In fact, no one really even used the phrase "Stockholm syndrome."
LATIF: Huh!
SARAH: But when we come back—we're gonna take a break. When we come back, we're gonna trace the path of this idea that we all know from this rumor-laden Swedish bank all the way into your head.
LATIF: Okay!
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LATIF: Hey, I'm Latif Nasser. This is Radiolab. We are back with Sarah Qari.
SARAH: Hello.
LATIF: Talking about Stockholm syndrome.
SARAH: Or the thing that as I said right before break, in the months after the hostage crisis wasn't yet even called Stockholm syndrome.
LATIF: Hmm.
DAVID KING: Nils Bejerot is credited with that.
SARAH: Coining the term, you mean?
DAVID KING: Yes. But I read all his reports to the police, listened to the interviews, and he doesn't use the phrase.
SARAH: According to David King, the idea of this, like, being a syndrome, actually comes from ...
DAVID KING: From the New York Police Department.
SARAH: ... the NYPD.
LATIF: What?
SARAH: Yeah.
LATIF: Why?
SARAH: So in the early 1970s, hostage negotiations were a relatively new thing.
EDWARD CONLON: No police department anywhere had any kind of systematic approach for what to do. And it was, you know, let's see if we can talk or the hell with it, we're going in.
SARAH: This is Ed Conlon.
EDWARD CONLON: My name is Edward Conlon, and I was a detective with the NYPD, and I'm also a writer.
SARAH: And he's written a lot about the moment when hostage negotiation as a practice emerged.
EDWARD CONLON: And one of the things that interests me about it is that it was created in response to the 1972 Munich Olympics when Israeli athletes were taken hostage and killed. And we had a chief here who said, "Do we have a plan? What do we do if something like that happens in New York City?" The answer was no, and he said, "Let's come up with something."
SARAH: And the guy who was tasked with coming up with something was a police officer named Harvey Schlossberg.
[ARCHIVE CLIP: Harvey Schlossberg, a former detective with a degree in psychology.]
EDWARD CONLON: If there was a museum of New York Jewish accents ...
[ARCHIVE CLIP, Harvey Schlossberg: That's all it is.]
EDWARD CONLON: ... Harvey's would be in it. [laughs]
SARAH: Yeah.
EDWARD CONLON: It's Brooklyn, 1950.
[ARCHIVE CLIP, Harvey Schlossberg: You can say a lot of things wrong. It doesn't really matter.]
EDWARD CONLON: He's small, kind of a trim guy. He's got the '70s sideburns. He smokes a pipe. He's kind of classic New York intellectual type.
SARAH: And so all through the summer of 1973, Harvey's trying to figure out what they should do, what they need to think about, and how do they put together a plan?
EDWARD CONLON: And in August of 1973, you have the bank robbery in Sweden.
SARAH: Harvey hears about it. He reads up on the case, and shortly after ...
[ARCHIVE CLIP, Harvey Schlossberg: The Stockholm syndrome—I'm not gonna go through the whole Stockholm syndrome at this point.]
SARAH: ... there's footage of him using the phrase "Stockholm syndrome" with a group of New York City police officers.
[ARCHIVE CLIP, Harvey Schlossberg: At this point, let me suffice to say that Stockholm syndrome simply means the forming of a relationship. Of course the more stress in the situation, the quicker the relationship and the more intense it's gonna be.]
SARAH: As far as David King can tell, Harvey is the first person to coin the term.
DAVID KING: Yes.
LATIF: Oh, wow. So this is the guy, Mr.—Mr. Stockholm syndrome himself?
SARAH: Yeah.
DAVID KING: I contacted him, too.
SARAH: Oh, did you?
DAVID KING: Just to get it confirmed. He said, "Yep."
LATIF: Huh.
SARAH: And specifically what he would tell police officers in these trainings is ...
[ARCHIVE CLIP, Harvey Schlossberg: You should not trust the hostage. The hostage will side with the criminal.]
EDWARD CONLON: Don't automatically assume they know who the good guys are and who the bad guys are.
[ARCHIVE CLIP, Harvey Schlossberg: You cannot share intelligence with the hostage. The hostage will tell the criminal everything you tell them.]
LATIF: Wow. That's—like, it's not a one-off thing. It's like a—just presume that's true.
SARAH: Yeah. Right. And, you know, after training, you know, the New York City police officers, Harvey and his team, they train the FBI, and then they start traveling all over the place training other police departments.
EDWARD CONLON: Every police agency in the Western Hemisphere and some of the Eastern. I mean, they trained the world.
SARAH: I mean, they trained 7,000 officers across 1,500 different police departments.
LATIF: Wow. It's so interesting that so much of this is—it's like a cop diagnosis, right? It's, like ...
SARAH: Yeah.
LATIF: It's like law enforcement and, I don't know, the psychologists working with them, as the ones defining what this is.
SARAH: Yeah, totally. But then in 1974, it leapt out of the police training handbooks and into the public consciousness.
[ARCHIVE CLIP, Walter Cronkite: There's been a big kidnapping on the West Coast. The victim is Patricia Hearst.]
SARAH: Thanks to the kidnapping of Patty Hearst.
LATIF: Oh!
[ARCHIVE CLIP, Walter Cronkite: The granddaughter of the legendary William Randolph Hearst.]
SARAH: So February of 1974, just six months after Stockholm, Patty Hearst, 19-year-old heiress to the Hearst family fortune, is kidnapped by this group called the Symbionese Liberation Army.
[NEWS CLIP: Dragged screaming, half naked, from her Berkeley apartment.]
SARAH: She's kept in a closet, beaten and raped.
[NEWS CLIP: Then, 71 days after the kidnapping, a bank robbery by the SLA.]
SARAH: Two months later the SLA is robbing a bank in San Francisco. And on the security footage from the bank you can see ...
[NEWS CLIP: Patricia Hearst in the middle of it all.]
[NEWS CLIP: The girl in the wig with the automatic rifle was Patricia Hearst.]
SARAH: She appeared to be helping them rob the bank. Then she actually gave an interview saying that she joined them.
[ARCHIVE CLIP, Patty Hearst: I've been given the choice of one, being released in a safe area, or two, joining the forces of the Symbionese Liberation Army and fighting for my freedom and the freedom of all oppressed people. I've chosen to stay and fight.]
SARAH: And sort of like with the Stockholm situation, when people heard this interview, they just thought she didn't sound the way that someone who's been kidnapped and beaten should sound.
LATIF: Yeah.
SARAH: There's no hint of ...
LATIF: Coercion or anything.
SARAH: Yeah. And so some people started to think maybe she's brainwashed. Other people to this day think that she was ideologically aligned with the SLA. And as the entire nation was trying to make sense of all this, in June of 1974 ...
[ARCHIVE CLIP, Johnny Carson: Well, I have to give Truman equal time.]
SARAH: ... Truman Capote goes on the Tonight Show with Johnny Carson.
[ARCHIVE CLIP, Johnny Carson: Somerset Maugham once referred to him as the hope of modern literature.]
SARAH: Super-famous writer. Like, wrote Breakfast at Tiffany's.
LATIF: Yeah, yeah, yeah.
SARAH: In Cold Blood.
[ARCHIVE CLIP, Johnny Carson: Fiction/nonfiction writer. Probably one of the—of our times. Would you welcome Mr. Truman Capote.]
SARAH: He sits down with Johnny Carson and he explains, "Well, you know what I think is happening with Patty Hearst is ..."
[ARCHIVE CLIP, Truman Capote: It's that thing called Stockholm syndrome. You know about the Stockholm syndrome?]
[ARCHIVE CLIP, Johnny Carson: No I don't.]
[ARCHIVE CLIP, Truman Capote: A couple of years back ...]
SARAH: So he tells the whole original Stockholm story.
[ARCHIVE CLIP, Truman Capote: They were having continuous sort of affairs—forced in the beginning.]
SARAH: False rumors and all.
[ARCHIVE CLIP, Truman Capote: These girls refused to testify against them. And one of them is now engaged to this convict and is going to marry him on his release.]
SARAH: That statement hits the newswires, and this totally bogus version of the Stockholm story just goes viral.
[ARCHIVE CLIP: One of the women is waiting for the robber to get out of jail to marry him.]
[ARCHIVE CLIP: What?]
[ARCHIVE CLIP: One of the females is going to marry one of the captors.]
SARAH: Suddenly everybody ...
[ARCHIVE CLIP: Stockholm syndrome and the mind control.]
SARAH: ... is talking about Stockholm syndrome.
[ARCHIVE CLIP: The individual is reduced to total helplessness.]
SARAH: And running with this idea that people—especially women—in these sort of hostage or kidnapping situations become attached, even romantically, to their captors.
[ARCHIVE CLIP: There may be a similarity in the Iranian hostage situation and what you refer to as the Stockholm syndrome.]
SARAH: And then through the '80s and into the '90s ...
[ARCHIVE CLIP: It's a very primitive, almost childlike attachment that develops.]
SARAH: ... people try using it to explain why some kidnapped kids seemingly never try to escape.
[ARCHIVE CLIP: For 18 years, Jaycee Dugard was held by a convicted sex offender.]
[ARCHIVE CLIP: She developed a bond with her abductor.]
[ARCHIVE CLIP: Elizabeth Smart, kidnapped from her Utah bedroom in 2002 never tried to run either.]
SARAH: And pretty soon it's getting used to explain cult members, sex workers.
LATIF: Right.
SARAH: Victims of sex trafficking, victims of child abuse.
LATIF: Yeah. Right. It's the when you have a hammer everything looks like a nail kind of thing.
SARAH: Yeah, totally. I mean, it's being used to explain things that are not at all like hostage situations. Most prominently ...
[ARCHIVE CLIP: Is it reasonable to take what we've learned about Stockholm syndrome, relate it to kind of domestic abuse?]
SARAH: ... domestic abuse.
[ARCHIVE CLIP: How do you deal psychologically with a woman who feels, like the Stockholm syndrome, tied inextricably to the batterer?]
JESS HILL: So I think that the media really hooked onto this concept because it was mysterious. You know, how do these victims get changed in this situation? Well, here's a really simple explanation.
SARAH: This is journalist Jess Hill.
JESS HILL: I'm the author of See What You Made Me Do.
SARAH: And Jess says when Stockholm syndrome is applied to women who are caught in an abusive relationship, it can act as almost a cover for a much more deeply pernicious idea.
JESS HILL: That actually women, they stayed with their abusers because they liked it.
SARAH: It becomes clear how it draws on a long history of psychological theories that try to explain or maybe even explain away those relationships, going all the way back to the early 1900s.
JESS HILL: From Sigmund Freud, who claimed to have discovered that there are these essential forces that drive human behavior. And according to Freud, all women, who were essentially lesser for lacking a penis and envied men for having penises, were innately masochistic, and unconsciously sought to be punished. So in the 1940s and '50s when you had—you know, Freudian theories are really at their peak—social workers who were working with what we'd term battered women, they believed that women would actually look for men who would abuse them.
SARAH: Then, Jess says, when you get to the 1970s, you start to have a supposedly more modern, scientific understanding drawing on physiological science about fight or flight and learned helplessness to say that actually women stay in abusive relationships because they are rendered unable to act.
JESS HILL: Now of course, it's an improvement on masochism, when you'd actually feel some pity for the victim instead of just thinking that they're some masochistic harpy. But it still lays the blame on the victim for her abuse. It's your passivity that drove the perpetrator to actually abuse you in the first place.
SARAH: And so Stockholm syndrome comes around, and I think part of why it's so resonant is it ties all of those ideas into a super-neat little package.
LATIF: Hmm.
SARAH: Right? Like, you have elements of, like, "She's into it," and also, "She's helpless." And those ideas are kind of just packaged together.
LATIF: Yeah, it's a cocktail ...
SARAH: It's a cocktail.
LATIF: ... of those other ideas.
SARAH: Yeah, that have been floating around in the culture. And these days, it's still thrown around by the media in this kind of willy-nilly way. It comes up in pop culture.
LATIF: Is it in the DSM?
SARAH: No. Actually it's not.
LATIF: Huh.
SARAH: And it never has been.
LATIF: Oh.
SARAH: And even though it's not in the DSM, you know, in the academic world it still comes up. You'll see, like, a paper here or there that mentions it or, you know, a psychologist going on TV that talks about it. And—and it's still sort of around.
ALLAN WADE: Oh yeah, in curriculum it comes up. If you begin to work with law enforcement, it can come up periodically in that arena. It's just kind of part of the air that you breathe in a certain kind of way.
SARAH: So this is Allan Wade. He's been a therapist for over 35 years.
ALLAN WADE: Specializing in cases of interpersonal violence.
SARAH: And Allan told me that about eight years ago he was working for a while in Sweden.
ALLAN WADE: Out of the blue, one of my close colleagues said, "Would you like to meet the Stockholm syndrome lady?"
SARAH: Meaning Kristin Enmark.
ALLAN WADE: The woman who's said to have Stockholm syndrome. And I thought about it for a minute and I said, "Well, talking to the first person ever said to have Stockholm syndrome is a bit of a rare opportunity." So I said, "Okay, sure." We arranged to meet in a Waynes coffee shop in the central part of Stockholm. So I'm sitting, having a cup of coffee and Kristin, who I didn't know was Kristin, but suspected it might be, tapped me on the arm.
SARAH: And what does she look like?
ALLAN WADE: Oh, she has blonde hair, she's very well attired, not fancy, but pleasant.
SARAH: So they sat down and started talking. And Allan says that right away, Kristin ...
ALLAN WADE: She said, "Are you interested in Stockholm syndrome?" And I said, "Well, honestly, I'm a little bit unsure about the idea." And she looked at me with a big smile and said, "Me too."
SARAH: So Allan and Kristin ended up talking for the next several hours.
ALLAN WADE: One of the things I realized quickly is that none of the world experts on Stockholm syndrome had ever talked with Kristin. People have been traveling the globe talking about Stockholm syndrome as experts.
SARAH: But none of them, apparently, had ever asked her about her experience in the bank.
ALLAN WADE: About the events as they unfolded.
SARAH: So Allan just started talking to her about it.
ALLAN WADE: "Could I ask you this? Could I ask you that?"
SARAH: And he says that there were these moments in the conversation where it seemed like Kristin was still trying to make sense of her own behavior.
ALLAN WADE: She said to me, "Why did I volunteer to be the hostage that went with Jan Olsson to leave the bank? Why did I volunteer?" So I asked for more detail about context, and I learned that there were three other hostages.
SARAH: Kristin talked about these other hostages, Sven and Elisabeth and Birgitta.
ALLAN WADE: And when she said Birgitta's name, she began to tear up a little bit. And she told me overhearing a phone call that Birgitta had from the bank vault with her husband, and said something like, "Yes, dear. I'm a hostage in the bank, and I won't be home for dinner. You're going to have to pick up the girls from school, and they'll be hungry. I left some fish at the back of the fridge, et cetera." So at that moment, I looked at Kristin and I said, "Were you protecting those little girls by protecting their mother?" And she looked at me with a very firm expression and said, "You know, I had a purpose." So at that moment—at that moment, the framework of so-called Stockholm syndrome really fell apart like a house of cards.
SARAH: So—so for Allan, clearly Kristin wasn't helpless or weirdly under the sway of these bad men. She didn't have a syndrome. She was acting in a way that was rational, that made sense, given the situation that she was in.
LATIF: So it's like, even patient zero didn't have the thing.
SARAH: Yeah.
LATIF: But so where—but now where does that leave you? Like, what do you make of this? Like, was that just all total BS and it's case closed?
SARAH: I mean, obviously if, as you said, Kristin didn't have Stockholm syndrome, it doesn't apply to her, and you can trace, as we have, this whole journey of how this thing that started out as a lie, becomes warped into this thing that we all know. And so I guess for a lot of the reporting, you know, I've kind of been operating on that assumption: this is a lie. This is—there's nothing here. But as I went through the reporting, I came across accounts of people that, you know, felt something for their captors, felt attached to their captors. I literally argued with psychologists who were saying, "This is real, and my patients come into my office experiencing feelings for people that have hurt them." And I was like, "No, you're wrong. This is a lie."
LATIF: Wow!
SARAH: And I haven't known what to do with it.
LATIF: I don't know. I feel like I've even seen this in my own life. Like, there are people you see—and not just women, men too—who are in situations of domestic violence. Or there are people who are in these very complicated toxic relationships and they can't get out.
SARAH: Yeah.
LATIF: Like, there is—there is a thing to be explained.
SARAH: I mean, yeah, true. And—and even when, you know, I go online and go poking around in places like Reddit or TikTok ...
[ARCHIVE CLIP: We need to talk about Stockholm syndrome because ...]
SARAH: ... right away ...
[ARCHIVE CLIP: A very real trauma response that can happen called Stockholm syndrome.]
SARAH: ... you can see that, like, for a lot of people ...
[ARCHIVE CLIP: There is also Stockholm syndrome in relationships.]
[ARCHIVE CLIP: Over time you start to sympathize with your abuser.]
SARAH: ... this thing that ...
[ARCHIVE CLIP: I'm still kind of working through it.]
SARAH: ... started out as a lie feels like ...
[ARCHIVE CLIP: I feel like I'm—like I'm—like I have Stockholm syndrome or something.]
SARAH: ... their truth. That they feel seen in some way by Stockholm syndrome. They're self-diagnosing with—with it. And, you know, under every one of these TikToks, there's comments and comments of people being, like, "Yes, that is me. I—I have it."
LATIF: Not in—not in an ironic, like, a silly way. Like, in a real—like, this is, "I have this."
SARAH: Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And honestly, I just felt stuck. But after the break, I will tell you about how I got unstuck.
LATIF: Just a reminder: This episode does contain detailed discussions of trauma and violence, including sexual violence and abusive relationships.
LATIF: I'm Latif. This is Radiolab. We are back with reporter/producer Sarah Qari.
SARAH: Yep.
LATIF: And before the break you were telling me how stuck you felt, and how you didn't even—you weren't even now sure what to think of Stockholm syndrome.
SARAH: Right. So I did really want to talk to people that have actually been through something like this, and are trying to reckon with their own experience.
LATIF: Yeah. Like, how did they make sense of it themselves?
SARAH: Yeah. Like, so ...
GRACE STUART: If there were to be a mess-up, can I just pause for a second, like, recollect myself?
SARAH: Oh my gosh, yeah yeah yeah.
SARAH: So I ended up talking to a couple of different people with very different experiences, but I want to start us off with this woman, Grace Stuart.
GRACE STUART: So I'm originally from the greater Philadelphia area, and I now do a lot of domestic violence advocacy through social media.
SARAH: I actually found her on TikTok. But she also has a podcast.
GRACE STUART: Called Why She Stayed.
SARAH: And she does one-on-one coaching for people who are in abusive relationships.
LATIF: Hmm.
GRACE STUART: And I came into this space just through my own lived experience.
SARAH: Grace herself was in an abusive relationship for several years.
GRACE STUART: There was a lot of emotional abuse, sexual abuse. There's so much. [laughs]
SARAH: And one of the things that I noticed in Grace's TikToks about the relationship, which is honestly what made me want to talk to her, is how despite all of that, when she was in the relationship, she would have a lot of conflicting feelings about walking away.
GRACE STUART: Yeah, absolutely.
SARAH: I think—I'm curious if ...
SARAH: And so I asked her, you know, had she ever come across Stockholm syndrome, and what did she think of it as a label or an explanation for her experience?
GRACE STUART: So yeah, it's an interesting question.
SARAH: And she told me that she did actually contemplate the term at one point in her relationship.
GRACE STUART: At the time, so many people just definitely wanted me to get out of it, and were putting a lot of pressure on me to not marry him. Like, "Please just don't do it." But I was still very bonded to him. And I remember sitting in my recliner in my living room, just very disheveled. I hadn't eaten that day. I was just so sick with, like, anxiousness.
SARAH: So sitting there on her couch, Grace says she opened up her computer ...
GRACE STUART: And that's when I searched Stockholm syndrome.
SARAH: She says that when she read up on it, she felt relief.
GRACE STUART: I was like, "Okay, this feels like what I'm going through. Maybe I'm not insane." And I think having that name for your experience is extremely important in getting free.
SARAH: Because, she says, it helped her start to see where her resistance to leaving and that feeling of being bonded to her ex was coming from.
GRACE STUART: The best way I can describe it is many victims have amazing instincts, and they are really intuitive. But people don't realize how much of domestic abuse is about confusion.
SARAH: For Grace, it was ...
[GRACE STUART: I think I got it all wrong.]
SARAH: ... confusion about what was even happening.
[GRACE STUART: What if I overreacted and made something out of nothing?]
SARAH: Whether to judge her ex by his good days or his bad days.
GRACE STUART: Is he the good guy or is he the bad guy?
[GRACE STUART: Is he kind or is he cruel?]
SARAH: Or if maybe ...
[GRACE STUART: Am I a perpetrator? Am I a narcissist?]
SARAH: ... there was something wrong with her.
[GRACE STUART: Let me just change this one thing about myself.]
SARAH: Grace says at the time she wasn't even sure what to call this thing that was happening to her.
GRACE STUART: I felt like I had nothing to point to, nothing concrete to say this is what's happening to me. It's the thick confusion that kept me trapped.
SARAH: And so when she ran into the idea of Stockholm, it was like, "Look, this is what's happening here."
GRACE STUART: And that was super—allowed me to take a deep breath. So if someone resonates with the term 'Stockholm' at some point in their journey and it brings them clarity, then okay. It's not the term I would select as the best one. I related more to trauma bonding, which is the term that I find more appropriate for survivors. But it's a starting point.
LATIF: Hmm.
SARAH: So thinking back to when I was stuck about whether Stockholm syndrome was true or false or what, I think what I heard from Grace is that there is a grain of truth here that matches her experience, which is that ...
GRACE STUART: You still can think of them as kind and caring.
SARAH: ... you can feel care or loyalty or empathy or affection for someone who's treating you badly. But ...
GRACE STUART: I remember ...
SARAH: ... she also told me that the real turning point for her ...
GRACE STUART: I read the book called, Why Does He Do That?
SARAH: ... was when she figured out how to stop troubleshooting her own actions, and instead ...
GRACE STUART: Put the microscope on what the abuser is doing, and kind of unraveling their tactics.
SARAH: Hmm.
LATIF: What's he doing to make you stay?
SARAH: What's he doing? Yeah.
LATIF: Yeah.
SARAH: And that's when she started noticing ...
GRACE STUART: They'll inflict pain, then they'll rescue.
SARAH: ... all of her ex's tactics. Like ...
GRACE STUART: He wasn't always telling me I couldn't go see friends or I couldn't see my family. He would just make those things very difficult for me.
SARAH: ... subtly isolating her or ...
GRACE STUART: He used to flip cause and effect so much. He would say I got him like this.
SARAH: Shifting blame onto her. Or even ...
GRACE STUART: "Oh no, that didn't happen like that. You're crazy."
SARAH: ... plain old gaslighting.
GRACE STUART: It was about power and control.
SARAH: And Grace says that when she was able to identify what her ex was doing, and how she was responding to it ...
GRACE STUART: For me, that was what opened my eyes. It really sealed the deal for me. It really did.
JESS HILL: So it's really important to know that coercive control ...
SARAH: What's interesting is that when I was talking to Jess Hill, she told me that this shift to looking at the perpetrator, looking at the abuser, it's not just helpful for victim survivors like Grace. It's also helpful for people looking at these kinds of situations from the outside.
JESS HILL: When you start to see what the perpetrator does, the behavior of the victim survivor starts to make much more sense.
SARAH: And not just that, it means that you can do away with terms like 'Stockholm syndrome,' and try to talk about and look at what's going on without the victim blaming or scrutiny. And, like, for me, to get to this point in the reporting, it was really exciting, because it's like, okay, here's a way to talk about things that are happening, things that are hard to talk about, in a way that doesn't do more harm, you know?
LATIF: Hmm.
SARAH: But I swear to God, in the middle of all of this, I sat down one evening and I was watching this sort of true crime documentary about the cult at Sarah Lawrence College. And I'm watching the people that are joining this cult, and it was all just so strange and foreign to me that I found myself having this knee-jerk reaction of asking these questions like, "Wow, why did they do that? Like, why didn't they just leave?" Like, "Why did they do X or Y or Z, you know, strange thing?" And so of course, as I'm doing this, I'm like, "Oh my God, I'm still doing the same things." Like, all of those same impulses to scrutinize the victim, and it's like—it just, like, immediately just slotted right back into my brain. And, like, literally in the midst of all this reporting. So that felt very uncomfortable.
LATIF: Yeah.
SARAH: And so I'm sitting there and I'm thinking all this stuff. And I'm, like, "Honestly, maybe what I need to do is call one of these people."
DANIEL BARBAN LEVIN: I'm gonna take a sip of this water.
SARAH: Yeah. Do it.
DANIEL BARBAN LEVIN: And get used to hearing every detail in such high fidelity.
SARAH: And so I did.
DANIEL BARBAN LEVIN: Okay. My name is Daniel Barban Levin. I live in Los Angeles, and I'm 33.
SARAH: I kind of want to get a little bit into your backstory ...
SARAH: And I think that—I think that this is the conversation that finally got me where I wanted to be, not just intellectually but also emotionally.
SARAH: I recognize that I guess what I'm about to ask is a really big question. But ...
DANIEL BARBAN LEVIN: Yeah.
SARAH: ... you already know what I'm gonna ask.
DANIEL BARBAN LEVIN: Like, what happened?
SARAH: Yeah.
DANIEL BARBAN LEVIN: Okay, I went to Sarah Lawrence College. One of my roommates' dads, Larry Ray, got out of prison and needed a place to crash. And we said yes. And he started a sort of self-improvement routine with me and my roommates, which seemed fairly innocuous at first. And the next summer, he got an apartment in Manhattan and offered me a couch to crash on while I was working in the city, and I took him up on it. And all of that devolved over time into abuse—sexual abuse, psychological/physical abuse, coercion, and ultimately what you would call a cult.
SARAH: Hmm.
DANIEL BARBAN LEVIN: And that averaged around maybe eight people in this apartment in Manhattan. I was there for about two years altogether and then I left. And I spent the next five or so years processing, not believing what had happened, being totally shell-shocked.
SARAH: So about six years after Daniel left the cult, news about it broke. This is in 2019. It became a big story about the Sarah Lawrence cult. And Daniel has since been interviewed about it, and I mentioned there was a whole documentary about it. But for those six years, he said he didn't talk to anybody about it at all.
DANIEL BARBAN LEVIN: Yeah. I think just—I couldn't really face what had actually happened.
SARAH: Right. And I mean, like, how do you—it's just such a crazy thing to say out loud.
DANIEL BARBAN LEVIN: [sighs] It's like you feel like you're constantly trying to prove it, both to yourself and to someone—even a sympathetic listener. It's like you're telling them you saw an alien.
SARAH: Totally.
DANIEL BARBAN LEVIN: It's really—it takes a lot of self confidence that I don't really, like, come with out of the box.
SARAH: No, I get that.
DANIEL BARBAN LEVIN: I wish there was one word I could say and it would be fully understood. But counterintuitively, actually leaving the situation required letting go of a need for an explanation. I had to accept that I wasn't going to know why this had happened, how I could justify it to myself or others. I just needed to listen to my body and leave, or else I felt like I was gonna die.
SARAH: Mm-hmm.
DANIEL BARBAN LEVIN: But, you know, I wish that I could just—I wish that I didn't feel like any of it was my fault, you know? Everybody who hears this story of a man beating and sexually abusing a bunch of 18 to 20 year olds in an apartment in New York think to themselves, "I would have walked out the door."
SARAH: I mean, I felt myself doing this when I watched the documentary. Like, knowing everything I know and working on this, I was still just like, searching for something like—like what was it about these people, you know? And, like, catching myself asking that question.
DANIEL BARBAN LEVIN: Yeah. I mean, it's fair. That has been hard for me to navigate, too. There were people who were living in that same house where he was sleeping on the couch and didn't get pulled into the cult. But, you know, speaking for myself, I was 18, going to college for the first time, had not reckoned with my neglectful upbringing and my mom's chronic illness and my own struggles with sexuality, and—and just trying to figure everything out and having no guidance. And that's a great time for somebody who presents as a kind of father figure to show up and offer some relief.
SARAH: On the other hand, Daniel says, I mean, he knows that his vulnerabilities don't fully explain what happened either. Like, we all have vulnerabilities.
LATIF: We all have vulnerabilities.
SARAH: A lot of people have vulnerabilities.
LATIF: Right.
SARAH: And trauma and all of these things.
LATIF: Right. Right.
SARAH: And it just seems like you could either scrutinize the victim survivor more and more, or you could look at the pernicious tactics of the perpetrator. But Daniel feels like both of those things can leave people with the same picture of the person who is going through the experience.
DANIEL BARBAN LEVIN: What people imagine is that you sort of become like a mannequin, and someone's pulling the strings as if you're being magically controlled.
SARAH: Yeah.
DANIEL BARBAN LEVIN: And I think that it's so much simpler than that. I did things that I might not otherwise do because I was in a situation where that was the—seemed like the most sensible option according to the information I had, you know?
SARAH: Hmm.
DANIEL BARBAN LEVIN: And I was scared. Like, when I lived with Larry I remember looking down at my feet and seeing, like, visible dirt spots because it had been so long since I'd been allowed to shower. And now, of course, that sounds so out of control. But you just kind of proceed, trying to avoid pain, you know? And then you add on top of that all of my friends were there, and I watched them do the same things. We didn't have opportunities for, like, crosstalk or reality checking. Like, you know, him slicing a grape vertically versus horizontally and having me taste it and say that it tasted different sliced horizontally or vertically and I agreed. You know, even now, I'm like, I guess it's the oxidization. There's, like, more surface area. You know so it's ...
SARAH: Yeah.
DANIEL BARBAN LEVIN: Yeah. And ...
SARAH: And on top of all of that, Daniel was telling me about how at the time he was basically broke in New York City, and he'd find himself thinking that maybe things would actually be even worse if he left.
DANIEL BARBAN LEVIN: You know, so it's just like the known evil versus the unknown evil. And sunk cost. And it's all the same factors. The brain hasn't magically changed. You know, you're just in a different situation, which—and I know—I'm not ignoring that the situation is crazy and really, really bad. But you still just—you only have the same tools and are bringing them to bear. And, you know, the way you make decisions is just with the information you have. That's a way of answering that question: why didn't you leave? And it would be much easier if the answer was just we developed Stockholm syndrome.
SARAH: Right. I mean, speaking of Stockholm syndrome, I guess I am curious what you think of it, or how you feel about it?
DANIEL BARBAN LEVIN: I think that Stockholm syndrome, it's one in a long line of really easy answers that we offer to ourselves in order to not have to confront complicated and scary questions.
SARAH: Questions like: you know, is it possible that something like this could happen to me? Like, because if you have those vulnerabilities and this kind of person walks into your life ...
LATIF: Right.
SARAH: ... then it's, like, really hard to say what you would do. I think that's ...
LATIF: Right.
SARAH: ... that's the scariest piece of it. And I think that's what an idea like Stockholm protects us from.
JESS HILL: It satisfies our need to be like, "Well, I would never respond like that." And the fact is you don't know how you would respond until you're put in that situation. And I can tell you, victim survivors, they never thought they'd respond like that either. And now they're on the other side of that experience, and they realize things that they never thought they would do, they did under those conditions because it's a fundamentally human response.
DANIEL BARBAN LEVIN: I actually think that trauma is unfortunately one of the more normal experiences you can have. Yes, the facts of what occurred are extreme, but the effects are still the same, you know, fear and grief and confusion and isolation.
SARAH: Mm-hmm.
DANIEL BARBAN LEVIN: But when people hear "Stockholm syndrome," it's just such a throwaway term. And I think we should be suspicious of any concept which doesn't invite further curiosity. I mean, people—if it is a thought-terminating answer and we just say, "Oh well, it was Stockholm syndrome," anything that ends our curiosity, I think, is really bad.
LATIF: I feel that. I feel that hard, especially as a journalist. But also, if you're, you know, a psychologist, or also if you're a friend, or also if you're a—you know, just someone who watches a lot of cult documentaries. Like—like, I do think that you've got to—you have to want to ask more questions.
DANIEL BARBAN LEVIN: Yeah. Right. And I think that if the questions that we were asked was less like, "Explain to me why you didn't leave," and was more like, "How did you leave? I am so glad that you got out. Can you help us understand how you did it?"
SARAH: And honestly, at the end of all of this, just to go back to the beginning for a sec, I can't help but think about Kristin Enmark, you know, the patient zero of Stockholm syndrome, and all of the questions that for 40 years, nobody asked her.
KRISTIN ENMARK: I always have felt that I did something wrong. I said wrong things. I said that I was afraid of the police. I wanted to get out. I wanted to go with them. And after this drama, all the attention has been focused on this, instead of looking at what did Jan do? What did Clark do? What did the police do? What did the society do? You said, "They're not really healthy. They got into something wrong." You know, a syndrome. So I have this 40 years of the feeling of doing something wrong. All the things that I did was instinct of survival. I wanted to survive. I don't think it's so odd.
LATIF: Thank you for that whole journey, Sarah.
SARAH: Thank you.
LATIF: And thank you all for listening. If you or someone you care about is experiencing domestic violence, remember you are not alone. Help is available. In the United States you can reach out to the National Domestic Violence Hotline at 1-800-799-SAFE—1-800-799-7233—or visit their website at TheHotline.org. They offer confidential support 24/7/365. Your safety and well-being matter, and there are people who care and want to help. Sarah, do you want to do the special thanks?
SARAH: Yeah, yeah. Okay, I should say this episode would not have been possible without Alice Edwards in particular. She contributed research, reporting, translation. Also big, big thanks to Terence Mickey for letting us use the tape of his conversation with Kristin Enmark. To Mimi Wilcox for help with archival audio. Check out her documentary Bad Hostage. Very similar vibes to this episode. And thanks also to Frank Ochberg, David Mandel, Ruth Reymundo Mandel, Cara Pellegrini, Kathy Yuen and Jani Pellikka.
LATIF: One more thing before we go. Sarah.
SARAH: Yes?
LATIF: Do you remember when you produced that story about Zoozve?
SARAH: [laughs] Yeah, of course!
LATIF: The moon-ish object around Venus?
SARAH: Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.
LATIF: That we officially named Zoozve?
SARAH: Mm-hmm.
LATIF: And then we learned that Earth has quasi-moons, too?
SARAH: Right.
LATIF: And then we started a global competition to come up with a name for one of these quasi-moons?
SARAH: Yes yes yes yes yes.
LATIF: Well, I am here to tell you—and anyone who is listening—that we gathered a bunch of expert people: astronauts, astronomers, celebrities, high school students. We had this crack panel who helped winnow down—because we got something like 2,700 name submissions.
SARAH: Stop. Wow!
LATIF: From, like, I think 90-something, almost 100 countries.
SARAH: What? Dang!
LATIF: And so they winnowed that all down to seven finalists.
SARAH: Oh.
LATIF: So now you and everyone—and anyone living on planet Earth can vote for the name of the quasi-moon. And the winner will be the official name that will outlive us all.
SARAH: That is so crazy, Latif! That—I still am not over how this started with you ...
LATIF: [laughs]
SARAH: ... seeing a thing in your kid's—it's just crazy. Anyway, so cool!
LATIF: But the fun that I and that we had in naming Zoozve is now we've—we've democratized it.
SARAH: Totally.
LATIF: And it's out there, and anyone anywhere can—can vote for their favorite. And the names are beautiful, interesting and ...
SARAH: Wait, and where do you go to vote? Is there somewhere you can see all the names and such? Is that ...?
LATIF: Yeah. Yup. The place where you see the names and vote is the same place. Go to Radiolab.org/moon. Radiolab.org/moon.
SARAH: Love it.
LATIF: Voting is open now, all the way until January 1st, 2025. So yeah, this—this December, tell everybody you know and vote yourself, and that is really your best chance to make your mark on the heavens.
SARAH: Oh! Amazing! I'm gonna go vote right now.
LATIF: Okay. And—and while you do that, I will say that this episode was reported and produced by Sarah Qari with production help from Rebecca Laks. Edited by Alex Neason. That's it for us. We'll catch you next week.
SARAH: Bye.
[LISTENER: Hey, I'm Lemmon and I'm from Richmond, Indiana. And here are the staff credits. Radiolab was created by Jad Abumrad and is edited by Soren Wheeler. Lulu Miller and Latif Nasser are our co-hosts. Dylan Keefe is our director of sound design. Our staff includes: Simon Adler, Jeremy Bloom, Becca Bressler, W. Harry Fortuna, David Gebel, Maria Paz Gutiérrez, Sindhu Gnanasambandan, Matt Kielty, Rebecca Laks, Annie McEwen, Alex Neason, Sarah Qari, Sarah Sandbach, Anisa Vietze, Arianne Wack, Pat Walters and Molly Webster. Our fact checkers are Diane Kelly, Emily Krieger and Natalie Middleton.]
[LISTENER: Hi, My name's Teresa. I'm calling from Colchester in Essex, UK. Leadership support for Radiolab's science programming is provided by the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation, Science Sandbox, a Simons Foundation initiative, and the John Templeton Foundation. Foundational support for Radiolab was provided by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation.]
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