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The Current Transcript for February 6, 2019

Host: Anna Maria Tremonti

STORIES FROM THIS EPISODE

Prologue

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VOICE: There's a lot of shame and guilt that comes from being related to one of these people. You could spend the rest of your life questioning every moment, wondering what did you miss. You got to understand all of that's back on that person. They caused this.

ANNA MARIA TREMONTI: Kerri Rawson grew up with a serial killer, her father. By the time she was born, he had taken seven lives. He'd go on to take three more. He'd also go hiking, play with her and her brother, teach them stuff, drive her to college, walk her down the aisle and then one day the FBI knocked on the door and she learned the dad she thought she knew, was also the man whose sadistic murders haunted Wichita, Kansas for decades. And no one in the family had a clue. At a time when Canadian law is confronting two serial killers, Bruce McArthur and Elizabeth Wettlaufer, and so many touched by their crimes are asking what was missed. Kerri Rawson's own complex story, offers some insights. She's my guest in an hour. Also today, as Facebook turns 15, with plans to merge messaging, as tech giants gather more of your data, as false news flourishes and algorithms lead you astray, Roger McNamee says we've been Zucked.

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VOICE: The challenges of social media historically were about massive surveillance, manipulation of attention and bad actors would attempt to manipulate what people think. All of that is about to get much worse.

AMT: Roger McNamee joins me in half an hour. But we're starting here.

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VOICE: I want people to come into our country in the largest numbers ever, but they have to come in legally.

AMT: We're looking at the messengers in President Donald Trump's State of the Union address and how they were heard. I'm Anna Maria Tremonti. This is The Current.

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When Trump says unity, he means surrender, says expert on rhetoric

Guests: Lenny McAllister, Chris Whipple, Jennifer Mercieca

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VOICE: My fellow Americans we meet tonight at a moment of unlimited potential. As we begin a new Congress, I stand here ready to work with you to achieve historic breakthroughs for all Americans. Millions of our fellow citizens are watching us now gathered in this great chamber, hoping that we will govern, not as two parties, but as one nation.

AMT: US Donald Trump standing in front of Democratic House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, gave the State of the Union address last night that veered between conciliation and confrontation. It came in a moment of tension over the state of the government. His appearance had been postponed because of that 35 day partial government shutdown sparked by the president's bid to secure funding to build a wall along the border with Mexico and with the threat looming that the government could shut down again, if a deal on border security is not reached soon. Stacey Abrams, a rising star for the Democrats, said in her party's response that the president had been sowing political division, instead of unity.

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VOICE: Making livelihoods of our federal workers a pawn for political games is a disgrace. The shutdown was a stunt engineered by the president of the United States, one that defied every tenet of fairness and abandoned not just our people, but our values.

AMT: In a moment we'll hear from a panel looking at whether President Trump's words will get him closer to achieving his political aims and any compromise with the Democrats. But first a response to how the president's message played within his own party. Lenny McAllister is a Republican strategist and former Republican congressional candidate. He joins us from Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Hello.

LENNY MCALLISTER: Good morning. How are you doing this morning?

AMT: I'm wondering what you heard last night. Did you hear what you needed to hear from the president?

LM: Mr. President wants to hnag his hat on a lot of domestic wins. He wanted to obviously talk a good amount about the First Step Act and how that's helping people not be over incarcerated. He wanted to talk about the national economy. He wanted to talk about America first and that's what he did. This was a president that simply spent the vast majority of his time talking about domestic policies and what he perceives as domestic wins to in many regards sidestep two big issues, number one, some of the tension that's going on overseas with foreign policy, but as well, the other aspect he wants to make sure he's not talking about on a regular basis is the ongoing investigation.

AMT: And so was that a good thing for you or not?

LM: Well I mean as a Republican and somebody that's looking at the economy continuing to grow and 304,000 jobs added last month, yes it's a very positive thing. As an American, somebody that wants to see a totality of the State of the Union being good, not so much. You still want to hear more from this president and you want to hear, where are we going moving forward here that's going to bring us more together in a cohesive fashion.

AMT: So did his speech get you, the U.S. Congress, any closer to reconciliation over the question of that border wall and avoiding a second shutdown, do you think?

LM: I don't think so. I think that both sides talked to their base. I think that both sides talked to their base effectively, the question is going to be those that are going to create the compromise and the American voter that's going to push people to compromise, if they're still satisfied with what they heard, whether it's from the president or it was from the minority party. And I think the answer's no. Just the fact that Stacey Abrams gave the response. Just the fact that in that room alone, you probably had six presidential candidates that are going to run for the Democratic primary sitting in the room, four of them in the Senate alone. Since that dynamic enough to keep the tensions going if you will.

AMT: So do you think that actually influenced what he chose to talk about because of sort of that Democratic activity going on in the background?

LM: Again he's already campaigning. It's 2019, it's after the midterms and the main thing he's going to be able to hang his hat on is, look at the economy, look at jobs, look at how things have turned around and I'm responsible for that. You know there's a reason why he mentioned over five million jobs being added since he's come into office. That's over 200,000 jobs added per month, since January 2017 and that average per month is better than what the Obama administration had over their last four year in office. These are things that he wanted to remind the American people of because if you just look at Twitter, if you just look at the tone, if you just . look at the divisivness, he's not going to win in 2020. He's not even going to get close. If it becomes an economic issue of is your life better now than it was four years ago? You'll see a movement towards what you saw n 2016, which is the polls will look one way and the votes may look differently.

AMT: So he not only talked about the economy, he talked about I've got the quote here, "Our military is the most powerful on Earth and America is winning each and every day." Why that specific nod to the military do you think?

LM: Because he's the commander in chief. He has to be able to at least speak to that and be able to give a sense of this is where we are in the world. This is what we're doing in order to secure American interests and moving forward from there, these are the things that I'm putting in place under my leadership and this is why. He's basically campaigning, why you have to do this for another four years.

AMT: OK. And so is he campaigning to all Americans or is he campaigning to Republicans who he's afraid will sway?

LM: Well I mean of course he's going to always talk to his base first. He has to secure his base, but when you start talking about the North Korea situation, you start talking about the renegotiation of NAFTA, you start talking about the coming to the table of the Chinese when it comes to trade, these are international affairs that the moderate who voted for Trump and did not vote for Hillary Clinton can get onboard with.

AMT: OK. The other thing he mentioned he actually says, "Here in the United States we're alarmed by new calls to adopt socialism in our country." He goes on to say, "tonight we renew our resolve that America will never be a socialist country." Who was that messaging?

LM: That was messaging the rise that you're seeing in the political left. The Bernie Sanders wing, the Kamala Harris wing, the AOC wing of the Democratic Party. That's exactly who it was speaking towards because there's no voters voting for that. There's a segment of presidential voters in 2020 that believe that that's the way to go, despite what they're seeing in places such as Venezuela, despite still being in the same hemisphere as Cuba and despite the failed as we've seen in places such as the Soviet Union, the former Soviet Union, the failed Soviet Union.

AMT: OK so now you make the point that he's already campaigning and it is a very different political landscape now that the Democrats control the House. How likely is he to succeed on the agenda he has over the next two years with what he said last night and with Nancy Pelosi sitting behind him?

LM: It really depends. I don't know how much he's going to be able to get done. It's divided government and many of the Democrats, basically their mantra is resist. It's not let's get stuff done, let's find a place of compromise, it's resist. And I even saw that in social media. So when you have that type of animus out there, there's no room to work for things. I think that the First Step Act might be one of the only things that's done in a bipartisan fashion and that's unfortunate because that means we're going to spend two years of everybody campaigning and very little things going to be done for the American people.

AMT: OK, Lenny McAllister. Thanks for your thoughts today.

LM: Thank you.

AMT: Lenny McAllister, Republican strategist, former Republican congressional candidate. He's in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Well we want more reaction to Mr. Trump's messages in his State of the Union address. We've reached Chris Whipple. He's the author of The New York Times best seller, The Gatekeepers: How the White House Chiefs of Staff Define Every Presidency. Chris Whipple joins us from Washington. Jennifer Mercieca was listening to last night's speech with more than a passing interest. She's an associate professor of communication and she has made a study of Donald Trump's use of language. She joins us from College Station, Texas. Hello to you both.

CHRIS WHIPPLE: Good to be here.

JENNIFER MERCIECA: Good morning.

AMT: Chris Whipple, I'll start with you. What were you thinking as you watched and listened to Donald Trump's address?

CW: Well you know I have to wonder about a couple of things. Number one, was that the longest State of the Union speech in history? I mean it certainly felt like it, maybe Jennifer knows the answer to that. I do not, but the second thing I had to wonder was it really Donald Trump up there or was it some kind of body double because it was not vintage Trump. It was not a Steven Miller American carnage speech. There was you know a lot of nonsense about the wall and about immigrant crime wavea nd that kind of thing, but for the most part it was conciliatory. It was unifying. Really makes you wonder who the speech writer was and of course at the end of the day, the question now is does it make any difference? Does it mean anything? Because if you've been paying attention for the last two plus years, you'll know that this is not Donald Trump.

JM: Jennifer Mercieca, you were listening to his specific choice of language. Did you hear what Chris heard?

JM: Oh I did and I've seen a lot of reactions to the speech last night and today saying that it was two speeches in one in and what I think people mean by that is this speech underminined itself. On the one hand he promised bipartisanship and working across the aisle and unity and on the other hand he used you know division and polarization as a cudgel, right, to undermine the message that he was making about bipartisan unity. It's fascinating. It was one of the things that I thought might happen, which is to say that you know he when he says bipartisan, he capitulation. He means that the Democratic Party would agree to his policies and not so much that they would work together to come up with joint policies and plans.

AMT: Chris Whipple, you've called this a watershed moment for the president. How so this moment in time?

CW: I really think it is. You know we're past the two year point. There isn't very much time left for the Trump administration to get its act together and it's really doubtful that it can. When you look at the recent revelations about, even just about Donald Trump's schedule you know with 60 percent of his time on some days of so-called executive time. You know the most precious thing, the most precious asset any presidency has is the president's time and you have to wonder whether he's really even serious about governing. I think his biggest problem from day one has been that Donald Trump doesn't understand the difference between campaigning and governing. Campaigning is you know dividing and demonizing and disrupting, governing is building coalitions and getting things done. Trump has never understood the difference and that's the biggest problem. He needs to go that right.

AMT: Well we heard our last guest say that it's time to campaign now that in fact there's really no choice now with such a divided house.

CW: Well the truth is that he's been campaigning from day one. It's literally the only thing he knows how to do. You know you cannot run the White House the way you run the 26th floor of Trump Tower. He's learned all the wrong lessons from the first two years plus. He seems to think that if everybody would just get out of his way and let Trump be Trump, that we would have brilliant decision making and great governance. And the truth of course is the opposite. You know he needs to empower a chief of staff to execute his agenda, but he has not done that. So you know lots of presidents come into office full of hubris, thinking they're the smartest guy in the room. Most of them get over it. Donald Trump has not.

AMT: I want to play a passage from the speech on the subject of border security. Listen to this.

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VOICE: No issue better illustrates the divide between America's working class and America's political class than illegal immigration. Wealthy politicians and donors push for open borders, while living their lives behind walls and gates and guards.

AMT: Jennifer Mercieca, what does that say to you about who the president was trying to reach?

JM: Well he's definitely appealing to his base there and part of his his political campaign in 2016 and throughout his term of office so far, he really has been trying to highlight the corruption pf globalism and globalists and the relationship between the Democratic Party or entrenched politicians and global concerns. And so part of what he's trying to do there is to pin the political class on this thing of globalism, right. They hide behind walls and they leave you exposed. They're corrupt because they're you know sort of taking money or benefiting somehow. from yu know immigration., And so, as someone who wants to protect America and America first, the plea or the argument there is obviously, I'm on the side of America and against globalism.

AMT: I've got another clip that I want to play as well. This is sort of about the state of the economy. Listen to this.

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VOICE: An economic miracle is taking place in the United States and the only thing that can stop it are foolish wars, politics or ridiculous partition investigations.

AMT: Chris Whipple, what do you think?

CW: Well it was just, forgive me, it was just a bizarre conflation of you know wars and investigations. And so it's just one of those head scratching moments, maybe just an awkward turn of phrase, but you really have to wonder does he somehow equate foreign wars with legitimate oversights and investigations into possibly illegal behavior. Who knows. But the the elephant in the room last night was the Mueller investigation. Obviously that was his only glancing reference to it and this White House is headed to a world of trouble in the next year and a half. We obviously don't know what the outcome will be, but I really think that this White House is ill prepared for what is coming toward it and just based on what we already know about the behavior of the president and the involvement of his campaign with the Russians. He's headed for serious trouble.

AMT: And beyond the Mueller investigation, of course there are Democrats who are new to the house who want to start other investigations. Jennifer what did you hear in that clip. Who was he speaking to?

JM: Yeah I really found that a fascinating construction. So he said if we want peace and legislation, we can't have wars and investigation, which so it's an overwritten phrase. It's an overwritten sentence, which means that he was trying to make that the focal point that everyone would pay attention to. Unfortunately as your other guest just pointed out, people and war are good that legislation and investigation are not and they're rhyming there, just makes it sound like Dr. Seuss is giving him political advice. And I think people probably would have laughed you know at that construction anyway, but the way he wrote it, I thought really just made it worse. Yeah that was a bomb.

AMT: There were some people reacting on Twitter right away, more than one person pointing out that Richard Nixon's last State of the Union Address included this line, I believe the time has come to bring that investigation and other investigations of this matter to an end. One year of Watergate is enough. Was he channeling Richard Nixon, Chris Whipple?

CW: Well possibly.

AMT: Is that a good thing or a bad thing?

CW: There are real parallels here. I mean you know to some extent this past summer reminded me of the summer of 1973. We've already got a case of you know where Donald Trump's own Justice Department says that he was complicit in campaign finance violations and directed his attorney to break the law. There's certainly a lot there and there's going to be more.

AMT: So Jennifer Mercieca, what are you, as you go over this is because you are studying his use of language, what do you concentrate on as you look at that speech again?

JM: Well the book that I'm writing is about the campaign and demagoguery and how Trump used demagogic rhetoric in order to win the presidency. A demagogue is an accountable leader and a danger in any political community, but especially in a democracy. And so as I look at the State of the Union here, I'll probably be looking at those instances where he used a baculum threat, which is something that's typical of his demagoguery, where he used ad hominem attacks. I'm really interested in the way that he used this undermining rhetoric, which is something that's very consistent with him, where he professes to be speaking on behalf of democracy and defending democratic values, but is in fact speaking in such a way that he undermines those values, which are all apart of the way that he prevents himself from being held accountable.

AMT: OK. Well we're going to leave it there. Thank you both of you, for weighing in on all of this today.

CW: My pleasure.

JM: My pleasure.

AMT: That is Jennifer Mercieca. She is an historian of American political rhetoric. We reached her in College Station, Texas. Chris Whipple is the author of The Gatekeepers: How the White House Chiefs of Staff Define Every Presidency. And he joined us from Washington D.C. Let us know what you think of what all of our guests had to say. You can tweet us @TheCurrentCBC. Find us on Facebook. Got to our website cbc.ca/thecurrent. Stay with us, the news is next. And then Roger McNamee once advised Mark Zuckerberg. He's now one of Facebook's fiercest critics. We will hear why he is so concerned about the power of Facebook and other online behemoths. I'm Anna Maria Tremonti. This is The Current on CBC Radio One.

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Why a former Facebook adviser says the 'like' button was 'beginning of the end' of company's good old days

Guests: Roger McNamee

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I'm Anna Maria Tremonti. This is The Current. Move fast and break things. That was a catchy mantra for an upstart tech company started in a Harvard dorm room, but with Facebook 15 years olds this week, the social media giant's growing chorus of critics is complaining the company moved too fast and broke almost everything. Concerns ranged from privacy issues to fake news and media manipulation, even actually the undermining of democracy. The #deletefacebook hashtag is gaining steam and it's even gaining academic credibility. A new Stanford University study released this week says quitting Facebook may even make you happier. New York based poet and author Alicia Cook struggled with the decision to delete her Facebook account in 2011. Now she says, she's better off without it.

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VOICE: When I first started using it, it wasn't even facebook.com, you had to type in thefacebook.com. It was definitely back then in its purest form, which was to connect people. It quickly morphed into just very self-absorbetion and I felt very overexposed. All social media really is is a highlight reel, you feel less than. It's very easy to like unravel and just be looking at your phone all day because you don't even realize how much social media and mindless scrolling affects your mental health. I'm so glad I don't have Facebook now in you know the last election season, everything because I've heard it's been like, it's worse.

AMT: Roger McNamee and to me was an early adopter and an early believer. He was once even an advisor to founder Mark Zuckerberg. Today Roger McNamee is one of Facebook's fiercest critics. He's the author of the book, Zucked: Waking up to the Facebook Catastrophe. And he's in our New York studio. Hello.

ROGER MCNAMEE: Anna Maria, it's a pleasure to be here.

AMT: I got to ask about that title. Zucked, pretty clever.

RM: My wife came up with it. And you know people ask me what does it mean, I say it means whatever you want it to mean.

AMT: Well let's talk about the rest of the title there. Catastrophe's a big word. Why do you see Facebook that way today?

RM: So I actually see it as broader than Facebook. I think you have to factor Google into the equation as well. And the reason is because the challenges of social media historically were about massive surveillance about manipulation of attention and the fact that the advertising model created incentives so that bad actors would not only share disinformation, but would attempt to manipulate what people think. All of that is about to get much worse. We have this new generation of smart devices using Alexa and other voice powered systems. They're going to take the surveillance into parts of our lives that previously were private, including the bedroom and you have artificial intelligence that's coming online now telling people what to think, telling people what to enjoy and buy. And doing so in a way that's not only opaque, but filled with all kinds of errors, implicit biases and things that you know could be prevented, but because the companies are making this stuff in such a hurry, they don't bother to fix the problems before they become public.

AMT: And I want to talk about the wider issue of all the companies as we go on, but let's just concentrate on Facebook for a minute. What was Facebook like when it started?

RM: When I first met Mark Zuckerberg, which was in 2006. He was 22, I was 50. The company was tiny. It barely had any revenue at all, it didn't have that many users. It didn't even have the news feed, which is the core of today's experience. I met him and he was astonishing. He was striking and he was really thoughtful, idealistic, really intense, all characteristics that you would generally associate with success. And the key thing about the idea of Facebook in those days was that it really was a simple product that did two things that mattered. It had authenticated identity and it had the ability to control privacy in a meaningful way. And those two things in my mind meant the company could become as big as Google was in those days. Maybe 100 million users in the English speaking world.

AMT: And the creation of the like button was a game changer?

RM: It was. The first thing they did like that was they give you the ability to tag photographs and that created a feeling, a psychological feeling that you had a reciprocity and that was the first viral thing they did and then the like button changed everything. That gave them social cues right. You suddenly were finding out what people's emotional state was and that was the beginning of the end relative to the sort of soft and cuddly early years of Facebook.

AMT: Now when you met him, he was 22 and you were 50. He was looking for advice.

RM: He was. I took the meeting without knowing what the topic was and I had been observing the tech industry at that point for I think 24 years and so I was very excited to meet the founder of this company because even then it was obvious that he had something very speical. And I took the meaning and opened it with a two minute monologue which I said look I just have to tell you something I think either Facebook or sorry either Microsoft or are you going to try to acquire Facebook and they can offer you a big number in your family representative ticket. I said I cannot tell you what to do but I think you have something unique. I think your vision is brilliant and if you still believe in it you should take the offer. Well it turned out the reason he was coming to see me was that Yahoo had offered to beat us for Facebook in pretty much everything I told them had just happened. So there was a very fortuitous thing and I had an opportunity from that point forward to advise him as the company was evolving and for three years we were very close and the nature of businesses like that is that the founder really has to keep upgrading their mentor group to suit whatever the problems are of the day. And I was the right person at that time but it was really obvious to me in 2009 when Sheryl Sempra came in that he wasnt going to need me anymore. And so the last thing that I did that was really important was introducing him to Sheryl and suggesting that he bring her in as the chief operating officer.

AMT: So we just heard from Alicia Cook on how the Facebook experience has grown worse over time for her. How did you see it change as you moved on?

RM: Funnily enough, for me it was mostly positive. I play in a rock and roll band and we were very early adopters of Facebook when they introduced groups and we could start to have a central way to communicate with our fans. And it worked really well for us, as it does for many people. I think in the United States there are things like Black Lives Matter and the march for our lives that use Facebook to organize and I think thats one of the things he does really well. I was largely unaware of the dark side. I mean yes I did see that if I spoke too long at Facebook or face bed time doing political things that would make me angry or frustrated. But I didnt see it as a global harm I thought was specific to me and it wasn't till 2016 that I started to notice things going on. It made me think there was something wrong with the architecture and I reached out to market share or an act over 2016 to make my friends aware of what I thought was a systemic problem in the product that they needed to get on top right away.

AMT: And how'd they respond?

RM: Well graciously, but without any interest in actually following through. They thought my concerns were isolated, no systemic and that they'd already taken care of them. When the election happened I shall we say a little bit more emotionally engaged in this and I begged them to do what Johnson and Johnson did after the poisoning in Tylenol, which was to say Johnson and Johnson didn't put the poison in the bottles, but they knew they had to take care of their customers and so they withdrew the bottles of Tylenol for a while till they could invent tamper proof packaging. And I thought Facebook needed to do something like that because it's a business based on trust and if they lost the trust the fact that the law says they're not responsible for what third parties do, wasn't going to matter. They were not interested in that either and so after three months of trying to convince them, I became an activist.

AMT: How much control does Mark Zuckerberg have over Facebook and the direction it goes?

RM: 100 percent. He has full voting control and he has all of the stature of having been right for years and years and years and having conceived this idea. He has complete control.

AMT: You call it a golden vote rule?

RM: Yeah. So the way that one works is everybody gets to vote and then Mark decides.

AMT: Last week the fact checking website Snopes announced that it is pulling out of its partnership with Facebook. I want you to listen to Brooke Binkowski, the former managing editor of Snopes.

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VOICE: I think that Facebook is going in the wrong direction as far as fact-checking goes anyway. What they should be doing is hiring people internally. They should be putting a stop to their own disinformation, since they're spreading it themselves. They definitely need to end their algorithymsor at the very least make them opt in instead of just subjecting us to all this to sort of false stories and hoax stories for engagement purposes that they've been doing. So I think that, they've got to take responsibility for what they're doing. They cannot outsource fact-checking. They have to do it on their own and they also need to clean up the mess that they made.

AMT: Roger McNamee, what do you think of what she says there?

RM: I completely agree. Here's the challenge. The entire business model is based on outsourcing absolutely everything that can be outsourced and the business model is based on appealing to outrage and fear because those things create higher levels of engagement, which means that disinformation is far more valuable to Facebook. Conspiracy theorists far more valuable than facts. And so what Brooke's describing is a flaw in the business model and it cannot be fixed and we saw a similar thing this also last week when Pro Publica announced that they had been terminated as a researcher on Facebook's election database you know of the election ads and they were doing a thing similar to Snopes and Facebook cut them off with a completely ridiculous explanation. And the thing we need to understand is this is Facebook amile the corporate model. I have adjusted because this is where it more accurately should be which is move fast break things apologize repeat that they have a very simple thing which is they apologize say they'll do better. They may do some external thing for a while, but as soon as the controversy dies down, they just go back to business as usual.

AMT: And this is why you're an activist now?

RM: This is why I'm an activist because it's not just that all that behavior is bad. The technology itself is allowing a growing threat to develop around these voice activated smart appliances and around artificial intelligence and again that's why I point to the fact it's not just Facebook. I started with Facebook because that was the company I knew best. It was the one where I had a relationship. It's the one where I saw the problem first and the one where I reached out. So Zuck is really the story of my discovery and in it imagine that I'm Jimmy Stewart in the Alfred Hitchcock movie, Rear Window and I see something that looks like a crime and I don't understand it, so I pull on the thread. And that's the narrative arc that I used to tell this story because Facebook and Google gather data on literally everyone. They manipulate people in a way that affects everyone, including people who don't use the products and it's really terrifying to me.

AMT: Tell us a little bit more of how you see that manipulation happening.

RM: So it starts really young. It turns out that screens, whether they're in a smartphone or tablet are just tremendous babysitters. And then they discover that YouTube has this channel called YouTube Kids and so you let the kids watch these videos all which start out very nicely. But many of which are algorithmically created and they're designed to stimulate the children with you know more and more outrageous things that cause dopamine hits, which are you know essentially a neurotransmitter that stimulates the kid in a way that's not meant to be sustainable. And so kids get hyperactive and they stop being engaged with the real world because it's not as interesting as these screens. Then you get them into elementary school and they they get a smartphone and that's when texting and Instagram come in and then they get to be teenagers you have the fear of missing out which is a really hard thing for teenagers to handle up because social approval is so important. And then when they become adults you get the whole issue of filter bubbles which is this notion that Facebook and Google do where they tell their everything you see based on what you've liked in the past because that maximizes engagement and in doing so they create a medically sealed information bubble around you so you if you remember the movie Truman Show. You're living your own reality and you can have your own facts. And that has really undermined democracy very broadly.

AMT: So you're talking about a huge societal change that you're saying essentially triggered by the big tech companies and mostly Facebook because it started that. That's what you're saying? But you use the word crime, that's an awfully strong word.

RM: Well I'm saying here that I'm using the term metaphorically right because I just think that we live in a world where at least in the world I grew up in, every person has a right to self-determination and the notion that a company can use deceit, can manipulate people without their being aware of it, take data from them without their being aware of it, use it in a way that they're not aware of, that feels wrong to me at a very fundamental level.

AMT: You know we invited someone from Facebook to answer to some of these issues. Facebook declined, sent us a statement and I'm going to quote it, part of the statement. Here it is. "We take criticism seriously. Over the past two years we've fundamentally changed how we operate to better protect the safety and security of people using Facebook. The reality is Roger McNamee hasn't been involved with Facebook for a decade." What do you make of that response?

RM: Well here's what I observed two things. So to the first point. Last week we had two instances that are really worth thinking about. First Facebook was caught and there's a legal case involved with them tailoring game applications to allow kids to run up huge bills on their parent's credit cards. And they did this deceptively. They were caught at it and you know they refused to do refunds and this was very predatory. And then a second thing happened was both Facebook and Google were caught by Apple, circumventing the rules of the App Store to release what they called research products that do massive surveillance on the people that use them. Many of whom or minors under the age of 18. Now if Facebook listens to critics and has made the changes, those two things wouldn't have happened because those are current. Right. And these issues have been on the table for all cap. And the second thing I observe is bits to master that have not been involved for the last 10 years it's also on that relevant. I mean enlist. I'm not making a point about the inside of Facebook. I'm simply pointing out what you can see and I would say these are I mean these are all things that have happened the last few months. So I would dispute that Facebook takes criticism seriously. I think what they do is they try really hard to appear to take it seriously, without actually acting on it.

AMT: Now Facebook has announced its plans to merge Whatsapp, Messenger and Instagram messaging. This is raising concerns. Critics are saying this gives big tech companies too much power. Tim Wu is a professor at Columbia University. He's the author of The Curse of Bigness, Antitrust in the New Gilded Age. He says this should be a red flag. Listen to him.

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VOICE: Either American, Canadian or European law enforcement should open investigation into Facebook's mergers. They've had enormous number of unchallenged mergers with which they've been able to protect their monopoly. And I think without serious competition, Facebook's never had to be serious about privacy concerns. You know we're in a new age of internet monopolies and we have an old law, the antitrust law, that calls for the breakup of monopolies and I'd suggest we're overdue and I'm suggesting the takeover, the consolidation of Instagram and WhatsApp is a trigger that should make people think hard about why we're allowing monopoly in so many areas of our life.

AMT: Roger McNamee, the U.S. has forced the breakup of big companies in the past. Can they do it with a company that spans the globe?

RM: I would hope so. So I think Professor Wu is exactly right about the problem here that Facebook's merger of these three things has huge implications. They should never have been allowed to buy either of these companies in the first place and the decision were obviously anti-competitive on the face of them from the first day and you know I think there are a lot of people in the Congress of the United States who now regret not having had action there.

AMT: What we're talking about really, you're talking about something that needs regulation if it's going to happen.

RM: No that's correct. I believe that the users, the humans formerly known as users, have more power than they realize. We do have the power to change our behavior to take our attention away from these companies to apply it differently and we have the ability to push our elected representatives to regulate these companies and I hope we will all do that. When I think about Facebook and Google today. It's going to take a concerted effort. The level of complexity of the problem is pretty huge and its getting worse because of smart device and artificial intelligence.

AMT: I want you to hear from Gizmodo reporter Kashmir Hill who tried to take things into her own hands to see if she could live without the Big Five: Amazon, Google, Facebook, Microsoft, Apple. She did an experiment where she blocked them. What she found surprised her.

SOUNDCLIP

VOICE: I couldn't use Uber and Lyft app. Spotify was taken down. And just the entire Internet was poor work for me. Facebook was really difficult to block because you will miss out on things. During that week one of my closest friends had her babies and I missed it and it just really hit home for me. So I spent the last 12 years like uploading photos and making connections to friends. So there's just a lot of me there. Photos around two years ago of like when I had my daughter. It's just these really meaningful memories, a digital history of my life and it's hard just to hit delete on that. It was surprising to me how dependent we are on these companies and people would say if you think they're too invasive, or too powerful, you just should stop using their services. And I wanted to see if that was possible and I found that it just was not possible and if you are worried about the power, their control, then yeah I think the results of my experiment were alarming.

AMT: Okay, what do you think?

RM: So I read her original article. To hear it in her voice is really amazing. So I've been running a similar experiment and I know exactly what she's talking about. Relative to Google, I've been quite successful. I've taken Google out of my life and I don't know if you remember the old video game Frogger, where you're the frog and you have to get across the river by hopping across logs. I treated Google as the river and I used other products, one password and ghostery and Duck Duck Go and things like that to replace the functions that I would get from Google. And every once in a while I'll touch a Google map and wind up having to start the game again, but on that one I've been pretty successful. Facebook for me has been impossible to get off of. My band does all of its promotion there. I'm trying to communicate with people by teaching you know the things I learned about platforms. I'm using Facebook to do that and what I've done is to change my behavior. No more news, less emotion.

AMT: Facebook starts its face mash, a site to raise the attractiveness of college women, women on campus and it turns into this juggernaut.

RM: You know, when I first met Mark I consciously chose not to focus on his years at Harvard because the Mark I knew was very responsible and very thoughtful and I wanted to believe that he had grown out of the hijinx of the college years and what we've learned since is that there's a piece of that hacker mentality, that defiance of authority, that remains pretty central to Mark's character, but which was not in any way apparent to me during the years that I worked with him.

AMT: Is that surprising? I mean he's a plutocrat. He's a really rich guy, one of many, who live in a different world.

RM: No argument about that. But again, keep in mind,hen I was working with him, they didn't have much in the way of revenue, they didn't have the current business model. So I haven't interacted with Mark at all in his plutocrat era.

AMT: You still have shares in Facebook, am I right?

RM: I do. I do.

AMT: Why?

RM: I have very simply. I didn't want anybody to think that my activism was an attempt to crash the stock. You know I wanted people to understand that I had profited from this and was for the period of my aggressive activism, going to hang in there on the stock and take the same risks as the employees and just I wanted to eliminate any uncertainty about my motivations.

AMT: How's your relationship with Mark Zuckerberg now?

RM: I don't have one. The last time I interacted with him was on October 30th of 2016, when I sent him the op-ed and that was the last time I heard from either Sheryl or Mark. The last time I spoke to anyone at all on Facebook was in February of 2017 and they ignored me for a long time and now they're doing what they said with you. They're sending out things that frame their position without actually addressing any of the issues that I'm raising.

RM: Your message is we have to be more aware of what we're in the midst of now.

RM: And also less trusting of technology. For 50 years our trust was completely justified and these guys essentially took advantage of that for their economic benefit and once burned, so we need to be twice shy.

AMT: Roger McNamee, thanks for your thoughts on all of this.

RM: Anna Maria, this has been a great pleasure and to all my friends in Canada, I just want to say thank you and keep up the good fight.

AMT: Roger McNamee, author of Zucked: Waking up to the Facebook Catastrophe. He joined us from our New York studio. Let us know what you think of what he's saying. Tweet us @TheCurrentCBC. Find us on Facebook. Go to our website cbc.ca/thecurrent. Go use all those tech giants to contact us and let us know what you're thinking.

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'It was rotting in me': How Kerri Rawson came to forgive her father, the notorious BTK killer

Guests: Kerri Rawson

AMT: I'm Anna Maria Tremonti. This is The Current.

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VOICE: Based upon your statements to the court, I will accept these pleas of guilty and a judge you Dennis L Rader, guilty of murder in the first degree and count 1, a class 8 felony. Murder in the first degree and count 2 a class 8 felony. Murder in the first degree.

AMT: Well the count ran all the way to ten. Ten guilty pleas to ten counts of first degree murder. That's the voice of Judge Greg Waller, pronouncing his verdict at the 2005 trial of Dennis Rader who gave himself the moniker BTK killer, BTK for bind, torture, kill. Dennis Rader terrorized Wichita, Kansas in a series of murders that spanned decades. Most of his victims were women, some were children. He relished his growing infamy. He taunted the police and the media, but his crimes were only half the story. His arrest brought another shock. The BTK killer had a wife and children. He was a scout leader. He was active in his church. He had been living what seemed to be a normal life, in a community where no one had the slightest inkling about his secret. Much of the same way people in Toronto were shocked to discover that Bruce McArthur, a friendly gardener, a shopping mall Santa, had been killing people, most with ties to the city's gay village for years. Kerri Rawson knows about that sense of shock. Kerri Rawson is Dennis Rader's daughter. And she describes that painful journey, confronting the truth in her memoir, A Serial Killer's Daughter: My Story of Hope, Love and Overcoming. Kerri Rawson is with me in our Toronto studio and I should warn you some of what we're about to discuss will be disturbing. Hello.

KERRI RAWSON: Hi. Thank you for having me.

AMT: When you hear that clip, what do you hear that I don't hear?

KR: I know each of the names behind the felony counts. So I sat here in ran each name and face through in my hand. That I've now learned the names. I started learning the names of my dad's victims, potential victims. The day of his arrest, he was arrested for the first eight and there were two after I was born, in 85 and 91, that they didn't know BTK had committed until the first night. I actually told the FBI about count number eight, which was Maureen Hedge, my neighbor that lived down the street. She had gone missing and was later found strangled and murdered out in the country about 10 days after she went missing and she lived like seven houses down from me and I was 6 years old at the time so.

AMT: And you remembered that night.

KR: I did.

AMT: And you told the FBI that and that's how they because that wasn't even on their list.

KR: It wasn't because my dad had changed his criminal M.O. on purpose for the eight count and the tenth one, which was Mrs. Davis in 91. She lived a couple miles from us. He didn't want them to look like BTK had done because the police they didn't think BTK really was still around after the 70s. They thought maybe he was in prison or dead. And so he didn't want them coming back and looking for him, especially in his neighborhood. But the night Ms. Hedge had gone missing, I was six and we had had a thunderstorm and I knew my dad was out camping with the boy scouts and I was in, I climbed in my mom's bed because it was storming and I wouldn't have done that if my dad had been home. And so when the FBI came in 2005 and notified me that my dad had been arrested, at first I was trying to alibi him and I was just shocked. And then it hit me you know that our neighbor lady had been murdered and it had never been solved as far as I knew. And I something twisted in my guts and I remembered that from what I knew of BTK, he strangled women and I said my neighbor lady had been you know strangled.

AMT: He committed a lot of crimes before your brother was born and he committed a crime while your mom was pregnant with you.

KR: Yes.

AMT: So there was so much you didn't know, that you were born into this and you say early on that you too are a victim of his crimes.

KR: Right. His hirst murder was a family. It was two parents and their youngest children. In 74 the family and he left three older kids survivors and then a young woman that lived by the Wichita campus named Kathryn Bright. And then he stopped for a few years and then after my brother was born his sixth victim Shirley. He actually used a photo of my mom and my brother as a ruse, like asking if this little kid on the street knew him and then followed him home and then showed his mom and then broke into their home and murdered this child's mother. So the seventh murder was when my mom was three months pregnant with me, it was Nancy Fox. She was a young woman that my father had spotted at a mall in Wichita and then there were three after I was born.

AMT: And this, you knew nothing of this, so let's go back. This man was your father to you. Tell me about the man you grew up with.

KR: I grew up was like a pretty normal father. We spent a lot of time camping and fishing and hiking, when I got older. My mom was not an outdoor person so it was always just my dad my brother and me or we would meet up with his brothers or my grandpa for camping and fishing. I spend a lot time with my dad outdoors we garden together. We built a gigantic tree house. He taught me about gardening. You know when you plant things and I am in a mental ward for the outdoors and I even have a science degree from college. All of that came from spending time with my father.

AMT: AT one point you write about a big trip to the Grand Canyon. You hiked the Green Canyon. Tell us about that trip.

KR: So we had been out to the canyon in 86 for vacation and then we went back in 95, I went with my dad and my brother and my husband and we stayed on the rim for a week and make or break their campground. So then in 97 we knew we always mind a hike in the canyon and stay overnight. So you have to apply for a permit so it can take like a year to be on the wait list. So we went out in May of 97. My dad and me my brother and my younger cousin and we had a six day hiking trip play and we went down Hermit Trail which is a rougher like not unpopulated trail. And it was it was a very hairy unmaintained trail that had rockslides on a little water. And I was in this place I was 19, but I just completely and totally trusted and relied on my father that he had like we searched everything. He had books. He spent a year planning this trip, so I figured we were adequately equipped with gear and enough water and skill and we definitely were not. Like we were struggling for water. Struggling with the distances my brother had been sick. He joined us later. I mean there was a very good chance that one of us could have come out of there not alive. And in hindsight you can look back now and you seem like how your father, my father, like his narcissism sort of drove him to do these things he wanted to do without really thinking about it.

AMT: And you say in hindsight, at the time he annoyed you, but you had no connection to this other life.

KR: No I mean at that time like growing up with my father, the majority of the time you're just with a like a loving kind man. But occasionally he would have flashes of anger. He could be like verbally abusive you know emotionally hard on you. He also could be controlling in your house. They would yell at you when you were really small like if your shoes weren't put away or like he always had just that he had his seat at the dining table so you would be in trouble if you sat there. So you just sort of learned at a young age, how to kind of walk around your father.

AMT: But again that wasn't something that raised any red flags.

KR: Well no I mean a lot of, I mean all parents raise their voices. You know and every adult and I see it now deals with stress and you know brings that home from work. There is a very large leap between someone being short tempered or even abusive sometimes. I mean my father was even like committed Domestic Abuse twice physical abuse against my brother when we were young adults but you still don't take those moments and make some massive leap into thinking your father could have harmed anybody, let alone killed them.

AMT: So you go from me when you see as a loving father, flawed, but your dad, to a knock on the door from the FBI. By this time, you're married, you're living in Michigan.

AMT: Tell me about the day you found out about the other side of him.

KR: It was February 25th, 2005. I was substitute teaching in Michigan. We had moved there about a year and a half before, for my husband's job. We had met at Kansas State. And so I was substitute teaching and I stayed home because it was snowing, I didn't like driving on the ice. I was still in my green pajamas like fluffy pajamas and I got up and I saw a strange man like sitting in a car outside the window. And it was bothering me because I knew he shouldn't have been where he was parked behind our apartment and I ended up calling my husband. My father had always instilled like stranger danger in me. He like some of that control and obsessiveness my father had. Like we had deadbolts on our door, so when I was little, he always talked to me about the deadbolts and keep them locked, but you got to keep the key because if you have a fire, you got to get out.. So he's telling you this when you're like four.

AMT: He was telling you how to avoid people like him, but you didn't know that.

KR: No I didn't know. He was extremely overprotective, especially of my mom and me to the point that key would get angry at us if we got hurt. So he's he's trying really hard to protect us, but we realized he was also trying to protect us from somebody like him. So I grew up very weary of the world and very like safety minded. And so now I'm sitting in my apartment in 05 and I've got what I call stranger danger like you know fight or flight and you're already scared of this person and now they're in your hallway and your door was supposed to be locked in your apartment. You were supposed to buzz them in and you know now they're asking you to come in. They're saying they're the FBI and my dad had always told me like make them show you a badge. Make them prove to who they are. Because he said they can pretend to be somebody else. And my father had gotten into people's houses you know just by doing that. And so I'm already very fearful and the agent comes in and he says, like do you know Dennis Rader and I was like yeah, that's my dad. And then he said your dad's been arrested. And then he said your dad is BTK.

AMT: So tell me what's going through your head because you have no clue and he's across from you and he says that's your father.

KR: Yeah. I mean I was standing in my kitchen. I had made a chocolate bun the night before and I remember you start focusing on the tiniest little things like you're going into shock and you don't know what's wrong with you and the room gets literally bright or dark and kind of spins. So you're focusing on things like cookbook strip a purse cause you're going through trauma and you don't know you're trying to ground yourself. You start arguing with him and then you're confused and like when he mentioned BTK I think cause he said, have you heard of BTK before he said your dad is. I thought maybe something had happened to my grandma because she lived alone, my dad's mom. And I said grandma's fraile, maybe something happened to her and she said no she's fine. And so I said Is my mom okay. Has my mom been murdered? He said no, your mom's okay. She's being picked up and I was like picked up, like where, by who? And he's like oh the police. He's just very very you know FBI, very straight up, just the facts ma'am. I finally talked to my mom. It was on a Friday night after that first night finally when I got ahold of her after hours of not being able to get a hold of her and terrified. And we both said basically at the same time, we echoed each other and we said we both told the FBI you've got the wrong man because they had arrested the wrong man in December. So we were sure that they had got the wrong guy again.

AMT: And they told you well actually we found evidence in your home.

KR: Yeah I talked to the FBI that night and he was very vague, but I think he wanted me to know like this wasn't going away and that we needed to start facing it. We found out later my dad had stored driver's license and jewelry of some of the victims underneath a false bottom floorboard in our hallway. And that was a hallway that we rode tornadoes out you know in the Midwest.

AMT: Did you feel physically ill at this?

KR: Yeah. Like I went into physical shock. I understand when I was notified for like five days. I was shaking not being able to eat not sleeping falling apart. And now I understand that I was actually experiencing trauma and I still have PTSD from those first days.

AMT: You write later that you realized you'd messed up those first few days after your dad's arrest. Why did you characterize it that way?

KR: I messed up. I should have had my husband take me to hospital and knock me out or put me under psychiatric care. I messed up because I was trying so hard hour by this me and that I loved that the first night I got on the Internet and I wolfed up all the crimes and I found other ones because we didn't know how many he had committed and there were several out there that BTK possibly could have committed. So now I'm exposing myself to crime scene photos you know details of crimes 30 years of news and I came out of that room staggered like not sure I was going to survive the night.

AMT: You know I know you have found it infuriating when people ask how could you not have known what he was doing. In Canada we are learning more about two serial killers right now. A man in Toronto, Bruce McArthur, who preyed on gay men in Toronto. The sentencing is going on this week. A nurse, Elizabeth Wettlaufer who killed the seniors in care homes where she worked. The crimes went on for years and people who knew them are now struggling to come to terms with the fact that they didn't see it. They didn't know it. What do you say to them?

KR: I understand that you're going to feel guilty that you didn't see something and you feel bad because you know these people have lost their lives to this person that you worked with or maybe are related to or maybe who's even your parent. At some point you got to let that go because if you don't it's going to eat you up inside and kill you. I deal with things by sharing everything I can possibly know and then dealing with it. Some people do not. And I tried for 10 years to not talk about it and stuff inside but it was it was killing me and I was riding at me. And I mean there's a lot of shame and guilt that comes from being related to one of these people or knowing them and then and then you could spend the rest of your life questioning every moment that you had with them and wondering what did you miss and why didn't you see it. You got to understand all of that. Back on that person that they caused this. They chose these things.

AMT: And they deliberately hid it. They went out of their way to hide it. That's why they got away with so many for so long.

KR: Right. And in the case, I know in the case of my father, I mean he's a certified sexual, sadistic psychopath now by criminologists. So if he's a psychopath he has that ability to disconnect from morality and disconnect from right and wrong and not like it doesn't bother him to commit these crimes he's not he doesn't feel remorse over it. He also has an immense ability to put on mask and change like how he talks, how he looks, how he dresses. In hindsight my dad owned a uniform for everything. Like he had his security uniform. Later he had his compliance student for going to the relatives self. There's the suit for church in college. Now we look like we were the purple and the white of the college and we'd go cheer football and we wear the hat. So he just blends in and looks very very normal.

AMT: What role has your faith and religion played in your confronting what happened in all of those years?

KR: Right I grew up in a like a Lutheran church. I grew up in a small American church and it was very important to go to church every week, to my family, including my father. Then I walked away from my faith and I found, I really found God in Christianity in college down. When I was in the Grand Canyon, I started praying. That's the first time I prayed and I ask edGod for help and he answered my prayers that week. So that's when I really latched on to my faith and Christianity as I understand it now and so when everything fell out on me on the 25th of February, I didn't know I was going to make it through the night after I had exposed myself to all that stuff on the Internet and everything that had happened and I just couldn't pick up my Bible and I just called out to God to help me. And he brought me Psalm 23 that night, even though I walk through the valley of the shadow of the death, beside me and he got me through that night. I woke up the next morning so without my faith in God without having that foundation and having something to hold on to that was good and helpful I wouldn't be here still.

AMT: You wrote letters to Dad when he was first in jail. Why?

KR: I wanted him to know I still loved him. You know I still love the man I knew and I still do today. I get pushed on it pretty hard right now in interviews, but I love the man that braced me. I still love the man I know. You know I still love the man that I can write with today and talk to about the birds and the seasons and migration and the changing colours and that's the man that I know and love. I don't know that other man. I don't know BTK. So for me to keep.

AMT: But you accept that he is?

KR: Oh I do. But it took a long time. There's a difference between told something or seeing something, hearing something and actually processing it. So when I wrote my father I just wanted him to know I still love him and I cared for him, but I also wanted him to know that he needed like I really thought he knew to plead guilty for the family's and for the community and not put any of us through that. Occasionally u.

AMT: Do you still write now?

KR: I do. We had long periods where I wouldn't communicate with him.

AMT: Why not?

KR: So after his sentencing in 05, before the sentencing I told him I would keep writing. And then after the sentencing, it came out that he had said in confession that my family were social contacts and pawns in his game and the detective said that from the stand. And and once I heard that I was done with my dad. And basically I wrote in my book even then, he could rot in hell when I heard him say that. So I didn't write my father for two years and he kept writing and asking why aren't you talking to me and he said hopefully someday you will write me and hopefully someday you'll forgive me in your heart.

AMT: You say you have forgiven him.

KR: I did.

AMT: What does that mean?

KR: In 2012, I had come far enough in my faith and I was open enough about talking that I think God was really just working on me because I knew as a Christian, I needed to gorive, but I didn't want to forgive. So I was wrestling with God. Finally in December of 2012 I was coming home from a movie and it basically just washed over me. And so I rushed home and I wrote my dad a really long letter about my life and his grandkids that he would never see and the life he would never have. And then at the end I wrote and I told him I've forgiven you. If you ask God for forgiveness, I believe you can still be in heaven some day.

AMT: You know there would be people who would forgive you for not being able to forgive him. And there are those who might not understand how you possibly could. What do you say to that?

KR: I mean I'm still being asked about that or people are arguing with me on Twitter about me saying he could be in heaven. I think people need to understand when you're forgiving somebody, you're not saying whatever they've done is OK because there's nothing, nothing is okay about what my father did to those seven families. Nothing will ever be okay and it's not even my place to forgive, forget that. That's the family's place. I'm trying to forgive what he's done to my family and the betrayal because I had to let that go because it was rotting in me, it was killing me. When you forgive somebody, it doesn't also mean that you have to be back in relationship with them. I have very strict boundaries with my father and to protect myself and my family. I still love him, but he can't be a very large part of my life.

AMT: You loved the man that you knew.

KR: I loved the man that I knew and it's very hard for people to understand that. I'm trying to write to show one that this is my life and this was my story and I want people to understand what it's like for somebody like me to go through hell. Also I lost somebody I loved and I grieved somebody that didn't die and I was not allowed to grieve him. I also want people to understand that maybe we're not catching these people quick enough. These serial killers because they don't look like monsters. You know we're not catching the Bundys and the Raders and the Zodiacs because they look.

AMT: And McArthurs and Wettlaufers.

KR: Because they just look like normal people because they can be normal people.

AMT: Well isn't that what scares us in the wider thing. Isn't that what scares us because they are like us on so many levels and then they're not.

KR: And it scares people so much they don't even want to sit down and read a book or read an article because they don't want to have to admit that that it could be their father, it could be their neighbor, it could be their co-worker. They don't want to have to that be their reality that it is.

AMT: So you know the other thing, we in the media and those of us on the outside, are pretty guilty of looking at a family of someone who's committed horrendous crimes like serial killings and taking it out on the whole family. You've experienced that.

KR: I have because especially nowadays it's even worse for the families now because of the Internet and the social media and the news cycle and the turn around and the glaring headlines and we got to get the hot story I understand on the side of the media and they need the story and they're trying to tell it. On the other hand the families have every right to privacy and to heal privately and when it's their turn to talk they will come talk and they will find you.

AMT: And again you are trying to process something that's been done that you don't know and people.

KR: They jump to conclusions because you're on CNN and they are automatically think because you're related to this person, you're obviously bad and you obviously hid something and it follows you the rest of your life. I mean I'm still dealing with it today being trolled, today on social media because I'm talking and I'm being told, I don't have the right to be a victim. I don't have the right to suffer. I didn't experience trauma because I wasn't in a war and that I need to shut my mouth and die. I mean people are contacting me and telling me they want to throw me in a woodchipper and my family and my kids because of my dad.

AMT: Your mom and your brother have remained very private in the aftermath of all of this. Why did you decide you wanted to share this part of your story?

KR: For the first 10 years I prayed to God for a quiet private life. I thought that was the way to go, but you reach a point where you can't help it anymore and you just erupt. So in the fall of 14, I basically erupted it in my hometown newspaper cause I was mad and my mouth just went flying. What I saw was talking healed me in a way nothing else had you know and then writing healed me. Forcing myself to go walk into my hometown newspaper and face those journalists and look them in the eye and shake their hand and say you know I'm Dennis Rader's daughter. To make myself do that was a pivotal moment in healing for me because now these people come into your life and they know how to work with trauma victims. They know how to work with crime victims. And they told me you're a crime and a trauma victim and we knew that early. And then talking about it was helping other people and so writing about it is helping other people and I know I'm talking about the trolls, but overwhelmingly, positively, pouring in so much I can't even respond to, just this week, since the book release telling me like you're helping me heal. I'm sorry you went through this. God bless you. You know and I'm helping people. Something in my story is resonating. So it's worth being a public figure and it's worth taking the hits, if that means I can help one person.

AMT: It's still hard to talk about. You're crying.

KR: It it is because it's a lot and you know like I spent four years writing quietly, you know. I didn't even know if I was going to get through the book. And then to see that it's helping people you know. We were talking about shame and guilt. You have so much shame because you're related to this man and you're so guilty because ten people lost their lives and you're still alive. So you have to figure out, can you laugh again, can you live again? Do you have the right to have children? You know my dad got to walk me down the aisle. There are many women who didn't get to get their dad to walk them down the aisle because my dad took their lives or fathers that didn't get to walk their daughters down the aisle. How do you reconcile them? What do you do with it? It takes a very long time to get to the point where I want to do some good with it. I mean my dad caused massive destruction for 30 years. So I figure I've got to at least do 30 years of good. As a child of this man, I carry that around and that's something I'm still needing to let go of.

AMT: Kerri, I want to thank you for sharing your story and for being so candid today.

KR: Yeah you're welcome. Thank you for having me.

AMT: Kerri Rawson, she tells her story in her memoir, A Serial Killer's Daughter: My Story of Hope, Love and Overcoming. She's with me in our Toronto studio. Let us know what you think of what she's saying. Tweet us @TheCurrentCBC. Find us on Facebook. Go to our website cbc.ca/thecurrent.

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Feb. 6, 2019 episode transcript

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