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The Current Transcript for August 8, 2023

Host: Anthony Germain

STORIES FROM THIS EPISODE

Prologue

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SOUNDCLIP

If that isn't danger close, I don't know what is. Holy [beep].

ANTHONY GERMAIN: Residents are on edge. Massive forest fires continue to threaten houses and devour trees on both sides of Adams Lake near Kamloops. This year, out-of-control wildfires have sent smoke billowing across the continent and will set a record for devastation in Canadian forests. But even under fire, nature is resilient. We'll look at rebuilding and regeneration and the hope that some indigenous ways and better management will help our forests rise from the ashes. And then.

SOUNDCLIP

It's kind of like cutting hair. But with a toddler who's bigger than you has hooves and is covered in lanolin, which is a greasy substance, and you've got a hot whirring blade.

AG: Author Peggy Orenstein learned to shear sheep and in the process discovered a lot about herself, her family and creativity. And in an hour, we'll continue our presentation of the CBC podcast Love Janessa. But we begin with a fire season like no other. Good morning. I'm Anthony Germain in this week for Matt Galloway and this is The Current.

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Bringing scorched lands back to life

Guests: Ed Struzik, Angela Kane, Ellen Whitman

AG: This year's wildfire season is on track to destroy four times more land than any previous year on record. Predictions are fire conditions are only going to get worse. Angela Kane is working to bring scorched lands back to life. She is the CEO of the Sequoia Mikula Restoration and Stewardship Society. It's an Indigenous led organisation that works to restore forested areas after wildfires. Good morning.

ANGELA KANE: Good morning.

AG: Angela. You're about 40 minutes from Adams Lake. What does the fire season look like from where you're located?

ANGELA KANE: It's very smoky and I'm pretty sure around the province there's not too many places that you can go that it isn't.

AG: Is the kind of thing where you go outside and you can feel it in your throat. Give me a sense of what it's like for you.

ANGELA KANE: Well, it's it's kind of a sense of eerie and deja vu, because back in 2017, I witnessed one of the Canada three pieces, largest wildfires at that time. And, you know, it's it's kind of a surreal feeling. You're the sky is blacked out or blocked out. You're you know, there's ash on everything. It you're not supposed to be going outside. So it's quite difficult for our elders or anybody that has breathing issues and stuff. It's quite difficult.

AG: Now, you work hard at addressing what happens after these fires go away. What kind of work is your organisation doing to help restore forests?

ANGELA KANE: Well, we're looking at putting back from an Indigenous perspective. We have found over the years that with the harvesting that a lot of our licensees do, they're just cutting back for more economical purposes and not so much from a balanced ecological purpose.

AG: So can you give me a sense of how you address that balance?

ANGELA KANE: Well, we work with our indigenous communities to identify specific species that are important to them culturally as well as for their their basic welfare. And through that identification, it's those species we work with, with the provincial government because they have their stocking standards and we work with them at creating those stocking standards and those species to put back onto the land after a wildfire.

AG: And what's the connection between the species that you make a priority and the indigenous values that you try to put into your work?

ANGELA KANE: Well, a lot of the species that our communities are utilising are either for their medicines or for food sources, as well as the plants feed the wildlife that they hunt during the seasons.

AG: And so when you look at what you described around you, do you start thinking, okay, boy, do we ever have a lot of work to do and we better focus on this area or that area. How do you approach it?

ANGELA KANE: Oh, it's it's it's difficult. We try and approach it on a first basis, you know, as if the only thing we can do, we look at there's just so many options and the wildfires just don't stop. I mean, every year there's more and more. The last time I was speaking with B.C. Wildfire, they're predicting 1.5 million across Canada burnt this year. So, I mean, that's the largest amount of wildfires in history.

AG: And within the authorities in B.C. that you work with, how do you convince people that indigenous leadership was important in the restoration that has to come after?

ANGELA KANE: I think it's you know, it's just having those conversations and letting them understand how important the forests are to indigenous communities and to everybody. I think, you know, it's building those relationships with the government and helping them understand why it's so important to preserve and and mitigate wildfire as best we can.

AG: And is there a working partnership there? Have you encountered any resistance?

ANGELA KANE: Not from our perspective. We deal with two regional districts currently, but we have had conversations with other first nations throughout the province that don't have the same level of conversation or relationship that we have. And this is something that we're really trying to promote throughout the province, is how important that connection is in building that relationship between government to government and understanding the indigenous ways. As we tend to look globally where other governments are looking to indigenous perspectives and ideas and history to help conserve and protect our force.

AG: As the CEO of this Restoration and Stewardship Society, how proud review of the Indigenous leadership that you attempt to provide?

ANGELA KANE: I'm very proud of the leadership that we have here. They're you know, they're they're hardworking and they they understand what's going on. It's, you know, it's let's roll our sleeves up and let's get down to work.

AG: And when you do get down to work, how confident are optimistic are you about the future of the communities, given the devastation that you described at the start of this interview?

ANGELA KANE: We're just getting going. But I'm pretty confident that, you know, we're going to be able to do the best that we can and start looking at providing more opportunities for our communities to helping in that preservation and conservation.

AG: All right, Angela, I know you have a lot of work to do. Appreciate your time.

ANGELA KANE: All right. Thank you very much.

AG: That was Angela Kane, the CEO of the Secwepemcúl’ecw Restoration and Stewardship Society. Ellen Whitman is a forest fire research scientist with Natural Resources Canada who studies the aftermath of forest fires. And Ellen joins me now. Good morning.

ELLEN WHITMAN: Good morning.

AG: When we have a fire season, this unprecedented fire season, what happens to the landscape and vegetation in our forests?

ELLEN WHITMAN: Right. Well, the vast majority of fires in Canada really take place in the boreal forest. There's a broad range of ecosystems, but generally speaking, our forests are adapted to wildfire and they're quite resilient. So we do see sort of a short period of time where immediately after fire, things look very dire. Obviously, it's lethal to trees a lot of the time, depending on the intensity or the heat emitted by the fire. So afterwards, it looks quite different. But we can see, you know, understory plants, things like flowers, grasses coming back before even the end of the year. And then within the next couple of years, often we already have tree seedlings. There is diversity. So there's other ecosystems in Canada that maybe don't respond so well to fire. But the vast majority of that area burned ends up looking green again within a few years and returning to being more of a natural looking familiar forest that we would expect within 30 to 100 years.

AG: And so these fires that we're looking at, what what's your sense of what this means for the regrowth that you're alluding to?

ELLEN WHITMAN: It's certainly a big change because of the sheer extent of the area burned this year, But we would really expect a lot of that to come back as a healthy forest eventually. So sort of the balance of the area burned that we might have on the landscape may have shifted a little bit. So you can sort of suggest that there would be a change in the distribution of forest ages across the landscape in response to that and maybe some shifts in the species and succession patterns we might see as that distribution is shifted. But there are some areas of Canada that have also been in a fire deficit, so it's a bit of a mixed bag, but we really would expect that to be on a trajectory of resilience and returning back to being some type of forest.

AG: And given your area of research. Can you give me a sense of what you've learned from studying other fires, for instance, the horrific wildfires that devastated Fort McMurray seven years ago?

ELLEN WHITMAN: Sure. Yeah. So what we do know, when we have these very big years like this one, there are some differences in how forests come back. So I talked about it being really typical for them to, you know, come back to same as they were before. But when we have very, very big fire years like this one, there are some shifts that can occur. So from previous studies that we've done, we've seen that in years like this one, there is more of an opportunity for us to sort of see changes on the landscape. So rather than coming back to exactly the same type of forest that was there before, we may see more of a shift towards things like broadleaf trees, like aspens, for example, to the detriment or to the loss of some of our conifer or species or those that are sort of longer lived need more time to recover after fire. And that's particularly the case in areas that have experienced short interval rebellions. So repeated lethal fires that are quite severe with something like 10 to 30 years between fires. That's where we often see a more dramatic change away from sort of a conifer dominated boreal forest. We might expect towards more of an open low density forest with a lot of broad leaves or even very few trees.

AG: Is that because there's not enough time for for seedlings and regrowth to actually happen before another fire comes in and wipes out the beginning of a new forest?

ELLEN WHITMAN: Yeah, that's exactly it. So they need these trees that are quite young, need some time to be able to develop their seed banks or to respond resiliently to get those tree, those seeds sort of farther up into the canopy, away from a flame. And so if you burn that area again, there's not a lot of seeds available in the first place. And then those seeds are quite vulnerable because they're very low to the ground and often not sealed up in a cone yet.

AG: And if the fires change the composition of a forest where you're going from fewer conifer trees and more broadly, what about the creatures that live in what used to be that forest?

ELLEN WHITMAN: Yeah, there's a there's dangers all the time when we sort of see the sort of different habitat availability is the way you might think of it. But if we have that particular shift, you can think about some species benefiting and some species not doing so well. So species that really enjoy or need sort of like open grassy landscapes. One example that always comes to mind for me in northern Canada is wood, bison or buffalo. They seem to do really well with this shift towards a more open and possibly more broadly forest. Often species like moose really enjoy browsing on broadleaf seedlings and trees, so they tend to respond really well to fire. But there are species that we really associate with old growth conifer habitat. So for example, caribou that may not respond very well to those changes if we see more of a shift towards that forest type.

AG: What do you think that the regrowth is going to look like after this fire season? If you can sort of paint a radio timelapse for me? What's it going to look like?

ELLEN WHITMAN: Sure. Yeah. So I've already seen, you know, beautiful, wonderful photos taken in some of the fires this year that show there are already understory plants coming back. So wonderful. Purple fireweed is something that people would see in the short term. And within a year or two we'd expect there to be some seedlings in that undergrowth. The tree seedlings is what I'm talking about. They're often the aspen are a little bit taller in the conifers are shorter, so you have to sort of look down through the shrubs and the aspen to see those smaller conifer seedlings. And then, you know, within maybe ten years you might return to that site and you could see small trees sort of up to maybe about your chest height in some cases, depending on the tree species. And within 30 years, it typically looks quite like a normal forest. But to get back to a really mature forest, we're looking at something like 50 to 100 years where you would really not necessarily see much of a difference.

AG: Just quickly to wrap this up, Ellen, correct me if I'm wrong, but you sound very optimistic.

ELLEN WHITMAN: Yes, I am optimistic. Certainly, we have serious concerns about sort of changing fire regimes in Canada, and I don't want to minimise that. If we see, you know, a vast shift in the in the cumulative area burned or in a really accelerating fire frequency. There will be changes to our forests and we do need to address those. But at the time being what we're seeing is still a resilient response. And so we do expect these areas to show up as a forest in the near future. So the timescales that humans operate on, it can be really stressful to see that change in the short term, but we expect it to return to a state that would really resemble something that people would be happy to see.

AG: All right. Well, Ellen, I appreciate your optimism and your insight. Thanks a lot.

ELLEN WHITMAN: Thanks for their time.

AG: That's Ellen Whitman, a forest fire research scientist based in Alberta. Ed Struzik is a fellow at the Institute for Energy and Environmental Policy at Queen's University. He's also the author of Dark Days at Noon The Future of Fire. And he joins me now from Edmonton. Good morning.

ED STRUZIK: Good morning.

AG: So what are you seeing? And. Forest restoration sites right now.

ED STRUZIK: I think the same thing that Ellen is talking about. Things grow very back very quickly. The Fireweed, you even see some Aspen shoots rising up from a smouldering forest. It's a natural process because really our forest, the boreal forest, is born to burn. They can't regenerate. They can't open up their cones unless they have intense heat. They're sort of adapted to fire. And so fire comes in. It's best explained to me by an indigenous elder. Some time ago he said, You know, you see that spruce tree, you know, with the boughs hanging down to the to the grass. It's it's old, it's can't hold its bough up any longer. And it's asking fire to come burn me so that I can produce new, new young. And I think that really sums it up very eloquently that our, our forests are born to burn. The problem right now is we have climate change driving an increasing amount of burning in very severe conditions. And Ellen had a wonderful photo that she took when she was a graduate student. And Wood Buffalo National Park have a very severe severe burn area where the seeds essentially were incinerated. All the nutrients in the duff below the ground were destroyed, and it's very unlikely that much is going to come back there. And that, I think, is really the the key to understanding what the future is going to look like.

AG: But there's a difference between born to burn and the intensity of the burn, right?

ED STRUZIK: It truly is. And we have a number of things going on is and the intensity of the burn followed by a lot of drought hot weather without the rain that you need to regenerate the forests. I think, you know, all we've said, we should look at the United States to see what's going to happen in Canada and the United States. Right now, forests are not regenerating as well as they have in the past. You know, 95% of the forests recovered from fires between 1981-2000. And in recent times, it's only about 75%, because not only are you getting this severe, intense, severe fires, you're also getting drought and you're getting these heat domes that are raising temperatures where the seeds really can't recover. I was in I was in the Stanislaus National Forest in California a while back and where the U.S. Forest Service tried to plant trees. And they just didn't take they could not take the heat and the drought.

AG: So what works best then? Replanting or just letting the regrowth happen naturally?

ED STRUZIK: I think, you know, a couple of things. We have to accept the fact that, you know, trees will regrow. But I think we also have to do a lot more of the prescribed burning and the thinning, you know, that Indigenous people did to encourage bison and moose to come back on the landscape. Because when you burn, you know, the first thing comes up are those succulent grasses and the aspen shoots that moose and bison love. So that's that's one thing, I think. But the other thing that we have to accept is that, you know, the southern end of our boreal is unlikely to survive this this warming that's taking place. It's gradually being taken over by either grasslands or temperate forests such as maple and oak. And to try to plant trees in the southern end of the boreal may be a big mistake. It may be an investment that we're not going to get the return on like the the U.S. Forest Service in the Stanislaus National Forest. So I think what we also have to do is try to understand where the refugee are, where are those those areas of our boreal forest that are likely going to be very resilient to fire. And we have a really mapped those areas out very well.

AG: I'm sorry. I wasn't trying to interrupt you. I was going to ask you. You're alluding to, I guess, our fire management strategy. How's it been to this point?

ED STRUZIK: You know, it's been slow. And the reason it's been slow is that, you know, Canadians tend to be risk averse and there's always a risk associated with the prescribed burn. They do get out of control. I mean, one got out of control in Jasper National Park in 2003. And nearly, you know, had it not been for some really bold management strategies. That fire could have gone all the way to Hinton. We've seen this in the United States. And there's the Los Alamos nuclear site was overrun by fire as well, not once, but twice because of prescribed burns. So it is risky. But I think the other and the other problem is that we have a lot of people in harm's way. You know, B.C., the interior of B.C. is really a haven for a lot of retirees, beautiful mountain country. They've moved there and it's very, very difficult to do prescribed. Bernsen those areas because people are so close to fires.

AG: It must take nerves of steel to actually light a whole region up on fire for what you think is a good reason.

ED STRUZIK: Oh, yeah, I've seen it done and, and I haven't seen it backfired. I've, you know, I've read about it but it, it, it, the risks are there, but I think the risks are greater if we don't do it. And the interesting parallel here is that, you know, we tend not to want to do it, but those people that are leading the charge are the indigenous people, many of them in the in the in British Columbia indigenous communities that have done done that and they've already seen the benefits. There was a fire in West Cologne a few years back and the Indigenous Reserve there had thinned their forests and prescribed burned and they basically weathered that firestorm that came through. I think only one building got destroyed. And in the post-mortem it was pretty obvious that had they not done it, there would have been a lot more damage done.

AG: Only 30 seconds left here, but I should ask you one last question. Other than prescribed burns, what's the most important thing that we can do to help with the devastation?

ED STRUZIK: I think we have to restore our wetlands because the wetlands are natural fire barriers. They slow fire and they offer refugia for animals, birds and animal and animals. When a fire comes, where do they go? They go into a wetland and they weather the storm and then they come back. We just don't have have we've we've drained so much wetlands over the years. I think we really got to do is start bringing some of those back as a management tool and dealing with fire.

AG: All right, Ed, appreciate that. Thank you.

ED STRUZIK: Thank you.

AG: That's Ed Struzik , the author of Dark Days at Noon The Future of Fire. The CBC news is next. And then.

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It is very much like a ballet. There's a number of steps and positions and you move yourself and the sheep like, imagine you were in a ballet with Nureyev and nobody told you the steps. That was what it felt like to reach shearing sleep. You know, for the first time.

AG: Writer Peggy Orenstein learned to shear a sheep, dye the wool and make a sweater. And she came away learning a lot more about life. That conversation coming up in six minutes. I'm Anthony Germain and you're listening to The Current.

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What sheep shearing during the pandemic taught author Peggy Orenstein

Guest: Peggy Orenstein

AG: I'm Anthony Germain and you're listening to The Current. When covid hit, and when some of us baked bread, or binge watched TV. Author Peggy Orenstein embarked on a more ambitious project. It's all right there in the title of her new memoir: "Unraveling: What I Learned About Life While Shearing Sheep, Dyeing Wool, and Making the World's Ugliest Sweater." Matt Galloway spoke with Peggy Orenstein in March.

Peggy Orenstein, good morning.

PEGGY ORENSTEIN: Good morning. How are you?

MG: Well, I'm well. This is such an interesting thing because as you say in the book, you could have just stuck with sourdough, but you did not. Why did you decide to do this, this project?

PEGGY ORENSTEIN: Oh, you know, I'm a longtime knitter. I knit and I kind of talk throughout about what it means to learn things from your mom. I learned from my mom when I was about 12 or 11. And I'm a curious person. And sitting there in lockdown, knitting was the only thing that sort of grounded me and calmed me like a lot of us who were off suddenly doing our handwork, baking bread or, you know, imitating Harry Styles Cardigan or whatever people were doing. And I just started thinking, you know, who thought of yarn? Like how did this happen? How did knitting happen? Because what else do you have to do but think about things like that? And I just had the, you know, kind of curious urge to go all the way back and see and deconstruct it. I mean, that's my job, right? Is that I like to look at how things happen and why and go deep into deconstructing where they came from. So there I was sitting and looking at yarn.

MG: And so we start with sheep shearing?

PEGGY ORENSTEIN: Yeah.

MG: Well, you could have thought about yarn. You could have followed this through. You didn't need to go into a barn. What was the interest and the appeal of going into the barn?

PEGGY ORENSTEIN: You know, I guess I really can't fully explain why I felt the need to do that, but there was also what it brought me that I sort of had this idea. You know, a book is a braid. And I thought, well, I've always wondered kind of where fibre came from. I never had time to try to make something from scratch. Maybe I'll really go deep on this. But then there's all this other stuff like why we don't think about our clothes the way we think about our food or the history, the law, looking at the whole world through fibre and textiles that I didn't know about. So one of the things I didn't know was how hard it is to shear a sheep, Matt. It's incredibly difficult, as it turns out.

MG: As it turns out and as we learned in the book. I want to play something for you. This is from 1964. It's a newsreel. Have a listen.

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[music]

MALE SPEAKER: Jeffrey Bowen has travelled to many countries demonstrating his techniques. In Russia, they honoured him with a hero of Labour award. And now it's the turn of British farmers to want the skill of a man who's been doing this sort of thing since he was 16. It's not exactly high class hairdressing, although some barbers might pick up a few tips on how to tackle those long-haired teenagers.

[music]

MG: The news should sound like that, I would say.

PEGGY ORENSTEIN: I know. Isn't that great?

MG: It'd be better now if it did that. Who was the Nureyev of sheep shearing?

PEGGY ORENSTEIN: Yeah. That's Bowen and it's the Bowen method. And he was a guy in New Zealand. And, you know, I think there's also this aspect of this seems so weird, partly because we're such an urban culture now. You know, we don't think about how far back. You know, if I said I was going to grow garden from seed, you wouldn't think that was peculiar. You know, of course, seeds don't kick. And it's really important to know with sheep shearing that it does not harm the sheep. You have to shear sheep or it dies. So it's kind of like, you know, cutting hair, but with a toddler who's bigger than you, has hooves and is covered in lanolin, which is a greasy substance that they exude in order to stay water resistant. So they're slippery. And you've got a hot wearing blade. And so doing it correctly is really important. What he did was very much like a ballet. There's a number of steps and positions and you move yourself in the shape that's ergonomic, that's safe for the shearer, for the sheep. And you know when you have that dream that you're suddenly on stage on Broadway and suddenly you don't know the lines.

MG: Indeed, yes.

PEGGY ORENSTEIN: It was like that. Like imagine you were in a ballet with Nureyev and nobody told you the steps. That was what it felt like to reach shearing sheep, you know, for the first time.

MG: As you mention, I mean, the sheep need to be sheared. Animal rights activists have said in the past that this hurts the sheep in some ways.

PEGGY ORENSTEIN: That's so wrong. It's really important to dispel that myth because part of that then leads to the comfort with, you know, our use of synthetic fibres in our clothing, 70% is made from synthetic. And that's plastic. It’s petroleum derived plastic that does not biodegrade, that just sits in landfills usually in the world’s south where it's called dead white men's clothes. So I went to the ranch where I was shearing, and it was a ranch where they did regenerative farming. And I was wearing my fleece that was made of recycled water bottles and feeling very good about that. And I didn't realize that was kind of the equivalent of waving a ham and cheese sandwich on a white bread at a bar mitzvah. You know, it was not great. And plus it sheds all these things called microfibers that are these invisible bodies that again, if I can use a Jewish metaphor, when I was growing up in Minneapolis, we throw our sins into the lake of the New Year on Rosh Hashanah to start over. And I used to imagine that all these sins of 100 years of my congregation were in this one lake, like what the bottom of that lake looked like, this kind of tarry mass. Microfibers are like that, but they're real and they're the biggest threat to the ocean and they're coming off of our plastic clothing.

MG: So okay, let's get to the shearing.

PEGGY ORENSTEIN: It's more fun.

MG: Well, but it's connected to this. And we'll get back to the larger story in a moment.

PEGGY ORENSTEIN: It's so hard to hear about that, though, because I mean, it’s like I'm already recycling, I'm composting, I drive my Prius. You know, it makes you want to just take to your eco certified bed. I just wanted to buy a pair of pants. But you have to know these things so that we can push back against them and make this world a better place.

MG: Absolutely. So you need special shoes to shear sheep?

PEGGY ORENSTEIN: Yes. You do because of the lanolin. And lanolin may sound familiar because it's in a lot of your like cosmetics or lotions or various other things. And even if you wore hiking boots or something with a really good tread, the lanolin on the floor is slippery and it would just make your feet shoot up from under you and down you'd go on your butt. So you have to wear these sort of suede slippers that build up a pattern of lanolin and stick. And, you know, my daughter, I was prancing around the house before I went to the ranch because afterwards, no, and my daughter who was in high school was sort of looking and going, so, you know, what are those? And I said, yeah, I'm going to wear them all the time. And she was like, you're not, mom. No, you're not.

MG: One does not just willy nilly shear the sheep. I mean, it's our man Nureyev of the sheep shearing who came up with the technique.

PEGGY ORENSTEIN: Right.

MG: There is a mantra that you repeat to yourself. Belli, crutch, undermine, topknot, neck, cheek, first shoulder, short blows, long blows, last side. What is that?

PEGGY ORENSTEIN: Love those long blows. A blow is basically just, you know, it's the different parts of the sheep and you're turning the sheep and you're turning your body. And, you know, for me, you have to be very careful. I purposely chose a woman to teach me because I thought, you know, upper body strength, I don't have it. There are not a lot of women sheep shearers. It's a pretty rare thing. And I also didn't pay attention to things like, oh, I don't know, she was half my age or that people say that minute for minute, it burns twice as many calories as marathon running or that, you know, the sheep has herbs and kicks and it doesn’t hurt it, but it doesn't want to be there any more than your toddler wants to be there when you’re giving it a haircut, you know. So the whole place, I have to say, it looked like a crime scene not because I was hurting the sheep, but because I was snipping the ends of my fingers a lot. And the thing that you don't want to do is throw the blade because the natural instinct of the sheep is wriggling because it's hot, it’s waring, it’s sharp to throw it and or drop it. And my teacher said if you do that, it's 20 bucks every time you do it because it breaks the blade. Instead, drop the sheep. And I worked so hard to focus on that and not drop that blade. And I didn't. I didn't drop the blade once, but I did slice up my fingers. And I was very stoic because I didn't want anybody to think I was a big baby about it.

MG: The sheep that you were shearing is named Martha?

PEGGY ORENSTEIN: One of them, the final sheep. Yeah. My ultimate sheep was Martha.

MG: And so how did it go?

PEGGY ORENSTEIN: Martha was very patient. She looked like a patchy, you know, a patchy toddler afterwards. She was the third sheep I sheared. And the first one took an hour and a half. By the time I got to Martha, I think I sheared her in 30 or 45 minutes. But man, it's exhausting. It is the single hardest thing I have ever done physically. It was really, really hard.

MG: I mean, because in part, you talk about in the book that you're drawn to almost extinct professions. I don't know how many sheep shearers there are, but do you have a new respect for that profession as somebody, as you said, who doesn't have a lot of connection with that world at all?

PEGGY ORENSTEIN: I don't think I ever thought about it. I would have thought frankly that it was automated. Well, you know, I would have thought that they just put them in some kind of machine. And it's interesting that is one of the things that so far has not been able to be successfully automated. It has to be done by hand. And I think that the respect that, you know, of course there's abuses. Of course there's abuses just like there's abuses of, you know, our pets. But when sheep shearing is done ethically and properly, it's beautiful. It doesn't hurt the sheep. It makes these gorgeous fleece. And I think that what I really learned was a respect for the natural fibre of wool and for sheep and what they can do for fire suppression, for the environment, for the world that we live in that I hadn't just hadn’t thought about the collapse of the wool industry in North America. There used to be in the 1950s, I found out, a Miss Wool of America pageant that was hosted by, If you are Old enough to Remember Art Linkletter.

MG: Oh, yeah.

PEGGY ORENSTEIN: Yeah. And, you know, Frankie Avalon would perform. And like Avalon was the Justin Bieber of his day, I guess. You know, all the big stars wanted to be on Miss Wool of America. And it went on for like 12 years. And then, you know, people didn't wear wool anymore and it went away.

MG: So you shear the sheep, you have the wool, and then you have to card the wool.

PEGGY ORENSTEIN: Yes.

MG: And this is really interesting because you write about this in terms of the process of that giving you an opportunity to connect with your father. Tell me about that.

PEGGY ORENSTEIN: Yeah. Yeah. So you clean up the wool, which I mean, it's full of what they call vegetable matter, but you and I call it poop. You have to wash that all out. And then you've got this fluff. And the way that it connected me with my dad was really special. So this was lockdown, right? We didn't know how long this was going to last. My dad was back in Minneapolis. He's since died, but he had dementia, hearing impairment, various other things in a facility. Nobody can go in or out. My brothers can't see him. I certainly can't fly out there. And as he's declining, you know, it's hard if you've had a parent who's declined cognitively. It's really hard. And if you're too far away, you can't really talk to him on the phone easily. I would try to call him every day, but I would find reasons honestly not to. You know, I was busy, it was two hours later there, whatever it was. And the carding is so boring. And what you're doing is you're taking these two basically dog brushes and carting the small amount of fleece, you know, boom, boom, boom, boom, back and forth, back and forth till it’s nice and fluffy. Then you roll it into a puff and you put it aside to spin. And it would take me 10 minutes to make one of those puffs. And I read that it takes 579 puffs to make a sweater. So that's forever. And while I was doing that, I might have my dad's aide put him on face time and I would just sit and be with him. And he was watching Twins reruns. You know, the Twins always won because there was no baseball. And he thought it was something that he was doing with his walker, which he wouldn't tell me. He said it was a trade secret that was making them win every time. He didn't know it was reruns and he thought I was there too. He would say, Peggy, can you hand me that glass of water? And I'd say, you know, no, dad, I can't reach it. But, you know, I could just slow down. These ancient arts are slow. They're very slow and sit with him and just be next to him and have that time together and sing. We sang a lot because the part of the brain that is affected by dementia is different than the part that stores song lyrics, and that's one of the last to go. So we would sing You Are My Sunshine, We would sing Give My Regards to Broadway, we'd sing all these old songs. And now that he's gone, he died in August. He was 96. That time, in our whole life together, in my whole life, it's among my most precious, precious memories. And having that opportunity that I never would have otherwise had to just slow down and be in his space in that very present way, it was just a real gift of during the process that led to this book.

MG: That’s really beautiful. And I mean, a lot of this book is like a conversation in some ways with your parents.

PEGGY ORENSTEIN: It is. You know, I say in the beginning that when I'm knitting during lockdown, I'm having an ongoing conversation with my mom all the time, which is a little weird because she was, you know, dead at that point for four years and I was still talking to her. But I realized what I had wanted in that conversation was something that was kind of in defiance of physical nature, which was that I wanted to have a conversation with her when she was my age. And I wanted to be this age too. And so I think a lot of that conversation and a lot of the conversation in the book about mothers is, I have an acronym, SLHFM, she learned from her mom because so many people, women that I met learned knitting or whatever they learned, not shearing, but usually some aspect of craft from their moms. And it got me thinking about not only what I learned from my mom because knitting was a real source of connection for us, but what I learned from her that I loved, what I learned from her that I maybe wish I hadn't, what I wish I learned from her that I didn't, and now that I have a daughter, how all those things go forward, the things I want her to learn from me, the things I don't want her to learn from me. I never taught my daughter Daisy to knit because I knit in a weird way and it's inefficient and I don't want her to learn that way. And I thought, well, that's one. There are things that we don't want our daughters to learn from us too, that we don't want to pass along, that we want to stop with us.

MG: Knitting means a lot of things to a lot of different people. It's not just a way to make clothes. Listen to this. This is a recording of women who got together to knit hats in protest of the presidency of Donald Trump.

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FIRST FEMALE SPEAKER: I decided yesterday that I wanted to have a pink hat because I'm going to march in Washington. And I came here and the place is filled with women. Everybody is knitting a pink hat. You can hardly get pink yarn in New York City right now.

SECOND FEMALE SPEAKER: Knitting definitely reduces tension. And so when there are people who are leading our country that I think really are incompetent, knitting helps me cope.

MG: Knitting is kind of a protest act. What do you make of that?

PEGGY ORENSTEIN: It has a really venerable tradition actually. I mean, when I said that I was first doing this project, people would, you know, be a little surprised that I had gone from teen sex to knitting.

MG: Yes.

PEGGY ORENSTEIN: First of all, I think that for me, my larger beat as a writer has always been examining the unexamined in everyday life and particularly women's lives. And our work with fibre has always, always been a source of public voice and a way to express dissent or patriotism, depending on the situation. It is really political. What's the first thing Women? American women, United States women did when Trump was elected? And people would say, well, they marched. And I say, no, no, they knit and they made those hats. No matter how you feel about those hats, there's a reason why that was the first thing that we did. If you go back to the revolutionary days, women boycotted British cloth and made home-spun and did these public spinning bees where they would spin in these town squares. That was one of the big acts that galvanized the American Revolution. Today, public knitters in some ways I think are even more radical because I think when you make something with your own hands, you're almost by definition pushing back against technology and consumer culture. But they have mobilized against nuclear proliferation. They have made temperature scarves that document climate change. They've dumped hand-made uteri on the steps of the Supreme Court to support abortion rights. And I think it's that tension between something that is sort of ultrafeminine and seen almost as passive in some ways, although it's not, and something that is sharply political that makes women's handwork, whether it's knitting or crochet, but women's work with fibre something that becomes an act of dissent. craftivism.

MG: Craftivism. Yeah. I was going to say there's a word that's applied to it, right?

PEGGY ORENSTEIN: Yeah.

MG: In the process of researching and writing about this and documenting that history of craftivism, you're also in the journey to make a sweater.

PEGGY ORENSTEIN: As it happens.

MG: As it happens.

PEGGY ORENSTEIN: Which I’d have pulled up if you were not an audio medium. Yeah.

MG: Well, there's a woman who you consult about the design of the sweater and she says, what do you want people to feel when they see your sweater? What did you want people to feel?

PEGGY ORENSTEIN: Well, I joke that it's the ugly sweater. It's not that ugly, but it weighs three pounds. It had that whole quarantine year knit into it and that was a heavy as led year. So that was there too. But it got me thinking about how much when we make something with our hands, especially fibre, the memories, the life, whatever is going on gets knit into those stitches and then it can transform. During the lockdown, I was also making a blanket. And when I finished that blanket, I just couldn't look at it. It just reminded me of that time. So I gave it to one of my friends. And that transformed it from this thing that kind of was heavy on me to this thing that was light and comforting and an act of love for her. And she calls it Blanket. And she'll call me up and say, I'm wrapped in Blanket because I've had a hard day and Blanket always reminds me of how much I loved. And, you know, that makes us both feel good. And I think you can transform stitches and memory that way too into something, you know, beautiful and loving.

MG: What does the title of the book Unravelling, what does that word mean to you now? Because I think a lot of us felt like we were unravelling in that moment, right?

PEGGY ORENSTEIN: Yes. And I've since realized, by the way, that I could have called it Ravelling because ravelling means both. Ravelling means unravelling and ravelling.

MG: I have learned something new.

PEGGY ORENSTEIN: Yeah.

MG: But I think a lot of us felt like that. And then we look back on it now, three years plus after and we wonder. It's hard to remember that in some ways.

PEGGY ORENSTEIN: I know. Not just because of lockdown and what was going on with the pandemic, but that was sure. But also for me, that forced me to confront, and I think for a lot of us probably, a lot that was going on in my life. I was hitting later middle age, you know, my parents were declining and dying, my daughter was applying to college. So I was facing the emptiness. You know, I had felt like it's just the nature of life. And you think that you've got it all together, You've got this part figured out. You've hit the sort of place where you feel like, okay, and then it all falls apart and you do it again. And that was exacerbated by lockdown with the pandemic. And it was interesting with the book that actually my editors discouraged me. I had something about the pandemic in the title or in the subtitle initially, and they said, you know, people are going to be so over that, right? That’s going to be so far gone and nobody is going to care about that anymore. But I think we are really still and really need to, you know, process means a lot of things in that book, in Unravelling. I’m processing the fleece, I'm processing my life and processing what's going on with the pandemic. And even like the other day, I heard the words Tiger King and I thought, whoa! It was like it brought it all back, right? You know, who wants to remember Tiger King? How embarrassing. But it's a touchstone, you know, of a certain time in our collective life. So we were all unravelling and trying our best.

MG: And how do you look back at that now?

PEGGY ORENSTEIN: Well, in some ways I think it's a blur, but I also look back, you know, because for those of us who didn't, I mean, my dad did get COVID and we did eventually. But for those of us who did not get sick in those early days, for those of us who were lucky and who were solvent, it also allowed for a time where you had to stop and think a little bit about who you were and what you wanted and what was important. And I think for me, as somebody who was so perpetually in motion before the pandemic, it made me look around and think a lot harder about the value of family and community connection. And one of the joys of releasing Unravelling has been that I hear from people who read the book and for whom it sparks memories. It’s all about joy and love and connection.

MG: What do you want to learn next?

PEGGY ORENSTEIN: You know, if I could, I would go out and learn all those ancient skills. But for me, you know, aside from being with my dad and having that time, the other big gift of this book was rethinking what creativity meant to me. Through much of the book, I'm pushing back against it. I keep saying I'm so terrible at this. I'm very impatient. I am always castigating myself for getting it wrong. And then there's a point where I suddenly realize that that's the point.

MG: Yeah.

PEGGY ORENSTEIN: You know, for those of us who do something somewhat creative for a living, the thing is that, I mean, it's a dream to be able to do that. But also commerce is part of it and you have to start thinking about, you know, what's going to sell and what you can do that's going to make sure that you can keep working and make a living and pay your rent and all this sort of thing. And that erodes some of that joy and some of that creativity and some of the purity of it. So the opportunity to be a beginner, to embrace that beginner's mind and be an amateur and to think about process rather than product. And I talk about having a cartoon up in my office by Lynda Barry talks about how when she was young, when she was little, she could just like, you know, draw, just drew. And then at some point the two questions come up which are is this good or does this suck? And those are kind of the death to creativity. And I talk about this term called creative mortification that I just love, which is that, you know, when you're usually a child and you're involved in something you love, whether it's art or music or baseball or, you know, your science project, whatever it is you're doing, that creative thing and somebody gives you a too harsh critique and you put down that test tube or that violin or that paintbrush or that baseball and you never pick it up again. That's, you know, mortification means death. And so the way to combat those psychologically lethal blows is to focus on the experience over the result and to be asking questions like what worked? What do I want to do differently next time, and have that experience of process rather than product. And I think that's sometimes what you lose when you do something professionally and to regain that by doing anything in your life. And for me, it was learning how to shear sheep and spin and dye and, you know, design a sweater. That was just a tremendous gift and a recalibration of what it means to live a creative life. And anybody can do that.

MG: It's really great to have the chance to talk to you again.

PEGGY ORENSTEIN: It's wonderful talking to you, Matt.

MG: Peggy, thank you very much.

PEGGY ORENSTEIN: Thank you.

AG: Peggy Orenstein's book is called "Unraveling: What I Learned About Life While Shearing Sheep, Dyeing Wool, and Making the World's Ugliest Sweater." Matt Galloway spoke with her in March.

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Love, Janessa – Ep. 4

AG: I'm Anthony Germain and you're listening to The Current. Throughout the summer, we're bringing you some of the CBC's best podcasts. Today we'll continue "Love, Janessa". Just a note, this deals with mature content. Here is host Hannah Ajala.

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HANNAH AJALA: Before we start, please note this series contains adult themes and strong language. So, yeah, my name is Hanna, and I'm a journalist. And I guess I wanted to ask an obvious question in regards to what I'm working on. Do you know Janessa Brazil? The answer from the woman on the other end of the line is no. Right. Okay. I mean, the reason why we ask is that I'm actually working on a podcast about catfishing. That was me calling a neighbor of Janessa Brazil's in a city in Florida. My producer found Jannesa's address on an old voter registration roll. I've made a lot of calls like this. Cold calls that went nowhere. There's loads and loads of images around her everywhere. So you've. You've never met a Janessa before? We traced old addresses, phone numbers.

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AUTOMATED MESSAGES: We did not receive the complete number. Enter the number you wish to call. (Dialling, ringing) Please hang up and try your call again. We're sorry.

HANNAH AJALA: I subscribe to Pornhub to find her. I messaged a guy on Facebook multiple times who seemed to be Jenna's ex-husband. I called a store in Rio de Janeiro where I was told her father might have worked. (speaking foreign language) I think she's finding out if someone speaks English. It's okay, Senora? I wanted someone to tell me why Janessa seemed to go dark around 2016. Before that, she had left a vibrant digital footprint. In 2011, she was photographed flanked by several tank top wearing adult entertainment stars at the launch of a new Tequila brand. In 2013 she promoted swimwear for a label specializing in Brazilian cheeky bikinis, but fresh Janessa posts seemed to drop off a few years later. Her feeds, her video stream channels all had become dusty, untended places. Her social media felt like an abandoned amusement park. But then my producer sent me a link.

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BUBBA: Janessa, say hi to Nicole.

JANESSA: Hi, Nicole.

NICOLE: Hi, Janessa.

HANNAH AJALA: And suddenly, she seemed very much alive. From CBC Podcasts and the BBC World Service. My name is Hannah Ajala, and this is Love, Janessa. The story of my wild quest to find the woman whose face and body is the bait used in catfishing schemes around the world. Episode Four: Helen of Troy.

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NICOLE: Hello?

BUBBA: Is this Nicole?

NICOLE: Yes, it is.

HANNAH AJALA: This is a clip from an episode of a radio show from 2019.

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BUBBA: Hi, this is Bubba. We're live.

NICOLE: Oh, wow.

BUBBA: You emailed me and told me to call you.

HANNAH AJALA: The host is of the shock jock variety. He calls himself Bubba the Love Sponge. Babar used to host a show produced by Howard Stern, the popular American radio and TV personality. Barber style feels very Sternesque, loud, cheerfully abrasive, filled with sex talk. He films all of his broadcasts at one point in today's episode. The camera zooms in on a baby goats that's walking around, getting laughs for rubbing on people's legs. So it's not your average recording studio. Bubba is a big guy with a big microphone wearing a fraternity t shirt and headphones. And some days he has a sidekick.

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BUBBA: And I have the person, you know, Janessa is part of my show. She's a co-host. Janessa, say hi to Nicole.

JANESSA: Hi, Nicole.

NICOLE: Hi, Janessa.

BUBBA: Now, now, Nicole. That's the real Janessa. And I think, you know, I mean, like...

NICOLE: I know she is.

HANNAH AJALA: It does look like Janessa Brazil. She sits in front of a microphone wearing a white jean jacket, elegantly made up. Her eyebrows are thin and arched high, a questioning look.

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BUBBA: Yeah. Nicole Now, where do you live? Nicole? Like, just.

NICOLE: I'm in Montreal.

BUBBA: You're in Montreal, Okay. And, you know, we're a radio show that's based out of Tampa Florida.

NICOLE: Of course I know you Bubba.

HANNAH AJALA: Nicole got in touch because after 25 years, her marriage is on the rocks. Her husband has become obsessed with a woman he met online.

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NICOLE: I don't know how he found this person, but it was all of Janessa's photos and this person was posing. Her name was Natasha Belov, a nurse, and he fell for it, of course, because of all that, you know, the beautiful, sexy photos of Janessa.

BUBBA: You sound like a pretty hot commodity. Why would your husband be going over some Internet bitch for you.

JANESSA: That he’s never even met...

NICOLE: Well.

BUBBA: So he stumbled upon some chick that's portraying herself as Janessa using Janessa’s photos.

JANESSA: It's probably a dude, too, I think.

NICOLE: I think it's a guy. Yeah.

BUBBA: Now, is he asking for money?

HANNAH AJALA: For over a year, Nicole's husband has been sending this woman money.

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BUBBA: And how much?

NICOLE: I think he sent her close to 5000.

JANESSA: Oh, my gosh.

BUBBA: And it's probably a lot more than that, that's probably what you. That's probably what you know.

NICOLE: Yeah, because she was claiming to be sick and, you know, and helping her grandmother in their heart. So I sat down, I said, listen, I go, I'm going to do everything I can to track down because I knew your name was Janessa. To track her down. To prove to you that the person you're speaking with is not even probably, like you said, a woman.

BUBBA: No, it's probably a man. Yeah, it probably.

JANESSA: Usually is a man.

BUBBA: Some guy. Some guy from Ghana or something like that.

HANNAH AJALA: Part of their co-hosting shtick is that Janessa and Bubba are platonic roommates. They post their roomie shenanigans online. You can see videos of Janessa working out. Sometimes. She mows the lawn in front of their house in a bikini. Bubba makes raunchy but affectionate jokes. They laugh a lot. They genuinely seem like friends. And on this episode, Bubba jokes that Janessa should get in league with the scammers and spread the wealth.

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JANESSA: This is why.

BUBBA: I'm going to start doing this for real. I'm going to make Janessa make phone calls from six until seven at the house every day to pay the rent and be like, Hey, listen, honey, you know, you got to work the phones.

JANESSA: Imagine if I got all the money that these people send out to be fake. Janessas? I'd be. I'd be a millionaire.

BUBBA: Probably should. Probably.

HANNAH AJALA: This moment kind of blew my mind. It meant that Janessa was aware that her image was being used by scammers all around the world, that she knows they're getting rich off of this entity, this floating digital being called Janessa Brazil, but the flesh and blood Janessa? According to her, she's not getting rich at all. And there doesn't seem to be anything she can do to stop it. So at this point, you probably have the same question I do. Why doesn't anyone do anything about this? Calling a radio show to vent about your husband being scammed doesn't feel like the pursuit of justice. Its a common thread in many of these stories. Very few people who have been scam tried to get their money back. The ones who do are rarely successful. So I want to know what legal recourse is there for someone who believes they've been targeted and defrauded?

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JOHN ARMITT: I have these two feral cats that live in my backyard that I feed. Garfield and Potato and they wait for me in the morning by the back door to feed them. They were eating so much I had to go to get like the monster size bag over a lounge chair out there. There.

HANNAH AJALA: This is John Armitt. I can hear him talking to my producer while I'm getting my tech set up.

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HANNAH AJALA: Hi, John. So sorry. Technology. How are you?

JOHN ARMITT: I'm wonderful. And you're in Lagos. I've always wanted to go there.

HANNAH AJALA: John's based in Ottawa, a feral cat lover and world traveler. He has a soft, nice guy energy, but his job is intense. John is an investigator for the Canadian Anti-Fraud Center.

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JOHN ARMITT: We are the central repository for data, for intelligence and resource materials that relate to fraud. We at the Anti-Fraud center, we do not conduct investigations, but rather we provide valuable assistance to our law enforcement partners. And we work really closely with Europol and Interpol as well. So by sharing our information worldwide, we can actually make some traction on this.

HANNAH AJALA: Around the world. The fraud business is booming. COVID helped. A lot of people were stuck at home in front of their computers looking for a little companionship. According to UK Finance, a financial services trade association, bank transfer fraud linked to romance scams was up 20% in 2020 from the year before in the UK and in the United States. Reports of romance scams hit a record high in 2021, according to the Federal Trade Commission. Victims lost almost twice the amount of money than the year before. $547 million.

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JOHN ARMITT: And the other aspect of it is romance, fraud are the lowest recorded frauds versus the highest amount of losses per victim, which is staggering. I've seen on average $150,000 in losses per victim, which is just devastating. And a lot of people seem to think like these fraudsters are just maybe overweight people in their grandparents basement committing these scams. But really, it's the massive organized crime groups that are making tons of money, whether it be organized crime or countries in corruption, receiving the funds to make it look the other way.

HANNAH AJALA: Did any of your work look at how Ghana has become a central hub for romance scams?

JOHN ARMITT: Some of the investigations have in fact led to Ghana, and I don't want to make it seem like Africa is the main hub around the world. Like, for instance, Jamaica. They have the prize lottery scams that they've been involved in, and we have our fair share of fraudsters in Canada, and there's a lot of organized crime groups within it that are not only targeting Canadians but also victims around the world as well.

HANNAH AJALA: I asked John to walk me through a typical story, a real world example of what happens when victims turn to the legal system for help.

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JOHN ARMITT: There is one particular case in Canada here where the victim was hit up by these scammers on a large social media platform. They started a dialog. She was a widow. She was looking for companionship. And this fraudster felt that void. So in this particular case, the person she thought was her new romantic interest was purporting to be a US soldier who was in Afghanistan when the Afghanistan conflict.

HANNAH AJALA: Scammers love to use images of military personnel as bait. Makes sense. An officer has a built in excuse to not reveal too much detail about their whereabouts or background. They can vanish for chunks of time and explain it away as a top secret mission. And who doesn't love a man in uniform?

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JOHN ARMITT: And so as the relationship evolves, he would make up excuses to why he couldn't come to Canada. And over the course of their time together, which was only a few months, she provided $150,000 in various methods, whether it be gift cards or wire transfers, sending cash in the mail. So the victim finally had had enough and had friends convince her to go to the police. So our investigation began and we end up identifying that there was a money mule in Canada that was the intermediary between sending the money to Nigeria.

HANNAH AJALA: A money mule is someone who transfers illegal money from one person to another, helping to launder out. These webs are huge ensure many different criminals are involved in a single scam. Each taken slices of the same pie. Sometimes a meal is working in tandem with a scammer, but sometimes they're also being scammed. The mule may not even know their mule. They think they're just receiving a nice cash present from a new love interest they met online. The woman works closely with police on a sting. The money mule, the man who allegedly had been the intermediary between the woman and her beloved fake military boyfriend agreed to come by her house.

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JOHN ARMITT: And we end up arresting the individual as he was trying to get an extra $60,000 from the victim.

HANNAH AJALA: When he showed up. Officers quickly intercepted. John says he didn't resist arrest.

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JOHN ARMITT: So as a result, we were able to seize some devices and technology from the individual search warrants and we were able to access that data. And the data was really surprising even for me to see of how many frauds this suspect was involved with. And it turns out that this individual, his brother, had immigrated to Canada, and they were not only targeting Canadians, but they're targeting Americans as well. This person was involved with identity theft, actually stealing people's wallets at malls involved in the SIM card swap. So he had individuals that were compromised working for financial institutions and telecommunication companies. So the far reach of this one individual was was quite incredible.

HANNAH AJALA: But even with all that evidence, the matter is still before the courts. It's been three years since charges were laid.

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JOHN ARMITT: The other challenges is the court process. We know a lot of our prosecutors don't have a lot of experience in cyber fraud or fraud or resignations. And as we know with the court systems around the world, that it could take 2 to 3 years before these matters get before a jury or a trial.

HANNAH AJALA: Every once in a while, a case does get legal traction.

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REPORTER: The US Federal Bureau of Investigation says it has busted a Ghana based criminal enterprise with the arrest of six of its ringleaders in the US on charges of laundering more than $15 million.

HANNAH AJALA: This clip is from a Ghanaian TV station, Joy News.

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REPORTER: According to the FBI, this comes include romance scams, targets in the elderly, business, email, compromise, cons and even fraudulent COVID 19 relief loans. Then the eyes of those.

HANNAH AJALA: Six men are part of a group the FBI labeled the Enterprise Criminals, whose elaborate schemes zigzags across the US and Africa in the 2010s. They snagged victims using dating sites and text messaging. Laundering money through dozens of American bank accounts. After years of investigation, a woman named Deborah Mensah was extradited to the U.S. from Ghana in 2020 and convicted as one of the enterprise's coconspirators. She was ordered to pay over $1.5 million in restitution. We've not been able to confirm whether the money has been collected or distributed to the victims yet. We do know that Mensah was sentenced to nearly six years in a New York prison where she sits today. An outcome like this is extremely rare. That Canadian woman who thought she was in love with a military man. The thousands of dollars she allegedly lost were likely laundered far from Canada as soon as the money left her account. Even if her case goes before a judge one day, she'll likely never see a penny.

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JOHN ARMITT: Like we tell people, the criminal court system is not set up to try and get your money back. Right? Like, if there's assets that we can seize and that kind of stuff, that's one thing. But if they've gotten rid of all the money and these accused have no money. You can't get blood from a stone sort of thing.

HANNAH AJALA: So our big hyperconnected new world works very nicely for scammers. If a scammer is in Quebec or Nigeria and a scamee is in Sardinia or Texas and the mules are doing their muling in between. That's a lot of different justice systems. Unsynced. Physically far apart. I wondered if crackdowns were more successful on a local level.

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FILEMON: I've been doing this job in terms of cyber secrets and cyber crime investigation for the past ten years now.

HANNAH AJALA: When I was in Ghana, I sat down with Filemon. Heads up that we were speaking in a car during a rainstorm, so it's a little noisy. Filemon is part of a private digital forensics agency that works with local law enforcement. His job is different than it was a decade ago.

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FILEMON: So at the time, you realized that cybercrime wasn't really, really something that people even care about within the country. It wasn't the kind of crime that you finally see law enforcement changing people to arrest and prosecute them because it was quite new.

HANNAH AJALA: And it could seem like criminals had a social cachet in Ghana and society that shielded them from prosecution.

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FILEMON: When somebody says cyber cybercriminal and enjoying their proceeds from this crime, they tend to donate to society. You know, they are kind of respected. So the laws wasn't really punitive. It wasn't really enforced. So people just do things without being punished.

HANNAH AJALA: I wondered if part of the reason the Sakawa boys had this slightly elevated status in some people's eyes had to do with Ghana's history. I heard there are scammers who justify their illegal actions because of colonialism. When I was in Accra, I met up with another Sakawa boy named Romanus. There's an argument that romance scams are a form of reparations for slavery. People see it as a way of taking back what was stolen from them.

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ROMANUS: And represent through them. Yeah, because back in their days we were not there, but we had a wide scale for our goals, more of our properties to get to the other side and then build something for themselves. So yeah, I can see it's kind of a payback.

HANNAH AJALA: A kind of payback. Wherever this camera's perceived justification is for these crimes, the end result is usually the same. No repercussions for the criminals involved. But why is it that most cases don't lead to a prosecution? I asked Filemon why most cybercrime investigations fail to lead to a prosecution.

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FILEMON: The early challenges that we have currently is the complainants. When is a case getting the complainant to come to court is difficult?

HANNAH AJALA: Why don't they want to come forward?

FILEMON: The person making the complaint has to also make sure that you are willing to support the investigations. Okay. You are willing to also testify. But if you are not. It is difficult and most of the time the victims are outside the country. So getting a plane ticket coming here, you know, they don't see as wanted, so they don't come.

HANNAH AJALA: So international justice usually plays out pretty badly for victims and pretty nicely for scammers, but there's a third party in the romance com chain, the bait. So I wanted to know if Janessa Brazil had ever sued anyone for using her name and image. Simon, the journalist from Episode One believed he'd uncovered Janessa's true identity and that her real name was Vanessa. When Simon thought he tracked down Vanessa, he tried to warn her about how her pictures were being used.

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SIMON DE BRASIL: And she basically said, Thank you for alerting me to this. I'm well aware of it. This scandal has been so enormous that I'm absolutely unable to work at the moment, and it's made my life a misery. I've been subject to court proceedings in Florida. I even had one man who claimed that he'd given me $2 million that I'd embezzled from him and I was taken to court. My assets have been frozen. I'm not allowed to post anything in public online, and I'm basically struggling to try and clear my name so I can get back to work again.

HANNAH AJALA: Of course, we don't know if Simon had actually been corresponding with the real Janessa Brazil, but we were curious about the idea of court proceedings involving her. We couldn't find any traces of her name in the courts, but then we found that video from 2019 of Janessa co-hosting Bubba's show.

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BUBBA: You know, you've got to work the phone to.

JANESSA: Imagine if I got all the money that these people send out to be fake Janessas I'd be I'd be a millionaire.

BUBBA: Probably. This is probably millions of dollars.

HANNAH AJALA: Bubba's share was recorded in Tampa and in Florida. My producers know a guy who specializes in finding people. Bob Norman. Bob's a journalist based in South Florida. He works closely with a private investigator to find people in a place where a lot of people go to not be found.

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BOB NORMAN: There is a culture of con in Florida. There's no question about it. There's a lot of grifting going on in Florida.

HANNAH AJALA: Maybe he's been down there too long. But Bob's take on Janessa was immediately skeptical.

BOB NORMAN: You know, when you look at her, I think it seems that suspicions arise over and over. And as you say, she's been the face of many scams. My first thought was that she's got to be involved. I mean, that was my first thought. Either that or she's the most unlucky person to be wrapped up in this all the time. It's natural to have suspicion. Is that fair? Probably not. Is it worth pursuing? Absolutely.

HANNAH AJALA: I have to admit that I felt sort of protective of Janessa when he said that making this podcast. It feels like I've spent a lot of time with her, even though we've never met. I realize I've come to think of her as someone who'd been exploited there. A better version of Janessa. Was I, too getting caught up in a fantasy of rescuing her? As Bob talked, I also wondered if I was a bit naive about who was pulling the levers on the Janessa Brazil scheme. After all, she was in a perfect position to make a lot of money off her image. And would that even be such a terrible thing? It was her image, after all, as she said on Barber's show. Millions of dollars have been sent to the fake giant ASOS around the world. And she hasn't seen a penny. Who could blame her if she tried to get some of that money herself? Do you see Janessa Brazeau as the victim? That she could very much so be the innocent person whose images have resurfaced the Internet thousands of times.

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BOB NORMAN: I mean, your image is not yours once it's out there. But I mean, if it- why would they use her face? What is she, a modern day Helen of Troy or something, you know, Or she's a siren from Uslyses. She draws the memories. Is that what it is? Is she just got a face that somehow is more effective than other faces? I don't know. Perplexing is a word that comes to mind. It's perplexing.

HANNAH AJALA: The best way to get to the bottom of this would be to speak to her myself. But first, I'd need to find her.

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HANNAH AJALA: If, let's say she does fall under the category of someone who doesn't want to be found, how easy would it be for for someone to disappear in the U.S.?

BOB NORMAN: It's not easy at all. It's almost impossible.

HANNAH AJALA: I guess we're kind of in the mindset slash limbo of trying to think of another angle or another approach that we may not have thought of. Does anything come to mind for you?

BOB NORMAN: Well, I mean, there's obvious, I think. Ideas that come to mind. One is I think you all are following that, trying to find other people that are close to her and trying to find another way into her graces or confidence in some way.

HANNAH AJALA: We know one person who's close to her.

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BUBBA: Janessa is part of my show. She's a co-host, Janessa say hi to Nicole.

JANESSA: Hi Nicole.

HANNAH AJALA: Bubba, the radio host from Tampa, Florida. His full now legal name is Bubba the Love Sponge Clem. By the way.

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BUBBA: B-u-b-b-a t-h-e l-o-v-e s-p-o-n-g-e. Then you have to put the little registered trademark, the R, the circle R, because it's a federally registered trademark name, and then the last name.

HANNAH AJALA: So I set my hunts for Janessa aside to see if I can get Bubba to talk to me. I try a Twitter, I try a twitch. I try his agent. I also try reaching him at a racetrack he owns in Ocala, Florida.

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WOMAN ON VOICEMAIL: Please check Bubba racetrack dot com for times and pricing. Thanks so much. And we hope to see you here at the right time.

AUTOMATED MESSAGES: At the tone, please record your message.

HANNAH AJALA: Hi, my name is Hannah Ajala. I'm a BBC journalist, hoping to speak to Todd, a.k.a. Bubba the Love Sponge. I can be reachable via email.

HANNAH AJALA: And then one day Bubba's name pops up in my inbox. Yes, I'm available for your podcast. Tell me what I need to do. Next time on Love, Janessa.

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BUBBA: I met Janessa in New York at Howard Stern Studios. And I just thought, Oh my God, she's so stunning. I hope I can add some insight for you guys.

AG: We'll hear that next episode of Love, Janessa tomorrow. The whole series is available on the CBC Listen App or wherever you get your podcasts. That's our program for today. Stay tuned to Radio One for q. Tomorrow on The Current - Jake Tapper.

SOUNDCLIP

It's just madness is going on. And that's honestly the 1970s were crazy but and that's I try to draw some parallel, some resonance. But when you go back to 1977 and all the crazy things that were going on, disco Star Wars, the rise of tabloid journalism, the death of Elvis. Evel Knievel is a huge character in this book. All of these crazy things going on in this one year. And it was just so fun to write them out and throw my characters into it.

AG: CNN's chief Washington correspondent has a new book out. It's set in the 70s, and very relevant today. Jake Tapper is joining me tomorrow. I'm Anthony Germain. Thanks for listening to The Current.

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Tuesday August 8, 2023 Episode Transcript

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