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Hello, if you're hearing this, it's because

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you're on the free feed for blocked

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and reported. What you're about to hear is

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the first little bit, a tantalizing

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chunk. of a forty five minute

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episode in which Katie tells me about

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this British figure who

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is very hard to describe. This is one of the

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strangest stories I've ever heard about

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a controversial online personality. I

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highly recommend it. If you wanna hear this episode

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in its entirety, go to blocked and reported

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dot org and sign up as a premium subscriber,

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just five dollars a month for three

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extra episodes a month like this one.

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Thank you and enjoy the free preview.

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Katie, you have a really exciting way to start this. Alright.

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Give it to me. What is it? We just it's a weird

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week. We just recorded a free one, then we took

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a break to eat. and now we're recording a paid one.

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What did you eat? What was your lunch like?

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I had chips and cheese. Just a few

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chips with some

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chatter on it. I just had There's only ten minute

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break. I just had few crackers with charter around it.

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Your mom maybe it was a moderate job. Wow. We're so similar. Wow.

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Are we synced out? They're so similar. Are

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we are we cycling together? Yeah.

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Are we cycling together? Food cycling?

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Yeah. Speaking of words,

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Jesse. We have a -- Good segue. --

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very feminine show today.

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I don't know how I feel about this. How feminine?

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Is it bleeding? Very It's AFAB.

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AFAB. Okay. Spleting

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out the eyes. Okay. But before we get to that -- Sure.

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-- we're gonna do a little update on

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the last preemailed episode. Do you

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remember that in that episode? So the subject

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of the episode was a woman named Brianna Madia,

1:26

and she said that she called nine

1:28

eleven when her dog got hit by a

1:30

car. it turns out that it

1:32

was her car that hit the dog, but that's another

1:34

story. And I said that that sounded,

1:37

like, weird because are you supposed to call 911

1:39

when an animal gets hit? Like, do they send the EMS

1:41

to do CPR and a dog? Anyway,

1:44

I must have asked people to write in and let

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us know because I did get a couple of responses.

1:49

One was from a guy who works in emergency

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services and he said, quote, do not

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call nine eleven for a dog. I think he

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says I think what he's saying is if you

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if your dog is hit by a car called nine eleven. And

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then I got a DM on Instagram

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and this one said this is a quote When you call

2:05

nine eleven, they can tell you where the nearest emergency

2:07

bed is, especially if you're unfamiliar with the

2:09

area and you don't have service to Google it, just

2:11

in FYI. hope you don't ever

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need to use this for moose. Guess who

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that was from?

2:16

Who? Priyana media. Oh

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my god.

2:20

Yeah. Really? Do you think that was a threat?

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I hope you don't ever have to use this

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on move.

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But she didn't comment on anything else about the episode

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or was she aware of

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it? She said she didn't she couldn't listen to the rest

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of it, which understandable. I'm not sure

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how she found it. Like, maybe she has a Google

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alert for her name. She probably does.

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or somebody sent it to her. But I guess I

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mean, that cost money. So maybe she yeah. Check

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the subscription, see if Promenor Media is a

2:43

is a subscriber, would you? That's

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a little bit awkward. Yeah.

2:46

It was a little awkward.

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Well, how's more than as

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well?

2:50

I guess so. I guess so later. Moving

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on, Jesse, have you ever heard

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of a woman named Jack Monroe?

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I think you mean a man named Jack Monroe?

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No. No. No. Jack is a woman's name.

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Okay. I have not heard of

3:04

a woman named Jacqueline,

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which I presume is short form. Monroe.

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Her her birth

3:09

name is actually Melissa. I don't know where Jack

3:11

came from or her dead name, and she calls it her

3:13

dead name is Melissa. So she's

3:15

got a very varied resume, but to simplify

3:18

it. She's a British writer or critic campaigner.

3:21

She's a food blogger and campaigner

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that's like UK for activists. Mhmm. I'm

3:25

trying to be sensitive. She focuses

3:28

on various social issues, including poverty

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and mostly food and security. That's news

3:32

speak for hunger. And she's pretty well known in

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the UK. She's won a bunch of different awards her activism.

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She has over five hundred thousand followers on

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Twitter, over, I think, a hundred and seventy thousand

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on Instagram. And since she first

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started becoming famous, her whole thing has

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been doing good, fighting hunger and other

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social ls. But it seems increasingly

3:50

clear that Jack may not be

3:52

all that she claims to be. Wow.

3:55

I know.

3:56

Okay. So Jack is not her given name,

3:58

but she first became known for

3:59

her blog, which was initially called

4:02

girl named Jack.

4:03

Obviously, girl is problematic,

4:06

circa twenty twenty. No. You can see why? She

4:08

has since renamed the the blog cooking on

4:10

a bootstrap And the in the beginning,

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it was basically recipes and essays on eating cheaply.

4:14

And I mean, really cheaply, like her whole thing in

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the beginning was cooking for her and her son

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on just ten pounds

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a week. ten pounds a week? Oh my

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goodness.

4:22

Not ten pounds of food, just ten

4:24

pounds. I've never cooked any of

4:26

her recipes. I've, like, looked at her Instagram

4:28

and I think they look pretty good. but here's

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what our Jackman Rose ore said.

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Her recipes produce without exception

4:35

in edible gruel. She grates spam

4:37

into meatballs. She rinses the

4:40

sauce of canned spaghetti and fashions it

4:42

into weird concoctions. Her most

4:44

famous recipe is for peach and chickpea curry.

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Seriously, that's the best she's got. Her

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recipes are also seriously nutritionally

4:50

inadequate. She claims not to think about

4:53

calories because she is an eating disorder recovery.

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and are riddled with basic culinary

4:57

mistakes. Span meatballs, how does that

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sound to you?

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Pretty bad. But to be fair, if you're trying

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to cook on like a super low budget, you probably can't make

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fancy stuff. Right? And plus, also,

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to be fair, she's British. Yeah. Which so she's

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had a huge disadvantage in terms of because they don't

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they don't eat real food over there.

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They mush everything together. mushy peas.

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Yeah. mushy peas. It's mushy beans, mushy

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toast.

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spaghetti on toast is, like, literally a thing there,

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which is just Okay. That's actually good.

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Is it? I

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mean, I didn't know it was British thing, but, yes, you're getting

5:25

on You

5:25

know, it's funny. And I'm really learning a lot

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about myself. Two nights ago, I went to a

5:29

great Italian place in Williamsburg to my brother

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and Layton Woodhouse. actually. And

5:33

Oh, go ahead. He well, he's not here.

5:38

Do you go out? Like, anyway, I

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had He's listening.

5:41

I had excellent pasta and

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I asked for more bread. So

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on the one hand, I'm eating pasta with as much bread

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as possible. Then when the Brits just

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put the spaghetti on the bread,

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I'm like, that's disgusting. I I gotta repeat

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some stuff. Yeah.

5:55

It's it's just a more efficient way to eat

5:57

your eat your carbs. Yeah.

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Okay.

5:59

So Jack first started appearing in the British

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press in twenty twelve. at the time

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she was a twenty four year old single mom that's

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British for mom, and she'd given up her

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job at a fire department at, like, a dispatch

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center. to either care for her

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son or because the commute was too long

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or because she was let go after mental

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health crisis, all of which she has cited

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as the reason she

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quit her job at various times. She

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and her son's dad weren't really together, and she

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slid into poverty, and she had to visit food

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banks and go on benefits. and she wrote

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about this and this viral blog post

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called Hunker hertz. Here's a passage from that.

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Poverty is the sinking feeling when your

6:35

small boy finishes his one weed egg and

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says, Mom, Mom, Mom, Mom,

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Mom, Mom, Mom, Mom, Mom, Mom, Mom, Mom, Mom, Mom, Mom, Mom, Mom, Mom, Mom, Mom, Mom, Mom, Mom, Mom,

6:43

Mom,

6:43

Mom. Mom,

6:46

Mom, Mom, Mom, Mom, Mom, Mom, Mom, Mom, or the guitar

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to the pawnshop first and how to tell them that there's

6:50

no bread and chips. I don't know what Weetabix is.

6:52

It sounds disgusting. It sounds like it's made

6:54

out of plastic. But anyway, She also

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said she sold most of her possessions, and this was subsequently

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picked up by the media. The Daily Mirror published

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a an article about it. I'll read you a bit

7:03

from that.

7:04

Mother and child spend nights wrapped up in

7:06

an

7:06

accident. rented flat with

7:10

no Christmas tree to mark the season.

7:12

Government plans to slash housing benefit

7:14

could dip them into destitution by whipping

7:16

eighty

7:17

by wiping eighty pounds a month

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from Jack's

7:20

Jackie's here. I switched to, like, something

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from the islands for a minute. Anyway,

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I was trying to do John Ronson.

7:25

You know what? You can do John Ronson,

7:27

but John Ronson. That's sacrilegious. Well,

7:29

I've listened to a lot of them.

7:31

I think I could pick it up a little bit. Okay.

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So there were other articles about Jack

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and the story was always that she was this

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desperately poor single mom trying to

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make it work at a time when the UK government

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was slashing benefits. At the time,

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the UK had a conservative government and

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Jack became in the face of austerity politics.

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She was so poor that she got food from the food

7:51

bank and pulled her kid out of day care because

7:53

you can afford the fees, and she wrote on her

7:55

blog that she opened up her house to sell everything

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she owned. And part of what made Jack such an

7:59

appealing figure to the media was that she wasn't

8:01

exactly the stereotypical face of poverty.

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She was educated. She was white. She was articulate,

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politically active online. She was queer.

8:08

She wasn't from generational poverty. She

8:10

pointed this out herself when she was testifying

8:12

at the House of Commons about food poverty. We

8:14

have a quote from that testimony because of

8:17

a garden The Guardian published a glowing write

8:19

up about it. Here's part of what Jack said. I had a

8:21

twenty seven grand a year job. not

8:23

been brought up on benefits and a track shoot watching

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Jeremy Kyle. I think that's like a Jerry Springer over

8:27

the UK. I'm a middle class well educated

8:29

young woman who fell a bit by the wayside. you

8:32

think it doesn't happen to normal people and you

8:34

think we're all scumbags eating burgers and

8:36

watching daytime TV, it can happen to

8:38

anyone. You can see why. So this was

8:40

this was years ago. You can see why this would be sort of problematic

8:42

now.

8:42

Right. It's kind of obnoxious. Like, unlike those other

8:45

poor people who deserve it. I don't deserve

8:47

report.

8:47

I don't watch Jeremy Kyle on TV.

8:49

I don't know where it tracks him. was trying

8:51

not to laugh because when you were saying when you were

8:53

telling her life story, I thought you were gonna say

8:56

she was so poor she had to pull her child

8:58

out of day care and eat him.

9:00

She's not Irish.

9:02

Oh. Okay.

9:04

So all of this attention led

9:06

to opportunities. In February

9:08

twenty thirteen, she announced that she landed

9:10

a job at her local newspaper, which she said was

9:12

her dream job. And a few months later,

9:14

she got her first book deal. but the job

9:16

itself didn't last very long. She quit

9:18

seven months later. She said this was

9:20

because she quote couldn't be a full time

9:22

newspaper reporter on top freelancing

9:24

for national newspapers, not to mention writing

9:26

a book and being free for TV and radio.

9:29

So basically, she's saying she's too big for

9:31

the local press. Yeah. So things were

9:33

looking up for Jack at that point. She was publishing

9:35

a national outlets. She was living with her girlfriend

9:37

at the time who was very successful. She founded

9:39

a restaurant chain. and she was hired by

9:41

the grocery store, Sainsbury's, to be the face

9:43

of their ad campaign against hunger. But

9:46

then she hit some bumps. In twenty

9:48

fourteen, she was fired from Saint Mary's for tweeting

9:50

that the prime minister David Cameron was

9:52

using stories about his dead son to legitimize

9:55

selling the NHS. That's the national health service

9:57

to his friends. That also became a

9:59

big media story. Her second cookbook

10:01

flopped and austerity by that point had stopped

10:03

being sort of the buzzy issue of the media.

10:06

As our Jackman resource said, quote,

10:09

Jack's appeal started to fade, so she started

10:11

to find other ways to cling to the spotlight.

10:15

Soon after,

10:17

Jack came out as transgender. Which

10:19

had nothing to do with the legislature said?

10:21

No. There was a space

10:23

between those two paragraphs. When the

10:25

daily mail covered this under the headline,