MADISON, May 7th, 2026. This is WLRN’s 10th Anniversary Edition! Stay tuned for the greeting with Jocelyn Crawley, world news with Cat Bradfield, an interview with professor Gail Dines and concluding commentary from Jocelyn.
The focus of this month’s show is the Jeffrey Epstein case and how it is being handled within the porn-sick society we live with Gail Dines, expert and activist for women’s and children’s rights and founding member of Culture Reframed.
Gail recently published a review in Ms. Magazine of Virginia Roberts Giuffre’s posthumous book, Nobody’s Girl. She talks with Thistle a bit about this book and about how the porn industry has gotten its tentacles into all aspects of American society. She also, at the end of the interview, tells the story of an activist skit performed with Mary Daly at Harvard University in the 1980s. She muses that if women could do it then, we can do it again today and should in order to fortify our movement for the dignity and rights of girls and women.
Listen to our original theme music from ten years ago composed by Thistle with a call for songs from Cat Bradfield for our Tenth Anniversary Summer Song Countdown show coming to an internet near you! To participate in this show, click this link and fill out the form: wlrnmedia.com/2026/03/08/cast-yo…rns-top-100-songs/ The more the merrier!
Thanks for tuning in to WLRN for all these years. All of our shows are archived here: wlrnmedia.com/category/podcasts/ so if you want to remember what was happening in women’s news back in the day, feel free to browse and discover compelling women’s news and commentary that spans the last decade. We also have Ten Year Anniversary merch, designed by Margaret, to celebrate this milestone. Find our mug and t-shirt here: wlrnmedia.com/merch/
Below, find Margaret’s artist’s statment for this month’s show.

Artist’s Statment: For the design of WLRN’s Episode 121, I started out exploring statues of the Medusa – the mythological figure who can be interpreted as a powerful symbol of female rage, trauma, and resistance against patriarchal violence. I also found images of Virginia Giuffe, one of the first of Epstein’s victims to go public. I settled on one where she was holding a photo of her younger self. I replaced her hair with that of the Medusa by Bernini.
For the background, I found a satellite view of Epstein’s torture island, which I overlaid with an image of synapses, rather snakelike – which suggested the subconscious effects of trauma. I also used a screenshot from the Epstein files that had all of the text redacted. So it is just stripes.
I played with files, focusing on Virginia, until her eyes became the most prominent part of the visual. She, and most of everything else ends up being obscured or abstracted. Which seemed appropriate. We can see all sorts of things in the files, but our justice system is not interested in pursuing justice.
