The Girlfriends S3/E1: Hell's Gate

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This is Andrea Gunning from Betrayal.

Are there two sides to every story?

Academy Award nominee Robin Wright stars in The Girlfriend on Prime, a psychological thriller that will make you question everything.

Laura has the perfect life and a son she'd die for.

But when he brings home his new girlfriend Cherry, played by Olivia Cook, something feels off.

Also starring Lori Davidson, The Girlfriend is a twisted game of cat and mouse where nothing is what it seems.

Don't miss the girlfriend, streaming now exclusively on Prime.

Sometimes the truth is just a matter of perspective.

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Hey you, it's Anna here.

I just wanted to give you a heads up on what to expect in this series, because this story has some pretty dark moments.

It's going to include addiction, domestic and sexual abuse, and murder.

And a lot of it takes place within the prison system.

But also, like every series of The Girlfriends, this is a story all about sisterhood and solidarity.

Along the way, I'm going to introduce you to a cast of women who've been through the most incredible, complex, and at times even tragic experiences, but have managed to come out the other end.

If you feel impacted by some of the themes in this show, you can reach out to Know More.

They're a domestic violence charity with a lot of great resources to help you or your loved ones.

You can search knowmore.org and we've also put a link to their website in the episode description.

So do take care and get ready for one hell of a story.

And more than a few swear words.

If you happened to be strolling near Queens, New York in the late 80s, you might have found yourself passing by North Shore Gymnastics.

Inside, there's a smell of chalk and sweat in the air.

Small feet are running across the crash mat covered floor, sending echoes that bounce around the room.

The room is bustling with girls of all ages, each in a brightly colored leotard straight out of an 80s workout video.

Standing at the side, with a sassy little expression on her face, is a seven-year-old girl with a point to prove.

Kelly Harnett.

At only seven years old, Kelly's just been told she's not big enough to do real gymnastics.

She can only play games in the sponge pit with the other little kids.

Boring.

This is not what I signed up for.

I don't want to jump into a huge,

like, it almost looked like a pool of spongy things and play cat and mouse.

It was basically like tag.

That's not gymnastics.

Kelly should She's already built her own DIY balance beam at home, and she's been somersaulting off the sofa for years.

So, playing tag in the sponges with the babies?

No, thank you.

I was getting really irritated about this.

Kelly hatches a plan.

Looking up into the stands, scanning through the sea of proud parents, Kelly makes sure her mum is watching.

And then, it's go time.

Okay, one, two, three, and everybody would run.

Kelly, the coach, and the rest of the little kids start running towards the sponge pit.

But after a few conniving strides, Kelly makes a break for it.

She's heading straight to the balance beam, a proper one, which is currently surrounded by a gaggle of big girls who do real gymnastics.

But Kelly isn't phased.

I just grabbed it, the balance beam, and I started doing cartwheels and round offs.

I remember looking up at my mom and she was proud of me.

She was happy.

The other moms?

Well, they're not so happy.

Actually, they're freaking the fuck out, pounding on the glass, screaming bloody murder, trying to get the coach's attention.

I felt like saying you snitches.

The snitching works.

Kelly's coach turns around to see her mid-maneuver.

He starts booking it across the gym.

Although he's running, I know I have a few seconds left.

I did like a cartwheel without hands, did the dismount, boom.

And my feet were together.

And that's always what they mess up on.

They back up a little bit.

My feet were together.

And he was like, oh my God, are you crazy?

What is wrong with you?

You know how hurt you could have gotten?

I was like, but I didn't get hurt.

So yes, I got in a lot of trouble for that.

This memory, it means a lot to Kelly.

She'll spend her life repeating it over and over again in her head.

How proud her mother was and how special she felt.

How she stuck it to the man and stuck the landing at the same time.

Kelly says she keeps doing gymnastics and after a while, her coach even lets her back on the balance beam.

But soon, that all changes.

My mom told the head coach that she has to take me out.

She said, no, no, you can't take her out.

And my mother said, I don't have a choice.

And she said, your daughter isn't natural at this.

This is the type that goes to the Olympics.

And it made my mother cry

because she didn't have the money.

It's about 30 years later.

And Kelly's walking out of a maximum security prison.

She's in shackles with a chain around her belly and cuffs on her wrists.

She's being escorted to a hospital appointment via a prison transfer van.

To pass the time, Kelly gets chatting to a prison guard.

He started talking to me about previous jobs because I was talking to him about how rough it must be to get stuck there and to have a home life and whatnot.

And he said, yeah, like I missed like the good old days.

I said, what'd you do?

He says to me that he used to be a coach at North Shore and that's where I used to go.

And I said, what?

Really?

And he goes, oh, gosh, I'll never forget the time.

And I don't know, something in my heart just told me, like, don't tell me he's going to tell my story.

He said, so, as the coach, I led them all to the pit.

And apparently, one didn't make it with us.

She ended up over by the teenagers.

I guess I missed half of her.

And then he did the air quotes routine, like still a little bit angry.

And he goes, but I saw you, she did such a damn good job.

I couldn't tell her that though.

I said, you just did.

And he looked at me and he was like, no.

And then I started to cry.

Thinking.

About seven-year-old Kelly

and how crazy life is.

It was one of those what went wrong moments.

You have a lot of them clearly in prison, but not to that extent.

But

he looked at me differently after that.

And he was just like,

what happened?

I'm Anna Sinfield and from the teams at Novel and iHeart Podcasts.

This is The Girlfriends, Jailhouse Lawyer.

Episode 1, Hell's Gate.

When you see a long ramp for the wheelchair accessibility along with a regular staircase, that is my courtyard.

Don't listen to the sign.

They got it wrong.

I am so not kidding.

Just walk straight upon entry.

To your left, you will see another ramp.

I can't see you.

This is great.

Is that Kelly's house?

Hi, how are you doing?

Good, how are you, Anna?

It's so nice to finally meet you.

Hi, Jay.

This is Kelly Harnett, now 43 and still with a point to prove.

It's late 2024, and she's waiting for me outside her apartment in Astoria Queens.

Kelly's wearing a red top with Bebe bejeweled across the front.

When she hugs me, she smells like a mix of rose perfume and the king-size cigarette she's smoking.

She's got big, wide eyes.

Her hair is vivid blonde, pulled back into a high ponytail.

She's sporting a headband that perfectly matches her eyeshadow, which she says it always does.

This is my first time seeing Kelly in person.

And up close, I can see how she got the nickname Jailhouse Barbie.

Kelly got out of prison three years ago.

She spent almost 12 years behind bars for murder.

Kelly says she's innocent of all charges.

But in the eyes of the justice system, Kelly was a villain, a perpetrator of a terrible crime who deserved to be punished.

As the reporter behind The Girlfriends, I've always had a victim-first philosophy.

In fact, I've said more than once that we don't interview perpetrators on this show.

And through that philosophy, through telling the stories we have, The Girlfriends has unwittingly reinforced the the idea that you have a victim, generally a woman, and then there's a bad villain, often a man, who hurts them.

A bad guy who thankfully gets locked up in the end with the key thrown away.

And in these stories, it's clear who to root for.

The victim.

A woman who is, a lot of the time, let's face it, dead.

Who then becomes forever memorialized.

frozen in a state of perfect, almost sainted victimhood.

But real life is rarely so neat, especially for the women who survive.

One good thing about Kelly, at least from a journalist's perspective, is that she is not at all withholding.

I don't even need to ask her that many questions.

She's a boiling pot of beans ready to spill.

Kelly's the type to wear her heart on her sleeve and on her front door.

We have the shamrock here on the door.

It represents my ethnicity.

I'm 100% Irish, but we always have to keep the two American flags here to establish that I am Irish American and that we're proud supporters of the powerized veterans of America.

Thank you.

You're welcome.

Oh, it's your piano program.

Yes, that is.

As I walk into Kelly's apartment, I'm struck by how much of a shrine it is.

To her life, sure, sure, but I actually mean a literal religious shrine.

It's full of roses, like so many roses.

Real fake jewelry pictures.

They're everywhere.

Oh, but today is a very significant day.

I don't know if I ever told you about my story about St.

Therese.

October 1st, today is her feast day.

Saint Therese is a Catholic saint.

Kelly's been praying to her since a rainy day about 40 years ago when she was around four years old.

My mom, she was driving to the rectory.

She parked the car.

I opened the car up and I stepped into a puddle.

Inside the puddle was a rose.

For some reason, I don't know why, I picked the rose up.

My mom got out of the driver's seat and came around and she saw me with the rose in my hand.

She said, Kelly, put that down.

It's dirty.

So I threw the rose down.

I go into the rectory, and my mom had to go in the back, and the nuns were sitting there, and they had this whole wall of pamphlets of about 50 different saints.

Randomly, I just picked this pamphlet.

It was a picture of a saint holding a crucifix and holding roses in her hand.

As I started to read the prayer,

it said she will send a message of love and a shower of roses from the heavenly gardens.

I just kept thinking of that rose outside.

I wanted that rose.

When we got back to the car, I waited until my mom got in the driver's seat, grabbed the rose, and put it in my pocket.

Throughout my whole life, I had been praying to St.

Therese and finding roses constantly.

I had shoe boxes upon shoeboxes, and then I started marking each one.

Sitting in Kelly's rose-adorned apartment, I'm watching her as she speaks.

I'm listening,

but simultaneously trying to get the measure of her, looking for hidden context in between her words.

I guess it's a reporter and me.

Kelly's eyes light up when she speaks about Saint Therese, which she does a lot.

This saint, she's one of the most important figures in Kelly's life.

I'm imagining Kelly, barely four years old, reading a prayer pamphlet, a sodden rose in her tiny pocket.

It's just beginning to dawn on me how extraordinary this story is.

And that's when I'm interrupted by the other most significant person in Kelly's life.

Here's my brother Ronnie.

Well good, I hope you're not.

Terrible.

I know it.

I know it.

I know it.

Yeah, that's Ronnie.

That's my best friend in the whole wide world.

Ronnie and I, I mean, we have.

Kelly and Ronnie live in the same apartment they've called home for nearly three decades.

Before it was just them, they shared it with their mom, dad, and their family dog, a cocker spaniel named Casey.

You can feel that family history here.

It's soaked into the walls alongside the nicotine.

This is my shrine that I made for my mother.

I know you're probably thinking, why is there a cigarette on top of that?

My mother's last words, not to be funny, God forgive me, was give me a cigarette.

So I gave her her last cigarette.

These are rose petals, of course, because of my love for roses.

Oh, these are the rosary beads that were found clamped in her hand when she died.

So when Rega Mortis sets in, it's Kelly's mom's name was Kathleen.

Before she died, she had been sick for a long time.

Kelly and Ronnie still keep her sick bed in the living room.

Currently, it's covered in teddy bears and a blanket with a poem printed on it about how special brothers are.

A gift from Kelly to Ronnie.

Yankee pillows because we're Yankee fans.

We used to be Met fans, but we were sick and tired of rooting for a losing team.

But I guess you know.

Scanning my eyes around the room, I spot a dresser next to the bed.

On it, a pair of 1980s Barbies, still in their original packaging.

One's a dentist and the other is a lawyer.

Both are blonde.

obviously.

Also in the living room is a makeup table with lights around the mirror like something from old Hollywood.

It comes complete with a pink and white heart-shaped chair.

But right at the center of the room, in front of the TV, is one of Kelly's most prized possessions, her electronic keyboard.

Some evenings, Kelly and Ronnie sit in here on the old sick bed converted into a sofa and listen to DJ sets on YouTube.

They dance and sing along.

Sometimes Kelly jams on her sims.

Honestly, I'm an aspiring DJ.

My favorite DJ is Paul Van Dyke.

However, I haven't gotten the money to get the turntables yet, the Pioneer turntables.

I don't have that much experience in this.

However, I go crazy on my keyboard.

And so,

yeah, I'm just freestyling

setting.

Excuse me, freestyling.

I had nothing planned, honestly.

Kelly's apartment here in Astoria is a safe haven for her and Ronnie.

But I'm shocked to learn that it's barely three blocks away from the scene of the murder that put Kelly behind bars.

I know I wouldn't want to stick around so close to the place where my whole life fell apart.

You could have left New York if you wanted to, but you haven't.

I know.

Home is wherever Ronnie is.

If Ronnie's here, then this is home.

If Ronnie moved,

then that would be home.

Wherever Ronnie would have moved to, I would have been going there.

And I'm glad Ronnie was still here because this is the place that I left.

We've lived here for 32 years.

I mean, that's home.

And I could tell you, there's no place like home.

Well, I think it's a very brave thing to stay in the same place.

It's easier to run.

Yeah, yeah, but I don't run from my problems.

Other than Ronnie, the one other very important reason why Kelly has refused to run is because she's always maintained her innocence.

I was just wondering how important it is to you that the people who listen to this podcast come out of it believing you.

You know, everyone's jury, everyone's going to have their own opinions.

Yeah.

I mean,

what can happen to anyone is a wrongful conviction.

Nobody could really sit there and say what they could definitively do in any situation until it happens to them.

It would be nice if people would be open-minded.

I was put away for 13 years wrongfully.

I'm not asking for a retrial here.

All I need is the chance.

Next, I'm going to give Kelly the chance to tell her side of the story about the terrible night that would change her life forever.

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Adam Brody, for example, uses WhatsApp to plan his grandma's birthday using video calls, polls to choose a gift, and HD photos to document a family moment to remember, All in one group chat.

Makes grandma's birthday her best one yet.

But Adam Scott group messages with an app that isn't WhatsApp.

And so, the photo invite came through so blurry, he never even knew about the party.

And grandma still won't talk to me.

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Why don't we we move on to the actual night itself?

Do you want to start us from earlier on that day, like what you'd been doing?

Sure.

I just want to warn you that I'm not going to be holding back on the grisly details in this series, like I've tried to in previous seasons of The Girlfriends.

The brutal details of the murder Kelly was accused of, and what she went through either side of it, are just too important.

It's in the details that someone like Kelly is found guilty or innocent.

It's in the details that her culpability is decided.

And it's in the details where Kelly come more from victim into villain.

It all started on July 6th, 2010.

Kelly's 28 years old.

She still lives at home, but she and her mum have been arguing a lot recently.

Mostly about about Kelly's new boyfriend, Tommy.

Kelly's mother, Kathleen, doesn't approve of him.

Thinks he's bad news.

More than once in their short relationship, Kelly has turned up on her mum's doorstep horrifically beaten, bloody and bruised.

Before long, Tommy usually turns up too, yelling vile abuse at their windows for all the neighbours to hear.

And Kathleen's explosive reactions put Kelly between a rock and a hard place.

So So Kelly's staying away from home.

She's with Tommy instead.

But by July 6th, Tommy's gotten into a fight with his roommate and says he can't go back to his apartment.

Now he and Kelly are sleeping under a bridge in Astoria Park.

I don't know, I guess you could say that I was transient by choice and also out of fear.

And out of love, honestly, because I didn't want to leave him in the park by himself.

so i was like that's a terrible thing for a girlfriend to do leave her boyfriend in the park by himself i said i don't want to do that so all day july 6th they're hanging out in the park but kelly is suffering she's been addicted to prescription pain pills since she was 17.

she and tommy actually met at a methadone clinic and right now kelly is withdrawing hard vomiting, feeling terrible.

Tommy has stopped her from getting her methadone dose for the past three days, which just seems like a cruel act of control to me.

So, right now, we're actually standing

at

the scene of the crime.

I would say I was standing right over here.

I've asked Kelly to come back to Astoria Park.

I want to try and make some kind of sense of what happened that night back in July 2010.

It's difficult to really say what the scene of the crime was because

the drinking like began

over here.

Kelly, still jonesing for her methadone fix, has spent the day with Tommy drinking four loco.

A single can is the equivalent of four cans of beer.

And as if that wasn't enough, to top it all off, it also includes roughly a metric fuck ton of caffeine.

The caffeine being in it, what it would do was wake you up so you keep drinking it, and then the caffeine wears off, and boy, does that alcohol hit you.

It sneaks up on you.

By about 3 a.m., Tommy and Kelly are wasted, exhausted from the rough sleeping and withdrawal.

They lay some blankets down under the bridge that cuts right through the park.

It just so happens to ironically be named the Hell's Gate Bridge.

And

boy, oh boy, was that given the correct name because it really was the gate to hell for me.

Tommy notices a man sat on a park bench across the way from him.

He yells over to him.

The guy says, hola.

I know now he speaks Spanish, right?

And I speak Spanish fluently and Tommy knew that

and

he asked me to ask him if it would be okay for us to join him.

And he said yes.

Tommy and Kelly walk over to sit with the man, who introduces himself as Angel.

And that's when he told me that his brother threw him out of the house because he had been drinking.

He said he beat him up.

And that's when he pulled out some type of, I don't know if it was a keychain or a charm, that he was in Alcoholics Anonymous.

Angel is drunk, like falls over when he tries to stand up drunk.

But Tommy doesn't care.

He just sees an opportunity.

He tells me to ask him if he's ever drank for loco.

And I asked him, and he said no, but that he would love to try.

So the man gave Tommy, I think it was $6.

And I got up.

I had this little book bag.

I put it on and I thought I was going with Tommy, except Tommy grabbed the bicycle of the man.

And I said, what are you doing?

And he said, oh, I'll be right back.

I said, what are you crazy?

Don't leave me here.

He just took off.

So here Kelly is, temporarily abandoned by her boyfriend, stuck in a dark park with a very drunk man.

At some point, while Tommy is still gone, Kelly says Angel goes way over the line with her.

She doesn't want to go into the details about it, which I respect, but she does describe it as a sexual offence.

Before too long, Kelly spots Tommy riding back into the park, and she bolts towards him.

I wanted to get to Tommy on bike before he got to Angel.

I didn't tell him exactly what transpired.

I just kept telling him, I'm not comfortable.

We have to leave.

We have to leave.

We have to leave.

And because you were.

Tommy's not listening.

He's focused on the drinks.

So I blurted it out.

I told him what happened.

That's when he said,

I'm going to F and kill him.

Let's be real.

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Not all group chats are the same, just like not all atoms are the same.

Adam Brody, for instance, uses WhatsApp WhatsApp to pin messages, send events, and settle debates using polls with his friends, all in one group chat.

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It's about three in the morning on July 6th, 2010.

After telling her boyfriend Tommy what just happened between her and Angel, Kelly is watching on helplessly as Tommy races through the park.

He's headed straight for Angel,

who's none the wiser about how much danger he's in.

I'm still 50 yards away now.

From a distance, I see him throw the bike down and

he is pommeling this guy.

Now I ran.

You know, first it was a fight, and I figured that's what was going to happen.

So I pulled Tommy's arm.

He threw me down and said, bitch, stay out of this.

You're fucking next.

Then I lost it.

And I'm saying, should I run?

Because he's 20 yards from me.

Should I run in that direction?

If he turns around around and sees me running, he's going to catch up to me in a second.

Kelly stays put, frozen in fear, under Hellsgate Bridge.

Watching on as Tommy's attack goes from violent to murderous.

He begins to choke Angel.

If I try to stop him again, he's going to kill me.

If I run, he's going to kill me.

So he comes over to me.

He grabs my foot.

All he did was take my shoelace.

I thought he was pulling my leg to kill me.

You think, oh shit, now it's my turn.

I saw him go over to the man,

put the shoelace around the man's neck, and it snapped instantaneously.

So he screams out,

Why won't this motherfucker die?

Now I realize he he really is going through with this.

He really is going to kill this man.

Then

he took off his own belt.

Tommy strangles Angel with his belt until he stops struggling.

Until his body.

goes limp.

It was at that point that

I was the most scared and he came over to me.

It would look like a person stalking their prey, not a person, rather an animal.

And it was then that I made it my point to walk to him literally as I'm doing right now with my hands out.

Kelly's still terrified she'll be next.

She goes into pure survival mode.

doing whatever it takes to stay alive.

It was right next to Angel, this poor poor man, laying on the ground.

But I had to try to manipulate Tommy, and I put my hands out, knowing he's an atheist, and I said, Pray with me.

Oh, glorious Saint Therese, whom Almighty God has raised you to aid and counsel mankind, I implore your miraculous intercession.

So powerful are you in obtaining every need of God, Savior.

He

screams

while holding my hands, Saint Teresa, please help me.

And to carry out your promises of spending goodness upon earth and letting fall from heaven a shower of roses.

Amen.

Then he looks at me and goes, oh my god, I just killed somebody.

So like he went back to normal, but it's too late, because the poor man is on the ground now.

If I didn't know what had happened here in Astoria Park all those years ago, I just think it was a nice normal park.

You know, it's got winding paths, a huge variety of trees, somewhere you can lounge out in the summer months and read a book or kick a ball.

On the surface, it certainly doesn't seem like the kind of place where a man could lose his life.

Now,

even though whatever happened happened

towards what he said to me or did to me, being that his name was Angel, I always,

due to my faith, felt that he was in some strange way my angel because had it not been for

this is terrible to say and I don't mean that his life should have been taken to save mine obviously you cannot bring someone back to life I wish you could I would do that for that man in a heartbeat however being that it happened I always try to find a purpose for it I try to find the good in it

I was addicted to Xanax, to Clanipan, to this, that, you know, many things.

And I had no intentions of getting off of any of them and honestly when I got to Rikers I was sick for five months it got me off of it so that's the good in it so I feel that the man that was standing right where we're standing right now I feel that he was my angel

There's something that makes my stomach flip at the idea that this could have all been part of God's plan.

I do like the idea that someone, something, intervened in Kelly's life.

But I guess it just doesn't sit right that in order for that to happen, Angel had to become some kind of sacrificial lamb who had to die for Kelly to break free of addiction and of Tommy's abuse.

I guess as a one-time Christian, now-time heathen, I just don't think a true God would have let Kelly go through any of this.

But then again, I'm sure if I'd gotten caught up in something so chaotic and senseless and awful, I'd be looking for meaning too.

So where do we go from here?

Well, the first thing you need to know is that this series is not a whodunit.

I'm not going to be proving Kelly's innocence or guilt.

That was decided in a courtroom years ago.

And as we tell this story, you can decide for yourself whether that was a right or wrong decision.

But I do want to know how this all happened.

How did Kelly, the sassy little gymnast who was apparently once destined for the Olympics, end up with someone like Tommy?

How did she end up in the park that night?

And finally, with the story she just told me, How did she end up in prison for 12 years?

I'm going to peel back the layers of Kelly's life to try and understand how she got to where she is today and learn how a victim of domestic violence ends up being seen as a villain in the eyes of the law and maybe in the eyes of many of you too.

I'm being penalized because of the fact that I chose to survive.

chose life over death.

What do you want, my blood?

This is the way it it seems.

That's what everyone would have preferred.

That was the better outcome.

A dead girl in the park.

Coming up on the girlfriends, jailhouse lawyer.

Kelly, she got arrested for murder.

This is the justice system?

I said, I know my sister, she didn't do this.

You have to think of the domestic violence aspect and not the truth-finding aspect.

I was afraid of Tommy.

It was like Kelly was his possession.

The trial, it was awful, and the verdict was guilty.

Our sisterhood, we've called ourselves the Shaudis.

You shaudy!

She goes, Harnett, you need to get your ass to that law library.

You gotta start fighting your case.

It became the love of my life.

I said, She has made your name, Kelly.

I said, were you a victim of domestic violence?

And she was like, yeah.

I said, can you please help me?

And I just started crying.

I was giving a lot of people hope.

I said, how many people have gotten other incarcerated individuals out of here?

He said, Nobody's ever done that.

I said, I'm going to be the first one to do that.

He goes, Oh, God, Harnett, jailhouse lawyer.

The Girlfriend's Jailhouse Lawyer is produced by Novel for iHeart podcasts.

For more from Novel, visit novel.audio.

The show is hosted by me, Anna Sinfield, and is written and produced by me and Lee Meyer, with additional production from Jayko Tayvich and Michael Ginnow.

Our assistant producer is Madeline Parr.

The editors are Georgia Moody and me, Anna Sinfield.

Production management from Cherie Houston and Joe Savage.

Our fact checkers are Dania Suleiman and Fendel Fulton.

Sound design, mixing and scoring by Daniel Kempson and Nicholas Alexander.

Music supervision by me, Alice Infield, Lee Meyer, and Nicholas Alexander.

Original music composed by Nicholas Alexander, Daniel Kempson, and Louisa Gerstein.

Story development by Willard Foxton, creative director of Novel.

Max O'Brien and Craig Strachan are our executive producers for Novel.

And Katrina Norvell and Nikki Itor are the executive producers for iHeart Podcasts.

And the marketing lead is Alison Cantor.

Thanks also to Carrie Lieberman and the whole team at WME.

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