S01 Bonus: Did this happen to you?

This is Susan Burton, the host of The Retrievals.

We're making episodes 4 and 5 this week, but I have some tape that I wanted to put into the feed.

I'll play that in a moment.

But first, I want to say thank you to everyone who's been writing to me with their own stories.

Among the people who've been writing are former patients at the Yale Clinic.

Some Yale Fertility patients are hearing this series and learning for the first time that there may be another explanation for the pain they experienced during their treatment there.

I will say more about this in the last two episodes.

I'd love to hear from any Yale patients or any Yale staffers.

The tape I want to play this week is one of my favorite pieces of tape, when I've tried to fit into almost every episode and it keeps not fitting.

But it actually belongs right here because it's a perfect bridge between where we've been in this story and where we're going.

It gets us from the patients and Donna to what happened at the clinic and to how to hold Yale accountable for that.

The tape is from Leia, the lecturer at Yale.

I love the way she goes from high to low here, from a towering institution to the supply closet.

I think

the thing that I, and I should say this about what it was like to be at the sentencing, is how little Yale came up.

I was really infuriated by that.

I am deeply,

deeply concerned about Yale identifying a bad egg

and saying we eliminated a bad egg.

You have a world-class institution where that has, what, I think, over a $40 billion endowment now.

Some of the wealthiest people in the world.

and the smartest people in the world run this institution.

You have a certain responsibility if you have that much power.

And

if you're going to be responsible for the lives of women and the lives of their families,

it's not enough to say, oh, we just hired a bad person and, you know, fentanyl, there's a fentanyl epidemic in the country.

That, I mean, that's in fact true.

But

you don't just like walk into an office building and I can't.

Let me just put it this way: at an incredibly rich institution, I can't just walk into an office supply, one of the office supply rooms, and grab anything I want.

I can't.

I literally can't.

Like, there's a whole thing: like, how many file folders do you want?

How many, how much paper do you need?

Like, do you need a, you know, like,

you can't just, I'm telling you, like, people who have name chairs at Yale are like, oh, God, I'm having a hard time getting,

you know, whatever.

Pencils, yeah.

Pens.

There's no chalk in the room.

So, you know, if you're going to have a room

that has drugs that are addictive,

you better have serious protocols in place

to

protect your patients and protect the people working there.

You just do.

And someone needs to be responsible and answer to that.

The patients will try to get Yale to answer to that.

And so will we.

That's next week on episode four of The Retrievals, a production of Serial Productions in the New York Times.