Following Ana’s death, police take Carl in for questioning. He has scratches on his face. His story is inconsistent, yet he maintains his innocence. In this episode, we rewind and take a look back at Carl’s history and his relationship with Ana and try to understand what led to that night.
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Pushkin that this show contains adult language and occasional descriptions of violence. Please keep that in mind when choosing when and where to listen. Previously on Death of an Artist. She was very magnetic, but she was also very very argumentative, and so often people would end up in a fight with her. Yeah, Carl, Carl can be really quite nice and wonderful, except when he drinks too much, he becomes the doctor jacquet Worth emergency. Yeah. Yes, my wife has committed suicide. We had a chorl about the fact that I was more exposed to the public. That she went to the bedroom and I went after her, and she went out of the window. In twenty fourteen, I made a pilgrimage to one of the holy sites of the art world, Dia Beacon. DIA is a sprawling museum housed in an old Nibisco factory in New York's Hudson River Valley. It holds one of the most impressive collections of minimal and conceptual art in the world. The work is always perfectly installed, the vibe is one of purity, more than anywhere else in the country. DIA stands for the belief that art speaks for itself. That it doesn't need institutional interpretation. There are no wall labels, no bells and whistles designed to lure people in. It's a place for true believers, for artists, and for hardcore art lovers like myself to go and look. It's a place for art for art's sake. DIA had just opened the first ever American retrospective of one of the fathers of minimalism, Carl Andre. I was in the midst of being courted for my dream job, a chief curator position in my favorite American city, Los Angeles. His fate would have it, it turned out that the person doing the courting was also the person responsible for the Carl Andre retrospective at DIA, so it seemed like a good idea to see the show. I entered an enormous open gallery. It was filled with both natural daylight and Andre's minimal sculptures metal plates arranged in a checkerboard pattern on the refurbished hardwood floors. It was breathtaking. There were large rectangular pieces of cedars stacked in piles that resembled staircases, a large table dotted with little sculptures made of assembled bits and bobs, all with witty titles, terse poems typed in caps on an old typewriter, or handwritten in block mechanical lettering on graph paper, each letter perfectly occupying one square. After I got my bearings, I asked one of the security guards where the start of the exhibition was. He said there wasn't one. You could just start wherever. I was a little disappointed. I love a story with a beginning, middle, and end. As I resigned myself to just wandering around, my ego was too busy fantasizing about that job in La to give room to any of the questions in the back of my mind. What happens when the art and ideas we once thought were radical suddenly seemed stayed conventional, old fashioned? Even did a man like Andrea deserve to be celebrated, worshiped, even at a place like Dia? And what about Anamndieta. I might have been avoiding these questions, but other people were asking them, and they were angry. I'm your host, Helen Molesworth and from Pushkin Industries, something Else and Sony Music Entertainment. This is Death of an Artist, Episode two. What the Wall label Doesn't tell You? After Carl called nine one one. The police showed up, expecting to find the aftermath of a suicide, but when they arrived things seemed off. The brought Carl to the station, where two detectives began questioning him. Detective Richard Nieves still remembers it. What he said to nine to eleven was different than he told us in the nine one one call. Carl had told the operator that he and Anna had had a fight about who was more famous, and then he said, quote, I went after her and she went out the window. But now he told us that he didn't know what happened to her. She just disappeared with two detectives in front of him. He said he'd stayed up watching TV after Anna went to bed, and that when he went into the bedroom to join her, he realized she was not in the apartment. No mention of any argument. We confronted him on that that he had two different stories, and he just said, well, I said what I said, and that was it. It's like he was trying maybe to tell us that, you know, just take my word for it and shut up, and that's it. That's all I'm going to say. Meanwhile, an officer got a statement from the doorman of a nearby building. He had been on his way to get some coffee at the deli below Carl's high rise apartment. That's when he heard a woman's voice pleading no, no, no, from somewhere above. A few seconds later, the doorman heard what sounded like an explosion. The deli night manager said he heard it too, but it sounded more like a thud, something landing on the roof of the deli. Anna had fallen. And then there were the scratches. Nievis and his colleague, a veteran detective named Ron Finelli, asked Carl about a scratch on his nose. Carl said it had happened over a week ago. He said that a straw gust of wind when he was out in the terrorist said, shoved the door into his face. But you know, a week ago we would have been scabbed and tried. But that the scratch, it looked pretty new to me. Carl, still at the police station, agreed to return to his apartment with the detectives. Detective Nieves noticed that the bedroom was in disarray, an overturned chair, tossled bedclothes, and in the kitchen there were several empty wine and champagne bottles, and one other thing stood out for Detective Nieves, the window sill. The weather was pretty high. I understand that she was a short woman, and in order for her to jump, she would have had to go upon a chair on the edge of the bed but accidentally fall from that. Now it's it's unless she was setting up there, which I understand that she was afraid of heights, so us that was not possible. As they spoke, Carl offered to show the dectives a catalog of his work. I just looked at it, and he was proud of it, and you know, and he was saying that he was more successful than she was. But then again, he was older and he had many, you know, more years of experience. The crime scene squad dusted for prints and took photographs. Carl asked the cops if he could make some phone calls, and then he phoned several friends to cancel dinner plants. At no point did Carl attempt to call on his family to break the news. By this time, the two detectives were starting to feel like they had a murder on their hands. I knew he was guilty. He was just covering up. He was guilty of just kind of picking her up and just you know, just throwing her out the window. She landed in between the Delhi and the Chinese takeout. It may have been the crime scene unit that said if she fell, she would have fell here, not over there. The police decided to take Carl back to the station for more questioning. Word began to spread that something terrible had happened to Anna and that Carl was about to be arrested. A group of Carl's close friends, many of whom were major players in the art world, sprung into action. Toby We went to a police station to ask what had happened, not just myself, but various and sundry other friends. That's Lawrence Wiener, tall, bird, thin, notoriously funny, a man who almost always had a cigarette in either his mouth or his hand. He was a much loved conceptual artist and one of Carl's oldest friends. He helped Carl find a lawyer, any lawyer, and fast. Ultimately, there would be three different lawyers who would come to Carl's aid. First up was Jerry Rosam. Lawyers like want to get their nose into the tent as soon as possible. He would trying to get control of the case. I didn't have that, you know feeling, is it thought that that here was a really important artist in need of some kind of help. At the police station, an assistant DA had shown up, a young woman named Martha Bashford. She made sure Carl understood his rights, requested photography of the scratches not only on his face, but on his upper left arm as well, and asked if he would be willing to have their conversation videotaped. Just then, Carl's lawyer showed up. My advice to the Carl was to not go any further with any video statements. From a legal point of view, I thought that he would wasn't appropriate for him to do. Carl took his lawyer's advice and declined to make a videotape statement. He also said he didn't want to be photographed. When the assistant DA heard Carl was refusing both a video statement and having his picture taken, that's when Marsh I've said, f you if he's under arrest now. He didn't have a choice, and the detective found another scratch, this time on his back, right below his neck. After pictures were taken, Carl was arraigned and sent to Rikers. Meanwhile, his lawyers were already working to bail him out. And I just made an argument that he was a very famous artist, and they had like a half million dosworth of art in New York, and that all of this was substantial collateral. That basically there was no way for him to go into hiding because he was such a public person, even though you're a judge had probably never heard of him, but you're this is an esoteric art, world contemporary art. So I was able to portray that to the judge. Of the judge set Bay Twitter fifty thousand dollars, Carl's second lawyer, Jerry Ordivar, was tasked with getting a quarter million dollars of bail money. They called someone who liew of Andre and would be sympathetic and who would have the funds or the cloud to get the funds. The turn to fifty thousand dollars and he called his bank and they delivered a check to me. That person was Carl's equally famous friend, the legendary painter Frank Stella. Stella had made history with a game changing suite of black paintings made by dipping your average hardware store brush into a can of house paint and then meticulously covering the canvas with stripes of black paint. Both Andrea and Stella had attended the same prep school, though their friendship started in earnest when they moved to New York in hopes of becoming artists. Stella was rich and famous, and in this instance he was also generous and loyal. He worked with some of Carl's other friends to gather the bail money as fast as possible, and so the lawyer headed to Rikers to pick up Carl along with a two hundred and fifty thousand dollar check and two passengers, artist Lawrence Weiner and the renowned art dealer Paula Cooper. Paula was and still is Carl's gallerist more than anyone else. Paula was the person who made sure that Carl had a place to show his work to the public and to sell it to maintain his livelihood. She's legendary because she was the first person to set up shop in Soho, and she's always been beloved by artists because of her commitment to new ideas. Carl waited in a cell away from the general population, special treatment because of his art world fame. They bailed him out, and Lawrence Weener recalled the somber drive back from jail. There's four people sitting in a car in absolute shock. The truth was just the most horrendous situation. No, Carl is a very private man, and the only thing he ever expressed to me was this deep sense of loss that Anna wasn't there. According to Lawrence, there was no discussion about what happened to Anna. I don't intrude on my friends, and that's not the kind of thing you can intrude on it. There are two questions. You asked, you know what happened, and somebody says no, and then they say that there's a deep sense of loss. They really are totally broken up about it. And that's the end of it. What else is there to say, I confess this comment stuns me. This instinct to be silent, to never talk about it, to sweep it under the rug, to think there's nothing more to discuss. I find this disturbed because silence would ultimately be Carl's legal strategy, and it's set the template for the art world silence in the decades that followed. To understand how Carl came to have friends with two hundred and fifty thousand dollars in their back pocket, lawyers at the ready, and then know how to get their friends sprung from jail before you had to spend too many hours at rikers. I'm going to have to take you back to the beginning. I'll tell you the story the way Carl told it in an interview for Art Forum. I was born in Quincy, Massachusetts, many many years ago. I always liked art class. Whenever I said that to my parents, boy, I loved art class, and my father was thinking, of course, let's clay. Carl's father was an immigrant from Sweden who worked as a marine raftsman at Quincy's famous shipyards. He read poetry at the dinner table and forbade his wife to work. Carl described his childhood playing in the salt marshes of northern Massachusetts as quote almost Ferrell. He excelled in his public elementary school and earned himself a full scholarship to one of the East Coast's most prestigious private schools, Phillips and Over Academy. Even though Frank Stella was one of cars Phillips Academy classmates, they didn't meet until after Carl moved to New York in nineteen fifty seven. Frank even let Carl use his studio for a while. Around this time, Carl was mostly writing poetry and made his living working on freight trains. His four year stint working the railroad, his friendship with Frank Stella, and his childhood and Quincy would all become part of his legend. Here he is reading one of his poems. He has Quincy Index one, a list of words describing his birthplace. Abigail Academy, Adams, Adams, Adams, Adams, Adams, Adams, Adams, Adams, Adams, Adams, Adams, Artery, Atlantic Bay, Bethlem Black's Blue, Boston, Brave, broad Book. Carl wrote poetry throughout his career, but it would be the sculpture that really got him noticed. Here he is in a documentary about minimalism. He's the first of eleven artists, all white, all men. He explains how he finds materials to put together, usually sometime once a day. I'm walking along Mercy Street, walking between the post office and the gallery. We see Carl walking in a relatively derelict street in Soho, which in the nineteen sixties was still a light manufacturing neighborhood, not yet home to fancy renovated lofts and the art galleries of the nineteen eighties or the glorified shopping mall it's become today. While walking, Carl finds five or six rectangular metal plates, which he assembles into a line on the pavement. Now, this is absolutely like gold. Define these because these are the materials of which I actually make my sculptures. I really like the elements, the aluminum and copper, magnesium and steel and lead and zinc. As we watch him nudge the plates into alignment with his foot, we see the new art and the new artist at work. Nothing is fixed, no bolts, no welding. The pieces are simply placed or stacked. Everything can be picked up and moved around. Nothing is permanent. The act of assembling the work and the act of walking on it or looking at it are almost the same. All of the acts ask you to think about the space you are in and how that space exists, both before and after your arrival and departure. This refusal to make anything like a monument, or anything permanent, or anything that related to what things looked like before was completely mind blowing for folks inside the art world. I remember in sixty five having a real epiphany. I warked into the galler and there were piles of bricks on the floor, and I thought, oh, oh, there's some construction going on. And I started to leave the gallery and then I thought, wait a minute, what if it's art? And I went and aft and it went art, and I got so excited. It was like a like a revolutionary moment. This is Peter Sheldall, who, even at eighty years old, as the enthusiasm and sprightly energy of a teenager. He's the renowned art critic for The New Yorker, though back then he was mostly writing for The Village Voice. It was literal in the world, real stuff, you know. Form was condensed to tidiness, and it was about me. It was about my presence barking around these things. It was such a cleanliness and dignity and insolence about it. I got a sense of a revolution and that I was here at the start. It was something that shifted, shifted to culture. You know. I was like a pivot and nothing that's quite the same afterwards. That's high praise coming from someone who saw almost every exhibition there was to see in New York during the nineteen sixties and seventies. But then Peter actually met Carl when I'm matt him did not like him. You know what he would say, Prima Donna and a bully. In the before times, like before the Internet, even the New York art world basically revolved around a handful of bars and restaurants in Lower Manhattan. Bars such as the Cedar Tavern and Max's Kansas City regularly get name checked in the art history books. The basic template remained the same. An art bar is a kind of divy bar where you just show up and know that folks would be there. In my day, it was the Shark Bar on Prince Street. Once they're people, okay, mostly men, raged on about this that or the other art theory and so and so's latest exhibition or whatever exhibition review had been published in last week's New York Times. Bars were where high stakes ideas and strongly held feelings got mixed with politics and booze to get sorted out in a major way. And so at one of these art bars Peter and Carl met. I started talking to him, and he said, you're like Frank O'Hara, right, Frank O'Hara was a prominent poet as well as a young curator at the Museum of Modern Art. And then he started running down Frank O'Hara, and I gave him the finger and laid my finger up an indoctive nose, and you know, and I'm still marveling that he didn't kill me. I mean he could have. He was a strong man. I mean, it's right, and I was. I was a skinny poet and we were drunk. I was drunk. Did you continue to see andre in bars? I see him, but but not not talked to him. Disavoided him. You avoided it. Real Peter's version of the nineteen sixties art world sounds like West Side Story, complete with rival art gangs scoping out different parts of SOHO, and much of the action took place at Max's Kansas City. The division was between the Warhole people and the minimalist people. The minimalist people were on the front along the bar, and the Warhole people were in the back room. And I could say that going in was like walking past heavy metal to Strawberry Shortcake. And I went to the Warhold people. I'm not sure how much the Insider Baseball is translating here, so for those of you who aren't up to speed on your art world posses. Shortcake refers to Warhole's notoriously Swiss friends as they were called back in the day, meaning gay people and anyone on the fringe of white masculinity circa nineteen sixty You went to the Shortcake, Yeah, well, I mean it was I felt comfortable there. All the minimums are ashall Robert's mission, well, Donald, Judge, Jesus, Hey, I'll accept shallow wit who was an angel in human form. What a wonderful guy. Okay, back to the main story. The other thing Carl was getting noticed for were his politics. He was an important member of the art Workers Coalition. Art historian Julia Brian Wilson describes it this way. Artworkers Coalition was a brief lived artists rights organization that came together in nineteen sixty nine, originally around issues of kind of artists rights visa VI the museum and the institution. Does the museum have the right to display an artist's work in a way that the artist doesn't want or intent, and very quickly demanded a whole slate of things that included more representation around African American artists and Puerto Rican artists. Carl was known as the resident Marxist of the group. He was the one who seemed to have actually read Carl Marx. I probably first read Carl's Artworkers Coalition Statement and grad school, and I'm just as enthralled with it now as I was then. It's so badass. The problem, he says, is not museums, but this baggy thing called the art world, a world he thinks should cease to exist. No galleries standing in between the artist and the collector, no critic in between the artists and the public, just artists making work for themselves and anyone else who shows up with interest and curiosity. Written in nineteen sixty nine, it's still a kind of utopia I could get behind. The Fact is Carl might not have always been well liked, but damn if he didn't have good politics. There was Carl the anti war activist and Carl the Artworker's Coalition activist, and there was also the Carl who sent checks to feminist causes. Between his groundbreaking work, his sharp tongue, and that he showed at the trailblazing Paula Cooper Gallery. All of this contributed to a reputation that was hard to be denied. But Carl's official biography, the one that would appear in every exhibition catalog about his work, started and stopped with Quincy and the railroad job. And this is pretty much the standard of how artists were discussed, birthplace, school, other important men they knew, with little to no mention of the wives, lovers, or children they spent their lives with. Carl Andre spent six years of his life with Anna Mendieta. Anna was born into a well to do family in Havana. Both of her parents, Ignacio and Raquel, came from political families dotted with generations of military men and politicians. Her father, a lawyer, carried on this tradition and was an early supporter of Fidel Castro. Their house in Havana bustled with extended family and maids and cooks. They spent a lot of time at a family beach house that has been called a mansion. It was in Varadero Beach, a long stretch of white sand that has been a resort destination for decades. Her friend Talia Delgado, whose family socialized with the Mendiettas in Varadero remembered it this way. I remember going to the beach to Bararedo, where her family used to also go. Our lives were pretty easy, filled with a lot of caretakers, an extended family, and Anna's outspokenness. Well apparently that started pretty early. She was very, very strong, determined person, even as a child. I remember telling me that whenever her parents had a fight, she would go in and spreak it up and say, I don't want to hear any more of this, because if you fight, you're going to break up, and if you break up, it's going to be terrible for me and for my siblings. So you have to really keep it together and work this out. This idyllic childhood would not last. This was the scene of turmoil in the capital Havana as the climax of revolution was reached. Anyone suspect of sympathy for the Bautista regime came in for a rough time. In nineteen fifty nine, when Anna was eleven years old, Fidel Castro's Revolutionary Army forced President Bautista out of power. At first, Anna's father was swept up in the new wave of optimism and possibility that Castro represented, and he secured his place in the new government. However, as Castro began to crack down on Cubans with ties to American businesses, Ignazio Mendieta came under fire. The collective promise that was made was slowly being taken over by a very autocratic managerial policy. This is Tanya Brigera, a Cuban artist, an activist. You've heard her as our voice of Anna, but she's also something of an expert about Cuba's autocratic policies. She's been detained several times by the Cuban authorities because of her art and her activism. At some point, Castro started deciding thing without consulting anybody. He started, you know, having an autonomy that you should not have the president. He was very clear from the nineteen fifty nine that it was with him or against him. While Anna's father maintained public support for Castro, he refused to join the Communist Party and ultimately became an elite counter revolutionary, working clandestinely to challenge Castro's power. Anna and her sister rat Clean followed in his footsteps, going so far as to hand out anti Castro leaflets. This is what Anna told a reporter in one of her very few filmed interviews Miami. Tanya translates, my grandmama politicized me since I was a younger in Cardines. She always told me all the war stories, all this story of Cuba, everything about that side of the family. By nineteen sixty, things were starting to get dangerous for the Mendietta family. Ultimately, Ignazio would be arrested and sentenced to twenty years in prison. But right before that happened, the family made the difficult decision to send Anna and her sister to the United States as part of a secret Cold War program that sent Cuban children to America. On his mother pregnant with her third child, her husband and trouble stayed behind. Please, he's from Cuba. He's going to stay here a WHI. It's a refugee camp. He's a refugee. The audio you're hearing is from a film made by the US government designed to explain to thousands of Cuban children why their parents had sent them away. When you are sending away to school for the first time, or you go away to come, everything is strange. Every body's strange. This is just an in between plays, or you wait until they find you a foster home. Somewhere in the United Anna and Raclean joined the fourteen thousand other children flown to the US as part of Operation Peter Pan. Where they landed was a far cry from never never Land. The sisters boarded a plane in tropical, cosmopolitan Havana. They eventually ended up in the flat, cold corn fields of Iowa and were immediately sent to a Catholic orphanage. They get off the plane in Iowa and this priest comes on to tell them how they're very lucky to be in the United States, and the United States has a lot of development. For example, he said, look at this, we have ballot pans. And Anna and her sister looked at each other like, oh my god, where we ended up. I mean, they knew all about poppointments in Cuba, and they were just really shocked by the lack of knowledge really of who these kids were and where they were coming from. It's hard to imagine these two sisters ripped from their beach house, their big extended family, their social status, and suddenly placed in an orphanage organized by age, which meant they were immediately separated. The sisters were shuffled through a few different foster homes and a boarding school, all of which made the temporary separation from their parents feel more and more permanent. This displacement, as emotional as it was physical, would have a profound effect. Here's Anna's friend be Ruby Rich. She's lied to about where she and her sister are being sent. They are both lied to about being kept together. They're allied to about going to a home like their own. They're allied to about everything, and over and over, every time they moved, they allied to again. So she not only has no control as a child, but she is absolutely betrayed as a child repeatedly. And I think that must have left a really deep mark. Years later, Anna described the long lasting effect of this displacement to a group of college students. Here's Tanya Brigera voicing Anna again, since I left Cuba when I was twelve because of the political situation there, that mark has marked, you know, an aspect of my life, so that I have failed, that I was torn away from the womb, from the modern land. Miraculously, despite all of this trauma, both sisters managed to graduate from high school and by the time their mother and little brother joined them nineteen sixty six, Anna had already discovered her calling. She wanted to be an artist. I think also that she's intoxicated by art making. I think it delivers her to herself in a way that nothing else had. And I think she's able there to put together all the different parts of her personality and her life and make something powerful out of that. And she'd been powerless, very powerless for a very key part of her life, and I think that part of her really needed filling up with its opposite. What happened next was one of those plot twists that can only be called fate. On a transferred to the University of Iowa, where against all the odds, she ended up enrolled in one of the most avant garde art departments in the country, led by a guy named Hans Brader. Brader came out of a super radical group of performance artists, and he was inviting all of the most cutting edge people from New York to come in lecture at the university. Brader's radical program was like a portal to another world, and Anna went right through it. He identified her energy immediately and the two became lovers yep. Anna was that girl, the super smart one, the wild one, the one that slept with the teacher. But their thing was no flash in the pam. They stayed together for years. While she was in Iowa, she moved from painting to performance. She said paintings were an illusion. They weren't real enough for her. What was real to her was trying to figure out the violence of the world around her, specifically the rape and murder that had recently happened on campus. In one performance, she invited viewers into her apartment where she was stripped down, bent over a table, and covered with animal blood. She was just as radical as the artist from New York, and that's where she was headed. In January of nineteen seventy eight, Anna moved to New York City. Hans helped her get situated by introducing her to artists, one of whom was the filmmaker Ella Troyano. Here's how Ella remembered Anna when she first arrived in Manhattan. I remember she had this notebook where she was so worried about money that she was writing down in a column every single thing that she spent money on. Every day. Anna Wood brag that she furnished her entire apartment with stuff she found on the street. Mattress and all her early years in New York were a whirlwind. She worked whatever job she could to make ends meet, and she was slowly gaining traction in the art world, appearing in group shows, making all the right connections, and eventually she met Carl. Here's ele Troiano again. You've got somebody who is in the city who totally believes an art, who is very, very poor, is working her ass off to get to situations where she can meet people that can give her a show, and she does everything right. And here is somebody all of a sudden, who, by the way, looks a little bit like Hans Braider. Looking at pictures of Carl and Hans, you can clearly see that Anna had a type. They were both stocky and bearded, bearish kind of men. When Carl came courting, some of Anna's friends even called him Hans of the East. And you know, Hans was a sweetheart, but Carl was less of a sweetheart and more of an unlikely lefario. One reporter even called him one of the art world's most notorious womanizers. You know, this guy is now wooing her the way he loves wooing with champagne, expensive dinners. And this is somebody who's writing down I have ten cents that I used to put on a stamp or whatever. That's enticing. But it wasn't just the bubbly and the coin. Carl had something much more important to offer an artist newly arrived in the city. Carl had an entry into every gallery and every museum. But I do think that she really loved him, and she thought that she knew who he was. While Carl and on his relationship went up and down, on his career was on a steady climb. She'd been getting good teaching gigs, and she was starting to win awards and grants, and then she won the prestigious pre Drome, a fellowship that came with an all expensive paid apartment and studio in Italy. It was almost too good to be true. She moved to Rome and October nineteen eighty three and immediately took to it. She loved her life in Rome. She told me that she felt that finally she could put together New York and Cuba, and it was called Roma. This is be Ruby rich again. She had so much nerve. I mean, she would pretty much do anything she wanted to do. She was not a fearful person, except interestingly when it came to heights. I want to pause here. This seems like a negligible detail, but Honest's sphere of heights would become an important part of the story. Everyone seemed to have a story about how afraid she was, But the anecdote that would make it to trial was from Marcia Pelle's, one of Anna's friends in Rome. Marsha learned about Honna's sphere of heights when they were hiking up to a friend's house at the top of a hill. She described what happened on a true crime show called City Confidential. And we start to walk up and the ocean is like a five Depp cut there, and this just a little thing of cactus. There's no fencer or anything. And we start to walk and she started to because she starts to completely freak out. And I had no idea what was wrong. And she said, I can't do this. I'm an agrophobiac. I'm petrified of heights. I can't get near the edge. So the idea that Anna had voluntarily climbed up onto the windowsill of an apartment on the thirty fourth floor. The people who knew Anna best were not buying it. Next time, on Death of an Artist, I thought it is better to tell him and say, look, I want a divorce. It never occurred to me that he would kill her. I wrote the article on the first anniversary of her death to raise the profile of the case again and make it too embarrassing for the district attorney to draw the case. At one point it was what they believe was a feminist cabal were about to get it. Sometimes people would scream at you on the street. I used jilled at him that he was a murderer. Death of an Artist is a co production between Pushkin Industries, Something Else and Sony Music Entertainment, Written and hosted by me Helen Mouldsworth. Executive producers are Lizzie Jacobs, Tom kinnig Leetel Mulad, Jacob Weissberg and Lucas Werner. Produced by Maria Luisa Tucker, editing by Lizzie Jacobs. Our managing producer is Jacob Smith. Associate producers are Pooge Rue and Eloise Linton. Additional production helped by Tally Abacassas Annamandieto's quotes were read by Tanya Brigera, engineered by Sam Baar, fact checking by Andrea Lopez Crusado. Our theme song is by Pooge Rue. If you love this show, consider subscribing to pushkin Plus to listen early, add free and get exclusive bonus content. Look for the Pushkin Plus channel on Apple Podcasts or at pushkin dot fm. Find more great podcasts from Sonymusic Entertainment at sonymusic dot com. Backslash Podcasts