Former Illinois Gov. Rod Blagojevich told an ethics class at Southern Illinois University Carbondale this month that he was the victim of an establishment “trying to bury me and bury the truth…The whole thing was a political prosecution.”

And he wants retribution. He told the students he hoped to see, “Everyone who framed me go right the fuck to jail.” 

The House impeached Blagojevich 114-1 in 2009. The Senate removed him and barred him from ever holding office in Illinois, voting 59-0. Famed federal prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald charged him with multiple pay-to-play crimes and a jury convicted him. Judge James B. Zagel sentenced him to 14 years in prison, saying Blagojevich has caused an “erosion of public trust in government.” Zagel died last year.

At one point Blagojevich publicly apologized. “I was the governor and I should have known better.” But there were no apologies in his talk to the students.

Blagojevich blasted “weaponized prosecutors acting as political hit men….When you don’t go with the establishment they will destroy you,” he maintained. He described the establishment as the “lobbyist-industrial complex and military-industrial complex” working in conjunction with the media.

But he’s grateful he was the “recipient of a miracle.” He called Donald Trump the “instrument” of the miracle. “That my life intersected with Donald’s was the hand of God,” he said of the man who commuted his sentence in 2020 after he served eight years.

Blagojevich made the remarks earlier this month in a media ethics class taught by Molly Parker, an investigative reporter for Capitol News who is a fellow at ProPublica and assistant professor in SIU’s School of Journalism and Advertising.

Through much of the hour-long question and answer session on Zoom, a youthful-looking Blagojevich held forth with the gregarious, cheerful banter he often displayed on the campaign trail. He made sure to ask each student’s name and addressed each by his or her first name as he concluded each of his often lengthy answers.

Blagojevich told the SIU students he was afraid his obituary would start with the statement picked up on government wiretaps about how he handled the replacement of the Senate seat that Barack Obama vacated after he was elected president in 2008.

 “I’ve got this thing, and it’s fucking golden; I’m just not giving it up for fucking nothing,” he was recorded saying.

Blagojevich told the class he had not been talking about selling the seat, just getting a political advantage for it. He intimated that Obama and Obama aides knew what he was doing – hastening to add that Obama did nothing wrong, just as he claimed he hadn’t.

He complained that Judge Zagel had kept him from playing portions of the wiretaps that he said demonstrated he was engaging the usual political horse-trading, not corruption.

In his eight years in prison he pulled together a rock band – G Rod and the Jailhouse Rockers – worked out until he could bench press 180 pounds and read the Bible every day. He said he knows all eight verses of Jailhouse Rock. “I had the years to learn them,” he joked.

He attributes his “miracle” release from prison to his daily prayers and a 2010 appearance on Trump’s Celebrity Apprentice show in which he became acquainted with the president-to-be. Trump told a disappointed Blagojevich at the time that he had “great respect for your tenacity” but fired him anyway.    

“Trump is actually a kind guy.” Blagojevich told the SIU students. “He was kind to my little girls,” he said.

Nevertheless he said he had to guilt trip his girls into voting for Trump in 2020. Asked how he and his family adjusted to his return, he said, he sometimes had trouble understanding his daughters, who grew up while he was in prison.  “I can’t get them to kiss me.”

Blagojevich helped inmates on their legal appeals while in prison “We have a system of justice that does great injustice,” he said. “Joe Biden was an architect of the infamous 1996 crime bill and (Sen. Richard) Durbin voted for it,” he said, repeating an attack Trump has made about Biden recently as he has talked about retribution against prosecutors. Blagojevich said he has kept in touch with Trump.

“I feel blessed, he added. “Those were ugly dark years (in prison) but I came of them stronger….I feel so much closer to God, benefitting from reading the Bible…I’m giving myself marks for being a bad ass and never giving into those guys.”

(For this reporter, watching Blagojevich banter with the students was a reminder of a day 22 years ago when a then young Blagojevich walked into the St. Louis Post-Dispatch editorial meeting room seeking the paper’s endorsement for governor. He immediately named the starting lineup of the 1964 World Champion St. Louis Cardinals, warming up the baby boomers he was charming. We wrote an endorsement editorial for Blagojevich’s Republican rival, Attorney General Jim Ryan – an unexpected choice for the liberal paper.)

William H. Freivogel is a former editorial page deputy editor for the St. Louis Post-Dispatch and contributes to St. Louis Public Radio. He is a member of the Missouri Bar. He is the publisher of Gateway Journalism Review.

Photographer Bill Putnam was searching palm groves along the arching river of the Tigris south of Baghdad in 2004 when the Iraqi soldiers with the U.S. Army unit he was embedded with started to drop. The sun was harsh and the air was thick with humidity that July day, 20 years ago. Patrolling under the weight of 70 pounds of kit, body armor and weaponry created the perfect environment for heat exhaustion. Putnam pointed his camera.

The black and white photo he made is a swirl of blurred motion. The Iraqi soldier is pulled onto a stretcher by firm hands surrounding him. It wasn’t until Putnam returned to the U.S. military base later that day that he learned it was over 140 degrees Fahrenheit.

The image is part of “The Burn Pit: Iraq, 2004-2006,” a documentary project consisting of roughly 250 digital and 150 film photos that Putnam made as an Army photographer and  later as a freelance photojournalist in Iraq, one of a generation of journalists for whom Iraq and Afghanistan remains a defining moment even two decades later.

It was even more so perhaps for Putnam, a U.S. Army veteran who returned to Iraq and then later went to Afghanistan as a civilian documenting war. 

Now, 49, Putnam works in public affairs in the Chicago field office of the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs. He wanted to make clear the project is not tied to his current job with the VA. 

The images that are part of his collection, which will launch on Instagram on March 10, consist of the everyday environments and humanity within a country at war . Over the span of the next two years, Putnam intends to share his project, one photo at a time, on the 20th anniversary that each shot was captured. 

The Burn Pit is not only a project of personal healing but also a reminder of the legacy of the Iraq war and those who witnessed it. 

“It’s on the forefront of my mind. It’s still there,” Putnam said. “I just want people to see these images and realize that we were there, and we still are.” 

Putnam began his military career as an active duty soldier in the Army in 1995, transitioning into the role of a public affairs specialist in 1999. He was deployed to Kosovo in 1999 and 2001. Columnist and former Lieutenant Colonel Peter Molin, who served as an executive officer of an infantry battalion Putnam worked with during his second deployment to Kosovo, appreciated the emotion and intimacy within his photography. 

“I think his heart is in the right place. He’s passionate about soldiers and helping soldiers,” Molin said. “He’s gotten a fair amount of acclaim for his pictures, but I think he deserves even more.” 

In 2003, Putnam worked as a specialist at the Pentagon, where he observed the initial invasion of Iraq. It wasn’t long after that Putnam was deployed to join his unit. 

“It was a weird dynamic to be in because there was conflict, like gun fights and IEDs,” Putnam said, referring to improvised explosive devices or homemade bombs. “But on the same day you could go out and play soccer and hand seeds out to farmers.” 

The project is not meant to be political, Putnam said. But there is ongoing legislation and lawsuits surrounding the burn pits, the open-air garbage piles where waste was burned with jet fuel around military bases in Iraq and Afghanistan. In 2021, the VA formally recognized several respiratory conditions and rare cancers linked to the largely incinerators with the PACT Act.

Putnam himself was affected by the burn pits when he was stationed at Forward Operating Base Falcon, a downwind base in southwest Baghdad.

Journalist and former NPR correspondent Sean Carberry said that the title of the project will hit home for a lot of veterans.

Carberry met Putnam at a memorial service for mutual friend NPR photojournalist David Gilkey in 2016. He described Putnam’s work as powerful and immediately recognizable. 

“The expressions, actions, emotions and circumstances are all vividly conveyed,” Carberry said. “You can see when someone cares about the people that they’re covering. There’s a strong humanity to his work.” 

Photography as a medium is in a state of constant reinvention, as technology paves the way for transformative iterations to take place in a way that wasn’t possible 20 years ago. Putnam was one of the first war photographers to embrace an iPhone in the field, to use the device in a purposeful way to make images and art.

Gregory Foster-Rice, an associate professor who teaches photo history at Columbia College Chicago, described Instagram as a forum of publication as ephemeral. While artists may find social media as a very accessible space for their work, it’s also very disposable in the way that the algorithm is designed. 

“Using Instagram is that idea of going straight into the new current channel of transmission, which is the internet.” Foster-Rice said. “They’re leaning into the present moment of how people experience photography.” 

As his deployment to Iraq was ending he ran into Time magazine bureau chief Michael Ware, who wrote a credential letter to help him return overseas. 

“I went back six months after I came home. My friend had just had his first kid, a week after I got there. I didn’t meet them until they were nine months old.”

Putnam did the math. From 1999 to 2013, 1/3 of that time was spent in numerous combat zones, starting at the age of 24. Armed with an M-16, a DSLR and film camera, Putnam captured the world of joys and hardships around him. He did not take into account that his time overseas as an observer and soldier would be a double edged sword. 

Carberry recognized the conflicting responsibilities that Putnam faced as a combat photographer, describing his work as not only a great challenge but an even greater accomplishment to capture his environment with honesty. 

 “His job was essentially to pull a different trigger, to snap a camera instead of shooting a gun.” Carberry said. “It’s a much tougher spot to be in because you’re in uniform.” 

Within the intensity of these environments of conflict, where does the healing begin? 

Carberry said there is no question that The Burn Pit was a part of Putnam’s healing process, which veterans of Iraq and Afghanistan, like those from Vietnam and even older conflicts, know is a life-long process. War is not something people get over.

For some people within the world of combat journalism, the healing never happens at all, in part, because of their commitment to keeping the stories alive but also because sitting still means processing the events that they had witnessed. Consumers of Putnam’s images will have various reactions based on their relationship to the moment. For Putnam, the moment is deeply embedded. It is personal.

He said the healing journey starts with bits and pieces. “It’s always on my mind in some way. A part of healing is acknowledging it, but also trying to not let it envelop me entirely,” Putnam said. “I was lucky that I managed to get through it all alive. There are people I know who are dead, or broken mentally. Somehow I landed on my feet. Stupid luck on my part.” 

Alina Pawl-Castanon is a Chicago-based photojournalist.

On March 18, Missouri and its legal ally The Gateway Pundit will try to convince the U.S. Supreme Court that the Biden administration violated the First Amendment by “coercing” social media companies to “censor” false conservative posts on vaccine and election denial.

The argument comes less than a month after the Feb. 26 argument in which a majority of the justices appeared to think the First Amendment editorial rights of the social media companies were violated by 2021 Florida and Texas laws restricting the companies from taking down false posts.

The two cases together are widely viewed as the most consequential First Amendment cases about the internet in the 27 years since an exuberant Supreme Court declared the internet was the modern “town square.”

The decades since that 1997 Reno v. ACLU decision have shown that town square was too sedate a metaphor for what has become a ubiquitous, powerful communications device that reaches into every family’s home, purse and pocket.

The press in 1791, when the nation added the First Amendment to the Constitution, had its ugly side with partisan newspaper editors saying nasty things about Thomas Jefferson and John Adams. But the men with the wigs could not have foreseen in their wildest dreams what would happen to the world when everyone had a printing press in his or her pocket. For that matter, the Supreme Court in the Reno decision about the public square had no clue what lay directly ahead.

Media scholars in the early days of the internet dreamed about the internet democratizing the media and looked forward to reader comments on news stories providing immediate citizen feedback to professional journalists. Now many publications spend time blocking or editing rude, racist, misogynist and false posts and pundits worry about the future of democracy in the internet age.

At the center of the February argument on the Florida and Texas laws was whether “censorship” was the right word for the process of social media companies applying their content moderation policies to identify and remove false or dangerous posts.  

Congress shall make no law

Justices Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito, the two most consistently conservative justices, said censorship was exactly the right word. 

“Can you give me one example of a case in which we said that the First Amendment protects the right to censor?” asked Thomas.

Justice Alito chimed in suggesting that “content moderation” is “actually… a euphemism for censorship?”

But Justices Brett Kavanaugh, Amy Coney Barrett and Chief Justice John Roberts -— whom Thomas and Alito would need to convince to build a majority — did not agree. 

They pointed out that the First Amendment protects against government censorship, not private restrictions on speech.

Kavanaugh pointed to a series of cases “which emphasize editorial control as being fundamentally protected by the First Amendment.”

Barrett said “it all turns” on whether the social media platforms are exercising “editorial control” in which case they are acting like newspapers – not like telephone companies as the states had suggested.

The chief justice pointed out that because social media companies are not bound by the First Amendment “they can discriminate against particular groups that they don’t like.”

Missouri and The Gateway Pundit

In the March case, Missouri Attorney General Andrew Bailey is making common cause with Jim Hoft, the right-wing publisher of The Gateway Pundit, the St. Louis internet site that is highly influential in far-right circles. The publication currently faces a defamation suit in St. Louis for claiming that two Georgia poll workers stuffed ballot boxes in the 2020 election – claims that Congress’s Jan. 6 investigation found to be false and to have subjected the women to so many threats that one had to move out of her home.

The Gateway Pundit, is among the most notorious purveyors of disinformation in the country.  As this GJR profile from 2021 reported, Hoft has been a champion of right-wing  conspiracy theories for nearly 20 years, and, like some others in the field, appears to have made a very good living out of it. 

When former Attorney General Eric Schmitt added Hoft to his lawsuit, former Missouri Supreme Court Justice Michael Wolff told GJR that “by adding Hoft to the case and giving him the state’s imprimatur, Schmitt has essentially normalized him.” 

Bailey, who became attorney general after Schmitt’s election to the Senate, is continuing to include Hoft in his submissions to the Supreme Court. The state’s brief to the court cites the Hunter Biden laptop episode a month before the 2020 election. Federal law enforcement agencies cautioned that the story about the discovery of the laptop might be Russian disinformation. That caused social media companies to take down a Gateway Pundit story. It turned out that the story was not the work of Russian agents. But the event occurred during the Trump administration.

Parades of horribles

Both Missouri and the federal government describe a parade of horribles if its side loses. 

The Biden administration and social media companies argue that “grave harm” could result from the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals decision limiting what federal health and law enforcement officials can tell social media platforms about health risks like Covid and Ebola or safety risks from terrorist threats. (The 5th Circuit heard the case because Louisiana joined Missouri in the suit.)

The lower courts “imposed unprecedented limits on the ability of the President’s closest aides to speak about matters of public concern, on the FBI’s ability to address threats to the Nation’s security, and on CDC’s ability to relay public-health information,” the Biden administration says in its brief to the court.  

This puts “unprecedented limits on the ability of the President’s closest aides to use the bully pulpit to address matters of public concern, on the FBI’s ability to address threats to the Nation’s security, and on the CDC’s ability to relay public-health information at platforms’ request.” The government too has a First Amendment right to speak about dangerously false posts, it argues.

Missouri responded that “the bully pulpit is not a pulpit to bully.” It argued: “This Court has rarely, if ever, faced … a coordinated campaign of this magnitude orchestrated by federal officials that jeopardized a fundamental aspect of American life.” The Biden administration “engaged in a broad pressure campaign designed to coerce social-media companies into suppressing speakers, viewpoints, and content disfavored by the government….The harms that radiate from such conduct…impact every social-media user.”  The government “conduct fundamentally transforms online discourse and renders entire viewpoints on great social and political questions virtually unspeakable on social media, ‘the modern public square.’” 

Missouri maintained that the Biden administration’s communications with social media companies took on a coercive tone, especially when administration officials, unhappy with the slow response of the companies, mentioned at times that the companies could face antitrust legal challenges.

Missouri says the Biden administration pressure campaign began at 1:04 a.m. on Jan. 23. 2021 when the White House flagged an anti-vaccine tweet from Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and called for Twitter to “get moving on the process for having it removed ASAP.”  The White House added, “if we can keep an eye out for tweets that fall in this same ~genre that would be great.”  

Missouri maintains this was the beginning of a campaign of “unrelenting pressure from the most powerful office in the world” to “bend [social-media platforms] to the government’s will.”  This led, Missouri says, to the social media companies eventually taking action against the “Disinformation Dozen” it blamed for 73 percent of misinformation on social media.

Threat to the press and academic researchers?

The Reporters Committee for Freedom of the press, in a friend of the court brief, takes neither side in the argument but warns that a “too-sensitive test for coercion could have two negative consequences.  First, it could lead to the chilling of the free flow of information from government sources to the news media.  Second, it could license…burdensome fishing expeditions for …evidence of collusion between journalists and public officials….Both results would threaten rather than promote the editorial autonomy of a free press,” it says.

Stanford University, which formed the Stanford Internet Observatory to track internet abuses in the areas of child abuse and election misinformation, filed a brief in support of the federal government. The lower court decisions that restricted government speech with social media companies included numerous references to the Stanford researchers who flagged false social media posts. In addition, Hoft, St. Louis’ Gateway Pundit, has sued to hold Stanford liable for violating his First Amendment rights. The suit also asks for a court order cutting off communications between the Stanford program and the government.

The university says, “private research universities like Stanford and their researchers are not state actors subject to constitutional constraints just because they speak to the government about their research. Indeed, the underlying research by Stanford, its communications with the government, and its flagging potentially violative content to social media platforms are all conduct that is itself protected by the First Amendment.”

The Supreme Court decided last October to delay the effect of the 5th Circuit ruling that would have limited government communications with the social media companies. Justices Alito, Thomas and Neil Gorsuch would have allowed the lower court ruling to go into effect. That vote could suggest that the more conservative justices on the court may be split on the two important cases that will influence the future of the internet’s turbulent town square.

William H. Freivogel is a former editorial page deputy editor for the St. Louis Post-Dispatch and contributes to St. Louis Public Radio. He is a member of the Missouri Bar. He is the publisher of Gateway Journalism Review.

Five months after police raided the Marion County Record in Kansas, drawing international media attention, newsrooms across the state are still reeling from the unprecedented seizure of cell phones and computers.

The Aug. 11 raid on the newspaper’s offices was unusual because it involved multiple agencies and included a search of the publisher and editor’s home. Such raids do not happen often and generally do not happen on the scale of the one in Marion, a town of 1,900 people about 150 miles southwest of Kansas City, Missouri. 

“The raid was highly unusual, and that is what made it so shocking when the news broke and chilled newsrooms across the country,” said Lena Shapiro, director of the First Amendment Clinic at the University of Illinois College of Law.

Surveillance video captured agents inside the home of Record editor and publisher Eric Meyer, which he shared with his 98-year-old mother. Joan Meyer, who also worked at the paper, died the next day of cardiac arrest.

“Can you imagine what happens if they’re able to do this and nobody challenges it and nobody hears it?” said Meyer, who delivered the keynote address on Feb. 17 at the Illinois College Press Association conference in Chicago. “We’ve already seen that the bullies don’t stop until they get to a point where it goes over the edge of something.” 

The Colorado Bureau of Investigation is now investigating as well. The Kansas Bureau of Investigation reportedly asked the Colorado Bureau to join the investigation to give an unbiased view. News reports have found that the Kansas Bureau of Investigation knew about the raid before it occurred. 

“I believe the raid has produced a chilling effect on investigative journalism in Kansas,” said Emily Bradbury, executive director for the Kansas Press Association. Until the bureau finishes its report, “we are all doing our jobs while looking over our shoulders.” 

The raid involved a beef between the newspaper and a business woman seeking a liquor license from the city. Police Chief Gideon Cody signed off on the raid maintaining that the newspaper’s search of  the Kansas Department of Revenue’s website amounted to identity theft and a computer crime.

But the newspaper and the paper’s attorney contend Cody was trying to find out what the paper had from his past. Cody left his job as a captain of the Kansas City Police Department while under investigation for making insulting comments to a female officer. Cody took the chief’s job in Marion at lower pay. During the August search, officers found documents relating to Cody’s alleged actions on the Kansas City Department. Last September the Marion City Council suspended Cody and he resigned a week later.

Shapiro said the federal Privacy Protection Act makes it illegal for law enforcement officers or government officials to search a newsroom in connection with a criminal investigation and that the law generally requires the police to proceed using a subpoena, rather than a search warrant, when it seeks information from a reporter or news organization, to help prevent the type of raids that took place in Marion. 

“That procedure enables the newspaper to challenge the demand in court before having to comply,” Shapiro said. “While the law contains some narrow exceptions that permit searches in some extraordinary circumstances, none applied in the Marion case.” 

After news broke of the August raid, more than 30 news and press freedom organizations condemned it.

This was “arguably the biggest press freedom story of the year,” said ICPA’s Immediate Past President Chris Kaergard, who is also a professor in the Communication Department at Bradley University. 

Meyer said the outpouring of support was “just amazing.”

Despite the raid, Meyer said they would not hold the publication of their paper, with the headline “Seized, but not silenced.” It has continued to report on the fallout.

“Come hell or high water, the paper is coming out. It took us two all nighters to give that paper out but we did it at least,” Meyer said. “The key is not to give in.” 

Meyer said keeping public officials accountable is why journalists “do journalism.” 

“This is why we do journalism,” Meyer said. “To challenge public officials because when does it stop? It is important to make sure we have a voice.” 

Maddie Marr, a sophomore mass media and public relations major at Illinois State University,  said it was “motivating” to hear Meyer’s story at the conference, which drew college journalists from across the state. “It made me motivated to just keep writing,” Marr said.

ISU senior journalism major Emma Bratt said she appreciated that Meyer spoke to issues that continue to be relevant to journalists. 

Meyer “gave a lot of insight into real-world problems within journalism,” Bratt said, adding that she will work to apply what Meyer taught into her own work. 

Overall, Meyer said to not underestimate the power of local journalism.

“We are the plankton feeding the whales,” Meyer said. 

Olivia Cohen is a Chicago-based journalist and the editor-in-chief of the Columbia Chronicle at Columbia College Chicago. She has reported for Bloomberg Law, the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel and the Chicago Sun-Times. 

When the Dobbs decision was handed down at the end of June 2022, reversing nearly 50 years of abortion access in this country, I was living in Richmond, Virginia working as a freelance photojournalist. I had recently accepted a new job back in my hometown of Carbondale, Illinois, and I knew Illinois – specifically southern Illinois – would become a major player in America’s new abortion access landscape because of its proximity to the South.  

For women in parts of Missouri, Tennessee, Kentucky, Mississippi, Arkansas, Louisiana and Texas, Illinois became the closest place with abortion services. In the first six months of 2023, the Guttmacher Institute estimates that 45,080 abortions were performed in Illinois. During the six months in 2020 before Roe v. Wade was overturned, only 26,390 abortions were performed in the state. 

Guttmacher research found Illinois had the largest increase, “by far,” in the number of patients traveling from out of state for abortions.

Since summer of 2022, two abortion clinics have opened in Carbondale: Choices Center for Reproductive Health, which relocated from Tennessee, and Alamo Women’s Clinic from New Mexico. I sat in on an interview with Andrea Gallegos, Alamo’s clinic manager, in May 2023. She picked Carbondale to relocate her clinic and her family after Googling “most liberal town in southern Illinois.” The search results were unanimous in their pick.

International media came to Carbondale to cover the new role it would play as the closest abortion provider for millions. Stories were featured in the New York Times, in a documentary by CNN and on Reuters’ Wider Image  blog, to name a few.

The photographer’s perspective

Photographing abortion before Roe v. Wade fell was difficult. As abortion bans went into effect across the country, access to clinicians and patients was seemingly more in demand and harder to get.

On an assignment in Oklahoma City in October 2021, about six months before Oklahoma would ban abortion completely, a nurse at Trust Women expressed her frustration. Why should she be responsible for patient care and public relations? Telling journalists stories to show the public why access to safe, legal abortions is important was getting exhausting.

When a patient in Oklahoma agreed to talk to us and allowed me to photograph the abortion procedure, she wanted people to know why she was upset. She had driven eight hours from Texas, which had a six-week-abortion-ban. She had taken time off of work, saved money and arranged for childcare for her children in order to get the abortion she believed was her personal decision. If a photograph could tell that story, she would oblige. 

Back in Illinois, I struggled to find a unique way to tell a visual story about abortion access. Did we need to see any more photos of women with their legs splayed? 

I found references to Elevated Access, an Illinois-based nonprofit network of pilots helping women access abortion by volunteering to fly them from states without abortion clinics to states with services. But my access was limited. I could photograph pilots, but not patients. The photograph with impact, a woman traveling across state lines in a tiny plane to obtain an abortion, was out of reach.

In May, an editor I had worked with several times before at The New York Times reached out to me. She liked the pilot story I pitched, but said it couldn’t stand alone as a story. Now, with the one year anniversary of Dobbs approaching, The Times was working on a piece which would be headlined “Abortion Networks Adapt To a Post-Roe World” and the Elevated Access piece would be included.

Reporter Kate Kelly and I traveled to Minneapolis where we met pilots as they handed off Erica, a mother in her 30s coming from the Twin Cities area and heading to Maryland for an abortion. It was her first time on a plane. She had waited a month for an appointment in Minnesota, but when the time came doctors told her she was too far along to obtain a legal abortion. So on May 9 she took a cross-country trip that involved two planes and three pilots. We met her halfway.

Erica allowed Kate to interview her. She said she had drug addiction that would prevent her from having a healthy pregnancy. Erica allowed me to take photographs if I kept her identity hidden. I had the time it took her to smoke two cigarettes on a bench in front of the airport to make a picture that mattered. 

We flew back to the Twin Cities with Andy, the pilot who had brought Erica on the first leg of her journey. In his tiny Cessna 182 Skylane I could take photos, but I wasn’t allowed to capture Andy’s face or any other identifying information. 

Andy didn’t have an abortion story or moment of conversion where he became a champion for women’s rights. He had always seen things the way he does today, except now he was a pilot and in a position to make a difference.

He and the other two pilots that day were willing to invest hundreds of dollars and a full day in Erica’s right to choose, but they were cautious about letting the whole world know the details. They have bosses and clients who may fall on the other side of the political divide, an ever-widening chasm between the left and the right.

For the doctors, nurses, patients and now pilots involved in the patchwork pattern of abortion access in this country, legal uncertainty and the threat of violence come with the territory.

I was careful, but editors at The Times went through everything I filed with a fine-toothed comb. 

People trusted us, people who had been scared.

Julia Rendleman is an assistant professor of photojournalism at Southern Illinois University Carbondale.