Ep. - 1709 - SATURDAY SERIES: ALICE LACOUR

Reality Life with Kate Casey

Alice LaCour, former federal prosecutor and co-host of The Prosecutors podcast, shares her journey from being a Taiwanese immigrant in rural Georgia with no English skills to becoming a Yale Law graduate,

Key takeaways

• Alice LaCour's immigrant background and early experiences with bullying shaped her lifelong struggle with imposter syndrome and taught her the importance of using her voice for others.
• Her decision to pursue law was unexpected—she initially studied economics due to its math-based nature, which resonated with her engineer father.

Main topics

• Immigrant experience and identity
• Imposter syndrome and self-worth

Notable quotes

"I didn't know it was bullying at the time. I just knew that I was strange. My job was to blend into the background."

Conclusion

Alice LaCour's story is a powerful testament to resilience, identity, and the transformative potential of

Transcript preview

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It includes six grams of prebiotic fiber, which is three times the amount of dietary fiber compared to the leading greens powders and more than two cups of broccoli. And the Groons ingredients have gut health, beauty, energy, immunity, recovery, and cognition benefits. Groons ingredients are backed by over 35,000 research publications. I've been taking my Groons for 20 days, and this is why I love them. You can save up to 61 % off with free gifts with code KateCasey at Groons.co. That's G-R-U-N-S dot co. Speaker 1 (1:34) Welcome back for another episode of Reality Life with KKC, and welcome back for the Saturday series episode. My guest today is Alice Lequeur, a former federal prosecutor, current litigation partner, and co-host of one of the biggest legal true crime podcasts out there, The Prosecutors. But before we get into the cases that she's worked on, I want to start with her origin story, because it's not what you would expect. Alice grew up the daughter of Taiwanese immigrants in a small town in Georgia. She didn't even speak English until the end of kindergarten. She was one of the only Asian kids in a town she describes, in her own words, as quite literally black and white. She was bullied. She didn't know it at the time. And she spent years thinking her job was to blend into the background. It took her decades, she told me, to realize that she actually had a voice. And that voice would eventually become her career. She studied economics because it was math-based, something her engineer father could relate to. Law was not even on her radar until a professor pushed her toward it. She laughed out loud when he suggested it. And we'll fast forward, Yale Law School, a clerkship for Judge Keith Ellison in the Southern District of Texas, then a second clerkship on the Fifth Circuit, then federal prosecution working, spanning guns, drugs, white collar crime, child sex trafficking, domestic violence. And along the way, she served on the confirmation teams of two Supreme Court justices. And somewhere in the middle of all of that, she had a baby, literally during a trial. She stayed on her feet through closing witness cross-examination while in labor, handed off her closing argument binder to co-counsel, and then went straight to the hospital. And months later, a juror recognized her at the grocery store and told her that the jury had run a pool on when she'd give birth. And now she's a mom of four. Then we get into the podcast itself, and specifically two of her most consequential cases. The first is Adnan Saeed, the subject of the podcast Serial, whose conviction for murdering Haemin Lee was vacated in 2022 before being reinstated by Maryland's high court. Alice and her co-host Brett spent years combing the trial record and landed somewhere deeply unpopular that the original conviction was correct. That conclusion brought them cease and desist letters, defamation threats, and online harassment, including, she told me, people posting her children's names and ages. The second is the case dominating headlines right now. Lindsay Clancy, the Massachusetts mother on trial for killing her three children, who was arguing she was in the grip of postpartum psychosis. Alice is covering that trial in something close to real time, and she was pretty candid about the backlash. This time she said, The anger is aimed at her specifically because she's a woman in a way her male co-host simply has not experienced. So her larger point was this. Whatever the jury decides, that verdict shouldn't become the entire referendum on how we treat postpartum mental health. Lindsay Clancy, she said, is one woman being tried under one very specific legal standard. And a larger conversation about maternal mental health has to keep getting spoken about regardless of the outcome. It's a wide-ranging conversation about immigration, imposter syndrome at Yale, motherhood in the middle of trial work, and what it actually means to sit with a case that the public has already made its mind up about. Here is my interview with Alice. Speaker 1 (5:06) Well, here's my new friend, Alice. I'm so excited to talk to you. I'm very inspired by your career and thrilled that you're with me today. Speaker 2 (5:12) Thanks so much for having me. I always love talking to another woman doing incredible work in the space. Oh, Speaker 1 (5:19) thank you. All right. Well, you have to first tell me about your family growing up because it's easy to look at somebody who has an incredibly exciting career. And that's on the back of years and years of study. But it starts with a little girl who at some point decides, like, I want to pursue a career in the legal field. So tell me about your family growing up and the moment where you thought, this is the career I want to move towards. Speaker 2 (5:51) No, thanks for asking that. I think people forget. It's easy to get lost and think, I'll never get there when you don't know the origin story. So my story is... I think not like many others. I never knew a lawyer growing up. My parents moved to the United States as immigrants from Taiwan. My mom spoke Speaker 1 (6:10) English. We Speaker 2 (6:11) spoke Mandarin at home. I was born here, but I actually didn't speak English until the end of kindergarten. So when I went to school, I didn't know any different. We had a strong community. We went to literally a Chinese bank, a Chinese church, a Chinese grocery store. So though we lived in the United States, I didn't know that I didn't speak the language that other people did. And, you know, my parents actually didn't even intend to stay in the United States. Their jobs ended up keeping them here, but they always loved, you know, their home. They loved being back there. So we would spend every summer there. And so in a lot of ways, it was like that was my home. I kind of grew up in two cultures. And then I show up at school and all of a sudden I realized I don't look like anybody else. I grew up in Georgia. The small town that I lived in, there were no other Asian people there. People were black and white and quite literally black and white. And people couldn't understand why I looked different. And then on top of that, I didn't speak their language. And of course, I didn't understand that the problem was me. So I was immensely bullied. I didn't know it was bullying at the time. I just knew that I was strange. I was different. My job was to blend into the background because if you blend it in, then no one can pick on you. I think that was really formative in the sense that I thought I didn't have a voice that mattered. And it took me, I think, decades to realize not only do I have a voice that matters, but I've been given a voice that I can use for others, which ultimately led me to my career as an attorney. I don't think if I didn't have that experience in the beginning. I would have quite appreciated how important it was to be able to take a gift and use it for good. So that's a very long way of saying I never intended to be a lawyer, quite frankly. What did your parents think about this? So they, you know, my dad's an engineer. And so like very different from the law. You know, I read growing up, but I didn't know anything about the law. I didn't watch the news. This was a really foreign world to me. Even when I applied to colleges, they didn't know how to help me. They'd heard of famous schools, but they didn't know application fees. They didn't know how to help me study for the SAT. And so in a lot of ways, I went into it blindly. And I'm thankful for that. So there wasn't pressure to necessarily go to the best schools. It was just, I don't know, this is what Americans do. I guess go to a school. And so I studied economics in college because it was... math-based. And I understood math. My parents understood math. It was something that they could relate to. But then as I was studying it, I graduated and thought I was going to be an economist. And things took a funny turn. I did research with a professor who was a law and economics professor. And he was the one who suggested that I go to law school. And I remember laughing out loud when he said it. And I said, not me. He goes, oh, yeah. No, absolutely you. And I didn't even know how to go about it. I didn't know that you had to take an LSAT at the time. And so he invited me to it. And my parents didn't, again, didn't understand the process, but they were supportive. I will say, I say this to people who may not have family members who fully understand what they do. It's okay. My parents... They support me. They love me. They're proud of me. They have no idea what I do, quite frankly. And it's okay. I try to explain it to them, but we do live in such different worlds. Lawyers in their country are very different from lawyers here in the United States. And so they see my name on briefs. They see me do oral arguments. They hear me speak as a legal commentator on TV, and they can be proud of me. But they don't know what I'm doing. And that's really wonderful because this is an amazing country. Like I could go from not speaking English to being able to speak, you know, on TV, explaining the law of a country that is foreign to my parents. Like how amazing. Speaker 1 (10:16) When you get to Yale Law School, did you feel like it was a diverse community? Speaker 2 (10:20) It was. They did an incredible job. Maybe decades ago, it wasn't. But when I went, there were a lot of us who we found each other quickly. We thought of ourselves as the misfits in the sense that I didn't feel like I belonged. I think everybody has imposter syndrome if they go to an Ivy League. And certainly I did. I mean, I'd seen Yale in the movies. I didn't know that that was somewhere I could go. And so I had good friends who, you know, their parents were... federal judges. They founded quite literally Court TV. That was one of my classmates. These people who had grown up in this world, I felt like they knew everything. But Yale was clear to tell us, you know, we're all here together. It doesn't matter kind of where you started. We're all on this journey together. And so, again, there was that imposter syndrome. I was really lucky to be surrounded by other people who were there for the right reasons. You know, everyone had different paths they were pursuing, but people really went there with genuine hearts to want to do something good with their legal degree. Do you feel pressure as Speaker 1 (11:26) a law student to... Speaker 1 (11:29) know immediately what kind of law you want to practice in the same way that an undergrad is asked, you know, even before they get to freshman year, like, oh, what do you want to study? What do you want to do? And it's like, you don't even have a minute to just sort of study just general stuff. So do you feel pressure as a law student? You have to know now, especially at a place like Yale, you have to know which kind of practice you want to go into. Speaker 2 (11:49) Oh, absolutely. Especially in the law, you kind of have to plan everything years in advance. So when you're a first year law student. You're applying for clerkships with judges three years out, maybe four years out. You're deciding which cities to apply for law firms in. Here's an example. I applied for all law firms in one city where I was dating a guy. And as soon as I did those interviews, he broke up with me. Well, there you go. That's Speaker 1 (12:13) a Speaker 2 (12:13) life Speaker 1 (12:14) lesson. Never plan around a guy. Speaker 2 (12:16) Exactly. Don't plan around a guy. But yes, you're right. People think you've made it here. Surely you know what you want to do with your life. And I will say one thing. I certainly never in a million years thought when I went to Yale that I would be a podcaster in addition to being a Speaker 1 (12:35) lawyer. But that was certainly not what I thought was Speaker 2 (12:38) going in. Speaker 1 (12:39) Now, clerking kind of puts you inside a judge's head before you're inside of a courtroom yourself. What is something that Judge Ellison taught you that you still carry with you? Speaker 2 (12:49) I was so lucky to get to clerk for two amazing judges. And the first one on the district court was Judge Keith Ellison in the Southern District of Texas, which is in Houston. He was phenomenal. You want to talk about someone who on paper looks like he belongs in all the ivory towers of the world. He was a undergrad, won all of the awards there. He was like... the best student at Harvard, basically. Then went to Yale Law School, won all the awards there, was essentially the best student at Yale. Became, you know, went to, got a Rhodes Scholarship. Rhodes Scholarship, yeah. Prestigious, you know, academic scholarship and goes to study over at Oxford, wins all of the writing prizes there. This is the man I'm supposed to write for. And he... was a man with, he still is, he