Twenty years in jail: Kathleen Folbigg's extraordinary story of wrongful conviction, and how science, advocacy and friendship freed her.
In 2003 Kathleen Folbigg was convicted of killing her four babies. Her trial relied on her husband's accusations and diary entries expressing her guilt over her children's deaths. She was sentenced to forty years in prison.
In Inside Out Kathleen takes us back to her traumatic childhood, her difficult marriage, her dream of nurturing a family, and the profound souring of that dream into a nightmare.
This is also , however, a story of unwavering friendship and resilience. Tracy Chapman and Kathleen were close at school. After Kathleen was jailed, Tracy renewed contact and, convinced her friend could never have committed such crimes, began advocating for her with extraordinary tenacity. She never doubted Kathleen's innocence, relentlessly petitioning for new evidence to be examined, and for a new approach to be taken as doubts about the safety of the conviction grew among scientists and the legal community.
Ultimately, these two women together faced down a misogynistic justice system and forged a friendship that supported Kathleen as she endured the trauma of the prison system. And finally, after many devastating setbacks, came the leaps forward needed to overturn one of the biggest miscarriages of justice in Australia's history: in 2023 Kathleen was released, pardoned and exonerated.
For the first time, in Inside Out Kathleen lays bare her time in prison, her life before she was wrongfully accused, and her hopes for the future; while Tracy describes with passion and insight the fight she took up to help to free her friend, and shares her hopes that their story will prevent other women from suffering as Kath did over those long twenty years.
