Law and Porter

Lee Anne is a fundraising consultant, a stand-up comic, and a woman who spent years believing she had to handle her hardest moment alone. In this conversation, she shares publicly for the first time the story of a miscarriage at six weeks, just after moving to North Carolina in 2014. She describes telling her husband to stay at work, driving home alone through a KFC drive-through, and going back t...

What does it actually feel like to love a foster child you may have to give back? In this episode, Loren shares her journey from a late-night application as a single woman to adopting her son, welcoming three siblings on a couple hours' notice, and learning to love both the children and the parents who needed her. Host Elizabeth Porter and Loren talk openly about attachment, grief, and the idea th...

Dawn was eight years old when a friend pulled her aside and told her that what was happening in her own home wasn't normal. It would be years before her family said the words out loud, and even after her abuser's arrest, the family's response was to stay quiet and move on.   In this conversation, the trauma nurse and author of Nursing the Wounds talks about growing up in the same small Mississippi...

Payton was twenty years old, a college student in Hattiesburg, when a relationship that started casually turned dangerous. He was charismatic and magnetic, the center of every room, and slowly, systematically, he isolated her from her friends and family and convinced her she was nothing without him, long before he ever raised a hand. In this episode, Payton tells the full story: the red flags she...

What's actually inside your kid's phone, and why the old 'stranger danger' warnings don't cover it anymore. Lauren Street works in child advocacy, and for the past year she's led the tech safety program at Kids Hub Child Advocacy Center in Hattiesburg, Mississippi. In this conversation, she breaks down what's changed: the danger isn't outside anymore, it's inside the device already in your child's...

Alexis walked into her divorce carrying two decades of unhealed childhood trauma — the kind that teaches a person to survive rather than feel. As a Licensed Master Social Worker, she had the clinical language for what was happening to her clients every day. She didn't have it, yet, for herself.   In this conversation, Alexis traces the slow unraveling of a life built on management instead of heali...

In November of 1999, Kelly got a 1:30 a.m. phone call that his wife hadn't survived a single-car accident — and in the disorientation of being shaken awake, all he could manage was, 'Would you repeat that again?' What follows isn't a tidy grief story. It's an unflinching account of raising three children alone, of a wife's addiction rooted in childhood trauma she'd warned him about from their firs...

Rachel married young, certain she'd found a stable, devoted partner. Years later, she was a widow raising two children alone — but the story in between is what makes this conversation unforgettable. In this episode, Rachel walks through the slow, painful discovery of her husband's addiction: unpaid bills, missing prescriptions, doctor-hopping, and a pattern of denial she didn't recognize until it...

At 26, Marlee had just started trying for a baby when a routine self-exam turned up something she wasn't expecting: breast cancer, the same disease her mother had been diagnosed with only months earlier. What followed was a whirlwind of treatment decisions that included accepting she may never carry a child — a loss she would eventually have to legally consent to before she could survive. In this...

Reverend Susan Eaton has spent her life teaching other people how to talk to God. Then her father was dying, her teenage child fell into a depression so severe she sat with them through nights that felt like watching someone disappear, and a cancer diagnosis interrupted everything else — and she found she didn't actually know how to pray through any of it. In this conversation, Susan talks about t...

Meet Grayson: the 9-year-old founder of Gray's Bake Co, a Mississippi bakery that started with a sourdough starter and a memory of Disney World. In this episode, Grayson talks about building a real business as a third grader — production schedules, pricing, hiring help, and the surprising amount of work that goes into a farm stand bakery.   He also opens up about the parts of entrepreneurship that...

At 21, Emily Rhodes got a phone call that split her life into before and after. In the chaos following Hurricane Katrina, her father was shot and killed on the wrong side of town — a case that was never solved. Months later, a minor car wreck led to a prescription for pain medication, and Emily discovered it numbed something the doctors hadn't been treating: the grief she had no idea how to carry....

Stephanie Johnson married her high school sweetheart in 1998. Eleven years later, six months after his leukemia diagnosis, she buried him. She was 32 years old, with three children under seven — the youngest born in the middle of his treatment.   In this conversation, Stephanie takes us back to the night before Jason's diagnosis was confirmed, when she says she fought a spiritual battle she couldn...

Sara Hathorn was driving her kids to the dry cleaner in a life that looked, from the outside, entirely put together — until a Dixie Chicks cover of "Landslide" came on the radio at a red light and she broke. That moment marks the hinge of this episode: the point where Sara stopped trying to fit a life built to satisfy everyone but herself, and started rebuilding one from $300 in the bank, a mortga...

Courtney was four and a half when she was removed from a house with no running water and a roof open to the rain. What was supposed to be rescue became years of abuse in a placement that should never have passed an inspection — and every time she tried to tell, she was punished for it.   This is the story of what she did next. Now sixteen, Courtney is interning in courtrooms, running a mentorship...

Ashlie spent years as a trauma therapist before she became a foster parent — and she will tell you clearly that knowing the clinical language for something is not the same as living inside it. This conversation covers a lot of ground: the sibling group she and her husband took in days after being licensed, the daughter whose reactive attachment disorder meant cycling between calling Ashlie mommy a...

Haylie walked into a family law office at seventeen, a self-described divorce court ordered and mentally disordered child of the system she would spend the next few years watching up close. Now twenty, she sits down with her boss — a family law attorney — to look back at what it actually felt like to be a kid shuttled between households, living out of a duffel bag, bounced around like a pinball be...

Jenny didn't set out to become someone who testifies before legislators or writes articles that strangers message her about at midnight. She set out to survive.   Her story begins with a childhood defined by a cousin's long illness and a quiet sense of not fitting the mold — too physical, too emotional, too outside the lines of what a Southern girl was supposed to be. It moves through a high schoo...

Ashlea was adopted at birth into a loving family — and spent the next two decades not processing a single emotion about it. In this episode, she opens up about what happened when she finally did: the counselor who called her Pollyanna, the rock bottom in her late twenties, and the treatment center where she learned that nearly half the room was adopted. We talk about disenfranchised grief — the gr...

What does it look like when someone loses themselves completely — and then finds their way back? In this inaugural episode of Law & Porter, Elizabeth Porter sits down with her friend Lizz, whose life story is as raw and honest as it gets. Ten years ago, Elizabeth nearly ended up with Liz's baby — a mix-up that launched a decade-long friendship. Today, Liz sits across from her as a sober, thriving,...

What happens when life hands you a diagnosis that rewrites everything you thought you knew about strength, identity, and survival? In this episode of Law and Porter , host Elizabeth Porter sits down with Amber — a wife, mother, and teacher who has faced triple negative breast cancer not once, not twice, but three times, including a Stage IV diagnosis. Over nine years, Amber has navigated four roun...

What does resilience actually look like — not the Instagram version, but the real, unglamorous, one-foot-in-front-of-the-other kind? In this deeply personal episode, host Elizabeth Porter turns the mic on her mother, Mary Porter: a woman with a history in television, a lifetime of quiet wisdom, and a story that most people could never imagine navigating with such grace. Mary was 39 years old with...

What does it look like to deconstruct the life you built — and decide what to carry forward? In this debut episode of Law and Porter , host Elizabeth Porter turns the tables and becomes the guest, interviewed by her mother, former television personality Mary Porter. Together, they trace Elizabeth's journey from a childhood marked by the sudden loss of her father — an attorney killed in a plane cra...