Bad Women: The Ripper Retold

Historian Hallie Rubenhold flipped the entire Jack the Ripper narrative on its head with her book The Five, and Bad Women takes that same approach into podcast form. Season 1 reconstructs the lives of Mary Ann Nichols, Annie Chapman, Elizabeth Stride, Catherine Eddowes, and Mary Jane Kelly — not as victims defined by their murders, but as full human beings with histories, families, and reasons for ending up in Whitechapel in 1888. Rubenhold makes a provocative case that most of the canonical five were not sex workers, directly challenging over a century of assumptions baked into the Ripper mythology. She traces each woman's path through Victorian society — from respectable working-class childhoods to the crushing poverty that pushed them onto the streets of the East End. The result is less a true crime investigation and more a social history of what it meant to be poor, female, and disposable in late-nineteenth-century London. Season 2 shifts to the Blackout Ripper of wartime 1942 London, co-hosted with criminologist Alice Fiennes. Across 45 total episodes, the production quality from Pushkin Industries is polished and cinematic. The show earned strong reviews and sat firmly in the Apple Podcasts top charts on release. If the standard Ripper podcast asks "who did it," Bad Women asks a harder question: why have we spent 130 years obsessing over the killer while barely acknowledging the women he targeted?