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Melissa Harris-Perry: You're listening to The Takeaway, I'm Melissa Harris-Perry. Conviction: The Disappearance of Nuseiba Hasan is a new podcast from Spotify and Gimlet Media. It focuses on the case of Nuseiba Hasan, a young Jordanian-Canadian woman who disappeared in 2006.

Habiba Nosheen: This is a story about a missing woman. A woman who one day just dropped off the face of the earth. This woman, she had a family, she had friends, she had a life, but no one seemed to notice that she was gone.

Melissa Harris-Perry: For the past three years, journalist and host Habiba Nosheen has been trying to find out what happened to Nuseiba. I recently sat down with Habiba to talk about her new podcast and the true crime genre. She started by telling me a bit about Nuseiba.

Habiba Nosheen: She grew up in a very religious, conservative Muslim family. She sounds very feisty, and she knew who she was and what she wanted, and no one was going to tell her otherwise. She defied a lot of her family's beliefs and views and just wanted to live life on her own terms. That's something I can relate to, and I found myself surprised by the parallels that I share with Nuseiba along those lines.

I also grew up in a very conservative Muslim family. I was also definitely a pain in the ass, and I was somebody who wanted to live my life the way I wanted to live my life, and I wasn't going to be told otherwise. I think I see a lot of parallels with that, with how Nuseiba chose to live her life.

Melissa Harris-Perry: Tell me a bit about the circumstances surrounding Nuseiba's disappearance.

Habiba Nosheen: She was actually reported missing almost nine years after the police suspect that she was last seen alive. That makes it really hard to know the circumstances of her disappearance. That's a lot of what the podcast focuses on, is retracing the steps of somebody who went missing. We know that the first 24 hours or the 72 hours of a person once they go missing is really important, crucial to try to find them, but we're talking about nine years. That's a long time for evidence to disappear, and for police to piece together what happened to her.

I think from what they told me, that's one of the main reasons why solving her disappearance has been so challenging, is because we don't have a date. We don't know the exact moment or the exact date that she was last seen alive. They know the circumstances now. That's what most of what the podcast delves into, is piecing together where she was and how did she disappear, because a lot of that, when I started reporting on this, was unknown.

Melissa Harris-Perry: Obviously, you've spoken to the ways that there were familiarities, some mirroring between you, your experience and Nuseiba's. I'm wondering what that initial impulse was to lend the mic to trying to find out what happened to her.

Habiba Nosheen: Actually, the story came to me from a very unusual way. I found myself in the spring of 2019, reading an anonymous email that a sender had sent saying, "There's something you need to look into, which is the disappearance of this woman named Nuseiba Hasan." Before that I had never heard of Nuseiba Hasan, didn't know anything about her. That's really the first time she enters my life, is this anonymous email from this person.

It took a long time for me to gain the trust of this person for them to come forward about who they were. I told them, "It's fine for me to keep your identity anonymous, but I still need to know who you are, and I need to know who I'm talking to." Ultimately, that ends up being how the story came to me. When I started talking to this person, they had no way of knowing the parallels that I would share with her. They were just contacting a journalist there, that's all they knew.

Few years before she went missing, she put up a child for adoption. It ends up being that child who grows up most of her life not knowing anything about the woman who gave birth to her and just being obsessed with that question. That drive and that motivation to find out who her mother was is actually why you're hearing this story today, because the world essentially forgot about her. You have this young girl who comes along and says, "Who was my mother? I want to try to find her," and when she does, she learns this horrific news that actually, the woman who gave birth to her is somebody who's missing, and the police suspect something terrible might have happened to her.

She's the one who contacted me and put me on this journey. What she had no way of knowing also is that I'm an adoptive mother as well. When she tells me that, "I've been obsessed with trying to find out who my birth mother is," I could immediately relate to that, because my daughter was given up under very mysterious circumstances, and I know very little about the woman who gave birth to her. She was just dropped off on a street corner, and that's essentially all I knew. That's all I still know.

The drive of adoptive child to learn and to want to know who was her birth mother and ultimately, what happened to her, I really could feel that. I could really understand that, and I wanted to find out for her. I wanted to find out because, first of all, as an investigative reporter, that's the kind of work we do, but it was just this additional level of connection that I did not anticipate when I first got that email.

Melissa Harris-Perry: Given that deep, empathetic response, I'm wondering, in part as an investigative reporter, how do you approach investigating a story like this without sensationalizing it, without exploiting precisely those people who have come to you with this yearning that you can so deeply understand?

Habiba Nosheen: That's something I thought a lot about during this reporting. All I can do, and I think the way I've tried to do this, is just to be really honest with the things I know and the things I don't know. When there were moments that there were parallels between my life and Nuseiba, instead of trying to hide that and fake it that there's a level of objectivity, of course, the investigation itself is absolutely, that's what I do. I'm a journalist who can look into facts objectively, but the way it affected me and the parallels to my life, the best way I could do that, is just to be honest with the audience and to just be transparent that this is a world I do know something about.

I think for me, when you do hear people say, "This genre can be exploitative," I think it's true. I think it can be and I think it matters who's telling the story, because the way stories are told is really important, and by who. It's important, I think, the perspective of understanding Nuseiba's life and what she lived through. Also, being a Muslim woman from Canada, it was something I really understood, and I think it allowed me to tell the complicated aspects of her life that are not necessarily obvious to people.

Melissa Harris-Perry: In pointing out that she is a Muslim woman, in centering that in who she was in her story and in the role that it plays in the context of her disappearance, it's also a reminder that so many of the true crime podcasts that many of us have become obsessed with over the years since Serial debuted in 2014. Focus on what has been sometimes called the missing white woman syndrome or the missing white girls.

To be clear, they are missed, and loved, and cared for by their families, and there are important reasons to investigate their disappearances. Yet, it can also create a second layer of disappearance for those who are not young white women. I'm also wondering about how the entire genre has evolved, and how your story here with conviction is part of that evolution.

Habiba Nosheen: I think you're absolutely right. The women who go missing and who get lots and lots of coverage, I think they deserve it. I think, absolutely, we should put in those resources to find out what happened to any woman who disappears. It is disheartening as a woman of color to see that the same level of public obsession and commitment to finding a missing woman is not what happens when a woman of color goes missing.

It makes me wonder, especially during this reporting, if I go missing, would anybody care? I think that was a big motivation for me wanting to center the story around a missing woman of color, who's story, who the world essentially just forgot. That shouldn't be allowed to happen. I don't know how the true crime genre has changed, but I hope the way we can change it is by making sure that it's not just the stories of white people that are told. People have color also matter and their lives also matter.

I hope that spending a part investigation and three years into the story of Nuseiba gives exactly that message, that lives of women of color also matter, because they certainly matter to me. I think sometimes we don't see the same level of commitment from the media and from the world just around the disappearance of people of color.

Melissa Harris-Perry: Habiba Nosheen is the host of the podcast, Conviction: The Disappearance of Nuseiba Hasan. It's from Spotify and Gimlet Media. Habiba, again, thanks for joining The Takeaway.

Habiba Nosheen: Thank you so much, Melissa.

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