Latest / Murder Files Unsealed / Court documents reveal new details in Celeste Rivas murder case

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Court documents reveal new details in Celeste Rivas murder case · Murder Files Unsealed

• 0:00
  Speaker 1: So picture this. It is the evening of September ninth,
• 0:03
  twenty twenty five. Thousands of teenagers are just, you know,
• 0:07
  packed into this massive venue in Minneapolis, right the base
• 0:10
  from the sound system is literally vibrating the floorboards, the
• 0:14
  lights go down, the crowd absolutely erupts, and this nineteen
• 0:18
  year old pop star steps up to the microphone.
• 0:21
  Speaker 2: A totally electric atmosphere.
• 0:22
  Speaker 1: Exactly, and he starts singing these songs about heartbreak and
• 0:27
  obsession and this really dark romance. I mean, it is
• 0:31
  basically the pinnacle of a gen Z Cinderella story.
• 0:33
  Speaker 2: Yeah. But and this is where it gets incredibly dark.
• 0:36
  If we rewind the clock just twenty four hours and
• 0:39
  we move like roughly fifteen hundred miles southwest to this
• 0:44
  sweltering industrial tow yard in Hollywood, California.
• 0:47
  Speaker 1: Oh man, the contrast is just jarring.
• 0:50
  Speaker 2: It really is. Employees at that towyard are dialing nine
• 0:53
  to one one because of a horrific odor and it's
• 0:56
  coming from the front trunk of a parked tesla.
• 0:58
  Speaker 1: And not just any tesla.
• 0:59
  Speaker 2: No, a tesla registered to the exact same nineteen year
• 1:02
  old who is currently standing on that stage in Minneapolis.
• 1:05
  Speaker 1: The temporal dissonance between those two events is almost I mean,
• 1:08
  it's impossible to wrap your head around.
• 1:09
  Speaker 2: It's mind blowing. On one side of the country you
• 1:12
  have absolute adulation, thousands of cell phone flashlights waving in
• 1:16
  the air, and on the other side, investigators are literally
• 1:20
  unzipping black cadaver bags containing the dismembered remains of a
• 1:24
  fourteen year old girl.
• 1:25
  Speaker 1: And that horrific collision of realities is exactly why we
• 1:29
  are here today. Welcome to this deep dive.
• 1:31
  Speaker 2: Glad to be here.
• 1:32
  Speaker 1: If you are a curious mind, you know, trying to
• 1:35
  make sense of how a digital fairy tale turned into
• 1:38
  a waking nightmare, you are absolutely in the right place, absolutely,
• 1:42
  because our mission today is to unpack this massive stack
• 1:46
  of explosive, newly unsealed court documents out of Texas.
• 1:51
  Speaker 2: Documents that completely pull back the curtain on the Celestrevus
• 1:54
  murder investigation.
• 1:55
  Speaker 1: Right and at the center of this massive storm is
• 1:58
  David Anthony Burke, known to millions as the rising pop star.
• 2:02
  Speaker 2: D four med We really need to establish the stakes
• 2:05
  here immediately, yeah, because what we are looking at, you know,
• 2:08
  is not a movie spirit. It is a profoundly tragic
• 2:11
  highly complex and ongoing legal investigation, and it's currently crossing
• 2:16
  multiple state lines.
• 2:17
  Speaker 1: Yeah, it involves a grueling forensic puzzle, the secret grand
• 2:21
  jury operating behind locked doors in LA and a young
• 2:24
  musician facing allegations that are almost beyond comprehension, right, And
• 2:28
  our goal for.
• 2:28
  Speaker 2: You today is to look at the raw facts of
• 2:30
  this case completely, impartially exactly.
• 2:33
  Speaker 1: We are going to explore the precise legal mechanisms and
• 2:37
  the timeline without you know, sensationalizing the loss of a young.
• 2:41
  Speaker 2: Life, because the tragedy of Celestereevas is devastating on its own.
• 2:45
  Speaker 1: It really is what we want to dissect for you
• 2:47
  today is how multiple entirely isolated systems like the architecture
• 2:52
  of digital platforms, the bureaucratic realities of local law.
• 2:55
  Speaker 2: Enforcement, and the complex machinery of interstate judiciaries.
• 2:58
  Speaker 1: Right, how all those things violently intercepted in this single case.
• 3:02
  Speaker 2: And to understand how that happened, we really have to
• 3:04
  start with the physical endpoint. We have to look at
• 3:06
  the discovery on Bluebird Avenue in the Hollywood Hills.
• 3:09
  Speaker 1: So let's look at the first week of September twenty
• 3:11
  twenty five. Bluebird Avenue. Is it's a quintessential Hollywood Hills
• 3:17
  location right.
• 3:18
  Speaker 2: Oh, completely. We are talking about winding, narrow roads, multimillion
• 3:22
  dollar properties, and just a heavy, heavy presence of luxury vehicles.
• 3:26
  Speaker 1: So a Tesla fits right in exactly.
• 3:28
  Speaker 2: On September third, a Tesla Sedan is sitting parked on
• 3:31
  the street in that neighborhood. It is essentially background noise.
• 3:35
  It blends in perfectly.
• 3:36
  Speaker 1: But this specific vehicle, registered to David Anthony Burke gets
• 3:41
  flagged for a standard seventy two hour parking violation.
• 3:45
  Speaker 2: Yeah, it has just been sitting there completely abandoned.
• 3:47
  Speaker 1: And parking ticket starts a very slow, very bureaucratic.
• 3:50
  Speaker 2: Clock right between September fifth and September eighth, the City
• 3:54
  of Los Angeles simply processes the violation.
• 3:56
  Speaker 1: A tow truck makes its way up into the hills,
• 3:59
  hitches the lugy ev and pulls it down into the
• 4:02
  city grid and they drop it at a Hollywood impound yard.
• 4:05
  Speaker 2: And an impound yard in September is a brutal environment.
• 4:08
  Speaker 1: Oh, I can only imagine it.
• 4:09
  Speaker 2: Is essentially an asphalt skillet baking in the southern California
• 4:13
  sun cars are packed and shoulder to shoulder.
• 4:15
  Speaker 1: And that environmental shift is critical to what happens next.
• 4:18
  Speaker 2: Isn't it. It is everything on September eighth, which, by
• 4:22
  the way, carries an immense emotional weight because it is
• 4:25
  exactly one day before the victim would have celebrated her
• 4:28
  fifteenth birthday.
• 4:29
  Speaker 1: Wow, that is just heartbreaking.
• 4:32
  Speaker 2: It is. The towyard employees notice an overpowering foul odor
• 4:37
  coming from the tesla.
• 4:39
  Speaker 1: And this isn't just you know, the smell of fast
• 4:41
  food left in a hot car, No.
• 4:42
  Speaker 2: Not at all. It's the specific biological marker of decay.
• 4:46
  It triggers this primal alarm bell in the human brain.
• 4:49
  Speaker 1: Right, which prompts the employees to immediately call the authorities.
• 4:53
  Police arrive and force open the front trunk.
• 4:55
  Speaker 2: And for anyone unfamiliar with electric vehicles, the lack of
• 4:58
  an internal combustion engine leaves a large storage compartment right under.
• 5:01
  Speaker 1: The hood, commonly called the fronk.
• 5:03
  Speaker 2: Right exactly inside that space, investigators find two black cadaver
• 5:07
  bags teeming with insect activity. Oh my god, one ba
• 5:10
  contains a severely decomposed head and torso. The second holds
• 5:14
  additional severed body parts.
• 5:15
  Speaker 1: Okay, let's unpack this for a second. The fronk of
• 5:18
  a luxury ev is basically acting like a modern day
• 5:21
  telltale heart here.
• 5:23
  Speaker 2: That is a very accurate analogy, and from a forensic
• 5:26
  pathology standpoint, the environment of that specific storage compartment creates
• 5:31
  an immediate nightmare.
• 5:32
  Speaker 1: An insurmountable nightmare for the La County medical examiner. Yes,
• 5:36
  so break down the actual thermodynamics of that for me, Like,
• 5:39
  why is a fronk worse than say, a shallow grave
• 5:43
  in the woods.
• 5:44
  Speaker 2: A fronk is essentially a sealed box. It is made
• 5:47
  of high density poly ordane in metal. Okay, when you
• 5:50
  place organic material inside a sealed container like that and
• 5:53
  you leave it in the sun, you create a hyper
• 5:55
  accelerated greenhouse.
• 5:57
  Speaker 1: Effect because there's no airflow at all.
• 5:58
  Speaker 2: Right, there's zero ventilation. The ambient heat is trapped and multiplied,
• 6:02
  which supercharges the rate of tissue degradation and insect colonization.
• 6:06
  Oh wow, So the cellular evidence, the microscopic clues the
• 6:10
  toxicologists and pathologists rely on to determine exactly how a
• 6:13
  body systems failed, is rapidly destroyed by that trapped heat, and.
• 6:17
  Speaker 1: That environmental destruction is exactly why. The unsealed documents show
• 6:22
  the medical examiner had to make a very frustrating conclusion.
• 6:25
  Speaker 2: Yeah, the official cause of death is listed as deferred.
• 6:28
  Speaker 1: Which means they physically cannot tell the courts how this
• 6:32
  fourteen year old died because the trauma has been literally
• 6:35
  erased by time and the elements.
• 6:37
  Speaker 2: Right, it is a massive hurdle for the prosecution when
• 6:41
  a cause of death is deferred. The visible trauma is
• 6:44
  so compromised that they can't definitively point to a.
• 6:47
  Speaker 1: Specific action, Like they can't say, oh, it was asphyxiation
• 6:50
  or blunt force trauma exactly.
• 6:52
  Speaker 2: They can't say this is what stopped the heart. And
• 6:55
  compounding this, early in the investigation, there was a working
• 6:58
  theory that the remains had been frozen and thowed previously.
• 7:02
  Speaker 1: Which would imply someone kept the remains in like a
• 7:05
  commercial or chess freezer before transferring them to the car.
• 7:08
  Speaker 2: Right though, the LAPD had to publicly step in and
• 7:11
  clarify that the body was explicitly not frozen upon its
• 7:15
  actual discovery in the towyard, and she.
• 7:17
  Speaker 1: Wasn't decapitated either, right, I know, there was a lot
• 7:19
  of wild online speculation.
• 7:21
  Speaker 2: Correct the police had to push back against that rampant
• 7:24
  online misinformation. But the mere possibility of a freeze saw
• 7:29
  cycle further complicates the pathology.
• 7:31
  Speaker 1: Because freezing expands the water in the.
• 7:33
  Speaker 2: Cells exactly, it bursts the cell walls and destroys even
• 7:37
  more evidence once it thaws.
• 7:38
  Speaker 1: The forensics are a literal nightmare. But if we step
• 7:42
  back from the biology for a second and look at
• 7:44
  the psychology of the crime scene, it's bathing right. You
• 7:47
  buy specific black cadaver bags, you engage in the greesome,
• 7:52
  highly organized logistics of dismemberment, but then you take your
• 7:57
  primary getaway vehicle.
• 7:58
  Speaker 2: Which is legally registered to your real.
• 7:59
  Speaker 1: Ness, Yeah, and you leave it parked on a public
• 8:02
  street in the Hollywood Hills to get ticketed by a
• 8:04
  meter mate. I mean, the sheer incompetence of that is staggering,
• 8:07
  it really is. Is this just the absolute panic of
• 8:09
  an amateur or did whoever did this just assume their
• 8:12
  celebrity status made them untouchable.
• 8:14
  Speaker 2: Well, investigators firmly believe they're looking at an aborted plan.
• 8:18
  According to the police sources cited in the unsealed documents,
• 8:21
  the working theory is that the killer most likely had.
• 8:24
  Speaker 1: Help help dismembering and disposing of the body.
• 8:27
  Speaker 2: Yes, dismemberment is incredibly physically demanding and psychologically taxing. It
• 8:33
  strongly suggests accomplices.
• 8:34
  Speaker 1: But leaving the registered car to accrue parking tickets.
• 8:38
  Speaker 2: That indicates a catastrophic breakdown in the disposal strategy. Someone
• 8:42
  lost their nerve or the logistics just became too difficult.
• 8:46
  Speaker 1: It is the ultimate collision of a calculated cover up
• 8:49
  and staggering sloppiness.
• 8:51
  Speaker 2: The don't methodically packaged remains into cadaver bags only to
• 8:54
  abandon the vehicle in a monitored seventy two hour parking zone,
• 8:58
  not unless the original plan was interrupted.
• 9:00
  Speaker 1: And that interruption left a direct, undeniable physical and paper
• 9:04
  trails Straight back to David Anthony Burke, it did. But
• 9:07
  to understand how a fourteen year old girl ends up
• 9:09
  in the front trunk of that specific car, we have
• 9:12
  to look far beyond the Hollywood Hills, We really do.
• 9:15
  We have to look at the exact kind of systemic
• 9:17
  cracks that make a person invisible long before they ever
• 9:20
  go missing. We need to talk about Celeste Abigail Revs Hernandez.
• 9:24
  Speaker 2: Celeste was from Lake Elsinor, California, that's the city in
• 9:27
  Riverside County, roughly seventy miles southeast.
• 9:30
  Speaker 1: Of Los Angeles, So geographically and socioeconomically, it is a
• 9:34
  completely different universe from the wealth of the Hollywood.
• 9:37
  Speaker 2: Hills, completely different. She was born to El Salvadoran immigrant parents,
• 9:42
  growing up in a first generation household that, by all
• 9:46
  public accounts, was deeply turbulent.
• 9:48
  Speaker 1: Yeah, the Riverside County Sheriff's Office records show that Celeste
• 9:52
  was reported missing at least three times in the year
• 9:55
  twenty twenty four alone.
• 9:56
  Speaker 2: Three times.
• 9:58
  Speaker 1: That isn't a teenager getting lost at the mom. That
• 10:00
  is a siren blaring that a child is actively trying
• 10:03
  to escape her environment.
• 10:05
  Speaker 2: We have context for that urge to escape. Media outlets
• 10:08
  spoke with her ex boyfriend, Damian Hernandez.
• 10:11
  Speaker 1: What did he say?
• 10:11
  Speaker 2: He explicitly stated that Celeste frequently ran away because her
• 10:15
  parents were quote really mean and she dreaded being in
• 10:18
  that house.
• 10:18
  Speaker 1: Yet we also see her mother, Mercedes Martinez, making tearful
• 10:22
  pleas on local television every time she vanished, just begging
• 10:25
  her to come home.
• 10:26
  Speaker 2: Right and after the remains were identified, family friends actually
• 10:29
  launched a GoFundMe to cover funeral expenses. It really highlighted
• 10:34
  the family's profound heartbreak.
• 10:35
  Speaker 1: It is this agonizing duality, you know, a family earning
• 10:39
  a beloved daughter juxtaposed against a home life that the
• 10:43
  daughter was repeatedly fleeing.
• 10:45
  Speaker 2: And that duality highlights a profound systemic vulnerability. When a
• 10:51
  miner is reported missing multiple times in a single calendar year,
• 10:54
  the bureaucratic machinery often succumbs to something. What's that is
• 10:58
  what sociologists called passion fatigue.
• 11:01
  Speaker 1: Okay, break down how compassion fatigue actually operates inside a
• 11:05
  police precinct. Why does the response change?
• 11:08
  Speaker 2: It basically comes down to resource allocation and perceived threat.
• 11:12
  The first time a fourteen year old vanishes, it is
• 11:14
  treated as a critical emergency.
• 11:16
  Speaker 1: Right, helicopters are deployed, Amber alerts are considered detectives are
• 11:20
  working around the clock exactly.
• 11:21
  Speaker 2: But by the third time she vanishes in eight months,
• 11:24
  the classification in the minds of the authorities often subtly shifts.
• 11:27
  Speaker 1: She is no longer viewed as an abduction risk.
• 11:30
  Speaker 2: Right, she is classified as a habitual runaway. The bureaucratic
• 11:33
  response slows down. The underlying assumption becomes well, she left
• 11:36
  on her own accord. She's rebelling, she knows how to survive,
• 11:40
  and she.
• 11:41
  Speaker 1: Will return when she runs out of options.
• 11:43
  Speaker 2: Exactly. The system stops treating the disappearance as an imminent
• 11:47
  threat to life and starts treating it as a recurring
• 11:50
  behavioral issue to be managed.
• 11:52
  Speaker 1: Now, I understand the strain on police resources, but it
• 11:55
  feels like we're almost putting her under a microscope for
• 11:58
  running away.
• 11:59
  Speaker 2: We have to be careful with that, Yeah.
• 12:01
  Speaker 1: I mean, should we be careful not to victim blame here?
• 12:04
  Her seeking an escape shouldn't be the focus over the
• 12:07
  predator who opened the door.
• 12:08
  Speaker 2: Absolutely not. We aren't analyzing her turbulent home life to
• 12:12
  assign her any blame for what happened. Analyzing her vulnerability
• 12:16
  is about exposing the exact architectural blueprint that a predator
• 12:20
  uses to hunt.
• 12:21
  Speaker 1: Because predators don't typically target the kid who is securely
• 12:25
  anchored in a stable community, right They.
• 12:27
  Speaker 2: Don't want the kid with hypervigilant parents tracking their location.
• 12:30
  They look for the child who was already drifting.
• 12:33
  Speaker 1: The child whom the systemic safety nets have already written
• 12:35
  off as a runaway.
• 12:36
  Speaker 2: Because if an habitual runaway disappears, the predator knows the
• 12:40
  police aren't going to knock down doors looking.
• 12:42
  Speaker 1: For her, and the timeline of her disappearance proves exactly
• 12:46
  how wide that crack in the system was. She was
• 12:49
  physically last seen and officially reported missing on April fifth,
• 12:53
  twenty twenty four.
• 12:55
  Speaker 2: But digital forensics later proved she was alive and actively
• 12:58
  communicating online well into September twenty.
• 13:01
  Speaker 1: Twenty four, and potentially as late as January twenty twenty five.
• 13:05
  She existed as a ghost in the physical world for
• 13:08
  nearly nine months while living a highly active life in
• 13:11
  the digital world, which.
• 13:13
  Speaker 2: Is a terrifying testament to how easily of vulnerable youth
• 13:16
  can be absorbed into a completely isolated digital ecosystem, all
• 13:20
  while the real world just stops looking for them.
• 13:23
  Speaker 1: And while Celeste is navigating this transient, incredibly dangerous existence,
• 13:28
  the man whose car she will eventually be found in,
• 13:30
  is experiencing a completely different reality.
• 13:33
  Speaker 2: A meteoric rise to global fame.
• 13:35
  Speaker 1: A rise that, when you look at his art, carries
• 13:37
  a deeply unsettling thematic irony. Let's talk about D four VD.
• 13:41
  Speaker 2: David Anthony Burke's origin story is basically the defining blueprint
• 13:45
  of the modern creator economy.
• 13:46
  Speaker 1: He was born in Queens in March two thousand and five,
• 13:49
  but raised in Houston, right.
• 13:50
  Speaker 2: He didn't come up through the traditional Hollywood machine. At
• 13:53
  seventeen years old, he was just a kid in his
• 13:55
  bedroom making gameplay montages.
• 13:58
  Speaker 1: Of Fortnite, uploading them to utube, tube and TikTok. But
• 14:01
  the economics of YouTube are super strict.
• 14:03
  Speaker 2: Yeah, if you use copyrighted music in your background track,
• 14:06
  the platform's algorithm flags it, it strikes your channel, and
• 14:10
  it demonetizes your video.
• 14:12
  Speaker 1: So to circumvent those copyright strikes and keep his ad revenue,
• 14:15
  this teenager downloads a freeium audio editing app called band
• 14:20
  Lab onto his smartphone.
• 14:21
  Speaker 2: He literally steps into his sister's closet because the hanging
• 14:25
  clothes provide cheap acoustic dampening, and.
• 14:27
  Speaker 1: He starts producing his own background beats and vocals. It
• 14:31
  is the ultimate democratization of music production.
• 14:34
  Speaker 2: He didn't need studio time or a producer, He just
• 14:36
  needed a phone and an Internet connection, and.
• 14:38
  Speaker 1: The Internet responded massively. Tracks he made in that closet
• 14:41
  like Romantic Homicide and Here with Me went stratospheric on TikTok.
• 14:46
  Speaker 2: Romantic Homicide actually peeped at number three on the Hot
• 14:49
  Alternative Songs chart. Here with Me cracked the Billboard Hot
• 14:52
  one hundred.
• 14:53
  Speaker 1: And this viral momentum lands him a major label deal
• 14:56
  with Dark Room Innerscope. He releases multiple epis pedals to
• 15:00
  Thorns the Lost Pedals, and.
• 15:02
  Speaker 2: By April twenty twenty five, right around the time investigators
• 15:06
  suspects Celeste's murdered, he drops his debut studio album, Withered.
• 15:10
  Speaker 1: Which hits number thirteen on the Billboard two hundred. I
• 15:14
  mean he is opening for massive artists like SCA. He
• 15:17
  is doing world tours. It's the ultimate gen Z Cinderella story.
• 15:20
  You go from a closet to opening for SAA and
• 15:23
  living in a Hollywood Hills rental.
• 15:24
  Speaker 2: But look at the thematic core of the art that
• 15:26
  made him famous. His music blends indie rock, alternative R
• 15:31
  and B, and pop, but his lyricism is almost exclusively
• 15:35
  focused on themes of dark, obsessive.
• 15:37
  Speaker 1: Love, severe emotional pain, and raw heartbreak.
• 15:40
  Speaker 2: The very song that launched his career is titled Romantic Homicide.
• 15:44
  He was being globally celebrated and financially rewarded for articulating
• 15:48
  a very dark, violent, strain of adolescent emotional.
• 15:51
  Speaker 1: Turbulence, and now he is the formal target of a
• 15:53
  California penal code section one eight seven a investigation And.
• 15:57
  Speaker 2: For anyone not steeped in the California legal system, one
• 16:00
  eight seven eight isn't a mysdemeter.
• 16:02
  Speaker 1: No, that is a specific penal code for murder.
• 16:05
  Speaker 2: The dissonance between his carefully cultivated, artistic persona of the sensitive,
• 16:10
  heartbroken teenager and the reality of a dismembered child and
• 16:15
  is vehicle is chilling.
• 16:16
  Speaker 1: But does that kind of overnight internet fueled fame warp
• 16:20
  a nineteen year old sense of reality and consequence?
• 16:24
  Speaker 2: If we look at the neurobiology and the sociology of
• 16:26
  that kind of overnight fame, the danger becomes very apparent.
• 16:30
  How So, well, at eighteen or nineteen years old, the
• 16:33
  human brain's prefrontal cortex, the region responsible for risk assessment
• 16:37
  and impulse control, is still years away from being fully developed.
• 16:41
  Speaker 1: So biologically he is still a teenager trying to figure
• 16:43
  out how the world works exactly.
• 16:45
  Speaker 2: Now, take that developing brain and suddenly inject it with
• 16:48
  millions of dollars. Yea a legion of devoted fans who
• 16:51
  worship every move.
• 16:52
  Speaker 1: At a corporate machinery of managers and handlers whose own
• 16:55
  livelihoods depend entirely on keeping the talent happy.
• 16:57
  Speaker 2: You create an ecosystem where the word no is completely
• 17:00
  eradicated from his daily life. The normal societal friction that
• 17:04
  teaches a young person boundaries is just removed.
• 17:08
  Speaker 1: When you are financially insulated from a consequence and socially
• 17:11
  elevated to the status of an idol. Dark or predatory
• 17:15
  impulses can easily flourish unchecked.
• 17:18
  Speaker 2: Because the environment actively enables them.
• 17:20
  Speaker 1: And that environment isn't just a physical entourage, it is
• 17:23
  a digital empire, which brings us to the most disturbing
• 17:27
  intersection of this entire case.
• 17:29
  Speaker 2: They didn't cross paths at a concert or a coffee shop.
• 17:31
  Speaker 1: Now Celeste was pulled directly into the architecture of his fame.
• 17:35
  Speaker 2: The unsealed documents reveal a highly disturbing digital timeline. Celeste
• 17:40
  was actively participating in D four vd's official discord server
• 17:44
  as early as twenty twenty two.
• 17:46
  Speaker 1: Let's contextualize those ages for a second. In twenty twenty two,
• 17:49
  D four VD is seventeen turning eighteen.
• 17:52
  Speaker 2: And Celeste is twelve turning thirteen.
• 17:54
  Speaker 1: A middle schooler, and within this discord server, other users
• 17:57
  were reportedly already referring to her as his girlfriend.
• 18:00
  Speaker 2: Following the discovery of her body, screenshots and chatlogs begin
• 18:03
  resurfacing online. They allege a history of grooming and actual
• 18:07
  sexual encounters.
• 18:08
  Speaker 1: We really have to understand the specific power dynamics of
• 18:11
  a discord server built around a single creator.
• 18:14
  Speaker 2: It operates essentially as a digital fiefdom. The creator sits
• 18:18
  at the absolute apex of the hierarchy. They are the
• 18:22
  sun that the entire community orbits around.
• 18:24
  Speaker 1: So for a vulnerable twelve year old girl who feels
• 18:27
  alienated and unloved in her physical home.
• 18:29
  Speaker 2: Being selected, acknowledged, and elevated by the king of this
• 18:33
  digital world is an intoxicating, overpowering form of validation.
• 18:37
  Speaker 1: It fulfills the exact emotional deficit she is running away
• 18:40
  from in the real world. Yes, but practically speaking, here's
• 18:43
  where it gets really interesting. A discord server for a
• 18:46
  massive artist has thousands, if not tens of thousands of
• 18:49
  active users. The chat feed scrolls by at the speed
• 18:53
  of light. How does a random twelve year old from
• 18:55
  Lake Elsin or even get noticed by the star? There
• 18:58
  has to be a mechanism or accomplices filtering these young
• 19:02
  fans directly to him.
• 19:04
  Speaker 2: That is the insidious nature of the creator pipeline. High
• 19:07
  profile figures rarely interact with the raw, chaotic feed of
• 19:11
  their general servers.
• 19:12
  Speaker 1: They employ or deputize moderators exactly.
• 19:16
  Speaker 2: These moderators act as gatekeepers. In many documented cases of
• 19:21
  online grooming. Within creator communities, there is a secondary layer
• 19:24
  of enablers.
• 19:25
  Speaker 1: Trusted members who scour the general chats right.
• 19:28
  Speaker 2: They identify the young, compliant or vulnerable fans, grant them
• 19:32
  VIP rolls, and funnel them into locked private voice channels.
• 19:36
  Speaker 1: Or direct messages where the creator can interact with them
• 19:38
  away from public scrutiny. Law enforcement is undoubtedly combing through
• 19:42
  those server logs right now to identify the digital accomplices
• 19:46
  who facilitated that access.
• 19:48
  Speaker 2: And that grooming didn't stay confined to a chat room.
• 19:51
  Speaker 1: No, it manifested in a deeply disturbing physical branding. The
• 19:54
  unsealed records and digital photos corroborated by Celeste's own mother
• 19:59
  confirmed that this four ten year old girl and this
• 20:01
  pop star shared matching tattoos, and.
• 20:03
  Speaker 2: Not just any design. They had. The word ahhh followed
• 20:08
  by an ellipsis tattooed in red ink on their right
• 20:11
  index fingers.
• 20:12
  Speaker 1: The universal physical gesture for silencing someone. The psychology of
• 20:16
  that is horrifying. You are an adult, or at the
• 20:20
  very least, a legally emancipated young man, with millions of dollars,
• 20:23
  and you are taking a middle schooler and permanently etching
• 20:26
  a command for silence into her skin.
• 20:28
  Speaker 2: A tattoo is an anchor. It is a permanent physical
• 20:32
  claim of ownership. But to explicitly choose the word sh
• 20:37
  is to literally brand the victim with the primary rule
• 20:41
  of the predatory dynamic.
• 20:42
  Speaker 1: It enforces the isolation.
• 20:44
  Speaker 2: It is a constant physical reminder stating our relationship is
• 20:48
  a secret and you are forbidden from speaking about it.
• 20:51
  It binds the vulnerable child to the powerful adult through
• 20:54
  shared transgression, and.
• 20:55
  Speaker 1: That digital grooming and physical branding eventually culminated in physical obstrud.
• 21:00
  This wasn't a girl who just wandered out the front
• 21:02
  door into the unknown.
• 21:03
  Speaker 2: No Celest's brother gave a statement to NBCLA noting that
• 21:07
  when Celeste originally disappeared, she was picked up by a
• 21:10
  man named David driving at.
• 21:11
  Speaker 1: Tesla, connecting the digital grooming directly to her physical disappearance.
• 21:15
  She stepped out of her turbulent home and directly into
• 21:18
  the vehicle that would eventually become her tomb.
• 21:20
  Speaker 2: Which sets the stage for a timeline of events in
• 21:23
  twenty twenty five that requires a staggering level of compartmentalization
• 21:28
  from the suspect.
• 21:29
  Speaker 1: Let's lay out the dates, because seeing them side by
• 21:31
  side is genuinely chilling. Based on the deferred autopsy and
• 21:36
  investigative timelines, Police suspect Celeste died in the spring of
• 21:40
  twenty twenty five, right around May.
• 21:42
  Speaker 2: The documents note a trip to Santa Barbara County during
• 21:45
  this window that is under intense scrutiny, though the specific
• 21:49
  events of that trip remain sealed.
• 21:51
  Speaker 1: And keep in mind the professional context. May twenty twenty
• 21:54
  five's exactly when D four VD is writing the massive
• 21:57
  wave of his debut album Withered, which draws in April.
• 22:01
  Speaker 2: His career is operating at maximum velocity while a murder
• 22:05
  is allegedly being covered up.
• 22:06
  Speaker 1: We move into the late summer. July twenty twenty five,
• 22:09
  D four VideA officially kicks off the Withered World tour.
• 22:11
  He is flying across the country doing press performing every night,
• 22:15
  and all the.
• 22:15
  Speaker 2: While his registered tesla is sitting completely stationary part on Bluebird.
• 22:20
  Speaker 1: Avenue, harboring the remains. Then we hit the cascade of September.
• 22:24
  September eighth, the towyard employees discover the cadaver bags in
• 22:28
  the front. It immediately hits the police wire, the LAPD
• 22:32
  mobilizes a massive forensic.
• 22:34
  Speaker 2: Response, and the very next day, September ninth, which again
• 22:38
  Celeste's fifteenth birthday, D four VD takes the stage for
• 22:42
  a massive arena concert in Minneapolis.
• 22:45
  Speaker 1: To play a show the day after the discovery. I mean,
• 22:48
  is that the ultimate show of sociopathy? Or is it
• 22:51
  the behavior of a kid who has completely dissociated from
• 22:54
  reality on the advice of handlers.
• 22:56
  Speaker 2: The psychological fortitude required to execute that performance is deeply unsettling.
• 23:01
  To stand under the stage lights, looking out at thousands
• 23:04
  of screaming teenagers.
• 23:05
  Speaker 1: Singing lyrics about heartbreak and violence, knowing that less.
• 23:08
  Speaker 2: Than twenty four hours earlier, law enforcement unzipped cadaver bags
• 23:12
  in the front trunk of a vehicle registered to your name.
• 23:14
  It defies the boundaries of normal human empathy and panic.
• 23:18
  Speaker 1: But is it him or is it his crisis management team,
• 23:20
  because you have to imagine his lawyers and managers are saying,
• 23:23
  do not cancel the show. If you cancel the show
• 23:25
  the day the car is found, it signals consciousness of guilt.
• 23:29
  Get on stage and pretend nothing happened.
• 23:31
  Speaker 2: It's almost certainly a combination of the two. High net
• 23:34
  worth crisis management dictates maintaining a facade of absolute normalcy
• 23:39
  until a legal defense is fortified.
• 23:41
  Speaker 1: Canceling a massive tour date draws immediate investigative and media scrutiny.
• 23:46
  Speaker 2: However, the internal mechanism required for a nineteen year old
• 23:50
  to actually follow those instructions to suppress the biological terror
• 23:54
  of a murder investigation and perform a pop concert it
• 23:58
  suggests a profound terear verifying ability to dissociate from reality.
• 24:02
  Speaker 1: But the reality was closing in fast. While he is
• 24:05
  on tour, the LAPD is executing search warrants.
• 24:08
  Speaker 2: On September eighteenth, just over a week after the Minneapolis concert,
• 24:12
  police raid his rental home in the Hollywood Hills.
• 24:14
  Speaker 1: They seize multiple electronics, servers, and computers. But the most
• 24:18
  jarring detail buried in the property inventory is the discovery
• 24:21
  of a burn cage incinerator.
• 24:23
  Speaker 2: An apparatus explicitly designed for the destruction of material.
• 24:26
  Speaker 1: So you have a burn cage at the house, but
• 24:28
  you leave the car on the street. If you are
• 24:31
  organized enough to buy an incinerator and dismember a body,
• 24:34
  why does the plan fall apart so spectacularly at the
• 24:37
  final step.
• 24:38
  Speaker 2: Because completely incinerating organic human remains is incredibly difficult, right.
• 24:44
  It requires immense sustained thermal heat that a standard residential
• 24:49
  burn cage struggles to achieve without drawing massive attention.
• 24:53
  Speaker 1: The presence of the cage strongly implies the initial intent
• 24:56
  was the total immolation of the physical evidence, likely with
• 24:59
  the help of those suspected accomplices.
• 25:01
  Speaker 2: But they likely realized the smoke, the smell, and the
• 25:04
  time required would alert the neighbors in a densely populated
• 25:07
  area like the Hollywood Hills.
• 25:09
  Speaker 1: The primary, highly calculated plan fractured under the weight of
• 25:12
  its own logistics and.
• 25:13
  Speaker 2: The abandonment of the tesla was the secondary, panic driven fallback.
• 25:17
  Speaker 1: Plan, and that panic creates a literal forensic battlefield. In
• 25:22
  November twenty twenty five, the case is officially classified as
• 25:25
  a murder investigation. LAPD Detective Joshua Buyers makes a highly
• 25:29
  aggressive legal maneuver.
• 25:31
  Speaker 2: He petitions the courts to have the medical examiner's autopsy
• 25:34
  report completely sealed under a security hold to protect the
• 25:38
  integrity of the probe.
• 25:39
  Speaker 1: Which is an exceedingly rare maneuver. In California, autopsy records
• 25:43
  are generally considered public information once the next of kin
• 25:47
  is notified.
• 25:48
  Speaker 2: It was so rare that the chief Medical Examiner, doctor
• 25:51
  ode Ukpoh, actually went on the record publicly criticizing the
• 25:55
  LAPD's request.
• 25:57
  Speaker 1: He argued against placing a security hold on his off
• 26:00
  scientific work. It really highlights this intense friction between two
• 26:04
  different arms of the justice system.
• 26:06
  Speaker 2: The police are desperate to keep the specific condition of
• 26:09
  the remains a secret so they can use that withheld
• 26:11
  information to verify witness statements or confessions.
• 26:15
  Speaker 1: The medical establishment, however, operates on the principle of transparency
• 26:19
  and scientific public record.
• 26:20
  Speaker 2: But the LAPD fought to seal it because they knew
• 26:23
  how vulnerable their physical case was. The elements had robbed
• 26:26
  them of a definitive cause of death.
• 26:28
  Speaker 1: The digital discord logs proved a grooming relationship, but digital
• 26:32
  logs don't inherently prove a homicide it's.
• 26:35
  Speaker 2: Exactly the Los Angeles prosecutors realized very quickly that they
• 26:39
  could not walk into a courtroom relying solely on compromised
• 26:43
  tissue and chat logs.
• 26:44
  Speaker 1: They needed human beings to testify. They needed the Inner
• 26:47
  circle to talk.
• 26:48
  Speaker 2: And that realization is the catalyst for one of the
• 26:51
  most explosive trans state legal chess matches in recent.
• 26:55
  Speaker 1: History, which brings us to the secret grand jury and
• 26:59
  the catastrophic clerical error that blew this entire case wide open.
• 27:03
  Let's talk about the Texas loophole.
• 27:05
  Speaker 2: This is where the machinery of the justice system becomes
• 27:07
  fascinatingly intricate.
• 27:08
  Speaker 1: By late twenty twenty five, a secret Los Angeles County
• 27:12
  grand jury is convene under the direction of a highly
• 27:14
  aggressive prosecutor named Beth Silverman.
• 27:17
  Speaker 2: They begin utilizing subpoena power to haul in everyone in
• 27:20
  D four b's orbit.
• 27:21
  Speaker 1: They subpoena record label executives, the subpoena his manager, Robert
• 27:25
  Morgan Roth. They even track down a friend of dfour
• 27:28
  VDS who had fled to Montana, and.
• 27:30
  Speaker 2: They utilize interstate warrants to physically arrest and extradite him
• 27:33
  back to Los Angeles. Simply for failing to appear before
• 27:36
  the grand jury.
• 27:37
  Speaker 1: A grand jury is an incredibly powerful investigative weapon for
• 27:40
  a prosecutor right.
• 27:41
  Speaker 2: Oh absolutely Unlike a standard trial, there is no judge
• 27:46
  presiding and no defense attorney permitted in the room to
• 27:48
  object to questions.
• 27:50
  Speaker 1: It is a closed door proceeding where the prosecutor presents
• 27:53
  evidence and compels witnesses to testify under oath, solely to
• 27:57
  determine if there is enough probable cause to issue a
• 28:00
  formal criminal indictment.
• 28:02
  Speaker 2: In January twenty twenty six, the LA prosecutors decide they
• 28:05
  need to go straight to the bloodline.
• 28:07
  Speaker 1: They utilize a specific legal mechanism called the Uniform Act
• 28:11
  to secure the attendance of witnesses from without the state
• 28:14
  in criminal proceedings.
• 28:15
  Speaker 2: They use this Act to serve subpoenas on d four
• 28:18
  Vet's immediate family living in Texas, his father Doward Burke,
• 28:22
  his mother Colleen Burke, and his brother Caleb Burke.
• 28:25
  Speaker 1: The court orders them to fly to Los Angeles and
• 28:27
  testify under oath on February eleventh.
• 28:30
  Speaker 2: The Uniform Act is essentially a reciprocal treaty between states.
• 28:33
  California cannot legally force a Texas resident to cross state lines.
• 28:37
  Speaker 1: But under the Uniform Act, California can present its evidence
• 28:40
  to a Texas judge, and.
• 28:41
  Speaker 2: If the Texas judge agrees the witness is necessary, the
• 28:44
  Texas court will order its own citizen to comply with
• 28:46
  the California subpoena.
• 28:48
  Speaker 1: But the Burke family did not submit quietly. The father,
• 28:51
  Dawud Burke, fights the subpoena tooth and nail.
• 28:53
  Speaker 2: He hires local council in Waller County, Texas, and files
• 28:57
  a petition for a writ of habeas corpus.
• 29:00
  Speaker 1: He is essentially utilizing a legal tool designed to prevent
• 29:03
  unlawful detention, arguing that California is illegally trying to pull
• 29:07
  his family across the country based on heavily redacted secret affidavits.
• 29:12
  Speaker 2: He asked the Texas courts to block the transfer, but
• 29:15
  the Texas judiciary doesn't buy the argument.
• 29:17
  Speaker 1: Between February second and February ninth, multiple layers of Texas
• 29:21
  courts reject do Wood's challenge and order the family to
• 29:24
  board a plane to La.
• 29:26
  Speaker 2: And this is where the entire veil of secrecy completely.
• 29:28
  Speaker 1: Collapses, because in the state of California, grand jury proceedings
• 29:32
  are mandated by law to be absolutely confidential.
• 29:34
  Speaker 2: Every subpoena, every piece of evidence, every affidavit filed by
• 29:38
  Beth Silverman in Los Angeles was under a strict judicial seal.
• 29:42
  Speaker 1: The public, the media, and even the fans were never
• 29:45
  supposed to know who the specific target of the grand
• 29:47
  jury was or what physical evidence had been recovered.
• 29:50
  Speaker 2: We weren't supposed to know about the cadaver bags, the
• 29:52
  fronk were the matching.
• 29:53
  Speaker 1: Tattoos, precisely, So what does this all mean? How did
• 29:57
  it get out?
• 29:58
  Speaker 2: Well, because the wood Burke chose to fight the subpoena
• 30:02
  in his home state, and because the local civil court
• 30:05
  dockets in Waller County, Texas operate under entirely different transparency
• 30:10
  laws and were not sealed.
• 30:11
  Speaker 1: The underlying affidavits that the Los Angeles prosecutors sent over
• 30:15
  to Texas to justify the subpoenas were simply entered into
• 30:18
  the public record.
• 30:19
  Speaker 2: A completely standard clerical filing in a Texas County court
• 30:22
  house blew the lid off the most secretive murder investigation
• 30:26
  in Hollywood.
• 30:27
  Speaker 1: That is the exact mechanism of how the public discovered
• 30:29
  that D four B is the formal named target of
• 30:32
  the murder probe.
• 30:33
  Speaker 2: The LAPD's own internal narratives regarding the decomposition, the burn cage,
• 30:37
  and the digital grooming were forced into the sunlight by
• 30:39
  the defense's own attempt to quash a subpoena.
• 30:42
  Speaker 1: The irony is absolutely staggering. By fighting the subpoena to
• 30:45
  protect his son, the father inadvertently published the exact horrific
• 30:49
  details he was trying to suppress.
• 30:51
  Speaker 2: And the legal justification for forcing the family to testify
• 30:55
  is compelling. Legal analyst Alison Trizel noted that the Texas
• 30:58
  courts found the family's potential time testimony material and necessary.
• 31:02
  Speaker 1: The detectives explicitly highlighted a close relationship between dfour V
• 31:06
  and his father.
• 31:08
  Speaker 2: The prosecutor's logic is very clear. If a nineteen year
• 31:11
  old finds himself in a catastrophic situation involving a deceased
• 31:15
  minor and a deathperate need for logistical disposal, the very
• 31:19
  first call he makes for help, guidance, or financial resources
• 31:22
  is likely to his parents.
• 31:24
  Speaker 1: The LAPD firmly believes the family holds critical firsthand knowledge
• 31:28
  about the timeline, the potential accomplices or even direct confessions.
• 31:32
  Speaker 2: But wait, if DS or VD has the vast financial
• 31:35
  resources to hire a Hollywood defense powerhouse like Blair Burke,
• 31:39
  an attorney who represents the absolute upper echelon of a
• 31:42
  list celebrities, why wouldn't his legal team ensure that Texas
• 31:46
  filings were sealed too? Do they just get outmaneuvered by
• 31:49
  the differences in state laws.
• 31:50
  Speaker 1: It highlights the massive friction of jurisdictional arbitrage. Blair Burke
• 31:54
  is a titan of California criminal defense, but she cannot
• 31:57
  practice law in Texas without jumping through specific and.
• 32:00
  Speaker 2: More importantly, the fight in Texas was a civil subpoena issue,
• 32:04
  not a criminal trial.
• 32:06
  Speaker 1: The Burke family retained Local Texas Council to fight the extradition.
• 32:10
  In the frantic, rapid fire environment of interstate litigation, local
• 32:14
  council often files a standard writ of habeas corpus, attaching
• 32:18
  the state's demands as exhibits.
• 32:20
  Speaker 2: Completely fairing to realize that those exhibits will immediately populate
• 32:24
  the county's public online docket before any motion to seal
• 32:28
  can be argued.
• 32:29
  Speaker 1: It was a localized procedural oversight that caused a national
• 32:32
  shockwave and.
• 32:33
  Speaker 2: The Los Angeles prosecutors capitalized on that fight immediately. Reports
• 32:38
  indicate that LAPD detective Alex Alas actually flew from California
• 32:42
  to Texas to appear in person at these local subpoena hearings.
• 32:46
  Speaker 1: That is highly unusual. It proves exactly how vital the
• 32:48
  prosecution views this family's testimony.
• 32:50
  Speaker 2: They view the Burks as the lynchpin that will finally
• 32:52
  break the wall of silence.
• 32:54
  Speaker 1: Which brings us to the razor's edge. Of the present moment,
• 32:56
  it is March twenty twenty six. The legal machinery is
• 32:59
  growning forward, but the fallout is already immense.
• 33:03
  Speaker 2: We have a family in Riverside County deeply mourning the
• 33:05
  loss of a fourteen year old girl whose life was
• 33:08
  cut brutally short.
• 33:09
  Speaker 1: We have a secret grand jury deliberating in downtown Los Angeles,
• 33:13
  holding the power to issue an indictment that would shatter
• 33:16
  the music industry.
• 33:17
  Speaker 2: And we have a global fan base that is viciously
• 33:20
  toxically divided online. D forty d's management team has issued
• 33:24
  absolutely zero public statements beyond quietly canceling the remainder of
• 33:29
  his tour dates.
• 33:30
  Speaker 1: The silence from his camp is deafening, but legally, remaining
• 33:34
  silent is the only viable strategy when you are staring
• 33:37
  down the barrel of a one eight seven a investigation.
• 33:40
  Speaker 2: Meanwhile, you have thousands of fans warring in common sections,
• 33:44
  some demanding accountability in justice for Celest while others outright
• 33:47
  refuse to believe the unsealed court documents.
• 33:49
  Speaker 1: Claiming the entire investigation is a fabricated set up by
• 33:52
  the police.
• 33:53
  Speaker 2: It demonstrates the terrifying power of parasocial loyalty. Because fans
• 33:58
  have spent hundreds of hours listening to his voice in
• 34:00
  their headphones, they feel a false sense of intimate knowledge
• 34:03
  about his character.
• 34:05
  Speaker 1: They are willing to defend him against empirical forensic evidence
• 34:08
  and sworn police affidavits because accepting the truth would mean
• 34:12
  emitting they idolized a predator.
• 34:14
  Speaker 2: But the justice system does not operate on streaming numbers
• 34:17
  or fandom. The forensic re examinations of the Tesla are ongoing,
• 34:22
  the grand jury remains active.
• 34:24
  Speaker 1: And Celeste's family is currently exploring a civil lawsuit against
• 34:27
  the LAPD simply to force more transparency regarding the investigation
• 34:32
  into their daughter's death. They are demanding answers, and they.
• 34:35
  Speaker 2: Absolutely deserve them.
• 34:37
  Speaker 1: This case is a labyrinth, but it is one we
• 34:39
  must navigate. Let's recap the journey of this deep dive,
• 34:42
  because the ground we have covered today is immense.
• 34:45
  Speaker 2: We started by looking at a vulnerable fourteen year old girl,
• 34:48
  Celeste Reevus. She was navigating a deeply turbulent home life
• 34:53
  and slipping through the widening cracks of a systemic safety
• 34:56
  net that suffered from bureaucratic compassion fatigue.
• 34:59
  Speaker 1: We watched her seque refuge in the digital world, only
• 35:01
  to be pulled into the dark side of a modern
• 35:03
  Cinderella story.
• 35:05
  Speaker 2: We broke down the architecture of a discord server, showing
• 35:08
  how a creator's fiefdom can be weaponized into a grooming pipeline,
• 35:12
  culminating in a permanent physical branding of silence.
• 35:15
  Speaker 1: We analyzed the gruesome physical discovery in the Hollywood Hills,
• 35:18
  unpacking the specific thermodynamics of how an electric vehicle's fronk
• 35:22
  accelerated decomposition.
• 35:24
  Speaker 2: Creating a forensic nightmare that robbed the medical examiner of
• 35:27
  a definitive cause of death.
• 35:29
  Speaker 1: We explored the chilling cognitive dissonance of a nineteen year
• 35:32
  old pop star performing for thousands of screaming fans while
• 35:35
  his abandoned car held a devastating secret.
• 35:38
  Speaker 2: And finally we untangled the trans state legal chess match.
• 35:42
  We explained the mechanics of the Uniform Act, the power
• 35:45
  of a secret grand jury, and how a routine clerical
• 35:48
  filing in a Texas courthouse accidentally utilized the Texas loophole
• 35:52
  to expose the entire hidden investigation to the world.
• 35:55
  Speaker 1: This deep dive serves as a harsh, unforgiving mirror. It
• 35:58
  reflects the catastrophic systemic failures in how our society protects
• 36:02
  its runaway youth.
• 36:03
  Speaker 2: It exposes the terrifying double edged sword of social media fame,
• 36:08
  proving that the exact same digital platform a creator uses
• 36:11
  to build an empire can also be meticulously structured as
• 36:15
  a hunting ground.
• 36:16
  Speaker 1: And it completely shatters the illusion that immense wealth, celebrity status,
• 36:20
  and high price Hollywood lawyers can permanently insulate you from
• 36:24
  the truth.
• 36:25
  Speaker 2: You simply cannot buy a big enough rug to sweep
• 36:28
  a tragedy of this magnitude under.
• 36:30
  Speaker 1: It forces every single one of us to fundamentally reevaluate
• 36:33
  what we are actually looking at when we look at
• 36:35
  success and celebrity in the digital.
• 36:37
  Speaker 2: Age, which brings us back to the very beginning. We
• 36:40
  like our danger to be visible. We expect terrible things
• 36:43
  to happen in abandoned warehouses or dark alleyways.
• 36:46
  Speaker 1: We don't expect the monsters to be on our Spotify
• 36:48
  wrapped playlists, or headlining massive arena tours, or driving luxury
• 36:52
  sedans down Bluebird Avenue in the Hollywood Hills.
• 36:55
  Speaker 2: The digital world and the physical world collided here, and
• 36:58
  the fallout is absolute DEAs station.
• 37:00
  Speaker 1: And I want to leave you, our listener, with a
• 37:03
  final lingering thought to mull over today, something that builds
• 37:07
  on everything we have unpacked regarding the intersection of art, commerce,
• 37:12
  and true crime.
• 37:13
  Speaker 2: When we consume art, especially music that so rawly and
• 37:16
  violently explores dark emotional themes of obsession, control, and heartbreak,
• 37:22
  we rarely pause to ask what real world experiences actually
• 37:26
  fuel that lyricism.
• 37:28
  Speaker 1: We give artists the benefit of the doubt. We assume
• 37:30
  it is just a theatrical performance designed for entertainment.
• 37:33
  Speaker 2: But if an artist's darkest, most violent lyrics are not
• 37:37
  just performance, but are actually confessions hiding in plain sight.
• 37:41
  Speaker 1: Does our eager participation in celebrity stand culture make us
• 37:45
  wilfully blind to the red flags waving right in front
• 37:47
  of us.
• 37:48
  Speaker 2: When we stream the music and buy the concert tickets,
• 37:50
  are we just cheering for the art or are we
• 37:52
  actively funding and applauding the warning signs of a predator.
• 37:55
  Speaker 1: Thank you for taking this deep dive. We will see
• 37:57
  you next time.