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If He Did It · Political Junkie Podcast

• 0:00
  SPEAKER_02: Pretty frightening.
• 0:00
  SPEAKER_02: It's not just African Americans.
• 0:03
  SPEAKER_02: It's white people who would associate, ordain to go out with a black man or marry one.
• 0:08
  SPEAKER_02: You're free in America to love whoever you want.
• 0:12
  SPEAKER_02: So it infects all of us, doesn't it?
• 0:14
  SPEAKER_02: This one rotten apple.
• 0:16
  SPEAKER_02: And yet they cover for him.
• 0:18
  SPEAKER_02: Yet they cover for him.
• 0:20
  SPEAKER_02: But this man used these words and these racial epithets so much,
• 0:23
  SPEAKER_02: he probably can't remember who he said it to.
• 0:25
  SPEAKER_02: He said it to everybody, whoever came in contact with him.
• 0:27
  SPEAKER_02: On tape?
• 0:28
  SPEAKER_02: Can you imagine the gall about that?
• 0:30
  SPEAKER_02: That you would have these racist views, and yet you would put it on tape.
• 0:35
  SPEAKER_02: Thank God he put it on tape.
• 0:38
  Oh, baby,
• 0:40
  [music]
• 1:05
  SPEAKER_00: with a short excerpt from day one
• 1:07
  SPEAKER_00: of defense attorney Johnny Cochran's closing argument in the O.J.
• 1:12
  SPEAKER_00: Simpson trial for the murders of his former wife,
• 1:15
  SPEAKER_00: Nicole Brown Simpson, and her friend Ronald Goldman on September 27th, 1995.
• 1:22
  SPEAKER_00: This is the If He Did It edition of the Political Junkie podcast.
• 1:26
  SPEAKER_00: I'm Claire Potter.
• 1:27
  SPEAKER_01: I'm Neil Young.
• 1:29
  SPEAKER_00: And Neil, it's just such a beautiful fall day here.
• 1:33
  SPEAKER_00: But I have to tell you, Halloween is coming in New York.
• 1:37
  SPEAKER_00: I was parking the car this morning.
• 1:39
  SPEAKER_00: And in front of the house next to me,
• 1:42
  SPEAKER_00: there were all of these like skeletons and,
• 1:44
  SPEAKER_00: you know, dressed up ghosts and stuff like that.
• 1:47
  SPEAKER_00: And I tried to pay one of them to watch my car.
• 1:51
  SPEAKER_00: And they wouldn't do it.
• 1:52
  SPEAKER_00: Can you believe it?
• 1:53
  SPEAKER_01: Typical male.
• 1:54
  SPEAKER_00: I know.
• 1:55
  SPEAKER_00: I just hate skeletons and ghosts.
• 1:57
  SPEAKER_00: They're just like so self-involved, so about themselves and their Halloween thingy.
• 2:02
  SPEAKER_00: All right, Neil.
• 2:04
  SPEAKER_00: So this is a really big week.
• 2:06
  SPEAKER_00: We are gearing up for the election.
• 2:09
  SPEAKER_00: We've got about another, what, 11 days to go.
• 2:13
  SPEAKER_00: Is everybody in California excited?
• 2:15
  SPEAKER_00: Yes.
• 2:16
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, you know,
• 2:18
  SPEAKER_01: our races here aren't very close,
• 2:20
  SPEAKER_01: so I don't think there's,
• 2:21
  SPEAKER_01: you know,
• 2:22
  SPEAKER_01: tons of talk about the election here,
• 2:24
  SPEAKER_01: but I think folks are excited for this election to happen
• 2:27
  SPEAKER_01: and see what hopefully happens in a good way.
• 2:31
  SPEAKER_01: Although,
• 2:32
  SPEAKER_01: you know,
• 2:32
  SPEAKER_01: real concerns about this not being something that the Trump administration tries
• 2:38
  SPEAKER_01: to mess up.
• 2:39
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, you know,
• 2:40
  SPEAKER_00: this isn't in our news summary today,
• 2:42
  SPEAKER_00: but did you catch the piece in the Washington Post about how
• 2:45
  SPEAKER_00: the Justice Department announced that if Dan Sullivan,
• 2:48
  SPEAKER_00: the real Dan Sullivan,
• 2:50
  SPEAKER_00: the Republican,
• 2:51
  SPEAKER_00: loses by a small amount, they are going to delay the certification of Mary Peltola?
• 3:00
  SPEAKER_00: In other words,
• 3:01
  SPEAKER_00: if Mary Peltola wins,
• 3:03
  SPEAKER_00: the Justice Department is going to say,
• 3:05
  SPEAKER_00: wait a second, you can't certify this until we investigate.
• 3:10
  SPEAKER_00: What is that about?
• 3:11
  SPEAKER_00: And do you actually think this inspires Republican voters?
• 3:15
  SPEAKER_01: Well, I don't think it inspires Republican voters.
• 3:17
  SPEAKER_01: If anything,
• 3:18
  SPEAKER_01: it probably just lights even more fires under Democratic voters to vote and
• 3:25
  SPEAKER_01: to make sure that these wins happen and also that they happen by margins that...
• 3:30
  SPEAKER_01: Well, I have a theory,
• 3:31
  SPEAKER_01: Neil, which is that the internal numbers say that Peltola is going to win.
• 3:53
  SPEAKER_00: But that she's not going to win by very much.
• 3:55
  SPEAKER_00: And so, and you were sort of hinting at this,
• 3:57
  SPEAKER_00: this is intended to inspire Republicans to get out there and vote.
• 4:03
  SPEAKER_00: So I think there's something being telegraphed here.
• 4:06
  SPEAKER_00: What shocks me is that we know,
• 4:09
  SPEAKER_00: of course,
• 4:10
  SPEAKER_00: that Trump's chief of staff is Susie Wiles,
• 4:12
  SPEAKER_00: that she's one of the best political consultants in the United States,
• 4:16
  SPEAKER_00: and that she's just sitting there letting this stuff go by astonishes me.
• 4:22
  SPEAKER_01: Well, wouldn't we love to know what's going on inside her mind?
• 4:27
  SPEAKER_01: Because I think there's something quite complicated happening there that I think has
• 4:32
  SPEAKER_01: to do with her own relationship to this work and the administration
• 4:38
  SPEAKER_01: and what she sees happening.
• 4:39
  SPEAKER_01: So I don't know.
• 4:41
  SPEAKER_01: We may never know the answer to that.
• 4:42
  SPEAKER_01: But something is quite complicatedly happening, I think, in her approach to this job.
• 4:51
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 4:52
  SPEAKER_00: How many days do you give her after the election to resign?
• 4:57
  SPEAKER_00: I'm going to say it's going to be less than a Scaramucci.
• 5:00
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 5:00
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, like, girl, go enjoy your holidays.
• 5:03
  SPEAKER_01: Like, get out of town.
• 5:04
  SPEAKER_00: And just heal.
• 5:07
  SPEAKER_00: Just heal from cancer.
• 5:09
  SPEAKER_00: Ring the bell.
• 5:10
  SPEAKER_00: Go to the beach.
• 5:11
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 5:11
  SPEAKER_00: Okay.
• 5:12
  SPEAKER_00: So let's get to the real news summary, Neal.
• 5:15
  SPEAKER_00: We're going to talk a little bit about grift in this summary because
• 5:18
  SPEAKER_00: the grifting never stops in the Trump White House.
• 5:22
  SPEAKER_00: We learned on Tuesday that billionaire Venezuelan banker Julio Herrera Vellutini,
• 5:28
  SPEAKER_00: who pled to a bribery charge in August 2025 in exchange for a reduced charge
• 5:34
  SPEAKER_00: that carried no time.
• 5:35
  SPEAKER_00: I think it was misdemeanor, political campaign, contribution-y thingy.
• 5:41
  SPEAKER_00: Anyway, He has sought a full pardon from Donald Trump because he doesn't even want
• 5:46
  SPEAKER_00: a misdemeanor on his record.
• 5:48
  SPEAKER_00: Now, how did this happen, Neil?
• 5:52
  SPEAKER_01: How did what happen?
• 5:53
  SPEAKER_01: The misdemeanor?
• 5:54
  SPEAKER_00: How did he get the pardon?
• 5:56
  SPEAKER_01: Oh, well, so, yeah, I mean,
• 5:59
  SPEAKER_01: it's an interesting route that I think,
• 6:01
  SPEAKER_01: well, first of all, let's just say what happened.
• 6:03
  SPEAKER_01: So he made a $3.5 million donation to Trump's super PAC.
• 6:06
  SPEAKER_01: Right.
• 6:09
  SPEAKER_01: That did not persuade the president,
• 6:11
  SPEAKER_01: which I'm curious what you think about that,
• 6:13
  SPEAKER_01: because, I mean,
• 6:14
  SPEAKER_01: I think he was not wrong to think,
• 6:16
  SPEAKER_01: hey, if I cough at $3.5 million, this guy is going to jump.
• 6:21
  SPEAKER_01: But Trump didn't at the time.
• 6:24
  SPEAKER_01: Trump's former lawyer,
• 6:26
  SPEAKER_01: Alina Haba,
• 6:27
  SPEAKER_01: who was like busy cooling her heels after,
• 6:30
  SPEAKER_01: you know, she was booted as U.S. attorney by a federal judge.
• 6:34
  SPEAKER_01: She then coincidentally received an offer of employment worth $10 million, which is good money.
• 6:43
  SPEAKER_01: Certainly better than you get as an attorney, U.S. attorney.
• 6:47
  SPEAKER_01: So she got this employment offer from a mysterious corporation that Herrera set up
• 6:55
  SPEAKER_01: in Florida in 2025.
• 6:57
  SPEAKER_01: And then all of a sudden, boom, he has a pardon.
• 7:00
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 7:02
  SPEAKER_00: And it's not altogether clear what this corporation is or what it does.
• 7:06
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, what this kind of looks like is Trump decided
• 7:09
  SPEAKER_00: that $3.5 million just simply wasn't enough from a billionaire.
• 7:13
  SPEAKER_00: So he ignored it.
• 7:14
  SPEAKER_00: But then he had this Alina Haba problem.
• 7:17
  SPEAKER_00: And you may remember that she was,
• 7:20
  SPEAKER_00: you know,
• 7:22
  SPEAKER_00: booted not just because she was incompetent,
• 7:26
  SPEAKER_00: but because a federal judge said,
• 7:28
  SPEAKER_00: you know, you haven't been appointed, so you have to leave.
• 7:31
  SPEAKER_00: And there was nothing to do with her.
• 7:33
  SPEAKER_00: And Habba had been part of his defense team in the E. Jean Carroll case.
• 7:38
  SPEAKER_00: And also,
• 7:39
  SPEAKER_00: I believe,
• 7:39
  SPEAKER_00: in the documents case,
• 7:41
  SPEAKER_00: the documents that somehow made their way to Mar-a-Lago were actually top secret.
• 7:47
  SPEAKER_00: And so Alina Habba has receipts, I think, don't you?
• 7:52
  SPEAKER_01: Yes, and also I think she's one of those people that's a little bit of a loose cannon.
• 7:58
  SPEAKER_01: And kind of like we were talking about with Kimberly Guilfoyle last week,
• 8:01
  SPEAKER_01: that there's an element of like when the crazy is working in your direction,
• 8:05
  SPEAKER_01: the Trumps are fully on board for it,
• 8:07
  SPEAKER_01: but they also understand that it can go a different way.
• 8:11
  SPEAKER_01: And so I think that makes a lot of sense.
• 8:14
  SPEAKER_01: 3.5 million was not enough.
• 8:17
  SPEAKER_01: An increased...
• 8:19
  SPEAKER_01: Financial offer that also dealt with this problem on their hands,
• 8:24
  SPEAKER_01: which is Alina Haba, pardon obtained.
• 8:28
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 8:28
  SPEAKER_00: And you've got to wonder if any of that $10 million is being kicked back to
• 8:33
  SPEAKER_00: the Trumps in any way, don't you?
• 8:36
  SPEAKER_01: Certainly.
• 8:36
  SPEAKER_01: And I mean, again, like that's a lot of money.
• 8:39
  SPEAKER_01: It's not clear what this company does.
• 8:42
  SPEAKER_01: It literally was just created.
• 8:44
  SPEAKER_01: And there's no sort of public record of what it has done or what it will do.
• 8:49
  SPEAKER_01: So, you know, lots of red flags all over this.
• 8:53
  SPEAKER_00: Oh, yeah.
• 8:54
  SPEAKER_00: So let's stick with the grifting for a little while,
• 8:56
  SPEAKER_00: because it seems like it is not only Republicans who are grifting.
• 9:00
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, who's surprised?
• 9:01
  SPEAKER_00: You know, we had a senator go down in New Jersey.
• 9:04
  SPEAKER_00: He and his wife were Keeping gold bars in their clothes in the closet and stuff like that.
• 9:11
  SPEAKER_00: But according to ProPublica,
• 9:13
  SPEAKER_00: in early 2025,
• 9:15
  SPEAKER_00: before the FBI was purged of the so-called deep state loyalists,
• 9:19
  SPEAKER_00: the Bureau was investigating pay-to-play deals in Congress.
• 9:24
  SPEAKER_00: Two members of the South Carolina delegation were prime suspects.
• 9:29
  SPEAKER_00: Republican Senator Lindsey Graham,
• 9:31
  SPEAKER_00: who we're going to get back to in a minute,
• 9:33
  SPEAKER_00: And Democratic Representative Jim Clyburn.
• 9:38
  SPEAKER_00: In exchange for campaign donations,
• 9:40
  SPEAKER_00: and that campaign donation in Lindsey Graham's case was $100,000,
• 9:44
  SPEAKER_00: the two men allegedly steered military contracts worth millions to Navitech,
• 9:50
  SPEAKER_00: which is a military contractor of some kind.
• 9:54
  SPEAKER_00: Republican incumbent Susan Collins,
• 9:57
  SPEAKER_00: who's in a tight race for her Senate seat,
• 9:59
  SPEAKER_00: was under investigation for a similar scheme.
• 10:01
  SPEAKER_00: She has said, this is complete nonsense.
• 10:03
  SPEAKER_00: You know, I would never do anything like that.
• 10:06
  SPEAKER_00: But the entire investigation is at a stop because all of the people who were working
• 10:12
  SPEAKER_00: on it were mysteriously fired.
• 10:15
  SPEAKER_00: How do you think that happened, Neal?
• 10:16
  SPEAKER_01: Well, I can't even imagine how that happened,
• 10:19
  SPEAKER_01: but you know, the question I think is like, how deep does the corruption go?
• 10:24
  SPEAKER_01: Or also like, what does corruption look like?
• 10:27
  SPEAKER_01: Beyond just the immediate orbit of Trump and the sort of,
• 10:31
  SPEAKER_01: you know, obvious plain daylight stuff that he's pulling off.
• 10:35
  SPEAKER_01: I think,
• 10:36
  SPEAKER_01: you know,
• 10:36
  SPEAKER_01: most Americans would say, yeah,
• 10:38
  SPEAKER_01: there's some level of this grift of like sort of steering contracts and directions
• 10:44
  SPEAKER_01: that,
• 10:45
  SPEAKER_01: you know,
• 10:45
  SPEAKER_01: help out donors that exist across like probably a broad swath of Congress,
• 10:52
  SPEAKER_01: if not everyone to some degree.
• 10:57
  SPEAKER_01: But and I think,
• 10:57
  SPEAKER_01: you know, Trump,
• 10:58
  SPEAKER_01: who's sort of one of the ways he rose to power was on this idea that he was going
• 11:03
  SPEAKER_01: to come and clean up the swamp.
• 11:04
  SPEAKER_01: I mean,
• 11:05
  SPEAKER_01: that only works if you have an American public that's sort of generally aware
• 11:09
  SPEAKER_01: that this sort of stuff goes on and they want something done about it.
• 11:11
  SPEAKER_01: Of course,
• 11:12
  SPEAKER_01: when he said he was going to clean up the swamp,
• 11:14
  SPEAKER_01: what he meant was he was going to steer the swamp in his direction.
• 11:17
  SPEAKER_01: But, you know,
• 11:17
  SPEAKER_01: there was an article I read just this morning that said that 19 percent
• 11:21
  SPEAKER_01: of American voters said that corruption is their number one issue going into
• 11:26
  SPEAKER_01: the midterm.
• 11:27
  SPEAKER_01: And that's only behind folks who said that the economy is their number one issue.
• 11:32
  SPEAKER_01: So this is a big issue on American voters' minds right now to a degree
• 11:36
  SPEAKER_01: that I think it doesn't normally show up as sort of a motivating factor
• 11:40
  SPEAKER_01: in elections.
• 11:41
  SPEAKER_01: I think that That perception and that sort of motivation, though,
• 11:47
  SPEAKER_01: is driven by Trump and what Trump is doing,
• 11:50
  SPEAKER_01: even if he isn't the only one that's, you know, a corrupt actor.
• 11:54
  SPEAKER_00: That's really interesting, Neil.
• 11:55
  SPEAKER_00: And, you know,
• 11:56
  SPEAKER_00: one of the things that strikes me about this as well is we are in a period
• 12:02
  SPEAKER_00: that James Carville described back in 1992 that you can characterize it as it's
• 12:08
  SPEAKER_00: the economy, stupid.
• 12:10
  SPEAKER_00: And how it must gall a broad swath of Americans to be really,
• 12:16
  SPEAKER_00: really struggling,
• 12:17
  SPEAKER_00: say, to fill the tank of their heating unit with oil, to pay the electricity bill.
• 12:25
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, my electricity bill is through the roof.
• 12:27
  SPEAKER_00: I don't know about yours.
• 12:29
  SPEAKER_00: To actually not even think about going on vacations,
• 12:33
  SPEAKER_00: but just to be able to sustain the things that allow you to keep moving through life
• 12:38
  SPEAKER_00: in a semi-comfortable way.
• 12:40
  SPEAKER_00: And the headlines every day are full of Trump and the people around him enriching themselves.
• 12:48
  SPEAKER_00: Do you think this is the kind of news that really moves an electorate?
• 12:55
  SPEAKER_01: I think it does.
• 12:55
  SPEAKER_01: I think it really can.
• 12:56
  SPEAKER_01: I think that like...
• 12:58
  SPEAKER_01: People are easily motivated by pocketbook issues.
• 13:01
  SPEAKER_01: We know that.
• 13:03
  SPEAKER_01: Just looking at a broad history of American politics,
• 13:07
  SPEAKER_01: we know that often is a motivating factor.
• 13:11
  SPEAKER_01: And so when that alone can Stimulate people's political involvement
• 13:17
  SPEAKER_01: and also their decision-making,
• 13:19
  SPEAKER_01: and you couple that with a broader context than just a bad economy,
• 13:25
  SPEAKER_01: but such obvious grift and money-making and a defiant attitude about that.
• 13:33
  SPEAKER_01: And also all the stuff that Trump is doing,
• 13:35
  SPEAKER_01: building the ballroom,
• 13:36
  SPEAKER_01: building these statues to himself and these memorials and all these sorts of things.
• 13:41
  SPEAKER_01: It doesn't change any American's life in any way.
• 13:44
  SPEAKER_01: I think more and more folks are easily fed up with that sort of stuff and motivated
• 13:49
  SPEAKER_01: to vote accordingly.
• 13:51
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, I agree with or not vote in the case of some Republicans who are just sick
• 13:56
  SPEAKER_00: and disgusted about the whole thing.
• 14:00
  SPEAKER_00: So let's get back to Lindsey Graham, one of my favorite topics.
• 14:04
  SPEAKER_00: And I stumbled into this on X.
• 14:09
  SPEAKER_00: It was just a sort of excerpt,
• 14:10
  SPEAKER_00: but there's a 30-minute video released on the Young Turks YouTube channel,
• 14:16
  SPEAKER_00: which features three Washington, D.C.
• 14:19
  SPEAKER_00: area sex workers who claim to have been paid to play,
• 14:25
  SPEAKER_00: as it were, by the South Carolina senator.
• 14:29
  SPEAKER_00: One alleges he was 17 at the time,
• 14:32
  SPEAKER_00: although the rumors Graham had sex with a minor are all over the Internet.
• 14:37
  SPEAKER_00: Technically, I need to say that's not true.
• 14:40
  SPEAKER_00: The age of consent in the Capitol is 16.
• 14:42
  SPEAKER_00: Now, that doesn't mean actually that a grown man who is a U.S.
• 14:46
  SPEAKER_00: senator should, in fact, be having sex with a 17-year-old.
• 14:50
  SPEAKER_00: But I just want to say that what Lindsey Graham did is not,
• 14:53
  SPEAKER_00: in fact,
• 14:54
  SPEAKER_00: a crime in Washington, D.C.,
• 14:58
  SPEAKER_00: One of these men says he did not even realize that he was having sex with a senator
• 15:03
  SPEAKER_00: until he saw Lindsey Graham on TV.
• 15:06
  SPEAKER_00: Actually, it was in the 2016, the run up to the 2016 election in the primaries.
• 15:11
  SPEAKER_00: So Lindsey Graham was actually debating Donald Trump and the sex worker is like,
• 15:15
  SPEAKER_00: oh, I had sex with that guy.
• 15:18
  SPEAKER_00: Neil, why is this coming out now?
• 15:22
  SPEAKER_01: Well, it's coming out now because it's being released by this group, Young Turks, right?
• 15:27
  SPEAKER_01: Isn't that what they're called?
• 15:28
  SPEAKER_01: And it's, you know, it's being sort of offered up as an October surprise.
• 15:34
  SPEAKER_01: Like it's meant to have some sort of effect on the election specifically.
• 15:37
  SPEAKER_01: I learned about this process.
• 16:05
  SPEAKER_01: There was all this talk about this video was going to be released,
• 16:09
  SPEAKER_01: and it was going to be overwhelming proof of a Republican senator who was up
• 16:15
  SPEAKER_01: to all this stuff.
• 16:16
  SPEAKER_01: And then there was all this immediate speculation.
• 16:19
  SPEAKER_01: Is it Hawley?
• 16:20
  SPEAKER_01: Is it Grassley?
• 16:22
  SPEAKER_01: And the list of people that you really hope it wasn't,
• 16:24
  SPEAKER_01: not because you don't want to see their comeuppance,
• 16:27
  SPEAKER_01: but you just can't really picture them doing any of these things.
• 16:30
  SPEAKER_01: And then, of course, people started suggesting that Well, it's probably Lindsey Graham.
• 16:34
  SPEAKER_01: And I thought, if this is Lindsey Graham, like, what in the world?
• 16:38
  SPEAKER_01: Why does this even matter?
• 16:39
  SPEAKER_01: And then sure enough, the next day when it was released, it was Lindsey Graham.
• 16:43
  SPEAKER_01: And I think this doesn't surprise anyone.
• 16:46
  SPEAKER_01: I don't really understand what the point of it is about a dead person.
• 16:51
  SPEAKER_01: I do think, like, obviously historians are...
• 16:56
  SPEAKER_01: Should, you know,
• 16:57
  SPEAKER_01: continue to write about dead people and investigate their past and create,
• 17:00
  SPEAKER_01: you know, a truer understanding of who folks are.
• 17:03
  SPEAKER_01: But like as a political strategy here, what in the world is is the utility of this?
• 17:09
  SPEAKER_01: Am I totally wrong, Claire?
• 17:10
  SPEAKER_00: No, you're not totally wrong.
• 17:12
  SPEAKER_00: I think the utility is to play on the idea that Republicans are corrupt,
• 17:18
  SPEAKER_00: that Republicans are always hiding something,
• 17:21
  SPEAKER_00: which is, of course, what Republicans are doing to Democrats as well.
• 17:24
  SPEAKER_00: They uncover these sort of bullshit things.
• 17:28
  SPEAKER_00: And we're going to be talking about one of those in a second.
• 17:31
  SPEAKER_00: I do think the part.
• 17:33
  SPEAKER_00: Yes, this is the least surprising October surprise ever.
• 17:36
  SPEAKER_00: Like compared to Hillary's emails, this is like not a surprise.
• 17:42
  SPEAKER_00: The part that does get to me,
• 17:43
  SPEAKER_00: however,
• 17:44
  SPEAKER_00: is people saying things like,
• 17:47
  SPEAKER_00: you know,
• 17:48
  SPEAKER_00: Lindsey Graham isn't around to defend himself or Lindsey Graham is being defamed.
• 17:54
  SPEAKER_00: There's nothing wrong with being a homosexual.
• 17:56
  SPEAKER_01: Completely.
• 17:57
  SPEAKER_01: Completely.
• 17:57
  SPEAKER_00: Being as a homosexual.
• 18:00
  SPEAKER_01: Yes.
• 18:01
  SPEAKER_01: There's been a lot of interesting reactions to this.
• 18:04
  SPEAKER_01: And it's like Republicans can't really pick the lane they want to be in.
• 18:08
  SPEAKER_01: And the lane that sort of surprises me that I think the overwhelming amount are
• 18:13
  SPEAKER_01: in is all of the folks who...
• 18:15
  SPEAKER_01: So that's an interesting lane itself.
• 18:17
  SPEAKER_01: Right.
• 18:30
  SPEAKER_01: The one that you just said, this is defamation.
• 18:33
  SPEAKER_01: These are lies against a good man, which of course is not what the bulk of people are saying.
• 18:39
  SPEAKER_01: And also this,
• 18:40
  SPEAKER_01: I saw someone and I can't remember who it was,
• 18:41
  SPEAKER_01: was saying like these homophobic attacks.
• 18:45
  SPEAKER_01: And I'm like, where's the homophobia here?
• 18:48
  SPEAKER_01: And also where's the irony and the sorts of people
• 18:53
  SPEAKER_01: who are like clutching their pearls that a homophobic attack might be used
• 18:58
  SPEAKER_01: in American politics?
• 19:00
  SPEAKER_00: Yep.
• 19:00
  SPEAKER_00: You know what I would do if I were Darlene Graham?
• 19:02
  SPEAKER_00: And she won't do this because she's not a good enough politician.
• 19:05
  SPEAKER_01: No.
• 19:05
  SPEAKER_00: But I would call a press conference and I would say in response to these videos,
• 19:13
  SPEAKER_00: my brother was a gay man who chose his privacy so that he could devote himself
• 19:21
  SPEAKER_00: to public life.
• 19:23
  SPEAKER_00: I would do that.
• 19:24
  SPEAKER_00: And then I would say my brother Was a man of God,
• 19:28
  SPEAKER_00: a Christian man of faith who believed that all people were equal and deserved love.
• 19:34
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, she's not going to do that because she's not that talented of a politician,
• 19:37
  SPEAKER_01: as you said, and she can't think through a sort of two-step move like that.
• 19:41
  SPEAKER_01: Also, I think it's a level of acknowledgement that, like,
• 19:44
  SPEAKER_01: she seems incapable of doing and who knows what the, like,
• 19:47
  SPEAKER_01: deeper dynamics of,
• 19:49
  SPEAKER_01: like, her family and all that was at work for decades and decades.
• 19:53
  SPEAKER_01: But I also think that, like, A lot of this is missing the point.
• 19:59
  SPEAKER_01: And I think a lot of Republicans are purposely missing the point.
• 20:02
  SPEAKER_01: The point isn't whether or not Lindsey Graham was gay.
• 20:04
  SPEAKER_01: And that's not what these...
• 20:08
  SPEAKER_01: You know, people coming forward are here to talk about.
• 20:12
  SPEAKER_01: The point was that he was paying escorts to do this and some of whom might have been underage.
• 20:18
  SPEAKER_01: And also,
• 20:18
  SPEAKER_01: I think the question about the underage person,
• 20:20
  SPEAKER_01: wasn't he involved in an act with Lindsey Graham in the state of Arizona,
• 20:27
  SPEAKER_01: which may have different.
• 20:29
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 20:29
  SPEAKER_01: So I thought that the particular 17 year old.
• 20:33
  SPEAKER_01: Had been involved with Lindsey Graham when Lindsey Graham was staying
• 20:38
  SPEAKER_01: at John McCain's Arizona Ranch.
• 20:41
  SPEAKER_01: And I made, I did not watch the whole thing because I could only stomach so much of this.
• 20:46
  SPEAKER_01: I have a book to write.
• 20:47
  SPEAKER_01: And unfortunately,
• 20:48
  SPEAKER_01: the book that would have been relevant for this has already been written by me.
• 20:51
  SPEAKER_01: So anyway, I may not have that detail exactly right.
• 20:55
  SPEAKER_01: But again,
• 20:55
  SPEAKER_01: the point here isn't like,
• 20:56
  SPEAKER_01: oh, this is now definitive proof that Lindsey Graham was gay.
• 21:00
  SPEAKER_01: Who cares?
• 21:00
  SPEAKER_01: It's that He was paying escorts,
• 21:03
  SPEAKER_01: which is not usually something that senators should be doing,
• 21:08
  SPEAKER_01: although a lot of them have.
• 21:09
  SPEAKER_00: Although they do it all the time.
• 21:11
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 21:12
  SPEAKER_00: I think we have to call Meghan McCain and get her opinion on this
• 21:16
  SPEAKER_00: because Meghan would tell us the truth, I'm sure.
• 21:20
  SPEAKER_00: But I did not know the Arizona piece because I actually was unable to watch the video at all.
• 21:26
  SPEAKER_00: For similar writing reasons.
• 21:28
  SPEAKER_00: By the way,
• 21:29
  SPEAKER_00: listeners,
• 21:29
  SPEAKER_00: the book that Neil is referring to,
• 21:32
  SPEAKER_00: if you go to the Political Junkie Substack,
• 21:35
  SPEAKER_00: you can see a link in Neil's bio and you can click on it and get the book and better
• 21:41
  SPEAKER_00: yet,
• 21:41
  SPEAKER_00: if you Take out a year's subscription to the Political Junkie Substack,
• 21:46
  SPEAKER_00: you can get Neil's book for free.
• 21:48
  SPEAKER_00: I will send it to you and it will be delivered to your home.
• 21:51
  SPEAKER_00: And it's a fantastic book and it will help you understand all of these things.
• 21:56
  SPEAKER_00: Okay, let's move on to our last item, Neil.
• 22:00
  SPEAKER_00: The big question this week in Ohio is when does owning the libs become a self-own?
• 22:06
  SPEAKER_00: In a horrifying new low that has divided the party of Trump,
• 22:11
  SPEAKER_00: Ohio Republican Vivek Ramaswamy,
• 22:14
  SPEAKER_00: who is in a tight governor's race with Democrat Amy Acton,
• 22:17
  SPEAKER_00: will spend $4 million running an attack ad featuring Acton's estranged mother.
• 22:24
  SPEAKER_00: And what does this woman, whose name is Donna Arthur, have to say, Neal?
• 22:29
  SPEAKER_01: Well, first of all, her mother hasn't seen or spoken to Acton in decades.
• 22:34
  SPEAKER_01: She's calling her a liar.
• 22:37
  SPEAKER_01: And so what this is referring to,
• 22:39
  SPEAKER_01: presumably,
• 22:39
  SPEAKER_01: is that the rape charges lodged against her second husband,
• 22:44
  SPEAKER_01: Donna Arthur's second husband.
• 22:46
  SPEAKER_01: Amy Acton's stepfather when Amy was 13 that resulted in she
• 22:52
  SPEAKER_01: and her brother being permanently removed from the Arthur home.
• 22:55
  SPEAKER_01: And then I think her having no contact with her mother ever since
• 22:58
  SPEAKER_01: because her mom sided on the side of her stepfather and the alleged rapist.
• 23:06
  SPEAKER_00: Right, right.
• 23:07
  SPEAKER_00: And, you know, there are a couple of interesting things here.
• 23:10
  SPEAKER_00: You know,
• 23:10
  SPEAKER_00: after I sent you the run of show,
• 23:13
  SPEAKER_00: I ran into a story that said that Donna Arthur has been interviewed again.
• 23:18
  SPEAKER_00: And the reporter said, well, how did you know your daughter was lying about this?
• 23:25
  SPEAKER_00: And Donna Arthur said, well,
• 23:27
  SPEAKER_00: my husband,
• 23:28
  SPEAKER_00: whose name was Bud,
• 23:29
  SPEAKER_00: I think,
• 23:30
  SPEAKER_00: was accused by one of his own daughters in a previous marriage of doing this.
• 23:36
  SPEAKER_00: And that was a false accusation, too.
• 23:39
  SPEAKER_00: And it was like, well, wait a second.
• 23:41
  SPEAKER_00: OK, so you brought a man into your home with your daughter
• 23:45
  SPEAKER_00: who had previously been accused of sexually assaulting his own biological daughter
• 23:52
  SPEAKER_00: in his previous marriage.
• 23:54
  SPEAKER_00: Thank you, Donna.
• 23:55
  SPEAKER_00: But it sounds like the abuse was really, really bad.
• 23:58
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, Amy Acton's brother said that they were both physically abused.
• 24:05
  SPEAKER_00: They were hit all the time and struck and so on.
• 24:08
  SPEAKER_00: But that Amy...
• 24:09
  SPEAKER_00: Was the older one.
• 24:10
  SPEAKER_00: And she would kind of try to get in the way and protect him and so on and so forth.
• 24:15
  SPEAKER_00: And then when she was 13,
• 24:17
  SPEAKER_00: she went to the authorities and said that he had been raping her for three years.
• 24:23
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, it's actually kind of amazing that she is up in front of crowds and talking
• 24:31
  SPEAKER_00: to people and running for office and so on.
• 24:34
  SPEAKER_00: But what do we think of Ramaswamy now?
• 24:37
  SPEAKER_00: I mean,
• 24:37
  SPEAKER_00: I don't know how far gone you have to be to find this woman in any way credible,
• 24:41
  SPEAKER_01: but this sort of...
• 24:58
  SPEAKER_01: Just underhanded,
• 24:59
  SPEAKER_01: like disgusting tactics of this,
• 25:02
  SPEAKER_01: I think,
• 25:02
  SPEAKER_01: just speak to what,
• 25:05
  SPEAKER_01: you know, Nikki Haley said of him way back in their presidential debate.
• 25:10
  SPEAKER_01: She called him like a creep or something.
• 25:12
  SPEAKER_01: And I think a lot of folks already believe this about him.
• 25:16
  SPEAKER_01: Republicans,
• 25:16
  SPEAKER_01: I think,
• 25:17
  SPEAKER_01: to their credit,
• 25:18
  SPEAKER_01: a lot of them are speaking out against this or condemning him or even saying
• 25:22
  SPEAKER_01: that he shouldn't win the race because of this.
• 25:25
  SPEAKER_01: A lot of them are just calling for him to take it down.
• 25:28
  SPEAKER_01: And that's good to see because...
• 25:30
  SPEAKER_01: You know,
• 25:31
  SPEAKER_01: you would hope that in our hyper-partisan moment
• 25:34
  SPEAKER_01: that people can still see things clearly.
• 25:36
  SPEAKER_01: And this feels like one of those rare moments where most folks are doing it, but not everybody.
• 25:41
  SPEAKER_01: J.D.
• 25:41
  SPEAKER_01: Vance doesn't have a problem with this.
• 25:45
  SPEAKER_01: So the ad was whining.
• 25:47
  SPEAKER_01: And of course, we know that he's spineless and has no soul and has sold himself out to Trump.
• 25:53
  SPEAKER_01: And so therefore,
• 25:53
  SPEAKER_01: he's going to also he needs Vivek to win in Ohio because this is in some ways
• 25:59
  SPEAKER_01: a little bit of a barometer to his own presidential ambitions.
• 26:03
  SPEAKER_01: But, you know, J.D.
• 26:05
  SPEAKER_01: Vance is going to J.D.
• 26:06
  SPEAKER_01: Vance.
• 26:07
  SPEAKER_01: But this is really, really low.
• 26:09
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, it's really disgusting.
• 26:11
  SPEAKER_00: And on the other hand, I mean,
• 26:12
  SPEAKER_00: I don't know about you,
• 26:13
  SPEAKER_00: but I just sent Amy Acton money to, you know, support her and say I care and so on.
• 26:21
  SPEAKER_00: But M.K.
• 26:22
  SPEAKER_00: Pritzker,
• 26:22
  SPEAKER_00: who is the wife of Illinois Democratic Governor J.B.
• 26:26
  SPEAKER_00: Pritzker,
• 26:26
  SPEAKER_00: a possible 2028 candidate himself,
• 26:30
  SPEAKER_00: responded by giving half a million dollars to an Acton Super PAC.
• 26:35
  SPEAKER_00: So it's backfiring in some practical ways.
• 26:38
  SPEAKER_00: I think Bernie Sanders gave her a million dollars out of his leadership pack
• 26:44
  SPEAKER_00: and called five or six other big guns and said, you have to give her money too.
• 26:50
  SPEAKER_00: So since this has actually happened, she's collected about $3 million in donations.
• 26:56
  SPEAKER_00: It's also the case that It seems to me exploiting Donna Arthur.
• 27:02
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, you look at her.
• 27:03
  SPEAKER_00: It's so gross.
• 27:04
  SPEAKER_00: You're looking at a troubled woman who's had a really hard life.
• 27:07
  SPEAKER_00: She's missing three or four teeth, obviously.
• 27:10
  SPEAKER_00: And first of all, they must have paid her.
• 27:13
  SPEAKER_00: I can't believe that she would have done it without being paid for it.
• 27:17
  SPEAKER_00: But it's also just kind of gross to exploit the woman, too.
• 27:22
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, nobody wins here.
• 27:25
  SPEAKER_01: Absolutely.
• 27:26
  SPEAKER_01: I will say,
• 27:26
  SPEAKER_01: you know,
• 27:27
  SPEAKER_01: there is a part of me that wonders if this was a different state and if this was
• 27:32
  SPEAKER_01: a different Republican we were talking about,
• 27:34
  SPEAKER_01: if the big Republican condemnation for this would not play out in the same way.
• 27:40
  SPEAKER_01: Because I think a lot of Republicans do not like Vivek Ramaswamy.
• 27:43
  SPEAKER_01: I think a lot of them...
• 27:45
  SPEAKER_01: Wouldn't mind him losing, and that most of that is driven by racism.
• 27:50
  SPEAKER_01: If you go online,
• 27:53
  SPEAKER_01: the Republican campaign against him,
• 27:56
  SPEAKER_01: because, as they say over and over again, he is brown, is And I think none of us...
• 28:21
  SPEAKER_01: I think neither of us want to see him win this governorship,
• 28:24
  SPEAKER_01: but I don't like the idea that he's losing this in part because a lot
• 28:28
  SPEAKER_01: of Republican racism in the state of Ohio is keeping folks away from supporting him.
• 28:33
  SPEAKER_00: Right.
• 28:34
  SPEAKER_00: Well, yes, that's a really good point, Neil.
• 28:37
  SPEAKER_00: I would also say that until this Amy Acton ad came out,
• 28:44
  SPEAKER_00: I would have said,
• 28:45
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, I find Vivek kind of icky, but In terms of MAGA, he's not the worst.
• 28:53
  SPEAKER_00: No.
• 28:53
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, he's a technocrat,
• 28:55
  SPEAKER_00: you know,
• 28:56
  SPEAKER_00: and he has sort of evidence-based ideas for how you might,
• 29:01
  SPEAKER_00: you know, work on the economy or work on social programs and so on.
• 29:05
  SPEAKER_00: And one of the reasons he's unpopular is that he has come out against the suspension
• 29:13
  SPEAKER_00: and blocking of H-1B visas.
• 29:15
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 29:16
  SPEAKER_00: So, which is a big thing in the Indian community because for the last,
• 29:22
  SPEAKER_00: I don't know,
• 29:23
  SPEAKER_00: 70 years or so,
• 29:25
  SPEAKER_00: Indians have been among the groups that benefited disproportionately from H-1B visas
• 29:32
  SPEAKER_00: because of high rates of education and skill and professionalism and so on and
• 29:36
  SPEAKER_00: so forth.
• 29:36
  SPEAKER_00: And the United States has benefited from this enormously.
• 29:40
  SPEAKER_00: Doctors, coders, engineers, you know, mostly STEM, but not only STEM.
• 29:45
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, it If you look at our field,
• 29:48
  SPEAKER_00: history,
• 29:49
  SPEAKER_00: the field of history has been immeasurably improved by post-colonial theory,
• 29:54
  SPEAKER_00: which really comes out of India, more or less, Indian intellectuals.
• 29:59
  SPEAKER_00: So on a certain level,
• 30:01
  SPEAKER_00: I found,
• 30:02
  SPEAKER_00: as a policy guy, I found Ramaswamy less objectionable than a great many magas.
• 30:12
  SPEAKER_00: And I find this, frankly...
• 30:15
  SPEAKER_00: It's not just that it's vile,
• 30:17
  SPEAKER_00: it's that it suggests that he's been kind of fooling us all along,
• 30:21
  SPEAKER_00: and he's a truly horrible human being.
• 30:22
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 30:24
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 30:25
  SPEAKER_00: Okay, speaking of horrible human beings, we're going to get to the news summary, Neil.
• 30:30
  SPEAKER_00: And listeners, this is sort of an odd thing for us to do.
• 30:33
  SPEAKER_00: We rarely do look back pieces,
• 30:35
  SPEAKER_00: but I was captured by an article in the New York Times this week, which...
• 30:43
  SPEAKER_00: Revealed more than two decades after O.J.
• 30:46
  SPEAKER_00: Simpson's trial for the murder of his estranged wife,
• 30:49
  SPEAKER_00: that's Nicole Brown Simpson and Ronald Goldman,
• 30:52
  SPEAKER_00: her friend,
• 30:53
  SPEAKER_00: that there are new developments in the case and developments that were actually kind
• 30:59
  SPEAKER_00: of available at the time.
• 31:02
  SPEAKER_00: So, so let's take a look at them.
• 31:04
  SPEAKER_00: But what Neil and I also want to do is talk about the OJ Simpson case as
• 31:09
  SPEAKER_00: a cultural pivot,
• 31:11
  SPEAKER_00: that it was actually a moment when a lot of things changed in politics,
• 31:16
  SPEAKER_00: in media, in how we think about crime and celebrity.
• 31:22
  SPEAKER_00: So to summarize this week,
• 31:25
  SPEAKER_00: the New York Times sort of ripped the cover off the 1995 OJ Simpson trial.
• 31:32
  SPEAKER_00: Simpson was charged with killing his wife on June 12th, 1994.
• 31:38
  SPEAKER_00: On October 3rd, 1995,
• 31:41
  SPEAKER_00: he was acquitted by a so-called,
• 31:44
  SPEAKER_00: defended by a so-called Dream Team,
• 31:47
  SPEAKER_00: which is a sort of peculiar reference to
• 31:51
  SPEAKER_00: the 1992 men's basketball Olympic gold medalists.
• 31:54
  SPEAKER_00: I think they must have used it as a parallel because Simpson was
• 31:58
  SPEAKER_00: a star football player in addition to being a television personality.
• 32:02
  SPEAKER_00: Anyway, Simpson was acquitted of the double murder.
• 32:06
  SPEAKER_00: And I just want to put a pin in that, Neil.
• 32:08
  SPEAKER_00: Do you remember where you were when O.J.
• 32:11
  SPEAKER_00: Simpson was acquitted?
• 32:12
  SPEAKER_01: I do.
• 32:13
  SPEAKER_01: I actually, yes.
• 32:14
  SPEAKER_01: So I was in my sophomore year at Duke University.
• 32:17
  SPEAKER_01: I was standing in our student center about to get my lunch and all the,
• 32:22
  SPEAKER_01: you know,
• 32:22
  SPEAKER_01: they used to have like TVs out where you would like watch the news or whatever
• 32:26
  SPEAKER_01: that all the TVs around.
• 32:27
  SPEAKER_01: The student center were, of course, on this trial.
• 32:30
  SPEAKER_01: And I remember the verdict coming in and some students cheering and a lot
• 32:36
  SPEAKER_01: of students just looking completely shocked by it all.
• 32:40
  SPEAKER_01: So I can literally picture the very space I was standing in, like the very corner of that room.
• 32:47
  SPEAKER_01: Yes.
• 32:47
  SPEAKER_01: How about you?
• 32:49
  SPEAKER_00: I was at the Center for Humanities at Wesleyan University.
• 32:53
  SPEAKER_00: I was a fellow at the center that year.
• 32:55
  SPEAKER_00: And this is when you still actually had televisions that pulled the signal out of the air.
• 33:02
  SPEAKER_00: And we actually watched the Bronco chase together a year before.
• 33:08
  SPEAKER_00: We'd been watching the
• 33:09
  SPEAKER_01: trial off
• 33:10
  SPEAKER_00: and on.
• 33:11
  SPEAKER_00: And when the acquittal happened, I remember everybody just going stone silent.
• 33:21
  SPEAKER_00: And what I also remember is I was sitting next to a colleague of mine
• 33:26
  SPEAKER_00: in African-American studies and English.
• 33:29
  SPEAKER_00: Her name is Ann Dusil.
• 33:30
  SPEAKER_00: She's a, you know, really famous feminist scholar.
• 33:35
  SPEAKER_00: And Ann just didn't.
• 33:39
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, yeah.
• 33:39
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 34:03
  SPEAKER_00: Illustration of intersectionality, right?
• 34:07
  SPEAKER_00: It's this intersectional moment in which there was no right way to respond.
• 34:14
  SPEAKER_00: If racial justice had perhaps triumphed for a moment,
• 34:19
  SPEAKER_00: violence against women was tossed under the bus.
• 34:25
  SPEAKER_00: So we're going to be talking about all of those things, but it was a real turning point.
• 34:30
  SPEAKER_00: And one aspect of this acquittal was the defense team's assertion
• 34:35
  SPEAKER_00: that Simpson was framed by racist cops.
• 34:38
  SPEAKER_00: What were some of the other arguments the defense made?
• 34:42
  SPEAKER_01: Well, the murder weapon was never found.
• 34:45
  SPEAKER_01: And that's really relevant to the breaking news of this past week.
• 34:49
  SPEAKER_01: The New York Times,
• 34:50
  SPEAKER_01: you know,
• 34:51
  SPEAKER_01: and this incredible investigation that everyone should read,
• 34:55
  SPEAKER_01: because it now appears that there was an accomplice,
• 34:57
  SPEAKER_01: this man named Joey Ippolito, who's a drug runner.
• 35:00
  SPEAKER_01: He Had also ties to like the New Jersey mob.
• 35:07
  SPEAKER_01: And so the news is that he tried to bargain with New York authorities by testifying
• 35:12
  SPEAKER_01: to his role as Simpson's accomplice who disposed of the murder weapon.
• 35:18
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 35:18
  SPEAKER_00: And apparently, Ippolito was dealing drugs, not just to Simpson, but to Al Collings.
• 35:26
  SPEAKER_00: Yes.
• 35:27
  SPEAKER_00: Or this is what he said.
• 35:29
  SPEAKER_00: Allegedly, this is what happened.
• 35:31
  SPEAKER_00: But also he knew Nicole and that Nicole was also a recreational drug user.
• 35:38
  SPEAKER_00: So he knew the whole group.
• 35:40
  SPEAKER_00: And that when this happened, Cowlings called him and said, I need your help now.
• 35:48
  SPEAKER_00: Why exactly he decided to help, I do not know.
• 35:52
  SPEAKER_00: But he did.
• 35:54
  SPEAKER_00: At least this is what he says.
• 35:56
  SPEAKER_00: And so when he was arrested for drug running again,
• 35:59
  SPEAKER_00: and he'd already served like an 11 year stretch in Florida or something like that,
• 36:02
  SPEAKER_00: really didn't want to go back.
• 36:04
  SPEAKER_00: This is like weeks before the verdict.
• 36:08
  SPEAKER_00: And I don't remember from the article
• 36:10
  SPEAKER_00: whether what he told New York authorities was actually conveyed to California
• 36:17
  SPEAKER_00: And they just said, look, it's too late.
• 36:19
  SPEAKER_00: You know, we've set up our case.
• 36:23
  SPEAKER_00: We can't go back into it.
• 36:25
  SPEAKER_00: Possibly a terrible mistake on the part of the prosecution.
• 36:29
  SPEAKER_00: But it's disregarded and it kind of goes into the vault.
• 36:33
  SPEAKER_00: And 20 years later, a reporter dug it out.
• 36:36
  SPEAKER_01: I may have this wrong,
• 36:37
  SPEAKER_01: but I believe that the California prosecutors were told about this like 30 weeks
• 36:43
  SPEAKER_01: into the trial and that it was sort of decided like,
• 36:47
  SPEAKER_01: well, we've got, you know, our narrative, our approach.
• 36:50
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, you know,
• 36:52
  SPEAKER_01: a lot of folks who know this story know that the prosecution really believed
• 36:57
  SPEAKER_01: that they had a Yeah.
• 37:14
  SPEAKER_01: That wasn't a great decision.
• 37:15
  SPEAKER_01: Like, you know,
• 37:16
  SPEAKER_01: there was additional evidence that could have brought in that they just decided not
• 37:19
  SPEAKER_01: to because they,
• 37:20
  SPEAKER_01: again, felt like they had a cut and dry, you know, cut and dry case.
• 37:26
  SPEAKER_01: And so I think,
• 37:26
  SPEAKER_01: you know,
• 37:27
  SPEAKER_01: partly that this information came to them so late that they just didn't want to,
• 37:30
  SPEAKER_01: like, add on additional elements here.
• 37:34
  SPEAKER_01: But yeah, I mean, this is really, we should say also Ippolito died in 2006.
• 37:38
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 37:40
  SPEAKER_01: So he's been dead for 20 years.
• 37:42
  SPEAKER_01: A lot of the reporting around this is because of unsealed
• 37:49
  SPEAKER_01: trial records
• 37:52
  SPEAKER_01: that were made unsealed to the New York Times and also lots of interviewing
• 37:57
  SPEAKER_01: with Ippolito's brother, Sam Ippolito.
• 38:00
  SPEAKER_01: And I think a lot of this story rests on Sam's version,
• 38:05
  SPEAKER_01: which is, of course, being questioned by other folks.
• 38:08
  SPEAKER_00: Right, right.
• 38:09
  SPEAKER_00: So, so listeners,
• 38:10
  SPEAKER_00: we don't actually have certainty about any of this,
• 38:14
  SPEAKER_00: but this is a new piece of the story that would make sense of why
• 38:20
  SPEAKER_00: the murder weapon was never found.
• 38:22
  SPEAKER_00: Although,
• 38:22
  SPEAKER_00: as we'll talk about a little bit later,
• 38:24
  SPEAKER_00: there are many murder weapons that are never found.
• 38:27
  SPEAKER_00: There are sometimes bodies that are never found and you can still charge someone
• 38:32
  SPEAKER_00: with murder successfully.
• 38:34
  SPEAKER_00: So, and,
• 38:35
  SPEAKER_00: you know, I,
• 38:37
  SPEAKER_00: I don't know what you remember about the prosecution,
• 38:39
  SPEAKER_00: but they fumbled the ball multiple times,
• 38:43
  SPEAKER_00: whether it's because they were under-resourced,
• 38:46
  SPEAKER_00: whether it's because it was a peculiarly difficult case,
• 38:49
  SPEAKER_00: whether it was because the defense team,
• 38:51
  SPEAKER_00: which we'll talk about a little bit, was so talented.
• 38:55
  SPEAKER_00: It seems like when they got this information, they just said, no, we've chosen a strategy.
• 39:02
  SPEAKER_00: We're going to go with it now.
• 39:06
  SPEAKER_00: In 1997, O.J.
• 39:08
  SPEAKER_00: Simpson was in fact held responsible for the crime by a civil jury.
• 39:12
  SPEAKER_00: And the analogy here,
• 39:14
  SPEAKER_00: listeners,
• 39:15
  SPEAKER_00: is that Donald Trump,
• 39:16
  SPEAKER_00: for example,
• 39:17
  SPEAKER_00: could not be charged with rape by the authorities in the E. Jean Carroll case.
• 39:24
  SPEAKER_00: But E. Jean Carroll could sue him in a civil case for sexual assault, and she won.
• 39:30
  SPEAKER_00: So this is an analogy, Ronald Goldman's parents They sued O.J.
• 39:37
  SPEAKER_00: Simpson for $33.5 million,
• 39:40
  SPEAKER_00: or I don't know what the original ask was,
• 39:42
  SPEAKER_00: but they ended up being awarded $33.5 million.
• 39:46
  SPEAKER_00: And a civil jury has a lower bar of proof.
• 39:50
  SPEAKER_00: What's the bar of proof in a murder case, Neil?
• 39:53
  SPEAKER_01: Reasonable doubt, right?
• 39:54
  SPEAKER_01: It's a high bar, understandably so.
• 39:59
  SPEAKER_01: But yes, it's a very different bar for a civil judgment.
• 40:03
  SPEAKER_01: And they were awarded $33.5 million.
• 40:05
  SPEAKER_01: That was money that they never saw.
• 40:08
  SPEAKER_01: It was never collected.
• 40:09
  SPEAKER_01: I think portions of it were.
• 40:11
  SPEAKER_01: But like he didn't have that money by that point because,
• 40:16
  SPEAKER_01: you know,
• 40:16
  SPEAKER_01: his own legal bills and his obviously his inability to work left him,
• 40:21
  SPEAKER_01: you know, with nothing.
• 40:23
  SPEAKER_01: And he also had hid his assets and he evaded collection.
• 40:29
  SPEAKER_01: So I think, you know, they in a lot of ways that family, those families were seeking help.
• 40:36
  SPEAKER_01: You know,
• 40:37
  SPEAKER_01: not the financial judgment,
• 40:40
  SPEAKER_01: but just a victory and sort of a court case that found him guilty of something
• 40:47
  SPEAKER_01: which they did get.
• 40:49
  SPEAKER_00: Right.
• 40:49
  SPEAKER_00: And, you know, I don't know whether the Browns ever had closure.
• 40:54
  SPEAKER_00: I don't know if you ever can have closure if your daughter or son dies in such
• 40:59
  SPEAKER_00: a terrible, terrible way.
• 41:01
  SPEAKER_00: But they did devote, I think, the rest of their lives to
• 41:05
  SPEAKER_01: punishing him.
• 41:07
  SPEAKER_00: In a way that, you know, the courts more or less refused to do.
• 41:12
  SPEAKER_00: He also, he hid his assets.
• 41:16
  SPEAKER_00: He sold his house, but all that money went to the lawyers.
• 41:21
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, can you imagine like all of these people scrambling for a piece of whatever you get?
• 41:26
  SPEAKER_00: So unsurprisingly...
• 41:29
  SPEAKER_00: By the early 2000s,
• 41:31
  SPEAKER_00: he was partnering with a ghostwriter to publish an account of the crime titled,
• 41:36
  SPEAKER_00: If I Did It, Confessions of a Killer.
• 41:40
  SPEAKER_00: And that book mentions an accomplice, right?
• 41:42
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, yeah.
• 41:43
  SPEAKER_01: And I think that his own team has acknowledged that I think this was part
• 41:49
  SPEAKER_01: of what they even suggested in the trial itself
• 41:52
  SPEAKER_01: that like one person alone couldn't have carried out this attack.
• 41:57
  SPEAKER_01: So it was,
• 41:57
  SPEAKER_01: you know,
• 41:58
  SPEAKER_01: in the air and it was in both the trial and in this,
• 42:02
  SPEAKER_01: you know, this book he wrote that came out in 2007.
• 42:07
  SPEAKER_00: Do people in Southern California still remember this crime?
• 42:11
  SPEAKER_00: Is it remarkable to people anymore?
• 42:13
  SPEAKER_01: I don't know.
• 42:13
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, I don't really know anyone who would have been around here.
• 42:17
  SPEAKER_01: I do have a good friend who grew up here.
• 42:19
  SPEAKER_01: And so she would have been like in high school at the time.
• 42:22
  SPEAKER_01: So I'll have to ask her what her...
• 42:25
  SPEAKER_01: Um, memories of that cause I'm sure it, it shaped a lot.
• 42:27
  SPEAKER_01: My, I should say my,
• 42:28
  SPEAKER_01: my, my roommate at Duke that year that I, my sophomore year was from Los Angeles.
• 42:33
  SPEAKER_01: He was from Sherman Oaks.
• 42:34
  SPEAKER_01: And so he was particularly consumed with this because it was literally the backdrop
• 42:38
  SPEAKER_01: of,
• 42:39
  SPEAKER_01: of his life and,
• 42:40
  SPEAKER_01: you know, what his, his family, parents were constantly telling him about back home.
• 42:45
  SPEAKER_01: um, But, you know, I also became I there's a good American Crime Story series on this.
• 42:52
  SPEAKER_01: Have you ever watched that?
• 42:53
  SPEAKER_01: The Ryan Murphy?
• 42:54
  SPEAKER_01: It's excellent.
• 42:55
  SPEAKER_01: I think Ryan Murphy, we've talked about him here and there on here.
• 42:58
  SPEAKER_01: He has a really uneven record, but his the American Crime Story he did on.
• 43:05
  SPEAKER_01: And the O.J.
• 43:05
  SPEAKER_01: Simpson trial is fantastic.
• 43:07
  SPEAKER_01: I actually watched it in a binge watching when we moved to Los Angeles
• 43:12
  SPEAKER_01: and became just a sort of like I became consumed with the story all over again.
• 43:17
  SPEAKER_01: You know, I don't know, within the last decade because of watching that.
• 43:20
  SPEAKER_01: And I even drove over to Brentwood.
• 43:23
  SPEAKER_01: And to see the coroner, I mean, her townhome is right there.
• 43:27
  SPEAKER_01: You know, someone else lives in it today.
• 43:29
  SPEAKER_01: And to see the very spot where this happened, which is right off a big major road.
• 43:34
  SPEAKER_01: It's kind of crazy imagining that this happened right there off of one of
• 43:38
  SPEAKER_01: the major roads in L.A.
• 43:40
  SPEAKER_01: But, yeah, I can't even imagine what it.
• 43:43
  SPEAKER_01: And I think that that American crime story really captures in a lot of ways.
• 43:47
  SPEAKER_01: Evocative ways, the larger sort of LA context of this all that when it was playing out.
• 43:54
  SPEAKER_00: Right.
• 43:55
  SPEAKER_00: Well, and Simpson's house no longer exists.
• 43:58
  SPEAKER_00: The person who bought the property became an extension of the crime scene tore it down.
• 44:03
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, understandably.
• 44:04
  SPEAKER_00: Understandably, yeah.
• 44:06
  SPEAKER_00: I think properties where somebody has been murdered are usually a bargain of some kind.
• 44:12
  SPEAKER_00: Okay, so after Simpson writes and publishes this book,
• 44:16
  SPEAKER_00: which I think sold modestly,
• 44:18
  SPEAKER_00: but I think most people thought it was incredibly tasteless and that it seemed like
• 44:23
  SPEAKER_00: a kind of finger in the eye of the Browns and everybody else who was involved
• 44:29
  SPEAKER_00: in this, the Goldmans and so on.
• 44:34
  SPEAKER_00: Then he is apparently still very involved with drugs.
• 44:41
  SPEAKER_00: I don't think that ever stopped.
• 44:43
  SPEAKER_00: And in 2008, he was convicted of armed robbery in Las Vegas.
• 44:49
  SPEAKER_00: Apparently he pulled a weapon on some memorabilia dealers who he claimed had stolen from him.
• 44:56
  SPEAKER_00: And he had set up a meeting with them.
• 45:00
  SPEAKER_00: Because he believed they had stolen from him.
• 45:02
  SPEAKER_00: And then there in the hotel room, he pulls a gun on them.
• 45:06
  SPEAKER_00: And that's when he goes to jail.
• 45:09
  SPEAKER_00: He is jailed in Nevada.
• 45:11
  SPEAKER_00: He is given a lengthy sentence.
• 45:14
  SPEAKER_00: He's paroled in 2017.
• 45:17
  SPEAKER_00: And then he dies of cancer in 2024 at age 76.
• 45:24
  SPEAKER_00: Unnoticed.
• 45:24
  SPEAKER_00: And as far as I can tell, virtually unloved.
• 45:29
  SPEAKER_00: It remains,
• 45:30
  SPEAKER_00: and I think your reference to Ryan Murphy,
• 45:33
  SPEAKER_00: it is a sensational story that in some ways captured the American imagination
• 45:38
  SPEAKER_00: and never let it go.
• 45:41
  SPEAKER_00: Let's start with race.
• 45:43
  SPEAKER_00: Race was a huge theme in this trial.
• 45:45
  SPEAKER_00: As our introduction showed, Johnny Cochran's entire closing statement was that O.J.
• 45:52
  SPEAKER_00: Simpson had been framed Because he was black and because he was a black man involved
• 45:58
  SPEAKER_00: with a white woman.
• 46:00
  SPEAKER_00: That in itself is a quintessentially American story.
• 46:04
  SPEAKER_00: In other words, O.J.
• 46:06
  SPEAKER_00: Simpson was lynched by the police for the temerity of having a white wife.
• 46:13
  SPEAKER_00: But there's a much bigger context here, right?
• 46:16
  SPEAKER_00: And for why, say,
• 46:18
  SPEAKER_00: a jury with, I think it was like nine African Americans and one Hispanic person?
• 46:23
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 46:24
  SPEAKER_00: Might refuse to convict, might have reasonable doubt.
• 46:28
  SPEAKER_00: So what's that bigger context?
• 46:30
  SPEAKER_01: Right.
• 46:30
  SPEAKER_01: There's that long history that you note,
• 46:33
  SPEAKER_01: obviously,
• 46:34
  SPEAKER_01: and I think shaping people's thoughts,
• 46:38
  SPEAKER_01: but also like a more immediate context of recent LA history,
• 46:42
  SPEAKER_01: which was that,
• 46:43
  SPEAKER_01: you know, just in a period of a couple of years before, like really 1987 to 1990.
• 46:48
  SPEAKER_01: So just a handful of years before this trial is happening,
• 46:52
  SPEAKER_01: Black neighborhoods
• 46:53
  SPEAKER_01: across Los Angeles were enduring what was called Operation Hammer.
• 46:56
  SPEAKER_01: And this was this Really violent paramilitary enforcement operation.
• 47:02
  SPEAKER_01: The L.A.
• 47:03
  SPEAKER_01: police are enormous,
• 47:05
  SPEAKER_01: incredibly well funded with huge, you know, weapons and military style.
• 47:13
  SPEAKER_01: Machinery at the ready.
• 47:15
  SPEAKER_01: So that was happening.
• 47:16
  SPEAKER_01: Then also in 1991 was the brutal beating by the L.A.
• 47:20
  SPEAKER_01: Police Department officers of Rodney King, right?
• 47:23
  SPEAKER_01: This man that had been stopped on suspicion of DUI.
• 47:27
  SPEAKER_01: The police officers used the N-word repeatedly.
• 47:30
  SPEAKER_01: They violently beat him.
• 47:33
  SPEAKER_01: Right.
• 47:33
  SPEAKER_01: Right.
• 47:33
  SPEAKER_01: Right.
• 47:51
  SPEAKER_01: But the officers were acquitted in 1992, and this unleashed riots across Los Angeles.
• 47:59
  SPEAKER_01: Two officers were later convicted in federal court in 1993
• 48:05
  SPEAKER_01: for having violated King's civil rights.
• 48:07
  SPEAKER_01: But this is like an immediate backdrop, and really even more than a backdrop.
• 48:12
  SPEAKER_01: I think it's like the cauldron in which this trial was playing out in Los Angeles.
• 48:18
  SPEAKER_00: Well, and then just a small detail about that acquittal was that
• 48:24
  SPEAKER_00: the officers' defense attorneys got the trial moved to Simi Valley.
• 48:29
  SPEAKER_00: They got it out of Los Angeles,
• 48:32
  SPEAKER_00: which they said there was no way that a white man could get a fair trial
• 48:37
  SPEAKER_00: in Los Angeles.
• 48:38
  SPEAKER_00: So they moved it to Simi Valley,
• 48:40
  SPEAKER_00: one of the whiter places in the world,
• 48:41
  SPEAKER_00: and also the location of the Ronald Reagan Library.
• 48:45
  SPEAKER_00: Not a coincidence, I think.
• 48:48
  SPEAKER_00: And so they are acquitted by an all-white jury there.
• 48:52
  SPEAKER_00: So it's very, very stark what is going on in law enforcement.
• 48:57
  SPEAKER_00: And, you know,
• 48:58
  SPEAKER_00: we're beginning to see the glimmers of what is going to flower in Trumpism some,
• 49:05
  SPEAKER_00: you know, 25 years later around whites are being discriminated
• 49:10
  SPEAKER_03: against.
• 49:11
  SPEAKER_00: Whites can't get a fair shake.
• 49:13
  SPEAKER_00: You're always accusing us of racism.
• 49:16
  SPEAKER_00: Now, by the time Simpson came to trial,
• 49:19
  SPEAKER_00: and it actually was fairly quick for a murder trial,
• 49:22
  SPEAKER_00: you know, a matter of like nine months.
• 49:25
  SPEAKER_00: So that's another area in which the prosecution might have slowed things down
• 49:32
  SPEAKER_00: to prepare their case more carefully, but they didn't.
• 49:37
  SPEAKER_00: And so there's this dream team of attorneys,
• 49:39
  SPEAKER_00: including Johnny Cochran, who's a civil rights lawyer.
• 49:42
  SPEAKER_00: He's actually not a criminal defense attorney.
• 49:45
  SPEAKER_00: He's a civil rights lawyer.
• 49:47
  SPEAKER_00: The first attorney on the scene is Robert Kardashian.
• 49:52
  SPEAKER_00: That is O.J.
• 49:53
  SPEAKER_00: Simpson's lawyer at the beginning,
• 49:55
  SPEAKER_00: who is the husband of Kim Kardashian and the progenitor
• 49:59
  SPEAKER_00: of all these other Kardashians.
• 50:01
  SPEAKER_01: No, he's the father of Kim Kardashian, the ex-husband of Kris Jenner.
• 50:08
  SPEAKER_01: But yes, they had actually divorced at the time of this trial.
• 50:12
  SPEAKER_01: But yes, and...
• 50:14
  SPEAKER_01: Robert Kardashian was good friends with OJ.
• 50:17
  SPEAKER_01: They were sort of, you know, part of the Brentwood social scene.
• 50:21
  SPEAKER_01: Kris Jenner or Kris Kardashian at the time was very good friends,
• 50:25
  SPEAKER_01: her best friend with Nicole Brown.
• 50:30
  SPEAKER_01: Robert Kardashian was a corporate attorney.
• 50:32
  SPEAKER_01: He was not a defense attorney.
• 50:34
  SPEAKER_01: He was doing this on behalf of his friend.
• 50:38
  SPEAKER_01: He's a big character in the American Crime Story show.
• 50:42
  SPEAKER_01: There's lots of suggestions that he never believed that...
• 50:47
  SPEAKER_01: That O.J.
• 50:49
  SPEAKER_01: Simpson was innocent and in fact was often the voice that was kind of pushing to him
• 50:56
  SPEAKER_01: to, you know, sort of fess up to it.
• 51:00
  SPEAKER_01: But yes, I mean, and I think, you know, it's...
• 51:04
  SPEAKER_01: One of the things we want to talk about here is sort of like the minor celebrities
• 51:08
  SPEAKER_01: that come out of this because the Kardashians name gets put into
• 51:12
  SPEAKER_01: the American public imagination via this along with a bunch of other names.
• 51:19
  SPEAKER_00: Right.
• 51:19
  SPEAKER_00: So we've also got F. Lee Bailey, who was already at the time famous for defending underdogs.
• 51:28
  SPEAKER_00: And F. Lee Bailey did a lot of freedom of speech cases.
• 51:31
  SPEAKER_00: He did Black Panther defense cases.
• 51:34
  SPEAKER_00: So F. Lee Bailey was seen as this kind of radical attorney taking on unpopular causes.
• 51:40
  SPEAKER_00: And then there's Alan Dershowitz, who keeps coming back like a bad penny.
• 51:50
  SPEAKER_00: And he, of course, ends up Entangled with Trump and defending Trump from an impeachment.
• 51:57
  SPEAKER_00: He's just a lovely guy.
• 51:59
  SPEAKER_00: And then there is Barry Sheck,
• 52:02
  SPEAKER_00: who is the founder of the Innocence Project and also defended,
• 52:11
  SPEAKER_00: what was her, Hedda Nussbaum.
• 52:14
  SPEAKER_00: The the woman who was married to Joel Steinberg and they they were involved
• 52:21
  SPEAKER_00: with drugs and they killed their daughter.
• 52:24
  SPEAKER_00: They beat her to death and then let her die.
• 52:27
  SPEAKER_00: Do you remember that case?
• 52:28
  SPEAKER_00: That's like a little bit.
• 52:30
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 52:31
  SPEAKER_00: The 1980s.
• 52:31
  SPEAKER_00: It happened right around the corner from from where I live in New York.
• 52:34
  SPEAKER_00: Oh, wow.
• 52:35
  SPEAKER_00: So Barry Sheck.
• 52:37
  SPEAKER_00: He had a long career defending undefensible people and sort of parlayed that career
• 52:43
  SPEAKER_00: into the Innocence Project in which, even today, he's getting people off death row.
• 52:49
  SPEAKER_00: So it's a group of attorneys who are sort of gradually becoming famous
• 52:55
  SPEAKER_00: for defending unpopular people.
• 52:58
  SPEAKER_00: And then there's Johnny Cochran who makes this into a civil rights case.
• 53:05
  SPEAKER_00: How did he turn this into a civil rights case, Neil?
• 53:10
  SPEAKER_01: Well, I mean,
• 53:11
  SPEAKER_01: it wasn't that hard to do so, given,
• 53:13
  SPEAKER_01: you know,
• 53:14
  SPEAKER_01: the history that we've just talked about,
• 53:17
  SPEAKER_01: but also, you know, the direct L.A. police that were involved.
• 53:22
  SPEAKER_01: And Mark Furr, right?
• 53:24
  SPEAKER_01: Mark, am I getting his last name right?
• 53:26
  SPEAKER_01: Furman.
• 53:27
  SPEAKER_01: Furman,
• 53:28
  SPEAKER_01: Furman, yeah.
• 53:29
  SPEAKER_01: You know, had a history that was, yeah, that was...
• 53:33
  SPEAKER_01: Really, really, I mean, right, like he had like some Nazi memorabilia that he had collected.
• 53:39
  SPEAKER_01: I think there was also a lot of testimony that he regularly used the N-word himself,
• 53:45
  SPEAKER_01: which I think was even a debate on the part of the prostitution.
• 53:48
  SPEAKER_01: And then,
• 53:49
  SPEAKER_01: you know,
• 53:49
  SPEAKER_01: the cast of characters involved in this investigation that the L.A.
• 53:53
  SPEAKER_01: Police Department was corrupt,
• 53:56
  SPEAKER_01: it was racist, that they had planted evidence and all the rest.
• 54:13
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 54:14
  SPEAKER_00: And Furman in particular,
• 54:15
  SPEAKER_00: he actually left a voicemail on one of his girlfriend's machines in which he used
• 54:21
  SPEAKER_00: the N-word.
• 54:22
  SPEAKER_01: Right.
• 54:24
  SPEAKER_00: And she was interviewed and she said,
• 54:27
  SPEAKER_00: well, yeah, you know, I've got this tape in which he actually did use that word.
• 54:32
  SPEAKER_00: So that was entered into evidence.
• 54:35
  SPEAKER_00: Then, of course, there's that iconic moment.
• 54:38
  SPEAKER_00: And the charge was that Furman had planted evidence.
• 54:41
  SPEAKER_01: Right.
• 54:41
  SPEAKER_00: There was a bloody glove that was found at the Simpson estate and put into evidence.
• 54:52
  SPEAKER_00: And it was a glove of a type that Nicole Brown Simpson had bought for OJ,
• 54:58
  SPEAKER_00: I think, for Christmas.
• 54:59
  SPEAKER_00: The other glove had disappeared.
• 55:00
  SPEAKER_00: Right.
• 55:01
  SPEAKER_00: But this glove was found and there's this moment in the trial in which Johnny Cochran asks O.J.
• 55:08
  SPEAKER_00: Simpson to put the glove on and O.J.
• 55:12
  SPEAKER_00: can't get it on over his hand.
• 55:15
  SPEAKER_00: OK, so there are two things going on with that glove.
• 55:18
  SPEAKER_00: One is that O.J.
• 55:20
  SPEAKER_00: puts on a latex glove first and putting on a leather glove over
• 55:24
  SPEAKER_00: a latex glove is not altogether easy.
• 55:26
  SPEAKER_00: But the second thing is that the Yep.
• 55:53
  SPEAKER_00: Possibly one of the most brilliant moments in criminal defense,
• 55:57
  SPEAKER_00: but also one of the most horrible because it did indeed instill reasonable doubt in
• 56:04
  SPEAKER_00: the jury that the evidence was connected to the man.
• 56:07
  SPEAKER_00: And if it wasn't, how did it get there?
• 56:09
  SPEAKER_01: Right.
• 56:10
  SPEAKER_01: Yep.
• 56:10
  SPEAKER_01: Yep.
• 56:10
  SPEAKER_01: Yep.
• 56:11
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, I can like picture that trial scene in my head so clearly.
• 56:16
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, it's like seared into my memory,
• 56:19
  SPEAKER_01: him doing that and the facial expression he made and It was a huge,
• 56:24
  SPEAKER_01: huge moment for the defense.
• 56:26
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 56:27
  SPEAKER_00: Well, and of course, O.J.
• 56:28
  SPEAKER_00: Simpson was also an actor.
• 56:30
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, you know, he had been a celebrity in Los Angeles since he went to, I believe, USC.
• 56:36
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 56:36
  SPEAKER_00: He was a running back.
• 56:38
  SPEAKER_00: And so he had lots of experience with the media.
• 56:40
  SPEAKER_00: And then after he's finished with his football career with the Buffalo Bills,
• 56:45
  SPEAKER_00: he goes into movies and he goes into ads and, you know, television and so on.
• 56:51
  SPEAKER_00: He's Very famous for that Hertz ad in which he's running to get his car.
• 56:56
  SPEAKER_00: And so he's also a man who can act.
• 56:59
  SPEAKER_00: And I remember that moment where he gets up looking kind of calm and diffident
• 57:04
  SPEAKER_00: and pleasant and tries to pull the glove on and then just sort of goes like this.
• 57:10
  SPEAKER_00: Can't do it.
• 57:11
  SPEAKER_00: You know, so that made a great impression.
• 57:14
  SPEAKER_00: So why did it matter that this trial was televised, Neil?
• 57:21
  SPEAKER_01: Well, it was such a turning point in American television history.
• 57:27
  SPEAKER_01: Millions and millions of people watched it, tuned in.
• 57:29
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, CNN's ratings went through the roof in this period.
• 57:34
  SPEAKER_01: It really, I think...
• 57:36
  SPEAKER_01: You know, and also it spawned other things like court TV.
• 57:39
  SPEAKER_01: Folks have argued that this is like what invents reality television.
• 57:44
  SPEAKER_01: And I think there's a lot to be said about that.
• 57:47
  SPEAKER_01: You know, ABC, CBS, NBC, CNN, all of them benefit.
• 57:53
  SPEAKER_01: And I mean, it was on TV all the time.
• 57:55
  SPEAKER_01: People like watch this without stopping.
• 57:58
  SPEAKER_01: And it took up like, you know, months and months of time in doing so.
• 58:03
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, you know, Court TV was established in 1991.
• 58:07
  SPEAKER_01: So it really benefited from this moment.
• 58:09
  SPEAKER_01: It's reaching 28 million households.
• 58:11
  SPEAKER_01: CNN is just killing people.
• 58:13
  SPEAKER_01: The ratings because of this.
• 58:15
  SPEAKER_01: Also, they're doing so in a time when they own cable news, right?
• 58:18
  SPEAKER_01: This is before Fox and MSNBC are founded.
• 58:22
  SPEAKER_01: They're not founded until 1996.
• 58:25
  SPEAKER_01: So it's benefiting from this moment and also the fact that it sort of has a monopoly
• 58:30
  SPEAKER_01: on the cable news angle of television.
• 58:36
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 58:37
  SPEAKER_00: And, you know,
• 58:37
  SPEAKER_00: it really sort of like we're all drawn in as a group by the lurid
• 58:42
  SPEAKER_00: and sensational quality of the murder.
• 58:45
  SPEAKER_00: And then one of the unexpected things that happens is when the police go
• 58:50
  SPEAKER_00: to arrest OJ, he takes off.
• 58:53
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 58:54
  SPEAKER_00: And he's in the back of this white Bronco holding a gun to his head.
• 58:59
  SPEAKER_00: He's talking on some kind of a satellite phone.
• 59:02
  SPEAKER_00: This was before we all had cell phones.
• 59:05
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, the technology here is like crazy.
• 59:09
  SPEAKER_00: And so he's talking on the satellite phone and the police are trying to say,
• 59:13
  SPEAKER_00: you know, just pull over.
• 59:14
  SPEAKER_00: It's all going to be fine.
• 59:16
  SPEAKER_00: In the car, he had a passport and a suitcase.
• 59:18
  SPEAKER_00: And I think Joey Ippolito said he was, in fact, planning to leave the country.
• 59:23
  SPEAKER_00: And he just left it too long and he didn't get away.
• 59:26
  SPEAKER_00: But then I can't even remember how I heard about it because it was in the middle of
• 59:30
  SPEAKER_00: the day and somebody said to me,
• 59:33
  SPEAKER_00: you have to come and, you know, look at the television.
• 59:36
  SPEAKER_00: There's this thing that's happening.
• 59:38
  SPEAKER_01: Well, it was, yeah,
• 59:39
  SPEAKER_01: it was in the middle of the day in LA,
• 59:40
  SPEAKER_01: but it was for those of us on the East Coast,
• 59:42
  SPEAKER_01: it was sort of like late afternoon, early evening.
• 59:44
  SPEAKER_01: And I remember my mom, this was the summer, but that was the summer of 1994.
• 59:48
  SPEAKER_01: So it was the summer before I graduated from high school and I was starting college.
• 59:53
  SPEAKER_01: And I remember being at some event, uh,
• 59:57
  SPEAKER_01: I think at church,
• 59:58
  SPEAKER_01: actually, and my mom picking me up and being like, you won't believe this.
• 1:00:02
  SPEAKER_01: And we raced home and turned on the TV,
• 1:00:05
  SPEAKER_01: as everyone else in the country was doing,
• 1:00:07
  SPEAKER_01: and watched for hours as this white Bronco was chased down the freeway
• 1:00:13
  SPEAKER_01: of Los Angeles.
• 1:00:15
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, by a fleet of police officers.
• 1:00:18
  SPEAKER_00: And the other thing that's weird for anybody who knows Los Angeles is,
• 1:00:22
  SPEAKER_00: of course, they closed the highway.
• 1:00:24
  SPEAKER_01: Completely.
• 1:00:25
  SPEAKER_00: So there's nobody on this road but the white Bronco and the police officers.
• 1:00:31
  SPEAKER_00: And then up above is a helicopter that has Zoe Tour and Marika Garrard,
• 1:00:38
  SPEAKER_00: who are the parents of Katie Tour, who now works at MSNBC.
• 1:00:44
  SPEAKER_00: Wow.
• 1:00:44
  SPEAKER_01: I think I knew that at one point.
• 1:00:46
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, I'd forgotten that.
• 1:00:47
  SPEAKER_00: They invented helicopter news.
• 1:00:50
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 1:00:50
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 1:00:51
  SPEAKER_00: And so every time something would happen,
• 1:00:54
  SPEAKER_00: they would zip into the air and they would get exclusive film.
• 1:00:57
  SPEAKER_00: So this is like one of the turning points for their business is they get film
• 1:01:02
  SPEAKER_00: that nobody else can get.
• 1:01:05
  SPEAKER_00: And I do think this is one of the turning points for media.
• 1:01:09
  SPEAKER_00: You know,
• 1:01:09
  SPEAKER_00: it's like nowadays we're so used to something happens,
• 1:01:12
  SPEAKER_00: someone captures it on their cell phone.
• 1:01:14
  SPEAKER_00: But there's just enough technology developing by the 1990s,
• 1:01:19
  SPEAKER_00: not that directly translates to the internet,
• 1:01:23
  SPEAKER_00: which is not really good with video in the mid-1990s.
• 1:01:27
  SPEAKER_00: You can do it, but it doesn't work well until really the 2010 or something like that.
• 1:01:33
  SPEAKER_01: Nevertheless, there's a lot of money to be made.
• 1:01:37
  SPEAKER_00: By selling video of these events.
• 1:01:39
  SPEAKER_00: And of course,
• 1:01:40
  SPEAKER_00: the fact that they happen in Los Angeles is not an accident because that's
• 1:01:44
  SPEAKER_00: where everybody's trying to make money from media.
• 1:01:47
  SPEAKER_00: So there's other context here too,
• 1:01:49
  SPEAKER_00: Neil, which is Court TV, which you're right, it was established in 1991.
• 1:01:53
  SPEAKER_00: Nevertheless, what we get is...
• 1:01:59
  SPEAKER_00: A series of trials broadcast by Court TV, the likes of which we've never seen before.
• 1:02:06
  SPEAKER_00: The one I was glued to was the Menendez Brothers trial.
• 1:02:10
  SPEAKER_00: Remember those boys who killed their parents and said they did it
• 1:02:13
  SPEAKER_00: because they were being sexually assaulted by them?
• 1:02:17
  SPEAKER_00: So that goes up in 1993.
• 1:02:20
  SPEAKER_00: I spent all of one sabbatical watching the Menendez Brothers trials.
• 1:02:25
  SPEAKER_00: But the Menendez Brothers trials trained me To watch Court TV.
• 1:02:30
  SPEAKER_00: So I was already ready for the Simpson trial when it showed up.
• 1:02:33
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 1:02:34
  SPEAKER_00: And then, of course, who was the great star of Court TV?
• 1:02:38
  SPEAKER_00: Do you remember who that was?
• 1:02:40
  SPEAKER_01: Oh, I'm blanking on the name, but yes.
• 1:02:45
  SPEAKER_01: Greta Nick Suster.
• 1:02:46
  SPEAKER_01: Greta, yes.
• 1:02:47
  SPEAKER_01: I was like the Scientologist.
• 1:02:50
  SPEAKER_00: Yes.
• 1:02:50
  SPEAKER_00: And she has this, you know, she's an attorney that they've just put on television.
• 1:02:54
  SPEAKER_00: She's not terribly pretty.
• 1:02:56
  SPEAKER_00: She has this sort of odd hairdo.
• 1:02:59
  SPEAKER_00: It's like long blonde hair that she parts on the side.
• 1:03:03
  SPEAKER_00: So she's this sort of rather plain person, but she knows the law.
• 1:03:09
  SPEAKER_00: And so she can interview people as they're coming out.
• 1:03:11
  SPEAKER_00: Anyway, I was devoted to Greta Van Sustern.
• 1:03:14
  SPEAKER_00: But again, she develops the notion of the celebrity crime host.
• 1:03:20
  SPEAKER_00: You know,
• 1:03:21
  SPEAKER_00: that there is a person who can give a general audience insight into these terrible,
• 1:03:27
  SPEAKER_00: terrible crimes.
• 1:03:30
  SPEAKER_00: And then, of course, the year after the Simpson trial, Fox and MSNBC hop in.
• 1:03:37
  SPEAKER_00: But you were right when you said CNN had an almost exclusive access to
• 1:03:43
  SPEAKER_00: the 24-hour news cycle at this point, right?
• 1:03:46
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, yeah.
• 1:03:48
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 1:03:49
  SPEAKER_00: So...
• 1:03:50
  SPEAKER_00: There was another thing that the Simpson trial did,
• 1:03:53
  SPEAKER_00: which was to reignite a national conversation about violence against women.
• 1:03:59
  SPEAKER_00: And that conversation had been kind of dormant since the demise of radical feminism
• 1:04:04
  SPEAKER_00: in the mid-1980s.
• 1:04:06
  SPEAKER_00: But how does the Simpson trial,
• 1:04:10
  SPEAKER_00: on a practical level,
• 1:04:11
  SPEAKER_00: intersect with the revival of the fight against violence against women?
• 1:04:16
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, I mean,
• 1:04:17
  SPEAKER_01: I think in large part because Nicole Brown Simpson's sister, Denise,
• 1:04:21
  SPEAKER_01: becomes this huge public figure and national spokesperson and a major player
• 1:04:26
  SPEAKER_01: in pushing what was the 1994 Violence Against Women Act to passage.
• 1:04:33
  SPEAKER_01: And, you know, I think really played an enormous role in that happening.
• 1:04:40
  SPEAKER_00: Yep.
• 1:04:41
  SPEAKER_00: Yep.
• 1:04:42
  SPEAKER_00: So, you know, The title of O.G.
• 1:04:45
  SPEAKER_00: Simpson's book was If I Did It.
• 1:04:47
  SPEAKER_00: But Neil,
• 1:04:49
  SPEAKER_00: if you and I were to write a book,
• 1:04:51
  SPEAKER_00: if we wrote it,
• 1:04:53
  SPEAKER_00: I think we might see this trial as a turning point in reality TV,
• 1:04:59
  SPEAKER_00: a turning point in the creation of new kinds of sensational news,
• 1:05:07
  SPEAKER_00: the creation of a national audience for local events.
• 1:05:13
  SPEAKER_00: A turning point for legislation about violence against women.
• 1:05:19
  SPEAKER_00: Any other turning points you can think of?
• 1:05:23
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, I think those are the major ones.
• 1:05:26
  SPEAKER_01: I think,
• 1:05:27
  SPEAKER_01: you know,
• 1:05:27
  SPEAKER_01: I think the sort of the one that you also mentioned with Greta Van Suchen,
• 1:05:31
  SPEAKER_01: sort of the celebrity sort of figure that's attached to these things,
• 1:05:37
  SPEAKER_01: whether it's like news anchors or legal analysts.
• 1:05:43
  SPEAKER_01: As well.
• 1:05:43
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, also like it spawned these,
• 1:05:45
  SPEAKER_01: I think in a lot,
• 1:05:46
  SPEAKER_01: in some ways you can almost see like a turning point in,
• 1:05:51
  SPEAKER_01: and it wasn't really recognizable at the time,
• 1:05:53
  SPEAKER_01: but in influencers or like people who are famous just for the,
• 1:05:58
  SPEAKER_01: just for being famous.
• 1:05:59
  SPEAKER_01: So I'm thinking here about Kato Kaelin and Faye Resnick and those sort of people
• 1:06:03
  SPEAKER_01: who are,
• 1:06:04
  SPEAKER_01: you know,
• 1:06:05
  SPEAKER_01: in the OJ Simpson orbit and Nicole Brown orbit that became a People who had
• 1:06:11
  SPEAKER_01: to testify at trial and then all of a sudden became celebrities overnight.
• 1:06:14
  SPEAKER_01: And I think we didn't have the word influencers at the time
• 1:06:18
  SPEAKER_01: and they didn't become influencers, but they became famous.
• 1:06:22
  SPEAKER_01: Like they got ad deals, especially Kato Kaelin.
• 1:06:25
  SPEAKER_01: In a lot of ways,
• 1:06:26
  SPEAKER_01: I think they sort of prefigured what is now commonplace,
• 1:06:29
  SPEAKER_01: which again, is like people who are famous just for being famous.
• 1:06:34
  SPEAKER_01: So that's what I would add to that.
• 1:06:37
  SPEAKER_00: That's really smart.
• 1:06:38
  SPEAKER_00: I like that.
• 1:06:39
  SPEAKER_00: And, you know,
• 1:06:39
  SPEAKER_00: the other thing I would add to that is part of what was so jarring
• 1:06:43
  SPEAKER_00: about this crime is that O.J.
• 1:06:46
  SPEAKER_00: Simpson,
• 1:06:47
  SPEAKER_00: when he was on a football team or in a movie or in a television show,
• 1:06:56
  SPEAKER_00: seemed to be such a nice guy.
• 1:06:59
  SPEAKER_00: He was affable.
• 1:07:00
  SPEAKER_00: He was kind.
• 1:07:01
  SPEAKER_00: He was pleasant.
• 1:07:03
  SPEAKER_01: Telegenic.
• 1:07:04
  SPEAKER_00: Intelligenic, smart.
• 1:07:09
  SPEAKER_00: So he seemed to be the whole package on a certain level.
• 1:07:14
  SPEAKER_00: And yet it appears, we can't know whether he really killed his wife.
• 1:07:21
  SPEAKER_00: I am convinced that he did, but we can't know that.
• 1:07:26
  SPEAKER_00: Nevertheless,
• 1:07:26
  SPEAKER_00: what we found out about him during the trial revealed that That he projected
• 1:07:32
  SPEAKER_00: an image of a man he was not.
• 1:07:36
  SPEAKER_00: And that to me sort of, and the sort of Americans ambivalence about that.
• 1:07:44
  SPEAKER_00: There were so many people who wanted to continue to believe in him.
• 1:07:48
  SPEAKER_00: And we see that playing itself out around Michael Jackson.
• 1:07:53
  SPEAKER_00: And we see that playing itself out around Donald Trump.
• 1:07:57
  SPEAKER_00: And a range of people who want to believe in the image they're being given when
• 1:08:03
  SPEAKER_00: in fact all the evidence says, no, this is a very troubled, cruel human being.
• 1:08:11
  SPEAKER_00: You know, I'd also like to just sort of add as a coda that a great many murders go unsolved.
• 1:08:18
  SPEAKER_00: In 2024,
• 1:08:18
  SPEAKER_00: the most recent year for which we have federal data,
• 1:08:22
  SPEAKER_00: Around 66% of homicides ended in an arrest and a conviction.
• 1:08:27
  SPEAKER_00: And probably some of those convictions will be reversed.
• 1:08:32
  SPEAKER_00: In Los Angeles in 1994, that number was even lower.
• 1:08:35
  SPEAKER_00: Only 58% of homicides resulted in an arrest and a conviction,
• 1:08:42
  SPEAKER_00: even though the national clearance rate was 64%.
• 1:08:45
  SPEAKER_00: So there are many murders that go unsolved.
• 1:08:49
  SPEAKER_00: It is not unreasonable for someone to actually think they can get away with murder
• 1:08:54
  SPEAKER_00: because people do get away with murder.
• 1:08:57
  SPEAKER_01: Absolutely.
• 1:08:58
  SPEAKER_01: And a huge cottage industry that,
• 1:09:00
  SPEAKER_01: you know,
• 1:09:01
  SPEAKER_01: makes podcasts and TV shows and documentaries out of, you know, the unsolved cases.
• 1:09:06
  SPEAKER_01: And, you know, some of those have led to the investigation moving forward or even being solved.
• 1:09:14
  SPEAKER_01: But yes.
• 1:09:15
  SPEAKER_01: Right.
• 1:09:17
  SPEAKER_01: I think seeing those statistics is quite shocking because it really reminds us
• 1:09:24
  SPEAKER_01: of how many of these things don't get solved and what that means for victims
• 1:09:30
  SPEAKER_01: and victims' families of never having a resolution here.
• 1:09:33
  SPEAKER_00: Right, right.
• 1:09:36
  SPEAKER_00: So, Neil, on that sobering note, let's turn to what we want to go viral this week.
• 1:09:43
  SPEAKER_01: Well, I'm going to sort of stay in the crime genre by talking about this TV show
• 1:09:48
  SPEAKER_01: on Hulu called Furious.
• 1:09:50
  SPEAKER_01: Have you watched this or heard of this?
• 1:09:51
  SPEAKER_00: I have not.
• 1:09:52
  SPEAKER_01: It's an incredible, I believe there's eight episodes.
• 1:09:55
  SPEAKER_01: I haven't finished it, but I also do want to talk.
• 1:09:58
  SPEAKER_01: Talk about it.
• 1:09:58
  SPEAKER_01: It's a show about a former police detective who's become a FBI special agent,
• 1:10:04
  SPEAKER_01: and she's investigating a series of murders that are happening.
• 1:10:07
  SPEAKER_01: And it turns out through the investigation that these murders are being carried out
• 1:10:11
  SPEAKER_01: by another woman who is basically seeking vengeance on the men who victimized her
• 1:10:17
  SPEAKER_01: when early in her life she, as a minor, was sex trafficked.
• 1:10:22
  SPEAKER_01: And so it's an incredibly interesting,
• 1:10:24
  SPEAKER_01: compelling,
• 1:10:25
  SPEAKER_01: complicated story that sort of looks at first like a police procedural and sort of
• 1:10:32
  SPEAKER_01: a standard crime investigation story
• 1:10:35
  SPEAKER_01: that really becomes this much larger exploration.
• 1:10:40
  SPEAKER_01: And I think in a lot of ways,
• 1:10:41
  SPEAKER_01: indictment of the bigger systems of justice and injustice
• 1:10:45
  SPEAKER_01: that create this larger context, especially when it comes to violence.
• 1:10:51
  SPEAKER_01: I think it's just a fascinating story.
• 1:11:07
  SPEAKER_01: Performance,
• 1:11:08
  SPEAKER_01: an equally stunning performance by Lola Petticrew,
• 1:11:11
  SPEAKER_01: who's the woman who's carrying out these acts.
• 1:11:14
  SPEAKER_01: And then also a wonderful portrayal by Quincy Tyler Bernstein,
• 1:11:20
  SPEAKER_01: who's sort of like a higher up figure in law enforcement.
• 1:11:23
  SPEAKER_01: She's wonderful.
• 1:11:24
  SPEAKER_01: These three women are just all giving just incredibly complex portrayals.
• 1:11:30
  SPEAKER_01: And I think really, again,
• 1:11:33
  SPEAKER_01: speaking to the larger complexity of this story that really gets into the sort
• 1:11:38
  SPEAKER_01: of bigger picture explorations of our justice system,
• 1:11:45
  SPEAKER_01: male violence,
• 1:11:46
  SPEAKER_01: of sex trafficking,
• 1:11:48
  SPEAKER_01: of misogyny, of really the larger dynamics that fuel a story like this.
• 1:11:56
  SPEAKER_01: I think the fact that this is playing out in our moment where things like
• 1:12:01
  SPEAKER_01: the Epstein files and Donald Trump and those sorts of things are,
• 1:12:08
  SPEAKER_01: you know,
• 1:12:08
  SPEAKER_01: the context in which this is being viewed make this story particularly resonant.
• 1:12:13
  SPEAKER_01: And I think Really just worth watching,
• 1:12:18
  SPEAKER_01: even as it doesn't necessarily lead to, from what I understand, a clear resolution.
• 1:12:25
  SPEAKER_01: But I think probably a clear resolution would feel really pat and in a lot
• 1:12:29
  SPEAKER_01: of ways unsatisfying given the moment we live in.
• 1:12:32
  SPEAKER_01: So anyway, I just want to recommend this show, Furious on Hulu.
• 1:12:36
  SPEAKER_01: I'm having to slowly watch it because of sort of the heaviness of it.
• 1:12:40
  SPEAKER_01: It definitely doesn't feel binge-worthy to me, but it feels so worth watching.
• 1:12:45
  SPEAKER_00: Fantastic.
• 1:12:47
  SPEAKER_00: I will put it on my list, Neil.
• 1:12:49
  SPEAKER_00: I may resubscribe to Hulu briefly in order to see it.
• 1:12:53
  SPEAKER_00: You make it sound wonderful.
• 1:12:56
  SPEAKER_00: So I'm sticking in the crime space, too,
• 1:12:59
  SPEAKER_00: because this week I went to see Nathan Fielder and Lance Oppenheim's new documentary
• 1:13:05
  SPEAKER_00: about Theranos fraudster Elizabeth Holmes.
• 1:13:08
  SPEAKER_00: You can see everything.
• 1:13:10
  SPEAKER_00: And I believe it was produced by Netflix, but it's in theatrical release by A24.
• 1:13:17
  SPEAKER_00: And they were one of the producers as well.
• 1:13:21
  SPEAKER_00: Here's a spoiler.
• 1:13:23
  SPEAKER_00: You will not see everything.
• 1:13:25
  SPEAKER_00: And that is the irony of the title is the further you get into this movie,
• 1:13:30
  SPEAKER_00: the more confused you are about who Elizabeth Holmes really is, what she did.
• 1:13:36
  SPEAKER_00: And most importantly,
• 1:13:37
  SPEAKER_00: and that's the direction the movie goes in, what is it that she thinks she did?
• 1:13:42
  SPEAKER_00: Now, listeners...
• 1:13:44
  SPEAKER_00: You may not remember Elizabeth Holmes.
• 1:13:46
  SPEAKER_00: She was the one that claimed to have invented a tiny box that was about the size of
• 1:13:52
  SPEAKER_00: a jewelry box that could do hundreds and hundreds of blood tests with one drop
• 1:13:58
  SPEAKER_00: of blood.
• 1:13:59
  SPEAKER_00: And it was supposed to have two main outlets.
• 1:14:02
  SPEAKER_00: One was Walgreens.
• 1:14:03
  SPEAKER_00: Walgreens was an early investor and also the military.
• 1:14:07
  SPEAKER_00: And you can see how something like that might be great for the military.
• 1:14:11
  SPEAKER_00: Um, because if somebody is wounded,
• 1:14:13
  SPEAKER_00: you can toss them in the helicopter and start actually running the blood test so
• 1:14:18
  SPEAKER_00: that by the time you get them to the aid station or the hospital,
• 1:14:23
  SPEAKER_00: everything can just go into motion and you would gain,
• 1:14:26
  SPEAKER_00: you know, several hours of time in being able to help this person.
• 1:14:30
  SPEAKER_00: As a result of this, Elizabeth Holmes tapped into a large network of, uh,
• 1:14:38
  SPEAKER_00: Republican, um,
• 1:14:40
  SPEAKER_00: Activists like George Shultz, the former Secretary of Defense, but also Betsy DeVos.
• 1:14:47
  SPEAKER_00: Remember her that she was head of the.
• 1:14:50
  SPEAKER_00: She was Secretary of Education, but she also runs the DeVos Family Foundation.
• 1:14:55
  SPEAKER_00: Her brother is Eric Prince.
• 1:14:57
  SPEAKER_00: He was also an investor.
• 1:14:59
  SPEAKER_00: So there's this vast number of Republicans who were invested in this thing.
• 1:15:04
  SPEAKER_00: And then there's a kid in the lab.
• 1:15:07
  SPEAKER_00: Who is George Shultz's nephew.
• 1:15:09
  SPEAKER_00: He gets the job because of George Shultz.
• 1:15:15
  SPEAKER_00: And then he goes back to his grandfather and he says, Grandpa, this isn't adding up.
• 1:15:21
  SPEAKER_00: The results aren't right.
• 1:15:22
  SPEAKER_00: I keep running the tests and they don't work.
• 1:15:25
  SPEAKER_00: And George Shultz is like, you're a horrible person.
• 1:15:27
  SPEAKER_00: Elizabeth Holmes is wonderful, blah, blah.
• 1:15:29
  SPEAKER_00: So what Elizabeth Holmes was really good at was charming people.
• 1:15:34
  SPEAKER_00: And charming them out of their money.
• 1:15:36
  SPEAKER_00: And then there's this sort of odd thing,
• 1:15:38
  SPEAKER_00: and this is sort of at the height of venture capital in Silicon Valley,
• 1:15:42
  SPEAKER_00: where people are pumping money into everything, hoping for the next Facebook.
• 1:15:48
  SPEAKER_00: In any case, the whole thing falls apart.
• 1:15:51
  SPEAKER_00: Elizabeth Holmes claims she never lied to anyone,
• 1:15:54
  SPEAKER_00: that it was really the guy she was living with at the time,
• 1:15:57
  SPEAKER_00: a guy named Sonny something or other.
• 1:15:59
  SPEAKER_00: He gets sort of pinned as the bad guy,
• 1:16:01
  SPEAKER_00: as someone who controlled her and abused her and blah, blah.
• 1:16:06
  SPEAKER_00: In the middle of the trial,
• 1:16:07
  SPEAKER_00: she gets involved with this guy,
• 1:16:09
  SPEAKER_00: Billy Evans,
• 1:16:10
  SPEAKER_00: who she is now married to, who is the scion of a hotel chain in Southern California.
• 1:16:16
  SPEAKER_00: So when we get to this documentary,
• 1:16:18
  SPEAKER_00: it is 30 days before Elizabeth Holmes is to go to prison in Texas to pay
• 1:16:24
  SPEAKER_00: for this crime, to serve 11 years to pay for this crime.
• 1:16:28
  SPEAKER_00: And the filmmaker,
• 1:16:29
  SPEAKER_00: Nathan Fielder,
• 1:16:30
  SPEAKER_00: he's the interviewer,
• 1:16:31
  SPEAKER_00: Oppenheimer,
• 1:16:32
  SPEAKER_00: was sort of directing the whole thing,
• 1:16:34
  SPEAKER_00: goes to live with Elizabeth and Billy and interview them constantly.
• 1:16:41
  SPEAKER_00: And it is just wild, including he will say things to Elizabeth like, you lied about X.
• 1:16:49
  SPEAKER_00: And she says, no, I've never lied in my life.
• 1:16:51
  SPEAKER_00: And he says, wait a second, you never lied about anything?
• 1:16:53
  SPEAKER_00: Like you never told anybody you couldn't come to a party because you were sick?
• 1:16:56
  SPEAKER_00: She said, no, I would never do that.
• 1:16:59
  SPEAKER_00: And so she keeps insisting that she is innocent despite the facts of the case
• 1:17:05
  SPEAKER_00: that have been laid out in court, that have been testified to by others.
• 1:17:10
  SPEAKER_00: She keeps saying, I did nothing wrong.
• 1:17:13
  SPEAKER_00: And by the end of the film, of course, he's very involved with her.
• 1:17:18
  SPEAKER_00: There is a twist that I will not tell you much about,
• 1:17:22
  SPEAKER_00: listeners, except what it involves is Amanda Seyfried.
• 1:17:28
  SPEAKER_00: Seyfried?
• 1:17:29
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 1:17:30
  SPEAKER_00: No, Seyfried.
• 1:17:31
  SPEAKER_01: Seyfried.
• 1:17:32
  SPEAKER_00: Who plays Elizabeth Holmes in the Hulu series about Elizabeth Holmes.
• 1:17:38
  SPEAKER_00: And Amanda gets involved because she's the only person
• 1:17:42
  SPEAKER_00: who really knows Elizabeth Holmes as well as Nathan does.
• 1:17:45
  SPEAKER_00: So he's the only person and she's the only person who can talk in
• 1:17:50
  SPEAKER_00: an unknowledgeable way and try to solve this problem.
• 1:17:53
  SPEAKER_00: Anyway, at a certain point,
• 1:17:55
  SPEAKER_00: Amanda Seifert gets involved and Becomes part of the story,
• 1:18:00
  SPEAKER_00: including there are moments that Fielder was not allowed to film that Seifert
• 1:18:06
  SPEAKER_00: then reenacts with him.
• 1:18:09
  SPEAKER_00: It's wild.
• 1:18:09
  SPEAKER_00: It is wild in terms of Elizabeth Holmes.
• 1:18:12
  SPEAKER_00: It is wild in terms of where we are as a culture in terms of technology saying
• 1:18:19
  SPEAKER_00: that they can solve problems that maybe can't be solved.
• 1:18:23
  SPEAKER_00: But it's also interesting in terms of filmmaking
• 1:18:26
  SPEAKER_00: because fielders keep saying all along,
• 1:18:29
  SPEAKER_00: I can't do X, I can't do Y, this is a documentary.
• 1:18:32
  SPEAKER_00: Except it's not really a documentary.
• 1:18:33
  SPEAKER_00: It's something else.
• 1:18:35
  SPEAKER_00: And I don't know what it is.
• 1:18:36
  SPEAKER_00: Anyway, everyone should see it.
• 1:18:38
  SPEAKER_00: Have you seen it yet, Neil?
• 1:18:39
  SPEAKER_01: I haven't.
• 1:18:39
  SPEAKER_01: I'm dying to.
• 1:18:41
  SPEAKER_01: How do you feel?
• 1:18:41
  SPEAKER_01: Because it's a three-hour movie.
• 1:18:43
  SPEAKER_01: And so a lot of people are saying they don't want to go watch a three-hour movie in the cinema.
• 1:18:47
  SPEAKER_01: But I've heard that...
• 1:18:48
  SPEAKER_01: Folks who have watched it say, oh, no,
• 1:18:50
  SPEAKER_01: you need to watch it at the movies because you want to be part of
• 1:18:54
  SPEAKER_01: a collective experience
• 1:18:55
  SPEAKER_01: where you're hearing like your fellow audience members gasping.
• 1:18:59
  SPEAKER_01: You agree with that?
• 1:19:00
  SPEAKER_00: I totally agree with that.
• 1:19:01
  SPEAKER_00: I went to the Quad on 12th Street here.
• 1:19:04
  SPEAKER_00: First of all, I went at four o'clock in the afternoon.
• 1:19:06
  SPEAKER_00: So you get out and it's time to make a dinner.
• 1:19:08
  SPEAKER_00: Perfect.
• 1:19:08
  SPEAKER_00: What's the deal?
• 1:19:09
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 1:19:10
  SPEAKER_00: But the theater was half full and I have actually noticed people are going to the movies again.
• 1:19:16
  SPEAKER_00: People are seeking out a collective experience.
• 1:19:19
  SPEAKER_00: And particularly this one, which I think will not be streamed for like six weeks after release.
• 1:19:26
  SPEAKER_00: And it's getting a lot of word of mouth.
• 1:19:28
  SPEAKER_00: But yes, it was wonderful.
• 1:19:30
  SPEAKER_00: It was riveting to be there with all these people, including when the movie ended.
• 1:19:35
  SPEAKER_00: We all just sat there.
• 1:19:36
  SPEAKER_00: Nobody knew what to do.
• 1:19:39
  SPEAKER_00: It was such an overwhelming experience.
• 1:19:41
  SPEAKER_00: And that was fun, too.
• 1:19:42
  SPEAKER_01: Amazing.
• 1:19:42
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 1:19:43
  SPEAKER_00: So anyway, yes,
• 1:19:44
  SPEAKER_00: I would go see it in the theater, Neil, and I can't wait to talk to you about it.
• 1:19:49
  SPEAKER_01: I can't wait to see it.
• 1:19:52
  SPEAKER_00: So, Neil, I think that's it for this week.
• 1:19:54
  SPEAKER_00: We will meet again next week, and it will be like four days before the election.
• 1:20:00
  SPEAKER_00: Listeners,
• 1:20:01
  SPEAKER_00: it's going to be a wild,
• 1:20:02
  SPEAKER_00: wild ride, and we're going to have something good for you, I promise.
• 1:20:06
  SPEAKER_00: So until then, Neil, arrivederci.
• 1:20:09
  SPEAKER_01: All right, see you then.
• 1:20:10
  [music]
• 1:20:20
  SPEAKER_00: it for today's show.
• 1:20:21
  SPEAKER_00: Thanks for hanging out with us.
• 1:20:22
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• 1:20:27
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• 1:20:33
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• 1:20:38
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• 1:20:39
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• 1:20:45
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• 1:20:50
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• 1:20:55
  SPEAKER_00: Our podcast is supported by the New School for Social Research and by paying subscribers.
• 1:21:00
  SPEAKER_00: Political Junkie is written, recorded, edited, and produced by me, Claire Potter.
• 1:21:06
  SPEAKER_00: Today's theme is 44 Special Blues,
• 1:21:09
  SPEAKER_00: written and performed by Hank Williams Jr., copyrighted music licensed from Lichty.
• 1:21:14
  SPEAKER_00: That's
• 1:21:14
  [music]
• 1:21:59
  SPEAKER_03: you got all of that.
• 1:22:02
  SPEAKER_03: I bet you did.
• 1:22:04
  SPEAKER_03: I'm going to listen and smoke.