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January 16, 2020 45 mins

In Part Two, Robert is joined again by Sofiya Alexandra to continue discussing John Ronald Brown.

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Speaker 1 (00:00):
M episode start Begin now, Robert Evans, Behind the Bastards
Podcast Part two, John Ronald Brown, Sophia, Alexandra Guest, private
parts unknown, introduction bad, How are you doing, Sophia good?
Just you can mention my other podcast work with mild Gray.

(00:24):
It's I forgot to include of the actual words necessary
to make that salad not gibberish. So of course I
forgot your second podcast too. That was a disaster. A disaster, um.
I think you will keep having a disaster until you
commit to going back to the old ways what I
have my wise, I have committed to getting fired and

(00:47):
then becoming a corrupt small time cop. I think that's
the path I want to go with. Did you if
you watch Jaws recently, there's a scene in the second
Jaws movie where Sheriff Brody gets at oh man, it's great.
There's a scene in the second Jaws movie where Sheriff
Brody gets out of his police car and is preceded
by forty or fifty beer cans tumbling out onto the

(01:09):
ground around him, and like, that's exactly what I want
to do for a living, just rolling around in a
police car, drunk as ship with a gun. No accountability
on some beach town in the middle of nowhere. I'm
glad that you're going to be a corrupt small town
cop because, as as we discussed in the previous episode,
I will be performing unauthorized surgeries and at that point

(01:33):
I'm gonna need a friend in the police department. Friend, Yeah,
this is the plan. Hey, would you like to be
the non doctor con man veterinarians doctor Spence to my
doctor Ronald und Yeah, no not, you're the cop. You

(01:58):
already have a role to play. Would you so feel
with you on anything? My friend? Perfect? We got a
clinic going, Robert, keep us out of the papers, all right,
Well that's good, you know, Sophie, it's complicated. I feel
like I want to know more about Spence because this
is not just a simple man pretending to be a doctor.
This is a man pretending to be a veterinarian who

(02:20):
pretends to be a doctor. And that's like a whole
different layer of scamminess. And oh, it's hilarious that he
needed to first fool himself to step one. He's like, no,
pretending to be a doctor. He's like, I can't do that,
that's too much lying. First, I'm gonna pretend to be
a vet and out of there pretending to be a doctor.
That's not that far. I can do that. Yeah, it's amazing,

(02:40):
It's really amazing. Can we put up a picture of
him too, because I'd like to, But the faces of
that firm were not for doctors clinic. He died in
a ditch like that is my assumption that he died
in a ditch overdosing on something horrible. If the world

(03:01):
it isn't any way, just in which it's not, he
would have died in a dish. So let's start part two. Um. Now,
As I mentioned in the first episode, John Ronald Brown
didn't only have sad stories in terms of his patients.
He had some happy customers. One of them was Patrese Baxter.

(03:23):
She was a longtime client and she calls him one
of the best surgeons in the United States, even though
by the time she met him, he was no longer
legally allowed to practice surgery in the United States. Still,
Dr Brown illegally gave Patrise a tummy tuck, a facelift,
and breast implants. She was so happy with the results
that she had him cut into her granddaughter's ears. Quote
they stuck out. The kids on her track team called

(03:44):
her dumbo, why don't you just fly? He did her
nose too. Patrese claims the surgery went well enough that
her granddaughter went on to work as a model, So
she clearly admired the man, But even Dr Brown's number
one fan acknowledged that he had some faults. She's also
not a good person if she's getting years of fucking granddaughter. Cut.
We haven't even gotten into what a bad person she

(04:05):
is right away. So she said he was brilliant, but
he had no common sense. He would walk through plate
glass doors. He couldn't balance his checkbook through a screen
door before. That is embarrassing and shameful. Um, now, just

(04:27):
t whis bring me to and it's very cute. Tut tusk,
tut tut tusk tusk who says that no one she
acknowledged that his bedside manner was not exactly great. Uh.
Sometimes he would grab a magazine mid conversation and start reading.
He mumbled frequently, and he never held his patient's hands. Still,

(04:47):
Patrese insists he was more of a hero than a villain.
He only charged for a sex change, and half the
time they didn't even pay. Now, before you take Pat
Baxter's commentary too seriously, you should know that she wasn't
just satisfied customer. She was also a surgical entrepreneur, which
is one of the most terrified phrases I've ever heard.
I lived in San Diego and ran a shady as

(05:09):
clinic in Mexico. She and John Brown became business partners
and worked together for years. She urged John to expand
his repertoire beyond basic plastic surgery and gender reassignment. There was,
she told him, a vast untapped market in men who
wanted bigger dicks. Oh man, I'm kind of excited about
where this is going. Oh yeah, yeah, I know this

(05:29):
is going in a fun direction. And it's one of
those things we've just been talking about the most vulnerable
people in the world been getting screwed over by this guy.
Yeah about this, Yeah, I mean, I'm societal of this. Yeah, okay, yeah.
So Dr Brown got into the penix extension business in

(05:52):
Penthouse Forum sent a writer to to Wanta to investigate
Brown's practice. Now, the good not a doctor had started
claiming an advertise spence that he could add one to
two inches to a dick by cutting the suspenser ligament
that held the penis root to the pubic bone, which
I wrote as public bone, which is not a thing,
but I found funny. Um. The article, titled The Incredible
Dick Doctor, portrayed Dr Brown actively as a horrible driver

(06:16):
who frequently backed into other cars. It pointed out that
his pants fell down once in the o R at one.
Oh my god, that's like a cartoon. That's imagine, right
before doctor starts cutting into you, his pants fall down.
You're like, Okay, I have to cancel the surgery if

(06:38):
you know aeal. Next, I am fucking telling everyone an
anvil just falls on his head. That's ridiculous, dude. At
one point in the article, he accidentally cut a patient's
penile shaft, sending blood spurting all over the room. His
quoted response to this funk up was I made a

(06:59):
boo boo. I was gonna guess it was oops. But
this is worse. Yeah, that's definitely worse than oops. So
someone from Inside Edition must have been reading Penthouse for
the articles, because three years later they sent a team
to investigate Dr Brown. The resulting documentary, The Worst Doctor
in America, was filmed with Brown's oblivious consent. At one point,

(07:19):
it showed him performing scalp surgery on a transwoman who
was supposed to be sedated, but the sedation didn't take
and the patient screamed and cried while the team recorded.
Brown called this nothing unusual. There's a special segment of
one interview that I think is worth me reading in
full inside edition. This is them narrating. But to Brown,
failure is no reason to proceed with caution, and he

(07:41):
continues to experiment on humans whenever he develops a new procedure.
And this is Brown talking back in the developmental stage.
I remember several times asking myself, is it really right
for me to be doing what amounts to experiments on
some of these people? After thinking it all through, these
people knew what I was doing, They knew I wasn't
It wasn't a proven experiment. They were all willing. So
He's like, I thought about whether I have any morrible responsibility,

(08:03):
and I decided no, No am I a SOULI school? Yeah.
Um so, Cherry, the young woman who's uh sister got
a sex change with Dr Brown, definitely considered him to
be a dangerous kook, but acknowledged he gives you a
vagina at a fair price. Competent doctor's charged twelve thousand

(08:24):
to twenty tho dollars for a vagina. At the time,
Brown's fees were reasonable enough that hundreds of women chose
to gamble on him, in spite of the fact that
his new nickname, Butcher Brown was by far the worst
yet not as good as tabletop Brown. Not as good
as tabletop Brown. Now, during my research, I came across
a tremendous resource called the Digital Transgender Archive. This wonderful

(08:46):
site includes pictures, articles, and scans of entire issues of
various znes and newsletters distributed by the trans community, going
you know, back like decades, and I came across one
from nine called twenty Minutes and a few pages in
it featured a cartoon drawn by someone named Radia. Uh
and Sophie. You want to show her the political cartoon

(09:06):
of Dr Brown. It's a little small, so creep on it.
Yeah that chucks out. Yeah, it's just it's it's pretty
much just a portrait. Yeah, he's dressed as like Jason
from the Friday the Thirteenth movies, with a hockey mask

(09:27):
covered in blood and a chainsaw of a patient on
its back. Yeah. Um now. That cartoon was followed by
a furious article about Dr Brown titled Mac the Knife
and I'm going to quote from it now a patient
no more like a victim of the nefarious Dr Brown
presented herself with the aid of a companion at the
emergency room of San Francisco General Hospital today November four,

(09:51):
for life saving medical assistance. Just a week earlier, in Mexico,
she had the misfortune to fall into the not so
tender clutches of Dr Brown. By the time she arrived
at s F General, she'd lost more than four pints
of blood and was well down the road to being
another and not so fortunate statistic of the infamous meat cutter.
From information available, she's but one of ten recent victims
of Brown's. For those of you contemplating surgery, don't go

(10:11):
to Mexico for it, and above all, don't let Dr
Brown do it. Admittedly, his price of three thousand dollars
is attractive, but the pain, anguish, and post surgical complications
are not worth the trivial amount of money saved. So
twenty Minutes had written warnings about Dr Brown before, and
he'd actually had someone from his office respond to them.
Since his potential clients read this magazine, and since he

(10:32):
knew no one from the a m A. Or law
enforcement was reading trans community newsletters, he felt secure in
just lying shamefully to these people to try to convince
more of them to let him commit surgery on their groins.
And here's his representatives response. Many of you have heard
about doctor John Ronald Brown, m D, some of it positive,
some negative. This letter is intended to set the record
straight and to inform those interested in his work. It

(10:55):
goes on to account Dr Brown's educational history all the
different hospitals he worked at, notably leaving out his repeated
failures to actually pass his surgical exams. Then it gives
this justification for the fact that his clinic had to
be in Mexico rather than the United States. Due to
the temporary rivocation of his license to practice in California.
His clinic has been moved to Plus, Mexico. He's currently

(11:15):
preparing for reinstatement of his California license, but states that
even when he is eventually vindicated, his practice will probably
remain in Mexico for various reasons, especially the reduced problems
of doing transsexual surgery, the reduced problems, meaning like the
reduced laws governing what you can do to people you're
performing surgery on now. In that letter, Dr Brown's representative

(11:36):
also brags about a revolutionary new technique he developed, taking
bowel tissue to make the new vaginal canal for his patients.
That's ensuring them a self lubricating vagina. Twenty Minutes notes
that as a result of his failure to actually do
this competently, more than seventy of his patients had received
permanent colostomies, and I found a quote from writer Dallas
and Aenny on all this. In the nineteen nineties, Brown

(11:57):
came to favor invasive surgery, in which you would aft
the neo vagina to a section of resected colon. His
results had never been good. The growing area of a
Brown patient typically looked as if the penis had been
split lengthwise and sutured to the growing with a simple
hole between the split halves. Patients often wound up with colostomies.
Several of Brown's girls dance topless, using scarves to conceal
the bags attached to their sides. When he started going

(12:18):
into the peritoneum. Things got really scary. Patients would return
home smelling of rotting flesh. Often they would return to Brown,
going again and again for revision, each time paying large
sums of money. Many eventually wound up in emergency rooms,
and I dare say some ended up dead. Now it's
hard to imagine just how fucking horrifying receiving surgery under
these conditions would have been. And there are very few

(12:39):
first person accounts from Dr Brown's victims, and none that
go into a tremendous amount of detail. I did find
the experiences of one transwoman, Canary Cohn, who received her
gender assignment surgery in Tijuana, and she went with a
better doctor than Dr Brown, one of the better doctors
in the area. So as I read this story, I
want you to remember that what Brown patients would have
woken up with was actually worse than this um. So

(13:00):
this is like a better case scenario than Dr Brown,
and it's still pretty fucking horrifying. Somebody, please please come here.
I cried and reached for the button, keeping it in
my hand. A peculiar wet feeling was gathering around my legs.
At first, I was too frightened to peer under the sheets,
but as the chill increased, I reached for the chain
over my head. With the light on, I lifted the sheets.
Then I panicked. The sheet under me was a pool

(13:21):
of blood, and more was flowing from between my legs.
I pressed the button again and again and began to
scream for help, thinking about detaching myself from the bed,
I propped myself on one arm, but then fainted and
fell back. When I woke up some ten or fifteen
minutes later, the blood had made its way down one
side of the bed to the floor. I was weaker
now and the pain didn't matter. I was bleeding to death. Sobbing,
I began to pray aloud. Then I screamed again and

(13:41):
again until my voice faded into hoarseness. Grabbing a book
from the table, I tried to throw it through the window,
but it fell from my fingers into the pool of blood.
The chills had changed to small convulsions as I tried
to calm myself. Bending my head, I looked once more
at the side of the bed, half covered with my
life's liquid. It looked pretty, somehow, red on white. I
couldn't help thinking how ironic it was that I had
we con saved all this time to pay for my
own death. I would be my own executioner. And again,

(14:05):
this is someone waking up in a clinic. So this
is someone getting surgery from one of these doctors who
actually does provide doctor aftercare. Dr Brown's patients typically woke
up in hotels or cars undergoing the same thing, not
attached to a bed, not in like obviously Canary eventually
did get medical help, but just took a while for
I think the clinic to realize what was going on.

(14:28):
But what a nightmare. You're bleeding to death and you
know it, and you paid for your surgery and it's
just like sober, yeah, yeah. And in the case of
Dr Brown's patients, this is happening like the back of
a Ford Fiesta. Um, it's it's hard to imagine. So
despite the fact that he had moved his practice to Mexico,
presumably because he couldn't legally perform surgery in the US,

(14:50):
Dr Brown still repeatedly performed surgeries in the United States
throughout the nineteen eighties. In nineteen four, he was arrested
for giving a presentation where he offered penile lengthening surgery
to a group of men in San Diego. He only
received a slap on the wrist for this and continued
traveling around California to perform minor surgery. Cherry recalled He'd
shoot silicone anywhere you wanted it for two hundred dollars.

(15:12):
He do breast surgery for five d He'd do cheeks, breasts,
and hips. After injections, you had to lie flat on
your back for three days so the silicone wouldn't go anywhere.
He plugged the holes with crazy glue. He's a big
fan of crazy glue. Yeah, I was saying, these are
like the people that have been busted for doing this stuff.
In Los Angeles County, one patient filed to complaint against

(15:33):
Dr Brown for a breast enlargement procedure he had performed
on her. It turns out that rather than performing any
kind of surgery, he just shoved a needle into her
breasts and injected them with raw silicone. He then closed
the holes with crazy glue. Another patient, a genetic female
named Mona, complained that after Dr Brown gave her a facelift,
face peel, eye job, and breast implants, he did not

(15:53):
do a good job. During the facelift, he severed a
nerve in her face, leaving her with a permanent crooked
smile her implants face, which caused the breasts to rot
and leak a fluid her boyfriend described as smelling like
cat piss. Then they fell off. To his credit, Dr
Brown performed some aftercare for Mona. She recalled that at
some one point he showed up to inject her with
painkillers wearing only one shoe. Oh my god, Wow, what

(16:18):
a good sign to not let someone doctor on you
when they're wearing just one shoe, Like you're going to
inject someone with medicine and you couldn't get your shoe
game on point for the day. Let's just go ahead
and extend it to the whole outfit. If you're missing
anything from the outfit, you're you're you're on a time
out for doctoring for the moment. It's like a guy

(16:39):
trying to shoot you up with insulin while wearing board shorts.
Like no, no, I'm gonna go ahead and pass. Yeah. Now.
Despite all this horror, it was the Inside Edition episode
that finally drew some serious legal attention to John Ronald Brown.
The FBI went after him, confiscated his money, shut down
his clinic and charged him with practicing medicine without a license.

(17:00):
He had previously been convicted for prescribing narcotics with revoked
license and practicing under a false name. With all of
that on his record, you might expect him to serve
some serious time. That seems like a significant crime, right,
m hm. He was sentenced to three years in prison
and served nineteen months. Oh my god, yeah, nineteen months. Um. So,

(17:22):
for a brief period of time, about a year, he
worked as a cab driver on Coronado Island, which is
possibly the only job he ever did that he might
have been qualified for. He remember, they said that he
got a constantly rearended people and got into car accidents.
He actually went into the only other profession he could
kill people. Like, that's not okay, that's not okay. You're

(17:46):
absolutely right, Like he picked the one other job that
he was dangerously bad at. I mean, we really could
he We have gotten him to be like a Walmart Greater,
just something where you're just harmless, you know. I feel
like as a Walmart Greater, he would have gotten people
killed just directing them to the wrong aisles, just throwing

(18:09):
peanuts at kids with allergies. So Paulciati interviewed John about
this period in his life, and Dr Brown insisted that
the time in jail didn't deter him from his chosen calling.
In the least. He said that he decided long ago
to rebel against what he saw as the unjust medical establishment.
I didn't like some of the things that organized doctors

(18:31):
were doing, so I rebelled. Later, I didn't like what
the government was doing in support of the medical organizations,
so I rebelled. I chose to ignore the laws. He's
a hero. He's a hero, Sophia. After a year, John
was able to put together enough money to reopen his
surgical practice in Tijuana. For a couple of years, he

(18:51):
continued chopping into whoever would pay, primarily servicing the trans community,
if you can call what he did a service. By night,
he had carried out an estimated six hundred gender reassignment surgeries.
That is the year he met Greg Firth. Now Greg
was a psychlo No Greg with two gs three. Actually

(19:15):
this is even worse than the regular Greg. There are
five letters in Greg's first name, and three of them
are G. It's a it's a disaster, It's gonna not end. Well,
it does not now. Greg was a psychoanalyst from New
York City. In addition to being a well respected mental
health expert, Firth also suffered from a rare condition known
as a potemnophilia. Have you ever heard of epotemnophilia? The

(19:40):
person who coined that term in ninety seven, John Money,
described it as an extreme sexual fetish wherein victims desire
to sever their own limbs so they can have better orgasms.
What yeah, wait, why DoD, Why do the limbs get
in the way of a good orgasm? That's a great question.
And we're gonna talk about appet nephelia a little bit

(20:01):
more in a minute. But you know what won't sever
your limbs to give you better orgasm? Sofia the following
goods and services. That's exactly right. That is the guarantee
we make is that none of these products will sever
your limbs in the pursuit of an orgasm. We're back

(20:21):
and we're talking about how there should be a legal
limit on the number of g's allowed in a name.
And I'm going to put it. I'm gonna say zero.
All rights are just ad That's what I'm saying. They're
just raised now yeah exactly name yeah, just reth deal

(20:46):
with it. So um Apa tem nephelia is usually described
as an extreme sexual fetish about, you know, wanting to
sever your own limb for a better orgasm. That is
not how many sufferers of describe it. What are they say? Yeah?
Firth and a lot of other people with it argue
that the sexual angle is either minor or non existent

(21:07):
in a lot of cases. Um Greg doesn't even like
the term appotem nephelia. He prefers body identity transfer. Um
One sufferer I found interviewed in Salon described the way
her condition made her feel in this way quote, For me,
sexuality is being comfortable with my body inside. I feel
my legs don't belong to me and they shouldn't be there.
There's just an overwhelming sense of despair. Sometimes I don't

(21:29):
want to die, but there are times I don't want
to keep living in a body that doesn't feel like mine.
Now First seems to agree with this more or less,
insisting in interviews it's not about sex, it's not about
getting off with someone. This is about becoming able bodied.
So these the people suffering this will claim that like
it's not I don't want to get it removed because
I think it's hot to have to lose a limb.

(21:49):
I feel like, this isn't my body part and I
can't be comfortable in my own body while I have
this armor leg because they're not an alien limb. But
they're not capable of realizing that that's like good disorder,
or are they. I think they are, But I think
a lot of them would say that the treatment for
the disorders to have the fucking leg removed or whatever. Um,
I'm not going to come down on this one way

(22:11):
or the other. This is just what they will say. Yeah,
I mean I think before, but I'm like, yeah, And
there are some people who definitely like there are amputation
fetishists and stuff too. It's complicated, I think the I
think some people will argue that folks like Greg just
have an amputation fetish, and I think some sufferers of
apotemnophelia will say it's not a fetish, it's like a

(22:33):
body Dysmorpheus sort of thing. This is not my limb
and I need it removed. And there are people who
will be like, you're just saying that so you can
try to get surgery because you think gets hot, Like,
I really don't know. I'm not a fucking expert on anything.
I mean, it doesn't really matter though, but it makes
me think of like anorexi or something. It's like, you know,
you're looking in the mirror and you see something that, yeah,
it's not it's not right. So you're like, no, I

(22:53):
have to keep getting thinner. I'm not thin. It doesn't
look right, like I can't. I'm not going to feel
happy until them this then, But it's ultimately something that
you know you recover from if you work on it.
But I guess not. I don't know if it does
it work like that for this, I have no idea. Um, well,
well well I'll tell a little bit more and we'll
see how we feel. Definitely, Greg actually does seem to

(23:16):
have a bit of a recovery um. But yeah, we're
building to that. So for years, Greg Firth has sought
to have his legs surgically amputated um and there are
some reputable surgeons who will do this for people with
appa tim nephelia. Unfortunately, the one first tried to contract
had to back out of doing the surgery after the
public hospital he worked at rescinded his privileges due to

(23:37):
bad publicity. They were actually protests in Scotland against voluntary
amputation being legal at all. Um. And when this all
blew up in the news, first doctor, the guy who
tried to go with, complained that banning safe voluntary amputations
and hospitals would only make the problem worse for his patients. Quote,
they may take the law into their own hands. They
may lie in a railway line and get run over

(23:58):
by a train. They may use shotguns and their limbs off.
They really are quite a desperate bunch, um. And the
doctor's kind of proven right in some of this that,
like you know, um, when someone has this kind of
and it's tough because like a lot of doctors will
say it's immoral fundamentally to do this because your job

(24:18):
isn't to remove healthy tissue. I think other doctors might
claim that, like, these people clearly aren't healthy, so you
are helping them by doing this. It's a very complicated
realm of medical ethics, um, or at least it seems
complicated to me. Let us know, if you're a doctor,
if you would remove someone's leg voluntarily, um, hit us

(24:40):
up now. Once his plans to remove his leg legitimately
with a real doctor in a real hospital fell through.
Greg Firth started searching around for other places where he
might have his alien leg removed. He read a story
about an underground surgeon based out of San Diego. Despite
the man's nickname Butcher Brown, that sounds good to me.
That sounds good to me. That's what I'm looking for. Yeah.

(25:02):
Greg decided this guy was a good person to reach
out to, and Dr Brown was of course only too
happy to help. Stacy running the d A who prosecuted
Brown for what later happened, said he saw it is
all the same. You cut off a boob, you cut
off a penis, you cut off a leg. Sounds like
a quality doctor. No difference between any of those things. Now.

(25:23):
First negotiated with Dr Brown, and eventually they managed to
settle on a price. He flew down to Mexico to
finally lose his alien leg, but when he showed up
at Brown's makeshift o R, the Mexican doctor Brown had
hired to assist him realize that he was about to
help sever a healthy leg. First recalled. He kept saying,
this isn't right, you don't want this. Eventually, the Mexican

(25:43):
doctor left the building, and Brown was forced to cancel
the surgery, since it turns out amputating is a little
bit of a two man job, so Brown agrees. Firsth
flies down there and like, Brown gets an actual doctor
in Mexico to help, and that guy is like he
tricks him basically, and once he realizes what's happening, he's like,
I'm not going to do this. This is fucked up. Um,

(26:03):
so good on that doctor. Um. A year later, in
John Brown called Firth with what he's called good news
and bad news. The good news was he had yeah.
The good news was he'd found another doctor. The bad
news was it would now cost ten thous dollars. By
this point, Firth was less convinced that he even wanted
to commit to the surgery, but he decided to give

(26:24):
it a shot. His good friend and fellow alien leg sufferer,
Philip Bondy, scolded him for considering bailing on the opportunity,
telling him, you'll regret this the rest of your life.
How ironic, because you can't undo imputating your leg, but
you can always undo having your leg. These people are
not super rationally thinking about this problem. Um, I don't

(26:45):
feel uh not to appa, timnophelia shame them. But I
don't think you should do this, um, And I think
given what happens next time, right, So first travel to
San Diego and took a taxi to the clinic in Tijuana.
By the time he arrived, conclude that his compulsion to
have his leg removed was gone. He told Brown absolutely
not um, and this would kind of tend to suggest that, like, actually, yeah,

(27:09):
you shouldn't have your legs removed. If this is the
kind of thing that's seeing, how horrible the o R
can like remove you of your compulsion. Um. Anyway, here's
how l A Weekly sums up what happened next. Thinking
perhaps that Firth was merely nervous, Brown offered him a sedative,
but Firth testified he didn't want to be sedated. He
wanted out of there. Before leaving, however, he suggested that
what he thought would be a win win solution for everyone,

(27:30):
even though he no longer wanted the operation himself, he
knew someone else who did. Maybe we could switch it around,
said Firth, Philip could take my place. And it turned
out that Philip Bundy's apotem nephelia was much stronger than
the Firth's. He flew right to Mexico and on May ninth,
or John Brown severed his leg. Normally, surgery like this
would be an impatient procedure. You would, you would not

(27:52):
want to. But if you know John Ronald Brown, you
know he doesn't do inpatient procedures. Instead, he drove the
freshly amputated Philip Bondi fifteen miles into the desert, where
Dr Brown tossed his leg out of the car to
be eaten by coyotes. Oh my god, why was that

(28:15):
his first idea? How is the coyotes the first idea
you have for getting rid of a leg? Because he
has John Ronald fucking Brown. That is crazy. Nurse coyotes
will be assisting in the procedure. Oh my god. That crazy.

(28:40):
Their medical coyotes, Oh my god. Those are probably the
only people that worked in this clinic that actually were there. Yes,
the most competent medical professionals. And you know what, the
coyotes did their job properly. They were the most ones. Yeah,
competent people. Yeah. Now, after throwing his patient's leg out

(29:04):
of a car window, John Brown drove his patient into
California to a holiday inn, gave him a ten minute
lesson in walking with crutches and drove off into the
sunset to count his money. Oh my god, oh god,
it's a nightmare. Two days later, Greg Firth went to
check up on his friend in the Holiday Inn and
found him dead. An autopsy revealed that gas Gang Green

(29:27):
from an improperly sterilized leg stump, had been the culprit.
Philip's death would have been an agonizing, almost unimaginably painful affair.
This was the case that finally made the law treat
Dr John Brown as the minister society that he so
clearly was. It's telling that he had to finally kill
a straight man before this happened. And I'm not just
saying that to score woke points. Um. After the police started, Yeah,

(29:50):
after the police started digging into Dr Brown, the detective
in charge of the case made a point of looking
into some of Brown's other patients. And I'm gonna quote
Pulciotti with The l A Weekly again. When d A
investigator Basinski, a tall, outgoing former cop with a shaved
head and a big gray mustache, began calling on the
people on Brown's patient lists, a lot of them just
hung up on him. Some more hookers, he said. Some

(30:10):
thought they were in trouble, some just didn't like the police.
I called one woman, and an older woman answered, why
do you want my son? She said. He committed suicide
two weeks ago. As Basinski later learned, Christina, formerly known
as Eddie, had mortgaged her house to pay for a
total of tin surgeries by Brown, but, according to legal
documents followed by running, the skin graphs that Brown used
to line Christina's vaginal walls were so thin that they

(30:31):
tore during intercourse. When Brown removed Christina's lower ribs to
give her a narrower and more feminine waiste, she subsequently
developed an abscess as big as a basketball. Christina's nose
job turned out so poorly that she ended up with
different sized nostrils, one of which turned up like that
of a pig. Christina complained to Brown that he'd made
her vaginal entrance too small, but when Brown enlarged it,
Christina felt he'd ruined her. Today, Brown says he feels

(30:52):
badly that he didn't better explain the procedure to Christina,
but when he called to tell her he was refunding
five hundred dollars her mother told him that her son
had just hanged himself in the garage. According to Running,
Brown took the news quite calmly, noting merely that transsexuals
had a high suicide rate. And I should note I'm
reading a quote from an article there Sciatti consistently correctly
genders Christina Christina's mother. Yeah, those are her quotes on

(31:17):
the matter though. Um, yeah, so the up it's also
super fucked up, also removing the ribs, like, yeah, that's
not okay, I mean, and it's kind of buried a
little bit. But the most fucked up thing there is
that when Dr Brown learns that one of his patients
has killed herself, doesn't care. He's just like a lot

(31:38):
of my patients killed themselves. Actually it happens constantly. Um,
it's amazingly terrible. Uh. And it it's it goes to
show that like John is usually shown as like having
killed one person Bundy, but he killed a lot of people.
They just the law didn't care about them. Um, and
oftentimes is that story shows their pair didn't either. And

(32:01):
also just like the fear of whoever, the fear of
whoever it is calling and checking on you means like
you're not really getting the full information anyway. Yeah yeah,
because like a lot of these patients were sex workers
and they're not going to talk to a fucking copy
even if the cop legitimately cares about what's being done

(32:22):
to them, Like it doesn't matter. Um So, Dr Brown
was arrested and police searched a Sandy Cedro apartment. They
found bloody shoes and pillows, used needles, vials of silicone,
dozens of empty tubes of crazy glue, bloody towel soaking
in bleach, and dozens of returned advertising brochures for his
horrible clinic. One of the brochures read as follows, Oh boys,

(32:46):
is going to be unpleasant to read. The prettiest pussies
are John Brown pussies. The happiest patients are John Brown
patients because number one each has a sensitive clit. Number
two all get orgasms. Number three careful skin draping gives
a natural appearance. Number four men love the pretty pussies
and the sexy response Yeah obviously not true. Yes, horrible

(33:12):
horrible eyes now also found in Dr Brown's apartment where
videotapes of the Bad Doctor's operations. These videos were given
names that reflect the level of professionalism I think we've
all come to expect from John Brown. I'm trying not
to laugh, but it's It's like one was titled Jack
has a new piss hole behind his balls. Um again,

(33:35):
this is how the doctor labeled his surgery tapes. Um yeah.
While bizarre, that video was not what hit prosecutors the
hardest in brown stash. That came across a recorded sex
change surgery which showed Brown using a scalpel so dull
he had to use it like a saw, jerking it
back and forth into the patient's flesh. Uh yeah. As

(33:58):
the media's chief expert on table top Brown, pal Ciolo
spent a lot of time talking to the detectives and
prosecutors trying to put Brown away. They showed him some
of these videos, and here's how he describes one. In
the video's opening shot, which is reminiscent of that famous
scene from The Crying Game, an attractive Asian girl and
the soon to be Las Vegas stripper is shown standing
naked from the waist up, quietly chatting with Brown, who

(34:19):
is off camera. She has nicely formed breasts and abundant
black hair that cascades down her shoulders. Then slowly, the
camera moves down her body and suddenly you realize she
has a penis. When the actual surgery starts, I find
it so unsettling that I have to turn off the tape.
All the men had the same reactions as running. The
judge asked, do I have to watch this video? I said, well, yes,
you do. You're the judge. Yeah, so yeah, I you know,

(34:45):
part of me is like I I kind of like
running here because he's like, yeah, you have to watch this.
You have to know what this guy did to properly
sentence him, and like just because it's gross, Uh, you
don't get to not look at it. You would look
at photos of a murder, and that's what this guy did.
So we're gonna watch the smoking videos. Like. I respect

(35:06):
that a lot. Um, you know what. I also respect
Sophia Goods and Services, the products and services that support
this show. We're back so um. Apparently Brown had intended
that tape and a lot of the other tapes to

(35:27):
be like advertising and training videos. Uh. The second scene
in that tape we just described shows the doctor sitting
in a chair wearing a white coat and explaining the
upcoming operation to the camera. Uh, he has a microphone
and his hand is kind of shaking, says running. You
see him reach up and grab his hand and this
is his dominant hand, the one he operates with. He
holds up crew drawings ripped out of a spiral notebook.
He says, this is the corporate of the corporate. He

(35:49):
stumped on the word. He finally says it the copora cavanosa,
the spongey tissue on the other side of the penis.
He goes off in this vein. You can see him
waving the cameraman off when he loses a thought. The
tape was so crude you could hear dogs barking during
the surgery and music playing. The scrotal skin was lying
on a board. It had pushpins in it. It was
so dirty and dried out it looked like it had
been run over by a tire. Yeah. The prosecution's chief

(36:13):
witness was a young trans woman named Camille. She was
one of the only victims of Dr Brown who was
willing to testify in court. Prior to her surgery, Camille
had been an insurance underwriter. She claims Dr Brown botched
her surgery so badly that she was basically unemployable now
her surgery went down in November n Quote, he gave
me an epidural. I woke up ten minutes prior to

(36:33):
the end of the operation. We started talking. Brown said,
we're almost done. I wasn't scared. I was happy as hell.
I was finally getting what I wanted. When you are
climbing Mount Everest, you don't worry about a little frostbite
on the top. But after the surgery was complete, Camille
started having difficulty with her recovery. She developed a recto
of vaginal fistula, which caused her feces to flow into
her new vagina. This was the result of Dr Brown

(36:54):
experimenting with his technique of using bowel tissue to create
vaginal walls. She said, quote, my bladder was block, my
limph glands swelled up, and my skin turned yellow. Black
stuff was pouring out of my lungs. All my systems
were shutting down. All he would have to do is
take one breath and let go. The fact that Camille
survived is almost miraculous, and her testimony helped to finally
put but Your Brown away for good. He was convicted

(37:15):
by unanimous decision and sentenced to fifteen years in prison.
He expressed no remorse or even real understanding that he
had committed horrific acts that had permanently disfigured and in
many cases, ruined, the lives of human beings. Pal Ciolo
talked to Brown several times in prison via collect call.
In their last conversations, Brown expressed that his entire career
was part of God's plan. He had called upon John

(37:36):
Ronald Brown to help the transgender community, and next, Brown
believed God had called upon him to invent a hyper
thermia chamber that would cure cancer, AIDS and genital herpes.
Brown described this as I'm sorry, like the other h
that seems telling, that seems like he had herpies. He's like,

(38:00):
the other two are for humanity, last ones for Papa.
This one's for Dr Brown. That's what it sounds like,
is you don't go cancer AIDS, harpies in the same
three equally serious. Seriously, that's amazing. Yeah. Now. Brown described
this as using a chamber with an ivy drip that

(38:21):
would spray a patient with hot water to cause a
healing fever. Uh. And in addition to this, Dr Brown
claimed to have developed a prototype asphalt removal machine, an
attachment for trailers that would make them more aerodynamic, in
a book that would provide a full explanation for the
movement of tectonic plates. He had a lot of book ideas,
including an autobiography about his medical career and a book
that would prove the existence of God. Tragically, John Ronald Brown, Yeah,

(38:46):
was taken away from us too soon to finish any
of these projects. In two thousand ten, just shot It
was eighty eight birthday. He died painfully of pneumonia in prison.
Oh well that's a silver lining painfully. Yeah, it's a story. Yeah, painfully.
It was a horrible death. Uh, he did not get
what he deserved. No, he absolutely did not. And on

(39:11):
that note, yeah, well, Sophia, what would you do if
you had a leg that you hated and desperately wanted
removed because you felt like it was an alien limb? Like,
what do you do? I think you go to therapy
and I don't know, try to work on it. I
don't really know. See, I was going to go with shotgun,

(39:34):
but yeah, therapy is probably better. I mean, I guess
I feel like depression in no way is the same
as this, but it's like depression makes sense. You know,
makes you want to kill yourself. And if someone was
just like, okay, here's a gun, I'd be like, oh,
that's not helping me. You know, probably just talked me

(39:57):
out of wanting to die. Yeah, that's yeah. I don't
know much about APATM nephelia, but it does sound like
a thing. I don't know, Like if that one guy changed,
then it's possible, right it is, but maybe he wasn't
as serious about it. I don't know, Like the doctor,
it's all the spectrum, right, you can probably be really

(40:18):
wanting your leg off and just a little bit wanting
it off. I don't know the doctor who, like the
legit doctor who had performed some of those surgeries and
then lost his operating privileges, Like there's a like he
he didn't make a bad point where he was like, look,
some people are going to do this, and as long
as you make sure you're only performing surgery on the

(40:39):
ones who are like otherwise going to go blow their
own legs off or lay down on a train track, like,
you're reducing harm. And I that's that There is an
argument to make, not that it's a bad argument, it's
just that, uh, you can try to guess who the
people are that are going to try it anyways, and
you can be wrong, and you know, there's really no

(41:01):
good answer. If you were wrong one way, people are
going to kill themselves or maim themselves on their own.
But if they come to you and you do it
every time, then there's no chance of them ever psychologically recovering.
So I don't know what the answer is there. Yeah,
I don't either, because it's one of those things where
clearly I think if Firth had been allowed to perform

(41:25):
or to to undergo the surgery, he clearly didn't really
want to lose his leg, and he probably would have
wound up regretting it. Um. I think. But the other guy,
the guy who died, Um, if he'd been able to
go to a real doctor in a safe o R
with a proper yeah, he'd still there's a good chance
he would have lived. Um. So it is it is.

(41:47):
There's not like an easy answer to this. I also
don't know anything about the disease, like does it spread,
Like after you get your one leg taken care of,
is it possible that you'll be like, oh, well, now
this leg is the alien and I need to get
this off and then you just keep going, how does
it work? Because you can get addicted to plastic surgery,
you can probably get addicted to this too, can't you?
Who know? You know, I assume, I assume you can.

(42:08):
I do think it's a bit different than that, just because,
like I think it's very focused. It tends to be
with these people like they're they're obsessed with this one
limb um. But you know, I'm not. Uh, I'm not
an expert on it. Um. It's certainly a pain a
complicated tail. Yes, as is the tale of John Brown.

(42:34):
What are you distracted by? What are you doing? The
bad John Brown? I'm trying to like, there's this screeching
noise coming over repeatedly the line, and I'm trying not
to be taken aback by it because it's horrible. Oh
that's my parent. I'm so sorry. I don't think so.
It sounds like somebody is like fucking an old television. Um. Yeah, okay, okay, um,

(42:59):
which are yeah? So it just sounds like you're there
is doctor John Ronald Brown. Um. It was a fun.
One of the interesting things about researching this was just
because I read. I had to read a lot of
old articles and documents dealing with the trans community is
like kind of experiencing the use of terminology and what's

(43:21):
okay evolve over the course of a couple of decades.
That was really interesting. UM, and I do recommend the
Digital Transgender Archive UM, which is like a really precious
source of You could kind of see it as an
attempt to make sure that like, no matter what happens,
what happens with the Magnus Hirschfeld's library doesn't happen again,
that these um, these historical documents of this community taking

(43:44):
care of itself and defending itself through the decades when
no one else gave a shit about them. UM, that
that doesn't get lost. It's a really um precious source
and uh, I found it fascinating, So I recommend given
that a ready read cool. Great yep, Well, Sophia, you

(44:04):
got any plug bubles you wanna you wanna drop down
in the old P zone? What's the P zone? That's
the plug zone, that's what it sounds like. All right,
my club, my plug holes are. You can find me
at this ifia on Twitter and Instagram. That's th h

(44:26):
E s O f I y A and you can
catch me with miles Gray on our podcast for twenty
Day Fiance Weekly. It's super fun. It's a game show
recap show of ninety d fiance and it's ridiculous and
we have sound effects. And you can catch me on
my other podcast Private Parts and known about love and
sex around the world. Well you can, you can. You

(44:49):
can do that. You can catch me on my other
podcast Worst Year Ever. You can catch me on this
podcast every Tuesday and Thursday, except for the Tuesdays and
Thursdays that I don't do this podcast. Um, and you
can find love in your heart, I hope. If not, sorry,

(45:09):
that's rough. That's the episode. M h m hm

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