July 14, 2025 • 46 mins
The Lincoln Project's Rick Wilson joins us to discuss how Trump is facing backlash from his base over the Epstein client list cover-up. Then we'll talk to director Eva Orner about her new film Surviving Ohio State, which explores the horrors Jim Jordan oversaw during his time at the university.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Hi, I'm Molly John Fast and this is Fast Politics,
where we discussed the top political headlines with some of
today's best minds. And according to an economist Yugov poll,
six and ten americans support Medicare for all. We have
such a great show for you today. The Lincoln Projects
own Rick Wilson joins us to talk about how Trump
(00:22):
is facing lots of pushback from the base over the
Epstein client list cover up. Then we'll talk to director
Eva Orner about her new movie Surviving Ohio State on
the Horrors. Jim Jordan oversaw well at the University of Ohio.
Speaker 2 (00:40):
But first the news, BALI, welcome back from vacation. Everything
is fixed. We went away. America is great again. I
particularly was reminded how great America was while I saw
a country that actually has infrastructure investments and how nice
life can be with it.
Speaker 3 (00:55):
How are you feeling.
Speaker 1 (00:56):
I love that you're bragging about your Yes, Jesse went
to Japan Where Molly went newwhere she went nowhere? Jesse,
did you have fun in Japan?
Speaker 3 (01:06):
I had a lot of fun.
Speaker 2 (01:08):
I ate well, but mostly I saw that it really
would be nice if we made nicer bridges and two
hundred mile an hour trains and stuff. It actually invested
in these things instead of giving billionaires tax cuts. It
would be nice if people had nice things.
Speaker 1 (01:22):
So my friend Jesse Cannon, yes, is a communist. Okay,
so let's see yes, Okay, so let's talk about what
we're talking about. Massive flooding in Texas. We now see
reporting a couple of days later that while these catastrophic
floods were roaring through central Texas, the Federal Emergency Management
Agency FEMA did not answer nearly two thirds of calls
(01:46):
to the disaster assistance line, according to documents reviewed from
New York Times. Okay, so that's two thirds of all calls.
It's two days later. Christy Nome was on Meet the
Press with Kristin Welker, and let's stay listen.
Speaker 4 (02:00):
Do you want to talk big picture in just a moment.
But the New York Times is reporting that thousands of
calls from flood victims to FEMA call centers went unanswered
in the middle of this ongoing disaster because you didn't
renew contracts to keep call center staff in place until
nearly one week after the floods. Why did it take
so long to extend those questions.
Speaker 5 (02:20):
Those contracts were in place, nobody, no employees were off
of work. Every one of them was answering calls. So
false reporting, fake news, and it's discouraging. It's discouraging that
during this time, when we have such a loss of
life and so many people's lives have turned upside down,
that people are playing politics with this. Because the response
(02:42):
time was immediate, and if you talk to anyone in
Texas that was there that was a part of this operation,
they would say the federal government and President Trump immediately responded.
Speaker 4 (02:51):
Just to be very clear, on July seventh, fifteen point
nine percent of calls were answered. I mean, does that
concern you that only fifteen percent of calls were answered?
These for people in a desperate state. FEMA often the
first call that they make. Only fifteen percent rested on
July seventh, several days after the floods.
Speaker 5 (03:07):
These contracts were in place, and those people were in
those call centers and they were picking up the phone
and answering these calls from these individuals. So that report
needs to be validified. I'm not certain it's accurate and
I'm not sure where it came from. And the individuals
who are giving you information out of FEMA.
Speaker 6 (03:24):
I'd love to have them put.
Speaker 5 (03:25):
Their names behind it because the anonymous attacks to political
size the situation is completely wrong. I care these emergencies.
Speaker 1 (03:33):
So what's fascinating about this is this is reporting from
the New York Times, right, it's reporting, it's obviously sourced
up to the held, and Christy Nome is just like,
it's not true. She's not even while maybe there was
some just lies. And again this is what Trump Trump
(03:54):
World does falls reporting fake news.
Speaker 2 (03:57):
Yeah, you know what, they always really exude what they
do the appearances, whether it's Herb Bessen, Lutnik or whoever prepared,
and by that I'm being totally absolutely sarcastic.
Speaker 1 (04:08):
Yeah, but it's also just like, I mean, look, this
is an administration that wants to end FEMA. They don't
want FEMA at all. So the fact that they are
ending call centers, we know this to be true, right,
I Mean, in the fifth season of this administration, we
saw Elon Musk up there with a chainsaw saying that
he was going to end basically the government because of
(04:31):
voice fraud and abuse, which is shorthand for things he
doesn't like.
Speaker 2 (04:35):
Yeah, well, in other news, what are the funny things
this administration claims it's doing is it's cutting all these costs,
it's doing all this great stuff. But really what they're
doing that it's also adding on costs because prisoners are
very expensive. Is there's hundreds at Alligator Alglatras that have
no criminal charges and they're imprisoning all these people that
did not seem to be in the plan that they
(04:56):
claimed they were having for who they were going to
put in prison in thisdministration into port.
Speaker 1 (05:01):
This was actually a huge scoop from Miami Harald, and
they published this. They had the list of people because
a lot of these people don't know. So this is
the data as a list of more than seven hundred
people or either being held under tents in Florida during
the summer or in chainlinks cells in Florida's pop up
jail called Alligator Alcatraz. There are a lot of things
(05:24):
to be horrified by in this story, but the thing
that I am the most struck by was that You'll remember,
Tripworld promised that they would not do this to people
who were not criminals.
Speaker 6 (05:37):
Right.
Speaker 1 (05:38):
The whole thing was they were only going to do
this to criminals. But in fact, you will be shocked
to hear that hundreds of immigrants with no criminal charges
in the United States are being held at Alligator Alcatraz.
And this is from the Miami Herald. It's actually joint
Miami Herald Tampa Bay Times Mixed. Among the detainees arrested
(05:59):
and convicted of crimes are more than two hundred and
fifty people. That's a lot of people who are listed
as only having immigration violations but no criminal convictions. You'll
remember Trump made a big deal about how he was
only going to deport in this way people who had
criminal charges. So these are two hundred and fifty people
who are just in this country illegally, which in a
(06:23):
previous administration would be a civil charge, but now that
Trump is in charge, it is a criminal charge. The
data is based on a list of more than seven
hundred people who were either being held under tents. Okay,
and then I think the most horrifying part of the
story comes from friend of the pod Maxwell Fronst, who
said that the drinking water comes from the toilet. The
(06:46):
Democratic congressman revealed the horrific conditions when he visited the
newly opened Alligator Alcatraz. Migrant Detention Center, which is in
the Florida Emigrads. You will remember Republicans have been very
excited about this because and Trump and Governor Desant has
toward it. They thought it was hilarious that the alligators
(07:07):
could eat people if they escaped. But Frost, who is
actually a person, said that he was pretty horrified. He said,
quote they opened the door, there were about six security
guards standing there pushing us back, but we could see
in and we could hear everybody. And when those doors open,
where I saw me and my heart sink. I saw
(07:28):
thirty two people per cage, about six cages in one tent.
I saw a lot of young men who looked like me.
People were my age, Frost began. Frost is very young.
I think he's the youngest member of Congress right now.
Speaker 2 (07:41):
Yeah, and there was other congress people who toward this,
who saw other horrible things, and it really sounds monstrous
and horrible, but this is what we were kind of
expecting to happen even before this administration took place. Speaking
of other things that we kind of saw coming, which
is that Trump is going to start playing with both
birthright citizenship and well beyond that of just natural Board
(08:03):
citizens that he doesn't like, which is why he's doing
dumb things like threatening Rosie o'donald Jesus Christ.
Speaker 1 (08:11):
So Trump is trying to distract from look he's got.
The base is mad about the Epstein stuff, the trade talks.
There are no ninety deals in ninety days. We're almost
at ninety days and we still have no deal, or
we have one deal or half a deal. But Trump
is trying to do something which he did in his
(08:31):
first administration. It worked for him, and he's like, look
over there. So now he's decided. And remember he does
love being mean to Rosie o'donnald. So he says he's
going to take away her birthright citizenship. She technically, I
think is living in Ireland, so I'm not sure why
she even cares. But he did say that she's not
(08:56):
in the best interests of our great country. I don't
know what that means. In the best interest. I'm giving
serious consideration to taking away her citizenship. She is a
threat to humanity, that's right, and should remain in the
wonderful country of Ireland if they want her. God bless America.
There is so much stupid here. It's hard to pars.
Speaker 2 (09:15):
I mean, I think it all translates to something. Please
stop talking about the guy who called me his best
friend wants Jeffrey Epstein exactly.
Speaker 1 (09:24):
Rick Wilson is the founder of the Lincoln Project and
the host of the Enemy's List. We are back from vacation.
Oh yeah, and since we're back, I had to get
Rick Wilson here because that was the I asked people
what they want and they were like Rick Wilson. I
was like, Okay, who am I to argue with that?
(09:45):
Cheers Rick Wilson, who got me drinking die coke again
after a decade not.
Speaker 3 (09:51):
Drinking down to two a day maybe three a day time.
Speaker 1 (09:54):
No, you always say that, and it's very annoying.
Speaker 3 (09:57):
It's true, though, I've managed when you.
Speaker 1 (09:59):
Hook someone up else on heroin and then you're like,
I am off the smack. But I'm glad that you.
Speaker 3 (10:08):
I'm glad you can control your daily uptake of crack cocaine.
Speaker 1 (10:11):
Yeah, thank you. I really want to hear about how
you're doing better, because that makes me really happy. Speaking
of schadenfreude, I was like, paying attention, but not so
closely because we've been covering this for a because covering
because we've been living this for a decade, so I
wasn't paying attention as carefully as I probably should have been.
(10:33):
But you know, you and I have this group chat.
Speaker 3 (10:35):
Yes, people who we.
Speaker 1 (10:37):
Shouldn't were not. I mean, I feel like you're not
allowed to say I'm not going.
Speaker 3 (10:41):
On this group chat. But if you aren't on it,
you're just not one of the cool kids.
Speaker 1 (10:45):
Well, I'm going to go a bit further and say that, yes,
own you know this is a group chat that has
the uh has pete hegseeth accidentally added himself to continue
on the Pete hag Seth grief chat. Yeah, somebody put
(11:08):
out a put a message that was like god, he
sounds like he's panicking, and I was like, oh wow,
I must have missed it a lot. So what happened
this Weekendreck Wilson.
Speaker 3 (11:17):
Well for the first time in a decade, For the
very first time since the beginning of Trump's ascendance in
twenty fifteen, he has completely lost control of his ability
to control MAGA and their narrative, the Epstein cover up
that he has ordered Pam Bondy to engage in, and
(11:38):
I am hearing increasing drum beats now that it was
Susie Wiles who went to Pambondy and ordered this to happen.
Speaker 1 (11:46):
I just want to say, like what Trump World said,
they could have been like a little more careful with it.
Instead they were basically like, there's no list, there's no anything.
You know. The guy was a was you know, a
peanut farmer.
Speaker 3 (12:03):
They yes, And they could have let the air out
of the system, the pressure. They could have popped a
pressure valve, right and say while Jeffrey Epstein was a
horrible monster.
Speaker 1 (12:12):
Right, and it was blackmail, as they said. Their announcement
was like there was no black mail. Obviously there was blackmail.
Speaker 3 (12:18):
I mean. And when she says I don't have a
client list per se, No, no, you said the words
client list. You said client list on your desk and
all that.
Speaker 1 (12:32):
Right, right, that's right. She did say I can list
on my desk and I planned to release it and
then she had MAGA influencers take these big folders and
then they posed for pictures in front of the White
House with these big folders like.
Speaker 3 (12:47):
Yeah, and it was and it was the irony of
it was you had guys there like Jack Sobiac and
DC dipshit or whatever his name is, Dreno and Libs
of TikTok, Libs of TikTok, all these people they had
the big folder like the Epstein files fees one, right,
And it turns out they got print outs from Google
(13:08):
searches and court documents that were all publicly available. None
of it mattered, and at the time they all swallowed
their their unhappiness about it. At the time, they all
were like, well, okay, coming. And so when Bondi did this,
and again I'm hearing it was ordered by by Wiles,
(13:29):
which means it came from Trump, right, wow does it?
Oh no, oh no, no, no, no, no, she's not She's
not going to hang out on something like this one.
She's smart enough to know what a cover up looks
like when it starts. And so Bondi directed Patel and
and Bongino in this operation. They clearly had some unhappiness
(13:50):
about it. They clearly and I think they should maga
better than she did.
Speaker 1 (13:55):
Let's have a second of Bongino pa tell miss because
it's super interesting. So yeah, so Bongino and Patel. Bongino
becomes number two at the FBI, Patel becomes number one.
They are the bosses. Right, there's no one above them.
Speaker 3 (14:12):
They have all the material, they have all the things
the FBI gathered off of.
Speaker 1 (14:16):
It, access to everything, everything, but the buck stops with them,
like mediocre white guy than no one's ever heard of.
On top of them, there is no James call me.
There is no adult in the room. It is just
those two, correct.
Speaker 3 (14:32):
And some people below them who are even less savory. Right.
And remember, we have much prior reporting, not just from
the news media, but from the FBI itself saying how
much stuff they seized from Epstine's properties in New Mexico
and on the island and everywhere.
Speaker 1 (14:50):
Right, And there's flight logs. I mean, we've all seen
the flight logs.
Speaker 3 (14:53):
I mean that's not when they raided. When they raided
his island, they took thousands of hours of videotapes and
thousands of photographs and thousands of documents, documents and so
so Bongina and Patel have had access to this material.
They know what it is. It's been sitting there festering.
(15:17):
And BONDI also knew because someone inside of the New
York Field Office told her, oh, we have all this
other material, and she directed Patel to direct the FBI
Field Office to deliver that to the DOJ, which they did.
So these guys all have had visibility who the fuck knows,
(15:38):
but they are reported. Remember now, the other thing that
Bongino said in an interview about three months ago was, oh, well,
we have to redact all this material. There's a lot
of se sam material, child sexual abuse material in it.
She have to hide. Listen, yeah, and believe me, I
don't want that released either, right, but there is a
system by which you can redact things or government files
(16:00):
like that. They know how to do this, They've done
it a million times. But this announcement being so sweeping
and so categorical, nothing to see here, Move along. It
flies in the face of the myth that MAGA told
itself for a decade. Molly, they told us for a
decade that the Epstein files of the Rosetta Stone, it's
got Bill Clinton and Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama and
(16:21):
Nancy Pelosi and George Soros and everybody else. The whole
lie of Pisagate, which Jack Pisobiec invented and promoted, the
whole lie of QAnon's center, the center of all the
QAnon garbage is this theory that inside of the Epstein
files is the key to proving there's a global Democratic
Party pedop file, cannibal witchcrafts conspiracy. Now that they've been
(16:47):
told no, their reaction has been very poor. They are
not happy. They are really really angry. They feel like
either that they're being lied to now because the dup
state got to go Butteau and pamelacking, or the more
uncomfortable truth for them that they know that they that
(17:08):
they as much as they want to say fake news,
deep state. There is no one pictured more with Jeffrey
Epstein than Donald Trump.
Speaker 1 (17:15):
Well, we don't know, but there's certainly a couple pictures.
Speaker 3 (17:18):
We've seen hundreds, Molly, there are hundreds, and their relationship contemporaneously,
by Trump's own words and by and by Epstein's interviews
with Michael Wolf and other people, and by and by
the sort of Palm Beach social society what they call
the shiny sheet down there. It used to be full
(17:39):
of Trump and his pal Jeffrey Epstein at Jeffrey Epstein
and Donald Trump spot at the Cosmos, all these things right,
there was a relationship between those two men that was
not just financial or.
Speaker 1 (17:51):
Aren't hundreds of pictures. I've only seen a couple pictures.
Speaker 3 (17:55):
We I had our goons get pull like one hundred
pictures for an ad we did the other day. Really,
oh yeah, it's ironic that there are so many pictures
of Trump and Diddy, which both with Epstein and Trump,
and Epstein and Diddy are Trump and Diddy. So many
pictures of the two of the of those two guys,
and yet and yet the magas it took until this
(18:17):
week for them to start going, oh fuck, maybe it's
our guy in this final.
Speaker 1 (18:21):
So let's so let's talk about So we don't know
what was in all the stuff it went, the the
stuff that the they sent to that Bondi sent the FBI.
We do know that MAGA world is furious there and
freaking out. And if you defend so who is the
(18:42):
scapegoat here? Like it seems like so far.
Speaker 3 (18:46):
Bondi is the one in the crosshairs from the MAGA
influencer class. They're blaming her, and and again I think
I don't think she spoke Maga as fluently as Bongino
and Patel did. Right, they were the on line trolls,
they were the podcast trolls.
Speaker 1 (19:03):
But but he's getting blamed for this, right, like they're there.
Speaker 3 (19:06):
A Trump especially, I mean, you go on truth Social
last night, Trump posts that very very very very very
very long truth basically saying stop talking about Epstein.
Speaker 1 (19:18):
Yeah.
Speaker 3 (19:19):
On his own site, girls, my guys and gals, Yes,
boys and gals, whatever it was, Yeah, on his own site,
he got ratioed so badly. It got ratioed, like of
the comments I look through, God save me, I look
through several hundred of the comments to that on true Social.
Speaker 1 (19:42):
Better are you than me? Baby?
Speaker 3 (19:44):
My friend? Those people are angry with him. They're like, sir,
I love you, I voted for you, I supported you,
but now you've broken my You've given up, right right,
My trust is shattered, damn right right, and now I'm
gonna have to eat cat food out of a ca
to survive. But I love you. But they're angry. The
Magga folks are furious.
Speaker 1 (20:06):
So here's a question for you. They're furious. And then
Bongino said this thing about how he needs he might need.
He took a day off because he was so upset.
Speaker 3 (20:16):
He took he took a personal day on Friday because
he was so upset. Here's what Bongino's doing under the surface, right.
First off, he knows this thing stinks on ice. Even
he is not a bright guy. Okay, he's not a
smart guy, but even yeah, he's he's a tiny little dwarf. No,
I don't know about that.
Speaker 1 (20:36):
I mean, I don't think he's cute, but he's like little.
Speaker 3 (20:38):
He's like a wee little leprechawn of hate madly is
but I like it too. Anyway, He's he's this tiny,
little little little intellect in a but he's a job.
But even he can see that he's going to get
this stink all over him, right, even he's going to
realize that, and he has such a good reputation and
(21:00):
to you know, yeah, look, the FBI had hundreds and
hundreds and hundreds of agents involved in these cases against.
Speaker 1 (21:06):
Them, so they must know.
Speaker 3 (21:08):
There will be people who know. There will be people
who still have material, there will be people who leak.
And because the rank and file FBI guys hate both
Patel and Bongino, it's gonna leak. So Bongino knows, right,
So what he's doing. I think my theory of the
case is that he's trying to puff up right, now,
go I'm gonna quit because you're hiding the Epstein files
(21:29):
so we can go back to his very successful podcast,
right in, a very successful podcast.
Speaker 1 (21:34):
And also he doesn't need this because it's not helping
his brand, not at all, not at all. And so
you think he quits the FBI, I.
Speaker 3 (21:42):
Think he quits. I think I think he's got probably hours,
not days at this point because because BONDI, look, BONDI
has a power that they don't.
Speaker 1 (21:54):
Have rights like the robot right she.
Speaker 3 (21:57):
Well, no, here, here's the thing. Bondy is bound to
Trump because of some relationships in the lobbying world that
could brought Trump a lot of money. Yeah, he used
to work for em Yeah, Brian Ballard and she had
and so he he has a lot of pressures coming
on him right now to save Bondy from money people,
people who are in deals with his family and deals
(22:20):
with the crypto bros and all this other crowd guitars
and the guitaris. Yes, because she was their lobbyist for
a buck fifty a month. And folks, I do not
mean one hundred and fifty dollars. I mean more zeros
than that.
Speaker 1 (22:33):
So it feels to me like this is similar to
the stories with Hegsath coming out of the DOJ. You know,
like every time Hegsath slips up, we see one hundred
stories about, right, why is the wife in the meeting?
Why is he still using signal? Why did he you know,
(22:55):
like when they wouldn't release the weapons to Ukraine, and
like that story came out real time, which means that
is people leaking on hegsas.
Speaker 3 (23:06):
Look, good administration's leak on purpose. Bad administrations just leak.
And the leaks are coming fast and furious. Now out
of the White House, out of the DJ, out of
the FBI, and this, Mike Molly, this has broken that
bond with Trump and his base. That is his superpower,
(23:27):
and frankly it extends. You can see how these ripples
could go further out and cause him even more trouble.
What is the number one thing Trump has over every
member of Congress and the Republican Party fear of the base,
that he could turn the base against them, that they
could shatter their primary election if if he gets a
candidate in there, because the base will always obey him,
(23:51):
what if a big chunk of the base goes I'm
done watching Trump protect you know, himself to it by
hiding the Epstein materials.
Speaker 1 (24:00):
I don't think there's an easy answer for that question.
And it's funny because it's like, when I'm talking about
the leaki, I'm thinking about like Trump one point out,
which was, oh god, constant leaking.
Speaker 6 (24:08):
Right.
Speaker 1 (24:08):
It was like there was just the first couple of
months of people being horrified and then it was just
a stream of endless leaks. And that's what this is, right,
this is just now.
Speaker 3 (24:17):
We're back to a leak level like Trump. The only
thing that would make the leaks more frequent right now
in Trump world is if Kelly and Conway came back
into the mix, because she was the she was the
all time reigning leak champion for what a reporter told
me a couple.
Speaker 1 (24:33):
Of years ago, but wasn't but a lot of this stuff,
like one of the biggest leakers, right, all of the
I mean right, that's what it's Trump, guys.
Speaker 3 (24:43):
Ninety five percent of the stories you see that have
a senior White House source, it's Donald Trump picking up
the phone and calling a reporter.
Speaker 6 (24:49):
I mean, I don't know if it's ninety five.
Speaker 3 (24:51):
Well maybe not nice, you're right, let's call it sixty five.
Speaker 1 (24:56):
My man likes to talk on the phone.
Speaker 3 (24:58):
He do like to talk on the phone.
Speaker 1 (24:59):
Yeah, yeah, So let's just get for a let's talk
for another second about kind of where we are in
this moment. Last week, Trump or two weeks ago, Trump
passed this big, beautiful bill that is going to just
wreak havoc, though some of the cuts are backdated to
the midterms, in the hopes that Democrats will get blamed
(25:21):
for them, and said Republicans, which I feel like is
just the epitome of maga. They're selling it as no
tax on tips and no text on overtime. That's not
how any work, right, and is going to work. But
I want you to it was like still a win
for Trump, right, he could transmit it as a win, right,
(25:43):
he got passed.
Speaker 3 (25:44):
It was I mean, he passed an extremely unpopular piece
of legislation that will not it will not grow more
popular with time.
Speaker 1 (25:52):
Correct, But he did get He wanted to appeal to
repeal Obamacare, and he was able to get a sort
of skinny dedicaid expansion repeal snuck in there.
Speaker 3 (26:04):
Yeah, and and look the damage this is going to
do to Trump's own base. They've timed it to delay
it till after the next election. But the people that
supported Donald Trump most fervently, and Steve Bannon is right
about this. A lot of the people on medicare, Medicaid, Snap,
Social Security as tan of all those things. A lot
of those people are maga voters.
Speaker 1 (26:25):
Well, because they felt that all their people were getting
their stuff and that there were these mysical getting their stuff.
And you know, and some of this can be blamed
squarely on the shoulders of New York City's mayor, who
put a bunch of people in a hotel right next
to the the the station, the train station, and gave
(26:50):
them phone cards. And then The New York Post covered
it with zeal if you give if.
Speaker 3 (26:56):
You give Trump and Murdoch a sword to cut your
head off, they will cut your head off. Yeah right,
I mean.
Speaker 1 (27:05):
But also, can I just say, having the one newspaper
in the one local newspaper in New York City, which
is arguably the biggest city in America, be controlled by
Rupert Murdoch means that everything that happens here has a
kind of troll is used for a kind of trollers.
Speaker 3 (27:26):
Of course, the Post, the Post exists as part of
the feeder mechanism for the National Republican or MAGA media complex,
because they're the ones who are always finding the story
of a Muslim man took his pants off in the
subway today, and then then every MAGA on their Facebook
believes that every Muslim guy in New York is walking
(27:48):
around with their deck hanging out. I mean it exaggerates, exacerbates, amplifies,
and like I said, it's a feed It's a feed
line for for Fox itself and for the other MAGA outlets.
It's why that's why they're covering them, Dami the way
they are with this unbelievable hyper vigilance at the post.
(28:10):
You know, everything is the antisomitic?
Speaker 6 (28:12):
Is he?
Speaker 3 (28:12):
This is he?
Speaker 6 (28:13):
That?
Speaker 3 (28:13):
Is he a communist? Well, he sees the means of production,
and they're looking at everybody who supports him. Now, oh,
he's supported by the bushwick Wickan coalition or whatever, so
that they can turn it into a bigger, stupid or
more more lurid idea of what New York really is.
Speaker 1 (28:30):
Lurid New York. Rick Wilson Goodbye Eva Orner. He is
a celebrated director of documentaries like Brande Helvel and the
Cult of Fast Fashion. And the new HBO Max documentary
Surviving Ohio State. AVA talk to me about how you
(28:53):
decided to make this movie Surviving Ohio State. So it
actually came to.
Speaker 6 (28:58):
Me through the producers, through agent, and my initial response
was that I didn't want to do it because for
a whole bunch of reasons. It's kind of crazy. You know.
I always go with my dart and my guy is this.
This is not for me because I'm Australian. I've lived
in America for twenty one years, but I did not
go to college. I know absolutely nothing about college sports.
(29:19):
I don't even didn't go to college either.
Speaker 1 (29:21):
Go on, yeah, yeah, I wait to college.
Speaker 6 (29:24):
But in Australia. But I don't even think I knew
what OSU or the Black Eyes was three years ago,
Like I was that out of the loop. And I
also thought it's a true die story. And I'd just
done pretty recently another abuse film for Netflix about Bikram
chadrib yoga guru. So I just everything it was saying
do I do this? And I spoke with John Werthheim,
(29:45):
who wrote the article that it's based on, and he said,
I think you're wrong. I think you should do this.
Talk to some of the guys. I think I called
three of the survivors and by the end of the
third conversation that all said, Wow, I told you things
I've never told anyone before, and I was so moved
and I thought their story was so important that I
for the first time, probably in a long time, I
went against my guard and I said, you know what,
(30:06):
I'm going to do it. And I really don't regret
it because getting to know the survivors and telling their
story has been a real honor.
Speaker 1 (30:12):
It's such a sort of weirdly tragic moment for me too.
But also I feel like this has been a very
tough road for survivors. Obviously, these survivors are not women,
but survivors are survivors, so talk to us about that.
Speaker 6 (30:28):
I think that's really tough. And this is not always
the case. But in other college sex abuse scandals that
you know that were really high profile, like Penn State
and Michigan State, the survivors were treated with respect and
they are believed, and especially the Larry Nasa survivors, when
they came out go young women, they were applauded, they
(30:49):
were considered heroes. They got their day and caught with
Larry Nasa, who was a monster and went to jail
for a long time. We all watched them, and they
also got big settlements. You know, the settlements in in
Michigan State were between one and one and a half
million dollars. And I think what's really tragic about this
story and difficult is that it's been seven years since
they first came out with the story. Always to you
(31:11):
has been saying, we're doing everything we can to settle this,
We're doing all the right things. But they're not because
behind the scenes they're fighting them in court and they say,
we've offered them settlements. But the settlements that are offering
a poultry in comparison. And this is something that a
lot of people don't know. The settlements that to you offered,
they're in the settlements. There are a few admit liability
(31:32):
and the survivors would have to sign them, and some
of us settlements demanding the survivors could never criticize OSU publicly,
and that's why a lot of them didn't sign. And
plus the average the average amount was two hundred and
fifty thousand dollars. So these guys have been through you know,
what is it now? Thirty forty years of hiding what
happened to them. Then they come out. Then they're ridiculed
(31:53):
because a lot of people were saying, real big tough guys,
I don't believe for a second you couldn't have clubbed
with this little doctor. And then on top of that,
you know OSU has been kind of farding them to
as as the lawyer in the film alone, Moselfa is
fi tooth and nail behind the scenes. So it's been
a really difficult experience for the survivors. On top of
everything they went.
Speaker 1 (32:13):
Through this doctor, doctor Richard Strauss. We have seen other
sports doctors, right, Larry Nasser is a really good example
of that. But do you think this story was made
more complicated because one of the coaches, right, or one
of the sort of assistant coaches, was Jim Jordan, Yeah,
Republican member of Congress. So did that complicate or add
(32:36):
a political dimension to this story.
Speaker 6 (32:39):
It's very tricky because the first people to come out
of this story were the wrestlers. They're featured predominantly in
the film, and Jim Jordan was a wrestler, an assistant
wrestling coach to OSC for ten years, and he was
really close to a lot of these guys they considered
considered him like a brother, and many many of them,
including a referee who was forty years old when he
(32:59):
was assault, should buy Doctor Strauss. Many of them say
that Jim Jordan knew. That they told Jim Jordan, and
they also thought that they would be able to count
on him when they came out with the story in
twenty eighteen, and also their coach, Rush Hallickman, and the
opposite happened. Russ went silent, and Jim Jordan actually, you
know you see in the film. He's come out repeatedly
on Fox News and other broadcasts saying it never happened.
(33:23):
I never saw it, And there are many many survivors
that they he knew. And what also came out in
the investigation that the independent investigation that OSU did after
this all happened was that a lot of coaches knew,
and Jim Jordan says in a click we use I
think from Fox he says, no coaches didn't know. That's
(33:44):
been proven to be incorrect. So Jim Jordan's very very
important in this story and very problematic, and he's really
let down a lot of guys who had a very
very close relationship with me and who looked up to
him and admired him enormously.
Speaker 1 (33:57):
Do you think that there was sort of less attention
paid to this because of the partisan aspects, Right, you
have Jim Jordan, who is this wildly powerful member of Congress,
super famous, and then you have Ohio, which is a
red state with a lot of restrictions, where the idea
that there's abuse and that it's then gay abuse. I mean,
(34:20):
I feel like it has to be that these two
things are quite a one two punch towards the kind
of red state mentality.
Speaker 6 (34:30):
Yeah, I feel like there was a lot going against
the guys, and they didn't. When I say the guys,
I mean the survivors. I think they didn't expect it.
They expected to be met seriously and taken seriously and
to be traded as abuse survivors should. I mean a
lot of them dropped out of school. Their lives were changed,
you know, they lost their career. Al who's in the
(34:51):
film who was raped, dropped out college. He would have
been a pro hockey player. I mean, Dan in the
film says, you know, his relationship with his father wasn't
able the same because he drops. I mean so many.
I spoke to maybe close to one hundred survivors. Most
of them won't obviously go on the record. It's such
a big thing to do. And I have so much
respect for the guys in the film, but a lot
(35:13):
of them on our John Doe's or their families don't
want them to go public. But the stories are not breaking,
and there's now they say over two thousand that we
know of survivors and two hundred and seventy one rape victims.
I think part of the problem is that they're men,
and a lot of them are athletes, and they're big guys.
(35:34):
And Mark Holmanan was a WWS fider. It's like, how
can these guys be a victim of sexual abuse? And
that's where John Werthheim's article, on which this was sort
of the jumping off point, was so important because it
wasn't really getting a lot of national media. Colleen a
journalist who's in the film, Colleen marsha Or who's a
local journalist who has been covering this story relentlessly, but
(35:55):
it wasn't in traction nationally. And then John wrote this
article and it was brilliantly cold, Why aren't more people
talking about the OSU scandal, and it was in Sports
Illustrated and that's what caught the attention of the producers.
We sort of went from there and it's been really
interesting a reception to the film because it's been surprised.
It's very I think it's quite a tough film to watch, obviously,
(36:16):
and it's had this massive response. I think it's only
been out for just over a week and it was
number one on Max. It's still in the top ten,
so there's a constant stream on social media of people
talking about it, and it's been really interesting. It's really
touched a nerve with people, and I think, you know,
all of the survivors and myself are getting text message
(36:36):
from strangers just saying thank you, I'm a survivor. You know.
They're kind of having this moment now, the guys in
the film where they're being treated like in the way
that they should have been treated seven years ago when
they first stepped out and spoke out. And it's been
really interesting for them because I can see a change
in them and I didn't expect it, and I'm really surprise,
(37:00):
and it's that they needed to be heard and they
needed to be heard on a big level with respect,
and if you look, you know, I look at the
social media all the time just to make sure there's
nothing that's the word not weird.
Speaker 7 (37:11):
They've done slavery happening because I want to be for
everyone safe, and like ninety nine percent of the comments,
if not more part I think I've only seen maybe
one negative comment, and I think for the survivors, it's
been this just incredible kind of week and a half.
Speaker 6 (37:28):
And I was so nervous to see the film. They
trusted me with their lives and I was really nervous
to show them. And they saw it in New York
about two weeks ago at TRADECA Film Festival. I did
a private screening with a to b on them the
day before so they could see it without an audience,
and it was just me and them and their partners
in the audience that I was terrified, and it was
really interesting because afterwards they were just kind of different,
(37:51):
and it really hit me me that they needed to
be seen and heard with respect. And I think that's
the thing that I'm just bled away by and really
proud of. I don't normally say that about my work,
but I feel like It's made a difference, hopefully to
their lives and to their families, and that's the most
important thing to me. I could imagine.
Speaker 1 (38:08):
Yeah, it's such an important thing. The sheer number of victims.
When you told me those numbers, I was kind of
shocked because even Larry Nasser, who was a serial, I mean,
I don't know. Those numbers are horrific and it's shocking
to me. And again, like, it is so important that
(38:30):
we are able to if there ever were a story
that is worthy of telling, it is this. Do you
think that there will be more legal accountability now? And
also does Ohio play a factor in how badly this
has been handled?
Speaker 6 (38:45):
Whio the state or Ohio State University?
Speaker 1 (38:48):
Yeah, Ohio the state, the sort of legislature around it,
the judges. So much has to go wrong for something
like this, for thousands of people, like the sort of
stuff that happened with the Catholic Church, there has to
be a sort of system of fuck ups, you know,
a cascade of fuck ups. So obviously there's the gender
(39:08):
of the victims. But I just wonder, like, is it
just a university or was the state legislators, the judges,
the courts that were they sort of not helpful to them.
I mean, where else did you see the kind of rod.
Speaker 6 (39:22):
It's a really good question and tricky to answer that.
I can give you one example. There's a judge who's
been handling the case. He initially ruled against them, citing
statute of limitations. That was ultimately overturned and it went
all the way to the Supreme Court and they decided
not to hear the case. So it's actually gone back
to trial. But this judge now is the judge in
(39:44):
charge again. It's a college town, it's a sports crazy town.
The judge is affiliated with Ohio State. His wife worked
for them selling paraphernalia. He was thasked to accuse himself.
He did not, So, yes, there are problems there. Also
obviously there's also obviously Jim Jordan involved. I don't know
(40:05):
the details, and there's probably not much more than that
I can say, but I think if he joined the dogs,
I think it's a very good comment and I'm hoping
now that there's going to be a little more mean mentioned.
But one of the things that happened was, I think
the day after the film came out, which was like
a week and a half ago, there was a hearing
(40:25):
in front of the district court judge and he ordered
them intermediation. But Colleen had told me this, Colleen Marshall,
who's the journal I was covering it. A lot of
the survivors were there. She said that, and she's also
an attorney, and she said neither side seemed to expect
resolution anytime soon. And one of the other issues that's
been really heartbreaking for the survivors is this hasn't been
(40:46):
going on since twenty eighteen, so we're on seven years.
And the judge had initially said he wants this to
be resolved quickly, and it is dragging. I mean, they
don't even have a court data. Now it's looking like maybe,
you know, twenty six, maybe twenty twenty seven. So they're
in this for another they don't know how long. And
(41:06):
I don't know if I was Ohio State with all
the press's coming out about this and all the talk
about this. They're a very rich university. It's the one
thing I don't understand. They've got a lot of money.
There can't be more cases. This is all the cases Thereah,
I think there's two hundred and something cases left to
be settled, just offer them big settlements, pay them out,
(41:28):
and this will go away. And if they'd done that,
there wouldn't be the article, there wouldn't be the documentary,
there wouldn't be all this talk about it. I don't
understand why they don't want to compensate them for what
they know how it happened. They've admitted it, they've apologized,
but now they're fighting them. And I don't understand why
a wealthy school just wouldn't do what other wealthy schools do,
(41:50):
and is pay them out so that they feel respected
and resolved in the pay will never go away. These
men were sexually abused or rage, but just pay them
out And don't understand logic behind.
Speaker 1 (42:01):
This, agreed. I just was so happy when you just
said this thing about how they have to do right
by these victims because it's so important. I have one
last question for you, which is like kind of a
stupid question, but I think is actually really important. One
of the producers of this movie is George Clooney. I
know how Hollywood works, and I know how hard it
is to get things made. It strikes me that George
(42:23):
Clooney quietly lends his name and makes things happen that
are for the good. I just was wondering your thoughts
on that.
Speaker 6 (42:32):
Yeah, I look, it's always hard to get films financed.
There's a little second film in for years with HBO,
and they've both gone to number one, which is really
rare for documentaries. So firstly, working with HBO is amazing
because they still make films like this, and I think
that's worth noting. You know, it's just it's incredible. But
I think also documentary is sort of Hollywood life, you know,
(42:53):
Hollywood issue or Hollywood ajacent. It's exactly very Hollywood, but
sometimes it's very Hollywood and in the life is so
many people watch documentaries. I mean the fact that this
was number one ahead of the Hunger Games movies on
HBO mats is extraordinary. I think that when we calling
them celebrities, but you know, he is a celebrity. He's
got a huge name and a lot of clout, and
(43:14):
I think when they put their name on something, it
can really help with funding, it can help with an audience,
and I think that's a great thing. I think that's
a really good thing.
Speaker 1 (43:24):
Yeah, I mean, it just strikes me as he is
a very singular talent and also of singular fame and
the fact that I just see him doing a lot
of good stuff in the world in ways that are
not a straight line necessarily. Thank you, thank you, thank
you for joining us. I hope you will come back.
Speaker 6 (43:41):
Thank you, Samuch driving me. I'm a huge fan.
Speaker 3 (43:45):
No time, Rick Welson, Well we've gone fast.
Speaker 1 (43:51):
It is that time.
Speaker 3 (43:52):
It is that time that America has craved for four
long weeks.
Speaker 1 (43:56):
And hence the time. Have we really been on vacation
for four weeks? No, it's been in like two weeks,
but it felt like five.
Speaker 3 (44:02):
It seems longer.
Speaker 1 (44:03):
It seems like.
Speaker 3 (44:04):
Longer because I missed you.
Speaker 1 (44:05):
Okay, tell me what is it?
Speaker 3 (44:07):
My moment of fuckery is in the Great State of Texas,
there is one person who has been responsible for depriving
more women of their civil rights, of their right to
personal integrity, of their right to autonomy, and of their
right to privacy than Ken Paxton. kN Paxon is a corrupt, vicious,
revolting criminal. He is also Texas's Attorney general right now,
(44:29):
who is trying to primary John Cornyn for US Senate.
This week, it was revealed that his wife of thirty
two years was divorcing him for biblical reasons.
Speaker 2 (44:38):
Eg.
Speaker 3 (44:39):
Ken Paxton would fuck anything that slows down, including lawn furniture.
That guy has the audacity to come out and say
write the classic like pr person tweet about their divorce
where he says, we asked for privacy in this time. Yeah, yeah, no, Ken,
You're not gonna get any privacy, buddy, nobody's giving you
a liqu of privacy.
Speaker 1 (44:57):
Their pal so Angela Paxton actually is a member of
the Texas Senate, Yes, state Senate. So there was a
comms person from the Republican whatever of Texas who is
like who said something to the effect of like, oh,
you know what you did right? I think is a
really good point. Like these these this crew tends not
(45:21):
to break rank. They are very disciplined on message. And
for them to be getting on this Angela Paxton train,
when Ken has had a lot of success bullying people
into doing what he wants, I think is pretty meaningful.
Speaker 3 (45:38):
A tremendous amount of power. And look, because he's funded
by Wilkes and a couple of these other oil bearing
types from out in West Texas with millions and millions
of dollars, he ran into a hard wall this week Interestingly,
there's another Republican now young African American guy from the
Dallas area who's weirdly placed a statewide media buy on TV.
I think he's going to get in the primary because
(45:59):
I think packs and may have a you know, Pats
only raised two million this quarter, which for Texas is
like couch change, right, be fun to watch? Yeah it?
Speaker 1 (46:08):
Well, that's it for this episode of Fast Politics. Tune
in every Monday, Wednesday, Thursday and Saturday to hear the
best minds and politics make sense of all this chaos.
If you enjoy this podcast, please send it to a
friend and keep the conversation going. Thanks for listening.
Hi, I'm Molly John Fast and this is Fast Politics,
where we discussed the top political headlines with some of
today's best minds. And according to an economist Yugov poll,
six and ten americans support Medicare for all. We have
such a great show for you today. The Lincoln Projects
own Rick Wilson joins us to talk about how Trump
(00:22):
is facing lots of pushback from the base over the
Epstein client list cover up. Then we'll talk to director
Eva Orner about her new movie Surviving Ohio State on
the Horrors. Jim Jordan oversaw well at the University of Ohio.
Speaker 2 (00:40):
But first the news, BALI, welcome back from vacation. Everything
is fixed. We went away. America is great again. I
particularly was reminded how great America was while I saw
a country that actually has infrastructure investments and how nice
life can be with it.
Speaker 3 (00:55):
How are you feeling.
Speaker 1 (00:56):
I love that you're bragging about your Yes, Jesse went
to Japan Where Molly went newwhere she went nowhere? Jesse,
did you have fun in Japan?
Speaker 3 (01:06):
I had a lot of fun.
Speaker 2 (01:08):
I ate well, but mostly I saw that it really
would be nice if we made nicer bridges and two
hundred mile an hour trains and stuff. It actually invested
in these things instead of giving billionaires tax cuts. It
would be nice if people had nice things.
Speaker 1 (01:22):
So my friend Jesse Cannon, yes, is a communist. Okay,
so let's see yes, Okay, so let's talk about what
we're talking about. Massive flooding in Texas. We now see
reporting a couple of days later that while these catastrophic
floods were roaring through central Texas, the Federal Emergency Management
Agency FEMA did not answer nearly two thirds of calls
(01:46):
to the disaster assistance line, according to documents reviewed from
New York Times. Okay, so that's two thirds of all calls.
It's two days later. Christy Nome was on Meet the
Press with Kristin Welker, and let's stay listen.
Speaker 4 (02:00):
Do you want to talk big picture in just a moment.
But the New York Times is reporting that thousands of
calls from flood victims to FEMA call centers went unanswered
in the middle of this ongoing disaster because you didn't
renew contracts to keep call center staff in place until
nearly one week after the floods. Why did it take
so long to extend those questions.
Speaker 5 (02:20):
Those contracts were in place, nobody, no employees were off
of work. Every one of them was answering calls. So
false reporting, fake news, and it's discouraging. It's discouraging that
during this time, when we have such a loss of
life and so many people's lives have turned upside down,
that people are playing politics with this. Because the response
(02:42):
time was immediate, and if you talk to anyone in
Texas that was there that was a part of this operation,
they would say the federal government and President Trump immediately responded.
Speaker 4 (02:51):
Just to be very clear, on July seventh, fifteen point
nine percent of calls were answered. I mean, does that
concern you that only fifteen percent of calls were answered?
These for people in a desperate state. FEMA often the
first call that they make. Only fifteen percent rested on
July seventh, several days after the floods.
Speaker 5 (03:07):
These contracts were in place, and those people were in
those call centers and they were picking up the phone
and answering these calls from these individuals. So that report
needs to be validified. I'm not certain it's accurate and
I'm not sure where it came from. And the individuals
who are giving you information out of FEMA.
Speaker 6 (03:24):
I'd love to have them put.
Speaker 5 (03:25):
Their names behind it because the anonymous attacks to political
size the situation is completely wrong. I care these emergencies.
Speaker 1 (03:33):
So what's fascinating about this is this is reporting from
the New York Times, right, it's reporting, it's obviously sourced
up to the held, and Christy Nome is just like,
it's not true. She's not even while maybe there was
some just lies. And again this is what Trump Trump
(03:54):
World does falls reporting fake news.
Speaker 2 (03:57):
Yeah, you know what, they always really exude what they
do the appearances, whether it's Herb Bessen, Lutnik or whoever prepared,
and by that I'm being totally absolutely sarcastic.
Speaker 1 (04:08):
Yeah, but it's also just like, I mean, look, this
is an administration that wants to end FEMA. They don't
want FEMA at all. So the fact that they are
ending call centers, we know this to be true, right,
I Mean, in the fifth season of this administration, we
saw Elon Musk up there with a chainsaw saying that
he was going to end basically the government because of
(04:31):
voice fraud and abuse, which is shorthand for things he
doesn't like.
Speaker 2 (04:35):
Yeah, well, in other news, what are the funny things
this administration claims it's doing is it's cutting all these costs,
it's doing all this great stuff. But really what they're
doing that it's also adding on costs because prisoners are
very expensive. Is there's hundreds at Alligator Alglatras that have
no criminal charges and they're imprisoning all these people that
did not seem to be in the plan that they
(04:56):
claimed they were having for who they were going to
put in prison in thisdministration into port.
Speaker 1 (05:01):
This was actually a huge scoop from Miami Harald, and
they published this. They had the list of people because
a lot of these people don't know. So this is
the data as a list of more than seven hundred
people or either being held under tents in Florida during
the summer or in chainlinks cells in Florida's pop up
jail called Alligator Alcatraz. There are a lot of things
(05:24):
to be horrified by in this story, but the thing
that I am the most struck by was that You'll remember,
Tripworld promised that they would not do this to people
who were not criminals.
Speaker 6 (05:37):
Right.
Speaker 1 (05:38):
The whole thing was they were only going to do
this to criminals. But in fact, you will be shocked
to hear that hundreds of immigrants with no criminal charges
in the United States are being held at Alligator Alcatraz.
And this is from the Miami Herald. It's actually joint
Miami Herald Tampa Bay Times Mixed. Among the detainees arrested
(05:59):
and convicted of crimes are more than two hundred and
fifty people. That's a lot of people who are listed
as only having immigration violations but no criminal convictions. You'll
remember Trump made a big deal about how he was
only going to deport in this way people who had
criminal charges. So these are two hundred and fifty people
who are just in this country illegally, which in a
(06:23):
previous administration would be a civil charge, but now that
Trump is in charge, it is a criminal charge. The
data is based on a list of more than seven
hundred people who were either being held under tents. Okay,
and then I think the most horrifying part of the
story comes from friend of the pod Maxwell Fronst, who
said that the drinking water comes from the toilet. The
(06:46):
Democratic congressman revealed the horrific conditions when he visited the
newly opened Alligator Alcatraz. Migrant Detention Center, which is in
the Florida Emigrads. You will remember Republicans have been very
excited about this because and Trump and Governor Desant has
toward it. They thought it was hilarious that the alligators
(07:07):
could eat people if they escaped. But Frost, who is
actually a person, said that he was pretty horrified. He said,
quote they opened the door, there were about six security
guards standing there pushing us back, but we could see
in and we could hear everybody. And when those doors open,
where I saw me and my heart sink. I saw
(07:28):
thirty two people per cage, about six cages in one tent.
I saw a lot of young men who looked like me.
People were my age, Frost began. Frost is very young.
I think he's the youngest member of Congress right now.
Speaker 2 (07:41):
Yeah, and there was other congress people who toward this,
who saw other horrible things, and it really sounds monstrous
and horrible, but this is what we were kind of
expecting to happen even before this administration took place. Speaking
of other things that we kind of saw coming, which
is that Trump is going to start playing with both
birthright citizenship and well beyond that of just natural Board
(08:03):
citizens that he doesn't like, which is why he's doing
dumb things like threatening Rosie o'donald Jesus Christ.
Speaker 1 (08:11):
So Trump is trying to distract from look he's got.
The base is mad about the Epstein stuff, the trade talks.
There are no ninety deals in ninety days. We're almost
at ninety days and we still have no deal, or
we have one deal or half a deal. But Trump
is trying to do something which he did in his
(08:31):
first administration. It worked for him, and he's like, look
over there. So now he's decided. And remember he does
love being mean to Rosie o'donnald. So he says he's
going to take away her birthright citizenship. She technically, I
think is living in Ireland, so I'm not sure why
she even cares. But he did say that she's not
(08:56):
in the best interests of our great country. I don't
know what that means. In the best interest. I'm giving
serious consideration to taking away her citizenship. She is a
threat to humanity, that's right, and should remain in the
wonderful country of Ireland if they want her. God bless America.
There is so much stupid here. It's hard to pars.
Speaker 2 (09:15):
I mean, I think it all translates to something. Please
stop talking about the guy who called me his best
friend wants Jeffrey Epstein exactly.
Speaker 1 (09:24):
Rick Wilson is the founder of the Lincoln Project and
the host of the Enemy's List. We are back from vacation.
Oh yeah, and since we're back, I had to get
Rick Wilson here because that was the I asked people
what they want and they were like Rick Wilson. I
was like, Okay, who am I to argue with that?
(09:45):
Cheers Rick Wilson, who got me drinking die coke again
after a decade not.
Speaker 3 (09:51):
Drinking down to two a day maybe three a day time.
Speaker 1 (09:54):
No, you always say that, and it's very annoying.
Speaker 3 (09:57):
It's true, though, I've managed when you.
Speaker 1 (09:59):
Hook someone up else on heroin and then you're like,
I am off the smack. But I'm glad that you.
Speaker 3 (10:08):
I'm glad you can control your daily uptake of crack cocaine.
Speaker 1 (10:11):
Yeah, thank you. I really want to hear about how
you're doing better, because that makes me really happy. Speaking
of schadenfreude, I was like, paying attention, but not so
closely because we've been covering this for a because covering
because we've been living this for a decade, so I
wasn't paying attention as carefully as I probably should have been.
(10:33):
But you know, you and I have this group chat.
Speaker 3 (10:35):
Yes, people who we.
Speaker 1 (10:37):
Shouldn't were not. I mean, I feel like you're not
allowed to say I'm not going.
Speaker 3 (10:41):
On this group chat. But if you aren't on it,
you're just not one of the cool kids.
Speaker 1 (10:45):
Well, I'm going to go a bit further and say that, yes,
own you know this is a group chat that has
the uh has pete hegseeth accidentally added himself to continue
on the Pete hag Seth grief chat. Yeah, somebody put
(11:08):
out a put a message that was like god, he
sounds like he's panicking, and I was like, oh wow,
I must have missed it a lot. So what happened
this Weekendreck Wilson.
Speaker 3 (11:17):
Well for the first time in a decade, For the
very first time since the beginning of Trump's ascendance in
twenty fifteen, he has completely lost control of his ability
to control MAGA and their narrative, the Epstein cover up
that he has ordered Pam Bondy to engage in, and
(11:38):
I am hearing increasing drum beats now that it was
Susie Wiles who went to Pambondy and ordered this to happen.
Speaker 1 (11:46):
I just want to say, like what Trump World said,
they could have been like a little more careful with it.
Instead they were basically like, there's no list, there's no anything.
You know. The guy was a was you know, a
peanut farmer.
Speaker 3 (12:03):
They yes, And they could have let the air out
of the system, the pressure. They could have popped a
pressure valve, right and say while Jeffrey Epstein was a
horrible monster.
Speaker 1 (12:12):
Right, and it was blackmail, as they said. Their announcement
was like there was no black mail. Obviously there was blackmail.
Speaker 3 (12:18):
I mean. And when she says I don't have a
client list per se, No, no, you said the words
client list. You said client list on your desk and
all that.
Speaker 1 (12:32):
Right, right, that's right. She did say I can list
on my desk and I planned to release it and
then she had MAGA influencers take these big folders and
then they posed for pictures in front of the White
House with these big folders like.
Speaker 3 (12:47):
Yeah, and it was and it was the irony of
it was you had guys there like Jack Sobiac and
DC dipshit or whatever his name is, Dreno and Libs
of TikTok, Libs of TikTok, all these people they had
the big folder like the Epstein files fees one, right,
And it turns out they got print outs from Google
(13:08):
searches and court documents that were all publicly available. None
of it mattered, and at the time they all swallowed
their their unhappiness about it. At the time, they all
were like, well, okay, coming. And so when Bondi did this,
and again I'm hearing it was ordered by by Wiles,
(13:29):
which means it came from Trump, right, wow does it?
Oh no, oh no, no, no, no, no, she's not She's
not going to hang out on something like this one.
She's smart enough to know what a cover up looks
like when it starts. And so Bondi directed Patel and
and Bongino in this operation. They clearly had some unhappiness
(13:50):
about it. They clearly and I think they should maga
better than she did.
Speaker 1 (13:55):
Let's have a second of Bongino pa tell miss because
it's super interesting. So yeah, so Bongino and Patel. Bongino
becomes number two at the FBI, Patel becomes number one.
They are the bosses. Right, there's no one above them.
Speaker 3 (14:12):
They have all the material, they have all the things
the FBI gathered off of.
Speaker 1 (14:16):
It, access to everything, everything, but the buck stops with them,
like mediocre white guy than no one's ever heard of.
On top of them, there is no James call me.
There is no adult in the room. It is just
those two, correct.
Speaker 3 (14:32):
And some people below them who are even less savory. Right.
And remember, we have much prior reporting, not just from
the news media, but from the FBI itself saying how
much stuff they seized from Epstine's properties in New Mexico
and on the island and everywhere.
Speaker 1 (14:50):
Right, And there's flight logs. I mean, we've all seen
the flight logs.
Speaker 3 (14:53):
I mean that's not when they raided. When they raided
his island, they took thousands of hours of videotapes and
thousands of photographs and thousands of documents, documents and so
so Bongina and Patel have had access to this material.
They know what it is. It's been sitting there festering.
(15:17):
And BONDI also knew because someone inside of the New
York Field Office told her, oh, we have all this
other material, and she directed Patel to direct the FBI
Field Office to deliver that to the DOJ, which they did.
So these guys all have had visibility who the fuck knows,
(15:38):
but they are reported. Remember now, the other thing that
Bongino said in an interview about three months ago was, oh, well,
we have to redact all this material. There's a lot
of se sam material, child sexual abuse material in it.
She have to hide. Listen, yeah, and believe me, I
don't want that released either, right, but there is a
system by which you can redact things or government files
(16:00):
like that. They know how to do this, They've done
it a million times. But this announcement being so sweeping
and so categorical, nothing to see here, Move along. It
flies in the face of the myth that MAGA told
itself for a decade. Molly, they told us for a
decade that the Epstein files of the Rosetta Stone, it's
got Bill Clinton and Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama and
(16:21):
Nancy Pelosi and George Soros and everybody else. The whole
lie of Pisagate, which Jack Pisobiec invented and promoted, the
whole lie of QAnon's center, the center of all the
QAnon garbage is this theory that inside of the Epstein
files is the key to proving there's a global Democratic
Party pedop file, cannibal witchcrafts conspiracy. Now that they've been
(16:47):
told no, their reaction has been very poor. They are
not happy. They are really really angry. They feel like
either that they're being lied to now because the dup
state got to go Butteau and pamelacking, or the more
uncomfortable truth for them that they know that they that
(17:08):
they as much as they want to say fake news,
deep state. There is no one pictured more with Jeffrey
Epstein than Donald Trump.
Speaker 1 (17:15):
Well, we don't know, but there's certainly a couple pictures.
Speaker 3 (17:18):
We've seen hundreds, Molly, there are hundreds, and their relationship contemporaneously,
by Trump's own words and by and by Epstein's interviews
with Michael Wolf and other people, and by and by
the sort of Palm Beach social society what they call
the shiny sheet down there. It used to be full
(17:39):
of Trump and his pal Jeffrey Epstein at Jeffrey Epstein
and Donald Trump spot at the Cosmos, all these things right,
there was a relationship between those two men that was
not just financial or.
Speaker 1 (17:51):
Aren't hundreds of pictures. I've only seen a couple pictures.
Speaker 3 (17:55):
We I had our goons get pull like one hundred
pictures for an ad we did the other day. Really,
oh yeah, it's ironic that there are so many pictures
of Trump and Diddy, which both with Epstein and Trump,
and Epstein and Diddy are Trump and Diddy. So many
pictures of the two of the of those two guys,
and yet and yet the magas it took until this
(18:17):
week for them to start going, oh fuck, maybe it's
our guy in this final.
Speaker 1 (18:21):
So let's so let's talk about So we don't know
what was in all the stuff it went, the the
stuff that the they sent to that Bondi sent the FBI.
We do know that MAGA world is furious there and
freaking out. And if you defend so who is the
(18:42):
scapegoat here? Like it seems like so far.
Speaker 3 (18:46):
Bondi is the one in the crosshairs from the MAGA
influencer class. They're blaming her, and and again I think
I don't think she spoke Maga as fluently as Bongino
and Patel did. Right, they were the on line trolls,
they were the podcast trolls.
Speaker 1 (19:03):
But but he's getting blamed for this, right, like they're there.
Speaker 3 (19:06):
A Trump especially, I mean, you go on truth Social
last night, Trump posts that very very very very very
very long truth basically saying stop talking about Epstein.
Speaker 1 (19:18):
Yeah.
Speaker 3 (19:19):
On his own site, girls, my guys and gals, Yes,
boys and gals, whatever it was, Yeah, on his own site,
he got ratioed so badly. It got ratioed, like of
the comments I look through, God save me, I look
through several hundred of the comments to that on true Social.
Speaker 1 (19:42):
Better are you than me? Baby?
Speaker 3 (19:44):
My friend? Those people are angry with him. They're like, sir,
I love you, I voted for you, I supported you,
but now you've broken my You've given up, right right,
My trust is shattered, damn right right, and now I'm
gonna have to eat cat food out of a ca
to survive. But I love you. But they're angry. The
Magga folks are furious.
Speaker 1 (20:06):
So here's a question for you. They're furious. And then
Bongino said this thing about how he needs he might need.
He took a day off because he was so upset.
Speaker 3 (20:16):
He took he took a personal day on Friday because
he was so upset. Here's what Bongino's doing under the surface, right.
First off, he knows this thing stinks on ice. Even
he is not a bright guy. Okay, he's not a
smart guy, but even yeah, he's he's a tiny little dwarf. No,
I don't know about that.
Speaker 1 (20:36):
I mean, I don't think he's cute, but he's like little.
Speaker 3 (20:38):
He's like a wee little leprechawn of hate madly is
but I like it too. Anyway, He's he's this tiny,
little little little intellect in a but he's a job.
But even he can see that he's going to get
this stink all over him, right, even he's going to
realize that, and he has such a good reputation and
(21:00):
to you know, yeah, look, the FBI had hundreds and
hundreds and hundreds of agents involved in these cases against.
Speaker 1 (21:06):
Them, so they must know.
Speaker 3 (21:08):
There will be people who know. There will be people
who still have material, there will be people who leak.
And because the rank and file FBI guys hate both
Patel and Bongino, it's gonna leak. So Bongino knows, right,
So what he's doing. I think my theory of the
case is that he's trying to puff up right, now,
go I'm gonna quit because you're hiding the Epstein files
(21:29):
so we can go back to his very successful podcast,
right in, a very successful podcast.
Speaker 1 (21:34):
And also he doesn't need this because it's not helping
his brand, not at all, not at all. And so
you think he quits the FBI, I.
Speaker 3 (21:42):
Think he quits. I think I think he's got probably hours,
not days at this point because because BONDI, look, BONDI
has a power that they don't.
Speaker 1 (21:54):
Have rights like the robot right she.
Speaker 3 (21:57):
Well, no, here, here's the thing. Bondy is bound to
Trump because of some relationships in the lobbying world that
could brought Trump a lot of money. Yeah, he used
to work for em Yeah, Brian Ballard and she had
and so he he has a lot of pressures coming
on him right now to save Bondy from money people,
people who are in deals with his family and deals
(22:20):
with the crypto bros and all this other crowd guitars
and the guitaris. Yes, because she was their lobbyist for
a buck fifty a month. And folks, I do not
mean one hundred and fifty dollars. I mean more zeros
than that.
Speaker 1 (22:33):
So it feels to me like this is similar to
the stories with Hegsath coming out of the DOJ. You know,
like every time Hegsath slips up, we see one hundred
stories about, right, why is the wife in the meeting?
Why is he still using signal? Why did he you know,
(22:55):
like when they wouldn't release the weapons to Ukraine, and
like that story came out real time, which means that
is people leaking on hegsas.
Speaker 3 (23:06):
Look, good administration's leak on purpose. Bad administrations just leak.
And the leaks are coming fast and furious. Now out
of the White House, out of the DJ, out of
the FBI, and this, Mike Molly, this has broken that
bond with Trump and his base. That is his superpower,
(23:27):
and frankly it extends. You can see how these ripples
could go further out and cause him even more trouble.
What is the number one thing Trump has over every
member of Congress and the Republican Party fear of the base,
that he could turn the base against them, that they
could shatter their primary election if if he gets a
candidate in there, because the base will always obey him,
(23:51):
what if a big chunk of the base goes I'm
done watching Trump protect you know, himself to it by
hiding the Epstein materials.
Speaker 1 (24:00):
I don't think there's an easy answer for that question.
And it's funny because it's like, when I'm talking about
the leaki, I'm thinking about like Trump one point out,
which was, oh god, constant leaking.
Speaker 6 (24:08):
Right.
Speaker 1 (24:08):
It was like there was just the first couple of
months of people being horrified and then it was just
a stream of endless leaks. And that's what this is, right,
this is just now.
Speaker 3 (24:17):
We're back to a leak level like Trump. The only
thing that would make the leaks more frequent right now
in Trump world is if Kelly and Conway came back
into the mix, because she was the she was the
all time reigning leak champion for what a reporter told
me a couple.
Speaker 1 (24:33):
Of years ago, but wasn't but a lot of this stuff,
like one of the biggest leakers, right, all of the
I mean right, that's what it's Trump, guys.
Speaker 3 (24:43):
Ninety five percent of the stories you see that have
a senior White House source, it's Donald Trump picking up
the phone and calling a reporter.
Speaker 6 (24:49):
I mean, I don't know if it's ninety five.
Speaker 3 (24:51):
Well maybe not nice, you're right, let's call it sixty five.
Speaker 1 (24:56):
My man likes to talk on the phone.
Speaker 3 (24:58):
He do like to talk on the phone.
Speaker 1 (24:59):
Yeah, yeah, So let's just get for a let's talk
for another second about kind of where we are in
this moment. Last week, Trump or two weeks ago, Trump
passed this big, beautiful bill that is going to just
wreak havoc, though some of the cuts are backdated to
the midterms, in the hopes that Democrats will get blamed
(25:21):
for them, and said Republicans, which I feel like is
just the epitome of maga. They're selling it as no
tax on tips and no text on overtime. That's not
how any work, right, and is going to work. But
I want you to it was like still a win
for Trump, right, he could transmit it as a win, right,
(25:43):
he got passed.
Speaker 3 (25:44):
It was I mean, he passed an extremely unpopular piece
of legislation that will not it will not grow more
popular with time.
Speaker 1 (25:52):
Correct, But he did get He wanted to appeal to
repeal Obamacare, and he was able to get a sort
of skinny dedicaid expansion repeal snuck in there.
Speaker 3 (26:04):
Yeah, and and look the damage this is going to
do to Trump's own base. They've timed it to delay
it till after the next election. But the people that
supported Donald Trump most fervently, and Steve Bannon is right
about this. A lot of the people on medicare, Medicaid, Snap,
Social Security as tan of all those things. A lot
of those people are maga voters.
Speaker 1 (26:25):
Well, because they felt that all their people were getting
their stuff and that there were these mysical getting their stuff.
And you know, and some of this can be blamed
squarely on the shoulders of New York City's mayor, who
put a bunch of people in a hotel right next
to the the the station, the train station, and gave
(26:50):
them phone cards. And then The New York Post covered
it with zeal if you give if.
Speaker 3 (26:56):
You give Trump and Murdoch a sword to cut your
head off, they will cut your head off. Yeah right,
I mean.
Speaker 1 (27:05):
But also, can I just say, having the one newspaper
in the one local newspaper in New York City, which
is arguably the biggest city in America, be controlled by
Rupert Murdoch means that everything that happens here has a
kind of troll is used for a kind of trollers.
Speaker 3 (27:26):
Of course, the Post, the Post exists as part of
the feeder mechanism for the National Republican or MAGA media complex,
because they're the ones who are always finding the story
of a Muslim man took his pants off in the
subway today, and then then every MAGA on their Facebook
believes that every Muslim guy in New York is walking
(27:48):
around with their deck hanging out. I mean it exaggerates, exacerbates, amplifies,
and like I said, it's a feed It's a feed
line for for Fox itself and for the other MAGA outlets.
It's why that's why they're covering them, Dami the way
they are with this unbelievable hyper vigilance at the post.
(28:10):
You know, everything is the antisomitic?
Speaker 6 (28:12):
Is he?
Speaker 3 (28:12):
This is he?
Speaker 6 (28:13):
That?
Speaker 3 (28:13):
Is he a communist? Well, he sees the means of production,
and they're looking at everybody who supports him. Now, oh,
he's supported by the bushwick Wickan coalition or whatever, so
that they can turn it into a bigger, stupid or
more more lurid idea of what New York really is.
Speaker 1 (28:30):
Lurid New York. Rick Wilson Goodbye Eva Orner. He is
a celebrated director of documentaries like Brande Helvel and the
Cult of Fast Fashion. And the new HBO Max documentary
Surviving Ohio State. AVA talk to me about how you
(28:53):
decided to make this movie Surviving Ohio State. So it
actually came to.
Speaker 6 (28:58):
Me through the producers, through agent, and my initial response
was that I didn't want to do it because for
a whole bunch of reasons. It's kind of crazy. You know.
I always go with my dart and my guy is this.
This is not for me because I'm Australian. I've lived
in America for twenty one years, but I did not
go to college. I know absolutely nothing about college sports.
(29:19):
I don't even didn't go to college either.
Speaker 1 (29:21):
Go on, yeah, yeah, I wait to college.
Speaker 6 (29:24):
But in Australia. But I don't even think I knew
what OSU or the Black Eyes was three years ago,
Like I was that out of the loop. And I
also thought it's a true die story. And I'd just
done pretty recently another abuse film for Netflix about Bikram
chadrib yoga guru. So I just everything it was saying
do I do this? And I spoke with John Werthheim,
(29:45):
who wrote the article that it's based on, and he said,
I think you're wrong. I think you should do this.
Talk to some of the guys. I think I called
three of the survivors and by the end of the
third conversation that all said, Wow, I told you things
I've never told anyone before, and I was so moved
and I thought their story was so important that I
for the first time, probably in a long time, I
went against my guard and I said, you know what,
(30:06):
I'm going to do it. And I really don't regret
it because getting to know the survivors and telling their
story has been a real honor.
Speaker 1 (30:12):
It's such a sort of weirdly tragic moment for me too.
But also I feel like this has been a very
tough road for survivors. Obviously, these survivors are not women,
but survivors are survivors, so talk to us about that.
Speaker 6 (30:28):
I think that's really tough. And this is not always
the case. But in other college sex abuse scandals that
you know that were really high profile, like Penn State
and Michigan State, the survivors were treated with respect and
they are believed, and especially the Larry Nasa survivors, when
they came out go young women, they were applauded, they
(30:49):
were considered heroes. They got their day and caught with
Larry Nasa, who was a monster and went to jail
for a long time. We all watched them, and they
also got big settlements. You know, the settlements in in
Michigan State were between one and one and a half
million dollars. And I think what's really tragic about this
story and difficult is that it's been seven years since
they first came out with the story. Always to you
(31:11):
has been saying, we're doing everything we can to settle this,
We're doing all the right things. But they're not because
behind the scenes they're fighting them in court and they say,
we've offered them settlements. But the settlements that are offering
a poultry in comparison. And this is something that a
lot of people don't know. The settlements that to you offered,
they're in the settlements. There are a few admit liability
(31:32):
and the survivors would have to sign them, and some
of us settlements demanding the survivors could never criticize OSU publicly,
and that's why a lot of them didn't sign. And
plus the average the average amount was two hundred and
fifty thousand dollars. So these guys have been through you know,
what is it now? Thirty forty years of hiding what
happened to them. Then they come out. Then they're ridiculed
(31:53):
because a lot of people were saying, real big tough guys,
I don't believe for a second you couldn't have clubbed
with this little doctor. And then on top of that,
you know OSU has been kind of farding them to
as as the lawyer in the film alone, Moselfa is
fi tooth and nail behind the scenes. So it's been
a really difficult experience for the survivors. On top of
everything they went.
Speaker 1 (32:13):
Through this doctor, doctor Richard Strauss. We have seen other
sports doctors, right, Larry Nasser is a really good example
of that. But do you think this story was made
more complicated because one of the coaches, right, or one
of the sort of assistant coaches, was Jim Jordan, Yeah,
Republican member of Congress. So did that complicate or add
(32:36):
a political dimension to this story.
Speaker 6 (32:39):
It's very tricky because the first people to come out
of this story were the wrestlers. They're featured predominantly in
the film, and Jim Jordan was a wrestler, an assistant
wrestling coach to OSC for ten years, and he was
really close to a lot of these guys they considered
considered him like a brother, and many many of them,
including a referee who was forty years old when he
(32:59):
was assault, should buy Doctor Strauss. Many of them say
that Jim Jordan knew. That they told Jim Jordan, and
they also thought that they would be able to count
on him when they came out with the story in
twenty eighteen, and also their coach, Rush Hallickman, and the
opposite happened. Russ went silent, and Jim Jordan actually, you
know you see in the film. He's come out repeatedly
on Fox News and other broadcasts saying it never happened.
(33:23):
I never saw it, And there are many many survivors
that they he knew. And what also came out in
the investigation that the independent investigation that OSU did after
this all happened was that a lot of coaches knew,
and Jim Jordan says in a click we use I
think from Fox he says, no coaches didn't know. That's
(33:44):
been proven to be incorrect. So Jim Jordan's very very
important in this story and very problematic, and he's really
let down a lot of guys who had a very
very close relationship with me and who looked up to
him and admired him enormously.
Speaker 1 (33:57):
Do you think that there was sort of less attention
paid to this because of the partisan aspects, Right, you
have Jim Jordan, who is this wildly powerful member of Congress,
super famous, and then you have Ohio, which is a
red state with a lot of restrictions, where the idea
that there's abuse and that it's then gay abuse. I mean,
(34:20):
I feel like it has to be that these two
things are quite a one two punch towards the kind
of red state mentality.
Speaker 6 (34:30):
Yeah, I feel like there was a lot going against
the guys, and they didn't. When I say the guys,
I mean the survivors. I think they didn't expect it.
They expected to be met seriously and taken seriously and
to be traded as abuse survivors should. I mean a
lot of them dropped out of school. Their lives were changed,
you know, they lost their career. Al who's in the
(34:51):
film who was raped, dropped out college. He would have
been a pro hockey player. I mean, Dan in the
film says, you know, his relationship with his father wasn't
able the same because he drops. I mean so many.
I spoke to maybe close to one hundred survivors. Most
of them won't obviously go on the record. It's such
a big thing to do. And I have so much
respect for the guys in the film, but a lot
(35:13):
of them on our John Doe's or their families don't
want them to go public. But the stories are not breaking,
and there's now they say over two thousand that we
know of survivors and two hundred and seventy one rape victims.
I think part of the problem is that they're men,
and a lot of them are athletes, and they're big guys.
(35:34):
And Mark Holmanan was a WWS fider. It's like, how
can these guys be a victim of sexual abuse? And
that's where John Werthheim's article, on which this was sort
of the jumping off point, was so important because it
wasn't really getting a lot of national media. Colleen a
journalist who's in the film, Colleen marsha Or who's a
local journalist who has been covering this story relentlessly, but
(35:55):
it wasn't in traction nationally. And then John wrote this
article and it was brilliantly cold, Why aren't more people
talking about the OSU scandal, and it was in Sports
Illustrated and that's what caught the attention of the producers.
We sort of went from there and it's been really
interesting a reception to the film because it's been surprised.
It's very I think it's quite a tough film to watch, obviously,
(36:16):
and it's had this massive response. I think it's only
been out for just over a week and it was
number one on Max. It's still in the top ten,
so there's a constant stream on social media of people
talking about it, and it's been really interesting. It's really
touched a nerve with people, and I think, you know,
all of the survivors and myself are getting text message
(36:36):
from strangers just saying thank you, I'm a survivor. You know.
They're kind of having this moment now, the guys in
the film where they're being treated like in the way
that they should have been treated seven years ago when
they first stepped out and spoke out. And it's been
really interesting for them because I can see a change
in them and I didn't expect it, and I'm really surprise,
(37:00):
and it's that they needed to be heard and they
needed to be heard on a big level with respect,
and if you look, you know, I look at the
social media all the time just to make sure there's
nothing that's the word not weird.
Speaker 7 (37:11):
They've done slavery happening because I want to be for
everyone safe, and like ninety nine percent of the comments,
if not more part I think I've only seen maybe
one negative comment, and I think for the survivors, it's
been this just incredible kind of week and a half.
Speaker 6 (37:28):
And I was so nervous to see the film. They
trusted me with their lives and I was really nervous
to show them. And they saw it in New York
about two weeks ago at TRADECA Film Festival. I did
a private screening with a to b on them the
day before so they could see it without an audience,
and it was just me and them and their partners
in the audience that I was terrified, and it was
really interesting because afterwards they were just kind of different,
(37:51):
and it really hit me me that they needed to
be seen and heard with respect. And I think that's
the thing that I'm just bled away by and really
proud of. I don't normally say that about my work,
but I feel like It's made a difference, hopefully to
their lives and to their families, and that's the most
important thing to me. I could imagine.
Speaker 1 (38:08):
Yeah, it's such an important thing. The sheer number of victims.
When you told me those numbers, I was kind of
shocked because even Larry Nasser, who was a serial, I mean,
I don't know. Those numbers are horrific and it's shocking
to me. And again, like, it is so important that
(38:30):
we are able to if there ever were a story
that is worthy of telling, it is this. Do you
think that there will be more legal accountability now? And
also does Ohio play a factor in how badly this
has been handled?
Speaker 6 (38:45):
Whio the state or Ohio State University?
Speaker 1 (38:48):
Yeah, Ohio the state, the sort of legislature around it,
the judges. So much has to go wrong for something
like this, for thousands of people, like the sort of
stuff that happened with the Catholic Church, there has to
be a sort of system of fuck ups, you know,
a cascade of fuck ups. So obviously there's the gender
(39:08):
of the victims. But I just wonder, like, is it
just a university or was the state legislators, the judges,
the courts that were they sort of not helpful to them.
I mean, where else did you see the kind of rod.
Speaker 6 (39:22):
It's a really good question and tricky to answer that.
I can give you one example. There's a judge who's
been handling the case. He initially ruled against them, citing
statute of limitations. That was ultimately overturned and it went
all the way to the Supreme Court and they decided
not to hear the case. So it's actually gone back
to trial. But this judge now is the judge in
(39:44):
charge again. It's a college town, it's a sports crazy town.
The judge is affiliated with Ohio State. His wife worked
for them selling paraphernalia. He was thasked to accuse himself.
He did not, So, yes, there are problems there. Also
obviously there's also obviously Jim Jordan involved. I don't know
(40:05):
the details, and there's probably not much more than that
I can say, but I think if he joined the dogs,
I think it's a very good comment and I'm hoping
now that there's going to be a little more mean mentioned.
But one of the things that happened was, I think
the day after the film came out, which was like
a week and a half ago, there was a hearing
(40:25):
in front of the district court judge and he ordered
them intermediation. But Colleen had told me this, Colleen Marshall,
who's the journal I was covering it. A lot of
the survivors were there. She said that, and she's also
an attorney, and she said neither side seemed to expect
resolution anytime soon. And one of the other issues that's
been really heartbreaking for the survivors is this hasn't been
(40:46):
going on since twenty eighteen, so we're on seven years.
And the judge had initially said he wants this to
be resolved quickly, and it is dragging. I mean, they
don't even have a court data. Now it's looking like maybe,
you know, twenty six, maybe twenty twenty seven. So they're
in this for another they don't know how long. And
(41:06):
I don't know if I was Ohio State with all
the press's coming out about this and all the talk
about this. They're a very rich university. It's the one
thing I don't understand. They've got a lot of money.
There can't be more cases. This is all the cases Thereah,
I think there's two hundred and something cases left to
be settled, just offer them big settlements, pay them out,
(41:28):
and this will go away. And if they'd done that,
there wouldn't be the article, there wouldn't be the documentary,
there wouldn't be all this talk about it. I don't
understand why they don't want to compensate them for what
they know how it happened. They've admitted it, they've apologized,
but now they're fighting them. And I don't understand why
a wealthy school just wouldn't do what other wealthy schools do,
(41:50):
and is pay them out so that they feel respected
and resolved in the pay will never go away. These
men were sexually abused or rage, but just pay them
out And don't understand logic behind.
Speaker 1 (42:01):
This, agreed. I just was so happy when you just
said this thing about how they have to do right
by these victims because it's so important. I have one
last question for you, which is like kind of a
stupid question, but I think is actually really important. One
of the producers of this movie is George Clooney. I
know how Hollywood works, and I know how hard it
is to get things made. It strikes me that George
(42:23):
Clooney quietly lends his name and makes things happen that
are for the good. I just was wondering your thoughts
on that.
Speaker 6 (42:32):
Yeah, I look, it's always hard to get films financed.
There's a little second film in for years with HBO,
and they've both gone to number one, which is really
rare for documentaries. So firstly, working with HBO is amazing
because they still make films like this, and I think
that's worth noting. You know, it's just it's incredible. But
I think also documentary is sort of Hollywood life, you know,
(42:53):
Hollywood issue or Hollywood ajacent. It's exactly very Hollywood, but
sometimes it's very Hollywood and in the life is so
many people watch documentaries. I mean the fact that this
was number one ahead of the Hunger Games movies on
HBO mats is extraordinary. I think that when we calling
them celebrities, but you know, he is a celebrity. He's
got a huge name and a lot of clout, and
(43:14):
I think when they put their name on something, it
can really help with funding, it can help with an audience,
and I think that's a great thing. I think that's
a really good thing.
Speaker 1 (43:24):
Yeah, I mean, it just strikes me as he is
a very singular talent and also of singular fame and
the fact that I just see him doing a lot
of good stuff in the world in ways that are
not a straight line necessarily. Thank you, thank you, thank
you for joining us. I hope you will come back.
Speaker 6 (43:41):
Thank you, Samuch driving me. I'm a huge fan.
Speaker 3 (43:45):
No time, Rick Welson, Well we've gone fast.
Speaker 1 (43:51):
It is that time.
Speaker 3 (43:52):
It is that time that America has craved for four
long weeks.
Speaker 1 (43:56):
And hence the time. Have we really been on vacation
for four weeks? No, it's been in like two weeks,
but it felt like five.
Speaker 3 (44:02):
It seems longer.
Speaker 1 (44:03):
It seems like.
Speaker 3 (44:04):
Longer because I missed you.
Speaker 1 (44:05):
Okay, tell me what is it?
Speaker 3 (44:07):
My moment of fuckery is in the Great State of Texas,
there is one person who has been responsible for depriving
more women of their civil rights, of their right to
personal integrity, of their right to autonomy, and of their
right to privacy than Ken Paxton. kN Paxon is a corrupt, vicious,
revolting criminal. He is also Texas's Attorney general right now,
(44:29):
who is trying to primary John Cornyn for US Senate.
This week, it was revealed that his wife of thirty
two years was divorcing him for biblical reasons.
Speaker 2 (44:38):
Eg.
Speaker 3 (44:39):
Ken Paxton would fuck anything that slows down, including lawn furniture.
That guy has the audacity to come out and say
write the classic like pr person tweet about their divorce
where he says, we asked for privacy in this time. Yeah, yeah, no, Ken,
You're not gonna get any privacy, buddy, nobody's giving you
a liqu of privacy.
Speaker 1 (44:57):
Their pal so Angela Paxton actually is a member of
the Texas Senate, Yes, state Senate. So there was a
comms person from the Republican whatever of Texas who is
like who said something to the effect of like, oh,
you know what you did right? I think is a
really good point. Like these these this crew tends not
(45:21):
to break rank. They are very disciplined on message. And
for them to be getting on this Angela Paxton train,
when Ken has had a lot of success bullying people
into doing what he wants, I think is pretty meaningful.
Speaker 3 (45:38):
A tremendous amount of power. And look, because he's funded
by Wilkes and a couple of these other oil bearing
types from out in West Texas with millions and millions
of dollars, he ran into a hard wall this week Interestingly,
there's another Republican now young African American guy from the
Dallas area who's weirdly placed a statewide media buy on TV.
I think he's going to get in the primary because
(45:59):
I think packs and may have a you know, Pats
only raised two million this quarter, which for Texas is
like couch change, right, be fun to watch? Yeah it?
Speaker 1 (46:08):
Well, that's it for this episode of Fast Politics. Tune
in every Monday, Wednesday, Thursday and Saturday to hear the
best minds and politics make sense of all this chaos.
If you enjoy this podcast, please send it to a
friend and keep the conversation going. Thanks for listening.
Host
Molly Jong-Fast
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