John Ronald Brown, the "Butcher" who performed illegal surgeries on transgender patients in 1980s Mexico for $2,500 using raw silicone and bowel tissue, faced no legal consequences until Philip Bondi's fatal gas gangrene in 1998. Despite gruesome evidence of his use of dull scalpels and victims like Camille suffering rectovaginal fistulas, Brown maintained his work was God's plan while inventing devices to cure AIDS. His eventual 15-year sentence highlights the deadly risks of unregulated medical tourism, contrasting sharply with ethical debates on apotemnophilia and the dangers of prioritizing profit over patient safety. [Automatically generated summary]
Transcriber: nvidia/parakeet-tdt-0.6b-v2, sat-12l-sm, and large-v3-turbo
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Trust Your Girlfriends00:14:42
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When a group of women discover they've all dated the same prolific con artist, they take matters into their own hands.
I vowed I will be his last target.
He is not going to get away with this.
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We always say that.
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Hey, it's Nora Jones, and my podcast, Playing Along, is back with more of my favorite musicians.
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You related to the Phantom at that point.
Yeah, I was definitely the Phantom in that.
That's so funny.
Share each day with me each night, each morning.
Listen to Nora Jones is playing along on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
What's up, everyone?
I'm Ago Modern.
My next guest, it's Will Farrell.
My dad gave me the best advice ever.
He goes, just give it a shot.
But if you ever reach a point where you're banging your head against the wall and it doesn't feel fun anymore, it's okay to quit.
If you saw it written down, it would not be an inspiration.
It would not be on a calendar of, you know, the cat just hanging in there.
Yeah, it would not be.
Right, it wouldn't be that.
There's a lot of life.
Listen to Thanks Dad on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
In 2023, bachelor star Clayton Eckard was accused of fathering twins, but the pregnancy appeared to be a hoax.
You doctored this particular test twice, Miss Owens, correct?
I doctored the test once.
It took an army of internet detectives to uncover a disturbing pattern.
Two more men who'd been through the same thing.
Greg Gillespie and Michael Mancini.
My mind was blown.
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Laura, Scottsdale Police.
As the season continues, Laura Owens finally faces consequences.
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Episode start!
Begin now.
Robert Evans, Behind the Bastards, podcast.
Part two, John Ronald Brown, Sophia Alexandra, guest.
Private parts unknown.
Introduction bad.
How are you doing, Sophia?
Good.
Just you didn't mention my other podcast, 420 Day Fiancé.
420 Day Fiancé.
420 Day Fiancé.
On this network with Miles Gray.
It's like I forgot to include 40% of the actual words necessary to make that salad not gibberish.
So of course I forgot your second podcast too.
That was a disaster.
A disaster.
I think you will keep having a disaster until you commit to going back to the old ways.
What's my whys?
I have committed to getting fired and then becoming a corrupt small-time cop.
I think that's the path I want to go with.
Have you watched Jaws recently?
There's a scene in the Second Jaws movie.
No.
Where Sheriff Brody gets at...
Oh, man.
It's great.
There's a scene in the Second Jaws movie where Sheriff Brody gets out of his police car and is preceded by 40 or 50 beer cans tumbling out onto the ground around him.
And I saw that and was like, that's exactly what I want to do for a living.
Just rolling around in a police car, drunk as shit with a gun, no accountability on some beach town in the middle of nowhere.
I'm glad that you're going to be a corrupt small-town cop because as we discussed in the previous episode, I will be performing unauthorized surgeries.
And at that point, I'm going to need a friend.
Right.
In the police department.
This is that friend.
Yeah, this is the plan.
Hey, would you like to be the non-doctor, con man, veterinarian, Dr. Spence to my Dr. Ronald?
Yeah, I feel like I can round.
Yeah.
No, not you, Robert.
Not you.
Sophie.
She was clearly.
Sophie, you're the cop.
You already have a role to play.
Would you argue with you on anything, my friend?
Perfect.
We got a clinic going.
Robert, keep us out of the papers.
All right.
Well, that's good.
You know, Sophie, it's complicated.
I feel like I want to know more about Spence because this is not just a simple man pretending to be a doctor.
This is a man pretending to be a veterinarian who pretends to be a doctor.
And that's like a whole different layer of scamminess.
Oh, it's hilarious that he needed to first fool himself to step one.
He's like, no, pretending to be doctor.
He's like, I can't do that.
That's too much lying.
First, I'm going to pretend to be a vet.
And out of there, pretending to be a doctor, that's not that far.
I can do that.
Yeah, it's amazing.
It's really amazing.
Can we pull up a picture of him, too?
I see what he looks like.
I love this picture.
Because I'd like to know what the faces of that firm were.
Not firm.
The doctor's clinic.
He died in a ditch.
Like, that is my assumption that he died in a ditch overdosing on something horrible.
Well, if the world is in any way just, in which it's not, he would have died in a ditch.
So let's start part two.
Now, as I mentioned in the first episode, John Ronald Brown didn't only have sad stories in terms of his patients.
He had some happy customers.
One of them was Patrice Baxter.
She was a longtime client, and she calls him one of the best surgeons in the United States, even though by the time she met him, he was no longer legally allowed to practice surgery in the United States.
Still, Dr. Brown illegally gave Patrice a tummy tuck, a facelift, and breast implants.
She was so happy with the results that she had him cut into her granddaughter's ears.
Quote, they stuck out.
The kids on her track team called her Dumbo.
Why don't you just fly?
He did her nose, too.
Patrice claims the surgery went well enough that her granddaughter went on to work as a model.
So she clearly admired the man.
But even Dr. Brown's number one fan acknowledged that he had some faults.
She's also not a good person if she's getting the ears of her fucking granddaughter cut.
We haven't even gotten into what a bad person she is.
Oh, okay, great.
Well, I sense that right away.
She said he was brilliant, but he had no common sense.
He would walk through plate glass doors.
He couldn't balance his checkbook.
I've walked through a screen door before.
That is embarrassing and shameful.
Now, she's just quietly whispering me too, and it's very cute.
Tusk-Tusk.
Tut-tut.
Tusk-tusk.
Who says that?
No one.
She acknowledged that his bedside manner was not exactly great.
Sometimes he would grab a magazine mid-conversation and start reading.
He mumbled frequently, and he never held his patients' hands.
Still, Patrice insists he was more of a hero than a villain.
He only charged $2,500 for a sex change, and half the time they didn't even pay.
Now, before you take Pat Baxter's commentary too seriously, you should know that she wasn't just a satisfied customer.
She was also a surgical entrepreneur, which is one of the most terrifying phrases I've ever heard.
Oh, wow.
She lived in San Diego and ran a shady-ass clinic in Mexico.
She and John Brown became business partners and worked together for years.
She urged John to expand his repertoire beyond basic plastic surgery and gender reassignment.
There was, she told him, a vast untapped market in men who wanted bigger dicks.
Oh, man.
I'm kind of excited about where this is going.
Oh, yeah, yeah, I know.
This is going in a fun direction.
And it's one of those things we've just been talking about the most vulnerable people in the world getting screwed over by this guy.
I know it's too big.
There's really no less bad about this.
Yeah.
I mean, I'm just kidding.
I'm just kidding.
The societal exists.
Yeah, okay.
Yeah.
So Dr. Brown got into the penis extension business.
In 1986, Penthouse Forum sent a writer to Tijuana to investigate Brown's practice.
Now, the good not a doctor had started claiming in advertisements that he could add one to two inches to a dick by cutting the suspensor ligament that held the penis root to the pubic bone, which I wrote as public bone, which is not a thing, but I found funny.
The article titled The Incredible Dick Doctor portrayed Dr. Brown actively as a horrible driver who frequently backed into other cars.
It pointed out that his pants fell down once in the OR at one point.
Oh my god, that's like a cartoon.
That's so tight.
That's amazing.
Imagine right before a doctor starts cutting into you, his pants fall down.
You're like, okay, I have to cancel the surgery.
Yeah.
If you know I'm going to step on a banana peel next, I am fucking telling everyone.
An anvil just falls on his head.
That's ridiculous, dude.
At one point in the article, he accidentally cut a patient's penile shaft, sending blood spurting all over the room.
His quoted response to this fuck-up was, I made a boo-boo.
Oh, I was going to guess it was oops, but this is worse.
Yeah, that's definitely worse than oops.
So someone from Inside Edition must have been reading Penthouse for the articles because three years later, they sent a team to investigate Dr. Brown.
The resulting documentary, The Worst Doctor in America, was filmed with Brown's oblivious consent.
At one point, it showed him performing scalp surgery on a trans woman who was supposed to be sedated.
But the sedation didn't take, and the patient screamed and cried while the team recorded.
Brown called this nothing unusual.
There's a special segment of one interview that I think is worth me reading in full.
Inside Edition, this is them narrating.
But to Brown, failure is no reason to proceed with caution, and he continues to experiment on humans whenever he develops a new procedure.
And this is Brown talking.
Back in the developmental stage, I remember several times asking myself, is it really right for me to be doing what amounts to experiments on some of these people?
After thinking it all through, these people knew what I was doing.
They knew it wasn't a proven experiment.
They were all willing.
So that's true.
He's like, I thought about whether I have any moral responsibility, and I decided no.
No, I don't know.
Am I a soulless ghoul?
Nah.
So Cherry, the young woman whose sister got a sex change with Dr. Brown, definitely considered him to be a dangerous kook, but acknowledged he gives you a vagina at a fair price.
Competent doctors charge $12,000 to $20,000 for a vagina at the time.
Brown's fees were reasonable enough that hundreds of women chose to gamble on him, in spite of the fact that his new nickname, Butcher Brown, was by far the worst yet.
Not as good as Tabletop Brown.
Not as good as Tabletop Brown.
Now, during my research, I came across a tremendous resource called the Digital Transgender Archive.
This wonderful site includes pictures, articles, and scans of entire issues of various zines and newsletters distributed by the trans community going back like decades.
And I came across one from 1989 called 20 Minutes.
And a few pages in it featured a cartoon drawn by someone named Aradia.
And Sophie, you want to show her the political cartoon of Dr. Brown?
Yeah.
It's a little small, so hold on.
Creep on it.
Yeah, that chucks out.
Yeah, it's him.
That's pretty much just a portrait.
Yeah.
He's dressed as like Jason from the Friday The 13th movies, with the hockey mask covered in blood and a chainsaw above a patient on a, And it says he is back.
Yeah, um now.
That cartoon was followed by a furious article about Dr. Brown, titled Mac The Knife, and I'm going to quote from it now.
A patient, no more like a victim of the nefarious Dr. Brown, presented herself with the aid of a companion, at the emergency room of San Francisco General Hospital today, November 4th 1984, for life-saving medical assistance.
Just a week earlier in Mexico, she had the misfortune to fall into the not-so-tender clutches of Dr. Brown.
By the time she arrived at SF General, she'd lost more than four pints of blood and was well down the road to being another not so fortunate statistic of the infamous meat cutter.
From information available, she is but one of ten recent victims of Brown's.
For those of you contemplating surgery, don't go to Mexico for it and, above all, don't let dr. Brown do it.
Admittedly, his price of three thousand dollars is attractive, but the pain, anguish and post-surgical complications are not worth the trivial amount of money saved.
So 20 Minutes had written warnings about Dr. Brown before, and he'd actually had someone from his office respond to them.
Since his potential clients read this magazine and since he knew no one from the AMA or law enforcement was reading trans community newsletters, he felt secure in just lying shamefully to these people to try to convince more of them to let him commit surgery on their groins.
And here's his representative's response.
Many of you have heard about dr. John Ronald Brown MD, some of it positive, some negative.
This letter is intended to set the record straight and to inform those interested in his work.
It goes on to recount dr. Brown's educational history, all the different hospitals he worked at, notably leaving out his repeated failures to actually pass his surgical exams.
Then it gives this justification for the fact that his clinic had to be in Mexico rather than the United States.
Due to the temporary revocation of his license to practice in California, his clinic has been moved to Playus, Mexico.
He is currently preparing for reinstatement of his California license but states that even when he is eventually vindicated, his practice will probably remain in Mexico for various reasons, especially the reduced problems of doing transsexual surgery.
The reduced problems meaning, like the reduced laws governing what you can do to people you're performing surgery on.
Now, in that letter, Dr. Brown's representative also brags about a revolutionary new technique he developed, taking bowel tissue to make the new vaginal canal for his patients, thus ensuring them a self-lubricating vagina.
20 Minutes notes that as a result of his failure to actually do this competently, more than 70 of his patients had received permanent colostomies, and I found a quote from writer Dallas Deny on all this.
In the 1990s, Brown came to favor invasive surgery in which he would graft the neo vagina to a section of resected colon.
His results had never been good.
The groin area of a Brown patient typically looked as if the penis had been split lengthwise and sutured to the groin with a simple hole between the split halves.
Patients often wound up with colostomies.
Several of Brown's girls danced topless, using scarves to conceal the bags attached to their sides.
The Walmart Greeter Scam00:07:35
But when he started going into the peritoneum, things got really scary.
Patients would return home smelling of rotting flesh.
Often they would return to Brown going again and again for revision, each time paying large sums of money.
Many eventually wound up in emergency rooms and I dare say some ended up dead.
Now it's hard to imagine just how fucking horrifying Receiving surgery under these conditions would have been.
And there are very few first-person accounts from Dr. Brown's victims, and none that go into a tremendous amount of detail.
I did find the experiences of one trans woman, Canary Khan, who received her gender assignment surgery in Tijuana.
And she went with a better doctor than Dr. Brown, one of the better doctors in the area.
So as I read this story, I want you to remember that what Brown's patients would have woken up with was actually worse than this.
So this is like a better case scenario than Dr. Brown, and it's still pretty fucking horrifying.
Somebody, please, please come here.
I cried and reached for the button, keeping it in my hand.
A peculiar wet feeling was gathering around my legs.
At first, I was too frightened to peer under the sheets, but as the chill increased, I reached for the chain over my head.
With the light on, I lifted the sheets.
Then I panicked.
The sheet under me was a pool of blood, and more was flowing from between my legs.
I pressed the button again and again and began to scream for help.
Thinking about detaching myself from the bed, I propped myself on one arm, but then fainted and fell back.
When I woke up, some 10 or 15 minutes later, the blood had made its way down one side of the bed to the floor.
I was weaker now, and the pain didn't matter.
I was bleeding to death.
Sobbing, I began to pray aloud.
Then I screamed again and again until my voice faded into hoarseness.
Grabbing a book from the table, I tried to throw it through the window, but it fell from my fingers into the pool of blood.
The chills had changed to small convulsions as I tried to calm myself.
Bending my head, I looked once more at the side of the bed, half covered with my life's liquid.
It looked pretty somehow, red on white.
I couldn't help thinking how ironic it was that I had worked and saved all this time to pay for my own death.
I would be my own executioner.
And again, this is someone waking up in a clinic.
So this is someone getting surgery from one of these doctors who actually does provide aftercare.
Dr. Brown's patients typically woke up in hotels or cars undergoing the same thing.
Not attached to a bed, not in, like, obviously, Canary eventually did get medical help.
It just took a while for, I think, the clinic to realize what was going on.
But what a nightmare.
You're bleeding to death and you know it, and you paid for your surgery, and it's just like so brutal.
Yeah, yeah.
And in the case of Dr. Brown's patients, this is happening in like the back of a Ford Fiesta.
It's hard to imagine.
So, despite the fact that he'd moved his practice to Mexico, presumably because he couldn't legally perform surgery in the U.S., Dr. Brown still repeatedly performed surgeries in the United States throughout the 1980s.
In 1984, he was arrested for giving a presentation where he offered penile lengthening surgery to a group of men in San Diego.
He only received a slap on the wrist for this and continued traveling around California to perform minor surgery.
Cherry recalled: He'd shoot silicone anywhere you wanted it.
For $200, he'd do breast surgery.
For $500, he'd do cheeks, breasts, and hips.
After injections, you had to lie flat on your back for three days so the silicone wouldn't go anywhere.
He plugged the holes with crazy glue.
He's a big fan of crazy glue.
Yeah, I was saying these are like the people that have been busted for doing this stuff who don't know.
In Los Angeles County, one patient filed a complaint against Dr. Brown for a breast enlargement procedure he had performed on her.
It turns out that, rather than performing any kind of surgery, he just shoved a needle into her breasts and injected them with raw silicone.
He then closed the holes with crazy glue.
Another patient, a genetic female named Mona, complained that after Dr. Brown gave her a facelift, face peel, eye job, and breast implants, he did not do a good job.
During the facelift, he severed a nerve in her face, leaving her with a permanent, crooked smile.
Her implants failed, which caused the breasts to rot and leak a fluid her boyfriend described as smelling like cat piss.
Then they fell off.
To his credit, Dr. Brown performed some aftercare for Mona.
She recalled that at some one point he showed up to inject her with painkillers, wearing only one shoe.
Oh my God.
Wow, what a good sign to not let someone doctor on you when they're wearing just one shoe.
Like you're going to inject someone with medicine and you couldn't get your shoe game on point for the day.
Let's just go ahead and like extend it to the whole outfit.
If you're missing anything from the outfit, you're on a timeout for doctoring for the moment.
It's like a guy trying to shoot you up with insulin while wearing board shorts.
Like, no, no.
I'm going to go ahead and pass.
Yeah.
Now, despite all this horror, it was the Inside Edition episode that finally drew some serious legal attention to John Ronald Brown.
The FBI went after him, confiscated his money, shut down his clinic, and charged him with practicing medicine without a license.
He had previously been convicted for prescribing narcotics with a revoked license and practicing under a false name.
With all of that on his record, you might expect him to serve some serious time.
That seems like a significant crime, right?
Mm-hmm.
He was sentenced to three years in prison and served 19 months.
Oh my gosh.
Yeah, 19 months.
So for a brief period of time, about a year, he worked as a cab driver on Coronado Island, which is possibly the only job he ever did that he might have been qualified for.
No, he wasn't.
Remember, they said that he got it constantly rearrended people and got into car accidents.
He actually went into the only other profession he could kill people.
Like, that's not okay.
That's not okay.
You are absolutely right.
Like, he picked the one other job that he was dangerously bad at.
I mean, we really could have gotten him to be like a Walmart greeter.
Just something where you were just harmless.
You know?
I feel like as a Walmart greeter, he would have gotten people killed.
Just directing them to the wrong aisles.
Just throwing peanuts at kids with allergies.
So, Paul Siatti interviewed John about this period in his life, and Dr. Brown insisted that the time in jail didn't deter him from his chosen calling in the least.
He said that he decided long ago to rebel against what he saw as the unjust medical establishment.
I didn't like some of the things that organized doctors were doing, so I rebelled.
Later, I didn't like what the government was doing in support of the medical organizations, so I rebelled.
I chose to ignore the laws.
He's a hero.
He's a hero, Sophia.
Yeah.
After a year, John was able to put together enough money to reopen his surgical practice in Tijuana.
For a couple of years, he continued chopping into whoever would pay, primarily servicing the trans community, if you can call what he did a service.
By 1996, he had carried out an estimated 600 gender reassignment surgeries.
That is the year he met Greg Firth.
Now, Greg was a psychologist.
It's never good when you meet a Greg.
No, this is a Greg with two G's.
Three, actually.
Uh-oh.
Uh-oh.
This is even worse than the regular Greg.
There are five letters in Greg's first name, and three of them are G.
It's a disaster.
This is going to not end well.
It does not.
Now, Greg was a psychoanalyst from New York City.
In addition to being a well-respected mental health expert, Firth also suffered from a rare condition known as apotymnophilia.
Have you ever heard of epitymnophilia?
No.
The person who coined that term in 1977, John Money, described it as an extreme sexual fetish wherein victims desire to sever their own limbs so they can have better orgasms.
What?
Yeah.
Greg's Psychoanalytic Disaster00:04:10
Wait, why do the limbs get in the way of a good orgasm?
That's a great question.
And we're going to talk about apotymnophilia a little bit more in a minute.
But you know what won't sever your limbs to give you better orgasms, Sophia?
The following goods and services?
That's exactly right.
That is the guarantee we make: none of these products will sever your limbs in the pursuit of an orgasm.
There's two golden rules that any man should live by.
Rule one, never mess with a country girl.
You play stupid games, you get stupid prizes.
And rule two, never mess with her friends either.
We always say that, trust your girlfriends.
I'm Anna Sinfield, and in this new season of The Girlfriends.
Oh my God, this is the same man.
A group of women discover they've all dated the same prolific con artist.
I felt like I got hit by a truck.
I thought, how could this happen to me?
The cops didn't seem to care.
So they take matters into their own hands.
I said, oh, hell no.
I vowed I will be his last target.
He's going to get what he deserves.
Listen to the girlfriends.
Trust me, babe.
On the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
Hey, I'm Nora Jones, and I love playing music with people so much that my podcast called Playing Along is back.
I sit down with musicians from all musical styles to play songs together in an intimate setting.
Every episode's a little different, but it all involves music and conversation with some of my favorite musicians.
Over the past two seasons, I've had special guests like Dave Grohl, Leve, Mavis Staples, Remy Wolf, Jeff Tweedy, really too many to name.
And this season, I've sat down with Alessia Cara, Sarah McLaughlin, John Legend, and more.
Check out my new episode with Josh Grobin.
You related to the Phantom at that point.
Yeah, I was definitely the Phantom in that.
That's so funny.
Shariach stay with me each night, each morning.
Say you love me.
You know I.
So come hang out with us in the studio and listen to Playing Along on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
What's up, everyone?
I'm Ago Modem.
My next guest, you know, from Step Brothers, Anchorman, Saturday Night Live, and the Big Money Players Network, it's Will Farrell.
My dad gave me the best advice ever.
I went and had lunch with him one day, and I was like, and dad, I think I want to really give this a shot.
I don't know what that means, but I just know the groundlings.
I'm working my way up through it.
I know it's a place they come.
Look for up and coming talent.
He said, if it was based solely on talent, I wouldn't worry about you, which is really sweet.
Yeah.
He goes, but there's so much luck involved.
And he's like, just give it a shot.
He goes, but if you ever reach a point where you're banging your head against the wall and it doesn't feel fun anymore, it's okay to quit.
If you saw it written down, it would not be an inspiration.
It would not be on a calendar of, you know, the cat just hang in there.
Yeah, it would not be.
Right, it wouldn't be that.
There's a lot of luck.
Listen to Thanks Dad on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
In 2023, former bachelor star Clayton Eckard found himself at the center of a paternity scandal.
The family court hearings that followed revealed glaring inconsistencies in her story.
This began a years-long court battle to prove the truth.
You doctored this particular test twice, Miss Owens, correct?
I doctored the test once.
It took an army of internet detectives to crack the case.
I wanted people to be able to see what their tax dollars were being used for.
Sunlight's the greatest disinfectant.
They would uncover a disturbing pattern.
Two more men who'd been through the same thing.
Greg Goespie and Michael Maracini.
Clayton Eckard Paternity Scandal00:14:48
My mind was blown.
I'm Stephanie Young.
This is Love Trap.
Laura, Scottsdale Police.
As the season continues, Laura Owens finally faces consequences.
Ladies and gentlemen, breaking news out of Maricopa County as Laura Owens has been indicted on fraud charges.
This isn't over until justice is served in Arizona.
Listen to Love Trapped podcast on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
We're back and we're talking about how there should be a legal limit on the number of Gs allowed in a name.
And I'm going to put it at, I'm going to say zero.
All right.
That just probably allows me to.
All the Gregs are just Rays now.
Sorry to the fucking audience.
Well, they could be Rays.
That's what I'm saying.
They're just Rays now.
Yeah, exactly.
That's true.
There's a good name.
There's Reh.
Yeah, just Re.
Deal with it.
So, apotymnophilia is usually described as an extreme sexual fetish about, you know, wanting to sever your own limb for a better orgasm.
That is not how many sufferers of apotymnophilia describe it.
Okay, what are they saying?
Yeah, Firth and a lot of other people with it argue that the sexual angle is either minor or non-existent in a lot of cases.
Greg doesn't even like the term apotymnophilia.
He prefers body identity transfer.
One sufferer I found interviewed in Salon described the way her condition made her feel in this way.
Quote, for me, sexuality is being comfortable with my body.
Inside, I feel my legs don't belong to me and they shouldn't be there.
There's just an overwhelming sense of despair sometimes.
I don't want to die, but there are times I don't want to keep living in a body that doesn't feel like mine.
Now, Firth seems to agree with this more or less, insisting in interviews, it's not about sex.
It's not about getting off with someone.
This is about becoming able-bodied.
So these people suffering this will claim that, like, it's not, I don't want to get it removed because I think it's hot to have a, to lose a limb.
I feel like this isn't my body part, and I can't be comfortable in my own body while I have this arm or leg because it's an alien limb.
But they're not capable of realizing that that's like a disorder, or are they?
I think they are, but I think a lot of them would say that the treatment for the disorder is to have the fucking leg removed or whatever.
I'm not going to come down on this one way or the other.
This is just what they will say.
That's so crazy.
Yeah.
I mean, I think I've heard of this before, but I'm like.
Yeah.
And there are some people who definitely like there are amputation fetishists and stuff too.
So it's complicated.
I think some people will argue that folks like Greg just have an amputation fetish.
And I think some sufferers of apotymnophilia will say it's not a fetish.
It's like a body dysmorphia sort of thing where this is not my limb and I need it removed.
And there are people who will be like, you're just saying that so you can try to get surgery because you think it's hot.
Like, I really don't know.
I'm not a fucking expert on anything.
Well, I mean, it doesn't really matter though, but it makes me think of like anorexia or something.
It's like, you know, you're looking in the mirror and you see something that it's not, it's not right.
So you're like, no, I have to keep getting thinner.
I'm not thin.
It doesn't look right.
Like, I can't, I'm not going to feel happy until I'm this thin.
But it's ultimately something that, you know, you recover from if you work on it, but I guess not.
I don't know if does it work like that for this?
I have no idea.
I'll tell a little bit more and we'll see how we feel.
Definitely, Greg actually does seem to have a bit of a recovery.
But yeah, we're building to that.
So for years, Greg Firth had sought to have his legs surgically amputated.
And there are some reputable surgeons who will do this for people with apotymnophilia.
Unfortunately, the one Firth tried to contract had to back out of doing the surgery after the public hospital he worked at rescinded his privileges due to bad publicity.
There were actually protests in Scotland against voluntary amputation being legal at all.
And when this all blew up in the news, Firth's doctor, the guy he tried to go with, complained that banning safe voluntary amputations in hospitals would only make the problem worse for his patients.
Quote, they may take the law into their own hands.
They may lie on a railway line and get run over by a train.
They may use shotguns and shoot their limbs off.
They really are quite a desperate bunch.
And the doctor's kind of proven right in some of this, that like, you know, when someone has this kind of, and it's tough because like a lot of doctors will say it's immoral fundamentally to do this because your job isn't to remove healthy tissue.
Yeah.
I think other doctors might claim that like these people clearly aren't healthy, so you are helping them by doing this.
It's a very complicated realm of medical ethics.
Or at least it seems complicated to me.
Let us know if you're a doctor, if you would remove someone's leg voluntarily.
Hit us up.
Now, once his plans to remove his leg legitimately with a real doctor in a real hospital fell through, Greg Firth started searching around for other places where he might have his alien leg removed.
In 1996, he read a story about an underground surgeon based out of San Diego.
Despite the man's nickname, Butcher Brown.
He's like, that sounds good to me.
That sounds good to me.
That's what I'm looking for.
Yeah, Greg decided this guy was a good person to reach out to.
And Dr. Brown was, of course, only too happy to help.
Stacey Running, the DA who prosecuted Brown for what later happened, said, he saw it as all the same.
You cut off a boob, you cut off a penis, you cut off a leg.
Sounds like a quality doctor.
No difference between any of those things.
Now, Firth negotiated with Dr. Brown, and eventually they managed to settle on a price.
In 1997, he flew down to Mexico to finally lose his alien leg.
But when he showed up at Brown's makeshift OR, the Mexican doctor Brown had hired to assist him realized that he was about to help sever a healthy leg.
Firth recalled he kept saying, this isn't right.
You don't want this.
Eventually, the Mexican doctor left the building and Brown was forced to cancel the surgery, since it turns out amputating is a little bit of a two-man job.
So Brown agrees.
Firth flies down there and like Brown gets an actual doctor in Mexico to help and that guy is like, he tricks him basically.
And once he realizes what's happening, he's like, I'm not going to do this.
This is fucked up.
So good on that, doctor.
A year later, in 1998, John Brown called Firth with what he called good news and bad news.
The good news was he'd found another doctor.
The bad news was it would now cost $10,000.
By this point, Firth was less convinced that he even wanted to commit to the surgery, but he decided to give it a shot.
His good friend and fellow alien leg sufferer, Philip Bondi, scolded him for considering bailing on the opportunity, telling him, you'll regret this the rest of your life.
How ironic, because you can't undo amputating your leg, but you can always undo having your leg.
These people are not super rationally thinking about this problem.
I don't feel.
Not to apotymnophilia shame them, but I don't think you should do this.
And I think, given what happens next, I'm right.
So Firth traveled to San Diego and took a taxi to the clinic in Tijuana.
By the time he arrived, he concluded that his compulsion to have his leg removed was gone.
He told Brown, absolutely not.
And this would kind of tend to suggest that, like, actually, yeah, you shouldn't have your legs removed if this is the kind of thing that's seeing how horrible the OR can like remove you of your compulsion.
Anyway, here's how LA Weekly sums up what happened next.
Thinking perhaps that Firth was merely nervous, Brown offered him a sedative.
But Firth testified he didn't want to be sedated.
He wanted out of there.
Before leaving, however, he suggested that what he thought would be a win-win solution for everyone.
Even though he no longer wanted the operation himself, he knew someone else who did.
Maybe we could switch it around, said Firth.
Philip could take my place.
And it turned out that Philip Bundy's apotymnophilia was much stronger than Firth's.
He flew right to Mexico.
And on May 9th, 1998, Dr. John Brown severed his leg.
Normally, surgery like this would be an inpatient procedure.
You would not want to.
But if you know John Ronald Brown, you know he doesn't do inpatient procedures.
No.
Instead, he drove the freshly amputated Philip Bondi 15 miles into the desert, where Dr. Brown tossed his leg out of the car to be eaten by coyotes.
Oh, my God.
Why was that his first idea?
How is coyotes the first idea you have for getting rid of a leg?
Because he is not even my number five.
He's not fucking Brown.
That is crazy.
Nurse Coyotes will be assisting in the procedure.
Oh, my God, dude.
That is crazy.
They're medical coyotes.
Oh, my God.
Those are probably the only people that worked in his clinic that actually were there.
Yes, the most competent medical professionals involved.
You know what?
The coyotes did their job properly.
They were the most competent.
The only ones there who did, yeah.
Competent people.
Yeah.
Now, after throwing his patient's leg out of a car window, John Brown drove his patient into California to a holiday inn, gave him a 10-minute lesson in walking with crutches, and drove off into the sunset to count his money.
Oh, my God.
Oh, God.
It's a nightmare.
Two days later, Greg Firth went to check up on his friend in the holiday inn and found him dead.
An autopsy revealed that gas gangrene from an improperly sterilized leg stump had been the culprit.
Phillip's death would have been an agonizing, almost unimaginably painful affair.
This was the case that finally made the law treat Dr. John Brown as the menace to society that he so clearly was.
It's telling that he had to finally kill a straight man before this happened.
I'm not just saying that to score woke points.
After the police started digging into Dr. Brown, the detective in charge of the case made a point of looking into some of Brown's other patients.
And I'm going to quote Paul Siatti with the LA Weekly again.
When DA investigator Basinski, a tall, outgoing former cop with a shaved head and a big gray mustache, began calling on the people on Brown's patient lists, a lot of them just hung up on him.
Some were hookers, he said.
Some thought they were in trouble.
Some just didn't like the police.
I called one woman and an older woman answered.
Why do you want my son? She said.
He committed suicide two weeks ago.
As Basinski later learned, Christina, formerly known as Eddie, had mortgaged her house to pay for a total of 10 surgeries by Brown.
But according to legal documents filed by Running, the skin grafts that Brown used to line Christina's vaginal walls were so thin that they tore during intercourse.
When Brown removed Christina's lower ribs to give her a narrower and more feminine waist, she subsequently developed an abscess as big as a basketball.
Christina's nose job turned out so poorly that she ended up with different sized nostrils, one of which turned up like that of a pig.
Christina complained to Brown that he'd made her vaginal entrance too small, but when Brown enlarged it, Christina felt he'd ruined her.
Today, Brown says he feels badly that he didn't better explain the procedure to Christina.
But when he called to tell her he was refunding $500, her mother told him that her son had just hanged himself in the garage.
According to Running, Brown took the news quite calmly, noting merely that transsexuals had a high suicide rate.
And I should note, I'm reading a quote from an article there.
Also removing the ribs, like, yeah, that's not okay.
I mean, and it's kind of buried a little bit, but the most fucked up thing there is that when Dr. Brown learns that one of his patients has killed herself.
Oh, doesn't care.
Just like, that's what he did.
He's just like, oh, a lot of my patients kill themselves, actually.
It happens constantly.
Yeah.
It's amazingly terrible.
And it goes to show that like John is usually shown as like having killed one person, Bundy, but he killed a lot of people.
Yeah.
They just, the law didn't care about them.
And oftentimes, as that story shows, their parents didn't either.
And also, just like the fear of whoever, the fear of whoever it is calling and checking on you means like you're not really getting the full information anyway.
Yeah, yeah, because like a lot of these patients were sex workers and they're not going to talk to a fucking cop.
Yeah.
Like even if the cop legitimately cares about what's being done to them, like it doesn't matter.
So Dr. Brown was arrested and police searched his San Yesidro apartment.
They found bloody shoes and pillows, used needles, vials of silicone, dozens of empty tubes of crazy glue, bloody towels soaking in bleach, and dozens of returned advertising brochures for his horrible clinic.
One of the brochures read as follows.
Oh boy, this is going to be unpleasant to read.
The prettiest pussies are John Brown pussies.
The happiest patients are John Brown patients because, number one, each has a sensitive clit.
Number two, all 99% get orgasms.
Number three, careful skin draping gives a natural appearance.
Number four, men love the pretty pussies and the sexy response.
Yeah.
Well, all of that is obviously not true.
Huge lies.
Yes, horrible, horrible lies.
Now, also found in Dr. Brown's apartment were videotapes of the bad doctor's operations.
These videos were given names that reflect the level of professionalism I think we've all come to expect from John Brown.
Oh, God.
I'm trying not to laugh, but it's like one was titled, Jack Has a New Piss Hole Behind His Balls.
Again, this is how the doctor labeled his surgery tapes.
Yeah.
While bizarre, that video was not what hit prosecutors the hardest.
In Brown's stash, they came across a recorded sex change surgery which showed Brown using a scalpel so dull he had to use it like a saw, jerking it back and forth into the patient's flesh.
Wow.
Yeah.
As the media's chief expert on Tabletop Brown, Paul Ciolo spent a lot of time talking to the detectives and prosecutors trying to put Brown away.
They showed him some of these videos, and here's how he describes one.
In the video's opening shot, which is reminiscent of that famous scene from the crying game, an attractive Asian girl and the soon-to-be Las Vegas stripper is shown standing naked from the waist up, quietly chatting with Brown, who is off-camera.
She has nicely formed breasts and abundant black hair that cascades down her shoulders.
Then slowly the camera moves down her body and suddenly you realize she has a penis.
When the actual surgery starts, I find it so unsettling that I have to turn off the tape.
All the men had the same reaction, says running.
The judge asked, do I have to watch this video?
Brown's Dull Scalpel Videos00:03:58
I said, well, yes, you do.
You're the judge.
Yeah.
Jeez.
Yeah, I, you know, part of me is like, I kind of like running here because he's like, yeah, you have to watch this.
You have to know what this guy did to properly sentence him.
And like, just because it's gross, you don't get to not look at it.
You would look at photos of a murder and that's what this guy did.
So we're going to watch these fucking videos.
Like, I respect that a lot.
You know what I also respect, Sophia?
Goods and services?
Yeah, the products and services that support this show.
There's two golden rules that any man should live by.
Rule one, never mess with a country girl.
You play stupid games, you get stupid prizes.
And rule two, never mess with her friends either.
We always say, trust your girlfriends.
I'm Anna Sinfield, and in this new season of The Girlfriends...
Oh my god, this is the same man.
A group of women discover they've all dated the same prolific con artist.
I felt like I got hit by a truck.
I thought, how could this happen to me?
The cops didn't seem to care.
So they take matters into their own hands.
I said, oh hell no.
I vowed I will be his last target.
He's going to get what he deserves.
Listen to the girlfriends.
Trust me, babe.
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Hey, I'm Nora Jones, and I love playing music with people so much that my podcast called Playing Along is back.
I sit down with musicians from all musical styles to play songs together in an intimate setting.
Every episode's a little different, but it all involves music and conversation with some of my favorite musicians.
Over the past two seasons, I've had special guests like Dave Grohl, Leve, Mavis Staples, Remy Wolf, Jeff Tweedy, really too many to name.
And this season, I've sat down with Alessia Cara, Sarah McLaughlin, John Legend, and more.
Check out my new episode with Josh Grobin.
You related to the Phantom at that point.
Yeah, I was definitely the Phantom in that.
That's so funny.
Shari, stay with me each night, each morning.
Say you love me.
You know I.
So come hang out with us in the studio and listen to Playing Along on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
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I'm Ago Modem.
My next guest, you know, from Step Brothers, Anchorman, Saturday Night Live, and the Big Money Players Network.
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My dad gave me the best advice ever.
I went and had lunch with him one day, and I was like, and dad, I think I want to really give this a shot.
I don't know what that means, but I just know the groundlings.
I'm working my way up through and I know it's a place that come look for up and coming talent.
He said, if it was based solely on talent, I wouldn't worry about you, which is really sweet.
Yeah.
He goes, but there's so much luck involved.
And he's like, just give it a shot.
He goes, but if you ever reach a point where you're banging your head against the wall and it doesn't feel fun anymore, it's okay to quit.
If you saw it written down, it would not be an inspiration.
It would not be on a calendar of, you know, the cat just hang in there.
Yeah, it would not be.
Right, it wouldn't be that.
There's a lot of luck.
Listen to Thanks Dad on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
In 2023, former bachelor star Clayton Eckard found himself at the center of a paternity scandal.
No Easy Answers Here00:07:53
The family court hearings that followed revealed glaring inconsistencies in her story.
This began a years-long court battle to prove the truth.
You doctored this particular test twice, Miss Owens, correct?
I doctored the test once.
It took an army of internet detectives to crack the case.
I wanted people to be able to see what their tax dollars were being used for.
Sunlight's the greatest disinfectant.
They would uncover a disturbing pattern.
Two more men who'd been through the same thing.
Greg Gillespie and Michael Marancine.
My mind was blown.
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This is Love Trap.
Laura, Scottsdale Police.
As the season continues, Laura Owens finally faces consequences.
Ladies and gentlemen, breaking news at Americopa County as Laura Owens has been indicted on fraud charges.
This isn't over until justice is served in Arizona.
Listen to the Love Trapped podcast on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
We're back.
So, apparently, Brown had intended that tape and a lot of the other tapes to be like advertising and training videos.
The second scene in that tape we just described shows the doctor sitting in a chair wearing a white coat and explaining the upcoming operation to the camera.
He has a microphone and his hand is kind of shaking, says running.
You see him reach up and grab his hand, and this is his dominant hand, the one he operates with.
He holds up crude drawings ripped out of a spiral notebook.
He says, This is the corpa, the corpa.
He stumped on the word.
He finally says it: the capora cavernosa, the spongy tissue on the underside of the penis.
He goes off in this vein.
You can see him waving the cameraman off when he loses a thought.
The tape was so crude, you could hear dogs barking during the surgery and music playing.
The scrottle skin was lying on a board, it had push pins in it.
It was so dirty and dried out, it looked like it had been run over by a tire.
Yeah, the prosecution's chief witness was a young trans woman named Camille.
She was one of the only victims of Dr. Brown who was willing to testify in court.
Prior to her surgery, Camille had been an insurance underwriter.
She claims Dr. Brown botched her surgery so badly that she was basically unemployable now.
Her surgery went down in November 1997.
Quote: He gave me an epidural.
I woke up 10 minutes prior to the end of the operation.
We started talking.
Brown said, We're almost done.
I wasn't scared.
I was happy as hell.
I was finally getting what I wanted.
When you are climbing Mount Everest, you don't worry about a little frostbite on the top.
But after the surgery was complete, Camille started having difficulty with her recovery.
She developed a rectovaginal fistula, which caused her feces to flow into her new vagina.
This was the result of Dr. Brown experimenting with his technique of using bowel tissue to create vaginal walls.
She said, Quote, My bladder was blocked, my lymph glands swelled up, and my skin turned yellow.
Black stuff was pouring out of my lungs.
All my systems were shutting down.
All I would have to do is take one breath and let go.
The fact that Camille survived is almost miraculous, and her testimony helped to finally put Butcher Brown away for good.
He was convicted by unanimous decision and sentenced to 15 years in prison.
He expressed no remorse or even real understanding that he had committed horrific acts that had permanently disfigured and, in many cases, ruined the lives of human beings.
Paul Siolo talked to Brown several times in prison via collect call.
In their last conversations, Brown expressed that his entire career was part of God's plan.
He had called upon John Ronald Brown to help the transgender community.
And next, Brown believed God had called upon him to invent a hyperthermia chamber that would cure cancer, AIDS, and genital herpes.
Brown described this as these things is not like the other.
No.
That seems telling.
That seems like he had herpes.
He's like, the other two are for humanity.
Last one's for Papa.
This one's for Dr. Brown.
That's what it sounds like.
Is you don't go cancer, AIDS, herpes in the same way.
Three equally serious dreams.
Seriously, dude, that's amazing.
Yeah.
Now, Brown described this as using a chamber with an IV drip that would spray a patient with hot water to cause a healing fever.
And in addition to this, Dr. Brown claimed to have developed a prototyped asphalt removal machine, an attachment for trailers that would make them more aerodynamic, and a book that would provide a full explanation for the movement of tectonic plates.
He had a lot of book ideas, including an autobiography about his medical career and a book that would prove the existence of God.
Oh, God.
Tragically, John Ronald Brown was taken away from us too soon to finish any of these projects.
In 2010, just shy of his 88th birthday, he died painfully of pneumonia in prison.
Oh, well, that's a silver lining.
Painfully.
Yeah, it's a story.
Yeah, painfully.
It was a horrible death.
Yeah.
He did not get what he deserved.
No.
He absolutely did not.
And on that note.
Yeah.
Well, Sophia.
What would you do if you had a leg that you hated and desperately wanted removed because you felt like it was an alien limb?
Like, what do you do?
I think you go to therapy and I don't know, try to work on it.
I don't really know.
See, I was going to go with shotgun, but yeah, therapy's probably better.
I mean, I guess I feel like depression in no way is the same as this, but it's not like depression makes sense.
You know, it makes you want to kill yourself.
And if someone was just like, okay, here's a gun, I'd be like, oh, that's not helping me.
You know, probably just talk me out of wanting to die.
Yeah.
That's all.
Yeah.
That's kind of.
I don't know much about apotymnophilia, but it does sound like a thing.
I don't know.
Like, I'm not sure.
If that one guy changed, then it's possible, right?
It is.
But maybe he wasn't as serious about it.
I don't know.
Like, the doctor's.
I'm sure it's all the spectrum, right?
You can probably be really wanting your leg off and just a little bit wanting it off.
I don't know.
The doctor who, like, the legit doctor who had performed some of those surgeries and then lost his operating privileges, like, there's a, like, he, he didn't make a bad point where he was like, look, some people are going to do this.
And as long as you make sure you're only performing surgery on the ones who are like otherwise going to go blow their own legs off or lay down on a train track, like you're reducing harm.
And there is an argument to be made.
It's not that it's a bad argument.
It's just that you can try to guess who the people are that are going to try it anyways.
And you can be wrong.
And, you know, there's really no good answer.
If you were wrong one way, people are going to kill themselves or maim themselves on their own.
But if they come to you and you do it every time, then there's no chance of them ever psychologically recovering.
So I don't know what the answer is there.
Yeah, I don't either because it's one of those things where clearly, I think if Firth had been allowed to perform or to undergo the surgery, he clearly didn't really want to lose his leg and he probably would have wound up regretting it.
Yeah.
I think, but the other guy, the guy who died, if he'd been able to go to a real doctor in a safe OR with a property, there's a good chance he would have lived.
So it is, it is, there's not like an easy answer to this.
I also don't know anything about the disease.
Like, does it spread?
Like after you get your one leg taken care of, is it possible that you'll be like, oh, well, now this leg's the alien and I need to get this off.
And then you just keep going?
How does it work?
Because you can get addicted to plastic surgery.
You could probably get addicted to this too.
Can't you?
Who knows?
You know, I assume you can.
I do think it's a bit different than that just because I think it's very focused.
Catch Me On This Podcast00:05:34
It tends to be with these people.
Like they're obsessed with this one limb.
But, you know, I'm not an expert on it.
It's certainly a pain, a complicated tale.
Yes, it is.
As is the tale of John Brown.
What are you distracted by?
What are you doing?
The bad John Brown.
I'm trying to, like, there's this screeching noise coming over repeatedly the line, and I'm trying not to be taken aback by it because it's horrible.
Oh, that's my parrot.
I'm so sorry.
I don't think so.
It sounds like somebody is like fucking an old television next to you.
Also, me.
Yeah.
Okay.
Okay.
We can't hear it on our end.
Yeah.
So it just sounds like you're wigging out for no reason.
There is Dr. John Ronald Brown.
It was a fun, one of the interesting things about researching this was just, because I had to read a lot of old articles and documents dealing with the trans community, is like kind of experiencing the use of terminology and what's okay evolve over the course of a couple of decades.
That was really interesting.
And I do recommend the digital transgender archive, which is like a really precious source of, you could kind of see it as an attempt to make sure that like no matter what happens, what happens with Magnus Hirschfeld's library doesn't happen again, that these historical documents of this community taking care of itself and defending itself through the decades when no one else gave a shit about them, that that doesn't get lost.
It's a really precious source, and I found it fascinating.
So I recommend giving that a ready read.
Cool.
Great.
Yep.
Well, Sophia, you got any pluggables you want to drop down in the old P-zone?
What's the P-zone?
That's the plug zone.
That's not what it sounds like.
All right.
My club, my pluggables are.
You can find me at the Sophia on Twitter and Instagram.
That's T-H-E-S-O-F-I-Y-A.
And you can catch me with Miles Gray on our podcast for 20 Day Fiancé weekly.
It's super fun.
It's a game show recap show of 90 Day Fiancé, and it's ridiculous, and we have sound effects.
And you can catch me on my other podcast, Private Parts Unknown, about love and sex around the world.
Well, you can do that.
You can catch me on my other podcast, Worst Year Ever.
You can catch me on this podcast every Tuesday and Thursday, except for the Tuesdays and Thursdays that I don't do this podcast.
And you can find Love in Your Heart.
I hope.
If not, sorry.
That's rough.
That's the episode.
When a group of women discover they've all dated the same prolific con artist, they take matters into their own hands.
I vowed I will be his last target.
He is not going to get away with this.
He's going to get what he deserves.
We always say that: trust your girlfriends.
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You related to the Phantom at that point.
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My next guest, it's Will Farrell.
My dad gave me the best advice ever.
He goes, just give it a shot.
But if you ever reach a point where you're banging your head against the wall and it doesn't feel fun anymore, it's okay to quit.
If you saw it written down, it would not be an inspiration.
It would not be on a calendar of, you know, the cat just hanging in there.
Yeah, it would not be right.
It wouldn't be that.
There's a lot of life.
Listen to Thanksgiving on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
In 2023, bachelor star Clayton Eckard was accused of fathering twins, but the pregnancy appeared to be a hoax.
You doctored this particular test twice, Miss Owens, correct?
I doctored the test once.
It took an army of internet detectives to uncover a disturbing pattern.
Two more men who'd been through the same thing.
Regillespi and Michael Rancini.
My mind was blown.
I'm Stephanie Young.
This is Love Trapped.
Laura, Scottsdale Police.
As the season continues, Laura Owens finally faces consequences.
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