What is the state of the documentary film in the age of manipulative online propaganda? In the hands and eyes of a documentarian like Amy Berg we find a journalistic commitment to the truth combined with the artistry of compelling and intimate story-telling. Along the way, her projects are guided by an obsession with justice. In two cases—that of the West Memphis Three, and more recently the murder trial of Adnen Syed— her film-making played a role in changing the real-world narrative; leading to the release of those wrongfully convicted via cultural bias, moral panic, and conspiracy theories. In other instances Amy's work has embodied investigative journalism to show how real conspiracies hide the awful abuse of innocents, while protecting the powerful. We ask her how she measures her instincts against the evidence, how she gains the trust of people who have been ignored for decades, how she managed to log days of interview time with an abusive ex-priest, and how she keeps her mental health intact amidst all the uncertainty. In This Week in Conspirituality, Matthew covers an example of the co-optation of trauma-informed jargon by women in the land of the Three Percenters. Show NotesPro-Trump brand is fined by FTC for incorrect ‘Made in the USA’ labelsThe Lion: Sean Whalen Is Empowering Thousands to Take Accountability for Their LivesAubrey Marcus's "Code of the Sentient Savage"
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Conspiratuality 125, deliver us from evil with Amy Berg.
Thank you.
What is the state of the documentary film in the age of manipulative online propaganda?
Well, in the hands and eyes of a documentarian like Amy Berg, we find a journalistic commitment to the truth, combined with the artistry of compelling and intimate storytelling.
Along the way, her projects are guided by an obsession with justice.
In two cases, that of the West Memphis Three, And more recently, the murder trial of Adnan Syed.
Her filmmaking played a role in changing the real-world narrative, leading to the release of those wrongfully convicted via cultural bias, moral panic, and conspiracy theories.
In other instances, Amy's work has embodied investigative journalism to show how real conspiracies hide the awful abuse of innocence, while protecting the powerful.
We ask her how she measures her instincts against the evidence, how she gains the trust of people who've been ignored for decades, how she managed to log days of interview time with an abusive ex-priest, and how she keeps her mental health intact amidst all the uncertainty.
In this week in Conspiratuality, Matthew covers an example of the co-option of trauma-informed
jargon by women in the land of the three percenters.
I was able to get a group of powerful women through their breathwork journey today.
We brought in the intention of forgiveness for ourselves.
We were able to invite in their power and strength and release the painful things burdening their hearts.
This group of women went deep and were able to let go of trauma and pain that they had been holding onto for years.
After their journey and opening up their hearts, they were able to connect on such a deep level.
We got together to share and hear their transformations.
So many of them were able to get out of their vines and drop into their bodies, letting go of things no longer serving them.
They had so many breakthroughs and found so much clarity through this work.
Breathwork is very healing and I'm so passionate on guiding you back into your power.
Your mind is part of your body.
I'm so sick of that fucking statement.
Okay.
So this breathwork person goes by the IG handle that underscore breathwork underscore girl.
Her name is Jen Coles and she's a little bit unconvincing to my ear.
It sounds a little bit like she's reading from a script that she hasn't really internalized.
It kind of reminds me of how you can parody a yoga voice really easily.
But it's really the scene in this IG reel that steals the scene.
Yeah, getting to see the visuals makes a big difference too.
Yeah, so we'll link to it.
It's pretty gnarly.
It's maybe 70 women.
It's possible there was a non-white person there, I'm not quite sure.
And they're all piled into Sean Whelan's Lions Not Sheep warehouse media space in Salt Lake City.
Now, his wife, Saxe Whelan, is leading the yoga class, and Jen Coles is doing the breathing stuff, and all of them are cuddled in with bolsters and rolled blankets for hyperventilation during Shavasana under a huge logo for the three-percenter anti-government militia group.
Come on!
Oh my god.
You can't make this shit up.
And I just have to say, big shout out here to Bea Schofield.
Because Bea Schofield called all of this years ago in multiple Facebook conversations and debates.
And you were right there with her.
For a while, I wasn't.
Because I really did not want to believe, well we'll get to it in a bit, I didn't really want to believe what a scene like this proves.
Now, if you're not familiar with Sean Whalen, he's the muscle patriot who took the Lions Not Sheep merchandise national, but he's now gotten dinged by the FTC for claiming that his shitty clothes were made in the US, but they're actually made in China.
That tracks, that definitely tracks.
Yeah, so we'll post to the WAPO article there.
Now, I'm pretty sure we're going to do a bonus episode on this ripped hypocrite sometime soon, but one thing that pops out character-wise is that he and Sax really like talking about or implying how much and how hard they rail.
And this is a pattern we also see with people like Aubrey Marcus and his partner Violana as well.
And I'll save this bit for the bonus episode, but I just want to flag that this is a TMI power move, and it's not that far off from talking about bathroom habits, and that is not that far off from pretty standard cult leader behavior.
History is just littered with stories of gurus exposing themselves while crapping or having sex.
I also have to point out that if you Google Sean's name, one of the first results is a men's journal article called The Lion.
Sean Whalen is empowering thousands to take accountability for their lives.
And it reads like the ultimate puff piece because it's actually by design.
It's a paid advertisement masquerading as a feature article on him.
Promoting his clothing brand, but also his sort of men's coaching, his whole vibe.
It's got a studio photo of him sitting there looking all serious, kind of like a proud boy.
But since you invoked Aubrey, Waylon is also the king of pithy statements, like those on his China Made t-shirts, which you referenced.
One of them is, give violence a chance.
There's free man, and of course the tagline, you have two choices to lead or be led.
Did you see the fuck John Lennon t-shirt as well?
Oh no, I missed that one.
No, that's a joke, but I'm just giving it a chance.
Imagine that we are all fully identified with our separateness and fighting all the time.
That's the world we want to move towards.
So you invoked Aubrey there, and I've been doing a lot of work on him recently, but he just gives me so much to work with.
And his latest Everyman post, Brings us back to the conspiracious realm that you're about to flag, Matthew, but it's not nearly as alpha male as Waylon, but it's in there.
Julian, would you like to read Aubrey's latest laundry list of manhood requirements?
It would be my... pleasure?
The code of the sentient savage.
Taste the food.
Have the sex.
Meditate.
Masturbate.
Eat the mushrooms.
Fast for a week.
Write poetry.
Get high and tell jokes.
Fight when you have to.
Walk away when you can.
Love hard.
Fail hard.
Tell the truth.
Forgive always.
He could have just kept going, right?
Well, he could have.
I think he is right now.
And I noticed that except for maybe forgive always, this is like a really concise list of consumption directives.
He just left out buy all the things, I think.
But I have to say, gentlemen, it was inspiring enough that I've come up with my own code.
This is just in draft form so far.
It's a little bit vulnerable for me to share, but let's see if you can relate.
Hold on, hold on, hold on.
Let me just walk over and put my hand on your heart and have you breathe for a moment before you recite.
Are you doing TikTok Reiki?
Wow!
Nice job, Julian.
Listen, I need your attention, guys.
Okay, so this is called Code of the Woke Dad Bod Depressive.
Make pancakes for the kids.
Listen to your wife carefully because you have a long history of being an emotional idiot.
Check your privilege.
Don't overshare your toilet habits.
Try to not eat too many cookies, but don't let your blood sugar crash.
Internally whine about lifting weights.
If you play baseball with your kids, you will get a foot injury and there's nothing you can do about it.
File another fucking piece about Aubrey Marcus on time.
Remember, posting will not make you feel better.
Pretend that baby aspirin is a psychedelic.
Daydream about writing YA novels for relief.
If you have more than one glass of wine, you're fucked.
Maybe get some new underwear, dude.
Think about your death, but not so much that you're a drag for your kids to be around.
And pardon me, I need some alone time.
That's not going to fit on one tweet.
You're going to have to make this a thread.
I know.
Very good though.
I actually see this as a 12 rules for life spinoff for the dad bod crowd.
Yeah, it's a manifesto for sure.
There's definitely, there's a whole sort of, there's a lot of content here that can be unpacked.
Yeah.
In workshops.
Okay, so back to the 3% breath workers.
So, Jen has this kind of like delivery and Sean Whalen's cursed warehouse is dominating the scene.
But what I want to focus on is that there is a 1000% overlap in the content between this promo monologue and what you might hear from legitimate yoga professionals at the International Association of Yoga Therapy or the trauma-sensitive yoga group. 100%.
Yeah, so she's talking about powerful women on a breathwork journey.
She's talking about the intention of forgiveness and inviting in power and strength to release the painful things burdening the hearts.
They were able to let go of trauma and pain.
They were able to open their hearts.
They were able to connect on such a deep level.
I think there's a connectometer that they use, actually, that the pro-scientists have to measure how deep things go.
So many of them are able to get out of their minds and drop into their bodies.
She's talking about breakthroughs.
So, what is the difference between libertarian boss ladies using trauma-sensitive language in Utah and yoga progressives using it in Portland.
I mean, what it underlines, what you just nailed so perfectly,
is that the language can simultaneously be generic enough for people to, anyone who's sort of curious
about personal growth and healing to relate to.
It's generic enough that it's like, oh yes, we want to go deep and we want to release what no longer serves us and all the rest of it.
But it also alludes towards some sort of process of discovering sort of Universal truths that are accessible through this experiential practice, and then those universal truths can be whatever politically manufactured worldview you want to then insert into that place.
It sort of shows how what has been going on all along within the yoga and wellness space has always had that vulnerability and has always actually been a way of delivering this double-edged sword of meaningful experience and an openness to indoctrination.
Yeah, and just to reference B. Schofield's work again, one of the things that she said
that really kind of brought it home for me was that you can have any kind of ecstatic,
heart-opening, you know, transcendent experience that you like, and your capacity to understand
and to apply and to translate that experience into real life is going to be utterly contingent
on your socialization.
It's going to be explained for you afterwards.
And this, it resonated with me because I didn't really want to acknowledge
that this was true, but it resonated with me because I realized that like the first cult that I was in,
the guy, Michael Roach, spoke about this kind of like universal Samadhi experience
that everybody should be able to attain and that it would lead to a particular result
that was just kind of foretold, and that's just the way it was gonna be.
He used to describe it as a kind of conveyor belt to a particular realization.
What I realized finally was that, no, he just had some fucking weird experience, and then whatever was around him in his environment, he used to interpret it for him.
It was actually, he had something, and then it was interpreted by who he was around and who he was influenced by, and I think the same thing is going on here.
Yeah, so it's like our brains have the capacity to go into certain kinds of states that feel very meaningful, that may have emotional significance, that have a sort of disorienting, you know, a deliciously disorienting quality, and sometimes I think those states can be beneficial, but for me, I've always felt that there's a kind of inverse relationship with how strongly that altered state is being tied to a particular set of either metaphysical beliefs Or, you know, beliefs about the real world and the literalization of what that implies, that now you've had this experience and so you've been transformed and now you realize these higher truths, or now you have understood, you know, the nature of the universe, or in this case, perhaps the nature of our political landscape.
And so it's always been a big mess, you know?
People maybe spontaneously would have these experiences and then interpret them through the lens of some kind of religious fundamentalism.
And then on the other side of it, people who want to indoctrinate you can use these types of experiences as part of that process of indoctrination.
And it's not to say that everyone who leads breathwork is doing that.
It's just to say there's a huge space within which that becomes possible when you're dealing with those kinds of altered states.
Yeah, and the fact that it can go in so many different directions has brought up this issue of how is it possible that so many people have translated their ayahuasca experiences or their cambo experiences or their meditation ecstasies into right-wing commitments involving freedom and sovereignty and so on.
It's tempting, and I should say too that when often those same realizations we can assume might lead you in the other direction.
And I think to answer that question, it's tempting to think in terms of horseshoe theory when we're reaching for these explanations for how right-leaning and left-leaning discourses begin to But in some ways, I think that's an easy way out.
At the beginning of our podcast, a bunch of people tried to say, oh, you're talking about horseshoe theory when you're talking about wellness spaces that kind of allow people to drift to the right when we're describing the overlap between yoga and wellness with a legitimate grounding and social justice activities.
Or experiencing concerns with the usage of that same discourse by medical libertarians, anti-vaxxers, and QAnon followers.
And my problem with that was that, like, so far as I can tell, horseshoe theory works on the macro level of understanding how, like, Nazi and Soviet regimes begin to rhyme with each other in terms of authoritarianism and how that crystallizes in suppression of dissent and the oppression of minorities and pogroms and murder.
But I feel like underneath the surface of the language that we hear in this Breathwork session, people using it can have different objectives, different values, and then they can bring different receipts.
I feel like it makes sense to look at something else in the way in which these somatic practices are marketed and how they can apply to anybody rather than arguing that somehow it all leads towards the same place.
I disagree slightly on that.
I do think it's a useful heuristic and it is just a heuristic so that means there's going to be limitations to it but we've argued internally about this before and I've said that I would much rather be around people who are for trans rights and for understanding how race plays into the construction of society than people who want to jail people or kick people out of the country or harm people.
So in terms of how it manifests and where it leads, I think there are differences.
But the sort of fanaticism that happens, horseshoe theory can make a useful guide for.
And yes, it did originate around the time of the Nazis, but every term has to evolve.
Every term is going to have more content to use as it progresses through the ages.
So one of the arguments that I found when I did that bonus episode on horseshoe theory, for example, where some people say, oh, it's specifically used for this.
And I think back to my time When I was at Rutgers studying with my favorite professor named Ivan Van Surtema, and in his book, They Came Before Columbus, he talks about a staircase of words, how words evolve through the ages to different situations, and so for that reason, when I see someone fanatically in these spaces who are using social justice terms, it can have the same level of fanaticism as those on the right, even though the ultimate results
Often manifesting a legislation in America is going to be different.
Yeah, they're pointing in different directions.
And I think so.
So I guess we have we have two usages of the term we're talking about.
We're talking about behaviors, especially in discourse.
And then we're talking about like policies, ideology and and like objectives politically.
And outcomes.
And outcomes.
Yeah.
Yeah, but then Matthew, you're actually, you're making a different point, right?
You're saying, you're saying, okay, so there's, there's that, there's horseshoe theory and the different ways we might think about that.
But what horseshoe theory sort of tends to imply most of the time, whichever way we're using it, is that if you go far enough to either extreme, you end up in a very similar place, which is authoritarianism, right?
But you're, I think where you're going is, is more the direction of how, If it's generic enough and it's non-specific enough, then you can inject whatever ideology you want to into a spiritual quest that ultimately is about, you know, this is J.P.
Sears saying, you know, never outsource your truth, always trust your own heart, right?
It's like if you feel that something deeply is true because you're in this altered state and tears are streaming down your cheeks and your whole body is tingling and so therefore it must be a download from spirit, That can be fucking anything, depending on your biases, your personality type, your conditioning, your worldview, and which guru is, you know, putting thoughts in your head.
And I think it's because the internal turn or the focus upon the subjective experience as sort of the primary mover of things is politically ambivalent.
And this is B. Schofield's point when she says, Look, Zen monks armed themselves to fight for the emperor in World War II.
Or, you know, look, the Bhagavad Gita was Gandhi's favorite book, but it was also the favorite book of his assassin and also the favorite book of Heinrich Himmler.
Or, you know, the point made by Ron Purser in McMindfulness, where he examines how mindfulness is being used to calm the nerves of Navy SEAL snipers or help tech workers become more productive.
So, yeah, because the internal turn has no inherent political content, it leaves the user open to the winds of the surrounding politics.
So you put this same three-percenter group of breathwork people in the Castro in San Francisco or Kensington Market in Toronto, and all of that intention-setting and breakthrough work heads in a different direction.
Well, hold on, it's maybe not the same three percenters, it's any group of people experiencing breathwork, right?
Well, I wonder!
I wonder.
I mean, I actually wonder whether, given the power of the trance state, The ideologies are so transitive.
We should run an experiment where we invite the lions not sheep people to come to Kensington Market Studio in Toronto.
Yeah, I mean, I feel like the insight I'm having right now is that, and I feel it really strongly so it must be true, is that The more one tries to carve out a space that is apolitical, that is transcendent of politics, the more likely it is that whatever powerful experiences, emotional experiences you're having, actually trend toward the right.
Right-wing populism and its kind of further developments are, by their very nature, very emotional, they're very naturalistic, they're tied to a lot of the values that people tend to have if they're into holistic stuff, and I feel like left-wing politics tends to actually be much more intellectual and analytic and you have to do the work, you don't just get the download.
Yeah, and it's not about purification.
It's not about pollution so much.
It's also not about youthfulness.
It's not about orderliness.
It's not about, yeah, it's not about the sort of aesthetics of glory.
It's much more workaday.
So, yeah, we have to remember Alan Hostetter here.
Yep.
The Singing Bulls man who comes back from Army Ranger duty Clearly traumatized, he goes into police work, he has some terrible back injury, and his internal turn comes amidst an opiate haze during which he takes up yoga, and yoga becomes a way of repairing his back pain and the trauma caused by his military service.
But that practice is not about changing any of the contexts in which it happened.
It's really about insisting that he can transcend the pain that a real world has caused him.
And so, he's so flummoxed That he can only seem to think in abstract terms like freedom and tyranny, and that means that he can make things like mask burning make ideological sense, and that he can head to the January 6th insurrection after hosting a Singing Bulls soundbath.
So, I wanted to do this piece because it's all related in my mind to the interview that Julian and I did with Amy Berg, because in her impeccable journalism, she has to figure out the reality beneath the language.
She has to get underneath the language that perpetrators use to cover up their crimes and their cruelty.
So when she's putting together West of Memphis about how the satanic panic ruined the lives of three teenagers in Arkansas, she has to understand that every pious accusation made by that community against those boys is actually a confession of internal domestic terror and confusion.
And then when she's interviewing Oliver O'Grady about the countless acts of child sexual abuse that he committed against the children of Texas under his care throughout the 70s and 80s, she has to see beyond his performance of transparency, beyond his duplicitous appeals for forgiveness, she has to see beyond this pantomime that he puts on of piety that characterizes Catholic abuse denialism.
But to wrap up on the 3% breath workers, let's just note a few things.
That this is a core part of our dilemma.
That people can appear to be speaking truthfully or earnestly.
They can appear to be speaking from the heart.
And if their orientation is driven by the internal turn towards self-care and self-recovery and self-protection and self-actualization, and that's where it ends, Then it doesn't really matter what they're saying because you don't know what they're doing until they do it.
It's what they're doing that matters.
And I'd say that if anyone out there in yoga and wellness land still thinks that these disciplines are somehow beyond politics or should leave politics at the door, this breathwork rave at a libertarian fun camp is your reward because everyone needs relief.
Bigots need relief, racists need relief, anti-vaxxers need relief, incels, misogynists, anons, 4chan chuds, tradwives and clanwives.
Georgia Maloney needs relief.
She's a big yoga fan.
I'm sure she gets a lot out of her wonderful stretches.
I'm looking forward to her hashtag self-care Instagram posts, right?
Right.
And the thing about fascists is that they're perfectly capable of making anything mean anything if it aids in their accumulation of power and self-regard.
But I think it's important here to also underline that it's not necessarily like You know, the classic pushback that we've gotten over the years is that this is a distortion of the true teachings.
The true teachings lead inevitably to progressive politics.
It's a distortion of the true teachings.
And in fact, you know, I love our friends at Off the Mat, but this is a debate that I've had with them on and off over the years where, for example, they made a t-shirt that says, Yoga is politics.
And I was like, you know, I get what, I understand what you're getting at, but that can mean anything.
And Hindutva people could come along and say, yeah, you're right, it does mean politics.
And they have.
Exactly.
And here's actually what it means in terms of the politics of our country, and here's what it means about a kind of Muslim genocide.
And the other piece of this is that if you're political, so then if you're taking something like yoga and you're saying let's turn it into a social justice path, if you are depending upon the revelatory experiences of contemplative practice to sort of justify your social justice orientation, You're doing the same thing, and this is where I think some of the discussion of horseshoe theory is interesting.
You're doing the same thing as a way into this emotional revelatory sense of the higher truths of social justice, and that may feel really good, and it may even be true in some way that I would agree with, but you're on incredibly shaky ground intellectually and politically in terms of how you're then going to justify your arguments.
Yeah, I mean, the takeaway for me is that if you are really generous as a yoga teacher or a wellness practitioner, you're going to feel like you want to give those gifts away to just anyone.
But if you are also smart.
You will contextualize self-care within pro-social values, if that's where you're at.
So that when, you know, Saxe-Whelan teaches yoga under the symbol of the three percenters, you know, her mouth might burn a little bit.
Our guest today is award-winning, Oscar-nominated writer-director Amy Berg.
She's deep into a body of work that weds intimate and emotional storytelling with the dedicated pursuit of truth and justice.
Our interview looks at how two of her projects, West of Memphis and The Case Against Adnan Syed, led to the release of those wrongly convicted via cultural bias and moral panic conspiracy theories.
Then we turn to her film, Deliver Us From Evil, which exposed the real conspiracy to
cover up and deny despicable abuse within the Catholic Church.
Amy, it's so kind of you to agree to talk to us today.
Welcome to Conspirituality.
Thank you so much for having me, Julian and Matthew.
It's great to be here.
Yes, hello, Amy.
Now, this is really fun for me because we've known each other personally for about 10 years, but I've been following your work for way longer than that, Amy, and we're going to touch on several of your documentaries today.
The obvious place to start is with your HBO docuseries called The Case Against Adnan Syed, because Adnan had his murder conviction overturned just a couple of weeks ago, and then just yesterday officially had all charges against him officially dropped.
This, just to fill anyone in who has been living under a rock, this is a case involving a young man convicted on very shaky evidence of having murdered his ex-girlfriend.
It came to global attention because of what was really the first hugely popular true crime podcast, maybe the first huge podcast period back in 2014 called Serial.
And then your HBO series followed up on further developments.
And that was released in 2019.
So first of all, congratulations, because I know you've been so involved in working toward justice for Adnan and his family.
Tell us about how it feels that he's finally out after 23 years and about your involvement both in the documentary series and in that fight.
Gosh, it feels so great.
I mean, there are a few days in my life that I know I'll never forget and this was one of them when he actually walked out of the courthouse.
Well, I had made a film, which I'm sure you'll want to talk about more later, called West of Memphis.
And I got to walk through that with Damien, Jason, and Jesse in 2011.
And after making that film, I said, I will never do another Justice film again, because it's like, it's one of the most exhausting things.
And it's so painful because you're like fighting against a rock.
Often.
And so, um, but I, I listened to the serial podcast and Rabia Chaudry, who's just, he's Adnan's activist advocate, I should say.
Um, and she's just like, she's just such an incredible force, um, had approached me about this, um, about making a film about this.
Um, so I, You know, after listening to Serial, I wasn't sure if Ednawn was innocent or guilty because I think that's what the kind of, the storytelling kind of led you in so many different places that it was kind of what was great about it and what was also kind of, you know, difficult about it because I left feeling so, so invested, but so also kind of unsatisfied and not sure like what actually happened.
So yes, I took this on as a film to tell a story, but when I got into the evidence, which Um, could lead you into many different corners.
Um, I just really saw a miscarriage of justice.
So I was both telling the story that I expected from, we started in late 2015 and we didn't, I guess it aired in the spring of 2019 and I expected him to get a new trial at the end of our investigation because we had uncovered a lot of things and he had won a circuit court ruling for a new trial and then he won the
court of appeals ruling for a new trial.
So it seemed like he was getting a new trial and that there wouldn't be a new trial because there
was no real evidence except for a witness statement that had changed multiple times.
So it was one of the most dissatisfying productions I've ever done because on the eve of our premiere
the special court of appeals, there's two courts of appeals in Maryland, they ruled against Adnan.
So it was like we were expecting to put a card at the end of this film that said Adnan Saeed had his, won this hearing and he was released from prison on this date.
That was what we expected to be the end of the film and that's what it was leading towards.
It was a four hour series.
So, All that is to say, I never stopped.
So after the film came out, I continued going down to Baltimore, speaking with Adnan, following the story, and so now I I guess I have this real need for completion, so now I feel like my series will have the right ending, and so that was a really long answer, but that is the truth of what it is for me, because I know he's innocent, and I know that he's now beginning.
Today is really the first day of the rest of his life, which is what I said to him this morning, because he cut his ankle bracelet off last night, so here he is, 41 years old, spent 23 years in prison, and he's just about to start his life.
You know, I had read some analysis of the case that observed a racially charged and Islamophobic tone to how the prosecution sold the case to the jury based on, you know, as has been covered, junk science and inconsistent witness testimony while they were themselves holding back crucial evidence about who else may have been guilty of the murder of Heyman Lee.
San Francisco public defender Manu Raju has said that they intentionally chose to substitute Islamophobia and racial bias for proof, and that the conviction was based in large part on race.
Apparently hundreds of references were made during the case to Adnan's race and religion, including saying that he was a Muslim of Pakistani descent, introducing him that way despite him being born and raised in the U.S.
They also implied that this could have been one of those honor killings that are characteristic of people like him, right?
So, I wanted to ask you, was excavating racial justice a driving motivation here for you?
We spent a good part of the series looking at that.
How they used honor killings and Islamophobia to reach the community, reach them in an emotional way.
Good trials go with science.
Bad trials go with emotion.
And you can always kind of use that rule.
And right now we're looking at what actually got Adnan out is the DNA that doesn't match to him and potentially matches to other people.
But the way that, this is the same thing that happened with the West Memphis Three, excuse me.
It was, you know, the satanic killing and the cults and like this fear that this other is going to, you know, murder.
And so, I mean, honor killings technically are killings within your same race and we're talking about a Korean girl and a
Pakistani boy, but people bought it.
People bought it because there was an instance with a Pakistani bombing at the capital just
a few months before this happened and this was definitely a community that had many ethnicities
and many different faiths and it was what the prosecution used to try to scare everybody
and it worked.
Yeah, incredible.
And then what was it like for you, you've touched on it a little bit already, just stepping
into such a public and in fact international sort of phenomenon right after Serial, such
a popular cause and then carrying on investigative work that resulted in this new show and helped
of course with his eventual release.
How did you, just how did you handle all of that and how did you avoid perhaps any sense of bias that you may have had from already being familiar with the case?
Well, I don't know.
I guess there's always a bias, so I don't know how to specifically answer that.
I can tell you that as a human, as a woman, as a mother, I sat in the courtroom and when Becky Feldman referenced my film two times as evidence that there were problems with the case.
It was one of the most chilling things I've ever experienced.
I felt so proud to be a part of something like this, because it was a miscarriage of justice.
And it was a miscarriage of justice not just to Adnan Saeed and his family, but also to Havenly and her family.
And I really, I think if you ask me about hot button issues, when I think about prosecutorial misconduct, it just I'm just ignited.
I just can't believe that a conviction is more important than the truth.
And this is why I said I couldn't do this again after the West Memphis Free.
I couldn't believe the arrogance and ignorance of the law in Arkansas.
And I didn't think it would be this bad in Maryland, but it was actually until the city state's attorney general took it over because you had The state's attorney general, Thiru Vignarajah, and Brian Frosch, they were fighting to keep Adnan in prison no matter what, and they knew that there was other evidence, and they decided to ignore it.
So, you know, I don't know how you get around that.
I will say one more thing, sorry to keep going on, but you know I have a son, Spencer, and when he was little, He used to have these night terrors of being in prison for something that he didn't do and he would come in my room his hair was standing up and he would just like need to like sleep in my bed because he was so afraid of it and I just it's just one of those things that I guess has always stuck with me as like the worst possible thing and so Adnan, Damien, Jason and Jesse are
You know they are all free now, but there are so many tens of thousands of other cases that need a close eye So I just I mean this is just a huge problem in the world right now I guess what I wanted to follow up with was whether or not the gut feeling comes before the data and the discovery and the examination of evidence.
I mean, you walk into a scenario, a story like this, and I imagine that you have a sense going in that something is wrong.
And I suppose that puts you in a very difficult position of trying to make sure that you don't find what you imagined to be there.
And to actually excavate the truth.
Yeah, that's such a great question, Matthew.
And on the two films that I made in this area, I had, first of all, I had to believe that Damien Echols was innocent before I made that film, because I was approached by Peter Jackson and his partner, Fran, and I knew that they believed he was innocent.
So, I didn't sign on to the job until I spent six months looking at the evidence.
In this case, it was a little bit different because I wasn't sure about Adnan.
I really left serial thinking that he might have done it.
And I walked into this thinking that that might be what we discover, is that Adnan was guilty.
So I brought on an investigative firm that Barry Schechter And I asked them to try to prove that Adnan was guilty.
I wanted to, like, figure it out, to go into it, you know, with that in mind, because I was open to that possibility with this film.
But when Jay Wilds is the only testimony that you can kind of hang your hat on, it's really tough.
I mean, there has to be, there has to be something more.
And there were fingerprints, there was DNA, there were so many things that could have led in a different direction.
And a person who discovered the body who took two lie detector tests, because he failed the first one, and then there were no other lie detector tests used in the entire investigation, so it seemed really shady, but I believed Adnan was innocent when I started really rolling the camera.
I believed that.
Can I just clarify something?
Did you just say that you hired an investigative team to argue against your preferred outcome?
I had to.
I didn't want to be caught off guard.
So you actually hired professionals to argue for his guilt so that you could evaluate your own evidence more clearly?
Yes.
Now, did you do that under the auspices of your own production company, or did your sponsors ask you to do that?
That was your call?
Because this is just a level of, I don't know, integrity and documentary fact-checking that I've just never even heard of.
Yeah, no, Disarming Films is my company.
We hired them ourselves through the production, and we wanted to make sure that we weren't missing anything.
They have access to things that we can't.
You know, find, so.
That's amazing stuff.
Yep.
There's the answer, right?
At first you said, I'm not sure how to answer that.
Well, you answered it.
You built the quote unquote steel man case against what your hopes were to be sure that you weren't biased.
And then it sounds like what you did rose to the level that could be referenced twice in the court as plausible counter evidence that had been discovered through this investigative process.
Right.
But I have to say that even when you hire an outside firm to investigate in this way, they're still limited by what the Baltimore Police Department will share with them and the prosecutor's office.
And there were just roadblocks every step of the way.
I mean, I remember like early on there was a helicopter agency that was used through the county policing, what's it
called? I can't remember the name of this.
It's like our highway patrol in California, the Maryland version of that, had this helicopter
company that they employed and this guy got on the phone, he remembered finding Hayes' car. And it
was like this thing that Hayes' car was missing for six weeks.
That was kind of like the big question, how did Jay know where Hayes Carr was?
And we were like ready, you know, we were going down to Baltimore that next day to, you know, find out what he knew.
And of course there was a fire and he couldn't find the documents and he's not sure if he could remember.
And that happened over and over and over again as we were investigating this.
So it was like, you know, just watching what they were doing, doing what we do best, which is talk to people like humans and just We aren't lawyers.
We're not deposing people.
We're just asking them what they remember.
And then a compelling story came from that.
So people's memories did tell a really interesting story in this case, but there were some really specific facts that made it impossible to believe that what was put forward in the original trial was true.
And there were like six judges in, during his post-conviction relief, uh, hearings that agreed that he didn't get a fair trial. It
was being reinstated over and over and over again as you saw in the series, but unfortunately
politics won out at that time, but now politics won out again, but it's in a different way now, so
he's free. Yeah, incredible.
You know, if I were to characterize a theme in your work, just from my own experience, it would be truth and justice, which is essentially what we've been talking about so far.
The day, as you've already sort of alluded to, the day that Adnan was released, I saw a photo that encapsulates this, right?
This is on Twitter, tweeted out by Damian Eccles, who is the central figure of the West Memphis Free that we're going to talk about right now.
They were released in 2011 after having been wrongfully imprisoned for 18 years, and you played a role as well through your film West of Memphis in that coming to pass.
How did it feel to have those two stories intersect in a moment like that?
Like I'm seeing that picture, right?
That is, that's tweeted out by Damien and it's of you and Adnan and it's just like, wow, here, here you, here you all are together.
It's totally intertwined.
I mean, Rabia saw West of Memphis the night before she called Sarah Koenig and it moved her and she, she wanted that kind of a film.
Um, Damien and Lori are, you know, friends for life for me.
I've talked to them about this case multiple times as I've been working on it.
Lori called me when I was down in Baltimore, you know, watching Adnan walk out of the courtroom.
It is intertwined.
It's all intertwined.
And I cannot wait to see them meet because they're going to meet and it's going to be amazing.
And like, I can't wait.
We even are talking about doing a conversation at like the New York Public Library or something together because it's just, I mean, I can't wait for them to meet because Damien's now been out for 11 years and he's going to have incredible advice.
As are, there are, I met three exonerees in front of the courthouse a few weeks ago that all were released by Marilyn Mosby and they have a group that meets once a month, a mental health group
where they go and talk to each other about their stories and about integration and it's
just it's an incredible program that the city state's attorney Marilyn
Mosby has set up down there and she's exonerated 13 people in the past few years.
I mean, she's doing the work.
Yeah, so with regard to the West Memphis Three, this, for anyone who doesn't know, this is the case of Damian Eccles, Jason Baldwin, and Jesse Miskelley, known as the West Memphis Three.
It involves these three teenagers falsely accused of the brutal murder of three eight-year-old little boys.
Their names, Stevie Branch, Christopher Byers, and James Moore.
The case happened to coincide, as you referenced already, with the cultural and even legal phenomenon of the Satanic Panic, which we've covered actually quite a bit here on the podcast.
The boys who were accused, you know, they listened to heavy metal, they were rebellious, Damien was very smart and a bit weird and standoffish, right?
He was interested in various taboo subjects that made it easy to paint him as someone at that time who you would imagine could sacrifice children in some kind of satanic ritual and then laugh it off.
Just so bizarre and yet not that uncommon during that time.
When did the satanic panic first come onto your radar?
Was it with this case or were you aware of that sort of context already?
I was aware of it, but not in the same way.
I mean, when you see the police videos teaching their, you know, the FBI and the police teaching each other how to identify this kind of thing, and then I mean, it was so great working with Peter Jackson on that film, because he is like the fantasy filmmaker, and he was so obsessed with the snapping turtles.
And I, you know, I'm not from the South, you know where I'm from, Los Angeles, and I've never seen a snapping turtle in my life.
And the first shoot I did was with John the Turtle Guy in Missouri, because the whole case was based on a satanic murder.
You know, if you look at the footage from the trial, you see John Fogelman like taking a knife to a grapefruit.
And actually, I mean, this is gross.
And I had to desensitize myself to this by making the film.
But if somebody had murdered those kids with a knife, the wounds would have been much deeper.
They were surface wounds.
These were all like surface wounds.
So the first shoot I did was going to this turtle farm.
And they killed a pig and we had to watch the turtles attack the pig.
But we weren't getting exactly what we wanted.
Like we weren't getting the shots that we wanted.
So John the turtle guy went in the house and shaved his arm and came back.
He goes, you want to see the mark?
And this is in the film.
He's like, he grabbed a turtle.
The turtle snapped into his arm, he unhinged the turtle and you saw the wounds, they matched
the crime scene photos.
They were exactly the right shape and it was just like when you look, when you just twist
it a little bit, the whole story becomes very different.
So it's unfortunate, especially because the medical examiner at the time had a snapping
turtle farm on his property.
He knew what they were, he knew what they were capable of, but they sold this narrative to a community and they won, basically, for 18 years.
Yeah, and just to clarify for anyone who hasn't seen the film, because that's an incredible part of the film.
These poor little boys had been killed.
They'd been bound.
They were dumped in kind of shallow water.
And when they were discovered, because of the ways that the bodies appeared to have been mutilated, the story was spun that this was the satanic ritual.
They were cut in various ways.
They were bitten in various ways by these horrible teenagers.
And then come to find, through the work that you did, that, oh, this is an area where these kinds of turtles are, and they will reach up and snap at the underside of whatever is floating in the water, right?
And so you'd use the pig to demonstrate it, use the guy's arm to demonstrate it, and that this was actually a much more plausible explanation for the terrible state of those poor little boys.
Now in West of Memphis, there's a clip of the man who many believe is actually responsible for this heinous crime, and that's Terry Hobbs.
He's the stepfather to one of the boys.
You see him sitting alongside the boy's mother, and it's on the Geraldo Rivera Show.
They discussed the murders as having a satanic ritual component.
Geraldo was involved at that time in convincing many American parents that Satanists were prowling their neighborhoods in search of little kitties to sacrifice.
And so was ABC's 2020 on an episode from 1985 that we've covered, I'm sure you're familiar with, titled The Devil Worshippers.
We now know that in the aftermath of 12,000 documented accusations worldwide in the satanic panic, not a single one was ever substantiated as being organized cultic ritual abuse.
Prior to making your own documentary films, I know that you'd won Emmys for producing investigative pieces, and some of those even ran on 2020.
So this is sort of an interesting, strange loop here.
So I wanted to ask your thoughts on the role of sensationalist media and shoddy journalism in moral panics, because we're going through a few moral panics right now, and perhaps even conspiracy theories that are rooted in pseudoscience and a kind of propagandistic angle.
I have to clarify my role.
I worked as a local news undercover investigator for CBS Los Angeles.
I mean, I was the person that would go out wearing like much thicker glasses than I'm wearing right now, a ski jacket and a camera in my pocket when it's 100 degrees out to try to catch like a guy who was selling drug prescriptions for uh oxycontin and those kinds of things and like the and like i was doing like that kind of stuff i did one story about the sexual assault um about the rape kits that were like not they were not preserved properly in los angeles sheriff's department and that went i think that did go to national news but i wasn't really part of that whole true crime thing with
TV at all until I started making documentaries on my own.
So, um, but what do I feel about the irresponsible journalism?
I mean, we, we're, we do it every day.
We just follow whatever the trend is.
I feel like at least social media is great for some things and it's, you know, destructive for other things.
But I mean, at least we're at a place right now where we can get alternate viewpoints on things and it's not just taken for For granted, because it's on 2020 or whatever.
But yes, I mean, I, you know, it's just people believe what they want to believe.
And we do have a responsibility to make sure that people can see the gray area and everything is not black and white.
And that's why I make films.
I always wanted to get into that gray area.
And, you know, It was unfortunate that all those families in West Memphis, Arkansas were living, like, Friday the 13th for all those weeks when, you know, the officials made them think that there were, like, satanic killers that were going to take their kids off the street.
I mean, what a horrible way to raise your kids and, you know, ham hobs.
Terry Hobbs' wife, you know, she's had a rough journey in life, and as have her kids because of how this has affected her.
There's no way around, there's no positive way around experiencing something like this.
And at least in Maryland, they're testing the DNA and trying to answer these questions.
In Arkansas, it's dead in the water.
They don't ever want to hear about this again.
They literally just wanted the cameras out of out of the town and they wanted to just shut this case.
And I mean, I have the prosecutor basically saying that on camera with me, Scott Ellington.
And so it's just like, how does Damien Eccles, who we all know didn't do it,
how does he ever get that murder conviction off of his record?
You know?
You said that these were the films that you wanted to do and you wanted to go into the gray areas,
but you also opened our conversation by talking about how after West Memphis Three,
you were never gonna do anything like that again.
So there's something that's driving you.
And you also said, I wrote it down, you said, you know, the justice work is really painful.
And so, maybe this is a question more for the end, maybe we'll return to it, but I'm wondering, when it really feels awful and uncertain, what do you do for your mental health?
I do a lot.
You heard it here, folks.
You heard it here.
This is our side business now.
When I'm in Los Angeles, I have the pleasure of doing private sessions with Julian and it's really good for my mental health, but I have to do a lot of work on uh... my mental health every single day exercise you know
for at least an hour a day i walk i live in new york so i walk a lot idea that i
meditate you know i
and try to stay calm because i am an anxious person And people don't think I'm anxious when they meet me, but I'm a very anxious person.
Julian knows that.
But I mean, I'll meet somebody and they'll think that I'm so calm, but I'm really, really working on it all the time.
Because especially when I go and interview someone, I interview them sometimes for like four or five hours.
I have to be completely alert and present and not like, Anywhere else except for there.
And so I just do a lot of work to stay calm and stay balanced.
And I have a great community and lots of love in my life, fortunately.
But I'm also really obsessive and passionate.
And I do have a need to tell certain stories when I'm emotionally connected to them.
And so that's why, you know, I guess I do what I do.
The characters that I've documented, they're in my heart all the time.
Yeah, I've seen you in other interviews where people will say, how do you maintain a kind of objective distance from your, and you're just like, don't ask me that, I'm the wrong person to ask about that, right?
That what you just said really bears that out, that you, and you said earlier too that the way that you and your team approach things is to really talk to people as people and earn their trust and just ask them what they remember and There's an emotional connection that I feel is part
of what makes your work so powerful because it's simultaneously,
you see this rigorous search for the truth wherever it's gonna lead,
but you're also telling a story and you're also inviting people to really,
I don't know, open up or be in, you know, you said a minute ago that it's the gray areas
and I feel like there's this, that made me think of this interesting correlation
between seeking truth and being comfortable with uncertainty
and I feel like the gray area is that uncertainty that you're just entering into it
and letting the people that you're interacting with in the course of making the films
be in that uncertainty too so that something can emerge.
That is so beautiful.
I'm so happy you said that.
I'm going to put that into my bank.
Because uncertainty is anxiety in a way, like that is kind of the definition of anxiety, but I guess it's so hard to not know where you're going, but you never know where So, you know, it's just like, that's pretty profound.
Thanks for saying it like that.
Oh, I'm glad it resonates.
I was just sort of following my own intuitive impression.
Well, I think you're also channeling, if I can use that word, something of what we've understood over the last couple of years, which is that the structure of conspiracism is the easy way out of anxiety, actually.
But it doesn't actually solve the problem.
It provides a neat and packaged and actionable answer to something that maybe can't be understood just yet.
So, yeah.
And the good documentary has got to do the opposite epistemological work to that.
It has to find connections, maybe motivated by a particular anxiety to find out the truth, but without that anxiety cresting to the point where the connections have to be forged before they're actually verified.
Good point.
I mean, this is that the gray area really does heavily rely on the institutions that we're examining.
And when you really kind of peel the onion back, it's all about good humans and integrity.
But if like, like the justice system was set up in a way to do justice, but if people are driven by their egos and narcissism and elections and religious beliefs and all of the things that they bring to their job every day, then you have injustice.
And, you know, that's why there's so many victims of the justice system.
And it's, I mean, you could say the same thing about the Catholic Church.
One of the great, um, teachers in my life was this, one of the characters in Deliver Us From Evil, Tom Doyle, who talked about how Jesus never went into a church.
He like, he found his church in nature and in community.
And it's like, You put the walls around it and you start collecting the cash in the basket and then suddenly you've lost the original intent.
I think he said the only time he went into a church he flew into a rage.
Which I don't think is technically true because there's that early scene from him being 12 years old or something like that where he's found in the temple teaching the elders, but that's before he's really known as Jesus, I think.
But yeah, he was a great, great character, which I think brings us to this film, Deliver Us From Evil, Julian, which you first pointed me to.
Incredible stuff.
You've got a little bit of an intro for it, right?
Yeah, so this is the award-winning and Oscar-nominated first film that you made, Amy, called Deliver Us From Evil, released in 2006.
It tells the story of an extremely prolific pedophile, a priest named Oliver O'Grady, who was simply moved from parish to parish by church officials, as unfortunately happens so often.
This was in California, and people like Cardinal Mahoney and Monseigneur Cain Who covered it up.
This of course enabled continuing child abuse and it even involved Joseph Ratzinger who would go on to be Pope.
One thing that really stood out on watching again, I just watched it last week, was how you contrast the horrors of what happened to these children.
With this kind of oddly charming and soft-spoken, like, ooh, I got caught with my hand in the cookie jar demeanor of the film's main subject, which is really chilling.
And you let it just kind of sit there.
I feel like the first half of the film, it's just like, wait, what's going on here?
Who is this guy?
How do I feel about him?
This is weird, you know?
And then it all just unfolds.
Yeah, let's just spell it out.
You had how many hours of Oliver O'Grady on tape?
Oh, goodness.
Well, I spent a week with him, and they were long days.
Unbelievable.
I don't know if there's anything comparable, actually.
Amy, are you aware of anything?
You must know the literature, but who has ever been able to interview a predator criminal for so many days in such a receptive, fluid format?
This is one of those interesting stories about TV versus independent cinema because I was at the time I was working
as a producer writer for an anchor named Drew Griffin at who's still at CNN.
He's amazing and he and I did like the Catholic Church stories together
at CBS and then I went to CNN with him and then through my contacts on that story I
and then I went to CNN with him.
And then through my contacts on that story, I got Oliver O'Grady's number,
got Oliver O'Grady's number and I spent a year trying to get him to talk to me and like I think it was
and I spent a year trying to get him to talk to me.
And I think it was after a few months, he let me record our phone calls.
after a few months he let me record our phone calls and then
And then there was a moment where Cardinal Mahoney went to Pope John Paul's funeral,
there was a moment where the Catholic Church stories together at CBS,
and he was photographed in first class asleep on the front page of the LA Times or something.
And I remember sending this to Oliver O'Grady.
I was like, can you believe this?
Look at this.
And he was so mad that he was in first class.
He was like, I want to talk right now.
So I flew to Ireland and I just, I, this was my first, and I was working, I was a huge, huge independent cinephile.
And I loved, at the time I was obsessed with dogma films and I had never been allowed to do, anytime I asked a camera person in my news organization to do anything different, I would get in trouble.
So I was like, you have to, it has to look a certain way.
Obviously there's like an actual, you know, There are the rules of CBS and CNN, and then there was what I wanted to do with independent film.
So I called this agent in Denmark, Marie-Louise Vergaas.
I'll never forget her.
She represented all the dogma cinematographers, all the Danes.
And Jens Schlosser came over to Ireland to meet with me because I had this interview set up.
I remember calling CNN from there and they said, oh, well, we're not going to put a pedophile on television.
Like we're not going to sensationalize a pedophile.
I was like, well, I'm not trying to sensationalize them.
I've got this, like, I thought it would be like an hour special or something for them, but they had no interest in it.
And so I was like, this is my chance.
I'm going to make a film.
I'm going to do it.
So I made this film like on my credit card to begin with.
And then I got financing later.
But, um, Yeah, there wasn't a priest at that time who had spoken to anyone on the record.
Incredible.
There were some depositions that I had seen, which I used in the film, and I saw what is still the problem with the sexual assault story today.
And I've tried to do this in every film that I've made about sexual assault, to be honest, because I just, you know, I know what it's like to be a victim personally and professionally, but I also feel like we don't really want to talk about why predators are predators.
We don't want to talk about, like, the fact that every single Every single abuser was abused himself or herself.
It's not, there's no like, there's no disputing this.
It's in every single report that they were touched when they were a kid, they were raped when they were a kid, they were abused somehow.
And most, I think it was like over 80% of high-risk offenders in the California prison system at the time had been sexually abused as children.
It was, I mean, it's just, It's undisputable.
So here is a man who's talking about his own abuse.
Here is a man who let me interview him for a week, and I hadn't spoken to a single one of his victims first.
So I had to then go, after spending a week with Oliver O'Grady, to talk to all of these people that had been abused by him, which was actually one of the most challenging things in my career, because why would they trust me?
I just literally spent, you know, a hundred hours with their perpetrator.
Well, Amy, how did they trust you?
You came to them and you said, you know, I've got him on tape and I would like to hear your story now, too.
I'm supposing you have to do that just ethically, but what about that conversation gave them the sense that you were there to listen to them and you hadn't just burned a bunch of tape on this guy?
Look, I say I'm anxious, but I'm also really patient.
I literally will put the time in.
It took me a year to get O'Grady on camera, and I spend a lot of time with everybody that I interview before I roll the camera.
And a lot of people won't do that, but I tend to do that when I'm going to engage and I'm going to invade somebody's life for a long time, probably, that I need them to trust me.
That's kind of just... It happened over time.
I'll tell you that I had one person...
Who probably doesn't mind if I say her name, Nancy.
She eventually signed the release, but she hadn't signed a release like when I was about to go to the festival.
I had been accepted to the film festival.
I was ready to screen the film and she still wasn't sure if she was going to.
And she was like 40% of the film, you know, it was just, it was, it was so, so anxiety provoking, but eventually she watched it and she came around and it's just about building trust.
And I do have a good intent when I make a film.
I always want to tell the true story.
And I know there are a thousand different true stories, but my true story is the one
that they have to believe in, I guess.
It must have been incredibly mind-bending to do those hours with O'Grady,
almost as if, you know, it's interesting that you got the film crew to come over from Norway,
you said, for the first time.
From Denmark.
Yeah, and because it feels really like watching this film That you have almost like a different camera or a lens or a series of filters that you're using to film O'Grady in Ireland and then another set of equipment for the survivors in Texas because they just throw off such different affects and, you know, heat and light and directness.
I mean, there's, I want to say a couple of things about him in a moment that I want to ask you about, but I mean, is that something that's at the heart of documentary making?
Okay, great question.
how you know that the spectrum of human experience of integrity and morality and failure is vast,
but you have to keep all of it in focus?
Okay, great question.
I actually have to remember back to this stuff because it's been 15 years, but with O'Grady,
I just remembered this, he did not want his face on camera.
I was going to have to blur him out.
So Jens and I picked this beautiful shot where he was at the altar and I was up with O'Grady in the little compartment upstairs.
And as the week went on, he changed his mind.
So we got closer to him.
You can see that the camera is closer to his face.
So it was like, that was kind of an evolution.
And then... And then eventually you're walking down the street in Dublin with him.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Right.
And yeah, and he's...
He had no business being on the street in Dublin.
He had no business being on any street around any child.
I mean, you're walking along the street with him and I'm almost like, well, I guess I'm glad that Amy's there because it's a little bit like a police escort, but I don't know.
She's not going to be filming forever.
So, so strange.
And scarily, I guess it was like five years ago, There was a public broadcast channel screening in the Utrecht in Holland and they broadcasted during crime time and I got a call like
The day after from one of the attorneys who said that O'Grady was living and working in a church there.
He got arrested actually because he had to leave town because the film aired that night.
He got on a plane, Aer Lingus to Dublin, left his computer on the plane in Dublin and it came to Chicago.
The FBI got his computer.
He got arrested because there was a ton of child pornography on it.
That's how they arrested him.
But I mean, he went on for another 10 years or so.
I don't actually know if I have the timing right, but it was something like five years ago.
I mean, this is just, nobody took it seriously in Ireland.
Um, I remember the parents were mad at me and it was just like a whole thing at the time.
But now look what we know.
I mean, I'm sure it's happening a lot less now, but I'm sure it's still happening.
Right, and I want to come back to the point you made about the sort of intergenerational cycle of abuse.
We can feel that coming in the narrative of the film.
That yes, he was actually abused as a child, and in this framework, in this context, it's predictable by now.
And then you had the abuse psychologist offering the opinion that many child abusers, especially in this Catholic context in which they enter the seminary as young teens, Might be developmentally arrested at the age of those that they victimize and at one point it actually occurred to me Does this feel for Amy like she's interviewing a 12 year old?
I think it's at the age that they are victimized Maybe I don't know I thought that but I thought that it makes sense either way.
Yes, it does.
It answers your question.
It does it feels like emotionally and When you talk about their abuse, you can see, yeah, you can see them kind of revert back to those moments.
I mean, you could see it on camera.
It was very, it's chilling actually.
Um, and it's, I think that's very, that's a great, you know, thing that I learned making that film about just how your development stops when something that traumatic happens.
And I mean, you guys talk about trauma all the time on the show and you know, it's such an important conversation that we're having now, but, uh, When I made Deliver Us From Evil, they were still blurring a victim's face out on the news, just saying sexual abuse victim or something.
You know, even like during the Kobe Bryant hearings, I remember everyone was blurred out.
So now people are at least, you know, speaking their truth and feeling good about it.
One of the amazing things about that disclosure that you capture is not only that you see the vulnerability and the regression, but you also see the contrast with a kind of emptiness or dissociation with which he speaks to you almost the rest of the time.
And we talked about a lot of this as we were looking at the Catholic We get the sense that he's not admitting to crimes that deprived victims of their dignity, but rather that he's admitting to sins that he committed against God, or sins that anyone or everyone could commit, that everyone could be forgiven for, which is why
Absurdly, he has this plot where he's going to invite everybody to Ireland so that he can shake their hands or have some sort of nice, I hope you're doing okay now, conversation.
Yeah, almost like the implication is that he's going to sit at his nice big wooden desk and they're going to come in like they're visiting the headmaster and they're going to have a nice little chat.
Yeah, I mean, that's a great juxtaposition of the character that first thinks, well, it happened to me, so it wasn't that big of a deal to me.
Look, I'm fine, so why can't they just get over it?
And then there's, like, the narcissistic sociopath that is, like, the headmaster, as you're saying.
It's like a big party for him.
Like, let's celebrate.
It's going to be fun.
And Godspeed, and he winks.
Right, and we'll be able to move on.
We'll be able to move on.
Which kind of is the echo of his lack of accountability inherited from the entire church structure that he was a part of for so long.
Totally.
And disassociation is exactly the right way to describe it.
I mean, I've seen that with so many different Victims of abuse, it's such an important term because you just like put a block between what you feel and what you think and it's like, I've noticed that with cult members who have left the cult, you know, there's a strong disassociative quality to their personalities and it's just, I don't know, it's an unfortunate way they have to live, I think.
But we all do it to a certain extent, I guess.
To capture it on film, you also have to wait, because dissociation is kind of nowhere, and it is empty, and it doesn't speak a lot.
It's almost like you're capturing an absence of something, like the hollowness of something.
Yeah, and then sort of waiting for him to come back in a way and to see where, you know, where those things overlap, the dissociation and the recollection or the sort of self-aware commentary.
You know, I wanted to come back to West of Memphis because there's an interesting point of overlap here that is something we've talked about quite a bit in the past.
And just to flesh this out a little, we talked about Terry Harbs briefly, who a lot of people think he may have been the real killer.
There's a lot that you present in West of Memphis that is suggestive of that.
You gathered all kinds of evidence.
He was violently abusive.
He may have molested his own kids.
He routinely scapegoated and harshly punished one of the little boys who was killed.
The family members even say that they have heard him admit to the murders and that it's the family secret.
But it seems, and you alluded to this before, that the legal system in Arkansas is uninterested in investigating further.
They've accepted, and this is so appalling, the final word.
As the final word, they say, well, the Alford plea that the three men took, In order to be released, in which you say I'm innocent but I plead guilty based on this legal technicality.
But that means, you know, they're actually guilty and they cannot be exonerated and therefore the case is closed.
And this, you know, creates all sorts of complications in their lives, of course.
So first, I mean, I see you have something to say about that.
Well, yeah, you just reminded me, I don't know if this is in the film, because I haven't seen it in so long, but I remember when I first asked John Fogelman about Terry Hobbs, he leaned in and he's like, Amy, he goes to my church.
That probably wasn't on camera.
I think that would have been in there.
Anyway, I remember that was the first thing he said to me about Terry Hobbs, and I just, you know, that says it all.
In Arkansas, that's everything.
Yeah, he goes to my church.
Terry Hobbs probably found out which church he went to to go to his church.
That would be the smart way to go.
So you have these two films.
One is about the satanic panic and a miscarriage of justice.
And the other is about actual, systemic, covered up, real abuse, right?
And so one of the things we talk about, and I wanted to hear your opinion of this, is do you think that the scapegoating that happens with moral panics actually serves to obscure the real, everyday, banal, ugly truth of abuse in our society, in our families, in our churches?
By people, you know, who we trust, people who are close to us.
Of course, but is it deliberate?
Like, you know, I don't know.
I could tell you, the judge, the prosecutor, they were so full of their own beliefs in this.
It's the religious right, and it's this satanic panic thing that they really do believe it.
I don't think that they actually made it up.
To win one over.
I think they believe it so deeply.
Yeah.
That, you know, I, I really, I don't know what else to say.
I can't, I can't imagine unless it's like, but I don't know.
I just can't believe that they would be like at the, the boys club.
I'm like, let's try this, but maybe, maybe I'm wrong.
I don't know.
Like, it just seems like they really, really, really believe it.
I would tend to go along with you there that it's more of a kind of cultural and psychological phenomenon where it's convenient to believe this and it fits with a whole set of beliefs that drive someone in that direction as opposed to sitting around saying, hey, look, we know that there's all sorts of problems with our society and our families and the real abuse that goes on, so we're going to concoct this fantastical thing.
It's a wild phenomenon.
But they will believe anything and this is unfortunately why our country is so divided today and it's it really it's a lack of resource you know the food isn't good the education isn't good the religion is it's just it's everywhere you drive I remember being on the highway and to see like spare the rod spoil the child like every single thing it's like you're like surrounded by mega churches and messaging and And you don't have an exit.
And that is why, in the weirdest way, Damien got out of it.
You know, even though he was, you know, on death row for almost 20 years, he found God in himself.
He read, he found Laurie, he found a community that, like, understood him and believed him.
And he was able to develop beyond what his chances were in that community.
And it's just amazing to me, like, how Just how easy it is to pull it over on people.
It's just amazing.
That's incredible what you're saying too because in a way it is his uniqueness, his intelligence, his curiosity, his creativity that made him be scapegoated in the first place.
Because he stood out from this particular culture, and then at the end, you're talking about how that is what is his salvation, ultimately.
Right.
Because what would have happened if, for some reason, he ended up like father to five kids before he was 23?
Like a lot of people down there.
What would have happened to his life?
So, thank God that Damien is where he is right now, and he and Lori are so happy, and he's such an intelligent man that he was able to put the time in, but there's still no repayment for his
time. I mean, he's never been compensated for it. He still has a conviction on his record, as does
Jason and Jesse, you know.
We could be here all day if we're going to even ask one decent question about all of your films.
Your most recent series called Phoenix Rising is about Evan Rachel Woods's allegations of abuse against Marilyn Manson.
You also made Open Secret, which is about pedophilia in Hollywood.
Polarized, which is a short about the climate crisis.
And then, of course, you have a documentary called Little Girl Blue about Janis Joplin.
You were, perhaps surprisingly, involved in this sweet Netflix series about dogs, which is my wife's favorite film of yours, or favorite piece of work of yours.
Okay.
And mine.
Bravo, Zeus, to the end of time.
I love that.
That is my favorite thing I've ever made, just for the record.
And that's not light, I mean, but it's about dogs.
It's kind of a light story about Syrian refugees.
Like there's a level of journalistic integrity, which is when we talked about having you on the show, it was really the main thing that came to mind for me is this level of rigor and integrity that you have.
Is there anything that comes to mind to you that you could impart to us about that?
I mean, I just always bring my whole real self to the table and I find that it works.
I find that just being Open, honest, and humble with the folks that you want to talk to.
Being able to share about yourself as well.
It creates less of a wall or a boundary to just be able to talk openly.
If I can relate to something, I can tell a story about it.
That's why I said prophet spray is a hard thing for me to answer because I can't totally relate.
You know, I was a reformed Jewish girl growing up in Los Angeles.
It's like a very different world.
So when you can relate Then people want to talk and then you find the story and then you follow it.
So like there is no reason I would relate to these Syrian refugees except we both love dogs.
And so when you have something like that in common like it's you know you're it's a win.
So I feel like you just find something that you can really really relate to and be emotional about and you can tell a good story.
I love that.
I love that.
And it's really interesting to me because a couple of things I've heard you say as well today.
One is that you spend a lot of time just reading and familiarizing yourself and preparing before you then go into that process of just being the real person showing up and finding the story.
And the other is that you have people that you outsource the deep investigative work to that you feel you can trust and then familiarize yourself with.
So I feel like that's That sounds to me like a powerful formula.
I do my best!
Well, your best is fantastic.
Thank you so much for joining us today.
It's really been an honor and a treat, Amy.
Thanks, guys.
It's great to be here.
Thank you, Amy.
Thank you, everyone, for listening to another episode of Conspirituality Podcast.
We appreciate your feedback and support.
Be sure to catch us next week for our first special correspondent episode.
