April 21, 2018 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
44:09
4065 An Open Secret | Gabe Hoffman and Stefan Molyneux
An Open Secret is an American documentary film directed by Amy J. Berg exposing child sexual abuse in the film industry in California. The film features interviews with victimized performers, who were targeted when they were young boys, as well as industry figures, the predators themselves, and journalists.Gabe Hoffman is a hedge fund manager and the producer of the documentary film An Open Secret.Twitter: http://www.twitter.com/anopensecretDocumentary: https://vimeo.com/142444429IMDB: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt3677412Your support is essential to Freedomain Radio, which is 100% funded by viewers like you. Please support the show by making a one time donation or signing up for a monthly recurring donation at: http://www.freedomainradio.com/donate
Hi everybody, Stefan Molyneux here with Gabe Hoffman.
He's a head front manager and the producer of an achingly, heartbreakingly, horrifyingly good documentary film entitled An Open Secret, which you can watch.
We'll put the link below.
You can follow him on twitter.com forward slash An Open Secret.
Gabe, thanks so much for taking the time today.
It's great to be with you.
It was awesome meeting you at Mike Cernovich's A Night for Freedom.
It was really great and I'm glad we get to connect.
Here a bit more personally because your fans were just all over you there.
It's a delightful mayhem in public.
So let's talk a little bit about, well, of course, an open secret.
If you can give people a brief description of the content and then let's talk about how it came to be.
Okay, sure. So the content is really a couple of parts.
One is we do unmask a pedophile who's In the industry very prominently, not a name that people would know like a film star, but he was one of the most prominent, let's say, child acting managers and scouts for the last 30, 40 years, managed many children for decades.
We do tell one heartbreaking story of really an injustice without giving it away.
There's a child actor who was recently, this is 2012, Bravely recorded his abuser admitting to having, you know, raped him just a couple of years earlier for, you know, years from when he was 12 to about 15.
And you'll see that there's a shockingly light prison sentence, even though that's just the state of California.
We'll get into later how there's actually a larger American problem with not dealing with pedophiles, child sex abusers.
And then, of course, the third part of that is a thing called DEN, Digital Entertainment Network.
That was essentially a front for pedophiles.
They raised over $50 million from folks like David Geffen, for example, the radio mogul worth many billions, considered the most powerful gay man in America.
They raised $5 million from Michael Huffington, the former Congressman from California ran for Senate in 1994 and lost.
He was married to Arianna Huffington, of course, and then came out of the closet subsequently.
People like Bryan Singer invested a couple hundred thousand dollars and even introduced two of the principles of this thing, DEN Digital Entertainment Network, to each other.
And Bryan Singer, by the way, was the number one paid director in Hollywood 2017, made over 70 million dollars.
So that Den was a front for pedophiles, essentially.
The principles, Bryan Singer had actually introduced two of them to each other.
And this occurred in about 1999, 2000.
They raised all this money.
They tried to become Netflix before the technology was really there.
And of course, it didn't work.
And, you know, them being pedophiles all came out.
This was, of course, before the internet was so big.
So it essentially got buried and forgotten.
And we had bought, in fact, out of bankruptcy, all of the video archives.
And you can see all these Rich and powerful people hanging out and around them and many others.
Right. It does seem like every now and then there's this eruption, like this geyser of old historical blood and wrongdoing that erupts out of Hollywood.
And then there's going to be lawsuits, there's going to be exposés, and it just kind of gets flushed down the memory hole.
And it feels like there's this seal that seals up these wounds over and over again to the point where now it's almost like Countdown to Oblivion.
When these accusations surface, of course, we've got the Me Too movement.
There was a Kevin Spacey stuff prior to that.
There was more Bryan Singer allegations and so on.
How efficient is this machine at covering some of this stuff up?
Well, the machine is incredibly efficient in terms of the child stuff.
I mean, the Me Too stuff, you're probably more than halfway through it now.
And let's face it, harassment of women is bad.
Rape and all that of women is bad.
The casting couch is bad.
Whether it's legal or just, you know, morally dubious is another story.
But those are adults. These things happened when they were adults, whether they were voluntary or not is a matter for debate, but those people can easily come to the press as adults.
It's certainly emotionally scarring, but let's face it, that's a completely different animal.
Being abused as a child is exponentially worse when someone is not even Their frontal lobes, their brain, have not even been developed.
Their sexuality may not even been there.
They've not even had, you know, sexual experiences or relationships.
So you're talking about an intensely more painful thing structurally.
You're talking about something that is very difficult for time-pressed members of the media.
And we have some good, you know, journalists doing work in the Me Too and the Harvey Weinstein and all that.
Combine that with the fact that it's so scarring and then combine the fact that in Hollywood specifically, About 80% of the child sex abuse is actually male on male.
In America, it's more like 70-30 the other way as the country in general.
But in Hollywood, for some reason, it's 80% of the abuse cases are on young males.
And of course, the overwhelming majority of young males are not gay.
So then you've got that added on top of it, where you've got many years of great children and so on and so forth.
There are a lot of issues within our legal system where, okay, if I can't put this person in prison or get justice, what's really the point?
And there's a lot of structural impediments.
I think they've done a better job in places like the UK. They've had a royal commission there years ago after the Jimmy Savile.
And for example, the big rock star Gary Glitter, right?
Just a couple of years ago, he got put away for a number of years and he's still in prison for things he did in the 70s and 80s.
They had a big national commission.
They had a reform.
And things with statutes of limitations getting eliminated, things with allowing an accuser to be anonymous to the public as an adult, but yet be exposed to their accuser in terms of the court.
A lot of things like that, and we just haven't gotten there yet.
We're a few years behind.
Right, right. And for those who weren't in Washington for an Eye for Freedom, you didn't get the benefit of this, although I'm sure it's somewhere on the web, this...
Really chilling, like, org chart from hell.
Of the people, the photographs, the sort of interlinkedness that's been able to be traced between these predators in Hollywood.
I wonder if you can give people a sense of how wide, how deep, how widespread these connections are.
Sure. And we'll be happy to, you know, give that to you guys.
It's not a big deal.
That was just from...
The research for the film a few years ago, and that had just focused on one node.
This is one tiny node in Hollywood, relatively speaking, and you're talking about 15 men where all documented connections between, for example, a child manager and then referring that child manager to somebody on a show, to a show, and then that kid getting abused on a show, and then there being a photographer, let's say, who photographs the kid Who's introduced by a friend who's also a pedophile.
And that just connecting on and on and going through Nickelodeon, going through Disney.
And every single one on that map, to be clear, was an actual convicted pedophile at the time.
And that's just one node.
You've got connections from that node to other nodes.
But that is one big, broad theme that you see throughout in Open Secret is you realize all these guys are friends with each other.
All these guys know each other.
It's absolutely remarkable.
You could take that even to things that aren't in our film but are in that big Deadline Hollywood piece that was in early December written by Don Chimileski, the reporter in our film.
If somebody just Googles Bryan Singer Deadline Hollywood, it'll pop up.
And that's a whole other node with names that people may not know, but they're pretty famous.
Gus Van Zandt, the Oscar-winning director, My Private Idaho, Milk, and many other big films.
You're talking about him using the same sort of network for perhaps barely legal boys, perhaps not, and the same feeders.
So there are organized systems in Hollywood where you have shady feeder people who feed these vulnerable young men up to people like Gus Van Zandt, Bryan Singer, Andy Dick, the comedian, Tyler Grasham, who's not a name people know, but he's been accused by about seven.
He represents a lot of young talent in Hollywood and had a couple of people on the hit Netflix show Stranger Things, for example.
So it just goes on and on and on.
It's truly scary.
And there are examples – I remember you talking about this, Gabe.
There are examples of men who've been convicted of offenses against children popping back up again on children's shows.
And that to me is – I try not to be shocked by the amount of human property in the world, but I do find myself somewhat appalled at how any of that can occur.
And that was just – there was just – the other one example I provided was Brian Peck and – Brian Peck, it wasn't just children's shows which we can go through.
So Brian Peck gets convicted a little more than a decade ago with a child, actually on a network show.
And the thing to remember, and you see from the film, is it's eminently clear that when somebody's a child abuser for a number of decades before they're caught, they don't just have one victim.
It's just the convicting victim that you find out about, let's be clear.
There's four or 10 or maybe 20 others that Don't have the courage to come forward and go through the legal system.
But in the case of Brian Peck, he actually worked on Anger Management, the hit show with Charlie Sheen.
And in fact, Charlie Sheen actually wanted and paid for Brian Peck to be there when he paid for it out of its own pocket.
Now, Charlie Sheen has other connections.
But yes, Brian Peck, after his conviction, and he's just one guy of many.
He worked on the children's film, Jack and the Beanstalk.
He worked on The Suite Life of Zack and Cody as a creepy mirror, a Nickelodeon show.
Yeah, and he is still working.
We show the IMDB in our film.
And he continues to go to horror conventions and things like that, which, you know, some of these things in magic or these horror worlds where Parents feel good enough to, hey, drop off their, you know, teen or their, you know, tween with a couple other friends and they go walking around like it's the mall and they pick them up a few hours later.
Yeah, those places are crawling with pedophiles too, convicted pedophiles.
And the organizers don't seem to do anything about it.
I mean, what does it take to not be hired on a children's show?
I mean, cannibalism?
Like, what on earth do you have to do to be blacklisted, other than be a conservative?
That too. And it gets to, you know, a lot of the themes that a lot of conservative really thought leaders like yourself, or whether it's Mike Cernovich or Alex Jones or Jack Sobiak and others have, that look, the worldview of various conservatives, this issue of society not properly dealing with child molesters, with pedophiles, and not doing what society needs to do, Is a prong.
It's a theme in your world view that you may have four or five or eight or 10 main prongs.
But it's one of them.
And it's one of them that the mainstream media doesn't seem to have interest in covering, despite the fact that it seems to be very popular on our social networks and other places.
You'll remember at ANFF, there was a little exercise I did, which was just, hey, this is an average day in America, and gave two examples out of the news.
If you wouldn't mind, that might be of interest.
Yeah, please do. Because you'll remember, I mean, the audience was like, what?
You're telling the truth? This really happened?
And yeah, it's on our Twitter feed, just a day in America.
So this is just yesterday, an average day in America.
Two stories that a guy who's got a full-time job as a hedge fund manager with a quick Google search found in five minutes and took 10 minutes each to read and post.
One is a pastor in Iowa.
Now he's a former pastor in his early 50s.
Now, he and his wife adopted a 12-year-old girl.
He repeatedly molested this 12-year-old girl from age 12 to 14 numerous times.
She was separated from the home.
She's now 17. It's pretty recent.
Went to court. He, the state, decided not to actually proceed with a conviction.
Instead, he entered what is an Alford plea.
And without getting into legal jargon, an Alford plea is basically a half-assed way of the accused saying, you have enough evidence to probably convict me.
I'm just not going to plea guilty.
So he entered an Alford plea to multiple counts of molesting this girl who'd been in his care, who, you know, the girl went and testified and all that and You know, begged for prison time and everything.
And he got probation.
Second one shocked you even more.
This happened in Ohio, again, just yesterday.
Man had been charged with having over one million child porn images.
One million. He pled guilty to 15 counts.
Now, the maximum sentence Was 120 years.
Eight years per count.
Guess what the judge gave him?
Probation. And this is not some podunk little county in Iowa.
This is Trumbull County.
Has over 200,000 people.
He is one of many elected judges.
It turns out this judge, yes, he's a Democrat.
He ran unopposed in 2016.
And here's the real shocker.
In February 2016, before he was up for his six-year term of re-election, went and checked the news, took five minutes.
There was a man who pled guilty, 75 years old, to molesting two young girls, ages 11 and 13, multiple counts.
He let the guy off with probation.
So you think these things can't go on in America?
Like, a judge does this, and then nobody runs against him in a populous county, gets re-elected, and is still doing The same sort of thing.
I mean, this is always astonishing to me.
I mean, there's a certain level of political elites that we don't really expect the law to touch very much.
It's funny, you look at Brazil, oh, it's a third world country, but at least they are putting their elected officials in jail for corruption.
So there's a certain level of political elite where it seems like the American legal system can't touch.
But it seems like there's such a popular consensus about how evil this behavior is, that short of murder, this is pretty much one of the worst things that you can conceivably do.
And the fact that people are wandering in—and these are different, just for those who—these are different, of course, than what you talked about at A Night for Freedom— But this grim repetition of, yeah, kind of half-plead, get yourself some probation and move on, this can't be reflecting the popular horror, sorry, the popular consensus of the horrors of what is going on.
So what is going on?
Why are the judges not outraged?
Part of it has to do with the mainstream media, and part of that has to do, frankly, with how new conservative media like yourself and others are just Showing growth while the old folks like CNN and this mainstream media are declining.
I mean, one part of news, as we've known it our whole lives, is to cover crime stories, expose crime stories.
Instead of CNN spending all day and night with some drunk ex-Trump aide talking all the time, heaven forbid CNN take five minutes And talk about really what should be a national outrage, a million child porn images, guilty to 15 counts, could have gotten 120 years, and he walks with probation.
CNN doesn't even spend five minutes on it.
So when you and others, and even our little podunk thing of just 30,000 people on Facebook, I post a story like this, and there's hundreds of shares, hundreds of comments, You or another journalist looks at something on ours, and what I love the most is when somebody has the time to not retweet our stuff, but is able to go look at the article, read it, and give their own take for their own people, because then their own people will send it out 10 times more.
And it's about us exposing these things through the internet and getting around the mainstream media to finally get the sense of collective outrage in America.
To make the big change, have a national commission, in our case it would be a presidential commission, to really bring all of these different state, local, federal folks together, organizations, gymnastics, education, and church, to actually make the big change that they're starting to make in the UK and Australia.
I'm not going to say the problem's any better in those countries.
You see terrible news there.
But at least A big part of why that news looks even worse there sometimes, Stefan, is because they're actually starting to come to grips with it.
They're starting to clean out their Aegean stables.
We're not even touching the stables yet.
Okay.
So let's try and figure out the why.
And there's a lot to unpack here.
Now, I can understand if you're in the entertainment media, you need access to the stars.
You need access to the directors.
You need access to the talent.
So maybe you don't want to ruffle too many feathers.
But I don't understand why – And that's not a good excuse, but at least it's some kind of reason.
Why is the mainstream media not interested in going after this kind of stuff?
Is it like the hangover of all of the Bill Clinton rape allegations?
Is it just they feel they're going to find a lot of Democrats?
I mean, what is going on that this is not something?
People are fascinated by it.
They're interested in it. They're outraged by it.
It's certainly going to sell newspapers.
Not that that's a great motive, but it's not unimportant for a business.
So what is the barrier that's keeping them from pursuing this stuff?
Yeah, and you, you know, thought leaders are better at coming up with kind of worldviews and explaining it.
People have different ones. I'm not going to be in the camp yet that there's a big sort of, you know, conspiracy.
At the same time, when you see things that are clearly popular, or even things like our film, where, look, when we made it free, four million views in four months, we get all these great reviews, you know, 94 Rotten Tomato rating, New York Times, Variety,
and so forth. We've got this credential director, Amy Berg, Oscar nominated in the past for her work with Deliver Us From Evil, which was a few years earlier than our film about the Catholic Church, and a million and a half dollar budget, you know, which I paid for full-fledged documentary.
It should be an easy sale, no problem.
We were blocked from the film festivals.
Film festivals are very easy to get into if you're just a few students and you have a couple thousand dollars and you make a short film.
Look, you pay your fee of a few hundred dollars.
They stick you in some corner on somewhere, machine.
There's hundreds, if not thousands, at any major film festival you go to.
In our case, at LA, Toronto, and London.
All three times, we were, of course, let in at first by the creative people who watched it.
Oh, great, another Amy Berg film.
Yeah, sure. We'll figure out the scheduling and what big screen we're going to put you on when.
You know, put you up for an award, maybe.
And a couple weeks later, we'd get the word back Which presumably came from higher-ups finding out and watching it that we were actually disinvited.
And this happened three times.
Finally went to NYC in New York.
We sold out on three days notice the 500-person theater and we got again these rave reviews, top of drudge report.
So it showed there was clearly a public clamoring for our film and yet We couldn't get a single offer from Hollywood to distribute it for any amount of money, not even no money down in a percentage deal.
We did a little independent theater rental and such, but that's really a tough gig to do yourself.
I kept the film on ice and knew that there would be some moment when the public would be receptive, maybe when Hollywood was down a little bit, give them a real kick.
And sure enough, when the Weinstein stuff broke, I released it for free.
So to your point, there's great public demand.
Why these things don't happen through the mainstream media and through these power structures is really a question of somebody who's a greater thinker than I and what their view is on the world, because whether it's the film or whether it's an outrageous story, like I mentioned, that a CNN doesn't even spend a second on, you do have to wonder why.
Well, and the thing that strikes me, of course, Gabe, is how strongly Hollywood went after the Catholic Church.
Endless movies, documentaries with major stars talking about child sexual abuse in particular within the Catholic Church.
And then, of course, when the tables are turned, so to speak, it's almost like, no, they're the real criminals.
We're not. And it would be one thing if this was a blanket topic they didn't talk about.
But by heaven above, they've been talking about it with every other group but themselves and that mirror.
Almost like it's been a distraction or a projection.
But when the mirror is held up to them, suddenly they're very, very quiet and tight-lipped and suppressing on the topic itself.
And we did hit them, you know, where it hurts in terms of, you know, SAG-AFTRA. SAG-AFTRA, you know, is the biggest union.
To basically act anywhere in America, you've got to be a member.
They've got over 100,000 members.
And how they reacted when we exposed a pedophile on camera and the guy admitted to it.
And they had their press minder there.
The press minder went back and reported this.
And our film was hush-hush.
It was just being made very quietly.
They didn't call to ask us for the tape.
They didn't call to say thank you.
They didn't send out maybe an email to their, you know, children members, parent members say, hey, this guy, you know, so-and-so, if your child has ever worked with him, There's a tape you might want to see.
No. Instead, they let the guy quietly resign, didn't tell anybody, had the lawyer send us a letter threatening us that if we simply identified him as who he was and what his prominent position was on the Committee to Protect Children, the Young Performers Committee, he'd been on there for decades, that they would sue us.
And of course, we had the story published and, you know, had their lies exposed.
But yeah, we did go after them where it hurts.
Hollywood probably has more regulation of animals.
Then children, you have to offer the dog water every 45 minutes and give it a break, and you're not allowed to pet it.
I mean, there's actually pages and pages of lists for even just handling of dogs on sets.
So in every big organization, it is a dirty secret.
And you might have just seen, it's not just USA Gymnastics.
The most USA girls volleyball team coach in America was just sued by no fewer than six Former girls for repeatedly raping them for years and years, and the wife knew about it.
And for decades, there would be these accusations against this guy, and he would just move to a different location and, you know, coach from a different place, and it just kept going on and on.
So there is this big problem, and it ends up affecting our society in so many different ways that we're not handling, and the media isn't helping.
I think the people, when they're informed by the media like yourself and others, or somebody who's, let's say somebody's persuadable, but they're an independent and they see yourself or Alex Jones or any conservative, Cernovich, and they're like, wow, Cernovich is talking about the guy with the million child porn images.
Why aren't I seeing this on CNN? They start to wonder about maybe some of these other things this guy is talking about are right too.
Well, and there must be.
I mean, there's a number of sort of theories as to why this wouldn't be dealt with within the industry.
And there is, of course, being complicit.
There's being bought out. There's being dependent upon powerful people for your income, for your prestige, for your status, for your opportunities, for your career.
But I think also, this is just my hypothesis.
I'm not saying this is proof, of course, Gabe, but my particular perspective is that If we think of Hollywood as an apple and there's rotten parts, nobody wants to find out how deep the rot goes and how wide the rot goes because I don't think they even know what's going to be left standing if people really start to go in because you've got one guy, pedophile, and then there's people who know about it, there's people who enable it, there's people who ignore it.
The radius goes out very far and very wide from just one guy and there are many of them.
And that was basically the entire BBC with Jimmy Savile and You know, almost an entire industry.
I mean, Jimmy Seville is like, I compare him to, in England, that's like, imagine Bill Cosby, but much, much more famous, with children and not women, with 10 times as many victims, who in the 1980s, for about 10 straight New Year's Eve's, he went to the Prime Minister's New Year's Eve party.
You know, you're talking top 10 sort of talent in the whole country.
And then you find out after he dies that he had, yes, a whole network of enablers and people who would make money off of him and his show and everything that had covered up what he had done for decades and decades.
You're right. There are tremendous obstacles, both on that side and then, of course, from the victim side, as we've talked about.
How high and how deep it goes, I really don't know.
You just have to keep digging. And I wonder also, Gabe, some of the opposition regarding Trump.
Now, Trump, of course, has his dark side like we all do, but he seems pretty confident at going after sex trafficking rings and arrests for these kinds of crimes has gone up under the Trump administration.
I also wonder to what degree, knowing that Trump would be willing to go after these guys, fueled some of the hysterical opposition to Trump's presidency.
Oh, there's no question.
I mean, it's been very limited.
But on occasion, you know, there'll be some liberal, there was one liberal, you know, blogger, for example, who went after us, but it was, you know, one in a few months.
And the guy interviewed me.
I won't even credit him by saying his name.
But he's got 50,000 followers.
It's, you know, smallish to moderate.
I said, yes, I do the interview.
And the first thing I ask is, well, have you seen the film?
The guy says, no.
Okay. Okay. And then all he wants to do is talk about, you know, Cernovich and Alex Jones.
And my answer is this.
Look, you don't like those guys.
They don't like you.
You've got different opinions.
You think they're a broken clock.
They think you're a broken clock.
Fine. But instead of demonizing them, maybe you might say a broken clock is right twice a day.
And maybe this is one of the two times a day on child sex abuse and Hollywood That maybe somebody was actually right and just, you know, got there first.
Because if I was too busy doing Megyn Kelly or CNN, I wouldn't have had time to go on, you know, some of the other shows.
That's just the facts of life.
But folks who are interested of any political stripe, I don't view this as a political issue.
You're correct that for some reason, conservatives going back Not only, you know, with Trump, it's been exacerbated under Trump, but even before Trump, conservatives have been much more interested in this crime issue of law and order of child sex abuse than others.
Well, it is...
I mean, I don't really consider myself a conservative, but I will say this, that I would hope that no matter what people's political perspectives and opinions are, I'd like to cross my fingers, Gabe, and hope that child rape is something we can all agree on as a terrible thing that needs to be rooted out and destroyed.
I mean, if your opinion's on tariffs and income tax and the appropriate role of government education, let's debate those.
How about we just take a little fruit ninja slice and carve off the fact that child rape, pedophilia, if that's not something we can all agree on, I don't even know how we can end up with one country.
Yeah, I completely agree with you.
And, you know, you're the great, you know, thinker and not myself.
It does sort of play into the whole Hobbesian, you know, natural law thing and how these problems, you know, would have been dealt with or would be dealt with under any form of natural law or rational society.
And it's obvious, not just from our film and not just from, okay, these are two examples in a day in America spending 15 minutes looking, that you realize we've got a tremendous problem in our society that just from a basic Crime and law and order and punishment that we're not dealing with properly here.
We're not even coming close.
Well, and we have, of course, spent a long time now, and rightly so, focusing on child sex abuse within the church.
Statistically, though, you are far more likely to end up being sexually abused in a government school than you are in a Catholic church.
And so there are other areas.
I think academia is going to be one, though, of course, not with children.
We're starting to see it in the sports world with coaches, which is something people have suspected for a long time.
I think that government schools are going to have to be a place where we look at this kind of stuff.
And it is hard to imagine how deep and wide this human rot goes and how difficult it's going to be, not just to see it and to observe it, but to actually start to deal with it in a moral and legal sense.
This, I think, could be the great fight of the generation.
Absolutely. You have all of these large organizations, which are, you know, any, whether you label yourself as a libertarian, conservative, whatever, let's face it, they are artificial constructs.
of large bureaucratic organizations that are not sort of natural and not naturally adaptable.
And any large bureaucratic organization will take on self-preservation instincts.
You can call it regulatory capture, you can call it, but it becomes like an organism.
And so the first mechanism of any organism is simply self-defense and cover up rather than excising something which It doesn't happen just in their organization, but it happens in others.
And so it becomes a protective mechanism for the abusers by extension.
I'm sure the organizations, most of them, don't want that to happen, but by not all coming together.
For example, if you want to buy a piece of real estate, you want to rent an office building, In America, there's these, and in the world, there's these voluntary standards called LEED, right?
You'd be LEED gold, LEED silver, and those are just a transparent set of standards.
You can read what they are, and it's all voluntary.
Wouldn't it be great if every large organization, which deals with a lot of children in America, school, religious, sports, you could look on whatever website it was and see, are they, and I'm making up a name, are they kids safe?
There was a set of standards you could look up that you knew, okay, if something gets reported, this is what happens with an accusation.
This is where it goes. This is who it gets reported to.
This is the process where you felt like there wouldn't be one of these serial predators who would just go on and on for decades and decades and get covered up or get ignored.
This happened in USA Swimming.
There was a huge investigative piece, Junior Swimming.
Hundreds, hundreds of cases covered up Now, it's been my experience that...
When you start to speak for the protection of children, when you start to uncover crimes against children in particular, children are the great voiceless in society, right?
They don't pay their taxes, they don't vote, and there's a lot of predation that occurs upon children.
And it is rare for the children to find someone who's willing to stand up and say, this is wrong, this is what needs to be done.
You know, we have this huge bigotry against children.
I sort of call it childism. It's the last realm of acceptable prejudice in the world.
You can still hit children, you can...
Punish them in brutal ways, and it's all legal.
And the consequences for the abuse of children, as you point out, I mean, you try beating up your wife and see how long you stay out of prison, but you can abuse children and, as you say, get off with probation if you're even caught at all.
So when I began to talk about the protection of children, the necessity for affection, care, concern for children, and the evils of child abuse, I got The communications, the messages, the thank you for speaking, thank you for this is what happened to me, and so on. Because it's like an oasis in the desert for somebody to actually stand up for what happened to people when they were children.
Has that occurred for you that as this information has gotten out that the stories have come piling in?
Big time. And they could be...
And to your point...
When someone is abused as a child, unfortunately, it's so traumatic in most cases that it's almost like they turn into a child permanently in terms of being voiceless and not being able to really express themselves or talk about what happened very widely.
It's only a very few survivors or very few victims become survivors and become brave enough to actually tell their stories.
We were lucky to find a few Brave ones, but I'll tell you, even that's, you know, temporary.
We capture it. Somebody comes to us and, okay, we get it on film right away because a couple weeks, couple months later, they'll change their mind.
It's really that damaged in many cases.
It's that bad. I mean, I could tell you about whether it's ordinary people or whether it has been things sometimes behind the scenes where we've been involved and I've been involved in vetting Some cases and then passing them off to a credible journalist and not getting any mention or anything, don't want it or need it.
Or in another case like the Deadline Hollywood thing, not being so behind the scenes.
And, you know, in fact, during the Oscars, we dropped a little teaser video of about a minute on our Twitter at An Open Secret for the first time telling everyone that there is actually an interview.
With this big network of, call them boy passers, and you will find out when we release this video in a couple of months that the shocking things that you see in that Deadline Hollywood article about Bryan Singer and his cadre are the least concerning things.
If people thought that our film and open secret rocked Hollywood, this will even more.
I mean, multiples.
It's truly horrific and Really, the only delay in this whole process has, frankly, been figuring out how we're handling things in terms of how we're working with law enforcement versus just dumping stuff out there because you want to be careful about it.
There are truly horrific buried stories in Hollywood that are slowly rising, but they concern, let's say, one of the most prominent publicists in Hollywood.
For example, there's an A-list actress who I won't name, but the daughter, when she was 11 to 13, was raped by the partner for years.
And it's now 12 years later.
I mean, this just goes on and on and on.
It's only a question of when folks get brave enough or when something can get vetted enough and get through all the editors and lawyers to actually get out there.
We're just scratching the surface in just Hollywood, let alone in America.
And it's going to be huge.
I mean, the stuff that you're working on, it is going to be explosive.
The media, academia, the Democrat Party, Hollywood, television productions, the talent, the talent managers, there are trillions of dollars of political and artistic and media power all wrapped up on the moral legitimacy of the left.
And the left, of course, has been lecturing everyone about how to be good, how to be right, how to be moral, and so on.
And they've taken the moral high ground.
You know, the conservatives are all Nazis and fascists and so on, right?
And if that moral high ground is detonated...
By the light beams of an accurate history and a portrayal that cannot be denied, which I think is the kind of footage that you're sitting on.
That is going to be such a fundamental sea shift in the cultural wars that I don't think there has been a historical, maybe the Reformation, but there's not been a historical precedence that I can think of about how...
Those who portray themselves as the highest moral agents of mankind are revealed as participating or enabling or ignoring or bypassing some of the most depraved human behavior imaginable.
I can't think of a bigger shift or swing that has occurred in history and certainly not with the capacity to broadcast it in the way that we have now.
Right. You think that, okay, it can't get much worse for Hollywood.
You know, the Oscars, okay, the ratings were down something like 16%.
Well, the Golden Globes, the award show before that, you know, was all about, you know, Meet Me Too and anti-Trump, and that was down, you know, over 20%.
So the Oscars tried to tell them to lay off the politics a little bit.
It didn't work much because their movies are terrible.
I mean, they gave their highest award to, you know, a film...
A Shape of Water, best picture, about a mute woman who falls in love with a fish monster, they have sex, and they live happily ever after.
So Hollywood isn't putting out good products, but if you think the moral ground couldn't get worse between those huge billboards in the middle of Hollywood by the street artist Sabo, you know, the Oscar for the world's biggest pedophile goes to, or It even extends to the Harvey Weinstein on the casting couch street art, which was in the gold color of the Oscar.
And by the way, that street artist was not a conservative like Sabo.
That was the same street artist who had done the naked Donald Trump.
The derision for Hollywood is starting to get bipartisan.
To your point, people don't even know how bad it's going to get until this stuff continues to bubble out.
I mean, the Golden Globes, with all the talk about Me Too and women, Did you realize that the only mention of child sex abuse epidemic in Hollywood, where you'd already had, you know, a couple dozen, you know, folks come out against, you know, big producer and theme park designer Gary Goddard, including Anthony Edwards, who is not some nobody, but who, you know, Gary Goddard had abused him as a child.
Anthony Edwards is a multiple Emmy Award winner for his work on ER. These include some big people.
Or Tyler Grasham with seven accusations.
You had already dozens and dozens.
Yet the only mention was when the host, Seth Meyers, made a couple sick jokes about Kevin Spacey.
That's it. And then there was no mention at all during the Oscars.
So yeah, Hollywood is hiding from this and trying to hide it.
But through the internet and through, you know, the bravery of survivors, they're not going to be successful.
And I really, of course, want to express a huge appreciation for the work that you've done.
I mean, I know that you've received threats legal and otherwise, I know that it has not made your life pleasant in some ways, but it is such a calling to stand up for victims of death.
Thank you.
And I just want to remind people, the film is very generously – you funded it yourself.
You very generously made it available.
We'll put the link to it below.
The documentary is called An Open Secret.
And we'll put the link to it.
And the Twitter account is An Open Secret, which is well worth following.
I look forward to staying in touch with you, Gabe, as you've talked about what comes out over the next couple of months comes out, which is going to be extraordinarily powerful.
This is a moment in history where we really have to look at this dark heart of entertainment and other areas.
We just kind of have to grit our teeth, do that dantean dance through hell, and turn the lights on and see what's going on.
I don't think it'll come again very easily.
This is a time when, in a sense, the planets have all aligned.
You're very, very key in that, and I just want to express my admiration and my appreciation For the work that you're doing.
And of course, thank you very much for the time that you've taken today.
Well, thank you for having me.
And, you know, everyone should realize that, look, every time you see, you know, a story about, look, somebody being caught and actually put in jail or somebody exposed, that's actually a victory.
And of, you know, the many problems that, you know, you and other, you know, great, you know, thinkers and philosophers see in the world, this is actually one where the battle is just beginning and But we can actually, you know, improve and ultimately win this battle as a society because unlike perhaps view on other big issues, this is one where universally people do agree something needs to be done.
It's just a question of victims and others continuing to have the courage and continuing to, you know, share links, share information, watch things, be informed, and vote with their dollars.
You know, this will change, but it will be a generational battle.
I believe that, you know, hopefully when we go to wherever we're supposed to go at the end of our lives, that we will look at this place and say, you know, at least on that one thing, things did get better.
Maybe it didn't get fixed.
It's an eternal problem. But yeah, that went from, you know, a one on the scale of one to 10 of us doing something to it went to a five to six.
We got somewhere. Well, and for those who are victims, recognize Gabe's not going anywhere.
I'm not going anywhere. We are not backing down because we understand what is at stake and how important it is to bring this issue to the light, to bring the comfort of at least the truth and honest acceptance of the wrongs that were done and the comfort of knowing that That you are believed and you are sympathized with.
And that casting out into the outer darkness has happened to so many children who've been abused in this kind of manner will not be allowed to stand.
And I really appreciate your time again.
The documentary, An Open Secret, An Open Secret on Twitter.
