Brace Belden and Liz Franczak’s rushed Perverts in Paris episode stems from a chaotic two-year research project debunking Jeffrey Epstein’s "bisexual woman with mental illness" myth (from The Bradley Edwards Book), while mocking the NYT’s Caliphate podcast for featuring a fraudulent ISIS claimant later arrested. Their planned Hanukkah guest session collapsed after technical failures—no email link, ignored calls, and a dead computer—so they scrambled a subpar episode in 24 hours, only to dismiss it as "terrible," revealing how production meltdowns can derail even sharp critiques of media deception. [Automatically generated summary]
We've been studying for the past two years, conducting interviews, talking to witnesses, and collating documents to prove one thing.
Jeffrey Epstein was a bisexual woman with mental illness.
Wait, is that the name of the New York Times thing?
No, that's actually, I shouldn't have used that.
That's just the name of the Bradley Edwards book, I feel bad, because I've used a lot of that in my research.
I thought it was the fake ISIS podcast.
Incredible.
So this woman just interviews some guy in Canada who's like, yeah, I was in ISIS.
And she's like, sounds good to me.
She's like, that's fucking crazy.
Tell me all about it.
He's like, absolutely.
He tells her all about it.
I haven't really looked into it that much because it's the New York Times.
You kind of got to assume it's bullshit.
But they did like a whole podcast series called Caliphate.
And he's like the main witness.
And then it turns out that he just made all of it up.
Like he'd never been to Syria.
He lived with his grandparents in Pakistan for a while.
He's Canadian.
And then he got arrested by Canada for lying.
The first clue should have been when she looked at him and he was a redhead.
Yes.
I don't think you're allowed in ISIS.
I will say if Canada, if it's, so I haven't looked into the law that much, but if it's possible to arrest someone for lying in Canada, then I would like to give some ex-girlfriends an all-expensive paid trip to Montreal.
I'm just kidding.
I would never do that.
Journey To The Episode00:03:08
that's too expensive hey here we are again
My nose is a little stuffed up, Liz, so I'm going to sound more nasally than usual.
Oh my God.
No, it's not.
Yes, it is.
Look.
Hello.
Hi, Brie.
Greetings, Liz.
This has been a journey to get to this episode, hasn't it?
I kind of want to tell people what happened.
Tell them what happened.
Also, don't forget what happened by Hillary Clinton.
Exactly.
Well, let's be honest here.
Let's tell them our arduous journey towards recording this episode right now.
Speak our truth.
Say our sound.
So we had a banger of an episode planned.
Big guest.
Big guest.
Huge.
Hanukkah guest.
Very big guest.
Can't give it away, but yeah.
Didn't work out.
Turns out Gmail.
Sometimes you're like, all right, so we do this remotely now, and we would have to do that remotely anyways because this guy doesn't live near any of us.
And so I email him the link, and I'm like, well, first of all, producer emails me the link.
And I'm like, what the fuck is I'm like texting him, like, what the fuck?
Where's the link?
Yeah, I'm like, there's no link.
Like, you piece of shit.
I call them a lot of names.
No link.
I put that behind me.
We're all forgetting lyrics.
Anyways, I get the link.
I send it to our guest who is a famously can be ornery.
Famously old person.
Famously old person too.
So that's it's difficult doing that in the first place.
He does not get the link.
And I send him, we're sitting here in the fucking recording session, like, where the fuck is this guy?
Yeah.
I send him the link again.
And he's like, I'm not getting the emails.
I'm turning my computer off.
And I die inside.
Shrimpled wither.
Then, well, then we, when we come up with another episode.
Well, yeah, we're on a little bit of a time crunch and due to some personal things that are none of your fucking business.
And so we were like, okay, we got to come up with an episode by tomorrow.
Yeah.
Which was yesterday.
We record the episode.
Hour and a half.
Hour and a half.
I wake up in the morning and I text the boys and I say, I don't like it.
Episode sucked.
It was terrible.
Bad episode.
I made a good joke during one part, but we had some good bits.