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Oct. 17, 2024 - Uncensored - Piers Morgan
32:16
20241017_the-menendez-brothers-joker-2-feat-michael-franzes
Transcriber: nvidia/parakeet-tdt-0.6b-v2, sat-12l-sm, and large-v3-turbo
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Hollywood's Empathetic Superhero Drag 00:13:18
I mean ultimately it just represents Hollywood in a nutshell.
They hate their fans.
I mean Jua King Phoenix who is an acclaimed actor was effectively asked to make a souffle out of cow dark.
It was so bad.
Fans and audiences want men to be men and women to be women.
I mean the only people that know the truth are obviously the parents and the Menendez brothers.
They were pretty scared about the situation that they were facing.
I think the proper charge of proper conviction should have been manslaughter.
A lot of the conversations on social media have kind of reduced this largely to something that is more, in my opinion, an exploit of the situation.
There have been accusations that Diddy acted like a mafia boss.
You were a mafia boss.
What was your reaction to this story?
Joker was a box office smash and a cultural phenomenon, raking in more than a billion dollars and landing Joachim Felix and Oscar.
The sequel, boasting the same leading man and the same director, is heading the way of the Titanic and not the incredibly successful DiCaprio movie, but the actual boat which resides firmly at the bottom of the ocean.
The pretentiously named Joker Folia Deux, hereafter known as Joker 2, is one of the biggest commercial and critical catastrophes in Hollywood history.
So what's gone wrong?
A hardcore fan said a Joker is broker because it became woker.
Joining me to debate all this and the fallout, uncensored contributor Esther Kraku, author of The Case for Canceled Culture, Ernest Owens, chief film critic for Variety, Peter DeBruge, and the CEO of YouTube network Geeks and Gamers, Jeremy Primer.
Welcome to all of you.
Jeremy, let me start with you.
For people who've not seen this sequel, but may be surprised by what a failure it seems to have been.
And it really has, in box office terms, been an absolute bust.
What has gone wrong here, do you think?
I mean, ultimately, it just represents Hollywood in a nutshell.
They hate their fans.
They despise their fans.
And if you watch this movie, it was a direct shot at all of the fans that supported the first film.
And it wasn't just the fans that supported the first film.
It was normies.
It was regular people.
It was elevated to the highest grossing rated R film of all time because of word of mouth, because you have to get normies involved at that point in time for a film to be that successful.
So there is no one type of fan that represented the Joker in 2019's success.
But in Hollywood's terms, they had to let those fans know, we don't like you and we're going to destroy everything that you loved.
There was a review in the London Metro which said the decision to make Joker 2 was a takedown of the incel celebrated Joker 1 and gave a middle finger to the right-wing online edge lords and was a bold, daring move by the filmmakers.
A, is that characterization correct, do you think?
And B, what do you think about that?
No, I mean, it's just it is a cultural problem within Hollywood.
I don't think that, I think that those words are being, you know, used in Hollywood on a consistent basis across the board.
But we've seen this from whether it's Star Wars, whether it's Marvel, whether it's other things that have a huge fan base and a huge support system.
They want to cater to that audience and that audience will give them a platform and then they will abandon that audience once they have the platform that they built off of it.
We've seen it time and time again.
I mean, you've got situations with the Joker.
The first film had a $50 million budget.
The second film had a $200 million budget.
Clearly, you were wanting that same audience to go support your movie.
But in reality, not only did they not support it at all, the Normies didn't either.
Usually when we see a film that has a huge amount of success, the follow-up film, whether it's good or not, usually sees a huge bump in the opening weekend and a massive drop on the second weekend if it's not good.
We didn't even see the huge bump in opening weekend.
No one was interested in this movie.
Average people, normies, hardcore fans, no one wanted a follow-up to this film.
It was a one-off that should have been left at that, but they decided to take this as an opportunity to disrespect everybody.
All right, Peter, you know, I took two of my sons to go and see the Top Gun Maverick sequels, the original Top Gun, because Top Gun is one of my all-time favorite films.
And I went with quite a sense of apprehension about whether it was going to try and change everything.
But in fact, it was a brilliant, just modern reincarnation of the original one in terms of the way it was made.
And I loved it.
It seems to me the big problem that people have with the Joker 2 is it's almost like a rejection on camera of what the first one stood for.
But you said that it struck a nerve with you, not in a good way, the first movie, by transforming the beloved Batman villain into a poster boy with incels everywhere.
I feared we go down the scarface route as a fictive role model for sick minds.
I mean, pretty strong words, but do you think that was the view shared by the makers of the second one in the sense that we've got a reverse course here?
You know, it's hard for me to get into Todd Phillips' mind.
It does really feel like kind of a perverse move to have basically taken everything that a certain kind of moviegoer, usually the kind of moviegoer that goes to superhero movies and embraces them.
Now, Joker was never a traditional superhero movie.
My kind of argument or take on it is that it was this intended to be empathetic portrait of a man with abuse issues, mental health issues, and that many of us read as an incel, kind of in superhero drag.
It wasn't the same Joker we'd ever seen before.
His villainy was nothing like, you know, what we'd seen in the comics.
And in a way, the billion-dollar success seemed to be a response to that kind of high concept idea.
Now, here, the villains of the movie, it's not Joker, it's the characters who love him.
You know, Harley Quinn is basically his number one fan.
And he realizes that she's not who she represents herself as, but rather is just a groupie.
And, you know, toward the end of the movie, without spoiling things, he's basically confronted with his fans and rejects them.
Even when he reassumes his kind of Joker persona, he's doing it as a rejection of the violence that's expected of him.
The only violence that happens in the movie, like the musical numbers, is happening in kind of a fantasy in his headspace, but not actually in the movie.
And so you've got a movie that's a musical that doesn't give you the violence, that doesn't give you the Joker or, you know, he essentially rejects this.
So in a way, it felt like perhaps Todd Phillips was listening to his critics, people like me who thought that that first movie, I don't think we were the majority.
There was a billion-dollar proof that people love this movie.
But there were those of us who were reminded of the Aurora shootings who felt triggered or, you know, as if he was deliberately playing with a character who had been associated with actual real world copycat violence and of a certain demographic, and that he was, he was never glorifying this character, but he was presenting a portrait that allowed it to be read that way.
And to me, it's the rare movie I felt, the first movie, that the world was worse off for having exist.
Really?
You know, like I...
I mean, it seems to me, look, I thought the first movie was fantastic.
Interestingly, if he did listen to critics like you, then clearly he's made a massive strategic mistake, isn't he?
No disrespect to you.
I know you're very good at what you do, but clearly taking the movie in the direction he's taken it, by rejecting the original Joker, he's also had the audience reject the movie in spectacular fashion.
It's been a humongously bad call, wasn't it?
I also don't think Todd Phillips is the kind of person to listen to his critics in the sense of like to take notes from them.
I think he's someone who responds to them.
There's proof of that in the Hangover 3, which kind of ends with them waking up kind of with a third hangover.
And that's a response to critics of the second movie who said this would never happen a second time.
How do you expect us to believe this?
You know, it's basically a big middle finger extended toward them.
And so I think there's a complicated reaction here where he's trying to be responsible.
He's trying to be original.
He's trying to be provocative.
And he's losing every one of the people who might have a vested interest in this movie along the way, making a movie for no one.
Let me bring in Eric.
He didn't want to make the movie, by the way.
He did not want to make a sequel.
It's that Warner Brothers backed up the Brinkstruck and forced his hand.
So he took this as an opportunity, I think.
Anyway, I didn't mean to interrupt.
Yeah, but I think that's a good point.
I want to bring in Ernest.
I mean, it seems to me it's a bit like making another Silence of the Lands and making Annibal Lecture a vegetarian.
It's like, why would you think that's ever going to work?
People want to watch it because he eats people.
You know, I think what happened here is that there should have not been a sequel.
I think that the first film was dark enough.
It had enough of the point across.
Joaquin Phoenix won the Oscar for Best Actor.
I think that was enough, to be honest.
I think, I don't know what another sequel would have looked like, to be honest, if it was not this.
I mean, I know this is a very polarizing film for various reasons.
You know, I don't think it was, you know, as good as the first one, arguably in the focus point.
But I do think that a sequel of the same exact, you know, poor, lone wolf guy who's, you know, killing people, I don't know if that would have been as entertaining.
Maybe it would have made more money, but it would have been, I think, artistically boring.
And so I think, you know, Todd probably wants to go in a direction of like, look, I want, I don't really want to do this, but if I am done.
But Todd was completely wrong.
He should have just done a lot more of the same, I would argue.
I mean, I want to bring in Esther.
I want to bring in Esther because Esther, some commentators, including Peter actually, have suggested that by making the film a musical, by casting a gay icon, Lady Gaga, having the Joker character kiss another man in the movie, the director, Todd Phillips, was deliberately trolling the online, online, right-wing fan demo.
And that by doing so, ironically, of course, he's self-imploded his franchise.
Well, I think we're intellectualizing what's right before our very eyes, which is this was a giant tax write-off.
I'm sorry, the film was so offensively bad.
There is no way that this could be intellectualized as any other thing than a giant tax write-off.
I mean, I watched it in a rural part of England and there were people leaving the cinema halfway through.
It was that bad.
I don't like musicals on the best of days.
I will admit my bias.
But there were just so many things about it that were just, it didn't make sense.
Actually, the music wasn't even the worst part of it.
It was the disjointed plot line.
I mean, Jua King Phoenix, who is an acclaimed actor, was effectively asked to make a souffle out of cow dung.
It was so bad.
I mean, the idea that this was a giant middle finger to incels and the people that enjoyed the first film really don't understand what made the first film quite unique.
Yes, it should have been a standalone, but I think there's something to be said about the fact that there was nothing about this that would indicate it would be commercially successful, which makes me think it was a write-off.
They quadrupled the budget.
They turned it into a musical, which is always a big gamble.
The plot was confused.
And in the end, I'm sorry, spoiler alert, the Joker wasn't even the Joker.
So it really, there was no point to the film.
It had no relevance to the entire film franchise.
And having Lady Gaga, who's very talented in there, but didn't really seem like she was actually embodying the character.
I mean, the best parts of her in the film were just her singing, which, yes, we know Lady Gaga can sing, but you're not actually making it.
You know what the big lesson is?
I'm sorry.
This was a tax writer.
I think the big lesson here is probably for the broccoli family as they work out what to do with James Bond.
Because given the way Bond ended up in the last movie as a kind of muted, emasculated, sobbing guy who ends up apparently being killed, if they continue to take 007 down that road, no one's going to want to watch it.
You know, I want, I mean, I'll come to Jeremy for this, but the truth is, Jeremy, people want James Bond to be a cold-eyed, steely killer who womanizes drinks and smokes, don't they?
I mean, if you tamper with the franchise too much, nobody wants to watch this stuff.
Spoiler alert for Hollywood.
Fans and audiences want men to be men and women to be women.
And it's that simple.
You get it back to the basics.
That's the bottom line.
And this is as simple as business.
Now, before I was a low-quality YouTuber, I worked in retail.
When I worked in retail, do you know what we did?
When something sold, we ordered more of it because the audience was telling us or the customer was telling us, we want more of this product.
Well, am I supposed to go, well, I don't like your opinion, so I'm not going to order more of the craft macaroni and cheese.
Corrective Measures for Cinema 00:06:19
It's the dumbest thing ever.
Give people what they want.
If people are going to your movie and giving you a billion dollars for a rated R movie, a fucking rated R movie made a billion dollars, the first one in history.
And what did you say?
Hey, all of you fans, go F yourself.
We don't like you.
We don't respect you.
Now, to the argument of...
Well, this is...
Yeah, I mean, this is what happens when filmmakers are activists instead of actual filmmakers.
This is what happens when people are not concerned about producing quality content and giving people what they want.
Instead, they're wagging their fingers at you and telling you, oh, you're naughty for liking this film that we created.
That makes you an install.
Therefore, we're going to create this awful film that people will walk out halfway through in rural parts of England, not die-hard fans, just average people that thought, oh, let me go to the cinema today.
I mean, this is exactly what happens.
And unfortunately, Hollywood is going to have to learn the hard lesson that if you decide to put out content that's more ideologically driven than about producing quality filmmaking, this is what happens.
But there's also, I think, Ernest, there's a kind of deceit at the heart of this, which is this.
Take up the Rachel Zagler comments last week about Snow White, which she plays Snow White, and she's Latino herself.
And she defended the fact that she should be playing Snow White, who in the original Grimm's fairy tale was as white as the driven snow was her skin color, by saying it's never been about skin color.
It was always about Snow White's resistance, to which I tweeted, well, imagine if that's the case, if Daniel Craig had got the lead role as Black Panther, and he had argued it's not about skin color, even though the original cartoon strip very much had the Black Panther as a black character.
It's not about his skin color, it's about his resistance.
People like you would have gone nuts and said, don't be so disgusting.
Of course it's about skin color.
And yet, Rachel Zagler, I bet you're about to launch a ridiculously indefensible defense of her right to say it's not about skin color for Snow White, right?
Well, I think also context matters, right?
Black Panther's origins and the origin story of where they're at, the context around the character is driven by a racialized plot that almost if you had a white Black Panther character, it wouldn't make sense.
Snow White is not driven by her racial identity throughout the film.
You could literally replace any person of any type of ethnicity to play it.
But if you're obsessed with skin tone, then sure, if you want to be very specific that the skin was white as snow and that's the only reference, then sure, I guess you could argue that.
But Black Panther isn't just driven by skin colour.
It's driven by the origin of the identity of it, right?
African roots and tribal.
Snowflake is a little bit of a colour.
Okay, so if you want to make that argument, come on, let me know.
Let me, I want to say, before I let Peter and Jeremy go, Peter, I'm going to ask you and Jeremy the same question.
Before this, IMDb said the worst sequel of all time was Jaws 2 The Revenge, which was absolutely god-awful.
Has it now been supplanted? by this second Joker movie?
No.
This is not the worst sequel of all time by a long mile.
In fact, it's quite a provocative movie.
I just think it's a train wreck.
It's definitely not a write-off either.
We've seen what Warner Brothers does to bury their movies, and you don't spend this kind of money to lose this kind of money.
They thought they had a hit on their hands, and there were a number of factors that worked against it, like Joaquin having bowed out at the last minute of a Todd Haynes movie, therefore not being available for publicity.
A lot of the things that would have helped them here.
If I can just insert a thought, because you brought up James Bond, you've brought up kind of like, you know, casting and not casting white people in roles we're used to.
Well, you haven't even got me onto the Snow White and the Seven Dwarves, where we're not allowed to have actual dwarf actors.
I mean, that was the most important thing.
Right, right.
I've heard all these arguments and like, I'm not really interested in that conversation, but I would like to bring up the point.
I just saw Blitz, the new Steve McQueen movie.
And this movie I adored.
It corrects something that I think is essential to the conversation about could you have a black James Bond?
And that, Piers, you live in the UK, not me, but like the my feeling is that in the history of a century of cinema, people of color have been erased from as extras from black, from British stories.
Here is a movie that retells the story of World War II, the air raid bombings, the Blitz, and it includes all of those characters in a way that we've been deprived for 100 years.
And so a lot of the kind of corrective measures you're seeing now are either restoring the diversity that exists in our world, maybe not in whatever fairy tale land something took place, but I commend Disney for taking steps to sort of embrace the fact that not all of their audience are little white boys like I was, or, you know, that everyone can find a princess to identify with and that they've been open on this.
Yeah, I was more struck by Rachel Ziegler's sort of defense of herself.
In relation to Bond, I'd have no problem with a Black James Bond, even though that would be a good idea.
In fact, I've said that.
Final word to Jeremy.
Can I just jump pick up on something you said?
Very quickly, yeah.
You said corrective measures.
You said corrective measures, which I think is actually indicative of the kind of mindset of people that feel like, you know, cinema and art should take a specific form.
Why should any sort of art have corrective measures, right?
The whole point of producing art and telling a story is to just express your creativity.
By saying, oh, you're doing this, it's incorrect because you don't have these 20 diverse characters or you don't have a transgender one-hand-handed Muslim woman.
You're placing constraints on art.
And this is why we end up having horrible films like Joker 2, because you can't just produce what you want.
You can't just express yourself.
You have to have corrective measures so that some little girl in Rwanda can somehow feel identified with the Joker, which is ludicrous.
You can't always have that.
Good point.
And final word, Jeremy, I just want to ask you, is it the worst sequel of all time?
No, not the worst sequel of all time.
I just want to say Peter said the worst sequel of all time.
Well, it depends on if you're talking about a direct sequel or like The Last Jedi is probably the worst true, like actual sequel because of the destruction it did to Star Wars.
Restorative Justice for the Menendez Trial 00:12:38
The Joker 2, look, Todd Phillips accomplished what he wanted to accomplish.
From a creative standpoint, I can appreciate that.
He did accomplish what he wanted to accomplish.
It's just that what he wanted to accomplish was a terrible, terrible thing.
And so I think he did what he wanted to do.
And that's the bottom line of this.
Yeah, I think you may be right.
It was an act of self-harm.
But I would say the two greatest sequels of all time, Godfather 2 and Top Young Maverick.
There you are.
That's the Dark Knights, the greatest sequel.
And they were hugely popular as a result because you know what?
They gave you what they said on the 10 in the first one, only with bells on.
Guys, thank you all very much indeed.
We're going to keep two of you, Ernest and Esther.
And we're going to say goodbye to Jeremy and Peter.
Thank you both very much for being on the show.
Thank you so much.
Well, as Joker 2 flops, the true crime story of how the Menendez brothers went on trial for killing their parents has become a huge success for Netflix, the dramatized series and a feature-length documentary account.
The brutal double murder 35 years ago, as well as the exposure revelations of sexual abuse claims aired in the brothers' first trial.
What do you believe was the originating cause of you and your brother ultimately winding up shooting your parents?
My dad.
Can you answer the question?
Yes.
Okay, it was you telling Lyle what?
My dad had been less of me.
And it's just come on, it's stopping.
Were you seeking help from your brother?
Yes.
Well, the whole success of the show and renewed public interest has prompted the LA District Attorney to announce that his office will now review new evidence against the case.
But can it really be argued that two of America's most infamous parent killers are victims of an injustice?
Joining us to discourage this is the former Mafia boss, a mega-popular podcaster, Michael Francis, who became friends with the brothers while locked up in LA County Jail.
And we'll have Esther and Ernest to respond to this.
Michael, fascinating that you befriended these brothers in jail.
First of all, what were they like?
Well, you know, they were young guys.
I mean, I think Lyle was 20 and Eric was 18 at that time.
They were pretty scared about the situation that they were facing.
And understand, we were in lockdown.
We were in solitary.
And, you know, some solitary confinements, you have a steel door, others, you have bars.
Well, in LA County, we had bars.
And then we had kind of a mirror reflection.
So I could see them.
They were in the cell next to me.
Lyle was in the cell next to me.
Eric was one cell down from that.
But you can see each other because of the reflection in the glass.
And, you know, look, they were scared of the situation they were in.
They looked for advice.
I was with Lyle for 11 months and Eric for two months.
They moved Eric out because there was an alleged escape plan between the two of them, which Pierce was, you had to be Houdini II to escape out of there.
So I think they just wanted to separate them.
But, you know, I had many conversations with Lyle along the way in 11 months.
And I believe totally, 100%, that he was abused.
I mean, he opened up to me about his dad and how abusive he was.
And yet the irony of it all was that he still loved his dad very much.
And he talked about him.
He even said to me at times he didn't know how he was going to function without him.
And so it was a lot of stuff.
I think with the mom, they were more upset that the mom did nothing to defend them when this was abuse was going on for so long.
And that's what I got out of it.
You know, Pierce, you know, look, I'm sure their lawyer told them, you know, be careful who you speak to in a situation like that because, you know, any cellmate could eventually be an informant against you.
But I was with them so long, and I think they looked up to me a little bit.
Lyle did.
And so he confided in me.
And look, you know, you can never justify a murder like that.
It was pretty brutal.
But I do understand, you know, what drove them to do something like that.
You know, if I may continue, I also asked Lyle, I said, you know, why didn't you just go to your relatives and report it?
He said, Michael, you didn't understand.
My dad ruled the family.
And, you know, if for any reason it got back to him, things would have been worse.
And I said to him, what about the police?
My dad was a very powerful guy in the industry.
You know, people knew him.
And I was afraid if it didn't work out, you know, what he might do to retaliate.
So, you know, they were kind of in their own box, their own prison.
dealing with this.
You know, what's interesting is, having can't speed with the whole story, is in the first trial, they used all this abuse as their defense and it got rejected.
And then in the second trial, they weren't able to use that and it went against them.
You are obviously used, I think, to hearing a lot of bullshitters in your life, and yet you believe the abuse stuff.
And if it's true that they were appallingly abused, including raped by their father for a long period of time, and they reacted the way they did by committing murder against their parents as a result of this, it is possible they could have got off on manslaughter and been released, right?
Yeah, I mean, I think the proper charge of proper conviction should have been manslaughter.
The district attorney has reviewed it all.
He's invited the family to a press conference, which indicates to me that it's going to be a positive result for them.
Why would he invite the parents?
I mean, the relatives, I'm sorry.
So I think, you know, they're really considering it.
I think the whole family is supportive of them.
They all want these men to be released.
The two of them got married.
I think Eric has a 15-year-old daughter.
So, you know, they've done over 30 years in prison.
They've been model prisoners, model inmates, from what I understand.
And I think they deserve a break here.
All right, Esther, Pamela Bazanich, who was the LA prosecutor during the first trial, so this is a very straightforward case.
These two people were sitting here watching television, the parents, and they got slaughtered by their sons.
In the Netflix documentary, she doubles down on that, saying that whole defense was fabricated, the abuse claims, and it was done artfully, but it was fabricated.
And if I were an immoral person, I would have fabricated much in the same way.
So she wasn't having any of this.
Interesting to me that Michael Francis, who, as I say, can probably smell bullshit from a thousand miles, did believe them based on his lengthy conversations with them in prison.
What do you think?
I mean, the only people that know the truth are obviously the parents and the Menendez brothers.
However, there are some things that we have to be aware of.
I think it's very interesting when the public sort of takes an interest in a case, in any case, that's been tried not once but twice and somehow thinks they know better than the jury that was presented with all the evidence and had to sit in court for days or even weeks at a time.
And I find that really irritating that, you know, you have something that comes to light because somehow members of the public think they know better than jury members.
That being said as well, I think it's quite curious that in the immediate aftermath of the murder of these parents, you know, the brothers spent $700,000 because we know that the family was very wealthy.
We also know that one of the purchases was a $60,000 Porsche.
I mean, if you're trying to endear yourself to the public that you were victims of abuse, flagrantly spending the money of the parents that you brutally murdered is not one of the things that will do that.
I'm not saying they weren't abused or not.
I don't know that.
However, I think it's interesting when the public somehow believes they know everything to the story when obviously the people that were murdered are not here to defend themselves.
And the behavior of the brothers afterwards also doesn't seem like people that were traumatized and wanted to have nothing to do with their family.
I'm not saying people can't grieve and people can't grieve differently.
But if I was abused, I don't think I want anything to do with my family, let alone spend such an obscene amount of their money.
But it's interesting, isn't it?
Of people who are abused, it was interesting to me that Michael said that one of the brothers said to him he still loves his father, even though he killed him because of all the abuse that he perpetrated on him, as he says.
That can often happen with people who are abused, and they can attach themselves in a weird emotional way to abusers.
Ernest, what do you think of this?
I mean, I want to play you a little clip.
This is of a TikTok trend as a result of the Netflix series involving the Menendez brothers and their fashion sense, presenting them as kind of fashion icons.
I mean, I always find this kind of thing pretty distasteful given what they're in prison for.
No one disputes the fact that they shot their parents dead.
What do you think of this whole Menendez brothers phenomenon?
And where do you sit in terms of their culpability?
Are they cold-blooded murderers?
Or if they were abused, and I do think it's fascinating that Michael believes that, if they were abused, was it manslaughter with diminished responsibility based on the abuse?
Well, I think for starters, the social, the pop cultural response to this has been just a little frustrating because it is a very serious case.
And a lot of the TikTok videos, a lot of the conversations on social media has kind of reduced this largely to something that is more, in my opinion, an exploit of the situation.
You know, you can thank Ryan Murphy for that.
A lot of the ways in which he has handled these very salacious crime stories.
We saw with Jeffrey Dahmer, where families of the victims were disgusted by the way that he had portrayed the situation.
It's very exploitative.
And that's been something that's been frustrating me about this: is that, you know, we're not really considering the victims in this situation.
It could be the Menendez brothers, right?
They believe they're victims of something heinous, which led them to kill their parents.
But whatever the case is, I think that whenever there is a pop cultural lens on the situation, it kind of in many ways reduces it.
Now, you have people like Kim Kardashian who says they should be freed, you know.
Where I stand on the situation is that if it's possible for restorative justice, however that looks, right, it would be upon the LA Police Department and the teams and the investigators and the judges to review this with a more critical lens, revisit it, look at the evidence, but don't let a Netflix movie be the basis to what drives them to use that as evidence because a lot of that stuff was taken out of creative liberty of Ryan Murphy.
There's a lot of stuff that's been over-embellished and taken out that does not provide the full picture.
So if the legal authorities that be do decide to review this case, which they are, and they do come to a conclusion that allows these individuals to be freed, I just hope that it was not the Ryan Murphy documentary, not documentary, the biopic, and I say that in parentheses, that is the basis to what drives them to make their decision.
All right, fair enough.
Final question to you, Michael, and it's about a different matter.
P. Diddy, in the last few days, at least a dozen new anonymous lawsuits be filed against him, accusing him of sexual abuse against men, women, and a 16-year-old boy.
This has all been conducted by a lawyer that we had on last week.
More and more allegations coming out.
There have been accusations that Diddy acted like a mafia boss.
You were a mafia boss.
What is your reaction to this story?
Well, if he were acting like a mafia boss, I can guarantee you that the federal authorities, the FBI, would have been all over him right away, like they always were all over us right away.
You know, what gets me here is how this can go on for 20 plus years with people talking about it for so long and the authorities doing nothing about it.
You know, Pierce, it's amazing to me.
This guy was very high profile.
These parties were well known.
And, you know, it begs the question, were there elitist people on top that, you know, the other side doesn't want to go after, that they let things like this happen and people get abused sexually and every other way and allow it to go on for 20 years?
I mean, it's hard for me to understand.
If he was a mafia boss, they'd have taken him down right away.
Yeah.
Because they were all for us.
We didn't get away with things like this.
I agree.
I think there was a lot going on in full view of everyone and everyone knew about it.
And for some inexplicable reason, it was never taken seriously enough by anybody, it seems, for so long.
And so many people appear to have been dragged into it.
Michael, great to have you back in Uncensored.
And thank you to Ernest Nestor, as always, for your contributions.
I appreciate it.
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