Jack Kershaw, a neo-Confederate lawyer who founded the League of the South and erected a Confederate monument after turning to law at age 50 due to anger over Brown v. Board, orchestrated James Earl Ray's 1977 Playboy interview and polygraph test following Ray's escape from Brushy Mountain State Penitentiary. While the test indicated Ray lied about the assassination but told the truth regarding pay, leading to lawsuits between the two men, Kershaw's career trajectory highlights a lifelong fight against desegregation. Ultimately, this narrative exposes how personal grievances over civil rights rulings fueled conspiracy theories surrounding Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.'s 1968 murder in Memphis. [Automatically generated summary]
Transcriber: CohereLabs/cohere-transcribe-03-2026, sat-12l-sm, and large-v3-turbo
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Josh Groban's Future Shaping00:02:03
This is an iHeart podcast.
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Hey, it's Nora Jones, and my podcast, Playing Along, is back with more of my favorite musicians.
Check out my newest episode with Josh Groben.
You related to the phantom at that point.
Yeah, I was definitely the phantom in that.
That's so funny.
Share each day with me each night, each morning.
Listen to Nora Jones' Playing Along on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
In 2023, Bachelor star Clayton Eckard was accused of fathering twins, but the pregnancy appeared to be a hoax.
You doctored this particular test twice, Ms. Owens, correct?
I doctored the test once.
It took an army of internet detectives to uncover a disturbing pattern.
Two more men who'd been through the same thing Greg Gillespie and Michael Mancini.
My mind was blown.
I'm Stephanie Young.
This is Love Trapped.
Laura, Scottsdale Police.
As the season continues, Laura Owens.
Finally faces consequences.
Listen to love trapped podcast on the Iheart Radio app app, Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts.
10, 10 shots.
Five, City Hall Building.
How could this have happened at City Hall?
Somebody tell me that a shocking public murder.
This is one of the most dramatic events that really ever happened in New York City politics.
I screamed, get down, get down.
Those are shots.
A tragedy that's now forgotten and a mystery that may or may not have been political.
That may have been about sex.
Listen to Rorschach, Murder at City Hall on the IHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
I'm Lori Siegel, and this is Mostly Human, a tech podcast through a human lens.
This week, an interview with OpenAI CEO Sam Altman.
I think society is going to decide that creators of AI products bear a tremendous amount of responsibility to the products we put out in the world.
The Forgotten Tragedy Mystery00:15:45
An in depth conversation with a man who's shaping our future.
Destroy the world with AI.
Listen to Mostly Human on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
Right around this time of year, 58 years ago, it was pouring rain in Memphis, Tennessee.
You can hear the wind rapping at the windows and occasional peals of thunder in the recording of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.'s final speech.
He arrived in the city around lunchtime on April 3rd and checked into the Lorraine Motel.
He was exhausted.
And starting to come down with something, and the weather was getting worse by the moment, but he gave the speech anyway.
That night, he addressed a crowd of over 2,000 people packed into the Mason Temple.
It was, of course, a moving speech.
They always were.
And his words were about more than just the Memphis sanitation workers' strike, they were about the struggle for freedom everywhere, across all of human history, from the book of Exodus to the churches in Alabama.
Bull Connor hadn't turned them around in Birmingham, not with dogs, not with fire hoses, and they wouldn't be turned around now.
They'd keep struggling, and they'd win.
One day.
Maybe not today, but one day.
Speeches don't have titles, not when you write them.
But this speech is remembered today as his I've been to the mountaintop speech, because that's how it ends.
He knows the struggle ends in victory, even if he won't be there with them at the end.
The speech ends with what sounds like a prophecy now, in hindsight.
Like anybody, I would like to live a long life.
Longevity has its place.
But I'm not concerned about that now.
I just want to do God's will.
And He's allowed me to go up to the mountain.
And I've looked over and I've seen the promised land.
I may not get there with you.
But I want you to know the night that we as a people will get to the promised land.
So I'm happy tonight.
I'm not worried about anything.
I'm not fearing any man.
Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord.
The very next day, he was dead.
Shot by an assassin as he was leaving his motel room.
I'm Molly Conger, and this is Weird Little Guys.
Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated in Memphis, Tennessee, a little after 6 p.m. on April 4th, 1968.
This isn't an episode about that moment in history.
Not really, not directly.
But it was an odd surprise as I sat down to write this week when I realized what day it was.
I was reading and writing about these supporting characters in the conspiracy theories about King's assassination.
On the anniversary of his death.
I'm trying to spend less time online.
I think that's something we should all aspire to.
But I saw an interesting post on Blue Sky that day from a user I'm not familiar with, but their display name is Ida B. Wells Winchester Rifle.
The post was about when we celebrate Dr. King.
Martin Luther King Jr. Day is in January, it's on his birthday.
And even as someone who routinely bumps up against some element of the story of his death in the course of my work, I don't think I could confidently tell you what day he died.
I mean, right now I could, but any other time of year, if you caught me by surprise and said, What day was King assassinated?
I wouldn't bet money on my ability to come up with the date April 4th, 1968.
And the gist of the post is that this is intentional.
We celebrate on his birthday as part of this project of whitewashing his legacy.
Because if we celebrated him on the day of his death, it would raise questions.
It would make us reckon with that death.
How did he die?
He was murdered, he was assassinated.
He wasn't just a nice, peaceful spokesman of polite nonviolence, he was a dangerous man.
If you were in the business of maintaining the political order, anyway.
He didn't die.
They killed him.
And if all you have is a vague recollection of, I have a dream, you might think that's all it was.
A passive dream of a possible better world, but he was dreaming of a world he was willing to die for.
One that he did die for.
It's a dream that's dreamt in milliseconds.
Behind eyes squeezed shut against the blast of a fire hose in Birmingham, and whether you were conscious of it or not, it's the same dream that so many of you have had when you squeezed your eyes shut in a cloud of tear gas on the street in Minneapolis or Ferguson or your own hometown.
So, as I was writing this week, I took a moment to really hear that final speech, to hear his words about developing a kind of dangerous unselfishness, about rising up with greater readiness, with greater determination, about struggling through the darkness, because we believe that what's on the other side is something so beautiful that it's worth fighting for.
He'd been to the mountaintop.
He had an unshakable faith that the promised land really does lie ahead if we're willing to keep going, even if we know, as he did, that we're planting trees whose shade we'll never rest in.
It's an important message today, I think.
It's not what this episode is about at all, but as I'm assembling the details about these terrible men and trying to position them in their proper context, I've actually really enjoyed.
Giving myself the kind of education about the civil rights movement that I just don't think I was getting in school.
I found some comfort in that speech this week, in the darkness of the work that I do and the world that we're living in.
I am going to tell you about a strange little racist, I promise I always do, but it's good sometimes to remember they're not the whole story.
Turning to the topic at hand, though.
The reason I was thinking about Dr. King in the first place is because I was reading some vintage pornography again this week.
That didn't come out right.
Let me explain.
This is a continuation of the story from last week.
We are still talking about Jack Kershaw, the man who made the world's ugliest Confederate monument.
His 25 foot tall polyurethane love letter to Confederate general and clan wizard Nathan Bedford Forrest stood next to the highway outside of Nashville, Tennessee.
Until 2021, when it was taken down by its new owner.
Jack Kershaw died in 2010 at nearly 100 years old.
And when he died, there were three facts about him in every news story he made that fucked up statue, he co founded the neo Confederate secessionist group, the League of the South, and he was a lawyer.
More specifically, though, Those articles all have the same exact single fact about his career as an attorney.
He once represented James Earl Ray.
That's why I was reading that old softcore porno mag.
I finally understand now that old joke about reading it for the articles.
Because this is the third time now that for some episode of this show, I have had to hunt down an issue of a 1970s nudie magazine.
First, it was the hustler spread that drove a Nazi serial killer to start plotting to kill Larry Flint.
Then, it was an old penthouse interview with the Alabama attorney general who indicted a church bomber.
And now, the September 1977 issue of Playboy magazine featuring the results of a polygraph test administered to James Earl Ray in prison.
James Earl Ray died in prison in 1998 while serving a 99 year sentence for the murder of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.
Today won't be the day we get into all of the competing, overlapping, and contradictory conspiracy theories about the exact level of his responsibility for that crime.
But he did confess, plead guilty, recant his confession, try and fail to get new trials, and seed some of those alternative theories of the case himself over the course of the three decades he spent in prison for the crime.
That's all you really need to know for the purposes of this article in Playboy magazine.
And, I mean, you know how I feel about the idea that something like this could have been the work of a lone wolf, you know?
But I have a stack of very unhinged books by conspiracy theorists of varying degrees of sincerity and contact with reality that I want to read before I try to navigate that minefield.
We've butted up against parts of this story before, though.
After King's murder, James Earl Ray was on the run for two months before his arrest.
He confessed and pleaded guilty in March of 1969, and then, almost immediately after being convicted for the crime he confessed to, he recanted the confession and hired church bombing enthusiast J.B. Stoner to represent him in an attempt to reverse his guilty plea.
That was obviously unsuccessful, and J.B. Stoner didn't stay on the case for very long.
Although he did keep James Earl Ray's brother Jerry on his personal payroll for years after that.
And throughout the 1970s, James Earl Ray burned through attorneys like wildfire.
So in 1977, he hired a new one, Jack Kershaw.
So that's why I was reading Playboy, because it was Jack Kershaw who arranged for the magazine to interview his client in prison.
Allowing them to conduct a polygraph examination just days after Ray was returned to custody after a brief escape.
If you did recently listen to the series of episodes about Joseph Paul Franklin, parts of this timeline will ring a bell.
If you didn't, don't worry about it.
I'm trying to be more mindful that any episode could be someone's first, so I should stop writing like you've all got an encyclopedic memory of all the tangential lore from old episodes.
So, if you didn't just listen to that three month long series of episodes about the Nazi serial killer, in 1977, Congress was starting to hold hearings on the King assassination.
The United States House of Representatives Select Committee on Assassinations had been established the year prior, and they were going to investigate the assassinations of President John F. Kennedy and Martin Luther King Jr.
I'll go ahead and spoil this one for you.
The 700 page report that came out a few years later essentially concludes, in both cases, that the fatal shots were fired by the guy we got for it.
Lee Harvey Oswald fired the shot that killed Kennedy.
James Earl Ray was the shooter who killed King.
That's what they decided.
But the committee determined that it was kind of likely that neither man had actually, truly acted alone.
But we can't really say what the conspiracy was, just we're pretty sure it wasn't a foreign government and it definitely wasn't our government.
So maybe there was a conspiracy, but who can really say?
Incredible conclusions.
Make of that what you will.
I'll link the report in the show notes if you're interested in losing your minds, I guess.
So in 1977, James Earl Ray is in prison.
He's not quite a decade into his 99 year sentence, and he's starting to hear that he's going to get hauled in front of a congressional committee.
They were going to ask him some hard questions, questions that he had managed to avoid up to that point.
I mean, at this point, he is crying foul and claiming his innocence, but when he originally entered that guilty plea, the whole point had been to avoid a trial.
To avoid any more questions about who might have helped him kill Martin Luther King Jr.
And whether or not there was a giant conspiracy involving both of his brothers, it makes perfect sense to hire a lawyer if you think you're going to get a congressional subpoena.
Congressional Subpoena Threats00:05:58
He already had a lawyer, of course, but the lawyer he had was not making any progress on the impossible task of getting him a new trial.
And he was in the middle of threatening to sue the lawyer he'd had before that one, so he was in the market for new representation.
In early 1977, James Earl Ray's attorney was a man named James Lassar.
Lassar had been working on Ray's case for almost seven years, and when he heard about the Congressional Committee, he advised his client not to voluntarily comply with the House investigation.
There wasn't.
A whole lot anybody could do about a congressional subpoena if one were to come.
But at this stage, the committee was just hoping he would agree to talk, and they made several attempts to interview him in prison.
And initially, he refused, which was his right.
He and his lawyer were initially on the same page about this say no to this.
Don't have a voluntary conversation with an investigator.
There's nothing to gain from this.
All downside.
Pretty much any good lawyer will tell you to say as little as possible in almost any situation.
But James Earl Ray had his own plans.
And after initially refusing to speak to the committee, he wrote a letter to the New York Times that he'd changed his mind and he was interested in a conversation.
His lawyer heard about this from the New York Times reporter who called him for a comment.
And then in March of 1977, Ray sent a letter directly to the Congressional Committee, informing them that he no longer agreed with the advice of his attorney, James Lazar, and if the committee had any further inquiries for him, they should contact his new lawyer, Jack Kershaw.
This, too, was news to James Lazar, who told reporters that this Jack Kershaw character hadn't even asked him for access to the case files.
Lassar told a reporter from the Associated Press that he thought Ray was making a big mistake, saying, One of the difficulties is that Ray's past attorneys have been clearly motivated by financial gain or publicity reasons, and he enters the case again in a manner which suggests that history is repeating itself.
He was right, of course.
Jack Kershaw wanted money and fame.
He may have hoped to get something else too.
Several articles about the negotiations between Kershaw and the Congressional Committee about the terms of Ray's potential cooperation mention that he was very insistent on receiving access to FBI files.
One's quote, dealing with King's enemies.
The reason he gave was that this would help him conduct his own investigation into the real killer.
He needed to see these files so he would know who else might have had a motive to kill King.
And at face value, that seems reasonable.
He's a defense attorney, and a defense attorney wants to be able to present an alternative theory of the crime to a jury.
But there is no jury because this isn't a trial.
And his client's already been convicted.
So that actually kind of falls apart.
Why does he want to see these files?
I wonder if he wanted access to those files because he wanted to see what the FBI knew about his own associates.
Not specifically as it pertained to the King assassination, right?
I'm not saying Ray wasn't the shooter, he probably was.
But the investigation into the King assassination was.
Very wide ranging.
Even once they'd identified and arrested the shooter, they kept investigating the possibility of a wider conspiracy.
And you won't be surprised to hear that a lot of white supremacists who were active in the 1960s had made public threats on King's life.
Threats that were serious enough that now that he's dead, they warranted some follow up from the FBI.
I've actually spent A lot of time with the redacted versions of these files that have been publicly released, and I can very easily imagine that the scores of racists whose associates were interviewed by the FBI would have loved to know what they said.
There was information in those files about a lot of guys Jack Kershaw knew some close friends and maybe some rivals.
A silver.40 caliber handgun was recovered at the scene.
From iHeart Podcasts and Best Case Studios, this is Rorschach, Murder at City Hall.
How could this have happened at City Hall?
Somebody tell me that!
July 2003, Councilman James E. Davis arrives at New York City Hall with a guest.
Outsider With A Secret00:03:03
Both men are carrying concealed weapons, and in less than 30 minutes, both of them will be dead.
Everybody in the chamber's ducked.
A shocking public murder.
I scream, get down, get down.
Those are shots.
Those are shots.
Get down.
A charismatic politician.
You know, he just bent the rules all the time, man.
I still have a weapon, and I could shoot you.
And an outsider with a secret.
He alleged he was a victim of a flat down.
That may or may not have been political.
That may have been about sex.
Listen to Rorschach, Murder at City Hall on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts.
Or wherever you get your podcasts.
I'm Lori Siegel, and on Mostly Human, I go beyond the headlines with the people building our future.
This week, an interview with one of the most influential figures in Silicon Valley, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman.
I think society is going to decide that creators of AI products bear a tremendous amount of responsibility to products we put out in the world.
From power to parenthood.
Kids, teenagers, I think they will need a lot of guardrails around AI.
This is such a powerful and such a new thing.
From addiction to acceleration.
The world we live in is a competitive world, and I don't think that's going to stop.
Even if you did a lot of redistribution, you know, we have a deep desire to excel and be competitive and gain status and be useful to others.
And it's a multiplayer game.
What does the man who has extraordinary influence over our lives have to say about the weight of that responsibility?
Find out on Mostly Human.
My highest order bit is to not destroy the world with AI.
Listen to Mostly Human on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
Hey, I'm Nora Jones, and I love playing music with people so much that my podcast called Playing Along is back.
I sit down with musicians from all musical styles to play songs together in an intimate setting.
Every episode's a little different, but it all involves music and conversation with some of my favorite musicians.
Over the past two seasons, I've had special guests like Dave Grohl, Leavey, Mavis Staples, Remy Wolf, Jeff Tweedy, really too many to name.
And this season, I've sat down with Alessia Cara, Sarah McLaughlin, John Legend, and more.
Check out my new episode with Josh Groben.
You related to the phantom at that point.
Yeah, I was definitely the phantom in that.
That's so funny.
Share each day with me each night, each morning.
Say you love me, you know.
So come hang out with us in the studio and listen to Playing Along on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
In 2023, former Bachelor star Clayton Eckard found himself at the center of a paternity scandal.
The family court hearings that followed revealed glaring inconsistencies in her story.
Ultra Runners Clowning On Ray00:06:14
This began a years long court battle to prove the truth.
You doctored this particular test twice, Ms. Owens, correct?
I doctored the test once.
It took an army of internet detectives to crack the case.
I wanted people to be able to see what their tax dollars were being used for.
Sunlight's the greatest disinfectant.
They would uncover a disturbing pattern.
Two more men who'd been through the same thing.
Greg Wespe and Michael Maranchini.
My mind was blown.
I'm Stephanie Young.
This is Love Trap.
Laura, Scottsdale Police.
As the season continues, Laura Owens finally faces consequences.
Ladies and gentlemen, breaking news out of Maricopa County as Laura Owens has been indicted on fraud charges.
This isn't over until justice is served in Arizona.
Listen to Love Trapped Podcast on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
Now, it's entirely possible that Jack Kershaw was just a fucking idiot who didn't see any problem with letting his client be interviewed repeatedly for hours at a time about a crime he'd already confessed to, even as he's promising this client that he's going to get him a new trial.
I can't imagine what kind of lawyer would think that's a good idea, but I'm willing to leave open the possibility that he really was just dumber than a box of hair.
More likely, though, he had absolutely no intention of winning this fight to get Ray a new trial.
He just wanted to be a part of this process for his own reasons.
And within his first full month as Ray's attorney, he had allowed investigators from the Congressional Committee to spend four full days grilling his client in prison.
Kershaw told reporters that he was exploring the possibility of civil lawsuits that he could file on Ray's behalf that would.
Afford them access to classified government documents on Martin Luther King Jr. and the investigation into those who had a motive to kill him.
In May, Kershaw's wife, Mary Noel Kershaw, wrote and recorded a ballad called They Slew the Dreamer.
It's as weird as you might expect.
Mary Noel Kershaw's been dead since 1989, but the guy who co wrote the song is still alive and extremely online, so I won't play it here.
The last thing I need is a copyright case from this weirdo, but if you're curious, you can find it online.
And part of the chorus includes these lyrics They slew the dreamer.
Let a dreamer take the fall.
They turned the courtroom into a costume ball.
Elsewhere in the song, the lyrics reference the mysterious Raoul, a made up guy that James Earl Ray claimed was the real mastermind and actual shooter behind King's murder.
Raoul was a blonde, Cuban, French Canadian who did not exist.
And then, in June of 1977, Jack Kershaw arranged for his client to spend the day with someone else who wanted to talk to him.
Not an FBI agent, not someone from the DOJ, not an investigator with the Congressional Committee, but a man named James McKinley, a writer for Playboy magazine.
The interview took place over the course of several separate visits with.
One visit having to be rescheduled due to Ray's escape from prison.
He was one of seven men who escaped from Brushy Mountain State Penitentiary in Petros, Tennessee on June 10, 1977.
He was about eight miles away when tracking dogs caught up to him 54 hours later.
And a fun side note here for any outdoors, extreme sports enthusiasts this is the origin of the Barkley Marathons.
That's the annual 100 mile ultra marathon that takes place in the woods in Tennessee every year.
So, a regular marathon is 26.2 miles because that's how far a Greek messenger had to run to get to Athens to deliver the news, the Battle of Marathon.
So, why is this eight mile journey into the woods the inspiration for a 100 mile ultra marathon?
The man who designed the course, ultra runner Gary Cantrell, Had spent quite a bit of time in that area.
He liked to hike in the area that is now Frozen Head State Park.
And he says when he heard the story of Ray's escape, he thought to himself, he only made it eight miles.
I bet I could do at least 100.
So he did.
In its current form, the race has been held almost every year since 1995, and only 20 people have ever finished it.
That doesn't have anything to do with this story.
I just Have to respect a guy who heard about James Earl Ray getting lost in the woods and wanted to see how much better he could do at running through the same woods.
Interestingly, James Earl Ray didn't die until 1998, so he could conceivably have been aware that ultra runners were gathering in the woods every year just to clown on him, but I couldn't find anything specific about whether anyone told him about it.
I hope they did.
Back in 1977, though, he was, as I said, very quickly recaptured.
Polygraph Measures Stress Not Truth00:04:03
And the prison immediately allowed the interview to continue.
They resumed the interview the day after he was returned to custody.
I mean, you would assume he would be placed in lockdown or something, right?
He was just allowed to get right back to hanging out with the guys from Playboy.
In the second half of the interview, he's complaining about having poison ivy.
Because he just got back from hiding in the woods for two days.
I mean, maybe things were just different in the 70s, but it seems very weird.
And so, on their third visit with Ray, this is after he's returned from escaping from prison, the Playboy team brought someone else along Douglas Wicklender, a polygraph examiner from John E. Reed Associates.
John E. Reed Associates is a polygraph examination company named for its founder, John Reed.
The Chicago cop whose read technique of police interrogation is notorious for producing false confessions.
And a polygraph is an interesting thing.
Not that you asked me, but if you did ask me, I would say don't ever take a polygraph examination.
They aren't admissible in court because they aren't science.
The machine can't tell if you're lying.
That's not something a machine can measure.
It measures things that are measurable, like your pulse, your respiration rate, your blood pressure, your galvanic skin response, which is just a fancy way of saying the machine can tell if you're sweaty.
It doesn't measure the truth, it measures physiological signs of stress.
Do some people start sweating when they're nervous?
Okay.
Do a lot of people get nervous when they lie?
Sure.
But a lot of people get nervous when they're being honest, too.
If we're talking about something kind of stressful, like whether or not you're going to go to prison.
I mean, every doctor I've ever seen thinks I have a very high heart rate because I get nervous when they take my pulse and they're not even asking me a question.
There's just no scientific support for this.
It's not reliable, it's not consistent, it's totally subjective.
The exact same results can be read differently by different examiners, and the same subject can have two wildly different examinations depending on whether they had breakfast, or if it's hot, or if they really have to pee.
It's fake.
There's no scenario where passing a lie detector test is going to help you, and it could end up hurting you, even if it can't be admitted as evidence in court.
I know you didn't ask me for my advice, but if you're ever in some kind of situation, Get a lawyer and shut up, and don't let them put electrodes on you, for God's sake.
So, what I mean is, the actual results of this test administered by a guy hired by Playboy magazine are irrelevant.
We don't believe in this, it's not real.
But if you are curious, the examiner concluded that James Earl Ray showed, quote, significant emotional disturbances indicative of deception.
When he denied murdering Martin Luther King Jr.
But the examiner said he appeared to be telling the truth when he said no one paid him to do it.
A silver.40 caliber handgun was recovered at the scene.
Denying Murder Allegations00:03:28
From iHeart Podcasts and Best Case Studios, this is Rorschach, Murder at City Hall.
How could this have happened at City Hall?
Somebody tell me that!
July 2003, Councilman James E. Davis arrives at New York City Hall with a guest.
Both men are carrying concealed weapons, and in less than 30 minutes, both of them will be dead.
Everybody in the chamber's ducks.
A shocking public murder.
I scream, get down, get down.
Those are shots.
Those are shots.
Get down.
A charismatic politician.
You know, he just bent the rules all the time, man.
I still have a weapon, and I could shoot you.
And an outsider with a secret.
He alleged he was a victim of a flat down.
That may or may not have been political.
That may have been about sex.
Listen to Rorschach, Murder at City Hall on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts.
Or wherever you get your podcasts.
I'm Lori Siegel, and on Mostly Human, I go beyond the headlines with the people building our future.
This week, an interview with one of the most influential figures in Silicon Valley, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman.
I think society is going to decide that creators of AI products bear a tremendous amount of responsibility to products we put out in the world.
From power to parenthood.
Kids, teenagers, I think they will need a lot of guardrails around AI.
This is such a powerful and such a new thing.
From addiction to acceleration.
The world we live in is a competitive world, and I don't think that's going to stop.
Even if you did a lot of redistribution, you know, we have a deep desire to excel and be competitive and gain status and be useful to others.
And it's a multiplayer game.
What does the man who has extraordinary influence over our lives have to say about the weight of that responsibility?
Find out on Mostly Human.
My highest order bit is to not destroy the world with AI.
Listen to Mostly Human on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
Hey, I'm Nora Jones, and I love playing music with people so much that my podcast called Playing Along is back.
I sit down with musicians from all musical styles to play songs together in an intimate setting.
Every episode's a little different, but it all involves music and conversation with some of my favorite musicians.
Over the past two seasons, I've had special guests like Dave Grohl, Leve, Mavis Staples, Remy Wolf, Jeff Tweedy, really too many to name.
And this season, I've sat down with Alessia Cara, Sarah McLaughlin, John Legend, and more.
Check out my new episode with Josh Groben.
You related to the phantom at that point.
Yeah, I was definitely the phantom in that.
That's so funny.
Share each day with me each night, each morning.
Say you love me, you know.
So come hang out with us in the studio and listen to Playing Along on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
In 2023, former Bachelor star Clayton Eckard found himself at the center of a paternity scandal.
The family court hearings that followed revealed glaring inconsistencies in her story.
This began a years long court battle to prove the truth.
You doctored this particular test twice, Ms. Owens, correct?
I doctored the test once.
Lawsuit Against Own Lawyer00:13:08
It took an army of internet detectives to crack the case.
I wanted people to be able to see what their tax dollars were being used for.
Sunlight's the greatest disinfectant.
They would uncover a disturbing pattern.
Two more men who'd been through the same thing Greg Wesby and Michael Maranchini.
My mind was blown.
I'm Stephanie Young.
This is Love Trap.
Laura, Scottsdale Police.
As the season continues, Laura Owens finally faces consequences.
Ladies and gentlemen, breaking news out of Maricopa County as Laura Owens has been indicted on fraud charges.
This isn't over until justice is served in Arizona.
Listen to Love Trapped Podcast on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
When the article was published, the prison warden was pretty upset.
I mean, it seemed so weird that Ray was allowed to hang out with the reporter from Playboy all day just hours after he got back from his prison break, right?
Well, according to the warden, he was not allowed to be doing that.
Warden Stonnie Lane says Ray was placed in administrative segregation after the escape, and he was only allowed to have contact with his lawyer.
Warden Lane says Ray's lawyer, Jack Kershaw, told him that the reporter was an investigator and the polygraph examiner had been hired to work on the case.
We got Houdini, that's what we got, the warden told an Associated Press reporter in August, shortly before the interview was published in Playboy's September issue.
We didn't know until this afternoon that Playboy had been here.
I went through the ceiling up there today, I couldn't believe it.
Prison officials had apparently not actually asked the reporter.
His editor, or their polygrapher, for any kind of identification.
Jack Kershaw told him he'd hired them to investigate the case, and they took his word for it.
But the warden wasn't the only one who was upset about how it turned out.
They didn't get the results they were hoping for, and Kershaw seemed surprised and furious that the polygraph examiner concluded that Ray was lying about killing King.
So he went to the press and called the examination faulty and blamed the results on the room being too hot and Ray not being allowed to have an aspirin for a headache.
And before the article was even published, Ray tried to file a lawsuit against Playboy, but he didn't do it through his lawyer.
He wrote it himself and mailed it from prison.
And then his lawyer went to the press and said, Just kidding, we're retracting that.
And I don't really know where that suit ended up.
I guess nowhere.
But his representation of Ray didn't last much longer after that.
The Playboy interview had not worked out well for anyone except Playboy.
And within months of the issue appearing on newsstands, James Earl Ray did file a lawsuit.
Not the initial one he contemplated against Playboy magazine, he was suing his own lawyer.
And Jack Kershaw responded by countersuing Ray and filing suit against the new attorney Ray had hired to replace him.
Those lawsuits must have fizzled out because when Ray filed a second lawsuit against Kershaw over the same issue four years later in 1982, none of the reporting I could find mentioned that there had been a prior lawsuit, so they must have been dismissed pretty quickly.
Ray's second lawsuit, the one he filed in 82, was against both Kershaw and the magazine.
He claimed the rigged polygraph test was hurting his chances of getting a new trial.
The only comment Playboy gave to the press was, We never pay for interviews.
And they denied they'd paid Kershaw the $11,000 to arrange the prison meeting with Ray.
I couldn't actually find any original court documents in this case, not in the time that I had this week.
And it seems to have faded away before anybody really had to make a bunch of sworn statements in court.
So, all I have is that comment Playboy gave the press about how they don't pay for interviews.
I don't know if they would have made the same statement in court because I don't think that's true.
Kershaw himself admitted in filings he made in the first lawsuit, one where Playboy wasn't a named party, that he had absolutely received that money.
The fact that he received the money was not an issue in the lawsuit between Kershaw and Ray.
The only fact at issue was whether or not Kershaw had told Ray about the money and whether that money went into Ray's legal defense fund or Jack Kershaw's pockets.
Again, everybody's suing each other, and I don't think any of it ever made it very far.
And in the end, Jack Kershaw only worked for James Earl Ray for eight months or so.
In one of his lawsuits, he called it Close to a year, but we're talking March of 1977 through sometime later that fall, after the Playboy issue came out.
And most of what he did was arrange for other people's access to his client.
There were interviews with reporters that he got paid for, and half a dozen interviews with investigators from the Congressional Committee on Assassinations.
No progress was made on getting Ray a new trial, and It's not clear to what extent he was successful in accessing any non public information about the King assassination.
This was the highest profile case of his career.
But if he ever actually entered a courtroom as a result, it would have been when he and his former client were suing each other.
Not long before his death in 2010, Jack Kershaw was interviewed by controversial true crime writer Sandra London about his involvement with King's Assassin.
The word controversial is doing some heavy lifting here.
It's the word that's used on her Wikipedia page.
I might choose a harsher one.
I've talked a bit in the past about my own fraught relationship with the genre of true crime, but I think even if you're a diehard fan of the form, You have to agree, it was not consistent with what you might call journalistic ethics for her to get engaged to the Gainesville Ripper while she was writing a book about the incarcerated spree killer who brutally raped and murdered five women.
I don't know.
So it's not surprising to me that she seems to have given a pretty softball interview to an elderly racist who was still peddling MLK conspiracy theories in his old age.
The interview she did with Kershaw appears to have been a longer conversation that just doesn't exist online anymore.
I could only find a short clip of it.
But in the clip that I found, she asks him how he got involved in the James Earl Ray case in the first place, which is a question I would actually really like to know the answer to.
Unfortunately, he doesn't answer the question.
He does, though, immediately tell a very strange lie.
As I recall, James Earl Ray jumped in out of the blue in that he announced that he wanted me to represent him.
And so I hadn't been practicing law too long at the time, and I was very much interested in the case.
And so I arranged an interview, and he told me his story.
In 1977, he'd been a lawyer for 15 years.
I mean, I know he's a very old man.
He's about to die in 2010.
And I imagine the years sort of start to run together at a certain point.
But I think he would have some idea, even in his 90s, that he was closer to the end of his legal career than the beginning of it in 1977.
I mean, he was 64 years old in 1977, and he all but retired just a few years later.
So it's a very odd thing to say.
Most write ups about Kershaw's life, articles written before and after his death, tend to focus on just this one case, just this one client.
You only ever hear about the case he took on in 1977 when he worked for James Earl Ray.
And I had a sort of passing familiarity with Jack Kershaw.
I always kind of figured, yeah, he was a lawyer.
He was always a lawyer.
I knew that he was a lawyer and that he was a racist and that he made use of those two things together, but the fact that he was a lawyer in the first place didn't factor into my understanding of him as a person.
So the fact that all of these stories leave out any additional detail about how he came to be a lawyer, I think that misses the real story.
He didn't start practicing law until he was 50 years old.
He was in late midlife when he decided to become a lawyer so he could get better at racism.
Representing James Earl Ray is a flashy headline, but he didn't accomplish much in that case.
Ray's victim was already dead.
He was just wasting everyone's time and getting a little more attention.
It's convenient shorthand, maybe, to say Jack Kershaw represented James Earl Ray.
It communicates very quickly something that is true.
He was a lawyer and he was a racist and he engaged in the practice of law as part of his ideological commitment to racism.
And what's more emblematic of that than representing the man who killed Martin Luther King Jr.?
But all of these stories represent his legal career just by telling you about the few months he spent arranging media interviews with James Earl Ray, and they ignore the fact that his actual legal career was dedicated to fighting school desegregation.
He signed up for night classes at the YMCA Law School because he got so angry about the Supreme Court decision in Brown v. Board of Education.
And that says a lot more about who he was and what he spent his life doing.
I'm going to stop making promises about how long a story might be because there's really no point pretending I know.
Just one more, I swear.
Because it's just so interesting to me that I can draw a straight line from a guy getting so mad about school integration in 1955 that he made it his whole personality to decades later, members of the organization he would later found using money from the foundation he named after his dead wife.
Beating my neighbors in the streets in August of 2017, years after he was dead and buried.
When I say all these stories are just pieces of one larger, singular story, I really mean it.
The guy who made the racist statue out of old bathtubs is part of this long chain of events that led to me being the person who is obsessed with connecting those events and telling you about them.
You know?
So, even though I did promise this was going to be the end of this story, I spent way too much time proving exactly which Nashville area shonies a bunch of old racists used to meet up at every week to skip this part of the story.
Weird Little Guys Credits00:03:27
Weird Little Guys is a production of Cool Zone Media and iHeartRadio.
It's researched, written, and recorded by me, Molly Conger.
Our executive producers are Sophie Lichtrimid and Robert Evans.
The show is edited by the wildly talented Worry Gagan.
The theme music was composed by Brad Dickert.
You can email me at WeirdLittleGuysPodcast at gmail.com.
I will definitely read it, but I probably won't answer it.
It's nothing personal.
You can exchange conspiracy theories about the show with other listeners on the Weird Little Guys subreddit.
And right now, don't forget to submit your questions either on the subreddit or by email.
For the upcoming QA episode.
But as always, just don't post anything that's gonna make you one of my weird little guys.
It's Nora Jones, and my podcast Playing Along is back with more of my favorite musicians.
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Share each day with me each night, each morning.
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