Here's who killed the #MeToo movement (with Kat Tenbarge)

Are we in the post-MeToo era? In this episode, we’re reconciling with not only how society at large has adapted to its rise and fall, but also how Hollywood and social media have adapted as well. Spitfire News’s Kat Tenbarge joins us to discuss that — and just who it is that killed #MeToo. Our guest Kat Tenbarge is an independent journalist, and publisher, editor, and creator of Spitfire News. Subscribe to Spitfire News at https://spitfirenews.com/, and follow her on Instagram, Bluesky, TikTok @kattenbarge. Listen to Ryan & Kat’s extended conversation by subscribing to Panic World’s Patreon. For just five bucks a month, you get longer episodes like this one, plus ad-free episodes, bonus episodes, and access to the Garbage Day Discord! https://www.patreon.com/PanicWorld. Sponsors Want to sponsor Panic World? Ad sales & marketing support by Multitude, hit them up here: ⁠http://multitude.productions⁠. Credits - Host: Ryan Broderick - Producer: Grant Irving - Engineer: Rebecca Seidel - Researcher: Adam Bumas - Business Manager: Josh Fjelstad Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:01Ryan Broderick?

  So the first question is, um, what's it like, like being a woman on the internet right now? Is it chill or not?

• 0:07Speaker 01

  Um, I think it's pretty bad. I feel like I have kind of run off two corners that are more hospitable to women. So like, I barely go on Twitter. If I go on Twitter, I will see something violently misogynistic within the first five minutes and it will put me in a bad mood. And it's the same thing with like TikTok. If I'm on TikTok for more than five minutes, like something's going to put me in a really bad mood.

• 0:31Ryan Broderick?

  Yeah. Opening X right now is like very Catholic because it's like videos of live deaths and like pornography and then people being like, we should kill all women and minorities. So it's just very disorienting.

• 0:45Speaker 01

  It's like worse than Reddit was when I first started using Reddit. Cause at least you had to navigate to see the videos of people dying.

• 0:52Ryan Broderick?

  Right. No, I was subscribed to those subreddits. Yeah, no, I wanted to just see, watch people die.

• 0:57Speaker 01

  Yeah. I would go there, but it was my choice.

• 1:01Ryan Broderick?

  Exactly. Yeah. It's about, it's about agency, I think.

• 1:18Ryan Broderick?

  Obviously, like this is kind of a silly question to ask, like in, in the second Trump era, but do you, like, I see a post probably like once a week now being like, you know, a Nora winning an Oscar is a sign that like, uh, society has totally regressed on women's rights. Like, do you feel like this, this is a real thing dripping down into pop culture?

• 1:37Speaker 01

  It definitely is a real thing dripping down into pop culture, but I don't think a Nora, which I haven't seen a Nora. So I cannot.

• 1:44Ryan Broderick?

  I don't watch any movie about Brighton Beach. I don't, I don't want anything to do with that place.

• 1:49Speaker 01

  I feel like the best picture Oscar category, it's not insulated from reaction, like from cultural reactionary movements, but it's not the prime example of like, why this has dripped into pop culture. Like podcasts are the place where you can see how reactionary politics have affected pop culture.

• 2:08Ryan Broderick?

  Grant is telling me in the chat, uh, Discord right now that Anora is great, which I didn't realize that like Grant hates women and thinks that like they should have to play prostitutes when Oscars, but that's interesting, Grant. Please don't chime in to crack me there.

• 2:20Speaker 01

  I, that was one of the tweets that like seeped through my non Twitter usage was like every woman who's ever won an Oscar was playing a prostitute. And I was like, that's just not true.

• 2:31Ryan Broderick?

  I don't, I don't, I haven't seen every, every movie ever, but I don't think that's true. But the reason I'm asking you this question is because today we're talking about whether or not we are officially in a post me too era. And trying to reconcile with not only how society has adapted to the rise and I guess fall of the me too movement, but how Hollywood and social platforms have adapted as well. And we're going to get into all of that on today's panic world. My name is Ryan Broderick. This show is all about the viral freakouts and moral panics bubbling up out of the darkest corners of the internet. And we're going to figure out today who killed me too.

• 3:11Ryan Broderick?

  And joining us is the publisher and editor and career of the hot new indie media publication Spitfire News. By the way, I love that we can say indie media now instead of like newsletter or Substack. So boring.

• 3:26Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 3:26Ryan Broderick?

  So, Kat Tembarch, how are you?

• 3:29Speaker 01

  I'm doing really great. Thank you for having me on. It's been a real whirlwind of being an indie journalist, but it is much more gratifying so far. I can say that for sure.

• 3:40Ryan Broderick?

  Plus like it's way easier to lie on your taxes. Just so much easier.

• 3:45Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 3:45Speaker 02

  I'll cut that for you. Please, please shorten this conversation because it's because Ryan will make me delete this. His accountant is typing me in.

• 3:51Ryan Broderick?

  Yeah, my accountant is typing me in all caps. Stop saying that on your podcast right now, but uh, yeah, no, I, it's Spitfire is great. It's, it's so good. And I see you burning up Blue Sky. You're one of the few people on there that isn't completely deranged. And so it's great to see you doing so well.

• 4:07Speaker 01

  Thank you. I was just thinking about that this morning because I was looking at the top most followed people on Blue Sky, which I do all the time to see how the site is evolving. And I'm like, wow, like I have an opportunity to radicalize liberals to be further.

• 4:23Ryan Broderick?

  Someone's gotta do it. Someone's gotta make them stop doing flash mobs and making little pithy signs. But we're not going to talk about that kind of thing today. We're gonna talk about a different kind of liberal erosion of values. So what we're gonna do is move through some of the big cases and moments that we kind of figure, and you can tell us if we're wrong, but we sort of wanted to figure out like when what we're calling the post Me Too movement started, and try to track how deep we are into this moment. And we think Me Too died with the Johnny Depp Amber Heard trial. What do you think?

• 4:56Speaker 01

  Yeah, I think that was like the high water point where if you put it on a timeline, it's like October 2018, when the Harvey Weinstein story came out, that was like the peak of what we think of as the Me Too movement. And then the valley thus far has been when the verdict came in for Depp.

• 5:14Ryan Broderick?

  I think that's exactly right. And so to kind of skip back a bit in the timeline, just in case people aren't familiar with how this all happened, because I think as we're gonna find in today's episode, a key piece of this, which is that these stories are so complex and fluid that by the time something happens, you're feeling the effects of it, but maybe you're not even knowing what's going on. So in 2016, Amber Heard and Johnny Depp, they get divorced, and Heard alludes to abuse in the divorce proceedings, but doesn't really go into detail. In 2017, Johnny Depp faces some backlash. People are posting that they wouldn't see the Fantastic Beasts movie, not because it's unwatchable garbage, but because also Depp is in it. And this is one tweet that we found, our researcher Adam pulled this. So,

• 5:57Ryan Broderick?

  "The reason why I won't spend a single dime in Fantastic Beasts, the crimes of Gringlewald", God, I hate this shit so much, "is because there's Johnny Depp in it, and I promised myself I would boycott all of his films. I just don't get why someone as vocal..." Okay, I see why Adam pulled this one. This is good. "I just don't see why someone as vocal as J.K. Rowling accepted he play in the film." Yes, that's it. That's the hat trick. We got it. Do you remember how J.K. Rowling responded to all this, by the way?

• 6:27Speaker 01

  So it's really interesting, and I think about this a lot because I, at the time, like, Depp was pulled from the movie. So I think publicly, it appeared that J.K. Rowling was on the side of Me Too. But then, in the following years, it came out that, or at least Johnny Depp claims, that she believed him all along. And like, he's like bragged about it. And, and J.K. Rowling has, of course, done many other things since then that indicate she is like pro Johnny Depp. She's like anti Me Too. She won't say, "I'm anti Me Too." She'll just like like Tristan Tate's tweets and like send flowers to Marilyn Manson.

• 7:03Ryan Broderick?

  Well, it's that classic, particularly classic British radical centrist thing of just like, well, it's just, it's just gone a bit too far, hasn't it? It's just a bit much now. So this has kind of been lost to history, but before the Depp-Herd legal battle got really extreme, J.K. Rowling tried to keep him on the movie. This is J.K. Rowling's statement at the time. "Harry Potter fans," oh my God, I hate all, this is, "Harry Potter fans had legitimate questions and concerns about our choice to continue with Johnny Depp in the role. We naturally considered the possibility of recasting. I, I understand why some have been confused and angry about why it didn't happen based on our understanding of the circumstances. The filmmakers and I are not comfortable sticking with their

• 7:46Ryan Broderick?

  original casting, but genuinely happy to have Johnny playing a major character in the movies." Which is confusing, to say the least. But this is kind of the moment, I think, where, and I think this is important, because, and you, you, you cover this quite a bit in your own coverage of the, the trial that's about to happen here, is that like the Harry Potter fans are involved. Can you kind of explain a bit about like how fandoms interact with cancellations? Because I, I think that is one of the most important dimensions that is very rarely taken seriously in, in an instance like this.

• 8:22Speaker 01

  Yes, and it really runs the gamut because it depends a lot on like who the fandom is, what specific demographic it is, how the people in the fandom have talked about issues in the past. And you see like, for example, with Neil Gaiman, like people who read and love Neil Gaiman books, and also fans of One Direction, when Liam Payne, before he died, when he was accused of abuse, fans in these communities were really supportive of the victim. There were obviously people who were like, I don't believe them, and I support Neil Gaiman, or Liam Payne, or whoever it is. But the overarching response on social media in the immediate period after allegations

• 9:02Speaker 01

  come out, if the fandom is super liberal, and the people at the top of the fandom have like, been progressive toward women, then a lot of times the allegations are taken more seriously. And this was absolutely the case with like, the Harry Potter fandom. And the Harry Potter fandom has, I think, the really vocal online part of it, has always been liberal, and has like, done things to push back against J.K. Rowling. And at this point in time, like, but also Fantastic Beasts barely has a fandom.

• 9:33Ryan Broderick?

  No, it doesn't, it doesn't, it's one of those movies that like, doesn't exist.

• 9:36Speaker 01

  Yeah, like, like, the subreddit for Fantastic Beasts is like, almost no one uses it. The fandom there, I don't think was that big, but I think it was probably more of like, the larger Harry Potter fandom that responded positively to Amber Heard's allegations. Whereas in other fandoms that are much more driven by like, to- toxic masculinity parts of the community, will respond more negatively.

• 10:01Ryan Broderick?

  Yeah, we, uh, we, I'll plug this here in case this ends up running first, but we're working on a Snyder Cut episode as well. And that has quite a big part of the Amber Heard kind of story there, too. So,

• 10:13Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 10:14Ryan Broderick?

  In July 2020, Johnny Depp kicks off a defamation suit against Amber Heard. It makes its way very slowly through US courts, but obviously because of the UK's libel laws, it happens much quicker there. By the way, for people listening, that's called libel tourism. It's quite real, and because of the internet, anyone in England can sue you if you make them mad and you get in a lot of trouble. It's a problem. But, once again, Britain shouldn't exist. So, what would you say are kind of like, the notable moments in the libel trial? Like, what sticks out to you, thinking back on it now?

• 10:45Speaker 01

  I really was not that tuned in to what was going on with Amber Heard and Johnny Depp until 2022, but I was aware of it through like the big breaking news around what had happened. I was aware that Amber Heard had accused him of domestic violence. I was aware that there was something playing out in the courts. Looking back at it, there were a few things that really stuck out to me as interesting from the timeline. Like, for example, when Amber Heard went to get a restraining order against Johnny Depp, which I believe was back in like 2016, when she came out of the court or when she came out of that building where she had obtained the restraining order, there were tons of cameras around her and there's a YouTube video from that day uploaded that I actually went back and looked at and

• 11:28Speaker 01

  went back to the very first comments that were posted. And in the YouTube video, you can hear people screaming at Amber Heard from the streets, like discounting her allegations. And in the very first YouTube comments, there were people like discounting her allegations. So there were kind of two things happening, as is often the case with me too, where like when allegations are made, there's a big supportive public reaction immediately. Like in the day of the allegations coming out, there will be viral tweets of people being like, I will never watch any Johnny Depp movie ever again. In the ensuing days, weeks, months, years, the big viral support goes away and like the online haters who like don't believe the victim, they stay forever.

• 12:14Ryan Broderick?

  Speaking of the online haters, during this trial, The Times of London did a study basically picking apart who was attacking Amber Heard online. And it wasn't a significant amount of bots, but there were bots. They found about a dozen, what they called inauthentic accounts, posting things like, fire her from all her roles, blacklist this crazy liar, and I'm starting a petition to get Amber Heard blacklisted from Hollywood.

• 12:43Speaker 01

  That tracks.

• 12:44Ryan Broderick?

  Yeah. And I, I don't know if the average person knows this, but like, normal, normal fans, normal quote unquote, fans of celebrities use bots pretty regularly. Like, that's not exactly evidence of a nefarious plot against Amber Heard as much as it is like a teenager in like, I don't know, fucking Italy that wants to like defend Johnny Depp or something.

• 13:09Speaker 01

  Totally. It's hard to parse what is coming from the fandom, which is its own sort of like organized unit in some cases versus what is coming from like the official representation tied to Johnny Depp. But in 2020, it became apparent to me that Amber Heard was some sort of men's rights target because it was like, at the beginning of the pandemic, I was at home with my family in Ohio and my younger brother was like on Reddit and he said something really demeaning about Amber Heard and I was like, what's wrong with you? Like, I was like, why would you say that? Why wouldn't you believe her? And he's like, well, there's all this proof on the internet that she lied. And I was like, I don't believe, for the love, I don't believe that. I was like, you're getting radicalized. But after

• 13:53Speaker 01

  our argument, I forgot about it again for like two years and then it exploded. But the, what ended up happening in 2022, all of those bricks were being laid in the years leading up to it and during the UK trial.

• 14:05Ryan Broderick?

  Yes. And, and, and I should say, like, it is possible that these were coordinated by, you know, maybe someone running defense for Depp. We, you can't really know to a degree.

• 14:14Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 14:15Ryan Broderick?

  So Depp loses the court case. But as you said, like, there is something, there was something about Amber Heard where everyone was like, we're gonna destroy this person. And, and I, I was wondering, like, do you have any sort of theory on like, like, is this because Johnny Depp is just so beloved and people can't imagine the Captain Jacksberry or whatever, like, could be bad? Or is there something, was there something about Amber Heard that like, made this the perfect storm?

• 14:40Speaker 01

  Yeah, I think that there are a couple of factors playing into like, why Amber Heard was like the unluckiest person in the world. But I think that one of them is definitely just like the fact that Johnny Depp is one of the most famous people who has ever lived. And he also is such a fandom icon, because so many of his most iconic roles have been in like either, uh, just like fan fandom franchises, like Disney, Pirates of the Caribbean, Alice in Wonderland, and also these like cult classic favorite films. So not only does he have tons of fans, but he also have, has fans who are already deeply engaged in fandom behaviors. And when it

• 15:19Speaker 01

  Comes to Amber, the fact that she was playing Mira in the Aquaman movies puts her in the crosshairs of the whole Comics Gate movement that had been building off of Gamergate at the time. So like Johnny Depp is a really good person to root for and Amber Heard is a really good person to hate. Because this community is already primed to hate any woman who appears as like a female lead character in a superhero movie. And I think like with with the DC Comics backlash at the time, it was just like this audience was already trained to be like anti Brie Larson, anti Kathleen Kennedy from like Star Wars. They're constantly looking for women who can become characters in their campaigns.

• 16:02Ryan Broderick?

  In fact, actually, yeah, in 2022, the Oscars set up like two awards that they for some reason wanted Twitter users to vote on for fan favorite and best cheer moment. And both of them are brigaded by fans. They vote for Johnny Depp in a movie that was never released in the US and they vote for Zack Snyder. And there's absolutely zero evidence that a whole bunch of bots were used for those. And I'm being sarcastic, there is tons of evidence.

• 16:35Ryan Broderick?

  I think you're at the 2022 is the breaking point because that's also when the US libel trial starts against Depp and Heard in Virginia. And that's where we get like the big moments like poop in the bed or like the big wine or the severed finger. I mean, what's, what are the greatest hits of that for you, would you say?

• 16:54Speaker 01

  Yeah, so going into that trial, you know, it became very apparent to me within the first two weeks of Depp v. Heard in the US. I was like, what are all of these people talking about? Like, I would be looking at the hate toward Amber Heard and I would be like, they are talking about things that are such minute parts of these allegations that involve like the lives of these two celebrities. I'm like, how did you even find out this information about them? So that's when I started digging into like what the biggest viral moments around the case were and where they came from. Because some of it was in reaction to what was happening every day on the stand like Amber Heard is doing cocaine on the stand.

• 17:34Ryan Broderick?

  Right.

• 17:34Speaker 01

  Came out of the fact that people were like taking footage from what was happening in court and just putting like the most viral spins on it imaginable, making up shit like also saying that her testimony was constructed from lines from the talented Mr. Ripley.

• 17:50Ryan Broderick?

  I remember.

• 17:51Speaker 01

  That was like a really big viral conspiracy theory about her. And so that was like the more deranged reacting straight to like trial footage stuff that went really viral. But in addition to that, there was this whole QAnon conspiracy around Amber.

• 18:05Ryan Broderick?

  Yes, of course.

• 18:06Speaker 01

  And some of that stuff was propelled into the mainstream and amplified in hugely viral ways. And what I ended up figuring out was that a lot of the Amber Heard conspiracy stuff predated the US trial and it had come out of these online communities and these creators who had been covering Amber since at least 2020. And those people, some of them were in contact with Johnny Depp's legal team. Some of them had been given materials from Johnny Depp's legal team.

• 18:35Ryan Broderick?

  Yes.

• 18:35Speaker 01

  Like audio files from fights that the couple had were like given to YouTubers. And Johnny Depp's lawyer, who testified to like giving this stuff to YouTubers, he was kicked off the case in 2020 for doing that. It was, he was violating protective orders and leaking stuff to tabloids and to YouTubers and he got kicked off the case.

• 18:57Ryan Broderick?

  Insanity.

• 18:58Speaker 01

  That happened in 2020. No one reported on it outside of like legal publications that cover very minute things. And no, that was never like a point of the discourse in 2022 was that Depp's lawyer had violated orders and leaked stuff and that that was shaping the conversation.

• 19:16Ryan Broderick?

  I, I heard a crazy thing about the 2022 trial.

• 19:21Speaker 01

  Mm hmm.

• 19:21Ryan Broderick?

  The other day from, uh, do you know Nathan Grayson from Aftermath?

• 19:24Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah.

• 19:25Ryan Broderick?

  Another indie, immediate pub, very good. So I was, uh, not to humble brag, I was, uh, helping him with his book launch and he, he's, he wrote this book about Twitch. It's absolutely fascinating. He was telling me.

• 19:36Speaker 01

  Can't wait to read it.

• 19:37Ryan Broderick?

  That there was a whole bunch of huge video game streamers. That during the Amber Heard Johnny Depp trial switched to covering it and then never looked back. And one of them was Asmongold.

• 19:49Speaker 01

  Yes, yes.

• 19:51Ryan Broderick?

  You know, for for people who sat out swimming in the cesspool, let's uh, let's play a clip of Asmongold here. So this guy got famous for just sitting on Twitch reacting to moments that he saw in the court case and like, just playing random TikToks that were against Amber Heard.

• 20:07Speaker 03

  This one should see this. It proves Amber made the bruises.

• 20:10Speaker 04

  I use like a bruise kit, not a bruise kit, it's a theater makeup kit, a color correction kit, but I use, I called it my bruise kit.

• 20:17Speaker 05

  Queen, did you mean this theater makeup bruise kit? It's literally called bruising abrasions. It's for theater and it's meant to make bruises, sweet girl.

• 20:26Speaker 03

  Oh, no.

• 20:27Speaker 05

  Bruise kit, queen. You knew exactly what you were saying, honey.

• 20:30Speaker 03

  That's really interesting. Holy shit.

• 20:34Ryan Broderick?

  Eh, yeah, horrifying stuff.

• 20:35Speaker 01

  It was Twitch streamers, YouTubers, Instagram accounts, Substackers, every format of media possible. There were people who switched to entirely covering Depp Heard, who made like so much money doing it and never looked back.

• 20:50Ryan Broderick?

  Post-election, everyone's like, you know, uh, right-wing misogynistic content is, is the water we're all swimming in. Like, there's no way to separate out from the rest of media. And I think if you're looking for a moment when that happened, it's this trial.

• 21:03Speaker 01

  The people who are now like, given White House media passes, they got their start writing fake conspiracies about Amber Heard on Substack.

• 21:11Ryan Broderick?

  Exactly. The trial ends in June of 2022. Depp wins. But also, so does Amber Heard, kinda. It's one of those. Uh, if you ever look back at like really crazy viral frenzies, which I do often, it's never like a decisive thing that we're fighting about. It's never a total shutout victory. In fact, like, no one right now is arguing that like Trump stole the 2024 election. We kinda like all know he won. But Trump and Clinton, it's like a percent off. Clinton wins the popular vote. Everyone argues like, did he steal it? Brexit, I think, came down to like 0.5% of the population voted for it.

• 21:54Ryan Broderick?

  You know, even, we're working on an episode right now about, uh, like deranged Snyder Cut fans. And like, the Snyder Cut guys, they're obsessed with the Snyder Cut because i- it's like, the movie could have almost been good, at least according to them. Like, these kind of fans really hang on to these uncanny valley moments in politics and culture and society. And they just relitigate them over and over again because they're so close that you, you go mad thinking about it.

• 22:23Speaker 01

  I'm really glad that with like the Amber Depp stuff, it's like, there is this room where you can argue that like, in the UK, the judge said that, you know, he, Depp lost that case. And he lost that case because the judge in that case was like, 12 out of 14 of these allegations that Amber has provided evidence for, she provided enough evidence. Like, I'm certifying that 12 of 14 of these things happened. And in the US trial, the jury decision, I remember at the time, like, big legal commentators who are not like legal drama channels, but are more-

• 22:57Ryan Broderick?

  Like real ones, yeah.

• 22:58Speaker 01

  Were like, this is a really weird verdict. This indicates that the jury does not understand the matter at hand, which I think is true.

• 23:06Ryan Broderick?

  I don't know if you went to journalism school, but when I was there, you know, the big thing was like, never write about British people if you don't have to. Because they will sue you. And for people who don't know this, in America, usually, you have to prove that you've been libeled. So like, if you tell me that, if you tell someone that I'm like cheating on my wife, I have to sue, I can sue you, but I have to prove that I wasn't, basically. Or like, or that you didn't make it up, essentially. In the UK, it's the reverse. In the Amber Heard, Johnny Depp trial, like Amber Heard had to prove that she did not commit libel. I've never heard of an instance of like a simultaneous UK-US libel suit happening where

• 23:48Ryan Broderick?

  the UK like that's a wild outcome like it's almost impossible.

• 23:54Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah. And that's one of the reasons why I think this case set so much precedent is that people who understand defamation law were like, whoa, this is a this presents a completely new paradigm in how we prosecute defamation in this country.

• 24:09Ryan Broderick?

  It sounds like your kind of theory is that like they just poisoned the jury so much that they they won in the US. Is that is that kind of your read on it?

• 24:17Speaker 01

  Yeah, I think that there are probably a lot of factors at play, but the one thing that I always come back to is that this jury was not even sequestered.

• 24:24Ryan Broderick?

  God damn it, Jesus Christ.

• 24:26Speaker 01

  It's crazy. Like this for six for six weeks, this jury was not sequestered. So every single day they went home and like even if they were following the rules, which people tend to not follow rules. But like even if they were following the rules to the letter and they were not looking at their phone and they were not watching TV and they were not speaking to anyone, they would still know that the public was overwhelmingly in support of Johnny Depp and overwhelmingly against Amber Heard, because you couldn't even walk down the street during this trial without passing a bar or a coffee shop that had a sign that was like, put money in here if you support Johnny and put money in here if you support Amber and the jar would be completely full for Johnny. Like even after months after

• 25:08Speaker 01

  the trial, I would be walking around places and I would see signs in front of restaurants that were like, come in for a mega pint. Like, it was just, it was such a huge inescapable cultural moment that there is, it would be impossible for that jury to not be tainted. And that's on top of the fact that celebrities often perform well in judicial settings because people are biased toward people that they already have heard of.

• 25:34Ryan Broderick?

  What you're describing is essentially a playbook that now exists and is used quite often. Like, this is not conspiratorial to say that like, someone did that on purpose, right? Someone set up this ecosystem around that jury to tamper with it and win the case in that way. And after the break, we're going to talk about who did that and how that has essentially shaped all almost all news that you hear ever since. Basically, the last like three years of news is now kind of operating this way. And we're going to talk about that right after a word from our sponsors.

• 26:11Ryan Broderick?

  One thing that I've been dying to talk to you about because I think, I think there's a really interesting argument to be made that one of the like, okay, I'm gonna try to barrel through this and like, I don't want to get canceled, okay? I think, okay, I think all social movements tend to have problems that they like can't really figure out by the nature of them being increasingly decentralized and populist. So like Occupy Wall Street had like all kinds of like crazy problems. Black Lives Matter had like organizing problems and then like all kinds of like fraud and grift as well, like all of these things happen.

• 26:54Ryan Broderick?

  And I think one of the central problems with the Me Too movement that was never quite figured out was if you can't get the justice system to adapt criminal prosecutions, then you have to use the court of public opinion and civil cases. And when I look back at the Johnny Depp Amber Heard trial, to me, it's a story of effectively the powers that be realizing that that is quite easy to manipulate. Does that read correct to you? Have I been canceled by saying that?

• 27:27Speaker 01

  No, I think that's exactly correct. And I think that like, over the past couple of years in particular, I've seen this happen to the Me Too movement and I've had a lot of conversations with people who are involved in this where it's like, the movement suffers because of these environmental sort of factors, like not being centralized and not being able to work with any actual institutions to like consistently uphold these values.

• 27:55Ryan Broderick?

  Like that's a crazy huge ask to be like, you, we need to overhaul the justice system. Unfortunately, we do. Like now we definitely do, but back then we did. I guess the way you could kind of like compare it is like the civil rights movement of the 60s, where like at a certain point, you have to, you have to work with the institutions in some capacity to overhaul them. And you know, it lasts for 45, 50 years. It feels like it's falling apart. Now, but we did it for a while.

• 28:21Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 28:21Ryan Broderick?

  And I think a lot of newer, more internet focused, social movements like never reached their critical mass where they can effectively change institutions in a semi, I can't say permanent anymore, but a semi, semi permanent way.

• 28:35Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 28:35Ryan Broderick?

  That I think has shaped the way a lot of celebrity news, but also just like political news, social news has functioned ever since because now people know that they can kind of manipulate it. So what does this look like? How has this played out since the Depp Heard trial and how is it actually being used? And so next on our little story of the post Me Too era is a little press tour for a little movie called Don't Worry Darling. Do you remember Don't Worry Darling and its press tour?

• 29:05Speaker 01

  Of course I do.

• 29:07Ryan Broderick?

  So what are the central controversies as you remember them of the Don't Worry Darling tour?

• 29:12Speaker 01

  Oh my gosh, there were so many and this, I mean, I'm sure we're going to get to it, but it just is such a setup for like.

• 29:19Ryan Broderick?

  Oh, guess what comes after that in our story today?

• 29:24Speaker 01

  I'm like, Don't Worry Darling, I at the time was kind of annoyed by what was happening around it for a couple of reasons. I was actually very annoyed about what was happening around it, but it was still so tame compared to what was to come. So Don't Worry Darling is a movie that I have seen way too many times. I think I saw it three times. But so it was directed and one of, and she appeared in the movie by Olivia Wilde, who is an actress. And the two leads of this movie were Florence Pugh, who is a very celebrated actress and Harry Styles, who is a very celebrated member of Wonder.

• 29:59Ryan Broderick?

  Yeah, Harry Styles, who has been in movies before. Yeah. A great actor, Florence Pugh and Harry Styles, who has seen movies perhaps.

• 30:08Speaker 01

  Exactly. And before it was Harry Styles, it was supposed to be Shia LaBeouf.

• 30:12Ryan Broderick?

  Could you imagine?

• 30:14Speaker 01

  And that was part of the controversy.

• 30:16Ryan Broderick?

  If everything happened exactly the same, but instead of Harry Styles or Shia LaBeouf, like, oh, I actually think like. The world would have ended. I actually, I think the discourse would have been so extreme, they would have turned the internet off. The CIA would have been like, enough of this.

• 30:30Speaker 01

  Exactly. You know, once it's Harry Styles, Olivia Wilde is in the process of separating from her husband, Jason Sudeikis.

• 30:39Ryan Broderick?

  That's where this all kicks off. Yes. So like Jason Sudeikis delivers divorce papers. It's interesting that it's, I actually hadn't put that together until we started to record. It's also a divorce story.

• 30:51Speaker 01

  Yes. They all carry these same, you know, they all have to have these little parts to them. So yeah, so Jason Sudeikis, who plays Ted Lasso, so he's like one of America's favorite people. He serves Olivia Wilde papers onstage at an event, which as soon as I saw it happen, I was just like, that feels very intentional to me. And we don't know exactly how that whole thing happened, but I was just like, okay, so this woman is kind of being humiliated onstage in a professional setting. And I feel like that is a significant omen for how it would then play out.

• 31:28Ryan Broderick?

  It was bizarrely nasty. Yeah. And I think everyone still had a little residual, like pandemic Ted Lasso brain damage, where like everyone thought that show was good for like a brief moment during the pandemic. So like everyone was like, well, if Mr. Nice Man is doing this, like she must deserve it. And like, I'm rewatching House right now and like Olivia Wilde's great as 13. She's great. She's wearing little vests all the time, little suspenders, little vests. She's great.

• 31:51Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 31:52Ryan Broderick?

  So it then spirals out into the press tour where there's discussion of Olivia Wilde and Harry Styles having an affair that may have caused the divorce. But the timeline doesn't really seem to back that up to me. It just seems like he was maybe a rebound, which is like, not a bad rebound.

• 32:10Speaker 01

  Yeah. What, what often happens with these cases within celebrity gossip is like with, when it's the man who's under scrutiny, he's always given the benefit of the doubt that the relationship was already over or heading toward it being over by the time he started seeing like a new woman. But when the woman is the one being talked about, the scrutiny goes in the opposite direction. So even though, you know, evidence would indicate that both Jason Sudeikis and Olivia Wilde were seeing other people at the time, the narrative became that like Olivia Wilde had cheated on America's Ted Lasso with like younger Harry Styles.

• 32:45Ryan Broderick?

  We found tweets, people calling her a pedophile.

• 32:49Speaker 01

  Oh, I'm sure.

• 32:50Ryan Broderick?

  Dating an adult man 10 years younger than her.

• 32:54Speaker 01

  God, I'm sure. And it's so funny how age gap discourse works against the woman, even in this case. Always. But so, you know, the relationship between Harry Styles and Olivia Wilde is like, really splashed out in the tabloids, as is to be expected. And then the other element that comes into it is the idea that Florence Pugh was upset with Olivia Wilde on set because Olivia Wilde and Harry Styles would be going off to, I don't know, hook up in the dressing room, and it was like an unprofessional environment. And the idea of this feud between Olivia Wilde and Florence Pugh, like, takes center stage.

• 33:32Ryan Broderick?

  And then it all culminates with everyone being convinced that Chris Pine got spit on by Harry Styles, which honestly, I was a spitter-truther. I believed that that, I actually, I watched it, I watched it probably a dozen times, being like, I think he spit on him.

• 33:48Speaker 01

  I think it's possible.

• 33:49Ryan Broderick?

  I don't know. Like, I like to pick like one harmless conspiracy theory a year and be like, that's gonna be like the crazy thing that I believe. I was a really big Louis Tomlinson fake baby person for a while.

• 34:01Speaker 01

  That was so fun.

• 34:02Ryan Broderick?

  It was super fun. I think you should give yourself, everyone should be allowed to like, as long as it doesn't like involve like vaccinations or, you know, race theory, like, just like, pick a thing. And like, I, oh, my most recent one was that Travis Kelsey and Taylor Swift had like a contract, and like, it's not a real marriage. But I'm a bit of a gayler anyways, so like, you know.

• 34:25Speaker 01

  I love that. We could do a whole episode about gayler.

• 34:28Speaker 02

  How dare you both not believe that?

• 34:30Ryan Broderick?

  Not for Taylor Swift. And I, and I can give you three or four hours of tape on why.

• 34:36Speaker 02

  So, I will defend the Kelseys to my dying breath.

• 34:39Ryan Broderick?

  Oh, my god.

• 34:40Speaker 02

  Go, I'll edit all, I'll edit all that disparaged.

• 34:42Ryan Broderick?

  Taylor Swift's gonna divorce that old horsemeat-looking guy like the minute that, like, she can't, or break up with him. Okay, so, this, this whole little story is like a moment where fandoms and celebrity teams, gamergaters and comic gators, they all are congealing on this weird story that is like, not quite gossip, not quite news.

• 35:08Ryan Broderick?

  It kind of feels like everything right now. It's how like all these internet factions are functioning together. Basically, the ecosystem after Dep V Heard was there to help these built in camps crusade and make the story bigger than what a tabloid story used to be. And we then kind of forget about it until a little movie called It Ends With Us slash year. So can you give us a little spark notes for what happened on the set of this movie and how this pertains to our story today?

• 35:39Speaker 01

  Yes, and like since you know YouTube drama channels first became a thing and this has now carried into all of our news, the biggest stories have to be like less consequential and involve like hearsay and drama and gossip in order for them to become like the big story, which is why these like celebrity stories carry so much weight is because they're like just fun enough that they actually capture people's attention. And then usually there's like some component of them that is actually serious that gets distorted. And so with It Ends With Us, It Ends With Us was originally a New York Times bestselling book by Colleen Hoover, who writes really bad books for women.

• 36:19Ryan Broderick?

  Nothing wrong with that at all. There's plenty of bad books for men. I don't read the Reacher series, but I watched the Reacher series because he's really big and he's like the biggest guy. And so I imagine Colleen Hoover must have some sort of big woman in her books that people like or something. I don't know, but it bad books are fine. I'm a bad book defender.

• 36:39Speaker 01

  Yeah, and I agree. I love bad books. I loved Twilight and I think Colleen Hoover carries a lot of like Twilight similarities. But so on Tik Tok, on Book Talk, the Colleen Hoover books are very popular and It Ends With Us was really popular and it's a story that is loosely based on Colleen Hoover's own life and it involves a woman whose parents were in a domestically, it was a domestic abuse situation with the character's parents and then she gets abused by her husband and that's what the book is about. And the movie was a straight adaptation featuring Blake Lively from Gossip Girl as the lead character and then this guy, Justin Baldoni, as the abusive character.

• 37:21Speaker 01

  And Justin Baldoni was also directing the movie and his production company Wayfair was also producing the movie and had gotten the rights to the movie.

• 37:30Ryan Broderick?

  Incredible. I'm gonna, I'm gonna direct and produce and write this movie where I abuse a woman.

• 37:38Speaker 01

  Yes, I know, it's crazy. And before this, before It Ends With Us, which was like, I can't remember, it was in the top 20 highest grossing movies of 2024. And before this, Justin Baldoni was really only known as a character in the CW show Jane the Virgin.

• 37:58Ryan Broderick?

  Oh, is that where he's from? Wait, is he the handsome man?

• 38:01Speaker 01

  Raphael.

• 38:01Ryan Broderick?

  He's Raphael in Jane the, oh, he was so handsome in Jane the Virgin. Wow. I remember I was like, can I get away with like dressing like this guy? I can't pull this off. I didn't realize I was the same guy. Okay.

• 38:13Speaker 01

  That's him. And that was what he was known for before all of this. But during the press tour and during the premiere of the movie, which was, I hate that I know this, but it was August 9th, 2024, at, in New York City. And I didn't even know what movie theater it was at. And that was the night that the movie premiered in the US. And before then, Blake Lively and some of the other cast members, which included Jenny Slate, they had unfollowed Justin Baldoni on Instagram. And during the actual premiere, he did not walk the red carpet with them. They did not take any photos with him, and they would not talk about him. And so just like immediately, people online were like, what happened on the

• 38:54Speaker 01

  set of It Ends With Us? And it just blew up and became this massive TikTok-driven speculation event around this movie.

• 39:04Ryan Broderick?

  And I remember like during the lead up to the release, I was just like with Don't Worry Darling, where I was like, what the fuck is happening? Like, why am I hearing so much about this movie? Similarly, I was like, why am I hearing so much about Blake Lively in the lead up to the release? And I remember, I mean, there's always been kind of like a, like an anti-fan kind of chatter about Blake Lively. I think it all stems back from like her and Ronald Reynolds' plantation wedding, which, you know, like, not ideal. Don't get married at a plantation. And I remember them just like really just going at about her and like up to this movie. And then, like, I start hearing like details about how she's a terror on the set.

• 39:47Ryan Broderick?

  And what we, you know, come to find out is that Baldoni's team is providing gossip to tabloids, much like Depp's team did. And then things get weirder when Deadpool Wolverine comes out and there's a character named Nice Pool that is apparently making fun of Justin Benelli. I thought it was a much funnier joke and that Ryan Reynolds was making fun of just like Canadian men. Cause I was like, oh, like Ryan Reynolds is like making fun of himself. Cause I figured that's just what he's like, but no, apparently he's making fun of Baldoni. And I remember thinking like at the time, like, oh, I really fell for the Blake Lively hate. Like, and personally, and I, I use Reddit a lot.

• 40:28Ryan Broderick?

  I follow like, you know, pop culture chat and FOMO, the Dumois, like hate subreddit, but also competing publications, sort of like, I follow that world really closely because it's fun and I like it. And, and I just remember feeling like kind of creeped out that I had been astroturfed. Cause my, I mean, maybe you've had this similar experience, but like during the, the first Trump presidency, like I would see Russian propaganda on Twitter and be like, that's Russian propaganda. And I got like pretty good at like learning the weird shit that they're obsessed with, like Eastern European, like turf war stuff that I had to be like, okay, like this is a thing Russia cares about. With this, I was like, oh, they got me. Cause I really believe that like Blake Lively was some sort of terror on the set of this,

• 41:12Ryan Broderick?

  of this movie and it come to find out, maybe she wasn't.

• 41:16Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 41:17Ryan Broderick?

  For instance, the movie was delayed because of COVID and Lively had put down some conditions for when she came back to work and they're quite revealing. So quoting the New Yorker, they wrote, "They range from basic safeguards. An intimacy coordinator must be present at all times when Blake Lively is on set in scenes of Mr. Baldoni. If Blake Lively and/or her infant is exposed to COVID again, Blake Lively must be," oh my God, "Blake Lively must be provided with immediate notice without her needing to uncover days later herself." No more mention of Mr. Baldoni. Of him speaking to Blake Lively's dead father. I guess this was like a thing where like he was like channeling her dead dad or something weird. No more private multi-hour meetings in Blake Lively's

• 42:00Ryan Broderick?

  trailer with Mr. Baldoni crying. Sure.

• 42:05Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 42:05Ryan Broderick?

  So he definitely sounds like a weirdo and she was more famous. So why wasn't everyone on her side? And I had said that we were going to talk about like who's behind all this stuff, but I'm gonna tease our audience one more time and say that we're gonna talk about exactly who's behind all of this stuff and how this works right after the break.

• 42:33Ryan Broderick?

  So what do you know about Melissa Nathan?

• 42:37Speaker 01

  Oh, boy, do I know Nathan. So I didn't know who Melissa Nathan was before the Blake Lively stuff, but she was, come to find out, Johnny Depp's crisis publicist during the 2022 Depp v. Heard trial. With that trial, the like behind the scenes figures who I was most interested in and aware of were like the lawyers and the lawyers play into the Blake Lively situation as well. But Melissa Nathan works in crisis PR and she used to work for a company that I think a lot of journalists, it's just very infamous. It's called Hiltzik Strategies. And Hiltzik is the Matthew Hiltzik who founded it. He was, I believe, in-house with Harvey Weinstein

• 43:20Speaker 01

  for like all of those decades. And then he went out of house and formed his own company.

• 43:25Ryan Broderick?

  Harvey Weinstein, where'd he go?

• 43:27Speaker 01

  And he represented Harvey Weinstein, did PR for him during all of that with the New York Times. So like, really, it is all just like a straight line. It's just, it's all the same people. They're all involved in all of it. And Melissa Nathan worked at Hiltzik. She became an executive vice president at Hiltzik. She represented Tiffany Trump during 2016. She represented Johnny Depp. She represented Drake. She represented.

• 43:50Ryan Broderick?

  All the best people. All of the people who have never been accused of being a pedophile.

• 43:58Speaker 01

  I think she was with Logan Paul. And just it's all the same people, Ryan. It drives me crazy. So the way that like I found out about Melissa Nathan is Blake Lively did like a civil rights complaint in California about the production of It Ends With Us. And simultaneously, as her team was building this complaint, which would eventually become a lawsuit, they were also working with The New York Times and they were working with Megan Chewie, who was one of the people who did the Harvey Weinstein expose and is a Pulitzer Prize winner. They were working with The New York Times to simultaneously release a New York Times investigation and a civil rights complaint involving the allegations against Justin Baldoni.

• 44:39Speaker 01

  And in those allegations, TLDR, Blake Lively accused him of sexually harassing her and other people on set. And then she said, after she brought those complaints to him internally and demanded that Wayfair like stipulate a list of agreements about how the rest of filming would go, she says that they basically started to engineer this retaliatory smear campaign. And that after she and other cast members unfollowed Justin and didn't want to be associated with Justin during the premiere, immediately she alleges that they like put this smear campaign into motion. And as evidence of this, they did this incredible legal maneuver that is very complicated and

• 45:18Speaker 01

  involves even more people, but they subpoenaed one of his publicist's phones and got like all these text messages.

• 45:27Ryan Broderick?

  I've got one right here. This is possibly the best subpoenaed text message of all time. So it's Melissa Nathan and she's being asked by Justin Baldoni, you know, what are they going to do to counter the accusations of an unsafe and unprofessional set? And she writes, this is so awesome. "We can't send over the work we will or could do because that could get us in a lot of trouble. We can't write, we will destroy her." Then she writes, imagine if a, this is awesome. This is so awesome. Imagine if a document saying all the, all the things he wants ends up in the wrong hands. And then she writes, we, you know, we can bury anyone.

• 46:13Ryan Broderick?

  That is just like, we can't put in writing that we're going to do crimes because someone might get it. And then they'll know that we do crimes.

• 46:20Speaker 01

  Literally, literally.

• 46:22Ryan Broderick?

  It's so awesome. And so basically the way that her team works, according to the New York Times, is that they pay people to post and then they get places like the Daily Mail to take that social content and aggregate it. Which in a lot of ways, like, I mean, you kind of came up in the same sort of like digital media, like chum factory that I did. And I feel very, not guilty, but I feel complicit in creating a world where like, anything on the internet can become a headline.

• 46:50Speaker 01

  Totally.

• 46:51Ryan Broderick?

  It is, it is now almost exclusively the world of like tabloids or like accounts that lives of Tik Tok that are using like one tweet to justify some culture war thing. And you can see in how Melissa Nathan's operation works, that that's exactly what they're doing is that they're paying like five reditors to be like, Blake Lively had a wedding at a plantation. Why doesn't anyone remember this? Which like honestly, once again, like don't have a wedding at a plantation.

• 47:16Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 47:17Ryan Broderick?

  There's a, there's an exchange in the New York Times piece, um, which it's with Jennifer Abel, another PR exec. And it reads, Jennifer writes, so are we in the clear now? Did we survive? And then Melissa writes, we survived. All press is so overwhelming. We've confused people. So much mixed messaging. It's actually really funny if you think about it. And then she, uh, wrote further, and socials are really, really ramping up in his favor. She must be furious. It's actually sad because it just shows you people really want to hate on women.

• 47:49Ryan Broderick?

  Oh, god damn it. These people are so, it is actually kind of refreshing when someone just like really evil and like is fine with it. I find it like better.

• 47:58Speaker 01

  I agree. I, I agree. Cause it's like, at least now you know. It made me happy to read this. Cause I was like, you see it, they're here, they're, they admit it. They admit it.

• 48:08Ryan Broderick?

  Yes. And like possibly the creepiest part of this and just, I think to, to kind of tease at how big this apparatus is and kind of influential. Do you know of a man named Jed Wallace? Have you heard of Jed Wallace?

• 48:21Speaker 01

  I sure do.

• 48:22Ryan Broderick?

  So, so Jed Wallace is not dissimilar from the cowboy from Mulholland Drive that basically has like that really creepy exchange where he's like, you gotta put her in the movie, you know, like gotta put her in. Um, and so for the New York Times, uh, they claimed that Jed Wallace was leading the social strategy and Business Insider wrote this about Wallace. Cause I, I think this will do a good job of sort of summing his, his vibe up. Wallace, 54, has represented it. Oh, oh my God. The YouTuber Aiden Ross, Paramount Pictures and Hamilton South are a self-described shaman and ayahuasca ceremony guide who offers life coaching services for CEOs and celebrities. Oh man, I love living in the 21st century

• 49:05Ryan Broderick?

  so much. In a 2021 lawsuit filed, okay. So I should say, like a lot of times, like, um, Grant, our producer does not like prep me for what I'm about to read. So you are, you are hearing my reaction to this in real time. In 2021, a lawsuit filed by Bam Margera,

• 49:24Ryan Broderick?

  Bam Margera jumpscare, uh, the star of MTV's Jackass against Paramount Pictures. Margera said that Wallace, who had no medical training or credentials, oversaw an inhumane substance abuse treatment program that included requiring Margera to take medication during daily FaceTime calls with Wallace. Wallace denied those allegations and the suit was settled in 2022. I imagine Jed has no interest in having his name out there, the publicist said. I imagine all his work is word of mouth and he doesn't want to be known because if he's the guy who makes things untraceable, that's the value.

• 49:56Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 49:57Ryan Broderick?

  So to put this all together, uh, like essentially a woman who worked with Harvey Weinstein for a long time, uh, has like a adversarial PR firm that hires like a genuine Hollywood ghost to like manipulate the internet. And so, you know, the large question we started with at the top is like, uh, do you feel like these people successfully killed me too?

• 50:17Speaker 01

  I mean, you know, yes. And I think that like, what they did with me too, is just like so unfortunate. And not to self promo, but I had a piece about Jed Wallace and Reddit comments and suppression on Spitfire last week. And I have a piece coming about Melissa Nathan and flooding the zone this week. Because Melissa Nathan worked under Steve Bannon on the 2016 Trump campaign.

• 50:42Ryan Broderick?

  Oh my god, damn it. Oh my god, damn it. It's all connected. It's all connected.

• 50:47Speaker 01

  It's all connected.

• 50:49Ryan Broderick?

  That's all of the worst people know each other.

• 50:51Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 50:52Ryan Broderick?

  If only there was some kind of island that they all could have flown to together to do like illegal activities. Like if only there was proof that like, I don't know.

• 51:00Speaker 01

  That would be crazy.

• 51:01Speaker 02

  And like, what if the plane that they flew on was named after a literary character? Just throwing it out there. Just like really like fan.

• 51:08Ryan Broderick?

  What if there was some sort of like global apparatus protecting like the most predatory people at the highest echelons? Anyway, okay. Um, so yeah, talk us through like what you learned. Like how, how do these people operate? How are they, how are they operating now?

• 51:23Speaker 01

  Yeah. I mean, so what I found when I was kind of digging into the supposed Reddit manipulation in this case, uh, which like in these text messages in the New York Times, in the lawsuits, they talk about how Jed Wallace's company is going to go after three social media platforms specifically. Instagram, TikTok, and Reddit. And one thing about Reddit is like, I have used Reddit for a long time, very, a lot. And so I was like, okay, how are they manipulating Reddit? And similar to you, Ryan, like I read FOMO. I read a lot of these pop culture subreddits. I find them fascinating. I was really upset and perturbed that FOMO, which had emerged as one of the only like pro Amber Heard spaces on Reddit.

• 52:05Speaker 01

  That was kind of like in the early days of FOMO, what made it grow so big is that it presented like a different space where you didn't have to hate Amber Heard, but they were so hard on Blake Lively. I was like, my one space has been corrupt, corrupted. And in Blake Lively's lawsuit, they mentioned FOMO specifically. And they're like, FOMO specifically was like the territory for Jed Wallace. And so I went on Reddit in late December, early January, and I was searching Jed Wallace's name, and I was also searching the name of Justin Baldoni's lawyer, Brian Friedman. But um, so basically, I was looking for comments about Jed Wallace in particular, because I wanted to learn more about this guy. I'd never heard of him before.

• 52:46Speaker 01

  And I found that all of the comments that said like Jed Wallace and contained details about his business were downvoted into the negatives. And the only reason I like figured this out is because I went on Reddit and I searched all of Reddit for Jed Wallace, and I sorted all comments containing the words Jed Wallace by new, so I could see that like across subreddits.

• 53:07Ryan Broderick?

  Right.

• 53:08Speaker 01

  His comments containing his name were being downvoted. And in some cases, they were being downvoted really obviously in really inauthentic ways. So like, right after the New York Times piece came out, some random guy in some random subreddit made a little comment being like Jed Avery Wallace, this is where his business is publicly listed, and this is his public previous list of clients. And that comment got downvoted like over a hundred times. And the guy made a follow-up comment being like, my comment had positive upvotes, and then within 15 minutes, my comment plummeted into the negatives. And I saw that, I saw that pattern on Jed Wallace's comments. I saw that there was a Business Insider article about Justin Baldoni's lawyer, Brian Friedman,

• 53:52Speaker 01

  about how Friedman had settled with his own sexual assault accuser when he was a fraternity member in college. He settled that lawsuit for like $40,000.

• 54:01Ryan Broderick?

  Also represented Kevin Spacey.

• 54:02Speaker 01

  Yes. And there was a Business Insider article about that. And if you search the link to the Business Insider article on Reddit, and you look at all the recent comments containing that link, those comments are also all down. So I saw all of this. I spoke to some Reddit moderators who were like pro Blake Lively and had been dealing with all kinds of weird stuff on Reddit. And I interviewed like some researchers who had studied Reddit vote manipulation. And what I found out is that it's really easy and really inexpensive to buy upvotes and downvotes on Reddit.

• 54:33Ryan Broderick?

  It is.

• 54:34Speaker 01

  It's really easy and really cheap. And in the text messages from Baldoni's publicists, they were outlining like this is how much social manipulation campaigns will cost you. And they were like, it'll cost you like $25 or $25,000 a month for three months to get these like Reddit services. And I was like putting it all together and I was like, so the business model here is Judd Wallace can do these small scale or big scale Reddit campaigns pretty inexpensively.

• 55:02Ryan Broderick?

  Yeah.

• 55:02Speaker 01

  And then like take home like a pretty big paycheck from this celebrity. But what's super disturbing about that is it's like, obviously anyone could do this about like any topic.

• 55:12Ryan Broderick?

  Anything, yeah.

• 55:13Speaker 01

  About anything. Um, and it's, it's, it's just, it didn't, it didn't even affect the overall sway of the online discussion about Blake Lively. Like people still hate her even more. They hate her even more now that she has revealed all of this stuff.

• 55:28Ryan Broderick?

  Oh, of course. Well, that's just the, the gravitational pull of misogyny.

• 55:32Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 55:32Ryan Broderick?

  Is that like it will always trend that way, unfortunately?

• 55:36Speaker 02

  So it's like before you had to like pieces of the playbook and you're like, step one seems to be this and but, but there are some murky things that happening. Can you kind of like sum up the playbook as you understand it now?

• 55:50Speaker 01

  So the playbook is ultimately a media playbook and it's split into kind of like two paths where you have the mainstream media playbook and the new media playbook. And it starts really with new media. It starts with people who are already fans of the perpetrator. And it starts by figuring out how to rally those people and provide them like a rich textual narrative that they can create content out of and that they can believe in and that that can evolve and like change shape as the events progress in real life. And that is like the fabric of a conspiracy movement is like you have to find people who are already invested in something for some reason and you have to give them a set of alternative facts, like an alternative worldview

• 56:34Speaker 01

  to believe in and all the little characters they need to build this narrative. And so that's how the playbook starts. Um, and then when it Came time when it was Showtime, when it was the 2022 trial in the US. Then you can point the mainstream media to all of this support for Johnny Depp. And the narrative right out of the gate becomes like, people support Johnny Depp organically. And the media can also be like sort of manipulated. Justin Baldoni's lawyer, Brian Friedman, is a master at playing the mainstream media. Because he is so good at understanding the logic of like what gets covered and how things get covered. Where if you have an entertainment trade publication or like an entertainment reporter at another mainstream publication.

• 57:18Speaker 01

  Their point of contact is you. If you give them a statement, they can report on that statement. If you respond to a claim with like a soundbite, then you know how they're going to use that soundbite. And so they sort of play the mainstream media by engineering this whole thing going on over on social media. Um, and the consequence of that is just like algorithmically, as these things become more and more popular. They start to take over social media platforms. And you can just kind of like line up the dominoes and watch them fall. Um, over time, it like refocuses the algorithm, fine tunes itself around what people want.

• 57:57Speaker 01

  And so by the time the trial was in full gear, the algorithm on YouTube, on TikTok, on Instagram, on every social media platform. Was like, this is the type of content people, people want. And if you as a social media creator, respond to that algorithmic incentive. And make more content that looks like this, then you will reap a massive reward. And that's basically the playbook. With Blake Lively and Justin Baldoni, the playbook is being put to a new test, which is like. Oh my God, Blake Lively exposed the playbook. Is the playbook still going to work now that people know what the playbook is? And what we've seen is that the playbook works even better.

• 58:34Ryan Broderick?

  Yeah.

• 58:34Speaker 01

  When people know what it is.

• 58:36Ryan Broderick?

  It's very Trump, it's very Trumpian in that way. It's like, we, we know they're lying.

• 58:40Speaker 01

  Mm hmm. Yes.

• 58:41Ryan Broderick?

  We still believe it.

• 58:43Speaker 01

  Yes. Yeah.

• 58:44Ryan Broderick?

  But the, the question that I kind of want to end on here. Cause I, I do think it's important to try to answer, even if maybe you and I can't. But I think it's something I, I want to talk about, which is like, do you think that? Let's say like Melissa Nathan, or like the people who are doing these things. Do you think there's an ideological component to it?

• 59:06Speaker 01

  I do, and this has been something that I have kind of like made up my mind about over the years of reporting on like sexual assault allegations against influencers and celebrities. I do believe there's an ideological component, which is ultimately just reinforcing the patriarchy.

• 59:25Ryan Broderick?

  And I don't mean this like in a leading way, but you think it kind of is, it can boil down to be that simple?

• 59:30Speaker 01

  I really do, because I think like, when you look at that, that text from Melissa Nathan, where she's like, "It's sad that people hate women this much." I think that kind of like gives the game away.

• 59:40Ryan Broderick?

  Yeah, me too.

• 59:41Speaker 01

  It's like, for Melissa Nathan, it's like, she is a woman, but her job is to like smear women, so she does it happily. And I actually think that like, there's a good chance that when all of this is said and done with like Blake Lively and Justin Baldoni, Melissa Nathan might come out on the other side, being pretty targeted, because she's a woman, and because she admitted all of this in text messages.

• 1:00:03Ryan Broderick?

  Hopefully, there was some kind of like leopard-based meme you could use to describe when that happened to you. I don't...

• 1:00:10Speaker 01

  Exactly.

• 1:00:12Ryan Broderick?

  I do think you're right.

• 1:00:13Speaker 01

  It's like, I mean, ultimately, the people who are the, the most powerful people in this case are like, male billionaires, male actors, male lawyers, male publicists. Like, the people who benefit at the top of this are all men who benefit from the fact that men benefit from an established power structure. And I think that like, there's a money component, and there's also an ideological component. And at the end of the day, like, the same, the same lawyers who represent these like, men in Hollywood and men in politics, who are accused of like heinous sexual crimes, these same lawyers will represent the occasional victim. Occasionally, they will pick out like a celebrity victim, and they will represent

• 1:00:55Speaker 01

  her. And they will go to court, and oftentimes, she will lose. And I just think that like, in the end, these lawyers and the people within the infrastructure, like, their ideology benefits men, so it can never truly be used in the opposite direction. And I think they know that.

• 1:01:13Ryan Broderick?

  I've kind of come to the belief that...

• 1:01:17Ryan Broderick?

  Most conspiracy theories are true in the opposite way. And like, the best example of this would be like red pill theory, which is like, once you take the red pill, you understand that like, the world, according to red pill people, is that the world is stacked against men and that women have total control over society and all the rest, which is true in the opposite.

• 1:01:40Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 1:01:40Ryan Broderick?

  And, and I remember like getting in a fight with my editor, an old editor of mine, we were catching up over coffee and, and he, he was asking me about like, you know, what was my read on the election coming up? This was, I think, last year. And I was just like, it's, it's just misogyny. There's no, there's actually no coherent politics in America other than misogyny. And he was like, I don't think that's right. And I was like, and I, and at a certain point, like, I don't think you can, you can't argue differently. I mean, you could say racism is a part of it, but like, at the end of the day, we are, we are boiling it down to a, a true hatred of women that is just like, very lucrative and very, and very easy and like, and very useful. And, you know, the stories that we talked about, I think in today's episode, they're,

• 1:02:25Ryan Broderick?

  they all have like, well, two of them have like, a bit of silliness to them, kind of, maybe one and a half. But the way that those stories play out is most likely true for almost everything we're seeing at this point. It's like AI text. Like, we'll never truly be able to know anymore, like, how much of the internet is being generated by AI. But if you're catching some of it, it means you're not catching a lot of it.

• 1:02:51Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:02:52Ryan Broderick?

  And so I, I would say like, for, for dear listener, if you are suddenly like, in a pitchfork mob online against someone and you don't totally understand why, like, Melissa Nathan might be the reason, or someone like her.

• 1:03:07Speaker 01

  Yeah. It's gotten to the point, and I was just having this conversation with my, one of my friends, where she was like, I actually want to criticize this Netflix show, but the woman starring in it is like the subject of a hate campaign.

• 1:03:18Ryan Broderick?

  Which one?

• 1:03:20Speaker 01

  Meghan Markle.

• 1:03:21Ryan Broderick?

  Oh dude, I saw a video of her trying to zest a lemon this morning. And, okay, I can tell you, we did an episode about Meghan Markle. Yeah, she is subject of a constant hate campaign online. And it is weirder and more British than anything you could possibly imagine.

• 1:03:34Speaker 01

  I'm sure, I'm sure. And yeah, and there's a lot of crossover with like people who hate Blake Lively, Meghan Markle, Amber Heard. They're also all readers of the Daily Mail.

• 1:03:44Ryan Broderick?

  And you know what? They love J.K. Rowling. I brought it back to the top. Look at that, Grant. Kat, thank you for coming on. This was a delightful conversation about horrifying social rot deep at the core of America. So, thank you for doing that. This has been great.

• 1:03:58Speaker 01

  Thank you for having me on. It's my favorite topic.

• 1:04:02Ryan Broderick?

  If people want to follow you online, where can they do that?

• 1:04:04Speaker 01

  So, you can subscribe to SpitfireNews.com and you can also follow me on Blue Sky, Instagram, even TikTok. Why not? It's at Kat Timbarch.

• 1:04:13Ryan Broderick?

  You're rocking it. Dot com. That's nice. That's classy.

• 1:04:16Speaker 01

  Yeah, thank you.

• 1:04:17Ryan Broderick?

  Very nice. Okay. Yeah, this is great. Thank you again.

• 1:04:22Ryan Broderick?

  If you want to hear more from me and Kat talk about bad men in Hollywood and the worst women that protect them, you should head on over to our Patreon, patreon.com/panicworld. And you can get a couple more delicious minutes of this episode over there for $5 a month. You just got to sign up and then you get that extra content. Thank you very much. I love you.

• 1:04:44Speaker 02

  And it's actually just, it's mostly me and Kat, so it's like the really good stuff. So, you're really going to want to listen.

• 1:04:52Ryan Broderick?

  Panic World is a Garbage Day production. Subscribe to the newsletter at garbage day dot email. Panic World is written and produced by Grant Irving. It's hosted by me, Ryan Broderick. Our amazing researcher is Adam Bumis. It's engineered by Rebecca Seidel. Our deranged logo was created by Gabby Cash. Please give us $5 at patreon.com/panicworld. Please give us products to sell by contacting multitude@multitude-production/adz. For any other way you would like to give us money or work with us or promote us or become financially entangled with us, you can reach out to our fixer, our wonderful bad man, Josh Fielstad, and you can reach him at [email protected]. And one piece of advice from me to you, chill out, touch grass, while you still can.