The TRUTH About Michael Jackson as Biopic Sets Records, and Blake Lively's DOOMED Legal Strategy, with Mark Geragos and Matt Murphy

26:33And here he goes further with it, and it was some disturbing additional details in Sot 3. He was left. The way he would beat you was you know it was hard you know sometimes you take um they make strip nude first you oil you down your whole ritual he'll oil you down so when when the flip of the um of the ironing cord hit you would just you know and it was just like me dying and you just flips all over your face your back everywhere. I always hear my mother, but no, you're going to kill him. You're going to kill him. I would just give up. I feel there's nothing I can do. And I hated him for it. Wow.

27:22And I have to say, a father making his son get naked and covering him in oil takes me to a different place. And it is very plausible to me that Michael Jackson might not have been ready to admit or ever prepared to admit what else happened. But it's just very strange to hear of a father making his child get nude and oil him up before a beating. Either way, Mark, you can make the argument that that behavior plus physical abuse, that behavior plus sexual abuse could have created something very dark inside Michael. Well, I mentioned earlier, The first time I was brought in was when Child Protective Services was called on him.

28:05And you see there that he's talking about her in one of the previous things, talking about his own children. And I think in retrospect, he was prepared for, later prepared for the criminal case. I don't think he was ever prepared in retrospect for that Child Protective Services investigation. It was so hurtful, devastating, and it shook him to his core. I just remember talking to him about it, and he just could not wrap his head around the idea that he would be doing anything untoward towards the kids. And we did get it shut down, but by that time it was shut down, the criminal case had kind of heated up, and so there was no rest for the weary, so to speak.

28:55And it was a very difficult time for him. I remember, I think I've mentioned this once before, one of the most terrifying times to have a client was being called one time and finding him on the floor OD'd in the run-up to the trial itself. And he had this wonderful housekeeper who was living in the house who had called and was panicked. And obviously, you couldn't take him to the hospital immediately. He had to have a doctor there. By the time the 2000s came around, he had undergone so much. And he was, to use the term, self-medicating, having others medicating. It was just a spectacularly hard fall from the heights, to your point, that he had been at, you know, 20, 10 years earlier.

29:53Yeah, I mean, it was everything, right? Just from my vantage point out in the press and in the public, it was the multiple accusations. Now the 93 accusation, the 2003 accusation of abuse, the endangerment of his own children injected into the conversation as he could lose custody of his kids. It's the multiple plastic surgeries, which like that's a whole, his name is almost synonymous with like the bizarre plastic surgery trend that's kind of taken over since then. But he was a pioneer in just doing too much and getting addicted to it and not knowing when to stop. The skin color changes, you know, there's so many eccentricities about him.

30:43and some you could kind of easily dismiss as the product of mega fame, like ultra fame, like Elvis-like fame. And of course he would wind up marrying Elvis's daughter. That's another whole twist, right? But like part of the mystery is, was it, how much was attributable to incredible fame in this bizarre upbringing like that, that, that might happen to any child who was exploited as much as he was at a young age and how much here's lisa marie presley just loving on him on stage oh sorry no no it's just a fan i was gonna say i don't think that's lisa marie but for a second i thought this woman's too tall to be lisa marie um and how much is attributable to but look at those look at those fans for for me as a just as an observer i don't remember that kind of reaction except for the Beatles back in the 60s.

31:40And Elvis, I'd say. Yeah. Look at that. I feel like Elvis brought people there too. But yeah, no, like it was a term starstruck. Yeah. And that's exactly what these people were, like struck by this megawatt star. And unlike so many of these stars, Mark, he delivered. You know, it's not like we we today build people up with image making and PR firms and, you know, sort of the social media blitz. Here's a woman being taken away on a stretcher. She's so overwhelmed by him. But he delivered in terms of the performance and the skills and the talent and just, you know, the way he moved was not human.

32:25It was overwhelming to behold. And what you see was, is just that kind of that tearing apart of him. And it's the analysis, I've thought a lot about it over the years and at what price and the kind of the collateral damage around him. And most recently with the new accusers and the, you know, on the heels of what we're talking about here, which is the movie that is out there that kind of drops off right before. Next up, I believe will be a movie that talks about the trial. And that, my guess, is be out momentarily as well. And when you see there, by the way, that clip that you showed. I don't know a whole lot of men that could do what he did in terms of leaping up on top of an SUV, even at that stage in his life and with the physical ailments that he had.

33:35It's just hard to. Well, that's that's one of the sad things. If it hadn't been for the drugs, he probably would have lived a long life because he was obviously extremely fit. You know, I mean, from years of aggressive dancing. I mean, for the love of God, Keith Richards is still alive, just based on what he did on stage with the Rolling Stones. Can you imagine? We could have had Michael for decades. But a man named Dr. Conrad Murray entered his life and bizarrely agreed as a board-certified anesthesiologist to administer propofol to him night after night in 2008 or 9 and killed him. I mean, he died.

34:14That is not a safe thing to have happen, and that's how he ultimately died. Go ahead. You know, I was just going to say, it reminds me, I see this all too often, with a lot of people trying to basically turn their brains off when they reach these kinds of levels. And that was, I think, to some degree, where he was, is just trying to literally anesthetize himself to the point where he could sleep, where he could just stop having the neurons firing and everything else. I mean, it's an immense tragedy and it's a first cousin to the talent that I don't even think there are not enough words to describe just how talented he was.

35:01and the kinds of, even in the somewhat addled state that he was by the time all of this other stuff was swirling around him, he had flashes, flashes of just an incredibly brilliant mind. And so I think to some degree, it was a way of just turning off that brain activity. I'm sure. I mean, propofol, anybody who's ever had a surgery knows what that feels like. They count, you have to count back from 10 and you never make it past eight because of the propofol, which knocks you out. Um, and you lose consciousness prior to, you know, them operating on you. And he, he could have anything. He had the money and the resources and the connections to get anything.

35:48And in the same way that the helicopter pilot should not have flown Kobe on that day because the weather was not safe, but he did it. I think out of fame, you know, admiration, like wanting to please Kobe, Michael Jackson had enablers like that in his own life. And one of them killed him. Conrad Murray killed Michael Jackson by, and he was later found guilty at a trial, right? A criminal trial, I believe he was put through. And of course lost his license as he should have because no anesthesiologist would do this, you know, in any respectable way. And so that's what took him. But if it hadn't been Conrad Murray, it would have been something else.

36:28It might have been a different kind of OD. Right. And we could have a whole... He was slowly but surely killing himself. Yeah, we could have a whole other discussion. I'm coming fresh off of the so-called ketamine queen and Matthew Perry. And you just wonder at a certain point, I know you want to hold people accountable, I guess about, I get that. But at a certain point, if you've ever, and I've argued this for years with people who are in the throes of addiction or have a loved one. Who doesn't have one degree of separation to somebody with a mental health or an addictive challenge and doesn't understand just how determined and how much they can persevere when they want to get whatever it is, is the carrot at the end that is being held out in front of them.

37:13So it's a very pernicious thing to be under the influence of, pun intended. So we've gotten childhood abuse. We've gotten allegations of abuse, child abuse and molestation against him. We've gotten the threat of his own losing his own children, potentially. We've gotten, you know, crazy, avid, obsessive plastic surgery and skin color changes and incredible fame, like just mind numbing, crazy ass fame and attention. And then a bizarre death. So that's kind of the arc of the Michael story. But in there, there really has been the question of, is he or isn't he on the molestation? Everyone wants to know, is he or isn't he?

38:02We want to know. I would like to know. If I'm at the roulette table and I can put it all on black or white, I guess it's black or red. Black or red, yes. What do I? Black and white, I think, was the song. Yes. Thank you. Yeah. What do I put it on? He was or he wasn't. And I got to say, I don't know. I don't know. I don't know enough. But there are some very disturbing allegations. So I'll start with the most recent. But you mentioned that there were recent allegations, and indeed there are. So this is a family that was supposedly his, quote, second family. And they had been defending Michael for all these years, saying no, no, no, no, no, including, I think, four young children who used to spend tons of time at Neverland Ranch, which was made to look like Disney.

38:54I mean, Michael's room, he always used to say he was like Peter Pan who never grew up. And his bedroom had a Peter Pan figure in there, a Captain Hook figure hanging from the ceiling. It was all done up to look like a Peter Pan. Well, I will tell you at Neverland, the two things that always struck me was there was a two-story video arcade that when you turned on the lights was absolutely incredible. And then you've got right there the other area that is adjacent. I think, as I remember, it was adjacent to the theater, which I also thought was. The amusement park? He's there with Macaulay Culkin in one of the rides, but keep going, Mark.

39:32So the interesting thing, in full disclosure, the family you're talking about is the Casio family. And I've spent an enormous amount of time with them. And I will tell you, if you spend time with them, they are convincing. They are persuasive. You don't have a heart if you doubt their emotional damage and sincerity and their authenticity. I saw it firsthand. I've spent an inordinate amount of time with them listening to them. I used to say about the Arvizo family, because I used to get all the time, the question is, did you believe, did you believe, back then in real time? And I used to say, well, I will tell you, I don't know about any other accusers, but I know in that particular instance that everything that we investigated, everything that we saw, led us to believe that it was a shakedown.

40:35And I'm not going to be dissuaded from that. I can't speak to, and nor should I, ever speak to any of the other accusations. I just know what I know, which is when you look at all of the accusations, when it turns out that the Arvizo family apparently hired the same lawyer that Jordy Chandler had, when you see the kinds of history involving the family. All of those things give you great pause. But then sit down and talk with the Casios, and that will give you great pause. And I think that somebody who's not there is going to make their own decision. It's almost a Rorschach test, I suppose, because we don't have anything along the lines of what sometimes you will have in these cases, which is computers filled with child porn or a tape of the molestation or some kind of an eyewitness or some direct, what's called direct evidence, even though I often will make the argument circumstantial and direct or equally powerful.

41:47In a lot of cases, circumstantial is more powerful. But it's a very mind-numbing kind of exercise to get into when you have somebody who is so enormously talented, who's been dead for so long, and you're revisiting whether or not there was this unbelievable dark side to him. And that's, I think, what is captivating people. But it certainly did not hurt the box office, which doesn't surprise me in the least. No, it's one of those things like it would be one thing if they were like Michael Jackson was a shoplifter. You know, he had a Winona Ryder problem, even though he was rich. He just felt the need to do this thing.

42:30People would have moved on. Who really cares? But he's been accused of literally the worst possible crime you can commit. But I mean, it is arguably worse even than murder. I will tell you, if you're, God forbid, you're ever sent to prison, you would rather be convicted of murder than you would have child molestation. You've got a longer shelf life than for somebody who's a child molester. They just don't last long in prison because it's considered the worst of the worst. Yes, there is a there is some weird honor code, even amongst the worst among us who have been sent away for for life that, you know, you you hurt a child.

43:07You're in a special class of evil. And so like this guy who we've been spent the first 20, 40 minutes of the show revering and celebrating and, you know, no question about his talent and how much we both admire it may have been the absolute darkest, worst, most evil thing you can be as a human on this earth. That's the incredible mystery around Michael Jackson. And it's also why those of us who want to just celebrate his music and his talent may very much like this biopic, you know, may very much like Michael because we don't have to deal with it. You know, it ends just as he's about to go on the bad tour.

43:43You know, I'm bad. And we don't have to even go there. But back to the Casio family. To the Casio family, they will tell you, yeah, that's great. You can celebrate all that. We celebrated all that, but you can't believe the every morning, and I think of one of them in particular, every morning I wake up, I have to deal with this. My life has been ruined. And it's emotionally, it is impactful in ways that it's hard to just give voice to. Oh, I mean, of course. If you've been the victim of child molestation, I mean, it's just a total game changer. Without heavy, heavy doses of therapy, your life is gonna be really tough to get back on track.

44:28Some people have done it. It's not impossible, but my God, what a massive challenge that's been given to you, but through no fault of your own. And so the Casio family has now come forward. They've been longtime defenders of Michael, but now they are alleging in a lawsuit that he did sexually abuse them as children over many years, many years. They'd long described themselves as his second family. I'm reading here from a New York Times piece, appearing publicly, including on Oprah Winfrey's show in 2010, to deny allegations against him and defend his reputation. And this is very helpful for Michael, because when he was being accused, either posthumously or during the course of his lifetime, to have children like Macaulay Culkin was one of them who had spent a ton of time with him during those tender ages.

45:09By the way, pedophilia is defined in the DSM-5 as sexual attraction to prepubescent children. It specifically says those prior to age 13, and that was reportedly Michael's thing. Some said between 7 and maybe 14 at the oldest was what he liked. But to have them come out and say, never me, never me, would be very helpful from the Casio kids to Macaulay Culkin, and there were some others. And they now say that they were groomed, that they were conditioned to protect him, calling themselves his soldiers and saying that they publicly denied the abuse for years because of fear, manipulation and emotional dependence.

45:48They recently appeared on 60 Minutes Australia. And here's a bit of that. For Aldo, the family's youngest, at times the fear was overwhelming. Did you find his appearance scary as a kid? Yeah. Yeah, especially when you're in bed with him at night and he turns into the zombie and, you don't love me, you don't love me. You know, his eyes were like this. Learning there were other victims meant this was no longer just his secret to keep. And I was like, oh, my God, he did this to other kids. That was enough for my courage to just blossom. I was like, no, no, no, no. This isn't made up. This is real.

46:40Aldo decided to tell his family of the abuse he'd endured, unaware he would also be opening the lid on the suffering of each and every one of his siblings. I called everyone to meet at my mom and dad's home, and I said, I just want you guys to know that everything that they're saying is true, because it happened to me too. Aldo's courageous admission led to all his siblings finally sharing what they say Jackson had done to them. It was the hardest thing for me to do was to admit it. Oh, yeah. I can't describe the feeling, the range of emotions that I was feeling at the time coming out. I mean, it's pretty powerful stuff.

47:24I mean, I will say just one caveat, a little less so because they filed a lawsuit. Like if the people who if people would just come forward and say this happened without then filing the lawsuit, I think it would be a lot more powerful. But they they did say in the context of seeking money, which must be noted. Go ahead. Well, they there we do have a civil justice system and I there are clear abuses in the civil justice system. I can think of cases. I'm sitting here in New York and in the Southern District. There's been all kinds of sanctioning of lawyers who bring cases that are patently ridiculous.

48:04And so there is that. But in this case, I think that was the last thing that any of the Cascios wanted. And I talked to them, and without betraying attorney-client, I will tell you that they tried mightily. I tried mightily to get them what they needed. And it's just a tough, tough situation. You know, imagine what they're in. They're in a situation where they didn't know the extent of what the others then subsequently told them, number one. One of the reasons that I thought was most compelling is I remember going to pick up Michael at one point for a court appearance. And they told me about that and they told me where they were hidden.

48:53And it was a location that nobody knew about, meaning a hotel nobody knew that I was picking him up in. And they told me where I was and that I was being hidden from Michael at the time. And it was kind of a stunning story to be told, given in retrospect, I too had been clearly a defender of his, a witness not once but twice during his trial as well. So I'm as perplexed and torn as you are from the outside and having been on the inside as to these cross currents. And it's a kind of a conundrum that I don't know where ultimately at the end I fall. So personally. And he's not here. He's not here to defend himself.

49:41And that was the problem, too, with finding Neverland. You heard them reference, you know, watching the claims and them, the one son then coming out and saying, it happened to me too. And he found the two accusers stories in Finding Neverland, a quote documentary, to be credible based on his own experience. Now, of course, I did not. Save Chuck possibly more than Robson, Wade Robson. And we'll talk about those two next. We have to take a quick break, but we've got to talk about Finding Neverland. which I think did more harm to these current allegations by this family than good, because Wade Robson in particular has got a lot of issues with his story and was clearly caught lying under oath in his civil suit against the Jackson estate, which it's just devastating to the whole story.

50:39and safe Chuck less so, but also had some money issues before he filed his lawsuit, which the documentary didn't disclose, and also didn't come forward until after Michael died. So it's, okay, so that's sort of a pattern. We're going to pick up that piece of it right after this quick break. Don't go away. Mark stays with us. Let's talk about an uncomfortable reality. What happens financially to our loved ones once we're no longer here? We put off thinking, about it for obvious reasons, but the best thing we can do for our family is to just take a few minutes and deal with this problem to ensure that they're not left with a financial burden of mortgage, tuition, medical bills, and so on.

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53:22Mark Garagos is back with me now. He is a very well-known, successful attorney, and he's also the host of In the Well. That is our new MK True Crime show. It's on our MK True Crime channel. If you go to your little podcast button and you just type in MK True Crime and subscribe, you will get In the Well, or you can go to mktruecrime.com, and it'll show you how to subscribe directly to the show via YouTube, et cetera. But get it because it's on fire after just two episodes. They kicked it off with quite a bang. It's Mark Garagos and Matt Murphy, Mark, a lifelong criminal defense attorney and also civil attorney and Matt Murphy, lifetime prosecutor.

54:02So the two of them in California have gone round and round with each other in the well of the courtroom and out of it. And now they bring that expertise to all of you. So we're very lucky to have him. All right. Keeping on taking a look at the two men featured in this Leaving Neverland, quote unquote, documentary. Wade Robson was, they both met Michael when they were children. Wade was this Michael Jackson lookalike from Australia who got folded into Michael's orbit. I think he won a contest and met him and might have appeared in like a music video with him and went on to become a well-known choreographer, stayed close with the Michael Jackson estate with Michael himself, said very, very nice things about Michael his whole life, actually testified under oath that Michael never laid a hand on him, both in the 1993 accusations.

54:58That one didn't go to trial, but did testify or told the sheriff nothing, absolutely nothing with me. And then in 2003, in your case, Mark, was again a witness for Jackson under oath, nothing, nothing, nothing. Then comes this documentary again, in quotes, leaving Neverland. And he has a very different story. Here is part of it. This is viewer warning, disturbing and and i must say for the record we took out the most disturbing parts just because it's very dark but you can imagine it um sat seven and then him guiding me to do the same thing with him so moving my hands um to touch his penis

55:41which you know was erect and I remember him putting my hands on his head when he was down there I'll forget the the the feeling of his hair I was rough almost like a um like a Brillo pad like this roughness and he's down there and you know with his his mouth on on my you know seven-year-old penis okay mark so i have to say when i watched the the movie i was horrified and i found him very credible and then i started to research him and let's just say less so so he sued the Jackson estate reportedly after he found out that he was not going to get this job with Cirque du Soleil and their production of Michael Jackson.

56:46Like Cirque du Soleil had licensed some Michael Jackson songs and they were sort of rehabilitating the MJ name. And he thought he was going to get a role with them and didn't and reportedly had some sour grapes over it. And then lo and behold said, I was a victim too and filed a lawsuit against the estate. And in the deposition testimony he had to give in the context of the civil case was asked, did you ever write anything about these allegations that you're making now? And he claimed under oath, he testified, no, never. But it turned out he had written a whole book alleging that he'd been molested.

57:24The defense team demanded the copies of it. my information was he did have to produce what he had. And that took a motion and a judge ordering it. And he wiggled out, he tried to wiggle out of doing it. And then they actually got some of the metadata from the drafts from the publishing companies. They went, the defense team, to publishing companies saying, did you get pitched a book about Michael Jackson by Wade Robson? And they did. And they got their hands on other versions of the book and his story differed version to version. And then there was testimony of him earlier that made clear he didn't remember the details.

58:09But by the time he got around to this documentary, again, in quotes, his memory was crystal clear for all of the abuse allegations, all of which left me with a lot of questions with all due respect to this man, because I don't know whether this happened and I don't want to attack somebody who may have been molested. But I just have to be honest, did not find this story credible at all when it was said and done. Your thoughts? Well, the experience I've had with leaving Neverland is famously, they have a clip of me coming out and saying, I'm going to land on you like a ton of bricks or something along those lines.

58:46The implication being is that I was coming out and attacking the... Oh, we have this, Mark. Hold on, I'll show the soundbite. This is from the documentary, leaving Neverland. It's you, Sat Nae. A news clip of Mark Garagos, who initially represented Michael in 2003 in the criminal case, is manipulated to appear as if he's threatening an accuser after Michael's arrest. We will land on you like a ton of bricks. We will land on you like a hammer. If you do anything to besmirch this man's reputation, anything to intrude on his privacy in any way that's actionable, we will unleash a legal torrent like you've never seen.

59:29In fact, he was talking about a completely different legal case in which he and Michael were secretly videotaped on board a charter aircraft. Disclosed that those two video cameras, which also apparently had audio on them, were surreptitiously placed in there, were recording attorney-client conversations. So just to make clear, Mark, there was a rebuttal to Leaving Neverland called Lies of Leaving Neverland. It's on YouTube now. And that was one of the lies they were pointing out that they perceived in the documentary as regards you. Keep going. Correct. And that was one of, it was so offensive to me when Leaving Neverland came out because what I had described there in the press conference in real time and what I was so angry about was they had filmed my conversations with him, attorney-client, which are sacrosanct, and they were marketing it.

1:00:23In fact, Greta Van Susteren was the one who called me the next day saying, this guy, this lawyer has got the tape and he's shopping it for a million bucks. And I called the lawyer and said, have you lost your mind? And he said, well, this is my client's lottery ticket. I went into court immediately, got a court order. Before I could execute the court order to go get it, the FBI was there. They seized it from the lawyer. And this guy was indicted who had done the surreptitious taping. So it was a wild situation to then take that and manipulate it. One of the reasons sometimes these documentaries drive me crazy, because it's great to tell a story.

1:01:06And documentaries can be some of the most effective storytelling there is. But you shouldn't really manipulate the facts to the point that you just literally tell a story that is not true. And that's why I was so. No, then then it's a docudrama and not a documentary. And that's. Yeah. So they did that. If they played fast and loose like that with you, what did they do with these other two men who are featured in it? And I just think I don't know whether those those facts are fatal to Wade Robson's claim, which has been resurrected because California passed one of those laws like New York did, where claims that were out of time and were sort of dead claims could be resurrected for a brief period of time if they related to sexual abuse.

1:01:53And Wade and James Safechuck took advantage of that and got their claims against the MJ estate resurrected. They go on to this day as a result. but I do know that as a journalist or a storyteller doing a documentary, you must include the credibility problems in your documentary and let the audience decide. And this guy did not do that on either one of these men, which is a failing. It is a fatal flaw in the presentation. By the way, if you're in a jury trial and this happened, say that this kind of manipulation happened. You would get a jury instruction that says, a witness who is willfully false in a material part of his testimony, he or she can be and should be disbelieved in others.

1:02:42I was thinking this morning, it's funny, Megan, that before I did this, I was watching the closing argument in Harvey Weinstein's third trial here in New York in the Manhattan court. Mark Agnifolo was giving it. I ran into, speaking of podcasts, Arthur Idalla, who tried it the second time, and he sends his regards. And I was thinking as I sat there about this, the accuser in this third trial, and such damaged goods, no matter what you say, given the testimony, given the medical records, The accuser clearly has mental health issues that are off the charts. So the argument becomes, when you're analyzing it, did the abuse cause this or are the mental health chicken or egg, is it the mental health that is causing the person to make the accusation?

1:03:40And those kinds of determinations should be left up to jurors in the courtroom and viewers in documentary. To your point, why ignore things that could be credibility issues? Let people decide based on a fulsome record as opposed to a skewed argument or kind of a rhetorical device. Yes, absolutely. There was in that lies of leaving Neverland, they pointed out this thing I just mentioned about how Wade's deposition reveals that he had to ask his mom to remember details about the alleged abuse. and that was at an earlier point in time than when he's with Leaving Neverland, remembering them all. He's got great details.

1:04:33He's a good storyteller. He can really take you there if you watch the documentary again in quotes. Boy, he really adds a lot of color, none of which he remembered years earlier when he was under oath and asked to tell this story. So there are a lot of questions. James Safechuck, he made equally disturbing allegations in the piece Leaving Neverland. The knock against him is that he was reportedly facing a serious lawsuit that hit right before he sat down for that documentary and was facing some financial, some serious financial threats. and that would have incentivized his filing a civil suit, as he did, and participating with this, quote, documentary.

1:05:18And again, that may not move you at all, but it should be disclosed by a filmmaker. In any event, here's James Safechuck, in part, again, with a viewer warning on the disturbing nature of what he's going to say in Sod 8. At the train station, there was a room upstairs. And we would have sex up there, too. what happened every day. It sounds sick, but it's kind of like when you're first dating somebody, right? You do a lot of it. So it was very much like that. He liked

1:05:57if I rubbed his nipples.

1:06:01So we would do stuff, and then in the end when he wanted to ejaculate, he would finish himself.

1:06:13You'd be in the hotel room, and he would pretend like somebody was coming in, and you had to get dressed as fast as possible without making noise. So not getting caught was a big, like, just kind of fundamental. It was very much a secret. And he would tell me that if anybody found out, his life would be over and my life would be over. He did say there that he remembers the abuse in Michael Jackson's train station. He had like a, you know, like I was just going to say, you know, you mentioned Matt Murphy and my podcast partner, Matt Handel. In fact, Matt and I faced off on a number of sex crime prosecutions.

1:07:01And Matt, I'm going to channel him and say that he would say that some of those things have the kind of insignia or indicia of what he has seen repeatedly and what I've seen coming at clients who were accused as well. So it's a very tough situation. I don't think there are any easy answers. And the look-back statutes, which you referenced, which are these statutes that revive statutes of limitations that have already expired, they actually started in the criminal context. And there was a case, Stodner, where they said you can't prosecute somebody criminally when you're going to take away their liberty after the statute has expired.

1:07:51But they left open the issue on these civil cases. And some of these civil cases and these look back statutes present real problems from my standpoint when you're trying to relitigate these later on, years later, when somebody didn't have notice. Yes, like the defendant is dead. Yeah. and now you've got the estate and you've got uh and you you don't see it happening against somebody who's a to quote my other podcast and and close friend adam carolla you never see people coming after the empty bags so there is that as well so it really is a conundrum it's it reminds me of the christine blasey ford situation against brett kavanaugh where it's like how is the guy supposed to defend himself 30 years later on, you know, what he did or did not do on a particular day.

1:08:46Now, in that case, we're dealing with a would-be Supreme Court justice. So it just so happened he did have detailed day planners, even from his time as a teenager, which was extraordinary and to his great luck. But I mean, Trump didn't when E. Jean Carroll tried to come after him and claim He raped her in a Bergdorf Goodman dressing room. If she had brought that claim that year or within, you know, two years or five years, he could have defended it. He could have easily looked up on his computer. No, this is what I was doing that day. That didn't happen. It's just allowing this to be brought decades after the fact just sets the poor defendants up for a certain disappointment.

1:09:28It's precisely why you have a statute of limitations. I mean, there is a reason why there is a statute of limitations with carved out exceptions traditionally for hundreds of years for things like murder. Obviously, there should be, and you can think of every public policy reason why there shouldn't be a statute of limitations for murder. And fast forward now to cold case DNA, things of that nature, and it makes perfect sense. But for other things where it is traditionally a he said, she said, and when you're in what I like to call money court, which is what civil court is, you're over there fighting over other people's money.

1:10:11There ought to be some bright line at a certain point where it doesn't change. I think back to when sitting here in New York, the Adult Survivors Act was about to expire. And the number of clients I had on the eve of that expiration who were handling cases, trying to settle cases, just because they didn't want to have to undergo the torrential downpour of the media lynching, so to speak, which also people tend to forget is a real problem. You can win the case eventually. You can get thrown out eventually. But how do you get your reputation back, to quote the original Ray Donovan? Well, that's like this J.P.

1:10:58Morgan sexual assault allegation that's being made by this guy who tried to go under John Doe, who was also at J.P. Morgan, against this poor woman, who I don't think did anything. I don't believe him. Maybe I'll be proven wrong, but I don't believe one word of what this guy is alleging. But it's the same thing where, you know, he's completely smearing her day after day after day. And it comes out that J.P. Morgan offered him a million dollars to settle this thing, which they said was reportedly two years of his salary. So it's for them. It's a rounding error, Mark. It's J.P. Morgan. They've got more money than the U.S.

1:11:34government. By the way, that must mean they think she did it. I'm like, no, that does not mean they think she did it at all. I could count a series of employees that I have extricated from large corporations, friends mostly, in the last two years where I have gotten them that kind of money as a severance when they are either laid off or they're perp walked out of the place. So for those who think the$1 million signifies guilt or an acknowledgment of guilt, no, it's when you have a high earner and you want to separate. I'm old enough to remember when nuisance value was$15 ,000, and now nuisance value is$1.5 million.

1:12:25So that's just the reality of it, especially in corporate America. exactly like you point out the higher earnings of the person threatening you the more it's going to cost to make them go away quietly even if you think their claim is total bullshit which jp morgan says this is because they say among other things he produced none of his records his phone all the things that he claimed support him he wouldn't produce they say where she did they say she handed over the phone take it look at everything talk to everyone i never laid a hand on this guy but I'm having my reputation ruined nonetheless.

1:13:03All right, back to Michael. And Matt Murphy's here, by the way. We're going to bring him in in a minute. But I do want to play these two soundbites. And I have to point out the one thing on Save Chuck, though. He mentioned that he was allegedly abused in this Disney-esque train station that Michael had built on Neverland, his property, which is made to look like Peter Pan's world. It is very, I'll tell you, it is very Disney-esque. I definitely want to talk to you about it. But what happened after the documentary, in quotes, dropped was Jackson biographer Mike Smallcomb revealed that that train station was not built until 1994.

1:13:40And in the documentary, James Safechuck claims he was abused from 1988 till 1992. And therefore could never have been molested in a room at the Neverland train station. Um, this guy, Smallcomb tweeted out Santa Barbara County construction permits showing approval for the building did not happen until September, 1993. So that would seem to be a pretty glaring error here in response to that. That's a no shit moment for the director, Dan Reed. If you're the defense lawyer and you find that fact, you can only imagine what you're saying to your associates at the time. yeah it's not ideal oh we have a clip of the director's response do we uh okay so so once again this from lies of neverland the rebuttal they address this let's watch it he says that one of the locations where michael jackson was abusing him on a daily basis was the neverland train station and he vividly describes the interior of the train station now this version of the story that he tells in the TV show places that abuse in the train station in 1988-89.

1:14:51The train station did not even open until 1994. And as you correctly say, in his sworn declarations, in his ongoing litigation with the estate, he says that Michael Jackson stopped molesting him when he was around 14 years old in 1992 because he got too old for him. And the whole narrative of this film is that Michael Jackson molests boys and then when the boys hit puberty and get too old he then ditches them and moves on to a younger boy that's the whole narrative that they're selling with this documentary but when it's revealed that this location where Safechuck is describing his abuse is it did not exist when he was the age he said he was Dan Reed the director of the documentary goes on to Twitter and says, well, there's no dispute about when the train station was built, but what's in dispute is the dates of the abuse.

1:15:45So James Safechuck was abused after the train station was built. Well, firstly, he's now accusing his own star witness of perjury because James Safechuck has signed not one but two sworn declarations in which he states that Michael Jackson never abused him after 1992. So in order to defend his documentary, he's throwing its star witness under the bus. Very persuasive. And Mark, on top of that, even if you extend the period of abuse to 1994, post when the train station went up, now James Safechuck is pushing 17. and during that time, Michael was living in New York for most of the year. He wasn't sitting at Neverland with James Safechuck, according to those who knew him.

1:16:34So it does raise questions about whether these two complainants in finding Neverland, leaving Neverland, who had previously testified repeatedly that Michael never touched them, but after he died and they fell on hard times, then came forward and said he did, how much credibility we can give them. And Wade Robson was another one who was reportedly found to have been looking up news articles about what had happened to other boys. Now, that could be the behavior of a victim, too, just trying to get back to that story. Or it could be somebody. Yeah. Or it could be somebody who, you know, was looking for details he didn't have because it didn't happen to him.

1:17:14So all of this. OK. But that leads me to where I wanted to go with you, which is you mentioned a moment ago, the nice maid you knew at Neverland. And was that Adrienne McManus? It was a different nice maid. Okay, because speaking of 60 Minutes Australia, he's shaking his head no, it wasn't her. Speaking of 60 Minutes Australia, which I think we all need to start watching. A former Jackson maid named Adrian McManus gave some damning testimony about Michael and what she eventually started to clean up in Michael's bedroom. She said after three months, they said, now you can start working. You can start cleaning Michael's bedroom.

1:17:58At first, they just gave her the rules of like, don't look at Michael. Don't talk to Michael. You know, you're not friends with Michael. You're the maid here. and then she did get to know him a little and she said he was very nice to her and then she started cleaning his bedroom and didn't didn't go well um this is an allegation and here is part of it and underwear is also in his bed i i did find um underwears that were Minsk briefs in the walk-in closet. And they were, and I don't like to say this, they were like crunchy, hard, with yellow stains all over them. I didn't know who they belonged to because the little boys started wearing Michael's briefs.

1:18:45There was a lot of Vaseline at Neverland. Sometimes it was found in the golf carts when Mr. Jackson would take off with the boys. Vaseline? Yeah, Vaseline. And there was a lot of Vaseline in Michael's bedroom. It was actually all over the ranch. Is there possibly an innocent explanation for that? I don't think so. Okay, now I will say on the Vaseline, like the guy was the king of plastic surgery. So who the hell knows what he needed the Vaseline for? You know what I mean? Like maybe that makes you go from black to white or soothes the journey somehow. or the scars he must have had all over him.

1:19:25I don't know. Having Vaseline in the golf cart. Right. I don't know. Vaseline, you know, I'm still PTSD from baby oil last year with Diddy. And so I'm always, I think there's a, I take all of that with a certain grain of salt. But, you know, the interesting thing is here that I believe the case is set for trial next year in the Beverly Hills courthouse in 2027. So we're going to have... Wade Robson and James Safechuck? I think that's set for trial. 2027, Beverly Hills courthouse. And if I'm not mistaken, then if that's televised, I can't even imagine what that's going to be like. I mean, that will be...

1:20:14And I, frankly, for a case like this, that's where this belongs, in a courtroom to try and settle it with admissible evidence as opposed to speculation or this, that, things floating out in the ether. I think that that's one of the great things about being in a courtroom is that you can actually get the evidence. I was thinking yesterday, completely off topic about that, but this Rebecca Grossman and the pitcher and that civil trial that's being tried in Los Angeles right now that's being televised, where she was convicted of the murder of the two little Iskander boys. And we're finding out stuff in the civil trial that we never knew about in the criminal trial.

1:20:59I have a sneaking suspicion, I know the lawyers involved, and they're all really top flight, that we will find out a lot that we didn't know and that has been reported once we get into trial next year. I mean, in very few of these cases where you have a sexually molested child or a sexually abused woman, do you have somebody whose testimonial is totally pristine and they have absolutely no credibility issues? I mean, they're humans. Most humans have some credibility problems if you've really dug deep or, you know, if you've been victimized by somebody who's extremely wealthy and famous, you probably would file a civil lawsuit, like F them, you know?

1:21:46So it's like, it's very hard to find just like the perfect little, you know, sweet Pollyanna who has absolutely no dirt on her to come forward and say this happened to me. You know, I, I want to keep that in mind as we go over these testimonials. And to that point, there are cases where some of the most heartbreaking cases in the criminal justice system are young children testifying against the family member. And then you say to yourself, why would they lie? If it's against the backdrop of a custody fight or something like that, and then it turns out that one of the mom or dad is programming the child.

1:22:29And upon cross-examination, you find that out. I mean, these are the kinds of struggles that you deal with in trials. And that's, I would never want to be a juror in those kinds of cases, but they happen every day across the country. I do want to say this about this woman, Adrienne McManus, the maid. So she was a prosecution witness in 2003. By the way, Matt Murphy just joined us. Hi, welcome to the party, Matt. Lifelong prosecutor now doing some defense work, some criminal defense work, but only for cops. Because that's how he's built. I was just going to say, yeah, you got to pass the first responder law enforcement lit this fest with Matt.

1:23:09For real defendants. That's what we love about him, Mark. Can I just say, after watching the little clips of Mark, he's much more handsome now with the gray hair. I'm just going to go out there and say it. He looks good. Thanks, Mark. You don't have an additional line on your face, which is saying something for a Californian in particular. It makes it even more persuasive, which is maddening to me in so many different ways. But well, I want to know, Matt, the last thing we want from Megan's point. Have you ever had a pristine complainant as a witness when you were prosecuting a case? Oh, there's always it's always messy.

1:23:45And what you were just saying, Mark, it's giving me flashbacks. Those custody disputes. Megan, just so you know, I used to have a sexual assault detective named Don Howell at Huntington Beach Police Department. And if you can believe this one, Mark, he was in there for about 25 years. I'm sure you've you encountered him at one point or another. Multiple. He used to send me the custody dispute stuff with a yellow stick on it with R &R, which stood for read and reject because there's it's so common that that those are false allegations. And it really undermines the integrity of real victims. Okay, I wanted to just offer one thought on the maid because we kind of left that testimonial hanging out there.

1:24:23But the truth is that she was accused earlier of having stolen on the job while she was working for Jackson. during the trial. Also on a separate point, she identified one of the boys who she allegedly saw Michael Jackson kissing. And she said she saw him touching their bottoms or their crotches. And she identified one of them as Macaulay Culkin. He too has denied ever being molested in any way, shape or form by Michael Jackson. So, you know, she she's also got with there's some questions about her testimonial and her credibility and certainly her honesty if she was accused of stealing. So all these witnesses have something.

1:25:03But here's there's a reason I brought in Matt now, because the worst soundbite, I mean, it's to me, it's worse than anything we heard from Wade, from James Safechuck, from the maid. It's from Michael himself. And Mark Garagos mentioned it at the beginning of our discussion as the thing from the Martin Bashir sit down that would change the trajectory of Michael's life would get the authorities interested in him. He would get charged. There was a possibility of losing custody of his children, the drugs, the ultimately early untimely death. And it was this crazy ass exchange I'm going to show here in SOT4.

1:25:45Can you understand why people would worry about that? Because they're ignorant. But is it really appropriate for a 44-year-old man to share a bedroom with a child who is not related to him at all? That's a beautiful thing. That's not a worrying thing? Why should I be worrying? Who's the criminal? Who's Jack the Ripper in the room? Did you ever sleep in the bed with them? No. But I have slept in the bed with many children. I sleep in the bed with all of them. When Macaulay Culkin were little, Kieran Culkin would sleep on this side. Macaulay Culkin's on this side. His sister's in there. We're all just jamming the bed.

1:26:22Is that right, Michael? It's very right. It's very loving. That's what the world needs now. More love. Mark. I will tell you at the time. Every sane person recoiled. Yes, and I will tell you at the time that that was one of the reasons that the calculation was made to do that two-part 60 Minutes interview because that was, to my mind at least, was an insurmountable or close to insurmountable thing to get over. By the way, why is it always, in my cases, that it's ABC who does the interview that ends up I have to deal with later? I don't know what it is, whether it's Martin Bashir or Diane Sawyer, but it always seems to be ABC.

1:27:06I know the answer. I know the answer because ABC does a lot of crime to its credit. I mean, I think all three of us are very into crime and ABC does way more of that than CBS or NBC even, which has Dateline, but ABC, that's kind of one of their main beats. So I think that's why. Thank you. I was this many years old before I understood that. Thank you. Because it always seems like I'm fighting ABC to get the outtakes from the interview that the client did before I I met the client. I think that's why. Matt, I've got to ask you, because in the course of your lifelong career as a prosecutor, you did a lot of sex crimes.

1:27:48We've talked about that. And I'm sure you've got a thought. You're a Californian as well on the Michael Jackson situation. I mean, there's been now we talked about him being accused in 1993 for an eight figure settlement. That plaintiff went away. Then there was an actual criminal trial by another accuser in 2003. He was found not guilty in that case by a jury. That was the one in which he moonwalked on the van the day of his indictment. Now we have at least these two other accusers coming forward in leaving Neverland, Wade and James, who we just went through. Now we have this family of four kids who we discussed with Mark, who had been like his second family, the Cassios, saying it happened to all four of them, even though they've all, all of these people had been denying that it had ever happened and had been great witnesses for Michael, not wanting to admit what they say is the truth.

1:28:41So as a prosecutor, how does all this grab you? Well, as a prosecutor, you always want as many statements of the defendant as possible. And you know what this the Michael Jackson thing, I think we were all shocked back in those days when we saw that interview. And and much, much credit to Martin Bashir's because he asked him the tough questions. And he kind of he kind of asked exactly what we were all thinking in the middle of that. Like, is that really appropriate? And we saw the answer. My boss, he's like a mentor of mine, Lou Rosenblum. When I left the DA's office and he'd been in private practice for six or seven years, he hit me with a real gem that I know Mark is going to appreciate here.

1:29:21He said, always remember and never forget, the way these people think doesn't stop simply because they've gotten into trouble and now you've decided to represent them. You see these interviews by people whose currency has been the media, like Michael Jackson or like Prince Andrew. I'm sure you saw that, the Guthrie interview. That was the biggest. He's still suffering the consequences of that absolute meltdown, kind of like we saw with the Michael Jackson clip we just watched. It doesn't take much to shift the public perception. Or another case that's out there right now that I was talking to Harvey Levin about yesterday, Mark, and that's this David case.

1:30:03As soon as Nathan Hawkman came out and said, we've got child pornography on the phone, everybody ran for the exit. So there's it doesn't take much, especially in cases like this. You know, as a prosecutor, you always want them talking and you want to talking for as long as possible, because if they say something like that, you've got a real weapon in your arsenal when it comes to prosecuting them. Mm hmm. I'm thinking about Alex Murdoch, who insisted on taking the stand at his family annihilation trial in South Carolina. It was a disaster for him. He thought he could outwit the prosecutors just like they all do.

1:30:40And none can. You know, it's like it's like my old pal from Jones Day used to say he had a great story of being across from the CEO of a company who was suing a Jones Day client. So he was with that CEO who was suing his client and the CEO's lawyer. And it was like the eve of trial. Are we gonna settle this or aren't we? And he looked at that CEO who was refusing to settle and my friend knew the guy ought to settle and said to him, look, is it possible that when I get you on the stand, you will have a very, very good day and I will have a very, very bad day? No, it's not possible. it's that it's not possible like you're not going to outwit me and sure enough that guy settled as they all should it's like if you have a really talented civil attorney crossing you or if you have a lifelong prosecutor who knows his stuff you're going down you're not going to outsmart the mat there's probably nobody in the world right now megan more than the guy that's sitting sitting there with us right now mark ergos who's probably had that hard conversation again and again.

1:31:49And as he sits there, he can't talk about it because it's all probably clients we all know or heard of. And he can't reveal any attorney client. And I know he's just jumping out of his skin right now because he's got so many examples of that that he can't share. But yeah, that's Scott Peterson. Oh, so many. I knew she was going to go there. Well, my father, who was my hero mentor, used to say it's a rare case for the defense that gets better after the prosecution rests. And boy, isn't that the truth. I remember one case in particular, who will remain nameless, where I had tried, I thought, the best murder case I had ever tried as a defense lawyer.

1:32:28And then my client insisted that he was going to take the stand. And I actually took him into chambers. And I said, I will quit before I put this guy on the stand. I know it's his absolute right, but I can't let him on. And sure enough, he took the stand and he did well for the first day and I refused to take him on direct. I had one of my associates do it. I just said, I'm not going to be a party to this massacre. But by day two, the prosecutor had so dismantled him that, and afterwards, the jurors, speaking of Dateline, who were interviewed by Dateline, the foreperson said, we were never going to convict him until he took the stand.

1:33:11And that's your worst nightmare. Okay. So I want to shift gears though, in the time that we have, because I teased at the top of the show, two things. I teased Katie Porter and who she's saying, release that tape, which we don't have time for. That was actually, we're going to have to do that tomorrow, but I will play. I promise Mark Halpern's here tomorrow and we are going to play it. And we're going to take a deep dive into it. Cause we've actually looked into her claims. Why does Mark Halpern get all the fun of Katie Porter? Has there ever been a worse as a lifelong Democrat in California? How did we get to the point where Katie Porter is our best and brightest?

1:33:48I don't even understand that. It makes zero sense to me. The woman has absolutely no redeeming qualities as a political candidate. You wouldn't hire her to run your 7-Eleven and we're going to hire her to run the fourth largest economy in the country. What is this blaspheme against the clearly most qualified candidate? Don't she deserves this. And so do I. That's the important thing, Mark. The people of America deserve to see this woman ascend and be if we have to have a Democrat, we can't have have, you know, not can't have confidence. God forbid you've got confidence. God forbid somebody runs who actually has run something.

1:34:31Steve Hilton would be great. Chad Bianco would be great, but if we can't have them, it's got to be Katie. She's the one who needs to do it because we deserve that. Okay, but anyway, what we teased was the Blake Lively settlement. And her lawyers are already making a bunch of noise and also trying to spin the pre-existing understanding that they were going to recover some attorney's fees because he sued her, he countersued her for defamation. and that claim was thrown out. And there's a California statute that protects alleged victims of sexual harassment from getting sued for defamation, because this is something that a lot of defendants will do, saying, if you do that, and the person who was claiming to have been sexually harassed has any sort of good faith basis for saying she was sexually harassed and your defamation lawsuit against her then gets thrown out as it was here, you are going to be able to recover your lawyer's fees against that defendant who filed a counterclaim for defamation.

1:35:36So she did get his defamation claim thrown out. She is entitled to some measure of fees. We knew that a year ago when that happened. And now that she's willingly settled all the rest of her claims, whatever existed of them, because most of her case got thrown out too, she's willingly walked away from all of them. and she's trying to spin the remainder of those fees as her big victory. She's won. You see, she's won. Meanwhile, we all knew you were getting some measure of fees. Here's her lawyer on a podcast just the other day. Hold on a second. What's the name of this show? The Town. And it was on May 8th on A Little Spin.

1:36:22Okay, let's listen to, is it, well, you guys play it. You've been looking at it. I don't know which one. It's 19A. So let me tell you why our client is happy, ecstatic with this settlement. The reason that our client is happy with this settlement is because it gives her the power and the opportunity to pursue what we believe is her most potent and powerful claim in a way that is efficient, in a way that is final, in a way that the defendants have no appeal rights over, and in a way that cuts off most of the noise that would be surrounding this case. and lets us get straight to the core issue of how the defendants retaliated against her, specifically the retaliatory lawsuit that they filed that called her a liar, that branded her a liar.

1:37:09And it's not one of these statutes where there's discretion for awarding the damages once the conditions are met. And we believe the conditions have essentially already been met. And what's important about that, Matt, is that they filed a$400 million defamation lawsuit against our client, against Ryan Reynolds, against Leslie Sloan. they claimed that all of this was a lie it was all made up and they were going to prove it in court they lost that well oh my god can i just to say that this was the best claim that they had all along for attorney's fees on the thrown out defamation cross claim that's what a what a revisionist history gary well first of all this is what's called anti-slap and there is this peculiar section, 47.1, whatever it is, that says if you prevail, you can get your attorney's fees if somebody comes after you.

1:38:01There's one problem with that. As you pointed out, Judge Lyman has had this on his docket, so to speak, since last year, number one. Number two, Blake Lively's claims were just gutted like a rainbow trout. No, no. You see, you don't know what you're talking about, Mark. This, in fact, was her most potent and powerful claim all along for the attorney's fees expended defending his defamation claim. And by the way, I think if somebody were to check PACER, which is the federal electronic docket, I believe that that gentleman who was interviewed just there by the, I think that was by the Puck outlet, I think he filed a request or one of his brethren filed a request to augment the briefing of what has been pending since last September.

1:38:58asked for, I believe, a five-page brief to supplement their arguments. That was - And he said no. Yes, summarily denied in record time for federal court, number one. Number two, remember Judge Lyman, I've said this before, I don't know him, but I knew his father and his father, Arthur Lyman, was a lion of the bar in First Amendment. I mean, he was one of the go-to lawyers. I don't know that the son falls too far from the father, but his father would have been appalled by the idea of this Section 47, that somehow if you cross-complain that you are eliminated from the ability to petition in court to vindicate your rights, because that's basically what it is, stripping you of your rights.

1:39:53I just don't think, number one, that there's going to be anything of great note, number one. Number two, remember, all of this is, speaking of noise, there are probably 10 insurance companies behind all of this fighting for who's got to pay reservation or rights, subrogation, indemnification. This is never going to come out of their pockets. It's always going to come out of the insurance company pockets. So this is what, I mean, I'm going to have to look it up in Black's Law Dictionary, Matt, But I believe this is what we call lies. What this lawyer is saying, this has been their their purest and most potent claim all along, most potent and most powerful.

1:40:35Those are lies. Take the next 22 seconds away in and then we'll come back right after this break. Well, the funny thing for me is watching Mark's face as we're both listening to that clip because I can see it. And it's like we're both literally laughing out loud. Albert Einstein had a great had a great quote that applies to the practice of law. He said, if you can't explain something simply, you don't understand it well enough. And I could add, or it's just pure spin. And that's what we're watching. It's just, you are so desperately trying to claim some sort of W out of this. I have more from this guy on this podcast.

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1:44:59and no apologies. Along with The Megyn Kelly Show, you're going to hear from people like Mark Halperin, Link Lauren, Maureen Callahan, Emily Jashinsky, Jesse Kelly, Real Clear Politics, and many more. It's bold, no BS news, only on The Megyn Kelly Channel, Sirius XM 111, and on the Sirius XM app.

1:45:22Mark Garagos and Matt Murphy are back with me. They are the hosts of the brand new show on the MK True Crime podcast feed. It's called In the Well. Go and find it every Friday on the MK True Crime YouTube channel and all podcast feeds. You just type in MK True Crime and if you hit subscribe, you will get In the Well in addition to our other true crime offerings. Well worth your time. Matt, let me stick with you on just continuing with the absurdity. I've got some more from this lawyer, Michael Gottlieb on the town, but the notion in there that she's ecstatic with the settlement because of her ability to pursue this most potent and powerful claim for attorney's fees, not damages, attorney's fees.

1:46:06So what are you hoping to get here? Give me a best case scenario dollar amount that you could collect and from who? So I want to step back from that because this lawsuit has never been principally about money for our client. It has been about accountability. It has been about shining a light on this underground smear machine that retaliated against her for raising claims of sexual harassment and retaliation and has harmed so many other people. And what you've seen since Blake stood up and brought this lawsuit is evidence coming out in our case that has led to information being used now in other litigations.

1:46:45The Nicholas case, the Amanda Ghost case. this underground smear machine has been exposed and people are now on notice that if they see, you know, if you see a MattBelanySucks.net website pop up, you're going to maybe have an idea of who might have put that website up. Really, we should be grateful to Blake, is what he's saying, Matt. No one's going to get smeared anymore on the internet because of her. You know, it's, Mark and I actually had this conversation before, Megan, and it's counterintuitive to me that when you're talking about defamation, because we learned in law school that in a defamation case, truth is always an absolute defense, right?

1:47:22So in this retaliation claim, one of the things I had a hard time wrapping my head around is that truth would not operate as a defense. And if you look at the interviews with Blake Lively and that Norwegian journalist, her last name is Klaus, I think, she just - It's spelled Kajursti, but I've just learned it's pronounced shirstie shasty shasty right and she's here's this i know she's doing her job at some press jonket for a woody allen film from like 2016 and she's just asking basic questions and her blake lively and parker posey they transform into the mean girls that we all saw in eighth grade that we all every single person is triggered who went to public school by it's like we we see that You know what I mean?

1:48:12And the idea that that got released and somehow they can point the finger back and blame Jason Baldoni or anybody else for that. I mean, she's she's got to live with that. And I'm not a reporter Posey either. She was also kind of a freaking. No, really mean. She looked terrible. She was equally nasty. Yeah. So you heard it there, Mark, that that basically there's not going to be any more harassment on the Internet because of Blake Lively. This is a fantasy. Harassment on the Internet was a thing before this trial, this case, and it will be a thing after this case. We're allowed to dislike her.

1:48:50We're allowed to write terrible things about her. And when it's phrased in terms of our opinion, you can't make up facts about somebody that are false. But if we think she's a terrible, spoiled, mean girl bully, we're free to say that. And we do think that and we think that based on the interview with Shesty, among many other clips. and behaviors by Blake Lively. And for this guy to be pretending that she was really just an Avenger for others. Meanwhile, you and I both know it was her thin to her tissue, paper, thin skin that led her to bring this law scoop because she was like, there's no way anyone could possibly just hate me organically.

1:49:27Justin had to have made it happen. Can you imagine just through this thought experiment? Can you imagine how disappointed my good friend, Brian Friedman was to not be able to try this case against this guy. I mean, people talk about cross-examining Blake and whatever, but for people who do this for a living, when you get an opponent or an adversary that is this tone deaf, you have to say to yourself, and I've had this so many times where guys have told me I've never lost the case and blah, blah, blah, usually some U.S. attorney. But big firm lawyers suffer from the same thing because they're in that same axis of evil, so to speak.

1:50:11There is a tone-deaf removal from reality that they just don't understand. The person who interviewed him in this, you should read the kind of tongue-in-cheek, or maybe it was their website yesterday, article about how bad this interview was. And it just, To Matt's point, and to what my father used to say, is clients get the lawyers they deserve. And boy, that holds true here. Yeah, and Justin Baldoni did too. There's one more. The questioning was about whether he had the right strategy, right? Is that the one? Is that the start? I'm looking at my SOT list here. Yeah, let's listen to SOT 19C. The lesson from this case, isn't it that you have to think really, really hard before you initiate a case like this?

1:51:06If you are a major celebrity and you have brand businesses and a film career and you want that to be what people know about you, not the back and forth bombs being dropped. I think you got to wait and see what we accomplish in our 47-1 before you write the final chapter of that book. But what I would say, Matt, is I don't think it's an option to sit back and let people assassinate your character and reputation with untraceable digital smear campaigns. I think when you discover that somebody has done that to you, that bringing that to light and holding those people accountable is important. And I think that what Miss Lively's lawsuit has shown is that there actually is a way to do that.

1:51:48You can shine a light on it. Matt Murphy, this is so wrong on so many levels. OK, can I just tell you, I've told the audience this before, but back in 2016, 17, when Trump and I were going round and round for nine months, he was coming for me. And then I left Fox and I went to NBC. David Pecker, who owned and ran the National Enquirer, was out to get me. I mean, I can't even count the number of hit pieces that he dropped. I was literally on the cover of the National Enquirer with the headline, world's most hated mom. on the cover with my picture. Now, did I try to get to the bottom? It's David Pecker.

1:52:30He's friends with Trump. These are lies. He's telling me I'm not the most hated. There are a lot of more hated people. What about Casey Anthony? She killed her toddler. She's definitely more hated than I am. I'm like, no, no, I didn't. Because as I once told my own children as we walked by a different headline that was negative about me at a kiosk on a cover of a magazine, when they said, Why don't you fight back against that mom? As I told him at the time, because the people who want to believe these lies always will. And the people who don't require no correction. He's just wrong. He's wrong in his PR strategy.

1:53:05And he's wrong about what this whole thing did to Blake Lively. She is not in a better place now than she was prior to this. No, she everybody looked at the videos and saw for themselves. Right. There's another video where she did an interview where She said, I can't feel fulfilled unless I have authorship over the project. I don't want to just be an actor who shows up and stands on a spot. It's a it's a clip that's that is also made the rounds. Now, everybody has seen it and it makes her look absolutely terrible. So maybe these are bad moments, but these are all things that she went out and did and said herself.

1:53:39Another thing, Megan, and I think this will this is something Mark and I were talking about the other day. And I don't know. It's an allegation that's out there. But to get text messages between Jason Baldoni and his publicist, there's a there's an allegation that they set up a sham lawsuit. They being Blake Lively's team where they sued this publicist to get the phone to release these text messages to the L.A. Times. I don't know if it's true, but if it is, that is some really shady stuff that I think the New York State bar should look into if it's true. And so to do all that and come out and talk about spin machines, you know, that's pretty rich.

1:54:22Look, you know, because the thing is, Mark, at no point was what are the heavy allegations by Blake Ben? Excuse me. They made up lies about me and use this PR firm to push them. It's that they just made her look bad, that they had a campaign to get her by using her actual videos and her promo interviews to promote the film and to spread them with the New York Post or the Daily Mail in a way that she thought was unflattering. But I did not see in her complaint. They made up a lie that I fired a pregnant girl. They made up a lie that I was uniformly abusive to the staff. That wasn't the nature of her campaign.

1:55:10It was that you intentionally spread mean things about me. They may have been mean, but they were true. You want to know the cynic in me who, as a practical matter, will tell you what I think is happening here. When Blake Lively's case was gutted by Judge Lyman, he issued an order. If you read that order, he was unflinching in his criticism of her lawyers to the point where it explains why, if what is being reported is true, as soon as they saw that order, as soon as her case was gutted, she had a monstrous legal malpractice action against her lawyers. How do her lawyers solve that problem? They immediately beg Baldoni's team to go into private mediation.

1:56:06You might say, well, how is that going to solve anything? There's a Supreme Court case in California that says, and mind you, they mediated this in California with a California-based, California-Hawaii-based mediator is my understanding. The California Supreme Court case says if you go through private mediation, you can't sue your lawyer for legal malpractice. So what this was was a very sophisticated legal strategy to insulate the big firm from getting sued for the tens of millions of dollars for what could have been argued was the if you read Judge Lyman's order, missteps by her lawyers. That's just the cynic in me explaining why all this happened.

1:56:56Then what happens? Brian goes out and declares victory. And these guys now have to concoct. No, but what about forty seven point one in our lawyers fees, which everybody knows the insurance company is going to pick up for anyway. So talk about just being a cynic here. What has happened here is really kind of one of the downsides, if you will, to when you when you have too much money. It's a kind of a take on the old Richard Pryor joke that having a big firm represent you in a civil case is God's way of telling you you make too much money. So because one of the things, I mean, the main thrust of her case was the sexual harassment claim.

1:57:42And it was based on a contract between the parties that never existed. That's what came out in the course of discovery. She never had a signature by the Wayfarer defendants. That's Justin's production company. And they tried to scramble on Team Blake's attorneys to say, well, there was this one that they signed, and so it was this version. But the court was like, many other versions came after that. They may have signed this one, but there wasn't a meeting of the minds yet. There were like nine versions of this contract. and you're asking me to enforce it. Which version do I enforce? Do I enforce the ninth version that they left after, that they kind of, whatever, everybody moved on after that?

1:58:28Or is it the one version that might've had a signature, but it wasn't countersigned? Like, I can't divine agreement. It has to be shown to me on a piece of paper with two signatures, which any first year law student knows. So how do we get to the point in this case where these, you know, storied lawyers didn't understand that their main claim is not supported by any document. That's a very interesting theory. All right. So now, so she will get her attorney's fees. What do you make of the fact though, that the judge is that they wanted to brief it again? They went back in Matt and said, give us another chance.

1:59:07They already briefed it. They briefed it. They submitted it. They said, Oh, she's got some$400, 400 million in damages, whatever. They briefed attorney's fees and she wants them trebled, meaning tripled, which is potentially a possibility under the anti-slap statute that they're getting the fees under. And the judge just came out. We just saw the order because originally he hadn't actually issued the order. Now we've got it saying the court does not require additional briefing at this time. So ordered Louis J. Lyman, May 11th, 2026. So he's not into it. He doesn't want to hear anything more from them.

1:59:40He's probably got his mind made up. Do you think he's going to give them some huge award with and then triple it? No. In a word, no. I don't see that happening at all. I think Mark's exactly right. The apple didn't fall far from the tree. And his dad was a First Amendment, you know, pillar. And this judge is over it. Megan, he's figured this out. I think he's sorted out the egos. He's read everything. He knows what this is. Another thing that Mark and I were talking about the other day is when you get into these cases with celebrities. And again, Mark has dealt with this way more than I have, but I've had a few.

2:00:17It is amazing to me how we get this image of how glamorous they are and all the money and all the power and the red carpet. And then you get into, you look beyond the curtain and you see, you know, text messages and you see a lot of petty, really small human beings. Like they're, they are, you know, the reality oftentimes is almost so disappointing because they're not as smart as the characters they play. And they get in these petty, ego-fueled feuds. And when you've got all the money in the world behind you, you wind up in situations like this. And I think somebody finally pulled her aside and said, you have lost this battle.

2:00:57You're destroying your career. Read the comments section of some of these things. You look terrible and it's so bad you're dragging your husband into it. That's my guess. And that, yeah, I'm sure the word ecstatic because of our attorney's fees is so laughably just ridiculous. But look, this is one of those, I approach everything, Megan, in my experience from a position of victims. And I've represented women since I've been in private practice who were legitimate, real victims of sexual harassment from people that were in positions of power. I know you've had that experience. That's a real thing.

2:01:31And it's kind of like Amber Heard and the Johnny Depp stuff. It's like we should believe victims until we shouldn't. And when it comes to this sort of thing, when you march out there and say, I'm going to do this on behalf of all people who have been subjected to sexual harassment, you undermine them. You undermine the real victims when, in my opinion, you do stuff like this. And Mark had a great point the other day. Blake Lively, when the judge gutted the cases because she was an independent contractor and not an employee, that was the technical reason. She could have taken an off ramp right then and there and said, I'm going to now rally so that independent contractors also have protections under the law for sexual harassment.

2:02:14And she didn't do that. And she could have done that. And Mark said, it was a great point. If they'd enacted a federal law, they would have called it the Blake Lively Act. And she could have been a hero. Right. She didn't take it. She didn't do it because in my opinion, she was driven by ego and trying to settle a score. And that's what this whole thing is about. And like Brian has been saying all along, Mark Geragos, he knew she is one thing to say in a complaint to the California Human Rights Office. One thing. But when you're on the stand under oath, being cross-examined by Brian, it's quite another to try to back up those claims about they walked in on me in my dressing room when I was breastfeeding my baby against my will and then confronted with a text message saying.

2:03:01Come on in. Come on in. I'm breastfeeding my baby, but it's fine. By the way, I don't know. She's going to get ripped apart. I don't know if I and I'm sure you've told it before, but I will tell it again for you. Brian became your lawyer because he started off as opposing counsel against you. And yes, I guess some of the the best kind of lawyering you can do is when your opponent says, no, no, no, I'm hiring this guy. So I never have to deal with him again. Oh, and Garrett goes, I started off like, I can't stand this prick. He is such an asshole. I cannot stand him. I hated him. When he was taking, wait, no, when we were taking the deposition of his client, he was like interfering in a way, you know, you don't like speaking objections at a deposition, right?

2:03:50I was like, oh, I can't stand him. And I like the way he talked to my lawyer. And so finally we get to the point where he's deposing me. And I was like, I was ready. Of course, I'd been a litigator for 10 years at Jones Day. this is not my first rodeo. I was totally ready for him. And I fell in love with him. He's so charming. He's so smart. He's raising good points. We're having a great back and forth. I had no stakes. And like, I, whatever, it was very clear where this, you know, Brian inherited it. He didn't actually take this case. Um, it was kind of given to him, but we bonded over these eight hours in a way where I was like, I think I made a friend for life.

2:04:26that case went away. And then when I got in trouble with NBC, it's a long story that I will tell someday in full, but, um, an agent connected me with Brian and the agent fled, but Brian stayed with me. And he was like, just so you know, I don't give an F. Lee said the word, what anybody thinks of me, I've got you. And it was like, that was it. We were off to the races and he hammered them. He got me everything I deserved. And that was really the beginning, like another beginning for Brian, who was already very well respected, but of this like niche practice he's really created where like any big talent in a serious fight with somebody who's generally a bully on the other side calls Brian.

2:05:15You know, like Chris Cuomo and Don Lemon hired him from CNN. Again, Gabrielle Union hired him when NBC started messing with her. Justin Baldoni. It's a long list now, but he's the go-to if you're an individual getting bullied by some massive entity on the other side. And that's really what Blake Lively has been. She and her dragons with Ryan and Taylor. And Justin had no power in comparison to them. you go to Brian and he is a master of the dark arts in a great way, Garaco. And by the way, that's also one of the reasons I love Matt Murphy and I love Brian both because when you're opposing somebody who's truly talented, like Matt was as a prosecutor, Brian was because we first were at odds with one another.

2:06:07Those are the, that's the long, long lost friendships. I mean, with Matt, I often say one of the, clients I'll never forget with him. And what endeared me to him is I, at one point, got so frustrated at him for wanting state prison on my client that I lashed out and said, you would prosecute Romeo for stalking Juliet if you had your way. And he laughed and finally gave me what I wanted because he could see how frustrated I was. I had the same experience with Brian. He was bedeviling me on something. And finally, we resolved it. And they're two of my closest friends in the world. It's funny, isn't it?

2:06:51It's like those fights on the playground when you're in fourth grade. Like two boys fighting on the playground, they're going to be best friends by the end of the day. And that's right. You really do. It really is a function of that. And I was thinking the exact same thing, Mark. I wasn't going to say it. But yeah, you really do. You get to learn in an adversarial process, especially when you're in a good, hard fight, you get to learn your opponent in a lot of ways better than their own colleagues do because you see them under pressure. You're creating the pressure. You see how they respond. And you really can develop a true, healthy respect for somebody like that.

2:07:25And that's why, you know, number one, Megan, that's why you brought in Brian Friedman. And number two, why I would hire Mark Kerrigos if I was in trouble tomorrow in an instant to defend me. Totally. Yeah. Same. And now they work together. So it would be super easy. Or you. I don't know. I feel like this is – I believe you when you say this is how boys, like, resolve things on the playground. Girls, instead of doing that, will just say nothing and then stick needles in your back, knives in your back for years quietly and your life will slowly be destroyed. You won't know why. So it's a different kind of playground.

2:08:02I'd put the girls' revenge up against the boys. I'd much rather just have a playground fight where we punch in the face. Having raised a ball-busting lawyer myself, I was shocked when she was in fourth grade at what those girls did to one another. It was like nothing I'd ever experienced up until then. Yes, it's like a rite of passage, sadly, for a lot of women. But boy, oh boy, you get tougher. That's for damn sure. All right, before we go, I want to put a period at the end of the MJ discussion. Because the real question is what now is going to be his legacy? Because this is a fight for legacy and for money.

2:08:44In the New York Times, the Daily Podcast, Mark, they pointed out that there was testimony that on the day Michael died, his brand was worth like$24. He had not a lot of money left in the coffers. The estate was very worried that it wasn't going to be able to generate any dough because it was so smeared with these allegations. But now we've had the MJ musical, which has defied expectations and become a smash hit for five years with nearly sold out venues. We've had the Cirque du Soleil. Now we have this movie with hundreds of millions already and on track to potentially make a billion dollars and the filmmakers, which is really the estate, saying we have another one that we can release quickly in the hopper, which may or may not cover all the stuff we've been discussing.

2:09:33There are some legal impediments to them doing it given like deals that have been signed, but it's a fight for them to continue earning and to restore his legacy. The family says they don't believe any of these allegations and they want the legacy restored. Can that be done? And will the public allow it? Well, if you want my non-legal answer, my non-legal answer is based on my experience. Yes, the public will allow it. And the fact that it has exceeded everybody's expectations in terms of the box office on this thing tells you all you need to know. No, I mean, even though there will be other, as I mentioned before, there will be other documentaries out.

2:10:18There will be other productions out because money spawns money. And that is going to triumph in the end, unfortunately or fortunately, depending on who's looking at it. What do you think, Matt? Yeah, I think Mark's right. And remember, you know, these songs are so iconic that when you hear one, it brings us back to a point in our life. like, hey, that was from 10th grade. Or, you know, we remember these parties and they're so personal to everybody because he was so huge. I mean, he's the largest pop star in the world. And look, I've dedicated my life to fighting, my professional life anyway, to fighting child molesters, basically, and those who would sexually prey on others.

2:10:59And I think that, you know, in the world of cancellation, he's dead. So I think that, I don't know, and this might be controversial, it's just me, but I think we all need to allow ourselves to enjoy the music. Other people are making that money now. And it's also a fascinating, iconic, you know, fall from grace. And people can't stay away from that. So I think both aspects of that story are going to go. I think it's going to continue to make money, and people are still going to talk about the implications of sexual assault and taking advantage of little kids. And, you know, whether it's true or not true, I think it's going to continue to be a part of our cultural landscape for a long time.

2:11:40Yeah. I mean, dying is the ultimate cancellation. He certainly was canceled. I feel like one aspect of it that wasn't discussed that really is a critical piece of the story is the parents who allowed their seven-year-old children to spend the night at a grownup's house who wasn't a parent and in his bed. Like they knew, they knew that this was happening and they allowed it. And the children who are now grown say, it's tough, especially when you don't have a lot of money as a kid and the world's greatest pop star pays attention to you and wants to be your friend and had a decent narrative of, I'm just a big kid myself.

2:12:26It's not that I'm a molester. It's that I'm just a bit, I never got to grow up. And it was very persuasive because he did have a very abusive father. He had a childhood where he worked all the time. He was obviously stunted in some ways. He was childlike even as a grownup. So it's kind of like, okay, I can see it. You know, Neverland looks like an amusement park. His room looks like a Peter Pan book. He is kind of a big, you know, you could go with it if you wanted to delude yourself into thinking there's no risks here. Most normal people never would, but I'm just saying this is what the parents convinced themselves of.

2:13:00And this is just not a good idea. Nope. No normal man wants a child in his bed. They just don't. As one thing, if you have a kid and he's sick and he comes in the middle of the night, I'm not talking about that. I'm talking about strange man who's not related to your child who wants him to sleep in his bed. It's a hard no. So maybe that is potentially helpful to anybody out there listening. Guys, looking forward to many more episodes of In the Well. Everybody go and subscribe at mktruecrime.com. Thanks for being here. Thank you, Megan. Thanks, Megan. Bye, Matt. All right. And we'll see all of you tomorrow with Mark Halperin and our deep dive on Katie Porter and how she has been victimized, my friend.

2:13:43She's the victim. That's what you need to know. And more on that tomorrow. Thanks for listening to The Megyn Kelly Show. No BS, no agenda, and no fear.

2:13:58In Traverse City, you'll find it's your summer to let go. Just let the rhythm of the water set you free. Full sail and eyes open, inviting you to breathe and just be. Out here, time slows as the gentle waves bring us closer than ever before. Embrace it all, then let go. Season after season in Pure Michigan. Find your season at TraverseCity.com. To realize the future America needs, we understand what's needed from us. To face each threat head on. We've earned our place in the fight for our nation's future. We are Marines. We were made for this.