And That's Why We Drink - E175 A Ruined Candy Crush Score and a Birthday Jimmy Buffett

Episode Date: June 14, 2020

We're ruining both penguins and clubs in this week's jam-packed episode! Em brings us the history of the hacker group Anonymous and Christine covers the murder of April Kauffman. And we just might have to come to terms with not being the "ideal Jersey Shore power couple"... and that's why we drink!Please consider supporting the companies that support us! Go to HelloFresh.com/60drink and use code 60drink to get $60 off your first three weeks!Get a 4-week trial PLUS free postage AND a digital scale when you go to Stamps.com, click on the Microphone at the TOP of the homepage and type in DRINK

hello everyone welcome to episode 175 i believe oh my goodness we're only we're only 25 away from 200 we better start planning something fun talk about crypt keeper um listen by the way last time we saw each other the last time we recorded that motorcycle was not there and also uh happy birthday happy birthday i know we it's been a wild a couple of weeks for i think probably everyone on the planet. I think globally, yes. So we decided instead of being our usual asshole selves that we would maybe just put our birthday aside for a brief moment and focus on the rest of the planet. So we are very appreciative to everyone who was understanding and supportive of our decision

to not record an episode for the first time in 175 episodes. It just felt like the first time that it was like this is the right thing to do um and so instead we didn't just sit around a lot of people were like oh don't just sit around and you know not do anything that's not what we were doing some people thought like because it was conveniently on our birthday week like we took it as like a way to not record no it was like no no. We were being, you know, the best version of white people we can be. And we were out there doing everything we could to, you know, do our part in what's going on right now. And yeah, I mean, and I know it should it should not obviously have taken this these incidents to like get us to that point. But

I think this was definitely a big wake up call. And it was just a crazy week. I mean, we were trying to really, really delve in and like educate ourselves and listen to, you know, different voices, black creators, support them instead of supporting ourselves for a week. And yeah, I mean, I was actually really I just want to give a little shout out. I was very proud. My little sister and her a couple of her classmates organized a demonstration in Cincinnati. And I went expecting there to a little shout out. I was very proud. My little sister and her, a couple of her classmates organized a demonstration in Cincinnati and I went expecting there to be like eight people and there were like 2,500. And she did a little speech on like a megaphone about wearing your mask and like staying, you know, safe.

And it just, I was the proudest big sister. I swear, Gen Z is going to save our damn lives someday. I'm telling you. That's a goddamn fact. And if it's not them, it's going to be their kids. I mean, that's a goddamn fact. If it's not them, it's going to be their kids. I mean, it's one of the two. It's not us. We're trying. I mean, that's crazy. I mean, I did not know that that happened. Wow. That's incredible. I was very proud. And like, I don't know if I even told you that there's so much going on. But Lisa

Lampanelli drove down. She literally called us the day before and was like, I'm driving down to join the demonstrations in Cincinnati because I don't want to go to demonstrations in like Connecticut. I want to come to Cincinnati. So we went to one on Saturday, one on Sunday. It was really great, beautiful, awesome music and speakers. And it was just a really great way to put, you know, everything else aside for a little bit and, you know, focus on what needs to matter right now. know focus on on what needs to matter right now i so the ones i've been to have only been peaceful and yeah you know not that to say that yours weren't but i do want to you know give everyone a shout out to you know the people who have been going and everyone has been doing their part in uh unifying but also being really respectful of the COVID, you know, nonsense that's still also going around. It was really, at least the ones we went to, everyone was wearing masks and like, not necessarily six feet apart in some areas, but there were, you know, me and Allison, we were protesting and making sure that we kept a distance from people. And it didn't always feel

like we were directly in the crowd at some points, but there were other people like that. And it felt like everyone was super respectful of the fact that people were just trying. And, you know, I just want to give a shout out to people that like, you know, if you're it's a it's there's no other reason on earth to leave the house during a pandemic except to stand up for people. And so it's nice to see everyone working together. In a time where, by the way, we were already tested to be working together in ways that the world has never seen. And we're now just doing it in a totally other wonderful geopolitical way. So yeah, the only like Gemini thing I was thinking the whole time at these demonstrations was, like, every time there were like news or camera crews or whatever, I was like, Oh, my God, I'm gonna be in a documentary someday.

I'm just kidding. My grandchildren will be so proud. No, it'm totally. It was very cool. And it will. It's also really scary just to think like 2020. Remember, people keep tagging me in this on Twitter. They're like, at the beginning of 2020, Christine said, like, this is our year. Things are going to just be so fun and easy and whatever. I'm like, what the fuck was I thinking? So I jinxed everyone. And then i said in the quote i literally said i hope this doesn't jinx it and i was like christine god damn it so i want to formally apologize there's been a few people who have uh there's a few tweets i've seen where like people are saying like now with you know everything that's gone on in this fucking year there's gonna be like historians one day that specialize in a specific quarter of 2020

like and then i saw this thing this is like you know not to take away from the gravity of everything i just just seeing what's going on socially i think there's a lot of you know really wonderful impactful posts but i also follow Reddit. And there's this one girl who did an AMA who was like, I recently just like underwent like some brain surgery, and I'm having some swelling. And so I have temporary memory loss. I don't know. And she was like, I don't know what's going on. Or someone was like, someone was like, has anyone told you about what's going on this year? And she was like, my earliest memory is from when I was seven. I don't know what's going on.

And everyone was like, who wants to tell her? Like, yeah, don't, don't. And they listed everything from like almost world war three, Australia's on fire.

The government confirmed UFOs, Kobe's dead. Also like, I mean all these things that we've literally already forgotten about compared to like the last two massive fucking problems the pile just keeps getting bigger and like it's totally true and then like jk rowling is now just like enemy number one it's the whole world it's like don't ruin harry potter for this girl who is who's seven in her mind like a lot of people are have been tagging daniel radcliffe as the chosen one, as he always has been.

But no, not to take away from the severity of what's going on. And we also, you know, obviously this is the most minimal fucking struggle that anyone's going through right now. But we as podcasters and specifically, you know, true crime podcasters feel like we have a responsibility. But at the same time, we're also comedy podcasters. And so we had this weird tango, you know, separate, you know, we had it privately where we were like, it would be wrong as two white comedians who it's who are known to go kind of bananas on their birthday episode. Literally the week of our stupid birthdays. This is not the time to either pretend nothing's going on or to get kind of dark and serious where it's needed.

So it was just probably better for all of us to be more productive than that. And so we've been obviously protesting and signing petitions and donating and doing everything we can educating screaming at our like conservative white families and doing our part and i think another part of it too is like we had a weird you know tango as emma said about trying to figure out you know as much as it is i believe our responsibility as well to like highlight these kinds of things that specific week, you know, we committed to amplifying black voices and creators rather than like, oh, it's our turn to talk about what's happening. Like we can do that any week of the year.

And I will like I do plan on covering, you know, this more often, which I'm ashamed to, you know, say it took this to get there. But yeah, I think this past week week that was really why we kind of shut down um i guess not shut down we just kind of stepped back it was just better and you know i feel like some people could see it as silence which is the exact opposite of what we want to do but um we and we personally don't see it as silence we saw it as we were taking the time instead of doing seven hours of notes we were doing seven hours of protesting and you know getting out there and helping and seven hours of researching and seven hours of educating and seven hours of listening

and trying to give you guys like a like a little bit of i know it's helpful to have a little bit of direction and so we wanted to share with you what we were doing, which is if you guys didn't end up listening to it, there's a tinyurl.com slash BLM forever, which has been really useful as far as petitions and which protests are going on and they update it regularly. That's not our link or Google doc.

Somebody created that. But so that's just, you know, if you're still kind of hoping to keep this movement going, which we do hope to. Yes. That's a really helpful link. Yes. So the last thing we're going to say is, for those of you who need to hear it, Black Lives fucking matter. If you feel differently about that, please stop listening to this show.

If your instinct is all lives matter, oh, where have you been? If you even want to question the conversation, please just turn this podcast off. And also, like, we're not going to argue, like, I mean, we'll argue or we'll defend our position, but we don't, we're not, like, the all lives matter thing, if you haven't, it hasn't been explained to you yet and you still are in that boat, then, like, you're not going to, I guess, listen to what we have to say. If people have explained it a hundred times to you, we're not going to be we can't know what we have to say yeah if people have explained it a hundred times to you we're not gonna be the hundred first that that does the trick

maybe do some inward work yes so anyway that's where we stand yes you know over the years we have gotten criticism of the show becoming political but at this point in the world this is not a political it's not political that drives me crazy it's a human issue like it's literally a human issue if you think it's a political issue again look inward please so moving on kind of but not really um because we did want to make sure that we didn't want to look like shitty white people and then think like okay well we did our part and did you know and stepped aside for one episode and now life is totally normal we wanted to cover stories that are a little more topical but and again how do you do that as a comedy show so we struggled and please be patient with us but we at least i tried really hard on this story, especially because it's supernatural.

And I was like, how the fuck am I going to put that in? So it was quite a an algebraic equation for me, if you will. So I the fanciest sentence I've ever said. I also want to say to make things a little more lighthearted where we can all laugh at me about something. I literally, Christine, so we started recording at 11 this morning. It's currently around 11, at least in California. Yeah. And I text Christine 10 minutes before signing on.

I was like, oh, I'm waking up right now. I literally stayed up until 830 in the morning doing these. Oh, no. And so I took a hot two hour nap. And so I just want to apologize in case I don't seem totally right in the head because I'm truly running on steam right now. Juice box or something. I have a bag of marshmallows, actually. And so I've just been taking like massive hits of sugar one at a time so fantastic sorry I don't know if I can show the brand but anyway if you if you want to look at this it's like beauty blogger um yes they are they helped me get through last night and they're

helping me get through now so um so my story actually has been suggested by a few people especially because I this isn't necessarily supernatural it's conspiracy theory which is something that i'm i do cover please refer to project pegasus probably my favorite episode i've ever covered and it wasn't even about ghosts um but a lot of people have asked about this especially because i recently tweeted about them especially because they have they are part of the, the news that's out there right now. So, um, I am covering anonymous. Oh my God. I am so ready for this, which by the way is a fucking wild ride. And I do want to say, I'm going to try to speak quickly because I do have a lot of notes.

I've literally did this until eight in the morning. So I've got a lot to say. Um, but I also want to do it justice. So I've got a lot to say. But I also want to do it justice. And also like, I swear to God, if you're listening, and you or someone you know, is a member of anonymous, I do not want you to do anything to me or this podcast. So I wanted to make sure I did as much justice as possible, because I do not want to piss them off. And the more I read about them, and the more delirious I got, the more scared I got. So okay, if you are an anonymous, I respect you. This is like, it's like, finally, I'm telling a ghost story about ghosts who could haunt me if I piss them off if I say the story wrong. So now I'm like, please, please, please, please. You're like in my shoes when I cover like Scientology and shit. Truly, I understand why you haven't covered it because like you're like, I don't want you to fuck around with me.

If you are an anonymous, I do this with love and light. And if I say anything inaccurate, please tweet me. I am at VM Schultz and let me know and I will absolutely throw in corrections in the next episode. Please do not hurt me. Okay, moving on. Freak me out. i'm ready okay so for those of you who don't know what anonymous says by the way because i i tweeted about it and i was looking through the comments not just on mine but on other people's tweets about anonymous a lot of people today don't know who anonymous is and it was kind of a bigger thing back in like i'll say like 2006 7 8 no i would say

actually probably closer like 2008 9 10 um and so it was right around when like i was graduating high school i would hear about them and so basically they're these this uh secret not so secret uh hacker group that is based out of 4chan which i know everyone's got opinions about 4chan we're gonna talk about it and by the way there's gonna be parts of this story where people probably hate me a little bit because i have to talk about the really uncomfortable things during a topical climate so i'm just reporting the news. Okay. So I want to say I, I got all this information from the documentary from 2012. We are Legion, which is the longer version of that title is we are Legion, the story of the hacktivists. And so it was written and directed by Brian Knappenberger. And I'm telling you right now, I don't mean to take away like the ability to watch it yourself. But I watched it and it had so much information that like, I couldn't even do the notes any better justice. So a lot, I'm talking like a lot of my notes come from specifically this documentary. And if you were to watch it, you're going to say that it's almost like, like chapter for chapter or something, because I just, I, it just was really

well put together. Um, and I also used Wikipedia and a couple other sites just to find some additional missions that they went on or things that they did. But most of the information is from the documentary. We are Legion, which even though I'm about to report on it, you should watch it. It's really, really good. Okay. And to start off, I'm going to read several of the quotes. These weren't all next to each other. They were just some of my favorite quotes to describe Anonymous to people who have never heard of them before. So I'm just going to read them back to back. And these are all from that documentary. The first one, and they actually like interviewed people in anonymous. This isn't like historians or sociologists talking about this. These are actual anonymous

members that went in front of the camera and are talking about themselves. Okay. The first quote is we stand for freedom. We stand for freedom of speech, the power of the people, the ability for them to protest against the government, to right wrongs, no censorship, especially online, but also in real life. Okay. Awesome. that's why we don't give that's why we don't show our faces or give our names we're speaking as a collective so for people who know who anonymous is they all wear like the guy fox mask and so you never know who they are in public so that's a lot of people wonder why they do that and it's because they want to speak as one unit and be seen as one being um they are quote individual young nameless faceless folks who have who are making geopolitical impact, which is both exhilarating and terrifying.

They are people who have a commitment to exposing and humiliating the man who have a very low tolerance for lies and what they perceive as overleaning power structures. And then my favorite one is they call themselves the final laws of the internet. If you are going to violate the freedoms of the internet if you are going to violate the freedoms of the internet you certainly better watch the fuck out oh shit so i have a quick question when they're being interviewed they're they're still anonymous right like they're not like hey i'm jeff they're literally faces first and last name on screen really which by the way freaked me out because i would imagine if like

you're afraid of like getting called out like everyone now knows your first and last name and that's kind of weird okay maybe i imagine they're like so immersed in the community that people already know who they are so they're not afraid to announce who they are or um i know some people are were former members oh there's a lot of people who ended up getting arrested for certain things and so maybe now that they're um you know now they've done their sentence maybe they're not like active in it exactly okay so um but some people seemed like they were still in it seemed i'm. I'm not sure, but seemed it. So before we get into what Anonymous is, let's talk about how hacking even came to be. So which I think, again, the documentary did a really good job of. So I learned from that movie that hacker culture began at MIT.

Surprisingly, not in computers or engineering or anything like that. It was actually in the model railroad club. What? And so they would, apparently hacking comes from pranks. Like they were just like, they were a group of like really goofy people in the model railroad club. With also like brilliant brains, I guess, from MIT. And so they would just like prank each other as friends. And so it's since they kind of had some knowledge into engineering as a railroad club, they started kind of hacking into systems with the total intent of making things funny. So like they would change like lights, they would change different color lights or they would there was one picture that I saw on the documentary where like they messed

around with like an entire building's worth of light. So it spelled out words at night in the windows. And so things like that, like just goofy things. And then it started turning into, I guess, those people had friends and slowly engineering and technology people got involved in these little pranks. So it got more advanced technologically. Whoa. So people started learning how to hack because they wanted to make funny pranks and, you know, do it through some really interesting engineering that hadn't happened yet.

So people started learning how to hack. And by doing this, it's interesting socially and psychologically and also in the vast realm of what information means. They, by learning how to hack just to make pranks, they were inadvertently expressing what people could do with information or how it could be used, if that makes sense. Oh, yes, totally. So there was one, I think, I don't know if he was necessarily an anonymous person, I remember, but he seemed to be like kind of more of a expert on the history of it. And so he was saying that they were inadvertently showing how information could be treated and also should be treated. by pranking, they were actually coding. And so they were learning how to build all these random softwares and programs that now that they had made them, it was like, okay, well, this is, you know, we made it, we should be able to, there's a use for it. And we should be able to use it how we see fit, because we made it. Oh, well, this reminds me a lot about like,

when I would attempt to put pink glittery skulls on my MySpace. And then suddenly, I was like, wow, I can code a website. I have that exact note in my notes. Oh, okay, good. Yeah, I mean, we all knew I would bring up MySpace eventually. I love when you talk about your pink glitter MySpace page. I remember like making it and then being too embarrassed because it had like skulls and like, then I was like, I'm too embarrassed. So I removed it and then I put it back. Then I made the skulls less glittery because I thought that was less embarrassing. Then I made the skulls less glittery because I thought that was less embarrassing.

Mine always had, it was always either like the typical Vans logo, like the checkerboard, or it was like this like ocean waves. It was like so, so basic seventh grade stuff. So like Jimmy Buffett or like Vans. Like a Jimmy Buffet or like a Warped Tour kind of vibe. Warped Tour with featuring Jimmy Buffet. Depending on my angst that week. Can you imagine a Jimmy Buffet or like a Warped Tour kind of vibe. Warped Tour with the featuring Jimmy Buffet. Depending on my angst that week. Yeah. Can you imagine a Jimmy Buffet starring?

Headliner. Headliner. That's our music festival. It's literally just Jimmy Buffet, but we call it Jimmy Buffet. Why do we keep saying it like you did? It's like how my dad calls the sci-fi channel the Siffy Network. I know. It gets in your head like haphazardly.

I can't get it out. One day I would like for my birthday for us to have a Jimmy Buffet themed buffet. Oh, I see. Okay. Well, all right. We got to include something for me because I'm not a Jimmy Buffet fan, but. We can include the door and you can walk right out. I thought you were going to say the doors.

I was like, yeah, I like the doors. Oh, no, no. This just means I have to leave. There it is. We'll play the doors music next to say the doors. I was like, yeah, I like the doors. Oh, no, no. This just means I have to leave. There it is. We'll play the doors music next to all the doors. And Jenny Buffet music at the buffet. I see. Wait a minute.

And then Fall Out Boy next to all the boys that attend. Oh, I was going to say next to when I fall over because I've probably had too much to drink. But yeah, I guess that too. There's no boys at this party. I created it and they won't come. Trust me. If I create it, they won't attend. I tried many times in my ninth grade year. We'll make, we'll at least send out like a post on MySpace or something.

See telling you this coding is really, really useful. I think anonymous could probably use me in my, my many skills. I found Patrick Stump's phone number. I mean, remember I found Patrick Stump's phone number. I mean, remember, I found Patrick Stump's phone number. And then I called, but he was on tour. And so his aunt answered, but I knew her name. So I was like, Oh, yeah, this is I knew who she was. So anyway, it was really horrible. And I don't recommend stalking people ever. So that was really bad. But I did it. I found out one of the Duggars phone numbers, which I will never,

ever call. I just wanted, I just like knowing I have it. Yeah, there's like a power in it. In case trouble strikes and I'm like, okay, well, time to call the Duggars. Obviously, they're going to fix all my crises. I will say too that, well, one day you will need that. You'll just be like, oh my God, this, I knew this moment was coming. When I realized I need Jesus. Yeah. Yeah. I should call now, actually. Let me, let me put them on speaker. One'll just be like, oh my God, I knew this moment was coming. When I realized I need Jesus. Yeah. Yeah. I should call now actually. Let me put him on speaker. One last thing. A couple of people messaged me because after I moved, everyone started trying to Google me and they were like, oh my God, I found all your info. And for whatever reason, some random phone number and address are now listed as my new address. And it's like completely incorrect. So I'm like, sweet, sure. That's me. And it's totally not. So, um, if you're concerned on my behalf, I appreciate it, but I've already checked. And, um, my new info is not there yet. Uh,

hopefully ever my information I have checked is also wrong on the internet. So they, just in case people are fucking stalkers, please, first of all, don't look. Although last time I said, don't Google pictures of me with long hair, it fucking skyrocketed on Google. Which I can see, by the way. I know you guys are brave behind your computers, but I told you not to do it.

So now that you're going to go do it, the information is actually inaccurate. My favorite people is when people are like, I found all this info about you, but it was only because I was concerned. And I was like, uh-huh. So you were like, I'm going to Google Christine's home address and phone number because I'm really anyway it was very funny and I appreciate it but I promise you I don't even recognize the zip code I was like holy shit somebody saved my butt I don't know

if they went in there and just like put fake shit in but so try you can try calling me it's not gonna work you'll probably get Patrick Stump's aunt or something perfect or the Duggars um so but also you do make a really good point it's a shame people today or at least you know the the cool trendy youngsters don't understand or appreciate what Myspace did for a generation they taught all of us how to code and like it's such a shame because Myspace showed up and then all of a sudden people liked MySpace because it was kind of uniform. But at the same time, it was like. You mean Facebook?

Facebook. Yeah, sorry. But when you had MySpace, like you learned how to make your own backgrounds. You learned how to add music. You learned graphics. And like, I don't know if you remember, but like you could literally like you would find pictures and like and fit them into your whole profile. And like you could have like. You could like shift the format of your entire page.

You could change the font. You could add like like little effects and moving and shit. Yeah. I mean, gifts before gifts were a thing, by the way. I know people listening that are like 15 and younger. Like there was a day where gifts did not exist, but MySpace like taught us how to make them. It was very weird. So anyway, back to back to the

story so uh all these hackers are learning how to build these programs simply to prank people and it's basically what they're actually doing is slowly building up this political community about how information should be treated once it exists and who should have access to it and how it should be treated and how it should be used so ultimately this hasn't happened yet but this is the inception of uh anonymous and their belief their core belief system which is that you know they may be they're seeing all this cool stuff they're capable of making. And one day, the consensus will be that everyone should have access to that freedom, or the freedom to that info. So there was one hacker named Richard Stallman, who apparently

wrote a lot of essays about software. And he was a huge candidate for information being free to the public. He wrote a lot of essays, which over time became very political. And so he's kind of known as one of the people to, I guess, be firm in that belief early on. And so then there were, since this hacking culture had showed up in engineering and computer science, there were all these like little groups that started forming like little, like local organizations that were like hacker groups and they would all try to play pranks on each other and shit. So fun.

But there were also, there were also some that I guess are more serious and they were like, okay, we just found this like little unit of people and we all know how to code. Like let's start making some really cool shit. So there was one group that was kind of, at least in this storyline, there was one group that was did like some security research. And they were kind of more serious into coding and like trying to find like, it was like security based stuff that they had started looking into.

There was another group that was very goofy and pranksters. And I guess in both of these groups, there were a few members that overlapped and were in both of these groups, there were a few members that overlapped and were in both of them. So they knew about pranking and like being kind of goofy, but they were also like really getting serious into the security communication culture. By the way, the goofy group was called the cult of the dead cow. Okay. And so that's a very college, college kid thing to come up with yes i love it a thousand percent also it sounds like someone who would have performed at the headlining jimmy buffet work oh my god they were the opening act the cult of the dead cow um so members who were

in cults the dead cow and i think also in the more serious group called loft um they were writing code one day together and i think it was more security based and this guy in call to the dead cow he realized that what they were doing and what they were creating with this program is they were helping communicate securely in a way where in theory the government couldn't even catch you doing it we're like if if you live in a country where the government is censoring or spying on your yeah um on your communication this program would be able to alleviate that um and so this this is a quote from one of the people in Loft, which was the more serious security group. His name is Chris. I don't know if he wants me to say his last name. His name is Chris.

Chris said, quote, the principle was freedom of expression. Everyone should have access to the Internet and everyone should be able to communicate on the Internet. Even more important in countries that where there were oppressive regimes. important in countries that where there were oppressive regimes. So this was kind of the first nugget of not only do we think people should have access to really cool information, but now in a kind of more of a political way, if you're being censored, or if you're being told that you can't, it just makes us want to help you even more. Yeah, wow. So that was where the term hacktivism came in, which is what Anonymous is known as, hacktivists. And so this actually came out of the program that Cult of the Dead Cow and Loft were working on.

So hacktivism became this culture where now people were trying to do digital protesting, which was the first of its kind. So there were virtual sit-ins, which are basically, I told you this was topical. Whoa, I know. This is really on brand today. So virtual sit-ins are this thing called, and I'm going to ruin this for, I'm sure there's some like computer techies out there who are, they're going to rip their hair out when I explain this because I'm kind of having a hard time with it. But basically, it's called denial of service is this tactic that they use during virtual sit-ins. And so for the rest of the show, I'm going to call it a DOS or DDOS. There's another D in there before and I forgot what it was. But something denial of service or DDOS.

It's called dope. A dope denial. And essentially. The dead cow group came up with that one. The dead denial of service. Okay. So basically, it's when hackers all get together and they overload a website with traffic and it crashes.

Yeah, that's been happening a lot this week too. Yes. Okay, sorry. I know we're getting there. No, you're good. So basically, it keeps legitimate users you're good so basically it keeps um legitimate users from accessing the site because it keeps crashing and is overwhelmed right um and they even so one of the early forms of this was there was an airline called lufthansa lufthansa lufthansa

it's a german airline lufthansa okay well apparently people didn't like them because they were using their planes to deport immigrants. Oh, boy. And so hacktivists came out and found out about that. And so they use DDOS or denial of service to take down all the airline's flight communications. So the planes couldn't fly out. Whoa. Holy shit. It only gets crazier.

Okay. That's like legit stuff by the way the german courts ruled that that was a valid protest a valid form of protest listen at least germans follow some rules they they know when they can't be they're like you got us you got it no loopholes and like that was at the time when hacktivism came out there were very specific groups that were doing hacktivism most of them were prank based it was just like now that they knew what they could do some people were using it for good but not okay most at this point that being said now coming up on like 9-11 um internet usage is now being surveilled like it never has been and a lot of people in the hacker

world were upset because now there's like there's not the freedom to move around anymore um in the way that they used to unless you had really good tech skills and you could work behind the system circumvent it exactly so this is where i'm gonna lose a lot of people but hang in there okay so a lot of people are about to get really mad. I just, should I just leave? Oh, is this, I thought you meant like, because I wasn't going to understand it, but you mean like opinion based. You're going to get offended.

Me? By everyone. Like if you listen to the show, you're about to get offended and I'm sorry. And again, I'm reporting the news and I can also tell you, I promise it gets better. So just hang in there, okay? It's about to get offended and i'm sorry and again i'm reporting the news and i can also tell you i promise it gets better so just hang in there okay it's about to get really okay it's about to get really fucked up and i'm sorry so now that we know the history of hacker culture and where it all comes from and what their main beliefs are um let's talk about 4chan my christ okay a lot of people if you don't know what 4chan is it's um kind of it's was literally quoted by the way on this documentary as the most vile disgusting thing on the internet so yeah that's pretty much sums it up it's just a place let me just get into it okay so 4chan came out in 2015 not 2015 2012 i think

2011 2012 2011 i think um or at least it uh oh well i'm looking at my own notes this has to be in like the 00s still so like oh six or seven or something so 4chan is basically a website where you can post anything and that's the most descriptive I can get it's like it's kind of it looks like reddit it looks like kind of old school like it really hasn't been updated right um but truly the whole idea especially at the time like let's culturally, like today is a very different world. And we have all we're a lot more PC. At the time, the internet had just become wildly accessible to a lot of teenagers. And there were no rules yet, because a bunch of teenagers up until this point had never fucking had computers. So it was a and, you know, being a teenager, one of the main points is a lot of shock value humor. So it became essentially this gold mine where people who were always trying to one up each

other with, you know, graphic humor could post and there was specifically a group called the B board. And that apparently was just like the worst of the fucking worst. It was literally in the documentary referred to as the Lord of the Flies. Oh, God. Because it's just if whatever your brain can't even process as the most grotesque thing on earth has probably been posted there. Why? Why, people? Whether it's memes or like really shocking graphic horrible videos. What's wrong with people? horrible videos what's wrong with people any even like comments i mean a lot of like you know specifically you know homophobic transphobic racial anything anything that could offend

anybody has been posted there in the worst way possible um and a quote from the documentary is it's what you get when people are allowed to express themselves with absolutely no restrictions whatsoever. And it was also enabled to get worse and worse because apparently the way that 4chan works, I have never used 4chan, but apparently the way that it was described to me through this doc is that if you don't keep a certain thread trending, apparently it wouldn't archive. So let's say you put something in there that you thought was really funny or clever. There was, you wanted to keep that thread going. You had to keep it trending, which means you needed attention grabbing things that people

will look at on that thread. So it will stay active. Right. Okay. So it enabled people to put some really vile shit on there just so it would stay active because you even if you offended someone on there like at least now people are talking on it right oh god so remember at this point i'm not defending that any of this is okay i'm just saying that given the the time period and the historical context to what 4chan was the time, the point of internet culture at this moment in time is that you are allowed to post whatever you want. That was the whole point of is like, look at all this freedom and power I have at my fingertips.

Okay. So it kind of became this sick challenge to always one up people like, look what I can do. Well, look what I can do and like, look that I'm able to do it. so uh that is where we get trolling if someone and this is again uh i don't know if this is a direct quote or at least this was this is a paraphrase of what someone said on the show if someone took the internet too seriously

or was offended trolls were going to try to upset you just to almost remind you at the again at the time it was almost like trolls had this responsibility to remind people of these hacker culture values of like remember where you are this isn't gonna fly here oh my god and again i don't condone this but i'm trying to like i'm trying to empathize with these other people so i can get through this story so um at their their values are very much like you don't get to be offended because the whole point is that we can do it and that's it like emotion this is no strings attached this is emotionless just look at the concept that can be created okay so obviously people with a little more sensitivity would get on there and be like, I can't fucking believe you post these things, but they would almost get a rise out of it. Sure.

That's exactly how trolls work. Right. How dare you show up on our platform where the whole point is that we can do it. And like, look, we're going to do it again. And then be surprised that we're doing it. Yeah. it yeah so this is where the anonymous name shows up because originally i don't know if this is like people could create their own accounts and like have a different username or everyone at one point couldn't do a username a majority of 4chan was that people would post and not it was such graphic

content they probably didn't want to have their name attached to it so everyone never put in a username so everyone just said anonymous as their username because they hadn't put a name in so see it became this running joke on 4chan that like hundreds and hundreds if not thousands of people a day are are putting content out there and it's all named anonymous and there was this joke of like, maybe it's all the same person on a bunch of different servers. Oh, that's funny. And it was kind of like, you know, no one's ever seen a person in real life put any content on 4chan.

It might as well be one identity, like anonymous. So anyway, being bred out of 4chan and then bboard which is like ultra 4chan and hacker culture of like we can do whatever the fuck we want and like we have the freedom of speech and blah blah blah anonymous as a unit originally started as you know now they've also got some

trolls under their belt and they're like we want to make a point that we can do whatever we want they started doing things for cheap laughs just to prove that they could do things and if it upset you fuck you like the train group the train group oh i thought like the railroad club or whatever oh kind of it's quickly moved from like we're doing like happy pranks to like are they no longer harmless pranks they're they're not as harmless anymore so okay but it's but you're right though it's like it still has the consistency of like its roots

of like okay now we're pranking but now we're breaking with the intent to get a rise out of you because you've shown you hate this i see okay and so to remember this later apparently they were doing it for laughs or at the time when lol literally just came out guys the phrase lol lots lots of love oh okay they were doing it for lulz but they were they were spelling it l-u-l-z lulz so the first time that this really got broadcasted there was a fox news segment where this guy like a random person too that's the path of it is like you just want to fucking bother someone and like just get under someone's skin so this random guy his myspace account kept getting hacked and he would make like a different account it would get hacked they'd make a different account it'd get hacked but they were posting like photoshopped i'm assuming photoshopped um graphic pictures of him with men while he had a girlfriend

oh dear and apparently this girlfriend broke up with him because she saw all these pictures on his myspace that they had they had locked him out of so he had he couldn't fix it so every time he changed the account there'd be new graphic pictures of him with men and his girlfriend. What the fuck? And again, not at all condoning this, but thinking about the timeline here, this was a time in the world where it was hysterical to teenagers if you were gay. Fucking horrible. Right. It's the worst insult, quote unquote. The worst insult.

So like this, like compared to today if someone like i mean yeah no one wants xxx pictures posted of them but if it was like gay or straight who the fuck cares now well and nowadays too like it's oh sorry oh no nowadays too it's like illegal well i know it's definitely legal too yeah but i was just gonna say also it's so much easier to be like that's photoshopped like right it's like it's so much easier for people to photoshop nowadays that it's like probably also easier to convince people that it's photoshopped exactly so and back then it was just a different world where being gay was apparently disgusting and worth laughs or lulls and also photoshop wasn't like a good enough argument so anyway that was the first real segment of like okay someone's being fucked with for literally no reason.

Yikes. And so it was basically insensitive pranks to anyone who they could get their grasp on. And it was for no reason except that they wanted to be disruptive, which I'm sure you could psychoanalyze until like maybe this was a culture of, you know, quote, computer nerds who like maybe liked feeling seen or feeling a sense of power over someone. So you could really get into that. But let's really piss people off. I want to make it clear now. I'm going to talk about it as straightforward as possible. But I don't want you getting the wrong idea that I was not wildly offended when I first heard about this. So the first time that that happened and then segments

started coming out where people were recognizing this group, it was almost giving them, again, an ego of like, oh, if you piss people off, now we're talking about it and now you're just going to want to piss people off even more for the clout maybe or. So I don't know if that was necessarily their agenda, but you could definitely read into it that way. And so people started getting together and gathering through 4chan because at this point, people are starting to become friends because they're all hacking people for fun. and so they decide to all get together one day and infiltrate this website called habbo hotel which is basically it was described to me as like a second life or sims or some sort of oh is it like a software it's like a it's like an online website that you can log into and like club penguin like club penguin it actually looked

it looked a lot like club penguin when i saw the the graphics i'm gonna picture it as club it's probably gonna ruin club penguin forever oh it will ruin all penguins and clubs no so um apparently they were like look at what we are capable of. Like, we're getting recognition. Like, let's really go piss people off now that, you know, we're known as people who will piss people off. And so they decided to go to Habbo Hotel and they decided that they were going to infiltrate this account. And by infiltrate, I mean like thousands of people on 4chan agreed that they were all going to make accounts. So thousands of accounts showed up on Habbo Hotel. all of them made the exact same sim avatar yeah so that way you couldn't tell who was who it was just thousands of the same identical avatar god who by the way

i'm sorry and i kind of hate that this is the story i'm covering given oh what's been going on in the world i'm really sorry um this the avatar was a black man in a black suit and um so they all these avatars joined this world together and i think originally the whole goal was like just to overwhelm, not necessarily the server. So it would shut down, but just to freak people out on the, on the gaming or on the site,

just to like people like literally couldn't walk through other avatars. And like, it was almost like stopping their enjoyment of the game. And then an idea came out on 4chan where they would take all of these thousands of people who happened to be black and arrange them all, make them all walk in a way where it forms a swastika. For God's sake. So, and apparently, I think the whole point was truly not even politically to be disruptive. I think the whole point was to

just kind of get in the way of people trying to play a game right and then it and then it escalated into that and like oh wouldn't it be funny if wouldn't it be funny if like while we're also in your way now there's also a swastika on like club how hilarious club penguin no and so apparently this is a another quote from one of the members i think they might have been an actual member of this abo hotel kind of task but or maybe they were just talking about the history of this in general saying the goal was actually to offend people because the idea that we could offend you by drawing a little shape on the screen was stupid to the people involved which by the way is the most privileged fucking thing in the world because totally i mean it goes without saying like you clearly one have never been educated about this

or two have been educated and are so entitled you don't give a shit and just throwing out the window so i just want to make clear that's wildly fucked up i am we're not trying to make life well one of the favorite like signs i kept seeing at the protests were uh what does it say like privilege it privilege means thinking something's not a problem because it doesn't affect you so like you're just like what's the big deal it's like that's so backwards exactly so i wanted to address it not necessarily because it's topical but because i don't, I want to give a well-rounded understanding of this group. It's worth knowing the history of it. Yeah. Also, if someone like watches the documentary after I covered this and realized I didn't look like I was like fucking hiding it out.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. so if you haven't gauged like your like your what you imagine this group of people are it's probably just on that instance alone probably a lot of white men a lot of straight white men on that website um but so there was i don't want to say like there was a good thing about that because there wasn't but there was a a cultural significance in hacktivism because of this because they were able to see all of us organized something and we were able to do something with our numbers and granted it was in a way that was disruptive and wildly fucked up yeah but look that we are capable of doing something yeah um and so at that point the friendships in 4chan are starting to get bigger and anonymous is actually kind of growing the

sense of community and they're recognizing what their power can do and um uh it kind of moves from hey let's all agree to start an account over here and then piss people off it starts kind of moving into you know let's just be friends how sweet quick fucking change and like that that doesn't that's not like a sweeping generalization there's still a lot of people unfortunate even to this day like 10 years later where their whole goal is to piss people off. Like trolling is still a massive thing. But there were some people as we know very well, but as we know, we are, we are familiar with that. But there's a but in this moment, some people recognized what they were capable of doing and in their power of numbers, uh totally accidentally ended up doing something good so okay which is the best way to do something good i guess um so 2007 hits and i don't know

if you remember hal turner or if that name sounds familiar um he so he was a radio host he was also a fucking nazi um and he like literally was a holocaust denier he thought that we should what the fuck we should still have slaves apparently okay like really a horrible horrible horrible fucking man and he of all people just happened to harass one of the people on 4chan. I don't know if they were like butting heads on something. I don't know how they came to. I mean, it seems like he was bound to accidentally piss someone off on the internet. So it makes sense.

One of them was bound to a 4chan person or Hal Turner. So but so I don't know how they knew each other or what the argument was. But apparently they had some issues and Hal turner started trying to harass this guy and now that anonymous or 4chan is like um kind of building up this community and they all happen to be hackers they were like well we're going to defend our friend who's like getting harassed by this fucking nazi so we'll put a giant swastika on his screen and it'll that'll show him it's like so yeah exactly so it's like this weird out of nowhere good thing that happened yeah and it's this perfect there's a really nice quote from one of the people who actually was involved and he had i think his face

was covered or some people like did have identities hidden um but this guy had a quote saying i guess we figured we had the moral high ground which allowed us to get more people on our side at least like you know online wise sure but he was also a fucking neo-nazi and you're not allowed to do that and there's a million neo nazis out there but he started picking on our dude and so we had to go to our dude's fucking defense and it just so happened he was also a nazi and so like they were like we were gonna defend our friend no matter what like if it was mother teresa we were gonna defend our friend sure okay just happened to be a nazi and it worked out for us

and so yes they all start trolling the fuck out of this guy and so to a point where they are mass calling him mass emailing him mass messaging him they're harassing him on the air. But apparently because he's a Nazi and because he was like used to having to defend his beliefs, he was not being intimidated by this group of people. Oh, sure. Which was a new challenge for them because they were used to people being offended like that. And so now all of a sudden someone is like fighting back and things start ramping up. So they overloaded his website, which apparently, according to the documentary, cost him a lot of bandwidth fees. Then they signed him up for escorts on Craigslist.

A bunch of people sent him like countless pizzas and also construction materials that he ended up having to pay delivery fees on they were just kind of wiping him clean financially however they could however they could so this ended up it got to a point there were so many people involved in this that literally hal turner didn't have enough money to pay for his radio show anymore so they shut him down oh shit they literally got him off the air at least temporarily they got him off the air and um so more and more people were like oh like there's like a reason to be hacking and trolling someone and people are like encouraging this fuck yeah we're gonna do it so sure more uh experienced hackers started also hacking into his private servers and they found emails

that saw that although he was a neo-nazi he was also an informant for the fbi and they also found out what they also found out that he had been threatening to kill judges um what the fuck and so then 4chan leaked this info and when this happened it came out as like hackers online in this 4chan group um they you know helped us find a nazi whatever and so even though like by the way he was saying like obviously nationalist shit on his radio show but they were like they took him down and he's like he's a great they're look at all these great activists. And so genuine activists now started joining 4chan thinking they were going to fight the Nazis. So more people started joining 4chan and Anonymous thinking they were joining a legit activism organization. Oh boy.

So there was a lot of original people in 4chan who are like there's like now this budding of beliefs because now they're almost not necessarily outnumbered but there's definitely a large group of them now who don't want to be insular and cause chaos it's like yeah again as the there was a quote earlier that they call themselves internet's first army and not that they ever said that out loud but it was just kind of an understanding that this is what it was turning into. And then in 2008 hits and they call it Operation Chenology. They have a lot of operations, which we're going to go to, but Operation Chenology. Basically, now there's millions of people in Anonymous at this point in 2008.

And this private video of Tom Cruise comes out talking about scientology and he looks fucking batshit crazy and so the video goes viral um and so website websites start posting the video everywhere for clickbait and scientology starts sending all these ceases and cease and desists oh man anonymous although they are changing in some ways they still have their core values of do not censor us we have the freedom to information do not fuck with us and so they found out that like you know scientology is telling us what we can and can't do on our internet like in our culture on our in our territory yeah so they started posting the video to like and by they i mean like again thousands and thousands all at one time are posting it on every website they can find just

so scientology can't take them down fast enough okay and then at one point the website gawk or even like wrote an article saying like this is newsworthy even if Scientology comes at us with a cease and desist, we're not going to take it down. Whoa. Okay. So there was one woman on the show or on the documentary who had an excellent point. I wish I wrote her name down. But so she said, and I'm going to quote her. She said, Scientology is an interesting target for anonymous because in some ways, it's the perfect inversion of what geek and hacker culture or what what geeks and hackers value science and i'm paraphrasing here but science fiction intellectual property freedom they're very closed off from the rest of society um and then she goes back to saying if you had something like a cultural inversion machine and you stuck in geeks and hackers you would probably get something

that looks a lot like silentology so there's a real pleasure in attacking your perfect nemesis whoa that was such a powerful quote it's like such a goose camp moment and then a member of anonymous added on saying quote we're such polar opposites with them being secretive and us hating secrets and most most importantly how fucking self-important they thought they were. They thought they were untouchable. And so Anonymous was like, you better fucking watch out. And so they also found out about Scientology's fair game policy, which if anyone knows, the second that someone says anything against Scientology as a member or decides to leave

Scientology, they will ruin that person's fucking career, their lives, their relationships, whatever they can. So it scares people into staying in Scientology. Anonymous knew about that. And they were like, so you're censoring people and messing with their freedom, which is going exactly against what we believe. Yeah.

And so basically they were ready to fucking throw down. And my favorite quote in the entire documentary was the same guy from earlier who said, he says, everyone knew who Anonymous was and what they were capable of. And people thought Anonymous and Scientology are going to fight. This is going to be weird and amazing. But like, truly. It sounds like a sci-fi book so anyway so hackers then started coming all over the world people who weren't even in anonymous who weren't really part of 4chan they just heard that like they were about to like duke it out with scientology and everyone avengers end

game style fucking was ready to go and so they started ordering pizzas again they started clogging the phone line so that scientists actually couldn't or scientologists couldn't get to the their uh to the company my favorite thing they did they found out every fax number in scientology across the world and faxed hundreds of pieces faxed hundreds of pieces of black paper so all of their ink would run out oh that's brilliant so again hackers are reaching out out of everywhere being like, how do we help? And this is when they create their own DOS system, their own system where they can overwhelm a site and shut it down. Sure. And they call it the Low Orbit Ion Cannon because that was apparently like the end all be all weapon in one of the video games that they all played.

So they called it the Arloik, a low orbit ion cannon. And it was their own version of like overwhelming a computer. And so one guy named Brian, he either built it or just used it during the Scientology thing. He ended up getting arrested later. Oh, shit. this Scientology thing he ended up getting arrested later um oh shit but anyway during this this was the first time that um Anonymous ended up making videos and uh because they also just recently put one out um with everything going on but this was the first time they put out an Anonymous video and it was called Declaration of War and it was the first time that Anonymous

actually called itself Anonymous um oh they also had a second video called call to arms excuse me where they basically told everybody like we're gonna protest the church of scientology and the quote literally was be very wary of the 10th of february and uh anonymous invites you to join us in an act of solidarity and then basically take up the banner of free speech of human rights of family and freedom and then they had a third video called code of conduct where they were like we know what sociology or what scientology is about like they are going to try to ruin our fucking lives if they know who we are so we have to go covered up like we cannot let people know what our identity is jeez so that's where the guy fosk matt the guy

fox masks come in which also was on brand for them because they were called anonymous but like yeah the whole point wasn't even because they're anonymous it was because they were afraid of scientologists like finding out who they are and ruining them afterwards. So they chose the Guy Fawkes masks, by the way, because of the end of the movie for V for Vendetta. They literally just apparently that's how anonymous people saw each other. So they were like, all right, let's do that. So apparently 10,000 people, more than 10,000 people across the world protested which was like they didn't even know because it was funny in the documentary they were like these are a bunch of like computer geeks in their basement like who are introverts and don't leave their house like what if like 10 people show

up and we look like assholes to scientology and 10 000 people showed up wow so at this time a lot of original anonymous people or a lot of original 4chan people are pissed because now this is clearly an activism organization in their eyes. So they're now doing things to piss off their own anonymous counterparts that are doing good. all the good anonymous stuff is happening original 4chan people are now pissing people off and trolling websites and calling themselves anonymous to give them a bad rep so for example they went on they hacked a bunch of epilepsy or epilepsy medicine or medical sites and put strobing lights as the backgrounds so that people would get fucking seizures the fuck and then they were calling it like anonymous of it so like i'll see okay so they were trying to do all these things but like don't let that

don't worry about that because anonymous ended up staying strong so they the next operation they had was operation tit storm which is a real thing oh dear and apparently that was because uh the australian government was censoring porn specifically towards people with small breasts. I don't understand. I don't know if I heard that fucking right, but it's in the documentary. That's beautiful, Em. Thank you. It's some sort of porn censorship, but apparently censorship is censorship no matter what it is. And so Anonymous went after all of their government websites.

And it's the first time Anonymous went after a government. Oh. At different times, they also hacked the, and they did that with DOS attacks against, they shut down the site so nobody could get to the government site. They did the same thing for the Motion Picture Association, the Recording Industry Association, because they were taking down file sharing programs, which was censoring the internet.

They also thought it was hypocritical, by the way, that they, apparently, the Motion Picture Association hired a software to DOS a bunch of file sharing programs to like try to shut them down on their own and uh um anonymous was like that's hypocritical because a lot of our people got arrested doing that for the scientology shit so like why do you get to do it and then the next big thing that happened was operation payback i am almost done i promise no no this is just beyond fast i knew none of this thank you i did a lot of work so i know so the next big thing we're in 2010 and this is called operation payback so operation payback happens with um the website wiki leaks

oh shit which anonymous is for because it's literally like leaking public whistleblower information and like shit that like the government probably doesn't want you to know about. So actually, the WikiLeaks founder was also a hacker. So he immediately believed that, you know, the freedom of information and all that. So he at one point apparently released half a million United States secret files on the Iraq war, which apparently was called cable gate, which I don't remember, but it was the largest leak of classified us files in history.

Damn. And so it also leaked that our government was surveilling its allies. Right. So apparently what happened next, because I guess the way that WikiLeaks worked was people would donate. That's how it stayed funded. In protest to what WikiLeaks had revealed about the government, PayPal, MasterCard and Amazon all ended their relationships with wikileaks which halted any donations being able to go to the site essentially killing the site so anonymous got pissed off because they were like so these three companies care more about the banks and they care

about people knowing about our information about what's happening in the world and so they got pissed off at pay and MasterCard, specifically MasterCard and PayPal, not so much Amazon at the time. I don't think Amazon was nearly as big as it is today. Amazon was like, I promise we're selling books, but someday we'll be huge. One day you'll see. But so they pretty much went after any credit card company and saw that they were still selling merch on KKK websites and Westboro Baptist Church websites. I see.

And so they were like, oh, so like you have no problem funding anyone with a fucked up ideology until they're telling us what the government's doing behind our back. So then basically the understanding was that these companies had shut themselves away or ended their relationship with WikiLeaks because the government got exposed and they shut off access to the website by having credit card companies walk away. And so Anonymous then disabled the credit card websites, like went after MasterCard and Visa and PayPal and apparently like like Bank of America they shut down Bank of America or some like massive bank and so basically that was its own whole fucking thing which ended up later coming back in the news and a lot of people ends up getting arrested for being a part of that. The government also, so I get these two confused because there was, they happened right near each other where they helped out Tunisia, the country, and Egypt.

They helped out both those because both those countries were being heavily censored by the government with their internet use. And I'm going to kind of combine them as one story even though i'm gonna try my best actually i want to do them both justice but i guess there was like volunteer activists in the middle east who were helping run internet and some of them happened to be part of anonymous and since they were hackers they had really good access to like back end of sites and stuff so they were able to tell their hackers in america or anonymous in america like hey this is like some of the shit that the government's hiding and like i

don't think the country knows about this and um so they ended up uh like breaking into government sites sending documents about what the government was doing and forwarding them to the u.s anonymous and so from there the u.s anonymous had gotten already they'd gotten wikileaks back up and they started posting all this shit on wikileaks about what other governments were doing um censoring their internet use from their people um and then somehow they also helped tunisia access this information so they found out what was going on and they saw what the government was doing to them. And so they made a guide for the people so that they could hide what they were doing on the internet from the government, like taught them how to hack pretty much and then

shared. So then people there were also like, they were like, I want to talk about what's going on in the world, but we're censored. Like I could never tell anyone like what's going on over here. So then Anonymous helped get that information from them and then tweet about it in America. So we would know what was going on. Oh, my God. And then they also used DOS attacks on government servers to shut them down.

Also hacked the prime minister, which left a message about Anonymous saying that's what they did. And then the same thing happened leading up to the Egyptian revolution and Egyptians couldn't access websites. And so Anonymous took reports from Egyptians, tweeted them out on behalf of them to help get the word out. And then the hackers that were volunteering over in the area and Anonymous came together to set up live feeds so people could see the protests that were volunteering over in the area and anonymous came together to set up live feeds so people could see the protests that were going on in real time again very topical protesters were getting hurt and killed by the government and basically when the egyptian government found out that people could see this live feed of what was going on they

literally shut down the internet point blank period like just shut down the fucking internet they were like we don't even want no one's gonna see what's going on oh so then because they were talking to fucking hackers with clout they knew how to work around third party sites. And so they turned the internet back on. They turned on Egypt's internet. And then they started. Oh my God, this is insane. They worked with the activist. I'm probably fucking up parts of this. If I'm wrong, please let me know and I'll correct myself.

But they also started working with the hackers that were over in Egypt to make sure that information was getting sent back and forth properly. And then and what they were sending was they were like these guides on how the people themselves could turn on third party sites to keep the internet back on in case it shut down again. They were also live tweeting mass dial up connection info, including usernames and passwords for different modems in the area so that people could sign on and they could be shown the government-censored sites that Anonymous was also posting for them to see. Oh my God. And then they tweeted out medical information for protesters. They found Arabic translators. And then they also attacked the

government sites so that they couldn't come back on while all the people were using the the internet so like to like took over they took over so the government couldn't see anything that was going on but all the people had entire access and then they also sent a tweet they posted a tweet saying welcome back to the internet egypt well except for government website you stay down and then they kept it down hell and ultimately the president also stepped down soon after that so whoa okay wow they're changing fucking lives over here so then uh the financial times came out with an article um a little bit after that saying that the ceo of this intelligence contract company our contractor company his name was aaron barr he was the CEO of this intelligence contractor called HB Gary. Aaron Barr apparently wrote to the Financial Times saying that he had infiltrated Anonymous and knew the members and was going to expose them. He literally told hackers, I will expose you.

I just want you to hear that. So I'm not going to tell you exactly what they did. I'm just going to read the quote that was literally on the Stephen Colbert show. Okay, great. So Stephen Colbert said, Oh, I love him. If Anonymous is a hornet's nest, Aaron Barr said, I'm going to stick my penis in that. Faster than you can say, get these hornets off my penis. Anonymous took down Barr's website stole his emails deleted his

company's backup data trashed his twitter account and remotely wiped his ipad they're like and the ipad for good measure exactly they're gonna ruin your candy crush score uh they also hacked a hundred thousand or somewhere near that of his emails or his data or something holy hell and they found a powerpoint they're called the wiki leaks threat where um aaron bard literally planned to leak fake documents uh no to make wiki leaks look bad presumably like wiki leaks would have then uploaded it they would have looked disc discredited and Aaron Barr would have done his job. What a dickhead. So then they were pissed that he was like, you know, so then they exposed that about him.

They were like, oh, so he's also trying to block our freedom of information. He ended up having to step down after all the shit they released on him. Whoa. And then soon after that, they were also after Sony, like the company Sony. Oh boy. So then they were DOSing Sony because apparently Sony was suing people for hacking their PlayStations. Like, apparently PlayStation had a feature on it for a while that Sony then took away. But people were like, we paid for that feature. We're going to hack our consoles to get it back.

Oh, I feel like I vaguely remember this because my brother was definitely in a member of that no this is my wiki leak uh no i just remember him telling me about it or at least being like on the periphery watching it well so apparently that happened and uh anonymous was like okay so you're telling us we can't do what we want with things we legally purchased like paid for yeah and then you took away so then they started hacking um sony but soon someone actually literally some hacker in anonymous actually broke into the playstation website and stole somewhere between 80 to 100 million people's login information home addresses and credit card information that's i think I remember that. Holy hell.

And apparently Sony and PlayStation had so much like crisis, crisis, I don't know what the right word is. Crisis management. Yeah. They had to clean up the fucking mess. And so it ended up halting people from being able to even use their consoles for two months. Oh, shit.

And it apparently did 150 million dollars worth of damage oh my god at the same time as this it's 2011 and there's a random group that shows up from anonymous called lulz security or lulz sec jesus and this group apparently are some original 4channers who were like okay we, we're fucking done with Anonymous being all holier than thou. LulzSuck is here and our whole job is to like do things for the sake of trolling. But at Anonymous level. So they started leaking strangers ATM information for no reason. They hacked the PBS website because they didn't like a documentary on there and changed it out for a story about Tupac.

They, which apparently Anonymous was against because they were censoring the press. Oh, true. They also hacked the database for X Factor. They also. Like the show? Like the show. Oh, okay. They also, more bank account information they leaked, they DOS'd the CIA for three hours.

They DOS'd the United Kingdom's serious organized crime website. Oh, dear. They also released 26,000 emails and passwords for porn accounts, as well as senate.gov. thousand emails and passwords for porn accounts as well as senate.gov uh they had an event called titanic takedown tuesday where they took down minecraft by request um they also took down the bank of portugal the assembly of the republic and uh the ministry of economy innovation and development they also dos sites for the government of brazil the president of brazil and then they leaked a bunch of police officers addresses numbers passwords and social security numbers and the british paper the sun what the so they also which is arguably the worst thing

hacked and leaked over a hundred thousand login information for military accounts through a defense contractor and 30,000 credit card numbers from an intelligence company. And they leaked all that to WikiLeaks. Holy shit. So after 50 days of this, apparently it was called the 50 days of lulls. the 50 days of lulls and it had it was like their celebration and after 50 days they said that they had quote achieved their mission to disrupt organizations and then disbanded and then were all arrested oh i was gonna say yeah can't get away with that forever people who were also arrested um uh who are mentioned in the documentary at least were the 16 people called the anonymous 16 who were arrested during operation payback which which was PayPal, MasterCard, WikiLeaks thing.

And their argument or what they were going to fight in court was saying that DOS attacks should be a valid form of virtual protesting. And then one of the members, who at the time was a 19-year-old girl, so definitely not the stereotype of a hacker. She was one of the people arrested. And about Operation Payback, she said, quote, they scared the shit out of the, they as in anonymous, they scared the shit out of the powers that be.

And that's why this is being investigated. That's why I'm under indictment because 10,000 angry people proved to the government that their regulations, their ideas, their views of PayPal, their view of WikiLeaks, their view of the Afghan war in Egypt, Indonesia, and Bolivia didn't fucking matter. Their opinion no longer mattered because someone out there on the internet was kicking ass. And the NSA has called Anonymous a potential national security threat, saying that they could disable parts of the u.s power grid time magazine called them the most influential people and one of the 100 most

influential people in the world in 2012 and um really quickly i do want to uh say i know i've been talking for fucking ever but i do want to talk about what's going on in the world right now. Yes. Yes. It's very necessary. I'm going to text please bring me a beer. I'm like living in Queens right now. Well, I'll also say that, um, I had a list. I might actually just, I have another list, which I won't really get super into, but at one point anonymous and LulzSec actually collaborated to leak a bunch of police information and credit card information and then made a bunch of donations on their credit cards from the police um so it was kind of like oh we're gonna do something bad but also like

robin hood that's like a very robin hood move exactly they also have been a part of a lot of Black Lives Matter. They had individual operations from Ferguson to back in, I think, 2012. Two cops shot Charles Hill in San Francisco. And they were cops from BART, the BART team or the BART system. And so they ended up leaking customer info there. BART, the BART team or the BART system. And so they ended up leaking customer info there. Let me see. For Ferguson, they did things when it came to Michael Brown and Tamir Rice. And they promised that if any of the protesters were harassed or harmed, they were going to attack the city's servers and computers and take them offline. Both times they had to. And they also

hacked into the kkk servers and released personal details of members that one i remember yeah um they also that's crazy there are multiple times where they have had different operations where they hacked into child pornography sites on the dark web and leaked like thousands and thousands of usernames and also disabled a bunch of image swapping websites thank god um they posted a not only leaked the names but also the emails and ip addresses of suspected pedophiles they posted on twitter um but they also there was my personal favorite in that it was like wildly fucked up is operation hunt hunter where there was a guy named hunter moore who had a revenge porn site called is anyone up and literally people

would just send their exes naked pictures to him and i guess it had already it was about to be taken down but people asked anonymous for help And so Anonymous crashed his servers, leaked his birthday, his address, his phone number, his parents' names, his social media information, his social media login information, his OKCupid profile, and his IP address. His OKCupid profile. What a piece of shit. And apparently what was really scary about it is he planned to revamp the site to make it even more dangerous for girls really anyone anyone can be a victim i shouldn't have said girls but primarily women were on this website um he planned to revamp it by making it even more stalker friendly by having a field for the, uh, like having a field that you could type in.

Hi, please. Sorry. I'm listening. Um, I just want to get my beer. No, you're good. I like, I want to hear about this, this with a nice cold beer for my revenge. He basically, uh, um, Oh, he was going to make it more stalker friendly by next to every person's picture was going to leave a field. So people could find out their address. Stalker friendly. What a great fucking word. And he was going to post pictures of maps to their house. So like how psychotic.

So anyone could see the picture that they like of someone who doesn't even know without their consent, that picture exists. And also here's their address and how to get there. You can drive there. I'm glad they released his parents names too because i'm sure they're fucking disappointed in him and you would think anonymous would have kicked this guy's ass unfortunately the only way that they were able that this got shut down was he ended up selling the website to an anti-bullying website which now now redirects the link to all the information about his lawsuits and like offers you to join on the class action against him.

Oh, that's good at least. 2016 i think um it started all over again uh with anonymous revealing over 350 alleged members of the kkk along with their links to social media um and sadly a lot of the people it's like it's not even impressive that they found 350 people because a lot of those people they leaked about already had that they were members of the kk and their bios oh they weren't hiding it like they were proud to be members fucking me but some of the people on the list implied that there was fbi infiltration and they even wrote as the header of this list they wrote the kkk are heavily infiltrated by the fbi and apparently there were allegedly three informants um that they found on there like that

one motherfucker that um yeah wasn't he an fbi informant yeah yeah he was far up on these notes but after that in 2017 they again hacked a child porn uh space in the dark web but apparently they knocked off 20 of the dark web in that one hack whoa um and so they took down over 10 600 different child pornography websites or at least 50 were porn 50 were scam sites but they left the calling card on every single website if you were to look at it saying we do not forgive we do not not forget. You should have expected us. And then they were pretty quiet until 2020. Uh-huh. And currently three different things have come out. One was May 28th.

May 28th, the thing that I tweeted, was Anonymous released a video to the Minneapolis Police Department seeking revenge on them, saying that they will expose their crimes to the world. And I think my exact tweet was like, do you know how fucking wild this has to be for Anonymous to come out of the woodwork? Yeah. Three days later, some, they also released, three days later, they released documents incriminating Trump and Epstein and multiple cases of pedophilia, rape and sexual assault. Although I have heard arguments that apparently that was information that was already public.

They were just republishing it. Yeah. Apparently. Still useful, but. Still useful. I mean, still something people should not forget about in the midst of what's going on. in the midst of what's going on um and then they also apparently have alluded to evidence of princess diana definitely being murdered by the british family because she knew of their involvement in the sex trafficking ring oh shit and there were some other wild accusations those

were the two big ones and then the tweets disappeared the same day but thanks to screenshotting they're still sure and then only four days ago apparently they shut down the buffalo new york website and then it came back up and they took it down again do we know why buffalo new york or just like because i'm not really sure why okay interesting anyway that's currently the update i'm if anonymous comes out and exposes crimes to the world we'll know about it so wow so okay What I've been following too is like my little sister, like the Gen, speaking of Gen Zers, are obsessed with Anonymous. Have you like seen this whole trend? Are they obsessed with it because like as of a week ago when it just came out or?

Yes. Oh, okay. I was like, unless they like knew about this from some. No, I don't think so. I think it's like a new thing, But my sister was like, oh, yeah, you know, the anonymous edits. And I was like, the what? She's like, the anonymous edits. And I was like, I literally don't know what these what you're saying to me right now. And she was like, oh, you know, like Gen Zers are creating all these anonymous edits and then anonymous is sharing them.

And it's like pictures of anonymous, like the mask and then like all these hearts around it. Oh, no, I have not seen that picture. Not at all. So it's like has all these like little like Boko, whatever, Bokeh, whatever they're called around around his face. And it's like basically turning him into, I think, like, I don't know, I could be wrong, but kind of like a romantic icon, like, oh, yeah, Anonymous.

And he has like hearts all around him. And my sister's like, oh, yeah, that's Gen Z. We just like to make anonymous edits. And I was like, I don't know what the fuck you're talking you know what as long as you're making edits about someone that's like on our side right now and like yeah to remind everyone like i'm not we're not forgetting the fact that like it did stem from something that the roots of it the roots of it are pretty wild and there's definitely arguably thousands hundreds of thousands if not millions of trolls out there who still love the original uh purpose of fortune but anonymous seems to whether

or not they actually like no matter what their belief is for all we know like they could be totally against certain social things but their one core value is do not fuck with people's freedom so wow anyway that's where they stand. And that's very relevant today. So here we are. Very relevant for today. And also very against oppressive government. So this is kind of the perfect disaster zone for them.

Truly. And I mean, it is kind of powerful. Like, I know you tweeted it too, but like, the witches came out, the Amish came out, Anonymous came out. It's like people are just uniting now suddenly um it's just wild out there uh yeah and i've seen a lot of people like apparently have been pretending to be part of anonymous and like leaking stuff but it's not like legit well so one of the one of those uh the last one i mentioned about the kkk and 350 people apparently that one was called operation hoods off oh interesting okay apparently they threatened to expose a bunch of information and then some random person claiming to be anonymous just posted a bunch of random people's information

oh that's yeah and then they had to be like no that wasn't us and then later they posted information being like okay this one's us and it just kind of like weirdly discredited them a little bit like convolutes it yeah and also like there's there is something to be said for you know as much good as they're doing they have gotten a lot of pushback from authority which like i'm sure is exactly what they want but authority does have a good point and that like yeah they knocked out like 20 of child porn rings or at least their websites or their servers but then people who were actually investigating those crimes all of a sudden to find the right like all of a sudden it was harder to find them or like they those servers were going to become more secure all of a sudden and they were like damaging cases

that were open i see okay that's interesting or even if you're accusing someone of being in the kkk like you better be fucking right or else everyone looks bad like oh totally you could literally just be saying a random person is a supremacist and like they're not you know so like you have to like take everything kind of with a grain of salt because as although they have this massive power and reputation behind them and like i would like to think they're not just gonna like randomly say that someone's in the kkk right you don't know you know yeah you don't know if there are other people like just fucking around trying to mess with them trolls right like if you're exactly you could literally just fucking decide to label someone like that and then their reputation through and so I like to think that they're doing all their stuff for good but there is

the argument that like you don't know really what's true and what's not without true hard documents which that you don't always get so yeah oh my god it's so wildly fascinating I knew none of I only knew kind of like vaguely from when we were in like that high school college age when some of that stuff happened but i don't know why i had not followed it that thoroughly and i didn't know any of the history so i mean i literally spoke for 45 minutes and i'm so fucking sorry but oh my god no what are you talking about you always say that i love it it's because trolls out there have said that i i uh the conversation. People, Em does not monopolize the conversation. I never, I literally never stopped talking. And so when Em's telling a story,

I just want to sit back and listen to the goddamn story. And if my stories are short, that's not Em's fault. It's my fault. So please stop yelling at Em about it. I know. I mean, thank you, first of all, for defending me. But also, no matter what, I wouldn't win because a lot of people say either I monopolize the conversation because my research is too thorough or people say like that I don't do enough research. So it's like, OK, well, I can't win. Here's fucking anonymous. Here's enough. This is why I keep telling him to stay off of Reddit, please, because the trolls get to get through on Reddit and I can't handle trolls.

So I just delete that. I can't even delete my Reddit account because I would inevitably end up like reading shit about us and it's it's mostly good so thank you for that but there's definitely some harsh ones like even moving there was this whole drama which i don't even want to get into but people were like this is the end of the podcast if christine ever gets pregnant like the show is over and i was like okay if you don't name the baby after me they're right okay fair but then i, OK, this is coming from a person who's claiming to be like extremely progressive and whatever. And I'm like, so you're literally saying, oh, the second you have a child, you can't

like do your job anymore, which is just so backwards. And so then all these people came. Thank God to my defense is very kind. And then they apologized later. So it was fine. But I just like this is why I avoid it because I'm like, I can't handle it. My psyche is too weak and fragile uh one person it was like some random website that does ratings i don't know why i was on it no i don't know what was wrong with me but someone

said that like i had completely plagiarized jethataki mongoose because what they gave us a one-star review because I had plagiarized Jeff the Talking Mongoose and their only evidence was because I guess last podcast on the left has recently covered it and so they thought that like they said like Jeff the Talking Mongoose is such an obscure topic it's not there's no way that you would have never found it and I was like buddy I've been doing this for three years like maybe so M doesn't even listen to podcasts so like do your research dude also like I literally like am just good at've been doing this for three years. Like maybe. Also, Em doesn't even listen to podcasts. So like do your research, dude. Also, like I literally like am just good at my fucking job.

I know we make a lot of fun of each other of like, oh, like we don't know what we're doing, but like there's a reason this has worked for three years. I know how to research. Yeah. And like, I feel like some people think we've like, quote unquote, strayed from our like incompetent roots. But like even at the beginning, like we really worked our asses off to try and make this because we only not to be you know braggy whatever like just because we want to make sure our stories are correct and we don't want to like misrepresent anybody and if i'm

doing crime like i don't want to misrepresent anything so i've always been very cautious of that and i feel like that hasn't changed like we're still we still do our stories and notes the pretty much the same way at the end of the day like if someone gave us a one-star rating because of a talking mongoose and because they thought they're like i didn't do my own research which i did then like whatever i'm having a good fucking life like i don't get to complain jeff no jeff jeff should never be the cause of a one star we also don't want another like a review to come out of this of like we're just complaining we're not we it's just no we are human and our feelings get hurt sometimes. But that being said, 99% of the comments that we see are so positive and we are very lucky and we do read them whether or not we should. And we're very grateful. And we

recognize that. Yeah. And I will say, too, like I we did briefly think about like or at least I did about, you know, posting that blackout episode and kind of stepping back. And like, I know, I mean, people have commented on my Instagram, like they lost another follower, blah, blah, blah. And I'm like, you know what? Fine. That doesn't bother me. Like that's not hurting me. You know, it's, it's this, so I want to be clear. Like, it's not like we're just like, oh, whining about everything that's negative. No, I just, I always get nervous that people that we're not coming across the way we want to be. So we're just people who try to be funny and then people say mean things sometimes. It's like, I don't know, which is part of the territory, you know, I mean, that's part of the territory.

So we do everyone that says nice things like it. It's so it's so wonderful. It's worth it. Yeah, I we I really am so grateful. I actually got really emotional a while ago and thought about tweeting it out and being like, I'm reading all these nice comments and it's making me so happy. So this is me doing that. You should tweet it. Okay. I'll do it. Um, no, yeah, it's true. And, uh, we just, we're just very lucky and happy and, um, that's all. Anyway, anyway, I'm going to pop a nice sugar pill called a marshmallow and drink my water and. Oh, hell yeah. And entertain me. Rouse me. And I'm going to rabble rouse here.

Medial razzle dazzle. See, nothing's changed. We still use stupid ass words. I want to also say, okay, I would like to preface this by saying because everything that was going on this past week, I had already done notes that we were planning to record last week. And then when everything kind of, you know, we decided to postpone the episode, I, you know, I was not just kind of sitting around. Like I, here's the thing. I had to decide between like doing brand new notes that were topical and like you know participating in my sister's protests and

trying to you know so point being the notes that I'm reading today are notes that were meant to be last week that I had done way before you know the the current climate shifted dramatically and so I am I will say I have been researching and starting notes that are more, you know, relevant to what's going on. Appropriate, exactly. And so this, I don't want it to look like I'm just like, anyway, back to normal, like back to just any old story I think is interesting on the internet. Like I'm trying to be.

That was our argument, not really our argument but our our issue last week when we were texting each other we were like so do we go out and protest or do we do right right like do we do content for the show that like how should we bet how should we use our time appropriately and it just happens that you had already done notes for an episode you thought would be coming out on a pleasant week so our birthday week, literally. And so I mean, again, like, I don't want to make an excuse like, oh, well, I didn't think it was interesting to talk about police brutality before. Now, that's not at all what I'm saying. I just I know that that's more currently poignant and topical and what people want to hear. And I'm fully aware of that. And I want to make a conscious effort to, to be more, you know,

aware of that in the future and more conscientious about diversifying my stories, I guess. And so I plan on doing that. But I want to apologize that today I just am doing the original notes that were planned. And I'll come back at you soon with updates. But no one blames you for protesting and sticking it to the man. We're good. Some people do. Some people do.

If people do, that's on them. You were busy saving the world in a different way. So We're good. Some people do. Some people do. If people do, that's on them. You were busy saving the world in a different way. So you're fine. You know me. Saving the world. That's what I do. That's what we say, Gemini season. That's what we say. Let us have like a moment where we just, you know, get narcissistic for no goddamn reason.

Anyway, so that being said, this is a very interesting story that I've been wanting to cover for a while this is the story of the murder of April Kaufman and I will say this I'm just going to start with a quote kind of like you did this is the this is a quote from April's daughter Kim and the quote in the 2020 episode I watched was very poignant. And it says, I feel it's like the worst made-for-TV movie on the planet, and this is my life. So just to give you an intro to what I'm going to be discussing. OK.

So we start in 2012 in New Jersey. Shortly after dawn on May 10th, Dr. James Kaufman, who's a prominent endocrinologist, leaves his affluent Linwood, New Jersey home to head to work. Okay. At 830, he and his wife usually have – his wife is April Kaufman, and he and his wife usually have this 830 a.m. standing phone call every single morning for 10 years. I know. For 10 years, they have this phone call. And so at 830, he makes his daily phone call to April. She herself is a popular business owner.

She's a veterans advocate and a local, interestingly, an FM radio personality. So that was her career. Not a Nazi, as far as I learned. So definitely different from your radio personality. But she doesn't answer the call, their set call. And he makes several more calls, and she also does not answer those calls so around 10 30 dr kaufman contacts uh the the family's handyman and says hey can you go by the house and check on april she's not answering like the phone and she usually answers for our daily call so around 11 20 a.m the handyman enters the home and he finds the doors

unlocked which is a little strange and he walks upstairs into the master bedroom and finds the body of april kaufman and she is dead uh he he checks first to see if she's alive she's not and he calls dr kaufman to come home immediately and then calls 911. And Dr. Kaufman rushes to his car. He's rushing home. And on the way, he calls the police station. He's like, I'm on my way home. What's going on? I want to make sure emergency services are coming. And they say, we just sent an ambulance to your wife. We're on the way. We'll meet you at the house. So Dr. Kaufman gets there first first he gets there before emergency services he discovers his wife um he's beside himself hysterical and the police just arrive uh sorry arrived just after

him at 11 29 with emts in tow and 11 45 a.m so about 15 minutes later 47 year old april christine kaufman is declared dead from multiple gunshot wounds fuck oh gunshot wounds okay yeah so they that's what they determined when the emts got there and were able to like you know assess her body so april's daughter kim who i mentioned in the quote earlier uh she is actually uh the daughter of april and her first husband okay or first partner um and so she is dr kaufman james's stepdaughter right so she he calls her um and he's like and she says what's going on what's going on and all he keeps repeating is mom is dead mom is dead mom is dead oh my god so april i know that i mean just imagine the thought no i like truly i't. I don't even know how you would recover from something like that.

So eventually, Kim arrives on the scene, and she says she shoves past the policemen trying to get inside. She says, what the hell is going on? And the officer says, your mother is dead, and we believe it's a probable homicide investigation. has dead and we believe is dead and we believe it's a probable homicide investigation and so at this point it's already kind of spreading that um that the the death is of a prominent radio host in the area so you know people are picking up on the story really quickly and there are these news helicopters flying around and so kim daughter kind of looks up sees all this activity going on she turns she turns to the police officer points says he did it that's the person that killed my mom and they look over and it's jim her stepdad and she's like i'm just gonna make the call right now that's

who killed my stepmom or i'm sorry that's who killed my mom she's a let she's stating that this is probably him but not definitely him yes she's saying in my opinion basically she turns she's like that's who did it she's like that's probably it exactly she's like i'm just gonna tell you right now i know who did this and it was him and then they look and it's her stepdad so obviously like you said it's it's alleged it's not you know right evidence by any means but that's kind of how this whole investigation kicks off. So as for the timeline, I'm going to give you a little bit of background on April. So she is a New Jersey native, born and raised.

She's a member of the Jewish community in the area, like very active, very well-liked, just like blonde hair, just very like, I don't know, outgoing. And, you know, she's on broadcast. Like she's just like a really well-known personality, very popular. She was raised on the Jersey Shore area near Atlantic City. And when she was little, she kind of had like a traumatic childhood. Her mother abandoned her to her grandmother when she was 11 and put her siblings up for adoption and put them into foster care. So she really didn't have a connection to, you know, primary parental figures. Yeah. And her siblings, she dropped out of high school in her senior year and she got when she got pregnant and she gave

birth to a sorry, Kim, her only child. And she was 17 years old when Kim was born. And at this point, she was like, I'm going to pick myself up. She got her GED. She became a hairdresser. She was like a badass raising this daughter on her own. Right. She spent the next two decades working super hard. And by 2001, she owned her own salon, a cafe, and a catering company.

You know. Okay. Just like casual. I'm just going to create every business i can think of i'm a single mom barely making it work to look at my conglomerate got it literally like i couldn't i like i i wasn't able to finish high school um and now here i am so anything's possible beautiful story okay but not like until now okay it stops being beautiful pretty okay i say yes okay

it has the makings of a beautiful a potentially it could have gone it could have become even more beautiful i wish it did um yeah exactly so in 2002 uh april and april and james kaufman meet so he's the dr kaufman i've been mentioning. Excuse me. And so they meet. This will be her third husband, I believe. Dr. Kaufman is a New Jersey native as well. And he says he's an ex-Green Beret, Vietnam vet. And she's very involved with the veterans community. And a lot of her platform on the radio is trying to aid homelessness of veterans in the area. And it's like a huge issue that she's really passionate about. So this is, you know, they have an instant connection. And so in addition to their involvement with veterans charities, they also both love

motorcycles and exotic birds. Okay. Just like we all do. I mean, I guess. Them and the Tiger King cast or something, maybe. Oh, God. Yeah, exactly. Yeah, actually pretty fitting. So they meet and hit it off clearly because I guess they're the only two people in the world with these extremely very specific interests. Okay. So they love motorcycles, exotic birds. He drives a Harley, smokes cigars.

motorcycles exotic birds he drives harley smokes cigars in the 2020 episode they were like this uh caricature from a trip to miami or something like perfectly shows the relationship and it has april kind of in the background and then this massive like drawing of of jim of dr kaufman holding a cigar with the parrot on his shoulder and on a motorcycle and like larger than she's just kind of in the background you know he sounds like jimmy buffet he does like a shitty jimmy buffet how did jimmy buffet show up in both of our stories this time hang on a second we always do this and he was on his way to a jimmy buffet if you know what i'm saying i know exactly what you're saying unfortunately he was on the way to our Warped Tour Junior or whatever we're calling it. Knocked off Warped Tour. Knocked off Warped Tour.

Weenie Hut Juniors, yeah. Weenie Hut Juniors. Oh, my God. Anyway, so they are like, he's like really larger than life and like kind of, you know, overshadowing a little bit. Friends basically said James and April found their match in each other. Wait, his name is Jimmy? Oh, I literally keep calling him Jim.

It didn't even occur to me. Yes, his name is literally Jimmy. Sorry. Yeah, wow. Listen, I'm not trying to slander Jimmy Buffett. If this story has him end up at a goddamn buffet at any point, I'm going to lose my mind. No, this is not Jimmy Buffett. Please do not not sue me i do not have funds to to fight you so all of anonymous and jimmy buffet and also like anyone

that's ever been in warp tour the doors fallout boy i like the duggars i like the duggars i like how your enemy is anonymous and mine is like potentially jimmy buffett but not i wish jimmy buffet was my my enemy just so i could make him fall in love with me and we'd have we'd would have like a beautiful beach buffet together you would and uh cigars and parrots or whatever is going on here i'm sorry this is obviously a story about my murder i just i'm just noticing a little like too many coincidences here yes i mean i think maybe this guy liked a little jimmy buffett and really wanted to emulate his hero if that makes sense at least moving on sorry no no um you're exactly right not really but sort of um so they friend said that james and april found their match in each other as both quote love to have fun and go fast in reference to the couple's pen

ship for motorcycles and fast cars like corvettes so you know you can picture it right like these you know they're going out to casinos they're driving corvettes and harleys and smoking cigars and having a good time being bad pre and bad b-a-d b-a-d yeah i think i think that's um that's pretty much the vibe i got and i will say too at this point uh dr kaufman's stepdaughter aka april's daughter um kim was so impressed with uh dr kaufman's veteran background that she is like i'm doing a project for college for my university and i'd love to interview you about your time in vietnam for this project and he tells kim that he will do it on one condition she will not bring up the interview to her mother and she will destroy the tape afterward oh shit and so the interview is like asking kim like well what did you think

at this point and she's like well i mean i don't know i figured it's not really my business you know i'm just fortunate that he wants to talk to me about it like it's not my business if he doesn't want to share this you know publicly or with other people or whatever it may be that is not my relationship with my mother oh no oh yeah if i were interviewing tom and he was like your mother can never know i was like she's on speed dial and speakerphone right now actually so she's actually underneath this chair and she never leaves me the second you leave this room she's gonna know every lick of information if tom said that to you and then you like walked into the room your mom would be like what do you know that i don't know like she would just know it you wouldn't

even have to like pretend the second he figured second he said your mother can't know, she would from across the country be like, what'd you say? She would burst in the room like, oh, I was on a business trip, but I came back for this very important moment. Yes, exactly. Oh my God.

No, that's so true. And so she was like, listen, I was in college. I was like, this is like a very respected Vietnam veteran. It is not my place to like say no, I won't destroy the tape afterward, whatever. So she's like, so I just went with it. So they did the interview and he tells her all about being at war in Vietnam. He says he was stabbed by the Viet Cong, who also stabbed his comrades and left them for dead.

It was extremely traumatic. And he tells Kim basically in this like emotional statement like he tells kim his mission was to bring the fallen soldiers dog tags back to their families and that was kind of like something he had carried on um through the rest of his life and so she had done this interview um and that's kind of so the relationship was okay like april said i'm sorry kim said he kind of kept me at an arm's length um there's like this video footage from April and James's wedding where like it's so awkward it they're like standing there on the beach and she's in the middle Kim is and like she's like making this horrible fate like grimace

or uncomfortable like with her eyes closed and you can hear the photographer girl like okay one two three and then on three she literally does this like ridiculously giant like fake smile yeah like grimace just like huge grimace like exactly what you picked her fake smile and dr kaufman like does the same and then like literally his as the picture is taken his face drops and he just like storms off and she's like clearly uncomfortable so i mean you can just see just from body language alone this is not a super happy close relationship between them he wasn't very affectionate um and so you know they they live like this i mean i'm sure there are plenty of child step-parent relationships that are not you know formed in love perfect love and harmony right so um this is kind of how they all coexist and by 2003

april herself is co-hosting a radio show on wbig she's uh like a hit people love listening to her on the way to work she's also a tireless advocate for veterans she works extensively for the wounded warrior project and vets for vets program um and then on valentine's day 2003 james and april married apparently it was super awkward from what i saw from the brief uh camcorder action we got and they moved into their beautiful linwood home afterward beautiful neighborhood like very upscale you know and friends peers and colleagues at this point after their marriage described the Kaufman's as quote, the ideal Jersey shore power couple, which is so weird. Cause like, I thought people called us that, but I guess we have some, uh, I thought like Snooki in the situation where like in charge of that in charge of the power couple, but whatever.

I mean, I guess throwing the word ideal in there changes it up a bit, but yeah. Wait a minute. Okay. ideal in there changes it up a bit but yeah wait a minute okay oh yeah so that's kind of their like vibe and since she's on the radio she's kind of popular and cool and people know them both and they ride harleys and go to concerts you know they go to like they go to margaritaville they're they go to margaritaville literally they're those people at the concert that are like drinking margaritas and having fun at the jimmy buffett concert um and within a few years dr kaufman establishes himself as an incredibly uh controlling force in their lives so like pretty quickly after they get married they're quote quote a power couple and then all of a sudden over a couple years he kind of becomes this like

overpowering force in their relationship um it's not even just with Kim anymore. It's also with April and April's friends. And this basically included like controlling her money. So, you know, we always know where that leads or typically leads. So, you know, he's controlling her money, her finances. And this also included incessant calls to see like, who are you with? Where are you? You know, I need to control where you are and who you're with at all times. Just abusive relation or I'm sorry, abusive behavior within the relationship. And according to Kim, Dr. Kaufman literally outright threatened to kill her mother if she ever tried to leave. So like it wasn't just, you know, not not just, you to leave so like it wasn't just you know not

not just you know but like it wasn't only these kind of threats it was a threat right it wasn't just surface level stuff quote-unquote it was like literally he was controlling her life and also threatening her if she ever tried to leave um and then when asked if she really thought he would do it april would just say he doesn't have the balls so like she was like this is just some asshole guy who's like treating my mother poorly and she's a controlling dick yeah controlling dick right um someone needs to stick that thing in a hornet's nest and maybe bingo maybe anonymous needs to get in touch with him i mean collaboration and that's why we drink presents wait a minute what a collab at wwd x anonymous it's so much fun x kind of warp tour x work tour we're gonna make a like

an eyeshadow palette and everything it's gonna be truly a warped tour for sure yeah it's very warped indeed um so according to kim there were also, indiscretions on both sides, a.k.a. both of them were cheating on each other throughout the relationship. Noted. So not necessarily the healthiest relationship and one might say an extremely unhealthy relationship. So in April, I'm sorry, I literally read her name as a month. In 2011, April. In April 2011. Oh, my God. Yeah, that does not work that way um in 2011 april speaks to her daughter kim and her friends about planning to divorce jim james jimothy dr kaufman

jimothy buffet yes jimothy buffet uh she says uh you know what to kim and her friends she's like you know what I'm done I'm going to kind of align myself to leave this relationship I'm making plans this is it I'm done and meanwhile Dr. Kaufman is quoted as saying that he would never ever let her leave and take

half his financial empire so bad news bears is what's happening here. I don't know about that right and now I will remind you of the beginning of this tale where uh april was found dead from multiple gunshot wounds okay in her home and i also want to add a little note here that april they basically went back and listened to april's final radio broadcast um and i will just want to read the line to you. She says, and my bottom

line is, if nothing else, my legacy of leaving, you know, a really beautiful daughter and two grandchildren on this planet, I really hope to God that people, you know, hey, I could probably get a flyover at my funeral now. So basically, she's saying like, hey, I feel like I've done good in this world. And hopefully my life turned out. Yes. And hopefully I've done good in this world and hopefully... Happy with how my life turned out. Yes. And hopefully I've done enough to get a flyover at my funeral. And like, it's almost just like chilling because it's like ripe, you know. Yeah. It's an eerie thing to say with only hours away from it needing to maybe happen.

Like literally hours. Exactly. So people were like, oh shit, like something's up. And so this is just going to build on itself, basically. So within two days of April's murder, Dr. Kaufman hires a lawyer, but not just any lawyer. He hires this guy named Ed Jacobs, who Nancy or sorry, I almost said Nancy Disgrace. Oh, my God. Nancy Grace. Shit. Who Nancy Grace describes on 2020 as a big-time mob lawyer who actually defended bill

cosby on one of his rape accusations so like this is the guy that he hires this like big time it's just strange because his wife has just been killed and like you know i understand getting a lawyer you have the money but like he gets this like why this dude yeah it's a little shady um he's known for defending like mob guys and like intense criminal cases and then on may 14th april's funeral takes place uh her friends and daughter speak but dr kaufman doesn't say a word he just kind of you know attends silently and they do at this point obviously look into his al. And he does have one. He is seen walking into a convenience store on surveillance video, like literally the exact minute that April was killed. So he pretty much has a clear alibi. But he could have also paid someone else to do it if he's paying like this big shot lawyer also, you know?

Well, yeah. Well, yeah, that's an interesting thought. I guess it could happen. It was a twist. It was a little twist tie that you... Unraveled real quick. It did unravel very quickly. You can't fool me.

Nothing gets past M. Anonymous Schultz. It was M. Anonymous Buffet. What's wrong with you? I'm sorry. I forgot you guys got married on the beach at that beautiful ceremony. Me and Jimothy go way back. you don't have to know our entire history me and Jimothy okay um right so he has this alibi quote unquote and around this time Kim meets her stepdad at a restaurant to speak with him but basically all he says is I have a very good attorney and I have been advised not to speak with anyone, including you. So she leaves.

She's like, fuck this. And that's the last time they ever speak to each other. So the investigation into April's murder unfortunately stalls pretty quickly. It turns out, like it was later said, it wasn't necessarily sloppy investigating, but almost an omission of investigating, which to me personally sounds like sloppy investigating but almost an omission of investigating which to me personally sounds like sloppy investigating but okay uh an omission of investigating sounds like a fancy way of saying like we're not investigating it sounds like not investigating yeah right like i think it's just a fancy word um and so basically uh the prosecutor's office uh i don't know somehow omission of us investigating was involved with the

prosecutor's office and they prevented the case from moving forward and this really frustrates Kim because she's like trying to find out who the hell did this to her mother and she thinks she knows and so around this time Kim also decides she's going to contact her stepdad Dr. Kaufman because there's personal stuff

at April's house that belongs to her mother that she wants, like family heirlooms. And it turns out not only does she not hear back from him, but it turns out he is just selling all this shit. Really? He's like, I'm just selling all this shit and you don't get it. Yeah.

He's like, you don't get it. Her own daughter, she doesn't get it. He won't even give her the Disney coffee mugs she wanted that were like her family's. Yeah, exactly. It's like really fucked. It's not even give her the Disney coffee mugs she wanted that were like her family's. Yeah, exactly. It's like really fucked. It's not even just like, oh, really fancy stuff. He just won't give her anything that belongs. Is it just like in spite of her?

Or is it because like he was advised legally to do this? I have no clue, to be honest with you. I mean, it seems cruel, but fucking shitty. Yeah, it sounds cruel that you would literally be like, you don't even I'm going to put this up for sale this this uh snoopy mug or this pluto whatever mug and uh yes i know snoopy is not disney and neither is nancy disgrace by the way she's our friend nancy disgrace would be our fucking friend yeah exactly um so basically it's just really shady and like all her friends all of april central like what the fuck dude you're just selling off her crap like right after she dies

and you're not even letting her daughter go like take what is should be her properly mourn you know yes yeah exactly so it's really shady um so may 10th of 2013 they hold a vigil for april with all her friends and family in attendance except dr groaufman just doesn't show up um and then he this is when kim is like okay i realize why he's not giving me all of these like all of the things i'm asking for even just disney mugs etc uh it turns out he's auctioning all of this shit off so just shady so 15 months after april's murder dr kaufman gets married again to a new woman he then so this is kind of an iffy one because a lot of you know kim and a lot of april's friends are like very hurt by this and um devastated by this but also supporters of dr kaufman were like well you know he's moving on he's allowed to like start a new relationship and so you know i could see both ways um the way the story shakes out

i mean you can form your own opinion at the end but point being factually speaking he gets married 15 months after april's murder yes he also immediately after the marriage files to claim april's six hundred thousand dollar life insurance payout and so that's also kind of hurtful to april's family especially when he just sold all her shit um and kim consults attorneys at this point she's like well if the investigation is stalling then i'm going to file a wrongful death civil suit against kaufman which is basically the most intense civil suit you can file is a wrongful death suit. So she decides she's going to file a suit against Kaufman in January of 2014. And basically, if nothing else, this prevents from this prevents Dr. Kaufman from getting the money, the $600,000, because it like stops that from going forward while this

lawsuit is happening. So in March 2014, instead, the insurance company puts the payout in a trust until the suit is ultimately figured out. So that's just she is at least able to stall that more than half a million from going to her stepdad. And meanwhile, she's continuing to work with lawyers to attempt to investigate her mom's murder. And meanwhile, Dr. Kaufman is like literally posting photos on facebook of him and his new wife vacationing and like jet setting it's so gross i understand maybe you moved on but i don't it doesn't feel like that to me it doesn't i don't agree yeah it's just like you know he stopped even communicating with people like he just kind of well what's interesting is there's there it would be one thing if like sure if like you know

allison passed away god forbid knock on wood and all that if i were with someone you know married to someone in 15 years there better be a good fucking reason like i better but like it sounds the story that you're painting sounds like he spent about zero minutes grieving. So it doesn't sound there's no way he's moved on or ever had feelings or whatever. And I'm a big proponent also of like, you know, everyone grieves differently. I understand that. And like, you know what? People move on quickly if they want.

I get that. Yeah. Everyone grieves differently. But this seems cold. Yes, and also this is also a murder show, so I think we can all probably have a bias too against

the guy who immediately files the life insurance. Probably even our own viewpoints are skewed a little bit because this is now years later, so it's kind of like, you know, on the surface it looks shitty. I think in person maybe it would be less egregious if, like, if she had died and then, like, a couple years later he's, like, honeymooning with his new wife. It's less egregious, I think, if this were out of context.

But you're right, like, literally the way that the story even has unfolded so far, it's like, what the fuck is this guy doing it just feels like nothing according to what you what you've told and according to how i'm responding it doesn't sound like this man has really ever done anything in love so it sounds yeah he doesn't seem like a good you're right i mean we literally talked about how he's an abusive husband and father and like literally like doesn't can't even like have a genuine smile in a picture and shit so it just feels like it's hard to believe that he found love so quickly when it sounds like he's never loved before if that makes sense so beautiful indeed thank you i'll tell i'll tell jimothy to write a song about it so sorry you and jimothy can that joke is like literally so dead and over and i refuse and like bringing

the corpse back every single second i can i know i know it's over people are like that's not funny anymore and i'm like it's my fucking birthday month was it ever though oh sorry that was cruel um i think you're hilarious m just hey just don't go my advice is don't go on reddit directly after this episode airs yeah i gotta keep my high while i can keep my keep my don't let anyone bring you down my big fucking head as big as possible before it declines oh god okay so basically he's honeymooning around and like april meanwhile is trying to investigate who the hell murdered her mother mother and um so kim is fighting her stepdad's living the good life and unfortunately the case stalls like i said but in early 2017 a 2017, a new Atlantic County prosecutor named Damon Tyner was sworn in.

And so low context there. He was the first black prosecutor in the history of the county. And many saw him as kind of like the much needed savior at the time. They thought he was going to like revitalize, you know the the status of a lot of these cases and to that end he did demand that all 140 cold cases be re-examined he asked law enforcement to present uh the most solvable case uh which in my mind is who knows what that means i guess in the eyes of law enforcement as far as like the most solvable case and basically they all agree that april's case is the most solvable and so that is the

first one that they kind of dive into okay and he contacts kim uh and she is stunned it's been five years since her mom's murder and she's like i've been just waiting for someone to listen to me and i look into this yeah and like want to help and she's just like pulling all her weight here and finally someone is going to step in and help her so she's extremely grateful and literally within his first month um on duty tyner meets with kim and her lawyers and they decide to get started on this case and i also want to throw out there i i how do i say this i don't know much about this guy i will say i i researched him in the context of this week because obviously you know it's suddenly really relevant um you know he's the first black prosecutor in

the area um you know criminal cases etc but at the same time when i searched for him um there was definitely uh i guess some disagreeable thing like like he had a he had a checkered past no i just think the way that he's been kind of presenting what's going on as far as like you know saying like this isn't the way you should be protesting like looting is danger you know just a lot of things where i'm like well that's not quite gotcha the whole story sorry i got distracted so i was trying to oh jesus no i didn't even see that sorry oh you missed her literally ducking right here she started here and then she didn't exist here so oh well no i did not see that uh she's very sneaky but so his uh i guess then would it be safe to say that like he just has

kind of disagreeable views of what's going on or i guess and a disagreeable again is like maybe it's just me and my own opinions you know whatever but i think some controversial beliefs i suppose so yes he's not full uh yeah and again like i hesitate to say that because it's like you know again like it's obviously awesome that this this guy's the first black prosecutor and like that's huge and like obviously um but i also want to give a caveat that like there's definitely been some controversy. And I will say, too, there was a I believe a death, a shooting death of a of a young black man in April or May in his under his jurisdiction. And that went pretty controversial. So I just want to point out, like, I'm not just saying like, oh, you know, this this guy's saving everybody. Like, I know that there's a lot behind his career.

But for what it's worth, you know, he's stepped up and told Kim like, hey, we're going to solve your mom's murder. In this case, he is doing some good things. Yes. What I was hoping to find is that I would Google him and he would be like this huge advocate for what's going on. And like, no. Sometimes Google disappoints. Yeah. Sometimes Twitter disappoints is what I'll tell you. Yikes. Shockingly. advocate for what's going on and like no i'm sure there's no points yeah sometimes twitter

disappoints is what i'll tell you shockingly but i will say too like uh you know i mean i'm sure there's so many politics behind what he does being elect you know being uh put in this position and i don't know so that's just what i'm saying is uh i was kind of like oh you know like well that's not as uh exciting as i thought i'd be able to like champion this person, you know, whatever. OK, point being to that end, he demands all these cold case to be open, asks which one is the most solvable. And they say April's murder is the most solvable. So he contacts April's daughter, Kim, and she's like, holy shit, finally, someone is looking into this, which is great. April's daughter, Kim, and she's like, holy shit, finally someone is looking into this,

which is great. So they meet and he's like, let's get these lawyers to unpack all of this evidence. So they take it takes them three hours for them to unpack all just like unpack all the evidence, like physically that they had at first. I thought unpack it like mentally. Yeah. Conversationally, but, no, like literally taking it out of boxes. So that's how much they had to go on. And they closed that case. Like it wasn't solvable. It wasn't closed. It was just like not paid attention to unsolved.

It was, it wasn't loved. It wasn't, it wasn't given the tender love and, you know, a little bit of sunshine, a little sprinkle of water that it deserved. Yeah. And so basically, Oh, I just kicked the camera.

Basically, they unpacked all this evidence. And I mean, just because, you know, just because the lawyers have evidence, it doesn't mean something's going to actually be taken by into consideration by law enforcement or, you know, whatever. or you know whatever like there are plenty of times where somebody takes on a case by themselves like a civilian and um or a lawyer and like no one's going to give them the time of day so nothing's going to happen right so they already have all this built up which is great and the most compelling piece of evidence they have is a four and a half hour video deposition of good old dr jim kaufman and this is basically four and a half hours straight of him getting grilled um and him answering questions on everything from his love of guns to the moment he first saw his wife's dead body. So it's just like this four and a half hour thing of just like we can sit here and

watch it and like see if there's anything we can take apart and like use against him. Excuse me. So they're watching this and like one of the investigators says at this point which i thought was really interesting he's like i like to just turn down the volume and watch the behavior watch the person talking yeah like the body language and so he's like and so that was telling in and of itself so he's watching this guy talk and um they listen to the whole thing and basically in the deposition dr kaufman is asked whether he ever served in a branch of the military. And he says, no, I never have.

And so. Which is weird because he's a vet. That's the first red flag, right? So they're like, well, did you tell Kim you were in the military for her college project? And he says, yes. And then they said, if you weren't in the military, where did you get those medals? Like he has these like all these if you weren't in the military where did you get those medals like he has these like all these medals that he got in the military and he says he fucking bought them with his fucking auction money maybe i guess so but like in other words he made up his entire

backstory of being a vet and like that's just extra shitty because april was like so outspoken about veterans rights and like that was a huge part of why she was so like enamored with him from the start. And like, again, like stolen valor is not good. It's identity fraud. It's theft. It's like a million things. Yeah. But also like morally, obviously really terrible.

But also just like the fact that, you know, his dead wife was just so like uh passionate about being you know about veterans rights and then he's like yeah i was stabbed by the vietcong and i saved all these guys you know uh memories also like the research that would have to go into the storytelling you would be expected to give in your lives for years well but that's why he had her destroy the tape because he was probably like i'm just gonna make this shit up and not and don't tell your mother because who knows what i told her and i'm just gonna make up another fan right to like make sure he didn't like mess up his uh his tail tail yeah but also that's so fucking shady too because it's like what even

is the point like what are you trying to accomplish if your stepdaughter says i want to interview you and you're like i made all this stuff up, what are you trying to accomplish? If your stepdaughter says, I want to interview you and you're like, I made all this stuff up. Like, why are you continuing this ridiculous lie? Right. For what? For attention in a college paper? It's just so strange to me that this was even.

But so obviously that's a huge red flag of like, what is wrong with this guy that he made up his entire backstory and history, yada, yada. Yeah, for sure. And he bought his own medals and then went off like oh i got the purple heart and it's like he literally purchased them on ebay or something um anyway so but he says all this and he's like but i also had nothing to do with april's death and they're like well now i believe you now we can tell you're very honest man um so they ask well who do you think did it and he says he has his own theory he believes april

was murdered by the pagans motorcycle gang no they were they were actually at the black lives matter movement uh the other day with everyone else first of all i've i've never heard pagans the only reason i make that joke is because like i've never heard you know pagans and people practicing witchcraft being mentioned more than in the last fucking week all for good reasons to god but uh well this one is definitely not a good so apparently this one there's like a motorcycle gang of witches who like kill no so there's so okay well i'll tell you about them so there's they're an outlaw motorcycle gang. They're called the Pagans. Oh!

And they. Are they Pagan? No, that's just like what they're called. Oh! I literally thought they were fucking witches on motorcycles. Oh, no, no, no. That would be great. Listen, if I got murdered by a fucking motorcycle gang of witches, let it happen.

That's fine. That sounds great. No, I wish it were that um lovely of a story but they're actually quite uh quite different violent and uh okay they're they're basically like the rivals of the hell's angels oh okay i am not familiar with that community at all i i hear pagans i think lovely witches that's all i know you were like yeah they were at the black lives matter room and i was like i can assure you they were not i see i retract my fucking statement okay i guess i can't assure you but as of the context of this story uh it's a

little bit i take it all back they give the pagans a very different name than the one i see yes it's just a it's just a name they pick that's probably has nothing to do with the actual you know practitioners got it practice yes um so i will say they're categorized by the atf as an outlaw motorcycle gang um it began in maryland in the 50s and it stretches up and on the east coast they are hell's angels rivals um they have many crimes associated with both um they have bad blood with each other and they have many crimes associated with them including um uh production and smuggling of multiple drugs weapons trafficking they have ties to organized crime in new york and philadelphia um and so essentially he's like oh no i think it was them they they killed april that somehow sounds more unrealistic than literal fucking

witches like right like here's a ridiculous wild group of motorcycles but i mean if you think about it they were they rode motorcycles and were like you know yeah they might they would have known about that community or that group of people yeah so he says they're like well why would she know why would they kill april and he says well april was friends with that some of them and introduced me to them and um later they researched this turns out that is bs although dr kaufman did have um relations that sounds i don't mean that to sound like an innuendo he like has a relationship with these people this motorcycle gang but april was not the one who like met them and introduced them like he tried

to make it sound like oh april introduced me to these like really bad criminals but like no he was the one who had the direct relationship with them not april gotcha just pointing that out so dr kaufman also like i said he admits a lot of his backstory was a lie but he does believe that april who introduced him and was friends with these this motorcycle gang, that's probably why she was killed. And so. The whole OK, this is like such a weird twist that I was I was trying to write out the best way to just like, you know, the sharp left turn. OK, the sharp turn. Yes, yes, yes, yes. They are witches.

Is that the turn? Maybe they're witches. They all start flying into the sky toward the moon. Oh, my goodness. Okay. Okay, so sharp left turn. Here we go. I'm just going to go for it, I guess. So throughout this time, investigators are still pursuing Kaufman, thinking he's the guy who who did this right every time they see him one of the investigators said every time he posts a picture with his new wife on vacation or like at you know courtside seats at a game or whatever he basically he's like i would print it out and put it on the computer as like fuel to be like we need to catch this guy he's just flaunting his new you know wealthy his wealthy lifestyle

on our faces like he got away with it exactly and so meanwhile dr kaufman is just like living the dream thinking everything's fine and dandy but unbeknownst to him remember he's an endocrinologist his medical practice is being investigated by the fbi completely separately from april's murder because it turns out dr kaufman was prescribing way more painkillers than a normal endocrinologist prescribes so they he came on the radar of the fbi and so now they're doing this like separate operation where they're looking into his whole medical practice but like it's totally unrelated at least at this time it's totally unrelated to april's murder so they all kind

of intertwine circles that become a venn diagram beautifully put yes thank you beautifully put um yes they're two oh shit why am i even doing this i was gonna say they're the two rhombuses that become a triangle yeah they're four angles that become a rhombus. I don't fucking know. Yes, exactly. So basically, they suspected that Dr. Kaufman may be operating a pill mill and drug trafficking in the Atlantic County area, servicing primarily the pagan motorcycle gang. So this is how this connection kind of happens. Okay. And so because of this, investigators get a warrant to go look at his records on june 13th of 2017 and again i want to be clear they get this warrant to go look at his practice for the pill mill not for april like this is completely separate got it

so they show up um to search his practice computers and phone and they're not there to arrest him for april's murder but for running this scam this pill mill and there's video footage from a body cam a police body cam in the episode of 2020 basically they show up and they're like hey we want to talk to you about and he comes out brandishing this nine millimeter hand millimeter handgun at law enforcement um and there's a 45 minute standoff and i like i just want to make a point quickly to um this like really hurt my heart because i was like watching this and reading about this and like just like this senseless and needless you know crime and brutality against black americans and then meanwhile this guy's like this white doctor literally branded like waving it around

at police and they wait over almost an hour for him to quote calm down and i'm like see this is just so this is exactly this is exactly i mean he's like throwing a gun around in their faces for 45 minutes and brianna was sleeping like lit literally thank. Thank you. And that's why, like, I keep seeing these fucking tweets saying, well, have you ever thought about, like, maybe if they followed the rules, they wouldn't be hurt by police. And it's like. She was sleeping. That's so fucking ignorant. Like, I can't even begin to even talk to a person about that. But point being, like, this just was really.

And that's part of the reason why I felt like I wish I had had time to do a new story. But I mean, I just want to point it out. So he has this gun. He's waving it around at the literal FBI. And they're just like, why don't you calm down, sir? And so he barricades himself in his office and a standoff ensues. He's screaming, I'm not going to jail for this and I'm going to kill myself, quote unquote. And at this point, they're like, oh oh he thinks we're here about april's murder at least that's what they're kind of realizing like he

doesn't even know why we're here he thinks we're here right to arrest him for his wife's murder and he's screaming like no i didn't i'm not i'm gonna kill myself before you take me in for this and yada yada right so they bring in a hostage negotiator um after about an hour of speaking with the hostage negotiator, Dr. Kaufman finally surrenders. He's taken into custody and he is deemed a flight risk. Wow. Okay. And he is denied bail as he's being held on weapons charges. So all they can basically hold him for now is weapons charges, waving a gun around at the police i guess so prosecutors are like okay while he's in jail we're going to take advantage of this time and build a case against him about april's death so he's here on an unrelated reason but since he's in jail now

we're going to start building this case um and they very fortunately um as they're trying to build this case and kind of figuring out how to move forward with it, an informant steps forward. So there's this guy. His name is Jeremy Glick, and he just so happens to be a former member of the Pagans motorcycle gang. Thank you for specifying. Yes. Motorcycle gang. Oh, my God.

I really hope the witches don't tweet at me like I made them mad. I'm so afraid. Well, I said it before explaining what it was that was my bad um maybe i should call them like the pig on motorcycle the pagans no i don't want them to be mad at me either because they might come at me with their motorcycles yeah let's just uh just just uh just define them as one of the other i'm just gonna read the words and then hopefully they can yell at like nancy disgrace and not me think of all the okay all of the groups of people we have talked about in this episode that we have we are asking to please not anger and you know what the number of them with weapons is astounding astounding number of people we've probably like somehow inadvertently angered who also have an enormous amount of weapons.

And when you throw in the weapons of like technology information. Yes. And mystical practices and like anything. That's the worst. They're all things I can't control. No, no. Thank God my address on the Internet is like some random person's address. Honest to God. Right. thank god my address on the internet is like some random person's address honest to god right

this guy glick um he happens to be a former member of the pagan motorcycle gang um he says he has dirt on dr kaufman he says first off he heard dr kaufman inquiring about having his wife killed back in 2012 um presumably seeking a hitman hit person hit person person yes but there's more he also has info on dr kaufman's involvement with the illicit selling of opioids so now they're like great so we can get both double whammy double whammy here two birds one stone two birds one parrots one witch two parrots one very very large nine millimeter gun one large weapon um so it turns out that in 2007 so five years before april's murder dr kaufman had started leading this double life he was treating patients by day and writing fraudulent opioid prescriptions for the

pagans by night the pagans gang not pagan people okay uh which they would then sell on the street for a marked up price specifically uh he worked with this guy ferdinand agello who was the local chapter president so like kind of the head of the local chapter of this motorcycle gang essentially he would provide these fake prescriptions through this guy ferdinand or a gallo who would then um you know facilitate the selling of these on the streets and so he was making bank off this and so now police have this information and they're like okay finally this is like the break we needed we can piece the pieces together um and so they figure out that in 2011, April had basically found out about her husband's pill scheme and that Dr. Kaufman had also,

her husband had also completely lied about his military valor and credentials. So when she talked to Kim and her friends about leaving him, it was at this point that she had kind of gotten leverage finally to use against him. And she's like, like i'm gonna get my way out of this finally like i know how to get out of it right and it was because she finally had this dirt on him right but dr kaufman surprise prize was like oh nope not gonna have any of that so instead he approaches that guy al ghello who he's been working with on the opioid thing and um he says he needs a favor he needs to find a hit person to kill his wife so in early 2012 they find a pagan associate named francis mulholland who is willing to pull the trigger in exchange for twenty thousand dollars

and in like a weird ironic sad twist. Francis Mulholland would later. Be found dead. Having overdosed on the opioid pills. That Dr. Kaufman had sold him. So. Karma is a bitch. Circle of sadness. The drug circle.

Drug ring. Drug ring? It's a circle of the drug ring. Opioid ring. It's an opioid rhombus take me out i don't know bye um i don't know any more of the words that are coming out of my mouth i'm sorry that's all yeah yeah so in september 2017 um he pleads guilty to all charges uh and kaufman's attorneys move to have all charges dismissed. So in December of that year, motion to dismiss is denied. In January of 2018, so a couple months later, Dr. James Kauffman and Ferdinand Aguero, in addition to racketeering

and other offenses, are charged with first degree murder in the death of April Kaufman. And six other people like in the Pagans gang or associated with them are charged with racketeering and fraud, among other drug related offenses. And prosecutors believe Agueroero had threatened Kaufman's life and the pagans and Kaufman are therefore kept in separate prisons because they're like, well, this guy's going to be like murdered by his own motorcycle gang, basically, or the people he's associated with. So they try to keep everyone separate while awaiting trial.

However, on January 25th of 2018 at 9. 20 a.m dr james kaufman is discovered dead in his jail cell the death is ruled a suicide he has hanged himself with a torn piece of his bed sheets and uh you know not to be one who doesn't have the last word he leaves behind a six-page suicide note and the note reads i'm just gonna read a little segment i cannot live like this i no matter what anybody says did not do anything to my wife and that's probably the most coherent part because when he goes on and on he quotes latin he's like ranting in latin including phrases that apparently roman gladiators would say to the emperor before they fought in the Colosseum. Cornelia Puella as Agricola. And Aspectura as un nomine, or un Puella nomine Cornelia.

I don't know. You're better at it than I am. Eche Romane, yeah. Eche Romane. His final words, however, are a bit surprising. He says, April came to me and said, would I like to go to a motorcycle rally to meet some of her friends? I was slightly shocked, to say the least, that they had the colors of pagans.

Basically, he's saying, I didn't kill April. She's the one who introduced me to these motorcycle people. They were her friends, not mine. And also, I'm a Roman gladiator, I guess. That's what I heard. And a poella nomine Cornelia. Well, sure. Also, Cornelia is there.

A thousand percent. She always is. The statement was, again, extensively investigated. And the accusation that April had a relationship with the pagans before he ever did was totally unfounded. Like, she didn't apparently have any relationship with them. She had just found out that he was selling them drugs. And that's the extent of her involvement. Got it. he was selling them drugs and that's the extent of her involvement so now this francis mulholland

had overdosed and the quote-unquote client of the hitman james kaufman had died by suicide so the atlantic city prosecutor uh goes after the person who investigators believe put the two together which is ferdinand agelo the head guy who had kind of facilitated finding the hitman. And so this is the case presented by the prosecution. They say Kaufman informs Augello of April's knowledge of their drug operation and that she wants a divorce. And they look for a hitman to take care of it so that she doesn't reveal their whole drug rhombus scheme to everybody. A thousand percent. she doesn't reveal their whole drug rhombus scheme to everybody.

A thousand percent. After a year of reaching out to various pagans and associates, they find Francis Mulholland, who finally agrees to do the job for $20,000. And they find 300 calls within one year between a burner phone that the doctor used and Aguillo, the head of the gang, which

abruptly conveniently stopped the day before April's murder. So take that for what you will day of the murder agello drops off mulholland in front of the kaufman home and he enters through the doors that dr kaufman had deliberately left unlocked for the hitman to enter and then later agello picks mulholland up after the deed is done at a nearby park and helps him dispose of the gun now all of this to be clear was done in an effort to maintain the the lucrative pill mill operation and and keep it secret sure um

so that she wouldn't blab about on it sorry she had she was in the wrong place at the wrong time and learned the wrong information and married to the wrong man correct and married to the wrong man yeah um exactly then on october 2nd 2018 the jury returns a guilty verdict on the following six counts first degree racketeering first degree leader of narcotics network uh second degree possession with an intent to distribute first degree murder and the death of april christine kaufman first degree conspiracy to commit murder and the death of april christine kaufman first degree conspiracy to commit murder and the death of april christine kaufman so all six were found guilty as charged um and then in early december of 2018 fernando aquello who was 62 at the time was sentenced to life in prison and he will not be able to apply for parole until december of 27 2073 sorry when he is 117 years old okay so bye bye um the insurance payout

it's the professional sentiment um the insurance payout was amicably settled this is interesting between kim april's daughter and dr kaufman's widow so the new wife and kim were able to like have like you know as friend or not as friends but like friendly between the two of them become acquaintances yeah and settle insurance without needing like to go to court or anything like that so that's at least a good sign um and so remember how jim had sold all of the belongings including like the disney mugs etc so there were these two friends of april's named lee darby and peg o'boyle who called themselves april's angels and they were so devastated by the fact that kim wasn't getting any of her mom's belongings that they basically swooped in and started making calls and raised money to get all of the belongings back that uh

he had sold that had belonged to april and that they were now um getting back to give to kim oh wow and the most like the wildest part is so that she had this like limoges porcelain collection and kim said when the things were returning to her the first item she touched she picked one of these little pieces of porcelain up and there was a hidden note inside it and she pulls it she's just like the most it's just wild she pulls out this note and you can see it on the 2020 episode too like she reads this note it says to kimberly from mom whenever you look at this know you are always loved you're so special best wishes for the rest of your life a with a heart shut the fuck up that's some supernatural shit

we really full circled this whole place i know i know i know it's for realsies i watched her read that and it was just so like she was like still choking up reading it all these years later and she's like she's like i keep that little limoges porcelain on my nightstand um and she's like i just know that that was meant to you know that was just a message meant for me there's like no other explanation in my mind and so when asked how it felt to finally have someone held responsible for her mother's death kim replied i can finally breathe again and that is the story of april kaufman's murder wow i know it's really bananas this was intense and also the longest episode we've ever done was it it's like two and a half hours long frick are you serious yeah jesus 240 this is really long i didn't even realize i'm we're sorry. No, it's literally. Sorry, everybody. It's my fault because I let

my own paranoia get in the way and I always want to make sure that I do well-researched or in-depth stories and then I totally, for 45 minutes, don't shut up. It always ends up being long. But I think both of our

stories were super good today. Yeah, they were very intense I was like definitely on the edge of my seat with that whole anonymous thing just like left turns left and right well if you are any of the people we mentioned

from Anonymous to the Duggars to Fall Out Boy to Warped Tour to Jimmy Buffet to the witches to the pagans who are not witches if you're in a motorcycle gang or part of To Fall Out Boy, to Warped Tour, to Jimmy Buffet, to the witches, to the pagans who are not witches. If you're in a motorcycle gang or part of an opioid rambus, please. If you are Nancy Grace, Snoopy, any of the Disney characters, or a ghost at this point, considering the end of your story, please do not harm us. And we hope we did justice. I like how we include Nancy Grace in like a potential threat to our well-being. Or your evil twin, Nancy Disgrace.

Yes. Ugh. Anyway. Thank you. We hope we did them at least a little bit justice. Yeah. Thank you. And sorry this was so long, but, you know, hopefully you are in a cleaning mode today.

Yeah, we helped you mop your floor. You're welcome. Well, thank you guys i hope everyone is doing okay i hope everyone is staying safe and i also hope everyone is doing their part however they can um and i hope that uh this world gets on some sort of positive track soon so hopefully um you know don't let the movement die i don't want people thinking that after a week you know, don't let the movement die. I don't want people thinking that after a week, you know, you post a couple Instagram pics. Right.

You did your part. No, let's keep doing what we're doing. Sign petitions. We got to all hold each other accountable. Yes. That goes for us too. Especially the entitled privileged people. Yes.

You know, we should use our privilege for the right reasons. We include ourselves in that, to be clear. A thousand percent. No, we're going to keep doing our our part so please keep doing your part um and uh i guess that's it and let me say to you right now and that's why we drank Ha ha ha ha.