Behind the Bastards - An Update on our Old Pal Jeffrey Epstein

Episode Date: November 12, 2019

In Episode 95, Robert is joined by Dan O'Brien for an update on the Jeffrey Epstein saga. Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Alphabet Boys is a new podcast series that goes inside undercover investigations. In the first season, we're diving into an FBI investigation of the 2020 protests. It involves a cigar-smoking mystery man who drives a silver hearse. And inside his hearse look like a lot of guns. But are federal agents catching bad guys or creating them? He was just waiting for me to set the date, the time, and then for sure he was trying to get it to happen. Listen to Alphabet Boys on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. What if I told you that much of the forensic science you see on shows like CSI isn't based on actual science?

And the wrongly convicted pay a horrific price? Two death sentences in a life without parole. My youngest? I was incarcerated two days after her first birthday. Listen to CSI on trial on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. Welcome back to Behind the Bastards, the podcast where I'm Robert Evans and we talk about bad people. And I introduce the show poorly. This is an episode about Jeffrey Epstein. And my guest today is Daniel O'Brien.

Dan, how you doing, man? Hello, thrilled to be talking to you for a third episode about Jeffrey Epstein. Jeffstein, yeah, that's what I've decided we should call him. Really thought we sort of closed the book on this one the last time. Has there been any updates? Yeah, you know, Dan, it's been a busy year. Since we last talked, a lot has happened. You won an Emmy.

I went to Syria and our friend Jeffrey Epstein had some big things happen as well. Yeah, you have to offer a bunch of retractions for your last episodes because it turns out he was exonerated on all counts, right? Is that the news? Oh, no, Dan, slightly different than that. He either killed himself or was murdered in a prison cell after being arrested at an airport and charged with a whole bunch of crimes. Yikes. Yeah, not a great year for Epstein. Now, I would imagine you have an order in which you want to proceed with this episode and that me jumping in right now and asking you questions is disrupting that in some way.

No. I feel like I don't care. Right off the top, do you have strong opinions on suicide versus murder? I have strong opinions that the case for murder isn't nearly as strong as a lot of people think it is. I think there's a lot of people misunderstanding, in some cases deliberately, what has actually been revealed. That said, there's definitely some fishy-ass shit and it's not unreasonable to want an investigation into it. Got it. I'm leaning towards suicide, though.

And I suspect most of the listeners think he was murdered. So, those people, where are you on this? I haven't thought too much about it, to be completely honest. That seems healthy. Yeah, I'm sure a compelling case could be made for either side. It doesn't quite matter to me, I guess. Which probably sounds callous. I don't think you can be callous about a mass child rapist.

I kind of think you can do whatever you want when talking about Jeffrey Epstein, as long as you're not talking about how good an art collector he was or something. Like that. I mean, if not callous, because I have no respect for Jeffrey Epstein. I don't give a shit, but the fact that I clearly don't care one way or the other means... I'm implicitly saying, I don't care if someone can sneakily murder someone and get away with it. And that's not a good stance to have. That's not an ideal stance to have. I don't know.

You're probably aware of a lot of the things that have recently come out. I think the most recent big story about Epstein has actually been a couple in the last week. The most recent is a Project Veritas video from your old alumni, James O'Keefe. Did you ever run into him at Rutgers, by the way? No, I did not. Okay, that's good. That's probably good for everybody. He seems insufferable. Yes. So he put out a video of ABC News anchor Amy Robach.

And in the video, she claims that the network quashed an interview she conducted with a source about Jeffrey Epstein's child prostitution business that involved Prince Andrew and kind of suggested that ABC had pulled the story due to threats from Buckingham Palace and a number of other powerful people. And so this has been pretty prominent on the internet. I think the way that most people have framed it is like, oh, James O'Keefe actually got a scoop. This is a clear example of ABC News killing a story to protect Jeffrey Epstein and the powerful people that he provided prostitutes for. And I'm not going to say that's 100% not what's happening, but I really don't think that's what's happening. So I should start by, I'm actually going to quote an NPR article here that kind of gives the response from ABC. So we'll start with that.

ABC News executives say their journalists were simply not able to corroborate the details of their reporting sufficiently for broadcast. We would never run away from that. Chris Vlasdo, head of investigations for ABC News, tells NPR. The network has filed approximately two dozen digital and broadcast stories on Epstein since early 2015 when ABC started talking to the accuser, Virginia Roberts, Jewfree. So there's a good point there, which is that if you're trying to say ABC was unwilling to talk about Epstein, that's really hard to support because they've actually done a lot of coverage of this case. And the idea that like, okay, well, we weren't able to back in 2015 when this video was, or sorry, 2019 is her talking about this. But I think she was frustrated that like they hadn't gotten the story out earlier and broken the story. But there's legal concerns when you're reporting something like this and you're alleging that like a prince is part of a child sex ring and like a bunch of very prominent, very wealthy people have been committing horrible crimes. And like your legal department is going to look over something like this in addition to your editorial department and be like, okay, either we have enough backup for this story to move forward or we don't think we can safely drop this yet because we don't have enough evidence to support it.

Right. I mean, it sounds like another case where idiots on the internet saw how professional adult does a thing, kind of simplified and misunderstood it and then applied it to something else. So like, we can see, oh, NBC actively covered up this Ronan Farrell's reporting on Harvey Weinstein, which they did. And then the idiots of the internet, the idiots of the world, the James O'Keefe's and whatnot, the trolls and stuff, they'll look at something that seems like it shares some of the DNA because they're like, hey, big news network, something, something, something, scandal, something, something, something. They knew part of it and they didn't tell us these things are the same thing, which is not the case. Yeah, yeah. And it's like, on the video, Roboc says, I tried for three years to get it out to no avail and now these new revelations and I freaking had all of it. I'm so pissed right now. Like, every day I get one more pissed because I'm just like, oh my God, what we had, it was what we had was unreal. But when the video leaked, she made a public statement. As the Epstein story continued to unfold last summer, I was caught in a private moment of frustration. I was upset that an important interview I had conducted with Virginia Roberts didn't air because we could not obtain sufficient corroborating evidence to meet ABC's editorial standards about her allegations.

The interview itself, while I was disappointed it didn't air, didn't meet our standards. In the years since, no one ever told me or the team to stop reporting on Jeffrey Epstein and we have continued to aggressively pursue this important story, which they did. Again, the network launched a two hour documentary. They've covered this a lot. It's one of those things. I'm certainly open to the possibility that with his connections and power, Epstein had an in at ABC that tried to quash the story at some point. That's certainly not impossible. But I'm not seeing evidence of that. I'm seeing evidence of it's hard to go after billionaires and princes and royalty and politicians when they commit crimes if you only have one source. Because you can get your ass sued for that stuff. I think people are blowing this out of proportion. I think you're right to connect it to what happened with Ronan Farrow.

Because that is a case of where he came in with this big story and they tried to quash it for very sinister reasons. I think O'Keefe was pretty smart to launch this fairly shortly after Ronan Farrow's book came out. Because I do think those two things have been connected in a lot of people's heads. Let's talk about Epstein's suicide slash murder. Yeah, this will be fun talk. He's just sitting with my buddy Dan talking about a murdered or suicided multimillionaire financier prostitute child pimp. Oh, I guess I should try to get ahead of this because it sounds like we're going to cover some pretty dark stuff if people are easily triggered by a talk of child molestation and or suicide. I also just knowing myself, I will probably make suicide jokes. I don't think suicide is funny or a laughing matter and should always be taken seriously. But because of the way my brain is wired, it just might happen. I'm just putting the warning out there.

Yeah, I had to physically fight myself to stop from just quoting the lines from the MASH theme song as a response to you. Which I didn't do and I'm proud of myself, but I might later. There's a number of things that people find really fishy about the Epstein suicide. Probably like one of the chief things is the fact that he was taken off of Suicide Watch, which seems really damning. Like why would you take this guy off of Suicide Watch? He seems like a clear case of the kind of person you would be worried would commit suicide. And in fact, a number of like corrections like people who have like worked in prisons and stuff. Like they have come out and said that like this was a dumb call to remove him from Suicide Watch.

Cameron Lindsay, a former warden who worked at three federal facilities, told NBC, for them to pull him off Suicide Watch is shocking. For someone this high profile with these allegations and this many victims who has had a suicide attempt in the last few weeks, you can take absolutely no chances. And I think this seems conspiratorial to people who don't really know how the justice system worked. And I kind of think this is just a situation of where Epstein was treated like a normal prisoner. He was not removed just out of like laziness. Like he had a face to face meeting with a doctor who determined that the Suicide Watch was not warranted anymore and removed him from it. And you know, basically he convinced a doctor that he wasn't a risk after his suicide attempt.

And you can say that that shouldn't have happened or that like it was a bad go, certainly a bad call. Like it was obviously a bad call. But this sort of thing is incredibly common. We actually don't know how many people die in of suicide in prisons right now. We only have data up to 2014. That feels like something we should get a better system to handle. Doesn't it? Yeah, we only have data up to 2014 because in 2014 suicide in jails and prisons in America hit a 15 year high and became the leading cause of death in jails. And after that, the Department of Justice stopped providing us with information about suicides in our jails for some reason,

which is that might be more of the conspiracy in my head that they're hiding this information. Yeah, suicide accounts for roughly a third of all deaths in jails and in 30% of all deaths in state prisons. It actually jumped 30% from 2013 to 2014 in state prisons. Sorry, it's 7% of deaths in prisons. It jumped 30% over the course of 2013 and 14. And we don't know how high it is now, obviously. But it had a 30% leap over the course of a year in 2013 and 14, which is huge. The AP and the University of Maryland's Capital News Service recently conducted an investigation where they found hundreds of lawsuits against local jails,

talking about suicides against local jails because inmates had committed suicide. And that's just in Maryland. The Marshall Project used public records laws to find suicide data from the Bureau of Prisons, which show arise since 2015. But again, they had to use like FOIA requests and stuff to get that data. Nobody's like publishing it normally. It's a huge systemic problem. And it might be like the single largest problem with American prisons. I found a really good quote from David Fathi, who is the director of the National Prison Project at the ACLU. In most prisons and jails I've seen, and there are exceptions, suicide prevention is a joke.

We have seen people able to attempt suicide while supposedly on constant suicide watch. We've seen people taken off suicide watch because staff thought they were okay and then killed themselves that same day. We've seen officers who were supposed to be watching someone on suicide watch actually sleeping. So this shit happens a lot. And it can't really be overstated just how big of a problem this is. I know that's just what you've been doing, but just only because I've been researching this for a future upcoming thing at work is that as mental health treatment facilities close down, more and more people in need of mental health end up in jails. And I know in a few cases the county jail is the largest single provider of mental health services.

Which is not great. Yeah, and I think one area people get when they see this removal from suicide watch for epsony is something sinister. It's sinister in like a conspiratorial way. I think what actually is happening here is that for the first time in his life this guy got treated like everybody else. And that's what happens to everybody else. It happens to a shitload of people in prisons and jails. They kill themselves and you can look at it as the deep state wanted him dead and so they had him removed from suicide watch and told him that it was either this or someone would murder him and then he did it. Or you can look at it like, oh, he did the thing that like 30% of people in his situation do or something like that.

A large chunk of people. Now one thing that is legitimately sketchy is that both of the cameras outside the jail cell where Epstein died were broken. Which is sketchy as hell. I'll give everybody who's on the murder side that. That shit's super fishy. It's another one where again I don't have all the information. Immediately at its base value it sounds sketchy but I've never done the research to know just how well maintained security cameras are. Exactly. And again, it's not like there's data on this because the Bureau of Prisons doesn't give people data on fucking anything. So maybe something's there, maybe not.

I don't know. We are now moving on to the part of the episode where I have an actual little essay written. Because Dan, did you run into a story at the end of last month where a forensic investigator who observed the Epstein autopsy said that it was consistent with homicide? Yeah. Yeah, did you look into that at all? Of course not. Okay, good. Good, good, good, good, good. Yeah, so that happened last month and a lot of people shared it on Twitter, including myself. And we're like, oh, this is okay. I guess maybe he was murdered. Like now we've got some fucking hard evidence. And then a couple of my fans were like, you should look into the guy who actually declared it a homicide, the specific investigator.

And I did. And he's quite the dude. Dan, you're gonna like this. You're gonna hate this actually, but. Oh, bad. I'm gonna read this to you anyway. So national reviews coverage, their headline was forensic investigator Jeffrey Epstein's autopsy more consistent with homicide. Fox News wrote, Jeffrey Epstein's autopsy more consistent with homicidal strangulation than suicide, Dr. Michael Baden reveals. Now, even the New York Times' coverage seemed to point towards a pretty damning revelation. They said, Epstein's autopsy points to homicide, pathologist hired by brother claims. Now, as that hired by brother part might suggest, this guy is not a totally independent analyst.

Yeah, because the Epstein family is very much taking the line that he was murdered. So I looked into this guy, Dr. Michael Baden, and he spent the last like week or so doing a pretty brisk business in media appearances. He was on Fox and Friends like right after this. And he claimed that Epstein's injuries, particularly the broken hyoid bone in his neck are in his words, extremely unusual in suicidal hangings and could occur much more commonly in homicidal strangulation. Okay, I feel like the word could there is doing a whole lot of work. Yeah, the word could is doing a lot of lifting and more commonly is also holding some water. Now, he told Fox and Friends, which is where all great forensic investigators go to drop their research.

I wasn't sure if you were aware of that, but yeah, really popular. He told them he hadn't seen injuries like this in a suicide in 50 years of doing autopsies. And if you just look at this guy's credentials, Dr. Baden's credentials on paper, it does seem like he knows his shit. He also has a suicide notes that he was the chairman of the forensic pathology panel of the US Congress Select Committee on Assassinations. He helped to reinvestigate the deaths of JFK and Martin Luther King, Jr. He was asked by the Russian government to examine. Let me guess, you got homicide on those two also? Yeah, he shared it. Actually, suicide on JFK.

Oh, wow. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I don't have more of a joke there, but I'm sure you can piece one together. He was asked by the Russian government to examine the remains of Zara Nicholas II and his family, which I feel like we know how that one went down. And he's conducted more than 20,000 autopsies and taught homicide courses for police, judges, lawyers, and doctors in most of the US and at least nine other countries. So that's a pretty good resume, I would say. Pretty solid resume. More autopsies than I have carried out. Certainly. Yeah, but I've only carried out three or four.

Yeah. Now, that's the overview of Dr. Baden's career that his website presents, but it leaves a couple of things out. So before we make any conclusions about this most recent wrinkle in the Epstein case, I want us to take a look at this guy's record. But before we do that, Dan, you know what it's time for? Is it time for goods, services? Yeah, goods, services, products. Time for an ad break. So don't think about Jeffrey Epstein hanging himself in a cell and instead think about capitalism.

During the summer of 2020, some Americans suspected that the FBI had secretly infiltrated the racial justice demonstrations. And you know what? They were right. I'm Trevor Aronson and I'm hosting a new podcast series, Alphabet Boys. The FBI sometimes you got to grab the little guy to go after the big guy. Each season will take you inside an undercover investigation. In the first season of Alphabet Boys, we're revealing how the FBI spied on protesters in Denver. At the center of this story is a raspy voiced, cigar-smoking man who drives a silver hearse. And inside his hearse was like a lot of goods.

He's a shark and not in the good and bad ass way. He's a nasty shark. He was just waiting for me to set the date, the time, and then for sure he was trying to get it to heaven. Listen to Alphabet Boys on the iHeart Radio App, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Lance Bass and you may know me from a little band called NSYNC. What you may not know is that when I was 23, I traveled to Moscow to train to become the youngest person to go to space. And when I was there, as you can imagine, I heard some pretty wild stories. But there was this one that really stuck with me. About a Soviet astronaut who found himself stuck in space with no country to bring him down.

It's 1991 and that man Sergei Krekalev is floating in orbit when he gets a message that down on Earth, his beloved country, the Soviet Union, is falling apart. And now he's left defending the Union's last outpost. This is the crazy story of the 313 days he spent in space, 313 days that changed the world. Listen to The Last Soviet on the iHeart Radio App, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. What if I told you that much of the forensic science you see on shows like CSI isn't based on actual science? The problem with forensic science in the criminal legal system today is that it's an awful lot of forensic and not an awful lot of science. And the wrongly convicted pay a horrific price.

Two death sentences and a life without parole. My youngest, I was incarcerated two days after her first birthday. I'm Molly Herman. Join me as we put forensic science on trial to discover what happens when a match isn't a match and when there's no science in CSI. How many people have to be wrongly convicted before they realize that this stuff's all bogus? It's all made up. Listen to CSI on trial on the iHeart Radio App, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. We're back. Oh man, those products. Can't wait to fucking put them in my mouth or whatever. Oh, you liked the products. I was a fan of the services.

Yeah. But that's the great thing about America is the freedom. Now, speaking of freedom or not speaking of freedom at all, let's talk about Dr. Michael Baden's career. All right. In 1979, while he was the chairman of that congressional committee on assassinations, he was also the chief medical examiner for New York City. Now, that's a really prestigious posting because New York is America's largest city. And I'm not sure if you're aware of this, but all of its citizens are very talented murderers. Yeah. And it's also, I don't know if you know this, but it never sleeps.

It does not. So there's always murder happening. Yeah. It is a murder factory. That's in fact what they call it on the streets I hear. Yeah. Taking the A train into the murder factory. I don't know if the A train goes into New York. I don't know if there's an A train. I don't know about the subway, Dan. Hey, it was a good joke and you were wise for making it. Thank you. Thank you for your approval. Now, Baden had been promoted to that very prestigious gig in August of 1978 after more than 10 years as the deputy chief medical examiner.

Mayor Ed Koch, who promoted him, told the New York Daily News that he had known Dr. Baden since 1966 and found him to be very capable and innovative. Now, Mayor Koch changed that tune less than a year later. According to New York Magazine, too many unforced errors added up, including a picked apart trial testimony in the Dr. X case leading to the acquittal of Mario Jaskolowicz in a spate of poison murders at Riverdale Hospital, a housing authority patrolman whose January 1979 murder went undetected for 12 hours, his body removed from the scene before proper death investigation, conflicting conclusions related to the chokehold death of a Brooklyn businessman at the hands of police, and off-the-cuff comments about the possibly sexual interrupting death of Governor Nelson Rockefeller. So he fucks up a bunch of really big cases. And more than anything, I think that got him fired.

It's the fact that he started a rumor about the death of the former governor. Like, there's this rumor that Nelson Rockefeller died fucking, which is a great way to be rumored to have died, if you have to be rumored to have died a certain way. But like, the origin of that rumor is just Dr. Baden. He was doing rounds at Lenox Hill Hospital and was just like, you know, the governor died having an orgasm. Is that a cool rumor? I understand that sex is pretty cool. But is that a cool death rumor? I don't think I'd like that.

How do you want to be rumored to have died? Not fucking, I guess. Because that seems like it's going to be traumatizing for the person I'm with and just a real mess to clean up, you know? And I don't want to leave this plane as a burden to many folks. I mean, I get there's the association of, oh, he died doing what he loved. But it'd be much cooler if they were like, yeah, he just finished fucking and then he just got hit by a bus. I guess, I mean, that's still a lot of men. If I had to be rumored to have died in a spectacular way, I would want it to be like skydiving and fighting.

Some sort of crypto zoological animal like Bigfoot. That would be, if a medical examiner was going to create a rumor about my death, I would want it to be something cooler than that, you know? Yeah, I think I'd probably just want something that was very out of character for me so that it would just confuse everyone around me. Just like in a big game hunting accident or, oh yeah, he died, he hit a dunk in the Warriors game and he just like fell off the rim weird. Like, Daniel can dunk? I mean, it sucks that he's dead, but he just dunked. He died doing what he loved, fist fighting rhinos in the Serengeti. Yeah. Yeah, he dropped three of them before they got him.

Right, or like, rumor is he was poisoned and then we were like, oh, that's interesting. I mean, some people might not like Daniel, but he's got poisoned enemies. That's very fascinating. Yeah, yeah, polonium. You want to go with like the government poisoning thing. Yeah, yeah, okay. So people were pissed to Dr. Baden for no discernible reason dropping a rumor that the governor had died fucking, which is a weird thing for a professional doctor to do. Yeah.

He was also in trouble because he had this really ugly habit of constantly losing crucial evidence, and I'm going to quote the New York Times here. In their talking about a case, the people versus Levine, the defendant was indicted for killing Miriam Winefield. Several important pieces of evidence were recovered. The deceased's fingernail clippings, her dress stayed with blood, a blue towel, a knife, and telephone cord, which apparently was used in the murder. All the items were lost, perhaps as distressing as the loss itself was Dr. Baden's attitude, which was characterized by the assistant as unknowing and uncaring about the significance of the loss. When the assistant came to Dr. Baden's office to discuss how to salvage the case in light of the lost evidence, he was not so politely told to leave. I mean, this is, again, I hate to keep beating this drum. That is superficially at face value, sketchy and weird and damning, if you don't know anything else. The reason I know this is just from, or the reason I adopted this attitude is because I work on the most. There's actually a lot more nuance to it than you'd think to show in the history of, not TV, it's HBO. We did an episode on coroners this year and that's how I know that it's very common for coroners to lose things or misplace important things or bungle things just because it's a position that's written into constitutions.

It's a very old position. Not a lot of people know too much about it. There are a lot of people who are unqualified just because it's an entire industry where there's not enough oversight and regulation because there's no one interested in doing that. So you hear these wild stories like a coroner who accidentally, not accidentally, he cremated this John Doe on purpose and then he realized from watching the news that the John Doe that he cremated was Michael Jordan's father and he was missing this high profile abduction case and the coroner just watching the news was like, oh no, I think I burned that guy. It makes you think he's a terrible coroner until you realize it's a very troubled industry right now. So maybe this guy is worse or being flippant, this fellow we're talking about now, or maybe he's just another symptom of this broken system. I think both of those things are true because number one, I think like he definitely he got fired. So whatever, however normal it is for these guys to lose evidence, he was doing it more than was normal and obviously had other issues like randomly talking about the governor's fuck death. But also the guy who replaced him was fired within a year or two also. So you're right, this is like, it does kind of seem like there aren't a lot of people who were great at this job, but he was not great at the job.

I do think that's fair to say because he got fired from it a year in for fucking up a bunch of stuff. Now, I should note Dr. Baden denies losing anything. He claims like in the specific case that I quoted that the decedent was brought in nude and that he went through hours of meetings about the lost evidence and that he wasn't flippant about it. I wasn't there. I was born. So I don't know what happened. I can tell you that district attorney Robert Morgenthau and city health commissioner Reynaldo Ferrer accused Baden of sloppy record keeping poor judgment and a lack of cooperation. Morgenthau called him cavalier and unproductive about lost evidence. So this is at least what the people who work with him say about him. Now, Mayor Koch demoted Baden back to deputy examiner in August of 1979. Baden sued the city for unlawful termination and was reinstated as chief medical examiner in 1980. But this didn't last long because the suit was brought up to another court and the verdict of the lawsuit was overturned and he was fired again. And as it stands right now in official legal terms, he was bad at being the city of New York's chief medical examiner. That is what the courts decided.

So that's that's that job. Now, Dr. Baden moved to Suffolk County next and he was made the chief deputy medical examiner there. He lasted less than a year at this job as well. In December of 1982, he was fired after an article in Wee Magazine quoted him giving advice on how to commit murder using undetectable poisons. I don't know. I love undetectable poisons and talking about them. And I sure it was a fun article. I can see why you wouldn't want a chief medical examiner giving murder advice. I can understand why that would frustrate people in the government. Yes, certainly. Yeah, I wouldn't. I wouldn't call that ideal behavior from a coroner. That said, I'm sure it was a fun article. Now, Baden denies having ever even given the interview. The reporter later admitted that he'd used Baden's words out of context, but I really don't know exactly what happened here. Again, I wasn't there. Suffolk County did offer to take him back, but Dr. Baden decided to move on. So he built a new career for himself this time as a celebrity medical pathologist, a coroner to the stars. He's a bad guy. Yeah, he's not a good guy. They're gonna know everything I said about nuance. He's bad. He's gonna go to hell. That's not really the job you pick if you're like a good dude, I think. Now, for the next several decades, up to the present day, whenever someone famous would die or get murdered, you could be pretty sure that Dr. Michael Baden was going to be there to take a six-figure

consulting fee for the defense or the prosecution in the court case that resulted. His first big case was the overdose death of John Belushi in 1985. A New York Times headline at the time makes it seem like this was about the easiest gig a pathologist could have. Pathologist cites heroin and death of Belushi, which not a real stretch. Now, the prosecution in that case was working to prove that Kathy Evelyn Smith should stand trial for murder since she'd been the one injecting Belushi with drugs. Testifying for the prosecution, Dr. Baden said that if not for the heroin, Belushi would not have died that night, and she did get in a shitload of trouble for that, which I don't know, I don't have a strong opinion on. On one hand, she definitely helped him do the thing that killed himself. On the other hand, if you read a lot about John Belushi, he was going to die that way. If someone was not injecting him with heroin, he was making horrible choices in that last couple of years, and it seems like everybody around him was pretty aware of what was going on. Really a sad story. Yeah, I don't feel qualified to wait into that kind of... And obviously, that one, you look at his role in that, there's nothing sketchy about that. They brought him in to rule on whether or not the fact that she was injecting with heroin was a factor in his death, and it was, and he ruled it seems accurately on that one.

And the Los Angeles medical examiner concurred with him here, so it's hard to view this as anything but an accurate assessment of the evidence. Now, over the next decade, Dr. Baden mostly stuck to safe cases, where there was little danger of his work doing anyone damage. He investigated the death of the czar and the murder of the Lindbergh baby. Interestingly enough, Dr. Baden claims the Lindbergh baby never had a fractured skull. He believes it was smothered. No other pathologists seem to agree with him, and fractured skull is still listed as the baby's cause of death. I don't know how the baby died, but he had a take on the Lindbergh baby. You're leaving a lot of blanks in your reporting there, Evans. I tried to dig up the Lindbergh baby's corpse. It turns out that that is hard to do and also considered ghoulish and horrible. So, I learned a lot of lessons working on this story. Yeah, and I'd like to apologize to the Lindbergh family.

Finally? Finally, yeah. There's a lot of things I actually should apologize to them for, but that's personal. Now, Dr. Michael Baden didn't really run into trouble in his new field until 1995. Now, that is the year. You might remember this. Orenfall James Simpson went on trial for murdering two human beings. Now, prosecutors contended that the attacks had happened very quickly, and the fact that he had killed his victims very quickly was necessary for the prosecution's timeline to be accurate. O.J. had to have been able to drive back to his home before 11 p.m. on June 12th, so it needed to have been a quick murder. So, it became part of the defense's job to show that the murder had taken a long time, because if the murder had taken a long time rather than being short, then the prosecution's timeline was fucked up and then it would be easier to get O.J. off.

You're trying to disrupt whatever case that the other side is making. So, the defense needed to be able to show that it had been a slow, drawn-out affair with a later time of death, which would have helped exonerate O.J. and make his side of things seem more credible. Just a nice casual reminder that in high-profile murder cases, both sides are going to be like, you know, it would be really helpful if these were the facts, and you've got professionals who are like, yeah, okay, then I'll make them. We'll do it. Oh, yeah, yeah. You'll pay me how many hundreds of thousands of dollars? Yeah, of course. Yeah, exactly. And that was his job. That was Dr. Baden's job in the O.J. Simpson case. The chief coroner of L.A., the guy who was not getting paid hundreds of thousands of dollars to weigh in, who was, you know, it was just his job to weigh in on murders, told jurors that he believed that a single attacker had murdered both victims very quickly after lying and weighed in the house. So O.J.'s defense needed to counter this conclusion by the L.A. coroner, and they went to Dr. Michael Baden for that. Baden slammed the L.A. coroner's office for performing a crappy autopsy and argued that Nicole Simpson had struggled and was not unconscious when her throat was slashed.

He claimed the wounds on her hands were defensive. He also argued that the cut on O.J.'s hand was not meaningful. And I'm going to quote from the Chicago Tribune now. In trying to minimize the cut's importance, Baden revealed to the jury for the first time Simpson's conflicting story about how he injured his hand. During an examination the week after the murders, Baden recalled that Simpson had said he'd cut himself in Los Angeles rushing to pack for a business trip to Chicago. He said he wasn't quite sure how he had cut himself and noticed he had been bleeding but didn't know how it came about, Baden testified. He recalled some blood after trying to retrieve his phone or some material from the Bronco. Now, since defense attorneys have previously argued that police must have planted Simpson's blood in his driveway in Foyer, Baden's revelation could help the prosecution. But Simpson told the doctor he cut the back of his left middle finger when he smashed a glass in his Chicago hotel room and anguished upon learning of his ex-wife's murder. He said he was at a sink or something and squeezed or broke or banged a glass along a sink top and somehow cut the back of his finger, Baden said.

Prosecutor Brian Kellberg suggested that Simpson's account of how he got the cut doesn't hold up under scrutiny. How, in your opinion, can somebody get a cut on the back of their hand by slamming a glass down without having any cuts or injuries on the palm, Kellberg said. Baden countered that Simpson could have brushed the broken glass with the back of his hand. Then Kellberg displayed photographs of Simpson's Chicago hotel bathroom shortly after he checked out. No bloodstained the broken glass shards in the white sink or a white towel crumpled to one side. Do you see any evidence of blood in those photographs? Kellberg asked. No, I do not, Baden said. So that's interesting. He didn't do a great job.

He kind of fucked up for the defense and also like the reason I read that whole cross-examination case is it makes it really clear. It's his job to defend OJ. Right. Like when he gets hired on one of these cases, he's not giving his unvarious medical opinion. It's his job to help the defense and that's what he was like. He was arguing for the defense there. Yeah. Yeah, that's what this guy does.

So again, when this guy says Jeffrey Epstein was murdered and is hired by his brother, he was hired by Epstein's brother to say that Epstein was murdered. Like that's pretty clear. Now, in 2007, Dr. Baden wound up at the helm of another high-profile Hollywood murder case. This time, he was hired by the defense for record executive Phil Spector. Now, Spector was charged with shooting actress Lana Clarkson to death in his gigantic mansion, a crime he absolutely committed. He's still in prison for it and will be until he dies. Now, one of the most damning pieces of evidence supporting this was the fact that Spector's jacket for the night had Clarkson's blood on it.

Now, this made the defense's case, which was that she'd committed suicide with Spector's gun, seem less likely. Now, Dr. Baden slid in to explain this away. He argued that although he'd attended her autopsy four years prior, he'd recently concluded that her spinal cord had not in fact been severed by a bullet, making it possible for her to have spewed blood on Phil Spector after shooting herself in the face. During cross-examination, the prosecutor asked Dr. Baden if he had any conflicts of interest in this case that might impact his testimony. He said, none that I can think of. You want to guess as to whether or not he had conflicts of interest? I think he probably did, but I'd like you to confirm that for me.

Yeah, so he kind of did. His wife was one of Phil Spector's defense attorneys. Cool. That might be a conflict of interest. I'm not a law guy. Wait, his wife? Yeah, his wife. Dr. Baden's wife was Phil Spector's defense, one of his defense attorneys. I mean, what am I doing wrong? How come I can't get a wife? Have you tried different names? There's something for everyone out there, you know?

They have a pretty cute story. Oh, yeah? Yeah, we'll talk about it in a little bit, but I want to talk about your romantic issues. Have you tried Defending Phil Spector in court? Not in court, no. Okay, just socially. I know you're a big Spector fan. Yeah, I host a semi-regular dinner slash variety show in my salon where people come and perform. Their performance is the food that they bring for everyone. We all share everything. It's a very, very chilled group.

For the tenth time in a row, I comprehensively defend Phil Spector. I think I'm just doing it for the love of the sport at this point because no one's challenging me. I've mostly convinced the group. Well, thank you for your service. Yeah, of course. That's a really noble endeavor. I can think of no one who's been railroaded by the justice system more than Phil Spector. And it's just a nice night. There are no phones. We put our phones in a bucket and just celebrate ourselves and our talents and the truth.

Yeah, I have a similar regular get-together, but to argue that Michael Jackson was murdered. And yeah, it's nice to get together with friends and talk about celebrities and crime. I don't know where this bit's supposed to go. You know where this bit's going to go, Dan, actually. Where? Right into products and services. Oh, sick. I love products. Products? And maybe a service or two.

That's a good guy. Each season will take you inside an undercover investigation. In the first season of Alphabet Boys, we're revealing how the FBI spied on protesters in Denver. At the center of this story is a raspy-voiced, cigar-smoking man who drives a silver hearse. And inside his hearse was like a lot of guns. He's a shark. And on the gun badass way. He's a nasty shark. He was just waiting for me to set the date, the time, and then for sure he was trying to get it to happen.

Listen to Alphabet Boys on the iHeart Radio App, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Lance Bass, and you may know me from a little band called NSYNC. What you may not know is that when I was 23, I traveled to Moscow to train to become the youngest person to go to space. And when I was there, as you can imagine, I heard some pretty wild stories. But there was this one that really stuck with me about a Soviet astronaut who found himself stuck in space with no country to bring him down. It's 1991, and that man, Sergei Krekalev, is floating in orbit when he gets a message that down on Earth, his beloved country, the Soviet Union, is falling apart. And now he's left defending the Union's last outpost. This is the crazy story of the 313 days he spent in space.

313 days that changed the world. Listen to The Last Soviet on the iHeart Radio App, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. What if I told you that much of the forensic science you see on shows like CSI isn't based on actual science? The problem with forensic science in the criminal legal system today is that it's an awful lot of forensic and not an awful lot of science. And the wrongly convicted pay a horrific price. Two death sentences and a life without parole. My youngest, I was incarcerated two days after her first birthday. I'm Molly Herman. Join me as we put forensic science on trial to discover what happens when a match isn't a match and when there's no science in CSI.

How many people have to be wrongly convicted before they realize that this stuff's all bogus? It's all made up. Listen to CSI on trial on the iHeart Radio App, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. And we're back. We're back and we are talking about variety shows, Phil Spector, and actually we're talking about Dr. Baden. It's time to get back into that. So we just talked about his lovely wife who defended Phil Spector in court and his lack of conflict of interest as a result of that. Now, Dr. Baden has spent a lot of his career in a world where accuracy is less important than showmanship. He was the primary analyst for the HBO series Autopsy for all nine seasons of its run, and he was like an onscreen presence for that. He wrote two nonfiction books, Natural Death, Confessions of a Medical Examiner, and Dead Reckoning, The New Science of Catching Killers.

He also coauthored two fiction books with his wife, Remain Silent and Skeleton Justice. Love it. Love those titles. Now, these are interesting stories, Dan. Both books center around a dynamic duo. New York City Deputy Chief Medical Examiner, Jake Rosen, and Philomena Manny Manfrida, a beautiful, crusading attorney, according to Amazon. The two fall in love and solve murders. I love that.

Yeah, it's pretty great. I love that in his fantasy fiction, he gives himself the job he got fired from. Yeah, that's very, very sad and sweet. So, I'm going to read from the Amazon description of the book Skeleton Justice, which is just a great title. Jake's careful forensic examinations, Manny's courtroom tenaciousness, and an unusual clue suggesting that a high-ranking politician has risen from the grave, take the pair from the bowels of the morgue to the world of international intrigue, at the heart of the story is a tragic tale of corruption interlaced with cover-ups, conspiracies, death squads, and dictators who committed crimes that to this day go unpunished. So, there you go.

Yeah, I think a cool thing for listeners to do at home, if they, like me, didn't know what Michael Baden looked like and just decided to look for the first time now, this is the right time to do it. Yeah, he is, you definitely want to picture him fucking a crusading and beautiful attorney. Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. You know what he looks like, who is that fucking the warmonger guy that used to be part of Trump's cabinet, and then he got fired with a mustache? Bolton?

Yeah, Bolton. He looks like if Bolton, like, ate his sadness away for like nine months, this is how Bolton would look. There's a Wilfred Brimley quality to him. Yeah, he's Brimley-esque for sure. A meanness to him, but he certainly, my brain is doing a Mandela thing because he feels very at place in Trump's cabinet. Like, I'm not positive that he's not on the cabinet somewhere because he just has that look that they all have. He could be the secretary for health and human services. I'm looking at a picture of him right now pointing at a graph at a press conference,

and like, yeah, he does it the way a Trump guy would point at a graph. Like, it's weird to say that, but he's got the exact, yeah, he does look like that. Yeah, my God, what a fella. Now, in more recent years, Dr. Baden was hired by the family of Michael Brown to analyze his autopsy report and testify. His report concluded that there were no signs of a struggle and that Brown had been shot six times. Now, this is more or less consistent with the other reports on Brown's death, except for the fact that he stated with certainty that Brown had been shot exactly six times. A lot of Dr. Baden's colleagues critiqued him for this because it's actually really hard to tell in a case like that,

especially when someone's shot like right over concrete, how many times they were shot, because the bullets tend to pierce them and then ricochet back. So it often, someone will have six holes in them, but they'll only have been shot three times. So NBC talked to a pathologist who was very critical of Baden for stating confidently how many times Brown had been shot. He said Brown was way too confident for someone who hadn't seen x-rays, clothing, or lab reports, all of which can be important. It was also worrying that Brown had been embalmed because that would alter the color of the wounds, potentially throwing off Baden's analysis of entry and exit wounds in his count of six bullets. It could be that only three bullets made those wounds, the pathologist said.

So I quote that not because he was wrong overall, like Michael Brown wasn't struggling, he was murdered, obviously, but the fact that he's talking about exactly how many times the dude was shot when he can't have known that. And as this other pathologist noted, he didn't see the x-rays, the clothing, all of this context that's critical to actually making an accurate assessment of a case. He didn't know that. He just wanted to have a take because it was his job to have a take. So he gave a take without having the information he would actually need. And it's fun to have takes. Dolphins are girl sharks. See? Look at how much fun I'm having. Dolphins are in fact girl sharks. That is the official stance of this podcast, and I think it's fair to say the official stance of iHeartMedia. Hell yeah.

Yeah, I can dictate corporate policy, R.E. Dolphins, that's in my contract. Now, the fellow pathologists are generally pretty critical of Dr. Baden. One former classmate of the doctors who also worked as a medical examiner said this of him. He is very bright, but he has a propensity for giving out statements and testimony which are not entirely accurate. Dr. Lowell Levine, who is the co-director of the college. I mean, I don't think you need to compliment sandwich that. He seems very clever or whatever. He's a smart guy, but he lies all the time. Yeah, he's a good doctor, but his patients always die.

Yeah, he's a dangerously unfit with tremendous consequences, but his book, oh my God. Oh, the fucking in that book. I will tell you, if you want to come while reading someone else's fantasy fiction, that's the book. Yeah, Dr. Lowell Levine, who is co-director for pathology for the New York State Police, and alongside Dr. Baden and worked with him, said this. Michael never saw a camera he didn't like. He used to yell at me about the press. They're just trying to make a living. Why don't you help them? So he's a guy he likes being in front of cameras. He likes the attention. It's not just about the money. It's also about being a part of the story. Yeah, a trait shared by all of the most normal balanced people.

All of the healthiest people in the world. Yeah, exactly, exactly. So it shouldn't come as a shock that Dr. Michael Baden found his way into the employ of Jeffrey Epstein's brother. He did not conduct an autopsy on Epstein. He did observe the autopsy. And again, the bulk of his case that Epstein was murdered centers around the fact that Epstein's hyoid bone was fractured in three places. Baden calls this very unusual for suicide and more indicative of strangulation, homicidal strangulation. Interestingly, Baden has recently claimed that the doctor who performed the autopsy didn't sign off on Epstein's cause of death is suicide. Dr. Baden claims the call was made by the chief medical examiner for New York City, which is the person holding the same job he got fired from doing. Now, he insinuated on Fox and Friends that this was strange, but the reality seems to be that for a case this high profile,

it's not unusual for the chief medical examiner to want to make that final call and to not make that call just during the autopsy. Because again, like that other medical examiner stated, there's other shit outside of the autopsy that you look at to try to determine what happened. So it's not really weird that things would have proceeded this way. Rolling Stone interviewed Dr. Judy Melanik, a pathologist, and she pointed out that hyoid bone fractures happened in suicide too, and that depending on the placement of the rope, it would not be at all weird for this for have happened to Epstein. If the fractures are nowhere near the ligature furrow and if there are defensive injuries on the arms, then the case is more consistent with the homicide being covered up than a suicidal hanging. If there are no other injuries to the body and the hyoid and thyroid fractures correspond to the location of the furrow,

then it could realistically be a hanging suicide. So again, he doesn't really give you all of the context that a professional who's not making money and not just trying to get in front of a camera is going to give you. Rolling Stone also spoke with Dr. Priya Banerjee, who's another forensic pathologist. Her comments are interesting to me, particularly in light of the criticisms made against Dr. Baden after his work on the Brown murder. The reason we do full autopsies is to make sure that the outsides and the insides correlate and that everything makes sense. I always do an autopsy with a skeptical lens. In addition, any death in custody is scrutinized in fine detail to evaluate what led to the person's death. Now Banerjee agreed that the broken hyoid bone was worrisome and definitely worthy of further investigation, but she didn't go on TV and say that she thought Epstein's death was probably homicide because she's a responsible medical professional.

Sure. Doesn't really sound like she has a future in the field. No, she's not going to be making OJ Simpson money, that's for sure. Now, Dr. Samson, who's the chief medical examiner of New York who declared Epstein's death a suicide, continues to stand behind that conclusion. She pointed out no one finding can be taken in isolation and referred to the complete investigation conducted by her office as opposed to just the autopsy that Dr. Baden witnessed. So, that's the story of Dr. Baden. I'm not saying Epstein wasn't murdered. I'm not saying I know what happened. I'm saying that all of this shit that keeps coming out that people take as damning stories is more indicative of the media cycle around this and the need for there to be stories about it than it is about a smoking gun because there's just not one. It's like in a lot of cases, it's worth knowing the source of this statement.

It's important to have the context of, yes, he said this and there is a chance that Epstein was murdered, but look who you're listening to. Yeah, you're listening to the guy who was hired to say that. Yeah. Yeah. It's his job. Right. And that's our fun story today. Are you happy, Dan? Yeah, I'm always pretty happy. Happier than you were with the last Epstein episode?

Much happier than I was with the last Epstein episode and not just because it was wildly depressing last time and he's fucking dead now, but I have to digest so much news for work and a lot of it is either very breaking news about something that happened that week or news that has just stories that have been building for years and years and have hours of footage around them that I don't get to keep up with everything. I miss so many things and I like that I could just sit down with you and you could tell me the news that I missed. It's very, very helpful. Yeah, and now you know the rest of the story or slightly more of the story. Has this changed how you're leaning, RE, suicide or murder for Epstein?

I think I'm leaning suicide. I'm not going to take the stand on that or anything like that, but everything you've laid out makes a pretty compelling case for it. Yeah, I'm not going to take a strong stance either because the dude did have dirt on two presidents, including one sitting president and a royal family member and that's just the top of the list. There's a lot of people who wanted the son of a bitch dead, but I'm not seeing any evidence for that yet. I think people need to chill out and trust that we're just not going to get any good information about this for a while. It's just going to be shit like Dr. Baden trying to stay in the news. That said, I think you'll convince listeners like me who knew a little bit about this,

but not too much that there's not a conspiracy there, but I think the people who already believe this is a conspiracy and they're like, fuck it, Hillary Clinton killed Epstein with her hands. They're lost, man. You're not going to get them to shake that belief. We all know Hillary Clinton did 9-11, but I don't think she killed Jeffrey Epstein. I think we should all just stop living in this conspiratorial world and start trying to make sure that she faces justice for her 9-11ing. Yeah, it was so crazy when everyone was like, Hillary Clinton, Benghazi, which she did do Benghazi also.

Guys, there's a bigger fish. What are you doing? There's 9-11. We've all seen the pictures of her flying those planes into the towers and parachuting out. She did both of them. In fairness to her, an incredible pilot, like one of the greatest of her generation. It's a shame she used her powers for evil. Well, that's going to be all for us today on Behind the Bastards. Tweeted us with hashtag Hillary Clinton 9-11 justice. I'm sure that'll lead to some really fun mentions for both of us.

Dan, you got any pluggables to plug? Yeah, the season finale of the show that I write for will be on that week, and then we'll be off for a couple of months for a nice hiatus. So watch the season finale. A lot of people, a tremendous amount of people, work very hard to get every episode of this show on to your TV or phone. And so watch it because a lot of us lose sleep making it. Now, the show that you work for is last week tonight with Communities John Oliver. Yes, that's right. Did I not mention the name of the show?

You did not mention the name of the very popular and influential TV show that you write for and won an Emmy for writing for. I'm so fucking cool. Oh my God, that's punk rock. I got to ask, with the Emmy, do you wear it around your neck ever, like when you go to the gym? I found when we, like the night you win the Emmy, they just hand it to you and then you walk around with it because you don't go, like, the hotel is far from where the Emmys are.

So you just go to the parties carrying this Emmy. You're at the governor's ball in the HBO party in the last week's night party with an Emmy in your hand and strangers, some of whom are famous, will say congratulations to you. So I've just never left the house without it. I don't have it on my neck or anything like that, but as soon as I discovered that people say congratulations to you and you hold an Emmy and my brain was like, more of this, please.

I've just, I mean, it's filthy because I have not let go of it. But yeah, if you've seen me in the street with the Emmy, say congratulations to me, please. Oh yeah, no, I will, but I will not shake your filthy Emmy hand. No, no. No, no. Well, that's Dan. Give him congratulations on his Emmy and ask him how various famous people smell in case he's met them and sniff them.

Yeah. Yeah. Evan, he's talking about smells. You ever going to come out to New York? What? You ever going to come out to New York to visit? Yeah, you know, I think my, I might wind up there next year to do some work.

I'm hoping so. I love the, the apple that never is small. Yes. As people call it. So we'll, we'll have a, we'll have an Emmy party. Cool. And yeah, you can find this podcast on the internet at behindthebastards.com. You can find us on Twitter and Instagram at At Bastards Pod.

You can buy T-shirts at T-public. And, you know, if you want to steal an Emmy and mail it to me, then I too will be able to get compliments from strangers in the street. So, you know, I don't know who, who, who was easy to Rob that's won an Emmy. I don't know. Try Will Wheaton. Did he win an Emmy? I don't think so.

Well, Rob will Wheaton either way. Well, maybe don't do that. It should not be urging people to commit specific crimes on the podcast. Give Will Wheaton an Emmy and then take it from him so that it's technically not a crime. I should just. You know, I gotta tell you, man, from one writer to another, you are sticking to landing here. Thank you. Thank you.

We try to end every episode gracefully and with applause. So the show's done. Yeah. Good. Alphabet Boys is a new podcast series that goes inside undercover investigations. In the first season, we're diving into an FBI investigation of the 2020 protests. It involves a cigar-smoking mystery man who drives a silver hearse. And inside his hearse was like a lot of guns.

But are federal agents catching bad guys or creating them? He was just waiting for me to set the date, the time, and then for sure he was trying to get it to happen. Listen to Alphabet Boys on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. What if I told you that much of the forensic science you see on shows like CSI isn't based on actual science? And the wrongly convicted pay a horrific price? Two death sentences and a life without parole. My youngest? I was incarcerated two days after her first birthday.

Listen to CSI on trial on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts.