Behind the Bastards - Part One: Steven Seagal Is So Much Worse Than You'd Ever Imagine

Episode Date: October 16, 2018

Trust us, Steven Seagal is a world class monster. On episode 26, Robert is joined by the Internet's Seanbaby about Seagal's aikido, alleged human trafficking and unconscionable blues music. 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. Hey everybody, I'm Robert Evans and this is Once Again Behind the Bastards, the show where we tell you everything you don't know about the very worst people in all of history. And with me today in the special San Francisco City by the Bay episode of Behind the Bastards is Sean Riley, also known as Sean Baby. It's a pleasure to be here. I had to check up on your last name because I've only ever known you as Sean Baby. It is Riley, yeah. Sean Patrick Riley.

Gotcha. Because you know, my dad, it was his turn to name the kids and he really wanted an Irish name, so he said triple the Irish. Sean Riley is very Irish. Right. Adding a Patrick in there just makes it exceptionally so. It's too much. Well, we are talking about the opposite of an Irish person today. Stephen Segal.

We have cans of wine. Is that not normal? Not normal. Normally I'm sober other than the natural high a Doritos gives me. I'm going to be your first drunken Irish guest. Drunken Irish, yeah. We did a really drunk one at Unite the Right too, but anyway, we're just going to dive right in here to our story about Stephen Segal. I can't wait.

Now, if you all remember, Stephen Segal, kind of mediocre bordering on decent, sometimes action stars of such films as Under Siege on Deadly Ground. Yeah. What? On Deadly Ground is not so great. No, no, no, no. Under Siege is all right. We're talking Hard to Kill. Yeah, Hard to Kill.

Above the Law. Above the Law. Hard Target was a Jean-Claude Van Damme movie, which was better than all of these. Yeah. We should talk about Jean-Claude Van Damme for three hours. Well, the thing about Stephen Segal, I suspect a lot of people listening to this might be surprised that Stephen Segal has been picked as a subject for this, and I want to ensure everyone up front, he's a monster, and that's part of what's so important to talk about today. Honestly, you can kind of tell from his movies.

There seem to be made by a very insecure man. I don't know if you've watched a lot of his films, but he has never taken a shot. Stephen Segal movies are just him just walking through his enemies. Oh yeah, yeah. No, it's not like a Bruce Willis thing where he's going to get shot and choked and beat up and stuff. Right, right. No, it's just... I'm the toughest guy that's ever been.

Yeah. And even when he made The Glimmer Man and, like, Keenan Ivory Wayans had all these funny lines, he was like, you know what? I should have all these funny lines, too. And so, like, there's two funny men. There's no straight guy in that movie, except Stephen Segal, you know, has no comic timing, and he sort of sucks, but, like, again, walks through everybody, and you have a knife. Stephen Segal has nothing.

You're so dead. Like, 10 seconds into that fight, you're dead. Oh yeah, he's going to break your arms to the knife, goes back towards you, and then he's going to stab you with your own knife. That's the kind of action hero. John Club and him, he'd get stabbed, like, 75 times and make a heroic comeback. Like, that's a story. Yeah. Yeah, that's an arc.

There's no arcs in Stephen Segal movies. The arc is just Stephen Segal is a badass. There are people opposed to him, and then they're dead. Yes. Yeah. So, Stephen Frederick Segal, or, well, Stephen Frederick Segal is the original pronunciation of his name, so we'll get to that in a second, was born on April 10, 1952 on his personal website, StephenSegal.com, he describes his early life, thusly.

A son of a math teacher and a medical technician, Stephen's humble childhood was underscored by a fascination with the martial arts and the blues. Some would say that this is a strange combination, but ask any martial arts expert or blues legend, and they will both tell you that it is the spirit that reaches deep within your soul that drives the artistry. You know where I learned the blues? I learned it on an ancient mountain top. It's actually freaky how accurate that is to what he claims about his training in the blues. I like every stupid thing I make up.

You're like, oh, yeah, that's actually Stephen Segal's origin. No, you can't think this is dumber than it is, and then it gets really sinister. So, that's the Stephen Segal tale. So, according to the Guardian, Stephen began studying Akito when he was seven years old, and soon thereafter, quote, profess to his parents that he was not of this cosmic realm. I learned from karate class that I came from space. Yeah. It's possible this was because young Stephen Segal was actually the reincarnation of a 17th century Buddhist Lama.

But again, more on that later. Okay. Probably the best source I've been able to find on Segal's early life was a November 1990 article in People magazine written at the height of his popularity. The author actually got to interview his mom, Pat, and get some presumably accurate information about the star's early life. The article notes that while Segal claimed that, quote, a lot of my youth was spent in Brooklyn, his mom says that he was born in Lansing, Michigan, and lived near Detroit until the family moved to Fullerton, California, when he was five. Here's a quote from that article.

Although Segal likes to paint himself as an urban street kid whom the Fullerton youth saw as some kind of crazy gangster, Pat says her son was frail and suffered from asthma. He was a party kid back then, she says, but he really thrived after the move from Michigan. Good for him. Yeah, no, moving to Fullerton was great. It's a weird thing to lie about. Yeah, wanting people to think that you were a gangster at five? I wouldn't have bought it anyway, but when I asked his mom and his mom sells him out immediately,

he doesn't even say, like, mom, I told everyone I'd come from the karate streets, you gotta cover for me. She's like, I'm not doing that, sweetheart. If People magazine calls, I'm telling them the truth. You are fat and asthmatic, and you're not from space. You know that kid in elementary school who always has all these bold lies about his uncle, who was a Navy SEAL or whatever like that? Yeah. Steven Segal is that, but never growing up or learning anything.

Yeah, that's a great way to describe it. So Steven's mom says that he spent most of his youth playing rock music rather than the blues, but confirms that he was obsessed with Akito from an early age. So that does seem to be true. Well, it's a perfect sport for a seven-year-old. Some shade on Akito being thrown will not be the last. Definitely not. She says, quote, he worked with this nice old Japanese man at a dojo in Garden Grove.

He had heard Steven to go to Japan. We don't know when Steven first went to Japan because he is a habitual liar, but in sundry interviews he's claimed to have first gone there at various years from between 1963 to 1973. So somewhere in that period. Fullerton College enrollment records note that he was enrolled there from 1970 to 71, which suggests he would have been at least 19 before leaving. This is meaningful because one of Steven's claims to fame is that he studied under Morihei Uyashiba, the founder of Akito.

Since Mr. Uyashiba died in 1969, it's likely that Steven's lying about that too. It's ridiculous. Yes. It won't stop being that. So Siegel moved back to California in 1974 where he met Miyaku Fujitani, a second-degree black belt and daughter of an Akito master from Osaka, Japan. They met in LA at a dojo where she worked and Steven pursued her, quote, aggressively. I don't like the sound of that.

No, no. It will be creepy later at this point. He was really good looking in his youth. He is legitimately swole, handsome guy in his early 20s, and she was charmed by it. So he somehow lost all that by the time he made his first movie? Oh yeah. No, he went downhill from age 18 on. It has been a steady slide.

To be honest, I think he might have peaked at five. So Miyaku eventually went home to Osaka and Steven went with her. So he went back to Japan a second time. They got married there. According to Robert Strickland, a former CIA consultant who knew Siegel in Japan, Siegel claimed to have married Miyako and moved there in order to, quote, avoid the draft. Marrying a Japanese national would make him less likely to be sent back to the United States.

So he doesn't talk about that so much anymore. Sure. Now that he's Steven Siegel's lawman. But yeah, that's apparently why he moved to Japan in the first place, to avoid the draft. Okay. Yeah. To this day, Siegel claims that he was the first and at the time only white man to open a dojo in Japan. If true, that would be impressive.

Spy magazine is calling you on your bullshit. I bet that's some serious bullshit. I really like every article of spy I read because they had a great one about Paul Manafort. Like this one, they spent six months studying Steven Siegel and like talking to people who knew him as a kid and like really getting into his backstory. It's a fun journey into the youth of Steven Siegel. Yeah. Spy magazine.

Spy magazine, baby. Quote, in fact, the dojo which was founded by Fujitani's father and noted Akito Blackbelt was owned by his mother-in-law and managed by his wife, herself a Blackbelt. Siegel has also boasted of his courage in battling criminals. Sometimes they are thugs of the Yakuza, the Japanese mafia. Other times they are mere garden variety criminals. I jumped right in front of their faces, Siegel told Movie Line. Shit.

I was a tenacious motherfucker, man, and I was fearless. Miyako, his ex-wife, says Siegel was not exactly telling the truth about fighting the Yakuza. Aw, man. Quote, it is a lie. She once chased a few drunks away from the dojo but was never involved with the Yakuza. So, that's a shame. It could have been Yakuza. You don't know.

You don't know, man. It could have been drunk Yakuza. Another major Siegel claim to fame is that he was the first Westerner to receive a Blackbelt in Akito. His ex-wife doesn't challenge this exactly, but she did tell Spy, quote, the only reason Steven was awarded the Blackbelt was because the judge who was famous for his laziness fell asleep during Steven's presentation. Judge just gave him the Blackbelt. It's like, where am I?

Who is this guy? You know what? Here's a Blackbelt. Normally we only give these to nine-year-olds at the YMCA, but you seem like a good guy. Like, a Yakuza fighting good guy. This is a ridiculous story. It's a really ridiculous story. And, like, such dubious honors to lie about.

That was the first Blackbelt. I'm like, okay, dude. That is, Blackbelt is one of those phrases that's like a shortcut to me just cutting, closing my ears to somebody. I'm like, okay, you're bragging about being a Blackbelt. So tough. Yeah. Unless the question is, can you teach me Taekwondo?

In which case, absolutely drop your credentials. Why not? Yeah. So Steven spent a sizable chunk of the eight seventies teaching martial arts in Japan, and according to him, this is when he first attracted the attention of the CIA. Here's how Steven put it in a 1988 interview with the LA Times. These guys were my students. They saw my abilities, both with martial arts and with the language.

You can say that I became an advisor to several CIA agents in the field. Through my friends in the CIA, I met many powerful people and did special works and special favors. Special works, special favors. I had the largest kung fu trophy in all of Minnesota. Steven claims that during this, well, Lansing, Michigan. They're two. Steven claims that during this period, he did security work for Archbishop Desmond Tutu

of South Africa, the Shah of Iran, and Egyptian president Anwar Sadat. I'm going to guess none of those probably. Probably not true. Probably not true. I don't buy it. Anwar Sadat, I mean, clearly his security team wasn't great because he got assassinated, so maybe Segal was working that job. Maybe that was because they tried Akito.

They tried Akito against a sniper. That's not working. Oh, sorry, Anwar. That was unfair. For a time, it was hard to refute or confirm Steven's claims of badassery. His ex-wife, Miyako, did admit that he would regularly go away for long chunks of time during their 10 years together, saying, my children don't have any memory of him as a father.

Oh, my God. So he must be a ninja or something. The first thing to pierce the illusion of Steven Segal, actual action hero, turned movie action hero, was that wonderful 1993 spy article, Man of Dishonor, by John Connolly. Now, like I said, this article was the result of a six-month investigation, and it was the first place to point out that Steven Segal's last name was originally pronounced Segal, not Segal.

Are you going to guess how that came about? I'm going to say, definitely had to do with ninjas. He had to have been defending some kind of a dojo. No, this is actually the only believable story he's ever told. He apparently went to a Segal exhibit at a museum and liked the pronunciation. Never would have guessed that. I believe that's true. No one would lie about that.

No one would lie about that. So when Segal came back from Japan in 1980, he opened two dojos, one of them in Taos, New Mexico, and one of them in Los Angeles. Taos is an odd choice, kind of a small town, that opened an Akito dojo. Not familiar, but it must be a great Akito town. It's a beautiful town. I didn't notice any Akito going on there, so I think it failed to take on.

Miyako says that her then-husband told her that he wanted to go to the U.S. to either get rich in Hollywood or by running restaurants, which he doesn't seem to have ever done. She supported him in his dreams, though, and spent years saving up money and living like a pauper to fund his trip back in his attempts to start a business. So that's sweet. That is sweet. I'm going to guess he does right by her.

Let's read the next paragraph. Before he left her, he told her, quote, I will always do the right thing. I will never betray here. You. Then he took her savings, went to America, and married another woman, Adrienne LaRusa, in 1984. Shortly thereafter, he met another woman, actress Kelly Labrock. According to Joe Hymes, then Warner Bros. VP of publicity, Segal saw Labrock in the film Woman in Red and said,

She is my destiny. So Hymes and Segal wound up having dinner with Jerry Pam, his former agent, and during dinner, Segal asked Pam what the best way to get publicity was. Pam told him it was to be seen in the company of famous people. So Segal asked him if he could help him meet Kelly Labrock. Pam told Segal that Kelly was currently in Japan. So Steven Segal, who was still married to Miyako

and illegally married to a second woman, flew to his first wife's home country to try to pick up a third woman because she was famous. That's how all great love stories start. It's almost a work of art as far as being a shitty person. It's like the being a garbage husband version of the Mona Lisa. If you're in a writer's room and you're like, Okay, we got to have this piece of shit do some stuff

to let the viewers know he's a piece of shit. You'd be like, dude, pump the brakes on all this. This is way too much. And it is way too much. And yet that does seem to be what happened. So he did meet Kelly Labrock in Japan, and within two weeks, they were lovers. Within a year, she was pregnant.

By this time, Adrienne LaRusa had decided to file for an annulment, so that's good. Segal granted her an annulment. She didn't seek any financial support, and in an interview later stated that, in fact, quote, I gave him money for months afterward just to get him out of my life. I can't say very much because I'm afraid of Stephen and his friends.

We'll talk about who Stephen and his friends could be here, but yeah, yeah, it's dark. I'm so sad for this girl. To get left for Kelly Labrock, I mean, there's not a whole lot of shame in that. That's gotta be most women's fears in the 80s. In the 80s? Yeah. But like, did it still pay the guy money?

Yeah. And he's also got another wife. I feel so bad. I bet you didn't even get those karate trophies. No, no, no, I'm gonna guess not. Miyako divorced Segal right around this time. He and Labrock headed back to Hollywood in her Beverly Hills mansion.

Now, he wasn't a movie star at this point. He was just sort of living with a movie star as part of his quest to get famous. His taustojo failed in the late 1980s, and Steven arranged for a mercenary he knew to steal Labrock's Porsche Carrera for the insurance money. Mercenary he knew. He knows a lot of mercenaries.

In interviews at the time, Segal claimed to be actively searching for the monster who'd stolen his wife's car. It's pretty remarkable, right? He just keeps going. I went in this hating Steven Segal, now I'm like, okay, he's coming around. Now you're coming around.

He just wiped the stain of hard to kill out. Yeah. Money problems were common with pre-movies Steven Segal. Multiple sources who knew him for years alleged to spy that he seemed to have mysterious backers who would regularly help him out of his pickles and presumably helped him start his dojos in the first place. Two of his friends recalled a time

when he left for around a week and returned with a new car and, quote, a stack of $100 bills six inches high. Hmm. Yeah. Well, that is what he claimed. He got the money for pulling off a hit for the mob. A hit? Like he confessed to murder to spy magazine?

To his friends. No, his friends later told spy magazine, spoiler alert about Segal, none of his friends stay his friends. It seems that way. Maybe because he's his giant piece of shit. That might have an effect. Whether or not he actually carried out a hit for the mob,

Segal spent years telling lies like this in order to craft an aura of danger. Spy reported in 1993 that Segal packs a 45 in his belt, not just loaded, but cocked and chambered. Some might think this tough, others merely cretin' us since he's just as likely to shoot himself in the testicles as to drop an attacker.

Now, in fairness to Segal, cocked and chambered or cocked and locked is a common way to carry a single action colt 1911, which sounds like the gun he was carrying. In more fairness and in more accuracy, if you carry a cocked and loaded pistol of any kind in a belt without a holster, you are asking to get yourself shot in the crotch.

Yeah, absolutely. It's dumb. It's a dumb thing to do. I'm carrying one right now, and I mean, I've got shot in the dick four times today. Five times? You lose track after a few. You know, but you save a lot of money on birth control. That's a great point. Male birth control is here, and it is called

Dangerously Carrying a Loaded Handgun in Your Pants. So Stephen's supposed history as a badass was not invented out of whole cloth. Throughout his life, he's had numerous friendships with former CA operatives, mercenaries, and soldiers. Spy suggests that this is because he basically just steals these people's stories and relates them during interviews to seem like a badass.

Quote, On one occasion, one of Seagal's students, a former Green Beret, was talking about his time in Laos. Later, Seagal told the same story to another group, only now he had become the protagonist. Unfortunately, the Green Beret was in this group. Makito remembers the soldier saying, Hey, idiot, that's my story.

Oh, busted. And that man died. After three quick chops of Akito. Speaking of Akito, you know what flips and throws, hunger... This is a fucking Doritos plug. This is a Doritos plug.

But it actually is time for us to have a normal ad break. So imagine that I made a comment that tied Akito into whatever ads come up next. 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, from the podcast series, Alphabet Boys. As 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. 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 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? 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. I'm Lance Bass,

and you may know me from a little band called NSYNC. What you may not know is that in 1993, 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, said 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, Apple Podcast. We're back and we're talking about

Steven Segal. I'm going to read another quote from his website. It gets into how he describes the start of his film career. Most of us know Steven for his roles as an action hero with an acting career that was launched at his Los Angeles dojo in the late 80s,

where he taught martial arts to the likes of Sean Connery, James Coburn, and the famed talent agent Michael Obitz. Yeah, when they were sparring. Not too bad. It's a sign of clumsiness. You probably shouldn't break a student's wrist. Yeah.

At least he didn't shoot his dick off. He didn't shoot Sean Connery's dick off, which I'm sure a lot of people are grateful for. So that's an 8 out of 10 day for Steven Segal already. It's a better day than most. Quote, it was Mr. Obitz who paved the way for Steven to co-write and star in his first and hugely successful action film

Above the Law in 1988. It's a good movie. The story for how he came to be in it is a little bit more complicated than Steven Segal's website gives and involves a lot more of the mob. Of course it does. Would you have guessed before this

that Steven Segal's career was bankrolled at the start by the mafia? Yes, or the Yakuza. The Japanese mafia, whatever. No, the American mafia. No good has ever led to Steven Segal doing anything. No, I would say that's probably fair. We're talking above the law.

We're talking above the law. I'll take you to the bank. The blood bank. Wait, is that a real line from the movie? Fantastic. It is almost certainly true that Michael Obitz arranged for Segal to meet with a group of Warner Bros. executives to show off his Aikido skills.

He was apparently quite impressive. Warner Bros. President Terry Simmel recalled with just a toss of his hand, Steven would send the other guy flying. It was pretty astounding. After the Aikido demonstration, he ran a dojo in Los Angeles and basically agreed to be tossed around with the help of his friend.

He said later in an interview, I still can't believe those guys at Warner's didn't know it was a rehearsed demonstration. It shouldn't have fooled anybody. Segal could not toss me or anyone else in the air unless we were in on it. If I get in right here for a second, if you watch an Aikido demonstration,

it usually is one dude in the center of a crowd and they run at him one at a time and he'll do a little thing with their wrist and we've now had, you know, three decades of MMA in our country and many more in Brazil and Japan and no one has ever gone in there as an Aikido expert and said like,

this is me, I'm going to Aikido a guy and they come in and he flips them all around. It just simply doesn't work. There's no record of Aikido working on someone who doesn't want Aikido to work on it. Yeah, the way I've heard it described and you know, in case our listeners don't know who you are, you have a lot of experience

in this world. I wrote a few UFC games, you know, big fan of the sport, trained in Jiu-Jitsu and Muay Thai, you know, I like this stuff a lot, I think about this stuff a lot and like everyone else in 1993 when UFC first came, I kept expecting

some magic Tai Chi guy to come down out of the mountains or an Aikido guy to come out or a Jit Kundo guy to lock everybody's hands up and beat them with combos and it just, it never happens, like these traditional martial arts have sort of been proven bullshit. There are great ways to stay fit

and have fun with your friends. But that doesn't explain the size of Steven Seagal. No. I'm not even sure that's true. I think it's a good place to like leave a kid for an hour. Yeah, absolutely. Anyway, my point is stories of Aikido devastating Yakuza members,

it's unlikely. Yeah. And if you grab a guy by the wrist and he does a front flip, he probably didn't mind doing that front flip so much, he's helping you out. It was a consensual flip. Right. The pose to the non consensual flips, which I think are more useful in a fight. I'm not an expert. I would say so.

Okay, all this, you know, Steven Seagal's a big fraudulent sort of exhibition where he tossed around his friend, was enough to convince the WB executives to drop $50,000 on a screen test, which shows you what money means in Hollywood. The screen set test was apparently an absolute disaster.

Seagal had no charisma, talked like whispering ghosts. That sounds like him, yeah. Seagal, that's how you would describe him in a profile, dating profile. Whispering ghosts, I have no charisma, my head stores one triangle.

He does have a weird shape there. Ovid's appeared to really love Steven though because he continued to vouch for this kid that he just met. So Warner Brothers was like this kid's no good, we're not going to put him in a movie, we already wasted $50,000 on it. So Ovid's last job before starting to work with Seagal is he had done like the casting

of the lethal weapon, which obviously gigantic hit. So they wanted him back for lethal weapon too. Clearly he's good at casting and he agreed not to take a pay bump which you're guaranteed for a job like that a sizable paid bump. If you're working in the sequel, he agreed to work for what he'd gotten paid to make the first one

if they would give Steven Seagal a job. So Michael Ovid's really fucking believed in Steven Seagal. Or at least that's one possibility here. It's possible that Ovid's just saw something in Steven Seagal. It's also possible that Seagal's career was bankrolled

by the mafia from day one and that Ovid's was maybe bribed. I don't know, I've never heard any allegations that Ovid's was bribed. Maybe he just loved him but there are credible allegations that Steven Seagal started his career in the mafia. People do get like a sort of a cult like love for their martial arts instructor.

Like if you go in cold as an adult especially and like start taking like karate classes you'd be like oh my god, my karate instructor can levitate. You don't even know. With one finger he can knock you out. And like that's just sort of becomes normal for you. He's just staying at the strip mall because he's too enlightened to work somewhere better. Right, so this guy

might have just thought that Steven Seagal truly was magical. Then that is entirely possible. I'm glad you brought that up because I wouldn't have thought about that. We do know that in 1990 Steven Seagal formed Steamroller Entertainment with a guy named Julius Nassau. Now Nassau's main business was providing pharmaceuticals to merchant boats but he

broke into... Pharmaceuticals to merchant boats. He sold drugs to sailors. In 1984 though Julius got into filmmaking and he claimed to spy that he'd been introduced to Seagal via Tony Danza. Danza denied this. Danza knew who Nassau's

was and basically said he's no fucking friend of mine. Don't talk to me about that guy. So Seagal told people that Nassau and he were related although neither he or Nassau ever gave any detail as to how Steven's mother denied any relation between them. Whatever the truth Julius's uncle also named Julius Nassau

owned a concrete company in New York. In 1985 it was revealed that Nassau's concrete firm had participated in a bid rigging scheme with Anthony Salerno the original Fat Tony. That's where the name comes from on the Simpsons. Fat Tony Salerno. Several employees testified against him.

Nassau the Younger and Seagal were good friends for about a decade. Nassau was the best man at Seagal's second wedding. He was also the co-owner of Seagal's $560,000 Staten Island Home. It's worth noting that several other mob guys connected to the Gambino family wound up having roles in Seagal's early films. Quote from

that spy article. One of the technical advisors on the set of Under Siege was Robert Booth Nichols who has been identified in federal wire taps as associating with the Gambino crime family. A retired Navy captain named Joseph John who was a technical advisor in the same movie responsible for securing the use of the USS Missouri, described Seagal

and Nichols as asshole buddies. Which I think means butt buddies and not both assholes who are friends but I can't tell. Yeah, I've never heard the term. It doesn't mean they have sex with each other. It might. I don't know. I don't know this guy. You just have martinis and get all loud together. You're like, oh, asshole buddies.

So another performer in a Seagal film, Jerry Seary is the stepson of a mafia capo, Robert Zimbardi, who reportedly got Seagal to give his stepson a part in Out for Justice. Seagal hired Seary who has ambitions to be a movie star to play a bookmaker. In a key scene, Seagal beats up a number of bad guys in the bar,

the one varmint who never takes a punch is Seary. No way Seagal was going to take a swing at Bobby Zam's kid, Spy was told. That is suspicious. If you're a bad guy and Steven Seagal's scene and you didn't get punched in the face, you're in the mob. Even weirder than all this is the fact

that during a 1993 deposition for a civil assault case, which I could not find more detail about, but I don't think he was the one being charged but he was deposed in a civil assault case, Seagal under oath claimed not to know how much money he had, what he actually owned, or what he had for a movie. His attorney explained

that Seagal did not have an individual contract with Warner Brothers. Instead, Warner Brothers had a contract with Seagal and his friend Nassau. At times, some of the money paid to Seagal went directly to Nassau. That is a little weird. Your movie deal is with another guy who has mob ties and he gets some

of your money and no one seems to know quite why. Was he his agent? No, they owned a production company together. His asshole buddy. His asshole buddy. So in the early 1990s, Julius Nassau started walking around LA with a card saying he was a Warner Brothers

producer. So it seems like Warner Brothers might have given him some title on some, but it's also like they refuse to talk about this at all. So who knows what happened. Spai interviewed him and he claimed that he would be handling foreign distribution for the movie, I think for Under Siege. Great movie. Yeah, great movie. The

interviewers at Spai thought this was odd, since WB at the time had the largest foreign distribution system of any Hollywood studio. Warner Brothers refused to comment, so Nassau explained, because of my experience in the drug business, I had contacts all over the world. Which is why he was the right man to help sell this movie overseas. Of course. Yeah.

Oh boy. They get those high sailors, man. They really like Under Siege. Hey, I've always said, if you can get sailors high, you can sell movies overseas. Yeah, especially about a navy chef that kicks ass. Okay, so at the time in 1993, this is about all that Spai knew,

but in the decade since 1993, a lot more information has come out. It turns out that Nassau was an associate of the Gambino crime family, and he loaned Segal at least half a million dollars of their money. Segal claims it was for taxes. When Segal and Nassau had a falling out around 2000, Segal was forced into a meeting with several mobsters, where they

demanded $150,000 per movie he'd made. So. Okay. Here's a quote from a 2002 New York Times article on the matter. Stephen Segal, the action film star cited as a mafia extortion target, has told investigators that after he stopped working with his long-time producer, he was ordered into a car in Brooklyn

last year and shuttled to a landmark restaurant where he was threatened by mobsters, according to officials and lawyers involved in the case. He was so intimidated, he recounted, that he agreed to turn over $700,000, although investigators are still trying to trace the money. Do you know what I would do if I was in a car with all those mobsters, and I knew Akito?

Fucking Akito, everybody. In the car? You can't throw someone in a car, Sean. No, I can't. I think it worked really well in those close quarters. They tried to punch and you're like snap, slap, slap, karate chop. Movies have taught me that that's... Just liquid human all over the car. Just bloody pieces of monster.

Then I drive that shit into the river. Coming out of the water like 20 minutes later. That's how long I'd hold my breath. I was sucking there out of their dead lungs that whole time. Fuck Akito. You should direct a Stephen Segal movie. My favorite thing about this is that some of these guys who were doing the meeting

were tapped, and so the FBI listened into them laughing about intimidating Stephen Segal. And the thing they thought was funniest is that he had a gun, but was too scared to do anything. Oh, Stephen. They're just laughing at him. They just think it's hilarious how sad he was. The thing about Stephen Segal is you really get the idea

he buys into his own bullshit. After something like that, he's got to rethink three decades' worth of that bullshit he's living under. Am I really a pussy? I'm going to correct you there. I don't think Stephen Segal has ever rethought anything in his entire life. He got into that situation like, they're lucky I didn't do my Akito or pull my gun.

Takes a real badass to get into a situation like that with only $700,000 in spending. No one expected me to pee my pants for eight straight minutes. So Stephen Segal in court claimed that these guys were basically just his business partners, and then the mob extorted him. It sure seems like what really

happened is that the Gambino crime family through Nassau invested in Segal in the hopes that they could cash in on a long and successful action movie career, which the joke was a little bit on them there. They caught him a little too late there. Whatever the truth behind his start, 1988, Segal became the hottest new action

hero on the block, and was on his way to becoming a massive star. Gary Goldman, an ex-mercenary, was one of the badasses Segal liked to surround himself with. For a while they were working on a script together, and Segal had Goldman vouch for him in interviews. In one interview with the LA Times, Goldman claimed that Segal had gone with him

quote, on several missions, and that he has a high level of skill that you don't just pick up reading fantasy magazines. I don't think anyone would question his capabilities. A lot of mercenaries, they take dudes who just read fantasy magazines with them and they're like, damn it, another one of these fantasy magazines, guys.

I really should have learned not to bring random people on my mercenary missions. Will we be getting magic spells on this mission? No. This is a real life, not a fantasy magazine. Well, my only expertise is fantasy magazines. I've cut out these little lightning bolt things. Yeah, but we gotta

get that Steven Segal guy back. He knows what he's doing. Well, this is so stupid. Full disclosure, about a year after this point, Segal and Goldman had a falling out and Segal backed out of their plan to write a movie, so Goldman wrote a letter to the same journalist at the LA

Times he'd lied to a year earlier and recanted. He said, quote, the plain truth of the matter is that Segal wasn't as a gutless coward who was trying to convert the heroic deeds of those brave men into a personal history for himself. Damn. Yeah. Among other things, Goldman's letter claimed that in 1988 he and Segal had gone

treasure hunting near Barbados with Randy Widner. Well, they were all hanging out on a boat. Segal bragged repeatedly about his time as a Navy SEAL, which do I even need to say that he was never a Navy SEAL? He wasn't a Navy SEAL. Absolutely not. At one point, Steven and Goldman had to

wait into the water to deliver equipment to a Zodiac boat, which is like a real badass cool thing that like a real cool person might have been able to handle. Steven Segal was not. Here's how Goldman said it went, quote, the surf was unbelievable, really tough. He started screaming and panicking and was sure he was going to die

in all that crap. Goldman claims that Randy Widner had to pulse Segal up by his hair while Goldman, quote, pushed his ass onto the boat with my shoulder. Well, the one thing I know about Navy SEAL is when you get him like in rough water, they just freak the fuck out. Oh, yeah. No, their training is to panic when water is rough. Yeah.

That's what makes it so deadly. You go down a beautiful Corona beach, but it's like lovely and you can watch the Plainsland, but there's the sound of all those Navy SEALs screaming. Just panic. They're like, you're doing good work, see? Yes. Panic a little harder. They'll be the best.

You really want to lose your mind out there. Remind me of this young recruit, Steven Segal. The best we ever saw. We're going to send you to the desert, so we want you scared of the sea. I love that they have special circumstances just to see, oh, you're in Navy SEAL. Well, here's the water and he just fucks it up so badly.

It doesn't even in there because later it became clear that Segal could not read a compass or a map. Both things, the Navy SEALs, sort of stress. Kind of important. In his letter to the LA Times, Goldman said Segal, quote, would surely die of starvation if he was given a compass and a map that

led to a restaurant five miles away. That's some good, like, badass way to call someone a pussy. Yeah, that's some solid mercenary ragging. Yeah. Goldman's smack talking prompted Segal to take action. He called up his friend, Robert Strickland,

the former contract employee with the CIA and had him meet on the set of a movie he was filming, I think on Deadly Ground. As they sat in his trailer, as they sat in his trailer, Segal handed Strickland a dossier he'd had compiled on Goldman and then showed him a briefcase with $50,000 in it.

According to Strickland, he said this, I'd like you to do me a favor. I'd like you to do me a favor. Now, I should note, Mr. Segal was 38 years old at this point and in the prime of his career, Robert Strickland was a 68-year-old retiree who was a good foot shorter than him.

Strickland claims his first response was you're crazy, to which Segal responded, if you won't do it, get someone who will, paying what you want and keep the rest. This would not be the last time Stephen Segal tried to pay to have somebody hurt. Well, what you want is a long paper trail when you want to assassinate someone.

Outsource it and then have them outsource it. That way it's easier to get away with when lots of people know about it. The more documentation you have for your crimes is absolutely better. No, I think most criminals would agree with that. In the summer of 1991, a writer named Alan Rickman, not the actor, that kind of messed

me up for a second too, wrote an article about Segal for gentlemen's quarterly. It was not complimentary. Segal flew an intelligence analyst to his Staten Island home to help him dig up dirt on the writer. Segal tells the consultant that Rickman would be a fag in the actor's words. He wants Rickman set up with a homosexual

quote to get pictures of Rickman going down on the man. When the security consultant refused, Segal asked what it would cost to have a hypothetical man whacked. When the consultant replied whacked dead, Segal said, of course, you people do that all the time. What if you were Rickman mask and I suck your dick? Does that get a word? My favorite part

about this is that in a television interview he lied about the other man's height and he called him a pansy, even though Rickman was an army captain, Rick, who was also taller than Steven Segal. Jesus Christ, Steven. He might be genetically incapable of telling the truth. It's really hard

to say. Bob Strickland, that former CAA contractor, seems to have been one of the people who put up with Segal's bullshit for the longest amount of time. Segal actually paid Strickland $50,000 of a $250,000 deal for his life story. Strickland thought this meant that Segal was going to make a movie about him, but it actually just meant

that Segal wanted the right to lie about his own life and tell stories from Strickland's life when he was interviewed. So one night, Strickland was watching the Arsenio Hall show and saw Steven Segal telling a story from Strickland's own life. That's an amazing interview, by the way. Oh, yeah. He gets all

dark for it. He's like, I think he's talking about Kelly LeBrock and how she was misbehaving and he's like, my house, my rules. There's a real window into the darkness that is inside that man. Well, if I was not a hack and a fraud, I would have seen that one, but I was too busy reading about Steven Segal. So, Strickland

got really angry when he heard his own stories being told by Steven Segal. So, yeah, he called Steven a bunch of times, left a bunch of angry messages, and Steven's response was essentially to threaten Strickland, which prompted the former CIA contractor to file a sworn affidavit in the Burbank Superior Court. Quote,

On December 11, 1991, Steven Segal said to me, in my attorney's presence, if anybody from the CIA fucks with me, they will be hurt. He claimed he was backed by very powerful people. More powerful than the CIA. More powerful than the CIA. The CIA is shit in their pants. No, yeah, yeah. I mean, he's it. You don't even know my friends, CIA.

He's one of those non-swimming Navy SEALs, which is the deadliest kind. And if you want to hear something that's even better than a Navy SEAL who can't swim. These sponsors? It's an ad break. Yeah, it's the sponsors. During the summer of 2020, some Americans suspected that the FBI had secretly

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cigar-smoking man who drives a silver hearse. And inside his hearse was like a lot of guns. He's a shark. And not in the good 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. 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

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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.

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 iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts.

And we're back. We're talking about Steven Seagal who has just ruined probably the longest friendship he ever had with a former CIA man by lying and stealing his life, becoming an experienced vampire. On national television. On national television. God, that's so embarrassing. Yeah, it's a really shameful thing to do.

So in the affidavit Strickland filed, he claimed that a mutual friend of he and Seagal had, quote, called me from New York and advised me to watch my ass. He stated that my safety could be in jeopardy because Steven Seagal is backed by powerful people who have vested interest in preserving his image and reputation. Which might have been true at that point, to be entirely honest, like he may

not have been lying about that. Seagal quickly followed the success of 1988's Above the Law, which was his first film, with three more action hits, Hard to Kill, Mark for Death, and Out for Justice. Yeah, all those are great. His career peaked in 1992 with Under Siege, or, I think, 1993 with Under Siege.

I may have fucked that up. But he was a pretty big star in 1991 when he was invited to host an episode of Saturday Night Live. Not the greatest success in the history of that show. In a way, it might be. Maybe. In a way, it might be. It depends on how much enjoyment you get out of this next

anecdote. So in the book Life from New York, which is a history of the show, several cast members chimed in about the week Steven Seagal was the host. Tim Meadows. The biggest problem with Steven Seagal was that he would complain about jokes that he didn't get. So it was like, you can't explain something to somebody in German if they don't

speak German. He just wasn't funny, and he was very critical of the cast and the writing staff. He didn't realize that you can't tell somebody they're stupid on Wednesday and expect them to continue writing for you on Saturday. So people, like, gave him intentionally bad shit because they hated him? I think so. I think that's part of the explanation.

David Spade said, quote, he didn't want to go along with what the plan was that week, and as a result, I think that was the first week that I heard talk about replacing the host and just doing a cast show. Yeah. And then Julia Sweeney, when we pitched our ideas for Seagal at our Monday meeting, he gave us some of his own sketch ideas. And some of

his sketch ideas were so heinous, so hilariously awful. It was like we were on candid camera. He had this idea that he's a therapist and he wanted Victoria Jackson to be his patient who's just been raped. And the therapist says, you're going to have to come to me twice a week for like three years because he said, that's how therapists fucking are.

They're just trying to get your money. And then he says that the psychiatrist tries to have sex with her. Whoa. That's Steven Seagal's idea of comedy. That's so weird. It will not be weird later in this story. It will actually make total sense in about 30 minutes. Okay. I've been a comedy writer for many,

many years now, and I am seriously racking my brain how to get to a place of comedy from such a dark premise. No, there's no punchline anywhere in that description. And I don't think there was a punchline in this show. I don't even, if you had nine hours to build the context for this, I don't

think you could make that like funny, funny. No, and I do think it's important to know that I want a nightmare. I suspect that for Seagal the punchline was, the psychiatrist tries to rape his patient. I think that was his idea. That was the joke. The ending's great. Are you ready for this? It's assault.

It's a horrible gruesome assault. It's sexual assault victim. See it all, it's like poetry. It ties back to the beginning. Oh god, he would have said that. He would have compared it to poetry. He absolutely would have compared it to poetry. And then he fucking cried a chat through the table. Fucking vanished in a puff

of flower cloud. In 2014, when guest Nicholas Cage expressed a worry to Lorne Michaels that he would be, quote, the worst host ever, Lorne Michaels reportedly said, no, that would be Steven Seagal. Yeah. He's one of the only people ever banned

from being on Saturday Night Live. Ever, ever, ever, ever again. They did that joke on Saturday Night Live. I remember Lorne Michaels coming out and saying, like, no, no, the worst host was Steven Seagal. But there was something real about it. Yeah, no. I mean, it sounds like he was terrible. There's another story. I think it was Rob Schneider

who saw Steven Seagal, like, walked up to him and said, I just finished reading the best screenplay in my life. And Schneider was like, oh yeah, who wrote it? And he was like, me. And it was not a joke. Oh my god. Steven Seagal. What a dream set up for that answer, though, because like

if you said, oh, I made the best screenplay. Most people were like, oh, what's it about? Yeah. But he asked who the writer was to perfectly set up Steven Seagal to say, oh, me. Fucking. I'm going to guess he knew. What a team. That should be the team. Schneider, Seagal. That should have been Schneider.

Oh my god. Oh my god. I would throw my own money into the production of that film. Yeah, especially if all of the bad guys are Seagal and Schneider. Oh, I love it. Like some sort of a time loop made it so every person in that universe was Seagal and Schneider.

I'm not saying they're in makeup. It's like really them. It's really them. You commit to the premise. Yeah. Hollywood. See this. This is an inspiring idea. That idea of the sex assault victim as a therapist, that's a dead end. That's a dead end. Don't pursue that. But Schneider and Seagal, that's

at least a skit. Let's do another podcast after this. We'll save it for that. Storyboard the whole thing. Okay, so you remember actually way less than 20 minutes ago when I said that him wanting to make the joke be entirely about sexual assault

would make sense very soon? Yeah. It's about to make sense. Oh, thank god. So the early 90s were a time of great professional success for Stephen Seagal and they were also when he began his career as a sexual predator. I mean, maybe he began it earlier, but we certainly know about assaults dating back to the early 90s. The signs were already present as early as 1990

when Robert Strickland watched Seagal harass one of his personal assistants. He said, you know, he had a lot of teeth in his trailer when, according to Strickland, Seagal told her that she needed to get over there immediately. When she came out still brushing her teeth, he said, gee, Rian, you look like that when I come in your mouth.

Some more Stephen Seagal humor there. That is the absence of a joke. Did they have a romantic relationship before that? No. Strickland, the former CIA guy who I'm going to guess was a pretty coarse fellow thought this was gross. I think, I've never met it personally. Profoundly gross. I don't think that is gross.

One of the good wife was a guest on the Katie Couric's podcast. They talked about the Me Too movement and Margulis recalled an unsettling encounter with Seagal in the early 1990s. He was a big action star at that point and she was still quite new, when a casting director told her

that Stephen wanted to do a scene with her in his room. Quote, I walked in and I sat down and I jumped right back up because there was something very uncomfortable and hard in the couch. He laughed and said, oh sorry, that must have been my gun, but I don't know about his gun. When Margulis grew noticeably nervous,

Seagal explained that he casually packed to protect himself from, quote, all the crazies that are out there. If your gun's in the couch, you're the crazy person. I think you might be right. That's not where the gun goes, not in the couch. What the fuck? If you got company coming over,

why you leave your gun in the couch? He wanted her to find it. He wanted her to find it. What kind of a person thinks like, what was his gun? Maybe it was. Was he trying to, like, terrify her? Maybe. The thing that he did next in this interaction was tell her that he was a healer

and that he wanted to read her palms. Maybe he was trying to play with her. Quote, he told me I had really weak kidneys. At that point, to be honest, as a New York girl, I kind of started laughing inside. Shortly thereafter, Margulis said she squirmed out of the room, but then realized that she hadn't received the cab fare she'd been promised,

so she went back and asked for it. She got the cash, as well as the pardon out for justice, and demanded she never be alone with Segal on set. So, not to diminish it, but this is a rather tame story to compare to the stories of many of the other women who have reported their interactions with Stephen Segal. You'd be real pretty if you had better kidneys.

Stephen Segal is out for kidneys. In 1996, John Connolly, the author of that spy article, wrote another article about Segal, this time for Penthouse. In it, he alleged that four female staffers had resigned from the production of his film out for justice in protest of his constant sexual harassment, and quote, a sexual attack on one of them.

They claimed Segal tried to undress them during casting interviews. One stated, when I was finally able to get him to stop, he told me I had the part. So, that does seem to be Stephen's modus operandi. Another woman claimed Segal would constantly brush past women in his office and touch them. His former housekeeper, Lea Bumgarner,

claimed Segal sexually attacked her while she was working at his house. She did plead guilty to stealing from him later, so maybe... I could also see Stephen Segal was addicted to me. Between the two crimes, I think hers is... Way more minor. In fact, stealing from a rich guy

barely qualifies as a crime. Barely a crime. Connolly talked to six women in total who accused Segal of harassment. They would not be the last. He stated at the end of his article that the code of silence around Segal's luggage behavior is starting to crack.

Shatter would be a more apt term. In 1998, Jenny McCarthy talked a movie line for her audition for the classic film under Segal's biggest hit in one of the first real clear signs that his career was already passed. He outruns an explosion in that movie, which is impossible because

Stephen Segal actually runs like fat woman waking up in a bathtub covered in snakes. That's a good description of Stephen Segal running. I've written a lot of Stephen Segal runs like jokes in my career, and I think that might be the most evocative.

You owe yourself to look up Stephen Segal running on YouTube because he has never managed to run like a normal person. He tucks his elbows in, and he kind of has like limp wrists, and he keeps the elbows tucked in tight, and he just sort of wiggles through the air.

It's like a scurry. He's running in these movies. You look at Tom Cruise, and he's just got beautiful form. Oh, no, because you could tell he spent hours. He tried it out. He had a 20-foot long jump when he ends that run. It's like a hamster getting electrified.

It's one of those things. You talk to people. I've talked to someone who does firearms training for movies. His job is helping movie stars learn how to use weapons and do shooting and choreograph gunfights and stuff. You can find this in other articles. Tom Cruise is really good with a gun,

with all the physical stuff he's done. He's really good at everything. Nobody says that about Stephen Segal. Nobody praises his ability to do stunts. So, in 1998, Ginny McCarthy talked a movie line about her audition for the classic film Understige 2

in which Stephen Segal outruns an explosion. Here's what she said happened. I was wearing this very baggy dress, which I always wear to auditions, with my hair pulled back. I'm listening to Segal go on and on about how he found a soul in Asia and was one with himself or whatever. When I said, well, I'm ready to read, he said, stand up. You have to be kind of sexy

in the movie, and in that dress, I can't tell. I stand up and he goes, take off your dress. I said, what? And he said, there's nudity. I said, no, there's not, or I wouldn't be here right now. He said, again, there's nudity. Ginny McCarthy, notable, fully-clothed woman. Well, she said, the pages are right in front

of me and there's no nudity. She's right to make the subjection. I'm getting to it. He goes, take off your dress. I just started crying and said, rent my Playboy video, you asshole. Fair enough. I always thought she was very funny on single bat. I always thought that hot girl's way

funnier than the hot girl. I would like Ginny McCarthy a lot if it wasn't for advocating children not get vaccinated. She's got a lot of bad for the world. And she's certainly in the right here. I just think that she has more width than you'd expect. No, she's a very funny person. And that's a really funny thing to say is,

rent my Playboy video, you asshole. Yeah, no, she's got a great response. Her recollection of the events is really good. When the Daily Beast questions Seagal Spokesman about this, he said the claim was completely false, and I should note several times so we don't get sued. Any of the many, many, many, many, many, many, many, many, many. The Washington Post says there are too many

allegations of assault and harassment to count. Oh. Too many to count. The Washington Post says that. They have great counters on staff too. They have whole people whose job is counting. Top-notch math scientists. Yeah, so there's no nice segue here. It's about to get really dark, so bugle up.

Like the delicious flavor of... No, no, no, this is not the time for that. In 1993, when Steven Seagal was filming one of his most popular movies on Deadly Ground, he met an 18-year-old extra named Regina Simmons. He invited her to a rap party at his house when she showed up, no one else was there. Yeah, regular listeners will remember this

as the same basic strategy used by Bill Cosby on several occasions. Tell him there's a party, there's no party. It seems to be a pretty common Hollywood creep strategy. Yeah. Regina says he told her everyone else had already left, and then he took her into his bedroom. Quote,

he closed the door and approached me from behind. Kissing my neck and taking off my clothes. I was in shock, I was completely caught off guard. Seagal was more than twice my size and twice my age. I was not sexually active, nor had I ever been naked in front of a man before. I froze. She alleges that Seagal then raped her.

She says there was nothing consensual about this, I couldn't move, and I felt as if I was watching my body from above. I felt tears coming down my face. Yeah. When Seagal was done, he asked her if she needed any money and then allowed her to leave. He called her the next day. It is a good question,

what is going on in Steven Seagal's head? I seriously think he probably doesn't think of himself. He kept calling this woman. I don't think he thinks of himself as a rapist. He thought this was like, yeah, it went really well. Yeah, I don't know. Not that that mitigates it at all, because he seems to be a monster,

but I think that is part of his psychology in this. Now, this story came out in March of last year after several women among them, Portia de la Rossi from Arrested Development, alleged Steven Seagal being a creepy sexual harasser. There was a whole press conference when Regina came out and another woman was there to support her,

Fabiola Datis. She auditioned for a part in an as-of-yet unproduced vanity project with Steven Seagal about Genghis Khan, which Seagal was supposed to write, direct, and star in. Tell me he was Genghis Khan. He was. It's a dark story, so I don't want to get lost in this, but that may be the only unproduced vanity project

I do kind of want to see. Datis said her initial meetings with Seagal took place in public and didn't give her any cause for concern. The two bonded over shared interests like Buddhism and martial arts, she said, and soon developed a friendly relationship via text and phone calls. At one point, Seagal invited Datis

for a private audition. She said, He explained to me that he would like to evaluate my figure and see if I would be suitable for the role. His assistant told me to arrive wearing a bikini or a bra and panties under my clothing, as this is quite standard in the modeling industry, I agreed to do so.

Datis noticed some strange things right off the bat. He was standing at a hotel that he had booked. Quote, I was taken up to Seagal's room by his assistant, who repeated to me multiple times in the elevator, Steven's word is as good as gold. I thought this was a bit strange, but I did not comment. When she arrived, only Steven and his bodyguard were in the room.

The assistant who led her there immediately left. Steven asked me to take off my clothes, which I did, although I was nervous, considering there were no other individuals present, and do a catwalk through the room for him. I did so, and Steven approached me and said that he would like to act out a romantic scene with Steven.

Datis told him that she was uncomfortable with this and said no, that's when she alleges Seagal reached under her bikini top and groped her while fondling her vagina with his other hand. She yelled that the audition was over. Steven sat there calmly as if nothing had happened, and while I was noticeably upset and terrified by the experience, Steven's security guard stood blocking the doorway

and only moved when Steven motioned for him to do so. I left feeling horrified and totally violated. Steven Seagal, there was lawyer, denies both of these allegations. Dude, it's so gross, but then to have a security guard there too. Yeah, that is the creepiest thing. You're going to stand here and watch.

I think it'll really help her feel more at ease if there's a weird dude watching. What if there's a giant guy standing in the back of the room? Yeah, well, I like grop her. I'm going to move fast, so I just want you to stand there and be weird. Which, it's one of those things there's always in these stories of Hollywood sexual predators, so many people complicit.

The assistant has to know what's going on. This is not Steven Seagal and his prime when someone might think, yeah, maybe a young actress wants to meet this handsome guy. Like, this is someone knowing, something creepy is going to go on, but this is my paycheck, so I'm just going to soldier on. There's other jobs you can take where people don't rape.

Yeah. You know what I mean? Yes. I've never worked at a place where someone's just trying some rape out near me. Yeah, you work here, right? You're cool with this rape? You understand this is just how Kingo's works. Well, I sure need this job, boss.

I'll just block the door in case anyone tries to make a run for it. This is a really bad time for an ad segue. Tremendously disastrous. Shop at Kingo's. Kingo's is not a supporter of the podcast, so I really don't care

what you do to them. How you feeling about Steven Seagal? Sush. It's a little grosser. These intimate details of this type of interaction is what's, like, it's easy to say, like, oh, this guy, he's a

attempted rapist. Fuck that guy. But then when you learn these little details, it's so gross that some woman had to explain that this is exactly what happened. Yeah. I should say we're back, but I think we've been back since the start of this conversation.

It's remarkable to me, I guess, one of the things I can never stop thinking about, because I like watching old movies, is you look at Humphrey Bogart on screen and you're like, did you assault somebody, Bogey? Yeah. Probably, right? Yeah. Probably. Yeah. I don't know, I've never heard anything about that,

but you just see how many of these guys did something fucked up. Even Boey has some dark stuff in his background, and it's like, not like this, nothing like this, but like, some stuff that's questionable. Anyway, it's a bummer. It is a bummer, and there is something about, like,

celebrity that I think jacks your game up. Yeah. It's one of the things that's really interesting to me, is I've read a lot of allegations from various, because we're not going to cover every allegation spinning at Steven Seagal. Again, as the Washington Post said, there are too many to count.

There are a number of allegations where he will do creepy stuff, he will grope someone clearly against their will, but they will say no that they don't want sex and he will let them leave, which makes me think in his head, Steven Seagal, I don't know. He's just like going for it.

I'm going to mitigate it, but I'm certain he doesn't think of himself as a rapist, which again, I believe the women in this case, because for one thing, there are too many allegations to count, which is usually the first sign that it's true. So yeah, back in March is when

those two latest allegations, including one of straight up rape, were filed against Steven Seagal. Not the first time allegations have been made, but the first time in the Me Too era, for sure. There were allegations against Steven Seagal starting back in the 90s and then right after Me Too kicked up, people started talking about them again.

And of course, these two women came forward in March, but in January, Steven Seagal decided that he wanted to get ahead of these sexual assault rumors and really deal with the problem in a proactive manner. Can you guess what media outlet he chose to talk to?

I bet it was like an Infowars... Yup! Oh yeah! Yeah, Steven Seagal showed up on Infowars in January of 2018. He told Alex Jones that the many, many, many women who'd made claims against him were paid liars. Someone has deep pockets.

This isn't just about me, because hundreds of people in Hollywood have been attacked and hundreds of people have been, in my opinion, falsely accused. My view is that 60% of these people are completely innocent and that includes me. In most of these cases the accusations are 20, 25, 30 years old. They're not providing evidence of proof of witnesses. They're just throwing

it out and all of a sudden somebody's life is ruined. I bet he really thinks this. Yeah. When people say it's a witch hunt, it's worse than any other witch hunt an America's ever seen. This is ruining our country. This is worse than the time we burned people to death. It's worse than the time we burned witches. He's the real victim here. He is the real victim and I'm never not excited by how many times terrible people's lives intersect. Alex Jones and Steve, of course, of course they wound up talking to each other. How could they have not? How could the world have allowed that to not happen?

I always wonder when, say you buy your own bullshit and you meet someone like Alex Jones who's also full of shit, do they completely believe all of the other guy's bullshit? Does that start to create this bullshit spiral where they start just like, I'm going to just say some crazy shit and Steven Seagal believes it. It may just be a matter of Alex Jones knows that Stephen Seagal's going to talk about his time as a Navy SEAL. I can talk about all the badass stuff I've done and the globalist trying to kill me and stuff. Yeah. And so like if Alex Jones is being like, I used to win fights against men when I was a child, like is Steven Seagal allowed to be like, I know you're full of shit? Or is he

like, I can't pretend like I know you're full of shit because that would admit that I understand the limits of this absurdity. It's mutually assured destruction is applied to lies. I love it. Shameless lies. It is remarkable. So Steven Seagal's career peaked around 1993-1994 by the year 2000. He'd had a string of flops and was no longer considered in the same tier of action star as Bruce Willis. If that was ever a fair thing to say about him. Yeah. He was like of a Jean-Claude Van Damme contemporary, but his films were like, didn't have as much joy or fun. And they weren't as like adventurous, I guess. Yeah. And when you've seen two Steven Seagal movies, you've seen all of them. Every Steven Seagal movie. It was one of those things when

Jean-Claude Van Damme came back and did JCVD a couple of years ago. Everyone was like, oh, yeah, you know, I'd like to watch Jean-Claude Van Damme again. Sure. Nobody feels that way about Steven Seagal. Yeah, there's nothing lovable about Steven Seagal. But Jean-Claude Van Damme is a classic movie star. Yeah. And the early 2000s began the start of a long, sharp decline for Steven Seagal from movie theater releases to direct to video releases to eventually direct to digital productions, which is kind of where he is now. And if you've seen a recent Steven Seagal movie, it's a heavy set elderly man pulling guns out of people's hands and trying not to move too much. Right. Just a bunch of catwalks in Eastern European settings.

Really dark lighting. Yeah. So, yeah, the early 2000s definitely marked the end of Steven Seagal's career as a serious action movie star, but they also marked the start of something else, something we're going to get into in part two of this podcast. Steven Seagal's twin careers as a blues musician, a cop. Well, I should say three careers, because in addition to being a blues musician and a cop, he's an alleged human trafficker. So, all that and more in part two. Sean, do you have any pluggables that you would like to plug? I'm easy to find on Twitter, search for Sean, baby. I still write jokes. It cracked.

Play Calculoords on your mobile devices. Yes. Play Calculoords on your mobile devices. You will get some of Sean baby's signature humor. Great jokes. Great way to teach math. Listeners should know Sean baby essentially invented comedy on the internet and was that might legally be true. Yeah. What was one of like the three or four people that is a big part of why I got into this industry. So, I didn't tell you that until now because I wanted this to have emotional resonance. Yeah. Unlike a Steven Seagal movie. I just wanted to prove we could do it better. What a perfect button on a perfect episode. You can find me on Twitter at I write okay. You can find us on Instagram and on Twitter. This podcast at at Bastard's Pod. You can find

us online along with some really sad pictures of Steven Seagal behind the Bastards.com and all of the many sources for this episode. If you've been wondering what would it be like if I spent 16 hours reading about Steven Seagal's life and times. A ordinary day for me. So, we will be back on Thursday talking about way more Steven Seagal and really getting into his intersections with like three other people we've done podcasts on because he is just the worst person and intersects with all of the other worst people. But until then, I'm Robert Evans. This is behind the Bastards and I love about 40 percent of people. 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 we're like a lot of goods. 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? 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.