Behind the Bastards - Part Two: John of God: Oprah's Favorite Ghost-Channeling Rapist Surgeon

Episode Date: July 9, 2020

Robert is joined again by Andrew Ti to continue discussing John of God. 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. Did you know Lance Bass is a Russian-trained astronaut?

That he went through training in a secret facility outside Moscow, hoping to become the youngest person to go to space? Well, I ought to know, because I'm Lance Bass. And I'm hosting a new podcast that tells my crazy story and an even crazier story about a Russian astronaut who found himself stuck in space. With no country to bring him down. With the Soviet Union collapsing around him, he orbited the Earth for 313 days that changed the world.

Listen to The Last Soviet on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Welcome back to Behind the Bastards, the podcast where we talk about Russian-trained astronauts. Welcome back to Behind the Bastards, the podcast where we talk about terrible people. And this is part two of our series on John of God. But the real bastard is also Oprah, and Dr. Oz, and Susan Casey, the author of that terrible article. So, pull up a fine Chilean red and get ready to hear some more. This is off topic, but I want to tell something I just ran across to my guest, Andrew T, before we roll into the episode. Andrew, how are you doing today?

What's up? J-O-G, ready to hear about the rest of this, motherfucker. Well, before we do that, I just came across something on Twitter. It's a book that's being sold. It's like a part of the Joe Biden grift, because every politician has a grift now. And this is a coloring book called A Hot Cup of Joe, and it has a cartoon of a sexy Joe Biden on it. Yeah, a piping hot coloring book with America's sexiest moderate, Joe Biden. Jesus Christ.

Yeah, it's awful. It is abuse. It is abuse. Yeah, that's... Well, that's fucking horrendous. It's almost worth buying so you can have it for whatever happens with the election, just to have this fucking horrible thing. Yeah, I don't want to give this person money, but I do want to see it inside this terrible, terrible criminal coloring book. The sexy 70-something politicians thing is one of the weirdest aspects of modern politics.

You have these two old and clearly not-in-the-best-of-health men, Joe Biden and Donald Trump, both of whose supporters have to depict them as muscle-bound hunks. And it's like, guys, they're elderly, dying men. Stop it. Even if you think they're the right person to be president, you don't have to pretend that they're... You don't have to get thirsty about them. What is wrong with you people? Joe's wear diapers. Let's talk about that situation. They're not out here bench-pressing.

Yeah, they're not doing wind sprints. Joe's abs don't exist because he's an old, sick man. Yeah. That's okay. And that's fine. It's not ideal, but whatever. Just stop it. Stop it, all of you.

The flesh on his face is melting day by day. It's what happens as you die. Which is fine. He's not fucking Popeye, okay? Yeah, this is not on them because they're pretty normally aged men for their ages. Joe, we're talking to you, you're a creepy people. What are you doing? Stop it.

You don't have to make them sexy. What is wrong with you? If I could just do a tiny poll and just point out that Sophie's idea of a sexy man is Popeye. We can just live in that for a second. I dare you to find a better example of uncut eroticism than Robin Williams as Popeye in a 1980s Popeye movie that absolutely exists. Look it up. It's fucking something else. Insanity.

Yeah. People made that. People made that and no one stopped them. Isn't that Robert Altman? I think so, yeah. I think it's Robert Altman. You keep talking, I'm going to look it up. No, I'm not.

Don't do it to yourself. Never mind. It's great. So, we're all back from... It is Robert Altman. I looked it up. I couldn't help it. Yeah.

All right. It's time to get back into this episode. Talk about John a God some more. That hit my world like a fucking carpet bomb. I just had to talk about it. So, back to John a God. Take your world like a cruise missile at your wedding. Yeah.

Like one of Raytheon's fine products hitting a wedding, which, you know, if you've ever thought not enough weddings have missiles hit them, then you're the kind of customer Raytheon's looking for. All right. We really should start the episode now. So, no human being has ever embodied the phrase, the road to hell was paved with good intentions, better than Oprah Winfrey.

She was a regular background figure in my childhood. My mom would have her on when she was working from home while we did chores, etc. Like she was just on in the background all the time. And compared to the other background figures of my childhood, guys like Rush Limbaugh and Michael Savage, she was pretty benign. At least she seemed that way.

I don't know if I would describe her as a monster, but her career has been a masterclass in how to enable monsters. Winfrey was a longtime friend of Harvey Weinstein. She regularly hosted Tony Robbins, another sex pest and self-help guru. She is largely responsible for making Dr. Phil and Dr. Oz into household names, and both of those men have gone on to do incalculable harm to society. And of course, she is the reason John of God and his clinic were put in front of the faces of millions upon millions of gullible desperate Westerners.

After that O Magazine article was published in 2010, she dedicated a special episode to John of God, inviting the author of that article and a doctor onto her show. They were both total converts, but how they and Oprah presented John to their audience is really interesting to me. And I want you to click that first link and play it to about 38 minutes, Andrew. Because you went expecting to find what? Well, I went to just gather evidence to see what's true.

Susan, when you were there, did he... I heard that he actually invites medical doctors from around the world to come up and witness him do these things. Is that correct? Yes, and they always are sort of very careful not to ever pit themselves against the mainstream medical profession. They're very much like... He's never going to do a heart transplant up there. It's like he's going to do whatever he can do with his ability to heal,

and then you might have to go to your doctor for the rest. Yeah. Okay, I'm back. That's good. Yeah, what did you think of that, Andrew? What did you think of that framing? Incredible. Incredible.

I mean, the one thing watching the clip is that... What is... Sorry, what is the journalist? Susan Casey. Yeah, journalist is a strong word for Susan. The one thing watching that is that Susan looks almost exactly as I thought she would. Yes. She's exactly the type of white woman that would promote this shit.

Yes. Yeah, and whatever picture I guarantee you, 100% of you, whatever picture you have in your head of Susan Casey is accurate. Because there's only one... That's fucking wild. Yeah, it's awesome, isn't it? Yeah. And then also this thing where he's not going to do a heart transplant,

but you might have to go to your regular doctor for that, is just key sweeping shit under the rug. Well, of course, you will need real medical care also. What's really cool about that is that it is very clearly and obviously an answer of Susan and this other doctor who we'll talk about in a minute, whitewashing John of God. So they know that if they're going to be on Oprah's show and talk to a mainstream audience, they have to put in...

They can't just be all... Especially because of this is 2010 and we aren't where we are now. Now you could just say, doctors are bullshit. This guy's the only real healer in the world. You could get away with that. Back then you had to be like, oh, no, you still... Regular doctors are still great for things. He's just helping with other stuff and that was necessary to get people on board.

But John of God's cult produced propaganda too. This is why I say that Susan Casey and this doctor are intentionally whitewashing him. Because for this episode of Oprah's show, they use clips from a documentary that John of God's cult produced. And in the actual documentary, there is no time wasted telling people that they need to consult their doctors. So I'm going to play next... Have you played next a clip from that actual documentary produced by the cult

that shows kind of how internally they talked about his healing powers. And it's very different from how Oprah did. Physical healings that cannot be explained away. You said to me in reply to my question, can you help me to become healthy again? And he replied, you are already healed. Holy shit. Yeah.

So yeah, you see like in that there's no talk about like, oh yeah, you got to... You got to fucking... Right, consult a physician. Yeah, no, he just heals your shit. Yeah. So the doctor guy that Oprah has on there is a fellow named Jeffrey Reddiger. And he's really interesting to me because he is a very real medical professional and was actually or is actually a member of the Harvard Medical School faculty. He researches spontaneous healing,

which is like when people go into a mission or whatever and there's no clear explanation why, which is a thing that happens. People get better from things we don't understand why. That's the thing that happens. And he is clearly there to inject both credibility and skepticism into the discussions about John of God, kind of like Dr. Oz was earlier. For example, Oprah at one point plays a video of one of John of God's brain surgeries where he's like shoving stuff up people's nose.

And Dr. Reddiger is really upfront and clear about the fact that this brain surgery through the nose stuff is sleight of hand, that he's not actually performing surgery, that there's a ton of space in the naval cavity and nothing inexplicable is going on. So he does make, he does state that to the audience, but he does that while he buys into the fact that scientifically inexplicable healing occurs at John of God's center. So I'm going to play another clip from that Oprah episode

so you can kind of see how this skeptic talks about this healing. Dr. Jeffrey Reddiger traveled to Brazil also to see John of God's work firsthand. Explain, if you can, the medical risks of surgery without anesthesia or proper sterilization. It doesn't look like he's sterilizing the knife or the probe. Well, yeah, as a physician, I have to say, you don't try these kinds of things at home or with your loved ones.

And this guy has a second grade education and I do have to say that these are things that I don't understand so I can't fully endorse things that are beyond my understanding. But I've seen them happen. Generally without anesthesia, you see enormous pain. I take care of people every day in pain from surgery and other events. The risk of infection is typically great and something that we have to take seriously.

So have people followed up with these people who have gone through these procedures? Maybe infections came later. Well, I think every situation with spiritual healing is different. Did you catch what went on there? This is really interesting to me. Dr. Reddiger notes that the psychic surgeries, which use real knives and actually cut people, he notes that that's dangerous.

He tells people not to do it at home. But he also says he's not aware of anyone getting infections. And then when Oprah points out that they could have gotten infected later, he doesn't respond to that. You'll notice he doesn't say that that's possible even. He just sort of says that like a bunch of things. Yeah, that's amazing. But it's the kind of thing because it's been acknowledged,

even though he doesn't then go on to state that like, actually, yes, we have no data that these people to suggest these people aren't getting infected. We're not performing any follow-ups. I didn't take any attempts to actually determine whether or not people got infected later. He doesn't say that. He gives a non-response so that the show can move on and the audience can move forward, content that John of God, that these are real serious skeptical people

and that that makes John of God even more real because this medical professional has vetted him with the requisite amount of skepticism, even though none of that was actually done. It's amazing. Like this is a master class in how to whiten, like it's laundering bullshit. Yeah. It's even like the way that like they can claim they've addressed the infection risk

by saying, oh, because they brought it up, it's fucking revolting. That's crazy. Yeah. It's awesome. I want to play one more clip from this episode because we just got to believe. And this is what medicine and psychiatry need to examine is I believe the powers of belief, the powers of the mind are far more powerful than we have even begun to explore. I believe that's an unexplored wilderness in terms of research.

So you said that since you made that trip as the skeptic and then you were there in the presence and then had the whole bleeding experience yourself, that it turned your life upside down. How so? Well, if you can say something to the fact that I believe this in my head, but I don't believe it in my heart, I don't get it. It's too much. And then a little incision manifests on the skin over the area of your heart.

That means none of this is what we think it is. It's something I don't know what that means. And there's, I'm sure, religions can layer on many different interpretations. Do you consider yourself a religious person? Because of this, I'm actually more interested in the development and cultivation of a spiritual life. All right. Yup. So that's interesting.

One of Reddiger's claims is that while he's watching John of God perform these surgeries, he spontaneously started bleeding from a hole in his thigh, which is kind of like a stigmata thing. Right. He's introduced as a skeptic who traveled to John of God's center in order to take samples and medically vet whether or not this man was a serious healer. And he says later in that interview, quote, some people I spoke with were able to remember the events going around them completely.

And some people seem to enter a sort of altered state during these surgeries. When I was assisting in one of these surgeries, John of God cut this woman's cornea. She didn't flinch. She didn't try to pull away from him. I can't explain that. I heard some people use the term spiritual anesthesia. I have no way to understand that. It's interesting that he says that because like,

there's actually a lot of reasons why someone wouldn't feel their eye getting scraped. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. It's like perfectly explicable and like lending essentially the name of your institution and by claiming to be baffled to give it like credence is like, God truly pathetic.

It's also like even accepting his words at face value until the end, it's like, okay, yes, the brain can do a lot. Yes. Psychology is more powerful probably in terms of physiological stuff than, you know, we give it credit for. And then pivoting to I want to have a spiritual life is like just an abdication of curiosity. Yup. It's just like, what are you?

Yeah. It is remarkable that some of these people don't feel pain probably. It's documented in other media, you know, other types of formats of this kind of shit. And sure worth exploring, but being like, yeah, I want to see, I want to learn more about these spirits is like incredible. He's such a piece of shit. Yeah.

Yeah. Obviously, like I've scraped my cornea before when I was out hashing in the woods and it didn't hurt, it hurt afterwards, like because just like it fucked up my ability, like my eye was taking in too much light or something. It was like kind of blinded me. It was very much debilitating afterwards, but the actual getting scraped by a branch in the eye, it didn't cause pain, which is part of why it took me a while to realize what had happened.

Yeah. I don't know. It's like, there's also a lot of data on how altered mind altering states like people have in these religious moments can impact perception of pain. Worship is definitively a mind altering state. John of God requires his patients to go through an elaborate series of meditations before and after treatment. And I actually found a scholarly study of his surgeries conducted by doctors from a Brazilian medical school. They note, the surgeries were always performed by John of God and occurred in a large,

non-sterilized and open room with dozens of spectators, most of whom were other patients and their relatives or friends. During each of these surgical sessions, approximately five patients usually remain standing while side by side in front of one of the room's wall. Rarely patients were submitted to the surgeries while they were seated in a chair. Visible surgeries were performed in a few minutes in a very grandiose and theatrical way, invoking strong emotional involvement and even perplexity among the audience. Incisions were performed with either sterilized scalpels or kitchen knives,

and surgeries were performed in rapid succession. Oh, God. The cleanliness of the instruments contrasted to reports of other mediumistic surgeries performed by dirty or even rusty implements. So you notice the stories about this guy that incredible sources state always say that he's just using like random kitchen knives, sometimes even that they're dirty. When actual scientists studied his, like they know his knives are always sterilized and he's not cutting open people deeply and removing organs. He is scraping their skin and their eyes.

The fact that they don't get, a lot of them don't get infections isn't weird. Have you ever gotten a scrape that didn't get infected? You've probably gotten a lot because your body is reasonably good at not dying from random scrapes. Otherwise there wouldn't be people. Yeah. Like it's very frustrating. Another frustrating thing is that this study goes on to note that like they don't know, like they couldn't find any evidence of infections among John's patients,

but they also note that they didn't actually get to follow up with any of these people further than a day or two on. Because like a lot of them like we're traveling in from elsewhere. So like the paper is a proper scientific paper and it concludes that like we need to do more research and track these patients for longer term to determine whether or not anyone's getting infected, which is what you say if you're an actual scientist. Dr. Reddiger on the other hand just gets on Oprah and announces that this is all inexplicable. Science can't explain this. It's like, yes it can.

You just didn't try. Like you didn't even try. And I hate him. Science doesn't work when you don't do it. That's a remarkable conclusion. Yeah. Thank you, doctor. I found a good critical write up of Dr. Reddiger's performance on the blog Science Based Medicine.

I'm going to quote from that now. Unfortunately, the camera angles used made it impossible for me to judge whether John was doing what he claimed. In the only close up shot that was presented, it was clear to me that the knife never touched the woman's eye. And when John actually appeared to be doing something, the camera never focused on the woman's eye. How convenient. It was almost as though Oprah producers were making a conscious effort not to show a camera angle that would allow viewers to judge whether the procedure actually being done was what John of God claimed. Personally, I'd have loved to see an ophthalmologist or even just a surgeon rather than a psychiatrist, because Dr. Reddiger is a psychiatrist, allowed to have a close up view of John's activities. Reddiger has also shown in a video clip apparently bleeding from the chest.

Apparently after having viewed John do his cornea scraping bit, he expresses fear and is concerned that the bleeding doesn't stop as soon as he thinks it should. So pointing out that he doesn't have a bleeding disorder. So again, Dr. Reddiger is a psychiatrist, which makes him a legitimate medical professional, but does not make him particularly competent to rule on whether or not someone's reaction to a light surgical cut is inexplicable, because that is not what psychiatrists specialize in. Yeah. Oh, but it's also just being like the arrogance of being able to say, I can't explain it. So it is therefore I won't explain it. Yeah, won't find out how to explain it. So it's therefore inexplicable.

Yeah, it's super great. Yeah. And it's also noted in that article that Dr. Reddiger isn't just a psychiatrist. He's a psychiatrist who's built an entire brand off of embracing spontaneous healing. At the time this came out, he headed up the initiative for psychological and spiritual development. And on his old website, he wrote this explaining what the Institute did, quote, We live in a culture that has advanced enough that we can send the person with a medical problem to the medical doctor, a person with an emotional problem to the psychologist, a person with a spiritual problem to the priest, minister, or rabbi.

Yet the initiative for psychological and spiritual development is founded upon the belief that beneath all and behind all the masks and appearances that we present to the world, there is something more and whatever healing potential exists comes from this place, which is great nonsense, beautiful, beautiful nonsense. So Dr. Reddiger's initiative appears to be defunct now. I don't think it exists anymore. I can't find evidence of that, but I didn't look super hard. So maybe I'm wrong. He does have a book out, however, called cured with an exclamation point. And it's about people going into spontaneous remission.

I don't know enough about Reddiger to declare him an absolute grifter, but I do know that he was once a ghost on coast to coast AM, which is like Alex Jones for people who are a little bit less racist than Alex Jones. So I'm going to say it's probably fair to call him a grifter. You don't go on coast to coast AM if you're like a credible person. Well, it's also like the, you know, not acknowledging that spontaneous remission is a severe outlier event. Yeah. And like, yeah, it's possible, but like putting your treatment faith in that is insane. Yes.

Yeah. And yeah, but it's a great grift. It's a thing people want to read about it. People love reading books about magical healing and shit. Yeah. Yeah. So yeah, Dr. Reddiger is part of the grand tradition in the medical field of credentialed medical professionals who provide cover for miracle-slinging con men. And of course, Dr. Oz would be another example of this type of person.

Another example is provided in Susan Casey's O Magazine article about John of God. And this is her, again, attempting to do some real journalistic research to talk about how it's not weird to believe that this guy could be curing cancer. Quote, the belief in the effectiveness of prayer is as old as civilization, the results are tough to pin down. Bernard Grad, PhD, a Canadian biologist from McGill University, worked with a spiritual healer named Oscar Estabane, conducting controlled studies in the late 1950s and 60s. Using mice that had been uniformly wounded, Estabane would place his hands upon the wire covers of certain cages, willing those animals to heal. The results were dramatic. In one experiment, the wounds on Estabane's treated mice were very significantly smaller after two weeks than those of mice that had been left to heal on their own. The team also discovered that plant seeds exposed to energy healing grew at a faster rate.

There was a force here, they agreed, and it appeared to be doing something beneficial. What that force was, however, no one could say for sure. Now, these studies happened. They're a real thing that happened. You can read them. Bernard Grad did carry out those studies, and if you look them up, you'll find conclusions that are pretty similar to what Susan Casey writes in her bad article. What you won't find is any clear follow-up to this study. In fact, basically the only writing about this research you will find comes from either woo-woo bullshit practitioners or other medical griftsmen trying to convince people that energy healing is real.

This makes it difficult to refute because there really aren't direct refutations of Dr. Grad's work. What we do have, however, is almost a century of additional research into quote-unquote energy healing, because, again, this stuff was done in the 50s and 60s. It wasn't a big study. It was conducted a long time ago. You can't say that we can't prove to a point of certainty that these people were actually conducting it well or abiding by all the rules they said they were. There's another 70 years of other studies into this that show very different results. Again, she picks out this one study from 70 years ago that says what she wants it to say. She ignores, for example, the fact that in 1999, three psychiatrists with a Lancet evaluated multiple studies, several hundred of them,

that showed links between religious faith, faith healing, and energy healing and health benefits. Here's how Science Magazine reported on their findings. Quote, Typically they say these studies ignore other factors that may improve health, such as abstinence from tobacco and alcohol, and even the scientifically sound practices they contend were inconsistent and don't justify bringing religion into medical practice. Richard Sloan of Columbia University and his colleagues reviewed every article containing religion and physical health they could find in Medline, an online service that indexes medical studies. Many of them, he says, focused on such groups as Roman Catholic priests or Benedictine monks, which forbid certain risky behaviors.

Others looked at more general populations of churchgoers and found lower disease rates, but failed to take into account that only people who were in fairly good health can go to church. When these confounding factors were taken into account, either by the original researchers in a follow-up study or by Sloan's group, the alleged benefits usually disappeared. Overall, Sloan says, The evidence is very unconventioning and weak, much weaker, for example, than the link between marital status and health. So again, you can point out there's a couple of individual studies that, like, haven't been refuted, that suggests a benefit between energy, healing, and health.

And then there's hundreds of studies that show no connection at all. And if you only pay attention to the studies that say what you want, it sounds great. If you look at the mass body of research, it doesn't look so good. But Susan Casey doesn't do that. Yeah, so that's cool. Following that 2010 episode of the Oprah Show, Oprah herself visited John of God in 2012. She described the encounter as blissful. And in her wake, thousands upon thousands of other seekers made the call to travel down Brazil way for some psychic healing.

By 2014, John's Humble Center had transformed into a straight-up commercial empire. Those passion-flower pills alone grew into a $10 million a year business. Celebrities visited, including Paul Simon, the princess of Japan, and Bill Clinton. Maybe. Probably. We don't exactly know. There's a bunch of celebrities who are rumored to have gone. I'm going to guess probably.

Bill Clinton seems like the kind of guy who'd try this. Mm-hmm. Yeah. But something else. Well, especially like all the other shit. Yeah. It's like who the fuck knows what's happening there? Yeah.

Yeah. But something else also cropped up over the years. Allegations of sexual misconduct by John of God. Objective observers noted that he seemed to have a strange non-medical fixation with women's breasts performing surgery aimed at treating heart conditions and other ailments by groping them and cutting around their nipples. So that's good. Oh, God. It's always like the most obvious shit, and yet there's still going to be years of like, of where they're like, oh, I don't know. He just, you know, he was just interested in heart surgery.

Yeah. It's always so transparent when the shit finally like when the mass starts to slip. I feel like. Yep. Yep. It is. But you know what mask never slips? The mask of capitalism.

And that means it's time for us to take our mask off and put some products and services on. Yeah. Hell yeah. 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. 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. And inside his hearse was like a lot of guns. 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. 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 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 offending 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. We're back. Okay, so, yeah, we left off. You know, John F. God has gotten this huge boost from Oprah and her grift community. People are flooding in from all around the world, but also some stories start to come out. The allegations all vague at this point, no individual names attached, but that he's sexually harassing and assaulting people. The allegations were enough that in 2014, a real newspaper, The Sydney Morning Herald, sent a real journalist, Tim Elliott, to look into the matter. Tim's article provided the first comprehensive look at John F. God's operation by someone who wasn't clearly two steps away from joining his cult.

In Casey, the center provided him with a white expat handler to introduce him to John of God's world. Since Tim was a man, his handler was a man. Diego Coppola. Here's Tim's article. Coppola was born in Peru, but spent most of his life in California, where he worked as a computer engineer. After visiting the Casa in 2001, just to check it out, he married a Brazilian and moved to Abediania. These days, he manages the Casa's 50 strong staff, a multinational team of volunteers who take care of logistics, channeling the constant flow of visitors, and, most importantly, forming an impenetral buffer around medium Joao, sheltering him from the ceaseless demands of a ravining public. Everybody wants a piece of medium Joao, says Coppola. Before I arrived, Coppola had promised me an interview with Joao, although he now lets me know that this is far from guaranteed.

He is not like you and me, Coppola tells him. He lives in another realm. Time tables don't mean much to him. What matters to him is doing the work, taking care of the healing. So that's good. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, like the handler for this sort of situation is always like, it's so fucking sinister. It's so crazy to me that people get sucked into this shit. It just seems like on the face, like, get the fuck out of there. Yeah. Yeah. Now, the reality is that John of God spent most of his time living in luxury on a ranch compound nearby. He only worked about half the week, and later revelations would suggest that he spent much of his downtime sexually abusing women.

Although he also spent a lot of his work hours sexually abusing women, too. So who knows? Tim Elliott spoke to an Australian seeker, a woman named Sarah Layton from Melbourne. She's very emblematic of the success cases for John of God, and I'm going to quote from him again. This is her fourth trip to the cost since 2011, during which time she has sought treatment for her liver, kidney, and heart, as well as female problems. She also had lots of psychic surgeries, which is when the entities operate on patients remotely. You wake up after one of these surgeries and you can actually feel the stitches in your stomach, she tells me. Real stitches? No. Psychic stitches, she says. What has helped her most, though, is the emotional healing.

She's had a hard life. After being sexually abused as a child, she was tortured. Before coming here, she had attempted suicide four times. She estimated she has spent $50,000 all up in airfare donations. I always donate to the Casa because John of God doesn't charge anything. And medications, such as healing herbs, which are sold at the Casa's pharmacy. I used my inheritance, $20,000 from my grandmother to pay for a lot of it, but it's worth it. My heart is healed, which Western medicine wasn't able to do, and my gynecological problems have stopped. So there's a lot going on there. Yeah. Yeah. First off, you see everyone claims he doesn't take money.

And then this woman's like, but I spent $50,000 here, which is like, yeah. I mean, I guess to that end, that's not that different than any religion. No. Yeah. Or then actually getting medical treatment in the legal way if you don't have health insurance. Or if you do have health insurance in a lot of cases. Yeah. Fuck. Yeah. But you'll notice that, and this is true with a lot of the most dedicated case studies who will come out and talk about this guy's healing,

is their actual medical complaints are really vague. And there's nothing in that that you can track pathologically. She vaguely says gynecological problems, but also says it's really my heart and my emotional problems that he healed. And Susan Casey, the O Magazine author, was in the same boat. She was grieving, not physically ill. And I've read a lot of stories about women who received healing from John of God, and an overwhelming number of them came in with emotional pain.

And these people do seem to have gotten real relief at the center. But there's nothing magic about what provided them with the relief. I'm going to quote now from a woman who wrote a story about her own treatment by John of God. This is what she described it as, quote, And like, yeah, if you're fucked up and grieving and like in a lot of pain, and you go to a distant location that's like set up to be solemn and relaxing and chill, and you detach from the internet and you stop getting wasted all the time, and you spend a bunch of time hiking in nature and hanging out at waterfalls,

that will help with your grief. Yeah, of course it will. And having someone confidently say this is helping with your grief. This is helping you will get better. Like that's a lot of what people need in those moments is like someone to really confidently tell them like this will pass and you will feel better. All of that stuff helps. There's nothing magical about it.

It's good to go like when you're really fucked up in the head. It's good to stop getting wasted and to spend a lot of time hiking. There's nothing controversial or inexplicable about that. Yeah, so in other words, a lot of the miraculous powers attributed to John of God are really just examples of the fact that life in his center is on balance healthier than the lives a lot of people left behind. That Sarah woman Tim Elliott interviewed even told him she's expected the same thing. She said, quote, you're in the fifth dimension here.

Whereas in Australia, it's the third dimension. In Australia, people don't understand spirituality. It's either work or going out and getting drunk. I find I have to escape that. And like, yeah, if your life if you were if you were like depressed and getting wasted every night and like that makes your body feel worse, it's bad for your health. And you go to a place and it guys like stop doing that for four months, hike, meditate. Yeah, that's going to help.

I mean, honestly, just like I could prescribe just don't be in Australia. Come on. Yeah, get out of Australia is a general rule. Get out of Australia. We all know. We all know what you people get up to. Yeah. But of course, John of God and his adherents couldn't just claim that the man had provided people with a relaxing retreat

because claiming that this is magical and it also can treat cancer and stuff. That's where the real money is at. So when Tim did his interviews, his patients referred to John of God as a spiritual x-ray machine. And in the very dumb biography, John of God, Heather Cummings claimed that John was able to see each of his patients as a hologram, which is why all staff patients and visiting journalists were asked to wear white. He says it made them easier to read. It also coincidentally opened up a huge market in town for white clothing of which John of God got a cut. Awesome.

Smart. Yeah. Yeah. And the uniform, like, starts to take away your identity and makes you more easy to manipulate and all that shit. Yep. Fuck. As business expanded in the wake of Oprah's show, John and his followers created new treatments. They opened up a series of crystal beds.

Patients paid $60 an hour for the right to lie around a bunch of rocks. They also opened up a gift shop. Tim Elliott writes that it sold, quote, books, CDs, DVDs, tote bags, t-shirts, coffee mugs, and crystals. All crystals have been blessed by the entity, reads a sign on the wall. There are John of God pendants, postcards, and travel pillows, even glow-in-the-dark John of God wall stickers. I really like imagining, like, the fucking, like, entity sweatshop where the guy just has to, like, or the spirit just has to bless. Oh, yeah. Like, just a, you know, 40 gross of crystals or else they can't go home.

Yeah. The entities are like, yeah, they're working long hours to make sure all those fucking crystals are holy enough. Yeah. Both the gift shop and cafe also do a brisk trade in water that has been blessed by the entity. People at the Casa Treat the blessed water like nitroglycerin. Don't drink it all at once. Jana Sue Jones says one afternoon when she sees me swigging from a bottle, you'll be up all night. Sarah Layton tells me she regularly buys 10 liter jugs of the stuff to take home in her luggage.

It's just water. Oh, my God. Yeah, I mean, a lot of religions have fancy water. Now, the heart of the whole grift is the pharmacy, though. When I first started reading about it, I assumed it just stocked a variety of herbal remedies that he was giving people. But it turns out that the reality was even dumber than that and more brilliant at the same time. Here's Tim, quote, I had assumed that the pharmacy would stock a range of different herbs to treat a variety of different conditions.

But note, there is only one herb for sale here. Passaflora, the flower of the passion fruit plant. When I asked Coppola about this, he explains that it's not what's in the capsules that counts, but rather the spiritual prescription that John of God writes for each patient. The intentionality of that prescription is transferred to the capsules at the time of purchase, he says. That's fucking brilliant. That's a great grift right there. Yeah.

I mean, that's like the homeopathy grift, you know, it's that you can put magic in whatever. Yeah. And if you have a line on passion fruit flowers, which does sound good. Yeah. And again, all of the people who see John, he is actually just being seen by him and showing up and being in that line is free. But they all get prescriptions for these herbs and, you know, some by $50, some by $10 worth. But the average, Tim knows that the average purchase is about $20, which would account for $40,000 a day in herb sales alone. Jesus Christ.

So great grift. A fucking plus grift, John of God, like very smart. So Abadiania is a small town. It is not located in a nice part of Brazil. Before John of God, its biggest industry was a series of brick factories. By the mid aughts, John was by far the largest business in the area. And this gave him power. The way Tim describes it, John of God's financial leverage turned Abadiania into his own personal fiefdom.

Quote, the biggest industry by far is medium jow. There are no less than 72 posadas or hotels here, all catering to Casa Pilgrims, most of whom come on two week tours and arranged for booking agents. These tours cost many thousands of dollars and must be approved by Joao or rather the entity. There are rumors that he also demands a percentage from the tour operators, but Coppola denies this. Medium Joao owns farms and some mines. He doesn't need more money. Not if he's making 40 grand a day from herb sales, he doesn't.

He also is definitely getting that kick back. Yeah, my friends in the pot industry got into the wrong business. Just convince people that any random plant cures everything and start selling that shit. Like that's the fucking money. You don't even need real plants. They could just be putting grass in those bills and people wouldn't notice. Yeah, or nothing.

Yeah, or nothing. Just sawdust. It's brilliant. So it soon becomes apparent just how much the town has been molded in the Joao, the entity's image. Photos of him are everywhere on street poles in the posadas and cafes. A whole industry has sprung up around the sale of white clothes for visitors who forget to bring their own. He is the brand here when visitor told me the locals are now worried about how long he's going to live. The entity oversees everything here from new businesses, which must be entity approved to new construction.

One Australian CASA staff member told me that before building a house here, she ran the plans past the entity. Now, Tim did eventually get to conduct an interview with John of God, but only after he made it through a gauntlet of fawning former patients. The center made him interview all of John's regulars, men and women who claim he healed them. The goal of this was obviously to instill a sense of awe in him, so that by the time he got to talk to John of God, he was in a mentally receptive place. But Tim is a good journalist, and this did not work on him. In fact, he says that by the end of the whole routine, he suffered from miracle fatigue.

Quote, If one more person tells me about their amazing recovery, I'll kill them. I'm a fan of Tim. Very good. When they sat down to talk, Tim became probably the first reporter to directly ask John of God about the sexual abuse allegations against him. John's response,

I thought you came to talk about me, not other people. That's fucking awesome. I mean, I guess if you're going to pass the buck, why not? Jesus Christ. Yeah. At this point, John tried to break off the interview to go nap, but Tim asked him about another allegation. Local reporters had alleged that he diverted donations meant to build a soup kitchen

and use them to renovate his house. John responded with a rant that he wasn't a thief. The person making the allegations was a thief. So like, very incredible guy here. Then the interview ended. And for a while, that was about all anyone had on the allegations against John of God. The Montreal Gazette had a big laugh in 2015 when John of God had an endoscopy, which revealed a tumor and he had to undergo major surgery and chemotherapy to have it removed.

When asked if this was hypocritical, John of God responded, what barber cuts his own hair and went right back to fleecing thousands of people per year, which is just great. Like, I'll cure your cancer, but if I get cancer, I'm going to get some fucking chemo. Yeah. I mean, look, he had an answer and the right answer ready to go, I guess. Yeah, that is the right answer. You know what will cure your cancer?

Oh God, please don't. We are FDA backed to say that all cancers are cured by whatever product and or service comes up next. So again, the FDA completely backs and supports this. And if they have a problem with what I'm saying, they can come after me. Come on, you fucking FDA cowards. Bring it on. Bring it on. Anyway, here's healing.

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. 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.

And inside his hearse were like a lot of guns. He's a shark. And not in the good and bad ass way. And nasty sharks. 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. 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 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 offending 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. We're back, and I am just waiting for the FDA to try and take me on. Let's do it. Come on. They'll take this cancer from your cold, dead hands, I believe. Yeah. Fuckin' it. I don't know. Who knows what's happening anymore? Doesn't matter. In September of 2018, a very brave Brazilian activist, Sabrina Bittencourt, went public with allegations from dozens of women against John of God. The blowback against her was immediate and severe. John was well connected in the Brazilian government, as well as extremely popular.

An avalanche of death threats forced Sabrina to flee her home country for Spain. One of John's victims was hounded into suicide by her own family, who were all adherents of the medium and members of the cult. The story did not disappear, though, because as the weeks went by, dozens and then hundreds of new women came forward with their own stories of sexual abuse and rape at the hands of John of God. By the time the 300th allegation hit, the chief lawman Ngoias was forced to issue a preventative incarceration request against John of God. Initially, John expressed a desire to work with law enforcement and comply with the investigation. From a local news story, quote, I am grateful to God for still being here. I'm still a brother in God. I want to comply with Brazilian law. I am in its hands. João de Deus is still alive, he told his followers. When he left only 10 minutes later, he told reporters that he was innocent of all accusations. The psychic's appearance caused a visible uproar in the center. Some followers greeted him with applause, while others complained about the presence of reporters.

Respect my father, one of the volunteers asked. Now, I included that quote about that John of God cult member saying respect my father, which is because I think it's really interesting. And it's interesting because John's actual daughter accused him of sexual assault. In January of 2019, after 300 other allegations go public, John of God's own daughter goes to the Brazilian magazine, Veja, to announce, quote, under the pretense of mystical treatments, he abused and raped me between the ages of 10 and 14. Oh, God. She claims the abuse from John of God only stopped after one of his employees impregnated her. In response to this, John of God beat his own daughter so badly that she suffered a miscarriage. She told Veja, my father is a monster. True. Now, eventually more than 600 women came forward to level accusations against John of God. Like, it is hard to overstate that. I'm sure it's thousands.

Like, if 600 women came forward in a climate so dangerous where, like, at least one of his victims was hounded to suicide, I suspect he is guilty of thousands of acts of sexual assault. But we know 600 women leveled accusations. Rather than report to the police, as he said he would, John of God went on the run withdrawing $9 million in cash in an attempt to flee the country. But he was unsuccessful in this and eventually had to turn himself in. Raids on his compound found millions of dollars in cash as well as a large number of illegal firearms. Police who interrogated him started to report bizarre incidents, including their computer spontaneously typing the letters, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, a bunch of times. The printer printing spontaneously and a mini fridge exploding. These reports are almost certainly untrue. They come from tabloid sources. But there is a lot of evidence that sympathetic Brazilian police certainly wanted citizens to believe this was all going on. You know, we started this episode talking about, like, the police tend to be on these guys' sides because they believe the bullshit. Yeah.

Less than a month after making initial allegations, Sabrina Bittencourt released a bizarre six-minute-long video accusing John of God of having run a 20-year-long human trafficking operation. She alleged that the cult leader's spiritual hospital was nothing but a cover for a baby smuggling empire that sold infants to parents in the U.S., Australia, and Europe for up to $50,000 apiece. Bittencourt alleged that John had established a network of isolated farms and mines and that he would bribe poor girls aged 14 to 18 to move there and spend the next decade continuously pregnant. Once born, the babies were sold on the black market. After 10 years, the birthmothers were executed to prevent any witnesses. Sabrina wrote, quote, or stated, quote, hundreds of girls were enslaved over the years, lived on farms in Goya, served as wombs to get pregnant for their babies to be sold. These girls were murdered after 10 years of giving birth. We've got a number of testimonies. We have received reports from the adopted mothers of their children that were sold for between 20,000 and 50,000 in Europe, USA, and Australia, as well as testimony from ex-workers and local people who are tired of being complicit with John of God's gang. Now, those are some wild ass allegations. Unfortunately, I don't know if any of this really happened.

Sabrina was absolutely right about John of God's career of sexual abuse. Hundreds of women came forward, including his own daughter. There's so much testimony, it's very clear what happened. But the baby smuggling stuff, there's not hard evidence of this. An investigation is ongoing into it. And Sabrina Bittencourt, like, she got hounded out of her home and deluged in death threats and suffered a mental breakdown. She came out with these allegations days before committing suicide. She was a sexual abuse survivor herself, clearly traumatized by that, as well as the ocean of death rates. This doesn't mean that her allegations weren't accurate, because there's actually a long history in Brazil that includes to the present day of, like, religion, particularly Christian cults that have, like, farming communes abducting people, basically, and forcing them into slavery to, like, grow plants and shit. Like, stuff happens in Brazil. It's a big country, and there's a lot of areas that are beyond the rule of law. This is not impossible, but it's really hard to know exactly what's going on. And you won't find any credible publications that have gone into the matter in detail, because really all we have are the allegations and the fact that they're being investigated. And unfortunately, it is unlikely we will ever know the truth, because if Bittencourt's allegations are accurate, it is highly unlikely that the Bolsonaro administration would allow the truth to get out. Because Jair Bolsonaro has connections to John F. God, and a lot of members of his political party were backers of John F. God. And if John F. God was operating a massive multi-million dollar baby smuggling empire, he absolutely did it with the consent and help of powerful men in Brazil, and the truth is just not going to fucking get out. So this is not a satisfying ending in that case, because I can't tell you what happened with his whole baby smuggling business.

Pretty clearly he raped a whole lot of people, and it was a monster. But there's just a lot that's unclear about this story that will be up in the air for years. Hopefully good investigations will kind of come to a more concrete conclusion about some of this stuff in the future. I will say, though, while our story doesn't end in the most satisfying way possible, it does end with something that kind of resembles justice. In December 2019, a judge in Goya sentenced John F. God to 19 years and four months in prison for the rapes of four different women. His lawyers are appealing, but John is incarcerated today. And at age 77, he is very likely to die in prison. So that's something. Yeah, something, I guess, resembling justice. Jesus Christ. Yeah, if you like squint. Yeah. Oh, it's OK. So, Robert, as someone who spends a lot of time looking at men like this.

Is there ever a case where it's like it just feels like these like the patterns of the shit is always the same? And I guess it's maybe self selecting because it's the shit we hear about. But it always feels like it follows like such a similar blueprint. It's like, you know, like every cult feels the same. Yeah, I mean, because they all operate on the same principle. Like every cult feels the same in the way that every oil and gas company works broadly the same way. Because the same sort of tactics, the same sort of promises attract and work on the same sort of people. And the same kinds of folks are able to successfully carry out these grifts because being able to do the work that these kind of people do. Like John of God isn't all that different from a guy like Elrond Hubbard.

They all have more more more alike than different or all that different from Sarah Paula White Kane, Donald Trump's spiritual advisor. They're all they just pick different kind of ways to do the same thing. And some of them are more successful than others and they're all differently successful. But it is it's always the same grift and it just leaves a huge amount of human shrapnel in its wake, which sucks. Yeah, Jesus Christ, this is fucking dark as shit, man. Yeah, man, this one's a rough story. Yeah, yeah. And like I just I wish we knew more about the baby farming stuff.

There just doesn't seem to be solid information and also just like Sabrina Bittencourt by the time she came out with those allegations was like pretty broken. Like broken in the sense that like human an ocean of hate from other people had like shattered her psyche. Yeah, which is also tragic. And, you know, what she did was very brave and she brought down this guy, but it cost her her own life, which is really fucked up. God, God, it's fucking horrible. Yeah, it's not great. Yeah, another successful episode of Behind the Bastards. We really nailed it today.

Just grim shit. How often does it end in anything resembling justice? Can't be that often. Yeah, not all that often. Most of them don't wind up in prison. I guess everyone dies, but still. Yeah, about 15 percent of the time something that like resembles justice happens to these guys. Yeah, that's about 15 percent of the time, I'll say.

I feel like that's high, Robert. Maybe, maybe. Look, if you if you the fan want to go through and run the numbers, please do. Yeah, I hate numbers and don't trust them. Yeah, I don't do math. Yeah, someone do run the stats, run the stats on the bastards. Yeah, let us know. Run the stats or just listen to run the jewels.

It's better. But only one, only one, you can't do both. Yeah, no, absolutely. That's the key. And you have anything you want to plug after that really just uplifting conversation? Yeah, God, I guess I mean, look, this is probably the only podcast that I can comfortably say. That yo, is this racist? Well, we take some of the worst, you know, just situations and shit in the news.

People's like questions on racism is horrible often. Not horrible, horrible, but I can definitively say we're less depressing than this. So word. Check it out. Yep. We you can find us on BehindTheBastards.com where we will have the sources for this article or this episode. You can find me on Twitter at IWriteOK and I have a podcast called The Women's War. Check it out.

The Women's War is uplifting and not, it's hopeful. Yeah, yeah, I'm more hopeful than this bullshit. So. Yep. Damn. Fuck the man. Yeah, thanks for having me. I mean, I can't say it was fun, but it was certainly something.

Yep, it was certainly something. So. Yep, we're done. I'm gonna stop recording now. He was just waiting for me to set the date, the time, and then for sure he was trying to get it to happen. 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 I Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. How about a Russian astronaut who found himself stuck in space with no country to bring him down? With the Soviet Union collapsing around him, he orbited the earth for 313 days that changed the world. Listen to the last Soviet on the I Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.