Behind the Bastards - Part Two: The Clarence Thomas Story

Episode Date: July 28, 2022

Robert is joined again by Miles Gray for part two of our four part series on Clarence Thomas. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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

And the wrongly convicted pay a horrific price? Two death sentences in a life without parole. My youngest? I was incarcerated two days after her first birthday. Listen to CSI on trial on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. Yes, of course I would fuck Elon Musk for the right amount of money, which is six million dollars or more. Miles, what number did you just throw out? I'm not going to lie about what I said. I'll say it again. I'm fucking for 400 bucks. Wow, no, definitely not.

You know why? Because I'll turn it into a story. I'll make money on the back of that. Launching on the iHeart Radio network in April 2023. I fucked Elon Musk. No money, no amount of money in the world. That's where I stand. Miles Gray and Elon Musk, a match made in hell. You really cornered me. See, you have me on the show just to get me to say some shit like that as well. Anyway, I do it for... It was not difficult. That's all I'm going to say. I think I would throw out 10 million first, but I would go as low as six.

That's good. I think that's realistic. Don't tell him that. No, I don't mean to cheapen it. Realistically, I think for it to really work for me, I'll probably do it for like 650. Wow, Jesus. So like two car payments? Yeah, or at least like a PS5 and some controllers. No, that is good. Yeah, a PS5 would be nice. PS5 and controllers?

Yeah, what if he just shows up at your house with a PS5 and controllers? Well then, you know what? I'm telling Alexa to put on some smooth jazz. There we go. Smooth jazz. That's your move with Elon Musk. Oh yeah, it's me and David Sanborn. You see, I think I would try because I'm younger than him, so it's probably... He can't tell the difference between me and a teenager. I would put on like Austrian yodeling albums and try to convince him it's what like the kids were into these days. It's like everybody on Reddit loves these yodeling albums, Elon.

And then try to see if I can get him to tweet about like his favorite yodellers. I bet we could do it. So you want to run an op on him? Okay. I want to get paid first. Like payment is first. And then fucking with them a little bit. So we have to run an op on someone to show like the veracity of our claims. Like there's strength to the business model.

Yeah, absolutely. This is actually how our marketing works. Like we run ops on celebrities and they unwittingly support your products. Yeah. So big yodeling, get at me, right? If you want to get it on the ground floor, if you're representing a yodeler and you want Elon Musk to tweet about them, I probably can't make that happen. What if I did? That would be funny.

There is that one like really famous like child who yodeled in Walmart. Like I feel like Elon Musk would be like down. Oh yeah. That kid's like 43 now. And he's all like, his yodeling is all fucked up because his voice changed. No. Yeah. Oh yeah.

He went like hard right too. I think he's a proud boy now. Yeah. So what you're saying is Elon Musk would love him. Mm-hmm. I'm sure. Well, welcome to Behind the Bastards, the podcast that is three and a half minutes in. We talk about bad people.

This week we're talking about Clarence Thomas. So boy, how do we get from there to here? Good stuff. So in 1971, Clarence Thomas enters Yale Law School. You know, he graduates from that school he goes to in fucking Wooster, right? Yeah. And he's a pretty, for those years he's in Wooster, he's a pretty hardcore, like black nationalist activist.

But in 1971, he enters Yale. He is one of 12 black students on the entire campus. Thanks to an affirmative action program recently instituted in the school that mandated 10% of the class not be white kids. You will remember that it was in the 1960s when Yale removed their secret caps on Jewish students. Like, Yale is, shall we say, a little bit behind the curve on integration. Oh my God. So, yeah, this program helps him get into Yale.

But it also makes clear the fact that he'd gotten into Yale through an affirmative action program makes him feel as if he has a target on his back. Quote, you had to prove yourself every day because the presumption was that you were dumb and didn't deserve to be there. He later added, as much as it had stung to be told I'd done well in high school despite my race. It was far worse to feel that I was now at Yale because of it. Which, yeah, man, that's the whole thing.

But also, like, it wasn't your lack of ability that would have kept you out of Yale earlier. It was that somebody had to force Yale admissions to accept people who weren't white. Like, right, that is the thing. It's not that you couldn't do Yale. It's that Yale had to be forced to be like shit. Yale would do you. Yeah. But, yeah, anyway, Thomas has always been a pretty conservative guy by personality.

Even when he was a radical, it was kind of rooted in very traditional ideas he had about the family and about gender roles. He remained religious as hell even after he left the seminary, the Bill Gates Seaman School. He felt discipline and an authoritarian upbringing were important for kids to have. But he was also a registered Democrat because his family was and because he supported the civil rights movement because, you know, there weren't like, that's what you did, right? Like, that's what his family did.

Like, that was the only reasonable option as he saw it for a very long time. Right. It was at Yale then that Clarence finally starts moving away from politically aligning himself with liberals. He's never really been a liberal, right? Right. But he votes with them and like, yeah. He starts to make that actual move towards a conservative political party and towards

a conservative more, like more of an open embrace of conservative ideology while he's at Yale. And I'm going to quote again from the New Yorker here. At Yale, Thomas developed an understanding of racism that he would never shake. Whites, Southern and Northern, liberal and conservative, rural and urban, are racists. Racism, Thomas would tell students at Mercer University in 1993, has, it has complex and to a certain degree, undiscoverable roots. Not knowing it's beginning, we can't know its end.

The most that can be hoped for is that whites be honest about it. Honesty is demonstrated through crude statements of personal animus or intellectual suggestions of racial inequality. Dishonesty is demonstrated through denial of one's racism and sympathetic extensions of help. Dishonesty lulls black people into a false sense of security, assuring them that they are safe when they are not. One of Thomas' favorite songs is the 1971 hit, Smiling Faces Sometimes, by The Undisputed

Truth. It's classic lyric, Smiling Faces, Smiling Faces Tell Lies, resonates with his experience of Northern white liberals. Among the virtues of the Reagan administration, he has said, was the fact that no one there was smiling in your face. So, if we're taking Thomas' experience on this, like what the way he describes it, is that he goes to seminary, everyone there is super racist and like conservative, and he hates that.

But then he goes to like fancy Northern liberal towns and schools, and everyone there is just as racist but pretends not to be. And he decides, well, I guess I prefer the unabashed racists. I mean, there's not no point there, right? There's not no point there. No, not at all. There's validity to what he's saying. Yeah, absolutely.

I mean, look at just what we saw in 2020 with people donning kente cloth and taking a knee. Exactly. And for what? Just to always come back and be like, well, you know, qualified immunity, let's not go too far with anything. And you're like, well, then what the fuck was that? And again, to his point, a false sense of security, and we are not. We are infaxing the opposite of that.

And then on the other side of it, he's like, man, these people, you know where the fuck they're at? Yeah, you know where all the Reagan's people are coming from because they are racist to shit. Yeah. And they don't say shit because they're racist and they know it. They know the rules of racism. Yeah.

So, in the end, Yale winds up leaving a pretty harsh taste in his mouth. His grades are, we don't really know exactly what his grades are, right? He has remained like, people will say that he was kind of a middle of the road student. We don't really know because his academic records remain sealed at his urging. Journalists who spoke to his professors repeat the same story. He was a pretty average student. Upon leaving Yale, he applied to a number of high end law firms, but he was not hired by any of them.

And this is probably less a factor of his grades than the fact that he was middle class and black, right? He doesn't have connections to these big money law firms that he's trying to get jobs with, which is ultimately why Yale people get hired. It's not just that they went to Yale and it's certainly not their grades. It's that their dad is somebody who's connected to the people who run the fucking law firm or they make friends or whatever, right? Right.

Years later, Thomas would tell a law school class, quote, since my reason for going to law school in the first place was to return to Savannah to assist in righting the wrongs, which I felt existed there throughout my childhood, I can't say this was a high point. If anything, I was steeped in frustration. And this is definitely a thing where he's like lying like hell because over the last couple of decades since his emergence as a public figure, Thomas has made a big deal about how he got into law because he wanted to join the crusade for civil rights. And again, like right wrongs that he'd seen as a kid.

This was a big part of the pitch he made his grandfather. And this is, again, very untrue because the one job Thomas was actually offered right out of Yale was at a Savannah law firm. And he had spent the summer interning at this firm and they did a lot of that kind of work. And he turns the job down because it doesn't pay enough. Now Clarence was ultimately willing to take a job that paid poorly, but not one that would let him serve his community in Savannah. Instead, he takes a low paid job with Jack Danforth, the Republican attorney general

of Missouri. Now Danforth, he's this kind of thing that doesn't exist anymore. He was like a liberal Republican. And he was on his own concerned with the fact that again, he's the attorney general of Missouri on his own. He's like, wow, this staff is too fucking white. We need to have some people who are not white guys around here. So he hires Clarence Thomas because he's like, I think as the AG, we need to have like black

lawyers representing people too because it's Missouri, which is good. Thomas does not like this because it smacks of affirmative action, which he deeply resented. And because again, he wants a high paid legal career and this is not that. And you know, he is initially not really super enthused by this offer either, but he eventually decides to take it. And his friend Clarence Martin later told Jane Mayer, quote, but the time he went to Missouri, he was very disillusioned. He didn't want the attorney general's job.

He never wanted to be part of the government. And in fact, he resented it. He wanted to be this great trial lawyer in private practice, but he lost his self confidence after all the Atlanta firms turned him down. So yeah, that's that's the call that he makes is to get his start in Republican politics with this guy Danforth. Now, because it's Missouri, he has to pass the state bar to do it, which is like, you know, you got to do an exam in every state to be able to do law shit there.

Right. Because lawyers. Yeah. Yeah. It's a whole thing. So while he counter to what you might hear on TikTok, apparently that's not true. But now I know you have to. You can't just do it in one.

Yeah. You can't just do it in one state. Miles, your your state of the District of Columbia Law Certificate that you you have printed out above your desk. Yeah. C-O-L-O-M-B-I-A. So yeah, he's got to spend the summer like cramming to pass the bar exam in Missouri. So he winds up crashing at the house of a St. Louis and double ACP chairperson.

While he crams all summer for the exam at the end of the summer, he tries to pay her and she told tells him to quote, help someone who is in your position in the future, basically pay it forward. Right. Yeah. So Thomas joins the Danforth administration as a conservative Democrat, but in short order, he starts to see how this low paid entry level position with the Republican Party might lead him to the kind of clout and wealth that he sought.

The key would be remaking himself as a political conservative. Cindy Faddis, who knew him when he worked for Danforth, recalled, he said that he thought he'd have an advantage as a Republican. Thomas is said to have stated, if I belong to the Republican Party, I could go farther. After that, the change was rather sudden and jarring, as this quote from the book Strange Justice Makes Clear. Clarence Martin, who visited Thomas in Missouri, found the transformation in his formerly liberal friend, with whom he had worked only the summer before, to be quite remarkable.

Gone was Thomas's college dorm room poster of Malcolm X, replaced by an oversized poster of a Rolls-Royce. No longer dwelling on being shut out of private practice, Thomas now had a new avenue for his ambitions. As a Republican, he told Martin, he planned a big future in politics. I remember him sitting with his feet up on the desk, smoking a cigar, said Martin. I saw a change in Clarence then. He said, the Republicans are going places in the next 10 years, and I'm going to attach

my wagon to their star. Martin forgave Thomas's apparent ideological expedience. In many ways, he was already conservative in his social views, Martin noted. And he really admired Danforth. I'd ask him, how can you become a Republican? And he'd say, blacks need to be on both sides, and these people are in power. It was a matter of practicality. All right.

So we've got to the part where he became Darth Vader. He's doing that. He's going. And it's interesting because Danforth is, you could draw a line between Danforth and his current position because Danforth is very anti-abortion. But Danforth is also, again, a liberal Republican and one of the weirdest things that we really don't have anymore. He's ideologically consistent.

So he is also an anti-death penalty crusader. So he's a Republican who is like really violently against the death penalty and against abortion. Which at least suggests that he's being consistent in the things that he's claiming. But yeah, this is where Thomas gets his start in politics. Now one of his colleagues at the Savannah law firm where he had done his interning, a guy named Fletcher Farrington, who later supported his nomination to the Supreme Court, insists that Thomas was not a, quote, complete opportunist, but that, quote, to some extent his politics were shaped by his opportunities.

At the core of everything, then, is the fact that Thomas's real goal, more than anything, was to attain a position that gave him wealth and prestige. As Farrington put it, his ambition was not to make a particular change in society, but to go as far as he could go. And I think that is something, you know, despite the fact that his grandfather winds up disappointed in him for not helping his community. That's something that's very consistent with the upbringing he has, right? All that matters is the work.

All that matters is like getting the best position you can in society, right? You need to go further than I was able to, right? Yeah. Yeah. I mean, he definitely is his grandfather's son. All right. You know what? Now I'm rooting for him again.

Now you're back on board. You're back on board. Yeah. All right. Go CC. Well, we are about to get to the Reagan administration, which I know is your favorite period in American political history. My dad's explanation why they were unhoused people when I asked him as a four-year-old.

Oh, good. Yeah. Was he a, because Reagan closed the institutions guy? Yeah. I was like, I remember being a bummed out like four-year-old person and like, you know, we were like giving food to like someone housed people. I was like, why did some people like have to live there and my dad's like, because of Ronald Reagan.

And I'm like, what I'm for. I don't know what that means. And I remember saying that shit in like first grade and like my teacher's like, who the fuck are you? That's amazing. Oh, that's good stuff. You know what else is good, Miles? Capitalism.

Oh, yeah. Which is the real reason why all of these people aren't able to live indoors. The Miles, sweet lady capitalism. Have you ever felt like the world's not getting hot enough fast enough? No. Yes. Maybe you're sitting in England and going 40 degrees Celsius. That's not that high, 40 is a low number.

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Back in the 1930s, a marine named Smedley Butler was all that stood between the U.S. and fascism. I'm Ben Bullock. And I'm Alex French. In our newest show, we take a darkly comedic and occasionally ridiculous deep dive into a story that has been buried for nearly a century. We've tracked down exclusive historical records. We've interviewed the world's foremost experts. We're also bringing you cinematic, historical recreations of moments left out of your history

books. I'm Smedley Butler, and I got a lot to say. For one, my personal history is raw, inspiring and mind blowing. And for another, do we get the mattresses after we do the ads or do we just have to do the ads? From iHeart Podcast and School of Humans, this is Let's Start a Coup. Listen to Let's Start a Coup on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you find your favorite shows.

I'm Lance Bass, and you may know me from a little band called NSYNC. What you may not know is that when I was 23, I traveled to Moscow to train to become the youngest person to go to space. And when I was there, as you can imagine, I heard some pretty wild stories. But there was this one that really stuck with me about a Soviet astronaut who found himself stuck in space with no country to bring him down. It's 1991, and that man, Sergei Krekalev, is floating in orbit when he gets a message that down on Earth, his beloved country, the Soviet Union, is falling apart.

And now he's left defending the Union's last outpost. This is the crazy story of the 313 days he spent in space, 313 days that changed the world. Listen to the last Soviet on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. What if I told you that much of the forensic science you see on shows like CSI isn't based on actual science? The problem with forensic science in the criminal legal system today is that it's an awful lot

of forensic and not an awful lot of science. And the wrongly convicted pay a horrific price. Two death sentences and a life without parole. My youngest, I was incarcerated two days after her first birthday. I'm Molly Herman. Join me as we put forensic science on trial to discover what happens when a match isn't a match and when there's no science in CSI. How many people have to be wrongly convicted before they realize that this stuff's all

bogus? It's all made up. Listen to CSI on trial on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. Oh, we're back. Clarence Thomas was good at his first job in government, by which I mean he pleased all of the people he needed to get another job in government that was better. It is worth noting that at one point while he is working as a lawyer in the AG's office

in the state of Missouri, Roe v. Wade comes up. His boss, obviously Danforth opposes the ruling and he challenges it in a court case, Danforth v. Planned Parenthood. It was later noted by colleagues that Clarence Thomas expressed no particular interest in this case. So at least at this point, people who work with him when there's like a big fight over Planned Parenthood in their office are like, yeah, he didn't really give a shit. Now this is not to say that Thomas didn't talk about abortion during this period in

his life. His mother recalled him saying that he opposed abortion on demand because if she'd had one, he wouldn't exist. Oh, my God. Now that said, that said, at another point, his sister has an abortion because the doc, she's already had several kids and a doctor warns her she might die if she carries this fetus to term. She had some kind of health condition, right?

And Clarence is said to be understanding of this. So again, if you're looking for kind of like a very clear like line between the guy who ends Roe v. Wade and this dude, it's not in his actual opinions on Roe v. Wade because more than anything, he barely seems to have one, right? Right. So one interesting thing about Thomas's career is that for a Supreme Court judge, he basically doesn't spend any time in court arguing cases. That is not his job.

He wants to be a great trial lawyer, right? Because like that's where the fucking money is. But he doesn't ever really do that. The time he's spent, he's in his works for Danforth for about two and a half years. And this is the only time in his entire career as a judge where he is litigating anything or his entire career in law where he litigates anything at all, right? So these are not interesting cases. His first major victory was an argument restricting the use of vanity license plates by rich people.

He was noted, right, like that's not really a big deal, you know? He was noted by some as being the office clown, though, which is consistent with a number of recollections of people who worked with him over the years. Now, depending on who you ask, you might also consider him an office bully. However, the person that he spent the time bullying in the office was John Ashcroft. So I'm not going to say that this goes in the bastard column for him. I think it's completely fine to bully John Ashcroft. Yeah, all right.

Maybe maybe you got a point here. OK, I'm back. I'm back. That gets you one year out of hell if we're going by Catholic rules. 100 percent. When your Bush is AG, no, why not? Yeah. So obviously, John Ashcroft, if you don't know, was a religious weirdo who was like

a man built entirely out of hangups. And Clarence Thomas, as we will discuss, loves to make extremely sexual jokes and comments to his co-workers. So a big part of what he do is deliberately try to flush fluster John Ashcroft by bringing up things that are inappropriate. Now, again, I will be honest here, I am a little bit drawing a line there because all the writing on his time with Ashcroft said was that he attempted to like deliberately try to fluster him.

But I'm bringing up the sex stuff because one of the most important things to know about working with Clarence Thomas is that the man loves, Miles loves pornography. Absolutely huge porn guy. I don't think you're ready for what a porn guy Clarence Thomas is. Well, I mean, what would I even I'm trying to even think of what I would describe if you said what's a porn guy to you? Yeah. Somebody who has like a couple like who subscribes to some magazines going like old school physical

media days and has like, you know, like like a shelf of tapes. OK. This is interesting. This is interesting, Miles. I'm going to describe to you what Clarence Thomas does about porn later. And you tell me if you think porn guy is the right thing to call him. But OK, that's fine. And look, you know, I'm not, you know, do you?

But yeah, but fuck this guy. OK, we'll talk about that in a minute. Now, Thomas's relationship with his mother was strained for completely understandable reasons. He grows up in a primarily male environment and he seems to have gone from awkward around women to sometimes hostile around women. When he was a black civil rights activist, he came from the camp who saw sexual equality as not a worthy battle.

Like it's about racial equality. We're not here to fight for sexual equality. That's a bad idea. We're here for liberation kind of. Yeah, exactly. Again, this is every it's like the suffragettes in the 20s being like women need to vote. Well, just white women, really. Not you or you or you, not you, certainly not you, but us.

Not that it was all of them, just like not that. But anyway, like this is this is it's never perfect. Yes. The start. It turns out movements that make meaningful achievements are often filled with people who still believe shitty things. So yeah, when when he starts going to Yale and he starts to turn away from those activist beliefs, he keeps the chauvinism.

One female classmate later recalled, at that time, I didn't know the word male chauvinist, but now looking back, I can say he defined the term. He barely spoke to women. He was so condescending and accustomed to them being subservient that when I'd offer an opinion in a conversation, it irritated him. When I talked, he'd just ignore me. He'd only talked to the men he thought women belonged in the kitchen. So he does marry a woman, Kathy Ambush, which is a funny name to have ambush.

And they stayed together for something like a decade. She is very traditional, which suits him. She's super Catholic. But Catholics are liberal, right, traditionally in American politics. So she's also she's very traditional. She is kind of the I'm going to stay at home and like be a homemaker type wife. But also she's deeply committed to being a political liberal and this becomes a huge source of tension for them.

Now, as I've said before, Thomas is loudly conservative in his social values. He rails against premarital sex. He had apparently told enough friends that it got out to reporters that he would leave his wife if she cheated on him immediately. Like this is just the thing he talks about to people. At the same time, he has a somewhat unhinged obsession with pornography and more to the point, Miles, he has a little bit of a habit of sharing it with his coworkers. And I'm going to quote now from Strange Justice, while Thomas argued against premarital sex

and adultery, telling one friend that he would leave a wife on the spot if she was unfaithful to him. He also showed an unusual interest in talking about sex and gross and explicitly anatomical language, according to several college classmates. By the time he reached Yale Law School, Thomas was known not only for the extreme crudity of his sexual banter, but also for avidly watching pornographic films and reading pornographic magazines, which he would describe to friends in lurid detail. An interest in pornography might ordinarily be considered a private matter.

But colleagues recall that Thomas was notable for the unusually public nature of his enthusiasm for pornographic materials. His detailed descriptions of the movies and magazines he had seen were an open form of socializing during these years that seemed funny to some, offensive to others, and odd to many. Oh. Oh, boy. So, it's been a rough road so far, but we finally got to the funny part.

Where he's doing play-by-play of these pornos he's watching. Look, this ends obviously in sexual harassment and a woman getting attacked on a national stage, and that is not funny. But the fact that he is in college, like showing up at parties and being like, you guys got to hear about this fucking porno I just watched, to like mixed groups of people who are like, what the fuck, dude? So, honestly, and I'm thinking with the vanity plates, it just feels unnecessary. And it's a smack in the face of the proper bureaucracy we're trying to one.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Hold on, hold on, hold on. Do you guys know what gape? Never mind. All right. It's butthole stuff. Have you all ever seen a facial? Man, I'm telling you, I saw this one.

I didn't know what I was looking at at the end of the video. I don't know what I was looking at. I was like, is that a windsock? I don't know. Colleagues spill some coffee on a shirt and he's like, so I was watching some German stuff the other night. Let me tell you. I mean, now that you mention it, I didn't mention anything.

I said, I'm sorry, I spilled something on you. God, yeah, it is. This is part of a broad and a really weird and unsettling pattern for Thomas. Friends and co-workers. And again, this is a lot of this comes from the book Strange Justice by Jane Mayer and I think Jill Abramson is her name. Two reporters. Jane, we've talked about a lot.

She's a huge reporter on The Koch Brothers. They find so many people with stories of Clarence talking in explicit detail about porn that he watches. It is like a normal thing in his life. And friends and co-workers recall that most of the time at work, he's a quiet man. He's very polite, very respectful, very normal. And then every now and then, he just kind of goes bug fuck in ways people around him don't really know how to cope with.

One friend told Jane Mayer, quote, one percent of the time he would go off the deep end. He'd say stuff I can't possibly repeat, stuff that would turn your ears red, things having to do with the person's anatomy. He'd say things like suck out of my ass with a straw all the time. But this was different. It was a lot worse. And I don't feel comfortable talking about it. Wait, wait, wait.

This guy just set the fucking floor as suck as out of my asshole. That's the normal shit Clarence Thomas says, yeah. Oh my God. I mean, even in my joking, I was still being like coy a little bit. But I mean, it makes sense in graphic detail. And he also has like this. He occupies this weird space of like a sexually repressed like teenager kid who's like, yeah, you know what?

I'm kind of nasty shit. I watch. Yeah. Let me tell you about this weird shit. I saw at the porn theater. And I think that is like he is a connoisseur of pornography. There are people who like worked at porn theaters in D.C. with stories of him coming into RIT things like he goes in for the weird shit.

Like he is an obsessive consumer of this. He finds like baffling and bizarre porn. And then he just like talks about it at work in the government. I just like it also like it's like a fucking weird character from a fucking like comedy where it's like my boss is really like 99% of the time like he's like this. And then he goes off the deep end. Yeah. Yeah.

It's bizarre. There are rumors that he was abusive in his first marriage, physically abuses abusive. There are not allegations from his ex-wife that I am aware of. And it's kind of to be honest, I from what I have seen at least, I don't think there's a lot there, at least not that I ran into Meyer and Abramson note that like in there. And again, they're very critical biography. He receives custody of their son after the divorce, which is why they think that he there might not have been anything to get.

Like these are just rumors around him as opposed to like somebody making an allegation. So they are out there. You can find them. I'm not aware of like much solid there. He does. This is actually kind of something we're really worth noting. He's make sure to take custody of his son after the divorce, which is him breaking this one cycle in his family history.

Right. He is the he is the man, the father in his family line, who does not hand over his fucking kid. Well, not his son. Not his son. Well, exactly. Right. Yeah, he doesn't he doesn't have a daughter.

So yeah, we don't know how that would have gone. Hard to fully test that theory. Yeah. You are right, Miles. It has not been completely tested. Yeah. He's like, you lucky. You look you.

My son. Yeah. Like what? Now there are rumors. Oh, sorry. I already said that. Danforth, the guy he's been working for, becomes a U.S. senator in 1977, and Thomas leaves his employ.

He has an opportunity to go with him to D.C., but he's like that would be in his mind kind of a lower prestige job than working for a state attorney general. And more to the point, Danforth, before he leaves, helps Thomas get a job in the private sector. This is like the high paid lawyer job he's been wanting all the time as a lawyer representing the Monsanto Chemical Corporation. Oh my God. This is like the one lawyer job he does other than like, politics shit, and it's Monsanto.

Hey, I mean, that's what he wanted, right? He wanted his big cushy, earth fucker job. He does. So he got it. He fucks the shit out of the earth. Now, obviously Monsanto has done a number of questionable things. I don't really see evidence that Clarence was super directly involved in it. His job was much more, his job was much more like rudimentary sort of like, his job was

much more mechanical. He was registering herbicides with the EPA, right? He was the guy who was like interfacing with the EPA in order to handle the registration of products. So he's not like the trigger man they send out when they poison people, right? He's the guy who's who's like doing this very kind of like meat and potatoes roll. Right. Exactly.

He's like, they're like, oh, wow, Monsanto, you must do some yeah, yeah, like with Glyphosate and stuff like that. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Big stuff. No, he just fucking registers them. He fucking filled out paperwork, can't even commit crimes right.

Oh my God. Get away from, you're such a fucking nerd. You don't even, oh, you just registered the fucking roundup. Get out of here. So the main benefit of this job is that it doubles his salary, which obviously allows him to live in much more comfort while he waits for his next political break, which comes near the end of 1979. Now, this was through Danforth again, who had taken a real shine to Clarence.

Danforth decided that he wanted to integrate his Senate staff, and he asked Thomas if he wanted a job as a legislative assistant. Clarence agreed on the condition that he worked on absolutely no, quote, black issues, right? And this is a big part of what he liked about Monsanto. Who said to do that? Thomas. Thomas does not want to work on black issues. He said, okay, I'll, okay.

No, Danforth is not saying that. Danforth is like, hey, do you want a job? And Thomas is like, the only way I'll do that is if I'm not doing black stuff, right? This is part of why he wants, he likes working for Monsanto because he gets experience in environmental and energy like law, and he wants to do that because it's not, well, there's money and it's also not at all associated with like civil rights. It has nothing to do in people's eyes with the black community. So it's like comfortable in that sense that he doesn't have to, that have to reckon in

his consciousness versus like, no, I think it's your right to fucking poison people. Yeah. And I also, I think he doesn't want to get like pigeonholed, right? Like I don't want to just be like the black guy who does black law stuff, right? Like if I'm going to be like, I'll be doing something. I don't want to help people live better lives. Yeah. That's also what he's saying, which is again, directly the opposite of what he claimed to

his grandfather. He wanted to do as a lawyer anyway. He seems to have been good at this job. Again, not particularly noteworthy, although legislative assistants generally aren't. The one thing that his colleagues really recognized in clearance was his remarkable ambition. Mayor and Abramson write, quote, less than a year after arriving in Washington over lunch with the reporter in the Washington Bureau of the St. Louis Post Dispatch, Thomas mentioned that he had his eye on a better job.

John Sawyer, now the paper's Washington Bureau chief, recalled being astonished when Thomas, who was an affable but completely unknown aide to a freshman senator, announced that the spot he wanted was nothing less than a seat on the U.S. Supreme Court. So he's he is gunning for the job that he gets pretty much from the beginning of his time in politics. Terminator over here. Yeah. Yeah.

He's he figures out that this is like possible for him if he kind of makes the right inroads with the Republican Party. Yeah. And he's like a fucking laser from this point on 100% and he's incentivized in the darkest fucking ways. And it's also wild to think that the reason like he even gets his head turned in this direction of like law or politics is because, you know, he got rejected by the Vienna Academy of Fine Arts, I guess, the form of Atlanta private like like law firms and shit like

that. He's like, oh, really? Yeah. Oh, really? OK. I got something for you then. Yeah. I got ideas.

Thomas makes his mind up early on to play to the right in order to secure himself a more prestigious career. But he also finds himself increasingly in ideological step, not just with conservatives, but with the extreme fringes of the right wing, which we're actively moving into take over from liberal Republicans. Again, this is the last era against in which liberal Republicans are influential in other episodes we've talked. I mean, we're talking about Danforth now, who is one liberal Republican.

We've talked a lot in the past about Henry Kissinger, appreciator Nelson Rockefeller, who is a Republican and also a very like a liberal. This is the period in which those people are being like held underwater until the bubbles stop, right? Right. And two of the people who are big factors in this are two black conservatives, both of whom have a huge influence on Clarence Thomas. Now one of these guys is Thomas Sowell, an economist and a writer who I was given a

lot of this guy's fucking books when I was a little kid. Sowell raged against the NAACP as a snobby clique of elites. He called out affirmative action because, quote, those who were already well off were made even better off while the ostensible beneficiaries were either neglected or made worse off. And it's interesting to me because like Sowell is kind of calling out Clarence Thomas because Clarence, he's a middle class kid who because he's middle class is able to take advantage of some of these like affirmative action programs because he's in a position to do so.

That is what Clarence, that Sowell is. I don't think that's a good reason not to support those programs, but that's what Sowell's arguing and he's kind of talking directly about Clarence Thomas, which is interesting. Now, this does not seem to have had any influence on Clarence Thomas, who loves Sowell and later said that encountering his ideas was like, quote, pouring half a glass of water on the desert. I just soaked it up. Now, one thing Sowell loved to talk about was the fact that women made less than men

because that's what they wanted. They took easier jobs so that they could have babies later. So it's fine. It's all good, Miles. It's all good. They make that choice for their babies that they're going to have in the future because they don't have other options. Let me tell you something about women.

All right, they want the easier jobs because they can't work so hard when they make the babies. That's right. Okay. What a patronizing. What a fucking... It is a really patronizing statement. I mean, that's just...

And the fact is, that thinking still exists and now in a very substantial way. We haven't moved that far from fucking cishet dudes being like, let me tell you something about a woman's body that I have no corporal experience with. I am 100 percent certain we're going to have that thinking used by Clarence Thomas in a terrible Supreme Court decision in like, I don't know, three months, four? He's like, I was watching Dr. Oz and said the vagina is like a self-cleaning oven. That's why they do not need an OBGYN. That's an outlawed medical practice.

Yeah, I'm making it a crime to do medicine. Oh, no. Oh, no. Miles, you know what else is a crime? How low the prices are on our sponsor's products, literally illegal. If you buy any of these products, the FBI will break down your door and shoot your dog. I mean, the SEC is already investigating. The SEC is coming after you no matter what.

You're fucked. You're fucked. They're on you. Sophie, is that how... Is that the script that the company sent us? Are we good? It's a version of it. It looks like...

I think Sophie stepped away, napping on the job. No, I'm just angrily shaking my head at you because I have no fucking words. Sophie. Sophie, products, thanks. What would you do if a secret cabal of the most powerful folks in the United States told you, hey, let's start a coup? Back in the 1930s, a Marine named Smedley Butler was all that stood between the U.S. and fascism. I'm Ben Bullitt.

And I'm Alex French. In our newest show, we take a darkly comedic and occasionally ridiculous deep dive into a story that has been buried for nearly a century. We've tracked down exclusive historical records. We've interviewed the world's foremost experts. We're also bringing you cinematic, historical recreations of moments left out of your history books. I'm Smedley Butler, and I got a lot to say.

For one, my personal history is raw, inspiring, and mind-blowing. And for another, do we get the mattresses after we do the ads, or do we just have to do the ads? From iHeart Podcast and School of Humans, this is Let's Start a Coup. On the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you find your favorite shows. I'm Lance Bass, and you may know me from a little band called NSYNC. What you may not know is that when I was 23, I traveled to Moscow to train to become the youngest person to go to space.

And when I was there, as you can imagine, I heard some pretty wild stories. But there was this one that really stuck with me about a Soviet astronaut who found himself stuck in space with no country to bring him down. It's 1991, and that man, Sergei Krekalev, is floating in orbit when he gets a message that down on Earth, his beloved country, the Soviet Union, is falling apart. And now he's left defending the Union's last outpost. This is the crazy story of the 313 days he spent in space, 313 days that changed the world.

Listen to the last Soviet on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. What if I told you that much of the forensic science you see on shows like CSI isn't based on actual science? The problem with forensic science in the criminal legal system today is that it's an awful lot of forensic and not an awful lot of science. And the wrongly convicted pay a horrific price. Two death sentences and a life without parole.

My youngest, I was incarcerated two days after her first birthday. I'm Molly Herman. Join me as we put forensic science on trial to discover what happens when a match isn't a match and when there's no science in CSI. How many people have to be wrongly convicted before they realize that this stuff's all bogus? It's all made up. Listen to CSI on trial on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your

podcasts. Ah, products. So the other black Republican who influenced Thomas in this period was Jay Parker, a writer and a firebrand who believed the government should end all state and local aid for food, clothing, shelter, and everything else. Now so Jay Parker, not a great guy, right? By that little description. Here's what's cool.

Jay Parker is obviously, because of everything we just said, very useful to Reagan era conservatives who come to power shortly after Thomas gets to DC. But Parker is also very useful to another group of white conservatives, the apartheid government of South Africa. Oh, fuck. Wow. Why do these, why did this group of people enter the game? Yeah, this is a cool story, Miles.

Who may not be the right word. This is the thing that happened. Cool zone media. Mm-hmm. Starting in the Nixon administration, South Africa launched a massive propaganda blitz aimed at shoring up their reputation. They spent more than $100 million a year targeting vast segments of the U.S. population. And this included, in one of its other chapters, reaching out to black America.

The apartheid government of South Africa bought several prominent black organizers to push their cause, generally without wide success. Jay Parker was one of these guys. And I'm going to quote now from Rebecca Davis of Rhodes University. Jay Parker promoted the entrance of the trans-kai and Vinda before taking on the representation of the South African government. And in 2009 wrote an unrepentant biography tellingly titled, Courage to Put My Country Above Color.

William A. Keyes, a former policy advisor to Ronald Reagan, was hired by the South African Embassy to act as Praetoria's point man to the U.S. black community and was paid almost $400,000 for his services. So this is number one. I think that a bunch of guys, a bunch of particularly like black speakers and writers who are associated with the Reagan administration, take apartheid money. And they justify it by saying like, well, they're fighting against communism. That's why Jay Parker calls his biography, Putting My Country Above Color, right?

Like yes, they are a nightmare racist regime, but it's more important to fight communism. I was protecting America. Wait, so wait, the interest, yes, the interest of the country that enslaved people like me that's my priority, actually, to do what's in the best interest of that entity, more so than the people that were oppressed. That's how do you get where I'm going? That is literally the title of Jay Parker's biography. The title should be, yeah, I mean, they enslaved us, but what sir, but communism, oh yes, okay.

We will, I think at some point we might talk about like the apartheid government of South Africa's American PR company and because it is a story, but Jay Parker, this guy who was a bought and paid for instrument of the apartheid governor, I can't say that enough, is one of Clarence Thomas's intellectual like icons and also a good personal friend of his. This and Parker like work together at the Reagan White House and, you know, the fact that he befriends Parker winds up being very good for his career. Thomas gets put on a job, gets a job on the incoming administration's transition team with the EEOC or Equal Employment Opportunity Commission.

And since the Reaganites didn't like the idea of equal anything, this job was about gutting the organization, not running it, right? And like that's why they're, they're putting them on there. And obviously this is not really in line with Thomas's promise to his grandfather that he was going to fight the good fight in his own way, but it does bring him closer to power. So working as the transition lead for the EEOC, he begins what is unfortunately a continuing negative trend, taking his personal opinions on what struggling people ought to do and forcing them into government policy.

So Thomas has a weird bug up his ass about class action lawsuits, which had emerged in this period to become the primary method by which people who were not rich and powerful held corporations and the government accountable. One of the first things he does at the EEOC is he sends out a memo suggesting that worker discrimination suits should have to be proven on a case by case basis, one by one, rather than being done via class action. He also co-authors a report in 1980 that attacks the existing definition of sexual harassment. The old definition had included unwelcome sexual attention, either verbal or physical.

Thomas argued this was too broad and that including verbal comments would lead to a quote, barrage of trivial complaints. The report he helped author concluded that the elimination of personal slights and sexual advances which contribute to an intimidating hostile or offensive working environment is a goal impossible to reach. And take it from me, the guy who has to talk about porn nonstop. It's just going to be him. It's going to be a mess, guys.

Yeah. I might as well wear a ballgad and a leather mask and some restraints. I don't know. That might be pretty hot. Well, I don't know. I was just watching this video. First, let me tell you about the cum shots. So imagine there's like a tarantula made out of cock heading right towards your face.

And then when it goes off, you know those Oreo ads where you're mixing two of them together and there's just that splash of the white foam, the white foam. Oh, no. Yeah. It's bad. It's frothy. It's one of those frothy ones. It's one of those frothy.

It's like the top of what would I imagine people drink in Seattle, one of those foamy lattes. Exactly. Exactly. I don't drink those much, but you know, the kind of leaves a mustache. He's it's again, every single thing it's like he's starting to make sense of how he moves. Yeah.

Of course, he sexual harassment can't be real because then anything he says is like gross and over the line and offensive. Well, it's even one of the things that's interesting is they're like in that last line, you see, they're talking about personal slights and sexual advances contribute to an intimidating hostile or offensive work environment, but they're saying stopping that is impossible. So why would we try all that hard, right? That's that's the conclusion, which is amazing. Which is wild because it's but then the again, because there's no such thing as a fuck, but

they're just they just do whatever they want because on the other side, it's like, well, we want to stop every single person from doing this thing, though. Yeah. But sexual harassment, like there's no way there's no way there's no way you can't just fucking do anything. You can't even fucking do anything about it. Yeah. Again, this is this is a broader question, but like when we're talking about dealing

with conservatives and their attempts to fuck people over, there's no point in treating them like they are good faith actors because their goal is to restrict you and do whatever the fuck they want. So stop pretending that that's the case. Yeah. To continue to be like, but they just said this other thing about a parallel subject. You're like, mother, that's not where they're at. Yeah.

They use the skin of humans to be like, it's all about doing whatever we want to whoever. Yeah. It's like, again, it's like Clarence Thomas being like, I don't believe interracial marriage is right. Oh, now I want to have one. So now it's fine. Oh man. Have y'all had sex with a white woman though?

Yeah. Like that. It doesn't matter like bringing it up to like, again, we're kind of acknowledging these things and a number of his poccasies because it's important to note it for history. But like, none of this matters in an argumentative standpoint. They're not there to have a good faith conversation. No. They're there to exercise power in ways that hurt people.

It's just power. Yeah. It's not about any kind of consistency of fuck. Yeah. It's just, yeah. It's cool. It's cool and good. I mean, the apartheid South African government's money in order to claim that you're just such

an anti-communist that this has to be done. So while Thomas ingratiated himself to the Reagan administration, he also began increasingly publicizing his existence as a black conservative. He joined an organization created by Thomas Sowell and started giving interviews where he would talk about his hardscrabble upbringing and how traditional right-wing values had gotten him through a tumultuous childhood of poverty. Now, this is not really true, right? Oh, my God.

Yeah. There's certainly a number of like his hardscrabble aspects of his youth and especially his grandpa's story. But like, he comes into his grandpa's middle class life and is, you know, taken care of as a result of that. Yeah. Not because of his hardcore conservative values. Yes.

Exactly. And a lot of his recollections of his family later to conservatives are deliberate lies or at least exaggerations that he made to sell his image better. He told one audience, quote, where I grew up or when I grew up, there was more a feeling of responsibility for kids that you brought into the world. These were values you learned. The government didn't have a damn thing to do about it. And like, that's the opposite of your childhood, Clarence.

You were like, your whole family was like a bunch of dudes, like being like, no, I ain't taking care of that kid. Like that was not the values that you learned from your family, Clarence. Wow. I mean, he's, I mean, I mean, he's a fucking terminator. Yeah. He doesn't give a fuck. He's got to figure it out.

It's like all the calculations are made. Like, lie about this shit, lie about this shit. They will love you for it. The worst of it is when he lies about his sister because Clarence Thomas is super fine with throwing members of his family under the bus for political clout. The book Strange Justice covers a fateful interview that he had with a reporter from the Washington Post, quote, it was in this interview that Thomas first publicly denies and announced his sister's reliance on public assistance.

She is so dependent, Thomas told the Post. She gets mad when the mailman is late with her welfare check. What's worse, he continued, is that now her kids feel entitled to the check too. They have no motivation for doing better or getting out of that situation. Now, Miles, there's a number of ways this could be fucked up, but I want to be perfectly clear here. All of that was a vicious and calculated lie. His sister had received government assistance at some point.

She was not on welfare when he made this statement, nor had she been for a particularly extended period of time. The only reason of her period of her life in which she was on government assistance was she had taken up working double shifts for minimum ways in a nursing home in order to not be on public assistance in the period when he makes these claims. The reason that she had spent a brief period of time on welfare was not that she was dependent. It was because she had had to quit her job when their aunt got sick and was dying, and she took her aunt in and took care of her while Clarence Thomas did nothing.

The one that took him in? Yes. That's why she was briefly on government assistance. Oh, my God. Like, that is a fucked up thing to say about your goddamn sister. How are you going to fuck everybody over with one fucking story? That is fucked. Yeah.

First of all, son of a fucking- Real bad guy shit. If you need help, you need fucking help. There's not a problem with that. Yes, yes, there's nothing wrong with being out of assistance. And on top of it, you want to then make up a lie to also smear your sister and also obscure the fact that you're an ain't shit nephew too. Because what he's saying is that like, well, she's just been ruined by welfare, and now

her kids are being ruined by it. The vicious cycle. She's so dependent. And the reality is like, she is making the health and well-being of a loved one her responsibility when you wouldn't. And that's why she briefly had to go on welfare before taking double shifts for minimum wage in order to get off of it. Wow.

Jesus Christ, dude. It's just disgusting too, man, because again, with his terminator precision, he is willing at every turn to commodify his blackness and weaponize it in service of further white supremacy. But then we're also hearing his fucked up story. This person who never felt he belonged fucking anywhere. And it's like he's like this horrible fucking echo of American society that manifested back into the form of this person who has been like, yeah, man, I've seen a lot of fucked

up shit because like, you know, fucking America, but also now I'm here to be the fucking destroyer. Let's keep it going. Yeah. It's freaky, man. It's like the fucking, ugh. He's bad. So the fact that he was willing to throw his sister under the bus in such a gross way for such mild clout was noted at the time by his colleagues, his kind of fucked up.

And he felt defensive enough about it that he lied to one of his aides and assured him that the comments had been taken out of context. And he'd been so upset when that journalist had meanly quoted him that he'd had to drive through the night to apologize to his sister. Now, when they heard this claim, Jane Mayer and Jill Abramson went to his sister to ask if he had driven through the night to apologize, no recollection of that apology. Not from Emma May. So that's cool.

And obviously this is bad. You shouldn't do this as a person to your sister, to anybody, really. But this goes over great in Ronald Reagan's Republican Party. This is a really good way to make your career as a Republican. He gets offered two different jobs with the administration. Now, one would have been working as a low-level policy aid and his work would have had nothing to do with race. He would be handling environmental and energy issues.

But that work was not glamorous and it paid for shit. So he turns down the job. The next gig they offer him is Assistant Secretary for Civil Rights in the Department of Education. So part three miles, you and me are going to talk about his entrance into a presidentially appointed job in the Reagan administration and his road to the Supreme Court. But Miles, why don't we talk about your own role, road to the Supreme Court? Yeah, let's do it. This episode will be played at my confirmation hearing or at the tribunals when the full

takeover happens. I don't know one of them. At Miles of Grey on Twitter and Instagram. And just podcast, Daily Zeitgeist, if you like news and politics every day, 420-day fiance, if you like weed and reality television or Miles and Jack got mad boosties, if you like basketball, three places to see me. I do like the idea of you standing before the Senate being confirmed as a Supreme Court justice.

And like Ted Cruz is like, now, Mr. Gray is it true that you've ingested an illegal narcotic known as marijuana and you just push play on an excerpt of this episode where you're saying some chips by some chips by some chips by Billy G. Yeah, exactly. Is it true that you said I am a gross fuck turd on an episode of the Daily Zeitgeist number 4433? Yeah, it is. I would have been like, which time? Yeah.

I don't know if I said that exactly. I may have said sniffling fuck turd or something like that. I don't know. But anyway, any other questions? Are we good? Okay, cool. It would be fun. Yeah.

And I'm like, now can we get to the gladiator phase of the Supreme Court confirmation hearing? I can't wait to fight the other fucking nominees. It would be really, it'd be really fun to get confirmed by the Senate because you would get to repeatedly say to Ted Cruz, didn't didn't a guy like call your wife ugly and then you had to pretend he was awesome for years? Didn't you like eat his food? How do you feel about that? How does your wife feel about that?

You and Heidi are still together. Oh, my God. Wow, dude. Yo, dude, I read that thing where like your daughter was like, yo, leave him, mom. Yeah. That's really fucked up. I commend you, bro, for not letting that affect you in any way, visit me. Yeah.

Being totally fine. Being so chill with that. All right, man. Cancun on three. Mm-hmm. Oh. So, Miles, that's our episode. Thank you, everyone.

Back out, Miles, 420 Day Fiancé, The Daily Zeitgeist and that basketball podcast with boosties in the name. I don't know basketball slangs. Oh, yeah. What does that mean? What does that mean? It means you got ups, man. You can jump.

You got vertical takeoff ability. You got mad boosties. All right. Well, I do have a package from ups, but I haven't picked it up from the place yet. Oh, my God. That was such a boomer joke. Get the fuck out. Sorry, I can't hear you, Sophie.

My earhorn is in the other room. Oh, my God. My eagle's vinyl is about to arrive. Oh, let me tell you about the eagles of all the bands. Oh, my God. Don Henley. Wow. That's it.

That's the name of a guy from the eagles. No, Miles. For me, it's credence all the way, baby. Oh, my God. But, okay. Robert has a book called After the Revolution. You can buy it, A.K. Press, A.C.

Cool Zone Media. Okay. That episode's fucking over. That was a terrible joke. The episode is done. Thank you. Hey, everybody, Robert Evans here, host of Behind the Bastards and a bunch of other podcasts. Here to let you know that Cool Zone Media is going on break next week.

This isn't something we normally do, but as our producer, Sophie, is currently on the run from the ATF, it was the only option. So next week, there will be no new episodes of Behind the Bastards, no new episodes of What Could Happen Here, no new episodes of Nothing. We will be back the next week after the week of the first to continue providing you with far too many podcasts. So just chill out next week. That's what we will be doing, chilling out and hiding Sophie from the ATF.

Love you all. See you soon. 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 Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. I 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. What if I told you that much of the forensic science you see on shows like CSI isn't based on actual science, and the wrongly convicted pay a horrific price? Two death sentences and a life without parole. My youngest, I was incarcerated two days after her first birthday.

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