Danny Jones Podcast - #79 - Investigating the Psyche of Ghislaine Maxwell | John Sweeney

Episode Date: March 1, 2021

John Sweeney is a writer, reporter, & journalist who famously tells the stories that power and money don’t want told. He worked for the BBC for 17 years, doing interviews with the likes of Donald Trump, Vladimir Putin, as well one of the first investigative pieces exposing scientology in 2007.  His latest project is a six episode series called “Hunting Ghislaine”  which investigates the life of Ghislaine Maxwell & tells how some of the richest & entitled people on the planet used their money and power to silence the abused. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

We're going to start posting each podcast episode that you see on YouTube a week earlier on Patreon. So feel free to join for early access to all episodes. Plus, we're going to start doing bonus podcast episodes every week. So if you want to join Patreon, it's patreon.com slash concrete videos. Next week's episode is already posted there. So feel free to go check it out. Hello, world. Today's guest is the amazing John Sweeney.

John is a writer, reporter, and journalist who famously tells the stories that power and money don't want told. He worked for the BBC for 17 years doing interviews with the likes of Donald Trump, Vladimir Putin, as well as one of the first investigative pieces exposing Scientology in 2007. His latest project is a six-episode series called Hunting Geelaine, which investigates the life of Geelaine Maxwell and tells how some of the richest and entitled people on the planet use their money and power to silence the abused. Hunting Gie Lane already hit number one on the UK Apple podcast charts, and we cover all of it in our following conversation.

Without further ado, please enjoy this captivating conversation with John Sweeney. Well, John, it's a pleasure to have you on here. I'm a huge fan of your work. I actually recently came across you when I saw my friend Sean Atwood, aka the unemployed geography teacher, doing an interview with you on his YouTube channel. Yeah, they, he went to prison, but somehow they let him out. I don't understand that.

I don't know why they would let that guy out, of all people. He looks, by the looks of him, he needs to go back. Yes, he's from witness. And I don't think Americans, I'm trying to think of how to geographically translate that. But I think it's like he's from Alabama, but not the nice bits of Alabama. Alabama. Really? It's a joke.

It's a joke. He's a smart guy. Yeah, he's super, super sharp guy. I like him a lot. So for people out there who don't know who you are for my audience, can you give me a brief description of who is John Sweeney? Yes. No. Okay, quickly, I used to be a kind of war reporter for the observer in the, in the, in,

In the 90s, then at 2000, I joined the BBC and worked there for 17 years. I helped free a number of women who've been falsely convicted of murdering their babies. But I'm better known in the States because I went ahead to head with the Church of Scientology. I lost my temper with the Church of Scientology. I'll do it now. You are not there for the beginning of the interview. You can see it on YouTube, 42nd. My little dogs run away, sorry, Bertie.

I, the Church of Scientology, think that I'm a bigot, et cetera, blah, blah, blah. I think they're a cult. I went to North Korea undercover. I pretended to be an academic with an alcohol problem, and the North Korean police didn't realize that we were doing it. We were making a documentary. I challenge Pump about

Pump his name is President Trump but Pump will do I challenge him about his connections with organised crime in 2013 Donald Trump walked out on me I challenged Radime Putin

about the shooting down of MH17 Putin held my gaze and I lived to tell the tail and 2019 I tried to do a about a far right British guy called Tommy Robinson. That didn't work. I felt tricked and let down. I felt

tricked by his side and let down by the BBC. So I left. And last year I made a podcast called Hunting Gilles, which is about Gillesne Maxwell and her father, Robert Maxwell, and his malign influence upon her and also about Gillesne, Maxwell and Jeffrey Epstein and so forth. that hit number one in the UK Apple Podcast charts and now there is a book and a and a TV series in the offing. So that's in a nutshell. I like a drink and I'm not a member of the Church of Scientology. That's a great resume you got there. It's okay.

I'm just the other day, much more interestingly, I've just become a grandfather. Oh, really? Yeah, it's fantastic because, I mean, I didn't do anything. Well, I did something about 30 years ago. But basically, you can go, hello, baby. And then, okay, here you are again. There you go. But it's kind of sweet. You get to deal with all the great benefits of having a grandchild, but you don't have to deal with any of the hard work of raising a child. Yeah. And there's an old friend of mine, Yenz, a Danish guy. We used to muck around in war zones to get. And Jens was quite an old guy with a beard. He looked like a Danish troll or troll. But a nice one.

And we put him in the front of the car. So when we'd hit the checkpoints with the guys with guns, they'd see the old guy first. And he looked like a kind of judge. So we managed to get through more often than not. But Jens said, I can remember this back in the 90s, somewhere in Albania. He said, the thing about grandchildren,

they are the desert of life. So that's kind anyway, that's sweet. So I like that. That's a very good analogy. Yeah. So what lit this flame for you to become an investigative journalist?

I've always so my family is storytellers both sides, my dad's family, my mom's family. My mom was they're both from Liverpool and my mum's mum, a single mum, my maternal grandfather, left the family pretty early on. And she was left with a nice house with a lease in Liverpool,

in the centre of Liverpool, and she ran a bed and breakfast. Often for actors just who were starting out in life, who were working in the local theatre in Liverpool. And there was a guy, some of your listeners may know, was a guy called Richard Breyers, who was an actor in the 70s in Britain, famous for something called The Good Life. And I bumped into him once on doing a story when I worked for The Observer, and when he was making a film, and he said, oh, yes, Mrs Owen.

Anyway, my grandma had one of her, there's a point of this story, Danny, I'm getting there eventually. One of her tenants was a sculptor, very posh. And he did nudes, sculpted nudes, often men. And one day, my granny went up, this long before I was born, when I'm dusted the sculptor, sculpture,

and something a bit fell off. And this guy, let's call him Mr. Plumley. Mr Plumley came back and said, Mrs. Owen, have you been interfering with my nude? And what had happened was she had knocked off the penis of this nude and then glued it back the wrong way round. Now, this is my anti-Margaret's favourite story. And the reason I tell it you is that I just love good stories

on both sides of the family, both the Sweenies and the Owens love good stories. And I've got that in my jeans, but there's something else too, which is it, the stories that are most interesting are the stories that power and money don't want told. That when the stories,

and I'm competitive about it, when somebody rich and powerful said, you shut up, all the trouble, that's what gets me out of, bed or gets me out of the pub in the evening because I want to I want to have I want to tell those stories and and and and and and so I kind of I would always think of myself more of a storyteller who's ended up telling stories powerful people don't want told than an investigative journalist

investigative journalist has got too many syllables in it and it sounds a bit high and mighty but I'm a storyteller and really I kind of I just want to be be in bed or in the pub. But the moment that somebody said, you shut up. The Church of Scientology says to former members, you shut up, or the North Korean secret police, you know, say, create this bizarre fantasy of what their dark tyranny is. That kind of gets me going and then off I go.

What is your view then? I know you have a long history working. with institutions like the BBC and more, you know, very large media institutions in the UK. What is your view right now on the current state of media technology and social media being a journalist? Well, by the way, the thing I forgot to mention, which I should do, listeners, is I'm also a writer. And the other day, so I've written 12 books. eight nonfiction, one about Scientology, one about North Korea, four novels.

One of them the latest, whatever, let me find it, here we go, is the useful idiot, which is, probably reads upside down, but anyway, you get a drift. And that's about Stalinism and fake news in 1933. And really, it's a story of two reporters in 1933 in Moscow. One of them was Walter Durante, who worked for the New York Times, originally from Liverpool and Englishman, who ended up working for the New York Times, and he, for example, got a great scoop where he managed to interview Stalin. But of course, you don't get to interview Stalin unless you play Goody Tooshoes. And what Walter Durante did was he told a great lie,

which was there was no famine in the Soviet Union in 33, and there was, and maybe as many as seven million people died. Now this is fake news back in 33 and there was another reporter called Garif Jones and he told the truth about the famine and he was shot dead in China, two years later than 35, I believe by the NKBD, which he then become the KGB, those are the people, the secret police that Vladimir Putin worked for. They're now called the FSB, same old shit I would say so the problem of of misinformation of lies a big big lies that's not new there's a great french writer gustavlobe who once said our ignorance of history makes us slander our own times things have always been like this and that's kind of true or rather that's very true

But nevertheless, I found the rise and rise of social media and the wild west nature of it, scary and troubling. I'm not a Trumpist or whatever you call him the former guy, as Joe Biden calls him. But I thought that there is a kind of unhorsing of reason and logic and respect for facts that have gone. that have ridden along with the rise of minds of social media. And that's become frightening. And as I said, in my introduction a bit in last 2019, I tried to do this story about Tommy Robinson, the far-right guy in Britain.

And I got clobbered on social media by his supporters, so much so that effectively I have a presence on Facebook, but it's very minimal and it's not active. I'm on Twitter a lot at John Sweeney Raw, R-O-A-R. They've gone away from my life most of the time. But the reason they did that was that what happened was that we had a good investigation into Tommy Robinson, him telling a bunch of the German far right in Bavaria. For too long, the German people had lived under the guilt of Adolf Hitler.

Now, you don't say that. That's a foolish thing to say. It's a dangerous thing to say, in particular to that German far-right audience in Bavaria. Don't do that. The BBC didn't run our film, and so all that happened was I kept on getting death threats and being threatened and being humiliated, and I wasn't allowed by my big organisation to fight back. It was really, really difficult. eventually I left

the moment I left I put up a video in which I'm going to swear now what's your policy on small swear as much as you want okay well I said I'll give you the piece of camera in my view

and these are not the views of the BBC Tommy Robinson you're a Nazi cunt cheers cheers now the benefit of that this is I'm drinking Italian Red by the way you will not

this is a beautiful wine from Italy you're drinking something disgusting in a cat. Terrible. And that's not why I worry about American civilization. Yeah, it's either this or Jack Daniels. Yeah, I mean, that's okay as a kind of

tranquilizer, but this is nice. Anyway, never mind that. Stop being a wine, it's not a job. It was horrible being attacked on social media in this way. The moment I put that video out and it's got something like, did it on Twitter, two minutes, and it's got something like half a million views or more, the heat went from Tommy Robinson supporters

because these people can smell fear. And I wanted, it was a simple message, I'm not afraid of you, And I had the clip of Robinson in Germany talking about Adolf Hitler in the way that he did in the film. And so the pressure from that crazy far-right community went away because they could tell that actually it wasn't me who was afraid of them. It was my bosses at the BBC. But I fundamentally do not believe that people, I, when I post stuff on Twitter, everybody knows it's me. I am John Sweeney Raw.

I am me. And I don't think anonymity causes is a thing for good because it means that, I mean, I know there are various arguments for it, but essentially it means that you can get a pylon from people who can behave dreadfully because they're doing it behind a curtain. we don't know who they are and I don't think that's good I don't think it's good for the public square I don't think it's good for democracy or the rule of law and some of these people

aren't American or British they're Russian, you know the Russian bots now we know this or they're Chinese and they can be North Korean or they can be anybody I don't know who they are so I you know that's a problem all of this

feels less heated now that Joe won. By the way, I told you about my granddaughter, her name's Shaila, and she's a smart cookie. So in March, she bet 500 quid on Joe Biden to win. Really? Michael Farage, by the way, bet £10,000 on Trump to win.

And I'm not a... Shailer's not a rich... She wasn't born at that moment, but being an astute person, she bet the money anyway. I don't know how she did it, but she bet it and she won £750. Then I know John Ossiff, the Democrat contender in Georgia. I've been on the drink with him in London when he was working in London, and both him and his friend, they were working at a TV company together.

I was a friend of his friend. But we went on the drink and said, you've got to run. to run you've got to run for senata and i thought you know shyla must think that actually john osoph's going to win so i put another 500 quid on um osoff to win and shyla won 650 quid on that so essentially um before she was born she could retire wow but it's um so um so um um um so um That's a joke, but I worry about the unhorsing of fact. At the same time, I also get it, in part because my mum and dad were Liverpool working class. And I was, I'm middle class, not working class.

I'm using British class terms, so you're going to have to translate them for your audience. But I also get it. There were way too many posh people. people at the BBC who had a rather, there was a comic from my childhood called a Beano, and they had a character in it called Lord Snooty, who wore a top hat. And there are too many Lord Snooty types in the media, in the mainstream media, in governments, in politics and civil service, and they looked down on people who ended up voting for Trump and voting for Brexit. Now, I wouldn't vote for Trump if I was American and I didn't vote for Brexit, but I get it that there are many, many people who are good people, who are lovely people who if I could share a drink or a chat with them,

wherever they were and I would enjoy their company. And I know that if something bad happened, they would do the right thing. I'm confident of that. Who have, I think, in my view, have been duped. And so we've got to listen to those people who voted for Brexit and who voted for Trump. And at the same time, and we've got to be critical

while we're reflecting them. Now, what's happening at the moment is the media is, I think it's reflecting things like Black Lives Matter and anxieties about trans and so forth and so on,

but at the same time, I am uncomfortable. that nearly all of my colleagues on the news night, on the BBC shows I worked on, newsnight and panorama, were posh, and didn't get what ordinary people would be thinking, the majority of ordinary people, and there's an anxiety about that. Now, weirdly, I think that COVID has helped reset some of that balance. I do think that 2016 was a poison year. And what's happened with COVID is we get it that society matters,

that working with others matters, that some of the lowest paid people in our societies have been the best of us. I'm talking about the Amazon delivery people, my bin men, who I just, these days when they empty my bins, I say thank you, all of that stuff. I'm a Londoner. That's kind of new civility. So there's something, so there was a big anxiety in 2016, 2017, 2018. Part of that is my knowledge of the Kremlin of what's happening because I've met Putin. I can see that Putin is manipulating things behind the scenes. And that led me to real disquiet.

at the same time I think that Joe Joe's got something and Britain we're still carrying on with Brexit I don't think it's going to work I think it's a silly mistake to put kind of nationalism above the best possible trade deal you could get that's my view

I also think that the medium have been too elitist for too long and there is and there isn't a proper correction on that. So at the moment, the problem which the media has created, in part for itself, they haven't properly addressed it. They're addressing some of the easier things, but not some of the other stuff,

which is that if everybody, so for example, in British terms, there would be hardly anybody where I worked who was on benefit, who knew family members who were on benefit, because everybody went to Oxbridge and all that kind of stuff. One of my friends is a guy called Owen Phillips, who was very, very good, who did a fantastic series for the BBC about Rupert Murdoch. He's Welsh working class,

and he feels this much more passionately than I do. but I had like hardly any friends at the BBC who were working class because there were hardly any working class people at the BBC I kind of sought them out because they're more fun and cleverer and smarter because they've risen but nothing very little I'm going on too much

no no not at all well it seems now I mean where are you so that I know where are you I'm in Florida. Right. Have you ever been to Florida? Florida is the whole. Have you ever been to Mar-a-Lago? I've heard of Mar-a-Lago.

Yes, I have. I've been to Florida. At some point, we were doing some crazy thing for Panorama, where you get so embedded in the story, you don't know, you forget what's happening. And we flew into a kind of cat-five hurricane, and we ended up staying in a hotel suite, where Jaila would normally stay for nothing because there were no hotels and we managed to anyway

so yeah, I've been to Florida. Yeah, Florida is a decent place. It's all right. Is it, is there snow? No snow. You're not living in an igloo at the moment. No, I have never seen snow in Florida. I was born here and I've been here for my entire life,

still never seen snow here. Texas is covered though. Yeah, Texas, because Texas, Texas is continent. It's colder in the inland. It's away from the sea. Yeah. Yeah, inland.

It's a little bit colder. Plus, it's quite a bit farther north than where I'm in Florida. I'm in like the middle of Florida on the, on the Gulf Coast. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So are you near, are you a member of the Church of Scientology? I could hit a golf ball and hit the main building on Fort Harrison. Oh, wow. I've had a guy by the name of Mike Rinder.

Have you answered the question? Are you a member of the church? I am not a member of the church. Okay, good, good, good. Okay, we can carry on talking. Yeah. So Mike Rinder is, you know, we're great friends, Mike and I. He's been on my podcast.

Yeah. So Mike left, he owes me a lot. Mike left the church of Scientology because of me, I would say. I don't know. Have you seen the film we made, which is on you. YouTube. I have not seen the film that you guys made. I've seen the HBO documentary going clear. Yes. So by the way, if people are super nutty about Scientology, they can watch the two films, which I think are flying around on YouTube. One of which is called, the first one is Scientology and Me, in which I scream. The second is Scientology Secrets of the Stars.

Mike's big in that and then I've written a book called Scientology Church of Fear which you can get their Amazon and the and maybe we can do some linky things so people can see this stuff. Absolutely.

But so what happens is that excuse me when I screamed at Scientology because they made me go nuts there were two PR men who were on my coast the whole time. Tommy Davis is the guy I screamed up directly, but standing next to him, looking gray and ash on the whole time was Mike Rinder. And Mike Rinder had been in the hole. And when I arrived in the States, David Miscavage, the Pope of Scientology, got him out

the hole to handle me, to deal with me. Mike Rinder was in that video when you're screaming at the guy? It is. He is on the edge. If you watch the whole 30-minute documentary, you could sit. So, Mike Rinder is the other minder. And what happened was that essentially there were dozens of them. There was only a normal BBC thing. BBC, by the way, I bitch about it all the time. It's a lovely thing. I still believe in it and I still pay my licence fee.

There was a brilliant producer called Sarah Mole. And there was a fantastic cameraman called Bill Brown. The production was from BBC Northern Ireland. And so Bill's from Belfast and all of the BBC Northern Irish cameramen are fantastically brave because they do in the 70s and 80s, they did riots all the time. So that's their upbringing. They're really, really good. Anyway, Sarah has a plan, which is, she's from Essex.

I'm going to do her accent for you. Here John, you see in Jurassic Park, ain't you? Yes, I have, Sarah. So, in Jurassic Park, there's that bit, isn't there? When there's the goat? And it's tebred. And then the T-Rex comes and gets it. Right then.

You can bleak, can you? So my job was to be the tebred goat. And what we would do, because she'd analyzed it. She'd watched Scientology attack people like, me who were trying to investigate them. And what they would do was ambush somebody like me in the middle of the night, which Scientology did, when you'd put the camera away, so we were defenseless. What happened was that Sarah made it a rule that whenever we were out, I had the two of us,

Bill had his big camera and Sarah had a small camera, and they were fully charged and on at all times and if the big camera wasn't charged we'll put it down because we're going for a meal at the very end of the day so would have the little small camera in case something happened this is before mobile phones really got going 2007 and before there were phones and video and mobile phones so also i had two sound mics on me um with two back packs in case one failed by the way going to the loo with two bloody sound mics it's like It's like something. Nightmare.

It's like a scene in Chernobyl. It's just like bloody annoy. Anyway, those are the rules. Because she knew that they would come for us. And lo and behold, they came for us at midnight at the hotel. But we filmed it. And I'm good at this stuff. And I fired back.

And I said, listen, you've been spying of this. And this is a bit creepy, frankly. Anyway, it was a fantastic basketball. battle. And I was the tevered goat. And eventually I got sick of the fuckers. And the tebred goat turned into a tethered rhino and I fucking charged them. That's the shout and all of that. The BBC thought about sacking me. But then they thought, oh, sorry, let's go for it. This is before Twitter. 2007, the film goes out. And then you get hundreds and hundreds of emails from next members of the church who fall in love with me.

who and two emails I love in particular. One is Mr. Sweeney, you're my hero. But then I am the vice president of the Royal College of Psychiatry. Because psychiatrists get it in the net from Scientology and therefore I became a pin-up of international psychiatry because I had to go at Scientology. It's so bonkers.

Tell a quick story. When I was in trouble, real psychological trouble, psychiatric trouble with the Tommy Robinson attacks and not being allowed to defend myself by the BBC. Eventually, I had to go sick and I saw a psychiatrist. And the psychiatrist said, before we start, Mr. Sweeney, I really enjoyed your film about Scientology. Then the BBC hired a second psychiatrist, a professor of psychiatry, who was going to check my psychiatrist, who said that I've been put under impossible work stress. therefore they couldn't sack me in the way they were trying to sack me.

And the professor of psychiatry said, Mr. Sweeney, before we start, I just wanted to say, I really liked your film about Scientology. What do you want me to write? That's amazing. It's true. It's true.

I said the high-pitched voice. I don't know why. I'm somebody who kind of lies all the time apart from when I go, hi-pitch, it's true. No, none of those things are true. Actually, anyway, never mind. Getting back to the main event. So Scientology was completely weird mind fuck.

It's an evil cult. They, if you don't know, I'm going to tell you anyway. I'm well aware. They believe that 75 million years ago, an evil space alien lord called Lord Senu brought space aliens to earth and killed them with H-bombs in volcanoes, but the spiritual remains of those space aliens called theetans have stuck to us and caused madness in humanity, etc., etc. And only Scientology will clear you of this. And if I tell anybody this, I will die and they may die because of the power of the story. And frankly, I've

doing little else since 2007 in any pub in London or Manchester or wherever I am in the world. Somebody sits me down and then I start telling them about Scientology. And here I am. I'm still very much alive. So I am living proof that Scientology is a load of bollocks. I found it so fascinating that Mike Rinder actually spent time with El Ron Huff. And did he? He didn't tell me that, but he was in his phone. He was actually met him. Yeah, he didn't. He didn't tell me that. Anyway, what happened was at one point, I, because we had hours and hours and hours of them filming us, me filming them, they're trying to, they're trying to break me and to break me. They bring me in a bit into into the Scientology tent and then break. me and Sarah and Bill, my colleagues, they film everything. We've got so much in the cam.

We start having, we kind of stop filming. And at one of these moments, I ask Tommy Davis and Mike Rinder, could I interview David Muscovich? He, by the way, is the Pope of Scientology, but unlike, for example, the Pope in Rome, David Muscovich is alleged. He just, he just, and Isaac go around smacking people. He would like, he'd get pissed off with me. He'd smack me if I was a member of the church. That's what people, Mike Rinder says that happened to him. Bang, bang, bang.

And I say I'd like to interview David Miscavage. I want to interview your Pope. And Mike Rinder says, well, you're not going to do that, John. And I said, why not? Because you're an asshole. At which point, Sarah, the Essex girl, who has got a wonderful sense of humor, goes, and she loses it, just starts giggling.

And Bill, who's a much tough, who we say they're both tough, but Bill, who's a tough-looking guy, stealth the laugh too, and both of them are corpsing because of, I'm not interviewing Scientology's Pope, because I'm an asshole.

But, Mike Rinder realized that although my team were mocking me, taking the piss out of me, as we'd say in English English, they also kind of had my back and they kind of, you know, we loved each other, we liked each other and we were a gang. And in our gang, the two people behind the camera couldn't take the piss out of me, could mock me. And we still liked each other. It was still good fun. It didn't matter. It was normal. But in his gang, he had to express faulty to the Pope. He could never mock him.

He could never, he could never give, he could never be a normal human being. And I think that was the moment when Mike realized he'd rather be in the BBC's gang than in the Scientology gang. after a lot of heartbreak for Mike because it meant breaking with his family who was still inside it, his mother, his sister and brother, his kids. He left and for years later he sat down and I interviewed him.

And he told me everything. What was frustrating at the time was the power of the BBC of British libel laws meant that we couldn't put in the smacking allegations and it was actually Alex Gibney and Lauren write who did that story in going clear. But I'm in the Going Clear documentary, which is so properly unfair,

so rigorous about Scientology, they have them shouting at me, but not me shouting at them, which strikes me as being a bit funny, but there we go. Anyway, if people are interested, they should chase those films we made for Panorama. The first one we did was in 2007.

So although going clear, got bigger punches, we attacked Scientology first. And of that, I'm very proud. I'm going to watch that. Anyway, so Mike, having broken from Scientology, organized a kind of event in Florida and the Gulf Coast, where you could hit a golf up the road from Scientology. what's it called?

St. Petersburg, Clearwater, yeah. Up the road from there in a hotel and there was about 100 X members of the Church of Scientology this is very early on. And me and my them misses

were split up but we were so great friends but we were invited out and it was the most, they paid for us to go there. And it felt like being inside Galaxy Quest in the island.

But they, But there were the fans who were ex-members in the Church of Scientology. And the thing is, I mean, I didn't do this, but had I charged $5 to do the shout, you were not there, I would have cleaned up because everybody wanted a video of me or a picture of me going, you were not there. And they kind of treated me like a God. And I had to say, listen, I'm not, you've left the gods, you know, the crazy gods. By the way, I was brought up a Catholic.

I get religious belief. I understand it. I'm still a bit of a Catholic myself, not very much, but a bit. So I don't want to knock other people's religious belief. I don't think Scientology is a religion. I think it's a money-making device. Party scheme.

It's a Ponzi scheme, or it's like the mafia, or the Coca-Cola Corporation, or all three. But it's not a religion in my book. Never mind. But there was some exciting. cultish about me being about me being

Scientology devil but Mike invited me to his wedding and and I and that really is for Mike this heavy duty Scientologist as he was and he was still for a time

he believed in the works of Hubbard but didn't like the church the thing and I think now he's out out but for a time anyway in the middle all of this, there am I at his bloody wedding. And it was wonderful and good. There's something, I'm going to struggle to make a serious point here, that for a time in particular in 2016,

2017, with the rise of Islamic State in the Middle East and terrible atrocities in Europe, In London, I reported on all five of them, I think, for the, or four of them for the BBC. There was a counter attack against a mosque in North London, by a right-wing fruitcake, and there were attacks in the States too as well. How do you deal with people who have been brainwashed into believing that we are the enemy? And Scientology is fundamentally silly, in my view, and although it has a ton of money, it doesn't have many adherents. However, I think it's important to study it and to understand it because if we can work out how to unbrainwash members of the Church of Scientology,

we might be able to work out how to unbrainwash people who are adherents of Islamic States or who believe that North Korea is the one, and people like the North Korean military believe that North Korea is wonderful. how do we unlock that brainwashing is important. And that's why psychologically it's interesting. Now, the guy who's done a ton of thinking about this is a wonderful American military psychiatrist originally called Professor Robert Lifton, who wrote the first book about brainwashing using that term, thought reformer of brainwashing.

And he'd been the military psychiatrist, called in to, treat American GIs who'd been brainwashed by the Chinese communists, the Maoists, at the end of the Korean Civil War. So these guys, American GIs had been caught and been brainwashed and his job was to try and treat them and reverse that. And he came away and wrote this book called Thought Reform of Brainwashing, which is fascinating. Then, Richard Condon, I think, read that book and then wrote the Manchurin candidate, which is, was a great and successful novel about a brainwash candidate for presidency. And then that obviously was turning a film of Fran Cynatra. then it lay low for a bit

and then the Israelis re-reversioned that story with somebody who'd been kidnapped and brainwashed by Hezbollah turning into an Israeli politician and an Israeli soldier had been brainwashed and then Homeland came along and pinched that story from the Israeli drama and reversing it again all of which tells you that there are no new plots in Hollywood, but also that this is a big thing.

And so that Scientology isn't just a wacky, vicious money thing. It also might help you unlock stuff. One of the things that Lichten talks about, and I believe this passionately, is that, is that the authoritarian mind or the totalitarian mind abhors humor. It has no tolerance for mockery or a sense of humor. And therefore, you've got to like and admire and support tolerance and mockery. in our leaders and in our own in our own doings. Right, right.

Whatever. And part of the reason I think, as I said, that Mike Rinder left the Scientology gang and joined the slightly rubbish BBC Panorama gang was because we had more fun and my colleagues could mock me and nothing would happen. And I laughed along too.

Right. And that is a central thing. There's, and this, I mean, there's all sorts of kind of fascinating military edges to this. So one of my heroes is General Bill Slim, who was the general in charge of the forgotten army, the British in Burma, the Japanese attacks. And the problem is all the money and all the resources were for the Battle of Europe, to, defeating the Nazis or the battle in the Pacific, where the Americans are smashing the Japanese Navy. There's no money and there's no resources in Burma,

but that's where Bill Slim is. And they have the longest retreat in the history of the British Army, a thousand miles backwards, and then the longest advance in the history of the British Army, a thousand miles forwards. And Bill ends up, they build their own, there are huge rivers, a thousand yards across. in Burma and they built

I ended up building so many boats that had more ships than the Royal Navy and they had elephants and I've written a book don't go away this is my elephant book elephant moon this is sold 200,000 copies and I love the story there's a bunch of elephant teak men

i.e these are teak foresters who use elephants they chopped down the trees and then the elephants push them down the rivers and they own the sawmill down the towards the capital and basically these massive teak logs go down the river and when they get to the sawmill they're stopped and they're chopped up so that the elephant men spends their entire lives up in the forests chopping down, teet trees, elephants pushing them along. And what happens is the Japanese attack, and then the elephants are incredibly valuable

because they can work in the jungle that no one else can. And they're escaping the Japanese on the way to India. When they come across a bus full of mixed-race kids from an orphanage, who are the sons and daughters, mainly the daughters, of British engineers, oil engineers, teak men, and their Burmese comfort women, and American oil engineers, a lot of oil in Burma, now Myanmar. But this is the human stain of empire. These are embarrassing kids.

And so they haven't been flown or taken ship to the safety of India. They've left because they've got no money and the people running the orphanage have got no money. and therefore they've managed they've had to walk out and they're all going to die and then suddenly this herd of working teak elephant arrive and the Japanese has sunk the last ferry so there's no way that can cross the last river the Chinwin to get to the safety of India and their teachers with them says well have you got a ferry and the elephant man in my book his real name is Bill in my book I called him Sam.

The elephant man says, well, we don't need a ferry because the children can ride on the back of the elephants. But we're only taking you across the river. Anyway, they then, between the, then on the other side of the river, there's a range of mountains. And I chuck in a Nazi in the story because Hollywood likes Nazis. Make it film somebody.

Anyway, that's my idea. couple Nazis. But Bill Slim had this rule returning to the point that anybody could say anything in his officer groups, the O groups. They had a plan to defeat the Japanese and build a block. This is what we're going to do. Bill set it out. All his colonel said, yes, that's going to be great.

All the majors said yes. The lowliest officer there, a weather lieutenant, put up his hand and said, it's going to rain, i.e., this plan will not work. And Bill writes in his book, Defeat Into Victory, I wanted to shoot him. But he doesn't. And he puts that story in to show a sense of humor about how his own ambition was told by the common sense of a lowly officer. But Bill allowed that officer to tell him the truth and also made a joke about it,

which means that's the better way to organise things, because disaster strikes when stuff gets blocked up, when people dare not say to the boss has troubled. One of the things, so to answer your question, I believe in a free media. I believe in free speech, but I believe in facts too as well. And I believe that our job is to call power to account. And I was troubled and I'm troubled by the crazy insanity of much online stuff.

And I think it should be policed in, for example, that people should only be who they are. If you post stuff on social media, we need to know who you are. no anonymous. That's over for me. So I was thinking the other day it's a friend of mine. His daughter is doing an exam and wanted to ask me about Putin's invasion of Crimea,

seizing a bit of land, 2014, and this is a no-no. Because the settlement after the Second World War is we don't pinch anybody's land again. You can break up a country like Yugoslavia into bits. Yugoslavia doesn't invade Italy. That's a no-no. And in 2014, Putin broke that rule.

And this, my friend's daughter wanted to know, I kind of asking, and the thing is, I was in Ukraine later that summer, not for the spring, but I was there in the summer. and I reported on the shooting down of MH17 and I ended up doorstepping Putin. But why did this happen? One of the reasons I think it happened

is because that Putin has ended up, some say, killing off an independent media, by which I mean people like Anna Potitive Skyer ended up being shot dead on his birthday. Now, he probably did. didn't order that, somebody else did, but whoever ordered it has never been found. The killers or some people who have been accused of killing have ended up being locked up, but not the people who commissioned the murder.

The reason, and this was a mistake, at the moment the sanctions for the Kremlin are like 2% of the Russian economy, $100 million, $100 billion, a hit, but it's 2% of GDP. It's a slap on the wrist. It's not a big thing. But nevertheless, the West aren't going to back down on this. With Joe Biden and the one house, there's more trouble for Trump, I think, down the track. The reason Putin made this mistake is that there's nobody telling him, don't do this, boss, because it's a mistake. Because he switched off the free media.

The reason why Trump lost it in the end, even though, as I've said earlier, that I, I don't. get it that Trump spoke to an awful lot of the left behind people and that they felt a kind of gut, belief and faith in him. At the end, Trump lost it because he started to believe his own propaganda. And there was nobody in his network who was saying, don't do this, boss, because you're attacking another pillar of the American constitution. Don't do this. Now, in the early days. Weirdly, people like Steve Bannon, who I abhorred, but he's got a, you know, he had a kohonis. He would argue with Trump. He would argue with Ivanka and all of that. He would, and then the other people around him, the generals, they were good people. They were smart. People

like Mattis, his first, um, uh, the oil man, I've forgotten his name, first, um, at the state department. They were big people. Rex Guy Tillerson I think his name was Yeah Rex Tillerson And then who was the Who was his whatever you call it His chief of staff Who was a military guy as well

There was a general Who was pretty good His name escapes me right now But you know those people By the end they'd all gone And you want You want If you're in power

You need people to say boss don't do this because it's a mistake. And Putin had shot those people, literally perhaps metaphorically certainly, the Kremlin denies any wrongdoing. So what you've got is a failure of that function. And I think that happened with late Trump as well. There's a moment in particular after the election

where I think he blows it for constitutional conservatives, for Republicans who wanted to vote for him. And that, by the way, is when my granddaughter Shireland, not yet born, that 500 quid on John Ossoff to win Georgia, because I couldn't imagine good Republicans really wanting to vote for Trump because he was going so crazy. What was that moment? Did he say something?

I think it was, he was what, he was, He was taped calling up the guy in charge of fair voting, of proper voting, saying we need 11,000 votes. I mean, it was like a mobster. It was Al Capone style. What do you think about him getting banned from Twitter? I was in favor of it. I am in favor of it because, hold on, as ever I want to tell a story. I'm an old man.

I drink too much. I have to get up at 4 o'clock in the morning, go for a pit. What I would do, I couldn't get to sleep. I'd go on to Twitter and then Trump had said something. He played kissy-kissie with Kim Jong-un. I've been to North Korea. It's a dark, evil place. Kim Jong-un is a tyrant and a sadist.

There is no value in playing nicey-nice with this guy. And Trump didn't do it. That was appalling. The way he paled around with Putin. appalling the way he diminished and demeaned and was horrible to his democratic allies in Europe and in the United Kingdom was horrible, horrible, horrible. These days, and I couldn't sleep

because I was sick with worry. Now that Trump is out and off Twitter, I wake up at 4 in the morning, I go for a piss, I switch on Twitter, nothing is happening, I switch it off, I go to sleep again. I wake up at 8 o'clock. I'm thinking, cricky, World War III hasn't happened, it's okay. I wore the dog and have breakfast.

I mean, like, like, so that there was something mad about it. Now, I believe in free speech. I didn't, and by the way, I mean this, I thought about suing Tommy Robinson, the far-eyed guy, who made my life a misery, and effectively ended my career at the BBC, although BBC managers should have played it differently in my view. But I didn't sue him and I don't want him to be shut down completely, but I felt very grateful when Facebook cut him off shortly after he put out of video attacking me

because it meant the heat I was getting from his anonymous supporters was switched off. I don't think people have a right to abuse other people and much of what Tommy Robinson said about me was utterly unreasonable and untrue. They have a right to do that to anonymous supporters and the second wave of the anonymous supporters hating you is terrifying. I don't, that doesn't square with me

with having free speech. Now this is difficult because I do, think that an elitist and too rich, too posh in English-English media, stop listening to working class people in Britain and the same problem applied in Europe and the United States. Part of this is the change in the nature of our societies, for example, the Labour Party used to represent the working class in a very clear way and the Conservatives used to represent people with money. Culturally in Britain, that switched

so that what happens now is the Conservatives are doing a lot better with the working class on cultural issues. The working class is much smaller. It used to be four or maybe five out of ten Brits and now it's something like two out of ten Brits. Basically, what you've got is six out of ten Brits. are middle class in a big band

but they're middle class and then you've got 20% who are poor and maybe or actually maybe 7 out of 10 of 10% are very rich and then you've got 10% are very rich and then 20% are poor but those poor people

and the people in particular who haven't had a who are undereducated or haven't had a good education they are moving to the rights in a way that's happening and you can see also that happened in Europe I know it's really best I suppose

because I go there as often as I can because the food and wine is so wonderful and you see this again and this pattern repeating and repeating and repeating so I feel that the media and the people who run places

have kind of stopped listening to the left behind and I don't like that and that's a problem and at the same time the right and the far right have seized the Wild West and have gone for it this opportunity it feels that switching off Trump for telling lies about the election

was a necessary thing he can still appear you'll, you know, he can still say whatever he wants and the media will get the story out. But this, the electricity of him being able to whip up his supporters, that's gone. And I think that's fundamentally a good thing.

I know, by the way, I'm a huge admirer of Alexei who? Alexei Navalny is the Russian, the effective leader of the opposition who's in prison at the moment. Do you know who he is? No, I don't know who he is. So you've got to, Danny,

he's a hero. You've got to, he's put out, so what happened to him was he doesn't like Putin and he's after him and he's getting traction. Putin's been in power for 20 years.

There are Russian voters now, 18, 19, 20-year-olds who have only known Vladimir Putin in power, and that's boring. And also, Russia isn't doing very well because it is fundamentally horribly

corrupt, and Alexei Navalny calls Vladimir Putin the Tsar of corruption. I've met Navalny a couple of times. His supporters get stabbed and tased and beaten up, but Navalny keeps him going for it. Last year, he was poised,

He was on a plane, started screaming, fell into a coma. The pilot landed the plane in Siberia. Doctors raced out, jabbed him with the right stuff, and he was flown to Germany, where the German doctors discovered he'd been poisoned by Novichok. Novichok is a nerve agent. You cannot buy this in a shop. It's created by the Russian secret states,

and they poisoned this guy. he survived. He's got balls of steel and he went back to Russia and has just been arrested. And he's banged up again. He's serving three years or they've given him three years, basically on trumped up charges. He's inside for two days when a video he's made pops up. He made it in Germany and it's about Putin's palace. He says, watch the video and it's fantastic. It's in Russian but subtitled in English. and it's like two hours long and it's wonderful stuff

but Putin has built himself or Putin's cronies have built him a billion pound like a one point one a half sorry a one point five billion palace on the shores of the black sea with with toilet brushes that are worth seven hundred dollars

crazy absolutely crazy with a hooker room where you can smoke Hubble bubble pipes with a stripper's pole in it and you can see the detail of it and the point is that it's created

it's been paid for by his rich scum oligarchs but you know it's his because you can't go there and if you try and go there you get arrested by the secret police and there's a two-mile exclusion zone

ships can't go near it because they might be a terrorist thing. It's the president's palace. This video goes up two days after Navalny's arrested because they've held it back. And 120 million people have watched it on YouTube. So it's really big. Now this is now, now, now Putin never calls Navalny by his name, kind of like Lord Voldemore. And I've actually met Naval and I said, And on my Twitter, I'm on Twitter at John Sweeney Raw. And there's a film called Taking On Putin, which is somewhere on YouTube. But I actually challenge, oh, I say to Navalny, why does he name you?

And he said, because I'm Lord Voldemort. The thing about Navalny, he's very, very funny. He's got a real wit. and he's got a mate who's a bit fat and Navalny's he's he's he's got a beautiful wife, two lovely kids, but he's got

a fat sidekick who's no matter forgotten who does the kind of grungy bits and there's one moment where Navalny's sitting he talks very intensely directly to Canberra obviously in a nice cafe somewhere in Germany

where he's talking like all this stuff, and it's very, very funny. And then it cuts to his fat mate on a little dingy, driving towards, we're going to the palace. Like that, like that. So it's genuinely really, really funny and brave as fuck. So people say,

what the fuck did the only go back to Russia because they tried to kill him? They tried to kill him. And the thing is, they could kill him in Germany. They could kill him in Britain. They could kill him in the States. So he's daring them to kill him, and he's incredibly brave. But Navalny has said, I don't agree with Twitter switching off Trump. Really? Because Navalny needs social media because he's avoiding the mainstream media in Russia won't deal with him because it's controlled by the Kremlin.

the difference for me is the attack on the capital is a line in the sand and basically as I said earlier that the problem is that Trump lost the smart brave people around him and said don't do this boss because it's it's a crossing of the line and I can't do not think it's right to do this in particular if your supporters are anonymous because then then what what means is that If you're trying to, how can you defend democracy if people threaten to kill you anonymously in this space? I don't believe in free speech the whole way, but I'm saying I also note with some anxiety that Navalny disagrees with me. But I think Russia and the United States are two different places. so that I'm putting forward the counter argument

but I'm sticking with I'm pleased that that Trump has kicked off Twitter Didn't you? You've done at least one extensive interview with Trump personally, right? I've done, yeah. And that was regarding some sort of hotel

he was building in Scotland? Yeah, he's such a cunt. Can I say that? Yeah. I'm going to finish. I've got a bottle of Italian Amaroni, which I'm going to bring up because this interview is going to last forever. I'm going to go grab my bottle of tequila too.

Hold on. Let's do this now. Trump's a cunt. Hold that thought. I'm going to get the bottle. Perfect. There you go. What do you have there? There's an advertising.

Amarone della Valpolicella. And this is from somewhere beautiful in Italy. Neglardivo or Policella, Italia. It doesn't say where. It's really nice. Can you get that in the United States? Yeah. Yeah, yeah.

But I would, yes, I'm sure you can. Anyway, it's... Here's what I'm drinking. you're drinking George Clooney tequila it's called Casamigos yeah yeah yeah yeah he's good George

he Lake Como really is very beautiful I'm trying to write a novel about an Englishman who parachuted into Lake Como during the war and was arrested he was being brought up in Italian in Italy and spoke fluent

Italian, but the British dropped him in on a full moon in 1943 and the Americans had just bombed Milan. So all the rich people had gone, left Milan to free the bombs and gone to their villas around Lake Como. And they'd watched, like 10,000

of them would watch this poor British spy being parachuted and everybody's watching him and he's instantly arrested. And he's beaten up slap, slap, slap. And then in my novel, he gets his first good coffee. He's had because he's been in Britain since 1939. He gets his first good coffee for four years. Oh, God, this is good. And there's a beautiful woman that says,

you know, how are you? And this is it. This is Italy. You know, I get beaten up. I get a beautiful coffee, beautiful woman. I'd miss Italy so much. Oh, that's incredible. La Bella Italia. I'd miss it. So I must work out what I've missed it. So is I'm trying to learn, your me Italian, pesima fragmented.

My Italian's rubbish, frankly. So Trump, so the first of all, one should always be fair. Trump is one of those people who are instantly and obviously hard, ruthless, and you've got to admire the power of the verbal punch they pack. Like he's not a very intelligent speaker, but the way he speaks, he like dumbs it down for people.

He like, the way he speaks, he, he hits a primal part of your brain that just makes certain people react very strongly. Yes. You're dealing with a primeval monster who, who takes you back into the slime from whence we came, and that works. He speaks from the gut to the gut. And if you don't look after yourself with him, he'll hurt you.

And because you know that, it's right to fear him. The problem is managing your fear while you're dealing with him, because he can say something so vicious that it can silence. you or you're left gasping. And I think what happened with Hillary was that Hillary never quite got through. There's a beautiful moment thinking of my

unborn granddaughter's bet for 500 quid on Joe to win. When Joe says to him, well, you just shut up, man. Remember in the first debate? And that was a kind of wonderful moment because it's so like Joe's, well, I was, you know, Joe's obviously,

he's going on a bit. His granddad, he can't remember where the keys to the garage guy. He's a big gar-gar. But he's not, he's not a patsy. One of my favorite movies,

um, he, now, how have we got the right title? The last show with Art Carney. Have you seen it? No.

The wonderful movie. It's in the 70s. And it's, It's about Art Carney, who's a wonderful actor, who in real life had a limp, and so he limps. And he's an old private eye, and he speaks in 1940s Raymond Chandler, the Big Sleep-style slang. And there's a crazy hippie woman who comes to him with some stuff about a cat. but behind the cat's story something dark is happening and in this kind of moment of poetry and beauty

the old private eye slowly untangles the darkness the gangsters and becomes a hero even though he's old he's got something wrong with him he's got some kind of bad stomach ulcer and every now and he collapses. And at one point the baddies beat him up and he coughs blood. And then a critical moment,

the baddies have got the upper hand and he collapses. But he's mucking about and he's got his gun and he says, listen, son, you're in trouble. And it's kind of beautiful. And there was a moment when Joe said, listen, ma'am, won't you shut up? was the art carny moments in that debate. And it was, and the thing about Joe was

that Joe isn't money and he kind of gets standing up for himself and standing up for the people he represents. So there was, although Granddad is a bit, it's far too old and doesn't know where he's left the keys, he's up for a fight. That was a sweet moment. Trump's very impressive.

The other thing which is squalid about Trump, and I hate it, was his transactionalism. If, like, if I were to meet you, if I, you know, if the world gets good again and I can fly to Florida. Amazing. We could sit here and drink wine together. Yeah, what I'd do is, to be honest, I'd get a bottle of Italian red, and I'd sit on the park bench opposite the Church of Scientology. and I'd go for a bit then I'd grow up then we'd go

we'd hire we should do this anyway we'd hire a soft top convertible drive around the nice bits of Florida find a lovely bar by the beach I'd go for a great big long swim because I like doing that

and then and then we'd come back and eat ribs and drink good wine and talk about the world and I wouldn't at any point, if I paid for all of that because I've got lots of money, I don't, I'm just fantasizing, I wouldn't think for a second that I owned you because I paid it, paid for it. Trump would.

So what happened with Trump was that when we arrived, we were going to interview him on the Tuesday, but on the Saturday or the Sunday, we went to, is it Bedminster, his golf resort in New Jersey? I'm not sure in the name of it he's got a golf resort in New Jersey I think it's called Bedminster or something like this and it's the Mara Lago of New Jersey and he was great in terms of TV he was great

he said hi John, great to meet you they're looking after you it's wonderful really good he gave me a Trump hat not make America grump again but Trump golf red hat fantastic very useful because I've got a bald head I used to drive it around I used to wear it when I

drove my soft top VWB to around I don't do that anymore unless somebody kill me but anyway I ended up we're in a golf buggy together and

he said okay John and he gives me a lift and he goes off a June like really quite a high speed and you can hear me, I'm on the end of the capacity of my sound mic, feeding back to the camera. But as we disappear in the lighted frame, so we're dying, the light is dying,

but as the light dies and we head off into the sunset, you can clearly hear me say, I'm a bit worried about the driver, because it's fucking lunatic is going to kill me. And that was Trump. And then it was just you and him in the golf cart? Yeah. Yeah, yeah. It's on panorama. It's a BBC panorama.

You know, Trump, the Kremlin candidate question mark. And that's me. And then he organized for us to go up and his Trump helicopter and fly around the golf course, all of which is wonderful pictures. He's not there. He's doing something else. But what this means is that when I come down to see, sit and interview him, he thinks he owns me. Now, you know, I've been in a golf buggy before. I don't

like golf. I think it ruins a good walk. But I've been in a golf buggy and I've been in lots of helicopters, oftentimes with the American Marines and the American Army in northern Iraq and all sorts of fucking weird and crazy places. But the idea that you can buy my soul for a ride in a golf buggy and a ride in a helicopter, that's just foolish. And the story I was there to ask him about was that he'd built this golf course in Scotland, but he'd fallen out with his Scottish neighbours because he treated them appallingly. And there's a problem with the way Trump treats ordinary people who get in his way. That was the purpose of the film, but actually what we were doing was riding on the back of a previous film made by a very good filmmaker whose name I think is Anthony Baxter.

And basically it was we were borrowing this other guy's story with some of his footage. We interviewed him. And I found that was a bit boring. Happy to know the story, but he didn't get my storytelling juices going because it's somebody else's story. However, I looked into Trump and I found that he had one of the people close to him was this guy called Felix Sater, a Russian-born gangster who back in the day in Wall Street in the 90s had fallen out with a fellow broker and had smashed a margarita glass. and then put the stem of the of the glass into this guy's net giving him a hundred and ten stitches and the guy goes inside when he's inside then he teams up with the gambinos for a pump and dump scam worth $40 million pumping up a share price which is ship and then they they pull out other suckers come in and they pull out then he does something i am so that union falls and he ends up doing, this is Felix Sater, he ends up working, I think, for the agency

buying Stinger missiles from the, in Afghanistan, using cutouts or whatever. He does something, which means that they let him out earlier. And then he ends up in the Trump organization. But this guy is a gangster thick with organized crime, that the CIA might have used him to do some skullduggery on their behalf.

That's good on him. It doesn't make him an honest or reliable business partner at all. And I hit Trump with that. Why didn't you say to Felix Sater, who has got a Trump card, a Trump organization card, Felix Sater, and a Trump organization email address of memory serves, why didn't you say to Felix Sater,

you're connected with a mafia, you're fired. This is on YouTube. And Trump says, John, maybe you're thick. But in the United States, we have a contract, and you can't break the contract. Now, actually, down the track, I did a film for BBC Newsnight. This is on YouTube, and it's called Trump and the Mob,

or Trump and his links with the mob, in which I find a clause in the contract he'd signed with Felix Sater or the business entity he was engaged with and Sater was part of it, which is called the bad boy clause that if Sater had been a bad boy, then it'd have to cough that up and it was his responsibility to cough. So there was perfectly good legal contractual reasons for Trump to do that. Trump called me thick. What does that mean thick?

The thick means stupid. Okay. Maybe you're thick, John, said Trump to me. All of my colleagues on Panorama loved this moment. And so whenever we go for a beer, they always, you know, there's always some fucking point where somebody says, well, maybe you're thick, John. And you can watch it. And I don't, I don't, I don't.

I don't say anything but you can tell from my face that I don't like it because I wear glasses I've written 12 books I'm clever I mean I don't have to like I went to the London School of Economics

I'm not that clever but I'm not thick anyway never mind but the point is that Trump has worked out perfectly how to hit me but this isn't my first rodeo and I roll with it

and then I say but I press him on it and then Trump says listen I've got to go to a meeting he's made it up there isn't a meeting he's just getting out because he doesn't like me and he comes over to shake my hand and I put my hand up like this

and I say one last question why did you buy your concrete from Fat Tony Salerno. Fat Tony was the Gambino and the Genovese crime family's man in Manhattan and if you bought concrete back in the day, you bought it from Fat Tony or else you had had trouble with a mob. And Trump's building is entirely concrete. He bought his concrete from Fat Tony. He, the evidence suggests, shares a lawyer, Roy Cohn. with Fat Tony.

Fat Tony was in the mob. There was a wonderful, great reporter of a village voice called Wayne Barrett, who I met in 2016 in the spring. And Wayne had always been on Trump's case back in the 80s.

Fantastic guy. And I asked Wayne, and this is in the video, Trump and his links with the mob, it's on YouTube. And I asked Wayne, about Fat Tony and Wayne said, Fat Tony, Fat Tony was fat.

It's a great piece of telly. Honestly, it's lovely. Wayne told me this story, which is yucky, but I'm going to tell it to you because why not? Wayne found out that Trump was, you know one of his casinos got blown up the other day. This video of a Trump casino

on YouTube, on Twitter, being blown up. How did I miss this? Okay, anyway. Which casino? One of the Trump Casinos in Atlantic City. Okay. Maybe, by the way, I've watched it.

I didn't watch it closely. The date could be wrong, but never mind. They've had to, somebody in, it looked like recently, but it could have been a couple of years back, have blown up a Trump casino, because it was abandoned and lost money. When one of his casinos was opened,

Wayne had been running stories about Trump getting in bed with the New Jersey Mafia, who owned the land. So that Trump effectively had to pay off the New Jersey Mafia to start this casino. And then, in those days, the New Jersey Mafia based in Philly was more murderous than the New York Mafia in the 80s. Common ground. So,

Wayne is reporting at Trump's getting in bed with some very nasty people indeed. Big, dirty killers, organized crime. Trump hates this, hates it. And Wayne Barrett is on his hate list.

Wayne is not invited to the launch of the casino. Wayne hires a year, young researcher called Tim O'Brien, who has ended up working for Bloomberg and working for Joe, for Joe Biden, and also being a great reporter for, I think, the wash post for a bit or whatever. Anyway, Tim O'Brien is Wayne's assistant. At this point, he's like he's 22, 23, just out of college. He's on the inside.

And between them, they work it out. And basically, Tim O'Brien goes to a door and lets Wayne in the back way so he can get into this party. There's Trump, all his women. And the moment Trump sees Wayne, Wayne is arrested by Trump security, who are Atlantic City police officers working moonlighting for the Trumpal organization. They lock him up and because of the trespass, basically they can lock him up for the night and they have to let him go in the morning. That night, Wayne tells me in 2016 when he's dying of cancer, he spends the entire night handcuffed, chained to a radiator and there's another prisoner in the cell, which is a police holding cell, not a, okay, and the other guy is mentally ill and

spends the entire night masturbating. Trump would have known that because it's, he owns the Atlantic City Police Department. That's Wayne Barron's allegation or concerned deny any wrongdoing. So what Trump is doing is he's deliberately getting to Wayne by organizing this. Or rather, the cops would have known this nutter and would have told Trump about it to make Trump enjoy that moment of sadism. And when I read Mary Trump,

his aunt's book about Donald Trump, or is Mary Trump, Mary Trump is Trump's niece, that's right, who's a psychologist, but she's fallen out with him because Trump was horribly cruel to her father, Fred Trump Jr. This married completely,

with the story that Wayne told me that there is something brutal and nasty and disgusting about Donald Trump so I felt as well as the fact that my unborn granddaughter won £1,300 from Trump's loss I felt an enormous sense of relief

when the great John King finally you know there's that moment in the Pennsylvania recount where suddenly the numbers switched. And I thought, thank God for that. Whatever time it was in the morning in London, I opened like the most, like a fantastically expensive bottle of Italian red.

Very nice. But also this is democracy. Now, I don't, and I think Trump has lost it. There's a moment when I was talking about, Putin. The Putin, the problem is that Putin has shot metaphorically, certainly literally, he would deny it.

It's shot the free media in Russia and therefore there aren't people around him who are telling him the truth, who have got the courage and the status to say, listen boss, you're wrong. Or for him to read that stuff and believe it.

So an honest media is vital to the proper working of power in the 21st century. And the problem is that social media disorganize and much of an anonymous creates an enormous fog machine so you can't see what the truth is. And it's turned everyone into a journalist, kind of. There's no, there's no barrier to entry like traditional media. Like for instance, for you to go work for the BBC, that's not easy. However, it's much easier to go grab a video camera.

and go out and start recording yourself, investigating whatever you want, posting it on YouTube and Twitter. Yes. Now, some of that is good, but much of it is bad. Secondly, there's another thing, which is that we've all become

not just our own reporters, but actually worse, our own news editors. And there are occasionally things, I read my Twitter well, and I think, got 60,000, 59,000 followers at the moment. But basically, if there are people out there who

put up videos, which are horrible, and I either block or mute them, because I don't want to see that. Now, I've seen people with their eyes blown out by the force of artillery. I've seen dead children in the mountains of northern Iraq. I've seen a baby with its arm shot off in a massacre in Africa. I've seen horrible things. I don't want to see that on my computer. In the normal, I don't want to see that. And I've seen terrible things as a war reporter.

So I know what I'm doing there in terms of editing that app. So there is a problem and I don't think, I mean, the people who own certainly Facebook, Google, Twitter profited from Tommy Robinson supporters threatening to kill me. And those threats went from online to offline, i.e. real people came up to me when I was in trouble with the BBC not putting out our film which would defend or at least say here's the context folks. And they, this is when the online hate goes offline, i.e. real world, it's terrifying. So what happened to me was,

I knew there was a wonderful Irish reporter called Lara McKee, who was, I think, 27, 28, 29. Not yet 30, certainly. And she was shot dead by the real IRA, at a confrontation with the police in Derry in Northern Ireland. And whoever shot her was pointing at the police lines, she just happened to be standing next to the police. So it was an accident manslaughter.

But on the other hand, it was criminal manslaughter in that if you fire a gun at that sort of range at a line of police officers and other people, you could well kill somebody that's what happened Lyra was murdered killed mine's slaughter not murder I'm on gardening leave the BBC won't put out this

film with Don and Tommy Robinson I'm still getting threats from these anonymous people I go at my own expense I fly out to Belfast because I'd met Lara McKee actually the Bruges Journalism Festival in Italy which is a wonderful event and I really liked that I took the piss out of

she was with a British lefty guy called Owen Jones so I don't agree with on much stuff but he he's good fun and we were ribbing each other she said something very funny I said come and join us and we was a gang I had a little gang and they they joined us and it was great fun and she said I go to her funeral most of my friends who are new from the media are at the are filming this event and I still I'm in a mess psychologically so I stand at the very back

and I tweet a little bit about you know the crowd clapping her funeral cortege as it leaves which places me at Belfast Catholic Cathedral in Belfast at this moment I tweet the coffin going in and the coffin leaving. So, and one of Tommy Robinson's supporters comes and finds me as I'm leaving the funeral at the end and attacks me verbally, not physically, in a way which I find absolutely shocking and terrifying.

So the problem I've got with big tech is that they're making money from advertising out of stuff that's caused me enormous psychological distress for no and that is wrong and I have no way of stopping that or sanctioning them because they're not publishers

they're not responsible for the content blah blah blah and I don't like that so I want to see the internet police properly I am listening to and wary of the warning from Navalny.

I'm also, but at the same time, I don't think that Trump should be allowed to go on Twitter after he started living, putting out stuff which is in a dark fantasy world. So we've got

to police it. Are you aware of the section that I believe was introduced by it was a long time ago. I want to say it was 10 years ago. It was some sort of a copyright protection

that blanketed companies like Facebook and YouTube and Twitter from this kind of stuff, from people, independent people publishing their content, it would sort of guard these platforms from legal liability for either copyright or, for, you know, stuff like you're talking about now. Are you familiar with this specific? And there is a, I've forgotten the lingo.

It's like preposition, Proposition 237 or. Yeah, I can't remember it either. Yeah, yeah. But essentially, I don't think it's, it needs to be policed. How we do it, I don't know. how we organize for people like

but Navalny is Navalny. My point, I think I'm my hard line is about I'm against anonymity because this can create these pylons which are terrifying if you're

at the wrong end of them in particular if you're in a bad way. Now listen, you know, I, one of my psychiatrists that acquired my I spent some time in 2019 in Italy and my then flatmate loved quoting this from my psychiatrist,

which was that Mr. Sweeney has a robust and resilient character, but nevertheless, under immense stress, anyone can crack. And that's true. And I cracked a little bit. So I feel that that was enhanced by this. So that I feel that their, my single point is that we've got to end anonymity, which means that people own what they say. Right. And therefore, the moment you do that, you don't want your mum, your loved ones,

your partners, your kids to find out you're a bit of a fucking Nazi or you're being pointlessly cruel to somebody. Right. and I and I and I and I um so that's so that's where I um I I I net out on this yeah the the the that section that that law scares me if it goes away because what will happen to all the people that that are independent journalists now that YouTube has people that make a living off YouTube and and publishing all their content there now that YouTube

has to protect its own ass from a barrage of millions of lawsuits from what any one of their creators could create and publish on their platform. I have a feeling that would effectively, I mean, I don't see how it couldn't put a company like YouTube out of business. Well, I feel

so I don't want those voices to be silenced I want those voices not to be anonymous. Right. And if you end the namelessness, because I'm struggling after too much red wine to say anonymous properly,

I did it. If you end anonymity, you prevent that. But also I think that the big tech, big tech have made a lot of money and that they could spend more money on policing what they're doing. prevent this to doing this.

My son's a social worker and he's concerned that the amount of, for example, child poor material out there is way bigger than the efforts that Google,

Facebook, etc. are making in terms of stopping that. Yeah, it seems like with all the money they generate, there could be, I mean,

obviously it can't come from them because they're obviously not going to are they going to regulate themselves there has to be a third party that that regulates them right if i was them i would start if i was them i would start spending big money on doing it myself get some cutouts get a fancy board of good people who know stuff and um and and get free speech and but also get common sense and at the same time I do that because otherwise people like me will create anonymous accounts. Yeah, we'll end up legislating. I want to see laws ending anonymous accounts. I would, so that it makes sense. You're held accountable. Yes.

I want accountability. I don't want silence. And I get that. Listen, you know, I spent eight days in North Korea and I wrote a book about it, North Korea under cover. And you heard what I was saying about Putin and Trump. It's because of a lack of sound criticism in Putin's world and in Trump's world that they failed. They lost their suppleness, and they paid for that.

So that I believe in free speech, but I don't believe in anonymous hate speech. I don't want to see silencing, but I think you can do this. I think that's a fixable thing. Yeah, I totally agree. We return it. Listen, my career is, since I left the BBC,

I mean, my, I went to a radio station, LBC Global, but basically it used to be called the Law and Broadcasting Corporation, which is a fun, lively station in London, and there the people have put out my podcast. And it's because of the, of the, you know, exciting stuff that this podcast on

Gillian Maxwell has, it's had 2.3 million downloads. So I am a beneficiary of the new world information order. I'm not against it, but I want some rules and I don't like anonymity. now what drew your interest to Robert Maxwell and his daughter initially? So I met Robert Maxwell when I was a boy. Really? Yeah, not when I was a boy when I was... How old are you? I'm 33.

Well, I would have been 28, something like this. I was a couple of... I was a freelance reporter in London and I was doing a piece about the Royal Rat Pack, the ghastly tabloid newspapers who used to Harry I menace members of the Royal Family and I came away from doing this story

feeling a bit sorry for the Royal Family and not liking these people in the middle of doing this there was a charity event I think if memory serves at Great Ormond Street Hospital or Kids Hospital in London there's Robert Maxwell and there's Princess

Diana. And Robert Maxwell was laying on the schmaltz and there was something sickening and wrong about him. Then what happened was, I was fascinated by him and I can remember in the summer 1991 he died on November the 5th, 1991. I proposed to the editor of the observer, my then newspaper, can I investigate Robert Maxwell? No way. Like the editor, the editor. Sir Donald Delford looked at me as if I'd offered him a fucking cow pat a cow pat is you know what a cat is yeah

what's weird with American English is so every now and then everything goes wrong and you don't understand. There's a few words I don't understand like thick and Thick it means stupid. Watching you and Sean talk for two hours. There was a couple of moments where I was like what the fuck are they talking about? Because there's some word.

But Sean's Yeah, Sean's from with So basically, he's from pretty, I was brought up in South Manchester for five years, and he witnesses north of Manchester and way rougher than where I was in Cheshire, so that we can roughly understand each other, because there are a regional, like Britain so small, but actually the amount of accents are going on. So that you would know that I'm considerably posh of and shorners.

I'm not posh, I'm no nor do anything like it. But Sean is, you know, anyway, never mind. You were hilarious. Watching you roast Sean was one of the funniest things I've seen in a while. He's from,

he looked, he did look like a bouncer in the strip club in the 1970s with a kind of like slightly naft cheap suit and the waistcoat like the defendants, you know, on a kind of serious charge.

On the other hand, Sean is funny and likable and he's been to prison for something he did do but he survived it and he's got his sense of humor and his love of life and so there's something

essentially very likable about him though he's also a bit dodgy you know as I left I checked my wallet yeah oh yeah no he was the guy he wasn't the bouncer in the nightclub he was the guy that sat outside the bathroom and then and then sold you a little bat

little baggies. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Would you like, would you like some perfume? Fuck off. What did he go? He went to prison for, um, ecstasy or something.

Yeah, yeah. Yeah, he ran an ecstasy, essentially like an ecstasy ring, like an empire in Arizona. Like, anyway, never mind. So. All right.

What were we talking about? We're talking about Maxwell. Yeah. So there was something about Maxwell that, that I knew was wrong. And I couldn't do the story for my paper because he threatened to sue everybody all the time. So he used the libel laws in a disgraceful way.

Then what happened was that he he ended up falling off his yacht. He was moving a cable around because the wife's going to run out of gas. And he fell off his yacht, called the Lady Shalem. And it was November the 5th, 1991.

And at that time I was a war reporter for the observer and I was commuting between northern Iraq and Yugoslavia as it was cracking up. And I just come back from the siege of Lubrovnik where, and I'd been reporting this

story from March, so for six, seven months, I've been seeing a lovely country called Yugoslava tear itself apart. People die. And in Dubrovnik, we went to the hospital and there was a little boy, I'll never forget this, who was he had salt and pepper hair, just like my boy Sam at that age. He'd been hit with a shell fragment, which had gone near his career.

but thank God has hit his upper leg, not his groin. But it was, this triggered my son, my memory, thinking, me thinking about my son, and I started to weep uncontrollably. Now, and the doctor who was with me said, you know, you should stop doing this work. And I wanted to say, no, listen, I've seen people with the heads blown off and it hasn't made me cry, but this has got to me because this kid looks like my son as I was crying. So I had to get out and I actually got out by hiding in a lady's toilet on a ferry. Men weren't allowed to leave Dubrovnik unless they be fighters.

And even though I had a kind of UN press card, it didn't matter. The ship's captain wouldn't let me go. And I stole back onto the ship, hidden a lady's toilet, got to Serbia, the other side and ran away. And before the Serb cops could work out of who I was, I got into a taxi and fucked off. And I got home. And I got home. It's bonfire night. I think my son opens the door and he said,

and he shoots me with his fingers, bang, bang, you're dead. I wouldn't let them have toy guns because of my experience. And what he used to do is make toy guns out of the toast. But nevertheless. Toast? Yeah. That's a British thing. That's where you put a bread and a toast.

Yeah, okay. I just can't imagine a gun made out of toast. No, it's what you do. If your dad bans you from having any kind of toy gun, you cut the shape of a revolver out of toast. That's creative. Yeah, it's a kind of NRA at five years old. I still, I mean, you could have, you know, dinosaurs and everything would, you know,

gobble you up. That's okay, but not guns. Right, right. And I stick by that. Anyway, I'm... So we go to the supermarket, my then misses. And we hear on the news, BBC Radio, Robert Maxwell, has fallen off his yacht. And the...

It says the supermarket has got a roof car part. I'm on the roof car park and my missus says, well, come on, let's go shopping. And I said, well, I've got to listen to this. And the thing is, I'd only just recovered from crying my eyes out and seeing a kid looking like my son. And so the thing is, I couldn't go anywhere because I was in bits. And I couldn't do this story. And it kind of hurt me. So 30 years on, I leave the BBC.

I want to do a podcast. I go to LBC and I say, I'd like to do hunting Gillen because she's gone. She's gone missing. And they say yes, but it takes them six months to say yes. Partly because of an election, then the virus hits. It's all a mess, but finally they say yes. And they say yes on July the 1st,

or rather I signed the contract on July the 1st. last year, 2020, and she's arrested. And the title of the podcast is Hunting Jelene. I'm going to find Jelene, right? That's what I'm going to do. And on July the 2nd, the FBI fined her in New Hampshire. And I phone up the boss of podcast, Chris Borm at LBC, and I say, I've signed the contract.

I've signed the contract. I just said, John, it's okay. It's still fascinating. she did this, how she hid how it worked. And the moment I then go and see, I think the first thing I do is I see the former editor of Private Eye, which is our wonderful satirical magazine in Britain, Richard Engrams, who's an old friend of mine. I've done little bits and pieces for Private Eye since the 80s and have been to Private Eye lunches. And Robert Maxwell used to sue Private Eye all the time. So often that Richard Ingrams, who wrote the stories,

who was the editor, can't remember how often he was sued. But he hated Maxwell when he was alive, but he feels sorry for Gillian Maxwell because her father was such a monster. So the traditional, so the story of Jean-N Maxwell is a dark fairy story, the darkest story. The darkest, one of the darkest you'll ever hear and the thing about the story is that the traditional version of it has seen in a Netflix Filthy Rich is there was only one monster and the monsters is Jeffrey Epstein

my version in Hunting Chelene the podcast and later this year I'm going to write a book about her called probably Hunting Chelan after the trial is over suggests there's at least, well, there's more than one monster. The second monster is her father, who was a grossly abusive man, who according to his own wife, Betty Maxwell,

who loved him for 40 years more, said he took sadistic pleasure in humiliating the people closest to him, his family. He bullied psychologically his family, horribly. He also may, and the evidence for this is not clear. It's not clear. But there is a woman with mental health issues who had an infatuation with Robert Maxwell. And Maxwell liked her as well. I don't know the nature of their relationship. But this woman's called Eleanor Berry and she says at the age of nine in a book, she says that Gillen Maxwell showed her various implements of beating like a piece of leather, a ruler, a cane that went swish as you

moved it in the air. And Jelaine, age nine, said to Eleanor Berry, Daddy's nice because he lets me choose what he's going to beat me with. I don't know whether that happened, but it's a fact that was an emotional bully, a psychological bully, who took, as his wife said, sadistic pleasure in humiliating his family. So my version of this dark fairy story says there isn't one monster. It goes beyond the Netflix version,

and Filthry which, there are two monsters. There is Jeffrey Epstein and there is Robert Maxwell. The question, that I wrestle with is Jelene Maxwell the third monster. Have you tried reaching out to her directly

to talk to her through the prison bureau? She has a PR man and I've approached him while I was making the podcast. It's available by the way on Spotify and Apple and all the usual places. It's called Hunting Jelene.

I pronounce Jelene, Jelene. Americans pronounce Jelan Jelan. I thought it was Jislane. Jislan is wrong. That was a joke. Yeah, yeah, and the bad one. Sorry, the tequila's getting to me. Yeah, yes.

Drink advisably. So, the so and the thing is that I think she was certainly a victim because her father was a cruel bully psychologically

I don't know whether this story about the beating is true but but it kind of fits other stories so it's grim however I think that you can be a victim and also a perpetrator and so the question is if you have been abused yourself or have been mucked around psychologically

does that lessen your defences does it make it more likely that you could abuse others and I spoke to in the podcast and episode six I spoke to a therapist who deals who lives in L.A. who deals with victims in the church of Scientology all the time and she said, said it's commonplace for victims to then turn into become perpetrators. And the problem is if you're raised inside a dark environment, then that becomes normal. Do you think because of her child, her alleged childhood trauma, do you think that it's possible that she possibly had no moral compass? Yes. I think that is, um, That's where I sit on this.

I feel that she didn't know what was right and wrong, where the boundaries were. This is common. Now, Betty, her mum, who loved Robert Maxwell, he said that for too long, all of us help perpetuate his quote's cult of personality. Now, Robert Maxwell didn't run a cult like Scientology, where you have suckers on the knees

paying for some kind of spiritual enlightenment because he had his businesses which were working much of the time and that was the source of the money but kind of a bit like Putin a bit like, obviously he didn't have enough people around him saying don't do this boss, this is bad. And if you've got a very, very, very powerful,

powerful personality and this guy was off the wall, then what you create is a kind of cult. The problem for Gillem was that she was brought up inside a cult, a kind of a cult. So when she meets, so her father dies, my view is he fell off the yacht deliberately. He committed suicide. He wasn't pushed. That's my view. others disputed. But when she lost one monster, she went to Manhattan and found a second Jeffrey Epstein,

who was the same kind of guy, brilliant, poor, made a ton of money, incredibly manipulative, and abusive. And his thing was abusing these poor kids, more child and women again and again and again. And the allegation against Yelene

is that she made, that happened. She was a handmaid into that abuse. She denies it. She denies all six charges against her. And to be fair and proper, we've got to wait until the trial this summer when we'll hear for the first time her defense. Do you think it will actually go to trial or do you think she could take a plea? I don't know. I don't think that there is anything very much for her to plea on because traditionally what you do is you plead to give up somebody else. But when Epstein killed himself and I believe he killed himself. You do believe he killed himself.

Yeah, I can set that out at great length. But I went because with two hours pretty much already, I'll send it out briefly. Okay. There's a friend of mine called Chris Atkins, who's written a very funny book called A bit of a stretch. and he was a former panorama producer freelance, who ended up in a tax scam and got done by the British taxman and went to prison sentence for five years and spent nine months in Wandsworth, which is a terrible nick in London.

Routinely, sex offenders and worst of all, paedophiles, were abused in prison, and, according to his own personal observation, prison officers didn't bother check up on paedophiles because they wanted them to die. So that my friend Chris, it's a British prison, not an American prison, but this is not a conspiracy theory. This is observed experience of prison culture. A convicted paedophile like Jeffrey Epstein back in again, for greater and better charges of paedophilia is going to have a horrible time in prison

from everybody including the prison guards. So I think he very likely that they didn't bother check on them, that they didn't care. I think that Epstein was a clever and manipulative man, but also he realized he'd run out of road and there was no good defence for what he'd done and therefore he was looking at life. and this was a way of saying fuck you

and he was that kind of guy who would do that. Thirdly I would say that there was a pathologist hired by Jeffrey Epstein's brother who I think is called Dr. Baden who went on Fox to say that his there's a bone there

called Hyode bone was broken and that is evidence of murder not suicide. So being a good reporter, I checked this with an American pathologist, and it's in the podcast, who set out the evidence

by going through something like 168 definite suicides by hanging and found that two-thirds of the cases the high-old bone was broken. Really? Yes, really, and the older the deceased, the more likely the higher would be broken. So when I say that Jeffrey Epstein killed himself, I'm not arguing with Donald Trump for a gag.

I'm setting out the known evidence, which is known. Number one, there is a culture inside prisons in Britain and the United States and around the world that hates paedophiles. The prison guards should have been checking on him. They didn't because they didn't fucking care. Number two, Chris says that the prison estate in British prisons and American prisons is always rubbish. The CCTV cameras didn't work. That's normal. Nothing works in prison because when you complain, nobody gives a fuck because you're a prisoner.

Number three, the physiological evidence that points to murder is rubbish. The physiological evidence, sorry, the pathological evidence points to suicide, not murder. And the advance of the suicide version is not supported by science. if you doubt me listen to my podcast hunting Gillian. Final question. If you were to be able to sit down with Geylane right now, what would you ask her? My question would be, did Robert Maxwell fuck you up?

Why that question? Did her father cause her to be where she is now? Because he was an abusive personality. there's a you don't have to go where this woman where this woman, oh, Lernernernerner goes. One of her brothers Ian Maxwell said that when he heard that his father had died, he felt both fear of what to do next,

but also a sense of exhilaration that this alpha male had gone from his life. So you can just use that to say, did he? So it's possible. I don't know where it goes, this court case. I'm fascinated to watch it. If I can, I'll try and get to New York.

But we'll see. The, there's, I'm sorry, I'm going on pointless. Oh, no, I'm going on for a reason because this is, this troubles me. I don't know what's going to happen. at the moment there is it seems three witnesses to abuse

and the charges relate primarily to 1994 to 1997 so the stuff we all know about all the stuff for example that's in the Netflix documentary Virginia Roberts Joufrey she meets them in 2000 she meets Prince Andrew in 2001 conveniently not a part of her charges

not in the charges now conveniently is a loaded adverb and one should always avoid loaded adverbs okay noted they may have done that the feds may have done it is because they

don't want to put Virginia Roberts Joufrey in the witness box lest she gets something wrong which is not to say that she's right fundamentally but abuse victims often make poor witnesses.

That's an argument that's been put to me. I don't know. My judgment about what she says about Prince Andrew and her, I think that, well, Prince Andrew can't explain the photograph. Virginia Roberts can. I think Virginia Roberts is telling the truth, but for whatever reason the feds aren't going there. There's a qualification for this, which is they're going there on the,

they've also charged Gillem with perjury, and it's possible they can take some of the perjury stuff and chuck it, but they're not, they're being careful about the timeline because I think they want a conviction. Had Epstein still being alive, Gillen's route to a soft sentence would have been giving the dirt on Jeffrey Epstein. Once he died, I think he killed himself. Then that's possibility for a plea. The value of the police of the feds has gone.

So what she's offering? what she could do is say I was a victim of Jeffrey Epstein I was also a victim of my father and I'm terribly sorry but I was not in sound mind when I did this her problem with that is that

she should have said that the moment Jeffrey Epstein died if I was her I would have done it the second he died and I would have given a press compliment saying it's the first time I can talk about this but I feel desperately sorry for the victims

Virginia Roberts included but I got this entirely wrong because I was manipulated by this man and it only now but he's dead that I can talk about this instead she disappeared that's a big problem for her as I said, she denies any wrongdoing.

She denies all the charges against her. And fair, fair, I believe passionately in the rule of law, and I believe in innocence or proven guilty. So we're going to have to wait and see what she says and what the defence is. I feel sorry for her. I do. But it doesn't mean I don't think, I think the evidence against her is damning. I'm fascinated as I said to see what's going to happen

but I do feel sorry for her she's in a horrible place in a awful prison and this horrible stuff from her past is coming back to her at the same time I also feel desperately sorry for the victims Virginia Roberts Uffre is the most famous I believe what she says I do and I think people are responsible for their actions.

Anyway, we have to, we'll see how it plays. John, I can't thank you enough for doing this, man. I really appreciate it. I'm a huge fan of your work. Your work is amazing. And thank you again. Where can people, I'll obviously link all of your stuff below, your Twitter, a link to your podcast.

Anything else? So there's my, there's the Amazon book page. which is basically the Church of Fear on Scientology North Korea undercover Elephant Moon the book about the elephant men rescuing people in Beaumont

don't know why I've mentioned that and the youthful lydia with John Gray, the wonderful British philosopher that was his book of the year and the new statesman is best yet he said I paid him a cabab to do that

that's a joke by the way the what else the YouTube film if you put in John Sweeney, Donald Trump, Trump and the mob, that's up there. Five million views.

Scientology and me, the shout, me screaming, 40 second clip. I'll do it again so people remember. You are not there for the beginning

of the interview. I love it, man. Hey, if you ever find your way back here in the States, I would love to get you down here to Florida as we could do another one in person. be amazing.

Yeah, yeah. Well, I'd do that and then we'd go on a pub crawl or whatever. Yeah, let's go on a pub crawl through downtown Clearwater and we can go grab a drink right across from the Jack Tar Hotel. Yeah. Well, my hope would be, I'd really like to get arrested by the Clearwater Police Department. And I mean, the problem is you'd have to look after me because what I'd do is I'd get too piss and I'd start trying to urinate.

by the way this has reminded me of my somebody I admire very much as a guy called Sean Lonsdale who Scientology hates it and he used to film them and they filmed him and I interviewed him and while I was interviewing him they turned up to try and monster him and it's all in this film Scientology

and me and they accuse him of being a sexual bea and he was openly gay and had been caught by the cops having sex with a gay man. And, you know, they turned him into a sort of a deviant. He wasn't. He was a brave and courageous American.

Scientology, when he die, I'm afraid I think he killed himself. And Scientology said that he was a horrible person. And I did a piece of BBC radio to say, well, for me, he was a bit of a hero. So if I can get to Florida, let's go on the razzle dazzle. Let's do it. And let us raise a glass in memory. Absolutely. No long style.

Yes, sir. Thank you so much, John. Let's keep in touch. Bye.