KILLED - Episode 1: The Director

Episode Date: September 1, 2022

Esquire fumbles a bombshell exposé on director Bryan Singer.  Featuring Maximillian Potter, Alex French, and Bruce Handy.To submit your KILLED story, visit www.KILLEDStories.com. 

A warning. This episode contains explicit language and content. Listener discretion is advised. Every day, all around the world, stories, ones meant for magazines or newspapers, blogs, or the local evening news, are killed. Remove from the pages, struck from the airwaves, relegated to that little special filing cabinet under an editor's desk. There are a million reasons why a story might get killed. Maybe the news changed, or a subject changed their mind. Maybe another publication got their first, scooped you.

Maybe it just wasn't working. But some kills are different. Some kills feel like they're being directed from a place behind the curtain. No? Is this an okay time to talk? I got some bad news. A place where shadowy figures call the shots. Pieces killed. Kill. The holy shit.

And in those cases, a story isn't killed because it reveals too little. It's killed because it reveals too little. It's killed because it reveals too much. The sky shows up and he notices his bar cart over in the corner and he says, kind of a drink. And I said, I don't think that's a good idea. He said, concern what we're going to talk about, please. I said, yeah, man, go ahead, help yourself. From Justine Harmon and AudioChuck, this is Killed, the podcast that brings dead stories back to life.

Episode 1. The Director You could say that 2018 was a pretty weird time to be the editor-in-chief of a men's magazine. With the aftershocks of the Meetoo movement coursing through the country's veins, magazines that traditionally glamorized a dawn draper-style existence didn't just seem retro, they seemed, well, kind of wrong. In the midst of all of this, a man named J. Fieldin took up the mantle at one of the oldest and most storied men's magazines

in the country, Esquire. The bad boy of Hurst magazines, the publishing giant behind Elle, Cosmopolitan, 17-end, Good Housekeeping. For nearly 100 years, Esquire had been a raucous playground for its male writers. Hemingway Fitzgerald Kapote, Mailer Wolf, Carver. All of them spilled ink for its discerning pages. Esquire's founders first considered names like Stagg and Trim and Boe before settling on Asquire. Fielding, a Texas-born editor who had recently resuscitated town and country knew that in order to survive, Asquire would have to confront its legacy head on.

He immediately vowed to air out the cigar smoke wafting through the magazine's pages. He immediately vowed to air out the cigar smoke wafting through the magazine's pages. Gone also were the three bees, no more brown liquor, boxing or bullfighting he vowed to the New York Times. That part had been easy enough, but what would he replace the three bees with? That was a bit more complicated. It was a month or two after the Weinstein stories initially broke.

I remember this conversation vividly. Meet Max Potter. Max was asked where's editor at large when the magazine's executive director of editorial Michael Haney called with his next potential assignment, a Me Too deep dive investigation into pedophilia in Hollywood. In many ways, it was the perfect modern Esquire story, an unflinching look at the darkest part of toxic masculinity. He said they had some intel and they wanted us, me,

to look into a particular entity in Hollywood. Max lives for this kind of stuff. Before joining Esquire, he'd been on staff at rival magazines like Details and GQ, and finally landed in Denver, where he spent a decade turning an unknown regional monthly into the kind of magazine that wins awards in New York City. Every writer Max knew was pivoting to video or podcasts. Max Potter doesn't pivot. And a few days went by. My editor called me, said, I'm going to

I'm going to partner you with Alex French. Yeah, I did know who Alex French was. We had never worked together. I'm probably a generation ahead of him in journalism, but Michael and the team at Esquire felt that two reporters on this was necessary because it was a fairly seismic undertaking. I immediately understood that he was correct. That didn't need to be sold on that. If this all sounds a little vague, that's because it was. The editors only had fragments of the story. It was up to the journalist to find the facts. Days later, Max was on a plane to LA to meet this Alex French. How we first met was, I can't remember the exact details, but we end up both coming from

our different places, Alex and Jersey, me and Denver, Colorado. And I met him at the rental car place. You know, I'm already off of the shuttle bus from LAX waiting at the Hertz or whatever the fuck it was, Avis. And he is wearing a red Adidas workout suit and a fedora. And I was like, you gotta be fucking kidding me. I work for flying. It's the most comfortable thing in the world. That's Alex. He says the track suit is actually black, not red. Yeah, no, it's black.

And also that the look slaps. I was very fond of wearing like my fedora with a hoodie, because it was sort of, you know, two separate, with a hoodie, because it was sort of, you know, two separate startorial impulses being accessed simultaneously in a way that kind of worked. Max and Alex were an odd couple, but like two separate startorial impulses being accessed simultaneously, it worked. Where Max was inclined to broad strokes, big picture thinking, Alex was fussy about detail. Where Max was skeptical skeptical Alex was curious.

I arrived I threw down my bags and we went out for dinner. We were talking about the story. And I said to Max like, do you think we're going to get sued? You know, just sort of like joking around and he was like, I definitely think we're going to get sued. The next morning they got to work. The next morning, they got to work. We were working the phones next to each other, apart from one another. Sometimes we would separate in the rooms in the Airbnb, we would come back and we would reconvene. You know, we'd not come during like, holy shit, I just talked to So and so and this happened

with jumping the car, we can meet her out at the valley at this restaurant, you know. It was just like the movies. Except they were rushing off to meet with two former stage moms turned to internet sleuths, who also claimed to know everything about Hollywood's biggest pedophiles. Early on in that visit, we met with two women that Alex lovingly dubbed the Mommies and these were moms that had formed an entity for parents of working child actors over the years what they had found was there was this sort of like purvy, dark underbelly on the internet that was essentially trading headshots and photos of child actors. Heading, headshots and photos of child actors,

they believed that it was sort of this online culture of pedophiles. And so they started their own sort of like unofficial watchdog group. They laid out what they believed to be a matrix of how they perceived this culture. They literally did a diagram, like a chart. Brian Singer was at the center of that chart, and we had several conversations and interviews with people as we were pursuing this other entity, and Brian Singer's name kept coming up.

For decades, rumors had trailed Brian Singer, the baby-faced wonderkind who held the Oscar-winning the usual suspects before practically being handed the keys to the X-Men Kingdom. Here he is talking about 2016's X-Men Apocalypse. He imbues her with extraordinary power to fly, to travel through lightning bolts. Her hair becomes shock white. There had been allegations of abuse on set, drug use, wild behavior, and all-night parties. Law suits alleging that Singer had raped and assaulted young boys,

some of whom were looking for their big break in Hollywood. Most of these suits were settled or dismissed, and then the story just sort of fizzled. Like his fictional mobster, Kaiser Soze, Brian Singer always seemed to get away. And like that, he's gone. We weren't thinking about Brian until these people kept bringing it up, and then we started sitting in our laptops and we started googling shit. And we're like, oh, he just got kicked off

of Bohemian Rhapsody. Bryan Singer has been fired from the movie Bohemian Rhapsody. But there was more. A guy named Cesar Sanchez Guzman had just fired a civil suit alleging that the Bryan Singer had sexually assaulted and raped him when he was 17. Oh, OK, what? Alex and I start to think like,

you know, the great mystery is screaming in our faces like, hey, knuckleheads, this is happening. This is a story that you're supposed to report. This is Killed, the podcast that brings dead stories back to life. Even though they had never worked together, Max and Alex quickly found their rhythm as a duo. The reporting was both chaotic and instinctual. One source led to the next, one foot after the other.

At one point, Alex found himself high on THC Peach Gummy Rings, and warehouse in New Bedford, Massachusetts. He was just pouring over dusty old office files that once belonged to singers business associates. The warehouse was like 150,000 square feet. I mean it was just massive. And the guy had like old toilets and taper quarters and televisions and tennis rackets. He had a ladder that you would like push long a wall and I have to like climb up onto the shelving.

It was like 20 feet up in the air, hanging on to like garage shelving. It was not something. I felt like a cat. Like I would go out into the wilderness and like kill something and drag it back to Max. Alex is up in this warehouse, and he's pulling down all these fucking boxes,

and he's calling me, and he's like, hey, I just found this, I just found this, I just found this. So we start calling more kids, and this leads to more alleged victims. Getting these alleged victims on the phone was one thing. Convincing them to share their traumatic histories with the world was another. I flew in to meet a dude, I'll just call him George. And George was homeless and we were

communicating via a social media channel because it's already had access to. He would go to a library and he would log on. He had a phone but it was like paid by the minute. The sky shows up and he was probably in his late 20s early 30s. He looked like he hadn't slept in forever. He was pulling a little like travel bag with the wheels on the bottom. He was living out of this fucking bag. But he also, it was obvious to me, whatever the best shit was that he owned in terms of clothing, he had put it on. Like, he was wearing his version of an interview suit. He wanted to make a good impression, but this kid didn't have shit.

And he had the shakes. I mean, he looked like he was on something, coming off as something, and he notices his bar cart over in the corner, and he says, kind of a drink. And I said, listen man, I don't think that's a good idea. And he was shaking so bad, he said, please. He said, considering what we're going to talk about please I said yeah man go ahead help yourself and his allegation was that Brian Singer sexually assaulted him and

gripped him. By summer Max and Alex had several victims on the record, claiming they had been sexually abused by Brian Singer. Singer has always denied the allegations against him. There was a pattern of behavior over multiple decades of sexual predation by Brian Singer on underage or barely legal men. And we had corroboration from all of them, like times, places, details. One guy had described to us the sexual encounter with Ryan Singer at the house that Brian lived in when he was in his 20s. And I said to the sky, can you describe the layout of the house to me? And he walked me through the house from the front door into the backyard. I tracked down the owner and I

had him like walk me through the house and like the land of the house matched. You know, we did that kind of work. Former Asquire features editor Bruce Handy recalls the breadth of the reporting.

My job at the beginning was more just you know, figuring out how to cut the story down to, you know, to a publishable length. Overall, at the beginning was was more just you know figuring out how to cut the story down to you know to a publishable length. Overall I think this was the piece I spent you know the longest on in my entire career. The home stretch before publication can be grueling. After editors give their final sign-off there is an intense fact-checking process where every date, every quote, every last detail is double-checked for accuracy.

You might spend days quibbling over whether a shirt is short-truse or pair. And once that's complete, there's a legal review. Max remembers going to New York for that final meeting with hersts in-house lawyer. Now in a room, after close to a year's worth of reporting, with a lawyer who's going to take a cheese grater over this. We're getting a colonoscopy, right? It's go time. And I'm like, sweet, bring it.

So at the end of that two days, there's a final meeting. And she's like, I see no reason why this doesn't run. A member of the S-quired team with knowledge of the meeting told me. My memory is that they came out of that three day review with the Hurst Attorney backing the story. A few days after, we get a call from Jay, and he's like, you know, Kate's got some questions.

I'm like who the fuck is Kate? Kate Lewis. Hirst magazine's newly minted chief content officer, Kate and her boss, Troy Young, had recently been elevated to the top two editorial positions across all of Hirst magazine's. In the years long tug of war between print and digital, it seemed like a big win for new media. Kate's a former HR executive, who at the time had very little experience editing

investigative journalism. And Troy's open contempt for print editions had earned him the nickname, digital Jesus. In the land of content, these two were kings. I should mention here that I was an employee at Hearst from 2012 to 2016, as an editor at both L and L.com, though I didn't report directly to either Kate or Troy, I knew them both, and I would interact with them on occasion. That the Esquire team had been summoned to the executive offices was unusual, but not

entirely unexpected. After all, this piece would likely be one of the most ambitious, Hurst would publish all year. Max called in from Denver, and Bruce, the features editor, was there in person. I started to get the sense that Kate and Troy, and whoever else was involved on a corporate level, they didn't really know what to do with this piece. There were certainly legal threats, which we were skeptical would really happen. But I remember these meetings where Kate would be talking about,

maybe we should be doing the story in a different way. One point she was talking about, maybe we should sort of serialize it, like, you know, publish it online and each month have a different victim or ledge victim. It seemed like it was a way to shoot the story in the foot. And I just felt they were kind of stalling for time and just kind of hoping maybe some other whole thing would, you know, fall apart, or, you know, we move on to just going into right about new sneaker drops or something. Alex didn't understand what was going on either. They proposed two things.

One was that we make Brian Singer into a blind item. Then the other idea was that we run like longer serialized versions with alleged victims who had already sued Singer. On the one hand, you're saying, you know, you don't have the juice to name the guy. And then on the other hand, you're saying, you know, you don't have the juice to name the guy. And then on the other hand, you're saying, like, let's water this down. It didn't make any sense to me. They basically said, we don't believe the guys in the story.

They're not presentable. Like, we just, we don't believe it. For three weeks, Max and Alex had tried to get their piece across the finish line. It took 21 days and that period was really stressful, you know, like it was awful when both. I had a crazy panic attack at a dinner party and wound up crying in my bowling aes. On October 15, 2018, Brian Singer tried to fend off the impending story. He wrote on Instagram, I have known for some time that Esquire magazine may publish

a negative article about me that will attempt to rehash false accusations. After that first meeting with Kate, Brian Singer posted an Instagram where he said all kinds of shit that just like was nuts. But certainly that registered at these executive offices where this Kate and Troy live. The Hurst Executives started asking about the reporting. Did you do this? Did you do this, did you do this? And we'd say, yeah, yeah, you know, those are good questions. And we did this, and we did this, and we did this. And yeah, and on top of that, we did X, Y, and Z.

They asked, can't you find some better victims? The New York Times Harvey Weinstein expose had Gwyneth Paltrow on the record. Couldn't they find like a Gwyneth Paltrow type? I don't even know what the fuck that means. Like better alleged victims. Like the victims, the alleged victims, or the alleged victims. Don't you have any sources that are like one of, was sort of the, you know, it felt like

we were going to have to find some celebrity source. So we did a memo. It was a, um, did we did a memo. It was a um a corroboration memo. We cranked that out. It was 36 pages long. We wrote it in 24 hours. Basically bullet points because we were told that Troy doesn't have the attention span. It was like without naming sources where we met them. The story they told, how we corroborated it, and then like chunks of censored and redacted transcripts so that Kate and Troy could see that these guys weren't fucking around in any way. And we got that to them like I think that was on a Thursday

and they took the fucking weekend. I don't think they got back to us until the next Wednesday. And those were like the five longest days of my life. Finally, Jay Fieldin, Esquire's gentlemanly editor in chief called. Jay called us. I was at home. It was like late afternoon and he says, I've got some bad news.

The story's being killed. They think that what you have is a bunch of guys who had consensual sex with Brian Sanger. And I was like, Jay, they were children. And Max just says, Alex, don't waste your breath, it's over. You're wasting your breath, brother.

Like, it's game over here. And I said, Jay, I just want to be clear. The piece is killed. And he said, yeah. And I said, just so we're clear, you know this is going to be on another editor's desk within 24 hours. And he said, I know. And he said, I know. This is Killed, the podcast that brings dead stories back to life.

After Esquire officially killed the story, Max and Alex only had 24 hours to make good on their promise. You know this is gonna be on another editor's desk within 24 hours. They needed to find a new publisher and fast, but who? Max had the idea that it was really important that we try to go to a place that had no involvement whatsoever in Hollywood.

An old colleague suggested a publication they hadn't yet considered. The Atlantic. The high-minded Beltway Gazette. Max sent a note to the editor, Jeffrey Goldberg. Here's what just happened, here's who we are, here's what the story is about. We want to move on this fast. If you're interested, please write me back. And in no time, he wrote me back.

He said, I'm going gonna send this to our attorneys. If they don't come up with any red flags as to why we shouldn't run this, I'm gonna be calling you back. Friends back at Esquire sensed trouble was a foot for Max and Alex. And I got an email from somebody inside Esquire and they said,

Kate Lewis is just asked for your contract. Shortly thereafter, my understanding is she walked into Jay's office and she said, they can't publish that. We have an exclusive contract, at least with Max. And I said, she clearly hasn't read my fucking contract because the Atlantic is one of the few publications that is not in the exclusive line item. Like I couldn't take it to GQ, I couldn't take it to the New York Times Sunday magazine.

But to me, this is indicative that the cane trade didn't want to just kill it. They wanted to kill it. When the shit started to hit the fan and when what happened started to happen, my editor, Michael Haney, and I had a conversation. He said, this isn't just about killing a piece. This is about suppressing the truth. I swear to you, I wrote that on an envelope when he said it. I'm looking at it right now.

There was no journalistic legal, fact-based reason to kill that story. And I counted them up. Like, we made 11 trips in a year to go meet with these alleged victims. They didn't come looking for us. They didn't want to talk about this. Like, they've never talked about this. They wanted to know like, can we trust you? Are you really going to do what you say you're going to do?

Are you really interested in getting to the truth of what happened? And every time we assure them in good faith, believing if the facts are the facts, if it's a sound story, if we can report it out, yes. The Atlantic ultimately agreed to publish the reporting, first online, and then in the March 2019 print issue of the magazine, as long as it met their own rigorous standards. They brought Max and Alex to DC for the close, those grueling last rounds of checks and revisions before a piece is finally done.

Bohemian Rhapsody, the queen biopic from which singer was fired for failing to show up on set just two weeks before production wrapped, would go on to earn over one billion at the box office. We had to do another like, you know, two-day marathon clothes down in DC and they put us up right by the Watergate where the Atlantic offices are. And the golden globes were on and we watched Bohemian rap city

win one golden globe after another and then at the end of the night it won best, you know, like musical comedy. you know like musical comedy. It actually won Best Drama. Bohemian Rhapsody. And Max and I just like leapt out of our chairs and like huge hug high five. I mean we knew like right there there was no way the Atlantic wasn't gonna publish that story. A few days later the Atlantic team reconvened for one last meeting. And we meet in some sort of like luncheon at little cafeteria in the ground floor of the water gate.

Jeff Goldberg says to us, do you guys get downstairs, like get a coffee or a beer, whatever, I'll be down a minute, I'm finishing reading the piece now. And Goldberg came downstairs and he had a printout of the story. He sits at the table and he taps it like there's silence. He sits at the table and he taps it like very professorially. And he he looks on the table and he said, you guys should be proud. This is journalism. It's the first time in months. I'd felt good. You know, like, thank you. Dude, thank you.

On January 23, 2019, a year after they started working together, Max and Alex's story ran on the Atlantic's website with the headline, nobody is going to believe you. It was based on the accounts of over 50 sources and painted a portrait of a powerful director who allegedly prayed on underage or barely legal boys. In some instances, they claimed, raping them. The piece claimed that singer once grabbed the genitals of an extra on the set of one of his movies, telling him, quote, I have a nice Ferrari. I'm gonna take care of you.

The boy was 13 and hadn't had so much as his first kiss. The Atlantic not only ran the story, a member of the Esquire team told me, but I believe they also reinstated material that hers legal claimed would get us sued and told us to remove. Yet, when the Atlantic published, singers' lawyers to my knowledge never said a word to the Atlantic. The Atlantic has great First Amendment lawyers.

They back writers. Max and Alex went on to give an exclusive interview to the Columbia Journalism Review. They named names. We knew that, of course, Hurst, Kate and Troy are probably not going to be super stoked when that happens. And they weren't. About the article, Hurst issued a statement that the piece wasn't up to its, quote, editorial standards. In response to a list of questions that killed scent Kate Lewis, a Hearst magazine spokesperson responded, quote, we do not discuss our editorial process, but we stand by the decision we made

based on our editorial standards. Hearst has a long history of defending first amendment freedoms, which speaks for itself, end quote. Troy Young declined a comment, saying, I'm not sure I have much to add. A month after the story broke in the Atlantic, Bohemian Rhapsody took home four Academy Awards. No one mentioned Brian Singer,

or what he was accused of in their speeches. Things began to quiet down, and Max and Alex were finally able to catch their breath. They had spent the last year running on fumes, dashing across the country in pursuit of an inconvenient truth and come out on top as the heroes of their own story. Hadn't they?

I go back and forth on this in terms of, like, was it a win, you know, I feel like Hollywood has created. in terms of like, was it a win? You know, I feel like Hollywood has created a lot of fanfare on like journalists doing whatever it takes to get the story and the bravery of these buckineering journalists. There was like nothing like that going on here. Max and I were full on like two guys who were like clinging to each other in sharky waters just trying to try and keep our heads above. And we didn't have a choice.

You know, we had made obligations to the alleged victims. We had to publish the story. And I lost my job because of that. And I couldn't get off the couch for a year. You know, this sort of long-term consequence for this for me was like a year of like pretty tough depression. Alex never wrote for Esquire again. Shortly thereafter, Max says, Hurst stopped hanging him too. Hurst did not respond to Kild's request for comment.

Alex was paid. There was no kill fee. You know, they paid him in full. They continued to pay my monthly contract deal until they decided they weren't honoring it. And so that was it. And there was nobody coming to us and saying, hey, you guys did really great work. It was pretty publicized when we got let go. Nobody picked up the phone to offer us a job. Max Potter and Alex French eventually were picked up as contributing editors at Vanity Fair.

A TV series based on Max's book, Shadows in the Vineyard, the true story of the plot to poison the world's greatest wine is in development with Judith Light and Noah Wiley attached to star. And Alex isn't crying into his bull and yeas anymore either. I wanted to be writer at large at Esquire for 20 years, you know what I mean? And I wanted to do four stories a year and I wanted to have that kind of career. Digital Jesus, Troy Young, resigned as the president of Hearst magazines after the New York Times published accusations of lewd sexist remarks he had made to colleagues. In a company-wide email, he apologized for maybe having shared too much of his full self at work.

You know, while we don't know for sure why Hurst decided to kill the story we did here, you know, the possibility existed that it had to do with Troy Young's own Me Too issues. Kate Lewis is still the chief content officer at Hurst magazines. Jay Fildin recently published his poem The Moor in his Alma Mater, The New Yorker. You can listen to it online. Deep green, saying Augustine, I cut in patterned lines. And Brian Singer? Well, he's just out there somewhere. What happened to Brian Singer? It looks like he's never going to work again.

Like, I know he's really, really wealthy, but, you know, he's also a creative person. I don't know. I shouldn't comment on that. We hear from sources that we've continued to talk to over the years. I'll never work again. That's justice. Like, where is the investigation to vet out the Bryan Singer allegations? There was no movement for the Bryan Singer allegations. There was no movement for the Bryan Singer victims. I just think it's worth, as a society, asking ourselves, why was the reaction

for the Weinstein reporting the way there was? Why was there the reaction to the Epstein reporting the way there was? And where was the consideration or concern in that regard for the alleged victims of Brian Singer? If you or someone you love has been the victim of sexual abuse, you can call the National Sexual Assault Hotline, 800, 656, Hope.

abuse. You can call the National Sexual Assault Hotline, 800-656-HOPE.