You're Wrong About - Matthew Shepard

Episode Date: May 12, 2018

But not how you think! Special guest Mike Owens tells Sarah and Mike about the (attempted) debunking of the gay-bashing victim. Digressions include Leopold and Loeb, Basic Instinct and Rolling Stone. The sound quality is even worse than usual. Continue reading →Support us:Subscribe on PatreonDonate on PaypalBuy cute merchWhere to find us: Sarah's other show, Why Are Dads Mike's other show, Maintenance PhaseSupport the show

You know, only a straight man could believe that having sex with someone makes them less likely to murder you. Welcome to You're Wrong About, the podcast where we set right what we once got wrong. We're still working on the tagline, but welcome to our show. I am Michael Hobbs. I'm a writer for Having a Post. I'm Sarah Marshall. I'm a writer for The New Republic and BuzzFeed. And we have a special guest today. Our special guest is Mike Owens, who is a Twitter friend, a long-standing Twitter friend of the show, who is a lawyer in Portland. Oh, Portland.

Yes, which Sarah has heard of from growing up here. Thanks for having me, guys. So today, we're going to talk about Matthew Shepard, who, because I am gay and Mike is gay, Matthew Shepard was always this totem for us. It was a huge deal. I mean, I guess I should say what it was. But Matthew Shepard's murder was something that really galvanized the country and it put the issue of gay bashing on the agenda. And then he became the symbol. And like all symbols, I assume that it's more complicated than we thought it was.

I mean, I do think that's a good starting point. So yeah, what are you guys, what's your kind of initial memory of how his murder went down and what happened? So I was 10 at the time. And I remember that this was something that I heard about, you know, while watching little bits of the adult news. I remember the way he was murdered being described in specific and really harrowing detail. And I can't remember what it involved specifically, but I remember being like, these are some details about people doing something to a person that I've never heard of happening to a person before because I'm a child.

That was my memory too, that it was that he was playing pool in a bar and two guys came up to him and thought that he was acting effeminately or something. And then I think they like hustled him out of the bar somehow, beat him up, and then they tied him to a fence post. This was always the detail that always really haunted me was that they tied him to a fence post and sort of half dead and then they just left him there until he died. It's like the most horrible thing you can possibly imagine. And then it became this huge cause celeb as it should have. And then it got more complicated from there. But Mike, what is your relationship to this case?

I was a senior in high school in Sheridan, Wyoming, which is in northern Wyoming when he was killed. And he was killed in Laramie, Wyoming. He was killed in Laramie, Wyoming at the University of Wyoming, which is in southern Wyoming. So I remember very well that I'm pretty sure was on the front page of the Sheridan Press, which is the local newspaper in Sheridan, Wyoming, where I lived and was a senior in high school. You know, gay man beaten, attacked in Laramie. That thought alone is always seared in my mind. At this time, I was not out to really anyone except maybe one of my sisters, but I definitely knew that I was gay. And so this was like something that I was deeply interested in from the get go.

And so then the following fall, uh, a little less than a year after he died, I enrolled at the University of Wyoming and began my freshman year there. And I worked at the student newspaper because I was a journalism major. I, I didn't personally cover the trial of Aaron McKinney, which was the one that was going on the second trial, uh, first killers. But I was in the newsroom a lot while the reporter who was covering it was coming back and everyone was talking about it. And of course I was on campus and so I just, and I got to see the protest with Fred Phelps, who was the leader of the Westboro Baptist Church, who brought his anti-gay crew to Laramie, to small town Laramie.

And so I kind of just lived through the community response to his murder and the trials of his killers. So what were actually the facts of the case? You know, and I, I, I have to say, like without giving way too much at the later talk, I mean, the initial facts of the case are still true. It, it, he was, Matthew Shepard went to a bar on, I believe it was October 6th of 1998. He was alone. He met Russell Henderson and Aaron McKinney there. You know, we don't know exactly what was said between the three of them.

They left together. They definitely knew that he was gay. They told him in the car that they were gonna rob him, that they basically had, you know, tricked him. And then they, they proceeded to rob him, beat him within an inch of his life, pistol whipped him multiple times. And then as you remember, Mike, they tied him to a fence post on the outskirts of Laramie. Sometime in the next, I want to say 24 to 48 hours, he was found by a cyclist who was riding through the hills. The thing that, one image that always a lot of people remember is that some people think he was tied up like a scarecrow. He wasn't. But the, the guy who found him said he thought it might be like a scarecrow or some kind of

Halloween decoration because it was just a few weeks before Halloween. Because he was, Matthew Shepard was apparently a very small man and he was, you know, laying nearly lifeless tied to this fence post. So he found him. Sheriff's deputy came, you know, they brought him to the emergency room there in Laramie. He had to be moved to the emergency room in Fort Collins, Colorado, a slightly bigger town, a short distance away. And then on, I think it was October 12th, so about six days after the attack where he actually died. So he was alive there for several days and kind of holding on. I mean, he was in rough shape and I don't think his prognosis was ever considered very good, but you know, there was at least some hope. What do we know about just

Matthew Shepard as a person? He grew up in Casper, Wyoming. I believe his dad was involved in the oil industry. And so at some point when he was midway through high school, they moved to Saudi Arabia and they lived in the Middle East for a while. And then he had lived in a few different places shortly after high school, including, I think he lived in Denver for a little bit. And then he was 21 when he enrolled at the University of Wyoming. So he was a bit old. I mean, I don't know that he was a true first year student because I think he'd done some college work in a couple places. And so he was kind of a 21 year old, a little older for being a new student to the university. One of the details that always stuck with me from, I think this was

from the Laramie Project or one of the documentaries about Matthew Shepard that I watched at the time was that he wore braces. I don't know why I remembered that, but there was just something very human about that, that he's just this 21 year old kid who wears braces and was probably slightly insecure about it. And I don't know why, but I always fixated on that detail that it just made him seem more kid-like to me and more sort of vulnerable. I guess one biographical detail that is also important to know is that he in Morocco a few years before he was murdered, he was apparently gang raped. Yeah, it's something his mom talked about and the effect that it had on him. And the only reason I can think that detail even matters is because

there's some talk about how he was very depressed and anxious and that later gets spun into explanations for why we'll get into this more later. He was involved in the drug trade and Laramie and that's really had to do with this being killed. And I believe the guy who came about and wrote the the new narrative about Matthew Shepard suggested his anxiety and nervousness and stuff showed that he knew he was going to be killed because he was deeply involved in the meth scene. But I think that his mom and family members said a lot of his mental health trauma to the extent he had and he was from that gang rape experience. Well, yeah, or even just if you were just a young gay man living in Wyoming, I would imagine there would be cause for anxiety.

I mean, was Matthew Shepard out? Yeah, I mean, he he definitely attended the, you know, very shortly gosh, it might even be the night he was attacked. He attended the LGBTQ student group meeting. And I'm assuming 1998 Laramie Wyoming was not wildly progressive, right? There was still a lot of homophobia kind of in the air. It is so hard for me to know what Laramie was like in 1998 because I know what Laramie was like in 1999. And that was and that was after Matthew Shepard had died and everyone is trying so hard to prove how much we're open and tolerant. And you know, I don't, I do, I have to imagine it was more progressive than you'd think because it was a college town. And as much as it was a conservative college town and the most,

you know, the least populous state in the union, it's still, I mean, there was no question when I was in Laramie that its campus was a much more liberal place in general than kind of the state overall. So I doubt that it was just that his murder changed everything and made people more tolerant. But I'm sure that it did in some ways. But I think it was probably a place where you'd feel relatively safe being gay compared to the rest of Wyoming. You know, even before Matthew Shepard was killed, I was, you know, I think I already knew or had a good idea I'd probably end up going to college there. And I was so excited like, Oh, I'm going to go to college in a college town, I'll be able to come out. I kind of had the idea that it would at least be

acceptable for me to be gay and out there if not like, you know, rainbow banners flying all around. So it's actually by the standards of Wyoming, it was pretty good. It was a pretty good place to be gay, a young gay dude. Well, and then what are, what are the standards of Wyoming? I mean, what was Sheridan like in 1998? I mean, it's not, I don't think there was a gay bar or club in the entire state. A lot of rest stops though, a lot of highways and rest stops, man. You got to, that's where a lot of us had our first. Yeah. I mean, I just want to give us a list of your sexual partners and experiences right now. Should we just do, do you want to list those off? Everyone's social security number. I think that's the best way to proceed from here.

You know, there was like, certainly nobody was out in my high school. I think they're, you know, it's hard to remember the timeline of this because again, you know, Matthew Shepard's murder did opened up a lot of discussions that weren't had before. I mean, I'll say this, the teachers I really liked and knew well in high school, I always felt would be supportive. You know, it's not like I was afraid like, oh, I'm gay. And if, if everyone finds out, you know, it'd be the end of the world. I mean, I did feel like there was a community of people even in Sheridan, Wyoming, where if I came out, they'd be cool. And I did start to come out. I guess I first, I started telling my friends in December of 1998. So, so basically, you know,

a couple months after he was murdered, not unrelated. I mean, those things had nothing to do with each other. I'd been ready to come out. And finally, as I'm watching the end of high school near, I'm like, I can start telling people, you know, yeah, that's what I did too. Because it's like, well, I'm not, I'm not going to see these people again unless I want to. So I might as well. I don't really care if they ostracize me. Yeah. Isn't them, isn't I mean, one thing that the Matthew Shepard killing did was sort of shatter that myth though, right? That I think a lot of gay people and a lot of straight people thought, well, you can tell teachers you're gay, you can talk about being gay. And then there's this poor kid that just gets murdered in the worst imaginable

way. And it makes everybody think or realize, I guess, that I'm not as safe as I thought gay people are still, you know, this was the time of, I think it was Will and Grace, it was Queer Eye, it was this kind of opening up of a conversation around gay people, they're not so bad. And then all of a sudden there's this wake up call that, no, it's still actually really bad for gay people. And there are still places where we can have the worst things imaginable done to us, simply for our sexual orientation. I mean, isn't that kind of what Shepard became totemic of? Yeah, I think so. But although I should say, I mean, that's one of the things that bothered me a little bit about, about the response to his murder is that, you know, very much was like, oh,

this is cowboy Wyoming. It's, you know, it's not a safe place. And obviously it's, you know, he was murdered there. But one thing a lot of people might like to talk about after he was killed was how much, how much gay bashing went on in big cities, which is absolutely the case, especially at the time, even more so than now, which is totally fucking true. I have so many friends that have been gay bashed in London and in Copenhagen. I have, I was at bars in Copenhagen where I saw people get their asses kicked for being gay. Like it's not, it's, it's not like it's some paradise in bigger cities. Yeah. Right. I am thinking back to a memory I know was pre Matthew Shepherd was when Ellen DeGeneres came out, I saw that I happened to be in the teacher's lounge

at my high school and they had a copy of Time Magazine and it was that kind of iconic cover that Ellen's on and it says, yep, I'm gay. And I just remember seeing that and thinking like, oh, cool, like the teachers are seeing this, they know about, you know, like this is, this is really changing the culture, you know, but another thing that to me proved that Wyoming wasn't that bad was that after, again, after his murder, that was like a catalyst in a good way in Wyoming for a lot of people to come out and openly state, I'm okay with gay people. And so, you know, again, for me, it felt like as terrible as his murder was, the good result was, you know, I kind of said this earlier, maybe in a flippant way, everybody learned me was trying to

prove how tolerant they were, but that was good. I mean, it felt awesome to me to be starting school in a place where this horrific tragedy had happened. But at least because of that, so many people were coming out to say this, you know, I'm an ally, I'm supportive, there were safe spaces, signs all over the university, all over town, editorials and all the newspapers, you know, the political culture was still very Republican. And so they weren't going to pass any hate crimes laws or anything like that. But even the conservative politicians felt the need to express statements of tolerance that maybe by today's standards would seem pretty, you know, pro forma and not very impressive. But, you know, in terms of what it did to the environment,

it felt good to be living through those changes. Yeah, it's weird to idealize those times politically because they sucked. But it also was a time when partisanship was less bad, right? And where you, even conservative politicians, center right politicians were willing to say, hey, let's, let's relax about gay people. Hey, gay people aren't so bad. They would still probably say, I mean, I don't want to like give them any credit, right? They still would want to amend the constitution to take away our marriage rights. But at least like the murder of gay people is bad, like at least, at least it was a time when they could be against the murder of gay people. Whereas now it's like even an admittance that like trans women of color are being killed at really

alarming rates, even admitting that that is a problem is like, oh, you're a social justice warrior. You're a virtue signal. I mean, you wouldn't even be able to do that now because it would look like, oh, you're giving in to the forces on the left. Yeah. It also makes me think of, because I think of what we're living in now is really just the Fox news era of right wing rhetoric. Like the party has just become Fox news, I think, essentially. And that makes me think of how after Ellen came out, there was a little bit of a sense of, oh, just the world is just so gay friendly now and TV is going to be filled with all sorts of, there was a Saturday night live sketch where they're saying, you know, since Ellen has been so successful, NBC is adding

lesbians to all of their shows. And I feel like I remember America being really, you know, kind of liberal to center America, feeling really self satisfied with the media, the media aspect of this, I think one of the things the media really struggles with is holding two contradictory ideas in its mind at the same time, right? That oftentimes you have these very incremental shifts, and then everybody writes their hot take of like the age of homophobia is over. And it's like, we're launching into this new dawn of gay rights, and there's going to be lesbians on every TV show. And then Matthew Shepard gets killed. And it's like, the era of homophobia is back. And we're going into this darkness again. And it's like, every event is like the country is making a 180

degree turn over and over again, when really, the country was slowly warming up to gay rights. And some people weren't. And there was somewhat of a backlash of that. And the fact that many people's parents became cool with gay people, after having gay kids or gay cousins or whatever, all the homophobic people were still there, they were all still alive in the country, they were all still hanging out. Yeah, and there's a sense where the media, mass media, and also just the public consensus, if it emerges from a large population or somehow purports to be representative of the country is it's like this golem. Yeah. Well, and which maybe leads us to the debunking, because I feel like there's something really interesting

that happens generally when we have a narrative or an event that the country believed a certain narrative about and then it flips a little bit or it changes. And we seem to, yeah, to tend to believe that when a specific story alters, that it has to alter completely, like that we had to be. Yeah, it has to flip completely. It can't just become slightly more nuanced. Right. The victim becomes the villain. The villain becomes the victim. Right. So Mike, before we get to the debunking, what do we know or what did we know at the time about the killers? They were from Laramie. I think they were both, I don't know if they were born there, but definitely grew up in Laramie, Wyoming. They weren't students at the university. They just lived in Laramie. I don't remember

a ton more about their biographies. I think it's pretty uncontroversial that at least Aaron McKinney was a meth user, maybe Russell Henderson as well. I don't even know what kind of jobs they were working. I do remember there was testimony or at least talk during McKinney's trial about one or both of them being Boy Scouts and their community kids. They grew up here. They're not monsters and no human being is a monster. I think that just the fact that they were like hometown boys from Laramie and Matt is this kind of, yeah, he kind of grew up in Casper, but he also lived all over the world. He's this worldly gay dude who kind of came back. Helped set up the narrative of redneck Wyoming meth users kill angelic international cosmopolitan

Matt Shepherd. Right. You can get the archetypes. You could just insert the archetypes straight into it. During the aftermath, I'm curious about this because as the community was trying to respond to this murder by creating safe spaces and by trying to reach out and be vocal about wanting to create a safer world for the gay people in their lives. I find it really interesting that that doesn't happen when women get murdered and there's really often more of a sense of we're going to find the one guy who did this and he'll be ideally some sort of outsider to society and then we will throw the book at him and put him in prison forever or execute him and then everything will be fine and there's so less the sense of this happened because of this pervasive problem in

society that we need to address. We're really, we're so entrenched in our white lady gets murdered narratives in America, which is the number one blockbuster narrative on grown up news. That automatically goes into let's find the one monstrous culprit and punish them and then everything will be fine again. Especially with domestic violence. Yeah. Where it's never like safe spaces or never like let's make it easier for women to report. No. Let's make sure that we get guns out of the hands of domestic violence perpetrators. It's much harder to make those structural arguments when you're talking about something like domestic violence. And we've had those conversations at various times. Like we talked about addressing domestic

violence as an epidemic like in the late 70s and the mid 90s and I think we're kind of doing that right now. But yeah, we really don't. We don't talk about structural issues if we're talking about an individual female murder victim typically. And I'm curious if there was a sense of a need for vengeance within the community. I guess the national narrative was this is probably more a systemic Wyoming, you know, cowboy masculinity or something. Locally, there was very much an attempt to do exactly what you're describing happens when, you know, women are victims of violence. And that is to it is just these two guys, you know, we're not like that. As a people as Wyomingites. You know, I'm sure the truth is somewhere in the middle of those two

polls. So there was definitely an attempt to be like, no, it's just these two guys. But there was also an attempt to kind of mitigate the the seriousness of the violence. Like I will never forget a faculty member who said to me, I don't remember what we were talking about, but she said, you know, Matthew Shepard was no angel. Oh, nice. That phrase, that fucking phrase, man. Yeah. And I mean, I looked it up to make sure my memory is correct. It was Michael Brown, who was shot in Ferguson that, you know, really kicked off the Black Lives Matter movement, where the New York Times literally used that same phrase about him in one of their write ups, an article that ran in August of 2014. Michael Brown, 18, due to be buried on Monday, was no angel.

And it just, it was like, I mean, it goes to show you how much that need to to point out that the victim was not an angel is an important narrative for any victim of some form of- Because some people deserve to get murdered as the implicit, you know? Yeah. Or at least, I mean, maybe they didn't deserve to be murdered, but like- It's always like, well, I'm not saying they deserve to be murdered, but there's always this sense of, I want to complicate it, I want to make things a little bit less clear-cut victimhood narrative. It's also a great phrase because it means literally nothing, you know? Because they're like, no one is. What's your point? Yeah. Such a great way of like, de-emphasizing the humanity of a victim while saying literally

nothing about them. In some ways, that phrase could be used to sum up the entirety of the debunking, the first go at trying to recast what happened with Matthew Shepard's murder. I mean, you could literally just call it the, all right, now we're out to prove that Matthew Shepard was no angel. And that is kind of where the debunking comes in. So give it, give it to us, Mike. What was the debunking? What happened? In 2004, 2020 runs a piece about Matthew Shepard. The producer is a guy named Stephen Jimenez, and it kind of promises a bunch of bombshell, you know, exposés about the case that nobody knew. I wasn't able to find it online, so it's been several years since I've watched it, so I kind of have to go off not only my memory, but a paper I wrote about in grad school.

But what I remember were the big bombshells that here are the things you didn't know about the Matthew Shepard murder. Here are the things we'll hint at before commercial. One, that Matthew Shepard wasn't killed because he was gay. He was killed because at least in large part, it was just a robbery gone bad. The reason they didn't know he was gay. They just wanted his wallet. He fought back. They happened to kill him. They don't deny that, you know, 2020 doesn't deny that they knew he was gay, but that that's not why they killed him because, and here's a great twist, Aaron McKenney, one of the two killers, is himself bisexual. Or at least he's had sex with men. And felt great about it, surely, and super well-adjusted.

So I'm going to kind of just briefly run through the bombshell stuff, and then I'll talk about them and kind of... Yeah, we can stop heckling. It's hard not to. I sympathize. They're right. They're heckle-worthy. Another one was that Matt Shepard himself was deeply enmeshed in the underground meth scene in Laramie. And so he was, again, he's no angel. You know, he used meth and was a meth user and dealer, I think they insinuate. Some of this stuff, it's hard to separate what was in that original 2020 report from what Stephen Jimenez has later said about Matthew Shepard. He went on to write a book that came out, I think, in 2014, where he elaborated in great detail on all these theories. I haven't read the book, so I can't criticize, you know, one of his favorite

things when people were attacking it, when it came out, is all these people are critics, and they haven't read the book. I didn't want to give him any of my money, so I thought about, you know, checking it out at the library, but I also don't want to give him any of my time. So I don't, you know, I can't discuss all the things he alleges in the book, although media matters and several other like GLAAD and other entities have really lengthy debunkings of the book. But anyway, in terms of the 2020 report, yeah, the big things were they didn't come because he was gay, they just wanted to rob him, they knew him. That's the other big bombshell. Matt Shepard and Aaron McKinney, I don't remember if it was alleged in that report that they'd actually had

sex together, Matt Shepard and one of his killers, but certainly that they knew each other. You know, only a straight man could believe that having sex with someone makes them less likely to murder you. Right? Isn't that so absolutely true? Like, or that because a person is either bisexual or at least has had sex with men, they couldn't kill someone for that very same reason, like any kinds of internalized homophobia or, you know, I think sometimes about the number of occasionally I'll read about a porn star or someone who like is straight, gay for pay, and ends up killing a person that was paying them for sex to get their money, you know, and it's like, yeah, exactly. The idea that having sex with someone means you don't harm them is in

just crazy. It's very heteronormative. Oh, well, I guess I should add to the idea that they were all probably high on meth at the time. And so it was like a meth-fueled crime, as opposed to a homophobia-fueled crime. You know, Cato Kalin claimed in his book that OJ was on meth at the time of the murder. So I feel like there's a whole basket of, you know, attempted debunkings being like, maybe all of the 90s happened because everyone was on meth. Ellen, when she revealed her homosexuality was on meth, I'm sure that would be the next debunking. But then what was the reaction, Mike, to this 2020 piece at the time? Like, what really bothered me about the piece wasn't so much that it ran and I thought it was pretty shoddy journalism. It was the fact that a number of prominent voices,

especially on the seemingly kind of pro-gay side of the spectrum, endorsed the theories or at least said, gosh, that we really ought to take a look at this. And the most prominent one was Andrew Sullivan, you know, was known as a conservative who was very, you know, not in line with the kind of general gay rights movement and entities. And so he appeared in the 2020 report and kind of gave it a bit of a stamp of approval. We need to kind of think about this. Wait, Andrew Sullivan was in the 2020 report? He was in the 2020 report, yes, they interviewed him. That's weird. He doesn't have any expertise on this situation. Why would they interview? Because they wanted a gay person, a prominent gay person, to appear on camera and suggest that it was okay to accept these facts,

these new facts. And I emailed him. I mean, I found it, I printed off the email. I sent him like a two-page email and I detailed with him the biggest problems I had with the report and why they were wrong. And, you know, his response was just extremely short and flip. I mean, you know, not like I expect him to give a lot of time to a random reader. But like, you know, I like laid out facts and sources and here's what's wrong with this stuff. And it was just very like, well, you know, it adds another important voice to the discussion. It's like, no, it doesn't. So I guess the more the merrier theory of discourse of... So a lot of people, what you're saying is a lot of people in institutions

sort of accepted this like debunking. They accepted, oh, well, maybe it was a meth thing and maybe it's more complicated than that. And let's make sure that we hear every side of the story, etc. I mean, because that's the kind of response that I would personally feel inclined to give if a case or a story like this that I had related to meaningfully or that had been important to my community, if details emerged suggesting that it was more complicated, I can imagine wanting to appeal to make sure everyone knew that I was totally reasonable and not acting based on emotion. And I was willing to consider all of the details anyone wanted to discuss, even if they didn't really make sense. I mean, the whole idea that anyone murders anyone for

only one reason just makes is so silly to me. Right. I guess that's one of the reasons I wanted to ask both of you at the start, like, what do you remember about as murder? Because one of the things that was so frustrating about the debunking, the new theories were a lot of the stuff that's still uncontroversial about the debunking is uncontroversial precisely because it was known all along. No one ever disputed that Aaron McKinney and Russell Henderson wanted to rob Matthew Shepard. Like they know no one there was never any idea that like these two guys got together and said, we hate gay people. Let's go find one and kill him. Like, that's not what happened at all. And that was never the narrative. I guess if you only read headlines and nothing more,

maybe you would have left with that impression, you know, and so I guess I'd be okay if maybe a random member of the public had that idea. But someone who's a journalist and who presumably should be following a little more closely, especially if they're going to comment on it, should at least be familiar with the narrative as it was reported at the time. And so it was never denied that they really were seeking to rob Matthew Shepard. I mean, within days of his attack, and I think maybe even before he died, Aaron McKinney told police, we wanted to rob him. We knew that he was gay. We pretended to be gay to lure him out of the bar. And, you know, then there is dispute about whether the ferociousness of the attack

was increased because Matt made a pass at one of them or something. And I think Aaron McKinney suggested in his confession an interview with the police a few days after it happened that it was because of Matt like grabbed his leg or something. He later denied that and said it didn't really happen. And I'm, you know, as far as I'm sure maybe he was making that up. Maybe he was exaggerating Matt hitting on him to kind of make it seem more reasonable. But talking to a police officer, you know, I'm sure a male police officer, a policeman saying, you know, who among us would. Right. Exactly. I mean, come on, a dude puts his hand on your leg, you're going to beat him up, you know? Yeah. And so I don't know, maybe he was exaggerating that, but like the full narrative

from the get go was like, it was pretty clear if you're paying attention, they thought he would be an easy target for a robbery because he was gay. Now, does that mean it's not an anti-gay hate crime? I don't think so. Like, I don't think it only is a hate crime if you literally decide, yeah, let's go kill gay people. We're going to leave tonight. We got a plan involved. Like I think most types of bias crimes probably don't happen that way. You're out in the world and you see someone who fits a, you know, identity category you don't like and then become aggressive toward them. But so it just was weird to have this new narrative, a lot of which was just what we knew all along. Yeah. Yeah. I always think of it kind of what we know about suicide now is that suicide is often

a much more spontaneous act than we think it is. You'd think that putting a barrier up on a bridge that stops people from jumping off the bridge, you'd think, well, if 15 people jump off this bridge every year, you put up a barrier, 15 extra people are just going to shoot themselves in the head or take a bunch of painkillers. But no, that's not what happens. You put up a barrier on the bridge and 15 fewer people kill themselves because oftentimes it's literally you're walking home from work and you happen to be on that bridge and you had a really bad day and you're like, oh, fuck it. I'm just going to jump off this bridge. And it is a spontaneous act. And so I think it's probably somewhat like that with hate crimes too, that they're not necessarily premeditated.

Let's go find a homosexual. It's like you're playing pool. There's this guy there. You probably have some latent homophobia. He acts a little effeminate and you're super misogynistic. And then you're like, oh, fuck this guy. Let's rob this guy. But then you can see the ways in which a murder like this could be spontaneous and a hate crime. At the same time, like those two things are not mutually exclusive. And I think it, you know, kind of going back to your point earlier, Sarah, about how we kind of talk about the violence toward women, how much we ignore intimate partner violence and violence toward women from people they know, which is much more common than strangers. It also is that same idea that like, well, this could only have been a

homophobic attack if they like, went out seeking to harm gay people. And in the same way, it can't be a misogynistic attack on a woman because this guy clearly loved that she was a woman. That's why he was dating her. You know, like, how can he hate women? He's having sex with one. They were his sisters and a mom. He couldn't possibly be misogynistic. And it has a father of daughters, et cetera. Yeah. Yeah, I would imagine, I don't have numbers in front of me, but I would imagine that most rapes are crimes of opportunity. And especially if we're talking about the kind of anonymous violent assault that we tend to focus on in the media to the exclusion of acquaintance rape,

which is far more common. But even if we're talking about the media's favorite rape, I think it's much more often that it just you see you're someone who just feels like the right victim, you know, and there's something about them that you need to vent some kind of that you need to dominate that you need to vent some kind of hatred onto. And if you're a bisexual man who may be, you know, whose bisexuality maybe makes them more likely to kill someone who is openly gay than less likely, if we're going to imagine that scenario, which to me seems a lot more likely than the 2020 version than like, I imagine too that you're, you're not going out planning anything, or maybe you are planning a robbery, but then you end up with someone who maybe reminds you

of the parts of yourself that you would like to kill. Well, and it's worth, I should say to the producer of that 2020 segment who went on to write the book, he's gay. And so it's a big part of the kind of defense of what I think is the shoddy journalistic practices is like he wouldn't want, you know, his natural instinct would be to support the narrative. My long time obsession with this case and the debunking is about our use of symbols and our use of cases to illustrate larger phenomena that you saw this a lot with Michael Brown actually and with Trayvon Martin, that those cases come out. It's horrible. That's used as kind of a tag to talk about, well, police are killing African Americans at wildly disproportionate rates. And then everybody pops out of a trash can and is

like, well, actually, Michael Brown, it looks like he fought back against the officer, like maybe Trayvon Martin was like shoplifting that day. And they try to complicate the narrative of this anecdote on which we've hung this larger trend. And frankly, who fucking cares? Maybe everything that the racists say about the Michael Brown case is true. And maybe everything they say about the Trayvon Martin case is true. That does not negate the fact that statistically speaking, African Americans are more likely to be killed by police than white people. So it really doesn't matter whether they are correct about their quote unquote debunking of these cases. But we to make a trend interesting to make a trend important, you have to tie it to these events. And then we get into

these events being more complicated than they seem at first, which fucking every event is more complicated than it seems at first. That's how human life works. And this idea of like you were saying no angel, well, nobody's no angel, like of course, Trayvon Martin is no angel. Of course, Michael Brown is no angel, they are human beings. And so then we start to complicate this narrative and then the entire edifice of the social problem falls apart of like, well, you know, they say that cops are killing black people at disproportionate rates. But you know, I read on Breitbart that like this Michael Brown kid like was fighting with the officer and it the whole thing gets swept away. And I think it's just something human and a huge weakness of journalism that you have to

tie bigger trends to these stories. And then once the story gets debunked, the trend gets debunked. Yeah, that's actually a good point. And that never occurred to me that that is just what we do. But it's like, if you're training a dog, and you know, they got a Pavlovian response to something, and you know, they always get fed, they always get fed from the green bucket. So every time you bring the green bucket out, they're like food, I'm working with dogs right now. So the dog mentions every episode now. Yeah, yeah. But and this and then this idea that yeah, that we learn about political realities and systemic realities by these totemic narratives. And then if then if someone can flip the narrative

or take it away from us, we're like, oh, you know, if the green bucket goes away, we're like, oh, there's no food in the whole world. And it's like, no, the bucket is not the food, the bucket just has come to signify the food for you. But like, it's still real, like, everything seems so much simpler to us that we have these these structural issues that we store the vitality of in these certain narratives. And then if narratives and then if we can explain them away in a way that makes us feel like they're not true anymore, then the whole thing goes away. It's really such a brilliant defense mechanism. It's terrible for trying to run a country. I mean, the thing that I think is really hard for people to incorporate is that even if all

of the debunking about Matthew Shepard was true, or even more true, like, let's say he was trying to sell them meth, and like he was this huge like meth kingpin, and he's just like this terrible human being. And it still doesn't stop the fact that he's gay and he got murdered. And it still doesn't stop the fact that homophobia in 1998 in America was a huge problem, and that many gay people were killed or beaten up or harassed or whatever due to their sexuality. So even if the debunking of the Matthew Shepard case was true, it doesn't negate the larger point. But then, of course, then the person who's arguing with you is going to say, well, then why did you bring up Matthew Shepard in the first place? If Matthew Shepard ultimately doesn't matter, if the facts

of this case don't matter, then why include them in the narrative at all? And then the answer is basically because nobody will read about homophobia unless it's linked to one of these cases because that's how media works. You have to have this totemic example first, and then in like paragraph five, you mentioned 10,000 homosexuals were killed last year or whatever. That's just how media works and also how humans work. We need to hear a story for us to care about the trend. And it just kind of fucking sucks because I wish you could just write a story saying, hey, homophobia is bad. Hey, lots of people got killed for this sexuality last year without tying it to this narrative because when you tie it to this narrative, you're basically saying Matthew Shepard matters,

but then you're also saying Matthew Shepard doesn't matter. And that in that duality is where we get into these asinine debates about the facts of these specific cases when really they don't actually matter all that much. People feel like as long as they debunk one, that's, you know, the whole trend is gone. I mean, I look back at what, like I said, what happened with Matthew Shepard, his murder as tragic and terrible as it was, I think so many good things came from it. You know, I never, I wasn't one of the people who learned a lot. You know, you asked me earlier about Matt's life and Russell Henderson and Aaron McKinney. Truth is, I don't know a lot of details about any of them individually. It was never my big thing to learn about any of their biographies.

Matt, I would care more about, obviously, as the victim of this crime. But, you know, without knowing that much about Matthew Shepard, I've always felt very grateful that, not grateful, that's the wrong word, but I feel like that's someone who sacrificed so that a lot of good things could happen. And at least for me, the environment that followed his death in Wyoming was so much better than it had been before. All those people, you know, not just LGBT people coming out of the closet, but, and I should really say gay people coming out of the closet, because, you know, I think back to those days, and it was very heavily focused on the gay part, you know, the other parts of that. We've still need a lot more progress. You know,

you were talking earlier about violence against trans people, especially. But, but not just gay people coming out of the closet, but allies coming out of the closet. And huge numbers vocally was just such a big deal for that state. And for me personally, that, you know, it's one reason why it almost didn't matter all the individual details about what happened. But, you know, again, as someone who's in training to be a journalist at the time, and now someone who's an attorney who cares a lot about like sources and facts, and it was, it was just from a journalistic perspective, it was so frustrating how this report went out. So debunk the debunking for us. What, what came out about the 2020 report afterwards?

It wasn't, I mean, it really wasn't even afterwards. I mean, like all these entities put out press releases and denunciations as soon as like as it was coming out. Matthew Shepard's mother was one of them, Judy Shepard, which what they did to her was really awful because they edited her into the report to to kind of make it seem like she was neutral or maybe even agreed with their perspective, but she did not at all. And then I think one of the one of the bad sides of the post murder environment in Laramie is that everybody I ran into was Matthew Shepard's best friend. That's why I said early on, I wanted to be very clear when I said I was involved with, I just meant like witnessing the environment after his murder. I did not know him. I was not his friend.

And the reason I feel it necessary to say that is because you would talk to so many people who are like, Oh, I knew Matt, we were really close who would act as though his loss was personal to it was about them personally. I don't fault people too much for that. I mean, there was a sense, especially those of us who worked in the newsroom at the student newspaper, you felt a little guilty that like there was a sense that this story and the national attention actually could be good for you personally because it could launch like a journalism career. It could be like, Oh, I get to be upfront and center covering this. And so there was a real kind of guilty sense that like, yeah, this terrible tragedy happened, but we could all kind of benefit from it.

And that same kind of sense is what I got from people who are like, Yeah, it's a terrible tragedy. Let me tell you my role in it. Here's how I knew Matt. And here's how I was really good friends with him. And that always frustrated me so much because I was like, if Matthew Shepard had so many great friends, so many best friends, why was he drinking alone at the bar that night? Who knows, maybe they really all were really good friends with him. I don't know. I wasn't there. But what that translated to with the 2020 report is they were just totally credulous of anyone who said they knew Matt or knew stuff about him. And, and I think that's probably continued again, I haven't read him in as his book. But my from from the reports I've read about it, he interviews

all kinds of people and use all kinds of anonymous sources who just claim, Oh, yeah, I knew Matt, I knew this about him without any kind of corroboration. I think the most interesting example of that is there's this guy, his name is Doc O'Connor. He apparently runs a limousine service in Laramie. Like, you know, like he's a limousine chauffeur, busy guy, I'm sure. Yeah, right. Exactly. I remember when I first learned this, I was like, man, how like what you're busy on prom night. And then that's it. Like, I didn't want to say that because I didn't want to sound like a West Coast, like liberal elite. I'm glad when you guys said I'm allowed to say something passive aggressive about Wyoming, because I'm in Wisconsin, where the two W's.

Right. So here's the thing, I love that that's your guy's initial response because because so he first shows up, I first become aware of him because he's a part of the Laramie project. And for anyone who doesn't know, the Laramie project was a play that was created by the Tectonic Theater project in the year and a half after Matt's death. They came from New York to Laramie. They interviewed tons of people. And then they kind of wrote a play where they played both themselves doing interviews and then would turn around and kind of play out the roles of different community members. And I really did like the Laramie project. I thought overall it was great. I watched it when it opened in Laramie and like sobbed two nights in a row watching it. It

was overall I thought a very good experience. But again, these are playwrights. They're not journalists. And so there were some anecdotes and stories in the Laramie project that always struck me as a little odd. And one of them was the one that sticks out more than anything was this Dock O'Connor guy, right? So he's a limo driver. He shows up in the Laramie project and he tells this story that he met Matthew Shepard a few days before he was killed. And Matt hired him to drive him. The way he told it was, you know, Matt hired me. He said, I want you to take me to the gay bar. And I said, well, I hope you have money because there's no gay bar in Wyoming. And he was like, yep, I know, I want you to drive me down to Fort Collins. And so he took him in his limo

from Laramie, Wyoming to Fort Collins, Colorado, which is about a 45 minute drive in good weather, which it often is not. And like just immediately, this story sounded so fantastic to me that it was hard to believe. So that doesn't mean it didn't happen. I don't know. It is possible that Matthew Shepard really was such an interesting, idiosyncratic guy that he like, where did he get that kind of cash though, really? You know, I want to make that point too. But to be fair, his family did, it sounds like have some money. So yeah, so let's assume, you know, anything is possible. Let's assume that the story is true. And that's the thing. Even though hearing it at the time, I thought, I kind of don't believe this story when I saw it in the Laramie project. Who cares? You know, it's

like a colorful, weird anecdote. Maybe it's a guy in the community who wants to exaggerate and make stuff up. But in some ways, maybe that's part of the story of the Laramie project is see what people will say about someone, you know? So it doesn't particularly bother me. It's a colorful, weird story. He drives Matt down to the gay bar in Fort Collins. Okay, fine. Fast forward to the 2020 report, 2004. Doc O'Connor is now the source for the idea that Aaron McKinney, one of the murderers, is bisexual or has had sex with men. Why? Because Doc O'Connor says he had sex with Aaron McKinney in the backseat of the limo. I think it was the backseat of the limo. I should be clear. Like, sometimes I'm wondering, I'm adding my own details, but he says he hooked up with Aaron McKinney.

And now it starts to be like, has anyone corroborated anything that this dude has said? Like, what a random set of coincidences that he both met Matthew Shepard a few days before his death and now, and drove him in the limo down to Fort Collins and now also says he's hooked up with Aaron McKinney in a three way. He had a three way with Aaron McKinney. Again, I don't know. It's possible that these stories are all true, but I do think on top of that he changed his story and then also claimed that he had known Matthew Shepard for a long time. So he tells the, you know, he tells the tectonic theater project when they're doing the Laramie project that that he just met him. Now he's telling 2020, no, I knew Matt a long time. So they rely on

Doc O'Connor this colorful story. That's like the heart of their claim that Aaron McKinney wouldn't have murdered Matt because he was gay. He also was into dudes on some level. And so the whole theory of the murder and how it can't have been, you know, motivated by homophobia hinges on this person, on the fact of this person's bisexuality, which has been established by this story that is pretty unlikely. Yeah. You know, and, and at no point in this 2020, like, again, I think if you're going to air the story fine, if you're going to air that guy's account, they should have at least confronted him with his inconsistencies. Like, well, wait, didn't you say, you know, right, or told the audience too of like, Hey, here's the story just so you know,

it's a bit more complex than this. Let's take this with a grain of salt. There's also, I think the real or one of the problems with this is that there is a way that journalism waits new facts over relevant facts. Because the fact that this killer might have been bisexual is like, Oh, the plot thickens. Oh, it's new. But like we said before, it doesn't actually change anything. It doesn't actually, it doesn't in some way invalidate what actually happened. It's an interesting wrinkle. But the fact that it's new, it almost makes us think that nothing else matters, or that it's an important fact. When really, when you think about it, the fact that this killer, whether it's true or not, it sounds like it's probably not true. But even if this killer was

bisexual, and he had a three way with a dude, it's like, Okay, like, and then he murdered a gay guy and tied him to a fence like bisexuals do. Like exactly. Like now that we know he's bisexual, it makes sense. But like, it really doesn't untie anything. It doesn't explain any mystery, or wipe off the table, any of the facts that we had before. It's just like, it's like finding out that he's like left handed or something. It's like, Okay, he's left handed. It's not that he was falsely accused. It's not that he couldn't have been there that night. It's not that DNA evidence exonerates him, or something that would actually invalidate the central facts of the case. It's just like, Oh, here is like a fact to add to his Wikipedia page. Right, right.

And it's funny too, because bisexuality in the 90s was often proof that someone, I mean, I guess they're saying he's a bisexual who planned a really violent, but non homophobia motivated robbery. And that just makes me think as I often do of Sharon Stone and how in basic instinct, like the whole opening act of that as a detective is being like, Well, she's bisexual. So she's probably the killer. And guess, and yeah, it's not relevant, but it's something that like the public always likes to find out that someone's bisexual. I also love that the the bombshell that he was bisexual plays on exactly the same homophobia that this case was supposed to debunk. It's like, Oh, he's bi. So it's just a case of gaze killing gaze. You know how like queer people

are constantly killing each other, like normal queer stuff. Like, why should we be? Why should we be concerned about the larger trend of societal homophobia and like, it's just a bunch of queers killing each other at a pool table. Like, it just all of these, it's like, we're putting in all these new tropes. And like, this is exactly the thing that we're not that we're all angry about. I mean, that's absolutely right. And it's also funny to me that like, they found one person who claims to have hooked up with Aaron McKinney. And that definitely makes him at least bisexual, like he couldn't possibly just be a straight dude who one time was like, I guess, I mean, I'm in a college town, whatever, I'll try. It's like, no, dude, whatever, hook up with another dude, unless they

were at least bisexual. I mean, come on, come on, dudes, you straight dudes, you don't do that. Like, which is funny, because so they go to Aaron McKinney, he they interview him in the story. And he's a big source of their hey, it wasn't really about him being gay about Matthew Shepard being gay, because he's now denying that that's why he killed Matthew Shepard. Unsurprisingly, why wouldn't you? He's a big proponent of the I was high on meth at the time. And that's the only reason and I had nothing to do with Matthew Shepard being gay, which he has every reason to say because it makes him seem a lot less monstrous, you know, but whatever. I mean, I'm a murderer, but I'm not a homophobe. The murder, the murder thing is true. I just want you all to know,

I'm not a homophobe. That just shows how much the culture had shifted by that point. Right, right. It's true. And because his defense at trial was the exact opposite. I mean, one thing to keep in mind is that to the extent the original narrative got overhyped on, it's all because Matt was gay. That's because that was Aaron McKinney's defense at trial. He put on the gay panic defense or tried to the trial court very much limited how much he was able to do that. And that's the first I'd ever heard of that. That was apparently an existing defense, which people still try sometimes. It's the first I knew of it, where you would argue that literally, you know, straight people, we, we, we all rationally hate gayness so much that we can't control ourselves

when we're confronted with it or hit on and we panic and act irrationally and lash out. And so his defense, I mean, I was reading a quote from his attorney's closing argument the other day was, you know, this attack started because McKinney was a chronic meth user and it ended because he panicked about being hit on because Matt grabbed his balls. That was the, the line. So his own defense is to exaggerate. And I think probably did indeed exaggerate how much of it was to do with Matt being gay to try to, you know, not be convicted, which, hey, I don't, I'm an attorney. I don't blame you. You say what you got to say. Got it. Fine. But then now 2020 goes to him, you know, a few years later, they say, you know, so did you kill him because he was gay?

No, absolutely not. That was never a part of it. I made all that up. Okay, fine. We believe you. We're basically, you know, reported his truth that the gay thing wasn't really part of it. Now, hey, this guy, Doc O'Connor says you two hooked up. I'm sorry. I don't know who that is. Like, so, so we're expected to believe McKinney now that he didn't kill Matt because he was gay, but when he denies knowing Doc O'Connor of ever having met this guy, yeah, he's probably lying about that part. You know, I mean, it's, again, it's just like you pick and choose which parts of each witness or, you know, source we believe based on whatever narrative we're trying to fit this current story into. That's one of the really useful things about narrative making with murderers

is that you can just say that they're lying whenever what they say doesn't corroborate your story and say that they're telling the truth when it does and nobody cares. Well, yeah, there are already murderers. Any lesser, any lesser sin, you're going to be like, well, they're also probably shoplifters, right? Like as long as once we know they're murderers, we can definitely be like, oh, yeah, they're doing everything else too. So calling them liars after that is probably really easy. Yeah. And I think there's just an overriding sense that if, if they say something that confirms the narrative you want, then it's like, it's them being good and saying the truth and being helpful for once. Thank you. And if they're like, oh, no, that's not a thing. You're like, you would say

that because you're a murderer. One of the things I think about a lot is when I was interviewing people for this big story I did about millennials last year, I remember one person that we were, we had talked for like an hour on the phone, I said, hey, thanks a lot for the interview. And they said, thanks for the opportunity. And sometimes I get nervous that people that I'm interviewing think of it as an opportunity or think of it as some way for them to get their name in the paper, some way for them to send out a message to their friends or to some way tell themselves a narrative about themselves. It sounds like that might be happening here to some extent that this limo driver wanted to be on TV, wanted to get his name in the paper, wanted to kind of

drop a bombshell and be the center of this story and really blow up this narrative for the rest of the country. And the producers weren't skeptical enough. They didn't think, look, we are a television crew. We're going to put you on TV and make you super famous. That's power. That's a weapon. And we need to be really, really, really careful in how we use that weapon, especially with TV where people's faces are on TV. And it's somewhat like you do get famous after you've been on 2020. I feel like those producers should be triple checking everything. And you can see how there's this unconscious collusion too as a producer that you're constantly vulnerable to where someone comes to you with a story that's highly unlikely, but really colorful

and gives you a detail that you can peg a whole investigation on. And it's, it would be so hard to not be like, yeah, that must be true because I want it to be true. And therefore, you seem credible. You know, I mean, I feel like one of the really, the paradoxes of journalism too is that if you're working in, you know, a subject matter that falls within the public interest and trying to create a more ethical world in some way, you're being able to spread that message. It has a lot to do with your own opportunism and your willingness to like find a story and some what do you mean? How so? Well, like this idea that so for example, I want to talk about what happens when pregnant women are in jail awaiting trial where there are

often way fewer social and medical services. And if you're actually in prison, and since there's a big backlog, you end up waiting around in jail for a long time potentially. And there was a case in Milwaukee last year where a woman named Shaday Suizer went into labor in her cell and gave birth and her baby died. And the jail's defense was, well, it was probably stillborn, which is not a great defense if, if that's the, your ideal situation in the jail that you're running. This is like one of those stories, you have that little back burner of stories that you've pitched around and people are like, there's not really a story there. Like we need to talk about how this could happen to like, we need to find the really compelling person who this happened

to like someone you wouldn't think would be in jail, like a nice white, you really need to find nice white ladies to peg most social issues on. And then you're in a position where you need to maybe opportunistically try and find a nice white lady and hold on to the parts of her narrative or encourage the parts of her narrative that make it a, you know, a compelling story that people will be drawn to, find whatever the, you know, legal reporting equivalent of bisexuality is. And then also where, you know, this is a separate thing, but equally relevant to what we're talking about in order to try and talk about the problems of flicking a community. The example story that you need to bring into interest, the so-called general public is someone who is somewhat

unrepresentative of the broader swath of people that this is happening to. I think about all the time that Rolling Stone Campus Rape article that fell apart, because I'm a terrible person. Whenever anything, whenever anyone is found to have done something really truly, I always, I always like, I always project myself into their shoes. And so I have never done this, obviously, but I can see the temptation as a journalist. You're like, you're walking around this campus, you're talking to people about Campus Rape, you get this amazing story and you kind of don't want to check it out. You're like, man, they're saying like, grab its leg, it's a gang rape, in a fraternity, it's so bad. I can just see myself having the impulse to be like,

I'm just not going to check this one out. It's too good. I don't want it to fall apart. But that is a function of this structure. Again, Campus Rape is an actual problem. And you need to find stories to hang this problem on. And there's huge pressure to find these stories. And it's really hard to find stories because there's a lot of people in the world and they don't always want to tell you about their brutal rape. And you can't get these stories from people in it. So there's just this pressure. And so obviously the Rolling Stone journalists, the whole system there broke down. But the incentives are there for every journalist is to try to find the Doc, the limo driver, who's going to tell you the juicy thing about this person who's seen as a saint. Because then you

can promo it by saying Matthew Shepard was no angel, and you'll get really big ratings in the same way. If some journalist came up with something about like one of these parkland kids right now, if you could find something like David Hogg was a member of Stormfront two years ago, blah, blah, blah, and you could kind of debunk these saintly kids, you'd get huge ratings for that. And there's huge incentives for journalists to seek those kinds of things out. And then the NRA is exonerated if David Hogg like stole a candy bar one time. Exactly. And then it would become this whole like, well, gun control doesn't matter. David Hogg stole a candy bar. So like, let's definitely not ban assault rival. It's funny too, because I mean, you guys are actually working journalists, whereas

that's a career I only contemplated and never went into. But when I remember how much when I was a student at the University of Wyoming, and I was writing a story, I could be like, okay, I need to get both sides. Who do I call to get the other side? Okay, I know it's going to be one of these sources. Like the kind of how easy it was to just pre construct the narrative, find the people you want to say it, fill in the blank journalism where you're like, Oh, yeah, I need a quote from someone who doesn't like the new health care administration standards. Right, right. I mean, obviously, for me, that was a much on a much simpler level than the kind of stuff you're talking about where it really is big bombshell stuff that does prove an important, you know, talk about an important

public issue. But it's just something that really hit me early on about how easy it is to gain the system as a journalist, how you've got to be on guard to make sure that even if you're, you know, with the best of intentions, trying to shine a light on something that's real and legitimate, you have to be careful about who you believe or give credibility to because I mean, I was looking back through this, the paper that I wrote about this in grad school and I wrote in there that Doc O'Connor was the prosecutors decided not to call him as a witness because they lacked his credit, their doubted his credibility. I don't remember, I don't have a source for that in my papers. I don't remember where I got that idea from, but I trust myself that it was legit.

And so, you know, but it just makes me think that like, you know, I'm not saying that the especially journalists do not have to go to the same rigorous standards as you do in a court, and I don't think you should have to, but like it matters that you don't give a platform to someone who is, you know, who's just telling you a great story, but maybe not an honest one. Yeah, well, speaking of gay youths, this is something I learned recently and found totally mind blowing and is to me an interesting example of the power of the story and the power of the debunk where in the Leopold and Loeb murder trial, which was the famous case where two two teenagers, two gay teenagers, which is not part of the narrative that they were sleeping

with each other at the time and that, you know, Nathan Leopold loved Richard Loeb and just wanted to be with him and so helped out with the murder, which he shouldn't do. But there's a famous quote from Leopold where they have him riding around and going to the different scenes of the Crimes Commission and the presses there with him and they're, you know, needling and needling and needling him trying to get him to say something about it, about the murder that they committed. He finally says something to the effect of, I guess you could justify this like a scientist, like an entomologist would justify sticking a bug on a pin and some, you know, one or some of the reporters are like, oh, he's talking about the murder. And that's how he felt about

committing the murder that he was a scientist conducting an experiment and he saw this kid's life as a bug. And what he says in his book and his memoirs, which he eventually publishes in the 50s, is that he actually meant that he felt like he was the bug and he was being experimented on by these people who were just trying in a scientific way to figure out what the situation was and why he would do this, which I think he himself felt pretty baffled by at the time. And what I find so interesting about that is that that bug quote becomes one of the hallmark quotes of the whole case, you know, and it's proof that they were monsters and that they just had no connection to human life and no empathy at all. And then he comes out with this bombshell of like, I was actually

just kind of talking and thinking about myself at that time and it wasn't a manifesto. And that hasn't been absorbed. Although Sarah, do you think there's any chance that he's lying? Because you mentioned earlier. You know, what's funny is that that never occurred to me. And I think that that also has to do with the fact that I was reading this memoir that he wrote when he was like 57 years old, which is the time around the time that he was released on parole and lived a quiet life of bird watching after that. And through reading this book, this is on like page 50. And at that point, I already felt a sense of really deep empathy for him as someone who just was a brilliant and morally vacant teenager who would have just done anything for the guy that

he loved. I was like, I could have been Nathan Leopold. We all could have been Nathan Leopold. I like was Nathan Leopold, a morally vacant teenager with inappropriate crushes. Yes. Yeah. And so he gets to that and I'm like, Oh my God, of course, this kind of thing happens all the time. And I like you. Yeah, it did not occur to me to this moment to be like, Oh yeah, it would be a very smart thing to be like, I didn't mean it. But so Mike, so after the debunking and the debunking of the debunking, are we left back with Matthew Shepard where we started? Yeah, I think so. I mean, unfortunately, I think a lot of people have a if they're paying any attention at all, but just like the medium level of attention, they probably have a sense that like, Oh, that

story was more complicated. It wasn't just about, you know, you know, the like, I was looking back at the thing that Andrew Sullivan wrote me. And he said, Obviously, the crime was much more complicated than a random and anonymous hate crime. But that's how it has been sold. Before that becomes the reality. And the drugs and robbery motives are lost. ABC News version does a useful thing. And I'm like, well, the robbery and drug motives were never not part like, I'm like, they were always part of the story. Like, yeah, these guys admitted they used drugs and they were broke and they saw them as a target for robbery. Like, that was always there. So I think, yeah, we're back to where we started if you had an accurate view of the murder from the get go. If you didn't

and weren't paying much attention, and all you saw was like gay person killed and then assume that meant that two monsters who were not even human beings went out that night in search of a gay person to murder and tie up like a scarecrow, which not actually quite what happened, you know, if that's what you thought at the get go, probably now you just think, no, that's totally false. It's all complicated. And I guess, you know, I can't account for what someone who pays that little 10, you know, what can you do? But, but I think anybody who's like really pays attention, it's like, yeah, we understood this story. We understood what happened to Matthew Shepard pretty clearly right after it happened. I mean, when I look back, like the best source of information about

why he was murdered is the details of Aaron McKinney's interview with the police on October 9th. That's three days after Matthew Shepard is attacked and four days before he dies. I mean, he was still alive when Aaron McKinney was like talking about how, yeah, I don't like gay people when they come on to me. And I don't, you know, like we, we lured him out because he was gay. And once he was in the car, we said, guess what? We're not gay. You're, you're going to get jacked. I mean, he's, he hasn't, as far as I know, talked to an attorney yet. I can't believe he would have, he wouldn't have been talking to the police. He's not come up. This isn't some master plan to like defend himself. This is the unvarnished immediate story. And it has the complexities. It's not like

we went out and saw a gay dude to kill him. And he was on meth, right? He admitted that. Yeah. I mean, at least that, that was part of his story at trial. I mean, I doubt he told the police that in that interview, but definitely part of his defense went to trial was, yeah, he's a chronic meth user. And so like he needed the money, like, you know, so, so yeah, I mean, it's just like, if you knew, if you, not even if you knew the facts of the time, if you just go back and read the contemporary accounts of the case, which I did, you know, I'm prepping, I went back and looked at like New York Times article that was published in December of 98. This before any of the trials have started. This is a month and a half after Matt Shepard's attack, you can get almost everything

you need to know about why he was killed, the full complexity of it from those contemporary news articles. And so this weird notion that like we ever needed to go and debunk an oversimplified story is, you know, I don't know, it's part of its own, I guess, occasional journalistic temptation that like I want to be the one that proves that we got it wrong. Well, if people are speaking to this need to address how we covered a story too simply back then, and now we have we now we can countenance how complicated it is, you know, why this story, because there are a lot of stories that we covered much more. I mean, I don't think that this that this wasn't oversimplistic coverage either. I mean, I'm sure at the time, you know, when anyone becomes a symbol of a movement, then

their their lives become simplified in some way. But the in both versions of the story in both the original version and the quote debunked version, you know, two people tortured and killed a very young man in a horrible way for no reason, you know, for no, you don't you don't have to kill someone when you rob them, like there was so the robbery element doesn't really matter. So so why is this the story that we're trying to prove our complexity on? From from what I know of Jimenez like later elaborations of the story, he really gets into the idea that Matt was like deeply involved as I mentioned in the like, meth. So this might have been an actual like drug execution. So so that there was a reason it was related to him like maybe stiffing someone on a drug deal, I

don't know, you know, and just one of the things I always find so interesting about this like Laramie Wyoming is at the time at least was a town of about 26,000 people. Yeah, sure, plenty of people did meth. It's rural town in the west that especially the time was common. But it like you read these ideas and it like it's like, how big was the underground meth scene of detailed networks of like, we got off people and they're like, and also there, I've seen claims that like Matt and Aaron McKinney were both actually gay prostitutes. And I'm like, how many gay prostitutes were in Laramie? I didn't know about them when I lived there. You know, I mean, it's just it's it's easy for me to hear how ridiculous some of these theory sound because I lived in this very small

town in a very small state. Again, I'm not saying no one's ever been killed over drugs in a small town that happens, but it's just like you you come away from it getting this like, you know, the godfather style like network of crime families and stuff. And it's like in this tiny little family is of Laramie. My like potentially extremely inflammatory hot take on this is that so I watched the Laramie project when at first when it came out as a movie, which I forget the year, but I'm pretty sure it was before the ABC 2020 special. And I fucking hated it. And the reason I hated it was because it was this saintliness narrative for understandable reasons. People wanted to get more attention on the problem of homophobia in

America and homophobic motivated assaults in America. And one of the ways to get mainstream America to do that is to create a saint that has been murdered. It is totally understandable that that happened. But it is also extremely unfortunate because sometimes people who suck get murdered. And that is also bad. Do you think that then maybe the later attempt to complicate the narrative is is a you know, well intention, but fundamentally, you know, and when it comes down to the details of the actual story misguided attempt to say like, in 1998, we had to make the argument that hate crimes and homophobia are bad because sometimes when you're trying to kill a gay person, you accidentally kill someone really great and not

just a regular gay person, not just not just a run of the mill disposable gay person. Yeah. But like a really nice one. And I mean, I'm also someone who wouldn't like I have no problem with criticism of the Laramie project, even though I found it very moving. I will never forget the line that bothered me the most. I don't remember what character says it, but they make some joke where they're like, I told him he was afraid of faggots. And that's why he killed him. Well, now you're going to prison and you're going to be a faggot. And yeah, it was totally a prison rape joke thrown in with the the F bomb, you know, like, and it just and everyone, you know, you get the idea that, okay, yeah, this guy is using that offensive awful word. But he's doing

it in a way that we all like it's, you know, a prison rape joke, like, which I it's funny because now I think the culture has turned more against those types of prison rape jokes, thankfully, although you still hear him sometimes. America is like the only country in the world that has prison rape. Prison rape is something that is very preventable and is like, really not. Well, we have it because we like having it and we all accept that it's like part of the deal. Exactly. I mean, I like to think that wouldn't happen now. But it just, yeah, it just, it also supports that idea that like, yeah, we all agree being gay is pretty bad. But I mean, you shouldn't kill someone for it. But if you do, your punishment is you have to be gay yourself.

But also being gay is fundamentally scary. And it hurts. And it's something that's imposed on you in a place that you want to escape from. Right. I think we should end with like what we've learned. And I think what I learned is that these cases are always more complicated than we think they are. And that saintliness, I think, is something we should be super wary of. And a lot of social problems don't have convenient victims. And that makes them really hard to talk about. Yeah. I mean, I've learned that when a case that captivated the nation bobs up again, and there's some alleged debunking information that it's good to look at it from a perspective of, is this something we're hearing about because it's interesting? Or because it's something

that we can be counted on as consumers to find interesting or intriguing? Because that reminds me of when there was a guy who claimed to confess to being Jean Benet Ramsey's killer. And there were no details that really bore that out. But it was interesting. It was interesting that he said it. He seemed nuts. He was on TV for a few days. You have these stories that are willingness to grapple with a social issue, get pegged to, and then if we can destroy the stories or question them in some way that allows the consumer, the citizen to absolve themselves and wash their hands of the story, then they can wash their hands of the whole situation. What did you learn, Mike?

I mean, I think that's true. That's absolutely true. So I mean, the end result of that is that, yes, if you build a victim up to be particularly saintly or angelic, it's going to make the ideological opponents of making structural and societal changes. It's going to make their job easier. The more you build them up to be a saint, the easier it will be for them to penetrate that narrative and knock it down. But having said that, you don't even have to do that. You don't have to turn them into an angel or a saint. They're still going to come after the victim. Yeah. And that gives us another pattern to look for too, because if you see people refuting something that no one actually said, like Michael Brown was no angel, it's like, that's interesting.

No one ever said that. So you're saying that you think someone needs to, or that at least a black teenager needs to be literally an angel in order to not deserve to be killed by the police for no reason. So it's like, we're learning, you know, a pattern of tells. I think another central lesson of this is that we should be really skeptical of any sorts of podcasts that attempt to do any debunking, because debunking is really problematic. I just think that the institution of debunking is really bad, and we should stick with the cultural narratives that we have. They're all fine.