You're Wrong About - The O.J. Simpson Trial: Paula Barbieri Part 2

Episode Date: December 2, 2019

"There’s no precedent for women in this family being treated like they matter." Sarah tells Mike about the Bronco chase as Paula Barbieri experienced it. Then, she recounts how a poor kid from Panama City, Florida, made it all the way to the high-fashion world of Paris, France—and discovered that she had jumped out of the frying pan and into the fire. Sarah continues to compare everyone to Erin Brockovich.This episode begins with a lengthy discussion of O.J. Simpson's suicide attempt on the day of the Bronco chase. We go on to describe scenes of domestic violence and attempted sexual assault; Paula deserved better.Continue reading →Support us:Subscribe on PatreonDonate on PaypalBuy cute merchWhere else to find us: Sarah's other show, Why Are Dads Mike's other show, Maintenance PhaseSupport the show

I've gotten so into baths and it's all because of Faye. Like, Faye opened the door to self-care for me. Welcome to You're Wrong About, the podcast where the women who are cut out of the made-for-tv movies get to have a starring role. Ah, because I've been complaining about the lack of Paula and the Ryan Murphy show. Yes, but she's only in two scenes. So I might be wrong, but I counted the number of lines she has and I think it's two lines and maybe she's in more scenes than that, not talking. Like, I have not done a frame-by-frame analysis, but I'm very happy that we are coming and doing this approach and that we are going to talk about Paula Barbieri just as much as history seems to require, which I think is a lot. I am Michael Hobbs. I'm a reporter for The Huffington

Post. I'm Sarah Marshall. I'm a writer at Work on a Book on the Satanic Panic. And we are on Patreon at patreon.com slash You're Wrong About. And we have tote bags and shirts now that say if Marcia Clark could get through 1995, then I can get through this day and I think they are very cute. And today we are talking about Paula Barbieri again. Are you excited to return to Paula? Yes, I want to know what happens to the Bronco Chase. I feel like I almost want it, but we'll get to it. I'm slightly sad that we're going to get to the Bronco Chase because it's been looming in the distance for so long. We don't have to. So, yes, where are we in time? Where do we pick up with Paula? I want to start by asking you, we talked about Paula a couple weeks ago. Yes.

Where is she at the moment that we're returning to her? She was dating OJ for some period of time before the murders. She broke up with him the morning of the murders. She then found out that his ex-wife, who she perceived herself to be kind of in competition with, had been murdered. She sees that OJ is wounded and sad. She perceives him as a victim of this crime as well, that he's now lost someone who is really important to him. She decides to, instead of continuing with the breakup that she had initiated, she kind of calls a mulligan and goes to him and essentially moves in with him in Robert Shapiro's house. He calls a mulligan and she allows it. She has kind of taken on this caretaker role of, I'm really scared that he's going to kill

himself. I'm really scared that he's taking medications, he's barely sort of lucid, and he needs my help. That seems to be her motivation for doing this so far. Yeah. But because she was cut out of the Ryan Murphy show, I have no idea where the story goes. So, we left off with OJ Simpson's possibly suicide note being read aloud on television after OJ has disappeared from Robert Kardashian's house. Yes, David Schwimmer. And then in her book, The Other Woman, right after she talks about that, Paula writes, most poignant of all was when OJ wrote how he'd done, quote, most of the right things.

So why do I end up like this? I can't go on, no matter what the outcome, people will look and point. But that's his bullshit persecution complex. Well, I mean, he's right. People will look and point, right? Yes. Like, that's what they do when you've been accused of murdering someone. He is right. But I mean, it does make sense to focus on yourself in a suicide note, if that's what this is. I mean, fair. I think that this is actually a moment of clarity from him in a way,

where if he's saying that he's going to go kill himself now, then he's saying essentially that I can't stand to not be loved anymore. Like, the public has loved me for my entire adult life. And after this, they can't, and I can't stand that. And I think that that's true. I mean, that's like deeply narcissistic, too, because what he should be sad about is that the love of his life just died. Yeah. I mean, should be sad about is like a loaded phrase, but it seems like this was a really important person in your life. And to be focusing on yourself just seems like bad and weird.

You know what I think is interesting, and maybe I've been thinking about this lately, is that we tend to use the word narcissist as like a value judgment in some way. It's like that person's a narcissist. And like, do you think that narcissists are narcissists on purpose because I don't? Right. Like, narcissists died because he couldn't stop staring at his own reflection. Like, people don't want to die while staring at reflections of themselves. I think if we're able to use the term narcissist to just mean like, wow, like this person,

like this kind of self-own that he's offering us in this note of like, the public has always loved me. I've always been the fastest boy. And that was his real love, really, was like the way that the public allowed him to feel about himself. And something that Paula mentions, they would often just like snag a little time together in an airport because he would be flying off to golf for Hertz or whatever. And she would be flying off to do modeling gigs. And so they would like get together for a meal or coffee or something in some airport somewhere. She tells a story where they're like running for him to catch a flight and a fan wants an autograph.

And he's like, run alongside me and a lot of craft stuff for you. Oh, wow. He, I think he has no real idea of what it's like to be able to wake up in the morning and be like, I'm proud of the person I am. I'm like, I'm a good husband and I'm a good dad. And I had a good golf game this morning and I feel good about that. Like, that's so foreign to him, you know, he never learned how to do that. And I think this means that he just has no coping technique at this point. So you think that's that sort of sense of devastation and oblivion

is what motivates him to get in the Bronco that day? Oh, yeah. Yeah, I do. And I think he had the sense of like, well, it's better to burn out than to fade away. Right. Right. So Paula is watching all of this on CNN. And we must remind you that it's been only five days since she got on a plane to Las Vegas thinking like I just broke up with my boyfriend and I've ended this garbage fire of a relationship and I'm moving on and things are great.

And I feel strong and healthy and alive. Michael Bolton is going to touch my cheek. And Michael Bolton is going to touch my cheek. And we're going to sing on a mountain together, probably, because that seems to be what he does based on his videos. And, you know, and in another part of the city, Marcia Clark is like, my desk is like almost clean. And I just filed for divorce from Gordon. So it's June 17th, Paula is watching CNN listening to O.J.'s letter and his farewell to her.

And it gets to the point where she's hearing the part of O.J.'s letter about his relationship with Nicole and just feeling just hurt about how Nicole is still the one who matters most to him. Yeah. She's still Plan B. Yeah. And so she writes, when the letter talked about Nicole, it really hurt me to hear the obvious that O.J. still loved her and that he'd hoped they'd have a future. But I couldn't think about that. Not now. When you're in denial, you have to be there all the way. An hour later, CNN broke into Larry King with a shot of San Diego Freeway, northbound.

I gaped at the sight of A.C.'s white Bronco rolling down the middle of the road with a dozen or more squad cars in slow pursuit. Wait, it's A.C.'s Bronco? I thought O.J. had a Bronco. O.J. has a white Bronco. A.C. also has a white Bronco. Okay. And Paula has a white Bronco. Wow. So these were like the Ugg boots of 1994. And Paula writes, O.J. was in the back seat, the newsman said. He was alive. Ecstatic at that simple fact, I began to piece together what might have happened. Though the district attorney would try to suggest otherwise,

there had been no conspiracy at Kardashian's house. Given the sedatives he was taking and the despair that it swamped him, O.J. lacked the harder mind for any escape and in the margin I've written, sure. But when he and A.C. saw how easy it was for Tom and me to drive off, it probably occurred to him that they could do the same. Paula is finding a way to blame herself for O.J. being taken into custody. As a person with a history of co-dependency and blaming myself for stuff that I really shouldn't blame myself for, I'm impressed by her co-dependent abilities.

This is like Olympic gold medal self-blame. We are all Paula. It's just amazing. She's sitting there, she's like, I'm so glad you're still alive, thank God, and it's my fault. And if you hadn't seen me get away from Robert Kardashian's house so easily, then you wouldn't have tried it, and it's because you learned by watching me. Oh my God. It's terrible. So the logistics of this are, he left Robert Shapiro's house,

Shapiro thought that he was turning himself in, and that A.C. was driving him to prison or what? No, no, no. Bob Shapiro was not that stupid. Bob Shapiro basically was going to take O.J. in. He had kind of been in talks with the LAPD. He was like, trust me, listen to me. Have you ever had any reason not to trust me? We've been working together for a long time. I'm a celebrity lawyer. And then as when we record this show, they're like, okay, are you going to bring O.J. in? We need him in like right now. And Bob Shapiro is like, ah, a little more time. I just need a little more time. It's as, Bob Shapiro is planning to take him in,

and O.J. and A.C. just like bounce. Do we have any sense of what his plan was? What O.J.'s plan was? Yeah, because he wasn't getting in the car by himself to kill himself, right? He was getting in the car with A.C. driving, right? Yeah, A.C. is driving. So yeah, what is your sense of what his actual strategy was with this? So his story is that his plan was to go to Nicole's grave and kill himself there.

And he has a gun in the car. And at various points, he's holding a gun to his head. In the back of the car is A.C.'s driving. They reach the cemetery and they realize the police are there. And he says they instead go to an orange grove. And A.C. gets out of the truck, and O.J. says that he takes the gun out, but A.C. came back before he could use it. And then they get back in the Bronco. So A.C. doesn't know about this plan, I guess, obviously. Well, he knows that O.J. has a gun. Does he know that he's like driving O.J. to the gravesite to kill himself?

Or do we not know? I don't think we can know that. Because he's still alive, right? He's still around. He gives interviews. I guess he must have written a book. No, he didn't write a book. He's one of the few people who did not write a book. Interesting. Okay. A.C. actually stayed pretty quiet. Here's what I think if I were A.C. Cowlings. So my best friend is Distrott. He's writing what is potentially a suicide note. We're

crying together in Robert Kardashian's house about how we were supposed to grow old together. According to Paula, there is this general sense of like, this is it. Also, you know, A.C. has a relationship with O.J. that's similar to the relationship a lot of men have had with O.J., which is that they're kind of, they're, he's the alpha. Yeah. He decides what they do. He decides where they go. Like if he gets a car, then you get a car that looks like his. I can see feeling the kind of loyalty to my friend O.J. where I'm like,

either I don't know what you're doing or I know that you're intent on killing yourself. And maybe I want to help you with that. Like maybe I feel like that is what you truly need. And I have the degree of loyalty to you that like I want to help you do it. Like I don't know. Yeah. People often do not know their motivations when they are doing stuff. It's only afterwards. Yeah. I don't think O.J. was very aware of what emotions he was having at what time. Yeah. I mean, this is another thing, right? That like we have, I think, we really need to work on

cultural literacy around abusive behavior because there's, if you are an abusive partner or the abusive party in a relationship, like to me, that correlates much more strongly with a lack of control over your behavior and a lack of awareness of your emotions and being some kind of like, now I have decided that I want to hurt you and I'm aware of all of my feelings. And this is a rational decision I've made. It's the criminal mastermind thing. Yeah. We want everyone to be a mastermind. And I think a mastermind is just a board game. Freedom's just another word for nothing left to lose and mastermind is just a board game from

the 80s. And then there's debate that maybe he was fleeing to Mexico because he did have like $8,000 on the car with him. Oh, okay. So in the run of his life, Jeffrey Tubin writes, the LAPD had put out an all points bulletin for Al Callings right around the time of the press conference at 2pm. Around that time, Van Adder-Lang and their colleagues put in their first calls to the many police departments whose jurisdictions abut that of the LAPD. But because the police had never seized Simpson's passport, the cops had to cast an

even wider net. They alerted the U.S. Border Patrol as well as the airlines, the U.S. Customs Service, and the Mexican Judicial Police. Not surprisingly, perhaps, given the vast public interest in the case, it was the broadcast announcement, not the law enforcement effort, that produced almost immediate results. Oh, right. Chris Thomas had been walking television at home in Mission Viejo when he learned Simpson was on the run. At 6.25pm, he and his girlfriend, Kathy Ferigno, were heading north on Interstate 5, the Santa Ana Freeway, on their way to a weekend of camping. They had been joking about

OJ's disappearance, studying in a half-hearted way the cars coming toward them, seeing if Simpson might be among them on his way to Mexico. After a few minutes of this, Ferigno looked into the passenger side rear-view mirror and started saying, oh my god, Chris, Chris, Chris. Thomas slowed down and in a moment Ferigno was face-to-face with Al Cowlings. When he noticed that she was staring at him, Cowlings glared at her. Their location at that moment was about 80 miles south of Kardashian's house in Encino. They were about a five-minute drive from the grave site of Nicole Brown Simpson. The Bronco was heading north, that is, back toward Los Angeles and away from the Mexican border.

So that corroborates OJ's story that he went to the grave, saw the cops, and then turned around. Yes. That's interesting that from day one, it's like the media is playing a hugely important role in not only documenting this case, but in some ways kind of solving it or changing it, that they're putting out these big bulletins. Oh yeah. I mean, from the beginning, this is viewers at home. What do you think? Kind of a trial. Tubin writes, when he was booked at the police station, Cowlings had $8750 in cash in his pockets. And in what appeared to be Simpson's travel bag,

they found OJ's passport and a plastic bag that contained a fake goatee, a fake mustache, a bottle of makeup adhesive remover, and three receipts from Cinema Secrets Beauty Supply dated May 27, 1994. The officers also found a fully loaded Smith & Wesson 357 Magnum Blue Steel handgun. It was registered to Lieutenant Earl Pacinger, yet another of Simpson's friends on the LAPD. About five years earlier, at a time when Pacinger was providing security for OJ, the Lieutenant had bought his client the gun. It's not amazing. It's also interesting for the defense theory that it's all an LAPD frame job, when he has a lot of buddies on the LAPD.

I cannot imagine having a client who was cozier with the police. OJ's friend, Ron Schipp, talks about he would bring over other police officers to OJ's house and not tell them whose house they were going to, and then OJ would open the door and their faces would light up, you know? He's like Santa to them. It's rare for anyone to be that popular with police officers, you know? But what do you make of the fact that he has a fake goatee and a fake mustache and stuff? I just think he's seen, he's seen like the Harrison Ford version of the fugitive too many times, where it's like, all I need to do is go into like a rest out bathroom and like dye my hair and then nobody will recognize me like the, like the Clark Kent version of a disguise where

like this extremely famous person puts on a pair of glasses and then it's like, who are you? If you're a celebrity at that time, the size of OJ, it's not clear to me that like a goatee is going to do it, buddy. People will be like, oh, it's OJ Simpson and he has a goatee. Again, like we're not dealing with like criminal mastermind here. Yeah, that's important. How many criminal masterminds are there actually? There are three. Okay. I mean, what he claims later, there's like many flavors of OJ lies. And this is one where you're like, OJ, like were you even trying with this one? What he says is that that's for, you know, oh, if I don't want to be recognized by the public, like when I take my kids to Disneyland, like that's what that's for that.

That's like him saying like, well, you know, I wanted to go to the buffet, but not eat anything. Yeah, because I hate receiving like the one true nutrient that my soul craves all day long. It's like, right. Okay, sure. Also, if you will permit me to channel Nicole for a second, when the fuck did OJ ever take his kids to Disneyland? He doesn't seem like he's that kind of parent. Right. He's showing up late for their recitals and skipping their confirmations. Good point. So what's Paula doing now? I mean, at the time that Chase is happening, she's just watching on CNN helplessly. But what she says OJ tells her later, because he says it is civil trial that they go to an orange grove. He's going to kill himself. But then AC comes back

before he can use the gun. OJ apparently has a the gun wrapped up in a towel. And Paula writes, the full story is even more chilling. I took the gun and put it in my mouth. OJ told me, I pulled the trigger and the towel jam the trigger. Whoa. What do you think about that? Because this book contains dozens of instances of OJ lying to Paula. And this is something where I feel like this doesn't seem plausible or implausible to me. Like I really don't know. Yeah, it's like watching the usual suspects or something. It's like at the end, you're like, I don't know what of that happened and what didn't. I can see this being a play for sympathy, which he definitely needs her for. But I can also see it being true. Like he's clear. I mean,

the way that he beat Nicole was just like the horrific nature of those beatings to me is like, this is someone who was not in control of himself. And also you're like, was his ego so powerful that it didn't want to let itself die? Right. I guess the question is like, does his narcissism make him more or less likely to actually attempt suicide? And I don't know. And I don't know if we could make that assessment. It's also interesting that whenever you hear these stories, the lens you want to apply to them is this makes sense or this doesn't make sense, where why would it prevent you from committing suicide if your friend comes back to the car? Like your friend is going to find out two seconds later that you killed yourself. So like, why does it matter that AC can see you?

But then on the other hand, people kill themselves or don't kill themselves for all kinds of reasons like things that happen do not make sense. Yes. And we weren't there. Yeah. But so Paula doesn't know any of this yet. All she knows is that OJ is on TV, she's watching it, and she's worried about him, right? That's about it. Yeah, she is sitting there watching this happening on TV, the same as the rest of America. And all those people who are trying to watch basketball all the time. Yes. She writes, I was desperate for the Bronco to pull over for OJ to step out. I think I shared everyone's thoughts. Just let this not be a catastrophe. I checked for messages on my home phone. With one eye on the television, I heard several disconnects, then a dazed but familiar

voice. Paula, are you there? Of all the unreal moments I'd experienced, that one might have been the most bizarre to hear OJ's disembodied voice as I watched his voiceless presence on TV, passing waves of cheering on lookers. So he's drunk dialing Paula again. He's doing it while he's in the car. Why do you think people only make phone calls when they're drunk? Because you're a millennial? Yes. You call me? I mean, I guess I just say emotionally drunk dialing. He's feeling things, and he's calling her. By your standard, I don't think OJ has made a calm phone call in his life, though. This is just how he calls people. Yeah, he's reaching out to her, basically. He's like,

Paula, Paula, Paula, help me. This is also hours after he's sent her away and given her. He's tried to do his best, Michael Molton, too. He has attempted to touch her cheeks softly and sent her on her way, and he has changed his tune after a few hours, it seems. In keeping with his struggle with impulse control. Yeah. I mean, I was thinking in terms of OJ and Paula's relationship generally, that they seem to share this, where she will call things off, he will start calling her, and then the sound of his voice will sway her, and they will start things up again, or he will try and send her away, but then he won't be... It's like each of them is on a chain,

and they can start running, but then they get to the end of it, and it snaps, and they come back to each other. Paula writes, I wanted more than anything to call OJ back, but I lacked AC's cellular phone number. It's such a 1997 phrase, cellular phone number. The truth was, OJ was calling from his own cell phone, but that possibility never dawned on me. I could do only what millions of others were doing, watch and pray. Star 69. Why didn't she star 69? We had that technology. So many rabbit holes here. And this is, to me, a very revealing moment. She writes, as the Bronco swung west on the 91 freeway, the north on the 405, I found myself melting into the truck's backseat. I felt OJ's fear and confusion, his sense of being hunted. I had

to hold on to every bit of my focus. If I faltered for even a second, I was sure OJ would die. She's a witch. I found myself melting into the truck's backseat. She literally feels that she is astrally projecting herself into the Bronco and keeping him alive. She's engaging in the kind of magical thinking. She's responsible for keeping him from killing himself. It's very abuser type of dynamic, right? Where it's like, it's not that I flew off the handle and beat you. It's that you made me do it by whatever tiny little slight that I've invented. Yeah. And she buys that. Yeah. And she's making herself responsible for everything. I mean, this is all OJ doing it.

And it's her fault that Nicole is dead. Her self-blame runs so deep that with one hand, she's denying that he could have killed anyone and with, I don't know how you deny things with your hands. In one breath, she's denying that he could have killed anyone. And in the other, it's, you know, but it's still her fault. It's still her fault that Nicole is dead. Yeah. And if he kills himself, that's also her fault. What is Paula not blaming herself for? Yeah. So she's melting into the backseat and she writes,

And so I shushed all my questions aside. I locked my forbidden doubts away, triple bolted the safe. I had lain next to this man in our most private hours. I shared my secrets and my life. I had never stopped loving him and good times are hard. How could I have loved a murderer? I couldn't conceive of it. Not if I was to give OJ the absolute loyalty he needed. Not if I was to stay sane. From that point on, through all that was to follow over the next 16 months, I never doubted OJ again. Wait, we need to do like one of those little if P then Q type of maps for the logic here. This is like an LSAT question, right?

Because is she honestly, do you think that she's honestly saying if I love him, then he can't be a murderer? She's in what the Greeks call a dilemma, right? Which means you're literally between the two horns, right? So in what might have been the trial of the sanctuary in Homer, Orestes is in a position where he has to avenge his father's murder by killing the person who killed his father. But the person who killed his father is his mother, which she does because Agamemnon sacrificed their daughter earlier. It's a whole big thing. Right. But you have a moral rule telling you to kill someone and you have a moral rule telling

you that it's forbidden to kill someone. Yes. And Orestes is in some versions saved from this. The gods literally intervene and they're like, we know we put you in an impossible position and we're just going to sort of wipe this away. Paula Barbieri is in Orestes kind of a place right now because according to kind of her moral universe, like the kind of laws that she lives by, she has to love O.J. Simpson. She has to have absolute loyalty to him because he's in pain and he is in jail and the world is against him and he's going to trial. But she also can't love a murderer. She can't have loved a murderer. But she has to love him so he can't be a murderer. He just can't. Right. That's what I think she's saying.

I mean, when this happens to a normal person who doesn't have the gods help, it's called being placed under citizens Orestes. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. Did you guys think that up? I've been sitting on that for like three minutes. I was waiting for a tiny pause so I could say it. It wasn't the most appropriate place to say it. No, but I really like that citizens are resting. Oh my goodness. Sorry. But yeah, I mean, I think it's like that's the place that she's talked herself into being. She's in a way like created this dilemma for herself in a way. Yeah. Well, let's talk about what made Paula Paula. What do we know about Paula's life pre-O.J.

so far? Can you kind of remind us of our knowledge to this point? So I love doing these super duper zoom in episodes and returning to the same people over and over again because oftentimes when I'm editing the show, I realize something that I forgot to sort of follow up on. And one of the things in Paula episode one that has stuck with me is that they mention in, I think it was in that terrible review where they referred to her Nicole like inability to leave O.J., where they basically said like she was abused as a kid. And maybe that's why she couldn't leave O.J. as a sort of like blaming her kind of way. Yeah. But I mean, do you think that is part of the dynamic here that she grew up in an abusive home?

I'm so glad you're asking me that. Absolutely. Yeah. We're just going to talk about Paula's life pre-O.J. and I feel, you know, to kind of spoil this for you a little bit that you will likely agree with my assessment that with very few and very minor exceptions, every man she has ever met or had any kind of a relationship with appears to have been complete garbage. Oh, really? You look at everything she had experienced of human relationships to the time she met O.J. and you're like, oh my God, yeah, like this is this is like pretty not that bad by what compared to what you've been through. So Paula is born on New Year's Eve 1966. Her parents are Marianne Cardinuto, who's a daughter of Italian immigrants who settled in Connecticut.

Marianne marries a salesman named Vincent Barbieri, who is apparently very charming, very much a ladies man, a big drinker and given to rage and to violent outbursts. And so in 1964, Marianne has two little kids, Vinnie and Michael. She flees her husband, Vincent and moves down to Florida and Vincent follows her. And that's how Paula is conceived. She writes that she's the result of her parents reconciliation. Oh, wow. It feels like, like this is the star she's born under, like she's born to two people who are like, we really shouldn't be married. I've already fled you once, but like, let's give it another try, I guess. Wow. And then they're together until Paula's is three. She talks about spending her childhood,

her dad is a truck driver. And so every time she saw a white truck in Panama City, Florida, which is where she grows up, she looks into the cab to see if her dad is inside of it. So he's like this phantom limb presence in her life, where she probably doesn't remember him super well if she was only three. So she's sort of constructed him. Yeah. And she sees him occasionally. But she says that when she's growing up, she'll sometimes visit him for a week in the summer in West Palm Beach, where he lives when she's older. But you know, even like the fondest memories, you know, she writes, I remember tickling his back while he read the newspaper over his morning shots of vodka. Oh, my God. And how he liked to call me button, you know, so like the best

memories are like, he's like quietly drinking and just like letting her be near him. And she talks about, you know, she as a kid will lie in bed crying about how much she misses her dad and her mom's trying to comfort her. And she says, is daddy dead? Why doesn't he call me? Why doesn't he love me? You'll see him soon, mom would say she was almost always wrong. Paula's big struggle as she's growing up is that she in middle school and high school, she goes out for cheerleader five times and she never gets put on cheerleading. But she was in she is in sixth grade cheerleading for the little sixth grade football players cheerleaders in sixth grade. It's a it's a big country. There's many different kinds of cheerleaders. And so they're having a homecoming game and her

dad promises that he's going to be there to escort her because that's what all the other dads are doing. And she's like watching all the other dads show up. And of course, her dad doesn't come. Let me show you a picture actually. Okay. Oh, well, here's little Paula. This is when she's like seven. Oh my God, look at her little bowl cut. Yeah. Everyone had that haircut. She has a little button nose. Oh, and then and here's her dad. Here's Vincent Barbieri. Okay. He's smiling. He's got his arm around two ladies. Two unnamed women. Two unnamed ladies. He's got curly hair. He's wearing like a polo shirt. One of those polo shirts that are now associated with white supremacy. But wait, really? I think they had different connotations in the 1960s.

And okay. And here's Paula, sixth Greek cheerleader being escorted to homecoming by one of the other football players because her dad didn't show up. Wow. Look at that face. She has kind of like a strained smile. To me, she like she's got a big smile on her face and her eyes are completely vacant. You know, to me, this is the look of like smile, though your heart is breaking. Yeah. And then the next picture of Paula that we have is when she's crowned the Azalea Trail Queen. Is that like a Girl Scouts thing? No, it is a Florida beauty pageant that she was in. Oh, fuck. Wow. Yeah. She looks amazing. Wow. She has like long flowing brown hair. She's wearing a sort of billowy white dress. She's holding flowers. In the earlier photo, she looks like

a cute kid. And now she's like, yes, she's a professional good-looking person. Like she looks incredible. Yeah. And then this is her when she's 17. Like she suddenly became someone who people wanted. I mean, that to me is kind of part of the story here. She writes, I grew up with the image of my dad as a Clint Eastwood character, a guy who drank two fingers of vodka for breakfast and could beat up any man anywhere. The difference was that Clint Eastwood never hit a woman. I was still an infant when dad lost it one day and pushed mom against a piece of furniture, cracking two of her ribs. Oh, my God. Then he just left us, leaving his sanitation truck company, the family's main source of income. Oh, wow. And so her mom, who's working in a law

office at the time, takes a leave and takes over the sanitation truck company because that's the main breadwinner. And so Paula as a little baby spends her days in her baby basket in the garbage truck next to her mom, who's like driving this garbage truck around, picking up trash because her husband has just beaten her up and then left. How is this not a movie in the 1980s during Dolly Parton? Yeah, good question. It's like a tough talking garbage lady. Yeah, there's still time. Two years after that, Paula's mom marries a guy named Bill. Do we think that he's going to be a good father figure? I mean, we already know it's going to be so bad. What do you think it's going to happen for Paula? I mean, I think it's because I've been reading so much about

trafficking recently that so much abuse that kids suffer is at the hands of step parents, not necessarily parents. Yeah. Yeah. Bill apparently is sweet tempered when he's not drinking, but those periods of time become less and less frequent. You know, the fresh start that Paula's mom is getting is that Vincent Barbieri drank vodka at breakfast, but Bill drinks bourbon at breakfast. So it's more of a lateral move than anything. Oh my God. And so Bill is kind of sporadically employed. Paula's mom, Marianne, is the one who is keeping the family together and making the money and supporting everybody. And so they moved to Panama City when Paula's seven, which at the time is a pretty small town. I'll just read it to you. As my father never paid

child support, mom was carrying the whole family on her salary as a supervisor with a land title company. There wasn't much money, but we may do. We lived off the garden and out of the Gulf where Bill would take us fishing. We feast on oyster shrimp and blue crabs. I could eat spaghetti and crabs every week when they were topped with mom's marsala sauce. One summer we caught loads of king mackerel, which we ate every way imaginable. To this day, I can't look at one. We lived in a town that felt safe and small. I could fish with my friends among the cranes and herons or build forts in the woods across the street. When the weather got hot, we'd invade the motels and go swimming. We called it pool hopping. When we got thrown out of one place, we just moved on to the

next. And there's good stuff. No one's childhood is pure misery. Bill gets her a bike and paints it silver so she can kind of get around town that way. Her mom makes all her dresses until she's 10 and then she starts becoming interested in fashion. She tells a story that is kind of supposed to be cute, but which really gives one pause, which is that the first jeans that she ever wore, she borrowed from her friend Sandra, and then she writes a reading circle that day. James Yon, the cutest boy in the class, kept edging over until he was sitting right next to me. I was startled when I felt him playing with my backside. What are you doing? I said. I was genuinely baffled. No boy had ever paid me a second look. And he said, Oh, I was just trying to get your

Levi tag with my pen. On our way home after school that day, James stopped and gave me a kiss, my first kiss. It was my initial glimpse at the power of fashion, which is like, that's great that you think that. So it's like your first romantic experiences with a guy touching you without your consent. It's so interesting thinking about sort of women gaining power by being conventionally attractive because it's a form of power, but it's also a target on your back for this kind of behavior to some extent. I mean, not to say that women who aren't conventionally attractive don't have these kinds of experiences because of course they do, and they're less likely to report them and be believed. But it's also like so much of the experience of being

a good looking conventionally attractive woman is shit like this, like being targeted for this kind of thing and laughing it off or telling yourself this different narrative about it. Or I guess like good looks generally thinking that it just happens to everybody. Or that it's about, you know, your appearance and like you have this power over this person because you look this way. So really you're the one who has the power in a situation like that's a story that girls are really encouraged to believe. So essentially, you know, Bill's drinking gets worse, his behavior gets worse. Paula says one night I came in for dinner and found my mother sitting quietly at the kitchen table with a cocktail in her hand. She was the

picture of dignity except for the tomato sauce dripping off her nose and the blue crab legs embedded in her hair. Mother, what happened? I cried. Bill just admitted, she calmly replied, that he hates spaghetti and crabs. She never raised her voice to him that night, never said a word. Bill was a big man, 6'2", 240 pounds. And she feared to fuel his fire. And she writes about, she lies in bed at night just listening to these fights between Bill and her mother, listening to the sounded dishes breaking, listening to like this horrible fight happening and then silence, you know, and not knowing what happened. And like, does that mean that like her mom has been hurt again? And like, if you spend your childhood lying in bed listening to adults fighting in a

way that you can't control, then to me it's a very straight line between that and imagining yourself into the backseat of the white Bronco. Like her whole existence is being a helpless witness to the violence of other people that can sometimes spiral out and affect her if she gets in the way. Right. I just think that after we tear down all the confederate statues, we should put up statues to people like her mom. Just like people who have never been noticed by history in any way, but have just like suffered silently in some kind of terrible relationship. And fucking managed to be good parents and managed to earn money anyway. I mean, this is, it's like to be doing all of this to be experiencing this level of abuse and just subjugation and somebody saying,

he hates your sort of signature cooking meal, which is like so belittling. The thing that you make because you have no money and because he won't work and because you need to be eating spaghetti and crabs every night. And then also like to be getting your kids through school and getting your kids into beauty pageants and like working at a garbage truck. Yeah. And driving a garbage truck all day. It's like the amount of strength that we don't know about because the strength is like keeping a situation from becoming so volatile that anyone else ever hears about it is, you know, like this is like the secret power holding the world together. Yeah. And she talks about, you know, her two brothers, Michael was the rebel, the one who defiantly fought back,

Vinnie was the one who ran away, and I was the joker laboring for a laugh. Wow. She's the one who's the people pleaser. She's the one who's trying to keep everyone cheerful and to be happy. She comes home from her best friend Marcia's one morning and finds her mom lying on the living room couch facing the wall and like can't see her face. And Paula's like, please look at me. And then she realized her mom has been hiding the fact that one side of her face is black and blue. Sarah, I'm going to cry. I know. Oh my God. This sucks. She writes the night before Bill had lost it again. The police finally had to knock down the front door to get in. They took Bill away but not before mom suffered a

concussion. Oh my God. Why do you say I pleaded with her? We can leave. Let's just go. We don't have to come back here ever. But for all those years mom put off moving on. I think she was afraid to lose her third marriage. She kept hoping things would get better. She kept hoping the brilliant, charming man she had fallen in love with would resurface. She was afraid finally to be alone. It wasn't until I was much older that I began to understand why it took so long for mom to leave. When you place a man at the center of your life and define your happiness through him, it's a very tough thing to let that man go. Even when he makes you feel as if you're on a roller coaster nine days out of 10, it gets hard to trust that you could ever be happy without him.

It's the patriarchy. It was the patriarchy all along. And that you look at her relationship with O.J. and I feel like anyone who looks at that and is like, well, why didn't she leave him? Why would she go back? She wants fame. She wants whatever. She wants money. Seeing all these ulterior motives in her just being like, well, I would never do that. I would never be in a relationship with O.J. Simpson. And it's like, okay, well, let's have you be born out of a reconciliation and abuse of marriage and then spend your infancy with your dad assaulting your mom and then leaving and then riding around in a garbage truck that she's driving to support the family and then see if you stay in a relationship

with O.J. Simpson 25 years later because it might be different for you if the preceding 25 years had been like that. I love recording this show on Saturday mornings because then I hang out with my friends afterwards and they're like, how's your day going? And I'm like, I'm really angry about an entertainment weekly review of a book that came out in 1997. Like I'm even more angry at that review now. Yeah, I mean, let's return to that review, right? Because that really is like the crown jewel in this kind of rhetoric. And just, yeah, her Nicole-like inability to leave O.J. is what it says, right? And that we need to forgive her for that. It's like, what kind of a moral universe do you believe in where Paula needs to be forgiven for anything? Right, right. It's also

weird because the way that we construct domestic abuse, to the extent that we hate it, it's always like this evil man and this victim woman, this kind of quivering in the corner type of woman, perfect victim archetype. And it's so much harder to deal with the way that this is generational and the way that people end up in patterns of being in abusive relationships. Like we tend to cast that as their fault somehow. Like, well, how did she end up in three abusive relationships? She must really like it or blah, blah, blah. I don't think it was a good choice for Paula to stay with O.J., but it's also just on a purely factual basis. Like, yeah, of course she did. That makes sense. We really can't look at things as isolated events.

Everything is part of the biography of multiple people, which is why this series is taking so long. And so Paula writes, what amazes me about mom is how she sustained relationships with her children. Every now and then, whenever the weather turned especially cold and stormy, my mother would skip work and let us skip school. She would cook up a big pot of spaghetti or stew, and we'd all cuddle in bed together and watch movies. That was a huggy day. Our lives finally changed in 1981 when I was set to enter high school. One day, my mother came home with a big smile and said grandly, well, I've got us a swimming pool you always wanted. By then a license realtor, she had bought 12 raw acres in the countryside, subdivided them into

one acre parcels, and sold them on installment plans. Then she traded the mortgages for a small motel called the Thomas Drive. We had not only a fabulous pool, but a new home and a separation from Bill. Sarah, this is like the end of cocoa. I'm like moist. Just emotionally obliterated, and this is only on page 135. Yeah, and I love how, you know, because another thing is like, Paula, you know, the public meets her in 1994 when she's like the girl in the Michael Bolton video. She's the professionally beautiful model who's been on magazine covers. She's done all these European campaigns. She speaks Italian. She's very cultured. The world meets her as an adult. What no one sees when Paula merges into the public eye is that she was once a 14-year-old girl for

whom the chance to move into a motel that her mom had bought and escape her abusive stepfather was like a greater miracle than could possibly be imagined. Oh my god. Now you're trying to make me cry. I'm not. I'm trying to make other people cry. And if you cry, then that's collateral damage that I feel okay about. It's never in the sad parts of the movie. It's always in the happy parts of the movie where I start crying. Yes. Oh yeah. I mean, this is like, you know, this is the part and Erin Brockovich read Mazary gives her a new car. Oh my god. This is the ending of the Dolly Parton movie. Fucking hell. Yes. And Dolly Parton gets her kids out and they get a motel. Yeah. Yeah. And to skip ahead a little bit, she writes that in high school, she suddenly has classmates who

are from Bay Point, which is a gated wealthy neighborhood in Panama City. And this is where like the fancy kids from the normal families live. And she's like, wow, like Bay Point. Like, I have no idea what Bay Point is like. She says it's a place for normal families where people didn't drink and fight and call the police every other night. And when she starts making serious modeling money, she buys her mom a house in Bay Point. Oh my god. That's the second ending of the Dolly Parton movie. God damn it. But you know, but things got better, right? They move into this motel and Paula and her mom clean the rooms and work the desk and run the place. It's a very small operation. And is Bill out of the picture at this point? As far as I know, Bill is out of

the picture. They've gotten separated. And you know, who knows how clean that separation is, but he at least seems to no longer be a clear and present nature. She starts high school, she gets really into the French impressionists. And we'll look at these pictures in our art books and think about what would it be like to be walking around in one of those paintings in Paris, France, you know, the only places she's ever been in her life outside of Panama City, basically, or to visit her cousins in Connecticut and to go to Disney World with her mom and Bill right at the start of the relationship. So like things are getting better. And then in an event that will recur on a larger scale, she gets her first real boyfriend her junior year. She gets off to kind

of a rough start because the first guy she goes out with her brothers are like, if you touch my sister, I'll break your arms. Oh my god. Great toxic stuff. Yeah. Playing the hits. But she gets her first real boyfriend junior year. And she writes he was very dramatic. Whenever I was late for my first class, which we just about every day, he'd call me on the phone and say, if you're late tomorrow, I swear, I'm just going to shoot myself. After we dated for a few weeks, I was ready to break up with him, but I kept putting it off. And then I got a phone call. My study had smashed his motorcycle into a parked truck and fractured both his legs. And so she feels like she's kind of done with the relationship. But now in the hospital, the same thing. Yeah. And what happens

is that she stays in the relationship until he's well. And then when he's all better and back in school, she breaks up with him. And her friends are like, how could you do that? Like, what a terrible thing to do? Like, why would you break up with this nice guy who just got over this accident? Oh, so she's the villain, of course. Yeah. And this is and this is her first flirtation with like trying out being like, this is not working for me. I don't like this. I need to stop. I've like put in my time and I'm ready to break up with you now. And everyone's like, how dare she? Yeah. Right. That's interesting. So when she's growing up, she really wants to get out of Florida. And I think an interesting parallel between her and OJ is that they are both people who really

came from nothing and who did escape, right? OJ got out through football. And she got out through modeling. Although I would really like to appropriate the Jenna Moroney from 30 Rock term, which is face worker, I believe. She gets out through face work. And so, you know, she keeps going out for cheerleader. That doesn't work out. She enters dance talent shows. She's like, not really making a dent there. She wants to be an actress. There's a period when she wants to be a lawyer, which is profoundly ironic. Yeah. She says my mother had worked in law offices for years. I think she would have become a lawyer herself, except that my grandfather believed that girls had no place in higher education. There's also this very offhanded

reference after her mother ran off to Florida, partly to get away from from Vincent Barbieri. She writes grandfather cartonuto was enraged by mom's departure when it was clear that she wasn't coming back. He took a bulldozer and rolled over the storage shed with all the possessions she left behind. What? So like the roots go deep. Because she left her shitty husband? Yeah. There's no precedent for women in this family being treated like they matter. Yeah. The moment when things really start to change for Paula is when she enters the sweetheart of the beach pageant, which happens in February of her junior year of high school. She enters sweetheart of the beach. She says she's never heard of a pedicure before. And all these other

girls have manicures and pedicures. She's been this like tall, skinny, flat chested tomboy who's kind of starting to come into her own basically. And she's announced first runner up at sweetheart of the beach. And the next month she enters the Azalea Trail, which is the one I showed you a picture from, which is a bigger contest. And she wins. And she writes, I remember that moment. It was the first time in my life that I felt pretty. Paula. And then fascinatingly, she writes, years later, I learned that a number of judges were concerned that I was too, quote, sexy to be a proper queen. Oh, wow. That would have seemed ridiculous to me at the time. I was still your basic brick wall. Her brothers used to sing brick house, but with the words brick

wall about her and make fun of her for being flat. I know they do not come off well in this story either. I have some grievances with Michael and Vinnie Barbieri. I was still your basic brick wall, a 32 B cup would have meant progress. But those grown ups must have spotted something I couldn't yet see in the mirror. There's something so deranged about the judges for a contest in which women are placed according to their looks. Yeah, she's too sexy. What do you think is the purpose of this event, Steve? You are literally ranking 17 year old girls on their physical attractiveness. But she should also be docked points because she's too attractive. Yeah. Like what? Yes. It's this it's this whole weird dumb myth that we have that women should be sexy, but they

shouldn't sort of want to be sexy or they shouldn't be trying. Michael Hobbes describes heteronormativity. I mean, I love it. I love it. I don't get this at all. I think that what happens in these situations is that male judges, you know, see this parade of teenage girls and presumably little baby Paula, who like doesn't know what a pedicure is, comes out and they're like, that girl made me feel sexual feelings. And that means that she's being sexy. And it's her fault. And she must be penalized. And it's like, you're attracted to her. Like that's you, man. Like this is your issue. Yeah. There's a difference between catalyzation and intent. I mean, I'm glad she's I'm glad this is happening for her because like she deserves all of the good things. I mean, yeah, it just it's like

she ran out of, you know, this burning building that was her family as she was growing up and then into this world that was supposed to be an escape for her, which is the world of pageantry and then of modeling. And wouldn't you know it? It turns out to be a bigger burning building. Yeah. Yeah. But I mean, things are from then on, from this point forward, like things, she's suddenly kind of like tied down to the fast track. Because then her senior year, she wins sweetheart of the beach. And then she goes with her friends, Terry and Debbie to a fashion show at the Panama City Mall. Because they're like, maybe you'll get discovered. And she's like, oh, yeah, whatever. And then apparently someone says, stop that girl. And it's Mary Lou Ton of Mary Lou's model school in

Pensacola. I really love that name. Mary Lou's model school in Pensacola. So she's discovered by Mary Lou of Mary Lou's model school in Pensacola. And Mary Lou takes her to what she describes as something big in Atlanta, which turns out to be the four day international model talent competition also known as the face finders Olympics. I did not know such a thing existed, but I'm not surprised. She goes to the face finders Olympics and kind of sweeps the thing. She there's a simulated photo shoot. There's a runway walk event. And she wins those categories. She says they talk with the top headhunters from Ford and Prestige and Elite, the cream of the cream. She's being told she should go to Europe and model their first and then come back and be like the

new European girl who everyone's interested in. They have a much higher class of perverts in the world. Oh, we will get to that. And so she is offered free tickets to Paris. She's 17 years old. Her dream. Yes. She's like, I get to go to the Louvre. The Impressionists, the Water Lilies, Notre Dame Cathedral, like, yes, France. And so she goes to Paris. Yeah. So what does she find when she gets to Paris? What happened? So it's June of 1984. She's just finished high school. Who does this remind us of? Oh, Nicole. Yeah. Every woman in the story is going to have a lot more in common with the other women than than the public maybe tended to realize at the time, you know, just, yeah, she's like, just out of high school, walking into the grown up world on

wobbly little baby deer legs. And her mom has scraped together $300 worth of spending money. Oh, wow. And sent her off to Paris. And she says that she and Mary Lou from Mary Lou's modeling school in Pensacola. Thank you. Have been won over by Claude Haddad, one of the more prominent agents we've met at the IMTC, the Face Finder Olympics. So she and Mary Lou fly to Paris. Mary Lou is going to help her get settled in and then fly back to Pensacola. And the first whisper that things are maybe going to not go as planned comes when Claude says, baby, your apartment is not ready yet. You must stay with me. It's okay. I take care of you. Oh, no, trafficking. Yes. Trafficking warning signs. Yes. Say more about that.

Well, again, I mean, as we discussed last week, there's no mystery to where trafficking is happening. It's where people do not have power for themselves. And so when you have an industry where it's a lot of young women, many of whom have not traveled before, many of whom have not traveled internationally before, and they're relying on a group of mostly older men, mostly wealthy older men to provide their food, their lodging, their schedule, their income. They're in a country where they don't speak the language. They don't know how to get around freely. Yes. I'm not wild about the term trafficking, but it's like when you think about an exploitative situation, it is an industry that does not provide mechanisms for people to point out wrongdoing. And that's exactly the

world that she's entering. Right. And so Paula writes that things feel a little weird, but she writes, always fine until Mary Lou returned to Florida a few days later. Within hours, the locks had disappeared from all the doors. A big problem I realized when Claude walked in on me in the bath and refused to leave until I started crying. Oh my God. Claude's phone blocked calls to the states. I felt trapped. Oh my God. It's no big deal, said Felicia, who's another model, as though she were some jaded woman of the world. That's just him. Still fighting jet lag. I slept soundly that night. It was dark when I snapped awake to see Claude at the foot of my bed, holding up the blankets to gaze at me in my t-shirt and panties, ready to climb aboard. Claude. When I cried out,

Claude dropped to his knees and served up a practiced line. I love you. You have made me crazy in love with you, he swore. Do you have a boyfriend? Have you ever been touched by a man before? The guy was completely nuts, so I thought. I burst into tears and somehow prevailed upon Claude to leave. And then the next day, he, again, just is giving her the spiel and when he goes into the kitchen for coffee, she says she basically grabs all her stuff and runs out into the street. Good. Yes. Yeah. What else would she have done, right? That's kind of the only solution. It's not like she's going to be able to stay and make the situation better by appeasing him. We know that doesn't work. Yeah. That's very brave too. Yes. I mean, she's going out into a foreign country

where not a lot of people speak English. She doesn't understand any of the government systems that could help her. Yes. That's a dope thing to do. She's 17 years old. Yeah. Yeah. No, this is like action Paula. I think she writes, not knowing how to use the pay phone outside, I asked the first man I encountered for help. My high school French must have failed me as the man grabbed his croc and started chasing me. Oh my God. Panicked. I ran into a pharmacy and jabbered at the people in hysterical English. They promptly threw me out. Finally, I found a good Samaritan who helped to connect me with Eileen Ford of the Ford agency in New York. I didn't know who else to call. She directed me to her colleague, John Luke, Claude's competition in Paris. And luckily,

John Luke doesn't try anything with Paula and gives her an apartment to live in with another model where he's not going to be like crawling into her bed all the time. That's like an actual miracle, though, that she found like she managed to find someone in Paris. Yeah. Not a sex pest, as the British say. And then I looked up Claude Haddad. And if you just like type his name into Google, all these other stories come up of just other models, you know, mostly who are teenagers in Europe in the 80s were like, Oh yeah, he climbed into my bed with me. I woke up and he was in bed with me, you know, because there were no locks on the door. I found a guitar and I put that against the door, so it falls down every time he like came into my room at night. And then I would just

like hide in the bathroom. You know, like this is this, he was doing this apparently with a lot of girls, which means Harvey style that other people in the industry knew about it. So this is from a book called Bad and Beautiful inside the dazzling and deadly world of supermodels. To me makes it sound like the supermodels are dangerous by author named Ian Halperin who writes, During a one on one interview, CBS 60 minutes journalist Diane Sawyer raked Haddad over the coals. Sawyer asked Haddad about the accusations against him. Amazingly, Haddad acted as if he had done nothing wrong. At times he even seemed proud of his sexual conquests. He bragged to Sawyer about how he was able to attract young beautiful girls. When Sawyer asked him how he felt waking

up each morning in an apartment full of models, Haddad gave a cocky grin. He called his models flowers. Oh my God. Smell them. He said, That's it. Just smell the perfume. Diane Sawyer asked Haddad if he had ever resorted to rape or sexual blackmail. Haddad's response was evasive. He said he couldn't recall but added it's possible. Everyone could read between the lines. Sawyer had finally nailed one of fashion's all time sleaze balls. Oh my God. Which is like kind of, but it's like this interview, this is in the late 80s. And it is one of the things I think about a lot about the Me Too movement is this, you know, this attitude that you see sometimes in media about it of like, who could have imagined that this rampant of abuse was

taking place in so many industries. And it's like, we knew, like this was on television, like people saw this. And it's just, it's, there are many cases where, you know, the public didn't have full information or where they lacked crucial pieces of information. But there are also a lot of cases where the information was right there in front of us and we just weren't absorbing it. Yes. So Claude, despite the fact that she's escaped him, he has kept most of her spending money, the $300 her mom scraped together for quote, safekeeping, which classic Claude, right? So Paula decides that the cheapest meal she can get in Paris is baguette and brie. She's lying in bed like lonely and traumatized eating brie and baguette every day. And of course immediately

starts getting criticized for putting on weight because she's five nine and up to 130 pounds, which I believe is underweight for that height. But you know, wow. And this again, this again is like not that funny, but in context, it's funny somehow that she's getting jobs, but she's like pretty unhappy putting on more weight than the clients necessarily want her to have. And so finally she gets, you know, ends up at a dinner party in a fashionable neighborhood where she's going to, you know, kind of move and shake and and meet some people. And she meets the host of the dinner party. She describes him as a gentle man with a strong accent who offers her a glass of champagne. And she's like, no, I don't drink. I don't smoke. But he doesn't think that that makes

her a hayseed, which is what she's afraid of and is being very charming and sweet to her. And that's Roman Polanski. I knew that was going to be him because you mentioned him earlier. You the most amazing part of this is that according to Paula, like if if we take Paula's account at face value, he was like the first safe guy that she met. Like, really? I mean, you know, who knows? Like, I think you have to leave the door open to like, maybe there's stuff going on that they just was, you know, he's his career matters more than Claude Hadads. You can see there being maybe stuff that wasn't talked about. But you know, if we're going to believe Paula, which is what I'm doing, then she is in this world where like the safest man he can find is Roman Polanski.

And he doesn't seem to have tried anything with her. Roman Polanski takes her to Italy to hang out while he works on the movie Pirates. And he takes Paula to the Sistine Chapel. He doesn't try to assault her. It's like, it doesn't mean that he's like a fantastic guy, but it means like in the world that Paula's in. It's like, yes, finally, Roman Polanski come save me. Not the role I was expecting him to play in the story. Yeah. And I mean, that's how life is when there's just that little safety. You're like, I am clinging to the person who's been nice to me so far. Yeah. There's still, I think, general creepiness here, but on the scale of the things Roman Polanski is accused of.

And on the scale of what Paula has experienced so far. I mean, also not just in modeling, but with like men from her family. Like when was the last time a guy, her dad's age, did a dad thing with her? Like her dad's not going to take her to a museum. That's never happened. That's never going to happen. So you just take what you can get and go with Roman Polanski. It's also interesting because it's so wrapped up in her looks. Like the evidence is not that this is a guy who's sort of looking for wayward, vulnerable youths and like in a genuine way, mentoring them and big brother, big sister. And I'm just a nice guy. Like it's clear that like her looks are somewhere in here as far as his motivations are concerned. But he doesn't appear in her telling to have done anything

with that particularly. Right. And then it's like, I imagine that he has this attitude of, you know, I'm dating an adult woman at this time or I'm in another relationship. But I just, I mean, kind of what Claude Haddad said, right? They're flowers. I like to have beautiful young girls around and they're like flowers for me. I can imagine him feeling that way, which is like weird and gross, but like worked out fine for Paula given the context of the situation. You know, it's just, it's like there is no shard of ideal world hidden in here. It's just degrees of like the weirdness of this system you find yourself in. And how do you make it work for you? If I found out my boyfriend was like showing around like, oh, like the Danish national gymnastics

team is in town. And one of the teammates is a 16 year old boy and like, I'm just showing him what Seattle is like. And we're going on bike rides. I'd be like, the fuck you are. This is fucking weird. There's no reason you need to be hanging out with that person at all. No, I think that's good. I think that's a good bright line to have in a relationship. Yes. So she's hanging out with Roman Polanski. And she's like, well, this is the best that Europe appears to be capable of offering me. Jesus Christ. I think when she was at the face finders Olympics, people were like, oh, you should go to Japan. And now she's like, yeah, Japan. And so she goes to Tokyo. And she says, I knew I'd made the right choice as soon as the higher card dropped me at my Tokyo apartment. I

had cable television. Got the lowest bar. Yeah. And this is where things kind of start to work out for her. She's working every day for months. She's making commercials where she's getting paid potentially like $40,000 per commercial if you can't residuals like she's. Oh yeah, Paula. Yes. Yes. Get it Paula. Get it Paula. Like if you're at this point in the story and you're begrudging Paula Barbieri making money, that kind of money off of modeling, then I just have nothing left for you. I have no more arguments. It's I've done my part. And so she decides that she's, you know, originally she was going to spend the summer modeling and then go to college. And then she decides, you know, I'm going to I'm going to stick with this modeling thing. Like this is

working out for me. And then she goes to New York in November of 1984. And I have a little story for you that is going to tie in with our recent gangs episode. Oh, the cab driver was losing patience. Fresh from the airport, I'd asked him to take me to Zoli, my new agency in New York at Lexington Avenue and East 56th Street. But as the cabbie slowed to drop me off, I saw a bunch of young guys in white loitering by the corner with their bicycles. I'd read about New York City street gangs. And my long plane ride had me just about hallucinating anyway. Please go around the block again, I beg the driver for the eighth time. Lady, you're here, you need to get out, he said. But you don't understand, I said, my voice quavering. There's a gang on the corner

there. And I'm just a girl by myself. Lady, the cabbie said, weirdly, those are pizza delivery guys. Now please get out of my car. Maybe they were all pizza delivery guys the whole time. What if all of the gangs and the warriors were all from competing pizza places? That would explain why their outfits were so on point. She's up to 140 pounds. Everyone's like, let's put you on a diet. She's like, no, I feel really good. I feel like this is a good weight for me. Yeah, let Paula be what she wants to weigh. Let Paula be Paula. But things are going well for her. She's getting work. She's like, I'm going to stay in this industry where I can have my own place to live. I'm making my own money. I'm sending money home to my family. I don't have

to live with my mom in whatever relationship she might end up in. I don't have to have my brothers threatening to break the arms of guys who go out with me. I don't know. I just love that she got to have this degree of independence. Right. For a couple of years anyway. Yeah. Yeah. And just as abusive as the industry was, she was able to make real money and the kind of money that she could change her family's life with and all of the family stuff persisted, because I don't know. I just feel like so many more girls deserve this kind of a chance and don't get it. So many of the other people that we've talked about. Yeah. And so begins the next big phase of her life and her first love, who is Dolph Lundgren. What the fuck?

How many 90s-ish cameos is the story going to have? You have no idea. But I will jump ahead a little bit and say that the relationship becomes fatally fractured because he cheats on her with his ex-girlfriend, Grace Jones. Wait, the Grace Jones? The Grace Jones. Paula got cheated on with Grace Jones. Wow. I mean, you know. I mean, I guess if you're in a relationship with someone and they have to cheat on you with someone, I guess I would understand more if it was Grace Jones. Yeah. I don't know if that makes it better or worse. But then also you're like, what the fuck am I going to do if my boyfriend is still hung up on Grace Jones? Like, what

chance do I have? Is that relationship positive in her life? I mean, is it not physically abusive, I guess? Yeah. I mean, this is right. We're like at the point where the bar for positive is like not physically abusive, which is like, she meets him during a photo shoot with him and two other models and they're all in bed together strategically covered by a sheep. Of course. He's like six, five. He's hot as breakfast. He's hot as breakfast. He's just pulled out of marble. Yeah. She says that there's this immediate attraction. Well, yeah. Because he's tall, flungering. Because they're both super attractive. Yeah, they're both unb- Oh, here, I have a picture, actually.

I'm hoping he's shirtless. If I looked like that, I would be shirtless at all times. He is sleeveless. Oh, yeah. He's shirtless in one of them. Okay. Thank God. So here they are together. Oh, wow. There's Dolph and Paula. He's huge. He's huge. His face is like an order of scale bigger than her face. Paula doesn't often have serious boyfriends, but when she does, they have enormous heads. Wow. It's like a Photoshop disaster. But she looks gorgeous. Yeah, she looks great.

And then here they are on the beach in Panama City, Florida. Oh, shirtless doll. God, she just looks like a smurf next to this redwood of a human being. Yeah, she does. And she's got like her whole body draped around just his upper arm. I can see why she likes him. I mean, there's something really appealing about that. He's big. He's buff. Yeah. He's Swedish, so he's probably like super socialist. Interestingly, eventually, he's like, you know,

in Sweden, all men have mistresses and it's normal, which is like an interesting version of the, you know, okay, just as all men cheat, but Dolph does well in Sweden. Don't use Scandinavia for evil. We know, we know what goes on in Scandinavia, Dolph. That's easily look up a bowl. Nice try. So they do this photo shoot together. There's this, there's this instant attraction. She writes, I didn't try to kid myself. I knew I'd gone head over heels, but I put Dolph off. That's hard to say. I put Dolph off

once he got my phone number and started asking me out. Besides, I had all the work I could handle. I needed to focus on my career. Dolph kept calling over the next month and I kept turning him down. I was working in Miami one afternoon, miserable with the flu, when I got a call from Tom Hahn at the time of Booker for my Los Angeles modeling agency. He confirmed me on a job in Malibu the next morning. And she's like, I'm too sick. I have the flu. Like, I don't want to work. And he's like, listen, they're paying you $10,000 for the day to do a simple kissing shot with this

guy. Just get on the plane and rest up on the way and they'll have a car there to take you to the job. She writes, that flight was one of the worst travel or deals of my life. I had a fever and the sweats and I barely found the strength to collapse into the car at LAX. In Malibu, I met the photographer and told him I couldn't do a kissing picture. I'm going to get the guy so sick, it's not fair. The photographer smiled and said, that's okay, just go and tell the client, he's out there by the beach. I'm sure we can work something out. I straggled out to the beach and there at Water's Edge stood Dolph, life is life.

I couldn't get a date, sorry, I couldn't get a date with you, he explained. So I figured I'd have to pay you to come to see me. Whoa. She says from that day on, as long as it lasted, Dolph Lundgren would be my world, my life. And it's like, but you were sick and he tricked you. You can see how their relationship had its salad days and was like working, you know, that there was like this infatuation and like good stuff happening and that it was exciting for her and he's gorgeous and like all that is true, but like from the beginning,

like he's not taking seriously your needs as a human being. Yeah, I mean, it's one of those stories that shows up in romantic comedies a lot where if she wasn't infatuated with him, this would be like a really like huge warning sign story. I have to pay you to kiss me and it's now like a weird professional obligation, like with contracts and stuff to kiss me. And you're like going through my agent and like tricking me into flying here when I'm sick to see like, I guess, you know, she has the fucking flu, like you shouldn't be doing anything but drinking ginger ale and watching a lot in order when you have the flu.

It is interesting how so many of the cute stories in her book are like deeply troubling. Right. And it's just, and if your context is like, if that's as good as it gets, then like, yeah, I guess that that's, you know, it's just all about what you believe you deserve to ask for to expect from the world. And so, you know, and then after that, you know, things are good for a while. And then essentially, like he starts to find things to be critical about. He's like, my friends like you, my family loves you, everything is wonderful. But do you realize that we go out for every meal and that you don't cook at all? That's, that's what he seizes on? Yeah. And so she sits down and reads Betty Crocker's cookbook and learns how to cook through

trial and error. She's like, you're right, I need to learn how to cook. I'm sorry. She also can't keep up with the amount of drugs that he apparently is using at the time. Oh, like steroids and stuff or like fun drugs like cocaine? Fun drugs. Oh, okay. She's not really into that. She doesn't like being around people or who are high. And she says, when you grow up with an alcoholic father and an alcoholic stepfather, it takes a glamour out of drug use. No fucking kidding. Yeah. On the other hand, I knew that Grace had done a lot of drugs with Dolph. For him, it was, if you love me, you'll do them too. So I tried for a while to keep up, but there was no way. Dolph was so much bigger than I was.

Yeah, it's like dosing a horse. Yeah, they're clearly entering this phase of the relationship where it's like, we've seen this before, we've seen this recently. It's not that she's doing anything wrong. It's that he has to continually find fault with her. And so he cheats on her with Grace Jones, and then he tries to make it up by sending her three days in red roses every day for weeks. And finally, you know, he confesses and comes clean. He says, yes, I cheated on you with my ex-girlfriend. And then he writes that it happened because I was getting too possessive. I was losing my individuality. I must learn, Dolph wrote, not to fully give yourself to anyone unless you're perfectly sure. Always keep a part of you to yourself, which makes you more mysterious

and attractive anyway. What? And unfortunately, never trust a man. He closed with Paula, try a smile and do a little happy face with his signature. Literally, you should smile more classic. Yeah. And at that point, she's like, okay, I'm done. Like, I'm done with this relationship. Like, I can't keep being cheated on and blamed for it. And luckily, Dolph Lundgren doesn't get arrested for anything immediately afterwards. So she's able to move on. So Thanksgiving of 1991 rolls around. She's at the gym and she meets this guy named Dean Hamilton, who just seems like a nice normal guy. And he wants a family, which is very important to her. Did she finally meet a nice guy? Well, oh, no, here's what happens. Oh, no, two weeks after they first meet, they fly to Vegas

and get married in a 24 hour wedding chapel. And then the next day, he calls her mother and asks for a list of her assets. What? And then comes to Paula and says, hey, I need $8,000. What? And she's like, great. So you married me so that you could get a loan so that you don't have to lose your house is her rate of the situation. And this is to me is the classic Paula feeling more ashamed than anger. I gave Dean the $8,000 anyway. Oh, man, since paid me back. Then we filed for annulment. Okay. So after that, she just focuses on work. And she writes work became my refuge more than ever. Off I went to Miami or St. Martin, wherever the booking took me. For months, I barely paused to catch my breath. If I slowed down, I knew I'd have to face my loneliness, or scarier

still get involved with another man. On one of my rare afternoons off, I was catching up on my errands tooling around the freeways in my Toyota 4 runner. As I turned off busy Wilshire Boulevard in Westwood and into my Valley parking stand, a black Mercedes pulled in behind me. A handsome bullnecked man jumped out and greeted me. Marcus Allen, the NFL running back, whom I'd met years before. What? Remember Marcus Allen? Yeah, what? He is part of this again? Yeah, remind us who Marcus Allen is. He's a guy, also a football player who Nicole dated after she left OJ. Yeah, which he denies happened, but everyone else said that he and Nicole had a relationship. He's younger than OJ. He's kind of his protege in a way. People describe him as kind of OJs,

the next OJ. And she writes, we never dated, but Marcus was one of those upbeat people who'd always had a smile for me. We exchanged phone numbers and said goodbye. Not an hour later, as I relaxed in my apartment, Marcus called. He was with a friend who was in the middle of a rough divorce, he said. Did I know someone who might want to go out with him? So that's how she meets OJ. Yeah, and then she goes to his house. Her first warning sign is that he's downstairs chatting her up, and then this woman who apparently was hanging around with him before Paula showed up like comes and is like, where'd you disappear to, honey? And she's like, hmm, that's weird. But then, you know, he, well, let me let me read you. I want her to have a cute story that doesn't have

She says at one point after Marcus had quietly vanished, I winced from some shoulder pain. When I've been under stress, it seems to collect right there. Hold on, OJ said, let me get you some mineral ice. This stuff works great for my knees. Oh, great. I thought is OJ prepared to rub the salvin under my sleeveless silk shirt. Now he's going to try to get fresh. I made no move to stop him. Maybe I was subconsciously testing the waters to see what would happen, to see if I'd have to dust off my right hook. But OJ was a perfect gentleman. He kept massaging that one spot on my shoulder. As he talked about how alone he was, I felt comfortable and connected to him. I mean, I guess it's a story without red flags. Well, and then he immediately starts inviting her to come

to Hawaii with him. Oh, and she's like, no, I'm not going to go to Hawaii with you. But then he goes to Hawaii and is calling her up from there and says, I was on the beach having margaritas with Marcus and Catherine, who's Marcus's wife, just sitting there in paradise. And now I'm locked in my hotel room on the phone with you for two and a half hours. Do you realize that you should be here? I don't understand why you're not here. I just can't get you out of my mind. What she does is she's like, well, let's, you know, I'm not, I'm not feeling super trusting right now, but like, let's keep talking on the phone. And she says that they talk every day, sometimes two or three times a day. He's smart and perceptive and interesting and interested

in her. And he's telling her, you know, of all about his version of the way that his divorce from Nicole is gone, which is, you know, in his telling, very sad for him. She writes, as the days passed, our mutual crush became a full-fledged infatuation. OJ and I actually got to know each other to really like each other over the phone. There was a sexual tension crackling over those wires, but it had a light quality. Physicality wasn't possible. And for me, that was a great relief. I'd never communicated like this with a man before. OJ held nothing back. He seemed a man who had nothing to hide. How could I help trusting him? Man, it's so much sadder now that we know a lot of what he's telling her is lying.

Yeah. Yeah. I mean, we also know that he's the kind of person that speaks for five minutes on the phone. You can put it down and walk away and come back. Right. You do wonder sort of how much of this is like him unburdening himself versus actually showing interest in her. But also, I don't know, if he's infatuated with her, maybe he really is interested in her. One of the things that people say about OJ and that I feel like is something that I hear a lot about people who have this kind of very public facing charisma is that when he was with you, the sun was shining on you. I imagine that this predates his football career. I mean, I know it does because we've talked about how one of his hobbies as a teenager was like stealing

other guy's girlfriends. He's always had this kind of weaponized charm and that's always been maybe the thing that he was as good at as he was at football. I think you just look at everything that Paula has been through and all of her interactions with men to this point and just how she used to look at every white truck in Panama City thinking it might be her dad and all she ever wanted was just some man to treat her like she was worthy of being taken care of. One would imagine, one would like to imagine based on how beautiful she was and how important she was to an industry that we think of as making people powerful and being about the power of the model. I think we would like to imagine that she wouldn't have been in such a state of emotional

starvation but I think that she was. And also the fact that it was over the phone too that it's, it might not have felt as looks-based to her, that it felt like somebody really liked her as a person which is also probably something that she's craving. Right because like how many experiences has she had of that and just yeah and then she's saying you know she's never connected with a man like that before. I mean that that doesn't mean that what she felt wasn't real it just means that she had such low expectations. Yeah. That's my Paula material for now. Oh that's it? Yeah. So we've, I like that we've gotten to the start of the Bronco chase but we haven't finished it yet. Yeah we said we'd get to it. We didn't say we'd finish it. It's also, I mean it's funny because

we keep saying this phrase but like I feel like chase is kind of a misnomer. It was really more of a motorcade. Yeah it was going like 30 miles an hour right? From the time that that OJ was detected inside the car like that he wasn't being chased he was more being followed. Yeah. But yeah we're leaving Paula watching CNN trying to telepathically project herself into the back of the white Bronco to keep OJ safe and apparently it worked. I guess so. I don't know but I guess we'll find out. I think people know that he survived that day. Mike I really appreciate your commitment to not spoiling anything but I think we can say with certainty that OJ made it. Okay so who are we talking about next time? We're going back to Marsha. Oh we're going back to Marsha next

time? Yay. What are you excited to learn about? Yeah I want to hear about Marsha's wall. I want to hear about Marsha's divorce. I want to hear about Marsha's kids and Marsha's family and how she survives as this trial becomes a trial. Thank you for wanting to know about Marsha's wall. Just to add to the anger at a more than 20 year old entertainment weekly review, one of the other phrases that stuck out to me when I was editing that episode was that in that review of Paula's book they said that she recites the pedestrian details of her life. Yeah what the fuck is that about? How many? Yeah I mean we've all dated Dolph Lundgren so who cares? We've all been like a teenage model on our own in Paris France being assaulted

by the guy who was supposed to take care of us and like running out into the street at 17 years old. Yes being rescued by Roman Polanski. I know it's like I'm sorry like why do we have to argue that Paula's life isn't interesting or that no one should hear about it like I feel very edified from having read this book. I also think nobody's life is pedestrian that's like a mean way to describe anybody's life. No one has a boring life for all human beings. Yeah yeah I feel like I don't know I have I want to close with a moral of some kind but like I guess like don't call anyone's life pedestrian is a pretty good one. Yeah and when you think somebody's life sounds pedestrian imagine Dolly Parton doing it.