You're Wrong About - The Wardrobe Malfunction

Episode Date: September 19, 2019

Our first live show! Mike tells Sarah about Janet Jackson, the 2004 Super Bowl Halftime show and the 9/16ths of a second that destroyed her career. Digressions include Puff Daddy, Jessica Simpson and Edward James Olmos. Like all positive developments regarding this show, performing live is something we feel weird about and so we spent the first few minutes talking about it!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

I got a highball, the energy drink they sell at Whole Foods. Ooh! Yeah. The off-brand LaCroix. Uh, it's LaCroix for dirtbags. Welcome to You're Wrong About, the show, wait. Welcome to You're Wrong About, a podcast hosted by two people with complimentary anxieties. Are you just saying that because that's what we were talking about like 10 seconds ago?

I mean, it's partly, but also it's, I would say it's true generally. I agree. Yes. I would say that we're both highly concerned about various aspects of making this show and life, but in a way that allows us to come together and balance, you know, the way that Thor and the raccoon balance Thor and, I'm Thor and you're, you're Bradley Cooper. Yeah, I was wondering who was going to be who in that scenario. Okay.

We both know I'm Thor. You know that I wear shawl collar sweaters to signify the fact that I'm at peace with myself. I am Michael Hobbs. I'm a reporter for The Huffington Post. I'm Sarah Marshall and I'm working on a book about the Satanic Panic. So I guess as our listeners can tell from the slightly shaggy opening to this, that this episode is a little bit different than usual, we did our first live show last week

and this is going to be that live show. And we're still loopy. Yes. And we, and we, we want to talk about what it was like for those of you who, who weren't able to join us, although it did feel like you were there in spirit. It really did. Yeah. I mean, I think it wouldn't be a you're wrong about episode if we didn't talk about how

weird we feel about something that we've done. Our feelings. Yes. Well, the weirdness here is that I don't feel weird about it, which is weird for me, right? The weirdness is that I don't feel weird. I feel fine. And I really enjoyed doing it.

And essentially we performed this at XOXO, which is this really wonderful, inclusive festival for independent online creators. Yeah, it was great. And before we get into the experience of doing the show, yeah, what was your experience of the festival like? Fabulous. I mean, I, I think you can kind of tell in the recording that like I was pretty nervous because I've never done anything like this before.

I could tell you were nervous in the first like 45 seconds, but then it felt like you, you didn't sound so nervous after that. I didn't really hear nerves in your voice. I was tense. And then I basically just went limp and blacked out so I don't actually remember much of the performance. I don't remember that much of it either. But I think the reason I was nervous the day of and the reason I feel weird about live

shows generally is that there's a very limited way that audiences can communicate to performers, right? That like an audience can boo, an audience can clap, an audience can laugh. There's a couple other ones like you mentioned backstage, the one in old sitcoms where they be like, ooh, like if somebody insults somebody else's mom. That was more of a ghost noise. It's, ooh. You know, it's like when there's the suggestion that maybe the parents are going to have sex

tonight. Yeah. Yeah. That the severs are going to get it on. Well, I mean, this is my thing is that is that I think, you know, as a member of a crowd, the only messages that you can send are like very basic, right? It's basically like thumbs up, thumbs down, ha ha. Withering silence.

Yeah. I mean, what I was nervous about the day of was that like you become the kind of show that just does like zingy one liners or like sort of hacky jokes or like you start gearing yourself toward what will elicit a reaction from an audience, which is different than what will elicit a reaction from like someone who's doing the dishes or just a podcast listener who's kind of listening to it in the background as they do their commute or something. Yeah. I mean, it's interesting.

You're right. I haven't thought about that. But if we're doing it just the way we're doing it now, both sitting in our closets today because there's leaf blowing happening outside of your building for some unknown reason, you know, then like we can be speaking to a much broader range of moods maybe. And I think of our listeners as being like someone driving across North Dakota in the middle of the night. Yeah.

Yeah. And you're right. It narrows. It narrows the emotional range of it maybe. Right. And also I'm used to having you as my audience, right? Like I'm used to saying things that like jokes that I think you will find funny or details that I think will resonate with you, whereas broadening that out like the goal to a large

group of however many people were there is like, well, you have to go to a more broad kind of place, right? Because I know like the little satanic details that you will really like, whereas a crowd of a couple hundred people, I don't know what like is going to catch them. So I have to do something like really broad, right? So it's like, it's like the intellectual equivalent of slapstick. Yeah. Well, I don't know.

I think I think that I in ways that only suggest I'm less, I have less of a history of emotional stability than you. I am more used to being a performer. Well, none of this, I mean, none of this like means anything, right? I mean, this is all just like the tape that was playing in my head the day of. No, it doesn't. It doesn't mean anything, but it's just interesting. And I just think it's it's nice to to let people in on this process.

It's also interesting because our like mental experiences of the live show are so different because mine was we had to be done at exactly 745. And so the way that we were sitting, there was a clock right behind Sarah, which I couldn't see. And I didn't know if it was there or if you could see it. So a few times I was like sort of whipping my head around like a horse. Yeah. But I like every time I looked at you really intently, I was actually looking

at the clock really. Oh, now you tell me I'm just thinking of like, oh, shit. I have 45 pages of notes that you made my mom print out. And so I think, I mean, if you listen to the recording, I am speaking really fast. Part of that is because I want to hit the time mark. And then part of that is just because that's who I am as a person. You talk fast because you're excited about. Yes, I mean, there's also there's also that in there.

So I mean, I also want to say that like I'm like doing the thing that I always do with like ruining something that was fundamentally good. Like I had a really great time with the live show. I wasn't nervous once we started. You're you're not ruining it. You're just adding you're doing your great British bake off thing and adding an icing of pure anxiety, which will only improve the whole over. Because I think I just say like the anxiety really throws it into high relief.

I just love this. This is well done. Well done, Michael. So I don't know. I should probably stop ruining it now. But I think that's like all the context for the performance. I should also say that there's we had a couple of visuals, like four or five slides or something in the live show.

And there's one right at the beginning where it says the wardrobe malfunction where we didn't actually say it out loud, but you'll just have to use context clues. Yeah, I guess that's what people are going woo about. Yeah, that's what I'm excited to hear what would people think of this version of the show so that as I continue to drag Michael out into my own comfort zone, perhaps a little more, you know, if you would like us to come to your town, then let us know and I will try and drag Mike there. Hi, everybody.

Everybody here is OK. So welcome to you're wrong about the show where we're in front of a live audience for the first time ever. Hi, everybody. Hi. So for those of you who don't listen to the show, Andy mentioned, we go through some things that are a little bit misremembered and a little bit. You those things that you kind of remember, but like you don't really remember the details.

You're like, wasn't that person shitty? But like, not actually that shitty. There was a bimbo and there was a park chase. There's always a bimbo somehow. It's a bimbo, it's always a bimbo. And so the way that it works is we sort of switch off where I research one week and then Sarah researches the other week. This makes it much easier for us to have two weeks to research each episode.

So it's my turn this week and we're going to be walking you guys through an event that is misremembered and I think it's worth talking about what actually happened and how we got it wrong, which is. So. I know there's some people here who like aren't from the United States. This this phrase means nothing to them. Photo means nothing to them. Jump to conclude.

Even though there's an X right here and what it's for. So, Sarah, do you want to walk us through exactly? I'm going to tell you what I think I remember, because you have been discussing this with all of my friends around me this week. And I'm not I'm supposed to stay in the dark, but I'll tell you what I remember from when it happened. It was 2004. Yes.

OK, it was a Super Bowl, which I did not watch because I was a 15 year old girl. So at the moment this happened, I was probably writing Newsy's fan fiction. Thank you. And my understanding is that Justin Timberlake and Janet Jackson were doing the halftime show and at the time it was like, wow, Janet Jackson, a living legend, is appearing with this guy who I remember for having cornrows once in the 90s. And he ripped off the cup of her.

Boosty a boosty a her beautiful. I think looks kind of latex boosty a a word that we all use all the time. And it corresponded with the lyric he was singing. And then they went to blacks. It was like, is it planned? Is it on purpose? Yes. And then it was just it was and my parents got both time and news week

at the time, and it was in both of them over several weeks. So that that was the metric for news. And I just remember that like her career just kind of was tainted by that and that the network was fine or the NFL was fine. And everyone was kind of like Janet, like women do, strolled along and ruined all our lives for no reason. Yes, so I'm guessing based on the fifty five previous episodes we have done. But it was not entirely the woman's fault, not entirely spoilers.

We're already spoiling this. We can leave now. OK, so what happened? So I think the first thing to mention is, you know, for people that didn't grow up in the United States, how big of a deal this was? Janet Jackson was the most searched, like person item term on the internet for two years, not the year this happened for two years. She is to this day, the most Teavode event in history until now. Teavode subscriptions. Teavode was new.

This is 2004. So Teavode was like a new, sexy, cool thing. This reminds me of a conversation I was having with your boyfriend right before we started doing this show where I was like, we were listening to a bright eye song that was playing in the bar. And I was like, I remember hearing this when I was shopping at Urban Outfitters. And I was like, that was a time capsule of a son. Yes. And so is that the most Teavode event. Yes. It was also sponsored by AOL.

I feel like it's like a who-who of a bunch of things that we all feel weird about now. Who's not? So it's also the founder of YouTube credits this event with the inspiration for YouTube that after the boost. Yeah, is pulled off. Oh, my God. Jen, it's the after Justin Timberlake rips the boost. Yeah, off he was trying to search on the internet. The internet was also young at that time.

And he thought, I want to see this boob again. I wish I wish there was a website where I could go see that boob again. And he says that he started coding that night to create YouTube. Now, why did we make that social network movie? Well, we could have made a movie about a loner guy like seeing kind of cast this boob for a second, being like, there's got to be a better way. What if we could connect horny young guys with boobs at any time? And another thing, and I think a much bigger legacy of this,

and we will get into the reasons for this, is that after this event, the next six hosts of the super time or Super Bowl, halftime show, super time, halftime, halftime show. What's interesting is that, and I think this, I mean, obviously, looking back, this is not a coincidence, but the next six performers at the halftime show were all male and five of them were white. And so this speaks to we're beginning to get to sort of what is the actual legacy of this event and how big of a deal it was.

So the way that it happened, as many things do, it all started with CBS trying to reach a younger demographic. Because we have all forgotten about this now, but the Super Bowl halftime show for decades was a marching band. It was like not hot shit. It was like this completely random thing. And it was just like, like oftentimes they would talk over it. It was super po-dunk.

There's one in the early nineties. They used to organize it around a theme. And so I went on Wikipedia and I looked at all the old themes and they're awesome. The one of them in the 1990s was a tribute to the cartoon peanuts. What? You know, that's great. There was one called a nation of tapestries that was narrated by Edward James Olmos. Yes.

I bet after the wardrobe malfunction, the Peanuts band people were like, remember when we just played a bunch of I want to say Lombardi, but that's the Packers coach. Yes. The Peanuts guy. Remember when we did that, no one got hurt. I don't know why they changed it. And so up till now, now they just do like the Beyonce show, right? Like they don't have themes anymore.

But even in 2004, they still had themes for the halftime show. And this sort of idea, which everyone kind of had almost abandoned at that point, was that everything is based around a theme. So the 2004 halftime show was based around the theme of choose it or lose it. And so it began with which sounds based on no, because the election had no. Was it election year? Yes. So it began with a PSA of Tom Cruise and Julia Roberts telling all the kids out there to vote and then standing on an apple crate.

Yes. And then. And then it's sort of it did this whole thing of like, you have to choose to vote, choosing all of this. And then it smash cuts to Jessica Simpson. And she says, but also Houston, don't forget to choose to party. And then it zooms out and then she's full. Like the whole stadium is full of a margin. We grew. I know everyone thinks this, but we grew up in the most embarrassing time.

And so basically the whole show, the whole game, it was CVS was this old funny, dirty network. They had hired MTV to get a younger demographic for this show. So the whole purpose of this was to try to make the Super Bowl cool again and to try to get the audiences that the advertisers really want. So for this halftime show, they had Kid Rock, they had Nelly, they had Puff Daddy. They had just name anyone who is like kind of embarrassing now. Probably perform Kelly Osborn.

She was the emcee, actually. Yes. Yeah. And so basically, I like, you know, ordinarily on a show like this, because normally we record for three hours and then we edit it down to an hour. So normally we would talk about the performance for like a long time because people have literally written PhDs on how all of the backup dancers for all the performances were white until Janet Jackson started performing. And there's all kinds of like weird, fascinating, like racial, semiotic stuff happening. And also just labor rights, right?

Sure. Why? What? Because if you're a backup, because if you're a backup dancer type person and there's a kind of a network kibosh on dancers of color and then someone comes along who's a headliner act and it's like, I don't I would like to hire dancers who are not all white to dance with me, actually, then that changes things potentially. You know, yes, sure. Just say, just say labor rights and I'll agree every time.

All right, labor rights, labor rights, labor rights, labor rights. OK, good. Labor rights, yes. Hi, oh. And so what's really interesting is, you know, after, you know, it kind of, it goes normally, there's a quote from Puff Daddy later who says, you know, a lot of us performed and thought really hard about our performance for months before this and nobody ever talks about us anymore. So the real victims of all of this were Puff Daddy, Kid Rock and Nellie,

who nobody talks about. But what's interesting, Kid Rock is being talked about sufficiently. But what's interesting is that the narrative afterwards will be that Janet Jackson did this to revive her failing career. That's sort of the narrative that everybody talks about. However, when we go to the tape, she was at the top of her career at the time. So her previous album had sold nine million copies. She had just starred in The Nutty Professor 2, which again,

things we feel weird about now. No, I still like The Nutty Professor. And it like it was like a four hundred million dollar movie. Like it's a huge opening. She was dating apparently Matthew McConaughey at the time. So like she was like doing well. I am, you know, this is fine. So she wakes up in the morning.

It's like January 2004. She's like, I am Janet Jackson and Matthew McConaughey is doing crunches on my terrace and I'm things are going right for me. I hope a bunch of 60 year old white men don't blame me for something I didn't do. And so basically the performance goes off sort of normally. She comes out the last two minutes. She plays all for you and Rhythm Nation. Everything goes fine.

And then Justin Timberlake rises from the stage, which again, PhDs are written on this. They love this stuff. Wait, does he like come out of like a like a platform comes up or does he like he's lying down and he sits up like Michael Myers? It's like when you used to go to the bank and you'd have that little tube thing that shoots it to the tower. That's what he comes out of.

So they have a pneumatic tube. Yes. So he comes out of the stage and they start singing Rock Your Body, which for those of you who remember that not terrific song, but it's a song. It ends with the line. I'm going to have you naked by the end of this song. And so I have a couple of slides. There's them singing.

She doesn't do a whole lot. I want everybody to look at the outfit that she has on. See how it's sort of like ringed with the little buttons there. This is the moment right before they're standing very close to each other. Look at her face. She's like already tired of what is about to happen for the next six months. She's like, oh, this is going to suck. This is like the VJ Day kiss analysis where you're like, oh,

that nurse didn't want to be jumped. Yes. I'm not going to show the actual breast because I feel like she's been through enough. So we're just going to go to each other. And so is Janet. That's called a way homer. So he kind of reaches over if you watch the footage. And I want like I've done some Zapruder film analysis on this.

And it's very clear that it's like it's a deliberate act. Because when he reaches over, you can see one finger is out. So like he knows exactly sort of where to pull to get this one of her sort of breast pieces to come off, right? So for those of you who didn't see it, the breast piece comes off. She has a sort of nipple ring thing over it. But sort of also like you can kind of see her nipple through. It's like technically a nipple ring, but it's really large.

I saw a picture of that when this happened. And I was like, do adults kiss? Do they just do that? Yeah, they just have that all the time. And so it is shown on TV for 9 sixteenths of a second. It is a little over half a second. And it's one of those things where I mean, this is why it's so T-vote is because it's one of those things where no one really knew what happened, right?

It's so fast. And the internet doesn't exist in a place where you can sort of figure out what happened. And so what's amazing is, you know, if they had cut to the fireworks half a second earlier, like there wouldn't have been any of this, right? It's only this sort of accident that we saw this tiny little glimpse of it. Immediately she covers herself up. Justin Timberlake says later that he covered her with a towel, which there's no evidence of.

Why would he have a towel? Exactly. What? I'm confused. So there's this event of, like, what actually happened. The human species may perish from the earth and not completely know because they're... It's one of those events where everyone says everyone else is lying. So the networks, MTV, CBS, both say they had no idea.

They didn't do it in dress rehearsal. They had experimented with something in dress rehearsal where, like, because, you know, the last line of the song is going to have you naked by the end of the song. So, like, something has to happen. So apparently they tried it. She was wearing, like, a leather, like, this really cool leather-kilt-looking thing. And they had tried it where he, like, rips it off of her, but it's too heavy and he, like, couldn't lift it.

So it was him, like, lifting, like, a gallon of milk and she was like, oh. And it, like, didn't look sexy. Little baby hands. Yeah. And so the theory that the networks put out is that they had sort of played around with this idea of doing something. Then they had decided, like, ah, we're just not going to do anything. Say the line.

Cut to fireworks. Whatever. Then we have the stylists. There's a guy in Houston who says he made the nipple ring custom for her. And that, like, another person was like... He was, like, the guy in 7 who's like, yeah, this guy came in. But, like, it's not clear if that's sort of corroborated. There's a tailor who says that he altered the dress.

Apparently what was supposed to happen, see the red, the red sort of thing underneath it? What was supposed to happen was the leather was supposed to come off. Leaving this, like, flame red fabric underneath it. There's sort of, there's a pruder film analysis is sort of, people have questioned, like, if you have this giant nipple ring on, why would you have, like, a large red thing over it? The nipple ring on because you had the large ring over it because you needed to keep it,

you know, as nipular as possible. Yes. The nipularity was paramount. Yes. Yeah. So I still don't know exactly what happened. It's mitigating. Yes.

She, what's interesting is she, Janet Jackson, the next day takes full responsibility. She says nobody else knew about this but me and Justin. We planned it. But then two years later on Oprah, she says, that's not true. I shouldn't have apologized for the whole thing. But she didn't give any details. Justin Timberlake the next day, and this is so fascinating to me, that, like, throughout this whole thing, he's never evil.

He's just totally clueless, right? This is a theme on our program. Yes. He, what he does afterwards is he, he has this sort of, like, happy go lucky sort of thing. So he shows up on, I think it was like evening magazine or like something access tonight. Yeah. Something, and so he says, he sort of, he just kind of skates over the surface of this

thing where he's just kind of like, well, you know, you guys wanted something to talk about. We gave you something to talk about, right? Like he doesn't have any sort of explanation, any, like, sort of thought process that goes into this necessarily, but what's really interesting is almost immediately the narrative that forms is that she planned it. She engineered this entire thing to get publicity. So this is one of the, this is in the New York Daily or the, I think it's the post or

no daily news. I want everybody to look at the subhead there, millions view her peep show. So this is what a lot of the organizational actors started saying immediately afterwards was that not only is it sort of a planned thing, but it's a one person, like it is a Janet joint. Like it is something that she planned the head of the FCC says, I'll bet she got what she wanted out of all this. What?

Yes. The, the head of the NFL says she had to have engineered it. And this, there's also one, the Chicago Tribune calls it Janet's boobylicious halftime. Like this was like the level of like sophistication that we were dealing with in the immediate aftermath. I also note they played a game question mark for results. So I have a question. Is this something that the people, I mean, obviously if you air the game, you don't make

any extra money off of it because no one knows it's going to happen. I mean, this is, this is why none of the theories of this event make any sense to me because I don't think she was like, I'll make more money. If I show my boot, like I live in America, like obviously I should do this and everybody will like me. Right? Like it, it doesn't seem like, I mean, my personal theory that I have no evidence for is,

Go on. Is that like, you know, people show up at like awards shows with like a pasty on like just over their nipple, but they have something like really revealing otherwise. And I thought, I, again, I have no evidence, but I think it's something along the lines of like, she thought people would treat it as like a pasty, right? That people would see like, well, there's something covering the nipple, right? Because when you look at the photo, it looks like it's covering the nipple. It doesn't look like it's, like it's not a bare breast, right?

So in my head, the logic is kind of like, well, it's going to be sort of shocking, but it's still like, like little Kim at the Grammys or whatever, right? Like people have done this before. That's a, that's a human woman. I would like to put forth that I am aware that my nipples are considered of such interest to society that like if I were to expose even the tiniest part of them, people would lose their minds, not in a sexual way, in a think of the children way, yes. Right?

This is why it doesn't, this is why it doesn't make any sense to me, right? Like I can't think of an explanation for this where it's like, that's the thing, right? It just doesn't, it doesn't make sense from anybody's perspective whatsoever. So it's again, like the human species may perish from the earth without us knowing exactly what happened. What's really interesting afterwards, so this is, this is sort of representative of like the, the right wing, sort of like she's bad, boobs are bad, women shouldn't show their boobs.

Like this is very, like when you read the old, like in Lexus Nexus, the old, like right wing response to the halftime show, it's really boring. It's just like, she's bad, whatever. What's really interesting is the sort of left wing response to it, so there's a bunch of columns that are published in the New York times that are basically like, well, what did you expect? Right? And one of them says like, well, Janet Jackson has been closer and closer to showing her

boobs for her entire career. What? Right? Cause she's getting like, it's like this whole thing of like, you know, women are showing more things and like bear mid drifts and like, kids are on their phones. So it's not just society and fashion are changing, it's Janet Jackson. Exactly. And it's sort of like the, the, the real blade, like the woke opinion on this at the time

was like, who you really should blame is like the corporate overlords, because by scheduling Janet Jackson, like, you know, she's going to show her boob, right? Like this thing that has never happened before, that like, it's not how she would benefit from, she's definitely going to do that. But like the real fault is with the NFL. So this is sort of like, these are the, this is the spectrum of opinion on Janet Jackson. They're like, don't hire a professional performer from a family of professional performers if you want her to like, not do something wildly inappropriate, that's expecting too much.

It's like very, very, very savvy, right? This is like the savvy opinion at the time. And so what starts to happen is we only actually get the real explanation for this, like 10 years later, but almost immediately Janet sort of falls off of the face of the earth. Yeah, what happened to Janet? What happened to Matthew McConaughey? Did he stand by her during this? Like Justin Timberlake, he has done very well in this whole thing.

Yeah. He's upside down somewhere doing setups. He's doing setups in the hall. But so she, like the reason that she did this was because she had an album coming out. Her album comes out a couple of weeks later. It's her lowest selling album since 1984. Wait, I have a prediction. Okay.

Okay. Did people buy it so that they could performatively destroy it? No, we didn't. It wasn't that. I mean, by this point, that's sort of the nation's attention had sort of moved on. But what's interesting is her, you know, this album comes out and just sort of like disappears into the ether, right? Like people don't really buy it.

For some reason, like MTV and VH1 don't play any videos off of it. Like even though she's a huge artist and she just played the Super Time Halfball show. And you think that they would be excited to play something off. And also controversy. Like the whole argument is that controversy brings money, right? So again, we've also, spoiler, done maybe 10 stories in the past where it's like this woman connived to get all of this attention and it's like, well, all of the attention like ruined her life.

So your theory is that she was a genius mastermind who was like, I am going to destroy my entire life. So genius mastermind, Janet Jackson essentially disappears. Like the radio stations aren't playing it. This is like the most petty shit. They do a tribute, like a tribute video thing at the 2016 Super Bowl where they show like clips from all the marching bands and like the peanuts tribute and all this kind of stuff. And fucking Janet isn't in there.

So like she has been completely erased from like all of these institutions or just like we don't want to. And they thought everyone would be like, oh yeah, I guess nothing happened between 2003 and 2005. Exactly. Yeah. And so basically she completely disappears. What's really interesting about this is that we didn't learn this until last year.

So do you know who Les Moonves is? Yes. You are right about Les Moonves. We're not going to do like a, you're wrong about Les Moonves. Okay. He's fine. Wait, I know. Les Moonves is the character on 30 Rock who's a guy with a moon vest who Kenneth tells his

ideas to. So Les Moonves, yes, yes, obviously. Do you know who he is? I know that he's a man at CBS who has done very bad things. Yes. 12 allegations of sexual harassment. After those 12, we have, Sybil Shefford says that her show was canceled from CBS. Moonlighting.

Moonlighting. No, Sybil. Oh, Sybil. But also I think she said stuff about like, he gave her crap about moonlighting in some way or maybe I made that up. Moonlighting is important to me. You might have made that up. Did you dream it?

You might have dreamt it. I dreamt it. I had dreamt. Go on. Yes. Well, that's terrible. Sybil Shefford does those only good things. Right.

And she, apparently he hit on her and she was like, no, Mr. Moonves and he canceled her show and there's also, this is really dark. The, you know, E. Jean Carroll, who accused Trump of raping her. She says that Les Moonves sexually assaulted her in an elevator and this is like on top of the other 12. This is like people who survive multiple mass shootings. Yeah. Like if you've been assaulted by multiple like famous terrible men.

Yeah. I mean, this is like Harvey level, terribleness. And so what's really interesting is what we find after all of this is happening, his career is tanking at CBS, he gets pushed out eventually. What we learn is apparently after this event, he became obsessed with Janet Jackson. So from anonymous leaks that we have from inside of CBS, apparently the Grammys were a week after the Super Bowl and both Justin Timberlake and Janet Jackson were scheduled to show up at the Grammys.

He shows up, he wins a bunch of awards. She doesn't go. And it's always kind of been like, how did this happen? Like did she bow out because of the bad publicity or like what she pushed out? It turns out what less or what these leaks from CBS say is that Justin Timberlake called Les Moonves and personally apologized in tears for the event. And the head of CBS, Les Moonves said, you can go to the Grammys. It's fine.

Boy, then boy. Yeah. And so he's mad because Janet Jackson didn't call him personally to apologize. Now she apologized in a written statement. She also filmed a video apology that was played on all of the networks, but he wanted a personal. But he didn't call him in tears and you have to crawl, you know, on your hands and knees to something.

And that's basically what he wanted, right, that she had a bad attitude. And so she had done this, right? She planned it, orchestrated it, like whatever stereotypes he had in his head. And so he went out of his way to cancel everything that was happening. He was the one that blacklisted her from the Grammys. And a really important aspect of this is media consolidation because CBS, MTV, VH1, all owned by Viacom. So if CBS was just this random company with this random CEO who doesn't like Janet Jackson,

who cares if the head of CBS doesn't like Janet Jackson, right? Doesn't mean MTV can't do what they want. They take a chainsaw to TVs. So we don't. So we, like, I want to be very clear that, like, we don't know exactly what happened behind the scenes. These are anonymous leaks. So we don't exactly know.

That's what's so forth may cause Dana Leaking. Well, we don't. I mean, to me, it's like, there are things that people do that are controversial that do not destroy their careers, right? So you can imagine a scenario in which Janet Jackson did this. Yes. Mel Gibson has done 50 of them. I know.

And let's move us has done 50 of them too, right? Like, this is not something, it's not inevitable that this had to kill her career. The one that really gets to me is seven years after the Super Bowl, Simon and Schuster tries to publish a memoir of Janet Jackson. Guess who Simon and Schuster is owned by? Oh my God. So Les Moonves, it comes out, but Les Moonves tries to have the editor fired for printing a book.

And he says how one of the quotes in this article with all these leaks is how the fuck did this get through, right? That everyone knew Janet was off. Don't they know I'm king of media? And so this is one of the things that actually explains it. This didn't have to kill her career necessarily, but someone killed it. It was engineered. It's like we had, because you got this false narrative, it's like, well, you know, she

was a bad lady. And then naturally everyone stopped wanting to listen to her music or see her on TV and she evaporated. Because that was a law of nature. And it's like, no, this one guy. Yeah. This one, I don't want to say a bad word, but like this one duty head. This one crumbum.

And so I think, I mean, I think it's worth thinking about because no one had sort of put this theory forward. Like it sounds like a baroque conspiracy theory, right? Of like, there's one man and like the corporate parents and blah, blah, blah. And then it's like, you get to the details in this and you're like, holy shit, like that is actually what happened. It doesn't sound that weird because I think what we've also realized is these, you know, material sexual harassers and assaulters have been, you know, unmasked over and over again

is that people who go to great lengths to conceal their crimes are also able to kind of manipulate situations and often do in all sorts of other ways. And that this kind of like, you know, and that we have this kind of romance and glamour of like it used to be that America was run by eight men and they were all bastards, but they were geniuses and it was great. And one of them was John Hamm or something. Yes. And now it's like, you know, being manipulative and having no sense of ethics, like actually

might affect your behavior outside of business and the fact that we're finding all these puppeteers at the stage, like the same, yeah, in the same misogyny that directs you to like sexually assault someone in an elevator also directs you to do other things that are not as that are like not as obvious as that career out of spite because she didn't apologize to you or she did apologize to you, but she didn't grovel. Yeah, she didn't really apologize. Yeah. But this is this is not this is only the first half of the you're wrong about.

So the second thing that explains this, the aftermath of this, the real that it comes with. Yes, because this didn't just affect Janet Jackson, right? This affected lots of other things. So after the Super Bowl halftime show, there are 540,000 complaints to the FCC, right? This is one of the numbers that always bounces around about this event. The most complained about event in US history. Like the year before they had gotten something like a year FCC, my family will never be the

same. I mean, 99 what we find out later is that 99% of those complaints came via the parents television council. So this is one of these right wing organizations that figured out in the late 1990s a loophole in the FCC's mandate. So the way that most government agencies work, I feel like people don't know this, but like OSHA and stuff is like they don't like the FCC doesn't like watch TV and be like, that's problematic.

I'm like, I'm going to go give you a fine. They respond to complaints. So every single time that somebody complains about something, they're controlled by the public. Exactly. And so it's like, it's nice to sort of have this kind of like everything you complain about gets an investigation, right? Like this is a good thing.

However, the loophole is that what if you just complain about stupid shit all the time, right? Like you can hijack an organization by just sending them the same complaints over stupid stuff. What if you complain about stuff that wasn't actually offensive or profane, but was suggesting an immoral lifestyle? I mean, that's never happened. So that's don't worry.

It's all, it all turns out fine. No, it's not not. Yeah. This is great. And so basically at the beginning of the 2000s, the parents television council, moral majority, all these other Christian right groups start getting really good at working the FCC to up its fines. And so once George W. Bush comes in in 2000, the first year of the Bush administration,

the FCC gives out $48,000 in fines by 2004, they're giving out 8 million in fines. So the FCC completely transforms during this period into the smut police, right? Like Janet Jackson to the parents television council on these other far right groups was a gift, right? Because she gets people really mobilized. You can say like, look at, look at how the country is falling apart. Look at how our morals. She's the Al Capone to their elitness.

Exactly. So the year after this happens, the minimum fine, so the year after this happens, the maximum fine for obscenity goes from $30,000 a year or from $30,000 per instance to 325,000 per instance, 10 times greater. Wow. And one of the things we've all completely forgotten about the whole Janet Jackson thing is that this case was tied up in court until 2012. And the reason why it was tied up in court is because what happened, because the networks

are saying we didn't know about this, right? So it's not fair to give us a $550,000 fine for something we didn't plan. We didn't know about it in advance. So it's, it's what's called fleeting indecency. It's like, it's, it's quick, I know it's a good, it's like, That's going to be my Fleetwood McTribute band. Yeah. So basically it makes no sense, right?

That like, there's all these other fleet instances of fleeting indecency. There's one where Bono of U2 wins a Grammy and he sort of lifts it up and he says, this is fucking brilliant. And it's one of those things where it's like, it's, I guess it's obscene, but it's not like, he's not using it in, he's just swearing in a general kind of way, it's just an intensifier. It's not, and also, you know, the network didn't know in advance, blah, blah, blah. But so what the parents television council and these other groups are pushing the FCC to do is define stations for fleeting indecency.

So even if they didn't know, even if it was only on the screen for half a second, even if it doesn't have any particularly moral content, they should still be getting fines for it. So what happens after the Janet Jackson incident is this huge chilling effect where all of the networks, because of the greater fines, because of these activated Christian right groups get super nervous. So one of, I mean, there's all kinds of stuff like ER stop showing butts, like ER used to show a lot of the butts and like NYPD blue used to show butts and they stopped.

I remember wondering, I knew that NYPD blue had shown butts and I was like, where have all the butts gone? What's going on? Yeah, exactly. That's, that's where Janet Jackson. But then the whole point of HBO and the reason people bought it was because it was, it's like a show. But because it's not TV.

We show butts. Yes. It's not TV. It's butts. Another one that I think is really telling is there's an episode of the OC where the FCC will not tell you in advance if it's going to give you a fine. It's weird. They're like, that would be censorship.

We'll just see if like the Christians complain and then like, then we'll find you afterwards. So all of the networks get really nervous. So Fox has an episode of the OC, again, things we feel weird about now. It's a time capsule. We have to love the past or it controls us. We're Fox. There's a scene of two people having sex and Fox ends up editing out the woman having an orgasm, but leaves in the man having an orgasm, right?

Is it teens or is it the grownups? I don't know. The teens who are played by 25 year olds or the grownups who are played by 35 year olds? All of the time I spent watching that show is blacked out. There's also one, and this is a thing because we're running out of time so I have to end with this one, but the one that I think is super fascinating and shows like the political project that was happening was there's a thing where ABC wanted to show saving private Ryan on Veterans Day, right?

Like it's our history. They weren't going to edit it. They weren't going to show ads. It was like going to be this big thing. Like we're going to show it in its entirety. 20 ABC stations, this is the same year as that Super Bowl incident, 20 ABC stations refused to run it because they're afraid of FCC fines because of the swearing. So it's the violence in the city of Aberdeen.

I remember that the swearing was when they were at D-Day, right? They're like, oh, it's D-Day. Everyone I know is being murdered by war. G. Willikers. I'm swearing. Yeah. Oh darn. So Janet Jackson was used as an excuse for stripping away, you know, actual content from

our media. Yes. So terrible men and Christian right-wing organizations used Janet Jackson for things they basically wanted to do anyway. And that's the only time that's ever happened in US history and you shouldn't listen to our show. Yeah. We've done no other episodes.

This is the only story that we're going to talk about. This theme doesn't occur at any other time. We will be taking no questions at any time. Thank you.