Tell Eve what to listen to · Staircase 'betrayal'
Plus: Tyler Perry's true crime op-ed
the true crime that's worth your time
You guys crushed it on my last road trip. It was the fall of 2019, Best Evidence was in its infancy, and I was driving to and from Indiana. Mixing business and pleasure, I listened to a podcast per day chosen by you all, then reviewed them here. Good times! Simpler times.
Next week, I’m driving to Minnesota and back, and I want to do it again! Propose a podcast for me in the comments over the next few days; I’ll write up a full lineup and drop it here for you Friday. The following week I’ll be off driving and listening (thank you, Sarah, for covering [“you got it, bb” - SDB]) and the week after that I’ll be back with reviews galore. Let’s do this!
Jean-Xavier de Lestrade is mad about HBO Max’s The Staircase adaptation. As everyone here knows, de Lestrade directed the gripping and influential docuseries of the same name; it’s that doc that provided the foundation of the star-studded adaptation that’s currently on every flip-flop wearer’s lips.
Along with properties like Serial, The Staircase (doc version) is one of those productions credited with/blamed for the current boom in true crime. It won a Peabody in 2005 for “taking viewers deep into the moral ambiguities of the legal system.” It wasn’t much after that that Antonio Campos, the director of the dramatic series, first reached out to de Lestrade, saying he was eager to adapt the film.
After speaking to Campos and reviewing his previous work, de Lestrade opened his Staircase archives—sharing footage, notes, and tips on particularly interesting unused video. He says Campos even spent a few days with his Staircase crew while they filmed additional episodes in 2011. For years, they remained in contact.
This past December, when Campos and HBO Max’s team flew to Paris to film several scenes for the long-planned adaptation, The Staircase’s editor, Sophie Brunet, even opened her home to host some of the filmmakers for dinner.
“We gave [Campos] all the access he wanted, and I really trusted the man,” de Lestrade told Vanity Fair Tuesday, sounding shell-shocked. “So that’s why today I’m very uncomfortable, because I feel that I’ve been betrayed in a way.”
De Lestrade tells VF’s Julie Miller that in the new series, “It’s alleged that we cut the documentary series in a way to help Peterson’s appeal, which is not true.” Meanwhile, doc producer Allyson Luchak says that the drama works to “malign or discredit our filmmaking by making it seem as though we were biased from the beginning … I don’t know why anyone would want to do this to Jean or Sophie, and undermine the work of so many.”
Luchak also notes that in the drama, much of her work (maligned as it allegedly is) is attributed to a dude. “I know that an audience watching fiction can only handle so many characters, and I have no desire to be fictionalized or be in it. But I did find it surprising, in 2022, that so much of a female producer’s work would be attributed to the character of an older white man,” she says.
That’s just a slice of the claims the doc-makers made against the drama (for more, read the full report), allegations serious enough that late last week, “de Lestrade and Matthieu Belghiti, another producer of The Staircase, sent a letter to Campos” demanding changes to upcoming episodes that they believe will mortally damage their credibility. “I feel, again, really uncomfortable,” de Lestrade said of the letter. “But I have to protect my work.” — EB
The Washington Post has a fantastic new longread on the inner workings of opioid manufacturer Mallinckrodt Pharmaceuticals. It’s a piece that reads like true crime, maybe because it is — I mean, we’ve all come around to the fact that the companies pushing oxy and its ilk (aka legal heroin) were operating as ruthlessly as (insert name of your favorite drug lord here) in his prime, right?
Just look at this lede:
The largest manufacturer of opioids in the United States once cultivated a reliable stable of hundreds of doctors it could count on to write a steady stream of prescriptions for pain pills.
But one left the United States for Pakistan months before he was indicted on federal drug conspiracy and money laundering charges. Another was barred from practicing medicine after several of his patients died of drug overdoses. Another tried to leave the country in the face of charges that he was operating illegal pill dispensing operations, or pill mills, in two states. He was arrested and sent to prison for eight years.
These doctors were among 239 medical professionals ranked by Mallinckrodt Pharmaceuticals as its top prescribers of opioids during the height of the pain pill epidemic, in 2013. That year, more than 14,000 Americans died of prescription opioid overdoses.
More than a quarter of those prescribers — 65 — were later convicted of crimes related to their medical practices, had their medical licenses suspended or revoked, or paid state or federal fines after being accused of wrongdoing, according to a Washington Post analysis of previously confidential Mallinckrodt documents and emails, along with criminal and civil background checks of the doctors. Between April and September of that year, Mallinckrodt’s sales representatives contacted those 239 prescribers more than 7,000 times.
Mallinckrodt declared bankruptcy in 2020; records like the ones the Post are writing about here are from a “cache of 1.4 million records, emails, audio recordings, videotaped depositions and other materials” revealed in the financial proceedings. Back in 2017, the Post reported that Mallinckrodt owned a full 27 percent of the opioid market from 2006-2014 (Purdue “only” had 18 percent, by comparison); the DEA referred to the company as “the kingpin within the drug cartel” in 2010.
So why are the Purdues synonymous with the epidemic and we don’t even know how to pronounce Mallinckrodt? That’s one of the things reporters Meryl Kornfield, Scott Higham, and Steven Rich try to figure out in their long and remarkable piece, a story that will also make you hate and fear a whole lot of MDs. — EB
Folks who use Wikipedia did a nice job with the McStay family murders, a case that rocked California in the 2010s. Joseph and Summer McStay, as well as their 4- and 6-year old-sons, disappeared from their SoCal home in 2010. The case made headlines across the country, while people like a certain Best Evidence subscriber who won’t be named and I speculated that Joe was a family annihilator.
The case also took on a racially loaded tone, given how close the family lived to the border, with some suggesting that they were the victims of cartel violence or even some sort of immigration-related crime. It was fodder for talk shows for years.
All that speculation was wrong. In 2013, their bodies were found in the desert. A full year later, Joe McStay’s former business partner was arrested in the case, and the news cycle started anew.
Now Investigation Discovery is attempting to pull together the far-flung threads of the case in a series called Two Shallow Graves. Per ID, the seven-ep series includes “unprecedented, multi-camera access to the entirety of the trial and personal, never-before-seen footage of Merritt and his defense team strategizing during the proceedings” and has “exclusive interviews with Merritt, his family, and his defense lawyers, as well as the prosecution, investigators, key figures in the case, and the McStay's family and friends.”
As someone who was never happy with the motive presented by the prosecution, I have to admit that I’m intrigued by this show, though ID’s refusal to send screeners certainly gives me pause. While road-tripping, this show might be my nighttime hotel binge: the first three episodes will drop on Discovery+ on May 22, and for broadcast viewers, ID will run two episodes a night for three days starting Sunday at 9 PM. — EB
Tyler Perry wrote an op-ed about missing Black folks for USA Today. I sometimes forget that Perry is so much more than Madea, then am reminded when I see stories of, say, a reward he’s offering in a missing persons case. This time, he’s arguably mixing activism and business, as he notes in the story’s dek (that’s the subhead) that he’s behind Never Seen Again, a docuseries that kicked off on Paramount+ last week.
Per the logline:
Each 30 minute episode tells the story of someone who vanishes into thin air, leaving behind a trail of evidence but no smoking gun. There is never a body. Are these people runaways or are they victims? And of what? Loved ones are desperate to put the pieces of the puzzle together. Never Seen Again untangles every possible theory, taking the viewer on a suspenseful detective journey that lands on one final question…can you solve this case?
Perry’s op-ed is ostensibly promotion for the show, but is as much a delineation of what he himself has done to shine a light on disappearances of Black and Brown folks. And without stating it explicitly, he suggests that a former police officer named Steven Calkins is to blame, even though Perry-led efforts to hold him responsible have failed in court.
It’s interesting that Perry chose to pick up the fight in the op-ed pages, and it’s also interesting that USA Today opted to play along. It worked, though: I’m adding the case to my tracker, and I’m going to check out his show tonight. Well played, Mr. Perry. — EB
Wednesday on Best Evidence: What is the real crime of the century (so far)?
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