Speaker 1: You're listening to a MoMA Mia podcast.
Speaker 2: Mamma Mia acknowledges the traditional owners of land and waters
Speaker 2: that this podcast is recorded on.
Speaker 3: It's a Woman's Will. Lucky to be.
Speaker 2: Ah, Hello, and welcome to Mamma Mia. Out loud. It's
Speaker 2: what women are actually talking about on Monday, the fifteenth
Speaker 2: of July.
Speaker 4: I'm Holly Wayne, right, I'm mea Friedman, and.
Speaker 3: I'm Jesse Stevens. And I went to actually message our
Speaker 3: producer and say, silly, silly, you've got the date wrong
Speaker 3: because I couldn't believe it was the fifteenth of July.
Speaker 3: I wanted to say to her, Oh, no, that's wrong.
Speaker 4: When did you think it was?
Speaker 3: I don't know, the second of June or something.
Speaker 4: Yeah, that's fair.
Speaker 2: We're racing through, yeah, through this year, and thank god
Speaker 2: because i'd like it to be over already. On the
Speaker 2: show today, the bullet that missed former President Trump but
Speaker 2: changed everything about the American election. Also, It's a Woman's Will,
Speaker 2: and we're waving drills while wearing teeny tiny bikinis and
Speaker 2: putting petrol in our butts. It's Katy Perry's come back
Speaker 2: and you're living in it. And Vail Shannondoherty, who was
Speaker 2: very clear that haters were not going to be welcome
Speaker 2: at her funeral, a rule that likely means her husband
Speaker 2: is not invited. But first at least eight shots in
Speaker 2: just a few seconds.
Speaker 3: That may change America forever.
Speaker 4: Take a look at what happened.
Speaker 2: Former US President Donald Trump has survived an attempt on
Speaker 2: his life at a campaign rally. The FBI says it
Speaker 2: is treating the shooting as an assassination attempt.
Speaker 5: Law enforcement officials say the person who opened fired was
Speaker 5: twenty year old Thomas Matthew Crooks.
Speaker 6: We are not enemies. We're neighbors. We're friends, co workers, citizens,
Speaker 6: and most importantly, we are fellow Americans. We must stand together.
Speaker 6: There is no place in America for this kind of violence,
Speaker 6: for any violence, ever, period, no exceptions. We can allow
Speaker 6: this violence to be normalized. You know, the political regular
Speaker 6: this country has gotten very heated. It's time to call
Speaker 6: it down.
Speaker 2: Yesterday, Donald Trump survived an attempt on his life and
Speaker 2: it's changed everything about the American election. We very much
Speaker 2: doubt that you haven't heard about this, but we're here
Speaker 2: to fill in some gaps and unpack some smart people's
Speaker 2: opinions about what comes next. Former President Trump was speaking
Speaker 2: at a rally in Butler, Pennsylvania, at about six o'clock
Speaker 2: on Saturday evening US time.
Speaker 6: Now.
Speaker 2: Butler is a smallish regional community on the outskirts of Pittsburgh,
Speaker 2: and he was talking in a kind of like show
Speaker 2: ground space usually used for the town's very popular farm show,
Speaker 2: and experts say that that kind of space in a
Speaker 2: rural area with very few surrounding buildings is actually should
Speaker 2: be much easier to secure than if you were in
Speaker 2: a city or any kind of place that had lots
Speaker 2: of overlooking buildings. So in theory, it's a relatively easy
Speaker 2: to see cure spot. All the same alone, gunman on
Speaker 2: the roof of a car park aimed his ar style
Speaker 2: rifle at the former president and took several shots. One
Speaker 2: whiz passed his ear, nicking it and causing the former
Speaker 2: president to duck and for his Secret Service agents to
Speaker 2: do what they're paid to do and pile on top
Speaker 2: of him to take any further bullets.
Speaker 7: I found those images incredibly moving. Isn't necessarily the right word,
Speaker 7: but it really made me think about what they do
Speaker 7: every day. Like that instinct, It's like Keny first responders, right.
Speaker 7: Your instinct is to move away from danger, but they
Speaker 7: literally put their body between the person they're protecting and danger.
Speaker 2: There were no further bullets because a sniper had shot
Speaker 2: and killed the gunman, twenty year old Thomas Crooks, but
Speaker 2: not before his bullets took the life of a man
Speaker 2: attending the rally, fifty year old Corey Compartori. Then, and
Speaker 2: this is the part that you've seen over and over
Speaker 2: on your phone's TV screens and on the front of
Speaker 2: every newspaper in the world today. As Trump is ushered off,
Speaker 2: he shakes off his service agents to rise head and
Speaker 2: shoulders above them, which is, by the way, very much
Speaker 2: against protocol. The whole point is that they're supposed to
Speaker 2: cover you, so that if there are more bullets coming,
Speaker 2: more gunmen there, they will get the shots, not you.
Speaker 2: He riises head and shoulders above them, raises a fist,
Speaker 2: and with his face splattered with his own blood, he
Speaker 2: shouts fight, Fight, Fight. Jesse, what did you think when
Speaker 2: you first saw this story.
Speaker 3: It's weird, isn't it. It just pops up in your Instagram
Speaker 3: feet alongside someone's picture from Europe, and it popped up
Speaker 3: and I went, oh, and I'm horrified by this story,
Speaker 3: and I, you know, echo everyone who just says this
Speaker 3: is not what democracy is. I think it's really scary.
Speaker 3: I think it's a really traumatic incident. I think the
Speaker 3: biggest tragedy is the person who lost their lives and
Speaker 3: people who are in a critical condition that's been really
Speaker 3: lost in this. I think that someone died for demonstrating
Speaker 3: their political beliefs, which should never happen in a democracy.
Speaker 3: But I actually don't think I was surprised. There was
Speaker 3: a moment of almost having expected this, which I have
Speaker 3: found in a lot of the commentary as well. And
Speaker 3: the commentary allowed me to understand why I felt that way,
Speaker 3: which was that the temperature had been rising so high
Speaker 3: in the US, and the way that these two candidates
Speaker 3: speak to and about each other is so intense. You know,
Speaker 3: a lot of commentators have said, how did it take
Speaker 3: this long for there to be an act of violence
Speaker 3: like this? But then, of course we remember that Nancy Pelosi,
Speaker 3: that was only a few years ago that her husband
Speaker 3: was bludgeoned in his own home. And then there was
Speaker 3: Brett Kavanagh. Someone tried to assassinate him after abortion laws
Speaker 3: were turned back there's been someone setting themselves a light
Speaker 3: outside Donald Trump's trial. Something like thirty seven people have
Speaker 3: died in like politically motivated attacks in the last few years,
Speaker 3: because in the US there doesn't seem to be a
Speaker 3: peaceful center. It's like the other side is your enemy.
Speaker 3: And to watch this, I realized that both sides had deteriorated,
Speaker 3: that there's been this representation from Democrats and from the
Speaker 3: left that you know, the deplorables and fake news and
Speaker 3: all that kind of stuff. The riot, of course, the
Speaker 3: insurrection the January sixth Capital event, and that was Republicans.
Speaker 3: But this, I went, oh, this was an attack on Trump,
Speaker 3: and now he's seen as a martyr, and this will
Speaker 3: be if he wasn't already going to win this election,
Speaker 3: that man will win the election.
Speaker 2: Mia, What did you think of the image, the image
Speaker 2: that I just described of him with the blood and
Speaker 2: his fist up, it's visceral, will definitely and to the
Speaker 2: history books as one of the most important news images
Speaker 2: of our time. What does it make you feel.
Speaker 7: I felt oddly detached when I heard this news, and
Speaker 7: I've been trying to work out why. I mean, part
Speaker 7: of it is just going into adrenaline mode with breaking news.
Speaker 4: But I also knew.
Speaker 7: That it, like seemingly everything, it would play into his hands.
Speaker 7: Because that image was so interesting to me because for
Speaker 7: those out louders who were old enough to remember the
Speaker 7: attempted assassination of Ronald Reagan in the eighties by a
Speaker 7: lone crazy gunman who was trying to impress Jodie Foster,
Speaker 7: who was a young actress at the time. So it
Speaker 7: wasn't even politically motivated by a guy called John Hinckley.
Speaker 7: What you saw in that footage was grainy, like people panicked, ducking.
Speaker 7: But what was interesting about Donald Trump's instincts is that
Speaker 7: your instincts, you would think would be to hide from danger,
Speaker 7: self protection. But he knew in that moment that the
Speaker 7: cameras were on him, and he was defiant without knowing
Speaker 7: what the attack was, what had happened, how safe he was,
Speaker 7: how safe he was that it was in fact an
Speaker 7: assassination attempt.
Speaker 4: He straightway said fight fight it.
Speaker 3: That meant fight who.
Speaker 7: Donald Trump has always fashioned himself as the underdog and
Speaker 7: as a victim, and even when he was president, he
Speaker 7: was always trying to make it that everybody was against him,
Speaker 7: and he wasn't getting the credit he deserved and the
Speaker 7: respect that he deserved, and that he was a victim
Speaker 7: of the fake news media who were lying about him.
Speaker 7: And he actually won the election and people said that
Speaker 7: he didn't. So his posture has always been very I'm
Speaker 7: the underdog, which is ironic for a guy who is
Speaker 7: as privileged as him and was literally the president of
Speaker 7: the United States. So I knew instantly that that image
Speaker 7: will probably win him the election, if he wasn't already going.
Speaker 4: To win it. And the thing about it because it
Speaker 4: makes him a martyr. Yeah, and of course all the discourse,
Speaker 4: what's so maddening about it? And I knew in that moment.
Speaker 7: He has a way of it's a little bit like
Speaker 7: I know you are, but what am I. He takes
Speaker 7: anything that anyone says about him, like fake news, for
Speaker 7: example's people were trying to say when he was just
Speaker 7: making out lies about Hillary Clinton and about Quanon, kind
Speaker 7: of conspiracy theories when he was running in twenty sixteen.
Speaker 7: He twisted that and used it to anything that he
Speaker 7: didn't want people to believe about him. He just called
Speaker 7: it fake news. He was the one that weaponized it.
Speaker 7: And so now he's weaponizing the idea that the rhetoric,
Speaker 7: because even you said, Jesse, both sides have been inflating it.
Speaker 7: It actually hasn't been both sides. He's been called what
Speaker 7: he actually is, which is a convicted rapist and felon
Speaker 7: and an existential threat to democracy. Those are sort of facts, really,
Speaker 7: but his language has always been incredibly incendiary, incredibly violent.
Speaker 2: The thing is, too, though about the fight Fight, Fight,
Speaker 2: is that there's Trump, but then there's also Trump's like
Speaker 2: literal army. What we saw on January the sixth when
Speaker 2: he incited a riot of people, armed people to invade
Speaker 2: a government building, and we do not know what would
Speaker 2: have happened to the high profile mostly democratic but not
Speaker 2: only not only Democrats, enemies of Trump who were in
Speaker 2: there if the mob had got their hands on them.
Speaker 2: There is a literal sense of building a resistance under Trump,
Speaker 2: and a lot of Americans who would not identify as
Speaker 2: Republicans necessarily. No one knows why Thomas Crooks had twenty
Speaker 2: years old, so young, my god, but did what he did.
Speaker 2: But he is a registered Republican. But I don't know
Speaker 2: that a lot of Trump supporters consider themselves Republicans. They're
Speaker 2: Trump supporters, you know.
Speaker 3: Just on the both sides thing. The reason that I'm
Speaker 3: cautious here because I know that in terms of violence
Speaker 3: entering political debate and Nancy Pelosi and you know, a
Speaker 3: lot of the cases were Republicans, some.
Speaker 7: Were Democrats, like a Bernie Sanders supporter attacked a congressman
Speaker 7: a few years ago.
Speaker 3: But with this, I did have a sense that in
Speaker 3: the moments afterwards, when it was being twisted to be
Speaker 3: about how this was Trump's fault, I just went, this
Speaker 3: is a human being who is running for president in
Speaker 3: a Democratic who just nearly by a centimeter, if his
Speaker 3: head had moved to a centimeter, would have been killed
Speaker 3: on a stage. Like I think we've got to be
Speaker 3: careful not to blame him for the assassination attempt. And
Speaker 3: I think that there are points throughout the campaigns and
Speaker 3: points across the last eight to ten years where we
Speaker 3: can go we've stooped to a certain level. But also
Speaker 3: we have characterized Trump supporters and Trump himself as something
Speaker 3: less than Jamie.
Speaker 7: Politics in America used to be really boring, like really boring,
Speaker 7: even with Ronald Dragan that was that wasn't a politically
Speaker 7: motivated attack in the good old days politics was boring.
Speaker 7: It's only since twenty fifteen that we've had things that
Speaker 7: were previously unimaginable, like riots in the Capitol building and
Speaker 7: people talking about hanging members of Yes.
Speaker 3: But I've listened to both sides, left and right, and
Speaker 3: this actually isn't just about Trump. This is just broadly
Speaker 3: how we speak about people and the level of contempt
Speaker 3: that's in our voice. And remember Hillary Clinton and the deplorables.
Speaker 3: When you start representing people as less than human, when
Speaker 3: you demonize the other side to such an extent, violence
Speaker 3: seems like.
Speaker 4: A started those chants of lock her up about Hillary Clinton.
Speaker 2: Yeah, the Democrats, But you can't I see what Jesse
Speaker 2: is saying because the presidential debate that happened two weeks ago,
Speaker 2: and everybody obviously the story out of that was all
Speaker 2: about Biden's fitness for office, which we'll get to in
Speaker 2: a second. But the thing that actually really struck me
Speaker 2: about that is all the reports said, these men will
Speaker 2: not say hello to each other, they will not shake hands,
Speaker 2: they won't refer to each other. That is not how
Speaker 2: politics used to be, right, It used to be like
Speaker 2: a sporting game.
Speaker 4: But you know, let me finish myself.
Speaker 2: It's like a sporting game where on the field you
Speaker 2: would take somebody's legs out whatever, and afterwards you shake
Speaker 2: their hands and you change shits.
Speaker 4: And when did that change? Whole agree, And.
Speaker 2: There is no question for me about what side in
Speaker 2: inverted commas I feel has heightened the debate. But I
Speaker 2: also think it's to do with the fact that we
Speaker 2: live in a very different time in terms of social media,
Speaker 2: and we all know that, we talk about it all
Speaker 2: the time, what the algorithm rewards, etc. It was striking
Speaker 2: to me that in the British election that we just saw,
Speaker 2: they are talking about each other with civility when they lose,
Speaker 2: they are They're losing gracefully. And this is also Trump's fault,
Speaker 2: to be honest, because.
Speaker 4: The Australian election the.
Speaker 2: Reason that people talk about Trump being a threat to democracy,
Speaker 2: and some people in the aftermath of the shooting have
Speaker 2: said that such hyperbole. It isn't. Because he lost an
Speaker 2: election and he refused to get out of office. That
Speaker 2: is the definition of threatening democracy. So that's all true anyway.
Speaker 2: I want to ask Mia quickly to Jesse's point that
Speaker 2: there's certainly not only one side here. Who's spinning. Almost
Speaker 2: immediately after this happened, senior Democrats came out straight away
Speaker 2: all what I would like to call the grown ups,
Speaker 2: and condemned the actions of the gunman, no question, called
Speaker 2: for calm, called for unity everybody from Obama to Biden
Speaker 2: to world leaders around the country. But there was a
Speaker 2: small portion of the left who went straight to work
Speaker 2: accusing the right of a conspiracy MAA, what's blueing on?
Speaker 7: Well, if QAnon is a collection of sort of conspiracy
Speaker 7: theories held by right wingers, So overall, the beliefs of
Speaker 7: QAnon that became really big during the Trump years that
Speaker 7: the Secret Service, the CIA, the FBI, and the elites
Speaker 7: are all working together to bring Trump down and to
Speaker 7: abuse children, and that there's a cabal of selling children.
Speaker 7: So that's sort of what QAnon is, and that Trump
Speaker 7: has come to overthrow all of these evil people. And
Speaker 7: what I hadn't heard about, but which has been around
Speaker 7: in the last couple of years and really showed its
Speaker 7: head after this assassination attempt is blueing on and that's
Speaker 7: the conspiracy theories held by the left. So what you
Speaker 7: might have seen over the weekend was the idea that
Speaker 7: the Trump shooting was staged to make him seem sympathetic
Speaker 7: and powerful, which is how it's gone down. But the
Speaker 7: idea that it was just tomato sauce, and the way
Speaker 7: that the Secret Service allowed him to put his head
Speaker 7: up and pump his fist and say fight, fight, fight, Yeah, exactly,
Speaker 7: and people saying that the image was just too perfect
Speaker 7: of the upside down American flag and him with blood
Speaker 7: but still looking defiant with his strong scale and not
Speaker 7: looking scared or all the ways that you would have
Speaker 7: thought he would look so. And this is where it is,
Speaker 7: both sides being crazy QAnon and Blue and on fighting
Speaker 7: it out and basically not believing anything that they see.
Speaker 1: The thing.
Speaker 2: It is not new or surprising at the moment that
Speaker 2: there are no agreed on facts about anything ever.
Speaker 3: And I saw that everywhere. It wasn't just in tiny
Speaker 3: little niches on the internet, like it was all over
Speaker 3: my TikTok feed, all over Instagram, people whose opinion I
Speaker 3: respect saying almost immediately that they don't believe that this happened,
Speaker 3: And I just went, this is how you know, the
Speaker 3: divide just gets wider and wider and wide.
Speaker 6: Yeah.
Speaker 7: Because of course it also reaffirms what the QAnon people think,
Speaker 7: and a lot of Trump.
Speaker 4: Supporters, which is that the Secret Service?
Speaker 7: How did they miss it? People said they saw the sniper,
Speaker 7: they tried to alert police and nothing was done. How
Speaker 7: did it happen?
Speaker 2: And they're blaming the Biden campaigns directly, So again, it
Speaker 2: just shows how far we've gone in denying the humanity
Speaker 2: of just a man.
Speaker 4: Denying reality.
Speaker 2: Okay, in the wake of the shooting, the US Democrats
Speaker 2: pulled their multi multi million dollar ad campaign that they're
Speaker 2: running at the minute, which attacks Trump and calls him
Speaker 2: all the things that we have established that is.
Speaker 3: Can I ask about that it Has Trump pulled anything?
Speaker 7: No, immediately, I'm sure it's out already. There'll be images
Speaker 7: of him bloody like that iconic even.
Speaker 2: When the Republican Convention is about to start, and he
Speaker 2: will be hailed a hero. The religious right are saying
Speaker 2: this is proof that his presidency is ordained by God,
Speaker 2: et cetera. Anyway, let's move over to the other side, which,
Speaker 2: if we were recording this show on Friday, would have
Speaker 2: been one we would have thought was the most unusual
Speaker 2: development we'd had in a while in American politics, which
Speaker 2: involves George Clooney. So while we're talking obviously about what
Speaker 2: the assassination attempt has done for Trump's chances, in the
Speaker 2: before the rally, many smart voices were saying that over
Speaker 2: on the other side, President Biden would likely step down
Speaker 2: on Sunday or Monday, not that he wants to. He
Speaker 2: has been very publicly digging in and saying that only
Speaker 2: the Lord Almighty can get him to step down. But
Speaker 2: Democrats have been saying that in this case, the Lord
Speaker 2: Almighty might take the form of George Clooney, who wrote
Speaker 2: a column in The New York Times last Thursday headlined
Speaker 2: I love Joe Biden, but we need a new nominee,
Speaker 2: and in it he spoke about how he was one
Speaker 2: of the main players at a big fundraiser for Biden
Speaker 2: in June, and he said, I love Joe Biden as
Speaker 2: a senator, as a vice president. I believe in his character,
Speaker 2: I believe in his morals, etc. But the one battle
Speaker 2: he cannot fight is the fight against time. None of
Speaker 2: us can. It's devastating to say it, but the Joe
Speaker 2: Biden I was with three weeks ago at the fundraiser
Speaker 2: was not the Joe big fucking deal Biden of twenty ten.
Speaker 2: He wasn't even the Joe Biden of twenty twenty. He
Speaker 2: was the same man we all witnessed at the debate.
Speaker 2: Clooney then name checked his choices. He interestingly put the
Speaker 2: name Wes More first to obviously who he thinks should
Speaker 2: get it. Let's say, from We's Moore, he says, and
Speaker 2: Kamala Harris and Gretchen Whitner and governors and Andy Bscher
Speaker 2: and so on and so on. Mia, Why does it
Speaker 2: matter even a little bit what George Clooney thinks about
Speaker 2: the president of the United.
Speaker 7: States, Because there are two things that are required to
Speaker 7: win the presidency. The first is people voting for you,
Speaker 7: but the second is money to help make that happen.
Speaker 7: And the donors on both sides have incredible power, not
Speaker 7: necessarily in saying we want the candidate to be this person,
Speaker 7: but there are certain candidates that will get more money
Speaker 7: being donated to the party and other candidates who won't.
Speaker 7: So for e then in a tap off, they're saying
Speaker 7: we're going to turn the tap off, which is understandable
Speaker 7: because if you believe that the wrong person is, you know,
Speaker 7: driving the car, you're not going to keep paying for petrol,
Speaker 7: you're going to say, well, why you're just going.
Speaker 4: To drive the car off a cliff.
Speaker 7: So with Joe Biden and why it could be George Clooney,
Speaker 7: there've been a lot of talks in the same way
Speaker 7: that people say, oh, Oprah should run for president, Michelle
Speaker 7: Obama should run for president, George Clooney should run for president.
Speaker 7: I don't think that's ever going to happen. But he
Speaker 7: has been a power player behind the scenes. He's good
Speaker 7: mates with Obama, and he's been a big supporter of
Speaker 7: Joe Biden and that influence because it's not just the
Speaker 7: money that George personally donates. It's when you've got big
Speaker 7: Hollywood stars, people then pay money to go and be
Speaker 7: at those fundraisers.
Speaker 4: That's how it works.
Speaker 7: So they're rain makers as well as being providers of
Speaker 7: rain themselves. The position that the Democratic Party are in
Speaker 7: that's difficult is that it's all relying on what Joe
Speaker 7: Biden decides to do. And of course this weekend's changed everything.
Speaker 7: But if everyone in the Democratic Party, if the members
Speaker 7: of Congress say he needs to step down, and he doesn't,
Speaker 7: then they're screwed. They've screwed their Party. So it's like
Speaker 7: everybody's in this circle of being paralyzed because they have
Speaker 7: to wait for it to be his decision. Now, George
Speaker 7: Clooney doesn't care, like it doesn't matter. He can say
Speaker 7: what he wants because he's a donor.
Speaker 2: But Clooney is not just Clooney. Clooney is representative of
Speaker 2: He is so embedded in the higher up Democratic Party
Speaker 2: that he would not have written that without their endorsement,
Speaker 2: their blessing, without So basically he's being a mouthpiece for
Speaker 2: a large number of very senior Democrats.
Speaker 7: Ye.
Speaker 2: Now Biden has lost them. Yes, and it will be very,
Speaker 2: very hard for Biden to keep holding on. What do
Speaker 2: we think that Trump's assassination attempt does?
Speaker 4: Though?
Speaker 2: Imagining that Biden's getting under more pressure every minute and
Speaker 2: plans are afoot and Pelosi isn't even really backing him anymore,
Speaker 2: and Obama hasn't distanced himself from the Clooney column, then
Speaker 2: do you go, well, now, it would be disrespectful for
Speaker 2: us to do anything about anything for what a day,
Speaker 2: a week, a month, And is a change of candidate
Speaker 2: actually the best way to get the story back on you?
Speaker 3: Yeah, they need a narrative because there's no story right now.
Speaker 3: And even we were watching this morning, Joe Biden addressed
Speaker 3: the nation the nation about what happened with Trump, and
Speaker 3: he is just so unint bying. It is more of
Speaker 3: what we've been seeing, which is this, it's just sad.
Speaker 4: Every time he talks, it's sad.
Speaker 3: Last week, I don't think we even talked about the
Speaker 3: fact that he mixed up the names of warring presidents,
Speaker 3: which is like we're talking about like steaks foreign policy
Speaker 3: that you just go what's going on? And over the
Speaker 3: weekend I kept thinking with Biden. What the Democrats are
Speaker 3: saying at the moment is that we would rather put
Speaker 3: a white, eighty one year old man who can't string
Speaker 3: a sentence together and mixes up names and is very
Speaker 3: uninspiring and every press conference before we would risk a
Speaker 3: woman of color. And I know that a lot of
Speaker 3: people have a lot of analysis of Kamala, but I
Speaker 3: don't think that you can unpick but those two things.
Speaker 7: No one's saying that except Joe Biden. He's literally he's
Speaker 7: holding his fire party and could be argued the country
Speaker 7: hostage because no one thinks that like nobody, there is
Speaker 7: nobody who is saying that he's a better chance than her,
Speaker 7: nobody within the Democratic Party.
Speaker 4: That's why it's so fastical.
Speaker 7: Now in terms of how it's changed what happened on
Speaker 7: Sunday in the attempt at assassination. It's good news and bad
Speaker 7: news for Biden. The good news for him personally is
Speaker 7: that it's changed the focus from him needing to step aside,
Speaker 7: and all he's trying to do is slow walk this
Speaker 7: and delay, delay, delay, until it becomes sort of too
Speaker 7: late to change candidates. So this has been very effective
Speaker 7: for that because it would seem to be unseemly. For example,
Speaker 7: imagine if George Clooney's op ed came out tomorrow or
Speaker 7: the next day, or even at the end of this week.
Speaker 7: So all of that has been put on hold. And
Speaker 7: also it's given him the chance to present as a stately, reassuring,
Speaker 7: calming figure like whenever there's any kind of unrest. It
Speaker 7: is very good for incumbent prime ministers and presidents because
Speaker 7: everyone freaked out and they just want to be calmed.
Speaker 3: But then he said, like he said in the first
Speaker 3: press conference, this is unheard of, and I thought this
Speaker 3: has happened in your lifetime. Joe Biden. You have seen
Speaker 3: one president JFK be assassinated. You've seen Ronald Reagan with
Speaker 3: an attempted assassination like not the right language, but on Trump,
Speaker 3: I just kept thinking that there are a few things.
Speaker 3: If you've been to the US, something that will strike
Speaker 3: you as very different to Australia is the incredible outward
Speaker 3: display of respect for war veterans everywhere at a sporting match.
Speaker 3: If you have put your body on the line for
Speaker 3: your country. There is little that Americans respect more than that.
Speaker 3: And that is how Trump will now be seen as
Speaker 3: a man who nearly lost his life, as a hero
Speaker 3: who nearly lost his life while fighting for America, and
Speaker 3: that is going to have an enormous impact on the
Speaker 3: rest of this campaign.
Speaker 4: Katy Perry has released the first single from her new
Speaker 4: and it's an anthem about feminism that's made a lot
Speaker 4: of people mad. Here is the song, and we're lucky
Speaker 4: to believe it, Goddy wamb It's pretty catchy.
Speaker 7: You'll be singing that in your head, I guarantee for
Speaker 7: the next few days. But it is the video, not
Speaker 7: the song so much that everyone's talking about.
Speaker 3: I also have some thoughts about the song. Back continue yeah,
Speaker 3: look it was.
Speaker 7: The video was roundly slammed across the internet after it
Speaker 7: dropped on the weekend for being a really cynical use
Speaker 7: of empty feminism to get attention and sell music at
Speaker 7: the expense of women. And there are two main reasons
Speaker 7: for this, which I'm going to unpack to describe the
Speaker 7: video itself. It starts with, you know, the very famous
Speaker 7: image in feminism of Rosy the Riveter. It's the illustration
Speaker 7: of the woman with the red bandana in her hair
Speaker 7: and a work shirt and she's got her bicep, and
Speaker 7: it shows Katie dressed like a sexy version of her
Speaker 7: on a building site with a whole lot of other
Speaker 7: sexy construction workers in teeny tiny hot pants and bikini tops.
Speaker 2: Really see every day on the street, yeah, work boots.
Speaker 7: Yes, So they sort of dance for a while and
Speaker 7: she's got this bikini top on that's in stars and stripes,
Speaker 7: and then an anvil comes from the sky like kind
Speaker 7: of in a road run a cartoon. It sort of
Speaker 7: squashes Katie Perry, and it's like, this is the reset,
Speaker 7: and so it's going to be.
Speaker 4: Like, well, what's the world like after it?
Speaker 3: Oh?
Speaker 4: Okay, So it was tongue in cheek sati hah.
Speaker 7: But then the world afterwards is kind of just the same.
Speaker 7: But like you know, sexy women including Katy Perry, like
Speaker 7: in bikini and dressed like a biomechanical.
Speaker 4: Horse that sex toys, that was driving.
Speaker 2: They were sex toys. They were agues.
Speaker 7: So the two main criticisms that she's using this empty
Speaker 7: feminism in this cynical weight attempt to get attention.
Speaker 4: The first is that the sthetic of the video is.
Speaker 7: Very much focused literally on the tits and ass of
Speaker 7: Katie Perry and the other women in the video, and
Speaker 7: she says that that's ironic because they are making fun
Speaker 7: of the male gaze while weirdly playing up to the
Speaker 7: male gaze though. And the second thing is that the
Speaker 7: song was co produced and co written by doctor Luke,
Speaker 7: and he is a hit maker for a music producer
Speaker 7: who was accused of sexual assault by his former protege Kesha,
Speaker 7: which he denied, and Kesh's lawsuit claimed that doctor Luke
Speaker 7: drugged and raped her on two occasions, made threats against
Speaker 7: her and her family, and called her derogatory names. She
Speaker 7: also said this the way he spoke about her trigger
Speaker 7: and eating disorder.
Speaker 4: The case was.
Speaker 7: Eventually settled with no conviction or admission of guilt on
Speaker 7: his part. But Katie Perry's decision to work with him
Speaker 7: on this song about female empowerment, which he co wrote
Speaker 7: and produced, is an interesting one, and she obviously predicted
Speaker 7: the blowback about this because yesterday she released a defense
Speaker 7: of the video as being satire that was actually taken
Speaker 7: on set while the video itself was being filmed.
Speaker 4: Here's what she had to say, girl Boss, shit, you
Speaker 4: can do it. You go girl, you were born to shine, and.
Speaker 5: We're kind of just having fun being a bit sarcastic
Speaker 5: with it. It's very slapstick, very on the nose, and
Speaker 5: with this set, it's like, oh, we're not about the malegates,
Speaker 5: but we really are about the male gaze, and we're
Speaker 5: really overplaying it and on the nose because I'm about
Speaker 5: to get smashed, which is like a reset, a reset
Speaker 5: for me and a reset from my idea of feminine divine.
Speaker 5: And it's a whole different world we go to after.
Speaker 7: This, except it's not really just a few sort of
Speaker 7: comments that are indicative from out louders and others. So
Speaker 7: you're dressed like every male fantasy. How is this empowering
Speaker 7: for women. You're saying, as a woman, you need to
Speaker 7: have a good body and show all your skin to
Speaker 7: be strong. This is so nineties. What about image for
Speaker 7: young girls everyone where? Don't you have a daughter? Is
Speaker 7: this what you aspire her to be? Someone else said
Speaker 7: a woman's empowerment song produced by doctor Luke call Alanis Morissette.
Speaker 7: Because this shit is ironic, and then someone else saying
Speaker 7: is supposed to make us feel empowered. Nothing says female
Speaker 7: empowerment like holding a bedazzle drill. This is the most
Speaker 7: surface level fake feminist shit I've seen in a long time.
Speaker 2: One of my favorite comments on that post was, for
Speaker 2: God's sake, you haven't even put the drill bits in correctly.
Speaker 7: Jesse, How did you feel when I sent the video
Speaker 7: to you over the weekend.
Speaker 3: I don't get it. I keep watching it over and
Speaker 3: over again. Then I was like, I need to know
Speaker 3: who wrote this, because I believe chat GPT wrote this.
Speaker 3: It's like you put in the video Feminist add them
Speaker 3: twenty twenty four.
Speaker 7: Well, doctor Luke, who was accused of sexual assault, wrote this, but.
Speaker 3: It was so incoherent and bizarre that I was like
Speaker 3: it it looks like a I has done this, But
Speaker 3: then I looked at the six riders, four of which
Speaker 3: a men, which is and the fact it took six
Speaker 3: riders is kind of saying a lot. But even the
Speaker 3: lyrics right are like it's a woman's world, which is
Speaker 3: a meaningless statement. And in a US context when abortion
Speaker 3: laws are being wound back, I think we probably require
Speaker 3: something point here if we're going to be doing a
Speaker 3: feminist anthem, it's being an activist without wanting to upset
Speaker 3: anyone and say anything remotely controversial. And then she says
Speaker 3: we ain't going away, and it's like where would women go?
Speaker 3: Like women are here, therefore feminism they'refore tits Like I
Speaker 3: don't understand. Also, yeah, what point we're making? So I've
Speaker 3: rewatched it like one hundred times, and what I am
Speaker 3: understanding is that feminism is an aesthetic I think, which
Speaker 3: is rosy the riveter, but also in a way it's
Speaker 3: perfect because it is an accurate reflection of the mess
Speaker 3: that is the current state of feminism. It is a
Speaker 3: woman with boobs and a male gaze, holding a vibrator
Speaker 3: and a tool belt and trying to say, Jesse, is
Speaker 3: there something wrong with because I think she kind of
Speaker 3: loves that this is where feminism is at.
Speaker 2: Because I think when she said that bit about it's
Speaker 2: not about the malgaze, but it is about the malgaze
Speaker 2: is what we often talk about when you're on Instagram
Speaker 2: or whatever and there's a picture of somebody saying blah
Speaker 2: blah empowerment, but they're in their bikini with their bum.
Speaker 2: That's what she's talking.
Speaker 3: About, right, Is she critiquing that or I.
Speaker 2: Think she's critiquing that. I think that's what she thinks
Speaker 2: she's doing.
Speaker 4: But it's not critique if you're part of it, like
Speaker 4: law is it? To me?
Speaker 7: It's like, you know when people they do it less
Speaker 7: now because they get called out, But you know when
Speaker 7: people post us a thirsty photo of like themselves in
Speaker 7: a bikini from behind with their bum and it's like
Speaker 7: just appreciating the beautiful sunset and tranquility and.
Speaker 4: Feel so grateful for this holiday I've been able to.
Speaker 7: It's like, you just want us to look at your bum,
Speaker 7: which is fine, but you don't have to dress it
Speaker 7: up in some message of empowerment or inspiration.
Speaker 4: But you're just being thirsty.
Speaker 7: Because we all live in a world where being validated
Speaker 7: for looking hot is power.
Speaker 2: Here's my question about Katie Perry. Right, she was one.
Speaker 2: It's enormous, right If you think about it, you think
Speaker 2: about kiss the Girl, obviously, but then you think about raw,
Speaker 2: you think about firework, you think about Last Friday Night,
Speaker 2: and all those that are so ingrained in our culture
Speaker 2: that we could all sing them at any time. She
Speaker 2: was a massive, massive deal. She was multi platinum selling.
Speaker 2: She sold all the rights to her music last year
Speaker 2: for two hundred and twenty five million dollars or something. Right, So,
Speaker 2: Katy Perry was a big deal. Now she hasn't really
Speaker 2: been a big deal for pretty much a decade. She's
Speaker 2: been releasing music, but it's not really cutting through in
Speaker 2: the same way. She is now thirty nine, she has
Speaker 2: had a kid. She is very much coming back with
Speaker 2: this album as the same Katy Perry as before. Because
Speaker 2: one of the things to note about this is it's
Speaker 2: not like Katie Perry wasn't playing with this kind of
Speaker 2: imagery before. She definitely was, Like who could forget the
Speaker 2: shooting whipped cream out of your boobs and all that
Speaker 2: kind of stuff and all the suggestive lollipop licking and things.
Speaker 2: What do you do if you're her, right, what do
Speaker 2: you do if you are a female pop star and
Speaker 2: we know how age is that industry is? We know
Speaker 2: that every five minutes there's a Sabrina Carpenter, or there's
Speaker 2: a Camilla Cabello, or there's a Charlie XCX. Pop music
Speaker 2: is obsessed with young, more dominated by women than it's
Speaker 2: ever been at any other time in history, which is great,
Speaker 2: but still mostly young, with a few like elder outliers,
Speaker 2: and I guess we could probably call Taylor Swift an
Speaker 2: elder these station a mid thirties. What are you supposed
Speaker 2: to do? Like, how does Katie Perry play that game?
Speaker 2: Because I saw a lot of comments on this going
Speaker 2: so sad. Is she having a midlife crisis? Isn't she
Speaker 2: too old for this?
Speaker 1: Now?
Speaker 2: Da da da da da? What does a Katie Perry do?
Speaker 7: I don't think it's the getting a gear off that
Speaker 7: is particularly surprising, because I mean, Beyonce was naked on
Speaker 7: a horse, and apart from me, everyone seemed to be
Speaker 7: cool with that. Right, It's not the getting the gear off,
Speaker 7: it's getting the gear off and saying you're doing it
Speaker 7: in the service of feminism and empowerment. When actually, you've
Speaker 7: just had quite the body transformation, and you want to
Speaker 7: stay relevant, and the way to stay relevant in our
Speaker 7: culture is to be considered hot.
Speaker 4: But the beauty that oppress all of us.
Speaker 3: And she's gone back to doctor Luke, and as well
Speaker 3: as obviously what you said about kesher, he is sort
Speaker 3: of who was with her when her career launched, right,
Speaker 3: and then she separated herself from him. So that signals
Speaker 3: to me, I want to go back to ten years
Speaker 3: ago Katie Perry, when I made Bangers, when I made
Speaker 3: absolute bangers. What Katie Perry probably isn't nailing is evolution.
Speaker 3: And this looked like a single that could have been
Speaker 3: on the same album maybe as Firework and Raw and
Speaker 3: all of those, and the music industry and the culture
Speaker 3: has evolved enormously, and even her look is almost exactly
Speaker 3: the same. And she said, I think it's it used
Speaker 3: to be. In her Twitter bio it said artist activist conscious,
Speaker 3: and she's decided that she's going to do purposeful pop.
Speaker 3: And to me, since she decided that.
Speaker 7: But that's just also not true, like you can call
Speaker 7: it purposeful pop. The only song and I agree she's
Speaker 7: had bangers like Firework and all of those things, the
Speaker 7: only one that was even mildly purposeful or transgressive was
Speaker 7: I kissed a Girl and I liked it. And we've
Speaker 7: sort of seen not really any evidence that she actually
Speaker 7: ever was queer. Maybe she was, Maybe she was, and
Speaker 7: that's not really any of our business. But that's the
Speaker 7: only thing that she's done back then, I kiss a
Speaker 7: Girl and I liked it. That's in any way transgressive
Speaker 7: or purposeful or kind of empowering.
Speaker 3: What that song did was ingratiate her with the LGBT
Speaker 3: community who have really like followed her entire career, and
Speaker 3: there's a theory that this was a real and you
Speaker 3: can see that there's a lot of kind of LGBT.
Speaker 7: That's what Again, it feels really tokenistic, like there's just
Speaker 7: inexplicably a cutaway shot of two guys kissing. That doesn't
Speaker 7: I mean, Madonna did that many many decades ago in
Speaker 7: a way that felt authentic. People know when they're being manipulated,
Speaker 7: they get it.
Speaker 3: And we always been manipulated by pops. We are it is.
Speaker 4: That's just not a sophisticated enough for tim. I quite
Speaker 4: like the video. It's an overach do.
Speaker 2: I watched it several times because I'm like my candy,
Speaker 2: it's fun, like I like, it's fun right, pretty colors.
Speaker 2: I cannot forgive the doctor luke bit. I just think
Speaker 2: that that is the biggest mistake, is that she's talking
Speaker 2: a lot about the feminine, divine and all that. Then
Speaker 2: work with an all female team, do something like that
Speaker 2: that would be more interesting, but.
Speaker 4: Have four men, right, you know what?
Speaker 2: It feels like a little bit because in that clip
Speaker 2: that you played before me or where she's talking about
Speaker 2: how it's satire in her mind, I think she's trying
Speaker 2: to be like that ironic gen Z thing of like
Speaker 2: girl bossing, you know how it's like been a bit reclaimed,
Speaker 2: you know how, like Emily Verner, my our friend and
Speaker 2: co host on the pod, will like post pictures of
Speaker 2: herself on a big workday going girl bossing, and it's
Speaker 2: kind of like slightly ironic because we all know that
Speaker 2: girls feminism is on the nose and it's gone, but
Speaker 2: they're like claiming it back. And I think she's trying
Speaker 2: to do all those things, but it just somehow feels
Speaker 2: cheesy off because the proof of this will be in
Speaker 2: is it going to be a hit?
Speaker 4: This song?
Speaker 3: And I feel like it might be even more derivative
Speaker 3: the girl Boss thing. But this feels like Barbie. It's
Speaker 3: looked at the success of Barbie and gone, we can
Speaker 3: use a Barbie doll as a signal of empowerment. And
Speaker 3: the song almost feels like a chat GPT rendition of.
Speaker 2: The Barbie message We're all the President's girl, Yeah yeah,
Speaker 2: and the thing about how hard our lives are and
Speaker 2: blah blah blah.
Speaker 3: It feels like she's taken that and gone, Okay, this
Speaker 3: is a cultural moment. I'm going to try and go
Speaker 3: with that, But it doesn't have the same depth or
Speaker 3: grit to it. It hasn't landed.
Speaker 7: I agree, and I think, look, I'm just going to
Speaker 7: say the quiet part out loud. Her body looks very
Speaker 7: different to the way that it used to, and I
Speaker 7: think she's really feeling a lot of validation based on
Speaker 7: how her body looks like. We saw some photos of
Speaker 7: her appearing at fashion Week last week or the week before,
Speaker 7: and she was wearing some panty hose or some tights
Speaker 7: that were all ladded nothing and an open, full length
Speaker 7: like fur coat. Now, Katie Perry, I would challenge you
Speaker 7: a little bit on the fact that she's always done
Speaker 7: like the whipped cream out of the bra and stuff,
Speaker 7: but in a very kind of fun way, Like remember
Speaker 7: she would go to the met gala dress like a Hamburger,
Speaker 7: or like she was very much in dress, very ott,
Speaker 7: but not as body con and not as body revealing
Speaker 7: as she has been in this new iteration of herself
Speaker 7: where her body does look very, very different. And again
Speaker 7: she's part of the game that we all are forced
Speaker 7: to play in terms of beauty standards and what is
Speaker 7: rewarded in our culture. But I think where people are
Speaker 7: getting their hackles up is that she is exploiting that
Speaker 7: and pretending that it's for every woman when it's actually.
Speaker 4: Just for her.
Speaker 7: One thing that it's important to note is the like
Speaker 7: the glee with which people leap on this in some places,
Speaker 7: and how it descends into it like really disparaging, misogynistic,
Speaker 7: nasty commentary about her personally instead of recognizing that, as
Speaker 7: you said whole, it's really hard to reinvent yourself and
Speaker 7: be a woman in the entertainment industry at any age,
Speaker 7: but particularly as you hit forty and beyond.
Speaker 3: Yeah, and I agree with the criticism, and obviously this
Speaker 3: is an album it'd warrants review, the culture is going
Speaker 3: to be talking about it. But I read one that
Speaker 3: was kind of mocking her for being an American Idol judge,
Speaker 3: which I thought was kind of a low blow. And
Speaker 3: she's a new mum, and she's Orlando Bloom's wife, and
Speaker 3: the tone which was applied to it, I just sort
Speaker 3: of went, do we talk about men in the same
Speaker 3: way or is this a little bit of fun that
Speaker 3: we have with a thirty nine year old woman who
Speaker 3: is clearly trying exactly there are men? Yeah, Like I
Speaker 3: reckon that there's been more written about Katy Perry's attempt to,
Speaker 3: you know, I don't know, make feminism sexy than there
Speaker 3: has been about doctor Luke. Like doctor Luke is he
Speaker 3: gets the odd article?
Speaker 7: Oh no, there was a lot written about him at
Speaker 7: the time. There honestly was. That's why people are so surprised.
Speaker 7: It's not like that was a small story that flew. No.
Speaker 3: But I think that men who do much worse. This
Speaker 3: is a career misstep. This isn't a crime.
Speaker 4: Oh yeah, of course. I don't think anyone's prosecuted. You
Speaker 4: just need to go to prison, let's be clear.
Speaker 7: But I think it's really just reflective of that disconnect
Speaker 7: between how people are smarter than that, Like, you can't
Speaker 7: just feed people one thing and call it another and
Speaker 7: expect them to buy it. So I hate the term
Speaker 7: calling out, but I think people are just drawing attention
Speaker 7: to the contradiction here, and even though she's trying to
Speaker 7: own it and say it's satire.
Speaker 4: Oh, it's a little bit tricky.
Speaker 3: Clara and I actually did an episode on Canceled recently
Speaker 3: about Katy Perry about her She's got like a weird
Speaker 3: feud with Taylor Swift that happened for a few years,
Speaker 3: this awkward transition to purposeful pop that we've touched on,
Speaker 3: the regrets about her early music. She has said that
Speaker 3: she would phrase I kissed a girl very.
Speaker 2: Different now it hasn't aged, It hasn't.
Speaker 3: Actually aged that well, and a highly publicized court case.
Speaker 3: To listen to that, there is a link in our
Speaker 3: show notes.
Speaker 2: I think it's hard being a female pop star, Oh
Speaker 2: so hard. Every Tuesday and Thursday, we drop new segments
Speaker 2: of Momma Mia out Loud just for Momma Mia subscribers.
Speaker 2: Follow the link in the show notes to get your
Speaker 2: daily dose of out Loud and a big Thank you
Speaker 2: to all our current subscribers.
Speaker 3: We woke up to the news this morning that Shannondohity,
Speaker 3: aged fifty three, died after a decade long battle with
Speaker 3: breast cancer, and despite her illness, her husband made her
Speaker 3: suffer until the very end. Shannondohity is best known for
Speaker 3: her roles in nine O two one zero and Charmed,
Speaker 3: and in twenty fifteen, in her early forties, she was
Speaker 3: diagnosed with breast cancer. Over the years, she documented a
Speaker 3: lot of her experience with treatment, from surgery to radiation,
Speaker 3: very publicly, and we knew that her cancer had spread.
Speaker 3: Just last year, she launched a podcast where she revealed
Speaker 3: that when she went into surgery to remove her brain tumor,
Speaker 3: it was just after she'd discovered that her husband was
Speaker 3: cheating on her.
Speaker 1: I had brain surgery in twenty twenty three as well,
Speaker 1: and I went in to that surgery early in the morning,
Speaker 1: and I went in after I found out that, you know,
Speaker 1: my marriage was essentially over, that my husband had been
Speaker 1: carrying on an affair for two years.
Speaker 3: She had been with kurt Iswarienko for fourteen years. When
Speaker 3: she discovered he'd been having a two year affair. She
Speaker 3: was heartbroken and filed for divorce in April twenty twenty three,
Speaker 3: but more than a year on it still hadn't been finalized.
Speaker 3: She wanted spousal support and claimed in court documents that
Speaker 3: she was trying to pay for all this treatment while
Speaker 3: he was on what sounds like their plane with another woman,
Speaker 3: going around the world at Gucci, spending money on jewelry.
Speaker 7: I had no idea about this story. I knew she
Speaker 7: was unwell, but I had no idea.
Speaker 3: In the court documents, she said, it is abundantly clear
Speaker 3: to me that Kurt is intentionally delaying settlement in hopes
Speaker 3: that I will not survive the divorce proceedings. It is
Speaker 3: simply not right that Kurt be permitted to prolong our
Speaker 3: divorce in hopes that I die before he is required
Speaker 3: to pay me. Oh my God, while he continues to
Speaker 3: live his life and shirk his responsibilities to his dying
Speaker 3: wife of more than eleven years. Doherty was candid in
Speaker 3: her podcast Let's Be Clear with Shannon Doherty, and even
Speaker 3: had a rule for her funeral, Holly, What were her wishes?
Speaker 2: She spoke on one of her podcasts about exactly how
Speaker 2: she wanted to be remembered and what she wanted to
Speaker 2: do with her money, and what she wanted to do
Speaker 2: with her funeral, And she says she wanted her guest
Speaker 2: list to be on the shorter side.
Speaker 1: And there's a lot of people that I think would
Speaker 1: show up that I don't want there, Like I don't
Speaker 1: want them there because the reasons for showing up aren't
Speaker 1: necessarily the best reasons, Like they don't really like me,
Speaker 1: And you know, if they have their reasons, and good
Speaker 1: for them, but they don't actually really like me enough
Speaker 1: to show it to my funeral. But they will because
Speaker 1: it's the politically correct thing to do, and they don't
Speaker 1: want to look bad. I kind of want to take
Speaker 1: that pressure off of them. And I want my funeral
Speaker 1: to be like a love fest. I don't want people
Speaker 1: to be crying or people to want people to privately
Speaker 1: being like thank god that bitch is dead now, you know,
Speaker 1: bye bye bitch, right, Like those are the things I
Speaker 1: don't want.
Speaker 4: Oh, it sounds like this podcast was like the full
Speaker 4: Burn book.
Speaker 2: Well, because the thing is about Shannon Doherty is that
Speaker 2: if you were obsessed with that era of TV, so
Speaker 2: Beverly Hills nine o two or no Charmed. She was
Speaker 2: a constant in the tabloids in those days for being
Speaker 2: and I'm just going to say it because I'm not
Speaker 2: saying that this is what she was. This is her
Speaker 2: reputation and what the tabloids decided she was, because you
Speaker 2: know how much we.
Speaker 4: Like to cast a role.
Speaker 2: She was a bitch. She was the one who the
Speaker 2: story went, was difficult with all the co stars, difficult
Speaker 2: with Jason Priestley left that show on Charmed, difficult with
Speaker 2: Alissa Milano left that show. So she's always been kind
Speaker 2: of portrayed, rightly or wrongly, absolutely as being like a
Speaker 2: woman who speaks her mind, wasn't afraid to make enemies,
Speaker 2: said what she said, they go. And then what has happened,
Speaker 2: obviously is that she has been very public about how
Speaker 2: sick she's been for a long time. When it was
Speaker 2: announced that she passed over the weekend, a lot of
Speaker 2: those people, including Alisa Milano, have released statements saying how
Speaker 2: sorry they are, as they should and as they would right.
Speaker 2: What's interesting to me about the idea of saying so clearly,
Speaker 2: don't pretend you're sad when I'm gone, is a really
Speaker 2: interesting one, because if you've always lived your life as
Speaker 2: being very straightforward about like, don't bullshit me. You know,
Speaker 2: I'm not afraid to call out bad behavior if I
Speaker 2: see it, or even behave badly if I am feeling it.
Speaker 2: Don't pretend that I'm a saint when I'm gone. Don't
Speaker 2: pretend that we loved each other when we didn't. Don't
Speaker 2: pretend if you're my husband. And I mean, their divorce
Speaker 2: was one of the most acrimonious I can remember in
Speaker 2: Hollywood in that when they split, Doherty's agent released a
Speaker 2: statement saying, if you want more details, ask his agent
Speaker 2: because they're intimately involved, basically saying that he was having
Speaker 2: an affair with his agent. And so it's kind of
Speaker 2: interesting and I think worthy of respect that she's kind
Speaker 2: of saying she's a woman who knew that her mortality
Speaker 2: was finite. She was a woman who knew that the
Speaker 2: end was close. The kind of people she wanted to
Speaker 2: be around her, despite all the rumors that she was
Speaker 2: difficult to work with. Her co host on her podcast
Speaker 2: was Holly Marie Coombs, who was the other person on Charmed.
Speaker 2: It was a show about three, which is if you
Speaker 2: weren't familiar with it, and it was massive, massive, massive
Speaker 2: in the naughties for a while they main friends, stayed friends.
Speaker 2: Talk sometimes about the Milano stuffed but obviously she didn't
Speaker 2: suffer fools, and she's saying, don't pretend just now I'm gone.
Speaker 3: A celebrity death is so loaded because there's an expectation
Speaker 3: that everyone who ever knew you or crossed paths with
Speaker 3: you will make a statement, and if they don't, what's
Speaker 3: wrong Exactly, So even the funeral would be about showing face,
Speaker 3: Like she's saying, you know, something that would absolutely be true,
Speaker 3: which is it? A Lissa Milano would probably be expected
Speaker 3: and probably be advised by her agent that she show
Speaker 3: up as a sign of respect, even though they'd had
Speaker 3: this massive falling out, whereas in ordinary people's lives we
Speaker 3: kind of just let that stuff lie. But because it
Speaker 3: was also public for her, I don't.
Speaker 7: No, don't people go to like the family funerals of
Speaker 7: relatives they can't stand?
Speaker 2: Yes, they do. And it's really interesting in that the
Speaker 2: episode of mid I did with Jackie Bailey, who is
Speaker 2: a funeral celebrant. She said that one of the most
Speaker 2: complicated things often about funerals, obviously is dealing with the
Speaker 2: family politics. And what people can and can't put aside,
Speaker 2: and also the idea of your loved one after they've
Speaker 2: gone being like a different person than the one that
Speaker 2: you were with, so you suddenly can kind of imagine
Speaker 2: that your relationship was different to how it was, or
Speaker 2: she was saying how the cause of a lot of
Speaker 2: tension in those final when a death is expected, in
Speaker 2: those final months, week's days, is We're going to set
Speaker 2: everything right in this very short period of time and
Speaker 2: finally have that conversation that I've always been having in
Speaker 2: my head with you, or set this relationship on a
Speaker 2: path that I always truly believe it should be on
Speaker 2: when actually a person who is dying is the same
Speaker 2: person as they were when they're alive, and that your
Speaker 2: relationship with them is going to be as complicated as
Speaker 2: it always was. Like a lot of things we like
Speaker 2: to see an absolute binary of, like is her ex
Speaker 2: husband sad or is he happy? Like I'm sure that
Speaker 2: his feelings about what's happened over the past, however long,
Speaker 2: are very complicated too.
Speaker 7: Well, he could have handled things differently. I mean, that's
Speaker 7: still going through the courts. But what she said was
Speaker 7: chilling to me about his slow walking this so that
Speaker 7: he doesn't have to pay me because he knows that
Speaker 7: I've got a very limited life expectancy, and his refusal
Speaker 7: to do that means that the time I have left
Speaker 7: will be awful. I can't have the comforts and any
Speaker 7: sort of security.
Speaker 3: This reminded me of an article I read in The
Speaker 3: Guardian years ago which was all about men who leave
Speaker 3: the terminally ill wives, and it said that the amount
Speaker 3: of marriages that end you to terminal illness a relatively
Speaker 3: small unlikely that your partner will leave you, I think
Speaker 3: at six percent, But when you interrogate that six percent,
Speaker 3: it is almost always the man who leaves. The reason,
Speaker 3: they think, is a lot to do with gender division
Speaker 3: within a household and the expectation that you clean, that
Speaker 3: you provide, that you cook, and that you caretake the
Speaker 3: care taking position. Not that it comes more naturally, but
Speaker 3: maybe it's more expected for women. So there were all
Speaker 3: these really heartbreaking stories of people remember ring, you know,
Speaker 3: their mum and dad, and how their dad was often
Speaker 3: very good, and it was saying that there's this thing
Speaker 3: about men wanting to fix a problem, but when the
Speaker 3: terminal diagnosis came in, they totally emotionally checked out, which
Speaker 3: I just thought was so so tragic. And also she'd
Speaker 3: had cancer for a long time before this affair had started,
Speaker 3: and I wondered the impact of that.
Speaker 4: I interviewed a woman called Rebecca Wolf, who's a writer.
Speaker 4: She had four.
Speaker 7: Children and had been with her husband for a really
Speaker 7: long time and they were about to get divorced. It
Speaker 7: had been a pretty unhappy marriage the last few years,
Speaker 7: and it had been emotionally abusive from her point of view,
Speaker 7: and it was just awful and she was getting out.
Speaker 7: And then he was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer and given
Speaker 7: a limited amount of time to live, and she talked
Speaker 7: about how incredibly complicated that was, and she didn't, you know,
Speaker 7: obviously all their plans to split up were put on
Speaker 7: hold and people hadn't really known about it, and she
Speaker 7: nursed him until he died. But she then had very
Speaker 7: complicated feelings.
Speaker 4: After his death.
Speaker 7: She absolutely grieved, but it was different to the way
Speaker 7: everyone thought she was grieving, which is it of someone
Speaker 7: who was still with him and planning to be with
Speaker 7: him into the future, and who'd lost a future. She
Speaker 7: hadn't she'd lost her past, but she hadn't lost her
Speaker 7: future and we'll put a link in the show notes.
Speaker 7: It was an amazing interview to listen to. But what
Speaker 7: do you do if you're a Lissa Milano on this day?
Speaker 7: I mean, has she released?
Speaker 2: Yes, she hasn't, And I actually think her statement's great,
Speaker 2: she said. And some people were rolling their rise of
Speaker 2: me like she shouldn't have released a statement, But I
Speaker 2: think that's tough. She said. It's no secret that Shannon
Speaker 2: and I had a complicated relationship, but at its core
Speaker 2: with someone I deeply respected and was in awe of.
Speaker 2: She was a talented actress, beloved by many, and the
Speaker 2: world is less without her. My condolence is to all
Speaker 2: who loved her. I think that's a great statement. I mean,
Speaker 2: I think, yeah, it's not about you when somebody else passes.
Speaker 2: And I think that if she hadn't a released statement,
Speaker 2: everybody would have looked because there is nothing we love
Speaker 2: more than a female feud in averted commas. So the
Speaker 2: Milano Doherty feud is in the pop culture canon of
Speaker 2: you know, co stars at war that we so buy into.
Speaker 2: I don't know, I think they we'll probably look back
Speaker 2: at Shannon Doherty, not in that way where we suddenly
Speaker 2: have to erase anything that's complicated about a person when
Speaker 2: they're gone. But in a way, what a gift to
Speaker 2: make a podcast kind of and document this final battle
Speaker 2: a cliched language, but this experience that is relatively common.
Speaker 2: And also to be so upfront about who you are.
Speaker 2: I mean, maybe she's not, you know, the easiest person
Speaker 2: to work with, get along with whatever, but that doesn't
Speaker 2: mean that, as Milano's said here, that a lot of
Speaker 2: people will be devastated by her passing. I say veil,
Speaker 2: and I also say go and watch Beverly Hills nine
Speaker 2: o two one. It's one of the greatest shows ever made.
Speaker 3: Out louders, If you feel like lifting spirits, well, may
Speaker 3: I suggest that you listen to our subscriber episode on
Speaker 3: a Family Affair, which stars Zac Efron and Nicole Goodman.
Speaker 3: People have listened to it have a lot of thoughts.
Speaker 3: I don't agree, so many thoughts, a lot of things
Speaker 3: we said. They think that we should have focused on
Speaker 3: other things more. They do being very cryptic, But please
Speaker 3: go and listen and jump in the outlauders and let
Speaker 3: us know what you thought about it, what your takeaways were. Overwhelmingly,
Speaker 3: just say the Outlouder's not given it five stars, not five,
Speaker 3: and we also were not giving it three or four
Speaker 3: or five stars. So h you can listen to that
Speaker 3: via the link in our show notes.
Speaker 2: A very big thank you our friends for being here
Speaker 2: with us on this enormous news Monday.
Speaker 4: We were so loud, news cycles drunk and it needs
Speaker 4: to go home.
Speaker 2: I know there are like five other things we could
Speaker 2: have talked about today too, but it's like we can't
Speaker 2: crumb it all into our show. This episode was produced
Speaker 2: by Emiline Gazillas. The assistant producer is Chylie Blackman. The
Speaker 2: audio production from Lea Porgees. And we'll be back in
Speaker 2: your ears tomorrow and then with more news and news
Speaker 2: on Wednesday Byye.
Speaker 4: Shout out to any Mum of me is subscribers listening.
Speaker 4: If you love the show and want to support us
Speaker 4: as well, subscribing to Mama Maya is the very best
Speaker 4: way to do so. There is a link in the
Speaker 4: episode description