The O.J. Simpson Trial: Paula Barbieri Part 2

"There’s no precedent for women in this family being treated like they matter."

Sarah tells Mike about the Bronco chase as Paula Barbieri experienced it. Then, she recounts how a poor kid from Panama City, Florida, made it all the way to the high-fashion world of Paris, France—and discovered that she had jumped out of the frying pan and into the fire. Sarah continues to compare everyone to Erin Brockovich.

This episode begins with a lengthy discussion of O.J. Simpson's suicide attempt on the day of the Bronco chase. We go on to describe scenes of domestic violence and attempted sexual assault; Paula deserved better.

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Transcript

The O.J. Simpson Trial: Paula Barbieri Part 2

Sarah: I've gotten so into baths, and it's all because of Faye. Faye opened the door to self-care for me.

Mike: Welcome to You're Wrong About the podcast, where the women who are cut out of the made for TV movies, get to have a starring role.

Sarah: Ah, because I've been complaining about the lack of Paula in the Ryan Murphy show to you.

Mike: Yes. Because she’s only in two scenes! 

Sarah: So I might be wrong, but I counted the number of lines she has, and I think it's two lines. And maybe she's in more scenes than that not talking. I have not done a frame by frame analysis. But I am very happy that we are coming and doing this approach, and that we're going to talk about Paula Barbieri just as much as history seems to require. Which I think is a lot.

Mike:  I'm Michael Hobbes. I'm a reporter for the Huffington Post.

Sarah:  I am Sarah Marshall. I'm a writer at work on a book on the satanic panic. 

Mike: We are on Patreon at patreon.com/yourewrongabout. 

Sarah: And we have tote bags and shirts now that say, “If Marcia Clark could get through 1995, then I can get through this day.” And I think they are very cute.

Mike: And today we are talking about Paula Barbieri, again.

Sarah: Are you excited to return to Paula?

Mike:  Yes. I want to know what happens with the Bronco chase. 

Sarah: I feel like I almost want to… we'll get to it. 

Mike: I'm slightly sad that we're going to get to the Bronco chase, because it's been looming in the distance for so long. 

Sarah: We don't have to. 

Mike: So yes. So where are we? Where are we in time? Where do we pick up with Paula?

Sarah:  I want to start by asking you, we talked about Paula a couple of weeks ago, where is she at the moment that we're returning to her?

Mike: She was dating OJ for some period of time before the murders. She broke up with him the morning of the murders. She then found out that his ex-wife, who she perceived herself to be in competition with, had been murdered. She sees that OJ is wounded and sad. She perceives him as a victim of this crime as well. That he's now lost someone who was really important to him. She decides to, instead of continuing with the breakup that she had initiated, she calls Mulligan and goes to him, and essentially moves in with him in Robert Shapiro's house.

Sarah: He calls a Mulligan, and she allows it. 

Mike: And so she has taken on this caretaker role of, I'm really scared that he's going to kill himself, I'm really scared that he's taking medications. He's barely lucid and he needs my help. And so that seems to be her motivation for doing this so far. But because she was cut out of the Ryan Murphy show, I have no idea where this story goes.

Sarah: So we left off with OJ Simpson's possibly suicide note being read aloud on television after OJ has disappeared from Robert Kardashian’s house.

Mike: Yes, David Schwimmer. 

Sarah: And then in her book, The Other Woman, right after she talks about that, Paula writes, “Most pointed of all was when OJ wrote how he done “most of the right things. So why do I end up like this? I can't go on no matter what the outcome, people will look and point.”

Mike: But that's his bullshit, persecution complex. 

Sarah: He's right. People will look and point. That's what they do when you've been accused of murdering someone. He is right. But it does make sense to focus on yourself in a suicide note if that's what this is. I think that this is actually a moment of clarity from him in a way, where if he's saying that he's going to go kill himself now, then he's saying essentially that I can't stand to not be loved anymore. Like the public has loved me for my entire adult life. And after this, they can’t, and I can't stand that. And I think that's true. 

Mike: That's like deeply narcissistic too. Because what he should be sad about is that the love of his life just died. Should be sad about, is a loaded phrase. But it seems like this was a really important person in your life, and to be focusing on yourself just seems like bad and weird.

Sarah: You know what I think is interesting, and maybe I've been thinking about this lately, is that we tend to use the word ‘narcissist’ as like a value judgment in some way. It's like, that person's a narcissist. And do you think that narcissists are narcissists on purpose? Because I don't. Narcissus died because he couldn't stop staring at his own reflection. Like people don't want to die while staring at reflections of themselves. I think if we're able to use the term ‘narcissist’ to just mean wow, this kind of self-own that he's offering us in this note of like the public has always loved me, I've always been the fastest boy. 

And that was his real love, really, was like the way that the public allowed him to feel about himself. And something that Paula mentions, they would often just like snag a little time together in an airport because he would be flying off to golf for Hertz or whatever. And she would be flying off to do modeling gigs. And so they would get together for a meal or coffee or something in some airport somewhere. She tells a story where they're like running for him to catch a flight and a fan wants an autograph and he's like, run alongside me and I’ll autograph stuff for you. 

I think he has no real idea of what it's like to be able to wake up in the morning and be like, I'm proud of the person I am. I'm a good husband and I'm a good dad. And I had a good golf game this morning and I feel good about that. That's so foreign to him, he never learned how to do that. And I think this means that he just has no coping technique at this point. 

Mike: So you think that sort of sense of devastation and oblivion is what motivates him to get in the Bronco that day?

Sarah: Oh yeah. Yeah, I do. And I think he had the sense of, it's better to burn out than to fade away. 

So Paula is watching all of this on CNN. And we must remind you that it's been only five days since she got on a plane to Las Vegas, thinking I just broke up with my boyfriend and I've ended this garbage fire of a relationship and I'm moving on. Things are great and I feel strong and healthy and alive. 

Mike: Michael Bolton is going to touch my cheek.

Sarah: And Michael Bolton is going to touch my cheek, and we're going to sing on a mountain together probably, because that seems to be what he does based on his videos. And in another part of the city Marcia Clark is like, my desk is like almost clean, I just filed for divorce from Gordon. 

So it's June 17th, Paula is watching CNN, listening to OJ’s letter in his farewell to her. And it got to the point where she's hearing the part of OJ's letter about his relationship with Nicole, and just feeling just hurt about how Nicole is still the one who matters most to him. 

Mike: She's still plan B. 

Sarah: Yeah. And so she writes, “When the letter talked about Nicole, it really hurt me to hear the obvious, that OJ still loved her and that he'd hoped they'd have a future. But I couldn't think about that, not now. When you're in denial, you have to be there all the way. An hour later, CNN broke into Larry King with a shot of San Diego freeway northbound. I gaped at the sight of AC’s white Bronco rolling down the middle of the road with a dozen or more squad cars in slow pursuit.”

Mike: It's AC’s Bronco? I thought OJ had a Bronco. 

Sarah: OJ has a white Bronco. AC also has a white Bronco. And Paula has a white Bronco.

Mike:  Oh wow. So these were like the Ugg boots of 1994.

Sarah: And Paula writes, “OJ was in the back seat, the newsman said. He was alive. Ecstatic at that simple fact, I began to piece together what might've happened. Though the district attorney would try to suggest otherwise, there had been no conspiracy at Kardashian's house. Given the sedatives he was taking and the despair that it swamped him, OJ lacked the harder mind for any escape.” And in the margin, I've written ‘sure’. “But when he and AC saw how easy it was for Tom and me to drive off, it probably occurred to him that they could do the same.” 

Paula is finding a way to blame herself for OJ fleeing and being taken into custody. Like as a person with a history of like codependency and blaming myself for stuff that I really shouldn't blame myself for, I'm like, I'm impressed by her codependent abilities. Like she, this is like Olympic gold medal self-blame.

Mike: We're all Paula.

Sarah: It’s just amazing. Like she's sitting there. She's, I'm so glad you're still alive. Thank God. And it's my fault. And if you hadn't seen me get away from Robert Kardashian’s house so easily, then you wouldn't have tried it. And it's because you learned by watching me. It's terrible. 

Mike: So the logistics of this are, he left Robert Shapiro's house, Shapiro thought that he was turning himself in and that AC was driving him to the precinct? 

Sarah: No, Bob Shapiro was not that stupid. Bob Shapiro basically was going to take OJ, and he had been in talks with the LAPD. He was like, trust me, listen to me, have you ever had any reason not to trust me? We've been working together for a long time. I'm a celebrity lawyer. And then as when we record this show, they're like, okay, are you going to bring OJ in? We need him in like right now. And Bob Shapiro’s like, we just need a little more time, need a little more time. It’s as Bob Shapiro is planning to take him in, and OJ and AC just like bounce. 

Mike: Do we have any sense of what his plan was? 

Sarah: What OJ’s plan was?

Mike: Yeah, because he wasn't getting in the car by himself to kill himself. He was getting in the car with AC driving, right? 

Sarah: Yeah. AC is driving. 

Mike: Yeah. What is your sense of what his actual strategy was with this?

Sarah: So his story is that his plan was to go to Nicole's grave and kill himself there. And he has a gun in the car. At various points, he's holding a gun to his head in the back of the car as AC is driving. They reached the cemetery, and they realized the police are there. And he says they instead go to an orange grove. And AC gets out of the truck and OJ says that he takes the gun out, but AC came back before he could use it. And then they got back in the Bronco.

Mike: So AC doesn't know about this plan, obviously. 

Sarah: He knows that OJ has a gun.

Mike: Does he know that he's like driving OJ to the grave site to kill himself? Or do we not know?

Sarah: I don't think we can know that.

Mike: Because he's still alive. He's still around. He gives interviews, I guess he must have written a book. 

Sarah: No, he didn't write a book. He's one of the few people who did not write a book. AC actually stayed pretty quiet. Here's what I think, if I were AC Cowlings. So my best friend is distraught. He's writing what is potentially a suicide note. We're crying together in Robert Kardashian’s house about how we were supposed to grow old together. According to Paula, there is this general sense of this is it. Also AC has a relationship with OJ that's similar to the relationship a lot of men have had with OJ. Which is that he's the alpha. He decides what they do. He decides where they go. If he gets a car, then you get a car that looks like his. I can see feeling the kind of loyalty to my friend OJ, where I'm like either I don't know what you're doing, or I know that you're intent on killing yourself, and maybe I want to help you with that. Like maybe I feel like that is what you truly need. And I have the degree of loyalty to you that I want to help you do it. I don't know. 

Mike: People often do not know their motivations when they are doing stuff. It’s only afterwards.

Sarah: I don’t think OJ was very aware of what emotions he was having at what time. This is another thing, right? That like we have, I think we really need to work on cultural literacy around abusive behavior. Because if you were an abusive partner or the abusive party in a relationship, like to me, that correlates much more strongly with a lack of control over your behavior and a lack of awareness of your emotions, than being some kind of, now I have decided that I want to hurt you and I'm aware of all of my feelings, and this is a rational decision I've made.

Mike: It’s the criminal mastermind thing. 

Sarah: Yeah. We want everyone to be a mastermind. And I think a mastermind is just a board game. Freedom is just another word for nothing left to lose. And mastermind the board game from the eighties. 

And then there's the debate that maybe he was fleeing to Mexico, because he did have $8,000 on the car with him. So in The Run of his Life, Jeffrey Toobin writes, “The LAPD had put out an all-points bulletin for Al Cowlings right around the time of the press conference at 2:00 PM. Around that time Vannatter, Lang, and their colleagues put in their first calls to the many police departments whose jurisdictions abut that of the LAPD. But because the police had never seized Simpson's passport, the cops had to cast an even wider net. They alerted the US border patrol, as well as the airlines, the US Customs Service, and the Mexican Judicial Police. Not surprisingly, perhaps given the vast public interest in the case, it was the broadcast announcement, not the law enforcement effort, that produced almost immediate results. 

Chris Thomas had been walking television at home and Mission Viejo when he learned Simpson was on the run. At 6:25 PM, he and his girlfriend, Kathy Ferrigno were heading north on Interstate 5, the Santa Ana Freeway, on their way to a weekend of camping. They had been joking about OJ’s disappearance, studying in a halfhearted way the cars coming toward them. Seeing if some sin might be among them on his way to Mexico. After a few minutes of this, Ferrigno looked into the passenger side rear view mirror and started saying, ‘Oh my God, Chris, Chris, Chris’. Thomas slowed down. In a moment Ferrigno was face to face with Al Cowlings. When he noticed that she was staring at him, Cowlings glared at her. Their location at that moment was about 80 miles south of Kardashian’s house in Encino. They were about a five minute drive from the grave site of Nicole Brown Simpson. The Bronco was heading north, that is back toward Los Angeles, and away from the Mexican border.”

Mike: So that corroborates OJ's story that he went to the grave, saw the cops, and then turned around. It's interesting that from day one, it's like the media is playing a hugely important role in not only documenting this case, but in some ways solving it or changing it, that they're putting out these big bulletins.

Sarah: Oh yeah. From the beginning, this is a, ‘viewers at home, what do you think?’ kind of a trial. Toobin writes, “When he was booked at the police station, Cowlings had $8,750 in cash in his pockets. And in what appeared to be Simpson's travel bag, they found OJ’s passport and a plastic bag that contained a fake goatee, a fake mustache, a bottle of makeup adhesive remover, and three receipts from cinema secrets beauty supply dated May 27th, 1994. The officers also found a fully loaded Smith and Wesson .357 Magnum blue steel handgun. It was registered to Lieutenant Earl Paysinger, yet another of Simpson’s friends on the LAPD. About five years earlier at a time when Paysinger was providing security for OJ, the Lieutenant had bought his client the gun.” Isn’t that amazing?

Mike: It’s also interesting for the defense theory that it's all an LAPD frame job, when he has a lot of buddies on the LAPD.

14:57 Sarah: I cannot imagine having a client who was cozier with the police. OJ’s friend, Ron Shipp, talks about he would bring over other police officers to OJ’s house and not tell them whose house they were going to. And then OJ would open the door and their faces would light up. He's like Santa to them. It's weird for anyone to be that popular with police officers. But what do you make of the fact that he has a fake goatee and a fake mustache and stuff? 

Mike: He has seen like the Harrison Ford version of the Fugitive too, where it's, all you do is go into a rest up bathroom and dye my hair. And then nobody will recognize me, like the Clark Kent version of a disguise for this extremely famous person puts on a pair of glasses and then it's who are you? If you're a celebrity at that time, the size of OJ, it's not clear to me that like a goatee is going to do it, but people will be like, oh, it's OJ Simpson and he has a goatee again, like we're not dealing with like criminal mastermind here. 

Sarah: Yeah, that's important. How many criminal masterminds are there actually?

Mike: There are three. 

Sarah: Okay. What he claims later, there's like many flavors of OJ lies and this is one where you're like, OJ, like where are you even trying with this one? What he says is that's for, oh, if I don't want to be recognized by the public, like when I take my kids to Disneyland, that's what that's for. That's like him saying I wanted to go to the buffet, but not eat anything cause I hate receiving like the one true nutrient that my soul craves all day long. It's okay, sure.

Mike: Also if you will permit me to channel Nicole for a second, when the fuck did OJ ever take his kids to Disneyland? He doesn't seem like he's that kind of parent. He's showing up late for their recitals and skipping their confirmations. 

Sarah:Good point. 

Mike: So what's Paula doing now? 

Sarah: At the time that the chase is happening, she's just watching CNN helplessly, but what she says, OJ tells her later, because he says it is civil trial, that they go to an orange Grove. He's going to kill himself, but then AC comes back before he can use the gun. OJ apparently has the gun wrapped up in a towel and Paula writes, “the full story is even more chilling. I took the gun and put it in my mouth, OJ told me. I pulled the trigger and the towel jammed the trigger.”. What do you think about that? Because this book contains dozens of instances of OJ lying to Paula. And this is something where I feel like this doesn't seem plausible or implausible to me. Like I really don't know. 

Mike: It’s like watching the Usual Suspects or something. It's like at the end, you're like, I don't know what of that happened and what didn't.

Sarah: I can see this being a play for sympathy, which he definitely needs her for. But I can also see it being true. Like he's clear he saw, the way that he beat Nicole was just, like the horrific nature of those beatings to me is, this is someone who was not in control of himself. Also, you're like, was his ego so powerful that it didn't want to let itself die? I guess the question is does his narcissism make him more or less likely to actually attempt suicide. And I don't know. And I don't know if we could make that assessment.

Mike:  It's also interesting that whenever you hear these stories, the lens you want to apply to them is this makes sense or this doesn't make sense. Where, why would it prevent you from committing suicide if your friend comes back to the car? Like your friend is going to find out two seconds later that you killed yourself. So like, why does it matter that AC can see you? But then on the other hand, people kill themselves or don't kill themselves for all kinds of reasons. Like things that happen do not make sense.

Sarah: Yes. And we weren't there. Y

Mike: Yeah. But so Paula doesn't know any of this yet. All she knows is that OJ’s on TV. She's watching it and she's worried about him, right? That's about it.

Sarah:  Yeah. She is sitting there watching this happening on TV, the same as the rest of America, and all those people who are trying to watch basketball at the time. She writes, “I was desperate for the Bronco to pull over. For OJ to step out. I think I shared everyone's thoughts. Just let this not be a catastrophe. I checked for messages at my home phone. With one eye on the television, I heard several disconnects. Then a dazed but familiar voice. Paula, are you there? Of all the unreal moments I'd experienced, that one, might've been the most bizarre. To hear OJ’s disembodied voice as I walked his voiceless presence on TV passing waves of cheering on lookers.”

Mike: So he's drunk dialing Paula again, he's doing it while he's in the car. 

Sarah: Why do you think people only make phone calls when they're drunk? Cause you're a millennial? You call me. 

Mike: I guess I just say like emotionally drunk dialing, he's feeling things and he's calling her.

Sarah:  By your standard I don't think OJ has made a calm phone call in his life though. Cause this is just how he calls people. Yeah. He's reaching out to her basically. He's like Paula, Paula, Paula, help me. This is also hours after he's sent her away and given her, he's tried to do his best, Michael Bolton, too. He has attempted to touch your cheek softly and send her on her way and he has changed his tune after a few hours, it seems.

Mike: In keeping with his struggle with impulse control.

Sarah: Yeah. I was thinking in terms of just OJ and Paula's relationship, generally, that they seem to share this where she will call things off. He will start calling her and then the sound of his voice will sway her and they will start things up again. Or, he will try and send her away, but then he won't be, it's like each of them is on a chain and they can start running, but then they get to the end of it and it snaps and they come back to each other. And Paula writes, “I wanted more than anything to call OJ back but I lacked AC’s cellular phone number,” such a 1997 phrase, cellular phone number. “The truth was OJ was calling from his own cell phone, but that possibility never dawned on me. I could do only what millions of others were doing: watch and pray”.

Mike: Star 69. Why didn't she star 69? We had that technology.

Sarah: So many rabbit holes here. This is to me, a very revealing moment. She writes “as the Bronco swung west on the 91 freeway, the north on the 405, I found myself melting into the truck's backseat. I felt OJ’s fear and confusion. His sense of being hunted. I had to hold on to every bit of my focus. If I faltered for even a second, I was sure OJ would die.” She's a witch. I found myself melting into the truck's backseat. Like she literally feels that she is astrally projecting herself into the Bronco and keeping him alive. Like she's engaging in the kind of magical thinking. Like she's responsible for keeping him from killing himself.

Mike:  It's very like abuse, abuser type of dynamic, where it's not that I flew off the handle and beat you, it's that you made me do it by whatever tiny, little slight that I've invented.

Sarah: And she buys that.

Mike:  Yeah. And she's making herself responsible for everything. This is all OJ doing it. 

Sarah: And it’s her fault that Nicole is dead, like her self blame runs so deep that with one hand he's denying that he could have killed anyone. And with, I don't know how you deny things with your hands in one breath, she's denying that he could have killed anyone and in the other it's, but it's still her fault. It's still her fault that Nicole is dead.. And if he kills himself, that's also her fault. What is Paula not blaming herself for? So she's melting into the backseat and she writes. “And so I shushed all my questions aside. I locked my forbidden doubts away, triple bolted, the safe. I had lain next to this man in our most private hours, I shared my secrets and my life. I had never stopped loving him and good times are hard. How could I have loved a murderer? I couldn't conceive of it, not if I was to give OJ the absolute loyalty he needed, not if I was to stay sane. \From that point on, through all that was to follow over the next 16 months, I never doubted OJ again.”

Mike: Wait, we need to do like one of those little if P then Q type of maps for her. .

Sarah: This is like an LSAT question, right? 

Mike: Because is she honestly, do you think that she's honestly saying if I love him, then he can't be a murderer>

Sarah:  She's in what the Greeks call a dilemma. Which means you're literally between the two horns. So in what might've been the trial of the century in Homer, arrestees is in a position where he has to avenge his father's murder by killing the person who killed his father. But the person who killed his father is his mother. Which he does because Agamemnon sacrificed their daughter earlier. It's a whole big thing. 

Mike: But do you have a moral rule telling you to kill someone and you have a moral rule telling you that it's forbidden to kill someone.

Sarah: Yes. And arrestees is, in some versions, saved from this. The gods literally intervene and they're like, we know we put you in an impossible position and work is going to wipe this away. Paula Barbieriri is in Arrestees kind of a place right now because according to her moral universe, like the kind of laws that she lives by, she has to love OJ Simpson. She has to have absolute loyalty to him because he's in pain and he is in jail and the world is against him and he's going to trial, but she also can't love a murderer. She can't have loved a murderer, but she has to love him. So he can't be a murderer. He just can't. That's what I think she's saying. 

Mike: When this happens to a normal person who doesn't have the god’s help it's called being placed under citizen's arrestees. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. 

Sarah: Did you just make that up?

Mike: I've been sitting on that for three minutes. I was waiting for a tiny pause so I could say it, it wasn't the most appropriate place to say it.

Sarah:  But I really liked that citizen's arrestees. Oh my goodness. 

Mike: Sorry. Yeah. I think it's that's the place that she's talked herself into being. She's in a way, like created this dilemma for herself in a way.

Sarah: Yeah. Let's talk about. Let's talk about what made Paula Paula. What do we know about Paula's life pre OJ so far? Can you remind us of our knowledge to this point?

Mike:  So I love doing these super-duper zoom-in episodes and returning to the same people over and over again, because oftentimes when I'm editing the show, I realize something that I forgot to follow up on. And one of the things in Paula episode one that has stuck with me is that they mentioned in, I think it was in that terrible review where they referred to’ her Nicol- like inability to leave OJ’, where they basically said like she was abused as a kid and maybe that's why she couldn't leave OJ, as a sort of like blaming her kind of way. But do you think that is part of the dynamic here? That she grew up in an abusive home?

Sarah:  I'm so glad you're asking me that. Absolutely. Yeah. We're just gonna talk about Paula's life pre OJ. And I feel, to spoil this for you a little bit, but you will likely agree with my assessment that with very few and very minor exceptions, every man she has ever met or had any kind of a relationship with appears to have been complete garbage.

Mike: Oh really? 

Sarah: You look at everything she had experienced of human relationships to the time she met OJ and you're like, oh my God. Yeah. This is pretty not that bad compared to what you've been through. So Paula is born on New Year's Eve, 1966. Her parents are Marianne Kartinuto, who is a daughter of Italian immigrants who settled in Connecticut. Marianne marries a salesman named Vincent Barbieri, who is apparently very charming, very much a ladies man, a big drinker, and given to rage and to violent outbursts. And so in 1964, Marianne has two little kids, Vinnie and Michael. She flees her husband Vincent and moves down to Florida and Vincent follows her. And that's how Paula is conceived. She writes she's the result of her parents' reconciliation. 

Mike; Oh, wow. 

Sarah: It feels like this is the star she's born under. Like she's born to two people who are like, we really shouldn't be married, I've already fled you once, but let's give it another try, I guess. And then they're together until Paula is three. She talks about spending her childhood, like her dad is a truck driver. And so every time she saw a white truck and Panama City, Florida, which is where she grows up, she looks into the cab to see if her dad is inside of it.

Mike: Aw, Paula. So he's this Phantom limb presence in her life where she probably doesn't remember him super well, if she was only three, so she's constructed him.

Sarah:  And she sees him occasionally, but like she says that when she's growing up, she'll sometimes visit him for a week in the summer in west Palm beach where he lives when she's older. Even like the fondest memories, she writes, “I remember tickling his back while he read the newspaper over his morning shots of vodka and how he liked to call me button”, so the best memories are like, he's like quietly drinking and it's like letting her be near him. And she talks about, she, as a kid, will lie in bed crying about how much she misses her dad and her mom's trying to comfort her. And she says, is dadd dead? Why doesn't he call me? Why doesn't really love me? “You'll see him soon, Mom would say. She was almost always wrong.” Paul, his big struggle as she's growing up is that she, in middle school and high school, she goes out for cheerleader five times and she never gets put on cheerleading, but she was in, she is in sixth grade cheerleading for the little sixth grade football players.

Mike: They have cheerleaders in sixth grade? 

Sarah: It's a big country. There's many different kinds of cheerleaders. And so they're there like a homecoming game and her dad promises that he's going to be there to escort her because that's what all the other dads are doing.. She's like watching all the other dads show up. And of course her dad doesn't come. Let me show you a picture, actually. Oh, here's little Paula. This is when she's seven.

Mike:  Oh my God. Look at her little bowl cut.

Sarah:  Yeah, everyone had that haircut. 

Mike; She has a little button nose. 

Sarah: Oh. And then, and here's her dad. Here's Vincent Barbieri.

Mike: Okay. He's smiling. He's got his arm around two ladies. 

Sarah: Two unnamed women.

Mike: Some ladies. He's got curly hair. He's wearing a polo shirt, one of those polo shirts that are now associated with white supremacy. But I think they had different connotations in the 90s. 

Sarah: And okay. And here's Paula, sixth grade cheerleader, being escorted to homecoming by one of the other football players cause her Dad didn't show up. Look at that face. 

Mike: She has like a strained smile.

Sarah:  To me she's got a big smile on her face and her eyes are completely vacant. To me, this is the look of like smile though your heart is breaking. And then the next picture of Paula that we have is when she's crowned the Azalea Trail queen.

Mike: Is that like a girl Scouts thing? 

Sarah: No, it is a Florida beauty pageant that she was in. 

Mike: Oh fuck. Wow. Yeah, she looks amazing. Wow. She has like long flowing brown hair. She's wearing a sort of billowy white dress. She's holding flowers. In the earlier photo, she looks like a cute kid. And now she's yes, she's a professional, good looking person. Like she looks incredible. 

Sarah: Yeah. Yeah. And then this is her when she's 17, like she suddenly became someone who people wanted. That to me is part of the story here. She writes, “I grew up with the image of my dad as a Clint Eastwood character, a guy who drank two fingers of vodka for breakfast and could beat up any man anywhere. The difference was that Clint Eastwood never hit a woman. I was still an infant when dad lost it one day and pushed mom against a piece of furniture, cracking two of her ribs. Then he just left us, leaving his sanitation truck company, the family's main source of income.” And so her mom, who's working at a law office at the time, takes a leave and takes over the sanitation truck company, because that's the main breadwinner. And so Paula, as a little baby, spends her days in her baby basket in the garbage truck next to her mom, who’s like driving this garbage truck around picking up trash because her husband has just beaten her up and then left. 

Mike: How is this not a movie in the 1980s starring Dolly Parton?

Sarah: Yeah. Good question.

Mike: Just a tough talking garbage lady. 

Sarah: There's still time. Two years after that Paula's mom marries a guy named Bill. Do we think that he's going to be a good father figure?

Mike:  We already know it's going to be so bad. 

Sarah: What do you think is going to happen? 

Mike: I think it's because I've been reading so much about trafficking recently that so much abuse that kids suffer is at the hands of step parents, not necessarily parents. 

Sarah: Yeah. Bill apparently is sweet tempered when he's not drinking, but those periods of time become less and less frequent. The fresh start that Paula’s mom is getting is that Vincent Barbieri drank vodka at breakfast, but Bill drinks bourbon at breakfast, it's more of a lateral move than anything. And so Bill is sporadically employed. Paula's mom, Marianne, is the one who was keeping the family together and making the money and supporting everybody. And so they moved to Panama City when Paul was seven, which at the time is a pretty small town. I’ll just read it to you. “As my father never paid child support, Mom was carrying the whole family on her salary as a supervisor with a land title company. There wasn't much money, but we made do. We lived off the garden and out of the gulf where Bill would take us fishing. We feast on oysters, shrimp, and blue crabs. I could eat spaghetti and crabs every week when they were topped with mom's Marsala sauce. One summer, we caught loads of king mackerel, which we ate every way imaginable. To this day I can't look at one. We lived in a town that felt safe and small. I could fish with my friends among the cranes and herons or build forts in the woods across the street. When the weather got hot, we'd invade the motels and go swimming. We called it pool hopping. When we got thrown out of one place, we just moved on to the next.” And there's, there's good stuff. No one's childhood is pure misery. Like Bill gets her a bike and paints it silver so she can get around town that way. Her mom makes her all her dresses until she's 10. And then she starts becoming interested in fashion. She tells a story that is supposed to be cute, but which really gives one pause, which is the first jeans that she ever wore, she borrowed from her friend, Sandra, and then she writes “at reading circle that day, James Young, the cutest boy in the class kept egging over until he was sitting right next to me. I was startled when I felt him playing with my backside. What are you doing? I said, I was genuinely baffled. No boy had ever paid me a second look. And he said, oh, I was just trying to get your Levi tag with my pen. On our way home after school that day, James stopped and gave me a kiss. My first kiss. That was my initial glimpse at the power of fashion”, which is that's great that you think that, but, it's like your first romantic experiences with a guy touching you without your consent. 

Mike: It’s so interesting thinking about sort of women gaining power by being conventionally attractive, because it's a form of power, but it's also a target on your back for this kind of behavior, to some extent. Not to say that women who aren't conventionally attractive don't have these kinds of experiences because of course they do, and they're less likely to report them and be believed, but it's also, like so much of the experience of being a good looking conventionally, attractive woman is shit like this, like being targeted for this kind of thing and laughing it off or telling yourself this different narrative about it. Or I guess like good looks generally thinking that it just happens to everybody.

Sarah: Or  that it's about your appearance and like you have this power over this person because you look this way so really you're the one who has the power in a situation. That's a story that girls are really encouraged to believe. So essentially, Bill's drinking gets worse. His behavior gets worse. Paula says “One night I came in for dinner and found my mother sitting quietly at the kitchen table with a cocktail in her hand. She was the picture of dignity, except for the tomato sauce dripping off her nose and the blue crab legs embedded in her hair. Mother, what happened? I cried. Bill just admitted, she calmly replied, that he hates spaghetti and crabs. She never raised her voice to him that night, never said a word. Bill was a big man, 6’2”, 240 lbs. And she feared to fuel his fire”. And she writes about, she lies in bed at night just listening to these fights between Bill and her mother, listening to the sound of dishes breaking, listening to this horrible fight happening and then silence, and not knowing what happened. And does that mean that her mom has been hurt again? And if you spend your childhood lying in bed, listening to adults fighting in a way that you can't control, then it's, to me, a very straight line between that and imagining yourself into the backseat of the white Bronco. Like her whole existence is being a helpless witness to the violence of other people that can sometimes spiral out and affect her if she gets in the way.

Mike: I just think that after we tear down all the Confederate statues, we should put up statues to people like her mom. 

Sarah: Just like people who have never been noticed by history in any way, but have just suffered silently in some kind of terrible relationship.

Mike: And fucking managed to be good parents and managed to earn money anyway. It's to be doing all of this, to be experiencing this level of abuse and just subjugation and somebody saying he hates your sort of signature cooking meal, which is so belittling.

Sarah: The thing that  you make, because you have no money and because he won't work and because you need to be eating spaghetti and crabs every night.

Mike: And then also like to be getting your kids through school and getting your kids into beauty pageants and like working at a-

Sarah:  garbage truck.

Mike: And driving a garbage truck all day.

Sarah:  Yeah the amount of strength that we don't know about because the strength is like keeping a situation from becoming so volatile that anyone else ever hears about it is, like this is like the secret power holding the whole world together. Yeah. And she talks about her two brothers, “Michael was the rebel, the one who defiantly fought back, Vinnie was the one who ran away. And I was the joker laboring for a laugh.” She's the one who's the people pleaser. She's the one who's trying to keep everyone cheerful and to be happy. She comes home from her best friend Marcia’s one morning and finds her mom lying on the living room couch, facing the wall and can't see her face. And Paula’s please look at me. And then she realized her mom has been hiding the fact that one side of her face is black and blue. 

Mike: Sarah I’m gonna cry. . Oh my God. 

Sarah: So she writes “the night before, Bill had lost it again. The police finally had to knock down the front door to get in. They took Bill away, but not before mom suffered a concussion. Why do you stay? I pleaded with her. We can leave. Let's just go. We don't have to come back here ever. But for all those years, mom put off moving on. I think she was afraid to lose her third marriage. She kept hoping things would get better. She kept hoping the brilliant, charming man she had fallen in love with would resurface. She was afraid finally, to be alone. It wasn't until I was much older that I began to understand why it took so long for mom to leave. When you place a man at the center of your life and define your happiness through him. It's a very tough thing to let that man go. Even when he makes you feel as if you're on a rollercoaster, 9 days out of 10, it gets hard to trust that you could ever be happy without him. 

Mike: It’s the patriarchy!

Sarah: It was the patriarchy all along. Yeah. And just that and that you look at her relationship with OJ and I feel like anyone who looks at that and is why didn't she leave him? Why would she go back? She wants fame. She wants whatever she wants money. Seeing all these ulterior motives and her just being like I would never do that. I would never be in a relationship with OJ Simpson. And it's okay let's have you be born out of a reconciliation in an  abusive marriage, and then spend your infancy, like with your dad assaulting your mom and then leaving, and then riding around in a garbage truck that she's driving to support the family and then and then see if you stay in a relationship with OJ Simpson 25 years later, because it might be different for you if the proceeding 25 years had been like that 

Mike:  I love recording their show on Saturday mornings, because then I hang out with my friends afterwards and they're like, how's your day going? And I'm like, I'm really angry about an Entertainment Weekly review of a book that came out in 1997. Like I'm even more angry at that review now.

Sarah: Let’s return to that review. Because that really is like the crown jewel in this kind of rhetoric. And you just, yeah, her Nicol- like inability to leave OJ is what it says, right? Yeah. And that we need to forgive her for that. It's what kind of a moral universe do you believe in where Paula needs to be forgiven for anything? 

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

Sarah: We can't look at things as isolated events. Everything is part of the biography of multiple people which is why this series is taking so long. And so Paula writes “what amazes me about mom is how she sustained relationships with her children. Every now and then whenever the weather turned, especially cold and stormy, my mother would skip work and let us skip school. She would cook up a big pot of spaghetti or stew, and we'd all cuddle in bed together and watch movies, that was huggy day. Our lives finally changed in 1981 when I was set to enter high school. One day, my mother came home with a big smile and said, grandly, I've got us a swimming pool you always wanted. By then a licensed realtor, she had bought hers in the countryside, subdivided them into one acre parcels and sold them on installment plans. Then she traded the mortgages for a small motel called the Thomas Drive. We had not only a fabulous pool, but a new home and a separation from Bill.”

Mike: Sarah. This is like the end of Coco.

Sarah: He was so emotionally obliterated. And this is only 135. Yeah and you’re like,  I love how you know, because another thing is like Paula, the public meets her in 1994 when she's like the girl in the Michael Bolton video. She's the professionally beautiful model who's been on magazine covers. She's done all these European campaigns. She speaks Italian. She's very cultured. The world meets her as an adult, like what no one sees when Paula merch is under the public eye is that she was once a 14 year old girl, for whom the chance to move into a motel that her mom had bought and escape her abusive stepfather was like a greater miracle than could possibly be an imagined.

Mike: Oh my God. Now you're trying to make me cry.

Sarah: I’m not! I'm trying to make other people cry. And if you cry, then that's collateral damage that I feel okay about. It's never in the sad parts of the movie. It's always in the happy parts of the movie where I started crying and you're.

Sarah: Yeah. Oh yeah. Yeah. This is the part of Erin Brockovich, Fred Mazur. He gives her a new car.

Mike: Oh my God. This is the ending of the Dolly Parton movie. Fucking hell.

Sarah:  Yes. And Dolly Parton gets her kids out and they get a motel. Yeah. Yeah. And to skip ahead a little bit, she writes that in high school, she suddenly has classmates who were from Bay Point, which is a gated wealthy neighborhood in Panama city. And this is where, like the fancy kids from the normal families live. And she's wow, like Bay Point, like I have no idea what Bay Point is she says, “it's a place for normal families where people didn't drink and fight and call the police every other night.” And when she starts making serious modeling money, she buys her mom a house in Bay Point.

Mike: Oh my God, that's the second ending to the Dolly Parton ending.

Sarah:  But things get better, right? They move into this motel and Paula and her mom cleaned the rooms and work the desk and ran the place. It's a very small operation.

Mike: Is Bill out of the picture at this point?

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

Mike: Oh my God. Great toxic stuff. Yeah. Plan the hits.

Sarah:  But she gets her first real boyfriend junior year. And she writes,” he was very dramatic. Whenever I was late for my first class, which was just about every day, he'd call me on the phone and say, if you're late tomorrow, I swear I'm just going to shoot myself. After we dated for a few weeks, I was ready to break up with him, but I kept putting it off. And then I got a phone call. My study had smashed his motorcycle into a parked truck and fractured both his legs.” And so she feels like she's done with the relationship, but now he’s in the hospital.

Mike: It's the same thing. 

Sarah: Yeah. And what happens is that he stays in the relationship until he's well, and then when he's all better, and back in school, she breaks up with him and her friends are like, how could you do that? Like what a terrible thing to do? Like, why would you break up with this nice guy who just got over this accident? 

Mike: So she's the villain, of course. 

Sarah: Yeah. And this is her first flirtation with trying out, being like, this is not working for me. I don't like this. I need to stop. I've put in my time and I'm ready to break up with you now. And everyone's like, how dare she. 

Mike: Yeah, interesting. 

Sarah: So when she's growing up she really wants to get out of Florida. And I think an interesting parallel between her and OJ is that they are both people who really came from nothing and who did escape. OJ got out through football and she got up through modeling. Although I would really like to appropriate the Jenna Maroney from 30 Rock term, which is faceworker. I believe She gets up through face work. And so he keeps going out for cheerleader that doesn't work out. She enters dance talent shows. She's not really making a dent there. She wants to be an actress. There's a period when she wants to be a lawyer, which is profoundly ironic. She says “my mother had worked in law offices for years. I think she would have become a lawyer herself, except that my grandfather believed that girls had no place in higher education”. There is also this very, yeah, off-handed reference after her mother ran off to Florida, partly to get away from Vincent Barbieri. She writes “grandfather Kartinuto was enraged by mom's departure. When it was clear that she wasn't coming back, he took a bulldozer and rolled over the storage shed with all the possessions she left behind.”

Mike:  What? 

Sarah: So like the roots go deep.

Mike:  Because she left her shitty husband?

Sarah: Yeah. There's no pressure for women in this family being treated like they matter. The moment when things really start to change her, Paula is when she enters the sweetheart of the beach pageant, which happens in February of her junior year of high school. She enters sweetheart at the beach. She says she's never heard of a pedicure before. And all these other girls have manicures and pedicures. She's been this like tall, skinny, flat chested tomboy who's starting to come into her own basically. And she's announced first runner up at sweetheart at the beach. And the next month she enters the Azalea trail, which is the one I showed you a picture from, which is a bigger contest and she wins. And she writes, “I remember that moment. It was the first time in my life that I felt pretty.” And then fascinatingly, she writes “years later, I learned that a number of judges were concerned that I was too quote, sexy to be a proper queen. That would have seemed ridiculous to me at the time. I was still your basic brick wall.” Her brothers used to sing brick house, but with the words, brick wall about her to make fun of her for being flat, I know they do not come off well in the story either. I have some grievances with Michael and Vinny Barbieri. “I was still your basic brick wall, a 32 B cup would have meant progress, but those grownups must've spotted something I couldn't yet see in the mirror.”

Mike: There's something so deranged about the judges for a contest in which women are placed, according to their looks, like she's too sexy. What do you think is the purpose of this event Steve? You are literally ranking 17 year old girls on their physical attractiveness, but she should also be docked points because she's too attractive. Like what?  It's this whole weird, dumb myth that we have that women should be sexy, but they shouldn't want to be sexy or they shouldn't be trying. 

Sarah: Michael Hobbes describes heteronormativity. I love it. I love it.

Mike: I don’t get this at all.

Sarah:  I think that what happens in these situations is that male judges, see this parade of teenage girls and presumably a little baby Paula who like doesn't know what a pedicure is, comes out. And they're like, that girl made me feel sexual feelings and that means that she's being sexy and it's her fault and she must be penalized. And it's like, you're attracted to her. That's you man. This is your issue. There's a difference between categorization and intent. 

Mike: I'm glad this is happening for her. Cause like she deserves all of the good things. 

Sarah: Yeah. It's just like she ran out of this burning building that was her family as she was growing up and then into this world that was supposed to be an escape for her, which is the world of pageantry and then of modeling. And wouldn't you know it, it turns out to be a bigger burning building. But things from then, from this point forward, like things, she suddenly tied down to the fast track. Because then her senior year, she wins Sweetheart of the beach. And then she goes with her friends, Terry and Debbie to a fashion show at the Panama city mall, because they're like, maybe you'll get discovered. And she's oh yeah, whatever. And then apparently someone says stop that girl, and it's Mary Lou Taan of Mary Lou’s model school in Pensacola. I really love that name. Mary Lou’s model school in Pensacola. So she's discovered by Mary Lou of Mary Lou’s model school in Pensacola and Mary Lou takes her to what she describes as something big in Atlanta, which turns out to be the four day international model talent competition, also known as the face finder's Olympics. I did not know such a thing existed, but I'm not surprised. She goes to the face finder's Olympics and kind of sweeps the thing. There's a simulated photo shoot. There's a runway walk event and she wins those categories. She says they talk with the top headhunters from Ford and prestige and elite, the cream of the cream. She's being told she should go to Europe and model there first and then come back and be like the new European girl who everyone's interested in.

Mike: Yeah they have a much higher class of perverts in Europe.

Sarah: Oh, we will get to that. And so she is offered free tickets to Paris. She's 17 years old.

Mike: Her dream!

Sarah:  She's like, I got to go to the Louvre!

Mike: The impressionists! The water lilies!

Sarah:  Notre Dame cathedral, like France. And so she goes to Paris. 

Mike: Yeah. So what does she find when she gets to Paris? What happened? 

Sarah: So it's June of 1984. She's guest finished high school. Who does this remind us of? 

Mike: Oh, Nicole.

Sarah:  Every woman in this story is going to have a lot more in common with the other women than the public maybe tended to realize at the time. She's yeah. Just out of high school, walking into the grown-up world on wobbly little baby deer legs. And her mom has scraped together $300 worth of spending money and sent her off to Paris. And she says that she and Mary Lou from Mary Lou's modeling school have been won over by Claude Haddad, one of the more prominent agents we've met at the IMTC, the face finder Olympics. So she and Mary Lou fly to Paris. Mary Lou was going to help her get settled in and then fly back to Pensacola. And the first whisper that things are maybe going to not go as planned comes when Claude says, baby, your apartment is not ready yet. You must stay with me. It's okay. I take care of you.”

Mike: Oh, no trafficking! Trafficking warning signs!

Sarah: Yes. Say more about that. 

Mike: Again, as we discussed last week, there's no mystery to where trafficking is happening. It's where people do not have power for themselves. And so when you have an industry where it's a lot of young women, many of whom have not traveled before, many of whom have not traveled internationally before, and they're relying on a group of mostly older men, mostly wealthy, older men to provide their food, their lodging, their schedule, their income. 

Sarah: Yeah. They’re in a country where they don't speak the language. They don't know how to get around freely. 

Mike: Yeah. I'm not wild about the term trafficking, but it's like, when you think about an exploitative situation, it is an industry that does not provide mechanisms for people to point out wrongdoing. And that's exactly the world that she's entering. 

Sarah: So Paula writes that things feel a little weird, but she writes “all was fine until Mary Lou returned to Florida. A few days later within hours, the locks had disappeared from all the doors. A big problem, I realized when Clyde walked in on me in the bath and refused to leave until I started crying. Claude's phones blocked calls to the states. I felt trapped. It's no big deal, said Felicia,” who's another model “as though she were some jaded woman of the world. That's just him. Still fighting jet lag, I slept soundly that night. It was dark when I snapped awake to see Claude at the foot of my bed, holding up the blankets to gaze at me and my t-shirt and panties, ready to climb a board. When I cried out Claude dropped to his knees and served up a practice line. I love you. You've made me crazy in love with you. He swore, do you have a boyfriend? Have you ever been touched by a man before? The guy was completely nutso, I thought. I burst into tears and somehow prevailed upon Claude to leave.” And then the next day, he, again, just is giving her the spiel. And when he goes into the kitchen for coffee, she says she basically grabs all her stuff and runs out into the street. 

Mike: Good. Yes. 

Sarah: Yeah. What else would she have done? That's the only solution. It's not like she's going to be able to stay and make the situation better by appeasing him. We know that doesn't work. 

Mike: That's very brave too. She's going out into a foreign country where not a lot of people speak English. She doesn't understand any of the government systems that could help her. That's a dope thing to do. 

Sarah: She's 17 years old. Yeah, no, this is like action Paula. And then she writes “not knowing how to use the payphone outside, I asked the first man I encountered for help. My high school french must've failed me as the man grabbed his crotch and started chasing me. Panicked, I ran into a pharmacy and Jabbered to the people in hysterical English. They promptly threw me out. Finally, I found a good Samaritan who helped to connect me with Eileen Ford of the Ford agency in New York. I didn't know who else to call. She directed me to her colleague, John Luke, Claude’s competition in Paris.” And luckily John Luke, doesn't try anything with Paula and gives her an apartment to live in with another model where he's not going to be like crawling into her bed all the time. 

Mike: That’s like an actual miracle though, that she found like she managed to find someone in Paris who’s not a sex pest, as the British say. 

Sarah: And then I looked at Claude Haddad. And if you just type his name into Google, all these other stories come up of just other models, mostly who are teenagers in Europe in the eighties were like, oh yeah, he climbed into my bed with me, I woke up and he was in bed with me, because there were no locks on the door, I found a guitar and I put that against the door so it would fall down every time he like came into my room at night and then I would just hide in the bathroom. This is this, he was doing this apparently with a lot of girls. 

Mike: Which means Harvey style, that the other people in the industry knew about it.

Sarah: This is from a book called Bad and Beautiful: Inside the dazzling and deadly world of supermodels. To me, it makes it sound like the supermodels are dangerous, by author named Ian Halperin, who writes “during a one-on-one interview, CBS 60 minutes, crew analyst Diane Sawyer, raked Haddad over the coals. Sawyer asked Haddad about the accusations against him. Amazingly Haddad acted as if he had done nothing wrong. At times, he even seemed proud of his sexual conquests. He bragged to Sawyer about how he was able to attract young, beautiful girls. When Sawyer asked him how he felt waking up each morning in an apartment full of models, Haddad gave a cocky grin. He called his models flowers, just, smell them. He said,  just smell the perfume. Diane Sawyer asked Haddad if he had ever resorted to rape or sexual blackmail, Haddad’s response was evasive. He said he couldn't recall, but added it's possible. Everyone could read between the lines. Sawyer had finally nailed one of fashion's all time sleazeballs.” Which is like kind of, but it's like this interview, this is in the late eighties. And I guess one of the things I think about a lot about the Me Too movement is this, this attitude that you see sometimes in media about it, of who could have imagined that this rampant of abuse was taking place in so many industries. And it's like, we knew. Like this was on television. Like people saw this and there are many cases where the public didn't have full information or where they lacked crucial pieces of information. But there are also a lot of cases where the information was right there in front of us and we just weren't absorbing it. Yes. So Claude, despite the fact that she's escaped him, he has kept most of her spending money, the $300 ger mom's scraped together for quote safekeeping, which classic Claude, right?. So Paula decides that the cheapest meal she can get in Paris is baguette and Brie. She's laying in bed like lonely and traumatized eating brie and baguette every day. And of course immediately starts getting criticized for putting on weight because she's 5’9”, and up to 130 pounds, which I believe is underweight for that height, but, you know. And this, again, this again is not that funny, but in context it's funny somehow, that he's getting jobs, but she's pretty unhappy, putting on more weight than the clients necessarily want her to have. And so finally, she ends up at a dinner party in a fashionable neighborhood where she's gonna move and shake and meet some people. And she meets the host of the dinner party. She describes him as a “gentile man with a strong accent” who offers her a glass of champagne. And she's like, no, I don't drink, I don't smoke. But he doesn't think that makes her a hayseed, which is what she's afraid of. And is being very charming and sweet to her and that's Roman Polanski.

Mike:  I knew that was going to be him. Cause you mentioned him earlier. Ew.

Sarah:  The most amazing part of this is that according to Paula, like if we take Paula's account at face value, he was like the first safe guy that she met. Who knows, I think you have to leave the door open to like maybe there's stuff going on that they just was, his career matters more than Claude Haddas, you can see there being maybe stuff that wasn't talked about, if we're gonna believe Paula, which is what I'm doing, then she is in this world where like the safest man he can find is Roman Polanski. And he doesn't seem to have tried anything with her. Roman Polanski takes her to Italy to hang out while he works on the movie Pirates. And he takes Paula to the Sistine Chapel. He doesn't try to assault her. It doesn't mean that he's like a fantastic guy, but it means like in the world that Paula’s in, it's yes, finally, Roman Polanski, come save me.

Mike: Not the role I was expecting him to play in this story. 

Sarah: Yeah. And that's how life is when there's just that little safety. You're like, I am clinging to the person who's been nice to me so far. 

Mike: Yeah. There's still, I think, general creepiness here, but on the scale of the things that Roman Polanski's accused of-

Sarah:  And on the scale of what Paula has experienced so far. Also not just in modeling, but with like men from her family. Like when was the last time a guy her dad's age did a dad thing with her. Like her dad's not going to take her to a museum. That's never happened. That's never going to happen. So you just take what you can get and go with Roman Polanski.

Mike: It's also interesting because it's so wrapped up in her looks. The evidence is not that this is a guy who's looking for wayward, vulnerable youths and like in a genuine way, mentoring them and big brother, big sister. And I'm just a nice guy. Like it's clear that her looks are somewhere in here as far as his motivations are concerned, but he doesn't appear in her telling to have done anything with that particularly. 

Sarah: And then it's I imagine that he has this attitude of, I'm dating an adult woman at this time or I'm in another relationship, but I just, what Claude Haddad said, their flowers. I like to have beautiful young girls around and they're like flowers for me. I can imagine him feeling that way, which is like weird and gross, but It worked out fine for Paula, given the context of the situation. It's just, there is no short of an ideal world hidden in here. It's just degrees of the weirdness of this system, you find yourself in and how do you make it work for you.

Mike: If I found out my boyfriend was showing around, oh, like the Danish national gymnastics team is in town and one of the teammates is a 16 year old boy. And I'm just showing him what Seattle is like, and we're going on bike rides. I'd be like the fuck you are. This is fucking weird. There is no reason you need to be hanging out with that person at all. No.

Sarah: I think that's good. I think that's a good bright line to have in a relationship. So she's hanging out with Roman Polanski and she's like, this is the best that Europe appears to be capable of offering me. I think when she was at the phase finders Olympics, people were like, oh, you should go to Japan. And now she's yeah, Japan. And so she goes to Tokyo and she says, “I knew I'd made the right choice as soon as the hire card dropped me at my Tokyo apartment. I had cable television.”

Mike: God the lowest bar. 

Sarah: Yeah. And this is where things start to work out for her. She's working every day for months. She's making commercials where she's getting paid potentially $40,000 per commercial, if you count residuals. Yes. Get it Paula. If you're at this point in the story and you’re begrudging Paula Barbieriri making money, that kind of money off of modeling, then I just have nothing left for you. I have no more arguments. I've done my part. And so she decides that she's, originally she was going to spend the summer modeling and then go to college and then she decides, I'm going to stick with this modeling thing. This is working out for me. And then she goes to New York in November of 1984. And I have a little story for you that is going to tie in with our recent gangs episode. “The cab driver was losing patients. Fresh from the airport, I'd asked him to take me to Zoely, my new agency in New York at Lexington avenue and east 56th street. But as the cabbie slowed to drop me off, I saw a bunch of young guys in white loitering by the corner with their bicycles. I'd read about New York city street gangs and my long plane ride had me just about hallucinating anyway. Please go around the block again, I begged the driver for the eighth time. Lady you're here, you need to get out, he said. But you don't understand, I said my voice quavering. There's a gang on the corner there and I'm just a girl by myself. Lady, the cabbie said, wirily, those are pizza delivery guys. Please get out of my car.” 

Mike: Maybe they were all pizza delivery guys the whole time. 

Sarah: What if all of the gangs in the warriors we're all from competing pizza places? That would explain why their outfits were like so on point. And so she's up to 140 pounds. Everyone's let's put you on a diet. She's no, I feel really good. I feel like this is a good weight for me. 

Mike: Yeah. Let Paula be what she wants to weigh.

Sarah:  Let Paula be Paula. Yeah, but like things are going well for her. She's getting work. She's like, I'm going to stay in this industry where I can have my own place to live. I'm making my own money. I'm sending money home to my family. I don't have to live with my mom and whatever relationship she might end up in. I don't have to have my brother's threatening to break the arms of guys who go out with me. I don't know. I just love that she got to have this degree of independence, right?

Mike: For a couple of years. Anyway, yeah. Yeah.

Sarah:  I guess as abusive as the industry was, she was able to make real money and the kind of money that she could change her family's life with. And like all of the family stuff persisted, but just I don't know. I just feel like so many more girls deserve this kind of a chance and don't get it. So many of the other people that we've talked about. And so begins the next big phase of her life and her first love who is Dolph Lundgren. 

Mike: What the fuck? How many, like 90s-ish cameos is this story going to have?

Sarah:  You have no idea, but I will jump ahead a little bit and say that the relationship becomes fatally fractured because he cheats on her with his ex-girlfriend, Grace Jones. 

Mike: Wait. The Grace Jones? 

Sarah: The Grace Jones. Paula got cheated on with Grace Jones. 

Mike: Wow. 

Sarah: I guess if you're in a relationship with someone and they have to key on you with someone, I guess I would understand more if it was Grace Jones. 

Mike: I don’t know if that makes it better or worse

Sarah: But then also you're like, what the fuck am I going to do if my boyfriend is still hung up on Grace Jones? What chance do I have? 

Mike: Is that relationship positive in her life? It's not physically abusive?

Sarah:  Yeah. This is right. We're like at the point where the bar for positive is like not physically abusive, which is yeah. She meets him during a photo shoot with him and two other models and they're all in bed together strategically covered by a sheet. He's six five.

Mike: He’s hot as breakfast. He’s chiseled out of marble.  

Sarah: Yeah. She says that there's this immediate attraction because he's Dolph Lundgren.

Mike: Because they're both super attractive. 

Sarah: Yeah. They're both- Oh, here I have a picture actually.

Mike:  I'm hoping he is shirtless. If I looked like that, I would be shirtless at all times. 

Sarah: He is sleeveless. Oh yeah. He's shirtless and one of them. 

Mike: Okay. Thank God. So here they are together. There’s Dolph and Paula. 

Mike: He's huge. 

Sarah: He's huge. His face is like an order of scale bigger than her face. Paula doesn't often have serious boyfriends, but when she does, they have enormous heads. 

Mike: Wow. It's like a Photoshop disaster. 

Sarah: But she looks gorgeous.

Mike: She looks great. 

Sarah: And then here they are on the beacon, Panama city, Florida shirtless Dolph.

Mike: God she just looks like a Smurf next to this Redwood of a human being.

Sarah:  Yeah, she does. And she's got like her whole body draped around just his upper arm. 

Mike: I can see why she likes him. There's something really appealing about that. He's big, he's buff. He's Swedish so he was probably like super socialist. 

Sarah: Interestingly, eventually,  he's like, in Sweden, all men have mistresses and it's normal, which is like an interesting version of the, OJ just says all men cheat, but Dolph does, well in Sweden. 

Mike: You don't use Scandinavia for evil. We know what goes on in Scandinavia, Dolph, that's easily look up a-able. Nice try. 

Sarah: So they do this photo shoot together. There's this instant attraction. She writes, “I didn't try to kid myself,  I knew I'd gone head over heels, but I put Dolph off.” That's hard to say. I put Dolph off. “Once he got my phone number and started asking me out, besides I had all the work I could handle, I needed to focus on my career. Dolph kept calling over the next month and I kept turning him down. I was working in Miami one afternoon, miserable with the flu, when I got a call from Tom Hahn. At the time of Booker for my Los Angeles modeling agency. He confirmed me on a job in Malibu the next morning.” And she's like, I'm too sick. I have the flu, like I don't want to work. And he's like, listen, they're paying you $10,000 for the day to do a simple kissing shot with this guy. Just get on the plane and rest up on the way and they'll have a car there to take you to the job. She writes “that flight was one of the worst travel ordeals of my life. I had a fever and the sweats, and I barely found the strength to collapse into the car at LAX. In Malibu I met the photographer and told them I couldn't do a kissing picture. I'm going to get the guy so sick. It's not fair. The photographer smiled and said that's okay, just go and tell the client he's out there by the beach. I'm sure we can work something out. I straggled out to the beach and there at water's edge stood Dolph, large as life. I couldn't get a date-” Sorry. *In deep voice* “I couldn't get a date with you, he explained. So I figured I'd have to pay you to come to see me. She says from that day on, as long as it lasted, Dolph Lundgren would be my world, my life. “ And it's like, but you were sick and he tricked you. You can see how their relationship had it’s salad days and was like working, that there was like this infatuation and like good stuff happening and that it was exciting for her. And he's gorgeous. And like, all that is true, but like from the beginning, like he's not taking seriously your needs as a human being. 

Mike: Yeah. It's one of those stories that shows up in romantic comedies a lot where if she wasn't infatuated with him, this would be like a really like huge warning signs story. I have to pay you to kiss me. And it's now like a weird professional obligation, like with contracts and stuff to kiss me.

Sarah:  And you're like going through my agent and trick me into flying here when I'm sick to see, she has the fucking flu. Like you shouldn't be doing anything but drinking ginger ale and watching Law and Order when you have the flu.

Mike: It is interesting. How so many of the cute stories in her book are like deeply troubling. 

Sarah: And it's just, and if your context is If that's as good as it gets then yeah, I guess that's, it's just all about what you believe you deserve to ask for, to expect from the world. And so, then after that, things are good for a while. And then essentially he starts to find things to be critical about. He's like my friends like you, my family loves you, everything is wonderful, but do you realize that we go out for every meal and you don't cook at all?

Mike: That's what he seizes on? 

Sarah: Yeah. And so she sits down and reads Betty Crocker's cookbook and learns how to cook through trial and error. She's like, you're right. I need to learn how to cook. I'm sorry. She also can't keep up with the amount of drugs that he apparently is using at the time.

Mike: Oh like steroids and stuff, or like fun drugs, like cocaine?

Sarah:  Fun drugs. She’s not really into that. She doesn't like being around people who are high. And she says, “when you grew up with an alcoholic father and an alcoholic stepfather, it takes the glamour out of drug use.” No fucking kidding. “On the other hand, I knew that Grace had done a lot of drugs with Dolph. For him it was, if you love me, you'll do them too. So I tried for a while to keep up, but there was no way. Dolph was so much bigger than I was.”

Mike: Yeah. It's like dosing a horse. 

Sarah: Yeah. They're clearly entering this phase of the relationship where it's, we've seen this before. We've seen this recently. It's not that she's doing anything wrong, it's that he has to continually find fault with her. And so he cheats on her with Grace Jones and then he tries to make it up by sending her three dozen red roses every day for weeks. And finally, he confesses and comes clean. He says, yes, I cheated on you with my ex-girlfriend. And then he writes that it happened because “I was getting too possessive. I was losing my individuality. I must learn, Dolph wrote, not to fully give yourself to anyone unless you're perfectly sure. Always keep a part of you to yourself, which makes you more mysterious and attractive anyway.” And unfortunately, never trust a man. He closed with “Paula, try a smile” and drew a little happy face by his signature.

Mike:  Literally you should smile more. Classic. 

Sarah: Ah, yeah. And at that point she's okay, I'm done. Like I'm done with this relationship. Like I can't keep being cheated on and blamed for it. And luckily, Dolph Lundgren doesn't get arrested for anything afterwards. So she's able to move on. So Thanksgiving of 1991 rolls around. She's at the gym and she meets this guy named Dean Hamilton, who just seems like a nice normal guy and he wants a family, which is very important to her.

Mike: Did she finally meet a nice guy? 

Sarah: Well-

Mike: Oh no. 

Sarah: Here's what happens. Two weeks after they first meet, they fly to Vegas and get married in a 24 hour wedding chapel. And then the next day he calls her mother and asks for a list of her assets and then comes to Paula and says, hey, I need $8,000. And she's like, great. So you married me so that you could get a loan so that you don't have to lose your house, is her read of the situation. And this to me is the classic Paula. “Feeling more shame than anger, I gave Dean the $8,000 anyway. He has since paid me back. Then we filed for annulment.” Okay. So after that she just focuses on work. And she writes, “work became my refuge more than ever. Off I went to Miami or St. Martin, wherever the booking took me, for months I barely paused to catch my breath. If I slowed down, I knew I'd have to face my loneliness or scarier still, get involved with another man. On one of my rare afternoons off, I was catching up on my errands, tooling around the freeways in my Toyota 4runner. As I turned off busy Wilshire Boulevard in Westwood and into my valet parking stand, a black Mercedes pulled in behind me. A handsome bull neckman jumped out and greeted me. Marcus Allen, the NFL running back whom I met years before.” Remember Marcus Allen? 

Mike: Yeah. What?  He is part of this again? 

Sarah: Yeah. TRemind us who Marcus Allen is.

Mike: He's a guy, also a football player who Nicole dated after she left OJ. 

Sarah: Yeah. Which he denies happened, but everyone else said that he and Nicole had a relationship. He's younger than OJ. He's his protege in a way. People describe him as OJ’s, the next OJ. And she writes, “we never dated, but Marcus was one of those upbeat people who'd always had a smile for me. We exchanged phone numbers and said goodbye. Not an hour later, as I relaxed in my apartment, Marcus called. He was with a friend who is in the middle of a rough divorce, he said. Did I know someone who might want to go out with him? 

Mike: That's how she meets OJ. 

Sarah: She goes to his house. Her first warning sign is that he's like downstairs chatting her up. And then this woman who apparently was like hanging around with him before Paula showed up, comes and is like, where'd you disappear to honey. And she's like, that's weird. But then, well let me read to you.

Mike:I want her to have a cute story that doesn't have red flags in it.

Sarah: She says “at one point after Marcus had quietly vanished, I winced from some shoulder pain. when I've been under stress it seems to collect right there. Hold on, OJ said.. Let me get you some mineral ice. This stuff works great for my knees. Oh great, I thought as OJ prepared to rub the Salve in and under my sleepless silk shirt. Now he's going to try to get fresh. I made no move to stop him. Maybe I was subconsciously testing the waters to see what would happen, to see if I'd have to dust off my right hook, but OJ was a perfect gentleman. He kept massaging that one spot on my shoulder. As he talked about how alone he was, I felt comfortable and connected to him.”

Mike: I guess it's a story without red flags. 

Sarah: And then he immediately starts inviting her to come to Hawaii with him. 

Mike: Oh. 

Sarah: And she's no, I'm not going to go to Hawaii with you. But then he goes to Hawaii and is calling her up from there. And says “I was on the beach. Having margarita is with Marcus and Katherine” who's Marcus's wife, “just sitting there in paradise and then I'm locked in my hotel room on the phone with you for two and a half hours. Do you realize that? You should be here. I don't understand why you're not here. I just can't get you out of my mind.” What she does is he's let's, I'm not I'm not feeling super trusting right now, but let's keep talking on the phone. And she says that they talk every day, sometimes two or three times today. He's smart and perceptive and interesting and interested in her. He's telling her all about his version of the way that his divorce from Nicole has gone, which is, in his telling, very sad for him. She writes “as the days pass fast, our mutual crush became a full-fledged infatuation. OJ and I actually got to know each other to really like each other over the phone. There was a sexual tension, crackling over those wires, but it had a light quality. Physicality wasn't possible, and for me, that was a great relief. I'd never communicated like this with a man before. OJ held nothing back. He seemed a man who had nothing to hide. How could I help trusting him?”

Mike:  It's so much sadder now that we know a lot of what he's telling her is lying. We also know that he's the kind of person that speaks for five minutes on the phone and you can put it down and walk away and come back. You do wonder how much of this is like him unburdening himself versus actually showing interest in her. But also, I don't know if he's infatuated with her, maybe he really is interested in her. 

Sarah: One of the things that people say about OJ, I feel like it's something that I hear a lot about people who have this kind of very public facing charisma is that, when he was with you, the sun was shining on you. I think I imagined that this predates his football career. I know it does because we've talked about how one of his hobbies as a teenager was like stealing other guy's girlfriends. Like he's always had this kind of weaponized charm and that's always been maybe the thing that he was as good at as he was at football. And I think you just look at everything that Paula has been through. And all of her interactions with men to this point and just how she used to like look at every white truck and Panama city thinking it might be her dad and all she ever wanted was just some man to treat her like she was worthy of being taken care of. One would imagine, one would like to imagine based on how beautiful she was and how important she was to an industry that we think of as making people powerful and being about the power of the model. I think we would like to imagine that she wouldn't have been in such a state of emotional starvation, but I think that she was. 

Mike: And also the fact that it was over the phone too, that it might not have felt as looks-based to her, that it felt like somebody really liked her as a person, which is also probably something that she's craving. 

Sarah: Cause like how many experiences has she had of that? And just, and like she's saying, she's never connected with a man like that before. That doesn't mean that what she felt wasn't real, it just means that she had such low expectations. Yeah. That's my Paula material for now.

Mike: Oh that’s it. I like that we've gotten to the start of the Bronco chase, but we haven't finished it yet.

Sarah:  Yeah. We said we got to it. We didn't say we'd finish it. It's funny cause we keep saying this phrase, but I feel like chase is a misnomer. It was really more of a motorcade. 

Mike: He was going like 30 miles an hour, right?

Sarah:  From the time that OJ was detected inside the car like that he wasn't being chased. He was more being followed. But yeah we're leaving Paula watching CNN, trying to telepathically project herself into the back of the white Bronco to keep OJ safe. And apparently it worked. 

Mike: Yes. So I don't know, but I guess we'll find out.

Sarah:  I think people know that he survived that day, Mike, I really appreciate your commitment to not spoiling anything. But I think we can say with certainty yes, that OJ made it.

Mike:  Okay. So what or who are we talking about next time?

Sarah: Oh, we're going back to Marcia.

Mike: Oh we’re going back to Marcia next time? Yay!

Sarah:  What are you excited to learn about? 

Mike: Yeah. I want to hear about Marcia’ wall. When I hear about Marcia's divorce, I want to hear about Marcia's kids and Marcia’s family and how she survives as this trial becomes a trial. 

Sarah: Thank you for wanting to know about Marcia's wall.

Mike: Just to add to the anger at a more than 20 year old Entertainment Weekly Review. One of the other phrases that stuck out to me when I was editing that episode was that in that review of Paula's book, they said that she recites the pedestrian details of her life.

Sarah: What the fuck is that about? We've all dated Dolph Lundgren. So who cares? We've all been like a teenage model on our own in Paris, France being assaulted by the guy who was supposed to take care of us and running out into the street at 17 years old,

Mike: Being rescued by Roman Polanski.

Sarah: I know. I'm sorry. Like why do we have to argue that Paula's life isn't interesting or that no one should hear about it. I feel very edified from having read this book. 

Mike: I also think nobody's life is pedestrian. That's like a mean way to describe anybody's life. 

Sarah: No one has a boring life, we’re all human beings. Yeah. Yeah. I feel, I dunno. I have, I want to close with a moral of some kind, but I guess don't call anyone's life pedestrian is a pretty good one. 

Mike: And When you think somebody's life sounds pedestrian, imagine Dolly Parton doing it. 

*Outro Music*