Episode 108: "Bodies in Low Places"

Is Garth Brooks the most prolific serial killer in US history? Stranger things than that have been true. 

I explore the "evidence" and the book Bodies in Low Places for more.

• Was Chris Gaines an indication of D.I.D.?
• Did Garth buy a plot of land to be a giant graveyard à la At Close Range? 
• Do people go missing whenever Garth is around? 

Or is this a joke that went awry and picked up steam without enough hard facts to rely on? 🤔

Links:

https://www.amazon.com/Bodies-Low-Places-Matthew-Cox/dp/B0FCHYBB1W

Chris Gaines Behind the Music: https://vimeo.com/197107209

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My forthcoming project, Simply Dag, will be available in hardback, paperback, ebook, and audiobook formats on July 29th! 

Transcript

Transcription by Otter.ai.  Please forgive any typos!

The podcast episode discusses the conspiracy theory that Garth Brooks is a serial killer, comparing him to infamous killers like HH Holmes and Elizabeth Bathory. The theory originated from comedian Tom Sagura's podcast and is explored in the book "Bodies in Low Places" by Matthew Cox and Pierre Rossini. The book humorously speculates on Brooks's potential crimes, citing his unusual behavior and song lyrics. The episode also touches on Brooks's background, his baseball career, and recent s3xual assault allegations made by a former hair and makeup artist. The hosts conclude that while the theory is entertaining, there's insufficient evidence to support it.

Garth Brooks, serial killer, conspiracy theory, HH Holmes, Elizabeth Bathory, Tom Sagura, podcast, Bodies in Low Places, Matthew Cox, Pierre Rossini, Chris Gaines, s3xual assault allegations, satire, public persona, legal disputes.

Welcome to con-sara-cy theories. Are you ready to ask questions you shouldn't and find information you're not supposed to know? Well, you're in the right place. Here is your host, Sara Causey.

Hello, hello, and thanks for tuning in. In tonight's episode, I want to talk about the bizarre, yet bizarrely entertaining conspiracy theory that Garth Brooks, yes, that Garth Brooks is a serial killer. And according to the conspiracy theory, not only is he some garden variety serial killer, but he's right up there with somebody like HH Holmes or Elizabeth Bathory in terms of his body count, a prolific serial killer. HH Holmes had his so called Murder Castle, which was a hotel with strange rooms and trap rooms and creepy places where he could torture and kill his victims, and then Bathory supposedly tortured and killed hundreds of girls and young women for a period of like 20 years back in the late 1500s there is an academic, I think, from Cambridge who's gone on a quest to redeem the name of Elizabeth Bathory, and to say that these were false accusations. She was not some prolific serial killer. I really would like to do an episode about that at some point. I just need to do a bit more research on it to understand better the accusations and so called proof that she was, as well as the counterpoints saying that she was not. HH, Holmes would make a great episode as well. Tonight, we will settle up and examine is it possible, I mean, Stranger Things than this have been true. Is it possible that Garth Brooks is a serial killer, or is all of this just a lot of crazy noise and distraction. Stay tuned.

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So as I said, I only learned about this conspiracy theory a few months back. I started seeing memes about where the body's Garth and Garth Brooks is a serial killer. And I'm like, What? What on earth even is this? Apparently it originated from the comedian Tom sagura. I am not super familiar with him, so that's probably one of the reasons why I hadn't heard about this conspiracy theory. Evidently, Tom sagura and his wife Christina, have a podcast called your mom's house. I'm sure it's wildly popular, but I've, I've never heard of it, frankly, sorry, and I've never listened to it. But they were roasting him like I heard this clip. They they had played one of his videos from his Facebook page, and he was saying things like he had, he did legitimately have a very weird look out of his eyes, and he was like, I like to get physical when I play music. Come to my show and you'll see me get physical with my music. And they were like, Oh, this is weird. This is creepy. He has serial killer energy. He just seems like somebody that would be off his rocker. And the internet, as it is, want to do it, takes a joke like that and then blows it up like okay, well, what if? And don't get me wrong, that's where great storytelling begins, because whether you are screenwriting for movies, you're creating a play, you're writing a novel, or even just coming up with a piece of art, that's so much of where we begin as creatives, the question, what if? So? The Internet decided, okay, well, what if he really was, what if the reason why he has this crazy look out of his eyes? What if it's not a fake persona? What if he really is cooped out? What if he really is a serial killer? And here we go. I had an audible credit, so I bought a copy of bodies in low places, written by Matthew Cox and Pierre Rossini. It's obviously a play on Garth Brooks. Is like first big smash hit, friends in low places, bodies in low places. And in like, the about the author section, they both talk about how they're ex cons. Matthew Cox says that he was, he was guilty of the things that he was accused of, claims that Pierre Rossini was not. But I was like, okay, so this is going to be really quite something. I don't know exactly what I'm getting myself into, but I'll listen to it like I like to listen to Audible while I'm doing other things I really, at this point in my life, have to mold. Task because I'm always reading something for my own work, or I'm editing, proofreading, actively writing, actively illustrating, and so being able to listen on Audible and this is like, not some kind of pitch for them. This is totally unsolicited, but it has helped me to carve out other pockets of time. There's a cliche that if you want something done, you should give it to the busiest person you know, because they'll find a way to make it happen. And I've really discovered that to be true in life. So while I'm loading the dishwasher or folding laundry or cleaning the house, scrubbing out the bathtub, just the mundane parts of life that have to be done every single week, I'll listen to something on Audible. And there were times listening to bodies in low places, I have to admit, where I laughed out loud, not about actual crime, but the way that they would describe things at times, was laugh out loud, funny. They would say things like the chubby cowboy. Not that body shaming is okay. I'm just saying from the from the perspective of a bizarre satirical book, The chubby cowboy was the last thing she saw Garth's hulking frame standing over her. We'll never know. Honestly, the book could have been titled we don't know, or we just don't know. Because you will hear that phrase repetitively throughout the whole book. They'll make all kinds of insane speculations and then be like, we don't know. We just don't know. Or we suppose that's how it happened. We, we, we speculate that Garth may have hidden bodies under the tour bus, but we just don't know. It's like, well, what do you know? So there were times when they would be painting their mise en scene, and I would get cracked up there. There was another quote from Wayland Jennings, where he said that Garth Brooks was to country music, what pantyhose was to finger banging. And I laughed so hard at that, because I was like, Well, yeah, there's some outlaw country for you right there, the outlaw country attitude of those guys like Merle Haggard and Waylon Jennings, and that's something else. I would say that even though it's not necessarily germane to the idea of whether Garth is a serial killer, one of the things they talk about in the book is you did have some of the old school outlaw country guys that were not fans of Garth, that felt like he was too country pop, and he was taking country music away from its roots, away from what it was meant to be, and trying to just commodify it and make it so Poppy that it no longer sounded like itself anymore. And I thought that that was interesting, but they give us a bit of biographical information to start off with, like, for example, Garth Brooks was born February the seventh, 1962 in Tulsa, Oklahoma, and he came from a musical background, which I'm not sure that I ever knew that. Like, I'm not a mega Garth Brooks fan, but I don't hate his music either. There are several songs that I would say, Yes, I like, but I don't like. Listen to his music on repeat all the time. So his dad worked for an oil company, and then his mom had been a country singer in the 1950s and according to the way that it's presented, in bodies, in more places, it's like Garth's mom and dad get married, they start having kids, and so because of settling down and having kids, the mom has to give up her career as a country singer. But I'm not totally sure how accurate that is, because when you start looking at more details of his background, Garth is the youngest kid of the bunch, and apparently the mom and the dad had been married to other people before, so when they got together, it was the second marriage for both of them, like they were. They were both previously married to other people, divorced, and then got married to each other. And Garth had like, four older half siblings, and then his mom and dad had two kids together, his sister Kelly and then him. So I'm like, well, it doesn't sound like she had to give up her career after she got married because she had already been married before. I just that's one of those details for me that, like, as a biographer, I'm going, hmm, I mean, are you giving us the whole story? Are you kind of painting a very specific picture here, because you want us to think that the the mom was resentful of Garth, and so that's one of the reasons why he might have had some kind of traumatic childhood. I just find that a little bit weird. We're also told that Garth, like the they would have, like musical talent type nights, where the kids would sing songs and play instruments and things like that. But even though there was a musical bend to. The family. Garth was active in athletics when he was in school, like, like, especially football and baseball. And he wins a scholarship to Oklahoma State University, OSU, as we would say around here in Stillwater. And he works, he studies marketing or advertising, I think. And then he works part time as a bouncer because he's like a burly dude and a former athlete. He works as a bouncer at a bar. Kind of tinkers around with his own band and playing guitar and things like that. Doesn't really get any traction, per se in terms of making it big, which I'm using in air quotes here, because that means different things to different people. But it's not like he gets signed for a record contract and becomes a country music star fresh out of school. So in 1984 he graduates from OSU with his degree, and he starts tinkering around with his music career, and he's playing in places like clubs and places that we would call in Oklahoma, that we would call honky tonks. He goes out honky Tonkin to try to see if he can make a go of it. And he has, like, a number of different musical influences, and not all of them, by the way, were country music artists. He gets some interest from a lawyer named rod Phelps, and Phelps makes an offer to help Garth create a real demo. And Phelps also has like, some contacts in Nashville, and there's like, something that happens between the two of them where Garth says that he wants to go to Nashville and maybe try to get a record contract going. But for whatever reason, it doesn't work out. But rod Phelps continues telling Garth like I still think you should go for it. I still think that you have some real talent. I am not sure totally why that that situation didn't work out, but for whatever reason it didn't. But by 1987

Garth and his then wife Sandy do relocate full time to Nashville, and Garth starts more actively trying to network in Nashville to see if he can get his big break. He's working like at a boot barn store, kind of like boot barn store, retail store manager by day, and then gigging at night to to try to figure out if he can get discovered, so to speak, gets get something going, and it's portrayed in bodies, in low places. Is like, is this something that set him on the edge? Could he have been set off by this arrangement? He moves to Nashville, and he's not immediately successful. Is it possible that every day at the boot bar, and he was helping customers try on shoes, but he was angry and mad at the world. Just laugh, because it's like, well, a lot of artists, and I'm speaking broadly here for any type of creative it doesn't matter what genre or category of artists you are. A lot of artists fall into that category. And a lot of people are told the starving artist mythology, and it's really unfortunate to me, because a lot of other artists who have become financially successful, it's kind of like they almost put a hand on the heads or the shoulders of other people, like I had to stay down. And so you do too, and you'll find people that'll say things like, well, Van Gogh only sold one painting in his lifetime. He didn't have any kind of fame until he was dead. Or Stephen King's wife worked as a school teacher and helped to make ends meet until his writing took off. Anne Rice worked at the Waffle House, and Liz Gilbert, in Big Magic, says that she didn't quit bartending until eat. Pray, Love became an international success. So we get this message drilled into us very often. Of like, Who are you to quit your day job? Who are you to make gigging your full time priority? So do I really think that Garth was in the boot barn every day feeling homicidal? I mean, no, no. More than anybody else that's working a job that is not their true calling, you're not going to feel over the moon about it, but you're also not going to go out and become a serial killer just because of that. So I felt like that argument was a little bit thin. So we fast forward in time to April 12, 1989 Garth Brooks releases his first big eponymous album, Garth Brooks through Capitol, Nashville, and it spawned some real hits, like. Much too young to feel this damn old if tomorrow never comes, not counting you and the dance. So I was wrong a few minutes ago when I said that I thought friends in low places was the first big hit it that came off of the next album from no fences. Pardon me. You know, the first one came out in 89 the next one came out in 1990 and it's just like, with the years, things blend together. Somebody will be like, Hey, did that happen in 21 or 22 and it's like, I don't know. I'm lucky to remember what happened last week. Like, the whole time pandemic, and then post pandemic is a blur, like trying to pinpoint exactly when something happened is a fool's errand. And we're told that he makes like, more than 400k from getting signed to a major label, and he takes every dime of that money and buys a scrubby ass piece of land that nobody else wanted in Tennessee. And it's like, Well, was it for a business purpose? Did he, like, put up a fence and start running cattle? No, did he put up a fence and start a horse farm? Or, like, thoroughbred operation? No, did he put a house on it and live there? No, it was just acres and acres and acres of scrubby ass land that nobody else wanted. Which, when you hear the story presented that way. It does sound very odd, because it's like, okay, it's giving at close range vibes. You may remember that movie came out in 1986 Christopher Walken still looked pretty young. Sean Penn looked like a freaking baby in that movie, even though he was playing a teenage kid, he basically looked like he could have been a baby. And it is based on a true story about this, like rural crime gang in Pennsylvania, and they steal and they fence stolen goods. But it's it's not like petty crime. Typically, they will steal and fence larger, more expensive items, and that's how they make their money. But in the movie, Christopher walken's character owns a piece of scrubby land way off in the boonies, and if somebody makes him mad, he will take them out to that piece of land, make them dig their own grave and then shoot them and put them in there and then bury them. So I'm like, Okay, this is definitely giving at close range. It's it's giving we've seen this in a movie, and so now we're putting it into the book. I'm not saying that's what they did. I'm just saying that's how it sounds. There are other people who contend that Garth did not go and buy a scrubby piece of land with nothing on it, but instead that the land had a house on it at the time, and he bought the house that had like, seven bedrooms and six bathrooms, like I've got, I've got my money now. Y'all, I'm living high on the hog. Other people say the house was not already there, and he had it built. In any case, the point that I'm making here is that there is disagreement as to whether the parcel of land he bought just stayed vacant because he was using it as a graveyard versus he actually did something with it. Another contention in this conspiracy theory is that whenever, whenever Garth comes to town, whether he is relocating to a place to live, or whether he's just there because he's on tour and playing some shows there, the rate of missing persons and unsolved homicides spikes. And then after he leaves, everything goes back to normal, which sounds like a pretty serious and also amusing accusation that like one person is like a juggernaut of murder. A few examples, Indianapolis in 1993 allegedly, there was a young woman who was walking home from a bar that was not far from where Garth Brooks was playing a concert at Market Square arena. She disappeared and has never heard from again. Chicago in 1993 there were three women who disappeared in unrelated cases during the same week that Garth Brooks was playing sold out shows at the Rosemont Cincinnati in 1993 there was a cold case murder of a college kid and Garth Brooks's tour bus was seen in the area. Cox makes the claim that every tour date lines up with missing persons and or unsolved homicides, supposedly at one point in time, one of Tom Sara's fans decided to do the leg work. And I'm honestly picturing Charlie Day from always sunny, that meme, you know, where he's standing there, looking maniacal, and there's strings and newspaper clippings everywhere.

Somebody supposedly did the leg. Egg work, and matched up every single concert, every single tour date that Garth ever had, and found these unsolved murders and missing persons, every single city, every single time, lining up perfectly. But it seems to be an urban legend, because anytime someone has tried to go and look for it and say, Well, okay, then where is it? Let's see the list. Nobody can ever produce it. Another supposed piece of evidence comes from Garth's songs. So, for example, in 1991 from the album rope in the wind, he has this song called pop a love mama, which is about a truck driver who goes out on the road, but his wife gets lonely, and so she starts messing around with other men. And there's a lyric in the song, Papa loved Mama. Mama loved men. Mama's in the graveyard, Papa's in the pen. So it's basically like he goes out on the road to do his truck driving. She cheats with other men, he gets tired of it and murders her. And because this is a song that he made, people are saying like it could be signs that he has homicidal tendencies or he has a fascination with murdering women. Of course, there is also the song The thunder rolls, which was from the album no fences and came out in 1991 the video caused a major stir, because it's about domestic violence, and this woman figuring out that her husband is cheating on her, is coming home late at night, and she decides, I'm not going to take it anymore. I'm going to unalive him. And in the video, Garth, this is like our, kind of, our first, I guess, notion maybe that he has this theatrical side, because he plays the cheating husband in the video, has like, a bad, fake looking beard and mustache on and in the video, but it caused quite a stir. It was one of those videos where they, like, they talked about banning it, and we're only going to show it after a certain hour, because it's violent and people shouldn't, like kids could see it and people shouldn't be watching it, and that only serves to whet people's appetite even more. The minute you say that something is forbidden, it just makes people that much more excited. And this is allegedly also that Garth is obsessed with murder. He did write the song as I understand it, but it was actually recorded first by Tanya Tucker. And the idea was that the song would would belong to her, and she recorded the version of it, but the producer, Alan Reynolds, didn't feel like she did it justice, or it wasn't being promoted the way that he wanted it to be. So she dropped the song from her album so that Garth could record it himself and put it on the album. No fences. So it's just like, I mean, is that song, in and of itself, evidence that somebody is a serial killer? No, it isn't. It might show that you have this song about a man killing his wife for being unfaithful, and then now we have a song about a wife killing her husband for being unfaithful. There certainly seems to be a theme there that he likes to write about. But that doesn't necessarily mean that he himself is a serial killer. An old interview resurfaced from crook and chase. And they had asked him something along the lines of, if you were to star in a movie, who would you want to be, or how would you want to be portrayed? What would you want to do? And he says, I want to be the bad guy. And they're like, Oh no, no, you don't want to be the bad guy. And he's like, Yeah, I'd rather kill somebody. And the audience laughs And Kirk and chase kind of laugh nervously themselves. It's just one of those moments like, Hmm, well, this certainly signals that maybe something weird is going on with this guy. It doesn't necessarily mean that he's a serial killer, but it certainly is not the kind of response that you would want to give on television, especially if you've cultivated this image of like, the aw shucks cowboy. I'm just a Down Home guy from Oklahoma, and I'm trustworthy. And look at me, I'm just earnestly making country music. And then you go on TV and you're like, I'd rather play a villain. I want to be a bad guy. I want to kill people. I'd rather kill someone. It's like, fuck dude. That's not how it's done. And I when I saw that clip, it reminded me of something else that I watched on YouTube, where Kevin Rudolph, you may remember him. I don't know if he was ever more than a one hit wonder. Sorry, but I don't know if he was. I only remember him having that song, let it rock with Lil Wayne. And I saw this video on YouTube where he was talking about what that experience was like, visa vie the media, and he was told, like, this song is actually going to be a big hit. It's going to get a lot of radio airplay in New York and LA, we're going to get the stations to promote it like you need to be ready for this, because you need to be. Ready for the media, and they hired a consultant to sit down with him and do some mock interviews, pretend to be like on the radio and on television, to assess what he looked like, what he sounded like, what sorts of things that he would say, and then to coach him. And he was laughing, because the woman they hired couldn't even remember his name. She called him Kevin Adolph, and he was like, so this woman conflated me with one of the worst mass murderers in all of history. She couldn't even remember that was Kevin Rudolph, and not Kevin Adolph like Adolf Hitler. But that just goes to show, like nothing is left to chance in Hollywood, like whatever reality TV show you've been watching that you think is real. It isn't. It's all fucking scripted, it's all fucking fake, all of it. So for somebody to go on and say, I'd rather be a villain, I'd rather kill somebody, it's like was he coached to say that? That doesn't sound like something that a media expert would have told him to say on crook and chase back in like, 89 or 90 I'm just saying, I don't think that that was coached. I think that may have been a part in the interview where he went rogue thinking that it would be funny. And then now people are looking back on it all these years later, like, um, were there some signs and signals that we missed along the way? And speaking of things that seem to be ill fated, that you can't imagine any media consultant would ever tell you to do or say there was the whole Chris Gaines shtick that happened in the late 90s and that I I don't even know, man, I'm trying to think of where to even begin. Garth invented this dude, this character, this persona named Chris Gaines. Supposedly, his real name was Christian Jean Gaines, and he was born in 1967 in Brisbane, Australia. Although, if you listen to Garth talk as Chris Gaines, he doesn't fucking sound Australian. You expect him to sound like Chase from House MD, and instead it just sounds like Garth with with a slightly, slightly lower, lower voice that he talks like. Chris Gaines talks like this, and it's like, how is this supposed to be a man from Brisbane, Australia. It's fucking weird. Man again, does that mean he's a serial killer? No, it doesn't. But this falls into the category of we think that Garth has disassociative Identity Disorder, something like Sybil. He has this alter ego named Chris Gaines, and maybe when he's doing his serial killing, he's falling into Chris Gaines. And so Garth doesn't have to take on the sins of Chris Gaines. Super weird. Chris Gaines, if you don't remember, or if you live outside the United States and you weren't around for this insanity,

it was Garth with like,

PC emo hair and a pubic hair soul patch on his chin. That's that was pretty much Chris Gaines. Garth was planning to star as Chris Gaines in a movie called The lamb, but the lamb never came together. And I will get to the whole crazy thing about the business partner that sued him. But there was going to be a movie called The lamb starring Chris Gaines, or, I guess we should say, starring Garth Brooks as Chris Gaines starring in the lamb. But it didn't come together in 1999 he did release the album Garth Brooks in the life of Chris Gaines. And I will be honest, most of the Chris Gaines stuff I didn't like, but there was one song called Lost in you that I actually thought was pretty good. You have to do you have to look around for it if you even want to find the video anymore. But I thought it was a pretty good song. The rest of it I didn't have any use for. And he hosted SNL, where it was like he was hosting the show and acting in the skits as Garth Brooks, but his he was the musical guest as Chris Gaines. There was also a documentary, which we might be able to more accurately call a mockumentary, that was done for the VH one series behind the music, which was super popular at the time. And it was like they were taking this shit seriously, and in this mockumentary, it's revealed that Chris Gaines was a rampant, raging sex addict. Supposedly, he would go out on tour and he would pack a chainsaw in his luggage, just long pause there, because what the fuck is gonna do? What with it back in the chainsaw, all kinds of women, all kinds of women flashing their boobies at the Chris Gaines concert. I think even Billy Joel made an appearance in this fucking mockumentary. And I'm like, Oh my God. We saw it. I watched it. And then my mother also watched it. And I. Remember us talking to each other about it, like, Did you see that? And there was a part about Chris's best friend dies and he goes off the rails, which sounded so much like the life Garrett episode of Behind the Music. I was like, this is just super weird. And supposedly, in this origin story. Chris Gaines looked one way when he was younger, but then he goes off the rails after his best friend dies, and he's like drinking and drugging and sexing and all of this, and he gets into a car accident, and he has to have massive reconstructive plastic surgery, and that's why he no longer looks the way that he did before. He now looks like Garth Brooks, I don't know, maybe, maybe the plastic surgery took away his Australian accent too and made him sound like Garth Brooks talking way down here, just like this.

And yeah,

I mean, this whole thing is kooky,

and I see both sides of it. I feel like he was trying to do something artistic. I don't actually think that this is some disassociative identity disorder, and he murders people as Chris Gaines, so that Garth Brooks doesn't actually have to deal with the crime. I don't think that at all. Here's here's my thought. Sometimes when people get mega famous, they start wanting to play, they start wanting to experiment. They start wanting to figure out other ways to practice their craft. But it doesn't always land with their audience. That's like back in 1972 there was the naked lunchbox, cover of Rolling Stone where David Cassidy is partially naked, and you can, like, see the beginning of his pubes. And he wanted to get away from this. Like, hey, I'm a teen idol. I'm safe for kids. I was on a Partridge Family, like he wanted to start being taken seriously as an adult instead of as part of the Partridge Family. And so he allowed Annie Leibovitz to photograph him that way, and and it definitely caused a stir. That's the thing. Sometimes artists get it into their mind that they're going to get away from whatever persona they've had and do something different, but their core audience might not embrace that. Now, somebody like David Bowie is an exception to the rule, but David Bowie had different audiences. David Bowie was not Garth Brooks or David Cassidy, and he established from early on in his career that he would invent personas, Ziggy, Stardust, Aladdin, sane, the Thin White Duke. You never knew with Bowie, if he was going to come out wearing a ginger red mullet, if he was going to have a platinum blonde Pompadour, if he was going to have a brunette, kind of spiky, industrial look with Trent Reznor, you didn't know what was going to happen. And people embraced that. I mean, certainly thinking of myself as an artist and a creative, I like to defy genres, and I like to work across genres in my writing, and I always want to be able to do that. And I draw inspiration from Bowie in that regard, because he didn't say, I want to get pigeon holed. He he wanted to be able to change. And sometimes he would act that's like in the hunger. He plays a vampire that starts to age and becomes like old and decrepit and really creepy looking. And then in Labyrinth, he's the Goblin King. And we all just kind of shrugged and said, Yeah, well, he's boy. He gets to do that. He's kind of made a career off of reinvention. And I think this is just my opinion. It could be wrong, but I'm just looking at it as an artist. I think that Garth Brooks probably had the desire to reinvent himself and to try something weird and quirky, and it just didn't land. And then the back story around Chris Gaines supposedly being Australian and having extensive plastic surgery and suddenly looking like Garth Brooks and sounding exactly like Garth Brooks, making him Australian, even though he doesn't sound Australian. And then this crazy story about the car accident, the reconstructive surgery, the sex addiction, packing chainsaws when you go out on the road, Middle America was just not feeling that from a country artist. Yet another component of this story is Garth Brooks, former business partner, a woman named Lisa Sanderson on April 15, 2013

she sued him for $425,000

in a court in LA and her allegation was that they were partners in this production company, red strokes entertainment. And she alleged that. He had caused financial damage to her, and had damaged her career because he kept turning down offers for work. She had been partnered up or or had had worked with him in some capacity, I think, for like, 20 years. And they which, I didn't know this, but apparently they CO produced a movie, a Christmas movie for TNT back in like, 2001 I think it was called, call me claws, and it had Whoopi Goldberg in it. And then came the lamb, you know, like the this, this movie where Garth is supposed to star and be Chris Gaines, Lisa alleged that he had, like, just shunted off one opportunity after another. And it was almost like the way it's described in bodies, in low places. It's almost like, you know, celebrities that don't want certain colored Skittles or certain colored Eminem's, like, I'll refuse to play if you have green Eminem's in my in my dressing room, or I'll refuse to go on if you don't have one specific brand of Scotch for me, things like that. And he wanted to, according to her, have roles in movies like Twister and Saving Private Ryan. And it was like, Well, you know, you're not an A list actor. You can't command the kind of roles and the kind of salary for a role that Tom Hanks can. You know, you're a wealthy, well regarded country music artist, but you're not a Hollywood actor, and there is a difference. Sanderson went on to say that she felt like Brooks had cultivated this public persona like aw shucks, I'm a cowboy, I'm down to earth and I'm humble. But she said that was all a ruse, and that after working with him so closely and seeing him what he liked, what he was really like outside the public eye, she labeled him, quote, paranoid, angry, deceitful and vindictive, and she said that he would turn against people close to him on a dime. I think that they wound up settling like the jury rejected most of her claims, and they found in favor of Garth. And I think she wound up having to pay him instead of him paying her, which I'm kind of like shrugging my shoulders. You can't see me, but I'm kind of shrugging my shoulders like, That's Entertainment, like the richer person, the person that can lawyer up better, is probably going to win when it comes to what's happening in LA. But I felt like that that was an interesting story. Like, okay, wait a minute. That tells us more about his ego. If it's true, if what she's saying is true, and that he had outrageous demands and thought that he could compete with a list Oscar winning actors, then it's like, well, he's living in a fantasy world like it. It's one thing, like there are all these different sort of niches of entertainment, and sometimes people think they can cross over, and sometimes they can't. Again, I go back to my David Bowie example. He could sing and write and record music, and then sometimes he starred in television or movies. And people get to thinking like, oh, well, I can do anything if I'm famous. And then they find out that they can't, like some people can, a lot of people cannot. And so for Garth Brooks to have, I think, any kind of idea at all, if he did that, he was going to have a starring role in Saving Private Ryan. That, more than anything, I think, to me, speaks to a WHAT THE FUCK moment. And on that note, I feel like I've said that a lot, on another note, on a related note, on a similar note, Garth had a baseball career. I totally brain dumped that. I'm sure I saw it on the news, but I had totally brain dumped the existence of this reality from 1998 to 1999 he was signed with the San Diego Padres. He played corner positions and went one for 22 in the spring training games in 2000 he tried out for the New York meds, but was released after going zero for 17 in 2004 he went to spring training with the Kansas City Royals. He did get one hit, and seemed to be more shocked than anybody else on the team that that happened. And then in 2019 he went to spring training with the Pittsburgh Pirates. Now, according to Garth, he was doing these baseball appearances and trying to participate in these teams to raise money for a charity called teammates For Kids Foundation. So it's like, I'm doing this for charity. This is It's not like I really think I'm going to be a pro baseball player, like I am kind of crossing something off my bucket list by getting to do this. But the real goal is to raise money for children's charities. It's not that I have the illusions of grandeur that I'm going to suddenly become. A major baseball player. The way it's presented, in bodies, in low places, it's like, yeah, he kind of did think that he was going to make it. And there were other people in the industry who were pissed off by that, because they're like, Okay, it's for charity, but he's got millions of dollars. There are other ways that he could raise money for charity. If he wanted to raise more money than he himself has, then he could do a black tie dinner. There's so many things that a celebrity like that could do, as opposed to taking a spot that could have gone to somebody else, that was one of the major criticisms of that move in bodies in low places, is like he's taking a spot that could have gone to some other person that has really been training and has really been trying to have a major league baseball career, so for him to just be able to walk on and goof off and play games and then say, Oh, well, it's for charity. Like, that's really not fair to somebody else who has worked their ass off to try to get put on the team, and it's presented in the book, is like, yeah, it's not only a delusion of grandeur, but it's also another example of his ego run amok, that he feels like he's just entitled to do things like that. Skipping forward a bit in time, you may have heard, I think, in the past year or two, there were allegations of SA and R, A, P, E, made by a former hair and makeup artist identified in court documents as Jane Roe, which I guess is just a clever distinction from Jane Doe. Jane Roe Brooks has said that none of it is true. He says that it's defamation and extortion. There was a lawsuit filed by Jane in the state of California in October of 2024 she says that the alleged abuse happened between 2019 and 2024 she says that Brooks are a P, E, D, her in an LA hotel suite in May of 2019 during a work trip, and that he further abused her by holding her upside down, trying to make her get dizzy, pass out, get sick. She said that there were other forms of misconduct that he would expose himself, that he would sext her and make unwanted comments to her and about her and around her, and she also claims that there was a hostile work environment, which I would think that would go with the territory of the other accusations. She said that she worked for both Garth and his wife Trisha, for several years, but became unable to continue because of the things that he was doing. His response is he's denied it. Said that the accusations are false and outrageous, and he claims that Jane made the accusations after she tried to shake him down for money. And he said no, he also said that she's really just after. At this point, the whole thing is blown up in the media because he says that she wants hush money, and he refuses to give it to her because he says he hasn't done anything wrong, and if he pays her off, it's going to make him look guilty, and he doesn't want to do that. As of this recording, there are two states that are navigating this. There's a case in Mississippi, and it was initially filed anonymously by Garth himself, I guess, as John Doe, but later his lawyers, I guess, tried to publicly identify the accuser in court filings. So then she goes to California and files her suit. The whole thing. I'm not a legal expert by any means, so it sounds like it is a tangled up web of stuff. The TLDR there is that he has been accused of SA and R, A, P, E, by this hair and makeup artist. We don't know how those cases will be adjudicated, but we do know that he has said vehemently that he denies the allegations and that none of them are true. By the time we get to the end of bodies in low places, the conclusion that the authors themselves make is like, well, is this a conspiracy theory that might be true, or is it just satire? So it's like we've gone through the book listening to all of these things, and then we get to the end, and it's like, Was it all a dream? What? What is it all fiction? And I personally hate that deus ex machina crap, where it's like it was all a dream, and suddenly a thunderbolt came from the sky and solved the problem, like we've taken you on this ride, and then we're finally going to stay in the conclusion. The conclusion, is this real, or did we make it all up? Is it all just satire? Is it something to just laugh around with? So they pretty much say in the conclusion, like, this is just satire. We were just fun and we was just goofing and fooling. Don't take it serious. And you don't know, as the reader, or in my case, via audible the listener, you don't know, like, did they feel that they had to put that on there because they didn't want to get their butts sued and they wanted the First Amendment protection that comes from satire, because there is a hedge of protection you get with satire, particularly political satire, that you don't necessarily get with other genres. The courts have really shown favor to fiction and to satire and political satire, in particular in American culture. I can't speak to places outside the US, but I know what I've seen as a writer and what my publishing attorney has said to me about genres like fiction satire. So you don't know if a publishing attorney said you've got to put this conclusion on that, hey, Deus Ex Machina, it was all a joke. It was all satire. Or if they really believed what they were writing, I don't know. They pepper in interviews with like psychiatrists and Foxtrot Bravo India, retirees. And another thing that I really find the most disturbing about it is they they pepper in real quotes from actual convicted serial killers, people like the Green River Killer, BTK, John Wayne, Gacy, Jeffrey Dahmer, Ted Bundy and so forth. And I guess that's done to help seed credibility. It's as if to say, see, look at what we're doing. We're talking about real serial killers who have been convicted of their crimes. So you can trust what we're saying about Garth. It's also guilt by association, right? Because it's like we're telling you about all of these convicted serial killers and about Garth in the same breath, so your brain begins to associate all of these people together. There were some quotes from the real serial killers that were terribly unnerving. I mean, where the things about Garth could sometimes become comical and laugh out loudable. The real serial killer information was fucking awful. That's like, there was a quote from John Wayne Gacy where he said the only thing I was guilty of was running an unlicensed cemetery. And I Oh, God. I was standing there folding laundry when that part came on, and I was like, oh, fuck, God damn, that shit is just awful. It is so gross to me, and it made me flash back to an interview I saw with him a long time ago. He was in jail, and he talked about like therapists and psychiatrists coming to see him, and he said, There is no cure for this. You can't just do therapy or take medication and get rid of it, like what is inside of me is never going away. And if I ever get out of here, I will do it again. I enjoyed what I was doing. I do not feel that I did anything wrong. I don't have remorse for it, and I would do it again. And I just thought, my God, that's harrowing. Like, on the one hand, I appreciate his honesty, because I think people need to hear that we have bleeding hearts who feel like they're trying to do the right thing by being anti death penalty. And I'm certainly not saying that, in my opinion, the death penalty needs to be applied willy nilly. We certainly have problems in our justice system. Justice is not blind in America. And I'm not saying, like, apply the death penalty for everything. Or little Billy nicked a package of gum from the corner store, so put him in front of a firing squad. That's not what I'm saying. I feel like, when we start making these claims, like, well, there's nothing that should be punishable by the death penalty. It's like, really, what about the Nazis? What about genocide? Like there absolutely has to be, in my opinion, a really final punishment, and it might only be reserved for people like genocidal dictators, mass murderers, serial killers, war criminals and so forth. But I just don't think you take the option off the table because you're sitting there listening to somebody saying, the only thing I did wrong was I ran an unlicensed cemetery. Meanwhile, he was torturing and killing boys and young men and putting them in his fucking crawl space and throwing lie over the top of them. And in another interview, he said, I didn't think about them anymore once they were down in the crawl space with the lie on top of them. It's like they never existed. They were never human, and they didn't matter that kind of person with that level of psychopathy or sociopathy, fucking telling you outright, there's no cure for this. There's no way to get it therapyed out of me. And moreover, if I get out of here, I'll do it again. I just don't feel that they need to exist in society. If that offends your bleeding heart sensibilities, sorry, but Sorry, not sorry. So some of those quotes were just diabolical listening to the green. River Killer, BTK, etc. But do I personally think that Garth Brooks falls into that category and that he is as prolific as HH Holmes or Elizabeth Bathory? No, I have not been presented with enough evidence to really say that. I think this conspiracy theory holds water. It's funny, and if someone chose to write it as a satirical novel, like they just made somebody Cletus Jones, the country singer who goes on a rampage every city that he stops in, there's homicides that happen. It might be really funny or it might be really intriguing, but to pin it on Garth and say that because he did Chris Gaines, and that wasn't well received. It flopped. And he looks weird whenever he posts Facebook videos. And then going back to the crook and chase interview, I'd rather play a villain. I'd rather kill people like it definitely doesn't suggest to me that he's your average person. There may be something screwy in the wiring, I don't know, but I just don't think there's anywhere near enough real, actual evidence to say that he's a serial killer. Come to your own conclusions. Check out bodies in low places, or any of the other sites that kind of deal with this conspiracy theory and come to your own conclusions, but for me, I'm simply not yet convinced. Stay a little bit crazy and I will see you in the next episode.

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