Splicetoday

Politics & Media
Jun 26, 2024, 06:24AM

CNN Tried to Slime Me. They Made Me Sound Awesome

Everyone knows the network’s a joke.

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CNN is on the defensive going into this week’s presidential debate. Their socialist bias is being thrown back in their faces, from Wolf Blitzer calling Hunter Biden’s laptop “Russian disinformation” to Kasie Hunt’s meltdown when she recently had a Trump spokesperson on the network. CNN’s a joke and everybody knows it.

The network once tried to slime me, but wound up making me sound awesome.

I’m not talking about the time that Jake Tapper had extortionist and psychopath Michael Avenatti on to declare that Brett Kavanaugh and I had drugged and gang-raped women.

I’m talking about something related to that nightmare but in a smaller subsection—the time CNN reviewed my short films to try and make me, and by extension Kavanaugh, look bad. “A key witness in the allegations against Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh produced and starred in a series of videos that shed more light on just who exactly is Mark Judge, a man who has been largely silent as a political storm has raged around the alleged assault of Christine Blasey Ford,” wrote Elizabeth Landers. Kavanaugh was accused of sexual misconducting high school by a woman named Christine Blasey Ford. It was a major conflagration—and total nonsense.

For the entire summer of 2018 opposition researchers were digging through everything I’ve ever done—and not done—and sending it to the media. This included books I wrote, girls I dated, and videos I’d made. What interested CNN, aside from the bullshit of Blasey Ford and Avenatti, were my movies. They reflected my interest in Hollywood, Catholicism, literature and women. I’d started getting paid for making films when Georgetown University purchased a video I made on the Fourth of July around 2010. Shortly after that I was at the “D.C Pool Party," which was gathering spot for young people in Washington who went to dance, meet, drink, and have a good time. It was a multicultural rave a mile from Capitol Hill that has nothing to do with lawyers or politics, or the election. It was the kind of thing you'd come across in Brazil.

I was there for about an hour and getting ready to leave when Eric, one of the party organizers saw my camera bag. "Are you a photographer?" he said. I said yes. "Listen, our photographer didn't make it today,” he said. “Can you take some pictures for the next three hours? You know, people having fun, pretty girls." He then named a good price. Eric was happy with the result. This led to more shoots, including one of a girl who went on American Idol—and made it into the Top 10. Suddenly I was negotiating licensing fees and signing waivers for my work.

Then the Kavanaugh war erupted. CNN was looking for dirt, and thought they found it with my films. And yet, they made me sound cool—even if it was unintentional. CNN’s Elizabeth Landers comes across pretty accurate and even good-naturedly funny here:

The videos are short vignettes, mostly four or five minutes in length, and include a mix of titles like “My Subconscious (Outtakes)” and also stream-of-consciousness narratives with Judge on-camera in an informal, selfie-like style of shooting, talking about philosophy, religion and other topics.

Some of the videos are provocative in nature: young women lying on a bed in bikinis in “An Autumn Day at Virginia Beach” and another video dedicated to Playboy Magazine in “Book Review: Hugh Hefner Playboy.”

“My Subconscious (Outtakes)” begins with what appears to be the silhouette of Judge standing outside, then transitions to video of a rough ocean, a party with couples dancing happily, a church Mass, a Brooks Brothers store, a woman lying in her bra on a bed and another woman lying on a bed covered in political pamphlets that read “Obama’s Betrayal of Israel.”

A cast of women, almost all fresh-faced and buxom, offer intense stares into the camera and wide smiles depending on the mood of the video. The women portrayed on camera do not speak in the short films that CNN reviewed; instead, music sets the mood.

Another short, “The Girl from Leesburg VA,” features a woman looking at wedding dresses in a shop, then cuts to her slurping down oysters.

References to the Washington area are sprinkled throughout the videos – the Georgetown neighborhood is the backdrop as Judge walks and talks in one video about the Christian movie-making industry.

Landers might be interested to know that two other writers and I have a script being considered in Hollywood right now. It’s based on the events of 2018 and my book, The Devil’s Triangle. You may be seeing those “fresh-faced and buxom” women on the big screen. 

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