Everything has to start somewhere, right? And it was Dan Sickles who first claimed temporary insanity as a defense for murder.   Of course, he was Congressman at the time he shot and killed his wife's lover, Philip Barton Key II, in broad daylight in Manhattan's Lafayette Square. And of course he was celebrated as a hero for "saving" women from such a rogue.  But that's hardly the only scandal that attached itself to Sickles' name. Tune in as Kasey walks us through his messy career, from...

Logo: Jessica Balaschak Music: Caveman of Los Angeles by Party Store Music --- Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/american-scandals/support

A cult versus FBI armored vehicles—what could go wrong?  Was David Koresh crazy? Not our topic today! Was the government overarmed and underprepared? Now, that we can dig into. In this week's episode, Kasey Howe looks at bad people on both sides, and the decisions that led to the live televised disaster that was Waco. Logo: Jessica Balaschak Music: Caveman of Los Angeles by Party Store Music --- Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/american-scandals/support

Logo: Jessica Balaschak Music: Caveman of Los Angeles by Party Store Music --- Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/american-scandals/support

Turns out, women involved in political scandals is a pretty tough Google—mostly because very few of them were scandalous on their own. Nevertheless, in honor of Women's History Month Kasey Howe offers a pu pu platter of women behaving badly, whether they intended to or not. From Iran-Contra to extramarital affairs, here are the women breaking bad in government. And no, this isn't the Nancy Reagan episode. Mark is as disappointed as you are. Logo: Jessica Balaschak Music: Caveman of Los...

“The Strumpet with the Trumpet.” “Nympho Dyke.” “Cocaine Slut.” “Black-Magic Voodoo Queen.”   Somehow, a former cheerleader from upstate New York got branded all of those things by the national media when her wealthy older husband decided to divorce her after six years of marriage. They were not famous (well, sorta). But their marriage coincided with the last gasp of the freewheeling decadence of the ‘70s, so there were plenty of lurid details to air in public. And neither Roxanne Pulitzer...

Boy, major corporations do not want to offer basic rights to employees. And proving that nothing is new, this week Kasey Howe looks back at the Ludlow Massacre of 1914, the result of some tense union negotiations around Colorado coal mines that ended with an entire tent city being burned to the ground by anti-strike militia. The deadliest strike in American history, the outcry eventually did result in some new legislation (including an 8-hour work day). We're not all giggles and gin,...

Lita Grey Chaplin’s greatest contribution to pop culture is not her two published memoirs or even her divorce complaint so scandalous that it was published and sold in 1927. Instead, it’s her name: Lita served as the root for Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita, the most famous underage sex symbol this side of Brooke Shields in her Calvin Klein jeans.   Though she was divorced from Charlie Chaplin by 19 and lived until the age of 87, Lita’s life was inexorably bound to her first husband and the father...

Has anyone been so aptly named as Anthony Weiner? Of course, we only know just how apropos his name is because he kept his dick in his pants (or gray briefs) but couldn't keep his dick pics on his phone. Instead, he flung them far and wide, from his Twitter account (he was a U.S. Congressman at the time!) to ladies he met online as Carlos Danger to, ultimately, underage girls across the country. How did a Democratic political star flame out so thoroughly and so often? What does any of this...

Sure, we all know Lucky Lindy's record-breaking flight across the Atlantic. And we all know the tragic story of his oldest son's kidnapping. But did you know that Lindbergh was both a eugenicist and a Nazi sympathizer, who accepted a medal from Hermann Göring shortly after Kristallnacht? And did you know that he had not on, not two, but three secret families in Europe, two of them with sisters? Probably not, because even the biographer who earned a Pulitzer Prize for his book on Charles...

We hear it every year around the holidays: By saying "holidays," we're declaring war on Christmas! But this isn't just a free floating conspiracy theory—there was an actual event that launched a thousand flakes of infuriated spittle. How exactly are in a war on Christmas? And why? Well, that's both more complicated than you'd think and also not at all complicated. Kasey Howe walks Mark through why people think America is starting to hate the day of Jesus's birth. Logo: Jessica...

The date was December 21, 2020. That's when a Twitter user tweeted, "You have to admire Hilaria Baldwin's commitment to her decade long grift where she impersonates a Spanish person." And the floodgates opened. The former Hola Magazine cover star turned out to be... well, a white girl named Hillary from Boston. How did this last for 10 years? What was the fallout? And what possible explanation could there have been? Mark breaks the "nothing from the last 10 years" rule of the podcast to lead...

Welcome a very special guest to the podcast this week, when Ellie MacPherson brings her zest, brio, and eye for the hilarious detail to the story of one governor of New York, his two wives, and 10 children.    Yes, it's the Nelson Rockefeller story, including a particularly rough 48 hours in the early '60s that found him possibly torpedoing his political career for love, and one of his children disappearing in Papua New Guinea.  If you love Ellie as much as we do, then be sure to check out...

When Mary McCarthy said of Lillian Hellman, "Every word she writes is a lie, including 'and' and 'the,'" Lillian Hellman laughed. Then she sued McCarthy for $2.2 million.    But that wasn't the end of it. This tossed off zinger on The Dick Cavett Show has resulted in a Broadway play with music, another stage play, and enough articles and think pieces to constitute a content farm. What is it about this lawsuit and these two writers that fascinates people more than 40 years later? Why are we...

As "Let's go Brandon" has shown, Americans love a good eff you slogan when it comes to our politicians. But that didn't start at NASCAR. Let's go all the way back to the 1884 presidential election, when Grover Cleveland's disgusting past (involving sexual assault, committing the woman to an insane asylum, and a son) came back to bite him in the ass on the election trail as people started chanting, "Ma Ma Where's My Pa." Logo: Jessica Balaschak  Music: Caveman of Los Angeles by Party Store...

"I got through Brenda Frazier, and I'm here." —Follies Brenda Frazier was born in 1921 and became one of the era’s infamous Poor Little Rich Girls. But the thing that set her apart from Doris Duke, Barbara Hutton, and Gloria Vanderbilt is that she didn’t have a successful second act. Even Gloria Vanderbilt had jeans! In fact, the only reason we still know Brenda Frazier is that she went to night clubs a lot and threw a party. Her debutante party was so extreme, so over the top, that she’s...

We sure went on a wild ride with American Crime Story: Impeachment, but the final leg of this trip was well with it. We got nuance; we got Acting; we got vulnerability. And we got a dramatization of Linda Tripp and Monica Lewinsky testifying—to VERY different results—before a grand jury. Join Kasey Howe & Mark Peikert as they wrap up the 10-episode season with their take on the final two installments, which find Monica and Linda handling their newfound fame very differently, and Paula...

If you know Boss Tweed today, it's probably from political cartoons from the 19th century about greed and graft in NYC politics. And you're right! But what you probably didn't learn is that Boss Tweed eventually went to jail—for a while.    Here, Kasey Howe recounts his checkered career, the high cost of chairs in in the 1800s, and why an escape by sea for a man who suffered from seasickness was never going to be an easy choice. Check out Thomas Nast's political cartoons here:...

When it comes to Hollywood scandals, L.A. native Andrea Van Landingham knows where the bodies are buried. Figuratively speaking! On this special episode of Shocking! Lurid! Tawdry! Mark is flying solo the author of Hollywood Horrors: Murders, Scandals, and Coverups From Tinseltown to dish on the stories that formed her, the ones she wasn't able to include, and why we're still fascinated by the lives of the stars whose movies we no longer watch.  Hollywood Horrors is out November 1 from Lyons...

... And Hillary Clinton pissed off Tammy Wynette. We're not gonna lie: Episodes 7 & 8 of Impeachment: American Crime Story (titled "The Assassination of Monica Lewinsky" and "Stand By Your Man") were tough to watch. But they're also the first time the show proved its need to exist. Giving Monica Lewinsky, Linda Tripp, and Hillary Clinton layers and nuances and showing how wide the chasm between their realities and the public's perception of them proved to be, these are powerhouse...

Truman Capote promised a masterpiece as his follow-up to In Cold Blood. Instead, Esquire readers got "La Côte Basque," a scandalous short story that dished the details of his best friend's most intimate secrets. Almost 50 years later, we're still gossiping about the fallout from that story—but only how it destroyed Truman Capote's life.   This week, Mark shares the collateral damage from that story, which was a lot bigger than Babe Paley never speaking to Capote again. Meet Ann Woodward, or,...

In this week's episode we learn that no good deed goes unpunished.    Gary Webb was just trying to do his job when the CIA started hassling him for no reason! (Well, maybe his series of articles on the CIA and crack cocaine had something to do with it?) Meanwhile the country could not be bothered because we only cared about a b*****b.    Logo: Jessica Balaschak Music: Caveman of Los Angeles by Party Store Music --- This episode is sponsored by · Anchor: The easiest way to make a...

Monica knows her malls, but she didn't see the trap Linda Tripp set for her in Pentagon City. She does spot a nice wine decanter though!   That's right, we're at the interrogation portion of Monica's story, with special appearances from her mom, Ann Coulter, and 6 bottles of Champagne. What do you think Linda bought at Bath and Bodyworks? What show did Monica's grandmother see that night? And what will Monica do now?  None of those questions are answered, but we're going to keep asking...

The book that quickly outsold Gone With the Wind has one of the most famous opening lines in literature: "Indian summer is like a woman. Ripe, hotly passionate, but fickle, she comes and goes as she pleases so that one is never sure whether she will come at all, nor for how long she will stay."   As it turns out, Indian summer was a lot like the woman behind those words. Grace Metalious landed into the national consciousness with the subtlety of an atom bomb upon publication of her first...

There's a fad diet. There's Christianity used as a weapon. There's a murder conviction. And there's big hair. Really big hair.  That's just three episodes of HBO Max's new documentary series The Way Down, about Gwen Shamblin, her Christian diet The Weigh Down, and the church she founded, the Remnant Fellowship. And somehow, Kasey Howe and Mark Peikert don't think three episodes is enough!  Join them as they discuss the brand-new show, it's shocking revelations, and just why Gwen's ethos is...