Bonus: The Bastards of Oprah
en
January 31, 2025
TLDR: A bonus episode combining Dr. Oz, Dr. Phil, and John of God, collectively known as Oprah's Bastards episodes, are stitched together with limited ad breaks.

In this bonus episode of "Behind the Bastards," the hosts Robert Evans and Andrew T explore the controversial figures associated with Oprah Winfrey, particularly focusing on Dr. Phil, Dr. Oz, and John of God. Despite their varied public personas, the episode discusses how these individuals have left a trail of harm that is both alarming and enlightening.
John of God: A Charismatic Healer with a Double Life
- Community Roots: John of God presented himself as a humble healer in Brazil, attracting desperate patients from all around the world seeking miraculous cures. He maintained the guise of a loving healer while engaging in horrendous acts against women and vulnerable individuals.
- Psychic Surgery: His methods included procedures he claimed could heal physical ailments through "psychic surgery," often performed with rusty kitchen knives and no anesthesia. This theatrical approach, mixed with the emotionally charged environment, created a façade of legitimacy and wonder.
Influence of Oprah Winfrey
- Media Endorsement: Winfrey’s notable endorsement in her magazine and on her shows enhanced John of God’s visibility, attracting thousands of hopefuls seeking cures. This massive publicity contributed to the growth of a cult-like following around him, pushing aside numerous red flags about his practices.
- Celebrity Visits: Celebrities like Oprah and public figures backed him, making it easier for him to establish and maintain control over his followers and exploit their desperation for personal gain.
The Dark Secrets of a Healer
- Allegations of Abuse: The podcast reveals unsettling accounts of sexual assaults and abuses committed by John of God purportedly under the guise of healing. With over 600 women coming forward, including horrifying testimonies from his own daughter, it became clear that the healer had a pattern of manipulation and violence against women.
- Legal Proceedings: The flood of allegations led to investigations, and John was eventually sentenced to prison, yet the extent of his alleged human trafficking and abuse remains unclear.
The Role of Other Medical Figures
- Dr. Oz and Dr. Phil: Both Dr. Oz and Dr. Phil are discussed as prominent figures who have promoted pseudoscience through their platforms, enabling charlatans like John of God. Dr. Oz, although a trained surgeon, has been criticized for endorsing dubious health practices that have misled countless individuals seeking real medical help.
- Questionable Credibility: These doctors often perpetuate harmful myths under the guise of medical expertise, essentially turning the media into platforms for their dubious claims, which significantly impacts public trust in genuine medical advice.
Conclusion
- A Cautionary Tale: Overall, this episode serves as a glaring reminder of how easily charisma and the promise of miraculous cures can deceive the public. The intertwining of celebrity culture with medical authority poses significant risks, as exemplified by Oprah's endorsement of dangerous individuals.
- Lessons Learned: It advocates for critical thinking and greater scrutiny of health claims made in the media. The users of these services must be vigilant and ready to demand more accountability from those who wield power over vulnerable lives.
In summary, the episode peels back the layers of this complex narrative of fame, deception, and the dark side of healing practices, encouraging listeners to remain aware and critical of the individuals they choose to trust with their health.
Was this summary helpful?
He was a boy scout leader, a church deacon, a husband, a father. He went to a local church. He was going to the grocery store with us. He was the guy next door. But he was leading a double life. He was certainly a peeping tom. Looking through the windows, looking at people, fantasizing about what he could do. He then began entering the houses.
He could get into the home, take something, and get out and not be caught. He felt very powerful. He was a monster, hiding in plain sight. Someone killed four members of a family. It just didn't happen here.
Journey inside the mind of one of history's most notorious killers, BTK, through the voices of the people who know him best. Listen to Monster BTK on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
I'm Arturo Castro and I've been lucky enough to do stuff like Broad City and Nargos and Roadhouse and so many commercials about back pain. And now I'm starting a podcast because honestly guys, I don't feel the space is crowded enough. Get ready for Greatest Escapes, a new comedy podcast about the wildest true escape stories in history. Each week I'll be sitting down with some of the most hilarious actors and writers and comedians to tell him a buck wild tale from across history and time. People like Ed Helms, Diane Guerrero, Joseph Gordon-Levitt and Zoe Chow.
It's giving funny true crime. I love storytelling and I love you so I can't wait. Listen and subscribe to Greatest Escapes on the iHeartRadio app Apple Podcast or wherever you get your podcasts.
Do you want to understand an invisible force that's shaping your life? I'm Osheloshan, one of the new hosts of the long-running podcast Tech Stuff. I'm slightly skeptical but obsessively intrigued. And I'm Cara Price, the other new host. And I'm ready to adopt early and often.
On tech stuff, we travel all the way from the minds of Congo to the surface of Mars to the dark corners of TikTok to ask an attempt to answer burning questions about technology. One of the kind of tricks for surviving Mars is to live there long enough so that people evolve into Martians. Like data is a very rough proxy for our complex reality. How is it possible that the world's new energy revolution can be based in this place where there's no electricity at night?
Oz and I will cut through the noise to bring you the best conversations and deep dives that will help you understand how tech is changing our world and what you need to know to survive the singularity. So join us. Listen to tech stuff on the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts.
I'm so sick of hearing men talk about women's basketball. If only there were a professional WNBA player with her own podcast, I could listen to. Hey, this is Lixie Brown, WNBA player and professional yapper. And this is Mariah Rose. You may know me from spilling the tea on hoops for hotties on TikTok. And we've got a new podcast full circle. Every Wednesday, we're catching you up on what's going on in women's basketball and not just in the WNBA, but with athletes unlimited, unrivaled and college basketball.
We've got you with analysis, inside stories, and a little bit of tea. I know you guys have seen a lot of former and current basketball players telling their stories from their point of view, and I just think it's time for the girlies to tap in. We want to share all of the women's basketball stories that you won't see anywhere else. Tune in a full circle.
and I Heart Women's Sports Production in partnership with Deep Blue Sports and Entertainment. You can find us on the I Heart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcast. Presented by Capital One, founding partner of I Heart Women's Sports.
Hey, everybody, Robert here. And if you've been paying attention, we just finished six episodes on Oprah Winfrey. And obviously that dealt with a lot of the most toxic things about her career in media and her show. But as I noted a couple of times, we didn't go into much detail about three of the worst things she's been involved with, Dr. Phil, Dr. Oz, and John of God, because we had done two partners of those. Well, given that all of those were
had a year or more old, in some cases older than that, we made the decision to run them as one big episode as a bonus. You're not getting less original content, obviously. But we put clip these together as one big episode so that there's a lot less ads. So you can kind of listen through this story of all of these very worst people associated to Oprah with fewer ads than you'd heard before.
So, take a listen, my friends, and yeah, I love you, go to hell.
Thank you, Sophie. Thank you for lying about it being a good introduction. But you know it is good, certainly better than my introduction. Is our guest for today, Mr. Andrew T. Fuck yeah, what's up? I'm alive, can't kill me yet. Nope, nope, can't. So you have made it through the Rona so far, Andrew. Yeah. Yeah. I have to say your hair looks as badly in need of a cut as mine does.
Yeah, I can't decide are you I'm like debating whether to just shoot the moon and grow it to like donatable lengths. Yeah, fuck. Yeah shave my head. I don't know. It's it's unpleasant. It's it's at the very unpleasant point of the growth like it like yeah, I hate it back in my neck. It's fucking disgusting. It's terrible
We could do what if we did like a locks of love thing, but instead of for people who need hair, it's for like weird horny people on the internet.
Yeah. Oh, yeah. Yeah. Yeah. We raise money for some charity. I don't know what kind of charity, like bombs, not food, maybe. That sounds like a charity. I mean, it could be like sort of an only fan situation. Yeah. The recording of cutting it will be useful to somebody. Yeah, that'll be ASMR for some very weird person. Yeah. And yeah.
So Andrew, Andrew, as a general rule, when you and I get together, we talk about a horrific story of colonial genocide, which is what our friendship has been based on up until this point. Even before the podcast, that's the part. Yeah, I would just call you randomly in the middle of the night and be like, have you heard about what they did to Haiti?
And I'd be like, nope. Let's hear it. Today, though, today we have a story that's horrible, really, really horrible, but it's actually a little bit of a reversal because it's like in part the story of this weird belief system from Europe being adopted honestly by people in a colonized nation and then used to justify horrific misbehavior on behalf of cult leaders. So that's kind of cool. Yeah.
Yeah. Cool. New shit. Yeah. I guess you can call it a type of, I don't know. I don't even know what to call this. It's a real motherfucker of a story though. This is the tale of John of God. Have you ever heard of John of God? I've heard of neither John nor God. So no John of God.
Now people might be confused. There's an actual like a Jesus II guy, like a Catholic person called John of God. I think he's a saint or some shit. This is not that guy. This is a modern spiritual medical grifter, repeatedly endorsed by Oprah Winfrey, who turned out to be a mass rapist and possibly a baby farmer. So that is
That's what we're getting into today. They're welcome, Andrew, for booking me. Yeah, thanks for having me. Jesus Christ. Yeah. It's going to be an interesting tale today. But before we get into John of God's story, we have to go back in history to the mid-1800s and to a man with what I would have to say is one of the most unreasonably cool names I've ever come across in my research.
Are you ready for this name? You're not running this name. Nobody's ready. This fucking name. Hippolyte Leon Dinesard Ravelle. That is a fucking name. Hippolyte Leon Dinesard Ravelle. That is a fucking name. Like Ravelle is like, so what a, I like, like going like subtle on the, on the final landing. It's just like, yeah, we could do it normal. You know, I like this name.
Fully 50% of his four names sound like Pokemon. I've got a hippo light. I've got a dinner's art. It's fucking rules. So hippo light Leon Denizard reveal was a French educator and he wrote under the markedly less cool pin name Alan Cardek, which I don't understand. If you're hippo lightly on the Denizard reveal, you lean into that shit.
This guy did not know what was clickable. Very frustrating. That's wild. Speaking as a guy who's named after fucking the godfather guy, you don't give up the gift of a name that cool. Very frustrating.
So anyway, under the boring name Alan Cardek, he wrote a series of books about spirits. And Cardek's core contention was that all living animals were inhabited by immortal spirits that bounced around from body to body over the ceaseless aeons. Cardek also believed that spirits could become disembodied through a variety of causes and that these free spirits could impact the world in positive and negative ways. Cardek's theories became the religion of Spiritism, which is still practiced around the world today.
And it is particularly popular for reasons I don't really understand in Brazil. It has something like 3 million adherents there. Damn. Yeah. That is... I guess it's sort of like a French version of sort of like an animist type religion, right? Yeah. I think...
I think you're you're you're very keen to recognize that because I suspect it has a lot to do with that. And usually, Spiritism winds up being kind of like a Spiritist Christian hybrid. And it does you're right. It kind of does because a lot of these places had sort of animus traditions prior to Europeans coming in and fucking shit up. And so Spiritism felt like this kind of genuine synthesis of these old traditions with, you know, the new Christianity. I think you're probably onto something there.
I guess that's kind of the shit that happened with Catholicism in South America where it basically became saints became a pantheon or the polytheism. It's like, yeah, it's fine. Just a slight demotion and everyone's the same.
Yeah, it's whatever. So we don't hear a lot about spiritism today in the United States. And probably the reason why is that a sizable number of what were originally the religion's chief pillars have just become normal facets of fringe spirituality. Like a lot of stuff that was originally part of this spiritualism religion that cardiac cooked up just kind of became things that people who like crystals all believe.
Yeah, yeah, yeah. And even Christianity, kind of like mainstream evangelical Christianity in the United States has even absorbed a number of spiritist beliefs, or at least different Christian cults around the world have done that. And in a number of places, including Brazil, this has led to spiritual healers becoming a very big deal.
Spiritual healers are individuals who claim to be able to carry out magical healing sessions because their bodies act as conduits for dead medical doctors, saints, and sometimes just God himself. Now, in the United States, this is often seen in Pentecostal communities, who I talk about a lot because people need to know more about them. If you've ever seen spiritual surgery sessions,
Oh shit. I feel like I can imagine it, but I can't think of one. But yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, it's kind of like laying on of hands type shit and laying on of hands, but then they'll like pull their hands away. They'll be like, Oh, there's a tumor inside you. The devil's put a tomb around your heart.
And they'll pull their hands away and they'll have like a bunch of bloody pieces of meat in their hands. And it's almost, it's always like chicken or something. Like they get guts from like an animal and they do sleight of hand, like magician shit to make it look like they're kind of like that guy in Temple of Doom pulling out, you know, organs. Yeah, like that's a big thing in the United States. And it's cool.
It's a big thing in the parts of the United States that I'm going to guess most people don't know anything about. Most Americans would be like, this isn't a big thing in the United States, but you're wrong. It is nice how the state of the art of 16th century magic has remained the same. If you can palm a chicken heart, you can get away with a lot.
Yeah, the most important thing to realize about just the world is that people have never been dumber than they are now, and they have never been smarter than they are now. Human intelligence, regardless of the actual amount of knowledge that exists, is a flat plane. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
So yeah, spiritual surgery is a thing that happens here in the United States and it's a thing that happens all over the world. The various kinds of spiritual healing traditions have existed since time immemorial. There's like a whole tradition of it over in India that has nothing to do with Christianity. It's like shit like this has been happening for thousands of years, right? But over in Brazil, a combination of spiritism and Christianity has created a thoroughly unique tradition of what is generally called psychic surgery.
Now, unlike most similar traditions around the world, in Brazil, this psychic surgery often includes real cutting with surgeons using actual knives on the eyes and bodies of their patients. So that's a cool wrinkle. That's fucking crazy.
Oh God, I mean, I guess it's like on some level, it's got to be a little bit similar to like, you know, an alchemy thing where it's like, you know, sometimes it the problem is just a little bloodletting is needed or like, yeah, she's building up and like that will work occasionally.
Yeah, and it's kind of like people who, for whatever reason, because of a depressive disorder, cut themselves. They tend to feel relief for one reason or another, and it's like because it releases endorphins and stuff. So you do that in the context of a powerful religious experience, and it can feel really good to people.
Yeah, so anyway, yeah, the Brazilian to first pioneer this technique was Jose Pedro de Ferritas or Ze Arigo. According to his autobiography, an obviously problematic source, he started working at a mine until he 14.
In 1950, at age 29, he started working at a mine at age 14. In 1950, when he was 29, he began to suffer a series of blinding headaches followed by hallucinatory trances. This all culminated in his body being taken over by the spirit of a bald German man in a white apron with a massive team of spectral doctors and nurses at his beck and call. So he was getting like a whole German surgery team in his head.
Jesus Christ. Now, this magical dead German was Dr. Adolf Fritz, a field medic in the German army who died in the trenches in 1918, which is cool. It's bizarre that like this Brazilian mine worker would choose like it's got to be a German field medic. That's what he picks.
Um, and I guess we all considered Germans trustworthy. I can't think of anything in history that would make me not trust German doctors. Um, so yeah, that scans. So, uh, together Dr. Fritz and Zairego had a wildly successful 20 year career performing surgery to adoring audiences of as many as 800 followers at one time. Zairego would go into trances and become so taken with the spirit of Dr. Fritz that he would grab random kitchen knives and use them to cut out tumors and the like from his patients.
He became known as the surgeon of the rusty knife, and this was not like nobody was like talking shit at him by calling him this. That's it.
That's like that's some shit. That's like a prison nickname the surgeon. Yeah, that is like a prison nickname Yeah, like if you're if you get like locked up and they're like, oh man, that's the knife That's the rusty knife surgeon like that's the dude you don't want to fuck with that's like the butcher bill motherfucker, right? Yeah, yeah. Yeah, that's incredible. Yeah, that's that was a compliment
Yes, that was a compliment. Yeah, because that's part of the evidence to these people that he's so clearly holy and sacred is that it doesn't even matter that he's using a rusty knife. And again, you'll see this throughout the whole episode and all these guys we talk about. Part of the thing everybody focuses on is that none of his patients feel any pain, none of them get infections, even though he's just cutting them with a dirty knife. That's how holy this is. Yeah. So that's cool.
You know what? That's just cool. You know, blood of Jesus, that works. It's fine. Antiseptic largely. Yeah, the blood of Jesus is profoundly antiseptic. Yeah, so he prescribed various medications, generally a mix of herbal remedies and complete nonsense. His patients could redeem their prescriptions at a local pharmacy run by his brother.
The height of Zairigo's career came when he removed a tumor from a popular senator. He was arrested in 1956 and convicted of practicing medicine without a license, but he was pardoned by the president of Brazil. In 1962, he was arrested and jailed again for the same thing, but the police allowed him to continue healing from his cell. He died wealthy and beloved in 1971 due to an auto accident that his spirits failed to warn him about.
This guy would be like an amazing character in like a Batman video game I feel like. He feels like real final boss energy.
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. But he's, we're just getting started with Zeyarigo. So Zeyarigo dies. And in 1990, this guy, Ruben Sferia, who's a 44 year old engineer and software salesman, kind of looks back in history, 19 years, and is like, this guy made a fuckload of money. What if I start claiming to channel the spirit of the same dead German guy?
Next up, Ruben's fairy has like Dr. Fritz is in my head and he starts like pretty soon he's attracting crowds of a thousand people every day to this giant hanger style building he buys in Rio de Janeiro. His patients were renowned to feel no pain even when he cut into them and they reportedly never got infections from all of his eyeball scraping and body gouging. Christopher Reed's is reported to have visited Mr. fairy for healing. It didn't work.
Boom. Too soon, but boom. Yeah. I mean, I just, I'm not making a joke. It just, it clearly didn't do the trick. Yeah. Seriously. Yeah. I mean, that's a bummer. He seemed like a nice guy, but yeah, this was not the, not the treatment. So, uh, in 1995, Mr. Faria married Rita Costa at age 34.
he dumped her a few years later for a 19 year old friend of his daughters. Mrs. Costa reported her former husband to the police for non-payment of taxes. The police confronted him during a surgery in Rio and arrested his bodyguard for possession of an illegal weapon. That bodyguard then testified that he'd been secretly helping his boss dispose of the corpses of a number of patients who died as a result of Mr. Ferry is hacking on their bodies. So it turned out like a bunch of people were dying and getting infected. And his bodyguard was just throwing him in a hole.
I guess I was going to say, like, what does it take to have the confidence to just cut people with the fucking rusty knife? And I guess it is, you just have to, you have to break a few eggs to make it a gauntlet. You know, I've always said there's no, nothing builds confidence, like having a large, heavily armed man willing to dispose of corpses for you. That really, that's all any of us really needs. Mm hmm.
I guess that's you for most people that I know. I mean, yeah, I'll do a little bit of corpse disposal. You know, it's like a, yeah. So a raid on Ruben's ferry is compound revealed more than a thousand boxes of conventional prescription medications suggesting that this spiritual healer was actually practicing traditional medicine, just without a license.
He was arrested in jail, but while his district police chief agreed that Ferrias needed to be locked up, he still professed a strong belief in the myth of Dr. Fritz, telling the Guardian, in my opinion, I think that Dr. Fritz does exist, but that Rubens Ferrias is doing things that he shouldn't. So, I think he's really channeling this German guy, but that doesn't mean he's not permitted crimes, too.
Oh, my God. Really? Thread the needle. Thanks, Don. Yeah. My favorite is... That reminds me a little bit of... I've known various people that have gotten out of Scientology. Yeah. And the worst of them sometimes say shit that is basically akin to like, well, I don't agree with all the homophobia and all the cult stuff, but obviously Zeno is real and, you know, controls our lives through us here, you know.
Shit like that, where I'm like, it's just about the practice of it, not the underlying logic of it. It's amazing. Hey, I worship Elrond Hubbard, not for his spiritual teachings or any of the things he wrote about space aliens, but for his ability to get boats full of young people to search for gold that his past life buried. That's what I celebrate about LRH. Yeah.
So, yeah, this all is the background, I think, that's necessary to understand John of God. So, on November 17, 2010, Oprah Magazine writer Susan Casey published an article about her visit to Brazil, where she'd met with the country's new hottest psychic surgeon. Oh boy, Joao Tixeira Depharia, better known as John of God.
This sparked a visit by Oprah herself in an avalanche of uncritical positive stories about how cool this new John of God guy was, for the first time a Brazilian psychic surgeon attracted mass interest outside of Brazil. But foreigners had been trickling into the country for years before that, and one of them, an American named Heather Cumming, wrote a book about John of God, the man who became her guru.
It is a thoroughly uncritical work of puffery from a woman who clearly worships her subject. But it's also our best source on the early life of John of God. So I'm going to start by reading from that. And I'm going to give the caveat that this information, this is all information that a mass rapist cult leader wanted to convey about his early life. So, you know, noted a little bit of salt here and here and there.
So, uh, Joao Tixera Defaria was born on June 24th, 1942, in the poor village of, oh boy, Kachowira Difumacha in the state of Goyas in central Brazil. His mother, Donaluka, was a popular member of the community and a dedicated housewife. Uh, John of God would later speak highly of his mother. And I have no reason to suspect she wasn't a nice person other than perhaps the fact that her boy grew up to a mass raping cult leader. The biography of John of God continues quote,
In the 1940s and 50s, there were no paved roads or infrastructure in this part of Brazil. The roads connecting the towns were dirt studded with cattle grids and wound their way through farms and villages. When construction of paved roads began in the late 1950s, Joao's mother ran a small hotel and cooked for the road workers to augment the family's meager income. Joao often says that his mother became famous for her delicious cooking.
His father was less successful. He was a tailor and owned a laundry business, but money was not great, and young Joao and his four brothers and one sister lived in constant economic anxiety. Young John had to work from an early age, starting as a cloth cutter in his father's shop at age six. He only attended two years of primary school before economic necessity forced him to end his formal education and take up a series of increasingly brutal jobs. Now,
That's what his biography says. That's not the only version of that we have. A 2005 ABC News profile on him notes that based on interviews with people from his hometown, quote, he is said to have been so rebellious that he was thrown out of school after the second grade and could not keep a job. So that's a different version of his background. Sure, sure. Yeah. But probably either way. Yeah. Shit was
Yeah, he had to do some shit. He got up to some shit and did some shit. Yeah. And he age of seven. Yeah. And he had basically no school and he never learns to read or write. That's, that's, that's the important thing here. Yeah. Never, uh, not a, not a reader this guy. So, um, his biographers though claim that he worked many jobs as a well digger, as a bricklayer. And you know, generally they say that he spent his late childhood and early adolescence in hard manual labor.
He never learned to read or write, but he did learn how to play pool, and this provided him with something of an escape from the dreary existence poverty had forced upon him. John's biographer claims that he was a brilliant natural clairvoyant who earned pocket money by actively prophesizing events at the pool hall.
Yeah. This is very funny because she notes that, quote, after being given money, he would return to the pool hall. He is an excellent pool player to this day. And I can't prove what I'm going to say next in any way, but my suspicion is that there is a germ of truth to this, but that he's not clear. Voya John just discovered he had a knack for pool hustling and various forms of cheating that required quick hands and charm. This is a guy who would go up to spend his life doing sleight of hand stuff to giant crowds.
The fact that he's a pool hustler as a kid makes total sense. So I think that's what's actually going on here is he's like, yeah, he learns how to hustle at a pool hall. Well, it's also like you can, the range of predictable items of things that could happen in a pool hall is like, yeah, finite and like less than 30, I would say. I feel like you could just shoot a lot of shots of the dark and that shit's gonna come true eventually pretty quickly.
Yeah, yeah. So, yeah, he spends a lot of time as a kid in a pool hall. He learns sleight of hand. He learns how to, uh, how to grift. Um, and yeah, the, the, the, yeah.
So, so far, the biographical information that we've got from his biography by his follower, Heather Cummings, has been broadly reasonable. This changes with this next paragraph. Quote, he also remembers walking into the fields with the villagers and pointing to roots and plants that would heal their ailments. The first recorded occasion of Joao's paranormal abilities took place when he was nine years old while he was visiting family in the town of Novaponte with his mother.
It was a beautiful, cloudless day, but Joel had a premonition that a huge storm was coming. He began pointing out houses, including the houses of his brother and saying that they would be blown down or lose their roofs. He urged his mother to leave before the storm, although she was not convinced she humored her son and they sought refuge in a friend's home nearby. Exactly as he had predicted the thunderstorm appeared, seemingly out of nowhere and badly damaged or destroyed about 40 houses in a small town. And depending on where you find this story, he always claims a different number of houses were destroyed. So I don't know. Yeah.
So he predicts a storm. This is his first case of clairvoyance. But despite being clairvoyance and able to read storms in the sky, he found himself still forced to labor in order to get by. At age 16, he moved to a city, Campo Grande, to try and make a living. He was only successful in fits and starts. And before long, he found himself unemployed and living under a bridge at the edge of town.
One day he headed to the water to bathe, and John claims as he approached the water, a beautiful woman called to him and invited him closer. They talked for hours. The next day he returned to the water to speak with her again, but he found a brilliant shaft of light in her place. He heard her calling his name, and so he approached. She told him to visit the Spiritist Center in Campo Grande, which he did. So that's his version of events. The spirit meets him, and they talk for hours, and then she sends him to the Spiritist Center in town.
So like, yeah, he arrives in the director of the center, like knows his name already and says they've been waiting for him. And then John immediately like collapses. He like passes out and when he returns to consciousness, there's this huge group of people standing around him and they tell him that he has incorporated, which is the term they use for when you're taken over by a spirit, the entity King Solomon. And he cured 50 people while possessed by King Solomon.
Which I remember King Solomon is the guy who cuts up babies, but yeah, I don't know and as far as like the luck of the draw goes Hey, that's a good get good get yeah name. Oh, yeah, I'm a woman KS. That's a big one. Yeah Hey, could have happened to anyone could have been amazing Could have happened to anyone. I mean I I would love to I don't know not King Solomon which King would I want to
Oh, Henry the 8th. Henry the 8th. That's a good. That's a bad. I mean, that's a bad king, but that's a fun king to incorporate. Yeah, should be. Or King Leopold. I could write a tricycle. Take some hands. That's true. Yeah. I guess. I guess.
The old dude, the old old dude from the Bible, he probably got up to some shit. Nebuchadnezzar, whatever. Oh, Nebuchadnezzar. You mean like the Babylonian Emperor? Yeah, that's a good one. Right? Those guys, those guys. Yeah, up to some shit. Yeah. Oh man, and it's so much more impressive to take on Nebuchadnezzar. That guy's got a way better name than Solomon.
A little lame, yeah. So, yeah, obviously this is all lies. The only truth here is probably that John's age 16 is about when John started fooling around with Spiritism. Unfortunately, I'm unaware of any serious journalism that exists to actually document what went down with John's early years in the religion.
But he claims that the director of the center had to take him aside and explain to him that he'd been chosen by an entity of light known as King Solomon. This director told him to leave and come back at 2 p.m. the next day to keep healing people. Since John was homeless, this guy invited him to stay the night at his house. John claims that this man's humble home and food were unthinkable luxuries for him given the poverty he'd lived with his entire life. He was given his own room with an electric fan.
So that's a big deal. Nice electric fan. It is like so weird to think about like the band of grifters welcoming in a new, I mean, this is in the retelling welcoming in a grifter like what the fuck was actually happening?
Yeah, and it's one of those things. Yeah, it's convenient that, you know, out in the, at this period of time out in the middle of nowhere, Brazil, you know, life spans aren't enormous. So you're, you're really, if you make it old enough, you could just lie about what happened to you when you were a kid because. Right. Yeah. Right, right, right. That makes sense. Yeah. Yeah. The earlier most people die, the easier it is to be a grifter.
Yes. Yes. When everyone I went to high school with is dead, I'm going to have some stories I start telling. I'll tell you that. Yeah. Yeah. No problem. Oh, I was healing the shit out of people in 11th grade. Makes sense. You want to take an ad buddy? Yep. You know who else was healing a lot of people when I was in the 11th grade?
Okay, so now let's talk about products. Nope, we did that. Now we're back. Okay, so, uh, Jenna God, he meets this, the spiritist church and they tell him that King Solomon's taken over his brain. Um, and he's like, that's, that's good and normal.
Yeah, so he winds up staying the night with the leader of the center and he tries to explain to him that he's not a practicing medium and he doesn't know anything about medicine and he doesn't understand how he was healing all these people. He was actually terrified because he didn't know how to, he was expected to come back the next day and he didn't know how to do what was expected of him.
Um, but as soon as he gathered at the spirit essential the next day, uh, King Solomon took him over again and he kept healing more sick people. John claims this went on for months while the more experienced spiritist practitioners educated him on the nature of the entities that increasingly took over his body. He became known as medium john and his new teachers.
It is kind of funny. Medium John. It's like the sequel to Big John that's not as good or rhythmic. Medium John. Just medium John. Every morning at the mine, you could see him arrive. He stood five foot eight and weighed 135. Kind of medium at the shoulders and medium at the hips. And everyone knew it was okay to give some lip to medium John.
It is like so juvenile to find confusing medium with medium, but that's so funny to me. It's very funny. His new teachers told him he needed to devote his whole life to healing other people. His biographers claim started a five or six year period of traveling throughout Brazil, healing the sick and the suffering.
He became known as Joel Curador or John the healer through his biographers and in interviews. John always makes sure that people know that he is a healer, but he also with the same time always firmly rejects being called a healer. So he makes sure that people knows that like everyone started calling me John the healer, but I'm not a healer. The entities that channel through my body are the ones doing the healing. I'm just a conduit. So it's very important to him that you believe both things.
Yeah, so this has a nice side benefit of allowing him to argue that he isn't practicing medicine without a license, which is handy when you're practicing medicine without a license. I don't know if you've ever practiced medicine without a license, but you got to be careful with it. So he's shifting the blame to literal King Solomon, essentially. Yeah, exactly. If somebody dies while he's performing psychic surgery, it's the dead king's fault.
That's a, that's a hell of a loophole. That's genius. I mean, I am going to start blaming all of my many crimes on King Solomon. I'm not, I'm not going to, I'm not even going to lie to you about that. Like I mean, that seems like a very good idea. Well, especially the baby chopping thing because that's he's got the baby chopping. He's got previous ammo on that.
Yeah, I mean, yes, officer, I was going 135 miles an hour in a 55. But if I didn't, this fucking king ghost in my head was going to chop up some babies. Like, do you want me to go a little faster? You want some chopped up babies? That's all I got to ask it. Yeah. Yeah. It's up to you up to you cop. Seems reasonable to me.
You want me to heal you? Let me pull out some chicken gizzards and pretend to rip them from your chest. So his biographers next note that while he did his extraordinary work of healing, Medium John was persecuted by members of the medical and religious establishments. He claims that they were threatened by his presence and that he lost count of the number of times he was arrested for practicing medicine without a license. John traveled constantly, never more than a few steps ahead of the law.
He finally got a break in 1962, and Brazil was thrown into turmoil via violent coup. His biography says the country suffered a revolution, and a military government came into power. The reality is that Brazil's democratically elected socialist president, Joao Gulaire, was overthrown by a military coup backed by the US government. A conservative military dictatorship would rule Brazil for the next 20ish years. John's biography glosses all over all of that.
because the advent of a military dictatorship worked out really well for him. Medium John traveled to the capital, Brasilia, and offered his services as a tailor to the military. Quote from his biography.
Because he was so young, he was not commissioned to create uniforms, but was given an opportunity to sew a consignment of work pants. His expertise stem pressed his new employers, and he was soon promoted to a full-time tailor and assigned to make uniforms for the army. Medium Joao continued his healing work quietly on the side, but word of his gift soon spread throughout the barracks. One day, he incorporated an entity who operated on the wounded leg of a doctor, which healed immediately. The doctor was enthralled with Medium Joao's gift, and from that day on, he became the spiritual healer for the military and civil authorities.
He was promoted to Master Taylor and became their protege for nearly nine years. Consequently, he was protected from persecution during that time and traveled extensively throughout Brazil with the army. There's a lot that's interesting there. The most fascinating thing to me is that so the army comes to believe that this is a magical healer and as a result, they promote him to Master Taylor, which is an interesting choice.
I mean, it's just like, keep them in the ranks, I guess. Yeah, keep in the ranks. Keep a paycheck going to the guy while you're dictatorship, Brazil. Look, I'm not gonna backseat dictatorship. You know what? There's a lot of bureaucracy. You can't just insert, like, which doctor, surgeon general.
Yeah, that's like a year eight of the dictatorship thing at best. You get a, oh my God, I want to be witch doctor surgeon general so bad. That sounds even better than Reverend Doctor, to be honest. You just have to, yeah, you have to work within the available structures until such time as you don't. Yeah. Yeah, I got really fucked up fighting those partisans the other night. I got to bullet my arm. I got to go to the master tailor to deal with this.
John claims that the experience of working as a protégé healer slash tailor with the dictatorship, instilled in him a deep desire to become a successful businessman. His fawning biographers explained that he, quote, needed money-making expertise to support his spiritual purpose.
This is so he doesn't sound greedy. Wonderfully they claim John just happened to have a great head for business and his financial success has allowed him to fund his healing mission all without charging patients a dime. This is absolutely a lie, but incredulous white Americans bought it for years. So basically he claims that he became a great businessman and that's how he's able to fund his his free healing hospital. The reality is like literally the opposite. He makes a bunch of money healing people and he used it to buy like ranches full of cattle and stuff. But whatever.
Yeah. Now, from this point on, the story of Medium John has a decent amount of documentation, so we're going to depart from his terrible, terrible biography. But before we do, I want to turn to his biographers for an explanation of exactly who these entities that take over John are. They describe the entities as transcendent spirits who are, quote, able to use Medium Joao's body to produce cures by performing visible and invisible spiritual surgeries.
Quote, medium Joel can incorporate approximately 37 entities, but only one entity can be incorporated at a time. The specific entity may change, however, depending on the needs of an individual patient. In addition to the entity incorporated at any given time, there is a highly evolved group of thousands of spirits who actually work on a person while the incorporated entity oversees healing. This group is referred to as his philange.
One spirit might specialize in diabetes or heart problems, another in emotional afflictions. These entities serve humanity in the hopes of alleviating pain and suffering on the earthly plane. This service is part of their evolutionary process. So he's a whole hospital a ghost. Jesus Christ. Having like support staff in this like fake
like spiritual slavery. It's like, I mean, I guess it makes it sound more plausible on some level. Like, oh, how could you possibly do this? No, we need, you know, the help of thousands to cure your fucking whatever. Oh. Yeah, no, I got nurses. Yeah. Is it ever like, oh, I'm sorry. No, the guy who could help you, he's out on vacation. We just have like the dude who helps me cut people's eyes. Do you need an eye cut? Yeah.
Oh, that's the other side of it is if you were like, if I were designing my own version of some cockamamie bullshit, I feel like it would be, it would involve as little true body horror as possible. Like, no, no, people love that shit. Yeah, I guess that's true. People love getting fucking cut into and blood and shit. Like, if you really wanna, if you wanna like, if you wanna get some cult shit going on, you gotta get gross with it, man. Yeah, it's part of it. It's part of it, but, oh, so in love. Physicality.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, that's why, you know, not everyone's made to be a co-leader Andrew
I don't think I got what it takes anymore. I believe you could be a cult leader, but it takes some sacrifice. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. I don't have the willingness to put in the reps to really get good. Yeah, yeah. There's a lot in common. Being a cult leader has a lot in common with having great abs, right? They both take you either have to be born with the right jeans or you have to put in a lot of time on the bench. Yeah. And it's not happening for me.
Yeah. Well, that's, yeah. We'll make choices. Yeah. There's not happening yet. I'll see. We'll see what life takes me. It would be cool to be able to incorporate the spirit that could just give you incredible abs. Like one of them has to know how to do abs, but okay.
So John claims that after a few years of making money and getting in good with the brutal dictatorship, his entities told him it was crucial he expand his work and heal more people. He wound up being guided to the town of Abadianya in Goyas. He first arrived there in 1978 and began his practice by sitting in a chair outside in the middle of the main road in greeting travelers who showed signs of illnesses. Through him, the entities would heal these people, and over time the numbers increased from dozens to hundreds to thousands per day.
John's incredible healings eventually earned him the loyalty of a mysterious benefactor, who purchased him a plot of land and paid to build a healing center, Casa de Dom Ignacio de Loyola. This spiritual hospital, as his followers would come to describe it, eventually received more than 10,000 visitors per month. Since Abiriania has only about 19,000 residents, the huge streams of sick and dying people represented a big infusion into the local economy. So like half the population of the city is coming in every week just to see this guy.
Oh, yeah. That's, I mean, I guess you need like desperation, tourism sometimes, but Jesus Christ, that's.
That is actually Jesus Christ business model also. So you know what? Maybe it's just a good one. Yeah. If Jesus Christ had benefited from like roadside billboards, I don't think they ever would have gotten to kill him. He would have made too much money, but. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Render and a Caesar about 38% and you're fine. Yeah. Yeah. Honestly. Yeah. So.
This was often glossed over by the positive coverage of John of God, but the extent to which he became an industry for the people who lived around him can't be exaggerated. I'm going to quote now from an O magazine profile by Susan Casey, just a terrible article from 2010 that none of the less revealed some important details about the economic impact of this guru on the small town of Abadianya.
Quote, several businesses had displays of white clothing, the casa request that only white be worn. This makes it easier, apparently, for a person's aura to be seen. There were a number of visibly painted small hotels lined up side by side, lilac purple, canary yellow, lime green. One of them, a coral colored one story building, opened up to the street, and inside I could see a John of God video playing on a large screen. An audience of about 20 people sat in straight back chairs and watched him cut into a man's chest with what looked like a rusty paring knife.
The man's eyes were closed and he was peaceful and still his rivulets of blood ran down his white shirt. Yeah, that's awesome. That sounds like the kind of charming small Brazilian town I want a vacation in. Just have a couple of fucking mojitos and watch some guy commit surgery on people. Hell yeah. This is like some mid-summer shit. This is like insanity. Imagine like you're just backpacking through Brazil and wind up here on accident and it's like, oh no.
Yeah, I have I have heard I did not want to be here. Yeah. Yeah. Holy shit. So John established a cattle ranch nearby and by the early 2000s, he was known to spend most of his week there running his various businesses. He was able to do this because increasingly throughout the 90s and early 2000s, a string of foreigners, generally American women moved in and dedicated themselves to helping his mission. This includes the Americans who wrote his biography.
John of God's practice involved a series of mass meetings where sick folks would basically fill up rooms and wait to be seen by the medium. He'd consult with his entities and then diagnose their problem. I'm going to quote now from a write-up in the Montreal Gazette. Once the diagnosis has been made, the healing procedure begins. It may be visible or invisible spiritual surgery. If the patient chooses invisible, they are directed to a room to meditate while the spirits do their work.
visible surgery can involve sticking a surgical clamp up the patient's nose. It looks very impressive, but it is nothing but an old carny trick, usually performed with a long nail and a hammer. Any anatomical text will reveal that there is a roughly four inch long passage up the nasal cavity that is quite ready to accommodate a foreign object without any harm. John maintains that, yeah, that's a good trick. Yeah, he's doing the nails up the nose thing, but he's calling it brain surgery.
Yeah, classic. John maintains that the success of his treatment hinges on the patient abstaining from drinking alcohol, eating pork, and having sex for 40 days after the treatment. This can provide for a convenient out in case no miracle occurs. Patients can be healed even if they are unable to travel to Brazil, all that is needed is a surrogate willing to undergo the spiritual surgery.
So that's awesome. That's a good grift. Oh, God. Yeah. Oh, well, I mean, I guess it's like if you're going to be a man grifter, at least bring up your little grifty town around you. Yeah. Yeah, I guess. Yeah. I mean, that's obviously the safest thing, right? Because then they'll have a vested financial interest in protecting you. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I guess that is what a cult is.
Yeah, that's basically, I mean, yeah, more. I mean, this is a little more complicated than just a cult, because there's a cult, but then there's also the town who, like, probably a lot of the townsfolk knew that this was bullshit, but they also know there's a fuckload of money in this shit. Yeah, yeah.
Yeah, yeah. Make everyone invested in you and, yeah, one way or the other. Yeah, it's got leverage. It's essentially the same way that like the pot industry works in large amounts of the United States or yeah, like any drug illegal business works where it's like, well, this is where the money is here. So nobody's nobody's going to start shit.
Don't snitch. This is the fucking godfather. Don't snitch. This is good for all of us. That's kind of what's going on here, except for, instead of good, honest marijuana, it's a guy cutting people's faces and shoving things up their noses. And he actually hates marijuana. He was famous for saying that if you smoked pot, you had to detox for a whole year before he could heal you. The entities don't like weed. Yeah.
can't be true, but fair enough entities. Yeah, if there are ghostly entities flying around, there's no way those ghostly entities don't like some fucking dank. Like, come on. They love weed. So that last write up I read you from the Montreal Gazette was obviously written by a credible journalist who was very critical of John F. God.
But I want to read another example, another person writing about what his healing sessions look like who actually like believed in him and was a member of his cult. So here's his biographer, Heather Cummings, recalling one of his healing sessions, quote.
The entity, Dr. Jose Voldavino, called for his, and that's the guy he's channeling, is this Dr. Jose Voldavino, called for his instruments again. I opened the special drawer and carefully removed the tray and took the instrument tray to him. He chose a paring knife, a regular kitchen serrated edge knife. He passed his hand over the man's eye and told him to relax. He opened the eye wide and pressed down hard and scraped.
See, here it is, he said. As he wiped the knife on the man's shirt, I could see a minute dark sliver. I know beyond a doubt after seeing so many of these operations that the sliver was not a topical foreign object being removed, but rather something from deep inside that only the entities can see. The entity looks into the eye as a representation of the whole body system, not limited to the physical eye. I understand this is a symbolic removal on the physical level, but originating from many levels and involving many different organs.
The sun is healed. You can take him to the infirmary, he said, as he wrote the post op prescription. So that's cool. That's an awesome gig, man. That is, I mean, I don't, like, I don't wear contacts because I can't touch my eye, I think.
Oh, I'll heal you, man. Yeah. Come over to my house. I'll whip out a big old rusty machete and I'll carve the ghosts out of your eye, man. It's fine. This is where I'm taking machete some next. Damn. God, that's a, that's an easy grist. Just start slashing people's fucking faces. It's fine.
Holy shit. Can you imagine the first time you try this shit? This will work. There's a lot of blind people who were like before he learned how to scrape people's eyes without blinding them. There's a whole village full of his first draft healings. Jesus Christ.
I guess some of those people are dead, huh? Yeah, I mean, you know, the good thing is, if you're actually like, if you're doing this kind of grift, I think you definitely want to start out only trying to heal people with serious terminal illnesses like cancer, because then once you fuck up, they're not around very long, right? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, that's really key. Yeah, a lot of good advice on how to start a medical grift in this episode. So take notes when society collapses. Some of you are going to do very well remembering this stuff.
Bye!
So yeah, like as that story noted, John of God would write prescriptions to his patients, and all of these prescriptions were for a specific herbal pill mixture sold in John of God's own pharmacy. The pills were mostly passion flour, and by some accounts, they've netted John more than $10 million a year. He also gets a cut of the sales of the white clothes, the hotel fees, the sales of blessed water, and the sales of healing crystals, which he prescribes to his followers. So you can see why no one in Abadehanya had any interest in questioning whether or not John of God was legit.
He did face occasional challenges for members of the Brazilian government, particularly folks in the medical establishment who were leery of his psychic surgery. But this sort of woo is extremely popular in Brazil, particularly among rural voters, and John of God was both rich and connected, so it is not surprising that very little was ever done.
What's more surprising is the degree to which foreign journalists bought into his schtick. In 2005, ABC News sent a small team to Abadi Anya to meet John of God. They put together a documentary, basically posing the question of whether or not he was a healer or a bullshit artist. And they kind of landed on healer. Like ABC News did a pretty shitty job with journalism here. And I'm going to quote from this right up in the Montreal Gazette, quote,
In an attempt to provide a critical review of John's antics, the producers invited two experts, cardiac surgeon, Mehmed Oz, and James Randy, the world's leading investigator of paranormal phenomena. Oz was probably chosen because he was a proponent of various alternative therapies, such as therapeutic touch and reflexology, and would be likely to be somewhat sympathetic to faith healing and perhaps at an era of legitimacy. Randy was invited as the token skeptic.
Oz appeared repeatedly in the hour long show, basically echoing the refrain that science doesn't have all the answers and not all other forms of healing need consideration. Science, of course, doesn't claim to have all the answers, but it does look for evidence before jumping on a bandwagon. Randy, who could have provided evidence for methods of trickery and for psychological manipulation, was given a total of 19 seconds on the show after being interviewed for hours. Why?
Because the possibility that cancer can be healed by penetrating the nose with surgical forceps by a healer chosen by God makes for better television than declaring him to be a self delusional simpleton or calculating fraud artist. So, I mean, this has to also be like something like the underlying like,
you know, faith in Christianity, like, you know, it's like, oh, you got to, you know, can't question religion, can't question religion takes you all the way to, well, this could be real. This clearly fake shit could be real. It's got to be real. What else can it be?
It's wild, man. And Dr. Oz is a big part of justifying this guy. You can't overstate how much Dr. Oz played a role in giving this guy legitimacy, because his job for his whole career pretty much has been to be a real doctor who will get up and say that nonsense makes sense, that nonsense medical treatments are good for you.
I think it's critical to point out that physicians are not fucking scientists. You can be a doctor. Ben Carson doesn't believe in evolution. Doctors are just high stakes technicians.
Yeah. And their engineers are regularly engineers and doctors actually are not irregularly like part of like terrorism. It's like Al-Qaeda had a bunch of engineers and doctors. Yeah. Because like, you know, if you've got that kind of intelligent, like Ben Carson is a great brain surgeon and is also able to convince himself that the world is 6,000 years old. Like the kind of brains that these people have don't, you know, there's a lot of very smart doctors obviously too, but you can be a doctor and very dumb.
Yeah, yeah, yeah. And you can be a doc, but I don't think Dr. Oz is dumb. I actually don't think that's, I think Dr. Oz is a very intelligent grifter who's made millions of dollars causing untold harm to the world and to our shared understanding of science. God, I hope that Dr. Oz ad comes on during this episode. He's a piece of shit and a monster. But I think it's- But I hope that- But I hope that- But I hope that- But I hope that- But I hope that- But I hope that- But I hope that- But I hope that- But I hope that- But I hope that- But I hope that- But I hope that- But I hope that- But I hope that- But I hope that- But I hope that- But I hope that- But I hope that- But I hope that- But I hope that- But I hope that- But I hope that- But I hope that- But I hope that- But I hope that- But I hope that-
None of those things are indicative of actual knowledge, necessarily. No, and this is part of why people talk about conservatives in particular, like, talk a lot of shit about the liberal arts and philosophy and all this stuff, and it's like, no, no, no. The reason why engineers and doctors should have some grounding in all that education is to stop Dr. Oz's from coming about.
It's to give people a broader understanding than just, if you get really good at one incredibly narrow technical thing, you can convince yourself to believe all sorts of stupid bullshit because you're a very smart person who doesn't have a wide-ranging education, and it's very easy for those sorts of people to convince themselves of the dumbest things in the world.
Yeah. And who have like, who are highly rewarded for it. So like, yeah, you watch like any Silicon Valley person make a pronunciation on anything outside of business. And it's like, oh, you are, you are less educated than the average person. You are bad at reasoning.
Yeah. And when a bunch of these people who are really good at one incredibly narrow task wind up responsible for a wide range of things, you have stuff like a viral epidemic get wildly out of hand and kill tens of thousands of people. But yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Hypothetically.
Hypothetically. Yeah. And Dr. Oz's, of course, a part of that was like urging people to take bullshit medical treatments during the coronavirus epidemic, because he's history's greatest monster. You know, he was also cited repeatedly in that 2010 O magazine article, because of course, Oprah gave Mehmet Oz life and nursed him at her metaphorical breast of publicity. And I'm going to quote from that next. So this is the write up in O magazine that really put John of God on the map. Quote,
Five years ago, Oz had participated in a primetime live segment focusing on John of God. He examined hours of film footage from the entities' healings. He looked at scans and biopsy reports, and the results he couldn't explain. The shrinkage of an aggressive tumor, for instance. This guy has a glioblastoma, which is a very deadly brain tumor, Oz recalled. It was grade four. They biopsied it and proved it. As an added credential, the biopsy was done at Dartmouth-Hitchcock Medical Center, a prominent hospital.
I took those films down to my radiologist, along with a new set of films the patient had taken after his visit to John of God, which showed the tumor had calcified and essentially died. Now, I don't know Dr. Oz's radiologist, but I do know that Dr. Oz himself was a famous charlatan and a liar. I can't speak to this specific case, but it's worth noting that no other doctors got to look at this information. I can, however, speak about other cancers that John of God claimed falsely to have cured.
In 2005, South African singer Leah Melman refused breast cancer surgery to be treated by John of God. She claimed to have been cured by him and showed up on Oprah Winfrey's show to tell everyone the good news about how Brazil's miracle healer had cured her untreatable cancer, which actually was treatable that she just chose not to get treated. She died of her untreated cancer two years after her Oprah appearance in 2012.
Oprah did not post a retraction based on any of this, of course. Some of this is probably due to the fact that there were many, many other grateful patients all too eager to come forward and share their own stories of miraculous healing. That 2010 article by Susan Casey included the stories of several charismatic foreigners who claimed to have been cured by John and now worked for him or made money taking groups to be healed by him. I'm going to read one example. This is a quote from that O magazine article, which
You can only find it on the way back machine because once this guy got accused of rape by literally hundreds of people, I'll propose the article. But I found it on the way back machine. And if you want to be really angry at an unspeakably shitty journalist, and Susan Casey is one of the very worst who's ever done the job, read that article because it will make you want to punch holes in your wall. So I'm going to read a quote from it now. So get your whole punch and hands ready.
Over a good Chilean red, Edwine, an ordained minister, motivational speaker and author of the Four Spiritual Laws of Prosperity recounted the story of her brain aneurysm, deemed inoperable by five neurosurgeons. Get your affairs in order, she remembers being told, and try not to sneeze. That's how fragile I was, she said. So I did it. I went out and got my living will, my durable power of attorney. But then I realized, I'm not ready to go just yet. She laughed at the memory. That's all it is now. After her dire diagnosis,
At the urging of her prayer group, all of whom say they received the same vision of John of God curing her, Edwene traveled to the Casa. I was nervous and I was skeptical, she said, but what did I have to lose? Almost immediately, the entity performed invisible surgery on her, a 40-minute process that involved sitting in a group meditation with her right hand over her heart. Nobody touched her, but Edwene remembers I could feel things moving around in my head. It didn't hurt, but it was different.
Afterward, she collapsed in exhaustion for 24 hours. Days later, she was told by her guide the stitches would be removed. That night, I could feel ping, ping, ping, like stitches being pulled out. Eventually, a CT scan revealed the truth. Her aneurysm was gone. I'm so grateful, she said, nodding toward the heavens. Since then, she's been back to the Casa once at Christmas, and now she was headed there for a third time, bringing a group of 20 people who also sought healing.
So this is the level of journalistic rigor that we're getting in this article. The magazine, everybody. The mention of the wine is particularly choice. Oh, it's got to be, yeah. Revolting. Yeah, Oprah magazine was definitely like, yeah, it was, it was, it was entirely geared at getting wine moms to believe spiritual nonsense and not get their cancer treated. Jesus Christ. I mean, Robert, you want to take an ad break real quick?
Yeah, you know what else doesn't care if wine moms get cancer treatment. The products and services that support this podcast, they don't give a good goddamn. Great. And that's the behind the bastards guarantee. We're back. Oh my gosh. What a great
I don't know. Whatever this is. What a great horrible story. John have got as a monster and a rapist, and we will only hear more about the horrible things that he's done. But I can't have the same kind of hatred for him that I can for these fucking O magazine grifters and doctor Oz. And I don't know why. I think it's because on like a global level, the amount of harm that these people do is so much higher. And it's also so much like
This is gonna sound weird, but the horrible physical crimes that John of God committed, he just went out there and committed with his own body. And there's a level of commitment to evil that's necessary, whereas Dr. Oz and Oprah, just sit in front of a camera and say bullshit that harms so many more people, well, at the same time, they're perfectly friendly and nice people, and so nobody hates them and they never go to prison.
Like I'm gonna say they're worse than a rapist, but yeah in a way they do more damage on a on a broad scale right like oh Yeah, it's not good. Well, it's like it's like sort of like it's like um
It's like whatever the PR version of money laundering is. They clean it. They're the cleaners. Yeah, exactly. That's exactly right. They're like money launderers for dangerous bullshit that gets people killed and molested and stuff.
And they are responsible, in this case, for sending thousands of potential victims to this guy who, again, turns out to rape hundreds of people. And they're being sent there by Oprah. But all she gets is traffic for it and more money, and everybody loves Oprah. And if she ran for president, she would absolutely win.
And it's fine, and it's just fine. Cause she's a friendly, nice person. I'm sure if I got to hang out with Oprah, I would enjoy her company. And I would forget momentarily the horrors that her brand has brought into the world. And that's very frustrating to think about. Although to be fair, actually, if she were to graduate to the level of American president, she would once again be in company where probably relatively speaking, her hands are relatively clean.
I hate to say it, but she would not be the worst president of my lifetime. She might be the best. It's entirely possible. Both things are true. You can be the friendly face of a lot of horror and still be the best president.
Yeah, I would still vote for her over the current guy or even Joe Biden to be honest. So here we go. It's fucking wild. This is so dumb. We shouldn't have presidents or billionaires like Oprah, but whatever.
Anyway, that O magazine article has been scrubbed from the internet because of all the rapes and stuff. But yeah, it's I almost recommend finding it and reading it just to get a crash course and how to write a really responsible article about a cult leader. Susan Casey should be in some sort of journalist prison.
But instead she went from being Oprah's editor in chief to working as the creative director for Outside Magazine, the editor of Sports Illustrated Women and the author of a ridiculous sounding book on dolphins. And I am sure that I have ruined any chance of publishing an outside magazine now, which bums me out. I would much rather do that than write about Nazis, but I don't like Susan Casey and I think she's very irresponsible. Yeah. She's the journalistic equivalent of like,
like taking your nine year old out shooting for the first time and just getting blackout drunk first. I mean, is it like, because it's like, so generally there's just like a vested interest in promoting like spirituality and Christianity on some level.
And like, cause it's like when you, when you encounter these people and you are not at any point like, hey, this seems fucked up. It's so wild to me that you don't, that they don't have that instinct. You know, the key is that all of the people surrounding John of God, cause you don't spend much time with him. You spend a lot of time around these like, and they're mostly like white American ladies who, who like love his shit. And they're all the same kind of, they're all Gwyneth Paltrow kind of people. And they're all,
like well-heeled and friendly and charming and they know how to speak to a specific segment of the population and those people find them trustworthy.
Yeah. So Susan felt the need to visit John of God, the author that O magazine article, so she could write a terrible article. But the, the, the ailment that sent her there was the fact that her father had tragically died very young. Um, and the resultant grief had nearly broken her. Um, she went to Brazil for healing. And she basically claims that John of God put her into a trance during one of his mass healing sessions. And she was able to visualize her father in paradise, knowing that he was happy and off living his eternal life allowed her to move on. And that's all fine.
Like seriously, grief is the worst thing ever and there are way worse ways of coping with it than paying a guru to help you to hallucinate heaven or whatever. Do what you gotta do to get by. I'm not gonna blame her for that. What I will blame her for is the utterly uncritical way that she wrote about John of God's bullshit, like his claims of being able to perform surgery without even touching people. So here's another quote.
When you consider the countless unseen things that have undeniable power, sound waves, microwaves, radio waves, emotions like anger or envy, wind, and of course the awesome universal power of love, it seems silly to rely on the naked eye for proof of anything. Yet that is what we do. Numbers on charts and graphs, x-rays, those we believe in, but we leave without documentation, something we perceive with one of our five senses is considered blind faith, sweet, but we don't really trust it.
So she's saying that it's silly to believe in radio waves, but not the power of ghosts to heal people's cancer. The hand waving of naked eye into evidence is fucking revolting. She is hand waving so hard it could power a fucking windmill farm like Jesus.
So she actually makes the argument in that article that it's unreasonable for us to reject the reality of John of God's powers just because there's no proof behind them. This is reinforced by something she writes about her arrival in the hotel at Abadi Anya. Quote, as I hoisted my luggage up to the second floor, a small sign of the wall caught my attention. Don't believe everything you think it advised. That's kind of gaslighting, right? There's gaslighting via decoration.
That's, yeah, that is exactly, that is what abusers say. That's fucking insane. Holy shit. In this same uncreadulous way, she writes about the entities that John of God channels, quote, if you spend time at Abadi Anya, you will hear the phrase the entities over and over again, sometimes plural and sometimes singular, and you will come to use it yourself as if it were a completely ordinary thing to say. What it actually means, however, is so extraordinary that it defies our sense of what is logical or even possible in this world.
The healing entities who work through John of God are the spirits of deceased doctors, surgeons, masters, and saints. Heather's website explains matter-of-factly. They use medium Joao's body, channeling their power through him. Sometimes the spirits show up anonymously, but there are several who make regular appearances. They include Dr. Agusto de Almeeda,
a surgeon and army man with a serious and efficient manner. Dr. Oswaldo Cruz, whose specialties were infectious diseases and bacteriology. Saint Francis Xavier, co-founder of the Jesuit order, along with Casa's patron, Saint Ignatius of Loyola, a priest and nobleman from the 16th century. Despite the presence of saints, medium Joao, born a Catholic, makes it clear that Casa is not a church, but rather a spiritual hospital. My mission has nothing to do with religion, he says.
Oh, have these guys ever been sued by the estates of these? This feels a little bit like Mormons, like, nope, baptizing people in.
Like post-mortem? Most of the poor people who come to John of God are too poor to sue if they're serious diseases. Don't get cured. And most of the rich people aren't actually coming there for serious diseases. They're coming here for things like like Susan has where like they're sad, you know? Yeah. That's a lot of those patients. Sorry, I meant I meant the estates of these spirits of the people. Oh, man. Yeah, that that would be fun to try to sue someone for that. I don't know that there's any legal precedent.
I think it's really funny that you're like talking about like, okay, we've got this infectious disease doctor, but actually he's calling it a second opinion from the 16th century nobleman. Yeah, exactly. It's like, hey, my grandpa, you know, admittedly, my Nazi grandpa probably wouldn't have supported this, I guess is not the best court case, but.
Yeah. You know. Yeah. Oh boy. Um, Susan goes on to write quote, at the Casa skeptics are as welcome as believers. I had already noticed that skeptics didn't tend to stay that way. Many, her rumphing empirical scientists had become impassioned. John, I've got advocates after visiting and witnessing him in action. She doesn't go on to quote any of these scientists, um, or, or give any evidence of this. She just like says it. Um, because this is again a perfect piece of journalism.
At one point, Susan attends a healing and says that John of God called for doctors in the audience to come forward. In her recitation of events, these learned men were all bold over by John's inexplicable healing abilities. As far as I can tell, Susan took no action to determine if any of these men were actual doctors. A real journalist, Michael Usher, did report critically on John of God in 2014 for 60 minutes, and I want to compare how she and Michael both wrote about the medium's ice-scraping surgery.
For my vantage point in this is Susan, from my vantage point only ten feet away. The change in his body and demeanor was easily visible. Now his eyes were more intense and they flashed noticeably darker. His gait became stiffer, his movements more deliberate. He turned to the three women standing against the wall, took the one closest to him by the hand and gently sat her in a wheelchair. Her eyes fluttered wide as she meditated.
Reaching to the tray, he selected a short knife with a wooden handle, a cheap looking type that you might use to pair an apple, and he held it up to the room, making sure that everyone saw its sharp blade. He tipped her head backward, running his hand across her face, and he opened her left eye, holding the eyelid wide. Then he began to scrape the knife across her eyeball, back and forth with visible pressure. Unbelievably, the woman sat absolutely still, without flinching or recoiling. I had a hard time watching this, believing as I do that the words knife and eyeball should never appear in the same sentence. After what seemed like an eternity devoid of trauma, he put down the knife.
The orderly took the wheelchair and steered it into the infirmary. As she had the entire time, the woman appeared to be napping. How on earth could a knife cross your eyeball and not hurt? Later, I would interview another recipient of this treatment. Connie Price, 62 from Jackson, Michigan. There was no pain whatsoever, she said, of the five minute scraping. I could feel the energy coming through him. I remember the heat pouring through that man's body. Price found the treatment beneficial. I can see a lot better now.
So you'll notice the only evidence of efficacy of healing is they didn't look to be in pain when this guy was rubbing a knife on their eye, and they said one of them said afterwards, I can see better now. There's no, again, that's not evidence. That's an anecdote. And that's not an anecdote based on like actually testing her eyesight.
Is that and also it's like, aren't there, isn't the whole thing? There's like, yeah, there aren't other nerves on your eyeball because that's how they do like, no, they stick, right? Yep. It's actually really easy to write. It's the same thing with like, it's actually very easy to rub an knife and even cut a little bit on an eyeball without somebody being in horrible pain.
And, you know, even when you actually are cutting into people's chest, like it's easy for people to not feel pain. Like again, people who like, there are people who like do cutting and stuff or who will like, like I have friends who like will suspend themselves from the fucking
things in the roof of a building with hooks in their back. It feels good to them. There's a release of endorphins. There's pain too, but they're not screaming an agony the whole time, even though you would think they would be.
Yeah, exactly. The fact that these people don't report pain or anything isn't weird and is part of like a long documented history of people experiencing temporary relief from faith healing and stuff like that. There's nothing mysterious about it.
For decades, Pentecostal revivalist preachers have done things like pray over people with injured legs and then have them discard their crutches and dance around. And the explanation for how this works is the same as the explanation for why if you throw your back out, you might find yourself forgetting the pain during a moment of extreme danger or extreme excitement.
Sometimes our brains override our experience of pain. It happens. It's a thing that people do. It's like those stories of women lifting cars off their babies. That's how Susan Casey uncritically reports on a healing session. Here's how a real journalist Michael Usher reports on a pretty much identical healing session.
John of God is not a surgeon. He is not a trained doctor. Yet he is presented with a tray of medical instruments, scalpels, and all sorts of scissors. He takes a scalpel and scrapes eyes. He sticks knives and scalpels of some sort down the back of people's throats. And he claims he is getting to tumors. He claims he is getting to the root of people's illnesses. He claims he is getting to what makes people ill or sick. None of it is done with an anesthetic, and you don't even know if what he's using is sterile.
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. That feels about right. A large part of why John of God's magic seems to work is the fact that he performs it all in public, among and in front of a large and enthusiastic crowd of true believers, many of whom also happen to be desperately ill. John tells them that they can all help fuel his work and heal themselves by sitting in the current and basically meditating for hours while he does his thing.
As Susan Casey writes, on any given day, maybe 400 people form the current, spelunking so deeply into their interior realms that they might well be a sleeper and esthetized. While doing so, they refrain from opening their eyes or crossing their arms or legs. These things, they are told, cut off the flow of energy as surely as would kinking a hose.
This is cool and dead. At least she said they were told in that one. Yeah. If I'm throwing a lot of shade on Susan Casey for her bad article here, it's because her choice to platform John of God with no critical thinking, or even an attempted examination, brought his line of bullshit to the eyes and ears of millions of vulnerable people. Oprah Winfrey had her on her show in 2010, and one of the millions of women who watched that episode was a Dutch choreographer named Zahira Linke Mouse.
She suffered from sexual trauma and Winfrey's episode, Do You Believe in Miracles, convinced her that Medium John could heal her? She waited in line twice to receive his healing after traveling to Brazil. On her first visit, he prescribed her some of his herb pills. When those didn't do the trick, she went back and he offered her a spiritual cleansing and a rare private session.
From the Washington Post, quote, she waited until everyone in line had their turns, until finally she was alone, and John of God invited her into his office, and then into his bathroom. That's where Moe says he raped her, all while leading her to believe it was part of her healing. Now, Moe's was one of hundreds, and perhaps thousands of rape victims of John of God.
And I want to end on this note to get to the point of what's really happened here, which is that an American industry based on uncritically looking at spiritual healers, funneled victims into this guy's hands and allowed him to achieve a level of influence and basically built a spider web for this fucking spider of a man.
So we're going to continue the story of John of God in part two, but right now we're going to continue the story of Andrew T of God's pluggables. Oh shit. You know, just go to the Yoza's racist podcast. I'm at Andrew T. His last name is spelled T-I everywhere. Yeah, that's it.
That is it. Well, I'm Robert Evans. You can find me on the internet at findthevastards.com. You can find me on Twitter at I write OK. And if you want, I will just sort of rub a machete all over your eyes. It's going to cost you, I don't know, let's say I don't take any money. But we do ask for $3,000 donations to our medical center. So give me $3,000 and I'll rub a machete on whatever party you want.
That's the guarantee. That is a guarantee. Absolute guarantee. I also have a podcast called the Women's War. It's upbeat. It tells you about how to make things that don't suck out of your society when it sucks. So maybe listen to that too. And I don't know, go in Christ and cut up people's eyes. That's the podcast.
Yeah it is. Dope. Part one of the podcast. Okay.
He was a boy scout leader, a church deacon, a husband, a father. He went to a local church. He was going to the grocery store with us. He was the guy next door. But he was leading a double life. He was certainly a peeping tom. Looking through the windows, looking at people, fantasizing about what he could do. He then began entering the houses.
He could get into the home, take something, and get out and not be caught. He felt very powerful. He was a monster, hiding in plain sight. Someone killed four members of a family. It just didn't happen here.
Journey inside the mind of one of history's most notorious killers, BTK, through the voices of the people who know him best. Listen to Monster BTK on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
I'm Arturo Castro and I've been lucky enough to do stuff like Broad City and Nargos and Roadhouse and so many commercials about back pain. And now I'm starting a podcast because honestly guys, I don't feel the space is crowded enough. Get ready for Greatest Escapes, a new comedy podcast about the wildest true escape stories in history. Each week I'll be sitting down with some of the most hilarious actors and writers and comedians to tell him a buck wild tale from across history and time. People like Ed Helms, Diane Guerrero, Joseph Gordon-Levitt, and Soie Chow.
It's giving funny true crime. I love storytelling and I love you so I can't wait. Listen and subscribe to Greatest Escapes on the iHeartRadio app Apple Podcast or wherever you get your podcasts.
Do you want to understand an invisible force that's shaping your life? I'm Osvyl Ocean, one of the new hosts of the long-running podcast Tech Stuff. I'm slightly skeptical but obsessively intrigued. And I'm Cara Price, the other new host. And I'm ready to adopt early and often.
On tech stuff, we travel all the way from the minds of Congo to the surface of Mars to the dark corners of TikTok to ask an attempt to answer burning questions about technology. One of the kind of tricks for surviving Mars is to live there long enough so that people evolve into Mars. Like data is a very rough proxy for our complex reality. How is it possible that the world's new energy revolution can be based in this place where there's no electricity at night?
Oz and I will cut through the noise to bring you the best conversations and deep dives that will help you understand how tech is changing our world, and what you need to know to survive the singularity. So join us. Listen to tech stuff on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. I go once forgotten who runs this valley. Time to remind them. Yellowstone fans, step into the Yellowstone universe. Our family legacy is this ranch. When I'm a protector of my life.
Hosted by Bobby Bones, the official Yellowstone podcast takes you deeper into the franchise that's captivated millions worldwide. Explore untold behind-the-scenes stories, exclusive cast interviews, and in-depth discussions about the themes and legacy of Yellowstone. You know, the first dozens to settle this valley fight was all they knew.
Whether you're a longtime fan or new to the ranch. Welcome to the Yellowstone. Bobby Bones has everything you need to stay connected to the Yellowstone phenomenon. I look forward to it. Listen to the official Yellowstone podcast now on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
Welcome back to Behind the Bastards, the podcast where we talk about terrible people. And this is part two of our series on John of God. But the real bastard is also Oprah. And Susan Casey, the author of that terrible article. So pull up a fine Chilean red and get ready to hear some more.
I have to this is this is off topic, but I want to tell you something I just ran across to my guest Andrew tea before we roll in the episode Andrew. How are you doing today? What's up? Yeah, J.O G ready to hear about the rest of this motherfucker. Well, before we do that, I just came across something on Twitter. It's a book that's being sold. It's like a it's like a part of the Joe Biden grift because like every politician has a grift now and this is a coloring book called a hot cup of Joe and it has a cartoon of a sexy Joe Biden on it.
Nope. A piping hot coloring book with America's sexiest moderate, Joe Biden. Jesus Christ. Yeah, it's awful. It is abuse. It is abuse.
yeah that's uh well that's fucking horrendous it's almost worth buying so you can have it for whatever happens with the election just to have this fucking horrible thing yeah i i don't want to give this person money
But I do want to see inside this terrible, terrible criminal coloring book. The sexy 70-something politicians thing is one of the weirdest aspects of modern politics that like, you have these two old and clearly not in the best of health men, Joe Biden and Donald Trump, both of whose supporters have to depict them as like muscle bound, like hunks, and it's like, guys,
They're literally dying men. Stop it. Even if you think they're the right person to be president, you don't have to pretend that you don't have to get thirsty about them. What is wrong with you, Pete? They both wear diapers. Let's talk about that situation. They're not out here bench pressing. Come on.
They're not doing wind sprints. Joe's abs don't exist because he's an old sick man. That's okay. That's fine. Whatever. Stop it. Stop it all of you. The flush on his face is melting day by day. It's what happens as you die.
he's not was is fine not fair they're they're dying yeah you'd like them to be like that this is not on them because they're like pretty normally aged men for the ages like people stop making stop making you don't have to make them
sexy. What is wrong with you? If I could just do a tiny poll and just point out that Sophie's idea of a sexy man is Popeye. I live in that for a second. I dare you to find a better example of uncut eroticism than Robin Williams as Popeye in a 1980s Popeye movie that absolutely exists. Look it up. It's fucking
Yeah. Something else. Insanity. Yeah. People made that. People made that and no one stopped them. Isn't that Robert Altman? I think so, yeah. I think it's Robert Altman. You keep talking. I'm going to look it up. No, I'm not. Don't do it to yourself. Never mind. It's great. So,
We're all back from... It is Robert Altman. I looked it up. I couldn't help it. It's time to get back into this episode, talk about John and God some more. I just had to, that hit my world like a fucking carpet bomb, and I just had to talk about it.
Take your world like a cruise missile at your wedding. Yeah, like one of Raytheon's fine products, hitting a wedding, which if you ever thought not enough weddings have missiles hit them, then you're the kind of customer Raytheon's looking for. We really should start the episode now.
No human being has ever embodied the phrase, the road to hell was paved with good intentions better than Oprah Winfrey. Like many of you, she was a regular background figure in my childhood. My mom would have her on when she was working from home while we did chores, etc. Like she was just on in the background all the time. And compared to the other background figures of my childhood, guys like Rush Limbaugh and Michael Savage, she was pretty benign. At least she seemed that way.
I don't know if I would describe her as a monster, but her career has been a masterclass in how to enable monsters. Winfrey was a longtime friend of Harvey Weinstein. She regularly hosted Tony Robbins, another sex pest and self-help guru. She is largely responsible for making Dr. Phil and Dr. Oz into household names, and both of those men have gone on to do incalculable harm to society. And of course, she is the reason John of God and his clinic were put in front of the faces of millions upon millions of gullible desperate Westerners.
After that O magazine article was published in 2010, she dedicated a special episode to John of God, inviting the author of that article and a doctor onto her show. They were both total converts, but how they and Oprah presented John to their audience is really interesting to me. And I want you to click that first link and play it to about 38 minutes, Andrew.
Because you weren't expecting to find what? Well, I went to just gather evidence to see what's true. Susan, when you were there, I heard that he actually invites medical doctors from around the world to come up and witness him do these things. Is that correct?
Yes. And they always are sort of very careful not to ever pit themselves against the medical, the mainstream medical profession. They, you know, they're very much like, they're not, he's never going to do a heart transplant up there. It's like he's going to do whatever he can do with his ability to heal. And then you might have to go to your doctor or the rest. Yeah. Okay. And that's, that's good. Yeah. What'd you think of that, Andrew? What'd you think of that framing?
Um, incredible, incredible. I mean, the one thing watching the clip is that, um, um, what is it? Oh, sorry. What is the, what is the journalist? The quote. Yeah. Okay. What's the strong word for Susan?
The one thing watching that is that Susan looks almost exactly as I thought she would. Yes. Exactly the type of white woman that would promote this shit. Yes. Yeah. And whatever picture I guarantee you, 100% of you, whatever picture you have in your head of Susan Casey is accurate because there's only one. Yeah, it's awesome, isn't it?
Yeah. And then also like this thing where he's like, he's not going to do a heart transplant. But he's like, you might have to go to your regular doctor for that is like, just like key, like sweeping shit under the rug. It's like, well, of course, you will need real medical care also.
What's really cool about that is that it is very clearly and obviously an answer of Susan and this other doctor who we'll talk about in a minute, whitewashing John of God. So like they know that if they're going to be on Oprah's show and talk to like a mainstream audience, they have to put in a, they can't just be all like, especially because of this is 2010 and we aren't where we are now. Now you could just say, doctors are bullshit. This guy is the only real healer in the world.
You can get away with that. Back then you had to be like, oh no, regular doctors are still good for things. He's just helping with other stuff. And that was necessary to get people on board. But John of God's cult produced propaganda too. And this is why I say that Susan Casey and this doctor are like,
intentionally whitewashing him. Because for this episode of Oprah's show, they use clips from a documentary that John of God's cult produced. And in the actual documentary, there are no time wasted telling people that they need to consult their doctors. So I'm gonna play next, have you play next, a clip from that actual, the documentary produced by the cult that shows kind of how internally they talked about his healing powers. And it's very different from how Oprah did. Physical healings that cannot be explained away.
You said to me in reply to my question. Can you help me to become healthy again? And he replied, you are already healed. Holy shit. Yeah.
uh... it is so yeah you see like in that there's no talk about like oh yeah you've got to uh... you gotta fucking uh... right consult a physician yet no you just heels your shit so the doctor guy that oprah has on there is is a fellow named jeffrey redder uh... and he's really interesting to me because he is a very real medical professional and was actually or is actually a member of the harvard medical school faculty
He researches spontaneous healing which is like when people go into remission or whatever and there's no clear explanation why which is a thing that happens people get better from things we don't understand why that that's a thing that happens and he
It's clearly there to inject both credibility and skepticism into the discussions about John of God, kind of like Dr. Oz was earlier. For example, Oprah at one point plays a video of one of John of God's brain surgeries where he's like shoving stuff up people's nose. And Dr. Rettiger is really upfront and clear about the fact that this brain surgery through the nose stuff is sleight of hand.
that he's not actually performing surgery, that there's a ton of space in the naval cavity and nothing inexplicable is going on. So he does state that to the audience, but he does that while he buys into the fact that scientifically inexplicable healing occurs at John of God's center. So I'm gonna play another clip from that Oprah episode so you can kind of see how this skeptic talks about this healing.
Dr. Jeffrey Reddiger traveled to Brazil also to see John of God's work firsthand. Explain if you can the medical risks of surgery without anesthesia or proper sterilization. It doesn't look like he's like sterilizing the knife or the probe. Well, yeah, as a physician, I have to say, you don't try these kinds of things at home.
and or with your loved ones and you know this guy says a second grade education I and I do have to say that these are things that I don't understand so I can't fully
endorse things that are beyond my understanding. But I've seen them happen. Generally, without anesthesia, you see enormous pain. I take care of people every day in pain from surgery and other events.
The risk of infection is typically great and something that we have to take seriously. So have people followed up with these people who've gone through these procedures? Maybe infections came later. Well, I think every situation this period of healing is different.
So did you catch what went on there? This is really interesting to me. So Dr. Rettiger notes that the psychic surgeries, which like use real knives and actually cut people, he notes that that's dangerous. Like he tells people not to do it at home, but he also says he's not aware of anyone getting infections. And then when Oprah points out that he could have, they could have gotten infected later, he doesn't respond to that. You'll notice he doesn't say that that's possible even. He just sort of says that like a bunch of things get like, that's really, yeah, that's amazing.
But it's the kind of thing, because it's been acknowledged, even though he doesn't then go on to state that, like, actually, yes, we have no data that these people, to suggest these people aren't getting infected, were not performing any follow-ups. I didn't take any attempts to actually determine whether or not people got infected letter. He doesn't say that.
He gives a non-response so that the show can move on, and the audience can move forward, content that John of God, that these are real serious skeptical people, and that that makes John of God even more real, because this medical professional has vetted him with the requisite amount of skepticism, even though none of that was actually done. It's amazing. This is a master class, and it's laundering bullshit, yeah.
Yeah, it's even like the way that like they can claim they've addressed the infection risk by saying, because they brought it up. It's fucking revolting. That's crazy. Yeah, it's awesome. I want to play one more clip from this episode because we just got it.
believe. And this is what medicine and psychiatry need to examine is I believe the powers of belief, the powers of the mind are far more powerful than we have even begun to explore. I believe that's an unexplored wilderness in terms of research. So you said that since you made that trip as the skeptic and then you were there in the presence and then had the whole bleeding experience yourself, that it turned your life upside down. How so? Well, if you can say the
something to the fact that I believe this in my head, but I don't believe it in my heart. I don't get it as too much. And then a little incision manifests on this skin over the area of your heart. That means none of this is what we think it is. It's something, I don't know what that means. And there's, I'm sure religions can layer on many different interpretations. Do you consider yourself a religious person? Because of this, I'm actually more interested in the development and cultivation of a spiritual life. All right.
Yup. So that's interesting. One of Rettiger's claims is that while he's watching John of God perform these surgeries, he spontaneously started bleeding from a hole in the side, which is kind of like a stigmata thing. He's introduced as a skeptic who traveled to John of God's center in order to take samples and medically vet whether or not this man was a serious healer. And he says later in that interview, quote, some people I spoke with were able to remember the events going around them completely.
And some people seem to enter a sort of altered state during these surgeries. When I was assisting in one of these surgeries, John, I've got cut this woman's cornea. She didn't flinch. She didn't try to pull away from him. I can't explain that. I heard some people use the term spiritual anesthesia. I have no way to understand that. It's interesting that he says that because like there's actually a lot of reasons why someone wouldn't feel their eye getting scraped.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. It's like perfectly explicable and like lending essentially the name of your institution and by claiming to be baffled to give it like credence is like got truly pathetic.
It's also like even accepting his words at face value until the end. It's like, okay, yes, the brain can do a lot. Yes, psychology is more powerful probably in terms of physiological stuff than we give a credit for. And then pivoting to I want to have a spiritual life is like just an abdication of curiosity. Yep.
It's just like, what do you, yeah. I mean, it is remarkable that some of these people don't feel pain probably. It's documented in other media, you know, other types of formats of this kind of shit. And sure, worth exploring, but being like, yeah, I want to see, I want to learn more about these spirits is like, yeah.
Incredible. He's such a piece of shit. I've scraped my cornea before when I was out hashing in the woods and it didn't hurt afterwards because it fucked up my ability, my eye was taking in too much light. It kind of blinded me. It was very much debilitating afterwards. But the actual getting scraped by a branch in the eye, it didn't cause pain, which is part of why it took me a while to realize what had happened.
Yeah, I don't know. There's also a lot of data on how mind-altering states like people have in these religious moments can impact perception of pain. Worship is definitively a mind-altering state. John of God requires his patience to go through an elaborate series of meditations before and after treatment.
Um, and I actually found a scholarly study of his surgeries conducted by doctors from a Brazilian medical school. They note, the surgeries were always performed by John of God and occurred in a large, non-sterilized and open room with dozens of spectators, most of whom were other patients and their relatives or friends. During each of these surgical sessions, approximately five patients usually remain standing both side by side in front of one of the room's wall. Rarely patients were submitted to the surgeries while they were seated in a chair.
Visible surgeries were performed in a few minutes in a very grandiose and theatrical way, invoking strong emotional involvement and even perplexity among the audience. Incisions were performed with either sterilized scalpels or kitchen knives and surgeries were performed in rapid succession. The cleanliness of the instruments contrasted to reports of other mediumistic surgeries performed by dirty or even rusty implements.
The stories about this guy that uncredible sources state always say that he's just using like random kitchen knives, sometimes even that they're dirty. When actual scientists studied, like they know his knives are always sterilized and he's not cutting open people deeply and removing organs. He is scraping their skin and their eyes. The fact that they don't get a lot of them don't get infections isn't weird. Have you ever gotten a scrape that didn't get infected? You've probably gotten a lot.
because your body is reasonably good at not dying from random scrapes. Otherwise, there wouldn't be people. It's very frustrating. Another frustrating thing is that this study goes on to note that they couldn't find any evidence of infections among John's patients, but they also note that they didn't actually get to follow up with any of these people further than a day or two on.
because a lot of them were traveling in from elsewhere. So the paper is a proper scientific paper, and it concludes that we need to do more research and track these patients for longer term to determine whether or not anyone's getting infected, which is what you say if you're an actual scientist. Dr. Reddinger, on the other hand, just gets on Oprah and announces that this is all inexplicable. Science can't explain this. It's like, yes, it can. You just didn't try. You didn't even try it.
And I hate it. Science doesn't work when you don't do it. That's a remarkable conclusion. Yeah, thank you, Dr. I found a good critical write up of Dr. Rettiger's performance on the blog Science Space Medicine. I'm gonna quote from that now.
Unfortunately, the camera angles used made it impossible for me to judge whether John was doing what he claimed. In the only close-up shot that was presented, it was clear to me that the knife never touched the woman's eye. And when John actually appeared to be doing something, the camera never focused on the woman's eye. How convenient. It was almost as though Oprah producers were making a conscious effort not to show a camera angle that would allow viewers to judge whether the procedure actually being done was what John of God claimed.
Personally, I'd have loved to see an ophthalmologist or even just a surgeon rather than a psychiatrist, because Dr. Rettiger is a psychiatrist, allowed to have a close up view of John's activities. Rettiger is also shown in a video clip apparently bleeding from the chest, apparently after having viewed John do his cornea scraping bit. He expresses fear in his concern that the bleeding doesn't stop as soon as he thinks it should, pointing out that he doesn't have a bleeding disorder.
So again, Dr. Redinger is a psychiatrist, which makes him a legitimate medical professional, but does not make him particularly competent to rule on whether or not someone's reaction to a light surgical cut is inexplicable, because that is not what psychiatrists specialize in. Yeah. Oh, but it's also just being like the arrogance of being able to say, I can't explain it. So it is there for I won't explain it. Yeah. Won't find out how to explain it. So it's therefore inexplicable.
Yeah, it's super great. Yeah, and it's also noted in that article that Dr. Rettiger isn't just a psychiatrist. He's a psychiatrist who's built an entire brand off of embracing spontaneous healing. At the time this came out, he headed up the initiative for psychological and spiritual development. And on his old website, he wrote this explaining what the Institute did, quote,
We live in a culture that has advanced enough that we can send the person with a medical problem to the medical doctor, a person with an emotional problem to the psychologist, a person with a spiritual problem to the priest, minister, or rabbi. Yet the initiative for psychological and spiritual development is founded upon the belief that, beneath all and behind all the masks and appearances that we present to the world, there is something more, and whatever healing potential exists comes from this place. Which is...
Great nonsense, beautiful, beautiful nonsense. So Dr. Redderger's initiative appears to be defunct now. I don't think it exists anymore. I can't find evidence of that, but I didn't look super hard, so maybe I'm wrong. He does have a book out, however, called Cured with an exclamation point, and it's about people going into spontaneous remission. I don't know enough about Redderger to declare him an absolute grifter, but I do know that he was once a ghost on coast to coast AM, which is like Alex Jones for people who are a little bit less racist than Alex Jones.
um so i'm gonna i'm gonna say it's probably fair to call him a grifter you don't go on coast to coast at f m if you're like a or am if you're like a credible person
Well, it's also like the, you know, not acknowledging that spontaneous remission is a severe outlier event. Yeah. And like, yeah, it's possible, but like putting your treatment faith in that is insane. Yes. Yeah. And yeah, but it's a great grift. It's a thing people want to read about it. People love reading books about magical healing and shit. Yeah.
Yeah. So, yeah, Dr. Reddiger is part of the grand tradition in the medical field of credentialed medical professionals who provide cover for miracle-slinging con men. And of course, Dr. Oz would be another example of this type of person. Another example is provided in Susan Casey's O Magazine article about John of God. And this is her, again, attempting to do some real journalistic research to talk about how it's not weird to believe that this guy could be curing cancer.
Though belief in the effectiveness of prayer is as old as civilization, the results are tough to pin down. Bernard Grad, PhD, a Canadian biologist from McGill University, worked with a spiritual healer named Oscar Estebani conducting controlled studies in the late 1950s and 60s, using mice that had been uniformly wounded. Estebani would place his hands upon the wire covers of certain cages, willing those animals to heal. The results were dramatic. In one experiment, the wounds on Estebani's treated mice were very significantly smaller after two weeks than those of mice that had been left to heal on their own.
The team also discovered that plant seeds exposed to energy healing grew at a faster rate. There was a force here they agreed, and it appeared to be doing something beneficial. What that force was, however, no one could say for sure.
Now, these studies happened. They're a real thing that happened. You can read them. Bernard Grad did carry out those studies, and if you look them up, you'll find conclusions that are pretty similar to what Susan Casey writes in her bad article. What you won't find is any clear follow-up to the study. In fact, basically, the only writing about this research you will find comes from either woo-woo bullshit practitioners or other medical griftsmen trying to convince people that energy healing is real.
This makes it difficult to refute because there really aren't direct refutations of Dr. Grant's work. What we do have, however, is almost a century of additional research into quote-unquote energy healing because, again, this stuff was done in the 50s and 60s. It wasn't a big study. It was conducted a long time ago. You can't say that it was conduct...
We can't prove to a point of certainty that these people were actually conducting it well or abiding by all the rules they said they were. And there's another 70 years of other studies into this that show very different results. So again, she picks out this one study from 70 years ago that says what she wants it to say. She ignores, for example, the fact that a 1999 three psychiatrists with a Lancet evaluated multiple studies, several hundred of them that showed links between religious faith, faith healing and energy healing and health benefits.
Here's how Science Magazine reported on their findings. Quote, typically they say these studies ignore other factors that may improve health, such as abstinence from tobacco and alcohol, and even the scientifically sound practices they contend were inconsistent and Joe justified bringing religion into medical practice. Richard Sloan of Columbia University and his colleagues reviewed every article containing religion and physical health they could find in MEDLINE, an online service that indexes medical studies.
Many of them, he says, focused on such groups as Roman Catholic priests or Benedictine monks, which forbid certain risky behaviors. Others looked at more general populations of churchgoers and found lower disease rates, but failed to take into account that only people who are in fairly good health can go to church. When these confounding factors were taken into account, either by the original researchers in a follow-up study or by Sloan's group, the alleged benefits usually disappeared. Overall, Sloan says, the evidence is very unconventioning and weak, much weaker, for example, than the link between marital status and health.
So again, you can point out there's a couple of individual studies that like haven't been refuted that suggests a benefit between energy, healing and health. And then there's hundreds of studies that show no connection at all. And if you only pay attention to the studies that say what you want, it sounds great. If you look at the mass body of research, it doesn't look so good. But Susan Casey doesn't do that.
Yeah, so that's cool. Following that 2010 episode of the Oprah show, Oprah herself visited John of God in 2012. She described the encounter as blissful. And in her wake, thousands upon thousands of other seekers made the call to travel down Brazil way for some psychic healing.
By 2014, John's humble center had transformed into a straight-up commercial empire. Those passionflower pills alone grew into a $10 million a year business. Celebrities visited, including Paul Simon, the princess of Japan, and Bill Clinton. Maybe. Probably. We don't exactly know. There's a bunch of celebrities who are rumored to have gone. I'm going to guess probably. Bill Clinton seems like the kind of guy who'd try this. Yeah.
But something else, especially like all the other shit, it's like, who the fuck knows what's happening there. But something else also cropped up over the years. Allegations of sexual misconduct by John of God. Objective observers noted that he seemed to have a strange non-medical fixation with women's breasts performing surgery aimed at treating heart conditions and other ailments by groping them and cutting around their nipples. So that's good.
Oh, God. It's always like the most obvious shit, and yet there's still gonna be years of like, of where they're like, oh, I don't know. He just, you know, he was just interested in heart surgery. Like, it's always so transparent when the shit finally like, when the mask starts to slip, I feel like. Yep, yep, it is. But you know what mask never slips?
the mask of capitalism. And that means it's time for us to take our mask off and put some products and services on. Yeah. Hell yeah.
we're back okay so uh... yet we left off you know john of god has gotten this huge boost from oprah in her group community people are flooding in from all around the world but also some story start to come out allegations all they get this point no individual names attached but that he's he's sexually harassing and assaulting people
The allegations were enough that, in 2014, a real newspaper, The Sydney Morning Herald sent a real journalist, Tim Elliott, to look into the matter. Tim's article provided the first comprehensive look at John of God's operation by someone who wasn't clearly two steps away from joining his cult. Like Susan Casey, The Sydney provided him with a white expat handler to introduce him to John of God's world. Since Tim was a man, his handler was a man. Diego Capola. Here's Tim's article.
Coppola was born in Peru, but spent most of his life in California, where he worked as a computer engineer. After visiting the Casa in 2001, just to check it out, he married a Brazilian and moved to Abadiyania. These days he manages the Casa's 50 strong staff, a multinational team of volunteers who take care of logistics, channeling the constant flow of visitors, and, most importantly, forming an impenetrable buffer around medium Joao, sheltering him from the ceaseless demands of a ravening public. Everybody wants a piece of medium Joao, says Coppola.
Before I arrived, Kapola had promised me an interview with Joao, although he now lets me know that this is far from guaranteed. He is not like you and me, Kapola tells him. He lives in another realm. Time tables don't mean much to him. What matters to him is doing the work, taking care of the healing.
So that's good. Yeah. I mean, like the handler for this sort of situation is always like, it's so fucking sinister. It's so crazy to me that people get sucked into this shit. It just seems like on the face, like, get the fuck out of there.
Yeah. Yeah. Now, the reality is that John of God spent most of his time living in luxury on a ranch compound nearby. He only worked about half the week and later revelations would suggest that he spent much of his downtime sexually abusing women, although he also spent a lot of his work hours sexually abusing women too. So who knows? Tim Elliott spoke to an Australian seeker, a woman named Sarah Layton from Melbourne. She's very emblematic of the success cases for John of God. And I'm going to quote from him again.
This is her fourth trip to the cost since 2011, during which time she has sought treatment for her liver, kidney and heart, as well as female problems. She also had lots of psychic surgeries, which is when the entities operate on patients remotely. You wake up after one of these surgeries and you can actually feel the stitches in your stomach, she tells me. Real stitches? No, psychic stitches, she says.
What has helped her most, though, is the emotional healing. She's had a hard life. After being sexually abused as a child, she was tortured. Before coming here, she had attempted suicide four times. She estimated she spent $50,000 all up in airfare donations. I always donate to the Casa because John of God doesn't charge anything. And medications, such as healing herbs, which are sold at the Casa's pharmacy. I used my inheritance $20,000 for my grandmother to pay for a lot of it, but it's worth it. My heart is healed, which Western medicine wasn't able to do. And my gynecological problems have stopped.
So there's a lot going on there. Yeah. Yeah, first off, you see like everyone claims he doesn't take money and then this woman's like, but I spent $50,000 here, which is like, yeah. I mean, I guess to that end, that's not that different than any religion, but yeah. Or then actually getting medical treatment in the legal way if you don't have health insurance or if you do have health insurance in a lot of cases. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
Yeah, but like you'll notice that like and this is true with a lot of the the most dedicated case studies who will come out and talk about this guy's healing is their actual medical complaints are really vague and there's there's nothing in that that you can track pathologically she vaguely says gynecological problems but also says like it's really my heart and like my emotional problems that he healed.
And Susan Casey, the O magazine author, was in the same boat. She was grieving, not physically ill. And I've read a lot of stories about women who received healing from John of God, and an overwhelming number of them came in with emotional pain. And these people do seem to have gotten real relief at the center. But there's nothing magic about what provided them with the relief. I'm going to quote now from a woman who wrote a story about her own treatment by John of God. This is what she described it as quote.
Meeting the medium was a solemn process. Hundreds of people in white flock to the casa every morning. Someone wheelchairs other frail from chemo. In an orderly line, we waited to go before him so he could prescribe our cures. Mine was as follows. Five trips to the local sacred waterfall. Four months without sex, alcohol, or black pepper. Four months of blessed herbal capsules. A translator quickly scribbled these directions on a small piece of paper.
For three hours a day, I sat in meditation in the current room, helping to conduct energy for healings. It felt special, purposeful. I napped, hiked, and stood under that freezing, holy waterfall. I prayed in front of the Casas Triangle, a big wooden wall hanging whose three sides represented faith, love, and charity. And then I went home.
And like, yeah, if you're fucked up and grieving and like in a lot of pain and you go to a distant location that's like set up to be solemn and relaxing and chill and you detach from the internet and you stop getting wasted all the time and you spend a bunch of time hiking in nature and hanging out at waterfalls, that will help with your grief.
Yeah, of course it went like and having caught someone confidently say this is helping with your grief. This is helping you will get better. Like that's a lot of what people need in those moments is like someone to really confidently tell them like this will pass and you will feel better. All of that stuff helps.
There's nothing magical about it. It's good to go when you're really fucked up in the head. It's good to stop getting wasted and to spend a lot of time hiking. There's nothing controversial or inexplicable about that.
So in other words, a lot of the miraculous powers attributed to John of God are really just examples of the fact that life in his center is on balance healthier than the lives a lot of people left behind. That Sarahwoman Tim Elliott interviewed even told him she's expected the same thing. She said, quote, you're in the fifth dimension here, whereas in Australia, it's the third dimension and Australia people don't understand spirituality. It's either work or going out and getting drunk. I find I have to escape that.
And like, yeah, if your life, if you were like depressed and getting wasted every night and like that makes your body feel worse, it's bad for your health and you go to a place and the guy's like, stop doing that for four months, hike, meditate. Yeah, that's gonna help. I mean, honestly, just like I could prescribe, just don't be in Australia, come on. Yeah, get out of Australia is a general rule. Get out of Australia. We all know. We all know what you people get up to.
Yeah, but of course, John have gotten his adherence couldn't just claim that the man had provided people with a relaxing retreat because claiming that this is magical and it also can treat cancer and stuff. That's where the real money is at. So when Tim did his interviews, his patients referred to John of God as a spiritual x-ray machine.
And in the very dumb biography, John of God, Heather Cummings claimed that John was able to see each of his patients as a hologram, which is why all staff patients and visiting journalists were asked to wear white. He says it made them easier to read. It also coincidentally opened up a huge market in town for white clothing, of which John of God got a cut.
Awesome. Smart. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And the uniform starts to take away your identity and makes you more easy to manipulate and all that shit. Yep.
As business expanded in the wake of Oprah's show, John and his followers created new treatments. They opened up a series of crystal beds. Patients paid $60 an hour for their right to lie around a bunch of rocks. They also opened up a gift shop. Tim Elliott writes that it sold, quote, books, CDs, DVDs, tote bags, t-shirts, coffee mugs, and crystals. All crystals have been blessed by the entity, reads a sign on the wall. There are John of God pendants, postcards, and travel pillows, even glow-in-the-dark John of God wall stickers.
I really like imagining like the fucking like entity sweatshop where the guy just has to like or the spirit just has to bless like a just a you know 40 gross crystals or else they can't go home.
Yeah. Yeah. The entities are like, yeah, they're working long hours to make sure all those fucking crystals are holy enough. Yeah. Both the gift shop and cafe also do a brisk trade and water that has been blessed by the entity. People at the Costa treat the blessed water like nitroglycerin. Don't drink it all at once. Janna Sue Jones says one afternoon when she sees me swinging from a bottle, you'll be up all night. Sarah Layton tells me she regularly buys 10 liter jugs of the stuff to take home in her luggage.
It's just water. Yeah, I mean, a lot of religions have fancy water. Now, the heart of the whole grift is the pharmacy though. When I first started reading about it, I assumed it just stalked a variety of herbal remedies that he was giving people, but it turns out that the reality was even dumber than that and more brilliant at the same time. Here's Tim quote.
I had assumed that the pharmacy would stock a range of different herbs to treat a variety of different conditions, but note there is only one herb for sale here. Pass the floor on the flower of the passion fruit plant. When I asked Coppola about this, he explains that it's not what's in the capsules that counts, but rather the spiritual prescription that John of God writes for each patient. The intentionality of that prescription is transferred to the capsules at the time of purchase, he says. That's fucking brilliant. That's a great grift right there. Yeah. I mean, that's like the homeopathy grift.
You know, it's that you can put magic in whatever. And if you have a line on passion fruit flowers. Which does sound good. Yeah. And again, all of the people who see John, he's actually just being seen by him and showing up and being in that line is free. But they all get prescriptions for these herbs. And some by $50, some by $10 worth. But the average, Tim knows that the average purchase is about $20, which would account for $40,000 a day in herb sales alone.
Jesus Christ. Great grift. A fucking plus grift, John of God, like very smart. So Abadianya is a small town. It is not located in a nice part of Brazil. Before John of God, its biggest industry was a series of brick factories. By the mid-aughts, John was by far the largest business in the area, and this gave him power. The way Tim describes it, John of God's financial leverage turned Abadianya into his own personal fiefdom.
Quote, the biggest industry by far is medium jow. There are no less than 72 Posadas or hotels here, all catering to Casa Pilgrims, most of whom come on two-week tours and arranged for booking agents. These tours cost many thousands of dollars and must be approved by Joao, or rather the entity. There are rumors that he also demands a percentage from the tour operators, but Coppola denies this. Medium Joao owns farms and some mines. He doesn't need more money. Not if he's making 40 grand a day for merbs sales, he doesn't.
He also is definitely getting that kickback. Yeah. My friends in the pot industry got into the wrong business. Just convince people that any random plant cures everything and start selling that shit. Like that's the fucking money. You don't even need real plants. They could just be putting grass in those bills and people wouldn't notice. Yeah, or nothing. Yeah, or nothing. Just sawdust. It's brilliant.
So, it soon becomes apparent just how much the town has been molded in the Joao, the entity's image. Photos of him are everywhere, on street poles, in the Posadas and cafes. A whole industry has sprung up around the sale of white clothes for visitors who forget to bring their own. He is THE brand here, when visitor told me. The locals are now worried about how long he's going to live. The entity oversees everything here, from new businesses, which must be entity approved, to new construction. One Australian Casa staff member told me that before building a house here, she ran the plans past the entity.
Now, Tim did eventually get to conduct an interview with John of God, but only after he made it through a gauntlet of fawning former patients, the center made him interview all of John's regulars, men and women who claim he healed them. The goal of this was obviously to instill a sense of awe in him, so that by the time he got to talk to John of God, he was in a mentally receptive place. But Tim is a good journalist, and this did not work on him. In fact, he says that by the end of the whole routine, he suffered from miracle fatigue,
One more person tells me about their amazing recovery. I'll kill them. I'm a fan of Tim. Very good. When they sat down to talk, Tim became probably the first reporter to directly ask John of God about the sexual abuse allegations against him. John's response, I thought you came to talk about me, not other people.