Bittersweet Infamy - #10 - The Tickle King

Episode Date: March 7, 2021

Josie tells Taylor about the reclusive millionaire who used a fetish empire to ruin lives. Plus: the 2021 Texas ice storm.

Hello and welcome to Fitter's Sweet Home for me, the podcast about infamous people, places and things. I'm Taylor Basso. I'm Josie Mitchell. My friend Josie is going to tell me a story. I don't know what it'll be. The only rule? The subject matter must be infamous.

Hi Taylor. Josie, how are you? I am... How are you doing? Today was better, so that was good. Okay, so just to let everyone in on what we're talking about. Josie, as you may have gleaned from previous episodes, is from Texas. A hot state.

Which is really just, it's boiling hot right now. Actually today is like in the 60s, high 60s. Oh sorry, that's like... What does that mean? Can you hear that? Okay. Yeah, a little bit. Yeah, that's the sound of the plumbers who've been working on our house all day because

all our pipes froze last week and we haven't had water in over a week now. We're going on day eight. How's that going? It's a little stinky. Yeah. It's hard. Who knew? Camping's fun, but not that fun.

Camping's fun when you can drive home at the end. I mean, we're kind of in the grateful position to laugh about this and whatever, but I was reading that an 11-year-old boy who was living in a trailer died of hypothermia or something like this. Yeah, yeah. There's been, I think I read today about two dozen casualties. Not all of them directly related to cold, like hypothermia, like in that voice case, but it's more like people going into their cars, trying to stay warm and carbon monoxide

poisoning or people having fires or using their ovens for heat and then having carbon monoxide poisoning that way. Yeah, it was. So walk me through, like what's the deal? You folks have like a privatized power grid. Right. Yeah. We're the, I think it's the only or one of the only, I'm going to go with only power

grid in the U.S. that is a closed grid, meaning that Texas produces so much energy and we consume so much energy that the state of Texas decided that they would be their own grid. Right. And I mean, there's enough oil and gas here that that hasn't proved to be a problem. In fact, Texas sells its energy out of state, but when Texas got so cold, everybody was upping their energy consumption to heat their homes, but none of the energy production process had really been winterized properly. Right.

So any of the wind energy, all of those turbines froze, natural gas production, all of like the equipment froze and went offline. And so then there was major power outages, so that then there was other energy production centers that didn't have any power to run. So they shut down. And so it was just, it was a huge, huge failure, it was a complete failure of the system. And so that's why like Oklahoma has been freezing for the last like three weeks. And to the point of like some emergency situations have occurred, but their grid is open so other

states can give them more energy. Our grid is closed. So we had rolling blackouts starting last Monday morning, and they intended them to be rolling, which means like, you know, 30 to 45 minutes of no power just to kind of save in other parts. But they realized once they had started it that they actually couldn't keep them rolling. They didn't have enough power to turn them back on. You should figure that out beforehand.

Right. Yeah. Yeah. So what's the mood of your average Texan like right now? Gosh, that's hard. Are people mad at the system? Are people mad that this has been allowed to take place? I mean, I can't speak for all of Texas, but I know a lot of people who are upset and who

are angry. The cities that I know of like my like Houston and my cousins who are in Austin and like everyone's just pissed. Like this is dumb. Why, why would this ever happen? And then of course things are compounding now, even though the weather is fine. I said 60 in the high sixties. It's like, I guess it's like 15 degrees Celsius.

Like it's a lovely day out. Like a sweater is what you need now. Yeah. But now the issues are a lot of pipes froze because we don't have the, we just don't have the infrastructure for that. Like our house, you've been here, it's raised above ground and all the pipes are underneath they're exposed to the air and they're just plastic. So they cracked.

So a lot of people have plumbing issues. Not everybody is back with power. Everybody that I know has power again, but so there's still people trying to get back online. But now in addition to that, the rate for a kilowatt skyrocketed. Yeah. Jesus. So that's that.

I mean, that creates a whole other situation. Like if you're living below the poverty line and you were already fucking freezing your balls off because of this, this creates a whole other headache for you right now because you're essentially like, you're left with a choice between your, your money and that you may not even have and your comfort and ability to not dive hypothermia or, or what no running water or whatever it is. Yeah. Yeah.

Well, and then somebody posted on Twitter today, I think they were like a local actor in Houston and I can't remember their name, but their bill was $200,000 from center point energy. Coming in. $200,000 for a week of power. If they, if they even had power the whole time. I wish you'd stop lying on the podcast. I can't.

I can't stop telling the truth. That is, that is fucking, uh, that is intense. So have you considered flying to Cancun just at just maybe getting away from it all, getting a nice escape. It seems like you folks could warm up a bit, have one of those, uh, fancy drinks from the HEPA commercial. Yeah. Like just really live it up.

The hardest part has really, because we've been using the toilet, we've been getting gray water and flushing the toilet, but we've decided like it's just, it's easier to just pee in the backyard. I'm very over peeing in the backyard. You poor thing. That's heartbreaking. Cause during, during the day, like we're not like, you can't see from the front, you can't see into the backyard, but like our neighbors could see into our backyard.

So during the day I pee on the other side of the house. What happened? What happened to Texas? It smells like a fucking zoo back there. And Ted, and your man Ted Cruz is going to Cancun. And Ted Cruz is getting the truncitas. Oh my God. Have you seen, have you seen, have you seen the memes of him with the white girl braids

and the suntan? So good. Oh my God, I'm so sorry that, that sucks. I'm so sorry. It's okay. It'll get resolved and it will be so wonderful. Yeah. It'll be a, it'll be a short story at some point.

Can I, can I give you the first line of your short story? Yeah, I'll type it out. The fourth time I went to pee in my backyard, I suddenly realized I don't love my father. Done. Go. Okay. Then you just write the story from there. Did you hear that they sent Ted Cruz today?

Well, he's back, right? He came back right after Thursday because he was like, my daughter's made me do it. He was just dropping his daughters off. He was just dropping his daughters off, yes. And then today, or maybe it was yesterday, it was over the weekend, somebody was just a very smart troll and sent mariachis to his house. That's cute. And they were like, sorry, you missed out on Cancun, here's a little taste of Mexico.

That's a riot. Give me those. I know, right? That's, that's, that's some top shelf shit. I really respect that. The neighbors were out, all the media was out. He wasn't there. He wasn't at home.

Who knows where he was. Oh, you hate to see it, but then you also, good for those mariachi guys because they didn't have to hang out with their friends. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. Yeah. So let's take your, our minds off all of this. I would argue that the quality of our stories has been going up week by week, but so too

has the, the infamy. I feel like our stories are getting more intense and strange and I worry, I worry that we're not going to be able to keep up this pace. I worry for our, our viewers that they will denature into, yeah, I suppose so. If you want to be like really prescriptive about it, then yes. My point being, I worry about, I worry that they can't handle all of this infamy. So I hope that this week you've brought a quiet story with very little conflict, no villains, no illegal behavior, and, and maybe we can all just kind of come together.

And justice for all, I suppose too. Is that what you're asking? And justice for all. Yes. Well, I have failed you miserably. Well fuck. And I'm proud of it. So.

What are you going to do with that? All right. Well then give me, then give me a shit show. I will accept that too. And I will say apologies for listeners who are hearing vibration or clanking. Those are, again, those are my pipes being not metaphorical. I'm very regular, it's fine. Those are the, the pipes of the house being worked on by some very, very hardworking plumbers

who have been here. Like they're going on hour 10 now and it's dark out. I don't know how they can see anything. Bring these, bring these men a beer and a nacho plate. You know what I mean? There are neighbors. I hope you're being hospitable. So I think what we'll do is like stop by when they're like chilled out and bring them a

kind of beer. Yeah. Bring them an edible arrangement for sure. Oh, big time. Okay. So, Taylor, have you heard of a man named David DiMotto? David DiMotto? Is this, I may have.

You may have? Okay. I may have. Well, he is dead supposedly, but the internet thinks that he's very much alive. Mr. DiMotto. Okay. Okay. Okay.

So, David DiMotto, he ran a series of nefarious, well, I shouldn't say nefarious at that point. I'll say this. He ran a series of tickling production. Okay. Yes. Taylor's nodding. I know it. I know it.

I know it. I know it, but I want to hear it. I know it, but I want to hear it. So, David DiMotto ran a series of tickling rings or cells, we can also call them, around the world and produced fetish videos that centered on male on male, mostly all clothed or fully clothed tickling videos. And I'll go on to describe a little bit more of that, but before he quote unquote died at March, 2017.

Wait, sorry. Sorry. I didn't, this quote unquote died shit, isn't it? Okay. Yeah. So, that's, so we got something here. Yeah. No, I think this story, it just keeps on giving.

If you, if you know it, you don't know everything. This one's still going. I know it, but I don't know everything. I thought this one was over. I thought this one was over. So, let's, let's, let's open her back up. He's never over. Okay.

So, he apparently died in March, 2017, and yet his videos produced by Jane O'Brien media are still being published online. And they're not necessarily new ones, but they're never before seen ones. And so. What? Yeah. Yeah. And as you probably know, throughout his life, David Amato pretended to be other people

online all the time. So the internet is very much like, are you dead? Are you David Amato? Cause we don't believe it. So, I'm going to tell you the story of David Amato, Jane O'Brien media, and a tickle fetish, an extreme tickle fetish. Yeah. Lay it on me.

So. How are you? Are you ticklish? Uh, yeah. Yeah. I'm ticklish also. The same answer. Yeah.

I feel like it's, I feel like, I don't know, when you say no, it's like, well, you're just hiding something. Why? Or you just want to be. But you know, I don't. No. I think you've maybe spent too long in this particular story, and it's made you paranoid about tickling.

I think that's paranoid as well. I don't, I've known people who weren't particularly ticklish, and it wasn't, I don't think it was a put on. They just weren't ticklish, which must be a nice way to be. If I was ever on Survivor, and I was doing one of those immunity challenges where you need to keep your hand on the thing for as long as you can, and the, you know, the last person to drop off loses, I think, I think getting an itch or a tickle situation would be my undoing.

Put it that way. So first I want to, for those who aren't familiar with Jane O'Brien Media, I'm going to describe a video for you, or like a series of them. So like I said previously, these videos can still be found online. It's not in some strange dark corner of the internet, but on the very brightly lit walls of Facebook. Yeah. There's a Facebook page for Jane O'Brien Media.

And that Facebook page directs you to a website called Tickletopia, where then you can pay for a subscription to the videos. But the Facebook page is where it like showcases all of them. And so imagine a white box studio. You know, like the studios where you can't really tell where the wall and the floor begins? Sure, sure. Like they might film a fitness video or something in there. Yeah.

Yeah. Exactly. And there's a freestanding mattress, probably like a queen size mattress, I'd say. So there's no headboard. It's not up against wall. Like it's just there. It's got a dark, a dark, what would you call that, like cover, coverlet thing, whatever. But all the monochrome.

Do you know that you've used the word coverlet in two episodes now? I don't really. Yeah, Betty Broderick. When you were very graphically describing the scene in which she murdered those people, they had a coverlet. That's right. I think it was a colonial little coverlet. Yes.

Yes. I love a let. Fair to use. That's it. Bittersweet coverlet. I love it. Okay. So a coverlet, a dark coverlet on this bed though, and it has ties or restraints that

are attached to the mattress to hold somebody down. And so within the series of video we'll start and it'll be a handful of men, of young men. They're barefoot, they've got gelled hair, they're predominantly white. Maybe some Asian guys in there, but predominantly white. And they're fit. They've got six packs. They're young, they're young, young cute athletic straight boys who are buff. Yes, exactly.

Yeah. And then there's a series of Jane O'Brien videos where all of them are wearing Adidas shorts and t-shirts, like monochrome. Did they sponsor? Sware? I don't think so. Yeah. I don't know.

This is up there. It's literally on the labels. It's like the three lines and everything. I think that Adidas sponsoring TickleFish videos would be up there with the ice cream company sponsoring the Breath Arian. You know what I mean? Yeah. Yeah, that's right.

Maybe the same Dawn Draper brilliant mind came up with both ideas. Yeah, you never know. You never know. You never know. So these boys will, like in the video, they'll all be gathered on the same bed and they'll do kind of like these little intro things, like welcome to competitive endurance tickling. And they'll be like, I'm Brody and I'm from Sacramento and I love to lift weights and it's great to be here.

I'm really looking forward to it. And so they like all go through that. They only give their first name and they always, always mention how they don't like to be tickled because that's a very important part of this process is that you can't enjoy the torture. It's torture. Yeah. It's tickle torture. Yeah.

Yeah. So you have to not like it. And so, so that's kind of the intro. And then when it comes to like the videos themselves or like, you know, the more soft, the harder of the soft core, I will say one of the guys is restrained on the bed at his wrists and his ankles and he's usually kind of spread eagle. And then there is another guy, Adidas Sportswear, who's straddling on top of him, tickling like his underarms or his torso.

And then slowly another guy or two will join and like tickle his feet and they'll use like brushes or combs to tickle him and then maybe another person will come too. So it's, yeah, the tickle lead, the person who's restrained is typically yelling and giggling, laughing, asking for it to stop, yeah, cursing, being like, guys, stop it. And then usually the videos go from anywhere from like 15 to 45 minutes. Oh, yeah. And I think it's important to note that everybody stays closed throughout. It's not like it starts there and then everyone gets under us.

Like everyone's closed throughout the entire thing. And then the next like part of this series is there's like one-on-one interviews with the athletes, right? And they're reading from a set of questions that are very, very, I don't know, very intense questions. Like some of them are like, how did you know that you didn't like to be tickling? And they answer that, but then some of the questions are like a paragraph length. And they're like, please talk about a specific time where you were tickled and you didn't

want to be tickled. Who was it who was tickling you? What color was the room that you were in? How did you, did you enjoy it? If not, how did you not enjoy it? Be specific. Use details. And they're like, oh, okay, okay.

So they are answering all these questions. And there's the final series of videos that I found was like one-on-one interviews, but it would be like in a nondescript hotel room, like any hotel room in the US kind of thing, like in front of the nondescript blackout curtains. And these young guys would be like, thanks so much to Jane O'Brien media. I flew here first class. The food was great. The guys here are really cool.

The headshots, that's worth it alone. I got paid 500 bucks at the start. And when I leave, I'm going to get 1500. Do you like my bro-ey voice? I'm like, yes, yes, I do, I do. Thank you. No problem. You're my straightest bro, dude.

No problem. Taylor. And so, yeah, yeah. And then they're always making sure to like thank Jane O'Brien media and saying like this was such a good experience. They should try and do it. The money's so good, da, da, da, da. It's clearly coached.

And those videos are always like shaky cam. And like you can hear also the other thing that I must forgot. You can hear somebody breathing behind the camera. What's that about? I don't know. I think they must. I don't know. Bad.

It's bad. That's what it's about. It's bad. Yeah. These particular Tickle Fetish videos are under the Jane O'Brien production cover. Right. And I mean, I want to, I just want to kind of cut in and without giving away too much of the story, I, you know, I want to say from my end at least that I have no sort of a

verse reaction to the idea of fetishes, to the idea of fetish porn, to the idea of sex plus positivity. If you get off by watching someone get tickled and you can find a consenting partner who is into that, then rock with that all the way to the bank. That's what I say. So I don't, I don't just sit here and laugh. Like I think the idea of it, I think if you don't have a Tickle Fetish, maybe a Tickling Fetish feels a bit absurd in the way that if you don't have a clown fetish, you might

think that that's funny. But on the, when you really whittle it down to bare bones, it's, it's, they're just, they're fetish videos. The, the only issues are there's an ethical way to make a fetish video and then there's unethical ways to make fetish videos. Yeah, yeah. And I think that's an interesting part of the story is that the two seem to be conflated a lot.

They're like, this dude, David DiMotto, made fetish videos and then he did all this other nefarious stuff. And it's like, actually, no, you can kind of separate those two. Like he made fetish videos and then he did all this illegal horrible stuff. Like those are very different things. Yeah. I think it is really important to say from the get go that the fetish videos are totally legit.

I mean, the production is not that bad. Like. Now we're going, now we moved into critical appraisal. Right. Yes. Yes. But the other part of it too is like, if people, if two or more people were doing what is in the fetish videos out on the sidewalk, out in the street, there is no indecency law that

would require them to get off the street. Do you know what I mean? I think people would, I think people would turn their heads, but they wouldn't be breaking any laws. They might be a little uncomfortable. There's stuff that like, maybe that seems strange, like the clowns might seem strange to some people who don't have that fetish. But if you do, then you have something that you know that you like.

Good for you. Exactly. Some people spend a long time trying to figure out what it is they like sexually. And if you have honed in on it and it is something where everyone involved can consent, such as clowns, such as like smoking hot clown babes, then honk honk, man. Exactly. Yeah. Let's go to the circus.

Exactly. So, yeah. I think that's really good to establish because what is infamous about this story is not the tickling fetish, but rather the harassment of participants, staff, or anybody who has any contact with Jane O'Brien media. And I think it's important too that it's like specific to this company. And then we'll see later on, like the roots of the company, so specific to this particular person.

And we'll see later to some tickling fetish that is like consensual and legit and da-da-da. And it's still a production company, but they're doing it in a much more above level way. Right. Yeah. So, to learn a little bit more about what this harassment is, we need to go back. We need to go back to the beginning of the internet before the dancing baby. Wow.

We're going real, we're going real, real. Yeah. Before AIM. Yeah. To a time when there was no regulation on the internet, which is very similar to now. Yeah. But we're just going to go back to like the mid-90s. Okay.

Okay. Can you, what's the sound of like the connector? It's like eww. Is the connector some sort of horrible monster from like a nightmare? What the fuck are you doing? No, it's just like the internet always gets rid of a dial-up. What's the sound of the imbibers? What the fuck was that?

Retainer slurs. Yeah. Okay. So, it's the mid-90s. We're, the internet is still a very new thing. The computers are fucking huge. We haven't even gotten to like the colorful Macs yet. No.

My God. The before times. Before times. Before times. Little gray square Macs. Yeah. With the colorful Apple too. Yeah.

Pop a color. Our neighbors had one of those. It was really exciting. We had, in my school, we had a bunch of those that we would later upgrade to the colorful ones. I would always play, there was an off-brand wheel of fortune clone. Phrase craze, it was called. I would always play Phrase Craze and I was the shit at Phrase Craze.

I bet you were. Back when I was like this. I bet you shut down that second grade classroom. Absolutely. I used to be the smart kid in the night plateau and everyone caught me, so it's not as good anywhere, but. Was that before or after someone found out that you couldn't use scissors? This would be after.

Anyway. Sorry. I didn't need to help you on that one. It's okay. I know how to use scissors now. It's fine. I did an exchange with Sheila Pascual. She taught me how to use scissors and I taught her times tables.

We had like a prison barter, so that's how I learned my times tables. That's how I learned how to use scissors. That's how she learned time tables. There you go. And then I had, I also was the shit at where in the world is Carmen San Diego. It was a big game that I played in the Starbucks. Yeah. Yeah.

We've got an internet user by the name of Terry DeSisto, a.k.a. Terry Tickle. She also goes by. Very nice face. Very, well, yeah, yeah. She was ahead of her time really. She was a colleague. She, she claimed to be a college daged girl in Boston who collected tickling videos of teenage boys who would tickle each other.

I think she would pay the boys really well and her solicitation on numerous types of websites and email and early websites, blah, blah, blah. She says, I collect tickling videos as a hobby. When that costs me a lot, a lot is capitalized of money. I maintain the largest personal collection in the world of made just for me amateur videos featuring guys being tied up and tickled by a girlfriend, good girlfriend, real friends, or even guy friends. End quote.

Right. And the photo that Terry uses is like she's looking over her shoulder and she has a like off the shoulder black thing. It's, it's like a senior portrait. Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Over the shoulder, but she's also has like this crazy kind of like 80s hair that's like three feet up from her forehead and then the rest is like a wave of teasing.

Nice. The guns down her shoulders. Nice. Nice. I love that. Yeah. You can still see, you can still see that haircut around, man. You can still see that haircut around.

Yeah. I mean, you do. You're like, whew. Good for you. Well, I think it's good for you. Okay. So Terry tickle soliciting these videos from young men and there's a few situations where we know that this is happening or like it's recorded that and reported that it's happening.

But there's a few that I'll point out. One is this young guy in Australia, Gary, who was in a garage band and his garage band created a website and they put up some pictures and Terry found him that way and started soliciting videos and, and really just like kind of hounding him for videos, I guess, right. She thought, Hey, he was really attractive and he'd be really good at tickle video, blah, blah, blah. So he said, no, I don't want to do that. No, thank you.

And in retaliation, Terry stole his identity, hacked Gary's website and went about the internet pretending to be Gary. What the fuck? He was a 16 year old boy. What the fuck? Yeah. And a small town in Australia and all of a sudden this lady from across the world, this adult from across the world is just like hacking your entire life has.

Yeah. He even sent him photos of his house, of his parents and his siblings and of his own school. And she said repeatedly, I'm going to ruin your life forever unless you do this. That is, I, I, that, that's terrible. That's so frightening. So frightening. And you didn't, you did nothing to, to earn this except exist. That's fucked.

Exist and be attractive to somebody, to some grown up across the world. And use the internet. Yeah. Yeah. That's fucking insane. And there's another case, and there's many, but I'm just kind of pulling out a few to give a sense. So there's a student who was at Drexel University and actually throughout the reporting and

subsequent lawsuits, he remains anonymous. Good. So I'll just call him the Drexel student. Sure. He had made some videos for Terry and had done some help working on a website for her, something like that. And at a certain point, he went off to college and he's like, well, I'm done with that. I'm just like, you would quit your job and just be like, I'm going to school now.

Bye. See you later. Right. And Terry was not done. She hacked the Drexel University computer system and she crashed the entire system. And then she also set up this email bomb, which repeatedly, repeatedly sent emails to the White House to whitehouse.gov with solicitations for tickle participants and advertising the videos.

Both of these attacks, she worked so that they breadcrumbed back to the Drexel student. So his university got in contact with him. The secret service showed up at his door, at his dorm room door. So one, that's fucking insane. That's insane. The amount of sophistication and time of an operation like that. So what it really is when it comes down to it, and I mean, if people haven't figured out who Terry Tickle is, they've at least figured out that she's linked to this broader

picture. So I think that what we're really looking at here is a case of somebody who, yes, has this tickling fetish, but also has bigger than that, this real pervasive sense of shame about who they are, and this far more pronounced fetish, if you want to call it that, but someone who gets off on wielding power over others and destroying lives, that to me, you can make as many tickle videos as you want, that has nothing to do with it. It's just this way of wanting to wreck people. Totally destroy people.

It's sadistic. Yeah. Maybe it's sadistic. It truly is. And so there's these instances going on. There's other stuff happening. She did the university-wide system crashing to multiple young men, most likely under similar circumstances of what we know.

There's four confirmed cases that are tied back to Terry Tickle of university platforms. That's fucking insane. I mean, is that not like legally actionable? Okay. Like, did any of these people, one, did any of the people who were framed get into more trouble than just getting their door knocked on by the FBI, and then two, did the person actually behind this ever face any kind of legal consequences? So I'm going to jump into that now.

So Gary, the Australian kid in the garage band, he finds a group online called Cyber Angels, and again, this is the early internet, even somehow even more deregulated than it is now. Yeah. Got in contact with them, explained his situation, and somebody from that group emailed him and said, here is a zip file. Send this to Terry Tickle, and she will leave you alone forever. He does it, and she's gone.

He doesn't really know what's on there because he's just fucking playing guitar in his garage. Doesn't know. Right. The file contained this goldmine of information, which was confirmation of stolen social security numbers from dead people attributed to Terry Disoto, and then credit card applications and statements for Terry as well. Also correspondence between Terry and David DiMotto, is why I actually get the first. So not only was there correspondence though, some of those like credit card applications

had his signature. Some of the PO boxes that Terry would use to send stuff were also attributed to David DiMotto. There were also work files from David DiMotto, which included his resume, right? And according to that, it was found out that DiMotto was working as a vice principal or like a vice headmaster and counselor at a series of schools across the East Coast. Beautiful. Yeah.

Just exactly where a person like that should be. One thing that his resume reveals is that he's worked at eight different schools in the last 10 years. So definitely a red flag. Definitely a red flag, especially when you consider, because I just remember that this dude Gary is 16. Yeah, he's 16. Yeah, that's rough.

Don't do that. Yeah. And I think too, like, you know, this was an era before our current era that's still trying to figure this out. But I think a lot of these schools, if they found out about him or if something came up that realized it was inappropriate, they would just move him. They would just be like, we know what you're doing. We don't want you here.

The old Catholic church shuffle. Exactly. Exactly. Past the trash. We just lost the Vatican audience. Oh God. Our one less in our Vatican city. Past the trash.

May. It was the Pope, though. So it was an important one. Okay. So a few people were reporting on this at the time. There's a woman who was reporting for My City Paper in YC. Her name was Deborah Skoblionkov. And she picked up the Drexel student story and was reporting on that.

But then there was also Hal Karp, who had intended, he was a freelance writer, so he wrote for a few different publications, but he had intended to do a piece on the cyber angels. And through that reporting, he found Gary and he asked Gary, hey, could you send me a copy of that zip file? And 16 year old Gary is like, fuck yeah, here we go. And so Hal has this treasure trove of information about David DiMotto. And connections to Terry Tickle.

So he starts reporting on it little by little. He's doing this. He's doing that. He gets pieces published in Reader's Digest, America's Most Wanted. At a certain point, he is contacted by two separate heads of universities and asked, can you please submit your materials to the FBI? Because we have tried and tried to report this, but they keep saying they don't know who this is.

They have no paper trail on him. And so Hal Karp is like, okay, and he does. He gives them all his files that he has. So in the mid-90s here, the cyber vigilantes are far outpacing the FBI. I know, right? It's like... Because it seems to me they were just like, yeah, okay, let me get back to you with a zip file in eight hours.

Yeah, yeah, just like a quick forward reply all done and done. Oh, that was so easy. Yeah, who knew? So within the week of Karp turning in those documents, D'Amato is booked into custody. Okay. So great, awesome, justice for all, Gary's safe, the Drexel student is safe. To answer your question, they are plaintiffs, or they're involved in the court case. The Drexel student's never named.

So they don't have any repercussions. It's known and it's well established that they were not responsible, that they were targets of this harassment. Good. What's not good is that David D'Amato turns out has a shit ton of money and got himself a very good lawyer. His dad is George D'Amato, who is, or I should say was at this point, a partner in this huge Wall Street law firm called D'Amato and Lynch, which is like really well established.

Can't touch the wealthy, can you? As wealthy as you can get, right? And he's also a lawyer. So in the documentation of the hearings that are against, you know, court case against David D'Amato, none of the cyber terrorism, which it becomes called later on, none of the cyber terrorism is brought up. None of the harassment of young men. And there's no word of this kind of tickling videos, which of course the tickling videos

is not. So then what the fuck are they, what the fuck are they talking about? That's all of it. What are they sitting a nice day? We're having. I know. Right? Like what the fuck do you talk about?

So he pled guilty to only two federal misdemeanor counts of computer fraud and abuse. So it wasn't even identity fraud. So I don't know. Early days of the internet, a very two sympathetic judge, lawyers that were, that were agreeing outside. A rich, a rich, a rich white guy. Yeah, exactly. So his sentence, he was meant to live in a halfway house while he was going to be studying

law at his father's alma mater, Fordham University. Just what you want. That's just what you want to do for this man. Give him a fucking law book. Study up. You can find your own loopholes next time. You won't have to ring us up. Fucking unbelievable.

I know. I know. After Karp heard that, he was obviously dismayed. He contacted, he's still on his freelance writing gig and he contacts Fordham University and he says, does David, is David DiMotto going to be a future student of yours? Because of this court case and some of these findings, he has a piece published, how Karp has a piece published in Readers Digest that talks about the court case and the issue with him going to law school and how that doesn't seem quite right.

So when Fordham University hears about this, they rescind his acceptance and the drug restructures his sentence so that he has to spend one year in prison. David DiMotto does. Okay. So you think like, okay, it's a little bit better. He should probably be sent for much longer and you would think that there would be some type of regulation or monitoring of his internet use, but there is none, absolutely none. Of course.

That is. So when is this happening? I think it's like 96 or 97. We're still a little bit in our infancy around internet lawmaking here, yeah? Yeah. Like in terms of things like the punishments too, like of course this person should never be, this person should get one hour at the damn library with an armed guard standing over his shoulder.

Yes. That's what this guy should get. Exactly. Exactly. So you would hope, you would pray, you would think that at least for that year, shit wouldn't be going down. But I've listened to this podcast before. And it does.

So while he's in jail, David DiMotto is still sending out instructions to his employees and to his producers as Terry DeSisto. Right. And he, so he's like handwriting letters and like sending out, yeah, it's all just hand written cross on. So wait, so he's in jail. So perks of minimum security or something, I don't know. So it seems to me, he's sending letters out of jail as Terry DeSisto.

I mean he's signing them as T. So maybe there is. I signed my emails as T and now that's ruined. Oh no, I took that away from you. I'm sorry. Is it a capital T or a lowercase? I think it was capital. I use lowercase. See, that's different.

Yeah, you're fine. You're totally fine. Okay. But I think you'll like this. He attributes the handwritten notes and the lack of online presence to the fact that Terry is sick with mono and she's in hospital. Yes. Okay.

Okay, Terry. I thought he liked that. Get better. Get better soon, babe. So he gets out of jail. There's no type of parole or restriction on his internet usage. So of course, Jane O'Brien media pops up. More and more videos are being produced.

The one that I started, that description, they're getting like higher quality, all of this stuff. Now we're moving from, I'm Terry Tickle, I'm the baddest bitch around with the biggest collection of private tickle porn. Maybe your girlfriend's tickling you, I don't know, to strictly into this competitive tickling hot boys in singlets tickling each other. Yes. It's really important to see the shift from like voiced and decided amateur videos to,

and it's not like a black and white shift. It's like this weird sidestep where it becomes CET, competitive endurance tickling. So it's all about the athleticism of it. It's trying to get young fit men, but also at this time to 2000, early 2000s, very decidedly heterosexual men. And I think that's an important one for David DeMotto because he has deep seated homophobia, deep hatred of himself and any type of, any type of homosexuality within him. But also he's realized that he can use the homophobia that is in sports communities or

in very heterosexual communities, he can use that homophobia as harassment and retaliation against these boys. It's another tool against them. Right. Yeah. Cause it's also the case and I, this is the impression I'm under, please tell me if I'm wrong. The young men who are doing these competitive endurance tickling videos, they don't explicitly

say you're doing this for somebody with a tickle fetish, you're doing this for people with tickle fetishes. They're very careful about not doing that. So that becomes another one of those lines of consent where obviously it's not okay at all to go after someone who makes a consensual tickle porn video for you and then just decides they want out or whatever, but there's this whole other aspect of like, if you don't put together that what you're doing is homoerotic soft core tickle fetish porn and not just some weird league that someone's trying to get off the ground for whatever reason.

If you don't make that connection in your head and I make no judgment on someone who wouldn't make that connection in their head, some people wouldn't. Not everyone goes right to, wait a minute, this is somebody's fetish. So then it becomes an extra shitty thing too because there's that aspect of like, you're so embarrassed that you've been deceived and now that you're being harassed by this like horrible monster of a person who really will stop at nothing to ruin your life for no goddamn reason. And on top of that, you have this extra thing of having to like go to whoever you respect,

your parents, your pastor, your friends and family, whatever it is and be like, yo, your boss and be like, yo, I'm in a really bad situation, right? Cause he's cause he'll fucking email them to the people you love. That's horrible. Yeah. That's horrible. That's so abusive and nasty. That's so horrible.

So Jane O'Brien media is doing this, David DiMotto is out of jail and yet still using other other personas, right? Terry tickle is pretty much retired. All her social security numbers are back to dead people. Jane O'Brien is also a bullshit name. Totally. Yes. Yes.

Totally. Jane O'Brien is another, another fake woman that he made up out of thin air to have a mask to hide behind. So he wasn't doing his, this bullshit under his own name. I think he may have learned a lesson though, which is to not attribute it to a fully crafted person with a social security number, but to a production company. Because as you know, in the US, if you're a business, you can do anything. You can literally do whatever the fuck you want to anybody you like.

Yes. Yes. So it does not matter. Now enters tickled the film. Have you watched a documentary tickled? So yes, I love tickled. That's where my knowledge of this story comes from. So all the stuff that you gave me just now, I'm so glad you included all of that in there

because the film touches on some of it, but not in this much, not in this coherent timeline and it also touches on a lot of other stuff. I love the movie tickled. I think it's a brilliant, it's a documentary, but it's also a thriller. Yeah. You know what I mean? They do a really good job. They do a really good job.

They do a really good job of how to reveal the information that makes it the thriller. That's what makes it the thriller. Yeah. They do a good reveal. So I don't want to, I don't want to spoil it for anybody who hasn't seen it. I mean, some of this is already kind of spoiled, but I think if you still watch it, it'll still be exciting. Absolutely.

I think that I would still enjoy watching the film, watch it with someone who has no idea what they're about to watch. I did that with Mitchell and he just like kept turning to me like, what? So but to give just like a brief setup of tickled the film, because I think this also kind of builds on the harassment angle to David DiMotto, is a New Zealand pop culture reporter named David Ferrer or David Ferrier. I think he pronounces it Ferrier. Ferrier.

Yeah. David Ferrier. Of, um, of, uh, Dark Torrest. Yeah. That's his new, his new Shabu. But before this, he had never made a film. He was just reporting on like kooky characters and pop culture stuff. He's this very tall attract.

He's really cute. And he wears cat shirts all the time. I think I, I have to say. Take off your shirt. What are you doing here? Man. Get a room. I don't have a lot of celebrity crushes.

Like when I was, even when I was like a teen, whatever, I didn't have a lot. But I have always held a fat flame for Jemaine Clement. Yeah. That's hilarious. Slight of the Concorde fame. That's so funny. Yeah, you would. Yeah, I would.

Right? Totally would. Right? Where I think I was home from college and my mom was like, we were watching Slight of the Concorde. So my mom was like, you should just write him a letter. You never know. You should just write him a letter.

You never know. I would do it. 100%. You never know. You never know. That's all right. So David Ferrier is gay though. He's bisexual.

Oh, look at you. In with a chance. All right. Okay. You did your research. You looked it up. Right. Yeah.

Yeah. You should write him a letter. I should write him a letter. Right. You never know. So he stumbles on to the Jane O'Brien stuff and he very innocently reaches out and he says, hey, is there anybody who's competed in one of these things that's a New Zealander? Dean, may you please?

This is on Facebook. This is on like the wall of Jane O'Brien media. On Jane O'Brien media's Facebook wall. Yeah. You are going to get some dead things in your mailbox. Yeah. Yeah. It's true.

So Jane O'Brien media responds back and it says something like, so far about five New Zealander's have participated, but to be brutally frank, association with a homosexual journalist is not something that we will embrace. We desperately don't want a homosexual participant base applying to this project. My concern is your quote unquote journalistic style, reputation and fan base in your country. This is offered in earnest and strictly professional. That is a word for word the email that Josie sent me when I asked her if she wanted to start this podcast.

Thankfully, I talked her into doing it. That's fucked up. That's bananas. So fucked up. And it's just like it escalated so quickly. Like I love the first line of like, we've had about five. So just to set the record straight, about five, maybe four. I don't remember.

There was this one guy. Maybe that one. It might have been South African. Yeah. I don't remember. But faggot comma, quite a quite a turn that took insane stuff. And then like there's a little bit more correspondence where he's like, I'm so sorry to hear you don't want to be associated with homosexual journalists.

Like what can you say, you know? And of course, not to gild the lily here. The unspoken extra sting on the tail of this interaction is that like absolutely anybody with eyes can see how intensely homoerotic these tickling videos are. Oh, very clearly. Like that's immediately like even if you were just passing by on the street, I don't know why we keep saying this is happening out in the street. It's the pandemic.

People need to get out. But like if you were just to happen on one of these videos and passing or see it as part of some weak and weird news show or podcast or whatever, and they didn't have all of this extra nefariousness attached, you would just look at it and be like, that looks like really, really gay tickle fetish stuff. Yeah. You know what I mean? That's just how it reads.

So like the idea that this person, you know, it's sad to me, I hesitate to empathize with somebody who seems to be a psychopath, but it's sad to me that someone would be so, so fearful of their own homosexuality that they would have this much kind of dysfunction and anger and whatever built up around it. Like that obviously is sad to me that sadness stops pretty quick when you see how this person deploys that against other completely innocent human beings. It's wild that this person would have the co-honest to send a video, to send a letter like that.

Yeah. And I think, yeah, you make the point that it's like, it's very clearly homoerotic and that's like the fact that they would reply with such homophobia is that's where it's just like the total disconnect because you could just be like, great, cool, do a piece on us. Yeah. Competitively. It's not porn.

It's not porn. Yeah. Look at him laugh. He's a champ. He's number one seed. Like you could do that easy. Yeah. Honestly.

Yeah. Honestly. This is gonna put me on the spot. If this was legit, if this was legit, a fun, not fun, it's terrible, it's tickle torture. But if this was a thing where everyone knew where they were getting into, everyone knew it was gay, tickle shit, but it was still a contest and there was still money. You'd fucking print. I think I still want to see it.

I'd watch it. Like not even in a porn way. I'd want to see, I want to see which one of these young studs can hold out the longest. Like you know what I mean? Win Taylor. It's this. Would you do it? Would you compete?

No. I, because I don't think I could win. Yeah. I don't think I, competitive endurance tickling, I'm as someone who's, I wouldn't say severely ticklish, but I'm not moderately ticklish either. I'm getting ticklish. Yeah. I don't know that I would do very well and I certainly don't think I would enjoy it.

Yeah. Like those three words, none of those three words, do I particularly enjoy competitiveness? No. Not really. Endurance. Fuck no. And tickling is not like, it's not up there, you know, I just. I love competitive.

I don't mind endurance. The tickling is where the wheels fall off the trolley for me a bit. All right. All right. Yeah. I get that. I get that. Go ahead.

Where were we? Okay. Where were we? Homosexual journalist. Oh yeah. The cute one. So he sends out, yeah, the Facebook thing, what he gets back in addition to the response on the page is an email from Jane O'Brien and also another woman named Debbie Coon.

Right. So they're kind of tag teaming and Tim and pretty much on the daily sending him emails that are harassment. Yeah. They are calling him names. They are belittling his career. They are doing, and he's responding to, he's responding to some of them just because it's just all seems so ridiculous.

And he's meant to follow these kind of ridiculous lines for his reporting, like he's, is that kind of like strange, weird and wacky reporting thing that he does. And so he's pretty affable guy and just kind of follows the line. But it turns to like, it gets a little, it gets a little gnarly. He talks to a friend named Dylan Reeves and they start working on this project together to kind of get to the bottom of what this all is. And that is, that's essentially where the documentary starts. More people from Jane O'Brien come to New Zealand.

The production company flies out three individuals. One of whom is named Kevin Clark, who is a producer and like cinematographer on the projects, on the videos. Probably the heavy breathing that we heard. Most likely the heavy breathing. Yeah. Yeah. Definitely.

Like that's not confirmed, but definitely. And so they come out to New Zealand and it's very awkward because it's all just like, you better watch your shit son because we're going to drown you in lofties and it's going to be horrible. And yet Kevin Clark and his other people don't know who Jane O'Brien is. They don't know who run the company. They know nothing. Right.

They don't even know who's, they don't even know who's guard dog they are supposedly. Exactly. Yeah. And so David Ferrier and Dylan Reeves decide, you know what, we got to make this documentary. No matter what legal threats are being made, like this is just too weird. And these, this is just, there's too, there's too much bullying happening to not try and rectify it. Yeah.

So they start fundraising for the documentary and there's like a group of them who are kind of researching things on the tickle fetish and things start to kind of pick up speed with the fundraising and then they realize Stephen Fry has backed the documentary through the Kickstarter. Oh. Yeah. He's an executive producer. Ah.

That's a fit. That's a fit. Yeah. Yeah. So, so they start to realize like, whoa, this isn't just going to be like an internet doc, like a 20 minute internet doc that we're going to put out there. Like this can be a feature length film. And the story tracks their research and what they uncover and what they find.

And some of it is what we've kind of said already. And I don't want to unpack all of it because for those of you who haven't seen the documentary, I want you to be surprised and excited by it. So I think there's some things that I do want to touch on from the documentary because I think they kind of illuminate the whole story. And one of them is they did interview a past participant in the tickle fetish videos and his name is TJ. And he's, I don't know if you remember, he's interviewed in the gym.

I like, I remember TJ. I do. Yeah. He's got a good hat. This has church on it. Yeah. That was nice. I'd wear that.

I know. I thought of you. He talks about his experience and he was a young kid. A member of his family was undergoing cancer treatment. He needed the money. He rolled up, met Kevin Clark, was like, hmm, that guy's a bit of a weirdo. He realized it was all guys and then he realized he would be restrained. He would be tied to the bed.

And he's like, did not know this, but I'm here. Yeah. I need this money. And they did give me the money. They're good. Whatever they are, they're good to, they're good to pay you. Yeah. And he's like, I just hope it doesn't get out there.

He said that the other guys who were there were, he quotes, normal guys. He says they were athletes, some MMA fighters. Others were actors. Yeah. He says normal actors, meaning, I think what he means is they weren't porn actors. Yeah. And they seemed straight, probably. They seemed straight.

Yeah. I think that's the other thing too, when he says quote unquote normal, he's also saying they were heterosexual. I get that the phrasing of that is a little problematic when you break it down. But I get where his type of guy, what he means when he says that, and he's been kind of victimized enough in the situation that I don't particularly need to quibble with his verbiage, but I also get like, you know, what is normal. Right.

Yeah. Yeah. Exactly. So he does a video. He does one of those interviews. He does, you know, kind of the whole series. And then a few years after he films it, he, he's like a semi pro football player. So he's going out for some teams and he starts Googling himself to see what coaches might

see when they look for him. And the videos come up. Right. He emails Jane O'Brien media and says, Hey, can we take those down? I never agreed to this and never consented to having them up. I just appreciate if we took my, my particular ones down, right, where I'm featured, right. No word from Jane O'Brien media, absolute silence. And then he decides, okay, well, I can talk to YouTube and tell them they're using my

name illegally. Please remove this video, which he does. And they do. And then Jane O'Brien media comes after him, right. They do very similar harassment to what we talked about earlier threats towards his family though as well. They make a website with his name and they post his email, his physical address, his cell phone number and include all the videos.

So if he was, there was an employer and they see like, Oh, TJ so-and-so. Okay. Well, maybe it's a different guy, wait, it looks like him, wait, that's the cell phone we have. Wait, that's the, it's everything. Yeah. They even email employers or potential like the school where he works at, where he's a coach.

Right. And they say, like, do you want an out gay guy with a male tickling fetish where he likes to be tied up by other gay athlete? Like they're just like- Horrible. Horrible. None of it's true. Yeah.

But there's absolutely no way to stop the machine because the videos get reposted to YouTube, but then they get posted on every other videos or every other video platform. So he's pretty fucked. Yeah. And he's been told that he's been released by teams because of this. Teams or even employers have said there's just too much media attention around it. We don't want to touch it. That's-

We don't want to touch you. I feel strongly about destigmatizing sex, destigmatizing gay, destigmatizing fetish, destigmatizing sex work because of situations like that where an employer feels emboldened to do that to somebody who literally, you hear this guy's story and your heart goes out to him because he was deceived, he was victimized, he needed money because he had a sick relative. You know? He was preyed upon.

Yeah. He was preyed upon. And so this guy, regardless of whether he was gay or straight, regardless of whatever, did nothing wrong. This guy, obviously being like- They said falsely in their email to his employer that he was gay. That's already bad. Obviously there's nothing wrong with being gay, but there's nothing wrong with doing

a fucking soft core tickle video. And obviously this guy was hoodwinked into it. That's fucking wrong. But if you're an employer and you're issue with this guy is that he got tickled for some money, fucking grow up, who cares? Yeah. Yeah. And I think, because that's another important thing that I want to mention from the documentary,

is they also interview a producer of tickle fetish videos named Richard Ivy, who's based out of Orlando, and then actually he's an executive producer of the documentary. He ends up funding them in some way. He probably feels strongly about ethical tickling in the community. I think so. I think he must. If this guy's a big name tickle fetish guy, he for sure has been hearing about Terry tickle for years.

He's like, she gives us all a bad name. Yeah, exactly. And yeah, and he did have some early interactions with her because they were both trying to find participants or actors who would be interested in doing it. But Richard Ivy is very above board and has been since the get-go. So yeah, I think that's a really important part of the documentary is that they show the tickling fetish for what it truly is, which is a playful consenting. Richard Ivy is very clear.

He's like, it's safe and consenting. He refers to it as erotic rather than sexual, which I think is a good way to distinguish it. It's like, it's for sexual pleasure, but it's not explicit sex. So they put together this documentary. And like I was saying before, they expected David Ferrier and Dylan Reeves and some other tickle friends who include this guy named Josh Drummond, who wrote about the experience. And Josh Drummond says, what we expected to be a view-on-demand doco for a few Kickstarter

backers and interested randos turned out to be a bonafide smash hit at Sundance, a critical darling doco is doco is very well, Kiwi, but yeah, I like that a lot. So yeah, because when you watch it, it's like, it's so well put together. You're like, well, of course, it's a fantastic film. So apparently before the film was released, after everything in the shop, before it was released, Demado seems to have gone to great lengths to keep it from being released. So anonymous agents contacted the producers offering to buy the film outright several times on several occasions.

Oh, wow. I wonder what those offers were like, because I'd entertain it. I get once you've imagined though, once you've put all of this like moral energy into like, we're going to right or wrong, we're going to stop this bully, TJ, your story is safe with us. And then you get like a really fat offer and you're like, oh, man, I can get jewels put in my teeth. Like how many more documentaries I could make that are all morally superior.

And then you just then you just shift into pro pro Terry Demont, DeSisto, pro tickling. You just start making the tickle videos. That's that. Yeah, that's that rabbit hole that you go down. But even the PR firm for the Sundance offices were broken into my god. It's never happened before. And I don't think it's happened since and yet because who the fuck would do that? So bad, so bad.

Like computers and desks or ransacked that kind of thing is pretty weird when it comes to how carp who was the reporter who reported or who had the zip file from the cyber angels and all that he he's in the documentary. He's he's a talking head, but I have this quote from him and I think it's really interesting. So Hal Karp says, quite honestly, when that guy, meaning David Ferrier first contacted me, my first response that it was that it wasn't legit. I assumed it was actually DiMotto, which yeah, yeah, because Hal Karp also really turned his life upside down.

So some vengeance might be in the cards there. Hal Karp says, I heard over the years that he blamed me for what happened, rightly so. And actually, for a long time, I simply stayed offline. I had no social media accounts, etc. For that very reason. And I told the New Zealand guy that I didn't believe him at all. But if there was a TV station where I could call him back the following day and request him by name, we could talk.

He turned out to be real and legit. Always good for you. That's why he's a cyber angel. So you've seen the documentary tickled. Have you watched the tickle king? Yes. Yes, but other than one climactic scene, which I'm sure you'll talk about, I don't remember what happened to it.

It's very short. It's 20 minutes. It's on YouTube. It's for free. Don't watch it until you've seen the feature length documentary, because it doesn't rehash. It just follows up. The kicker, which I'm sure is that climax you're talking about, Taylor, is that at the LA screening, where it's only Dylan Reeves, the co-director, who's doing a Q&A, David

D'Amato is in the audience. He's there with a big bag of popcorn, watching away. I kind of, listen, I'm not, I'm not going to give David D'Amato any points. I like that move. No points. Zero points. I don't like that move. Zero points.

You're fucking, you're rotten in hell if you really are dead, but showing up with the big bag of popcorn, I would have brought like glossies to sign and hand out to people. You know what I mean? I hear, I hear I've got some fans in attendance to my biggest fan, David Barrier, like I would go full real house once on the moon. Yeah, yeah, that makes sense. But I like the bag of popcorn. Yeah, I agree.

I also like popcorn, so. Yeah, no, I love popcorn. So it's a little wild that he's in the theater, and he takes part in the Q&A as well, because everybody in this theater has just watched a movie where essentially the plot is, who is this man? Can we get in contact with him? No, no, no. He eludes the entire film, and yet there he is in the movie theater where you just watched

the film. So it's very surreal. And a person who has, as you've established, gone to great lengths to hide behind fake games, fake faces, random anonymous yes men who he sends out as legal guardians and whatever, goes to a great amount of trouble to seem like other people and everything at Yes. Yes. He uses a lot of funds to do so, and yet here he is. Q&A doesn't really lead to a lot.

He has some stylistic compliments for the documentary. It's well made. But his verdict is, and I quote, as we say in New York and in Hollywood, you need to lawyer up. So he's just, he has all this pseudo-legalese that he uses, which I think if anybody else were saying it, it would be like, eh. Oh, I'm scared of him. He's this.

He's so intimidating. He's a middle-aged white dude who wears a suit. He's a bigger man, and he has a wide vocabulary, and he talks not like he knows everything, but the way that he talks, you believe that he knows everything. It's terrifying. Sorry, sorry. I just, but I just want to cut it really quick. To me, that move that David D'Amato did where he brought in the popcorn, that is the move

of a petty gay man. Like to me, from the inside, from inside the community, the movement, I- That one time. That one time. But I called it the movement. It was fucking hilarious. I still call it that. But like as someone from within the movement, I'm literally looking over there, like you

should have just had like a fan to clock out while you were doing that. That's, that's very true. That's a really good point. Yeah. Yeah. Mmm. I'm watching this movie about myself, bitch. I already know what you're going to tell me, because I was on the other side of those

emails. Like. So that part goes into the follow-up film of the Tickle King. There's another part where they're outside the theater, and Dylan Reeves, the co-director, is talking with David D'Amato, and David D'Amato says something to the effect of like, how can you, you're a family man, aka you're heterosexual. Yes. How can you associate with David Ferrier, this homosexual recorder?

Oh no. And Dylan Reeves is just like, I don't understand that logic, that logic doesn't make sense. Yeah. Because I don't, I don't have. Because I'm not homophobic. I'm not homophobic. I don't hate gay people. That's tough.

Yeah. Yeah. So the documentary comes out in 2016. The follow-up, the Tickle King, comes out, that's like a year later, but like, like 11 months later, an Irish twin, if you will. And then, and then March 2017, an obituary appears, yeah, in a New Jersey newspaper, heralding the news that David P. D'Amato is dead. Okay.

So of course, everybody suspects that he faked his own death. He's got the money. I've never heard this. Yeah. Yeah. He's definitely got the money. He's got the know-how. Yeah.

He knows how to manipulate these systems, and he certainly has the motive to do so. He's already a very in-sealer creature, a hermit, has people at working at a high level underneath him who all claim not to really know who this person is. Yeah. So it's not, it's not crazy out of the question. Yeah. There's still somebody who's running the Jane O'Brien Media Facebook group, and they go under the name of Louis Palusso.

Like the page on the website, or the page on Facebook leads to LouisPalusso at yahoo.com. You go to Tickletopia, which is the new website that's a subscription service to all the archived videos. Louis Palusso is running that as well. His email is there. The intro of that site reads, Thanks in advance for keeping the tickling alive. I don't like it. So here's my thing, and I, you know, if you are one of our, what I assume to be, many

listeners with a tickling fetish, I would request that you don't subscribe to this service. No. Go to myfriendsfeet.com, owned and operated by Richard Ivey. Go to Peggy'sfeet.com, oh yeah. I'm a child, baby, now I get brought up, and I'm just one of my favorite King of the Hill episodes. So good. So good.

And Peggy Hill had nothing to be ashamed of. No, she's got beautiful feet. Beautiful giant feet, and someone made her feel beautiful. There's so many, there's so many levels to that episode. Yes. So the internet is like, there's no fucking way that David DiMono is alive. But I have even more resolution for you, Taylor Mitchell Lasso. Okay.

Because usually I don't. Usually I'm like, I don't know. I stopped researching, so the story is done. David Ferrier and Dylan Reeves, they kept getting correspondence from people saying like, I think I saw him, he's over here. And so David Ferrier and Dylan Reeves co-write a short article for the spinoff, which is a New Zealand. I know the spinoff.

Oh, okay. It's great. Yeah, no, it's the funny writers. So they post something to the spinoff, and they very clearly say David DiMono is no longer living. And we debated about whether or not we should publish his death certificate, but considering the amount of attention and the amount of conspiracy surrounding his death, we think it's the only way to actually give him some peace.

So they post his death certificate. You can get one of those if the key goes. You see that he died from cardiac arrest with complications due to obesity and diabetes. And they pretty much say he's dead, y'all. This is done. So I don't know if the people behind tickled, who seemed like a dogged, intrepid sort. They're satisfied. I can imagine them being like, I'm so glad this guy is dead.

Please don't make us do another documentary. I don't want to deal with this for all. But I take their word. To me, it seems like the obvious thing to do is to look into this guy, Louis Paluso. Yeah. Because what do we know about this guy? Is that supposed to be anybody? There's no way in hell that's a real name.

He has posted on the Jane O'Brien Media Facebook saying, RIP David, and then so he posted that and then a few clicks down, he posts, just to be clear, I meant David DiMotto. So we know RIP David DiMotto. David Suzuki is still alive, guys. Thank God. False alarm. Still saving the planet. Wow.

Yeah. Yeah. All of this, all the lawsuits that David DiMotto supposedly rots on people, all of the production stuff that he does, all of the flying people in or contestants or talent or in, force our hotels and blah, blah, blah. All of that, there's no way that the money he put in to this endeavor, both the harassment and the production, could ever have matched money that he made out of this. Oh, so, oh, I see what you mean, you're saying that he put significantly more money in than

he got out. Yes. Oh, so I took that the wrong way. But money wasn't the object. Which is a little terrifying to me, to be honest. This was never about money. This was a project, a lifestyle, a full-time job, undertaken by somebody who had no care for money because, like you said, he came from an extremely wealthy family, he had a

support net. Daddy was a lawyer. Daddy was a lawyer, inheritances, fucking hedge funds, whatever the fuck, I don't know what hedge funds are, but because I don't fucking have one, is my point. This is not someone for whom money was the object. This is someone who operated out of a mix of anger, shame, an intense sexual need to possess people, to have power over people. To have power over people and to use that power over people.

It wasn't a hypothetical kind of power, it was someone who liked to use their power to humiliate and stalk and embarrass and shame people. Yeah. There is a lot to this story, it's such a pattern of behavior from this one awful man. Yeah, I think that's what's very interesting is it's just like, it's on the same road, but he's driving very erratically on that road. And it's surprising where he goes, even within the confines of this repeated behavior. It's really, really strange and awful.

I think that we really like to be lawyers into other subcultures. And this is a very- We isn't you and me, or we isn't like humans. We, the global we. We really like to- I'm thinking of CSI. In the past year or so, I've put on a couple of CSI episodes here and there, and I find that the ones that I come back to are the ones where they'll go to the furry convention, or they'll go to the little people convention, or they'll go to- and God help you if you

had any kind of sexual fetish on CSI, because you were dead in a way that was directly linked to how depraved you were for wanting to fuck clowns, and I'm sorry that I keep going there, but there was a clown fucking episode. Point being, we like to be lawyers into other subcultures, and we like to exoticize kink and fetish and this sort of thing, because societally it's not- I think that it's gotten better lately. I think that now that everyone's on OnlyFans, you know, we kind of need to start having these conversations, but up until very recently, and even now, there was a lot of stigma around

the idea of things like kink and fetish, and sexually being in ways that were outside of the vanilla, and so like I said, I think that that provides a window for a lot of people into this story as, whoa, here's this bananas thing, and it's in the context of a tickling fetish. And like I say, obviously once you go deeper into this story, this isn't a story about a tickling fetish at all. This is a story about- It could have been about anything.

It could have been about anything. It could have been about videos of people dusting antiques or whatever. It doesn't fucking matter. It's about a person who gets off on hurting others. I think it also kind of resonates in a digital age too, because everybody now has some sort of like online past, and you see it come back to haunt people. You see it come back to haunt people who said things on their Twitter account. Someone made some sort of video clip 10 years ago, and then it resurfaces or whatever, and

I think that it causes great distress, obviously, when stuff like this comes out. And so even if it wasn't something as dramatic as someone in my family had cancer, even if it was just like I wanted to keep my lights on, or I wanted to fucking buy a nice jacket for myself, or whatever it was. Or have a story to tell. Or have a story. This will be funny. This will be weird.

And I get paid two grand at the end of it, you know, whatever. And for all of that to kind of like resurface and then get blasted, I think that like really touches a nerve as far as like digital anxieties. Yeah. You know? Does that make any sense? Yes. Yes it does.

Yeah. That's crazy. Yeah. You expect a very angry letter from Jane O'Brien Media after we put this out. I'm a known, I'm a known homosexual. They're going to come after me first. Oh. Jebabies.

Whatever. I'll just send him back a message being like, okay, David, we all know who you are. We all know you're not dead. Who zombie fuck off. Thank you, Josie, for that story and to all of you for listening. If you want more and for me, we release episodes every other Sunday on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, and at bittersweetinfame.com. Stay sweet.

The sources that I used for this episode were the documentary Tickled by David Ferrer and Dylan Reeves, which came out in 2016. I also used their follow-up documentary, The Tickle King, which came out in 2017, also by David Ferrer and Dylan Reeves. I used the article Funny Not Funny, an interview with Hal Karp by Angela Travis, published in centraltrack.com on July 28th, 2016. I used the articles by Debra Skoblyonkov, one called Tickle Me Terry, published in February 1998 and Not Tickled, published summer of 2001.

Those appeared in My City paper in YC. I watched the ABC News Nightline episode called The Bizarre Controversy Surrounding Tickled Documentary, which aired 2016. I also used a few articles that appeared in the publication The Spin-Off. The first article was by David Ferrer himself. It never stops. David Ferrer descends back down the Tickled rabbit hole, published April 2017. And then also David Ferrer's article Life After the Tickle King's Death, which appeared

in June 2017. And an article by Josh Drummond, which appeared May 2016, Malice and Tickle Land, down the rabbit hole with David Ferrer's Tickle Friends.