HBO Robert Durst doc "The Jinx"

[8bitagent]

I had heard of the big Durst family empire, given they built the new world trade center "Freedom Tower" and so many more famous skyscrapers over the decades, and were one of the richest
families in America. And I had seen the Ryan Gossling/Kristen Dunst 2010 film "All Good Things". But had forgotten about the bizarre case of the Durst heir/brother of Douglas Durst Robert Durst.



Pretty blown away by the 6 part HBO documentary series, found it on par with fictionalized films like Zodiac or even last year's True Detective.
And a good example of what zillions of dollars at one's disposal can do, and how sometimes the best detectives in a case like this are just regular people.
He was arrested as the finale aired the other night, with a latex mask, guns and cash in his hotel room. And now apparently they are wanting
to re-open other missing person cases to see if there is a link.
http://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/durst-n326476

[Wombaticus Rex]

Well, let's see: start your documentary with two world-weary cops walking the camera through crime scenes they investigated many years ago, then hire the same production house who did the credits to True Detective to make essentially the same montage with the same effects, invoking a different setting and time period.

I don't fault Jarecki for those ham-fisted touches, though, that was surely insisted upon by HBO brass keen to capitalize on their most critically adored property since The Sopranos, yeah?

The content itself was remarkable and that ending was, of course, one hell of a blow to the gut.

Bob was ultimately a very sad character; it seemed as though he had wanted to get caught for decades only to be foiled by police ineptitude and of course, the immense power & protection his own wealth provided him.

[Jerky]

Not so sure what I think about Jareki, by the way. He is trying to get Jesse Friedman's conviction for pedophile rape overturned (despite his being out of jail already) based on some pretty flimsy freaking "exculpatory" evidence (and against the preponderance of a lot of rather convincing evidence).

Everyone here has seen Capturing the Friedmans, I take it? Pure RigInt popcorn fodder, that (altho it takes away one's appetite).

Jerky

[8bitagent]

I don't watch much of true crime related docu-dramas or specials from tv, but just given the enormous hype and headline news updates relating to this I had to check it out.

Obviously, Bob comes off as not sympathetic perhaps, but sad...he feels more Dustin Hoffman in Rainman than Hannibal Lecter. Hiii....! this is bob... is is voice message whenever Jarecki calls.
That moment where they show the Saturday Night Clip spoofing how he got off on that heinous 2001 act is really surreal. Or the scene where Bob is in a Time Square Starbucks.

Tonight TSA agents were attacked in the very same New Orleans airport Durst was about to flee to when cops closed in on him...not just finding a latex mask, guns and money but copies
of true crime books about him. He seemed fascinated at films, specials and books accusing him of these crimes. Wouldn't be surprised if Durst was watching the Jinx in the hotel when he was arrested.

Images of his brother Douglas standing in front of the Freedom Tower the Dursts constructed contrasted with the notion Bob had done all this after decades of feeling left out of the loop.

[guruilla]

writing a piece about this, here's some bits for RI-ers to chew on:

Durst was the first-born son of Seymour Durst, of the New York-based Durst Organization. To give you some idea of how powerful the Durst Organization is, it “owns and manages more than 8.5 million square feet of Class A office space in Midtown Manhattan and over one million square feet of luxury residential rentals.” In 2010, it joined in the development of the “Freedom Tower” or One World Trade Center, the building which replaced the twin towers destroyed in 2001. In other words, among the 1% of the 1%.

Robert Durst was the black sheep of the Durst empire. While he was a real estate developer in the business in the 1980s, it was his younger brother Douglas who was appointed to run the business, causing a rift between the two brothers that had been present from the start (as children they underwent counseling for sibling rivalry).

In 1982, Durst’s wife Kathleen McCormack Durst went missing. Though Durst was suspected by many of murdering her, he was never officially accused. In 2000, Durst’s longtime friend Susan Berman was shot in the head and killed. Once again Durst was suspected but not accused (until just last week). In 2001, Durst was arrested for the murder of his neighbor Morris Black, whose body Durst dismembered and wrapped up in garbage bags. He pleaded self-defense and was found not guilty of murder in 2003.

Andrew Jarecki made the 2003 documentary film Capturing the Friedmans, about a father and son both accused of sexually abusing children, and a 2010 feature film All Good Things, based on Durst and the possible murder of his wife. The documentary was highly memorable; the film not so much. Jarecki, like Durst, was born of a well-to-do family. The son of a “philanthropist-financier” and pharmacologist Henry Jarecki (a German Jew who fled the Nazis as a child), Jarecki junior went to Princeton college. He is the rare case of a filmmaker wealthy enough to be able to finance his own films (he even bought the rights to All Good Things back from Miramax when the film failed monumentally at the box office).

Jarecki tried to contact Durst during preproduction of All Good Things but Durst’s lawyers declined the invitation. (Jarecki consulted closely with the family of Kathleen McCormack.) After the film was completed, however, Durst apparently contacted Jarecki before its release and was invited to a screening. He liked the film—said that it moved him and felt that Jarecki “understood” him, and offered to give Jarecki an interview in which he would share some things he had not talked about publically before. Jarecki agreed. The interview eventually led to the six-part HBO series The Jinx, which climaxed with Durst’s apparently unwitting confession (on which the series ends) and which led, however directly, to Durst’s recent arrest.

....

The way that Durst inadvertently confesses his guilt while talking to himself on the toilet is both wildly improbable and weirdly inevitable. It is the kind of dramatically resonant and thematically true denouement we tend to expect, and get, only from the best kind of fiction. There is an inevitability to Durst’s self-exposure that relates both to the organic nature of the circumstances (we have already seen how Durst talks to himself unwisely even while he is wearing the mic) and to the psychology of the character. Why did Durst agree to the interview at all if not out of some deep, semi-conscious desire to confess?


It is possible that, as much as or more than Jarecki manipulating Durst, Durst manipulated Jarecki. That Durst wanted to get back at his family, to make a name for himself, even through infamy, and that he used Jarecki to do so. This begs the question as to the assumed positivity of the outcome of Jarecki’s “snare.” Exposing a killer would seem an unequivocal good; but there is a larger picture to consider. First of all, there is a smaller picture, which is the relationship between Durst and Jarecki. Jarecki was friendly with Durst and there was a bond of trust between them. Admittedly Durst broke that bond by lying to Jarecki about being in Madrid when he was really still in LA. And Jarecki wrestles openly with his decision to trap Durst by springing evidence on him, describing what he is about to do as “cold.” There are no technical grounds for betrayal, even at the best of times; and certainly, when it comes to exposing a killer who may even want, at some level, to be exposed, betrayal is a strong word to use. Nor is there any indication that Jarecki uses false pretenses to snare Durst. But his decision is a ruthless one, characterized by cunning and not compassion. For some viewers, it may have had the curious effect of eliciting new sympathy for Durst, even after everything we’ve seen of him. Intentional or not, the show’s tidily devastating (or devastatingly tidy) resolution left me with a feeling of ambivalence.

More troubling still is the question of Jarecki’s artistic and worldly ambition, and of how much that may have been influencing his decision. Jarecki’s motivations are not clear, probably because they weren’t clear to himself, but the impression I was left with was that the filmmakers exploited the situation in a subtle way. Their strategy works to expose Durst’s crimes, but it also gives The Jinx its gut-wrenching resolution, closure. It amounts to an unprecedented media scoop in which an artist exploring a real-life subject changed the course of that subject’s destiny. It proves that life is not only stranger than fiction, but also more astonishing than art. At the same time, Jarecki gets to incorporate the truth into his fiction—the drama-documentary narrative he is weaving—and to show, in a viscerally disorienting way, how life imitates art even while art is representing life. That line is beautifully and horrifically blurred in The Jinx, because the truth which it reveals would probably never have come to light if Jarecki hadn’t been making art out of it.


Beyond even this morass of intersecting psychological patterns and complexes, there is the larger picture, namely that what Jarecki is dealing with in The Jinx is an incredibly powerful family, an empire, with its own interests and agendas, all of which intersect directly both with Jarecki’s film and with Durst’s fate. The fact that Jarecki was able to make his film at all, and have it aired on HBO—never mind the uncanny timing of Durst’s arrest the day before the final episode aired—suggests—whether he was aware of it or not—that Jarecki had support from on high and that The Jinx was part of a larger cultural and political “end game.”

To back up this possibly outlandish statement, The Jinx shows just how effective power and wealth can be when it comes to fabricating false narratives and suppressing the truth, in the case of Durst’s defense for murdering his neighbor Morris Black. Durst admitting to dismembering the corpse was not enough to convict him, because he then claimed self-defense and the jury (which may have been bought) was somehow persuaded that the corpse-dismembering was 100% irrelevant to the question of whether Durst was guilt of murder or not. This would be true, if there was any evidence for self-defense whatsoever besides Durst’s own testimony. But there was not. Durst was found not guilty because he had enough money to buy the desired verdict (his legal council cost him over a million dollars). It is probably as simple as that.

Now consider the entire Durst foundation and how much power it would have to stop a show like The Jinx—or to support it. If the Durst family tried to pull strings to stop the show, then someone more powerful would have had to protect Jarecki from that effort. Or it’s also possible the Durst family wanted to use Robert Durst’s vanity to get him out of the way (after Durst’s arrest they made a public statement supporting the show). Either way, we are talking about a corporate cold war in which Jarecki and his art are just a pawns on the board, means to an end. Not that Jarecki didn’t have his own ends, and—in a case of perhaps fearful symmetry—was using the Dursts to achieve them.

Indirectly, I’d say this is the subject of The Jinx. (The title comes from something Durst said about why he didn’t want to have children: that any children he had would be jinxed.) Durst, like Jarecki (and like myself), was born of a powerful family, born with a sense of power, privilege, and entitlement. He was conditioned with the conviction that he would grow up to be a somebody, a player upon the world stage. Instead (like myself, and a bit like Jarecki after his last film—his first attempt at a Hollywood movie—was a massive financial failure), Durst ended up on the margins of power and privilege. He had the wealth but not the power (like Jarecki, but unlike myself: I gave up both). Durst’s frustration with this situation may well have been a major part of what compelled him to commit murder. Certainly, his desire to be a Somebody seems to have motivated his involvement with Jarecki’s film, which can’t be separated from his—perhaps unconsciously or perhaps even consciously—setting up the circumstances that would lead to his exposure.

...

Does the astonishing and soul-wrenching end of The Jinx justify the means which Jarecki used to get it? What is the alternative? If honesty and transparency are the closest we have to solid ground in a sea of cultural snares and blinds, Jarecki was neither honest nor transparent. If Jarecki had been honest with Durst rather than laying a trap for him, he may not have got the confession he got or the dramatic ending he needed for his show. But he may have got something equally meaningful. We'll never know, but for me, the ending left a sour taste in the mouth. While The Jinx is undoubtedly great TV and even great art, the idea that it makes Jarecki a cultural hero is one that throws into question the kind of culture that makes heroism out of opportunism.

The counter-argument is, why should Jarecki have been honest with a man who is a killer and a pathological liar? The answer to that is that, if we gauge our owns sense of what’s true or right by the actions of others then we are already lost. In a society that has been assembled around the will to power, this means we eventually become exactly as bad as the very worst around us, even as the worst rise to the highest positions of power and influence. Not that I am suggesting Jarecki became as bad as Durst by his act of manipulation. Only that, maybe, it was a step in that general direction . . . ?

[Lord Balto]

It's just too pat.

[guruilla]

?

[bks]

thx for the read. Very smart and insightful. I've been trying to keep from knowing anything about this case and your mostly meta-analysis was much more to my tastes.

The counter-argument is, why should Jarecki have been honest with a man who is a killer and a pathological liar? The answer to that is that, if we gauge our owns sense of what’s true or right by the actions of others then we are already lost. In a society that has been assembled around the will to power, this means we eventually become exactly as bad as the very worst around us, even as the worst rise to the highest positions of power and influence.

.
I vigorously disagree with the bolded part. It absolutely does not mean this whatsoever, and that's a vital point. You're risking a slippery slope fallacy. Ethics is best construed as an open-ended process of deliberation on the best way to live. Full stop. It cannot ever be reduced to principle-following or code-following, and least of all reduced to mere behavior codification. I know you are not suggesting the latter, but just want to be clear about it.

I'm not defending Jarecki either, fwiw.

[guruilla]

.
I vigorously disagree with the bolded part. It absolutely does not mean this whatsoever, and that's a vital point. You're risking a slippery slope fallacy. Ethics is best construed as an open-ended process of deliberation on the best way to live. Full stop. It cannot ever be reduced to principle-following or code-following, and least of all reduced to mere behavior codification. I know you are not suggesting the latter, but just want to be clear about it.

I'm not sure what you are disagreeing with then. That if we base our sense of what's right on what other people do, it won't lead us astray? That was my point, that correct behavior has to stem from an inner compass or it's just restriction/repression/mimesis.

[Wombaticus Rex]

Via: http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/20 ... -link.html

Police Investigating Link Between Robert Durst and Vermont Student Who Went Missing in 1971

Vermont police are investigating a link between creepy-as-hell real-estate heir Robert Durst and an 18-year-old Middlebury student who went missing in 1971, according to the Burlington Free Press. Middlebury freshman Lynne Schulze disappeared on December 10, 1971 after being seen eating dried prunes bought at the health-food store Durst and his then-wife Kathie operated, All Good Things. Her friends believe she was originally going to take a bus to New York, but after missing it, was headed back to campus.

Though the only evidence that Durst had anything to do with Schulze's disappearance is that their timelines overlapped, police are still investigating the possibility of his involvement.

"We are aware of the connection between Robert Durst and the disappearance of Lynne Schulze," Middlebury Police Chief Tom Hanley said. "We have been aware of this connection for several years and have been working with various outside agencies as we follow this lead."

The case, which is not officially considered a homicide, was reopened in 1992, but authorities did not say why.

[AhabsOtherLeg]

It's quite a story, though I admit I am not yet very familiar with the details of it. On first glance it reminds me of the Foxcatcher case, but only in a way.

The moral of the story is that your dad being a politically powerful billionaire doesn't necessarily set you up on the best course towards being a well-balanced and non-murderous individual - as Uday and Qusay Hussein could no doubt attest.

It does set you up on a good course towards being wrongly exonerated several times over, or never prosecuted at all, though.

[AhabsOtherLeg]

Just watched The Jinx. Fascinating, and I have to admit I found it hard not to like Bob Durst - or at least be sympathetic towards him. He has his own way of doing things, and he does things his way come hell or high water, and he talks about the consequences of doing things his way (some of them horrific) in an apparently open and upfront manner - which gets him in trouble, repeatedly, throughout his life.

There is a temptation to sympathize with that kind of honesty - blatantness might be a better word - or even admire it, despite the fact that we, as an audience, can be pretty certain that Durst is being dishonest throughout. Readers of Henry Kissinger's books about his time in office will know the feeling.

Has anyone (outside of certain blogs which are known enemies of RI) ever discussed the vanishingly small possibility that Durst might've been the "Mr. Real Estate" that Maury Terry's prison informant identified as being the head of the Son of Sam cult back in the day?

Genuine question, I would like people who are better informed than me on both cases (a formidable tribe) to consider it.

Maybe he doesn't seem like the type of guy who would go in for that kind of thing now, as an elderly ill-healthed super-wealthy utilitarian-transvestite habitual identity-thief who stands accused of at least three murders - but we all did crazy stuff when we were young... eh?

"I don't know what's in the house..."

Before anyone says it, I know Andrew Jarecki is less than wholly reliable. No wonder Durst thought him trustworthy. Like Stalin with Hitler.

Well, not quite, but you know what I mean. Paranoiacs seem to find it easier to trust conmen more than they trust regular people, for whatever reason. Shared premises perhaps.

[bks]

.
I vigorously disagree with the bolded part. It absolutely does not mean this whatsoever, and that's a vital point. You're risking a slippery slope fallacy. Ethics is best construed as an open-ended process of deliberation on the best way to live. Full stop. It cannot ever be reduced to principle-following or code-following, and least of all reduced to mere behavior codification. I know you are not suggesting the latter, but just want to be clear about it.

I'm not sure what you are disagreeing with then. That if we base our sense of what's right on what other people do, it won't lead us astray? That was my point, that correct behavior has to stem from an inner compass or it's just restriction/repression/mimesis.

Long loop, I know

My point was poorly articulated. What I mean to say was: when someone does something violent and evil to another person, and another person engages in an equally violent act of retributive violence against the first person, it does not automatically make that second person evil for doing so, nor the immoral equivalent of the first person. The second person is not automatically "just as bad" as the first, even if the physical act the second performs id the equivalent or even more violent than that of the first.

[seemslikeadream]

Once-Fugitive Real Estate Heir's Plea Deal Approved
By JANET MCCONNAUGHEY, ASSOCIATED PRESS NEW ORLEANS — Apr 27, 2016, 12:17 PM ET

Real estate heir Robert Durst will serve 7 years, 1 month in prison on a weapons charge — more than 4 ½ times the maximum under federal guidelines.

U.S. District Judge Kurt Engelhardt sentenced Durst, 72, on Wednesday in New Orleans, approving a sentence that Durst had accepted in February as part of a plea agreement. Engelhardt also fined Durst $5,000 and said that his sentence, once served, would be followed by three years of supervised release.

Durst will get credit for time served since his arrest in mid-March last year, Assistant U.S. Attorney Michael McMahon said.

"They always do that," he said.

Ten years and a $250,000 fine would have been the maximum sentence that Durst could have faced for illegally carrying a .38-caliber revolver after being convicted of a felony. However, Engelhardt noted, a presentence report recommended 12 to 18 months under federal guidelines.

Durst still faces a separate murder charge in California. Durst is charged in Los Angeles with killing a female friend, Susan Berman, in 2000 to keep her from talking to New York prosecutors about the disappearance of Durst's first wife in 1982.

His attorneys have said repeatedly that he is innocent, does not know who killed Berman, and wants to prove it.

"I have been waiting to get to California about a year so I can state my not guilty plea," Durst, looking pale in an orange jail jumpsuit, told Engelhardt. "I truly, truly want to express my statement that I am not guilty in the death of Susan Berman."

Engelhardt said the longer-than-standard sentence was reasonable because the plea deal included agreements with U.S. attorneys in Houston and Manhattan and the Orleans Parish district attorney not to prosecute Durst on a variety of offenses. Those could have carried sentences longer than 85 months, Engelhardt said.

Accepting the sentence "cleared the decks — at a cost," defense attorney Richard DeGuerin said. "It's a great cost, but he's not facing any other prosecutions except what's in California."

"This case is and always has been about the accusation that Bob killed his best friend, Susan Berman. He did not kill Susan Berman, he doesn't know who did, and he's eager to get to California and prove that," DeGuerin said.

McMahon and DeGuerin said Durst also will forfeit more than $44,000 found in his hotel room when he was arrested and $117,000 in a package sent to Everette Ward, the name under which Durst had registered, and intercepted by the FBI after his arrest.

Durst's attorneys and prosecutors in Los Angeles have agreed that he will be in Los Angeles by mid-August.

He's likely to leave Louisiana within a couple of weeks, McMahon said.

"He'll be out of here pretty quickly," McMahon said, noting that timing and the specific prison that Durst goes to is up to the federal Bureau of Prisons.

Engelhardt recommended that Durst serve his time at FCI Terminal Island, California, about 30 miles from downtown Los Angeles. The location is near the trial venue and has medical facilities Durst needs because of his "advanced age and serious health considerations, including mobility challenges," defense lawyers wrote in a request filed Monday.

An estranged member of the wealthy New York real estate family that runs 1 World Trade Center, Durst was tracked to New Orleans in March 2015 by FBI agents worried that he was about to flee to Cuba.

He was detained at a hotel on the eve of the finale of a six-part documentary about him, and was arrested early on the morning of the show. "The Jinx" described the disappearance of Kathleen Durst, the death and dismemberment of a neighbor in Galveston, Texas, and Berman's death.

At the end of the show, Durst is heard muttering, "What the hell did I do? Killed them all, of course."

[guruilla]

Jinxed: Things HBO Won’t (Ever) Tell You About Robert Durst
Dursts Vs Jareckis Part Two: The Epstein Connection
C & P-ing below, for pics and links go to url above

A True Psychopath?

In 2015, Robert Durst’s brother Douglas was quoted by the New York Times describing Robert as “a true psychopath, beyond any emotions. That’s why he does things, so he can experience the emotions that other people have vicariously. Because he has absolutely none of his own.”

(This is curiously in sync with an exchange I had on the latest Dodcast, talking about sadomasochism, serial killers, and inverted empathy.)

Douglas related a story about a series of seven dogs, Alaskan Malamutes, all named Igor [by Robert], that Robert went through leading up to the disappearance of his first wife, Kathie. According to Douglas, all of the dogs disappeared and were replaced within six months. “In retrospect,” he said, “I now believe he was practicing killing and disposing his wife with those dogs.” Later, Robert was recorded in jail saying, “I want to Igor Douglas.” (“Douglas Durst: My Brother Robert ‘Is a True Psychopath’”)

This is Durst biographer Matt Birkbeck (A Deadly Secret: The Bizarre and Chilling Story of Robert Durst) interviewed by Vulture in “What The Jinx Got Wrong” (non-paywalled here):

There are some really crucial questions here [for Durst]. One of which is, “How did you learn to dismember a body?” And that was never asked. It was more about, “Tell us about Kathie.” . . . . The really big question also was, when Durst was 10 years old, he went to go see a psychiatrist because he was having mental issues after his mother died. The psychologist letter is in the book, and he says he can’t even be treated because he’s got some real severe issues. [“Personality decomposition and possibly schizophrenia.”] It’s a warning to everyone that you’ve got this ticking time bomb . . . back in 1953. And that wasn’t addressed either, the doctor’s letter. But like you said, he’s a filmmaker, and he’s got his own agenda.

In the same interview, Birkbeck explains that, when he first met with Jarecki in 2005, Jarecki and his producing partner (Marc Sperling) had his book and they spent three hours talking about it. Yet The Jinx ignored many key details in the book, including some “obvious things they could’ve asked [Durst] but they didn’t.”
Serial Killer?

One thing they didn’t ask Durst about was the other missing women.

Durst was considered a person of interest in 2003, in the disappearances of Karen Mitchell and Kristen Modafferi. Mitchell went missing in 1997, while she worked at a homeless shelter in Eureka, Calif., where Durst had been spotted. After leaving the shelter, Mitchell visited her aunt, Annie Casper, at her shoe store and was never seen again. Durst lived in the nearby town of Trinidad at the time, and visited Casper’s store—dressed in drag—at least four times. Modafferi, a college student from North Carolina, also went missing five months earlier.

Birkbeck: “Before these cases even came up before the public, he had been living this random bizarre lifestyle . . . Durst had visited with or seen Mitchell at a homeless shelter that she had volunteered at.” (Durst often lived among the homeless, sometimes dressed as a woman, and used a number of disguises and aliases.)

In March 24, 2015, Vermont police begin investigating a possible link between Durst and Lynne Schulze, a college student who went missing in 1971 after shopping at Durst’s health-food store, back in 1971. A CNN article quoted Middlebury Police Capt. Tom Hanley: “We are aware of the connection between the disappearance of Lynne Schulze and Robert Durst. . . . We have been aware of this connection for several years and have been working with various outside agencies as we follow this lead.” The name of Durst’s health food store where Schulze shopped the day she disappeared was (the name of the movie Andrew Jarecki made about him) All Good Things.

According to Birkbeck, the FBI has been involved in the Durst case since 2012. Their interest picked up with the Gilgo Beach murders. Birkbeck again:

I think [the FBI is] convinced that he’s a serial killer, and so they’re trying to connect him to other cases around the country. Being that some of those women had been dismembered, they began looking at him. They couldn’t make a connection, but their interest there led them to the Westchester County District Attorney’s office and the Los Angeles police. . . . There have been reports linking him to other murders, like Karen Mitchell in California, or Lynne Schulze, who disappeared outside his store in Vermont.[T]he fact is, you’ve got different investigations in different jurisdictions, and it became complicated for them to work with each other. . . . The Mitchell one is the strongest one of them all because you know that he lived up there, he had gone to the shoe store that Mitchell’s aunt had owned, and Mitchell worked there, too. . . . And then you’ve got this dead-on composite [sketch.] Not only is it the spitting image of Bobby, but the guy that gave the composite, he knew Durst.1

More sensationally, there is William Steele, the ex-con author of Sex and The Serial Killer: My Bizarre Times with Robert Durst. In an interview for The Horror Report, Steele claims he was friends with Durst and was privy to his secret life as a serial murderer. He claims Durst killed and dismembered a dog in his (Steele’s) house, and that he recorded him bragging of other crimes:

The graphic photographs he showed me of many women, naked and bound, women I know now to have been sexually tortured and murdered. The trophies he kept from the women he killed, the blood and gore covered green dress he wore the night he murdered and dismembered the dog in my house, its parts strewn about, my having slipped in its blood on my floor in the dark. As I detailed in my book, he stunned me with the revelation that his murdered wife’s remains were in the suitcase he brought to my home “to prove it to me” he said.

Durst Family Connections

According to a 2023 State of the Nation article, “The Zionist Mafia,” Robert Durst’s grandfather was secretly financed by foreign criminals and the mafia to establish his real estate company. The Dursts covertly work with (Mafiosi) the Genoveses and Luccheses, along with several other Jewish families that dominate real estate in New York City, backed by mobsters and foreign entities with the aim of monopolization.

Seymour Durst lower right, Donald Trump back left

(For some background on NY real estate and Mafia money-laundering, see “How New York Real Estate Became a Dumping Ground for the World’s Dirty Money,” The Nation, and “New York City makes it easy for corrupt people to hide their money in real estate,” Business Insider.)

Grandfather Durst was president from 1945 to 1972 of the Hebrew Free Loan Society, which (to this day) “makes loans without charge to needy individuals of any faith [Jews] and to Jewish community organizations, largely in the field of religious education” (NY Times).

Some current or recent interests pursued by the Durst Org:

Durst to fire unvaccinated corporate employees Sept. 6 (2021)

Durst Family Foundation donated to Woke Covid Response fund

Durst Family Foundation donated to Increase-Immigrants plan

Durst Family Foundation is one of “More than 200 philanthropic institutions from across the country have signed onto this joint GCIR statement in support of children and families seeking refuge in the United States.”

For his part, ever the high-roller, Bobby enrolled in a doctoral program at UCLA and moved to California in 1965, the exact same time Carlos Castaneda was doing his “field work” for The Teachings of Don Juan. Apparently, Durst was moving in similar circles; soon after he hooked up with (Mob boss’s daughter) Susan Berman, he met John Lennon and Yoko Ono:

during primal scream therapy with psychotherapist Arthur Janov. He was also a follower of Beatles guru Maharishi Mahesh Yogi. Friends say Durst affected a hippie image, living in cheap apartments, and smoked a lot of dope. [And in March 1981, while] Susan Berman was in New York, promoting her book, and Durst was not only seeing her but also dating another old friend, Prudence Farrow, Mia Farrow’s sister and famous in her own right as the inspiration for the Beatles’ song “Dear Prudence.” (“Durst Case Scenarios”)

A year later, Durst’s wife Kathleen went missing, a problem Bobby’s crime family helped make go away:

The Manhattan Supreme Court filing says Durst’s late father, real-estate mogul Seymour Durst, paid ex-cop Edward Wright to conduct a “shadow investigation” that kept his family abreast of the NYPD’s probe. Wright’s efforts allegedly revealed that cops “knew or should have known” Durst had repeatedly lied about “his involvement in Kathie’s disappearance and murder.” [A] $100 million suit . . . says the NYPD has been stonewalling a request for its records under Freedom of Information Law for nearly 18 months. “The NYPD knows that once its cover-up is fully and properly exposed, the public will likely conclude that the NYPD intentionally concealed evidence to shield Durst from being prosecuted in connection with the disappearance and/or death of Kathie,” court papers say. (NY Post)

A suit filed by Kathie’s sister, Carol Bamonte, claimed that

the Durst Organization [are] “accessories after the fact” to Kathie’s murder. . . “The crime family members” helped develop “a false alibi” for Durst, telling a series of lies to the media and the cops to keep them from suspecting Robert [and] creating this “false narrative” [as] “further evidence of [Robert] Durst’s guilt” . . . Seymour, who has since died, “ordered” his family and employees “not to cooperate with the police investigation,” and they spread “a publicity smear campaign against Kathie and her family”. . . (NY Post)

Jarecki and The Jinx avoid getting into this swampy background, however, and don’t even mention the lawsuits. A cover-up is insinuated in the fictional version, All Good Things, a movie that Douglas disliked, but that Bobby loved.
Back to Jeffrey’s Island (Jarecki Family Connections)

Nick Jarecki and Nancy and Andrew Jarecki are all listed in Jeffrey Epstein’s infamous little black book, on page 29, with 9 phone numbers and 2 addresses under the three names. Their billionaire father, Dr. Henry Jarecki, is listed on page 74, along with 14 phone numbers.

Henry Jarecki traveled with Epstein multiple times, and owns two islands in the British Virgin Islands, where he founded a youth center.

None of this is Andrew likely to be documenting any time soon.

(An online thread on Henry speculates that brother/uncle Richard Jarecki has been involved in money laundering via European casinos.)

Henry Jarecki was worth $1.3 billion in 2014 and made most of his millions dealing in silver and gold. He is a member of the exclusive Futures Industry Association Hall of Fame, along with Alan Greenspan and Sen. Robert Dole. His wife Gloria was a film critic for Time, while Dr. Jarecki dabbled in theater production. (A Streetcar Named Desire, Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, and Tap Dogs played both Broadway and London stages, and Cat won London’s Laurence Olivier Award for the best revival play in 2010.) In the 2012 presidential election campaign, the Jareckis contributed more than $400,000 to Democratic Party candidates and PACs.

Returning to the Epstein connection: Virginia Roberts Giuffre, in court documents from a civil suit, released in 2019, claimed she was told to have sex with (famous computer scientist and 2001-advisor) Marvin Minsky, at Epstein’s compound in the US Virgin Islands, when she was 17 and Minsky was 73 (she also named Alan Dershowitz, Norman Finkelstein’s great nemesis). A second witness testified taking a private plane from Teterboro to Santa Fe and Palm Beach with Minsky, in March 2001, and that Epstein, Ghislaine Maxwell, and Dr. Henry Jarecki were passengers on the same plane (PPEmpire, Feb 2023).

Here’s Epstein and Maxwell’s victim/recruiter, Natalya Malyshev, pictured with Henry at a Paolo Zampolli event back in 2010. Paolo Zampolli was one of the primary funders of Ghislaine Maxwell’s Ocean-focused charity, the TerraMar Project.

(At the article, there is also a shot of him with (son of Oliver) Sean Stone, who interviewed me last year. No doubt Zampoli schmoozes with all kinds, but still. . .)
Enter the Loftus

With all of this on record, the involvement of the infamous Elizabeth Loftus in the defense of Robert Durst in 2020 becomes a bit of a smoking gun.

Loftus is a similar sort of high-level fixer-witness to Deborah Lipstadt: her name pops up in all the wrong places. In 2002, she was ranked 58th in the Review of General Psychology’s list of the 100 most influential psychological researchers of the 20th century. Since then, she has become a veritable one-woman False Memory Syndrome Foundation (which was dissolved in 2019). She is most (in)famous as a witness for the defense in the trials of Harvey Weinstein and Ghislaine Maxwell.

In the latter case, Loftus claimed that monetary greed could cause a human brain to create a false traumatic memory; when questioned about the basis of her theory by the jury, Loftus stated: “I am not aware of any studies on that, but based on my research, it’s definitely plausible.” The jury perhaps didn’t ask her about potential motivating factors in giving false testimony.

Loftus has also been called as a witness at the trials of Ted Bundy, O.J. Simpson, Rodney King, Oliver North, Martha Stewart, Lewis Libby, Michael Jackson, the Menéndez brothers, and the Oklahoma City bombers. That’s quite the (MKULTRA psyop) CV, and it puts Robert Durst in some pretty high-level (and highly dicey) company.2

Can the same be said of Andrew Jarecki?

(To be cont.)
1

The Gilgo Beach serial killings were a series of killings between 1996 and 2011 in which the remains of 11 people were found in Gilgo Beach, located on the South Shore of Long Island, New York, United States. Most of the known victims were sex workers who advertised on Craigslist. The perpetrator in the case is known as the Long Island Serial Killer. In July 2023, Rex Heuermann, a resident of Massapequa Park on Long Island, was arrested in Midtown Manhattan and charged in the murders of three of “the Gilgo Four” victims. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gilgo_Bea ... l_killings
2

According to the New Yorker in 2021, Loftus “could find little experimental evidence to support the idea that memories of trauma, after remaining dormant for a decade or more, could abruptly spring to life.” From the same profile:

For decades, during cross-examinations, lawyers have accused Loftus, a childless scientist, of being unable to comprehend the pain of victims. “You really don’t know anything about five-year-old children who have been sexually abused, do you?” a prosecutor asked her, in 1985, at the trial of a camp counsellor accused of molesting his campers. “Well, yes, I do,” Loftus responded. “I do know something about this subject because I was abused when I was six,” by a babysitter. At that moment, she later wrote, “the memory flew out at me, out of the blackness of the past, hitting me full force.” The defense attorney at the trial, Marc Kurzman, recalled a “stunned silence.” He said, “That was supposed to be the big finale of the cross-examination, and it pretty much shut the whole thing down.” Some scholars have proposed that Loftus has her own repressed memories. “She has not been able to integrate her own experience into her research,” two literary critics wrote, in 2001. “There is something split off in Loftus,” the psychologist Lauren Slater asserted in her book “Opening Skinner’s Box,” from 2004. “She is the survivor who questions the validity of survivorship. That’s one way out of a bind.”

See also “Ghislaine Maxwell’s legal team use controversial ‘false memories’ theory as part of her defence.”