The Liver King – this hilarious exposé is like Tiger King … but with way more genital eating
For many young men, masculinity is sold as an obsession with protein, and a personality that answers the question 'What if WWE was real, and all the time?' Which brings us to Netflix's explosive new documentary. Untold: The Liver King (out Tuesday 13 May), real name Brian Johnson, is a fitness influencer who promotes 'ancestral living' as the solution to enervating modernity. This includes a great deal of hollering and extreme workouts, saying the word 'alpha' a lot, plus eating a carnivorous diet of raw animal organs, including an unfeasible amount of genitals.
Liver King angry that people addicted to phones. Works with marketing agency to pump out stunt videos specifically designed for them. Opening shot shows Liver King pulling truck on chain. Famous caveman activity. Meanwhile, other men push truck from behind. Liver King knows not everyone can go full primal, so sells range of nutritional supplements that help bring in an annual income north of $100m. You'd think he would exclusively trade in shiny rocks, and in a sense he does.
Having piously attributed his inhumanly buff, conker-y body to the benefits of eating dicks and going on podcasts, it is proved that Johnson has, in fact, been injecting steroids to the tune of more than $11,000 a month. He does so on screen. He subsequently confesses to a lifetime of grifter behaviour, each extraordinary chapter of which could warrant its own deep dive.
The trajectory is inevitable – but Untold: The Liver King has an ace up its sleeve. It's so funny. 'Why eat vegetables when you can eat testicles?' is his mantra. He describes his first orgasm, a spontaneous ejaculation while bench pressing. We feel the film-makers' delight in their subject, who has more quotable moments than the book of Psalms. 'Where does oxygen come from?' Johnson asks his sons, who are invariably checked out or laughing at him. 'Wind.'
The Hulk Hogan cartoon fun of it all is complicated by the implications of its reality. Johnson is demonstrably a moron, inveterate liar, a parody of an influencer and paragon of toxic masculinity. The latter, literally. In one disturbing scene, he instructs his teenage sons to dissect a dying bull in a field and eat its pumping organs. You can almost taste the salmonella and E coli. It's jaw-dropping, but I'd advise you to close your mouth.
His relationship with his 'weak' children, Rad 'Ical' Johnson and Stryker 'the Barbarian' Johnson is the central heartache. Johnson exhorts Stryker to pronounce the word 'steak' with more guttural emphasis. Stryker doesn't tell his parents when he has broken his leg, knowing they scorn pain medication. The boys eat 15 raw eggs a day, and it is revealed a woman from child protection services pays regular visits. 'She's like: 'Why am I here? These kids are awesome,'' boasts the deluded patriarch. The Liver King's originating grief is that his father died when he was a year old; he remains blind to the fact he has robbed his own children of a stable father figure. They could have called this Flesh Man Is in Trouble.
Similar streamer offerings, such as Devil in the Family, split their arc across three episodes or more. The Liver King is a tight 70 minutes, all protein, and leaves one wishing it were longer. The sly wit of director Joe Pearlman shines through, fusing elements of Tiger King, Spinal Tap and classical tragedy. As the sun sets, the show teasingly invites us to question crucial elements of what has gone before – well-structured documentaries and online videos sharing, as they do, a few narrative tricks.
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Stories of influencers melting down cannot help but be modern parables; they are the hollow totems of what we value. Scandal only damages those who have shame. The documentary leaves an upbeat Johnson who has metabolised his experience, and believes his reign is just beginning. He has turned his ranch into a produce store and meeting place for any 'primals' who still believe in his message. 'People say why don't you have a retreat, something like that?' says Johnson. 'We're gonna have 302 of 'em.' Long live the king.
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We do have sketch artists who are allowed to be in the courtroom, and then we are able to show those sketches. And we see a very different looking Diddy. His hair is completely gray, his goatee gray. He is allowed to wear his own clothes, as is Harvey Weinstein. Let's talk a little bit about what we're actually seeing that people aren't privy to. NEUMEISTER: Can't have dye, right, Mike? SISAK: What we've learned from this trial is that Sean Combs, according to his assistant who testified, was using Just For Men to hide gray hair and he had jet black hair up until the time he was arrested and put in jail last year. And then we also learned that hair dye is not allowed in jail. So in court, he has had this gray salt and pepper hair, goatee. He has been allowed to wear for the trial, sweaters, button down shirts, khakis and the like. It's a stark difference in look. NEUMEISTER: I'll tell you though, the guy is so involved with his defense, it's like off the charts, kind of amazing. I don't think I've ever seen this to this degree before. There was a witness, it was Kid Cudi, where at the end of his testimony, the prosecutors got him to say he believed Sean Combs was lying when he said he didn't know anything about his car when he brought it up. Kid Cudi's car was exploded in his driveway one day with a Molotov cocktail. And absolutely destroyed. And so he had a meeting with Sean Combs some weeks after that. And at the very end of the meeting, he said, brought up the car. And Sean Combs said, 'oh, what are you talking about? I don't know anything about that.' And after, as soon as that, the prosecutor finished asking the questions, got that response, then two lawyers, one on each side of Combs looked to him Combs said no, and only then did the lawyers inform the judge that there would be no more questioning. SISAK: I recall being in the courtroom earlier in the trial when some images were shown from some of the videotapes at issue here with these sex marathons that have become known in his parlance as "freak-offs." And there was a binder of some of these images, and Combs was sitting next to his lawyer and waved over, hey, I want to see those, and he's looking through them and he's holding the press, the public. We were not allowed to see these images. Their graphic images. The defendant, of course, was allowed to see them and he held them in a way that we could not see what he was looking at. And then he passed it back. And then other times he's hunched over a laptop computer looking at exhibits that are showing text messages and emails that were exchanged over the years with various people involved in the case. And then when there are breaks, we see him standing up, stretching, turning around, looking at his supporters in the gallery. His mother has been there. Some of his children have been there, some of his daughters have left the courtroom during the especially graphic testimony. But at other times, when his children are there, when his supporters are there, he's shaping his hands in the shape of a heart. He's pointing at them. He's saying, I love you. He's whispering. There was a moment when another reporter and I were sitting in the courtroom during a break and Sean Combs turns around, there's nobody in front of us and he asks us how we're doing. We say hi back to him because you're in such close proximity. We're only 10 feet apart or so. I'll pivot quickly to the Harvey Weinstein case where there's not as much of that because while Harvey Weinstein does have a contingent of supporters, it's mostly paid supporters, his publicist, his lawyers, his jury consultant. People that he will wave to and talk to and acknowledge as he's being wheeled into the courtroom. He uses a wheelchair to get in and out of court. One of the interesting things that ties the Sean Combs case and the Luigi Mangione case is one of the lawyers, Marc Agnifilo, represents both of those men. Karen Friedman Agnifilo is the lead defense attorney for Luigi Mangione. She is married to Marc Agnifilo. They are partners in the same law firm and Marc Agnifilo is ostensibly the lead attorney for Sean Combs. He is also assisting on Luigi Mangione's defense, both in the state and federal case. WALKER: In the beginning of the Combs case, the jury was shown that explosive video that the public already saw in the L.A. hotel hallway of Combs dragging Cassie and kicking her when she's on the ground and he made a public apology on his social media to her. And his lawyers have said that he's not a perfect person and he has anger issues, but he's not charged with domestic abuse. SISAK: The refrain from the defense has been that, if anything, there could have been domestic violence charges brought against Sean Combs back in 2016. Those charges would have been brought in a California court by Los Angeles police. There has not been any real discussion of an investigation in 2016 of any effort to charge Sean Combs with domestic violence at that time. So, in some sense, while it's a thread that the defense is pulling, that he's actually charged with sex trafficking and racketeering in this federal case, it almost is a bit of apples and oranges in the sense that the violence that the defenses conceding to, prosecutors allege, was part of the mechanism of the racketeer of the sex trafficking. In other words, they allege that Sean Combs used violence to keep people quiet, to people compliant. NEUMEISTER: And a lot of charges like domestic violence are all kind of things they could have brought against Sean Combs years ago. Well, there's a statute of limitations that would rule out certain charges. And certain charges just, there is no federal domestic violence charge. So when the feds go after somebody, they look for what kind of charges are federal crimes. And in this case, sex trafficking, bringing people across state lines to do illegal sex acts, or racketeering, which can involve many different things, including that 2016 tape of Cassie being beat up by Sean Combs by the Elevator Bank in that Los Angeles hotel. That, actually, is a centerpiece of the evidence against Combs in this case. WALKER: The point is that that hallway video of Diddy beating up Cassie is actually part of the case of racketeering because he's using violence to control people. NEUMEISTER: Listen, there's violence all through this, right Mike? SISAK: The Kid Cudi arc in this narrative, which is in 2011, Cassie, who's the longtime girlfriend of Sean Combs, starts dating Kid Cudi. Combs is upset about that, according to this witness, Capricorn Clark. Combs comes into her home holding a gun, kidnaps Capricorn Clark, takes her to Kid Cudi's home, where according to Clark, Combs was intent on killing Kid Codi. Now, Cudi was not there. He testified at this trial, so Combs is alleged wish of killing him did not come to fruition, it may be a bit of a crafty strategy by the defense in this case to own the things that they cannot otherwise explain away. They are owning the things the jury eventually is going to see. The video of the 2016 assault at the hotel in Los Angeles. A video, by the way, that was suppressed from public view until it aired last year on CNN. NEUMEISTER: And that is part of the racketeering charge, it's alleged that he used all of his employees and his whole security staff to cover up these things. So, when that happened in 2016 at that L.A. hotel, they paid like $100,000 to try to get the copy of the security video so it would never become public. WALKER: I think we've covered so much that I'm not sure what we have left to cover, although there probably is more. But are there any big points or big arcs that you think are worth mentioning? NEUMEISTER: In the beginning, the first week, it was all Cassie's testimony and there was so much evidence in everything and her testimony about sexual acts and such but last week it seems all about violence and threats and how he would have used his employees to cover up the crimes. SISAK: We've heard from Cassie about the freak-offs. We've heard from some of the male sex workers that were involved. And then we're seeing other pieces of evidence that prosecutors say show the depravity of these events and then also the network of people that Combs relied on to keep them secret, to keep going, but to keep them secret. WALKER: Well, I think that that about sums it up. The judge in the beginning said he wanted to be done by July 4th. SISAK: We've had people ask us, all three of us that have been in court at various times, what do you think of the prosecution's case so far? And as reporters, we don't have opinions on things, but I would urge caution whenever there's a case, let the presentation play out, get to the end of the prosecution case, but also listen to the cross-examination, listen to what the defense puts on. Often defendants will not testify on their own behalf because it can be perilous, but there are cases where it might be advantageous. NEUMEISTER: When there's celebrities involved, it's a wild card, where you really can't predict what's going to happen and how that's going to play into the jurors' minds and everything else. WALKER: And I think that's a good place to leave it. Thank you both. Mike Sisak, Larry Neumeister. I'm Julie Walker. Thank you for listening. ___
