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Chapter 1: What fears influenced Adele's rise to fame?
This is exactly right. I'm Michelle McPhee, and I've been unraveling the strangest criminal alliance I've ever reported on. A Mormon polygamist and an Armenian businessman.
Multi-million dollar house, Ferraris and Lamborghinis, private jets, a billion dollar fraud.
But how long can this alliance last? Tell me what you know. Is somebody coming after me? Listen to Kingdom of Fraud on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. How much you weigh, Wanda? Right now, I'm about 130. I'm at 183. We should race.
No, I want to leave here with my original hips. On the podcast, The Matchup with Aaliyah, I pair prominent female athletes with unexpected guests. On a recent episode, I sat down with undisputed boxing champ, Clarissa Shields, and comedian, Wanda Sykes, to talk about Wanda's new movie, Undercard, the art of trash talk, and what it really means to be ladylike.
Open your free iHeartRadio app, search The Matchup with Aaliyah, and listen now. Brought to you by Novartis, founding partner of iHeart Women's Sports Network.
In 2023, Bachelor star Clayton Eckerd was accused of fathering twins, but the pregnancy appeared to be a hoax.
You doctored this particular test twice, Ms. Owens, correct?
I doctored the test once. It took an army of internet detectives to uncover a disturbing pattern. Two more men who'd been through the same thing.
Greg Gillespie and Michael Mancini.
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Chapter 2: How did Adele's music impact cultural events?
And though we can't hear what the two are talking about, we can see the very clear emotion which takes over Pacino's eyes. Fear. Pacino's character is dreading what he's about to do, but there's no turning back now. There are things he needs in this life, and he has no other way of getting them, or so he thinks.
He's desperate, and he has to move fast before that security guard locks the front door behind him. So he exits the car, along with his accomplice, Sal, played by John Cazale. And they walk inside the bank. And Pacino carries a long white box with a bow. And no one knows that inside that box is a rifle. He anxiously looks around.
And these employees, these tellers, the security guard, the manager, they're all innocent. Pacino's character means them no harm. And that's when the fear takes over. Watching this scene play out on her television in the comfort of her own home, Adele Laurie Blue Adkins, otherwise known simply as Adele, felt her pulse quicken.
It didn't matter that she'd seen this film, one of her favorites, more times than she could remember. Her response was always the same. Because Dog Day Afternoon, or Al Pacino's performance in particular, tapped into a universal fear that on some level is always present within all of us, no matter the scenario. It's the most primal of human emotions.
In fact, do not be afraid is the most common phrase found in the Bible, in one form or another. And though we've been told not to be afraid for centuries, we still are. You, me, Pacino in Dog Day Afternoon, and Adele. In 2011, Adele became a once-in-a-generation phenomenon with the release of her sophomore album, 21.
It entered the Billboard album chart at number one, where it stayed for 24 weeks, breaking the record set by Prince's Purple Rain some 27 years prior. And while the album was at number one, three of its singles, Rolling in the Deep, Set Fire to the Rain, and Someone Like You, simultaneously topped the Hot 100.
The first time that had happened since the Saturday Night Fever soundtrack way back in 1977. The album 21 has since become the longest charting album by any female artist, breaking the record held by Carole King's 1971 album Tapestry. To date, Adele's 21 has shipped 17 million copies, by far the most of any album released this century.
And at the time of 2NE1's initial release, you could not escape Adele. Her songs were the most requested songs at karaoke bars. They were the most played at funerals. If you got scared to get onto a plane, one survey showed that Adele's songs were voted the best to calm your nerves. And if you couldn't sleep, another survey showed that those same songs could cure insomnia.
In Leeds, England, a seven-year-old girl miraculously woke from a week-long coma when Rolling in the Deep came on the radio. Adele's voice is there in life and in death, deep down in her subconscious, which makes sense because Beyoncé once told her, when I listen to you, I feel like I'm listening to God. Adele has one hell of a voice, like three dusty Springfields all at once.
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Chapter 3: What role did fear play in Adele's career decisions?
But there was no reality in which Adele didn't punch him. She'd grown up tough, raised by a single mother, first in Tottenham. a London neighborhood with a high rate of poverty, gang violence, and crime. And then in Brixton, the place the Clash once told you about. And when they kick at your front door, how are you going to come? Adele was going to come with a fist to the face.
And some weren't so lucky. Like Avril Johnson, sister of reggae star Tipper Eerie, who was murdered inside her Brixton home in front of her children the same year that Adele and her mother moved to town. The gangs of Adele's childhood would give her the idea for the song title, Rolling in the Deep.
To roll deep, to roll with a crew, with people who have your back in your time of need, was a necessity of London's criminal underworld. Tonight, however, Adele had no crew, just herself. hauling ass down a London street in the dark. And she soon realized that no one was chasing her after all. No bouncers from the pub, no soon-to-be ex-boyfriend.
She was the one doing the chasing, although she was chasing nothing, just the ground beneath her feet. The events of that night became the inspiration for Chasing Pavements, Adele's second single from her debut album, 19, named for the age she was when she made it. The song was an unexpected success, leading to numerous Grammy nominations and a performance on Saturday Night Live.
Only years earlier, Adele had been a student at London's Brit School, the same performing arts high school attended by one of her many inspirations, Amy Winehouse. From there, it was a blur. Her songs went up on MySpace, multiple record labels emailed, a record deal with XL Records soon followed. And suddenly, Adele was doing what she dreamed about doing since she was a kid.
But it didn't come easy. From the jump, Adele was afraid. For one, she had terrible stage fright. Projectile vomiting prior to a show was not uncommon. In Amsterdam, she once tried to escape out of a fire exit just so she could avoid facing the crowd she was to perform in front of. And as she became more famous, however, the fear evolved.
In 2011, the year of 21, the year she released what would become the biggest album of the 21st century, she was afraid of something much more profound. She worried that the more famous she got, the more out of touch she would become. And thus, her life experiences would no longer be the life experiences of her audience. She feared she would no longer be relatable. And that wasn't all.
Two things happened that year in quick succession. The first led to the fear that she would never be able to sing again. But the second, that had her fearing for her own life.
When a group of women discover they've all dated the same prolific con artist, they take matters into their own hands.
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Chapter 4: How did Adele navigate her personal struggles publicly?
Al Pacino made it look easy. sitting there in his brown college boy jacket, getting comfortable in the black leather chair, beginning to understand the true nature of his character, Michael Corleone. He wasn't a loudmouth or a hothead like his brother Sonny, played by Jimmy Caan. And he wasn't as transparent as the Corleone's family attorney, Tom Hagen, played by Robert Duvall.
But as Kahn and Duvall paced the dimly lit room, mahogany tables, hardwood floors, and arguing about what to do with this dirty cop, McCluskey, protector of the narcotics man who had put their pops in the hospital, Pacino was slowly, methodically turning. He was the dark horse, the silent type, the one you never saw coming.
Al Pacino, as Michael Corleone, was getting ready to push past his own fears, such as what would happen to him if he joined the family business? How would it change him? And what would he have to do? And there was only one way to find out. Only one way through. Fear was not an option. Fear was the mind killer. From a couch across the room facing the television set, Adele leaned in.
The pivotal scene from one of her favorite films, The Godfather, played out on the screen. Pacino was so good, so tough. He was her guy. And the way he was able to subtly show how his character conquered his fears was truly inspiring. These crime films that Adele loved, the crime films that were universally loved, they served more than one purpose.
They were a source of comfort when Adele wanted to curl up and shout out the world and escape into great storytelling. And that's something we can all relate to. But there was something else as well, these movies, especially when it came to scenes like this.
These films, these performances, could give you the strength and the tools to overpower fear before the world with its teeth and its insatiable appetite overpowered you. July 23rd, 2011. Andrew Morris, Amy Winehouse's bodyguard, checked in on his employer at around 10 in the morning. he found her laying on her bed, unconscious, at her home in Camden, North London.
She'd been up late the night before, drinking, and it wasn't unusual for Amy to be passed out till midday. So Morris let her sleep it off. Five hours later, however, at three in the afternoon, he decided to check in on her again. And there she was, still on the bed, still unconscious, still in the same exact position as before. This now struck Morris as odd. He ran to her side.
She wasn't breathing. She had no pulse. Morris picked up the phone and called for an ambulance. Shortly thereafter, Amy Winehouse would be declared dead. She was 27 years old. It would be months before an official inquest would find that Amy Winehouse died from misadventure caused by high alcohol consumption. But misadventure wasn't the only thing that killed Amy Winehouse.
Adele, for one, was well aware of this fact. News of Amy's death hit Adele particularly hard. She was sad. She was pissed. She was, as she put it, offended. Amy had gone to the Brit school just like Adele. She was the reason Adele began to play guitar in the first place. The reason why Adele found the courage to write and sing her own songs.
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Chapter 5: What inspired Adele's song 'Rolling in the Deep'?
Only this time, it wasn't laryngitis. This time, a blood vessel on her vocal cord burst. She gave it another couple of weeks and let the hemorrhage heal and then went back at it. But it kept happening. Her voice, that incredible voice, it kept giving out. The media and the internet took notice and sharpened their knives. She was a smoker. She was a drinker.
She was a loud talker and even a loud cackler. We've seen this one before. It's Amy 2.0. Just another wildly talented British singer running her god-given instrument, Ragged. Adele wasn't listening to what was being said about her online. Instead, she was listening to the advice of other singers who had gone through similar problems.
Veterans like Roger Daltrey, Steven Tyler and Elton John, even younger singers like John Mayer, all of whom had undergone cutting edge throat surgery to salvage their voices and keep their jobs.
And so, on November 3rd, 2011, coincidentally, the same week that 21 returned to the number one spot on the Billboard album chart, Adele canceled all performances and went under the knife at Mass General Hospital in Boston. Actually, it was a laser, not a knife, which the world-renowned throat surgeon Stephen Zeitels used to remove a polyp that had been plaguing Adele's vocal cord.
And then, for months after, Adele's future was uncertain. For five weeks, she was unable to talk. Five long weeks in which she wondered what her voice would sound like when it returned. What if she would never be able to sing like she used to? What if she couldn't sing at all?
But every inkling of self-doubt melted away months later on February 12, 2012, when Adele made her long-awaited return to performing at the 54th Annual Grammy Awards Ceremony in Los Angeles. Not only did she take home seven awards that night, including Album of the Year, but she performed Rolling in the Deep, and she killed it.
Her post-surgery voice was not only strong, it had actually gained some upper range. It was like the Adele everyone already knew, only better. But despite her rousing performance and all her trophies, Adele was upstaged that night by tragedy. The price of fame, which Amy Winehouse had so sorely paid the previous year, was now hanging over the Staples Center like a ghost.
The Beverly Hilton Hotel, Suite 434. The portraits of Marilyn Monroe and Marlon Brando hanging on the walls surveyed the room in silence. Trays of uneaten food opened bottles of champagne, the remaining contents now warm and flat. In the bathroom, prescription bottles of Xanax and muscle relaxers on the counter. Next to them, a spoon for cocaine.
And there in the bathtub, submerged under six inches of water, the body collapsed. A 48-year-old Whitney Houston. Whitney never made it to the Grammys that night. She didn't even make it to the pre-party thrown by her mentor, Arista Records founder Clive Davis, the day before the Grammys.
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Chapter 6: How did Adele's experiences shape her identity as an artist?
That fear remained after all these years as one of Adele's greatest fears that she would become unrelatable. The grandiose houses, the multiple awards, the money, the fame. Adele was a long way from the mean streets of Tottenham, and she knew it. The challenge now was to remain relatable with those streets, with any street, anywhere in the world.
And after four years of working on new music, after much anticipation from her fans, after the smashing success of 21, Adele returned at last with a song that was so authentic and so relatable that it was downright criminal.
We'll be right back after this word, word, word.
I'm Ana Navarro, and on my new podcast, Bleep with Ana Navarro, I'm talking to the people closest to the biggest issues happening in your community and around the world. Because I know deep down inside right now, we are all cursing and asking what the bleep is going on. Every week, I'm breaking down the biggest issues happening in our communities and around the world.
I'm talking to people like Julie K. Brown, who broke the explosive story on Jeffrey Epstein in 2018.
The Justice Department, through, we counted, four presidential administrations, failed these victims.
Listen to Bleep with Anna Navarro on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
You know the famous author Roald Dahl. He thought up Willy Wonka and the BFG. But did you know he was a spy? Neither did I. You can hear all about his wildlife story in the podcast, The Secret World of Roald Dahl. All episodes are out now.
Was this before he wrote his stories? It must have been. What? Okay, I don't think that's true.
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Chapter 7: What challenges did Adele face during her vocal issues?
And audiences could relate to Adele because she was offering a different side of herself, which in turn gave listeners the opportunity to recognize the same different side in themselves. Hello wasn't just another kiss-off to an ex or a rally cry to stay strong in the face of great adversity. It was a ballad about forgiveness and about moving on. It was about closure and about growing up.
It was the definition of a universal hit. And it hit everyone, everywhere, all at once. November 9, 2015, Ypsilanti, Michigan, 6.40 p.m. The police squad car tore down Railroad Street, coming to a dramatic stop outside an apartment complex in the 900 block. Two officers emerged from the car, the pulsing blue lights illuminating their every movement as dust crept in.
They led with their service weapons, creeping swiftly with purpose towards the apartment building's front door. Kidnapping in progress. That was the call they'd received from dispatch. Something about someone being dragged against their will inside. The cops did their sweep. The coast was clear and the door was unlocked. And they were inside. There.
Halfway up the stairs, two men, arms twisted and bent like a mall pretzel. They wrestled, they struggled, and then the cops saw it. The perp was pressing the muzzle of a handgun into the other guy's abdomen, and the cops were yelling now, drop it, on your knees, I said on your fucking knees.
The perp froze, dropped the piece, and seconds later he was in police custody, riding in the back of the squad car on his way to county jail. 21-year-old Brian Earl Taylor had multiple felony warrants and was out on parole when he was arrested and charged with unlawful imprisonment and carrying a concealed weapon.
Allegedly, he had been in the process of forcing the other man in the stairwell to take him to his apartment where he planned to rob him. At the time of the arrest, Adele's Hello was the number one song in the country. It was like air or water. Gas station clerks, retail store workers, bank tellers, gym rats, dental hygienists. It didn't matter who you were or what you did.
You heard that song and you heard it often. Even the perps heard it. And we know this because four months later at his sentencing in March of 2012, when it came time to plead his case, Brian Earl Taylor didn't just ask for forgiveness for what he'd done, he sang it. Brian Earl Taylor sang a personalized version of Adele's Hello to the judge on the day of his sentencing.
And I got to think that the thought process here was that he, the criminal, was hoping to find some common ground with the judge, with the law. And that common ground being Adele. The common ground of the biggest song in the world. The common ground of Adele's universal relatability. Relatable or not, Adele couldn't help with Brian Earl Taylor's plight that day.
He was sentenced to up to 17 years in prison. It was then that Brian was driven to change. He worked in the prison system's palliative care program, helping other inmates who were sick or dying. He taught himself piano on the prison's keyboard and began to write his own songs.
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Chapter 8: How did Adele's divorce affect her public image?
The Florida pawn shop may have paid pennies on the dollar for this stuff, but when you're talking millions of dollars, that's a lot of fucking pennies. So that question again, was he a changed man? He was merely a man with a strengthened resolve and the desire to get it right the next time. But a fresh scam needed a fresh celebrity and a fresh mark.
This time, the mark wouldn't be high-end jewelry. It would be high-end sneakers. Sneakers with serious resale value. The sneakers of NBA players. And the celebrity through which he could work this scam had to be God-tier. Someone who commanded respect and awe from just about anyone. In 2017, as Justin Jackson put his new scam in place, that celebrity was Adele.
Justin Jackson created an email address that appeared to belong to Adele's manager, Jonathan Dickens. He then began to email the representatives of NBA players, offering tickets to Adele's concerts in exchange for their sneakers, which he said would be donated to a charity auction.
Of course, just like there had been no Madonna and no photo shoot, there was no Adele and there was no charity auction and there were no concert tickets. But not everyone that Justin Jackson contacted could easily sniff that out. Paul George, Victor Oladipo, and Richard Hamilton were among the pro ball players who actually sent their sneakers as requested. This mild success made Jackson greedy.
He wanted to attend the Rolling Loud hip-hop festival in Miami, where Kendrick Lamar was headlining, but he didn't want to pay for it. Then why should he, when he could pretend to be Adele's manager and get tickets for free? When festival organizers received a suspicious email from someone claiming to be Adele's manager, the red flags immediately went up.
They contacted Miami-Dade PD, who in turn contacted the fake Jonathan Dickens, Justin Jackson, posing as the festival's production manager.
A meetup was set in downtown Miami, and in May of 2017, days before the Rolling Loud festival, Justin Jackson and his wife, Angel Lee, rolled into Bayfront Park thinking they were really pulling it off, only to be immediately arrested and charged with over a dozen felonies, including grand theft, identity theft, and organizing a scheme to defraud. Adele's songs are one-of-a-kind currency.
Her identity is another kind. And her manager's identity is yet another. My point is, even those in Adele's orbit have value on the black market. And Justin Jackson's brazen but ultimately dumb crime was the criminal world's proof of and cosign on Adele's cultural value. Once Hello hit, Adele was no longer relatable. She was exploitable. Thus, the counterfeit Adele was born.
But scammers, moles in her inner circle, or felons who sang her songs in court, none of these had anything to do with her divorce from Simon Konecki. The two had married shortly after the birth of their son, but the end of that marriage came just a year or so later. There was nothing as dramatic as an Adele lyric that had led them to this point.
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