Jake Brennan (30:06)
The arrest was made by members of the Crime Suppression Unit at Will Rogers park, located at Cannon and Lamitas in Beverly Hills. The undercover cop who slipped into the Will Rogers Memorial park restroom with George Michael on April 7, 1998, claimed that George went in first. George insisted it was the other way around. George also insisted that he unzipped his pants and began masturbating only after the other guy did this undercover cop dude. And that claim contradicted the police report that followed, which stated that the cop was not masturbating but rather simulating urination. And that was rich. George thought if he tried taking a leak while doing all the things that the guy was doing to himself in there, you'd get piss all over your hands. In George's eyes, this was entrapment, plain and simple. But whether or not George's version of what went down was true didn't matter. He knew that he'd never win a game of he said, he said against the Beverly Hills Police Department. Not when this was particular Task force. A Crime Suppression unit would do whatever it took to make arrests and thus justify their existence. After receiving numerous complaints about sexual activity in public toilets, George pled no contest. He was fined $910 and sentenced to therapy, community service, and two years probation. He was also forbidden from going back to Will Rogers Park. That part he could handle. There were other parks, other public toilets, many more fish in that proverbial sea of cruising subculture. But his reckless behavior, his complete disregard for the control he so carefully wielded when it came to his private life, had very nakedly revealed his secret to the entire world. And now the press was having a field day with that secret. Zip me up before you go go down and outed in Beverly Hills. These were actual headlines from actual publications at the time. But as crushing as I'm sure it was for George Michael to read all these things and to suddenly find himself the butt of every joke from every late night talk show host and as stupid. That's his word, by the way, as he felt over allowing himself to be well exposed in this particular way. The arrest and his subsequent outing had an unexpected result too. In many ways, it finally gave George the thing he'd sun so earnestly about years earlier. Freedom. I'm a dirty, filthy fucker, and if you can't deal with it, you can't deal with it. George Michael was taking the opposite approach that he once had when it came to journalists. Now he welcomed them into his house and told them everything. What do you want to know? His boyfriend, Kenny Goss. Open relationship tricks, Rent boys, escorts, whatever you want to call them. Of course, he's got a little black book and the wallet to match because sex ain't cheap. But you're not paying for the sex. Of course, that's not what the money's for. The money is to pay the trick to leave once the sex is over. Just like George was ready for this journalist to leave right now. The guy had gotten a good look at the bag of weeks and pills on his coffee table, of the Harlan Miller painting on his wall titled Incurable Romantic Seeks Dirty Filthy Whore. Now George's cell phone was blowing up. It was Paul. Paul made adult films and did dirty deeds, not so dirt cheap. But best of all, right now, Paul had the champagne. If George was willing and able. Champagne being the two's code word for ghb. B, AKA liquid ecstasy, an extremely potent drug capable of sending one into a heightened state of sexually charged euphoria. Shit, yeah. George was willing and George was able. Let's fuck. The journalists hit the bricks. And there was Paul, right on schedule, a travel sized shampoo bottle in his hand. George squeezed a few drops of GHB from the bottle into a glass of Cocoa Cola and drank it down. And the drug sent his libido into hyperdrive. Even better, it made him feel beautiful. On ghb, he didn't have to think about young George Michael, the overweight pimply reject, or so he'd always seen himself. He also didn't have to think about Anselmo and the others he'd lost, or that straight French playboy. And the others he never had in the first place. The drug made the music vibrate through his body. Each key he touched on the cigarette stained piano, the one previously owned by John Lennon, which George had won at auction for something like £1.5 million. Each key resonated inside of his fingertips and then his palms, his arms, his shoulders, his entire body. GHB supercharged his self esteem each time he left one of his many homes, like the one just north of London in Highgate. From there he took a path not unlike the one back in Beverly Hills. Down a curving hill and into Hampstead Heath, a big park full of bushes and trees where men just like him were looking for sex. The thrill of being caught, the guilt, it was all still there. But seeing as he'd been arrested once already, he was now far more cavalier than ever before. But the thing is, GHB is incredibly addictive. And when you overuse or abuse the drug, it can lead to what's known as a G hole, which is when someone high on GHB just slumps over and checks out, even when they're standing up. And for you, George Michael, you're about to fall into a G hole that won't let you go for the next four years. February 2006. Do some GHB, some marijuana, and then you hit a London club. You leave at 1am 30 minutes later you're found in your Mercedes, stalled out, knocked out, asleep at the wheel. The drugs are found on your person, as is allegedly a studded black leather fetish mask with a zipper on the mouth. So what you think? Live and let live. The cops Let you off with a warning. Two months later, it's April. More ghb, more weed. This time you're driving the Range Rover, trying to get back to your house in Highgate, and suddenly there's this fucking Ford Fiesta just parked there. Fuck. You put it in reverse and then in drive. And then. Shit. Where did that little Peugeot come from? Somehow you find your way home and the next morning the cops are at your door asking about the fucked up front end of your Rover parked in the driveway. Five months later, it's September. Your tour starts. Your first tour in 15 years. You're calling it 25 Live to celebrate your quarter century as one of the greatest to ever do it. The tour will stretch out for the next two years and will see you perform 106 shows in 41 countries and gross over $200 million. Every stage you step on, you kill it. You're a professional, which means you can compartmentalize. It also means that you work hard and you play hard too. On a day off, you tee up ghb, sleeping meds, antidepressant, chase it all with a joint. You can't see straight as your Mercedes tears ass into the night, weaving from one lane to the next, Hampstead Heath to get your rocks off. But you don't make it. You pass out. Your Mercedes rolls to a stop and once again the cops find you and your drugs. This time they charge you drug possession and driving under the influence. In December, the judge sentences you to community service and a small fine and she takes away your license for two years. But she doesn't want to interrupt your historic tour, the one that has become the most commercially successful European tour of the year. She knows that tomorrow you're playing the first of two sold out shows at Wembley. You show your gratitude, your capacity for change. I'm glad to put this behind me, you say. Now I'm off to do the biggest show of my life. Big shows and big plans aside, you don't put it behind you. It's still there, the addiction and the kink. You're no longer allowed to be in the front seat of your Mercedes or your your Range Rover. But guilt continues to drive your underlying compulsion. In September of 2008, police find you slinking around the public toilet at Hampstead Heath. You looked up and suspicious and, well, you are fucked up and suspicious. And your well documented reputation precedes you. They search you and find crack cocaine. Yet you swear to God they were tipped off, probably by someone who wants you to go to rehab. Jesus. Elton John should mind his own fucking business. You aren't in the market for salvation or for Elton John's pity. It's all self loathing and bad habits. Soon you can legally drive your car again. And much to no one's surprise, once again you crash it. Though this time not into a bunch of parked cars. This time you put your Rover through the facade of a one hour Photoshop in North London. The engine is still running when you're woken up by a police officer banging on the driver's side window. And a few days later someone writes wham. On the part of the storefront where you crashed your car. But you're not laughing. Because now on this, your seventh arrest in 12 years. Yes, years. Even though it's all been a blur and felt like mere months now, a judge is describing a new kind of penalty. Not just another fine and another loss of your license. There's something else. You're going to prison. By 2010, MTV was a shell of its former self. Gone were the days of non stop music video programming. Of Prince and Madonna and Michael Jackson, every hour on the hour and of MTV News, anchored for years by Kurt Loder. So there was no news coverage to be found on MTV on September 14th of that year, when 47 year old George Michael, Grammy winner, best selling artist of 1988, biggest grossing European tour headliner of 2006 and 2007, owner of multiple luxury homes throughout the world and one of the horniest MTV artists to ever live, was strip searched, given a nondescript inmate uniform and led down the dank and disgusting hallways of HM Prison Pentonville. Located in North London, Pentonville was no joke. The men's prison was infamous. It housed rapists, murderers and pedophiles. It was crawling with roaches and rodents. George was led by guards to the Vulnerable Prisoners Unit, which was for, quote, sex offenders and people who have committed serious crimes, unquote. His arrival was anticipated just as it had been years ago in places like Wembley and Rio. Only now, his audience was out. Not for his voice, his music or his sex, but out for his blood. The voices of incarcerated men, violent men, men at their absolute lowest, echoed through the prison halls. Where's George Michael? Bring us George Michael. George was terrified as he was led inside his cell. He kept his head down and kept to himself. Normally, the company of strange men loitering around toilets would have turned him on, but this, this was tough, different. The very thought of going to prison had been enough to scare him sober. He actually detoxed while awaiting sentencing. But now that he was on the inside. It was even worse than he could have ever imagined. Luckily, only the first three nights of his two week prison sentence would be here at Pentonville. The rest would be served two hours away in Suffolk at High Point Prison, where George slept in the good Behavior wing, played pool, received get well letters from Elton John and Paul McCartney, and on the day he left, signed autographs for every staff member and prisoner. A free and for now clean George Michael got to work on what was next, which was Symphonica, a live album documenting an orchestral tour of originals and covers he made in 2011 and 2012. Sober, George was all nice suits and button down shirts. His once trademark good hair had been buzzed down tight with a salt and pepper goatee to match even before he hit 50 years old. He was playing the elder statesman type. But a new lease on life, a new swell of creativity, a prison stint, detox therapy, a handwritten letter from a beetle. These are things that happen in hopes that they take hold and inspire not just change, but sustained change. And that doesn't always happen, because sometimes there's something that takes hold, even strong, whether it's a kink or a compulsion or an addiction, one driven by habit or by some deep seated psychological trauma. And look, I'm clearly not Sigmund Freud here, and I'm not kink or compulsion shaming either. We all have something, some more destructive than others, of course. And obviously George Michael had the kind of demons that you couldn't cast out by two weeks in a jail cell. A sex icon for the ages, an icon for the gay community at large. A man who owned numerous pieces of luxury property and lived the sort of life that most of us will only dream of. With all of that, he was never able to feel as sexy as he was seen by others. And so he was back to texting his friend Paul, back to asking for delivery of champagne, AKA ghb, back to a manufactured sense of sexiness, back in that G hole, unconscious this time, not behind the wheel, but in his bathtub, where an overdose sent him straight to the emergency room. Two years later, George Michael was dead at 53 years old, discovered by his latest boyfriend on Christmas Day. The official conclusion was natural causes stemming from a heart disease that makes it difficult for your body to pump blood. But considering that his family chose to withhold the toxicology report, and also considering that he died completely alone at some point on Christmas Eve or early Christmas morning, it's entirely possible that it was a less medical and more emotional affliction of the heart that did end George Michael, once one of the biggest stars on the planet. And that is a disgrace. I'm Jake Brennan and this is Disgrace Land. All right, thanks for getting kinky with me in this episode. This week's Question of the week is how many times have you had sex in a public toilet? No, that's obviously not the question of the week. The question is, which 1980s MTV era artist is your favorite? Is it Mr. George Michael or is it someone else who best defines the era for you and why? I want to know. Hit me up at 617-906-6638. Leave me a voicemail, send me a text. Hear your answer on the After Party bonus episode coming up right after this one and you can also send your answers to me. Disgracelandpod on Instagram X and Facebook. Leave a review for the show on Apple Podcasts or Spotify and win some free merch. Alright, here comes some credits. Disgraceland was created by yours truly and is produced in partnership with Double Elvis. Credits for this episode can be found on the show notes page@gracelandpod.com if you're listening as a Disgraceland All Access member, thank you for supporting the show. We really appreciate it. And if not, you can become a member right now by going to Disgracelandpod.com Membership members can listen to every single episode of Disgraceland ad free. Plus you'll get one brand new exclusive episode every month, weekly unscripted bonus episodes, special audio collections and early access to merchandise and events. Visit disgracelandpod.com membership for details, rate and review the show and follow us on Instagram, TikTok, Twitter and Facebook @Disgracelandpod and on YouTube at YouTube.com Disgracelandpod Rocka Rolla He's a bad bad man.
