transcript

Speaker 1:
[00:00] The C-Word is an Audacy podcast. And now, the next chapter of The Serta Counting Sheep.

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Speaker 5:
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Speaker 1:
[01:56] TMZ's favorite Chinese import.

Speaker 6:
[01:59] The current Asian dragon lady for Hollywood.

Speaker 1:
[02:02] Crazy hot or just crazy?

Speaker 6:
[02:05] Bat guano crazy.

Speaker 1:
[02:07] Wacktress.

Speaker 6:
[02:08] She looks like a rat on meth. This week, we're talking about Bai Ling.

Speaker 1:
[02:16] Bai Ling.

Speaker 6:
[02:40] Welcome back to The C-Word, a Luminary production. This is a show where we discuss women whose societies deemed mad, sad, or just plain bad. And we attempt to untangle who they really were beyond their wild reputations.

Speaker 1:
[02:52] We are going to talk about women who've been called crazy by sifting through the cultural trash heap of history one rumor at a time.

Speaker 6:
[03:02] I am bat guano expert, actually, Lena Dunham.

Speaker 1:
[03:06] And I'm Alissa Bennett, historian of bat guano behavior.

Speaker 6:
[03:11] And we will never call you crazy. Before we get started, we don't claim to know all the facts, folks. We're just passionate students of these interesting women in history, and we're trying to focus a lens on how and why these women achieve notoriety.

Speaker 1:
[03:31] This is a discussion about what various people have said about these women over the years. We're not saying that every statement or account we'll be discussing is true. So if you hear something that piques your interest, we encourage you to do your own investigation.

Speaker 6:
[03:45] Our hearts are in the right place, and together we can try and get to the bottom of what has been said about these women over time. By the way, if this sounds a little different than usual, if you hear a motorcycle or a dog or some hot celebrity, I'm recording in Los Angeles during this pandemic. Where are you, Alissa?

Speaker 1:
[04:04] I'm in my parents' basement where I live now. I'm living here now. You know what's crazy is that before the pandemic, my big fantasy was to move into my parents' basement, and now I'm here.

Speaker 6:
[04:17] Can I ask a question? Have you turned it into fully your office now?

Speaker 1:
[04:21] No, this is just where I record my Webby-nominated podcast.

Speaker 6:
[04:28] Now on to Bai Ling.

Speaker 4:
[04:31] Bai Ling.

Speaker 2:
[04:32] Bai Ling. Bai Ling.

Speaker 4:
[04:34] Bai Ling.

Speaker 7:
[04:35] You don't know who she is? She's that Asian chick in all the movies.

Speaker 4:
[04:38] That little Chinese body.

Speaker 3:
[04:40] Sexual omnivore.

Speaker 4:
[04:41] Bai?

Speaker 3:
[04:41] Bai?

Speaker 4:
[04:42] You're an alcoholic.

Speaker 8:
[04:43] Your reputation comes before anything else.

Speaker 3:
[04:46] Should I feel scared to be near you?

Speaker 6:
[04:50] Alissa, what are five things we need to know?

Speaker 1:
[04:52] Number one. Bai Ling is an actress known for her work in the Chinese and American film industries, including cult classics such as The Crow and Crank, High Voltage. But what she's really known for is her wild, tabloid-friendly behavior, garnering her the moniker Wacktress. Have you ever been called a Wacktress?

Speaker 6:
[05:14] I've definitely been called embattled a bunch of times. And I was always like, what? Me?

Speaker 1:
[05:18] Number two, Bai Ling grew up in Chengdu, China, where she honed her love of performing during her teenage years. After appearing in several Chinese art house films, she moved to the United States, where her career took off immediately. Number three, throughout the 2000s, Bai Ling acted steadily. But guess what? She also became a frequent character in The Tabloids, who delighted in documenting her wild dancing, her nip slips, her penchant for telling paparazzi that she was from the moon, and of course, her drinking.

Speaker 6:
[05:53] Yep. Never forget that drinking.

Speaker 1:
[05:55] Number four, in 2011, years of this kind of behavior culminated in Bai Ling's legendary appearance on season five of Celebrity Rehab, where she entered treatment for alcohol addiction. The show brought to light details of sexual abuse Bai Ling had endured throughout her life. Number five, Bai has apparently been sober since her appearance on Celebrity Rehab and continues to be a prolific actress. So let's get into Bai Ling, who I'm sad we don't know.

Speaker 6:
[06:26] Yeah.

Speaker 1:
[06:29] So Bai Ling was born in Chengdu, China. We're not entirely sure what year. Bless you, Bai Ling. It's a hot move. Some sources state that she was born in 1966. Some people say she was born in 1970s. Some people say that she was born at some year. Between these two points, it's most likely 1966. We don't care.

Speaker 6:
[06:51] We find that usually it is the oldest number that you're getting.

Speaker 1:
[06:55] You usually don't. Yeah. It's usually the oldest number.

Speaker 6:
[06:58] Do you know that my mother got really mad at me because when I was younger, I was upset that she didn't have like a more filled out Wikipedia and IMDB. So I took it upon myself to change the myself, and I put her birthdate in, and I was like severely punished.

Speaker 1:
[07:12] Girl, people don't like that. Yeah. All right. Back to Bai Ling. So it kind of doesn't matter because any of those possible birth years, places, Bai Ling's childhood and Mao Zedong's cultural revolution in the People's Republic of China, which began in 1966.

Speaker 6:
[07:29] And I'm not a history professor, but I've heard that this was a period in which Chairman Mao hoped to strengthen communist ideology throughout China by cracking down on old customs and culture and eliminating tons of quote unquote enemies. Some are between 500,000 and 8 million people were killed.

Speaker 1:
[07:47] I was born in 1984.

Speaker 6:
[07:50] Get real oldie.

Speaker 1:
[07:52] So Bai Ling's father was a musician and her mother was an actress, and the Cultural Revolution was, guess what, not the best time for them, as most traditional forms of art were contemned as being bourgeois. So Bai Ling was mostly raised by her grandparents.

Speaker 6:
[08:08] So when Bai was in her early teens, her parents also separated, as if growing up in a quasi-perpetual lockdown state with your grandparents wasn't enough. She was also painfully shy, and in 2004, said of her childhood, I had fear. I couldn't talk to anybody. I think my previous life, I was a wild animal running around in nature.

Speaker 1:
[08:27] So despite these problems at home, little Bai Ling joined the ranks of so many other C-Word subjects by demonstrating an early aptitude for performance. At 14, she became an enlisted performer in the People's Liberation Army.

Speaker 6:
[08:44] Listen, it's something. This essentially means she was a team member of a military troop designed to entertain soldiers in Tibet, etc. She mostly sang and acted, but also had to train as a soldier, quote unquote, just in case. Bai said that the male soldiers would get her drunk regularly so that they could sexually abuse her.

Speaker 1:
[09:02] So her story about this actually first came out to the public when she was on Celebrity Rehab in 2011. Don't worry, we're going to get there later. She told Dr. Drew Pinsky that one of the officers raped her and she became pregnant. She said that she then had an abortion under a fake name. We don't know exactly when this happened, but she would have been between 14 and 17 years old as she was a kid. Yeah.

Speaker 6:
[09:28] And we can imagine this must have been incredibly traumatic. And soon afterwards, teenage Bai Ling was admitted to a mental hospital. She said that at the time she was in the hospital, she was always telling the nurses, I'm not crazy, I'm an actress, I want to get out of here, I'm doing a movie. Which as you can imagine, nurses like when you're like, I'm an actress, don't worry, just let me out of here, I have a movie to do. They were like, okay.

Speaker 1:
[09:53] And it's also I think this familiar refrain that's going to come up again and again and again in her life where she's consistently saying to people, I'm not crazy, I'm an actress. And everyone's like, maybe you're both. So despite everything, her dreams of being an actress soon came true. And in 1976, Mao Zedong's Cultural Revolution came to a close and Bai Ling started acting in stage plays and joined a theater company. And she caught the attention of an assistant director who's looking for attractive young actors. And she was cast in the lead role in Tang Wenji's 1985 experimental film At the Beach.

Speaker 6:
[10:36] And by the way, I've watched little bits of this and it looks very kind of pretty and classy. Like, it's not like the brief role that Savannah had in a horror movie, like At the Beach seems like it was a beautiful experimental narrative by start as a young girl from a village who's supposed to marry her cousin, but instead flees to the city where she enjoys herself by sleeping around. The film was somewhat controversial in China, but it was her first breakthrough. Her career was taking off.

Speaker 1:
[11:01] And one of her better known roles in Chinese cinema was in Ark Light, aka The Shining Light. And she played a girl with a psychological disorder whose doctor falls in love with her classic. This kind of established this pattern that recurs throughout this career. So she's cast over and over in these roles that center around psychological and or sexual trauma, which is interesting to me because I think that it's kind of the same trap that befell Brittany Murphy. And I think that it activates this very common problem where we as a public have a very hard time differentiating between the role and the actress. So I think when the performance is too complete, it's impossible to look at the actress and think that they don't have some kind of deep-rooted psychological connection to whatever part they're playing.

Speaker 6:
[11:49] The other thing is that if you are an actual survivor of psychological and sexual trauma, there's probably something that happens that we would argue is re-traumatizing or triggering when you have to replay it over and over in situations with people who probably aren't the most careful with your mental health. While it's getting better, movie sets don't necessarily have a reputation like the place to be if you're hurting.

Speaker 1:
[12:10] Well, also, I think that if you have these emotions in your back catalog of real emotions that when you are able to convincingly play these roles, of course a director is like, this is fucking great. There are all of these stories throughout cinematic history.

Speaker 6:
[12:25] Well, the whole thing where Kubrick was like, Shelley is fragile and I'm going to torture her because look how easy it's going to be to make her go insane. Or like Tippi Hedren, whereas there are certain actresses who are just like, oh no, no, no, you're not going to try this. But the awful thing is like, we're not all given the same resources.

Speaker 1:
[12:42] Right.

Speaker 6:
[12:42] So back to Bai, one pretty crazy detail is that while living in China in 1989, Bai Ling claims she participated in the 1989 Tiananmen Square protests, where she says she saw, quote unquote, a lot of people die. Allegedly, she was only allowed to promote Arclight at the Moscow Film Festival if she agreed not to discuss the protests at all in the press. So she starts working in this incredibly repressive moment in culture, while not still under the regime, the attitudes remain.

Speaker 1:
[13:17] I mean, it's like a kid who grows up not being able to have any candy, and then suddenly the candy is available.

Speaker 6:
[13:24] And now their teeth fall out.

Speaker 1:
[13:25] And they're like, all I want to eat is candy. Like, I'm going to do this thing that was pushed out of me.

Speaker 6:
[13:31] Yeah. And I'm going to show up literally nude because I was basically told that just wanting to make art was subversive. Now I'm going to like embody that. So is that what you do?

Speaker 1:
[13:43] Is that what happened to you?

Speaker 6:
[13:44] That's what happened to me. But the thing I was also going to say is that what's also hard is like then Bai Ling comes to America, a place where people arguably have like the least knowledge about like any other culture of any place on earth. So no one has any way to like square her behavior.

Speaker 1:
[14:01] Yeah, we don't care. We're like, you're in America now.

Speaker 6:
[14:05] It's not nice. So it's 1989. She's had a number of big roles in China under her belt and she decides it's time to move to the United States. NYU Tisch awarded her a grant to come as a visiting artist in theater. She got an agent and in 1991 went to LA to audition for Mary Katzke's film Pen Pals.

Speaker 1:
[14:28] So Bai Ling doesn't know how to drive. Somehow she rents a car anyway and she spent over three hours trying to drive herself to the audition. When she gets there, she's good enough that people don't remember that she's late. She gets the part and this is the beginning of her American film career.

Speaker 6:
[14:49] And also who cares if she ever learned to drive because in 1993 she was cast in everybody's favorite goth masterpiece, The Crow. Okay, if you don't know, The Crow stars Brandon Lee, Bruce Lee's gorgeous fucking son who I would murder someone to lick the thigh of.

Speaker 1:
[15:08] Still?

Speaker 6:
[15:09] Yeah, we're getting there. I would get in my sex time machine and I would go to the set of The Crow and I would lick the inside of Brandon Lee's thigh and then I'd go.

Speaker 1:
[15:17] You'd probably save his life. You'd probably save him.

Speaker 6:
[15:20] Yeah, well, he played a rock musician who is murdered with his fiance and comes back to life to avenge their deaths. Bai Ling plays Micah, who is the lover of the main bad guy, but also his sister. Well. Yikes. So I want you to talk us through what happened on The Crow because this is arguably a pretty traumatic entree to Hollywood.

Speaker 1:
[15:41] Right. So she's on the set. This is like a big movie, right? So Brandon comes up to her and he's like, oh, hey, my father was Bruce Lee. And she's like, I don't know who that is. And then she later that night found out that Bruce Lee was the Anglicized version of his Chinese name. And she goes back to the set the next day. And she's like, I know your father as whatever his real name was. And then they really bond and they become friends and they're hanging out on set. They're playing video games together. Everyone looks very hot. She looks very hot in this movie. And then of course, one of the most infamous tragedies in cinematic history occurs. They're filming a scene in which Brandon Lee's character is shot. And Brandon is accidentally shot for real with a prop gun that was supposed to only have blanks loaded. This is always a big mystery to me.

Speaker 6:
[16:31] Yeah, I really don't understand. And like, I actually know people who know people who are on this prop team. There's a lot of sort of like conspiracy that's gone on around it and confusion about how this could possibly happen. It started an entirely new regime about the way that they check and kind of like the safety measures around violent scenes. But the fact is, he died. It was an incredible Hollywood tragedy. And clearly, Bai Ling was very shaken up. She would later say that watching the movie, it felt like he was not dead. And he was just, quote, they're watching us in a different form, quote.

Speaker 1:
[17:09] So despite this dark start to her career, she soldiers on, she continues to work. And in 1997, her career really started to take off because she got the lead role in a movie called Red Corner, opposite Richard Gere. Her character was a Chinese defense attorney assigned to Gere, who was an American wrongfully accused of murder while visiting China. The movie was pretty much uniformly ridiculed by critics who called it contrived. They called it an uninteresting melodrama, they called it xenophobic. Andrew O'Hare went so far as to write in Salon, I left the theater feeling guilty for every time I've looked at an Asian woman on the street.

Speaker 6:
[17:52] Okay, on the one hand, fucking gross, Andrew. But this does bring up another interesting point, which is that when you are an actress who's a quote unquote minority, the roles that are offered to you are often roles that enhance stereotypes that you may not actually want to be a part of. So there's this terrible thing which is on the one hand, you can do incredible work, but no matter how incredible the work you do in the role, your part may be a part of a story that doesn't tell a truthful or particularly human tale of the place you love or come from.

Speaker 1:
[18:25] Right. So there is one thing that people liked about this film, and it was Bai Ling. So she won two awards for her appearance from the National Board of Review and the San Diego Film Critics Society Awards. The New York Times wrote that she gave the film, quote, not only grace, but substantial gravity. She's so good. Let's discuss.

Speaker 2:
[18:50] I'm very sorry that I did not believe your innocence.

Speaker 9:
[18:58] But now, I do.

Speaker 6:
[19:01] She's good.

Speaker 1:
[19:02] She's like crying very believably. She's telling this story about like growing up during the Cultural Revolution and how dehumanizing it was. And it's real. And the fact is that it's so distant from the Bai Ling that we know in terms of like tabloid culture and tabloid media. The performance is so subtle. It's such a light touch and it's a very, very good performance. But when you take these performances and you look at them in the context of what her public persona eventually became, the public persona completely washes the performance out because it's so much more memorable, because it's so much more extravagant or flamboyant.

Speaker 6:
[19:41] That it's almost like the performance, which was artful, tasteful and specific, is like replaced by the intensity of how she's chosen to engage the public. Could I have been guilty of this at times? Maybe. May we?

Speaker 1:
[19:56] So what we want as the public is we want the inverse of that. So we want the performance to be where the intensity is, and we want the public persona, especially for an Asian woman, and this is our racism. We want the Asian woman to present these mannerisms that we've assigned to that culture. So we want them to be restrained, we want them to be elegant, we want them to be reserved. And she's doing the opposite, so.

Speaker 6:
[20:21] So, cause the film was so incredibly anti-Chinese, and that it depicted all this corruption and conspiracy within the Chinese government, in addition to just being kind of dumbly racist, the film was banned in China soon after its release. Then for good measure, Bai Ling was banned from the country as well. Her Chinese citizenship and passport were revoked.

Speaker 1:
[20:40] That's crazy. That's, so we have to imagine how devastating it must have been to be banned from her own country, especially after she worked for national identity for all of her teenage life. She told Paper Magazine in 2004 that she was in tears and couldn't sleep after being prohibited from visiting her family. Ultimately, she was able to have the ban lifted after writing an apology letter, but the incident followed her for years. I mean, this would follow you forever. People would be like, hey, you know, Bai Ling, the one who had her passport revoked for that shitty movie.

Speaker 6:
[21:18] The thing is, her career in America was going very well, right? She was working steadily in film, including The Will Smith Vehicle, Wild Wild West, and TV for several years, and was named one of People Magazine's 50 Most Beautiful People in 1998, which is kind of a big deal. She was one of the leads in 1999's Anna and the King, a film that made me cry very, very much, a role for which she shaved off her waist-length hair to become a female monk because she didn't want to marry some dude, and she looked hot. In 2004, she was cast in Spike Lee's She Hate Me. So things are actually going well. She was working with real directors, real actors, getting it done.

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Speaker 1:
[23:08] So her next big career move was joining the cast of one of the most anticipated films of the early 2000s, Star Wars, Episode III, Revenge of the Sith, a film I've never seen. This was a very big deal.

Speaker 6:
[23:21] I saw it in theaters with my dad.

Speaker 1:
[23:24] It was a big deal. It was a George Lucas film, and it was the Star Wars franchise, which is like the big leagues. So she played someone named Senator Bana Bremu, she was like a kind of hot alien who was always slinking around in this purple satin gown and doing kind of intergalactic politics.

Speaker 6:
[23:48] Her outfit looks like a fetish look. It's like slightly too long for this, but the vibe is fetish look that you could purchase at Ricky's if you were trying to spice up your relationship with the married man you're fucking.

Speaker 1:
[24:01] It's very Comic-Con also.

Speaker 6:
[24:03] Yeah, it's like got Renaissance aspects. They're showing as much skin as they can, but then they're covering her blunt bangs with a kind of like green and purple intarsia lace hood, and she looks like she's taking it seriously.

Speaker 1:
[24:17] She probably was. So people thought she was not taking it seriously enough because after shooting wrapped, she posed for not only the cover of Playboy, but also a pictorial. It was the June 2005 issue, which was supposed to come out the same month as the movie. The text on the cover of the magazine said, Star Wars, sexy alien, Star Wars, collector's issue, and of course, Bai Ling naked.

Speaker 6:
[24:47] Okay. Firstly, the cover is just not even that different than the outfit she has to wear as Banna Bremu or whatever. Like it's so fucking tame. She also looks gorgeous.

Speaker 1:
[25:01] It looks like it's made out of laser cut tape. It's very Alexander McQueen early 2000s.

Speaker 6:
[25:08] So no big deal.

Speaker 1:
[25:09] So these ended up being a big deal in her career. But we have to imagine that this is a Chinese woman who has been achieving some notoriety within film. She's been castigated culturally and literally from her country of origin. So she is thinking like I'm going to become this icon. I have this big film that's coming out and I'm going to do this thing because I can, but guess what?

Speaker 6:
[25:36] She kind of couldn't.

Speaker 1:
[25:38] People were like, you can't do that. So this cover comes out and she is miraculously cut from the film.

Speaker 6:
[25:47] Like fully cut. Like she's not in the film.

Speaker 1:
[25:50] She's gone.

Speaker 6:
[25:51] Brina Bamu doesn't do any more intergalactic politics because she's just a memory, a memory. There was even a Senator Banna Brimu action figure and Playboy was totally at odds with toy merchandising fantasy and they ripped it from the shelves.

Speaker 1:
[26:06] Can you imagine how much it would be worth to those Star Wars people now, those passionate Star Wars people?

Speaker 6:
[26:11] She still makes money signing pictures of her in the costume, even though she's not in the movie. And listen, when it came out, no one directly said we cut her because of the naked Playboy shoot. George Lucas has denied that, saying he has also cut his two daughters from the film. But we don't know. We weren't there. If you were going to make an action figure of her and suddenly she's not in the movie, I doubt that was the situation. I bet his daughter's had the cute little walk on parts as baby trolls or something.

Speaker 1:
[26:38] So MTV comes out and they say, this word is in quotes, they say that Bai Ling has shriveled her big chance, that she's blown it, that this was a bad move. An editor of the Asian American Culture magazine, Hyphen, wrote at the time, quote, I'm not sure how much more revealing her Playboy spread can be. In almost every photo I've seen of her, she's got cleavage hanging out everywhere.

Speaker 6:
[27:04] Well, Bai Ling for her part was proud of the Playboy cover, saying, the truth is I did personally work with two of the 20th century icons, George Lucas and Hugh Hefner. I'm the first Asian woman on the cover of Playboy Mag, she said. I went from a communist country to Playboy.

Speaker 1:
[27:21] Truth. That's true. So later in 2005, Bai served on the jury of the 55th Berlin International Film Festival and guest starred on Entourage. But the Playboy cover fiasco followed her everywhere. And she eventually becomes pigeonholed as a very certain type of kind of raunchy mid-2000s celebrity that's supposed to be entertaining but not respected.

Speaker 6:
[27:47] Well, it's interesting. She goes from like entertaining the communist troops and then being told that she's a really gifted actress based on these parts to basically being like put in a category with Tara Reid.

Speaker 1:
[27:58] Right. So all of these decisions that she's made for her kind of life life, do all of the heavy lifting for who we think she is. So we forget that she's a good actress. We forget about this personal history. We forget all these things about her because the eye is automatically attracted to scandal.

Speaker 6:
[28:17] And we also have to note that this was happening in the early to mid 2000s. This was pre Kim Kardashian, pre body and sex positivity. No one was like applauding women for turning their commodification into ownership or a brand. Showing your body might get you the money that you needed in that second, but it wasn't anything to like build an empire on.

Speaker 1:
[28:37] Yeah, we were like gross.

Speaker 6:
[28:39] When Kim Kardashian first came out, we were like gross. That bitch worked hard. So this brings us to 2007, which can only be described as a bad fucking year.

Speaker 1:
[28:48] It's a bad year. So Bai Ling becomes more outspoken, which adds to the image the public had formed of her as a hypersexual and therefore, like ridiculously dismissible person. In the second half of the odds, she continued to appear in movies. Most of them were kind of like those shitty, not very great action films. And she guest starred on an episode of Lost, but her acting was totally overshadowed by various red carpet appearances. You know what I'm talking about. And by the sequence of bizarre interactions she had with TMZ. They're undertakers. Those people are undertakers.

Speaker 6:
[29:25] It's horrifying. It's around this time that TMZ starts to refer to her as quote unquote, whackedress. There are so many of these videos, we cannot play them all for you. And we don't even really recommend you falling into the black hole of the TMZ archives because they'll probably make you sad and you're also supporting monsters.

Speaker 1:
[29:41] Okay, on June 18th of 2007, these videos were posted of her doing this kind of dance. TMZ called it the chicken dance. I think she looks very free. Almost every tabloid write up about her for the next few months referenced this performance. And at one point TMZ filmed her telling them that she thought it should be called the cheetah dance.

Speaker 6:
[30:04] And note that the title was, So you think you can dance? Not if you're Bai Ling. Nice try, Bai, but girl makes Paris Hilton look like a member of the Bolshoi Ballet. That's not nice.

Speaker 1:
[30:17] It's rude. So on July 2nd, 2007, TMZ reported that Bai had a Harper Collins book deal in the works. Hi, Rupert Murdoch, for a memoir called My Life as a Crazy Movie Star. The text of TMZ's report reads, How Ling, whose only major roles stateside include a one-episode stint on Lost and a silent part in Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow, convinced Harper Collins to give her a book deal is beyond us.

Speaker 6:
[30:50] And this one is really telling because Bai Ling was working consistently, but TMZ didn't know shit about her filmography. To them, she was only relevant as a star of tabloids and the creator of the Chicken Dance. Yet, they were the ones that were manufacturing that brand of stardom. And this goes back to the idea of her public persona being louder than her roles. And also the idea that this thing happens in Hollywood where when you think you're empowering yourself, you're actually empowering other people to mock you. And it's one thing to say you're taking back the power, but where the power is placed is so confusing that it's hard to stay a step ahead.

Speaker 1:
[31:28] Exactly.

Speaker 6:
[31:29] So on July 5th, 2007, the paparazzi cornered Bai outside a club with a man who would later be identified as Damon Elliott, aka Buck 22, aka the son of Dionne Warwick, aka Whitney Houston's cousin.

Speaker 1:
[31:42] Small world.

Speaker 6:
[31:43] Bai told them she and Damon had gotten married in Vegas earlier that day.

Speaker 1:
[31:48] There's no record that that ever happened. We don't know. I wasn't there. You weren't there. But what we do know is that these two kind of dated on and off for at least a little while.

Speaker 6:
[31:59] And I'm just going to look up Buck 22. I just want to see if I think he's hot. Oh, he looks sweet. They look like they're cozy together. He looks well put together. She looks like her usual kooky self and he's accepting it. She looks happy and cozy and content. And the part I like most is he keeps wrapping her tiny self up into his body or doing things like kissing her thigh or neck or back. There is one picture I don't adore, which is like him dressed in a cop uniform as he like holds her naked body where she looks like a mannequin. Oh, yeah. And at one point, it seems as though this is really interesting just if I'm doing research. They're on the beach with his daughter and they're also on the beach with Pink, the singer. These two seem like they had fun for a while. I'm not going to deny it. There's good energy here. So at this point, August 2007, she plays a pop song she recorded from her car speakers and sings along. It seems like she might be forgetting some of the words. And obviously people are like, this woman is crazy. I like it. I love it. Okay. So the most intense part of this is Bai Ling in this video clip is sitting in a red convertible. She kind of seems like she's about to roll away, but she doesn't. And she puts on a song that she has recorded. And as the beat starts, she's like, you guys like it? And the TMZ guy is like, yeah, I like it. Because he knows.

Speaker 1:
[33:27] The people are going to make fun of her for it.

Speaker 6:
[33:29] Well, it's also like when a drunk girl grinds on a guy at a bar and she's like, get out my body. And he's like, oh yeah, totally for the next 13 seconds. And then she starts to sing the chorus of the song and it goes like this.

Speaker 1:
[33:45] And it didn't work.

Speaker 6:
[33:48] I think it's catchy.

Speaker 1:
[33:49] Everyone was like, I can't wait to leave you, Bai Ling. See you tomorrow on TMZ. So for all of 2007, the summer of 2007, the paparazzi do not leave her alone. She was a very, very easy target for them, especially since she often seemed to have been drinking before encountering them. She once said, this is a sad interview. She said, when I have champagne, everyone is my friend. So she was always down to get naked on camera. She constantly referred to her past life as a cheetah and or a tiger. She was always talking about how she was from the moon. She was the tabloid dream. Even if she was just performing the tabloid dream, we couldn't tell the difference.

Speaker 6:
[34:36] She also didn't seem to particularly care that they were constantly in her space. She seemed to play along with a lot of the tabloid antics. It almost feels lazy on the paparazzi's part. She was guaranteed clickbait and she let them write in. But we also need to acknowledge off the top here that what we are witnessing and what is being turned into this kind of LOL JK gossip are a series of moments that document this woman's intense addiction and downfall. But no one cares because it's entertaining and we can marvel at her seeming insanity, which by the way, we know we have a rich culture of doing. Remember when Amanda Bynes started going on Twitter and saying she wanted Drake to murder her vagina and we were all like, you've changed.

Speaker 1:
[35:17] I want to say that I'm guilty of this too. Regardless of how empathetic you are, regardless of how much you understand what that internal mechanism is that perpetuates this behavior and turns it into a cultural product, it's still so fascinating to watch someone come apart at the seams. Because I think that it hooks into systems where it's like, I'm not as bad as Bai Ling. Like maybe I have done these regrettable things, but they're not that public and they're not that often. So it's like someone causing these repeated ruptures in public that make us feel normal, insane, and like chased.

Speaker 6:
[35:57] Completely. Stuff like the tabloids being obsessed with Bai's various quote unquote nip slips are just a way of them saying like, we want to see more of you and more of you and more of you and nothing is enough. And they're not acknowledging that she's already shown it all to them. They're not even acknowledging that a nip slip at the beach or at a party or on the red carpet, since these were constantly happening, like these quote unquote wardrobe malfunctions, throwback Thursday. No one's acknowledging that.

Speaker 1:
[36:24] What happened to wardrobe malfunctions? They just stopped.

Speaker 6:
[36:28] I know, because everyone just like was like, we're whores now. Like, I don't know.

Speaker 1:
[36:33] That was a tacky time.

Speaker 6:
[36:35] People say that it ended Janet Jackson's career.

Speaker 1:
[36:37] It was like a pink spandex, headbanded, bandana tied around the ankle, tacky ass moment in American history. So it really was. Okay, back to Bai Ling. So one TMZ article put the whole situation this way. They said, surprisingly enough, Bai Ling was able to keep one of her nipples covered on the beaches of Hawaii yesterday.

Speaker 6:
[37:07] By the way, this is the kind of shit people used to say about me. I was like, who cares? But at the same time, I remember the first day, the fappening happened when everyone's nudes leaked.

Speaker 1:
[37:16] Oh, yeah.

Speaker 6:
[37:16] There was this moment where a bunch of friends were texting me, their nudes were in the bunch. For a second, I was like, oh my God. Then I was like, oh, everything I've done on TV is so much worse than anything I've ever said to a boy, I'm fine. No one's going to be disappointed in me.

Speaker 1:
[37:31] There is a website called mandatory.com. It was like a shitty junkie culture website from this time. They said in 2006, Bai Ling is naked or almost naked most of the time. Seeing a nipple slip from her is never a surprise or really all that exciting. At this point, she could be standing naked in a grocery store and someone could say, hey, check out that naked girl over there. And the only response would be, where? Behind Bai Ling?

Speaker 6:
[38:01] I mean, lolmandatory.com.

Speaker 1:
[38:05] Good one.

Speaker 6:
[38:06] So 2007 has been a bust and 2008 is not much better because in February, Bai was arrested for shoplifting at LAX Airport, my favorite store too. A gift shop employee accused her of stealing two star magazines and a pack of batteries for about a total of $16.

Speaker 1:
[38:25] That's a bargain.

Speaker 6:
[38:27] The next day, Bai told E! News she had had an emotionally crazy day after having had quote unquote the huge problem of breaking up before Valentine's Day with her boyfriend, quote unquote wrong boyfriend, she told them.

Speaker 1:
[38:41] In the E! article, Damon Elliott, do you remember her Damon Elliott, Lena?

Speaker 6:
[38:45] Oh yeah.

Speaker 1:
[38:46] Her boyfriend that she told everyone she married seven months earlier who she posed with as a sex doll, he was dressed like a cop.

Speaker 6:
[38:54] Yep.

Speaker 1:
[38:54] Is quoted us saying, quote, she was in a mentally unstable state of mind yesterday and that she had some relationship issues. The article also calls Damon a close pal, which is weird, obviously, because they had allegedly been bound to each other through God in a ceremony seven months prior.

Speaker 6:
[39:15] And it sounds like he's implying that the relationship issues were not with him.

Speaker 1:
[39:19] Yeah, we don't know. We weren't there.

Speaker 6:
[39:21] We really weren't there for this one.

Speaker 1:
[39:23] Bai wasn't there either.

Speaker 6:
[39:25] No. And on March 5th, Bai was charged with, quote, unquote, disturbing the peace and was ordered to pay a fine and penalties totaling $700. Bai Ling wrote on her website that it was an innocent mistake.

Speaker 1:
[39:37] So then in April of 2008, TMZ posts another video of her where she claims that she just came back from vacation on the moon and shot three movies there. We're not.

Speaker 6:
[39:49] We've been up to these days.

Speaker 2:
[39:51] Oh, I've been back to the moon, had a vacation there, I shot three movies there already, seriously. But you see it here.

Speaker 1:
[39:58] She's not that wild in this video.

Speaker 6:
[40:01] I mean, no, besides saying that you'll eventually see the three movies she shot on the moon, she seems cheerful.

Speaker 1:
[40:06] But she's like laughing about it. Like she knows what her public persona is. She's playing the game. But people will then in turn suggest that she is crazy enough that she was being sincere and genuine and not get to the obvious point that she was like having a laugh because people think she's crazy.

Speaker 6:
[40:23] And you know, she would later tell interviewers that she was quote unquote from the moon and that her grandmother was too. This would become a parenthetical repeated an article after article after article written about her. And things kind of just stayed bad for her after this. For example, there was this 2009 Young Hollywood clip in which paparazzi berate her about being over and another video taken in a convertible. She takes off her skirt and waves it at drivers on the freeway. She literally says, I don't know where we are. Can I just say like the skirt thing? Like when we wrapped an episode during the first season of Girls and I was like really excited because it was six in the morning, I was in this like little like denim wrap skirt and I took it off and ran around in my tights and waved the skirt in the air to signal that everybody could go home, like stuff like that seemed just like fun and innocent or like I don't know where I am is something I literally say six to seven times a day. I know it's another thing if you're wasted.

Speaker 1:
[41:19] Yes. And it's hyperbole and it's a joke and it's also playing into these sort of stereotypes that exist about you, that you are aware of, you know, it's just her kind of taking this material that's been thrown at her and turning it into a gorgeous early 2000s gown.

Speaker 6:
[41:35] That's a hundred percent true with knit aspects. Anyway, Bai's like not being accepted as the creative self she is. She does appear to be inebriated or hung over at certain times. And in early 2009, there's also this Gawker article by Kyle Buchanan, now of the New York Times. Blasphemy. That says, Page Six reported by Ling, quote unquote, made out and partied pretty hard with Mickey Work, which to me sounds hot and fun.

Speaker 1:
[42:00] Another actress who we are covering this season is attached to Mickey Work and that's Brittany Murphy. And she was supposed to be in that film, The Expendables, and she was going to play Mickey Work's girlfriend. And if you look on Crazy Days and Nights from around this time, everyone is like, oh, Brittany Murphy is going to be Mickey Work's girlfriend so that they can smoke crap together. So we take these antics that male stars have engaged in, or that we think male stars have engaged in, we don't damn them eternally for it, but we will damn any woman that's in this orbit. We let famous men get away with these behaviors, but we know that they're bad, right?

Speaker 6:
[42:41] Yeah. But despite all these antics, some people were starting to question her tabloid persona. In a June 2009 post on IFC's website, one writer asked, if she's as crazy as the media often depicts her, how come she's been hired for at least nine upcoming features? Good fucking question. It's also really worth noting that even though tabloids loved selling bye to us as a kooky, slutty alcoholic, she was shooting multiple feature films a year, showing up on set and doing her job. Like this was no Lindsay Lohan situation.

Speaker 1:
[43:11] Bendito.

Speaker 6:
[43:13] Bendito.

Speaker 8:
[43:20] Kayak gets my flight, hotel, and rental car right, so I can tune out travel advice that's just plain wrong.

Speaker 7:
[43:27] Bro, Skycoin, way better than points.

Speaker 5:
[43:30] Never fly during a Scorpio full moon.

Speaker 3:
[43:33] Just tell the manager you'll sue.

Speaker 5:
[43:35] Instant room upgrade.

Speaker 8:
[43:37] Stop taking bad travel advice. Start comparing hundreds of sites with Kayak, and get your trip right. Kayak, got that right.

Speaker 4:
[43:47] No one goes to Hank's for his spreadsheets. They go for a darn good pizza. Lately, though, the shop's been quiet. So Hank decides to bring back the $1 slice. He asks Copilot in Microsoft Excel to look at his sales and costs, to help him see if he can afford it. Copilot shows Hank where the money's going, and which little extras make the dollar slice work. Now Hank says, I'll line out the door. Hank makes the pizza. Copilot handles the spreadsheets. Learn more at m365copilot.com.

Speaker 1:
[44:23] So in 2011, Bai rockets back into our collective consciousness with an appearance.

Speaker 6:
[44:30] Rockets back into Alissa's consciousness.

Speaker 1:
[44:32] Yeah, cause I was like a celebrity rehab hound.

Speaker 6:
[44:35] I know, I know this about you.

Speaker 1:
[44:36] So she appears in the fifth season of Celebrity Rehab hosted by Dr. Drew Pinsky. I'm a doctor too.

Speaker 6:
[44:44] I know.

Speaker 1:
[44:45] So she was there to treat alcohol addiction. This is the second time we've talked about season five of Celebrity Rehab, cause she was on there with Mary Shawn Young.

Speaker 6:
[44:55] Yep.

Speaker 1:
[44:56] This was like a crazy cast. So her co-stars included Michael Lohan, who's Lindsay's dad. I think that Long Island Lolita was there on that season.

Speaker 6:
[45:05] Yes, she was.

Speaker 1:
[45:06] It was like an all-star cast. So she goes to Celebrity Rehab. She is prescribed medication to deal with her quote, unusual thinking, which seems like a very 19th century redux. She doesn't want to take the medication. She's like, I don't want to take it because I don't know how it's going to make me feel. She refuses, refuses, refuses. And then in one episode, she climbs up on the roof of the facility, and it prompts the producers to call 911. But in subsequent interviews, Bai Ling says, I just needed to get some fresh air. Like you're stuck in this place, like this fake hospital.

Speaker 6:
[45:43] At my rehab, I found a Robin's egg and held it in my hand. She's stuck in like a wing of like a broke down hospital that Dr. Drew Pinsky bought.

Speaker 4:
[45:51] Where is Bai?

Speaker 6:
[45:57] You find her room?

Speaker 4:
[46:01] Bye.

Speaker 6:
[46:03] If you don't mind, Alissa, I would like the honor of describing it.

Speaker 1:
[46:06] Take it away.

Speaker 6:
[46:07] So we see Bai Ling looking very stressed out. First, she's wearing like a pair of black pajamas with like a cream business shirt under them. That's kind of like a pajama work outfit. Then she puts on a crimson robe and silver Ugg boots. And then she walks out of her room and proceeds with just the strength of her own hands to unscrew her own like fancy nameplate that says Bai Ling from the door of her room. She then like scurries out, walks around the house, clutching her nameplate. And when they next see her, she's like peeping over the edge of the roof, like she's hiding in fucking World War II. And then at that point, like one of the guys on the show, just some meathead is like, Bai, Bai Ling. And then the other woman's like, Bai Ling, Bai Ling, this isn't cool. And then Dr. Drew walks up, like coming from his pool or something, and looks up and Bai Ling is on the roof. And he's like, what's happening?

Speaker 3:
[47:00] She's on the roof.

Speaker 6:
[47:02] Bai, how did she get up there? What's happening?

Speaker 1:
[47:06] And he's also like, we have to dramatize this in Call 911.

Speaker 6:
[47:11] You gotta call the cops. I mean, she could jump. Even though really what she's doing is just like, expertly, she looks like she knows how to do stunts.

Speaker 1:
[47:19] She's like extricating herself from a humiliating situation, which is what Celebrity Rehab is about.

Speaker 6:
[47:25] And she's basically like, I came here to get better, and this fucking sucks. So here's the thing. Three producers call 911 based on this clip, and then Bai's whole turn on the show is very, very, very, very dark. Do you want to describe what we would see?

Speaker 1:
[47:40] So in between trying to make her take this medication that she doesn't want to take, and her escaping to the roof, eventually there's a group session, and she starts crying, and she tells a story about a boyfriend who she said made her different drinks every night to get her drunk, and then sexually assaulted her.

Speaker 6:
[48:00] And Dr. Drew treats this like a total fucking set of gonads because he tells her that that wouldn't have happened if she hadn't drunk. Therefore, doing exactly what we do to every woman throughout history, if your skirt hadn't been short, if you hadn't been walking in that neighborhood, wanting to get drunk and escape your pain doesn't mean that you're allowed to be sexually assaulted every night. The women in the room all look vaguely uncomfortable, and then Bai Ling says, My nipples all over, all the tabloids think I'm like an idiot bimbo, I am not a bimbo.

Speaker 2:
[48:30] I hate it, I'm making myself like an idiot.

Speaker 3:
[48:33] If I don't stop, I'm dead.

Speaker 6:
[48:36] Quote, I'm this beautiful, talented actress, but I fucked myself up being in these clubs with my nipples out and the tabloids think I'm a bimbo. I'm not a bimbo. If I don't stop, I'm dead. What's wrong with me? And you know who follows her out to comfort her? She's sobbing uncontrollably.

Speaker 1:
[48:55] I do know, Mary Shawn Young.

Speaker 6:
[48:57] You know what? Girlfriends hold girlfriends down, Alissa. It's a lot like how you and I met. I was weeping in a bathroom and you came out to follow me. Who in that situation was the Bai and who was the Mary Shawn Young? I'm the Bai.

Speaker 1:
[49:11] You can be the Bai this time. So Shawn is one of our C-Word ladies. We have to say that this moment between them is so sweet. It's so real. The only real moments that happen on Celebrity Rehab are between the people who are incarcerated on Celebrity Rehab. So she tells Bai that she's talented, that she's not a bimbo. She coaxes her back to the group session. And at this point, all of the other women in the room are crying too. Whatever Bai Ling is saying about herself is obviously hitting this cord that's so familiar to the women in this room that they're there with her.

Speaker 6:
[49:50] As a woman in recovery, I speak to a lot of other women who are in recovery from addiction and there are very, very, very few of us who weren't sexually abused or assaulted while we were high. And one of the parts of like addict recovery that like I had to like very personally carve my way out of was the idea that you're supposed to take responsibility for every single bad thing that happens while you're under the influence. Cause it's a very classic.

Speaker 1:
[50:17] Right, it's very AA.

Speaker 6:
[50:19] Very classic AA theory, but AA was, when AA started, all there was was one chapter called For the Wives. Like no one thought about the fact that you could be an alcoholic or an addict and a woman.

Speaker 1:
[50:30] Right. This also goes back to this theory where when women experience trauma, they turn that trauma onto their bodies. So they cut, they starve, they get into drugs. When men experience trauma, that trauma is often directed outwards in the form of violence and abuse upon others.

Speaker 6:
[50:49] Yeah.

Speaker 1:
[50:49] So in the same episode, Bai Ling later sits down for a one-on-one session with Dr. Drew, where she kind of gives him the full scope of her trauma. He asked her about her time in the military in Tibet, and she very candidly reveals a very traumatic history of abuse.

Speaker 6:
[51:08] And she's now so good at fulfilling expectations that she is handing him the story the way she thinks he wants it heard. And it's also amazing, like she even dresses in a costume for each thing. Like here she's wearing this little military hat and jacket and leggings, and she's like, I'm here to tell you about my story as a military child, dressed as a military child.

Speaker 1:
[51:33] But it's also under the construct of entertainment and the entertainment industrial complex. So for anybody, it would be hard to process your trauma on film and on camera and with this panoptic gaze on you, but doubly hard because he's also in on it. Like he's complicit to the fact that we're generating entertainment out of her suffering.

Speaker 9:
[51:52] Looking at leaders, I was hoping I can trust them, they will love me. And in a way they do love me and I feel compassion sometimes for them.

Speaker 6:
[52:03] And she says it right there, I wanted these leaders to love me. He's like, the way you deal with your trauma is incorrect. Wow, you had the ability to like empathize with the people who abused you.

Speaker 1:
[52:13] Right.

Speaker 6:
[52:14] So you're not even feeling your trauma correctly.

Speaker 1:
[52:16] Right, right.

Speaker 6:
[52:17] And then he's like, I cannot forgive them.

Speaker 10:
[52:20] I'm just saying I would have trouble with forgiving them.

Speaker 6:
[52:23] I do. You are able to. He's forcing her to basically rehash all of this and then trying to force a reaction that he thinks is going to be TV worthy and like stir up the emotional pot and terrify her.

Speaker 1:
[52:39] Which is probably what Bai Ling had experienced for most of her life, that the responses are canned because they're crafted.

Speaker 6:
[52:45] As her life goes on, it's all about recreating these situations in which she like basically has to like bifurcate herself in order to be seen or felt. That's one of the reasons why if she has stayed sober the way she claims, it's a fucking miracle because the last thing that's going to happen to you when you go on a show like that is you stay sober. Like you're going to be shaking with desire to leave your body because of what you've given them and left at that like fake hotel that they're staying in. Celebrity Rehab is not on anymore, is it?

Speaker 1:
[53:17] No. They've had like a very shocking casualty rate. I will say that.

Speaker 6:
[53:23] Well, that's the thing is like every rehab has a fairly low rate of people staying sober. It's a known thing and it doesn't mean you didn't have a good therapist. But the situation she finds herself in involves like not having a fighting chance.

Speaker 1:
[53:39] Right.

Speaker 6:
[53:40] So, after this, Bai Ling was not as much in our sort of like 2000s tabloid public consciousness, and her film career has started to bounce back, if slowly.

Speaker 1:
[53:53] Get it, girl. She's still our Bai Ling. She still shows up in the tabloids with like a nipple that maybe pokes out of a crocheted top.

Speaker 6:
[54:02] What I like to call the casual nipple.

Speaker 1:
[54:04] She gets herself into a scrap every once in a while, but she's doing her best.

Speaker 6:
[54:11] In 2016, Bai Ling set off a very different kind of controversy for appearing in a television documentary series about the Long March, a major moment in communist history. Chinese viewers were fired up about Bai Ling's involvement.

Speaker 1:
[54:26] So basically, a lot of Chinese viewers saw Bai Ling as being anti-Chinese, whether it was for the previous statements that she had made about her experience in the military or for appearing in Red Corner, which again, honestly, was pretty racist.

Speaker 6:
[54:41] It's like a man running for political asylum from China as Richard Gere just laughs, I don't have my passport.

Speaker 1:
[54:47] Yeah. And Bai Ling's like, I don't either, bitch.

Speaker 6:
[54:50] Yeah.

Speaker 1:
[54:50] Some commenters also referenced her naked photographs and her not that big deal shoplifting arrests.

Speaker 6:
[54:59] Could have been an accident. So one commenter posted the following on Weibo. Don't come to my country, you disgusting person, get out. Another posted on a New York Times article, you do not bite the hand that feeds you and she has done more than once. Once again, imagine what it feels like to hear this from the country you were raised in and continue to represent. And the other thing that we find is that like, bite the hand that feeds you is not a term that anybody ever brings up about a dude. Like, they're like, dudes feed themselves, but they're like, don't bite that little hand.

Speaker 1:
[55:32] Right. So just like with Star Wars, a version of the documentary that she got in trouble for was published with all of her scenes cut out. And just like with the original Red Corner Scandal, Bai published an open letter she wrote. It's like apologies, apologies, apologies. She said, I want all of you to see a brand new Bai Ling, a Bai Ling who is full of positive energy, a Chinese Bai Ling.

Speaker 6:
[55:57] Wow, this one is really significant. This is the story for me that we've done that is the most about cultural identity. Because while we've covered women of many nations, like this is the person who has been in the most love hate tug of war with her heritage. And when the Playboy scandal happened and she said, I went from a communist country to Playboy, it seemed like her career split. And it would have been a difficult split to ever reconcile, especially as someone who told Paper Magazine in 2004, I love China, whatever I have is because of Chinese culture. The future is in China. I want to be like an ambassador between the East and West.

Speaker 1:
[56:36] Except both the East and the West are like heaping shame on this woman. Like we cannot get enough of heaping shame on her.

Speaker 6:
[56:44] But maybe Bai's apology kind of worked, because in 2018 she starred in Chinese director Tan Bing's The Fatal Contract. Bing said it was a dream to work with Ling, and that he felt Chinese audiences had embraced her.

Speaker 1:
[56:58] So honestly, like within contemporary culture, Bai seems to be doing pretty good. She's withstood a lot of cultural pressure from a lot of different sources. Yeah.

Speaker 6:
[57:09] And the thing that I would hope, not to jump to what I would hope for this lady, but I hope we're coming out into a world that's ready to look back on her as an icon, because what I always love is when women live long enough to see their own reframing.

Speaker 1:
[57:25] Right.

Speaker 6:
[57:25] I think Jane Fonda is in a way an example of this. She's lived long enough to see her embraced as a radical and kids on TikTok.

Speaker 1:
[57:31] But it's a different time. Jane Fonda, a lot of the political things that she was criticized for are not memorialized with an internet culture. So there are, of course, people of a certain age remember them. Even I'm too young to remember this. So it's a different situation because we can Google Bai Ling's name and this whole spate of humiliations is going to pop up on the computer forever.

Speaker 6:
[57:56] If you had a wish for Bai Ling, Alissa, what would it be?

Speaker 1:
[58:01] I like her how she is. I think that we're the ones that need to change.

Speaker 6:
[58:05] Yeah.

Speaker 1:
[58:05] I don't think she's the one that needs to change. I think a lot of the things that are documented in these videos are probably very sincere expressions of who she is, and they're not hurting anybody. I think it's okay to say kind of off the wall shit. And I wish that we didn't pile shame on her. I wish that especially in retrospect, hearing her talk about how to be around people or to feel like she could open up, she felt like she needed to be drunk. And then we shame her for it without having the information about her sexual assaults and the political turmoil that she grew up in. I wish that we didn't make her feel that she had to be humiliated.

Speaker 6:
[58:47] Alissa, I really, really want you to read Bai's last words here.

Speaker 1:
[58:52] I accidentally or innocently destroyed the beautiful Bai Ling that everybody loved, that beautiful, talented actress. Instead, the media bring me out as this crazy slut showing her nipples everywhere. I become this character that pop culture Hollywood machine created. Somehow, I became a victim to that image.

Speaker 6:
[59:23] Alissa, I love making this show with you. Makes you feel super safe. I love you. And I think that if a Bai Ling were to listen to this, I think she'd feel really seen and I hope that somebody recommends it to her.

Speaker 1:
[59:36] Yeah.

Speaker 6:
[59:42] This is The C-Word, I'm Lena Dunham.

Speaker 1:
[59:44] I'm Alissa Bennett, and we will never call you crazy. The C-Word is a luminary podcast. It's produced by Pineapple Street Studios and Good Thing Going Productions. Our producers are Dina Kleiner and Liz Watson. Sophie Bridges and Diane Hodson are our associate producers. Jenna Weiss-Berman and Max Linsky are our executive producers. Our theme song is by Liz Fair. Other music is by Matthew McLaughlin and Andrew Miller. Special thanks to Michael Cohen and Victoria Endicott.

Speaker 8:
[60:37] Thanks for watching! I'm Paul, the message for everyone paying big wireless way too much. Please, for the love of everything good in this world, stop. With Mint, you can get premium wireless for just $15 a month.

Speaker 7:
[60:48] Of course, if you enjoy overpaying, no judgments, but that's weird.

Speaker 8:
[60:51] Okay, one judgment. Anyway, give it a try at mintmobile.com/switch.

Speaker 5:
[60:58] Up-front payment of $45 for three-month plan equivalent to 15. Thanks for watching. Intro rate first three months only, then full price plan options available, taxes and fees extra.

Speaker 8:
[61:04] See full terms at mintmobile.com.