- 3 months ago
When whispers become reality, the truth can be more disturbing than fiction. Join us as we examine chilling rumors that were eventually confirmed as fact! Our countdown includes government surveillance programs, sexual predators in Hollywood, political scandals, and corporate corruption that shocked the world. Which disturbing truth surprised you the most?
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NewsTranscript
00:00When we first contacted Cambridge Analytica, they told us that they had deleted the data.
00:05About a month ago, we heard new reports that suggested that wasn't true.
00:09Welcome to WatchMojo, and today we're taking a look at 10 chilling news stories that the world was whispering about before they even broke.
00:15It was interesting, not long after he's arrested, everyone who had a relationship with Jeffrey Epstein, suddenly, no one really knew him.
00:25The government made alcohol unsafe to drink.
00:27At the request of the city of Chicago, the federal government, specifically the Department of the Treasury, has inaugurated a special program to deal with the flow of illegal liquor and the violence which it creates.
00:39There's no getting around it. Prohibition was a mess.
00:42Few people supported it. It led to a rise in organized crime.
00:45It ruined the economy, and people died from drinking poisoned alcohol.
00:48Yep, knowing that bootleggers converted industrial alcohol into moonshine, the government mandated that manufacturers add toxic chemicals to their alcohol.
00:56Bootleggers knew their sources had been poisoned, but they continued to make moonshine anyway.
01:01Meanwhile, Howard and me hammered our four 300-gallon submarine stills.
01:06They were the biggest stills Franklin had ever seen.
01:09This led to a 600% increase in alcohol-related deaths, with some sources claiming that up to 10,000 people lost their lives.
01:17The government poisoned your booze sounds like a wild and baseless conspiracy theory, but in this case, it was at least partly true.
01:23To prevent industrial alcohol from being consumed, the government required manufacturers to add harmful chemicals, leading to thousands of poisoning deaths.
01:34Bernie Madoff was running a Ponzi scheme.
01:36I just can't continue this charade any longer, and that's what caused me to acknowledge to my family that I had been committing this fraud.
01:48For a long time, Bernie Madoff was a respected financer.
01:52He ran Bernard L. Madoff Investment Securities, and even served as chairman of the Nasdaq Stock Exchange.
01:57But his reputation came under question, thanks to persistent rumors that he wasn't so above board.
02:02Whistleblowers, including an executive named Harry Markopoulos, had continually claimed that Madoff was running a Ponzi scheme.
02:08As today's testimony will reveal, my team and I tried our best to get the SEC to investigate and shut down the Madoff-Ponzi scheme.
02:16Madoff was even investigated six times by the Securities and Exchange Commission, but they never found anything.
02:22It wasn't until his own sons, Mark and Andrew, came forward that action was finally taken.
02:27Madoff was arrested, and a Ponzi scheme worth nearly $65 billion was eventually uncovered.
02:32Markopoulos was vindicated, and has fiercely criticized the SEC, even publishing a book called No One Would Listen.
02:38There's nothing to be proud about in this case. I feel horrible about the result. It's been a total disaster for the victims.
02:44The government is spying on us.
02:46You can't come forward against the world's most powerful intelligence agencies and be completely free from risk,
02:54because they're such powerful adversaries that no one can meaningfully oppose them.
02:58There are a ton of kooky conspiracy theories out there.
03:00For a while, the government is spying on us through an intricate global surveillance program sounded like one of them.
03:06Well, in 2013, whistleblower and former NSA contractor Edward Snowden revealed mass surveillance programs undertaken by the Five Eyes Intelligence Alliance,
03:16consisting of Australia, Canada, New Zealand, the United Kingdom, and the United States.
03:21This is the truth. This is what's happening. You should decide whether we need to be doing this.
03:26Leaked documents revealed the data was being harvested through covert wiretaps, commercial partners, servers, and even undersea cables.
03:34The information obtained ranged from metadata to actual text messages, emails, images, and video chats.
03:41Yeah, browsing history is the least of your worries.
03:43U.S. officials cast Snowden as a traitor, while public opinion was divided, with some seeing him as a hero.
03:49The greatest fear that I have regarding the outcome for America of these disclosures is that nothing will change.
03:59Russia interfered in the 2016 election.
04:02The 2016 presidential election was a historic one, with billionaire real estate mogul Donald Trump writing a populist, nationalistic sentiments to a shocking victory.
04:11While the campaign is over, our work on this movement is now really just beginning.
04:18Rumors soon emerged that Russia had interfered in the election.
04:21It sounds made up, but turns out it was true, and U.S. intelligence agencies, including the CIA, FBI, and NSA, had the proof.
04:29Candidate Donald Trump routinely downplayed suggestions that Russia was interfering.
04:34It could be Russia, but it could also be China.
04:36It could also be lots of other people.
04:37It also could be somebody sitting on their bed that weighs 400 pounds, okay?
04:42Russian agencies hacked into Democratic email accounts and computer networks, and created thousands of fake social media accounts to sow discord in the United States,
04:51criticize Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton, and support Trump.
04:54According to the report, Putin, quote, aspired to help President-elect Trump's election chances, when possible, by discrediting Secretary Clinton and publicly contrasting her unfavorably to him.
05:06A Republican-led Senate Intelligence Committee concurred with these conclusions.
05:10The second Gulf of Tonkin incident never occurred.
05:13You're pretty sure there was a torpedo attack, though?
05:16Oh, no doubt about that, I think.
05:18On August 2, 1964, North Vietnamese forces attacked the USS Maddox, which was on patrol in North Vietnamese waters.
05:25Act of aggression against us, we were in international waters, I sent officials from the Defense Department out,
05:31and we recovered pieces of North Vietnamese shells that were clearly identified as North Vietnamese shells from the deck of the Maddox.
05:37Two days later, a second attack allegedly occurred against the USS Maddox and the USS Turner Joy.
05:43President Lyndon B. Johnson used this incident to justify open warfare in Vietnam.
05:48He put forward a resolution, the language of which gave complete authority to the president to take the nation to war.
05:56The Tonkin Gulf Resolution.
05:58However, many questioned whether the second attack had ever happened.
06:02This was finally confirmed decades later, when it was revealed that the second attack was based on wrongly interpreted communication intercepts.
06:09Even though the evidence was dubious at best, Johnson ran with it and never looked back.
06:14Politicians used stolen Facebook user data.
06:16By having hundreds and hundreds of thousands of Americans undertake this survey,
06:22we were able to form a model where we have somewhere close to four or five thousand data points
06:28we can use to predict the personality of every adult in the United States.
06:32Is our social media for sale?
06:33A rumor suggesting this began in December 2015, when journalist Harry Davies reported that Ted Cruz was using Facebook data
06:40harvested from a British consulting firm called Cambridge Analytica.
06:44Reports in a similar vein followed, and the rumor that American politicians were using stolen Facebook data quickly gathered traction.
06:51The truth was uncovered in 2018, when whistleblower Christopher Wiley came forth and revealed that,
06:56yep, those reports were bang on the money.
06:58We just spent 14 months working on the Ted Cruz campaign and had collected a huge amount of voter data and research,
07:06which we were able to hand over to the Trump team.
07:09Cambridge Analytica had harvested nearly 90 million Facebook profiles
07:12and sold them to the political campaigns of Ted Cruz and Donald Trump.
07:16With that, social media, and our trust in it, was never the same.
07:20So, you have to understand how your data is affecting your life.
07:28Our dignity as humans is at stake.
07:31Accusations against Bill Cosby
07:33Given Bill Cosby's wholesome image from movies and TV shows,
07:37the accusations against him were a horrifying shock in every way.
07:40It all started to come to light in 2014, when stand-up comic Hannibal Buress
07:44brought up Bill Cosby's alleged past behavior during a show in Philadelphia.
07:47When this stand-up segment went viral, it became a story in the public conscience.
07:55Soon after, more and more women started coming forward with terrible claims about Cosby.
07:59I was 17. My agent introduced me to him to groom me, to mentor me, to get me ready for show business,
08:06and part of that was bringing me to New York City.
08:09He was convicted of aggravated and decent assault in 2018,
08:11but then the conviction was later vacated in 2021.
08:14I hope that we are creating a new platform for those people to say,
08:20I'm not alone, and I don't need to be alone anymore. It wasn't my fault.
08:25Harvey Weinstein's predatory practices.
08:27Harvey Weinstein had an incredibly complex machine designed to maintain silence around this.
08:33For decades, producer Harvey Weinstein was a Hollywood titan.
08:37But in 2017, bombshell articles in the New York Times and the New Yorker reported dozens of accusations of sexual abuse and assault.
08:45And so we spent many, many weeks and many months trying to get women who had had encounters with Weinstein to tell us their stories.
08:53More and more women courageously came forward, sparking the hashtag MeToo movement.
08:58In March 2020, Weinstein was sentenced to 23 years behind bars.
09:02But rumors had actually circulated for years.
09:05Gwyneth Paltrow alluded to Weinstein as being coercive back in 1998.
09:09I do all my movies for Harvey Weinstein. That's Miramax for all of you.
09:12And I'm lucky to do them there, but he will coerce you to do with me.
09:16Other celebrities like Courtney Love and Seth MacFarlane dropped public references,
09:20and 30 Rock included not-so-subtle jabs about it.
09:23I'm not afraid of anyone in show business.
09:25I turned down intercourse with Harvey Weinstein on no less than three occasions.
09:30Out of five.
09:30It was less rumor and more open Hollywood secret.
09:33Justice eventually prevailed, and Weinstein's crimes were finally acknowledged and punished.
09:38Jeffrey Epstein was a predator.
09:40He was known as this sort of Gatsby-like figure of mystery in New York.
09:46While he's now a household name, Jeffrey Epstein didn't make mainstream news until the mid-2000s.
09:51For a long time, Epstein was a nondescript owner of a brokerage firm.
09:56But around 2005, rumors started spreading that Epstein was a sexual predator.
10:00They began in March of that year, when a Florida woman accused Epstein of targeting her stepdaughter.
10:05This accusation drew the attention of the FBI, who discovered that Epstein was running an extensive sex ring.
10:11They were politicians.
10:12They were businessmen.
10:13They were powerful people.
10:16It made me think that if I had run and caused a ruckus, the police wouldn't have believed me.
10:21They wouldn't have done anything about it.
10:22However, Epstein only spent one year in custody after agreeing to a plea deal negotiated by the infamous Alan Dershowitz with state attorney Alexander Acosta.
10:31Epstein was famously arrested again in 2019, but died in prison before he could be convicted.
10:36Once again, he had, you know, managed to escape any kind of accountability.
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10:57The Catholic Church Scandal
11:01Only the globe can stop time.
11:03For years, there have been rumors of rampant sexual misconduct within the Catholic Church.
11:07It's the type of rumor that no one wants to believe.
11:10After all, the church is supposed to represent the divine will, an institution of benevolence and safety.
11:15Rumors of this sort began in earnest throughout the 1980s, although the alleged abuses go back even further.
11:21The rumors picked up steam throughout the 90s, before the Boston Globe blew the story open in 2002.
11:26He made a reference to a Sunday column about 84 lawsuits against one priest, John Gagin.
11:33This guy's personnel records were under court seal.
11:36And Marty asked a pretty simple question.
11:39You know, why are these sealed and have we tried to unseal them?
11:41Their investigation proved that there were systemic issues within the Catholic Church,
11:45and the work led to numerous criminal prosecutions.
11:48The team would go on to win the Pulitzer Prize for their journalism.
11:51We find people who are victimized by society and by institutions that are supposed to protect them.
11:59We give a voice to people who are voiceless.
12:02Which of these news stories did you know about before they became public?
12:05Let us know in the comments.
12:07In at least the first year that we covered this, we probably wrote at least 600 stories.
12:11We were trying to cover why did this happen?
12:13Why do priests abuse children?
12:15Why did there seem to be more boys abused than girls?
12:17We were trying to explore every aspect of why this had happened.
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