‘The Jinx — Part 2’ Revealed a Twist in the Robert Durst Saga — What’s Next?

If the first The Jinx series had released as a binge-watch, everything about the Robert Durst story would be different.

“He would have been in Cuba,” director Andrew Jarecki explains of Durst, while reflecting on the docuseries’ 2015 beginning, during a chat about its 2024 ending.

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The New York real estate heir had been suspected of three murders when HBO released The Jinx in February 2015, a project that Jarecki had already been working on for years. Part 2, which concluded its follow-up six episodes on Sunday night, explored how Durst went on the run after watching the fifth episode of The Jinx — Part 1. He never made it to Cuba, however — as he was apprehended the day before the next week’s finale aired, and would go on to broadcast his now-famous bathroom confession.

“It’s a unique situation, because usually a television show is not intertwined in that way with real life,” Jarecki tells The Hollywood Reporter. “I’m always reminded how great it is that HBO does it week by week. The gradual progression toward the events that happened in episodes five and six of the first part, if all that had happened at once, it would have been so different.”

Now, nine years after that revelatory finale — a moment that true-crime television has been chasing ever since — viewers have been tuning in week to week with anticipation about what Jarecki and the Jinx team had to say with the second part of the story, which comes after Durst’s death in 2022 at age 78. Jarecki hopes the finale makes it clear for anyone who may have wondered why The Jinx was back.

With Durst’s death, his conviction in the Susan Berman murder case was vacated; he also died before he could be taken to trial for the killing of his first wife, Kathleen Durst McCormack, who disappeared in 1982 and whose body was never found. Now, the only remaining legal avenue for the grieving McCormack family is an ongoing wrongful death lawsuit they filed against Durst’s estate and Debrah Lee Charatan, Durst’s widow who became executor of the estate following his death.

“Someone sent me someone saying, ‘She’s the new jinx!'” says Jarecki of the HBO docuseries turning its lens on Charatan in the finale — the person who could, if she chose, help the McCormack family, which has never seen accountability for their missing family member. “I said to her, ‘I think it might be a compassionate thing for you to be the first Durst to do the right thing by the McCormacks.’ And she said to me [mimicking her voice], ‘Not one dolla.’ I don’t know how to reconcile that.”

With the ongoing lawsuit, Charatan declined to participate in The Jinx — Part 2. Below, in a chat with THR, Jarecki reveals his off-camera conversations with Charatan and explains why she still fascinates him — perhaps even enough to keep telling this story.

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We spoke when The Jinx — Part 2 was premiering six weeks ago. How has your experience been week to week?

I’ve just been appreciating that people are really absorbing the episodes, and thinking about it for a week. And trying to think what it’s about. Or like you, listening to the podcast and assimilating all that information. There is stuff we’ve been working on for five or seven years with Part 2, but also other things we’ve been thinking about and trying to fit into the rubric of the show for some 20 years. Just as an example, the whole experience of working with Nick Chavin.

The ending title cards to Part 2 announce that Nick Cavin (Durst’s former best friend who testified against him during Susan Berman’s murder trial) died shortly after you interviewed him.

He wanted to be super famous, but he was not super famous. He was a very low-key guy. And we sort of held that for the end because not only is it sad, but I have so much appreciation for the fact that, of all these people, he was the one who really has an epiphany. He really comes to terms. It’s so strange that’s what happens to him, very soon after that last interview. I think he sort of knew this was his chance to say what was deeply on his conscience.

Do you think he was aware he was declining when speaking to you for Part 2?

I think I could tell, and I talked to his wife yesterday and she could tell, that in that last year, he sort of transitioned into this other state of mind. When you see him earlier in the show, he’s full of vinegar, saying, “Bob and I didn’t have that same moral problem with murder and murderers.” Yesterday, his wife, Terri [Chavin], told me Nick really wanted to come off as this tough and irascible naughty boy, and that’s kind of what drew him to Bob. But she said a big part of him was being compassionate. And I think he was vulnerable, like all of the people Bob drew into his orbit. Bob was good at figuring out what you needed and providing it, whether that was friendship or being the advertising guy for the Durst family [as Chavin was]. I think Bob knew that if you found people like that, they were going to come in handy.

And you see that with other people in the culture, people who are spellbinders, who wander through life saying, “I need a good friend who is going to bend these rules.” His friend Susie Giordano took his 62 file boxes to his basement in upstate New York. These are pedestrian acts, but they all contribute in some way to this kind of crime spree, and those people don’t see that’s what’s happening when it’s happening. Almost no one sees it until later. That’s what we call the accountability tour. When we go back and I call these people and we have conversations. I’m really relieved, I think, when Nick has that breakdown.

You detailed how getting Nick to participate was due to a years-long chain of events, and that makes me think about the rarity of you following this story for as many years as you have: so long that the cameras even are there when you hear that Durst has died. Would you advise other filmmakers to go this in depth and, do you think you could go this deep again?

Sadly, I do. For me, it doesn’t every feel exhausting because it’s always new. If the story were not new, if it wasn’t evolving in really dramatic ways, then we wouldn’t have ended up making it. Someone wrote after the first episode — they didn’t understand where we were going — and they said, “Part 2 of The Jinx should have been a podcast.” First of all, there is a podcast [HBO’s The Official Jinx Podcast]. But second of all, keep watching. It’s such an evolving story.

One of the joys of being able to work on something for so long is that even the people who are skeptical about talking to you, 95 percent of them do come around. You see in the final episode that Debrah [Lee Charatan], Bob’s wife [from 2000 until his death], is someone I had been wanting to talk to for years. I’ve had a couple of odd interactions, which I talk about in the podcast, where I go to lunch with my mom at a restaurant on the Upper East Side. We’re sitting in a window table and I look out, and Debrah is standing there. This is a few months after Bob went to jail, and I have a conversation with her. And it was super interesting. And then also, in the podcast, you hear her telling Bob about that conversation [in recorded calls]. She’s like, “I ran into Andrew Jarecki. It was so weird.” And he says, “Well, did you give him an interview?” And she says, “Of course not. You know, he’s not one of my favorite people.”

I actually ran into Debrah twice at the same restaurant. One time I talked to her for three minutes, and the other time I talked to her for 20 minutes. And later, when I reached out to her again and I said, “I think it’s going to be valuable for you and maybe even will give you some kind of closure to participate, and I don’t think you are going to like it if all you are hearing about yourself is from another dozen people who knew you, who worked with you.” And she thought a lot about it, I think. It’s hard to know. She may have just been shining me on. But I think she thought about it. And I ended up having three dinners with her.

Her lawyer Alan Abramson, who you see in the final two episodes, is her kind of protector. He’s a very interesting guy and very well-connected — he has this strange movie connection because he’s married to [awards strategist/publicist] Cynthia Swartz, who was Harvey [Weinstein’s] Oscars guru. He was the best lawyer in the room, I think, and Debrah did very well by finding him and deciding to make him her protector. He told me, “I think she’ll do it and I’ll talk to her about it.” And I said, “Let’s set up a series of dinners.” After our three dinners, which were informative, she decided not to be in the interview chair. And yet, here she is in the final episode. Because during the course of this whole longitudinal experience [of making Part 2] she ends up getting deposed in the lawsuit with the McCormacks, and so there she is sitting for hours worth of probing questions about her relationship with Bob, and a lot of stuff that never would have otherwise seen the light of day.

So that’s another thing that happens [when you work on a project for so long]. You walk around this neighborhood long enough and you trip over things, and things fall into your path. And that’s only a function of hanging in there. So it’s an enormous amount of work, but it doesn’t feel like work when you are doing it. I don’t think this is just entertainment. It’s entertaining, but I also think it gets to a lot of issues about how human beings are in a way you can’t describe but have to see it happen.

If I hadn’t been talking to Nick Chavin for years and years, I wouldn’t have run into him at [New York Times writer] Charlie Bagli’s party and he wouldn’t have said, “I really want to be on television.” I interviewed Nick for four days, longer than I interviewed Bob. And then eventually went back to interview him in Florida, and he was in such a different place. He realized that Bob was gone; the spell had worn off. Almost like someone who had been in a cult. When you are in it, you don’t know it.

That’s what’s interesting about Debrah — she still has something to lose. Do you think she only declined an interview because of legal reasons? Was that before the wrongful suit was filed in February 2022? [Weeks after his sentencing in the Berman case, a grand jury had indicted Durst on a second-degree murder charge for killing Kathie. Durst’s death, in January 2022, brought that case to a halt.]

It was throughout. She told me that she declined because of legal reasons, but I had this one interview with her that was pretty pointed where she said, “The McCormacks have no case. There’s no chance they’re getting any of my money.” And I said, “Why do you know that?” And she said, “Just look at the legal precedent. Since all of Bob’s money is protected in this trust and I’m the beneficiary, they would have to pierce the trust and that’s really very different than Bob’s money. Bob doesn’t have any money.” And I said, “Well, there’s a lot of evidence that you and Bob spoke on the phone and had video visits, in which you very specifically talk about how to hide this money from the McCormacks. Don’t you think, if a jury sees that, they’re going to wonder if there’s a way for them to pierce the veil of the trust? Because it’s very clear that you and Bob arranged to spend down his personal funds, and make sure all of his money was in the trust. And then you worked hard to invest that money and increase the value. So, I wonder what a jury would say.”

And, from what I understand about how it’s going to play out, there is a reasonable chance there’s going to be a jury trial. If there is a trial [for the McCormacks’ civil lawsuit], I think it’s going to be a jury trial.

And she said, “No chance. There’s no way that’s going to happen.” And her lawyer said, “No chance. There’s just no chance under the law, she’s fine.” And I said, “OK, well if that’s true, then what are you worried about? If, as you said, there’s no chance you’re going to have to succumb to the McCormacks’ lawsuit?”

And this was at the time I had said to her, after all this, “Do you have compassion for the McCormacks? Do you feel sad for them?” And she said, “Yes, I do. I feel bad for them. I have sympathy for them.” So I said, “Then why don’t you be the first Durst to do the right thing by the McCormack family? They don’t need all $100 million, they just need enough money to hold their head up and pay for their kids to go to college. I think it might be considered the better part of valor for you to recognize that your husband [Durst], who you were with since 1986 or 1987, did this and did create this situation.”

And she was sort of torn because, she says in the deposition, when they ask her, “Do you think that Bob killed Susan Berman?” She says, “I accept what the jury said,” which is obviously rehearsed. She looks at her lawyer and says that. Then they ask her, “Well, do you think that he killed his wife, Kathie?” And she says, “No.”

Well, the jury said he killed Susan Berman, capital murder. And the reason is because it was a witness killing. The entire trial is there to prove there was a motive for Susan’s death, and the motive was because Susan knew what happened to Kathie, or enough about what happened to Kathie, and that she could tie Bob to Kathie’s murder. And here she is saying, “I accept what the jury said … except the part about the entire motive and the fact that it was a capital murder and that the jury concluded that Bob had killed Kathie.” So, you can tell she’s really stuck.

In that deposition, in the middle of a case against her and the estate about whether she should have to pay for Bob killing Kathie, she can’t use the words, “Yes, I believe he killed Kathie.” So she has to say, “I accept what the jury said about Susan and I absolutely don’t accept it.” Her position is untenable, and that’s probably one of the reasons she didn’t want to sit for an interview. She knows I would not have ignored that question.

How did your conversations go when you were informed that she wasn’t going to participate?

Eventually after our dinners, Alan called me and said, “I hear all the arguments for why she should do it; people might understand her more and see her more as a human being. I get it, you can’t cut something you don’t have. But, she’s willing to wing it.” And I said, “Just out of curiosity again, what is she worried about?” He said, “Well, we’re in the middle of this lawsuit and she doesn’t want to say anything that could sway anything.” And I said, “But you guys both told me over dinner that there is zero chance she has a problem. And also, when I said to her I think it might be a compassionate thing for you to be the first Durst to do the right thing by the McCormacks and she said to me [mimicking her voice], ‘Not one dolla.’ I don’t know how to reconcile these things.” And he said, “Yep. I understand. I understand that predicament.”

Do you agree with her that there’s zero chance for the McCormacks?

No, I don’t agree with her. I think it may take some really thoughtful lawyering. I do think that a jury could be inclined to award the McCormacks damages and find a pathway for getting that money. Because when Debbie says in the deposition that, the way the lawyers have explained it, this has nothing to do with Bob. Well, Bob and his family were clearly the source of the money and it was the lion’s share of Bob’s net worth. When people talked about Bob and said he was a zillionaire, he was. So, the parties are the same, right? Debrah and Bob? Yes. And the money is extremely high? Yes. And the money exists? Yes. And the person who got the money is your good self, so it’s only you and Bob and a pack of money, and you’re telling me that it has nothing to do with you and is somehow part of a different legal entity established years ago? From a human standpoint, it’s a distinction without a difference. From a legal standpoint, she makes a good argument. And I think the magic bullet for the McCormacks, if there is one, lies in the conversations between Bob and Debrah. Because no jury is going to listen to those conversations — as we played them in the show, or listen to those conversations in their entirety — and not hear a cavalcade of obfuscation. It’s a cavalcade of hiding money. It’s all they care about, right?

And it’s very strange, because Bob doesn’t care about much and acts like he doesn’t care about money. During the course of his life, he gives money to all types of people. Sometimes, it’s manipulative. But sometimes he gives it out of compassion or because he doesn’t care. He says from an early age, “I have more money than I could spend.” He doesn’t have expensive taste. Bob’s not living in Greenwich in some palatial mansion and he’s not living on Fifth Avenue. Debrah cared a lot more about it. That’s how I feel.

I remember thinking, “Why is he so intent on keeping the money away from these particularly needy people, when he has helped all of these other needy people?” And I think it’s that there was an indignance about people thinking he was a murderer. It really bothered him. It bothered him when he tried to get into a co-op when he couldn’t. And this goes back to when I talked to him about why he was doing the interview [for The Jinx — Part 1]. He felt misunderstood. He felt that people saw him as a killer, and that’s not how he saw himself. It irked him. I think it was the feeling that he had done certain things that he felt were survival.

You think he felt that what happened to Kathie was survival?

I think the way that he told himself that this had gone down was that Kathie had become untenable. She decided she wanted to have a divorce, she was being extremely unreasonable. Not only was she deciding to take money from him, which made him feel very exploited and that maybe it was always about money — which, it absolutely was not for her — it felt to him like she had really turned on him. Which, she had. He had beaten the love out of her. I think Kathie had concluded he was really bad for her and he said, “Great you can leave.” And she said, “No, I don’t have enough money to finish medical school. I didn’t go through all of this — nursing school, dealing with all of your bad behavior toward me and my family, and nurse you along here and make excuses for you in the last decade, so that you could pull the plug out of my medical dream at the last minute. No. I’m going to get a divorce settlement and go on with my life.” And that for him, I think, was intolerable.

He would say that she had changed and had become his enemy, and that she was doing absolutely inexcusable things, like going to his family members and talking about him and his bad behavior: how he don’t get out of bed, that he was stealing money from the Durst organization. She knew those details, because he had talked about it, and she was bringing them to the family saying, “I need you to help me get out of this marriage and you’ll be done with me.” And she got very little sympathy.

You can see from the interviews with the Durst family members [in the finale when they are also deposed] how ineffective they were at helping her. I think they at the very least did nothing and shared none of the information that they knew with the police, but they were also cruel to her and her family. They decided to circle the wagons and leave the family bereft when Kathie disappeared.

So, if you ask Bob what happened, if you could wake him up in the middle of the night and give him sodium thiopental and say, “C’mon, just blurt it out,” I think he would say, “It was impossible with Kathie. She had become totally unreasonable. We were fighting more and more, and the fights were escalating. And at some point, we had a big physical fight and something bad happened. She fell, she hit her head. Whatever happened. It wasn’t me doing it. It was something that happened during a fight.”

Because I don’t think he sees himself as someone who planned to kill his delightful wife, who everyone thought was the sweetest person. I think it got into a situation where it got closer and closer to her getting hurt, and then he just pushed it. And now he’s stuck. And he goes through a whole bunch of very disturbing ministrations that involve a rental car, and getting her down to the pine barrens and getting rid of the body. There was a lot of bad behavior after that.

But, going back to what I imagine he would say, I think he thinks of that as, “Well, it wasn’t my fault to begin with. But I wasn’t going to ruin my entire life over it. I’m not going to jail because my wife was impossible. And then after that, 18 years later, can you believe after all I’ve done for Susan Berman, she calls me and says, ‘Hey the police are trying to talk to me and, do you think I should talk to them?’ What is that? That’s her manipulating me. She wants to remind me that she was there for me during an important time, she was my bosom buddy. And I looked after her over the years. Even though I just sent her $25,000, that’s not enough” — which, he had sent her that money — “the money and proximity to me isn’t enough. Here, this person, allegedly my most loyal friend, who is actually threatening me.”

It’s not until me and John Lewin [the prosecuting L.A. deputy district attorney] talk to him years later that we tell him Susan had actually not been contacted by the police. She told him that she had, but it wasn’t true. And it washes over him. He was very surprised at that. So Susan Berman was playing a dangerous game. Bob found that disloyal and, again, intolerable. So, I think he would say, “I was just trying to survive. Here’s my best friend doing something horrible to me. So, I had to stop that. I did it with a heavy heart.”

He cried on the witness stand, and I think that’s real. It was real to him that he lost his best friend. The fact that he was the reason why she died is sort of separated for him. We would always say, “Bob might have killed three people, but he always had a good reason in his mind.” And that he may have killed his wife, he may have killed his best friend, he may have killed his neighbor, but he still ended up being a guy who lost his wife, he lost his best friend and he lost his neighbor. These people weren’t in his life anymore. I always thought that was Bob’s internal logic.

Do you think the Durst family remains untouchable?

Yes, I think the Dursts are largely untouchable. We’ve seen in this country in recent years that the justice system sorta-kinda-sorta works, but if you have an unlimited amount of money, you can just delay everything. Because there’s always an appeal, there’s always a way to push it. The design of the system is such that it doesn’t account for one side of the legal equation having unlimited resources. Perfect example, one of the reasons why everyone was so impressed with the prosecution of Bob Durst is because the L.A. District Attorney’s Office made the decision to spend millions of dollars and throw a room full of people, all those assistants and law clerks, real manpower at it. So, L.A. was able to overcome Bob Durst’s $12 million defense with private lawyers with a bunch of public servants. That’s very unusual. For the most part, if you can throw $12 million at a case — let alone $100 million or amounts that big corporations or political candidates throw at things — you really can gum up the system. You can really slow it down, confuse it. And no one is really prepared for that.

Ultimately, if the wealth gap is big enough and if it’s that hard for a regular person like Kathie McCormack to get justice, someone can delay it for 40 years and in fact, a group of people can delay it.

There’s a great line when Bob Abrams, the lawyer for the McCormacks, asks Bob Durst, “It’s been 40 years since your sister-in-law disappeared and you’ve never reached out to the McCormack family. They were married for a decade and she was in your life.” Douglas [Durst] lived in a house that Seymour Durst owned for many months; he and Bob lived with their young wives in that house. Douglas had a relationship and a friendship with Kathie, and I think he loved her; she was very hard not to love. And, they never reach out to the family. They never offer to help them with all the many things they could have done. Seymour was friends on a first-name basis with Ed Koch and Mayor [Abraham] Beame before him, Seymour knew everyone as a massive real estate developer in New York City. There was no one he couldn’t get on the phone, and yet he does nothing.

So as Liz McCormack says, they knew. That line really struck me. She says, “People talk about how after Kathie disappeared, the Durst family didn’t do anything. What about before she disappeared? They knew.” They said they knew he was violent, Douglas says he knew [Bob] was violent since he was 4. So Douglas, Wendy, Tom, Seymore [Durst] know that Bob’s wife is being treated with violence and they do nothing about it. So, the family can’t even reconcile it. I don’t know if the Dursts know that they were complicit in that way. I certainly don’t think they see themselves as complicit. Now, is it possible they could have a Nick Chavin-style epiphany? You see a hint of it with Wendy. She says, “If I knew then what I know now, I was a dumb kid.” Well, she was in her mid-30s. You get to your mid-30s and you are a well-educated, wealthy New Yorker — you’re not a child anymore. It was a diffusion of responsibility from people who should have known better.

You open the finale with Durst’s conviction being vacated, because it didn’t go through the appeals process before his death. To your point about unlimited resources and how this lawsuit can be delayed, if the legal system doesn’t arrive at accountability, what are your hopes with this Part 2 ending?

I hope that people see the insidious nature of complicity. As an audience member, you watch television shows, movies and documentaries hungry to see yourself. I think when you see a story like this, there’s an opportunity to feel like, “Oh, those people are all terrible, they have nothing to do with me.” But hopefully at the end of six episodes, if you really ask yourself some questions you may say, “Well, as much as I want to mock those people for being taken in by Bob Durst, what would I have done in that situation? Where are my vulnerabilities? What if I were Debrah Charatan and I had all this money at stake and I felt insecure, I came from a poor background, would I have been drawn into something like this?” That’s the tough question you have to ask yourself watching this. It’s not that it was one person or two people, it was many people who were brought in. It’s important not to put the complicit at a distance and say, “Those people are ridiculous.” Those people are not ridiculous. Those people are you, those people are me in different circumstances. What would we do?

In our prior chat, you said this was a good place to stop telling this story, but there could always be something that develops that makes you fire your cameras back up. In the past six weeks, have you filmed anything and is there more to explore here?

I’m definitely not there yet. I do think there are places this story could go that would interest me. I still am fascinated by a person like Debrah. If you watch the opening titles, there’s that spider flowing through the title sequence. She’s interested me a lot through this whole thing. She’s a unique, shadowy figure who has chosen to keep herself out of the spotlight. I also think the Durst family are so insulated by the enormous amount of money they have — they really accumulated billions and billions of dollars, and one of the ways they’ve done it is by keeping a very low profile — so I think they’re equally fascinating, but very hard to pin down. So all of this stuff interests me. I have no plan to do anything with it, but would I be totally surprised to find my interest piqued with some of them? They’re really interesting.

And then of course, the twins [Michael and David Belcher]. Why do people like the twins so much? I think the reason we like the twins in this context is their energy and hopefulness. They really cared about Kathie. They were born years and years later, but they were the same age. Kathie meets Bob when she’s 19. And I think they related to her and her hopefulness. The twins are like our break from the carnage. So there’s something to follow with them, for sure.

Part 2 ends on a re-creation of Debrah Lee Charatan in her spacious home. Did you scale that after her house?

Yeah, her real house is similarly large and extremely expensive. Her house in the Hamptons that she’s talking to Bob about — when he asks how much they could get for it and she says, “Eh, 20.” That was years ago. That’s oceanfront property in Bridgehampton. Her life out there is opulent.

In her deposition, she says, to paraphrase, there’s nothing Durst could have done to make her leave and that in the end, it all has been worth it. Do you anticipate you will hear from her after this?

What would she say?

Under other circumstances, that she was misunderstood and wants to tell her story. I don’t think, however, that applies here.

And I said to her, “You are going to feel misunderstood. No matter how much work I do to try to have people understand you, you have to represent yourself.” I think at the end of the day, she probably didn’t know what she would say to me in an interview. And I don’t think she would know now, because I have too much of the backstory and information. When Bob first sat down with me, he thought that I was going to film that first 20-hour interview and then I was going to go home and cut it together, and it was going to be Bob’s version. That wasn’t my deal with him. I said it was going to take a while. After that first interview went 21 hours, I think he felt, “Wow we got a little deeper into this then I thought.” And then we went away and started doing our investigation, and I think he thought, “This was not what I had in mind when I decided that I wanted something to help me not be misunderstood.” He knew we were doing more work than he was comfortable with, and I think Debbie is in the same position. I think Debbie knows she can’t count on sitting down and giving a gloss of what happened. I just know too many of the facts.

How in touch are you with the McCormack family and what is the status with the lawsuit? You said you think it will go to jury trial. Do you think soon?

I don’t know exactly what the timing is, but I try to stay in touch with all of them.

I imagine I may never talk to Debbie again. I don’t know what she’s thinking. Is she watching? I don’t know. She says, “I watched The Jinx” and is asked, “What did you think of it? “Not much.” She would like me to believe this film has not influenced her life in any way, that it’s not under her skin. She said repeatedly to me, “I don’t really care what people think. People are going to have their opinions of me. The people who love me love me, the people who don’t like me don’t like me.” But I said, “I don’t really think that’s what you think. You have 19 websites designed to improve your image, about your philanthropy, your real estate company, helping young entrepreneurs with advice. You’ve said this stuff to me about how you are your own independent person, but your public image is completely dominated by your relationship to one of the most reviled people in America. And that was a decision you made, you stuck with. You had hundreds of chances to change the path, and you didn’t do it. But the only way to get out of it, I think, is for you to take some responsibility, for you to tell us something about yourself, for you to say you are trying to be part of the solution.” And she said, “Yep, I hear what you are saying.”

She did try to make a deal with me. At one point she said, “I know things that you don’t know. You know more about this story than anyone else in the world, except me. And I have a lot of things I could tell you, if you agree that I won’t appear in the show.” And I said, “I just want to be direct with you. There is no version of this show that doesn’t include you. So, there is no deal to be made. I wouldn’t do that. The film is going to work one way or the other.”

She’s a dealmaker, a negotiator. But it wasn’t something that was available. I think she’s done an amazing job staying out of the spotlight. And I do have some compassion for her. I understand she had a tough childhood and a tough time. I don’t think it was easy to be her. But there are pathways to success that don’t necessarily include a lot of the choices that she made.

The Jinx — Part 2 is now streaming on Max.

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