Kelly Clarkson's War Over a $15,000 Mechanical Bird Has Everyone Fighting

Oct 14

Written By Guest User

PDS Published 10/14/2026

This bizarre Kelly Clarkson bird-gate scandal is insane, with video footage now being released, and it's all just dividing the internet.
OpenAI found a spy device wrapped in toilet paper in a spy plot allegedly planned with a chat. Russell Brand's rape trial is officially underway, with Brand being called a ruthless sexual predator.
And this raid on Ilhan Omar's home might actually be an even bigger deal than you think, with Trump allies saying Mamdani— we're talking about all of that.
And actually even more on today's brand-new Philip DeFranco Show.
Your daily dive into the news, starting with let's talk about this Kelly Clarkson scandal.
Because amidst all the very serious dumpster fires out there, we've seen this Kelly Clarkson situation really just take on a life of its own this week.
That's why you had Clarkson making some accusations, and then a small business owner accusing her of asymmetrical social warfare over a dispute involving a $15,000 singing mechanical bird named Molly.
Because, yeah.
The singer-songwriter, TV personality, the winner of American Idol's five-minute visit to the Art of Play store in Brooklyn, has become a bizarrely intense feud and just national news.
Because after she tweeted about her negative experience there, everyone on social media started taking sides, and now one of the things you're seeing is one of the owners making a big statement about how the whole situation has affected the store.
And his team. "We are afraid for the safety of our shopkeepers. Kelly Clarkson has put us in— things changed when she used her platform to attack us. It's just asymmetrical social— Kelly Clarkson's problem is like she got three to, like, formal person."
And because of that, he was bruised, and she decided to blow up a Molotov cocktail into our shop.
And the lowest, perverse part about it is these people around the world, while our shop is on fire, are demanding that we are the ones that issue an apology.
We bear no ill will against Kelly Clarkson. We invite her to come back and enjoy the store, but we find her gross abuse of power to be completely reprehensible.
And she should face social consequences.
That is Adam Rubin, and he's the co-owner of what's been described as a curiosity shop.
You have them saying that because the clerks in the shops, when receiving nonstop phone calls and threats, and employees' personal social media accounts, they're getting attacked.
But where we should start, because I kind of just dropped a crazy bomb on you, is at the beginning.
Because you've got Clarkson driving and making her way all the way out to Brooklyn, checking out this store. She sees the bird. She loves the bird. She's very interested in purchasing this bird, Molly.
But she says that those dreams were crushed by a shopkeeper who didn't recognize her and insinuated that she could not pay the $15,000.
So shortly after leaving the store, Clarkson posted her angry tweet, claiming that she was given the Pretty Woman treatment by the shopkeeper.
Writing, "Had a few things in mind to buy, and literally it was looked at as if I couldn't afford it and was told he could find something comparable for— Wow, dude, you're an idiot and just lost a huge sale."
Whether— then calling out the store by name and giving it a thumbs-down emoji.
And then, with just that tweet getting viewed over 46 million times, a lot of Kelly Clarkson fans, they got super pissed, and the story gained traction.
So then, initially, Art of Play, they respond by saying, "Hey, this was a misunderstanding," because Molly just isn't for sale, saying she's permanently attached to the wall because they use her in magic shows that they have there, right?
Then even that initial statement, it got into the negative attention that they've been receiving since the singer's tweet, claiming they've been attacked by millions of people who have never visited the store, and adding, "We're going to keep our heads down and hopefully we can clear things up with Kelly someday."
In closing, as a talented, popular singer once said, "What doesn't kill you makes you stronger."
I don't know if it was the whole statement or just that last line that had some bite to it, but Clarkson did not appreciate that response, with things escalating from there.
With Clarkson responding with receipts, what appears to be a screenshot of a $15,000 price tag, which is next to Molly, saying the shopkeeper elevator-eyed her and said in a condescending tone, "Yes, it's for sale, but it costs $15,000. So if you'd like me to find something comparable for you..."
Clarkson calling this person at the store rude and a liar and adding, "Don't get a free pass to treat people less than in your store just because you are a small business."
Art of Play, they responded to that with a second statement, saying they'd like to clarify one additional detail about the situation.
And in that post, they explained or said that Molly has a nearly identical automaton owned by the creator who lives in Seattle, right, who said he would be willing to part with Edwin Bird for $15,000.
Another statement also claiming that the shopkeeper explained this to Clarkson and offered her a different singing bird automaton that costs around $2,000. It would have been one that she could have taken home that day, right?
It was in the shop, but with that, saying that she did not stick around long enough to see, right?
And then he's got people all over the place sounding off on this. But things got taken to a whole different level.
And that's because you had journalist and podcaster Pablo Torre entering the chat.
And ultimately, you had him getting and posting footage of Clarkson in the store to try to get to the bottom of this. And then you see her entering the store with her kids. They're then looking around.
All of a sudden, it looks like, oh my gosh.
Clarkson sees this bird she loves, and it looks like she proceeds to have a conversation with a worker there who turns out to be one of the co-owners. That plays out briefly, but then they separate.
Some saying it then looks like the co-owner is pointing to the $2,000 bird, but then also he gets wrapped up in another conversation. At the same time, Clarkson goes to the corner of the store.
She then proceeds to walk towards the exit, putting back something that looked like she was going to buy.
And then before she leaves, it looks like she has some words with the person at the cash register. She seems very bothered.
It looks like the person at the cash register really doesn't know what's happening.
And then they share a little footage from outside where it looks like you see Clarkson without her phone.
And so then, seemingly from this footage, especially because there's actually no audio in it, you have people just having completely different takes on this depending on where you go on the internet.
Where you would Pablo Torre and his co-host and a number of people online appearing to sympathize with the store, with that questioning the argument that Clarkson was treated poorly based on what she was wearing, given that she really fits in with all the customers there.
"Kelly Clarkson looks exactly like everyone else who's in the store, including the shopkeeper, including who she's talking to."
So in order for this kind of, like, classist kind of profiling to occur, she would have to appear to not be like everyone else.
And that's clearly not the case.
And then you also had them calling out Clarkson for using her platform to direct negative attention to the store. Do they feel like they deserve all of this?
"In reality, this is a class warfare kind of thing, but it's the opposite. You aren't the underdog. You are the ruling, oppressive class, in essence, by, you know, treating these people—again, they're not on your level financially."
Any sort of fashion to behave in that way is the entitlement of the rich.
But then also, a lot of the online discourse that you're seeing are people coming to Clarkson's defense.
That appears to be for a mix of reasons. You know, A, she's a beloved celebrity with a generally squeaky-clean reputation.
And B, you've got people saying, you know, they do not like the way that it looks like the shopkeeper allegedly treated her.
"Some people just don't care about celebrities, and I respect that. What I don't respect is someone walking into your store and your employer and/or you, the owner, because who knows, it could have been the owner that was behind the counter, deciding that they don't think you can afford to be there."
You also have others saying it's actually the store owner who's making things worse with what they've described as his dramatic response to media outlets, with some people commenting things like, "This is some loser shit. Your employee was rude to someone they thought was beneath them, and it turned out to be Kelly Clarkson. Just take the L, dude."
And then also, you've got a branch of the reactions here being people just laughing at the situation and even doing skits around it.
"Many amazing things in here. I'll come in. Thank you. The sale section is going to be to your left."
"The sales section?"
"We promised you something that would be more in your price range. You're going to find it in that sales section."
Hey, ultimately, with where we are right now, I got to ask you, where do you land on this? Right? What are your thoughts and reactions? Are you on Kelly Clarkson's side? Are you on Art of Play's side?
You land somewhere in the middle where you think, like, no one's coming out of this smelling like roses. What do you think and why? Because again, depending on where you go online, vastly different reactions.
But then jumping from that to other news, we've got a story that starts with these:
"He pranced around me like an ostrich. He licked me like a lizard. He treated me like an animal and left me bleeding."
Those are all things that you had said about Russell Brand today during the opening of his trial for rape and sexual assault.
That's because you're looking at seven charges, six women, and a handful of stories that are as bizarre as they are disturbing.
And you've got all these alleged incidents taking place in the UK between 1999 and— and also because this isn't happening in America, where seemingly everything's televised for your entertainment.
We do not have footage of the courtroom, but what we do have are transcripts. And the lead prosecutor, right, Kami Jones, she did not paint a flattering picture of Brand.
You had her calling him a ruthless, manipulative, calculating sexual predator, saying his desire for sexual contact was indiscriminate and voracious, that he was childlike in his expectation that his every desire should be— then adding women were simply a means to an end, whether groping them, sexually or indecently assaulting them, or vaginally, orally, or anally raping them.
Brand's pled not guilty to all the charges, though.
At the same time, people are pointing out that he's been very blunt about his sexual past, even telling Megyn Kelly stuff like:
"In Europe and in the United Kingdom, where I'm from, the age of consent is 16, and I did sleep with a 16-year-old when I was 30."
Russell Brand admitting that, given his wealth, fame, and power, his sexual behavior was exploitative, selfish, and wrong.
But he said not illegal, according to him. He never violated anyone's consent, at least not technically or legally, even though what he did crossed a line, of course.
With all this, we're going to see what a jury decides.
And then in the meantime, of course, there is the court of public opinion, so that, of course, is all playing out.
But let's get started with the first alleged incident in 1999, when you had Brand performing comedy at the British Labour Party conference.
Because according to his former friend, who was with him on the way there, Brand boasted that he wanted to sleep with 5,000 women during his life, adding that his goal was to never leave a situation without having some kind of conquest, always trying to score in every situation.
And then after the event, you had Kami Jones saying that Brand started chatting with a woman about politics, and believing he was gay, she invited him to her hotel room to continue the conversation.
Then when she came out of the bathroom, she says that she found him wearing nothing but budgie smugglers, which is the British term for tighty-whities, and then adding that he was, quote, "prancing around the room a bit like an ostrich," doing a silly walk like Basil Fawlty, referring to the '70s sitcom character played by Monty Python's John Cleese.
So the woman claims that she was like, "Why are your clothes off?"
And then Brand responds with something like, "It's okay, it's just how I am. Don't worry, I'm mostly naked at—"
With the prosecutor saying that he pushed her onto the bed and started, quote, "doing things with his tongue that were horrible, like a lizard," and adding that she knew that there was nothing that she could do to stop him from going further.
And so he raped her and later acted as if nothing had happened.
This woman saying that she was left in shock, crying and feeling ashamed, dirty, and— then the morning afterward, Brand's friend at the time said that he burst into the apartment and told them to pack up their stuff because they had to leave town immediately.
The friend also adding that Brand acted weird in the car, hiding his head beneath the window, and later admitted that his sexual encounter that night, quote, "might have got a little out of hand."
And then the second alleged incident came in 2001, when you have a woman working at MTV offering to show Brand where the toilets were.
But then, according to Kami Jones, when they got there, he said, "Come in, go on, come in."
And he grabbed her hard by her— with her allegedly resisting, saying, "I'm not coming in there. Don't be silly. Are you mad? Get it off me," before finally getting free and describing how she felt bewildered and shocked.
Then the third alleged incident came in 2004 at a bar where a birthday party was taking place, with Kami Jones claiming that within less than a minute, Brand lunged forward and grabbed a woman's breasts while sporting a big, weird— at which point he allegedly pulled this woman into a bathroom and forced her to go down on him.
The woman allegedly saying, "What are you doing? I don't want to do this."
To which Brand allegedly replied, "Oh, come on, don't be a spoilsport," saying, "You want to," or something along those lines.
With him then later that night in a car allegedly whipping out his dick and saying, "Come on, suck it," but this time accepting a no.
Then for the fourth alleged incident, that is said to have taken place not long after, with Kami Jones claiming that Brand met a woman at a radio station and, quote, "instantly grabbed her by the face with both hands, pushed her up against a wall and kissed her as sloppily—"
And that he also groped her body, and she tried to push him off, but saying he was too— with her describing it as rough, fast, and—
Then for the fifth alleged incident, that is said to have taken place in 2009 between Brand and an aspiring comedian who says that she idolized him.
Kami Jones claiming that they had consensual sex at first, but then, quote, "without warning, without asking, without her consent, he penetrated her anally."
And she said that despite begging him to stop, he— adding that he had taken off his condom before doing it, and then told her afterwards to clean up the mess he'd made.
She said that she bled for several days after.
Then as far as the final alleged incident that took place the same year, when Brand was working with a woman on a work— with Kami Jones claiming that he became angry, fed up, and petulant before leaving the room, after which his team told the woman that she had to give him a massage if they were to—
Then allegedly, he came back, fell to his knees, and stuck his head into her groin, with her saying that she could feel his breath on her genitals.
With him then at a later date allegedly texting her, to which she replied, "Why are you even messaging me?"
With Kami Jones claiming that he responded, "Because you're dirty and I want to push you," which the woman shot back, "I think you pushed me far enough. You treated me like an animal."
And there he allegedly texted back, "I'm sorry."
If you've followed Brand at all in recent years, he's repeated that apology publicly, if not for these specific cases, at least for his conduct.
With him claiming that he's changed, saying that back then he was an immature party boy, and now he's a devout Christian and married father of— saying he's giving up the hedonistic individualism of his youth and submitted himself to a higher power.
People saying that even his brief comments to the press as he entered the courtroom today, they were inflected by that religious—
"I feel blessed. I feel, of course, concerned and— but hopeful that this process will lead to good outcomes for everybody involved. That's— that's my prayer."
As far as what outcome we'll get, we should see relatively soon, right? Because it's believed that this trial could last as long as ten weeks.
And so for now, I really would love to know your reactions to this whole story and this situation, as well as what your predictions are here, as you're maybe sharing that with me in the comments down below.
And as we have more to talk about in just a minute, let's take a quick break and hear from a sponsor.
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And then right back into the news.
We still don't have any more official information about this unprecedented raid on Representative Ilhan Omar, but you do have sources now giving The Washington Post some absolutely key new details we should talk about.
On Monday, Ilhan Omar's D.C.-area home was searched by federal agents with Homeland Security Investigations, which is a branch of DHS that handles criminal investigations.
While the Justice Department only said that it had authorized a search warrant as part of an ongoing federal criminal investigation, it was widely reported that the probe was related to alleged immigration records for background.
Omar fled Somalia with her family during the civil war when she was just a child, immigrating to the U.S. in 1995 and later becoming a U.S. citizen.
And she has said that her father, who died in 2020, became a naturalized citizen in 2000 when she was still a minor, and so she was able to get her citizenship through him before she turned 18.
But also with this, as earlier reports first started rolling in on Monday, you had The New York Times telling us that investigators were looking into whether her father lied or omitted certain details while seeking legal status in the U.S. before becoming a citizen.
That's a very key thing here, because if there was indeed conclusive evidence that Omar derived her citizenship improperly, the DOJ could push to denaturalize her and potentially even deport her.
Now you've got sources telling The Post that agents are especially focused on whether Omar or her father purposefully lied about a birth date on immigration paperwork so she could get citizenship through him as a minor.
Now, a big thing, of course, is this is not the first time that these allegations have come up.
Back in 2019, there was a video from a political opponent that went viral, claiming that Omar was actually 18 when her father applied for citizenship, and thus she would be ineligible to earn her own citizenship through him.
Then, not long after that, the Minnesota Legislative Reference Library, which keeps biographies of elected officials in the state, revised her official birth date in its records from 1981 to 1982, with the library telling The Post that Omar's staff had asked for the change as part of a broader effort to correct her birth year on various public sources, including Wikipedia.
That appears to be backed up in emails between Omar's staff and the library that were obtained by The New York Times.
But another key thing here is that The Post also obtained an email from the library's director, who said that the initial 1981 date wasn't based on a birth certificate or any other supporting paperwork.
And in fact, you had the director explicitly saying the date was put down because it was widely available in Wikipedia and the Biographical Directory.
And so we added that birth date without documentation.
That tracks, because Omar has said that, like many other Somali immigrants, she's been unable to get her birth certificate because decades of internal conflict and the collapse of government infrastructure caused by the civil war.
They were repeatedly arguing that the request to change her birth date was simply an attempt to correct mistakes in various public sources, not cover up the truth about the year she was born.
And actually, with this, you even had Fox News admitting a discrepancy does not establish that Omar falsified immigration records.
But then also, beyond that, you had an official telling The Washington Post that investigators were also looking into whether Omar's father may have intentionally lied or omitted information about his past military service while seeking legal status in the U.S.
The outlet reporting there.
Both questions are considered key to the investigation because they led to Omar securing her citizenship.
But, and this is another key thing, sources also told The Post that the immigration-related inquiry was launched earlier this year, several years after DHS had declined to move forward with the probe based on similar allegations.
And that piece of reporting, it's just kind of bolstered the widespread outrage and the allegations that Trump's weaponizing federal agencies to target political opponents ahead of a midterm cycle that's expected to really, really hurt him.
Among other things, like we talked about on Monday, the DOJ has a longstanding policy that explicitly instructs officials to avoid taking public steps, like executing search warrants or issuing subpoenas in political cases, 60 days before an election, so as to not unduly influence voters.
With all of this, right, that's exactly what the Trump administration has done, and they're still continuing to.
Right on top of the raid, it's also now widely being reported that the DOJ has issued around a dozen subpoenas in the probe, including to Omar's family, which to many is exactly the kind of overt measure that they're not supposed to be taking.
Then actually, also yesterday, you had U.S. Attorney Jeanine Pirro announcing that she had launched a separate probe into Omar's financial disclosures last year.
In those filings, Omar and her husband had disclosed assets between $6 million and $30 million, which is a huge increase in wealth from prior filings.
But also, she later revised the documents to declare assets between $18,000 and $95,000, claiming that the initial filing was an accounting error.
And actually, last month, a House watchdog recommended that the ethics committee dismiss misconduct allegations regarding the disclosures after finding that there was actually no substantial evidence to believe that she violated House rules.
And so it appears that Pirro's announcement is just yet another break with DOJ policy.
Then you just get more and more people arguing that this is just stacking evidence of Trump's blatant corruption and abuse of power.
And then also, you have many pointing to his past efforts to use the federal government to target his perceived political enemies.
You also have other big voices in the space right now, including people that are often kind of bundled up with Omar, like Hasan Piker, talking about this being more of what we'll probably see in the future.
"This is insane. And the reason for why I say it's insane is not because, like, how dare you go after a congresswoman?
"The reason why I'm saying that is because if you can do this to an American congresswoman, an American naturalized citizen who's an American congresswoman, okay, we're broaching totally new territory at this point.
"You could do this to anybody all the time. Okay? Nonstop. This is, you know, this is unprecedented in many respects. They can do this.
"They can do this to anybody.
"They can do this to— I'm Donnie's— or I'm— I'm Donnie also is a naturalized American citizen, right? First they'll go for naturalized U.S. citizens.
"Then next up is going to be American-born, like natural-born U.S. citizens, if they have at least one immigrant parent, and then they continue expanding.
"Erdogan does this. Vladimir Putin does this. But again, and now Trump is doing it."
And actually, as you have all this playing out regarding, you know, what's next, what are the goals, you then have people looking to people like Laura Loomer, because among other things she's done recently, she was attacking Mamdani in a post on Twitter, calling him a communist jihadist and adding, "He's a jihadist who deserves to be raided the same way Ilhan Omar."
Saying Mamdani qualifies for dinner— saying, like Ilhan Omar, Mamdani is a reminder of why Muslims need to be banned from holding office in America.
And while Trump, especially when they're together, always seems like he has this schoolboy crush on Mamdani, you've got many paying attention to what Loomer is saying here, especially because of her perceived connections to the president and the White House.
As far as how this is going to play out, we are going to have to wait to see.
Or does it play out like a lot of the other failed attacks on Trump's perceived enemies? Or is, you know, each situation unique and different?
But then jumping from that to other news, we want to talk about how you have this actual foreign national who's accused of spying on OpenAI's executives, and also the big-picture spin that the DOJ is putting on all of this.
Because we're talking about Abdulrahman Alza, a Saudi Arabia national who was hired by OpenAI as an engineer on their product team last year.
But then he was arrested by the FBI after his security team found a recording device when they did a sweep of a conference room reserved for executives.
A conference room typically used for meetings with government officials and other business leaders.
And specifically, the device was plugged into a USB port on the back of a TV, wrapped in toilet paper. It was supposedly built to evade detection.
It had advanced encryption, could monitor audio, and had a way to transfer data without being— Alza is said to have stashed it in that conference room a couple of days before it was found, and he planned to put more of them in other offices and conference rooms to secretly record.
Then also, here's the wilder, even maybe goofy part: he reportedly used a chatbot in his research for what rooms to put these bugs in.
According to the indictment, he asked ChatGPT about a bunch of questions about internal details of OpenAI, things like building addresses, meeting rooms, meeting room capacities and calendars, and leadership and exact—.
Then also, his spouse allegedly submitted multiple prompts to chatbots about building, customizing, installing audio recording, testing, obfuscating, and remote accessing a— with there being specific questions about building a continuous audio recorder, customized Wi-Fi connectivity, and encrypting an SD card.
And then OpenAI, when their security found the bug, they used one of its models to figure out what it was and where it came from.
The way that it appears it all played out was pretty cut and dry.
A few days after the device was found, Alza reportedly came back to the conference room, despite his lack of clearance to be there, and immediately looked behind the TV, seemingly to find the device.
Within that same day, a security team reportedly took a peek inside of the backpack that he brought to work, and they found another bug just like the one from the conference room.
With all this, according to OpenAI's statement, it doesn't seem like he actually got ahold of anything important, like model weights, source code, or customer data.
Of course, despite that, in case it wasn't obvious, he was very much fired when he got caught.
And, well, right now, we don't know the full details behind his motive.
What we do know is that the Department of Justice is definitely framing Alza's arrest as important for national security.
Jay Clayton, director of national intelligence, for example, saying in a statement:
"This serious situation underscores why winning the global superintelligence race is a national security priority."
And saying the intelligence community remains committed to guarding America's cutting-edge intellectual property from foreign threats.
Which is very similar to what the U.S. attorney for the Northern District of California said, echoing that it's a matter of national security, and this arrest highlights our relentless efforts, in partnership with the FBI, to identify and prosecute those who seek to steal our technology, as alleged in the indictment.
We thought this. The key thing to understand is, like, this is not a brand-new concern, where you've had both big tech leaders and politicians repeatedly sounding the alarm that AI and tech companies, they are high-priority targets for foreign intelligence agencies looking for a leg up.
This also isn't the first time that that concern has been proven.
I mean, just one example: back in January, Chinese national Linwei Ding was convicted of economic espionage and theft of trade secrets after stealing plans for AI-focused computer chips while working for Google.
Though in that case, the espionage conviction was later overturned after a judge said that there wasn't enough evidence that this guy was actually taking the secrets back to China versus trying to use them to launch his own company.
But then also, you have, like, back in 2022, a guy who used to work at Twitter was convicted of six charges related to accusations that he spied on users for Saudi Arabia.
And then also, of course, there's the more general security and protocol controversies in the AI space recently, like the Hugging Face incident back in— where we had that OpenAI model going rogue and attacking another tech company, stealing data and performing unauthorized activity completely on its own, with no direction from—.
In that same month, an OpenAI agent hacked Australia's university healthcare system in the same—.
I could really just go on and on there.
But you get the idea.
You've got safety and security concerns in the AI space being a very big deal in the moment, as also these big companies appear to be continually dropping the ball.
And the recent firing of three of their safety researchers, it doesn't really inspire a lot of confidence for many people that things are going to change much anytime soon.
But as far as this situation, right now, you have Alza facing five years in prison, and he's facing up to $250,000 in fines.
But also, neither he nor his attorneys have made a public comment about the situation, and so we'll have to see how the situation develops.
And then there's even more that we get to dive into in just a minute.
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And then, diving right back into the news, there's a few more things we got to talk about.
First up, we've got to talk about how Pope Leo was just diagnosed with lung cancer less than a year and a half into his papacy.
But the news here, it's actually a lot more hopeful than a cancer diagnosis usually sounds.
Because on Tuesday, you had the 71-year-old pope having surgery at a hospital in Rome to remove what he described as a small, localized nodule in his lung.
When your doctors are digging it out and testing it, they confirmed that it was cancer, and specifically lung adenocarcinoma, which is the most common type.
The key thing here is that they caught this extremely early.
The pope himself saying that it was found at a very early stage, and the surgery, it only took around 90 minutes. It went off without any complications, and you had doctors removing the entire lobe to make sure they got all of it.
And oncologists are calling the prognosis excellent, right?
One described it as one of the more treatable cancers out there.
The pope's own doctors say that he should be able to live a normal, active life after this kind of surgery.
Also, a big thing here is that there is a family history, right?
His mom died of cancer back in 1990. And actually, his brother is also reportedly battling cancer right now.
Because the Vatican, they say Leo is going to stay in the hospital for about a week, with his public events on hold until October 20th.
And notably, they say that his plane trip in November, that's still on.
The big key takeaway here is that the early signs are genuinely encouraging, right? All things considered.
And then also in the news, you've got pharma bro Martin Shkreli possibly trying to fast-track a return back to—.
And if you forgot, he's the guy that jacked up the price of a life-saving drug by more than 4,000%.
Since being released from prison back in 2022, he's been explicitly banned from engaging with the pharmaceutical industry.
Like, he's not even supposed to look in their direction. He is allowed to get himself ibuprofen.
Despite that, you've got the FTC and seven states claiming that he's traded stocks in at least 60 different pharma companies.
Apparently, he wasn't even sneaky about it.
He did a lot of this while livestreaming to followers on YouTube and Twitter, and then he also apparently gave opinions on company management and organized campaigns to short biotech stocks.
But the guy literally telling viewers, "I'm showing you how to trade and invest in biotech."
There's definitely a case going on, with prosecutors wanting a judge to hold Shkreli in contempt.
On top of that, they also want him to divest in pharma stocks and pay any profits as a fine.
And these increasing consequences are for his flagrant disregard for the ban.
In the press release for this, they specifically mentioned the possibility of reincarceration.
That, my friends, you beautiful bastards, is the end of your Wednesday Philip DeFranco Show.
Another daily dive into the news.
And hey, if the next course is your dessert, if you want something that's a lot more opinion and takes rather than just pure news, you should definitely check out today's brand-new episode of Crashing Out.
Those come out every Wednesday at noon on YouTube, Spotify, Apple Podcasts, really wherever you get podcasts.
But hey, no matter what you do, thank you for watching. I love your faces, and I'll see you right back here tomorrow.