Jesse Ridgway Has Used Every Person in His Life and He’s Never Going to Stop

**Tony Brueski** (0:01)
This is Hidden Killers Live with Tony Brueski and Robin Green.

**Tony Brueski** (0:08)
This is an interesting story that we're going to be getting into. You've probably seen Jesse Ridgway, even if you don't know who Jesse Ridgway was, I didn't, popping up in your feed. If you've been following True Crime or you follow any True Criminers, he's been popping up in the last week because of the stunt that I'm going to call it, that he pulled. You probably have seen it. Maybe you've been enraged by it because on the surface, it is rather enraging.
Discovering that him and his wife, they're pregnant, and then, oh my gosh, there's a marker here that shows the baby has Down syndrome, and then they abort it the next day. This segment is not a debate about abortion or rights or anything like that. It's about the mind of Jesse Ridgway because Jesse Ridgway has a history, a history of fraud, a history of hoax, a history of performance, as he called it, playing a character. In his mind, what he's done historically online on YouTube, to millions of people, has been a performance. Is this another performance? Because if you're looking at patterns of behavior, this fits the pattern of behavior. So I'm watching it going, why is everyone so enraged? This is bullshit. It's staged. It's fake, in my opinion. Now, whether it is or not, is besides the fact. We are jumping into the mind of Jesse Ridgway today, and we're going to be getting your thoughts in the comment section on Substack. We're going to identify what's going on here in the brain as best as we can. The machine, the trolling, the compulsion, the reason that he keeps doing these sorts of things and getting an audience. The audience is the third part of the conversation. Why do they keep coming back? Why do people keep getting drawn in? Why are we talking about it right now?
Again, this isn't about the rage of what I would consider to be a hoax. This is about the compulsive mind that continues to pull millions of people down its rabbit hole with it. Shavaun Scott, psychotherapist and author, joining us to help break this down and have this discussion.
You were kind of in the same boat I was when you first heard about this. I texted you the other night going, here's what I want to talk about. Give me your journey on how you kind of dived into this and how you got close to the same conclusion I did of what's going on here.

**Shavaun Scott** (2:31)
Yeah, I never heard of this guy, of course, not on my radar at all. I have read in New York Times and a bunch of other places about the controversy in the story and it seemed legit, right?
They certainly took him seriously and it wasn't until you mentioned it that I actually got in and took a deeper dive on YouTube and started watching his shit. I mean that quite literally. It is crap and so fake. Every single one of those videos, I'm like, who could believe this? Who could take it seriously? That's one of the questions too, is why would anybody take this guy seriously about anything or believe anything, he would say. But the fact that he's been doing this for 12 long years, and he's in his thirties now and he's still at it and obviously making probably a very good living doing it.
Yeah, there's a lot to unpack there and it was quite surprising. I'm saying there's two kinds of people in the world. Maybe this is obviously a gross oversimplification, but those who watch Masterpiece Theater on PBS and those who watch Jesse Ridgway and they're very different kinds of folks.

**Tony Brueski** (3:49)
I completely agree.
I did not know who he was from Adam.
I mean, look, anybody can do anything they want on the internet, on YouTube. I mean, I have no problem with someone doing performative work or even doing content that is presented as real and it's not. I think there's spaces for that, especially in the world of satire and things of that nature, to help get points across and to help people understand their own thinking better. There's lanes for all of these, but then there's also lanes where it's just 100% pure unadulterated rage bait and it's let me put something in front of you that has nothing to do with anything of substance, not your own life, not my life, not that life, just something in front of you that's going to enrage you. And let's get you so angry and so upset that you're going to thousands of people called 911 on this guy years ago, in one of his previous online iterations called The Psycho Series, and I learned all about this while studying up on this, of portraying himself as being in a conflict with his father, committing murder, fleeing the country. People thought it was real. Now, okay, stunts, I get it, I've pulled many of myself in my days in radio and such, but when you're getting thousands of people calling 911 because they genuinely fear for the safety of yourself or others, and you just kind of go along with it for years and continue that charade, that's something else entirely. There's no lesson behind that. There's a confirmation circle of do crazy shit, get paid for it. Let's keep doing this again, because that's the cycle. And we'll get into the machine of it in a little bit. But when we look at it, what the hell is going on here?