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- Do you need bottles? - I have bottles.
[street noise]
Does anyone need... You need bottles?
What time? 4:15?
The timekeepers are going to give a signal.
Okay.
Everyone has bottles? Okay.
- You ready to go in? - Let's go.
There's a guard walking around looking puzzled.
I think he's trying to count the number of people.
I'm really nervous, man.
- Let's start. - Let's go, let's do it, go.
- Mic check. - Mic check!
- 100,000 dead. - 100,000 dead!
100,000 dead!
- 100,000 dead! - Don't do anything.
You can't do anything as far as...
- Temple of death. - Temple of death!
- Temple of money. - Temple of money!
- Temple of greed. - Temple of greed!
- Temple of Oxy. - Temple of Oxy!
- Sacklers lie. - Sacklers lie!
- Thousands die. - Thousands die!
- The Sacklers knew... - The Sacklers knew...
- Their pills would kill. - Their pills would kill!
They built this wing!
- They killed this wing... - Take this outside...
Excuse me. No, excuse me...
[screams, cheers]
[applause]
- Sacklers lie! - People die!
[chanting continues]
[♪]
It's easy to make your life into stories.
But it's harder to... sustain real memories.
What do you mean?
Well, the difference between the story and the real memory.
The real experience has a smell and is dirty,
and is not wrapped up in simple endings.
[♪]
The real memories are what affects me now.
[sound of slide projector]
Things can appear that you didn't want to see,
where you're not safe.
And even if you don't actually unleash the memories,
the effect is there. It's in your body.
[wind gusting]
All right.
[♪]
It was a claustrophobic suburb. "Don't let the neighbors know."
My mother used to say that all the time. It wasn't just an attitude.
Actually, the neighbors did know, we found out years later
'cause there was so much screaming in the house.
Tell me about your sister.
My mother insisted that Barbara speak in full sentences at the age of one.
And so she stopped talking for at least a year and a half.
Yeah, that was the first act of rebellion by my sister.
She would just wash my hair or hold me,
or these kind of things that you need when you're a kid.
And she knew how to do that, even though
she hadn't been mothered in that way.
She made me aware at a very young age
about the banality and deadening grip of suburbia.
She had a wildness to her.
She played the piano constantly.
Chopin... Rachmaninoff, Tchaikovsky...
And you could tell how she was feeling by how she was playing.
[♪]
The parakeets would sit on her shoulders while she played.
She trusted me with all her secrets.
She went on Saturday nights to the movies to make out with boys.
That was when she stood up for herself and yelled back.
And she talked to me about feelings for other girls.
It was a period of sexual repression, and she was made to fear her sexuality.
And a lot of it was her need to be held.
She had a saying: "Lean cat, savage cat."
I felt very close to her,
but she was in and out of institutions for most of my childhood.
Once they started sending her away, they kept sending her away.
My parents took away her credibility and...
silenced her by calling her "mentally ill."
The police came into the house.
My father started wailing on the front lawn, wailing.
They were talking to my mother, saying that
"We found your daughter, and she committed suicide."
And I heard my mother say, "Tell the children it was an accident."
My interpretation from that minute was... denial.
She didn't want us to know the truth.
That's when it clicked.
[busy street noise]
[workers talking quietly]
Okay, let's try it towards the left.
- Yeah. - Or like in the middle?
I don't know. Can you move over to the right?
Keep going, okay,
I can't really see because your body... Thank you.
Wow.
Do you like it?
Okay, I just want to see one more thing. Can you switch these two?
Okay, and one more idea. A couple more ideas.
I could do this all night. [chuckles] Watch out.
Yeah...
[gallery noise]
I was thinking about this last night that...
People talk about all kinds of relationships, with their partner,
their children, their parents and...
The relationships that have mattered most to me,
probably my whole life, are my friends.
I only escaped because of my friends.
Right.
Yeah, that's better. That's perfect.
[♪]
"I survived the opioid crisis.
"I narrowly escaped.
"My relationship to OxyContin began several years ago in Berlin.
"It was originally prescribed for surgery.
"Though I took it as directed, I got addicted overnight.
"In the beginning, 40 milligrams was too strong.
"But as my habit grew, there was never enough.
"I went from 3 pills a day, as prescribed, to 18.
"The drug, like all drugs, lost its effect.
"So I picked up the straw.
"My life revolved entirely around getting and using Oxy,
"counting and recounting, crushing and snorting was my full-time job.
[♪]
"When I got out of treatment, I learned that the Sackler family,
"whose name I knew from museums and galleries,
"were responsible for the epidemic.
"The Sackler family and their private company, Purdue Pharma,
"advertised and distributed their medication, knowing all the dangers.
"I've started a group, P.A.I.N., to hold them accountable.
"To get their ear, we will target their philanthropy.
"They have washed their blood money through the halls
"of museums and universities around the world."
[♪]
I had no idea that it was going to actually have the traction that it did.
It's definitely among the, if not the most,
proud moments of my tenure as editor of the magazine.
She knew how to use her power.
She's a figure that these museums also wanted to work with.
They want in their collections. She's a major name in the art world.
When she published the portfolio
it was the fact that she was doing it that mattered.
I knew this would put her on the line in a real serious way and...
I was concerned for her safety. I was concerned for...
whether she would be drummed out of the art world.
I think that...
She was taking on a very powerful family, one of the most powerful families.
I mean, if anyone belongs in jail, it's these people.
And as long as there's a jail, they should be in it...
until the whole prison system is dismantled.
They should be the last to leave.
- Last one, lights out. - Last one.
After I met Nan and we connected on levels of...
having experience with addiction and stuff like that...
She said, "Why don't you come to one of our P.A.I.N. meetings?"
Most members of P.A.I.N. have a direct experience with addiction,
or loss of a loved one.
We have members who lost their children...
to overdose, that have family members who are struggling,
or that they themselves have struggled.
Yeah, but death is the bottom line of this,
and that should be reminded, we should do a die-in of some sort.
Do we want to marshal numbers?
- But each of us will be then responsible... - Trusted friends...
The focus on the family,
I would say there was a little bit of fear in the group about
going straight for them, although we felt that we should.
Yeah, this is the decisive one.
Nan actually said, "Do you think my career will implode?"
And I said, "Probably."
I said, "Yes, these are very scary, powerful people.
"But then again, what else can you do?"
And she said, "I think we should take these people down."
And I said, "Well, I'm with you."
And then we started meeting and we would sit in Nan's house
and dream up of things we wanted to do.
He's really sweet.
He's sweet on Alex, man.
Go on.
Let's see where it all starts here.
I mean, there's literally so many of these that it's hard for me to find...
Yeah, this is September 2019... I get this legal hold notice.
"Dear Mr. Keefe, I write on behalf of my clients,
"members of the Raymond Sackler family.
"You are hereby directed to preserve and not to destroy, conceal or alter
"any and all documents and communications in your possession
"that relate in any way to any members of the Sackler family,
"the article, Purdue Pharma, and/or OxyContin..."
And on and on and on.
One of the things that's so strange about the Sackler family is that
we talk about them in monolithic terms,
but really it's three families and...
they spring from these three original brothers, Arthur, Mortimer and Raymond.
His name is Arthur Sackler.
For 40 years, he has brought energy, goodwill and intelligence to art.
He owns thousands of works,
presently displayed not only at the Metropolitan Museum,
but in university collections as well.
[applause]
Knowing that the goal of peace is engraved in your hearts,
Mrs. Sackler and I present to you this verse...
Arthur died before the introduction of OxyContin.
And yet so much of what's happened is, in part, a function of Arthur's legacy.
His contemporaries knew him as this great art collector and this philanthropist.
And the dirty secret was that
he had come to this position of prominence and great wealth
through the marketing of this drug, which also happened to be quite addictive.
He creates a whole means of selling Valium in which you're targeting doctors.
He devised a compensation scheme in which
he would get paid a series of escalating bonuses
based on how much Valium they sold.
Well, Valium becomes the best-selling drug
in the history of the pharmaceutical industry.
From his personal collection,
Sackler gave the Smithsonian carte blanche to select a thousand pieces,
the best from a lifetime of collecting.
The whole Sackler enterprise has been about marketing,
the marketing of OxyContin, but also the marketing of the family name.
There's the family of the art world and the museum world and philanthropy.
And then there's the kind of grubby, unpleasant story of...
big pharma marketing and addiction and death.
Don't be afraid to take what they give you.
Often it will be an opioid medication.
Some patients may be afraid of taking opioids
because they're perceived as too strong, or addictive.
But that is far from actual fact.
The Sacklers owned Purdue, this company that set out very deliberately
to change the way in which these strong opioids were prescribed
and to do so, by claiming that they weren't addictive.
A week or two after my article came out,
I got this email, this kind of cryptic email
from the studio of Nan Goldin that said,
"The photographer Nan Goldin would like to meet with you."
And I was a little mystified, didn't know what it was about.
But we set up a meeting.
She had this kind of "roll up your sleeves,
"We gotta do something! We gotta organize!
"We gotta get out there!" And I probably was...
I blush to think, but I probably was gently patronizing and said,
"Well, good for you, glad to hear it. You keep me posted on that."
I love working in a material I know.
Blue valium bottles.
My anger at the Sackler family, it's personal.
I hate these people, but it's not about my own addiction.
I mean, when you think of the profit off people's pain.
You can only be furious about it.
Sacklers lie, people die! Fund harm reduction now!
[dead silence]
We consciously talked about Act Up and what Act Up had done.
And how we wanted for these actions to make an impact.
This idea of a bottle was the first object we created.
All the museums, institutions need to stop taking money
from these corrupt, evil bastards.
[cheers, applause]
I got thrown out of every school and every house that I lived.
I got thrown out of my parents' home. I got thrown out of my foster family.
I got thrown out of the communal foster family.
- Seriously? - Yeah.
There's not one I can think of that...
Yeah, I made an art of it.
Okay, but why were you with foster parents?
A psychiatrist told my father that if I stayed in the house,
the same thing would happen as what happened with Barbara.
So my parents sent me to a foster agency.
It was the Jewish adoption agency on Beacon Hill.
Yeah. I must have been 14.
The woman of the house straightened my hair.
She wanted me to be a WASP basically.
I remember when I first went there, I projectile vomited all over my room.
I must have been terrified.
I didn't remember that till now.
I landed in a hippie free school that couldn't throw me out.
[sound of slide projector]
Satya school saved my life.
[sound of slide projector]
I was shy beyond social phobia, like crippling shyness.
There were like six months that I didn't speak at all.
I think my sister's suicide had silenced me.
Until I met David.
He said I was still speaking in a whisper.
[♪]
I was 15. He was 14.
[♪]
He was a vision to me.
[♪]
We met each other, both stealing steaks.
We were shoplifting.
Both of us converged in the steak department.
- Are you serious? - Yes.
Oh, I was a great shoplifter, pretty much all my life.
I'm not sure how good I am anymore, but that's how we became friends.
David was a great wit, very ironic, very precise.
And that was the coin of the realm.
He taught me to use humor as a survival mechanism.
He had this elegance and he was very androgynous,
which was something I was really attracted to.
And one night, we hitchhiked to my brother's dorm,
'cause I was between homes,
and he laid down on the bed and I laid down next to him.
And he got up and laid down on the floor.
And I said, "Are you gay?"
And a light came on for him.
He always said that it was the first time somebody recognized him.
[sound of slide projector]
Then he named me Nan.
So I brought him out and he named me Nan.
So we liberated each other.
David was the eye of my storm.
David and Tommy in a sandpit. That's one of my first photographs.
We all got cameras from Polaroid.
I attached to it more than anybody else at the school.
It was the only language I spoke at the time.
Suddenly I had, you know, a personality, and it gave me a voice.
Photography was always a way to walk through fear.
Taking a picture is kind of protective.
It gave me a reason to be there.
[sound of slide projector]
[♪]
[MUSIC: "Cheree" by Suicide]
David was living with this most beautiful queen in Cambridge.
Very quickly, I moved in with them.
♪ Cheree, Cheree ♪
♪ Oh, baby ♪
We went to Goodwill pretty much every day.
All the rich women were giving their clothes to Goodwill,
and they were exquisite clothes.
♪ I love you ♪
Like Fortuny gowns.
♪ Cheree, Cheree ♪
And we went to The Other Side every night.
Right away, I felt at home there.
I remember being really excited to take pictures at that time.
It was like a flash of euphoria. I know when a picture works.
I get a rush.
I would have the film developed in a pharmacy, and each of them would make
a pile of the pictures of themselves and compete to see who had the biggest pile.
If they didn't like one of the pictures, they tore them up,
and that was okay with me.
I've always wanted the people in the pictures to be proud of being in the work.
People have said, "Oh I didn't know I was that beautiful."
Which is, you know, what I want them to feel.
My roommates, they were running away from America,
and they found each other.
They didn't think, "We're pioneers. We're rebels." They just were.
It was about living out what they needed to live out
in spite of the reaction from the outside world.
[MUSIC: "What Makes A Man A Man" by Charles Aznavour]
♪ There's always those who spoil our games by finding fault and calling names ♪
♪ Always accusing ♪
♪ We love each other but it seems ♪
♪ The love lives only in my dreams ♪
♪ It's so one-sided ♪
♪ But in this life, I must confess ♪
♪ The search for love and happiness ♪
♪ Is unrequited ♪
♪ I ask myself what have I got ♪
♪ And what I am and what I'm not ♪
♪ What have I given? ♪
♪ Then answers come from those who make ♪
♪ The rules that some of us must break ♪
♪ Just to keep living ♪
♪ I know my life is not a crime ♪
♪ I'm just a victim of my time ♪
♪ I stand defenseless ♪
♪ Nobody has the right to be ♪
♪ The judge of what is right for me ♪
♪ Tell me if you can ♪
♪ What makes a man a man ♪
While I was living with the queens,
I started going to art school for photography.
Said I wanted the queens to be on the cover of Vogue.
But in those days, that was so far.
[street noise]
It was a time that was really scary for them.
You could get arrested walking down the street in Boston.
My roommates stayed home basically, and they went out at night.
And... survival was an art.
[seagulls cawing]
David and I started going to Provincetown in '75.
It was the gay mecca.
I worked in a Portuguese hot dog stand.
And then later, I got a job as a bartender at the Pied Piper, the lesbian bar.
I was living in this separatist lesbian community.
You know, it was sort of like flannel shirts and tea.
And I'd come from taffeta gowns and Quaaludes.
And so I was kind of the oddball
'cause I would wear pearls and lipstick to the beach.
I fell in love with this beautiful woman. We were lovers, briefly.
She had lots of other lovers.
I was obsessed with her.
So I photographed her constantly.
I have often used photography as a sublimation for sex.
It's generally better than sex.
I had a button machine.
You know, you take a picture and put it on a button.
- You had a button machine? - Yeah...
That was my way of making a living.
Walking up and down Commercial Street in my high heels with my button machine,
and Cookie and Sharon and Divine and John Waters
came by and had buttons made.
I knew Cookie from John Waters' films, and I already idolized her.
[MUSIC: "Female Trouble" by Divine]
♪ I got a lot of problems ♪
♪ Female trouble ♪
♪ Maybe I'm twisted ♪
I'd like to set fire to this dump.
Just cause we're pretty everybody's jealous.
It's like a prison here, even at Christmas it's like a prison.
[♪]
[MUSIC: "Sunday Morning" by The Velvet Underground]
♪ Sunday morning ♪
♪ Brings the dawning ♪
Cookie was all about finding what was funny in life.
♪ By my side ♪
Cookie and Sharon were together for many years.
Sharon was working at a pizza place, and Cookie came by one night
with her bicycle and her son, Max.
And he had long hair with gum and popsicle sticks and leaves in it.
And Cookie had on these little Springolator pumps,
but they were held together with safety pins.
And Sharon thought, "I'm gonna take care of these people."
♪ Sunday morning ♪
And then Cookie said to her, "I believe in timing."
♪ I've got a feeling ♪
Cookie took Sharon home with her through a swamp with big pussy willows.
And that was the beginning of Cookie and Sharon.
It was a time of freedom and possibility.
That's when I did my first slideshows.
You ready? Does everyone have their chant?
That's bullshit, get off it, they made addicts just for profit.
We were flying last night!
We were ready to do another New York action
and the Met and the Guggenheim to us are like
two of the most important museums.
And we knew that the Guggenheim had the Sackler Education Center.
So they were like a big target for us.
An important part of the museums we choose is
Nan is typically in the permanent collection.
It's much stronger when the message is coming from inside the house.
I'm not worried. What if they recognize me?
By the time we did the Guggenheim, our name was out there.
Other museums were alerted that we might be coming.
I'm supposed to wear it so that no one knows who I am.
- That's not drawing attention. - Very subtle disguise.
It calls a little attention, doesn't it? It's kind of horrible.
The attorney general in Massachusetts had just released internal emails
and documents of the Sacklers, which were vast, and had really damning quotes.
One of them was the quote from Richard Sackler, saying that
upon the launch of OxyContin in 1996,
that OxyContin would cover the country in a "blizzard of prescriptions."
I was like, "What if we made a bunch of prescriptions
"and throw that back in their faces?"
We're trying to align the banners with
the fountain right at the bottom of the spiral?
- Yes. - Okay.
- Okay, "Shame on Sacklers," right? - Yeah.
The goal is to get the names off the walls.
As long as the names are there,
they still maintain their hold on their reputation.
They're still whitewashing their reputation.
The museums are still complicit in that.
The energy was definitely right.
The whole museum was already buzzing when we went in.
It was a packed Saturday night.
- Nan, are you ready? - No, where is everyone?
We had a Signal thread, but it was really like,
"Go at this time. If you see prescriptions falling, it's starting."
- Are we ready? - Yeah.
[screams, cheers]
[♪]
I was at the bottom looking up, and I checked out for a minute
because I was looking up at the prescription slips
and just like in awe of the visual that it created.
[encouraging shouts]
Say it loud, say it clear, Sackler name not welcome here!
Say it loud, say it clear, Sackler name does not come here!
Say it loud, say it clear, OxyContin got them here!
I was holding one of the banners.
We looked like we're hundreds and hundreds of activists.
Right? We were not hundreds and hundreds.
People are shouting with us. They're agreeing with us.
- No longer! - No longer!
- The Sackler family must go! - The Sackler family must go!
- The Sackler family must pay! - The Sackler family must pay!
- People die! - Sacklers lie!
[♪]
Say it loud, say it clear, Sacklers are not welcome here!
We have journeyed from the Guggenheim down to the Met
to send a message, a message of life and death.
My son was prescribed OxyContin for a knee surgery in high school.
The doctors told him: "Take the pills every four hours.
"Take them before the pain starts. Take them on schedule."
When my son talked of his pain, I said, "Did you take your pill?"
I became an accomplice to my son's demise.
- That's not right. - That ain't right!
My son became addicted to OxyContin. It progressed to heroin.
It took 11 years. But it fucking killed him!
It killed him. It took his life. He died alone in a bathroom.
I don't expect the Sacklers to care about my son.
We care!
But 400,000 lives, right? Somebody should care about that!
Yes!
And how did the Guggenheim respond?
They didn't say anything.
The museums were keeping quiet.
The first year, it's like 25 museums were supportive of the Sacklers.
Either said nothing or were supportive.
They know the Sacklers are a bad look...
- For their PR. - Right.
But they're terrified of what will be found out about them.
The rich people are scared that we're going to dig into
the evil way they made money.
[MUSIC: "The Hunter Gets Captured By The Game" by The Marvelettes]
♪ Hoping you might fall into it ♪
♪ Love hit me like a sudden slap ♪
♪ One kiss and then I knew it ♪
♪ What's this whole world comin' to ♪
♪ Things just ain't the same ♪
♪ Any time the hunter ♪
♪ Gets captured by the game ♪
I moved to the Bowery in '78.
This place that should have become a museum.
So many people lived there, and it was one of the big addresses
in lower New York at the time.
It was a shithole loft because there was no light.
It didn't have any walls for a while.
Kind of dysfunctional, but managed to function.
We used to fuck in the elevator. There was a lot of drugs.
Always a lot of drugs, a lot of coke, a lot of speed.
The Bowery was the Ballad.
The Bowery was the Goldin headquarters.
And that's where I was situated in the universe, was the Bowery.
When I got to New York, this guy gave me some names of galleries.
In those days, you went to galleries with your portfolio.
So I called some galleries, they weren't interested.
And then I went up to see Marvin.
I walked in and showed these photos that no one had ever seen before.
Totally bad prints and torn.
And immediately, we understood each other.
She showed up one day with a box of pictures,
showed up in this party dress, a polka dot party dress
with a lot of crinolines, and kind of weird makeup and...
walked up the very fancy stairs of this gallery and... had this box of pictures.
And I opened up this box of pictures and about 20 of them in it and...
I had never seen pictures like that in my life.
These portraits and pictures of people living their lives
that really were unlike anything anybody else was doing.
He asked me to bring more stuff, and I brought up a crate.
[laughing]
And I got the cab driver to bring me up by giving him a blow job.
So that's how I entered the art world.
[more laughter]
This was 1979.
[♪]
[MUSIC: "You Can't Be Funky" by Bush Tetras]
The first week we were there, the Mudd Club opened.
And I met Vivienne Dick.
Vivienne was curious about everything,
and a lot of stuff that happened, she took me to.
♪ Talk, talk, talk ♪
♪ Well, the walls are so thin ♪
I mean, there were different worlds in New York that I was moving between,
and they didn't necessarily like each other.
The world of Vivienne and this woman I lived with named Suzanne...
♪ Yours eyes are shallow and your glance is cold ♪
And Greer...
She was making her dolls all the time, working constantly.
♪ You can't be funky, you can't be funky ♪
♪ You can't be funky if you haven't got a soul ♪
And then there was the world of Bruce.
And David.
♪ Well, I lock you up tighter every place that you go ♪
And Cookie.
[MUSIC: "Fire" by Lizzy Mercier Descloux]
She was the center of New York downtown life.
♪ Fire ♪
♪ I bid you to burn ♪
[♪]
♪ Fire ♪
People used to say we were marginalized.
And we didn't care.
Normal people were marginalized to us.
♪ You fought hard and you saved ♪
♪ But it's all going to burn ♪
Cookie was in films, she was in plays.
And then she was writing art criticism.
Cookie used to say, "I don't know why people think I'm wild, I'm not wild,
"wildness just appears on the road in front of me."
You have to hear her voice. And that tells you everything.
This kind of irony and humor.
"'You should really wait for Charlie to come back from the store.
"'He's the one to talk to.
"'He's right in there buying oranges for us.'
"She pointed to the Haight Street Chinese fruit store,
"but I'd had enough and thanked them and left looking for more action.
"These girls were Susan Atkins and Squeaky Fromme and Mary Brunner and others.
"And I missed meeting Charlie Manson by 5 minutes."
Cookie was working as a go-go dancer.
I was dancing in New Jersey because
you didn't have to take your top off in New Jersey.
New York was topless. New Jersey wasn't.
[MUSIC: "Boogie Oogie Oogie" by A Taste of Honey]
So we'd take the bus out to Paterson,
and go to these low life bars, and wiggle our asses,
and then get on the bus and come back to New York.
♪ If you're thinking you're too cool ♪
I was dancing to have money to buy film.
♪ Boy, oh boy, have I got news for you ♪
Then I started in the whorehouse.
Yeah, that got pretty ugly.
I haven't kept many secrets in my life.
But I never did talk about it before.
But I think at this point in my life, I should talk about it
because of the incredible stigma around sex work.
Vivienne got really interested in the fact that I had worked in a house,
and decided she wanted to make a film about it.
It's a fiction film.
I'm playing the madam of the house where I worked... who was a monster.
Hi. How are you? Have you been with us before?
She would have us on our backs all day,
and then she'd come home from Bloomingdales, showing off her lingerie.
I mean sex work isn't negative in itself, but it's no party.
It's one of the hardest jobs you could have.
[street noise, honking]
And so that's how Tin Pan Alley came.
Somebody said, "You should go meet Maggie."
She was hiring women who had been sex workers,
and helped people get out of it.
She was an incredible force. She was a community organizer.
She was a great cook. She was a radical.
And she was a ballet dancer.
So she hired me pretty quickly. Like immediately.
The bar was a safe space for prostitutes and also a way
to work their way out of prostitution if they wished to do so.
And it was a center for those on the left,
the squatters movement, the anarchist movement,
the Black movement,
people who were interested in supporting political prisoners from the Latin left.
And so it was really a polyglot place.
It had hustlers, it had artists, Reuters journalists.
It had people from NBC who were on strike. And it had the IRS.
When the IRS would come in the afternoon to get drunk,
they were as hard to handle as the bikers.
But the bar was controlled by women.
It was very important to me that we not have bouncers,
and not depend on male strength for keeping the peace.
And so when people behind the bar, including Nan,
decided that it was time for someone to go, that person would go.
- It's on the house. - Oh, thanks, Nan.
Tin Pan was very integrated.
The New Wave was not a very integrated scene at all.
And also it cut across class lines, which New Wave also didn't do.
I spent a lot of time at Tin Pan but I can't say...
Talk about repetitive nights, you know?
When I first started, I loved it there. The first two years...
I listened to people. Really listened.
And they weren't used to that.
I was sort of the dominatrix of the bar and I got tips
because people wanted to impress me, win me back...
And I would work till four in the morning and then we'd go to The After Hours.
[saxophone music playing]
Tin Pan Alley became a major kind of staging point
as people were planning for the Times Square Show.
It was multi-floor. It was collaborative.
There was graffiti, sculpture, there were painters, lots of video work.
There was music...
[♪]
[singing]
The first floor is where most of the performances were.
So Nan invited everyone in the bar.
So, yes, I was anxious to see her work and...
I was sitting on the floor and this music starts and the slides start.
[MUSIC: "I Put A Spell on You" by Screamin' Jay Hawkins]
[♪]
♪ I put a spell on you ♪
♪ Because you're mine ♪
♪ Stop the things you do ♪
♪ Watch out! ♪
♪ I ain't lyin' ♪
♪ Yeah ♪
♪ I can't stand ♪
♪ Ooh! ♪
♪ No running around ♪
♪ I can't stand ♪
The work was incredibly political.
It was about power,
and particularly about the power that men have over women,
and how that power is translated up in society.
The very first time I saw Nan's slideshow, it was extremely raucous.
What I remember mostly is the noise,
not just of the music or of the equipment,
but of people talking to the screen... Commenting.
At the beginning, the audience would be made up
exclusively of the people in the show,
so they would scream at me if they didn't like something,
and scream if they loved something.
So I edited according to that to some extent.
Then I had those pictures of my friend having sex with her boyfriend
and she demanded I take them out at some point.
And so that's when I started photographing myself having sex.
I figured if I was showing her having sex, I had to show myself having sex.
[MUSIC: "Double Shot Of My Baby's Love" by Swingin' Medallions]
♪ Double shot of my baby's love ♪
I was doing it at underground clubs and
my boyfriend at the time was spinning records.
[♪]
So that's when the music started.
I would start with songs that I knew and then
people would send me music, literally.
But I changed them every single time.
It was fun, it was really fun. People would be dancing.
You know, it was fabulous.
[MUSIC: "8th Wonder" by The Sugarhill Gang]
♪ Scream it out and say yo, hit it! ♪
♪ Ya don't stop ♪
I was always late for everything. I didn't sleep.
I mean, I was up all night editing.
You never saw the same thing twice.
She changed the music, she changed the slides,
she changed the order of them.
Sometimes her own changed feelings changed the meanings of them
because her photographs don't hold just one meaning.
You know, a lot is going on in a Nan Goldin photograph.
And I guess that's what made people think it was so cinematic
because to most people, they seem like characters,
whereas to the people being photographed, they seem like themselves.
She photographs from our side.
The mid-80s was when I was closest to Cookie.
She wasn't doing very well so this friend of hers told her to spin a globe
and wherever she put her finger, to go there.
So she went to Italy and she met Vittorio.
It was the greatest love of her life.
It was a huge wedding. Everyone in lower New York was there.
Rene Ricard, Greer, David Armstrong,
Francesco Clemente, Teri Toye...
Peter Hujar was there.
And we were standing next to each other taking pictures.
It was a beautiful wedding,
and a wild party.
Yeah.
[MUSIC: "Ballad of Dependency" by Charlotte Rae]
♪ He charges forth while others are debatin' ♪
♪ Conniving, cocky knave with all the trimmin' ♪
♪ I know one thing can trim him down ♪
♪ Women ♪
♪ In women he meets deep authority ♪
♪ On them he feels his old dependency ♪
Once I started sharing the work, I got a lot of shit.
"There's no such thing as a good woman artist," was said to me in the mid-80s.
It was really heavy resistance...
especially from male artists and gallerists who said,
"This isn't photography. Nobody photographs their own life."
It was still a kind of outlier act.
It was basically a time of black and white, vertical photographs.
So it's hard to understand that that could have ever been radical.
I thought the art world was bullshit and that Times Square was real life.
That's where I met Brian.
Our first date, we went to see The Clash right around the corner from the bar.
And then we went up to Harlem and copped.
And then he just stayed. And he stayed from '81 to '84.
He was beautiful at the time, and I fell in love with him.
He was very tender.
You can see it in Brian's eyes.
We had very good sex, and that can keep people together for a long time.
And then we started fighting a lot.
And I was good at fighting.
He wanted to break up and I didn't want him to.
And then we went through that a lot, trying to break up.
And then when I went to Berlin, we'd broken up.
And then he came to Berlin and... And that story.
I did a slideshow at some loft, and we went to a bar,
and then he realized I'd been with this girl, and he became jealous.
And that's what set it off.
We were so intertwined, we didn't know how to break up.
So this was his way of breaking up.
He punched me in the face repeatedly, like boom, boom, boom.
And he went after my eyes.
I was bleeding and there was this girl, Sylvie, from Paris.
Sylvie came in and dragged me out. She saved my life.
He trashed the room and he wrote in lipstick all over the room:
"Bitch," "Cunt"...
He burned my diaries.
The greatest luck of my life is that I left the slideshow
at the loft where I'd shown it because...
- He would have destroyed it. - He would have destroyed it.
Yeah.
All the bones in the orbital floor of my eye were broken.
- And... - To go for your eyes.
Maggie said he wanted to blind me.
My pictures of myself battered were what kept me from going back.
Women who've been battered have come to me and told me
that they were able to talk about it because of those pictures.
The struggle between autonomy and dependency is
the core of "The Ballad of Sexual Dependency."
My father tried to get it stopped from being published.
The pictures were one thing, but they were so afraid of the text...
'cause he said that I was trying to prove that they killed my sister.
That's how he put it.
Brian was trying to get it stopped.
It makes it even more radical: all these men trying to stop it.
When I got back to New York, I went to Tin Pan.
I was terrified because there were all those men,
and I couldn't be in a crowd with men.
Maggie thought I was shooting dope and I wasn't, but I was snorting it.
And I remembered when I quit Tin Pan, I thought,
"Oh, now I'm going to get really strung out because there's nothing to stop me."
And I did.
It's a little scary around here.
A New York Post reporter called me cold without being introduced.
He called me on my cell phone. He said he got it on the internet.
We have to really have the facts
if we're going to go up against this family.
They could sue us, right?
After a few of our actions, Purdue Pharma started taking out full page ads
in The New York Times, saying, "Of course we care about the opioid crisis.
"We're in the market of opioids."
People are still accepting Sackler donations.
What's happening with the National Portrait Gallery?
I don't know what's going on with my work being in the show or not.
What do people think?
It would be a serious blow if Nan Goldin refuses to show her work there
- because of Sackler money. - So...
Nan was set to have a retrospective
at the National Portrait Gallery in the UK,
but they're in the middle of accepting a $1.3 million grant from the Sacklers.
So Nan told them that she would not do her retrospective with them
if they were to accept it.
Unbelievable!
Oh man, it's working, right? It's working.
I can't believe it!
When the National Portrait Gallery refused the donation from the Sacklers,
I thought this is a watershed moment.
This is an incredible rush to think that
people are actually beginning to rethink how we do things.
Let's go over what happened in one week.
I think it doesn't happen to activist groups very often.
On Tuesday, the National Portrait Gallery was the first to refuse money.
Yeah!
On Thursday, the Tate crumbled.
On Friday, surprisingly, the Guggenheim.
- Yeah... - And that was shocking.
[applause]
Okay, and then those dirty deep bottom feeders, the hedge fund,
refusing to take the Sackler money, which is unprecedented.
[celebrating shouts]
The domino effect was huge.
The fact that this is happening by all these major museums
and also Nan has her hand in every single one,
including the Tate, is major, and then the Met followed.
But it was not good enough for us.
We had a very clear demand: no longer accept Sackler money.
Then the next part obviously is take down the name.
Subsequently, we then saw this WhatsApp log
that came out from the Mortimer Sackler family members,
and you actually see them start to talk about Nan Goldin.
They talk about it solely as a matter of public relations management.
You don't have a single person who says, "Well, wait a second,
"maybe there's some substance to this critique.
"We should look hard at what we've done. Is there some way we can make amends?
"Are there questions we should be asking?"
Instead, it's just entirely, "How do we manage this PR problem?"
[sound of passing subway]
When did you know you were being followed?
I was leaving Nan's by myself on a Friday night.
And...
I noticed a car.
I noticed that the person sitting in it is obscuring his face.
And the second I'm directly across from him, he kind of looks at me.
The next week, as I'm crossing my direct street,
up to the stop sign, pulls this car.
And I looked at him.
And I just kept walking.
I walked for like 15 feet or so, and when I looked back,
he was just taking my photo from his car.
And like I'm just having a memory of that moment because it's like...
There is no...
I don't think I've experienced a greater fear than that moment
'cause I don't know who the fuck this guy is.
But I know it's the same guy from the week before.
So I think I even yelled at him, but I don't even know if he knew.
He peeled out, and I was terrified.
And then, imagine my shock
when the next week, exactly a week later,
this guy is outside of Nan's.
We just walked out of Nan's house.
The same car is in front of the house again.
And the guy is...
right there... watching me film him right now.
He's pulling out right now.
I went out with my wife and two children. I have two small boys.
We walked out one day to run an errand, and we're getting into the car,
and a neighbor came over and she said,
"Hey, I don't want to freak you out, but just up there,
"there's a guy who's parked across the street from my house
"in an SUV, and he's been there all day,
"and I think he's watching your house."
So the first thing I thought, of course,
was that I knew that Nan had had this experience
and Megan had had this experience.
And so it felt of a piece in terms of the M.O.
When I was fact-checking my book, I asked Purdue if they knew anything about
these people who've been following Nan, and Megan and me and...
Purdue came back and said,
"Absolutely not. Of course, we would never do such a thing.
"That's outrageous." Really strenuously denying it and...
in my queries to the Sacklers, I asked the same thing and...
There were some of the things I asked about that they came back and denied.
And this was not one of them.
[street noise]
Bob is one of our board members.
- Hi, how are you? - Now, admittedly...
It's a little crazy here.
So has anybody had a Narcan kit before or have been through a Narcan training?
Yeah, I got a kit a couple of weeks ago.
I have a kit in my house, but I haven't been trained.
So I'm just going to go over a couple of the essentials,
signs and symptoms of an opiate overdose, and how to use Narcan
to reverse an opiate overdose, okay?
So if you see somebody who you think could be experiencing an opiate overdose,
you say, "Are you okay?" They don't respond.
You do the sternal rub, they still don't respond.
You may shake them.
If they still don't respond, that's when you're gonna give Narcan.
So you're going to give Narcan and call 911.
You can do whichever you want to do first, but do both.
Open it up, hold it. Spray it up their nose, okay?
If it's not an overdose, it's not going to hurt them and it won't work.
But if it is an overdose, it's gonna save their life.
Okay?
Focusing on harm reduction is what's going to bring people out of this crisis.
Safe consumption sites, reducing stigma and helping drug users
is the long goal, so...
[sound of train passing above]
Okay, we're going to start the hearing. Good morning.
I'd like to welcome you to today's hearing
on the adequacy of funding for substance use disorder services.
Our next witness is Nan Goldin,
founder of Prescription Addiction Intervention Now.
I'm gonna speak, by and large, from the personal experience.
That maybe will help inform you of what it means,
some of these bills that you're trying to pass,
what it actually impacts on a human being.
I wouldn't have gotten off Oxy without buprenorphine.
On a small dose of buprenorphine, cravings for opioids are reduced.
At larger doses, you can't even feel the effects of opioids if you try.
I was one of the lucky ones who was able to access MAT immediately
and afford good treatment.
Doctors need to pay to train and receive a waiver
to prescribe buprenorphine,
when no such certificate is required to prescribe OxyContin.
Again, this is a policy that increases the stigma in the medical community
about treating people addicted to drugs.
People need to be kept alive.
Addiction is not a moral issue. It is not a criminal issue.
Harm reduction means not only
recovering the harm caused by the disease of addiction,
but also the harm caused by the social and moral assault
on people with substance use disorder.
Thank you very much.
It's important to hear from people who take Medication-Assisted Treatment.
- But I'm not ashamed of it. - No.
And it's not my road to recovery.
- It is my recovery. - That's important to share.
People think you have to be off everything in order to be in recovery,
and that's certainly not true.
- Yeah, the stigma is terrible. - Okay. Thank you so much.
Lock arms?
We joined with Housing Works and Vocal New York,
who really wanted to do an action...
- We are here... - We are here...
- to draw attention to... - to draw attention to...
- Overdose Awareness Day! - Overdose Awareness Day!
- No stigma! - No shame!
In order to do the harm reduction,
the safe consumption sites invite people in and say,
"Look... whatever you're dependent on is not what we question right now.
"We just want you to be able to do it in a safe way.
"Not put anybody at risk."
"Here's how to shoot up in a clean way."
"You don't know what you bought, we'll test it for you."
- Hey Cuomo, what do you say? - How many people died today?
[chanting continues]
No more deaths! No more deaths! No more deaths!
[shouts and cheering]
[sound of slide projector]
I went to rehab for the first time in 1988.
I had been kind of isolated from my friends.
I thought I was going back to my community...
And then I realized most of the people were dead or dying.
We'll never be silent again, Act Up!
[protesters continue shouting]
Act Up! Fight Back! Fight AIDS!
[screaming, cheering in street]
It was like World War II.
We watched everybody get wiped out, and there was nothing we could do.
I got a call from Artists Space, and they asked me to curate a show.
I wanted the subject of it to be AIDS.
And I was told there hadn't been any shows about AIDS.
I asked all my friends to contribute something
because I wanted it to be a community.
It was the first show I curated.
Mortality no longer feels like some abstraction
that I could push away to the age of 80 or 90 or...
There's no longer a luxury of pushing the idea of mortality away.
David Wojnarowicz was my spiritual guide. He was my political guide.
"If you want to stop AIDS, shoot the queers,"
says the governor of Texas on the radio.
And his press secretary later claims the governor was only joking,
and didn't know the microphone was turned on.
And besides, he didn't think it would hurt his chances for re-election anyways.
And I wake up every morning.
I wake up every morning in this killing machine called America,
and I'm carrying this rage like a blood-filled egg.
And there's a thin line, a thin line between the inside and outside,
a thin line between thought and action.
And that line is simply made up of blood and muscle and bone.
I've been looking all my life at the signs surrounding us,
in the media, or on people's lips,
the religious types outside St Patrick's Cathedral,
shouting to the men and women in the gay parade:
"You won't be here next year. You'll get AIDS and die! Ha ha!"
Nan Goldin curated this show with the idea of
choosing the work of people that she knew who were affected by AIDS,
who were living with AIDS.
She wanted to dispel the notion of AIDS victim.
Now, I'm hardly a victim if I can resist.
What I see is institutionalized ignorance about this epidemic.
She also wanted to deal with issues of sexuality
in the midst of this epidemic.
That there was sexuality, there was safe sexuality,
and that this was going to continue to occur,
despite the silencing of that information by a church or government.
There is really important work in the show.
Like David's. Like Peter Hujar's.
Philip-Lorca diCorcia.
Mark Morrisroe.
Greer Lankton.
Darrel Ellis.
People both really well-known and people unknown.
It was about the loss of a community.
And trying to keep people's legacy alive.
I called David and asked him to write for my catalogue.
I sent him pictures of some of the work that was in it,
and I said, "You can write whatever you want.
"I'll support whatever you write."
I was asked to write a catalogue essay
pertaining to a show dealing with AIDS and a community of people.
So I started talking about what I was experiencing right there in my life and
dealing with image and representation and everything seen through the framework
of having a taboo disease in this society.
I love that this tiny, little, skinny catalogue
with thumbnail reproductions in black and white
could cause a major political shake-up.
At the Artists Space Gallery in Tribeca,
preparations are still underway for next week's exhibit,
but the National Endowment of the Arts has canceled its grant.
The National Endowment for the Arts refuses to sponsor
an art show here in New York City
because it deals with AIDS and homosexuality
and also offends some political sensibilities.
One thing I want to point out is that it's artist-organized.
It's organized by a photographer named Nan Goldin...
Susan Wyatt, the director, got nervous about David's writing,
and so she took it to the NEA.
The catalogue reportedly criticizes Senator Jesse Helms
for his position on homosexuality and art,
and calls New York Cardinal O'Connor "a fat cannibal in a black skirt."
- You think the phone is gonna ring again? - Any minute.
About what? What do you think it's gonna be?
It's probably Cardinal O'Connor,
expressing his direct support of my statements.
And admitting that since he does feast on the body of Christ, that he is a cannibal,
and that, yes, he does have a penchant for black skirts.
He is fat, translucent and immoral.
After the news first broke, David called, really upset,
and told me that they were trying to make him take out
"fat fucking cannibal in black skirts."
I think it's very dangerous and very scary.
I see an outbreak of McCarthyism and a blacklisting of artists...
if this is continued to allow to happen.
What happened is that the artistic focus of the show really was lost.
And what turned out to be the show in its present form,
was not and is not sound artistically.
Composer Leonard Bernstein managed to become embroiled in the controversy.
This after declining the National Medal of Arts
because of the NEA action taking away the grant.
And the thing that makes me laugh is, if at this point in time,
images and words that can be made by an individual have such power
to create this storm of controversy... Isn't that great?
It means that the control of information has a crack in its wall.
[phone rings]
Hello. Yeah.
Hi...
Well, it's just been a zoo.
Senator Alfonse D'Amato tore up an art catalogue on the Senate floor...
How can they ignore the political aspect of AIDS?
Is the fact that I may be dying of AIDS in 1989, is that not political?
Is the fact that I don't have health insurance
and I don't have access to adequate health care?
Is that not political?
[♪]
Vittorio was given three months to live and he started drawing cartoons.
He was still alive a year and a half later.
That's the wake of Vittorio.
Cookie had already lost her voice.
She was constantly writing so people could see what she needed and wanted.
Then Sharon came back to take care of Cookie.
The picture of Sharon nursing Cookie...
To me, this is the meaning of love.
I was raging.
"Call this doctor. Call that doctor. Someone's gonna be able to help her.
"There's got to be something. There's a treatment out there somewhere."
And then to realize there was no doctor to call.
It was just... I didn't get it.
We had Cookie's memorial at St Mark's Church,
and the next day, "Witnesses" opened.
My name is David Wojnarowicz.
I'd like to read this in memory of Peter Hujar,
Keith Davis, Bebe Smith, Cookie Mueller, Vittorio.
One of the first steps in making the private grief public
is the ritual of memorials,
and I've attended a number of memorials in the last five years,
and at the last one I attended,
I suddenly found myself experiencing something akin to rage.
What made me angry,
what made me angry was realizing that the memorial had little reverberation
outside the room it was held in,
and at the same time, worry that friends
will solely become professional pallbearers,
waiting for each death of their lovers, friends and neighbors,
and polishing their funereal speeches,
perfecting their rituals of death rather than a relatively simple ritual of life,
such as screaming in the streets.
Not the church! Not the state! We decide what art is great!
[protesters chanting]
Step on the sidewalk, can't stay in the street.
And I imagine what it would be like if friends had a demonstration
each time a lover or a friend or a stranger died of AIDS.
And I imagine what it would be like,
each time a lover or friend or stranger died of AIDS,
or of this disease,
their friends, lovers or neighbors would take their dead body
and drive with it in a car 100 mph to Washington, D.C.,
and blast through the gates of the White House
and come to a screeching halt before the entrance,
and then dump their lifeless forms on the front steps.
But bottom line, even a tiny charcoal scratch
done as a gesture to mark a person's response to this epidemic,
means whole worlds to me, if it's hung in public.
And bottom line, we have to find our own forms of gesture and communication.
You can never depend on the mass media to reflect us
or our needs or our states of mind.
[chanting]
NEA, stop your tricks! Art is sex and politics!
Mark Morrisroe died soon after it opened.
[♪]
David Wojnarowicz died in 1992.
People don't really understand the anger, and frustration,
and pain of those years.
They don't understand what we went through.
It's still killing people.
It never went away.
David Armstrong died in 2014.
You know, we spent a lot of our life together.
Decades of friendship.
[protestors chant in French]
[chanting in French continues]
Many people have started to refuse donations from the Sacklers,
including the Guggenheim Museum, the Met Museum, the Tate,
and the National Portrait Gallery, as well as medical institutions worldwide.
We need to demand that the Louvre stand by and hear us,
and be the first to take down their name.
[drumming solemnly]
- Can I ask you a question? - What?
- When you overdosed, were you alone? - Yeah.
Totally.
I thought it was dope, so I snorted it and it was fentanyl.
And a lot of people want fentanyl, but I was not prepared for fentanyl.
And I just went out like that. I just went out.
And then I came back. And then I went out again.
Nobody brought me back. I just came back.
I'm so lucky that I came back by myself.
I mean, all the judgment of people who are addicted to drugs
are stigmatized without understanding
what the experience of not having these drugs is.
To have to go through withdrawal.
Your brain is stripped of its opioid receptors,
so you have no protection from any kind of pain.
It's not just the physical part.
It's like... the darkest...
you can go. It's a darkness of the soul.
It's unbearable.
[♪]
[phone ringing]
Okay. I am here.
You can come by whenever you want.
- Hello - Hi.
- What did you say? - I'm here at the restaurant.
You can come here whenever you want.
- Great. How many did you get? - All that you wanted.
[phone hangs up]
[♪]
[phone ringing]
- Yeah. - Hi.
- Who is it? - You still in the bed?
Oh, no, I never went to sleep.
You know what really hit me as peculiar?
And I've been thinking about it all morning.
Misery does not love company. Misery loves attention... in this case.
[♪]
[sound of windshield wipers]
The supply has become very dirty. Basically lethal.
Fentanyl is in everything now.
Isn't this fentanyl here?
So fentanyl has like one big peak, coke has two peaks right here.
And they're at slightly different numbers.
- Okay. - Here you can see this deviates.
You want to show them the bloody ones you did?
No, but it's good 'cause then it will be obvious it's not real.
- What is our messaging? - Our messaging is...
"Purdue is bankrupt, but the Sacklers aren't.
"Their personal wealth has all been made from OxyContin
"and it needs to be taken from them."
I think the messaging is the Sacklers are getting away with murder.
We want their money and where we want to spend it.
The company ends up declaring bankruptcy.
That's this kind of amazing escape hatch because
what happens is that Purdue, the company, says,
"Listen, we realize there's all these lawsuits,
"but we don't have the resources to fight or settle them all,
"and so instead we're gonna declare bankruptcy
"because our coffers are almost empty."
But the reason that the coffers are almost empty, we now know,
is that behind the scenes for a decade leading up to this bankruptcy plea,
the Sacklers have been quietly siphoning money out of the company.
So they took more than $10 billion out of the company before it declares bankruptcy.
- Whose money? - Our money!
- Whose blood? - Our blood!
[protesters chanting]
- You think they could get away with this? - Of course. Yes.
I never expected that they'd be held accountable.
I don't think that much money can be taken away from a billionaire family.
[cracking egg]
The fact that a bankruptcy court is deciding a public crisis issue is crazy.
That's the problem.
So I've been involved since the beginning basically.
At some point, a lightbulb went on and I was like:
"Let's bring the activism into the courtroom,"
and ever since then, we've been fighting in the court.
And we weren't exactly welcome the first time.
You know, we're like little assassins, we go in and get out.
I told the lawyer for Purdue that I'm doing it pro-bono.
He was like, "What?"
He was like, "What? Wait, what?"
You know, because they spend $30 million a month
on legal fees and professional fees in this case.
There's like 80-something attorneys and people on this call.
That's a lot.
Good morning, this is Judge Drain. This is a completely telephonic hearing.
We're here today in re: Purdue Pharma L.P.
Your Honor, we think there's a huge mistake here.
We think the process that the DOJ went through was wrong.
We think that the results, which are completely vague and baffling
to me and my clients, is wrong.
The DOJ neither invited input from Purdue's victims,
nor the public, nor apparently any members of the House and Senate.
The negotiation between these two parties, the DOJ and Purdue/The Sacklers alone,
is not sufficient to make this kind of policy decision.
My clients are like the Ghost of Christmas Past,
they're here to tell you in 2007,
they saw there was a problem, the problem got worse,
and this is our moment, their moment, to tell you
we gotta make sure that the future is safer.
Okay, well... All right, thank you.
Good morning, Your Honor, and good morning to everyone who is on the line.
Your Honor, Mr. Quinn many times used the phrase
"Purdue/The Sacklers,"
the kind of suggestion that Purdue and the Sacklers are in this together
is really not helpful.
And it's just, it's not fair.
This is so depressing.
Thank you so much, Mike, thank you so much for going out there and battling.
I feel proud to be doing it, and, whatever, we're in it.
The fact that our group is in the bankruptcy,
at the front of the bankruptcy, fighting every single thing, tooth and nail,
- is pretty amazing. - Yeah, it's pretty funny.
It's fucking crazy.
Is there any chance of criminal charges?
No.
The way the plan's structured, if the DOJ filed
criminal charges against the Sacklers now,
it would blow up the whole bankruptcy.
So effectively, they just dodged criminal liability.
We followed these people into bankruptcy court
and we're watching them completely manipulate the justice system.
There's no justice for us, only for billionaires.
So all we can hope is that the money in the settlement
that goes to the states, goes to the right places,
that it goes to harm reduction, and not policing.
[cheering, applause]
That it goes to groups like you that are saving lives.
This is a proceeding in federal court.
It is being held remotely,
but the rules and decorum of a federal court apply.
Yeah.
So let me confirm, I see David Sackler on the screen,
and I see Theresa Sackler.
Richard Sackler is on the phone
and will stay on the phone throughout this proceeding.
Dr. Sackler, can you confirm that for me?
Yes, Your Honor, I am here on the phone and I'm listening.
Before we start, there's one clarification I wanted to make:
I believe Richard said that he is listening.
I believe that he's also supposed to say that he is watching,
he's supposed to be watching the video but not seen.
Can he confirm that?
I can confirm that, I saw... I've seen everything.
Okay, that's important, and thank you for raising that, Mr. Price.
All right, the first person who will speak today is Tiffinee Scott.
[deep breath]
Richard. David. Theresa.
We have never met,
but I feel like I already have a relationship with you due to OxyContin.
Have you ever provided Narcan to one of your children?
Have you revived one of your children from an overdose?
I have.
There are no words to describe my pain.
In May of 2020, she was found unresponsive, lifeless...
lifeless in bed by me, her mother.
The deceit and horror you all caused, shame on you.
I remember the day Trent told me he was addicted to OxyContin.
He called me from the campus of the University of Alabama.
I could tell in his voice, there was great fear.
I drove the three hours, he met me in tears, we wept together.
"Dad, I can't stop taking Oxy. Dad, I'm afraid I'm going to die."
- And he did. - This is so hard.
I encountered opioids for the first time shortly after you launched OxyContin.
And I am one of the living survivors of your monumental greed.
I hope that every face,
every single victim's face haunts your every waking moment...
- It won't. - ...and your sleeping ones, too.
Thank you.
The next person to speak is Nan Goldin.
It's nice to finally see the Sacklers, face-to-face.
The Sacklers' so-called apology, which was mandated by this settlement,
is insulting to all of us who have been damaged by them.
One family is largely responsible for the onset of this crisis
that has led to the deaths of over half a million Americans,
and caused irreparable damage for generations to come.
Yet their settlement grants them immunity, not just for themselves,
but for generations of Sacklers to come.
Purdue has been found guilty of federal crimes,
but its private owners have never been prosecuted.
We hope the Justice Department will pursue criminal charges.
Thank you.
Okay, thank you.
[woman screaming, panicked]
They're already on the way, they've already been dispatched.
Has he taken anything?
I just don't know. He has in the past.
[woman screaming]
Oh, my God.
- You said he's 20 years old? - Yes.
- What's his name? - Pardon me?
- What's his name? - Bryan...
- We're on the way, okay? - Thank you, sir.
4,804 days.
Richard, if you're still listening,
that's how many days since I made that horrifying call.
I have lived with the pain and heartache
as a result of the loss of my only child, a pain you will never understand.
I can only echo the pain and suffering
that Kristy feels and that all of us that are here today feel.
I want to point out to the Sacklers that by the time this two-hour hearing is over,
you can add 16 more people to your death list.
I asked my father for records from the hospitals she'd been in.
And he gave them to me without reading them himself.
So this box came...
"The Box," I think of it as, with the primary documents.
[♪]
There was the history of Barbara for me to read and I was terrified.
I wanted to know, but I didn't want to know.
[♪]
I didn't understand that the first place she was sent was actually an orphanage.
And then she burned down the curtains and ran away.
She's described as a "rebellious adolescent."
It says in the interviews that the psychiatrist thought that
Mrs. Goldin should be in the hospital, not Miss Goldin.
And that's actually written in the hospital record.
[♪]
My mother had been sexually abused for years by a family member.
And when my sister hit puberty, my mother couldn't cope with it.
My sister didn't have any outlet. She didn't have any context.
It was not mental illness.
I just knew how hard it was for her to be alive.
She wanted a home so badly.
If she had found people, if she'd been loved,
she would have survived.
[♪]
[sound of locomotive approaching]
[locomotive speeding by]
Persons in the area told police they had seen Miss Goldin
a short time before
when she asked when the next train was due to pass.
Shortly before 5:30 p.m., persons said, Miss Goldin put her pocketbook
on the ground next to the tracks, then lay down across the tracks
as the Capitol Limited approached.
The train's engineer told police they saw her and nailed the brakes,
but were unable to stop the train.
Pathological examiner ruled her death as a suicide.
Other significant conditions contributing to death: severe mental depression.
I mean, that's the problem, you grow up being told,
"That didn't happen. You didn't see that.
"You didn't hear that." And what do you do?
How do you believe yourself? How do you trust yourself?
How do you continue to trust yourself?
And then how do you show the world
that you did experience that, that you did hear that?
So that's the reason I take pictures.
- Nan, what are you...? - Beautiful, you look beautiful.
- Nan, does that have sound? - Yeah.
Oh, my dear!
Let's go, honey.
My mom's a dance fanatic.
[♪]
And she's gonna teach her old husband how to move it.
I like to do this...
- Go, Mom! - Go for it.
[♪]
My father and mother were not equipped to be parents.
They had children because it was expected,
more than it was about nurturing other human beings.
That looks good!
- Yeah, but hold it up more. - Is that high enough?
- Yeah, that's beautiful. - You can see it?
Barbara loved Nan very much. They were very, very close.
When she died, she had in her pocketbook a very beautiful, small book of Psalms.
And she had this wonderful quotation from...
- Conrad... - The Heart of Darkness.
Joseph Conrad. She was also, like Nan, a very wide reader.
And I have the quotation upstairs, but it had in it something about...
- Can you stop? - Yeah...
- You should get the quotation. - Stop.
- Something about regrets. - Yeah. Infinite regrets.
Is it on now?
Quotation from Heart of Darkness...
And it was just written on a piece of paper?
"It's a droll thing life is, that mysterious arrangement
"of merciless logic for a futile purpose.
"The most you can hope for is some knowledge of yourself...
"that comes too late...
"A crop of unextinguishable regrets."
I think this story is an important story, not just for me, but for society...
About conformity and denial.
And also about stigma.
The wrong things are kept secret and that destroys people.
My sister was a victim of all that, but she knew how to fight back.
Her rebellion was the starting point for my own.
She showed me the way.
- Let's turn off for a minute. - Yeah.
[mic turns off]
[♪]
Oh, wow.
[laughing]
Wow.
We did it, baby.
Four years of work. Congress didn't do anything.
Justice Department hasn't done anything.
Bankruptcy court, you know, completely left them better than ever.
You know, they're completely vindicated by bankruptcy court.
And so this is the only place they're being held accountable, the only place.
And we did it.
Wow...
Oh, my goodness. What a feeling.
- Incredible. - It's amazing.
- The Sacklers are now "private sources." - Here, stay there.
It doesn't say what private sources.
Beautiful!
- Oh, man! - It's so good!
It's hard to believe.
[♪]
[MUSIC: "Unsuffer Me" by Lucinda Williams]
[♪]
♪ Unlock my love ♪
♪ And set me free ♪
♪ Come fill me up ♪
♪ With ecstasy ♪
♪ Surround my heartbeat with your fingertips ♪
♪ Unbound my feet, untie my wrists ♪
♪ Come in to my world of loneliness ♪
♪ And wickedness ♪
♪ And bitterness ♪
♪ Unlock my love ♪
♪ Unsuffer me ♪
♪ Take away the pain ♪
♪ Unbruise, unbloody ♪
♪ Wash away the stain ♪
♪ Anoint my head ♪
♪ With your sweet kiss ♪
♪ My joy is dead ♪
♪ I long for bliss ♪
♪ I long for knowledge ♪
♪ Whisper in my ear ♪
♪ Undo my logic, undo my fear ♪
♪ Unsuffer me ♪