103: Carol Burnett v. The National Enquirer & the Seemingly Perfect Couple

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Brandi starts us off with a story from her Johnson County, Kansas, bubble. Ed and Tyler Patton seemed like the perfect couple. In many ways, they were opposites. He was a partier, while she was more straightlaced. Their friends figured that Ed and Tyler’s differences were what made them a good match. But less than a year after they got married, Ed was murdered. Despite her many protests, Tyler seemed like the obvious culprit.

Then Kristin tells us about legendary comedian and actress Carol Burnett. Carol is well known for being a hollywood trailblazer, but she’s also a trailblazer when it comes to fighting back against tabloids. It all started with a fun night out in January of 1976. Carol was out with some colleagues. She shared her dessert with a few nearby tables. On her way out, she said hello to Henry Kissinger. A few months later, when the National Enquirer wrote about Carol’s night out, they told an entirely different tale.

And now for a note about our process. For each episode, Kristin reads a bunch of articles, then spits them back out in her very limited vocabulary. Brandi copies and pastes from the best sources on the web. And sometimes Wikipedia. (No shade, Wikipedia. We love you.) We owe a huge debt of gratitude to the real experts who covered these cases.

In this episode, Kristin pulled from:
“Burnett v. National Enquirer, Inc.” wikipedia
“Carol Burnett sued The National Enquirer and won!” clip from John Fugelsang’s ‘Tell Me Everything’ show on SiriusXM
“Burnett Wins Enquirer Suit,” by Jay Mathews for The Washington Post
“Tabloid Law,” by Alex Beam for The Atlantic
“Carol Burnett given $1.6 million in suit against National Enquirer,” by Robert Lindsey for The New York Times
“Carol Burnett launches trial balloon,” by Vernon Scott for UPI

In this episode, Brandi pulled from:
“Kansas Woman Brutally Beats Husband To Death With Wooden Plank” by Benjamin H. Smith, oxygen.com
“Greed led wife to kill husband, jurors told” by The Associated Press, Lawrence Journal-World
“State v. Patton” findlaw.com
“Widow found guilty of murdering husband” The Associated Press, Lawrence Journal-World