“Personally, I think Douglas Durst’s brother got screwed by Douglas—no wonder he’s angry,” Trump tweeted at 2:20 p.m. on Dec. 20, 2013. This, of course, came after the brother in question, Robert Durst, was acquitted of a 2001 murder in Texas in which he admitted cutting off his neighbor Morris Black’s head. Durst is awaiting trial for the 2000 slaying of friend Susan Berman in California.
The Daily Beast, January 27, 2016
We are all detectives.
We are obsessed with crime. In our minds we are not just detectives, we are the best detective who ever lived. Sit down Hercule Poirot, Clarice Starling has nothing on me, or as Secret Service is fond of saying,
“Okay, Nancy Drew.”
And as the best detective of all time, I like to think I know when someone is lying.
I don’t.
This occurs to me when I recently watched The Jinx on Max. It’s a 2015 true-crime documentary series about the late convicted murderer Robert Durst. When I realized Durst was always lying, someone else came to mind: Donald Trump.
It’s not the only thing the two had in common. They were three years apart in age and had problematic relationships with their fathers. They were both New Yorkers from families in the real estate business, although the Durst organization has a good reputation.
The Trumps not so much.
One thing Americans outside of New York City have consistently missed is how little respect the Trump organization has with players in the area. They’ve always had a veneer of sleaze. Much has been written about how Donald Trump was rejected by New York society.
He never understood the rules of money. No matter how ruthless you are in business, you at least have to pretend like you have an interest in humanity. It’s not in good taste to be flashy with the toys and neglect to be a benefactor of charities. In New York, we laugh at the golden escalator on which he rode to announce his candidacy. He was a joke.
This particular joke is on us, even though it’s unfunny as you get.
Trump and Durst were dangerous men, and deeply flawed humans. The human part of them interests me.
Unlike Trump, I sense Robert Durst knew who he was. He never wanted children because he feared he had a jinx. The jinx was nothing more than his nature.
I suspect both the late Durst and Trump suffered from acute loneliness. They wanted the benefits of playing nice with others, without playing nice.
Durst solved it by talking to director Andrew Jarecki on camera. Trump solved it by running for President.
It’s one way to make friends.
But it was the similarity in their style of lying which caught my attention. They just keep at it. And at it. And at it.
Why do we let them off the hook?
Part of the answer is we’re collectively idiots. We aren’t smart because we insist on believing the best in people, even as they give us their worst.
I’m pretty good at tells. After dealing with two lying boyfriends, I finally began to get the hang of it. And I was a semi-serious poker player for many years. I’m better than most at catching people out.
Except I’m not.
It’s one thing to sit at a poker table and smell bullshit. It’s a different matter to deal with a pathological liar. I am a registered cynic, and it never occurs to me someone might be lying 100% of the time.
And tells only appear when someone doesn’t believe their own story. If a sense of entitlement is strong enough, it doesn’t present as lying. We think we deserve our alternate reality, therefore the rest of you must accept it.
Durst was so full of tells he’d go broke in a half hour at a poker table. There were times when Jarecki asked him a question and his body completely betrayed him; more than once, he sat there and actually scratched his head.
The tells didn’t matter. He just kept lying. It’s similar to long-distance running. He and Trump are endurance liars.
We want people to feel badly when they lie. People feel badly when they get caught. And Robert Durst, even when he was caught, did not panic.
He could afford the best lawyers. He could just keep lying.
Director Jarecki’s brilliance is his open-mindedness. He approached Durst without prejudice, and remained curious, without judgment. He wanted to hear Durst’s story. There was more than one payoff in this approach. The story did the work.
I’m working with an exceptionally gifted editor right now. She’s helping me get the first draft of my book in shape. And several times, we’ve talked about storytelling versus political lecturing.
This will come as no surprise to anyone who reads my work: I’m partial to the lengthy diatribe. I became an essayist in large part because of Donald Trump’s presidency. I was so outraged by our choice I couldn’t stop writing.
Absolutely no one wants to be lectured. And preaching to the choir doesn’t change the result of the election. What changes people’s minds is storytelling.
I know this because I survived life by reading. I love nothing more than a good story. Where I get into trouble with my writing is trusting the story is enough. I don’t need to tell it, then tell you how you how to vote.
I need to let the story do the work. And The Jinx does exactly that.
It worked so well its subject was arrested for murder. He’d been evading justice successfully for decades, and because of new information in the series, he was convicted of killing Susan Berman.
Durst is dead now, and the documentary is nine years old. I’m almost a decade late in watching the series, but it’s normal for me. I’m usually late to a pop culture party.
But I still want everyone in America to watch it.
I wouldn’t care about Durst if it weren’t for Trump. I like true crime, but I’ve had enough of watching old white guys pull one off. They do so much crime in real life, I’ve had my fill. And Durst is one of the least appealing characters I’ve ever seen.
But it’s an absolute triumph to catch a criminal in the act, which is what Jarecki accomplished.
We watch true crime for a lot of complicated reasons, but chief amongst them is the desire to solve the mystery. Jarecki isn’t just the director; he’s the successful amateur detective, taking us right along with him.
His approach is a model we could all borrow. People rarely respond well when faced with suspicion and condemnation. I can’t help but think of the suggestion,
“Help me understand.”
The film is a long-form version of this plea.
Help me understand why you’re innocent when you’ve been accused of killing your first wife, your best friend, and your neighbor.
He gave Durst the rope with which to hang himself.
But it put Jarecki in grave danger because he finds himself liking the guy. He spends time with Durst, and by the end, he’s stuck with his feelings about him.
So are we. And that’s genius, too. It explains everything about Trump’s cult following.
No one wants to admit someone is likeable if they’ve committed a terrible crime. We want killers to be monsters, not humans, because we don’t want to admit they’re like us. Trump throws out a few good one-liners, and his audience makes him a good guy.
Humans—particularly men— are dangerous animals. Only mosquitos beat us at killing. We do everything we can to deny it. We like to pretend we’re better than we are.
Humans are also predictable. Men like Durst and Trump rely on our predictability. They’re amoral, so it’s easy. It’s not just America First, it’s Trump First.
It’s Durst First.
This is difficult for people to resolve. If we like a guy, we want them to be a good person. We convince ourselves of our goodness and theirs because it’s a story we make up. Trump and Durst know we prefer fairy tales rather than face our own darkness. They rely on our idiocy and predictability.
I make a point of never, ever saying I’m a good person. I’m not at all sure I am, and I don’t think it’s for me to decide. I’m human. That’s it.
There’s a great moment near the beginning of the film, when Jarecki asks Durst why his own brother Douglas would take a restraining order out on him.
“Because he’s a pussy,” Durst replies.
It’s pure Trump. The two of them may as well be twins separated at birth.
For Durst, if someone got in his way, he killed them. He knew he could keep lying, keep denying, lawyer up with the best.
Then, like magic, an ambitious woman appears. It’s smooth sailing. Durst answers a question for us: who would you rather blame? A serial killer or a woman simply doing her job?
It’s the serial killer, hands down. Because we’re not just idiots. We are women-hating idiots.
This is not supposition. Durst killed Morris Black in Galveston, bagged the body parts, and threw them in the bay, not understanding they’d float back up.
City boy, I sniff.
When he realized he hadn’t disposed of the body properly, he went back in the wee hours and finds the head in the water, then makes off with it to delay the body’s identification.
But in Texas, if you fear for your life you can use deadly force. Texans don’t have to call 911 first like most Americans. And if you kill someone in self-defense, it is the burden of the prosecution to prove it wasn’t self-defense.
There were no witnesses. And except for minor details like dismembering the corpse, there was no evidence it wasn’t self-defense.
Besides. There was a woman across the country at fault.
The crime in Texas was not the first murder of which Durst was suspected. His first wife disappeared in 1982. The DA in Westchester County, New York, Jeanine Pirro, kept the case open and went after him, because it was her job.
Durst’s lawyers found the magic words guaranteeing his freedom:
“If Ms. Pirro had kept her mouth shut, none of this would have happened.”
It was all #PoorRobertDurst after that. He was found not guilty. One juror said he was just the unluckiest man alive. Another opined she felt sorry for him, suffering at the hands of that woman.
You don’t have to be Sherlock Holmes to realize Jeanine Pirro was to Durst as Hillary Clinton was to Trump. There is nothing this country hates more than a successful woman.
And we the people of the United States prefer to let a serial liar, cheat, fraud, and sexual offender be president instead of allowing a woman the presidency.
You cannot, as they say, make this shit up. But you can repeat it, as Trump is now the GOP nominee for president.
Trump declared his candidacy the year the film was released. Jarecki couldn’t have known the mirror he held up to our society would include the next president. He simply trusted the story, and the mirror is Windex clean.
In 2015, on the last day the miniseries The Jinx aired, Robert Durst was arrested for murder based on evidence uncovered in the documentary, then convicted of the crime. He died in prison.
I’d love to think Donald Trump will be convicted of his many crimes before the election. However, I am not a fantasist. All those digs at Biden’s age imply a possible Kamala Harris presidency.
Maybe we could convince Jarecki to do a documentary on Trump. His presidency was the crime of the century. Storytelling might be our best shot at holding him accountable.
I do wish I had an answer to misogyny. I can only watch in awe, wondering if we’ll ever appreciate a hard-working woman as much as a cold-blooded killer.
Loved this! I was fascinated with Durst, and watched the documentary years ago. I was amazed and disgusted with his ability to lie so easily. I never saw the similarities of him and teflon Don until after reading your piece. So true. He learned from the best, though. His buddy and mentor Roy Cohn taught him how to cheat the system! Why people can't see him for who he truly is , completely baffles me!