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By John Swartz
The tech mogul’s ex-girlfriend is shown suggesting he is still alive, but tells MarketWatch her words were twisted out of context, just one of many complaints from family members and others who were close to the pioneer of cybersecurity about the popular new movie and how it was made
In the chilling climax of “Running With the Devil: The Wild World of John McAfee,” a documentary that has become one of the most popular movies on Netflix since its premiere last week, a former girlfriend of the tech mogul is quoted as saying that received a call from him after his death.
The quote torments and teases with alleged evidence that McAfee – a shadowy figure whose wild life has attracted a worldwide cult following – did not die by suicide in a Spanish prison more than a year ago, a conspiracy theory that followers began to advance almost as soon as it was announced the news of his death.
The woman who said it now insists her comments were twisted out of context.
“What I said is that I got a call from Texas from someone who said he was John, who said he was still alive in Spain. I told the filmmakers that I didn’t know if it was him or someone impersonating him. I said that on film, but it wasn’t used,” Samantha Herrera told MarketWatch last week.
In his only interview since the premiere of the documentary, Herrera shared with MarketWatch, in a lengthy phone conversation, his frustration and anger. Speaking about this phone call, which was claimed to be from McAfee, she said she questioned the mysterious voice on the phone to see if it could be McAfee’s, but doubts grew as the voice struggled to answer to most of her questions.
“I’m so upset. They are making a lot of money on my behalf and I asked them to smear my face. It’s really shady and low,” said Herrera, a mother of two young children who said she recently lost her job because of the notoriety stemming from the documentary. “They denied my name. People harass me on social media.’
Like its subject, Running With The Devil is a phantasmagorical tale of death, sex, drugs, firearms and cryptocurrency, but also a sinister descent into deception, media manipulation, falsehoods and self-aggrandizement. And as with anything related to the late cybersecurity pioneer, it quickly became an extravagant rumor that sparked debate, controversy and the threat of legal action.
In-depth reporting: John McAfee’s body stuck in Spanish prison morgue as battle rages over his inheritance
“This Frankenstein’s monster of a movie is a cautionary tale of fabricated reality and side-truths,” said former deputy editor-in-chief Rocco Castoro, who starred in the film and said he is now considering a lawsuit. “This is the only truth about John McAfee. He was a rogue actor before fake news, the protoplasm of Trump and his team.”
Castoro traveled to Belize in late 2012 to meet and film McAfee after he was named a person of interest in the murder of American businessman Gregory Fall, and this footage forms the backbone of the film. Castoro says he owns the primary footage used in the film and claims the director and producers of “Running with the Devil” were not authorized to use the footage, but looted the footage for their own documentary – titled “Running with John McAfee” – – and denied him production credit and payment.
“Curious Films’ repeated requests that I sign a release and my repeated refusals are worth further investigation into why they felt they needed a release in the first place,” Castoro told MarketWatch.
Krista Warby, Castoro’s manager and documentary filmmaker, said Curious Films — the makers of “Running With the Devil” — used her client’s footage without proper credit and lifted his pitch deck. “My question is how [did] Netflix to go legal to approve the release of the document? This is our dock. They literally ripped it out,” she said.
Castoro said Curious Films also did not mention that the documentary would be distributed by Netflix, a claim echoed by Herrera and John McAfee’s daughter, Jen, who expressed disbelief that the documentary lends credence to the debunked theory that John McAfee was involved in the death of his own father.
“They haven’t made a documentary,” Jen McAfee told MarketWatch. “It’s a lot more like a James Bond movie.”
More from John Swartz: The bright (and very dark) John McAfee I got to know
Netflix Inc. ( NFLX ) did not respond to emails seeking comment on McAfee’s documentary, which is getting mixed reviews but ranked No. 7 among Netflix’s top 10 movies this past week despite debuting in mid- the week; the streaming service named it the second most popular movie of the weekend. Netflix’s documentary division has distributed three of the last five Oscar-winning documentaries, while also adding a huge amount of true crime features on figures such as Marilyn Monroe, serial killers John Wayne Gacy and Ted Bundy, Jeffrey Epstein and infamous kidnapper D.B. Cooper.
Representatives of Curious Films, including founder Dov Friedman, McAfee documentary filmmaker Charlie Russell and producer Fay Planer, as well as the production company’s U.S. attorney, Kathleen Conkey, did not return emails and calls for comment for several days. In an interview with Esquire published this month, Russell explained Herrera’s latest quote: “I don’t know what I think, and I don’t think she does. She says it, then looks at the camera, and I can’t tell if she thinks it’s real or not.”
The production company has also dodged repeated calls from critics who were involved, including Castoro, Herrera and Jen McAfee.
“I don’t want to get sued for this,” Castoro told MarketWatch. “His family deserves their story to be told.
Controversy follows McAfee even in death
The controversy surrounding the mysterious McAfee is no surprise. Unsubstantiated conspiracy theories and myths about McAfee’s life were often propagated and spread by the man himself, a great storyteller who had a slippery grasp of the truth. McAfee’s sharpening tales were a gang of henchmen, an arsenal of weapons, and a seemingly endless supply of drugs and alcohol.
“Drugs heightened his psychosis, his paranoia,” cameraman Robert King, who worked alongside Castoro on the trip to Belize and filmed footage used in the documentary, told MarketWatch. “John had quite a few.”
After traveling with McAfee in the U.S. and abroad, “Syria felt like a vacation,” said King, who risked his life shooting video in wars before filming McAfee’s flight from Belize to Guatemala and the U.S. in late 2012. King also the recording later traveled across the US, the Bahamas and the Dominican Republic, and said he allowed the documentary to use that footage.
“He was a narcissist who was emotionally disturbed and he hid it well,” said Alex Cody Foster, author of the forthcoming book The Man Who Hacked the World: A Ghostwriter’s Descent into Madness with John McAfee.
“I saw violent outbursts of his anger. He once gave $400,000 in cryptocurrency to a guy to buy cars, but the guy squandered it and John ended up threatening to kill him and his family,” said Foster, who traveled for five weeks with McAfee in 2018 and is featured in ” Running With the Devil’.
It was Foster who brought up speculation about McAfee’s role in the death of his abusive father. Some have suggested that John McAfee killed his father, Don McAfee, and staged a suicide, a claim vehemently denied by McAfee associates who say John McAfee was at school when his father died.
In 2016’s Gringo: The Dangerous Life of John McAfee, Oscar-nominated director Nanette Burstyn (“American Teen,” “The Kid Stays in the Picture”) accused the computer security pioneer of two counts of murder and rape. She said he led a small army of gun-wielding bandits in Belize and named one of them as the shooter in Fall’s murder.
John McAfee vehemently denied the allegations in an interview with this reporter in 2016, but McAfee’s family members are convinced he was present at Fall’s murder in Belize. And nearly everyone interviewed on camera in “Running with the Devil” told MarketWatch they believed he was capable of violence, citing personal interactions with McAfee.
But many of these narratives are missing from the finished documentary. The main point of criticism is that the filmmakers filmed hours of interviews that were boiled down to one sensational quote – as seems to be the case with Herrera. McAfee’s first wife, Jen McAfee’s mother, was interviewed for hours, but she does not appear in the film at all, according to the family.
Foster said he and other on-camera subjects signed waivers with the knowledge that the final say on the footage belonged to the director and that it was unclear what form the project would take. Foster and Castoro said they believe Netflix decided to make a documentary rather than a multi-episode miniseries, which they say led to potentially rushed editing of the film at the last minute.
For more: John McAfee dies by suicide, Spanish court rules after long delay
The film abruptly ends with the assumption that McAfee is alive, glossing over much of the last few years of his life: his failed attempts in 2016 and 2020 to become the Libertarian Party’s presidential candidate, his emergence into the cryptocurrency world, his October 2020 arrest in Spain for US tax evasion and his suicide in a prison outside Barcelona on June 23, 2021. McAfee’s body remains in Spain amid legal disputes, more than a year after his death.
“I wanted the film to come out. I didn’t feel like I was let down,” operator King told MarketWatch. “I’m happy that the viral gaze is on the Spanish justice system. The film puts pressure on the Spanish authorities to close this case so it doesn’t interfere with their system. People deserve the right to be buried after they die.”
– John Swartz
(END) Dow Jones Newswires
08/31/22 2021 Eastern Time
Copyright (c) 2022 Dow Jones & Company, Inc.
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