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Ultimately, do you feel like McAfee is a dangerous character?
I don’t know. I honestly don’t know. I don’t think he’s committed any crimes in the States — I think he recognizes that there’s a difference between [these] places. Belize has a different economic bracket, a different culture, a different way of investigating crimes. It’s very different than the US and I think he made a judgement call when he was there that he would not make here — I hope. But at the same time, you never know. I guess we’ll find out.
Do feel that McAfee is guilty of the three crimes you’ve laid out?
Yes, I think so. With Allison, yes. With Middleton, yes. With Gregory Faull, I think so. There’s certain things I can’t check. I can’t check Eddie’s alibi. I’m not an FBI agent. I can’t go and subpoena bank records. I can lay out my theory, which is a huge responsibility in making sure that I think that’s true. But at the same time, I’d like a real investigative unit to take it from there and do things I can’t do.
But it’s challenging. How well is any DNA evidence preserved? I don’t know. I know that the FBI has been investigating it, but unfortunately it was much later that they were called in to do it — it was only this year. In the beginning, it would’ve been a different situation.
Why do you think the media was so ready to close the chapter on McAfee’s time in Central America?
Because we live in a 24-hour news cycle. Once you get your headline you move onto the next thing. Who’s going to be crazy enough to spend three months in Belize and find out what really happened with something that occurred four years ago?
"He's made spinning an art since his Silicon Valley days"He was [at the point that I started shooting] running as a Libertarian candidate — he’d just announced … In some ways that felt really important to me. This guy is running for president as a serious Libertarian candidate. And now he’s a CEO. And as I was investigating this, his star was rising in the media. I had him on Google Alerts and there would be 5 [stories] a day — he’s talking about the iPhone hack, or he’s talking about WhatsApp, or he’s doing this, or he’s running here. He’s no longer in the Cyber Party, now he’s a Libertarian candidate. It was all coinciding at the same time. But this is where documentaries are filling in a hole in journalism. Which is unfortunate, and it’s because our culture changed, the way the media’s changed, it doesn’t follow up in this investigative way.
Is there something unique about John that let him get away with these possible crimes?
Well, he’s very good with the media. That is one of his fortes. He’s very charming, he caters to the press. But he also knows how to spin yarns and it makes for a good story. He’ll say, I lost all my money, and then he’ll say, Oh I made all that up. Or, I posted 100 times on this drug website about using bath salts — but I made that up too! He presents himself as this titillating subject, but then pulls back from it. [He’s] like Teflon because of that — nothing sticks. He’s just good at spinning, and he has made it an art since his Silicon Valley days.
It sounds maddening to an observer — either he’s a psychopath, or he’s incredibly calculating.
I think he’s very calculating, but I also think he may be a loose cannon to a degree. At least these days he’s always on top of what he should be doing and when he should be doing it. I think that he does rely on certain tropes still. For example, he went and hired someone to interview people in Belize and say that I paid them all to create this fiction. Three of those people I’d never met in my life, and they were like, ‘Yeah, Showtime interviewed me. They wanted me to say that John killed Gregg F.’ I was like, I’ve never even met you. Some of these people I did, after the fact, end up licensing photos from. I’ll be first to admit that, and that’s generally a practice that’s done. But I didn’t pay people for interviews, or pay them to lie on camera.
"He’s said it to me before: If it’s the last thing I do, I’ll take you down."
But he paid them $1,200 each to do this. I called a couple of those people that I did interview and I was like, 'Why would you say this?' And I recorded those phone calls. And they were like, ‘They paid me $1,200 and I needed the money.’ That’s crazy — he’s doing what he’s accusing me of doing. That is so John McAfee.
What’s been his reaction to the film?
Well, that ‘you are a horrible person.’
So you really think those emails last night were from him?
I do. Yes. But of course he can’t email me because he’s pretending he never emailed me. He can’t not email me. I’ve gotten emails also from his acolytes now. Now that he’s pretending that he never emailed me, I’m starting to get these people coming out of the woodwork, writing to me, yelling at me. Including his current wife, who I hold no grudge against at all, calling me a b-i-t-c-h every other sentence. And he has a very different voice than that — a very specific [written] voice. Very specific. So I can tell it was him [last night].
He’s said it to me before: If it’s the last thing I do, I’ll take you down. He’s now echoing that. He said that to me in May and then he forgot for a while. So I don’t know. This is the first time I’ve done a film where I don’t have a close personal relationship with the subject. I have a strange cyber relationship. So it’s very hard to gauge.
Gringo: The Dangerous Life of John McAfee debuts on Showtime September 24th.
Update: This piece has been updated to credit Showtime Documentary Films.
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