At the end of that June, Gray put out a statement. “Although we have discussed his obligation to address this accusation, he has not provided me with any additional insight into the facts of the underlying claim. Not knowing more, I want to avoid weighing in irresponsibly,” she wrote. “My understanding is that Virgil plans to make a statement shortly.” Cass never made a statement, never appeared on either podcast again, and did not respond to multiple requests for comment, including a detailed list of questions sent to an email he has used in recent months. He still appears on Bad Faith’s cover art, but attempts to reach him through Gray and other former associates went unanswered.
None of the Chapos who would talk about their former cohost could say what he’d been up to since the split, but they indicated that he’s still receiving subscriber money. “We all want to have a Chapo pension for anyone who, no matter what conditions we part under, helped build the show,” says Frost. Wade confirms that Cass receives money, albeit a smaller share than that of the current hosts; he describes the arrangement as “somewhere between pension and contractual obligation.”
Eisenberg, one of Cass’s best friends, eventually cut him off. In late 2021, he was considering Cass to be one of the groomsmen at his wedding. “I had to tell him, ‘I can’t rely on you. I have to let you go from the group.’ He didn’t put up much resistance, if any.”
“He was kind of like a tumbleweed,” says Eisenberg. “He ran away from his problems.”
As one cohost fell away, another struck out in a new direction. In June 2020, Frost took a Xanax and boarded a socially distanced flight to Los Angeles. She started a Hollywood production company called ColdFeet. “I run head first into things,” she explains. “For better or worse, sometimes for worse, I never get cold feet.” Unlike Chapo, where everything is evenly distributed, Frost is sole CEO, though she brought on the rest as owners and lured them West. “I was the pioneer,” she says. “Then I sent back word that it’s bright and sunny here in California.”
In 2016, Menaker talked about expanding Chapo into a site with videos and blogs, but ColdFeet was more than a pivot to video. “Imagine if they actually produced a feature-length film,” says Catherine Liu, a professor of film and media studies at UC Irvine who has known Frost since 2014. “Hollywood is very milquetoast, anodyne, liberal. Democratic Party politics could be produced by bots. Is there space for some kind of spontaneous media experience of left spectacle and entertainment and laughs? Yes. It’s all we have now. We have so little political power.”
It wasn’t long before Christman had an Amber in each ear preaching the virtues of California. He got to know Amber Rollo while swimming in the Rockaways that first pandemic summer. She was a comedian, native to the Golden State, living in a Bushwick loft with no AC, no heater, and no stove. Rollo, who wasn’t a podcast listener, recalls Christman wanting to take “a step back from bigger politics and trying to focus more on his small community.” As winter approached, she and Christman loaded up her 1990 Chevy conversion van with a broken odometer and took off for California.
When the couple later decided to get married, Menaker, an online minister of the Universal Life Church, came out to officiate the wedding at Little Secret, a Hollywood DIY venue where Rollo hosted shows featuring former presidential candidate Marianne Williamson and Amazon union organizer Chris Smalls. At karaoke afterward, the bride and groom sang the B-52’s “Love Shack.” Chapo producer Chris Wade and his wife, Molly Mary O’Brien, who sang Tenacious D’s “Fuck Her Gently,” looked around and decided to move. David Weigel attended, but didn’t sing. Biederman didn’t sing either—“I like [karaoke] in the Yakuza series of games,” he says, “not in real life”—but he too succumbed to the Hollywood drift. Menaker, the son of New Yorker and New York Times editors, was the only one to stay loyal to the city. “Go Yankees,” he says.
With mentors like The Big Short director Adam McKay, Uncut Gems codirector Benny Safdie, and Oscar-winning screenwriter Josh Olson, Chapo was quickly entrenched in projects. Jason Grote, who had been a writer on Mad Men, helped Christman and Menaker adapt their podcast series about George H.W. Bush for TV. “I’m a drama writer, so the pitch was coming off as a little bit more prestige TV and a little bit less Chapo,” he recalls. “Safdie advised us to just write it as a pilot.” They wrote an episode where a young H.W. is tricked into dosing John F. Kennedy with acid. “If you play it as drama, people are more resistant to it,” Grote says. “Whereas if you crank up the absurdity…”
Matt Christman, a founding member of the podcast “Chapo Trap House,” Des Moines, Iowa, Aug. 13, 2019.By Tom Brenner/The New York Times/Redux.
In September 2023, with Rollo in a Santa Monica hospital, preparing to give birth, Christman collapsed. By the time Rollo waddled into his hospital room across town, he was unconscious. “He had a stroke. We don’t know if he’ll ever be able to do anything more than this,” a doctor told her. “That was terrifying. I’m about to pop and they’re telling me that the love of my life, the father of my future child, might never do anything,” she says. “That evening, he mumbled, ‘I love you.’ That put the fight in me.”