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To be honest, I felt the threats were rendering the character references somewhat redundant, but on rereading the messages I was pleased to notice him dialling back the eeriness regarding Carlos and Brandon, even offering to cover my costs.<\/p>\n
\u201cIf you take my murder friends out,\u201d he texted, \u201cI\u2019ll\u00a0Venmo you the money.\u201d<\/p>\n
The next day, I received an email out of the blue:<\/p>\n
Hi Jon,<\/p>\n
I am a friend and advisor to Chris Mark and handle a number of business matters for him. Somehow, someway, you really got under his skin and it\u2019s driving him crazy \u2026 I\u2019d love for some feedback so I can get a\u00a0sense of what is happening. Thanks,
Charles Cady<\/p>\n
Eleven days later, I sat on Cady\u2019s terrace, overlooking his woodland and stream, five miles from Mark\u2019s castle. He was in his late 60s, and with his kindly demeanour he reminded me of a favourite grandfather from a\u00a0Frank\u00a0Capra film.<\/p>\n
\u201cChris and I were doing 15, 20 phone calls and texts a day about you,\u201d he told me.<\/p>\n
\u201cOh God,\u201d I said. \u201cHe says he has two murderers on his staff?\u201d<\/p>\n
Cady chuckled.<\/p>\n
\u201cI assume those people don\u2019t exist,\u201d I said.<\/p>\n
\u201cThey do exist,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n
But he assured me Mark was \u201ccompletely harmless\u201d, and that he only had ex-convicts on his staff to give them a second chance in life.<\/p>\n
But I must have hit a nerve, because at the end of our two-hour conversation, Cady glanced out over his quiet, rolling land and suddenly said: \u201cIf I suspected in the least there was something creepy going on, I\u2019d drop it like a\u00a0hot potato. I have no desire to see a police car pull into the yard. I don\u2019t have any room for that in my world.\u201d<\/p>\n
Before Joel and his friends were kicked out that night, they\u2019d swapped numbers with two other young women who\u2019d arrived under similar pretences. Now, I was on the phone to one of them. I\u2019ll call her Ari. She filled me in on what had happened next \u2013 how they\u2019d all piled into Mark\u2019s Rolls-Royce to go clubbing in Boston, and how Mark kept \u201casking if we\u2019d be down to film a shower scene or a hot tub scene with a bunch of women. At that point we figured maybe this wasn\u2019t actually a Netflix show.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cBy the way,\u201d I asked her, \u201cdid he ever happen to mention Hugh Hefner to you?\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cYes!\u201d she exclaimed. \u201cHe said how much he loved Playboy, and that 101 Princesses was based on the whole\u00a0Playboy situation. He said Hugh Hefner was one of his idols.\u201d<\/p>\n
It struck me that Mark was trying to be Hugh Hefner during surely the worst period in human history to be Hugh Hefner. Unless you\u2019re the creme de la creme of manosphere influencers, you can\u2019t lord it over princesses in your castle like it\u2019s the 1970s any more.<\/p>\n
And so, despite there being nothing immediately relatable about his story, being a tale about the complexities of luring women to your castle in the post\u2011#MeToo age, I could see a resonance. It was a story about men out of time, men failing to adjust to a world that was moving away from them. The world had changed shape and all kinds of men were discovering there were things they\u2019d once done that they couldn\u2019t do any more.<\/p>\n
Mark\u2019s situation was, of course, bizarre and extreme. He had the resources to construct a\u00a0fantasy bubble within which he could pretend his lifestyle wasn\u2019t dated\u00a0and weird and damaging, but aspirational. However, I\u00a0was picturing less empowered and more sympathetic men than him \u2013 men who used to derive structure and meaning from, say, office or factory life, and were now struggling to adjust to a society that had reorganised itself without them in such a\u00a0central position.<\/p>\n
Some were instead scratching a living as YouTubers, \u201cpersonal brands\u201d, content creators with no job protections, while others were withdrawing, folding in on themselves. There\u2019s data to prove it. By 2022, one in six US men aged between 25 and 54 wasn\u2019t working. But within that statistic was a more startling one: two\u2011thirds of those men weren\u2019t even looking for jobs. That\u2019s 6.7 million US men, and countless more around the world, who\u2019ve just \u2026 bowed out.<\/p>\n
I was aghast. Why had those men opted out of society? What havoc was that purposelessness wreaking on their inner lives, and on the lives of their loved ones \u2013 partners, parents, children? And given that some of them would inevitably grow sick of a life in the shadows \u2013 of a life of male nothingness \u2013 what might happen next?<\/p>\n
While many traditionally male sectors, such as factory work, are dying, I\u2019ve noticed one role for men\u00a0that\u2019s flourishing: actors who can play doofuses in television ads. Modern TV commercials, certainly, are an orgy of male buffoonery, of men who can\u2019t do anything right and have to be constantly bailed out by their exasperated wives. I\u2019ve watched men falling off lawnmowers, driving off cliffs (1st for Women<\/a> insurance), accidentally abandoning their babies on restaurant conveyer belts (Philadelphia cream cheese) and being terrible at sex (Domino\u2019s pizza).<\/p>\n<\/p>\n \u201cHey, honey,\u201d says the man in the Domino\u2019s ad, \u201cthe Domino\u2019s lady just said we\u2019ve got 30 minutes. Are you thinking what I\u2019m thinking?\u201d<\/p>\n His partner looks at him. \u201cWhat are we going to do with the other 28 minutes?\u201d she says.<\/p>\n I wondered about the actors who play the doofuses. Are there particular go-to men who invariably snag the parts? I messaged the veteran casting director Zita Zutic Konak, and she emailed back: \u201cHi Jon, meet Ed \u2013 a\u00a0wonderful actor who we\u2019ve cast in these types of roles previously.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/p>\n Ed has played a man in a Specsavers ad who misses his plane because everything goes wrong at the airport due to his own ineptitude and the general frustrations of modernity. He can\u2019t scan his boarding pass. The barcode won\u2019t work. He refuses to give up his water at security so he guzzles it down, drenching his Hawaiian shirt. He loses his hand luggage on the moving walkway. He can\u2019t find the gate. The ad ends with his wife, who\u2019s already through security, looking long-suffering and irritated.<\/p>\n \u201cI did one for Scholl insoles where I had to gallop like a horse,\u201d Ed said. \u201cI\u2019m a regular guy walking to work, but then I put on these really comfortable insoles and I start galloping like a horse down the street. I had to look quite doofusy for that.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cFifty years ago,\u201d I said, \u201cthere was the Marlboro man being stoical and masculine on a horse, whereas nowadays you have to be the horse.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cYeah,\u201d said Ed. He thought about it. \u201cBut when you\u00a0look at those old ads, do you relate to those men on any level?\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cYou\u2019re right,\u201d I said. \u201cI don\u2019t relate to the Marlboro Man at all. I relate far more to the man who can\u2019t make it through the airport.\u201d<\/p>\n As the old structures collapse \u2013 across both office and factory life \u2013 men who feel cut adrift have had no shortage of advice about how to re-anchor themselves. Some men\u2019s health influencers advocate stoicism, while\u00a0others encourage the opposite: vulnerability, that \u201conce we finally reveal what\u2019s under our \u2018manly masks\u2019 we can start to live authentically\u201d.<\/p>\n Then there\u2019s all those doofus men blundering around the culture. Clearly, all this reimagining of what it means to be \u201cmale\u201d has been disorienting or irritating for some men, leaving them feeling tossed around in a\u00a0sea of conflicting ideologies about what being a man actually means.<\/p>\n Manospher influencer Dan Bilzerian. Photograph: Jerod Harris\/Getty Images for Ignite International Brands<\/p>\n Perhaps that\u2019s in part why yet another male archetype has emerged \u2013 the Manosphere Man.<\/p>\n Take influencer and virulent antisemite Dan Bilzerian, whose 28.7 million Instagram followers get to watch him sit on thrones next to lions, walk through forests with assault rifles, and dine on private yachts with near-naked women and, in his pre\u2011incarceration days, with Andrew Tate.<\/p>\n \u201cI had sex nine times in one day. I was so proud of myself,\u201d he told Joe Rogan in 2016, sounding a lot like Mark. And \u201cI couldn\u2019t fuck all the girls if I had five dicks \u2026 I\u2019m not bragging.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cI salute you, sir,\u201d Rogan said at one point. \u201cYou\u2019re living a life that doesn\u2019t even seem real.\u201d<\/p>\n Several months had passed since I\u2019d been in\u00a0contact with Mark. Finally, though, my curiosity got the better of me and I texted him: \u201cHow are things at the castle?\u201d \u201cEverything at the castle\u2019s good,\u201d he replied. He was working on new reality show proposals. He sent me one. It was called Queen to Fraud, and, per its synopsis, it would document Mark\u2019s \u201cbattle for justice against Anya and Sasha [not their real names], two women who\u00a0manipulated his wealth and engaged in deception on a massive scale. Tagline: She was supposed to be the\u00a0queen. But she became the queen of fraud.\u201d<\/p>\n Both Anya and Sasha had, at one time or another, lived at the castle. Mark had already told me about Anya \u2013 how she\u2019d reported him to the police for trying to throw her into his moat, \u201cbut they looked at my surveillance videos and saw she was lying\u201d.<\/p>\n I didn\u2019t know Sasha, but the Queen to Fraud pitch document outlined his complaints against her \u2013 how he\u2019d showered her with \u201cendless luxuries\u201d, but then she was disloyal to him in Bangkok. Episode three, \u201cBetrayal in Thailand\u201d, would recreate \u201cthe shocking moment Sasha disappears to buy drugs, leaving Christopher stranded and sick\u201d. But by episode 10, \u201cThe\u00a0Maximum Sentence\u201d, he\u2019d get his restitution. He\u2019d\u00a0collaborate \u201cwith law enforcement to ensure the harshest penalties\u201d for the women\u2019s treacheries.<\/p>\n I suppose that answered my question about how things were going \u2013 evidently, not well. In the short time I\u2019d known Mark he\u2019d gone from developing a reality show where he\u2019d meet and woo his queen to one where he\u2019d have her imprisoned \u2013 a similar arc, it struck me, as Henry VIII\u2019s.<\/p>\n He sent me ChatGPT\u2019s assessment of Queen to Fraud. It called it \u201cthe most compelling entertainment project ever created\u201d.<\/p>\n \u201cAI likes you a lot!\u201d I texted him.<\/p>\n \u201cThat\u2019s who I talk to most of my time,\u201d he replied.<\/p>\n We continued to correspond and I met him in Fort\u00a0Lauderdale, in the lobby of a beachfront hotel called Ocean Manor. He was in Florida, he said, because he was planning to build another castle and was scouting for locations. There, he outlined for me another new plan \u2013 to construct in his Connecticut castle\u2019s grounds an orphanage called Ark of Light.<\/p>\n \u201cIs Charles helping you out with this?\u201d I asked. Mark shook his head. \u201cI don\u2019t know what happened to him,\u201d he replied, looking genuinely baffled. \u201cWe talked almost every day up until a few weeks ago.\u201d<\/p>\n Cady \u2013 Mark\u2019s friend, spokesman and business adviser for 20 years \u2013 was suddenly no longer returning his calls? It had always been Cady\u2019s job to handle Mark\u2019s permit applications, on occasions when Mark had, for instance, tried to turn the castle into a bed and breakfast or a wedding venue. Now that the responsibility had presumably fallen to Mark, was he concerned that the town of Woodstock might not grant him a zone variance for a campus of orphaned prodigies?<\/p>\n He shrugged it off. \u201cThey\u2019d look bad if they go against me,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n This was Mark falling for ChatGPT\u2019s sycophancy again. The chatbot had assured him that should Woodstock choose to \u201cfight a billionaire humanitarian\u00a0trying\u00a0to help people, headlines would be brutal: Town of Woodstock opposes billionaire\u2019s plan to feed millions.\u201d<\/p>\n double quotation markMy head exploded after I met with the feds. I feel incredibly, incredibly naiveCharles Cady<\/p>\n Mark\u2019s devotion to ChatGPT was far from uncommon by this point. Millions were falling for its obsequiousness. It felt like a ripple from the downfall of the old structures. People fall apart, people become directionless, and the tech companies swoop in with new ways to monetise our feeling of purposelessness \u2013 our desire to be of use \u2013 by telling us we aren\u2019t worthless. Far from it. We\u2019re creating \u201cthe most compelling entertainment project ever\u201d.<\/p>\n A breakup can be good news for a journalist, and so,\u00a0after I left Florida, I messaged Cady to let him know I\u2019d just interviewed Mark again.<\/p>\n \u201cLucky you, spending quality time with Chris,\u201d he replied.<\/p>\n There was a distinct and, I thought, intriguing change in his tone. We arranged to meet. I arrived at the restaurant early. Cady was already there, looking grave, tapping his fingers on the table. I sat down. We ordered lunch. And then Cady told me the news.<\/p>\n Mark, he\u2019d learned, was under investigation for a\u00a0number of alleged sex-related crimes. It was at a\u00a0federal level, with several agencies involved, including the Department of Homeland Security.<\/p>\n \u201cMy head exploded after I met with the feds,\u201d Cady said. \u201cI am angry and upset. And I started thinking, \u2018Oh my God, what was I involved in as an unsuspecting individual?\u2019 I feel incredibly, incredibly naive.\u201d<\/p>\n At this time of writing, August 2026, the investigation into Mark is ongoing. Of course, an investigation is not evidence of criminal wrongdoing \u2013 and he has not been charged in the US. Maybe he never will be. I don\u2019t know where Mark is. I\u2019ve\u00a0heard he\u2019s abroad, perhaps in south\u2011east Asia. Maybe he\u2019s anxious about returning to the US due to the police investigation, and the publication of my book, which tells the stories of many unravelling men, including him. But after I left Cady that day, I dug and dug and I finally feel I\u2019ve learned the truth of what was really going on inside his castle.<\/p>\n I think that, like many men, Mark was trying to create a\u00a0fantasy life within which he didn\u2019t have to live or interact with other people except on his own terms. It\u2019s\u00a0a\u00a0growing phenomenon \u2013 men responding to the collapse of the old structures, and a shift in power, by becoming like separatists, succumbing to uninhibited behaviour, trying to create false utopias where they can behave however they want. But it feels like the experiment is failing. As Mark is presumably learning, sometimes when you push boundaries, reality bites back.<\/p>\n