Inside the DeSantis Doc That Showtime Didn’t Want You to See

When executives at Showtime pulled a VICE documentary exploring Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis’ experiences with Guantanamo Bay detainees, it was hard to ignore the timing: It was one day after DeSantis officially declared for president.

The Daily Beast has obtained a transcript of that unaired documentary, “The Guantanamo Candidate,” which was anchored by Seb Walker, a longtime correspondent for the Emmy-winning newsmagazine.

Among a number of insights into DeSantis’ past, the transcript features interviews with former prisoners and a former Naval staff sergeant-turned-Gitmo whistleblower who overlapped with DeSantis. All three allege inhumane treatment at the hands of the U.S. government, with the detainees directly implicating DeSantis—at the time, a junior-level military legal adviser—in approving and overseeing brutal measures.

These former prisoners alleged that DeSantis watched forced-feedings, a cruel and degrading practice that a United Nations investigation into the controversial offshore prison concluded was torture in February 2006. This was the month before DeSantis arrived, per his military records.

The Florida School Board Mom Fending Off DeSantis’ Culture War

(During his first campaign for governor, DeSantis admitted he legally cleared the practice as a Naval Judge Advocate General, telling his Gitmo commanders, “Hey, you actually can force feed, here’s what you can do.”)

The saga of the ill-fated mini-doc has played out in drips after The Hollywood Reporter broke the news in early June that Showtime had shelved the documentary. But the story has largely gone unnoticed amid VICE’s plunge from billions to bankruptcy. Showtime had slated the segment to air on May 28.

A Semafor report this week shed more light on VICE’s internal bewilderment at the decision to pull the episode, a move that appeared to come out of the blue after the months-long project was completed and had already been advance-screened for journalists. One source told Semafor that a Showtime lobbyist in D.C.—DeDe Lea—had expressed concerns about the episode.

Three people familiar with the production told The Daily Beast that, given the timing and the seemingly impenetrable secrecy surrounding the decision, they could only explain Showtime’s last-minute call as politically motivated, though it’s still unclear exactly how and where it originated. One of the sources called the move “blatant corporate censorship for political gain.”

But Showtime’s decision to muzzle a report critical of a high-profile conservative politician also epitomizes the complaints that conservative politicians—including DeSantis—have habitually brayed in their crusade against so-called liberal “cancel culture.”

The Daily Beast has independently confirmed the authenticity of the transcript, which we are quoting here at length in the interest of transparency, as well as out of consideration for the segment’s journalistic merit and value to the public discourse.

The documentary bears many of the marks that have long defined VICE’s brand of aggressive but humanistic investigative reporting.

“The Guantanamo Candidate” captured on-location reporting from four countries outside the United States: Serbia, Yemen, Israel, and from the prison compound itself, which is under lease from Cuba.

The doc opens with a view from the edges of the U.S. Naval Base at Guantanamo Bay, which a voiceover described as “possibly the most famous prison in the world” and “a place defined by secrets.”

On scene, Walker explained that the military prohibits filming of much of the landscape, citing “sensitive infrastructure.”

“But that’s where we’re headed,” he said.

A voiceover noted that because so much of the controversial outpost’s past and present is classified, “it’s hard to even know who’s worked here.”

There is, however, one major exception—“a Republican politician who could be America’s next president,” whose time at the prison is drawing “increased scrutiny.”

VICE contextualizes its investigation as a counterpoint to DeSantis’ inclination to present his military record as a political strength, and draws attention to his evolving narrative about his Gitmo stint.

In a scene from Florida’s 2018 gubernatorial debate, DeSantis boasted that he wasn’t at home with his family during Christmas of 2006. “I was in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, at the Terrorist Detention Facility… not as a detainee, as an officer.”

The doc then presents a clip from DeSantis’ 2022 “Top Gun” campaign ad, where he lectured hypothetical recruits about “today’s training evolution: dog fighting—taking on the corporate media.”

The documentary contrasts DeSantis’ account with those of two anonymous ex-prisoners, whom the transcript indicated were not represented in the flesh; their claims were delivered in “voice notes.”

“Officer DeSantis was one of the officers who oversaw the force-feeding and torture we were subjected to in 2006,” one former prisoner said. The second former detainee claimed that DeSantis was “one of the officers who mistreated us,” adding that DeSantis was “a bad person” and “a very bad officer.”

Over a view of “Camp X-Ray”—the now-abandoned section of Gitmo where DeSantis was stationed but has since fallen into disrepair—the narrator revealed that a VICE freedom of information request for the Florida governor’s active duty record returned “little about Guantanamo” outside of his arrival in March 2006.

But as the documentary noted, that period was “a brutal point in the prison’s history.”

Detainees had been on a prolonged hunger strike to call attention to their treatment, and the government’s solution was to force-feed prisoners Ensure dietary supplements through tubes placed in their noses. Detainees alleged the process caused excessive bleeding and was repeated “until they vomited and defecated on themselves.” (DeSantis, a legal adviser, would almost certainly have been aware that the UN concluded that force-feeding amounted to torture the month before he started working at Guantanamo.)

Since it opened in 2002, the prison has held nearly 800 detainees and so-called “unlawful combatants” in the War on Terror, many of whom were locked up without formal charges. After 20 years, at least nine prisoners have died—two of natural causes—and about 34 remain at the detention center, according to Amnesty International; the rest have been transferred or released.

VICE spoke to one of those former detainees at his new home in Belgrade, Serbia—formerly suspected al Qaeda operative Mansoor Adayfi, who in an Al Jazeera op-ed this April publicly aired allegations that DeSantis personally oversaw his forced feeding.

“The first time we saw DeSantis was in 2006,” Adayfi said, which he called “the worst year” of his 14-year stretch at Gitmo. “He came with the groups who arrived to bring the camp under control.”

DeSantis Melts Down When Asked About His Time at Guantanamo Bay

Asked what made DeSantis memorable, Adayfi said it was his smile.

“As I’m looking at you now, I could see them standing behind the fence, watching and looking at us… like, look at each other… and were smiling,” he said, according to the transcript.

“While being you, screaming and shouting and bleeding and like, throwing up and shitting on yourself and someone is smiling at you?” the former detainee continued. “You cannot forget that.”

Adayfi added that he first recognized DeSantis as a political figure “two years ago.” That would have been when DeSantis began burnishing his conservative presidential cred, denouncing COVID restrictions and heaving the weight of his office at the cultural flashpoints du jour.

“I never recognized the name… then I came to the photo. I was like, ‘What?’” Adayfi recalled. He said he stared at the photo.

“I cannot forget when he was there watching us with the force-feeding,” he said. “You cannot forget that because those people left really bad scars in your soul.”

In Jerusalem this April, DeSantis—no stranger to grudges himself—scoffed at the idea that anyone could accurately recall an officer of his comparatively low stature from that long ago, placing an emphasis on his rank that he hadn’t in previous campaigning statements, such as the debate. Adayfi, for his part, memorialized his Gitmo experiences in a book he began writing while imprisoned.

The transcript then presented DeSantis’ own 2018 account of his role in the forced-feedings, when he told CBS News Miami that he had personally and professionally endorsed force-feeding as a legal way to break prisoner hunger strikes.

“The commander wants to know, well how do I combat this? So one of the jobs as a legal adviser will be like, ‘Hey, you actually can force feed, here’s what you can do, here’s kinda the rules of that,’” DeSantis said at the time.

DeSantis altered that language in a Piers Morgan interview this March, again invoking his junior rank as evidence that he would have lacked standing to order forced-feeding.

“There may have been a commander that would have done feeding if someone was going to die, but that was not something that I would have even had authority to do,” he said. However, DeSantis did not deny that he had provided that legal advice.

But as the documentary notes, the forced-feeding era led to something worse: the simultaneous hanging deaths of three detainees.

Showtime Quietly Shelves DeSantis Documentary: Report

While the government claimed the deaths were the result of a suicide pact, VICE spoke to two people who found that difficult to believe. They included former Naval staff sergeant Joe Hickman, who stood guard that night and theorizes that U.S. officials killed the three hunger strike leaders in order to restore order among the prisoners.

Hickman, who later contributed as a whistleblower for the Justice Department’s investigation into the deaths, recalled DeSantis as popular and “extremely handsome.”

“Navy girls would go crazy over him,” Hickman said, though he added that he doesn’t believe DeSantis, who became a JAG straight out of Harvard Law, would have been in the room that night.

“They weren’t going to give somebody like that that kind of responsibility,” Hickman said in the transcript.

But VICE contrasted this with a recent Washington Post interview with DeSantis’ commanding officer, Capt. Patrick McCarthy. McCarthy told the paper that DeSantis was involved.

“He would have been one of the folks that I dispatched to help facilitate the investigative effort,” McCarthy said.

The Navy’s own investigation also found that Guantanamo-based JAGs handled documents and evidence, and VICE noted that “one JAG officer was even present at the hospital as the bodies were brought in.” (McCarthy declined to speak to VICE, the transcript shows.)

The production then moved to Taizz, Yemen, per the transcript, where Walker interviewed the brother of one of those three dead detainees. The brother, Antar Al-Salami, explained that the circumstances and other unsettling details of the deaths undermined the U.S. government’s suicide narrative—a point Hickman also made both to VICE and as a whistleblower.

Al-Salami recalled in the transcript that his brother’s body was “completely dissected,” but still bore marks of torture, “such as pulled-out fingernails, for example, black and red bruises on his neck, traces of torture on his body.” Medical officials who oversaw an autopsy reported that his brother’s vital organs had been removed, he said—“including his throat.”

The voiceover added that “all three of the dead men’s families say their loved ones’ throats had been removed, making it impossible to independently verify the official cause of death.”

When Walker asked what it’s like to know that “the man who might be the next president of the United States may have been there on the night that your brother died,” Al-Salami replied, “I send condolences to myself and the American people in advance.”

“Because that man is a blight on humanity,” he said.

After Yemen, the production crew followed DeSantis on his trip to Israel this April. While there, Walker confronted the governor during a question and answer at an event hosted by Jerslusalem’s Museum of Tolerance. The heated exchange was captured on camera, and global media ran stories observing that DeSantis “explodes,” “melts down,” “blows up,” and responded “angrily.”

In response to Walker’s questions, DeSantis didn’t specifically deny the allegations. Instead, he claimed “all that’s BS. Totally BS.”

When Walker replied that detainees allege DeSantis was present during the traumatic forced feedings, the governor once again emphasized his rank, dismissing out of hand the idea that anyone could have remembered such a thing. The detainees, he told Walker, “are just trying to get into the news.” (Again, the transcript indicated that two of the former detainees alleging DeSantis’ involvement did not reveal their names or faces.)

“Do you honestly believe that’s credible? This is 2006. I’m a junior officer. Do you honestly think they would have remembered me from Adam? Of course not,” DeSantis said at the press conference. “They are just trying to get into the news because they know people like you will consume it because it fits your pre-ordained narrative that you’re trying to spin. Focus on the facts and stop worrying about the narrative.”

On that note, the production returned to Adayfi, the former detainee who allegedly recognized DeSantis in a political photo.

Asked what he feels about the prospect of a DeSantis presidency, Adayfi replied philosophically, saying it came down to how a person chooses to live their life after bearing witness to such atrocity.

“Such a person, when someone experienced such places and did nothing about it… we have to question their humanity, their value, their ethics,” he said, according to the transcript.

DeSantis’ deployments to Guantanamo and the Middle East have already played a significant role in his political ambitions, and that will extend to the Republican primary. The race’s far and away leader, former President Donald Trump—a longtime military torture enthusiast who has nevertheless run on a foreign policy platform that’s frequently but conveniently not always the inverse of the GOP’s historical hawkishness—has already gone after the Iraq vet’s “neocon rhetoric” and suggested that DeSantis could draw the country into nuclear war.

But despite substantial investigative reporting efforts, many of the facts surrounding DeSantis’ activities at Gitmo are still unclear. And that secrecy finds a parallel in the fate of the documentary itself.

According to a source with direct knowledge of the events, the documentary was shelved on May 25, the day after DeSantis officially launched his campaign. That was just four days before the documentary was set to air, and after promotional materials and advance screeners had been sent to reporters, the source said. (The links to the screeners have since been removed, according to three sources with knowledge.)

Still, the central question—specifically who at Showtime tabled the episode and why—remains unknown.

The Daily Beast spoke to several sources with knowledge of the events and sent detailed inquiries to VICE, Showtime, and the DeSantis campaign. No one offered an explanation. However, three people with knowledge of the events described the network’s decision in interviews as abrupt and devoid of rationale, each of them pointing to the coincidence of DeSantis’ announcement, which they characterized as impossible to dismiss.

The Daily Beast emailed detailed questions to the DeSantis campaign, including whether he observed forced feedings, observed torture, or oversaw forced feedings or torture.

The email also asked whether anyone affiliated with the campaign, the pro-DeSantis “Never Back Down” super PAC, or the governor’s office had been contacted by anyone affiliated with Showtime or its parent company, Paramount, in advance of the documentary’s scheduled release. We also asked whether anyone affiliated with the DeSantis operation had ever communicated with anyone affiliated with Showtime or Paramount about the documentary.

The campaign’s full reply contained the web address for the video of the Jerusalem press conference, hosted on the Rumble video platform, along with “at 21:09,” when Walker’s questioning began, footage also included in the documentary transcript. The campaign didn’t reply to a follow-up noting that the exchange doesn’t address the question of contact with Showtime.

DeSantis Defends Tuberville Blocking Military Promotions Over ‘Abortion Tourism’

In response to The Daily Beast’s detailed questions, a Showtime spokesperson said, “We don’t comment on scheduling decisions.” When The Daily Beast re-upped the questions independent of scheduling—including about Showtime’s assessment of the documentary’s content and whether the network had any contact with the broader DeSantis operation—the spokesperson did not reply.

A VICE official told The Daily Beast that this particular scheduling decision also carried collateral damage, because the second half of the episode has also never aired—VICE correspondent Isobel Yeung’s reporting from Taiwan on the microchip industry, titled “Chipping Away.”

The Daily Beast also brought questions to VICE, whose spokesperson Elise Flick provided a statement: “Our News programming enjoys an unprecedented level of trust and engagement among viewers around the world and we not only stand behind our rigorous reporting but are proud of the incredible journalism showcased in this story.”

VICE declined to comment on its communications with Showtime, though one VICE official told The Daily Beast that, in terms of production, the Showtime team “continued to be very pleasant and easy to work with for the rest of the season.”

Two sources with knowledge of the production confirmed Semafor’s reporting that Showtime never expressed concerns to VICE about the segment’s actual content. The episode had passed VICE’s internal legal and journalistic standards reviews, both sources told The Daily Beast, adding that Showtime executives had initially signed off without any additional notes.

“No one at VICE or Showtime has offered any form of explanation,” one of the sources said, calling the decision to kill the piece a case of “blatant corporate censorship for political gain.”

That person could not say for sure why Showtime pulled the plug, but offered that, in their view, the most likely scenario is that network executives “watched it last-minute after seeing his campaign announcement and decided to delay it.”

As governor, DeSantis has routinely expressed hostility to the mainstream media, a posture that in recent months he has elevated to being openly litigious. That streak has found its most recent incarnation in DeSantis’ very public and very political ongoing feud with Disney, which famously houses major operations in Florida.

Showtime’s parent company, Paramount, is also a sprawling entertainment conglomerate with high stakes in the Sunshine State. But Paramount has recently found itself on uneasy footing, most specifically after turning in a $1.1 billion first-quarter loss stemming in large part from its big bet on the faltering Paramount+ streaming service—including a $1.7 billion integration with Showtime, which has not migrated any VICE content.

It turns out DeSantis and Paramount have some recent history. Two years ago, another Paramount newsmagazine property, 60 Minutes, ran a controversial segment that suggested, without much evidence, that Florida had chosen Publix as its COVID vaccine rollout partner in part because the grocery chain had contributed $100,000 to DeSantis’ re-election campaign. The segment sparked outcry not just from Republicans, but from influential state Democrats as well.

DeSantis apparently had little difficulty recalling that particular slight. The governor allegedly pulled out of the informal $2 million book deal he struck in 2021 with Simon & Schuster after he learned, a year later, that the publisher was a Paramount property, Politico reported. (It’s unclear whether DeSantis knew that his viral “Top Gun” campaign ad was biting off of another Paramount property.)

Last November, a week after DeSantis won that election, the Paramount streaming series “The Good Fight” ran a season finale in which a fictional character alleged that DeSantis, by name, “forced me into oral sex” after a CPAC conference. The episode later revealed that the claim was a duplicitous ploy to put Trump ahead in the 2024 polls, and as a fictional plot line it likely would have survived a defamation claim, experts said at the time.

“Political connections can make it very difficult to do a news show, especially with subject matter like this,” a source with knowledge of the production told The Daily Beast. “But also it’s a little strange because from a news perspective, it was a perfect time for the story to drop.”

While that may be true, times were far from perfect for VICE and Showtime’s corporate entities. The air date was just two weeks after the once mighty Brooklyn-based media startup filed for bankruptcy and restructuring. Those federal bankruptcy filings became a battleground against Showtime, via Paramount, which inserted itself into the proceedings to challenge elements of the Season 4 contract but was overruled this month.

According to a source with knowledge of internal discussions, the bankruptcy chaos had eclipsed the episode’s cancellation even among VICE staff.

The news, this source said, “got swallowed up by whether we have jobs tomorrow.”

Read more at The Daily Beast.

Get the Daily Beast's biggest scoops and scandals delivered right to your inbox. Sign up now.

Stay informed and gain unlimited access to the Daily Beast's unmatched reporting. Subscribe now.