Just The Gist

In the movie The Terminal , Tom Hanks plays a man who is forced to live in an airport for 9 months after his passport is declared invalid. Most people know that The Terminal was based on a true story, but they don't know that in real life, Mehran Karimi Nasseri wasn't stuck at the airport for 9 months. He ended up living there for 18 YEARS. He entered the international terminal of Charles de Gaull...

For more than a decade, the entire McDonalds Monopoly game in the US was completely rigged. From 1989 to 2001, anybody who won a major prize in the competition had actually cheated, with help from someone on the inside. That someone was Jerome ‘Jerry’ Jacobson, Head of Security for the company in charge of making and distributing the McDonald’s Monopoly pieces. But when McDonalds found out that no...

If you go to prison for having your mother murdered, it’s probably best not to joke about it in an effort to grow your TikTok following, no? That’s exactly what Gypsy-Rose Blanchard did this week, and since her story is part of JTG lore, we thought it was time to check in: two years after being released from prison, what exactly is going on with Gypsy-Rose Blanchard?  Gisten to our original e...

At the 2017 Oscars, La La Land was announced as Best Picture. The producers rushed the stage. The speeches started. And then a panicked staffer ran on, confusion spread through the Dolby Theatre, and La La Land producer Jordan Horowitz grabbed the microphone and said: "There's a mistake. Moonlight, you guys won Best Picture. This is not a joke." It was the most chaotic two minutes and twenty-three...

In 1989, the Oscars opened with Snow White going on a date with Rob Lowe, giant cardboard stars with human legs, and (for some reason) dancing tables. The ceremony was so bad that Disney sued, seventeen of Hollywood's biggest stars penned an open letter saying they were ashamed, and producer Allan Carr never worked again. Today Rosie breaks down the 61st Academy Awards — widely considered the wors...

In 2019, the CEO of eBay was caught up in a bizarre scandal that involved harassing a random married couple called David and Ina Steiner. David and Ina had live cockroaches, spiders and even a pig carcass mailed to their home, explicit magazine subscriptions addressed to them but delivered to their neighbours, their house posted online as the location of a swingers party, trackers placed on their...

In 1996, John F. Kennedy Jr. was the closest thing America had ever had to a prince. The only son of assassinated President JFK, he'd been named People Magazine's Sexiest Man Alive, dated half of Hollywood, and was widely expected to follow his father into the White House. When he married Calvin Klein PR powerhouse Carolyn Bessette in a secret ceremony on a remote Georgia island, they became witho...

In 1987, there was a news event that brought the entire world together. People did not stop watching their TVs for days - the First Lady of the United States even postponed surgery until she knew the outcome. Eighteen-month-old Jessica McClure had fallen down an old well and was wedged almost ten metres underground for 60 hours. Every news channel that existed had cameras in that tiny backyard in...

Being sucked out of a plane mid-air. Swimming away after his train crashed into a river. Being hit by a bus and walking away from a (different!) bus crash. His car swerving off the road and plummeting off the side of a cliff. Two separate car explosions. Over the course of his life, Frane Selak survived every single one of these accidents. "You could look at it two ways," Selak said in an intervie...

In 1978, 909 people lined up, drank poison, and died. More than 300 of them were children. For decades, it was described as the largest mass suicide in modern history, and it remained the greatest single loss of American civilian life in a deliberate act until 9/11. But was it really a mass suicide, or mass murder? Jonestown was founded by Jim Jones, leader of the Peoples Temple, a racially integr...

Alysa Liu just won Olympic gold for a figure skating routine that has already gone down in history. People are saying she changed the stuffy world of competitive skating forever. But just four years earlier, she had quit the sport entirely - and was thrilled at the thought of never skating again. So how does someone go from Olympic retirement at 16… to gold at the Milan Winter Olympics? Alysa Liu...

In 1997, a little film starring Nicholas Cage premiered in theatres called CON AIR. It was a huge blockbuster, helped massively by having a hit song to go along with it, called ‘How Do I Live’. But there were actually TWO versions of ‘How Do I Live’ released at the same time. Singers Trisha Yearwood and LeAnn Rimes both released their own version of exactly the same song, on exactly the same day,...

In 2002, five men were racing in the 1000 metre short-track speed-skating final at the winter olympics in Salt Lake City. The only Australian in the race - Steven Bradbury - was not considered a medal-contender. He spent most of the race in last place - far behind the four other skaters duking it out for the gold, silver and bronze. But then, with just 50 metres of the race to go, the four skaters...

With this week’s premiere of Netflix’s ‘Reality Check: America’s Next Top Model’ , it seemed like a good time to take a look into the history of the Smize Queen herself: Tyra Banks.  You know her as the creator and host of America’s Next Top Model. You know her as a Victoria’s Secret Model. You know her as the woman who yelled, “WE WERE ROOTING FOR YOU. WE WERE ALL ROOTING FOR YOU!” But do yo...

On November 17, 2019, the world watched as Prince Andrew (since downgraded to regular person BUT WORSE), scored one of the biggest PR own-goals in history during a Newsnight interview with Emily Maitlis. Convinced the interview would be his chance to get rid of those pesky Jeffrey Epstein rumours once and for all, it became clear within minutes - to everyone but him - that things were not going to...

In 1991, a billion-dollar experiment took place, designed to see if humans could survive in an artificial earth inside a giant glass dome that would eventually be built on other planets. Years was spent building Biosphere 2 in the USA, and inside was an ocean with actual tides and waves, a rainforest, a desert, vast wetlands, a farm with crops, animals, housing and laboratories. ‘Rain’ could even...

The Sentinelese people are one of the last remaining isolated Indigenous tribes on earth, continuing to live today as they have for thousands of years. Since 1956 they have been protected by laws that prohibit anyone approaching their home on North Sentinel Island. But the laws are also in place to protect any outsiders who try to go there, as the Sentinelese tribe have pretty much tried to to kil...

In 1887, Nellie Bly was just 21-years-old when she completely changed the way investigative journalism was done by basically inventing going ‘undercover’. She pretended to be insane, got committed to an insane asylum and then wrote about the horrific treatment she endured and as a patient. Bly’s reporting on her time at the Women’s Lunatic Asylum on Blackwell’s Island was turned into a bestselling...

Timothée Chalamet has made no secret of the fact he is campaigning HARD for this year’s Best Actor Oscar for his role in ‘Marty Supreme’. But many are saying he made a major misstep in a recent interview, in which he declared that audiences shouldn’t take his work for granted, as he’s been delivering ‘some top level shit’ for years. Cut to an industry-wide eyeroll and the line ‘some top level shit...

We didn’t plan this but 2026 is starting with a NEPO BABY themed week!  Remember when famous actresses Felicity Huffman and Lori Loughlin were sent to prison for literally taking spoilt Nepo Babies?  Over $25million in bribes exchanged hands. Almost every major elite university in the USA was involved. And at the end of the day, the whole thing came down to dodgy photoshop and old-school...

AN EMERGENCY MINI (which very quickly turned into a medium and then a large)! Brooklyn Beckham just went NUCLEAR on his parents Posh and Becks, officially announcing that he is OUT of the Beckham family and going all in with his in-laws - the billionaire Peltz dynasty. So is Brooklyn just a spoilt Nepo baby who found a richer family, or are the Beckhams actually as toxic as he says? Is his wife Ni...

Totally awake. No pain relief. Just straight up raw-dogging surgery. In 1686, King Louis XIV's anal fistula got so bad that he needed to go under the knife. But surgery for an anal fistula didn't actually exist yet. In fact, surgery in general didn’t really exist at all.  Enter Charles-François Felix, a 'Barber Surgeon' willing to take on the task. King Louis let Felix spend 6 months ‘practic...

[UNLOCKED BONUS] In 2018, momager Kris Jenner pulled off one of her biggest moves yet: she got youngest daughter Kylie Jenner on the COVER of very serious and respected Forbes magazine. Why? Thanks to her cosmetics company, Kylie was (apparently, according to financial 'proof' provided by the Jenners) about to become the world's 'youngest self-made billionaire'. The cover was a massive coup not ju...

We’re kickin’ it old school - FROM THE VAN (from Tasmania!). A mixed bag of 2025 JTG highlights, reccos, and the first ever year of The Gisty Awards! GET GISTED. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.