When Frank Farian first laid eyes on Rob Pilatus and Fab Morvan, he saw everything he wasn’t. They were handsome, young, and Black. But Frank had something they didn’t. He had power.

So, Frank offered them a devil’s bargain. Almost overnight, Milli Vanilli’s debut album went five times platinum and scored a Grammy nomination. But when the lie at the center of their success started to unravel, Rob and Fab would discover the hard way the difference between star power and real power.

From Wondery, Blame It on the Fame is a story about the lie that shot to #1 and what it cost to tell the truth. Hosted by Amanda Seales.

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March 21st, 2012. El Cajon, California. Shaima Alawadi was attacked inside her home and died from her injuries three days later. Shaima was a Muslim woman and because a threatening note was found next to her body, investigators initially considered the possibility that her death was a hate crime.

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June 28, 2014. Cottonport, Louisiana. When 29 year old kindergarten teacher and mother of two, Megan Ducote Parra, is found on the floor of her living room in a pool of her own blood with a gunshot wound to the head, detectives quickly rule it a suicide. But after some investigation of their own, Megan’s parents became suspicious that she may have been murdered.

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