Megyn Kelly hosts a mega-episode dissecting Jared Fogel's predatory grooming tactics, Rochelle Herman's FBI collaboration, and his 2029 release despite no remorse. The show then analyzes the unresolved Casey Anthony trial, where Chaney Mason argues prosecutors failed to prove Kaylee's death beyond reasonable doubt, leading to an acquittal. Finally, Michelle Dowd and Steve Hassan reveal how cults exploit situational vulnerability through information control and malignant narcissism, warning that authoritarian groups like Scientology suppress dissent to create dependency. [Automatically generated summary]
Welcome to The Megyn Kelly Show, live on Sirius XM channel 111 every weekday at New East.
Hey everyone, I'm Megyn Kelly.
Welcome to today's Sunday mega episode, bringing you some of our true crime show highlights from the archives.
Today, we have a deep dive on.
Oh, this one's so disturbing.
Jared from Subway.
If you have not heard this, you've got to listen to this.
All right.
Even if you have heard it, listen again.
It is a truly disturbing first-hand account, okay?
From someone who knew him well, was undercover working with the FBI.
The depths of this guy's depravity are deeply alarming.
You'll hear it in a minute.
Also, a look back at the Wild Casey Anthony case from both sides in a very interesting interview with her lawyer.
That is one of the few that is sort of seared in my memory, and you'll see why.
And also, a look at cults like you've never seen before.
I mean, who doesn't like a good cult story?
Enjoy, and we will see you on Monday.
Today, we bring you the case of convicted sex offender and pedophile Jared Fogel.
You may remember this guy as Jared from Subway.
Subway sandwiches.
Jared was a popular spokesman for Subway for 15 years.
While the world watched Jared talk about his weight loss and his favorite sandwiches on TV, one woman, Rochelle Herman, was working tirelessly behind the scenes to put Jared behind bars.
She knew something the rest of us did not.
And this is the story of how she learned it and worked to expose him.
Rochelle joins us today to walk us through the Jared Fogel case and to share how she helped take down the now disgraced Subway spokesman.
Rochelle Herman, so good, good, good to have you here.
Thank you so much for being on.
You're very welcome.
I appreciate the invitation.
Thank you.
Oh, I'm so awed by what you did, your whole role in this.
I've watched the whole series, and you are a heroine and just an incredibly courageous, ballsy person.
I mean, the number of things you did to advance the case against this guy is a long list and at extraordinary peril to yourself, your family.
All right, so we're going to go through it.
And I knew this story.
I was in news, but I didn't know anything about you, Rochelle, prior to seeing this.
So I'm grateful for this investigation discovery production and to get to know you.
All right, so let's start at the beginning.
You're down there in Florida, you're minding your own business, you're building your radio show, you're doing well, and that job as a journalist, as a public person, brought you within the orbit of Jared Fogel, the subway guy.
For what reason?
How?
He was working with the American Heart Association for talking with children, motivating them because of childhood obesity.
So he was a guest on my show because I always gave time to, you know, organizations such as the American Heart Association.
So you met him, and on that first meeting, did he what did he seem like?
The first time that I met him, he was about 20 minutes late, but he thought he seemed very nice.
He was very low-key, very pleasant, and he wanted to help children.
That was the whole process for the interview.
I think we like to tell ourselves we would be able to tell if we were in the presence of a child predator, just to make ourselves feel better, you know, as moms, as humans.
And that's why it is important that before you started to spend more time with him, he seemed quote normal to you.
We can't tell.
Like, just ask anybody who's in the Catholic Church.
You can't tell.
No, that's a very important point that you bring up, Megan, is you can't tell.
And that's why I worded it the way that I did, because he was very nice, very cordial, polite, and he was really focused on wanting to help children with childhood obesity.
So you can't tell who a predator is.
Most people have no idea when they're sitting right in front of them.
Although, I mean, in so many instances, they create a job or a situation around them that brings children into their orbit.
I mean, it's such a push-pull because they do that.
And yet, we all know so many great educators and coaches who are wonderful, who would never hurt a child, who make it their mission to help children as a profession, who we don't want to scoop up into that perverted, sick thing.
But it's no accident, right?
That it's probably no accident that Jared created this charity having to do with children.
No, it's no accident at all.
And, you know, when we're talking about, you know, across the country, I think it's about 80% or more where the predator is known, whether it's family related, but they do happen to know that they're familiar with the child.
They are, whether they're friends or, as you had mentioned earlier, educators.
They could be clergy.
I've received a number of messages from people around the world that have been victims.
They have fallen victim to being, you know, having sexual abuse as a child through these individuals.
And they run the whole gamut of who you think would be safe.
I should say up front: the FBI does not want you to be doing this interview.
Is that true?
Yes, but let me, please let me clarify.
The FBI, I was approached recently and they asked me to fall back.
And the reason why is for my own safety.
It's not because I have brought a voice to what is happening.
And I'm giving my voice to help anyone who has been subjected, whether it's Jared's victims or otherwise, to childhood sexual abuse, trafficking, whatever.
And they don't want me to put my life at risk and apparently i have angered a certain demographic there's a number of people i have received some um emails messages from individuals not very many i would say maybe two percent um very angry with what i did and and they're in defense of jared um gosh yes it's really sick in my opinion All right,
so we'll get to why and all of that, but it's absurd.
Thank you for, I mean, again, putting yourself at risk and coming on to tell the story.
It is important.
It's not just about Jared, though we do need to watch him too, because he's getting out of prison in the not too distant future.
But there are sadly many, many Jareds out there.
And Rochelle's become a bit of an expert in how to spot them and how to keep kids safe.
So there's a lot baked into your story.
All right.
So that was meeting number one, rather unremarkable.
And then tell us about the second time you met him.
Well, it was actually shortly after that.
I had met him because we did, we were scheduled to do radio first.
I did radio and TV as a show host.
And we did the radio interview first.
And then I met him at a local middle school in Sarasota.
And it was then that he said something to me when we were alone in the auditorium.
We were setting up for the influx of the children to come in.
And they were all very excited to meet him.
And so we were setting up and my cameraman was across the way preparing the cameras and our mics were hot.
Jared didn't know that.
And he had leaned over to me.
He was very flirtatious and very friendly and was just into general chatting with me.
And I asked him if he was excited about meeting the kids.
And then he leaned over and he said just above a whisper how hot he thought middle school girls were.
This is so bizarre.
This happened at the beginning of your second meeting.
Like he's saying the same way.
It's so confusing, right?
That he would right off the top say something.
Do you think it's because he didn't realize how inappropriate that sounded to someone who's normal?
I can only speculate why he said that to me.
But he was very interested in me and maybe he wanted to say something to me to see whether I would be on board or and don't waste his time.
But what happens is I kind of shut down inside when someone says something that inappropriate.
I just, I have a blank expression.
And I think that is, you know, my reaction to situations of this nature or similar is that I don't lash out.
I'm internalizing everything.
And I was thinking to myself, did I really just hear what he said?
Was that accurate?
And I looked across, I glanced to my cameraman and his mouth hit the floor.
And I could tell, yes, that's exactly what I heard.
Now, most of us, I got to be honest, would have said, so Jared's a freak.
My God, what the hell's up with Jared from Subway?
And moved on.
I mean, that's truly what most people would have done.
He's a freak, but like, there's no evidence that he's more than just a weird freak who thinks about these things.
Not you.
This is what makes you different.
Like the people who make a difference on this earth are the people who just go the extra mile, who don't just move on.
And so while you were thrown, you were, you know, you said you sort of internalize.
You started to come up with a plan.
Well, I did and, and if, if I may um, what I did I thought anybody would do.
And I was told down the line um, by one of the agents that I was working with.
They told me Rochelle what, what you have done um, in the initial steps, and everything that I did, most people would not do.
And I that was really perplexed by that.
I was like, what do you mean?
Most people wouldn't do that.
That is the right thing to do.
It's a moral and public obligation.
And no, apparently most people wouldn't.
No, and it's usually the instinct is, oh my god, get away right, like usually, it's like the guy's something's off, let me get out of here.
But you went the other way.
You went in and created a relationship with him.
That would prove very important and is ultimately one of the reasons why he's behind bars for as long as he is um.
I want to run a clip from from the show, um, that sort of takes us a little bit into some of that.
It's called Jared From Subway catching a monster and it talk.
It's you talking about your decision making, about what to do next.
Slot three, what do you want to do you?
I had to play a role with Jared that I was interested in him personally, romantically.
This was, in essence, a honey trap.
I was going to use his flirting with me interested me to my advantage.
Absolutely, why would I not?
That was my leverage.
I think you're incredible.
I think you're amazing baby, and everything I can imagine in a woman, everything I can imagine in a man, everything I can imagine in a friend and everything I can imagine everything.
So you got close to him and this was in the midst of you two getting closer as quote, friends.
But you were doing it for a reason.
I did, and I will tell you.
I would lay my life on the line to help protect, especially a child, anyone that you know is in need.
It's just my natural instinct to dive right in, but it for what I had to do and what I was subjected to hearing is nothing in comparison to what these children go through.
It's so disturbing.
We my producer, Natasha cut a bunch of clips from the show, 80 of which we're not going to run.
It's too dark, it's too disturbing and we talk about dark things sometimes on this show.
Too dark, too disturbing in the context of the film.
It's okay, it works and you need it to be in there in the context of this interview.
It would be too much for people to hear these actually just dark, graphic desires of Jared as spoken to you.
I mean, you're the reason we have them.
But we'll play a couple enough so the audience gets.
But you went through a lot having to hear that.
It's like stumbling upon child pornography.
Like, imagine if you've stumbled upon a magazine of child pornography just as you're cleaning your house and reading the most vile discussion.
That's what you were forced to endure in these conversations with him.
It was even worse than that, Megan.
Dark Desires and Children's Reactions00:02:42
The fact is, is that he was telling me what he was doing, what he did, the children's reactions.
And one thing that was not, there's a number of things that were not revealed, addressed in the docu series.
There's only three hours out of five years 24/7 work that I had been able to acquire.
So there's more to it, of course.
But there's a difference when what you see in a magazine and a story that you read than when somebody is telling you what they're doing and the reaction.
And he actually defined how he was grooming the children, which ultimately led to the rewriting of the playbook for profiling pedophiles within the FBI.
Right.
The grooming is all over the news, that word these days.
And I confess it was looming large in my own mind as I watched the docuseries because you hear some of it in his exchanges with you, what he wants you to do to help get children, you know, in his mind, ready for to visit him.
Of course, this would never happen.
And you were, of course, working with the FBI, but it is, it was illuminating.
And I think we can draw some lessons from it.
But I'm getting ahead of myself because I want to lay the foundation first.
So you decide to start befriending him.
But as you point out, it's more of a honeypot operation.
Like lure him in.
He was obviously attracted to you and get him to start talking, get him to say more about the hot middle schoolers.
But you didn't know whether he would.
I mean, it's tough to know whether that was a passing comment and he's just a weird guy, or this is an actual pedophile, and he's going to actually confess it to me, a public figure.
So how confident were you that you could get him to do that?
Well, I wasn't very, it wasn't about confidence, to be honest with you.
It was just about strategy, what to say, how to say it.
But really, what he was saying to me wasn't what he wanted to do.
He described in such detail what he did and the responses from the children, their reactions, what they would say, how to be able to really wade through and find the right specific child,
which was typically from a, you know, from a broken family, possibly have some kind of mental health issues, depression, or otherwise.
Fragile Confidence and Strategy00:08:32
I mean, he wanted the weak to pray on.
You start just using your dictaphone, Ben there, sister.
I was that person too, many years ago before we had the iPhone.
I was a lawyer back then.
But yeah, you started to tape him using a dictaphone.
And the vast majority of your relationship was over the phone, right?
Like, where was home base for him?
You were in Florida and he was where?
Well, his home is in Indianapolis or was in Indianapolis.
So that's his home base.
And that, but he traveled so much.
I mean, majority of the time, he was always on the road.
And not just in the United States, he was abroad in a number of other countries.
And he would be on the phone with me and I would be on the other, on the other end of the phone, and I could hear the crowds and the excitement.
Oh, you're the Subway guy, the kids screaming.
He said to me once that he was as popular as Michael Jackson in Australia.
You know what's crazy?
The docuseries does a good job of showing that he really was.
I lived it.
I was a human on this earth at the time.
Everyone knew him.
I knew him, but he was hugely popular.
It was beyond your normal, oh, there's that guy from the ad.
He became just ubiquitous.
He was everywhere.
He was Subway.
He was in every ad.
I mean, like, was it 300 ads for Subway?
Yes, I believe so.
He was just an everyday ordinary guy.
And people really supported him because of his quick rise to stardom and for losing weight and, you know, doing his diet with specific sandwiches from Subway.
So it was like, you know, for the average person, for anyone really, looking at him, he was just like an all-American hero because of how he reached, you know, that level of stardom.
And then the movie points out, he made millions.
I mean, he became very rich, very famous, well-traveled, beloved, with a lot of access to power players.
So all this happened over the course of some 15 years.
And I think that's about the span, all based on that one article in his University of Indiana, where he was going to school and lost 245 pounds in a year by eating two Subway sandwiches a day.
Then they did an article on him.
Subway heard about it, made him their spokesperson, and boom, off to the races.
So you're in the midst of this phone relationship with him.
And he is starting to say incriminating things.
So the first time, this was something that was unclear to me from watching the series.
He made the comment about the middle schoolers.
Then you're on the phone with him.
And you can hear in that last clip I played how it's getting kind of sexy between the two of you.
But then, and you were clearly in some of the clips trying to push it to like, so on the kids' subject, because you're on a mission.
How hard was it to extract the admissions that you would ultimately get from him in that phone relationship?
It was interesting because it was a phone relationship because I was never allowed during the time that I enlisted with the FBI to meet with him in person.
Although I wanted to because I felt as though the case could move, you know, much more swiftly and I could gain deeper information, more hands-on, if you will.
And he it was to me baffling that somebody would entrust another person with a phone conversation as a relationship and share in detail everything that he did.
When I think about it, I'm thinking perhaps he was lonely, didn't have, because he was so busy with his schedule at Subway.
He really didn't have time to make friends.
And he was, he had his friends, but not being all over the world, anyone that he could trust like that.
So perhaps it was just something that a necessity for him.
So maybe easier than you expected at first.
Now, wait, before you brought in the FBI, I love how you're moving the pieces.
But before that, you did have one meeting with him and it was scary, right?
Can you tell us about that?
Yes.
He said he was coming into Palm Beach and he was going to be there for a couple of days.
He had to do some work with Subway and asked if I would come up.
And, you know, here I am based out of Sarasota and I really wanted to get this information.
So I did.
I agreed to.
And he told me where he was.
And that's when I took the drive and I went there and he opened the door, welcomed me in.
Hi, how are you doing?
And then almost immediately became very flirtatious and hands-on.
And I kept pushing him aside and just trying to continue with the conversation because I had my dictaphone in my handbag and it was recording.
So I wanted to get as much information as quickly as possible because I was very uncomfortable being there.
And it wound up in you fleeing, right?
Like he, he left the room and you fled, which must have been very, you must have been very scared to just kind of jeopardize your operation by just peacing out.
I was.
I will tell you, I replay that time over and over in my head.
And I was so grateful when he did excuse himself from the room for a few minutes because that was my opportunity.
Other than that, I don't know how I would have gotten away because I don't, I'm not sure if he would have let me.
And you think back now, think of all he had to lose.
What if he had found your dictaphone?
What if your person spilled?
Well, that was definitely top of mind, but I will say I raced to my car as soon as he, as soon as that door shut, I quickly and very quietly exited and raced to my vehicle.
And then the entire drive home, which is about three hours, I was crying.
I was so upset because of what I just put myself at risk of, but I still needed more information.
I was very disappointed that I didn't get anything concrete.
It was inaudible, but there had to be another way.
And I knew that he was interested enough that another opportunity would arise.
You just told me you had a phone call from your kids and you had to get out of there when he called to say, hey, where'd you go?
So one of the things that's interesting to me, just from a human perspective and watching your story, is you talk about how you cried on the way home.
And there's another point at which you admit you threw up after one phone call.
And just you're very open about how this was actually really, really difficult on you emotionally.
And I have to say, Rochelle, I like that.
It's almost a more interesting story because you are very vulnerable in that way.
You're not this, you know, tough as nails, like I was going to nail him and I got him.
And it was, yeah, screw him.
You were very fragile at times in this thing, but you kept at it.
That is such a hopeful story, I think, to everyone out there.
And even if you are a crier, even if you're emotional, even if it's really hard, if you keep at it, whatever it may be, you could accomplish something hugely important.
You certainly can.
Now, I would like to point out, Megan, if you don't mind, that this really tore me apart.
It was very emotionally draining psychologically.
It was just a disaster because of everything that I heard.
I do not want, in my mind, to share with other people.
And that's why it took me quite a while before I came out to even share even a portion of what had transpired.
FBI Protocol and Family Attacks00:06:14
But, and I thought after the docuseries was aired, it would make me stronger.
And it did, but it was a grueling two years piecing this together.
And after the airing, and I can't go into detail too much, but there was an attack on a family member of mine.
And that is what made me very strong.
I'm different now than I was before that happened.
And that's only been a couple of months.
It just put everything into perspective for me, in the sense that you know you're, you have to stand up and and do what is right, because these it's not.
It's not something that anybody should stand down, it's something that I believe everyone.
You can make a serious difference if you make an effort to stand up and do what's right.
That's crazy.
I didn't realize there was a contingent of Jared defenders out there.
How is this even remotely controversial for what you did or what he's been exposed for, I don't know.
There there was a couple that I read um, they felt as though my recording him was illegal, which actually there was a gray area.
So and the FBI knew that because that's what I shared with them it's public broadcasting entity he knew that I was a known talk show host.
He called into the same telephone number, the same studio line.
He knew it was the studio number.
There was no expectation of privacy.
I didn't realize that.
Wait, these are.
These phone calls are on your studio line, the initial ones.
Before I agreed to work with the FBI, before I presented the case to the FBI.
I recorded everything within the studio.
He's a lunatic.
I mean talk about risky.
Okay, so you get these tapes.
And he does start saying very inappropriate and incriminating things.
And you go to the FBI and I mean, as soon as they hear what you have, they've got four agents in the room with you.
It's like they're, you know, i'm sure that at first they were like some lady from Sarasota is here she's.
Then it becomes very real, very fast, and they and you become a confidential informant for the FBI.
You start working with them.
You start, what was it wearing wires?
Or how would you work with the FBI on that?
Oh, I had phone calls yes 24, 7.
Um, you know, I had, I there.
There is protocol for when you make an outgoing call if I were to call him, and when you receive and from you know, beginning to end, different things you need to say just for legalities and also, once I had those tapes, once I had that recording you, I needed to bring them and do a drop immediately.
Um, for the integrity of the, the information, it's like something out of a movie.
You're going to like the dark parking lot doing the quick drive-by, you know handoff, and they say that's for your own safety, so nobody, if he were watching you, you know he wouldn't see anything.
Well, that's Exactly right.
That's why they do it in, you know, the darker corners.
They'll do it at, you know, undernight, you know, in alleyways.
And they do it where they pull up alongside me and it's always the dark, you know, the black suburbans, very dark tin.
You do the handoff.
It was really very surreal, very creepy.
I wanted to have further conversation with the agents when I made drops at certain times, but they did, they could not, they did not do that.
And I found out later on the reason why was because they did not want to chance anyone seeing this transpiring because it would put me at risk.
See, as a CI, CIs, you're given aliases and numbers, and that's what you're referred to, not your real name.
But I came out when Jared was arrested and I shared because the public has a right to know.
And that is exactly why I'm here today.
And there's further information that I'd like to share.
And I have a lot of things, you know, that I'm going, that I am pursuing because I think that I can make a big difference, but with the help of others, you know, out there, you know, mostly the victims, because without their stories, you know, they can really share some insight that we don't have personally if we haven't gone through it.
Well, you added a piece to it that was very important, which was it's one thing for the FBI to be saying we found thousands of images of child pornography on his computer in his hard drive.
It is another for us to hear it in his own words, his sick perversions.
There's just no getting around that.
One thing you can compartmentalize a little bit more easily, like, oh, God, who knows what was on there?
I guess he's a sick dude.
But to hear him, again, we won't be playing the most graphic sound bites here, is a different story.
You just, you know, and you feel very motivated to keep him behind bars forever, ideally.
But right now, that we're not on track for that.
So you're working with the FBI.
How long did that period go on?
You and the FBI?
Actively, just under five years.
So this is a great frustration to us and to you.
The audience now is saying, five years?
What do you mean?
He's making these admissions in the docu-series that you hear him talking about allegedly going to Thailand and what he did to the little children over there who were being sex trafficked.
Why wouldn't they go arrest him?
Isn't that enough to get a search warrant to see if he does have child pornography?
Like, why?
And what was the FBI saying?
Well, one would think I was very frustrated because I had given thousands of recordings over the years, and they were so compelling.
Intimidation and Compelling Recordings00:06:29
I even made phone calls to the office out of Tampa, middle of the night, you know, and trying to track down my handlers, my lead agent, to let them know that Jared is boarding a plane.
He's going, he's, you know, it's going to this city.
And he told me he's, you know, this one particular incident, there was a little girl he was going to see.
And he alluded to the fact that the parents knew what he was going to do.
So there's more to the story than just that, but that is what he had told me.
And I had that all on tape.
And I couldn't understand why it was so difficult, you know, working together with other law enforcement agencies to follow him, you know, when he gets off the air, the airplane and just track him to where he's going to track his cell phone, something.
And I still, I don't understand all the inner workings.
have their reasons but um i found that to be very frustrating because i didn't know what else to do we're going to play two sound bites here of your discussions with him and this is where it took just a particularly dark turn for for poor you because you you're a mom and you had two young kids who are i think nine and ten I mean,
it was a period of years, so they were aging, but they were around there.
And Jared knew that.
And he started to turn the discussion to your own children, which is something very different than the abstract idea, which is awful enough.
So we've got a bit of that from the piece.
We'll play SAT 4 first.
And this is a viewer warning.
This is disturbing and not appropriate for children.
Can you do anything I tell you, Daniel?
Yes, I will.
Your promise?
Yes.
We're looking for your kids make it.
Oh, my God, Rochelle, that is stomach turning.
It really is.
For all those years prior, he really did not bring my children into conversation at all.
So now his sights were set on my kids.
How did you manage through that?
Actually, when that initially happened and he started to zone in on my kids and ask questions, that's when I spoke with my lead agent, Billings, Special Agent Billings.
And she, I was going to quit and just walk away.
And through conversations, they did not have anybody else to get in.
They had tried for quite a while through me to try to introduce an agent to take my place ultimately, but he would never bite.
He was just, he was just very stuck on wanting to talk with me.
You were it for the FBI, for everyone.
Here's a second sound bite.
same vein and same warnings.
So what's your kids?
Do you think I'll like better seeing naked your son and your daughter?
I don't know.
You seem to like both girls and boys.
That's what you think I would like better.
I don't know.
I really don't.
Hello.
Oh, my God.
That was very difficult for me to hear.
Of course.
My God, your strength is superhuman.
The FBI, they just weren't doing it.
And you ultimately did something extraordinary.
Again, another extraordinary act.
You went to, was it the local DA to try to get somebody to do something?
I went to local law enforcement, Sarasota Police Department.
I had my own talk shows, TV, radio, great following.
Did it not locally, just not only locally, but nationally as well on a number of different venues.
And I was going to and played it out in my mind many times because I felt that there was so much information that I had already shared.
I know what he's doing.
They know what he's doing.
And every minute makes a difference.
That's a potential child being violated, being stopped.
Stop, you know, being harmed.
And that is something that I wasn't going to stand down any longer.
So I went to the Sarasota Police Department and essentially turned in the FBI.
And of course, you can only imagine the looks that I got.
And they were questioning, what did you just say?
What are you doing?
And you're reporting.
Why?
And I said, because, you know, it's, I felt as though they were putting the public at risk for not moving quicker in the case.
But I am not, it was great teamwork, and I applaud and commend all of the law enforcement worldwide that really participated in this inner poll and because there were so many different countries that were involved.
But they wouldn't allow me to leave.
I went on my lunch break and I was there for many hours and they had tied in, there was probably about 30 or 40 law enforcements.
And then all of a sudden the FBI, a bunch of agents walk in the door and I felt as though I was almost being, you know, quashed not to say anything through intimidation.
But I stood my ground and it took them quite a while before they convinced me not to go public.
They did say that I would be impeding an ongoing investigation and there would be repercussions legally against me.
And I still did, I didn't care.
Legal Threats and Police Intervention00:04:23
And they saw that.
And it finally took one of the detectives from Sarasota Police Department that pulled me aside.
And only by what he shared with me did I agree not to go public because having my own airtime, I wanted to lock the door and then broadcast what I had been doing, what I had discovered, and just warn the public myself.
That's a last resort.
Right.
And he told me, this detective, he said that what they discovered, because they couldn't tell me all the details, and I understand that, but they said, he said to me, what they discovered was that Jared was but a pee in a pot, regardless of how big he was, so well known that he was leading them to even larger individuals,
political figures, celebrities, and that a case like this typically takes at least 10 years, if not longer, to get the concrete information.
And so it will happen.
He will be taken down, but it's going to take that time and process.
But in the meanwhile, when that does happen, he told me that I would see these others fall from grace, really, and be exposed for what was really going on.
And that leads me to believe Jared pled guilty.
I was so grateful that the children and even myself didn't have to go to trial and put anybody else at risk of having to go through that whole ordeal because that's traumatizing again to these children.
So I just, I just wonder, you know, I don't know whatever has been redacted from the reports, what he did to steer them in this direction or if it was only through their own investigative resources of how they found out.
But, you know, now we see Epstein, you know, he had fallen shortly thereafter, really, in the grand scheme of things.
It was only a few years.
But, you know, and I can't see why he would not have at some point engaged with Epstein because he liked going to Boca Rattan.
Like going to Palm Beach and spending time there.
And, you know, Palm Beach is where Epstein lived.
And that's where his playground was for the most part, aside from his island, of course.
But so I think there's a lot more to it.
And I think a lot more is going to come out.
Wow.
I haven't even considered the Epstein connection because I was going to say there was no domino cascade of celebrities and public figures falling for this kind of thing after Jared.
Epstein would be a big one.
That if there were, if there were a connection there, that would be a very significant one.
How long in advance of Jared's arrest did that conversation with you happen where they said all that and urged you not to go on your show?
About three, four years, maybe.
Could have been longer.
But I had been working with them, I think, for about three years.
And that's when I went to Sarasota police to turn them in, to hopefully, you know, ramp up the operation and put new, you know, maybe some new eyes on the case.
And so it was with a few years after that, because I had a couple more years in.
And, you know, that was that, that's just how all that transpired.
So you are, you're going through this.
There's, it's very difficult for you.
Now, were you a single mom?
I couldn't tell whether you had a divorce or.
Yes.
Okay.
We, we were, we were separated, obviously, first, it's, um, and then ultimately divorced.
So I was a single mom raising my children, but we had 50-50 custody.
Um, and it's interesting.
My, um, my ex-husband, my children's father, I was retired police department from Sarasota.
Time Consuming Calls and Arrests00:05:14
Um, and aside from our differences that anyone would have going through a divorce and being divorcees, um, most people don't get along right away.
That takes years to develop.
But he removed that aspect of our personal life.
And he was all hands in, all hands on deck, helping me watch the children, taking them last minute, doing whatever he could to provide me the time and the understanding because I would be able to talk to him during these times of duress because I told him what I was doing.
I would never do that without telling their dad because he had a right to know and it was important that he did know.
But I have to give him a lot of credit because he did what I think is very difficult for most people is to put your differences aside and move forward because he knew what I was doing was very important and risky about it.
Your son, Thomas, is featured in the docuseries and appears very proud of what you did.
We pulled just one soundbite, but there are a few that we could have chosen from.
It's Sod 8.
I'm very proud of my mother.
She did do something heroic.
It was selfless because she lost a lot in the process.
Your daughter does not appear, and there's speculation in the wake of this docuseries that the two of you are estranged, perhaps because of these phone calls, perhaps she held them against you or something else against you.
What's the truth on that?
The truth on that is she was not, she's a very private person.
She was all for us doing the docuseries.
She thinks it's important, but she just, you know, personally, she doesn't like, you know, all the attention.
She doesn't like that.
She does it.
She's very private and tries to keep to herself.
But as far as being estranged from her, of course, you know, there was a certain period of time that she was upset with me.
She was angry with certain situations because of what she would, you know, perhaps read.
And she thinks that I put them at risk, which I never did and I never would.
I have been able to just share with her exactly through facts, factual information, exactly how everything transpired.
And she sees that now.
But what she was most angry with me about was that she lost her mom for all those years.
She didn't have the mom connection throughout her childhood for the most part that other kids did because I always had to be away.
I could never tell her why.
And still to this day, I think that there's some, you know, animosity there because I didn't have to do that with the kids, is what she had said when she was younger.
She's an adult now, so she thinks differently.
But her whole idea was you didn't have to do that.
You needed to spend more time with us.
And I get that, but I had it was a lose-lose situation in a sense because I lost my ability to be the mom that I always wanted to be.
And was that time consuming?
People out there might be thinking, well, you just had some phone calls every once in a while, a couple of tape drops.
Like, what was so time consuming about it?
Well, I was a single mom.
I had to make a living.
I did my own shows.
I booked.
I did everything.
So it's, you know, that alone, especially even back then, it's really a two-income family.
So that took a lot.
I did not get compensated during my time with the FBI for all those years.
And I would have to leave my house, hire sitters if my, you know, if their dad wasn't available.
And it was just, it was so time consuming because he would call during the day, but a lot of the calls would come in the evening.
Being around the world, he'd be in different time zones as well.
And they would be relentless.
He would call continuously, and I had to go through the taping.
And then as soon as they were done, go meet up with an agent and make the drop.
And I really was not getting the sleep that I needed.
And it was just very draining on me.
How many phone calls would you say there were?
Over all those years, how many phone calls would you say you had taped?
Oh, well, if you average it out at the eight to ten per day for years, seriously?
Only towards the very end did they become less and less because he kept wanting to see me in person and they would not allow that.
And that really with kids by that time.
At the end there, Michelle, what didn't he get married and have children of his own?
Documentary Impact and Mistakes00:13:08
Like at the at the end?
I believe so, but I don't think that I was working with the FBI at that point.
Okay.
So there was a period where your phone calls ended and then there was a gap and then the arrest.
That's correct.
Okay.
Because weirdly, the arrest did not happen as a direct result, as I understand it, of your tapings, though they would become relevant at trial.
He had a guy running his children's foundation who was also a disgusting pervert, as it would turn out.
And that guy, his name was Russell.
What's his, what's his last name?
Russell Taylor.
Russell Taylor.
That guy, Russell Taylor, would be the reason Jared would ultimately get caught because he Had without getting too graphic, but he and his wife were into some very disturbing things.
And there was an email that got circulated of his wife and some sort of very twisted sex act.
And the act itself is unlawful.
And they got wind of the fact that Russell was emailing it.
Emailing the pictures is not unlawful, but they just decided it's time to investigate Russell and his family situation, what's going on there.
And that led them to Russell's computer, which had all these sexual images of children on it, including his own stepdaughters, who we now know whose images we believe were funneled to Jared Fogel.
And the young women, who are very young moms, at least one of them is a mom herself now, spoke at length in the documentary.
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They were very put together, I have to say, for girls who have been through this.
This guy was taping them in their showers, in their beds.
It's their stepfather, put cameras all over their home.
This sick, perverted, and then using the tapes to, I don't know if he sold them.
He certainly provided them to Jared for people to get off on the images of his own stepdaughters who had no idea he was this way, who thought that he loved them.
Here's a little bit from Christian and Hannah, the two daughters who spoke out in the documentary.
After Russell was arrested, we had to talk to the FBI.
I was in a very traumatic, frozen state.
I couldn't even believe what was happening to me.
They sat me down and told me that there were cameras all throughout the house.
They were everywhere.
Russell, he was watching us in the shower, watching us get dressed in our rooms, watching us masturbate.
We were being watched 24/7.
My God.
So, this leads the police to Jared because they saw Russell had it.
Russell had given some to Jared.
And then they went to Jared.
They got a search warrant for Jared's computers.
And then they had him.
I mean, they had all the images.
God only knows what was on his computers.
And by that point, Rochelle, he was definitely married and they had children.
It's just terrifying to think that a pedophile can not only molest children, he can make children of his own.
And God knows what their future would have been had he not been caught.
It was a huge deal.
We have a video of the raid when the police got to his house and it hit the news like that: that Jared Fogel, the subway guy, has been arrested.
His home has been raided.
Here's the video back at that time of him coming out of the house.
And no one could believe it.
No one could believe that this guy who'd been in our living rooms for 15 years as this sweet guy next door was a sick child molester.
So now the day that that happened, you were no longer working with the FBI, but you are the person who's put all these.
What was that like for you?
It was very surreal.
I thought that I would have received a phone call to, you know, prep me and let me know.
I knew while I was working undercover, that was always the plan.
If they had decided that this is the time they were going to arrest him, the plan of action was they were going to send agents to my children's school.
The children had to be prepped if this day were to happen, you know, that, and the schools, all the, you know, the teachers and the superintendent, they all needed to be made aware of this over the years.
And they had switched schools from time to time as they were growing up.
And, you know, so they were, my kids knew that there was something that was happening.
They, my son had revealed to me that they knew that I was working with the FBI.
There was a bad man I was helping them get.
But he said to me, he never knew who this person was.
And he was actually saying about he and my daughter, because they'd have conversations.
And it was worse that they didn't know who it was because they didn't trust anyone.
They didn't know, honestly, could it be someone that they know, a friend, a family member, somebody at school?
I didn't know all these years that that was what they were subjected to.
So that really, you know, that is difficult and, you know, really stomach churning to me to hear what they had to go through.
Because everyone's the boogeyman.
Everyone's the boogeyman when you don't know.
But of course, you weren't at liberty to share any of that.
Yeah.
So he had two children at the time he was arrested.
They were three and five, a boy and a girl.
And his wife left him immediately.
She had no idea.
That was pretty clear from her public statements.
She was very angry at him and devastated, devastated.
I cannot imagine finding out this person who you love and are building a family with is a monster.
I mean, a true monster.
It's just this poor woman who must have had to go through years of therapy and make sure her children were okay.
So at the trial, well, there wasn't a trial, but he got arrested and he winds up pleading guilty.
But then we get to the sentencing.
And the judge, though the judge did not give Jared the time you or I would have liked, which could have been up to 50 years, the judge did saddle him with more than the prosecution even recommended.
And my understanding, Rochelle, is that that was in part due to your tapes and hearing the years of his admissions on them.
Yes, that's exactly what I had been told.
And that really gave me a gratifying feeling that those were not wasted years.
It was very disappointing when I separated because I wasn't able to get an agent.
And he just wouldn't, he wouldn't bite no matter what I said.
And believe me, you know, we put forth great effort trying to get somebody else to take my place because it did ultimately take a toll on me.
But I was willing to move forward.
But it just, you know, I couldn't move forward anymore after he started engaging with my children.
Right.
And honestly, at that point, I'm sure your faith in the FBI's actually making an arrest was waning.
It's how many years of this am I going to have to go through?
It's going to be my whole life.
It's going to be my children's whole life.
You did your part.
You definitely did your part.
So he cops this plea.
He's in prison now till 2029.
I mean, it's 2023.
That's six years away.
He's still going to be a relatively young man.
And now he knows.
He knows now about you.
He knows it wasn't a friendship that you were taping him.
So that's got to be scary for you.
Well, it is.
In a sense, it is because I've had all these years.
He has enough money.
If he wanted to do something, he could have easily hired someone.
You see that all the time.
I will share with you, my daughter had said to me, and I thought that she was, you know, a little, you know, overreacting, but she said to me years ago, she was terrified of Jared with his money.
Either he himself would do this or when he gets out of prison that she felt as though he would rape and murder her and her brother.
And I said, no.
I said, why would you think that?
And she said, well, you essentially took his children away from him.
Why would he not do the same to you?
And so I posed that to the agent that I was working with, and the response really took me back.
She said, she's not far off.
And that was the end of it.
And I still to this day, it's still very disturbing, but it legitimized my daughter's feelings that she wasn't far off.
So there's a lot of twists and turns that people don't realize that, you know, that are still in the shadows that we deal with every day.
Forgive me for this question, but I should just ask you for the record.
You never did provide any images or access to your children, to Jared.
Oh, no.
Oh, no, no, not at all.
And when I said moments ago about his my leaving, you know, because I couldn't take his engaging with my children, that is through referencing his mentioning of my children, because I never brought them up and I never gave any accurate names of their friends.
I made up every name I ever used referring to a child because one day I knew he would be in court.
And in hindsight, that those names being in line with a child that I was referencing that really didn't have anything to do, they would end up have been subjected to going on the stand, being interviewed to make sure everything was okay, that they weren't involved.
So I made everything up from the names to everything so that that would never take place.
He's 45 now.
I guess he'll get out at age 51.
That's still a relatively young man.
You don't grow out of pedophilia.
It's a lifelong affliction.
This is why so many people are like, well, how does he get out?
Like, how do we keep him in?
How do we make sure he doesn't hurt more children?
Like, what reason do we have to believe he's not going to just pick back up where he left off when he gets out?
First, he has no remorse.
He never did.
And any of his comments, any of the articles that you read, anyone that he speaks to, he's only remorseful because he got caught.
And he's saying, oh, I made a big mistake.
Big mistake.
He never talks about what he did was wrong.
He never talks about how sorry he feels for his victims.
Never.
Every single person from statistically speaking that that commits a sexual crime, that in their lifetime, they end up committing 179 on average sexual crimes.
And I think he's well over that quota.
But when he gets out, he will have a lifetime of supervision until what something falls through the cracks.
I don't know.
So my he should be chemically castrated.
There should be a mandatory chemical castration.
Thailand Trip and Sexual Offenses00:08:30
Yep, absolutely.
Well, I'll become a lobbyist and be right there to try to help move that along because I do believe that somebody, especially like him, needs that.
If the FBI were to release some of these recordings that you have never heard, you've not heard, that would undoubtedly be right there on the documentary to go through.
There's worse than is in the docuseries?
Oh, yes.
Yes.
You have to understand I gave all of the recordings.
It was only these recordings.
I didn't save every recording.
You know, initially, I was just giving them everything.
And then the reason why I have those recordings was for my own protection, because I didn't want anything to be used against me and be thrown in as though, you know, collateral damage because they couldn't make a case.
And then all of a sudden, even though I didn't do anything, you know, use these tapes again, you know, against me for any reason.
There was nothing that indicated they would do that, but I'm one that thinks ahead.
So I had made copies of those tapes for myself.
And I had every legal right to do so.
They just didn't know that I made those copies.
Wow.
Smart.
So there's, okay, I didn't realize that.
And that was also probably played for the judge, the most graphic pieces of evidence.
Possibly, yes.
We don't know.
Yes.
No, we don't know.
And I think there's a lot that's redacted.
I think, you know, these higher ups, these individuals in society, you know, as I said earlier, political to Hollywood celebrities, who knows around the world, that also were friendly with Jared or that would talk maybe online and share ideas and children even.
Because at one point, and this is just before I turned everything over to the FBI, Jared wanted me to meet him in Chicago.
He wanted to, as he said, get a couple of kids.
And he talked about underground clubs.
He knew where to go.
And that's when I was asking him, well, how would we get these kids?
Where would we find them?
Oh, we'll, you know, we'll figure it out.
So I knew just the way he was saying it and leaning towards it.
He's done this before.
He knows what he's doing.
The FBI had told me that a pedophile has different fetishes, if you will.
So they're A, B, and C. Jared is truly an anomaly, something they've never seen before.
He is the entire alphabet.
So that is what prompted them in their review and rewriting of how to profile pedophiles.
Do you know whether I know on the phone that recordings we heard in the film, he's saying he went to Thailand and he's pretty explicit about what he allegedly did over there.
But then the docu series also says that as far as we know, they couldn't find any evidence that he actually did go to Thailand.
Well, that struck me as odd because you just look at his passport to find out whether he went to Thailand.
That's knowable.
So do we know whether that was true?
And do we know whether there were actual children victims?
I mean, as opposed to, of course, the victims in the photos were victims, but I mean, you know, that he laid hands on children, actual children.
Is there evidence that I do not know?
I know what he told me.
I know for detail.
You cannot make that up.
I mean, there's too many minute details, reactions, conversations he's had.
Um, even with this one particular boy, his parents, that this is what they do, this is how they make a living.
They don't have a problem with it.
Talking about the child, they want to do this.
He would tell me they want to and there is proof that he went to Thailand because there are other production companies that are doing documentaries, or they were because I was scouted by a number of them over the years and they had called upon me because of my, my work um, and there are cases.
He went to Thailand, he went to to Asia, different areas around the world, and he would go with the founder of Subway, he would go with some of the vendors from Subway um, as a group.
So whether they were uh, conducting business or it was a pleasure trip, that I do not know, but there is actual evidence and proof that they did go.
I don't know if that's been halted or what, or these documents, these documentaries, will come out here in short order, but they've been working on them for the past two or three years.
You mentioned Subway.
I mean we haven't even really touched on that piece of it.
It's, it's miraculous to me that this brand withstood this controversy, that the face of the brand turned out to be a serial pedophile.
There's no other kind and they're fine.
They did fine.
There was a question about whether they knew, or had reason to know, that Jared had this issue with children.
The docuseries touches on it a bit.
His wife seemed to think that Subway had been given a heads up on at least one complaint about inappropriate behavior towards children.
Subway denied that, but what do we know about Subway's knowledge, if any?
I know for a fact Subway knows.
I wrote them an email during one of my uh breaks, if you will.
I had an emotional break one night um, I remember being curled up on the couch um, and crying because of what I had just heard, and I said that that's enough.
I wrote an email to Subway.
I went on their corporate website and once you hit submit, it's it's.
You don't get a copy because it wasn't through your own email feed.
So I sent it to them and I told them that Jared Was a sex offender, that he had made comments about my children and that I know that he's doing these things.
I forget verbatim exactly what I said.
I do have notes in one of my journals that I could reference, but for a long time, Subway said, Oh, we never received that.
Well, a forensic investigation revealed otherwise from by a third party.
And then finally, Subway stood up.
Oh, we did find that email, but it didn't say anything about sexual nature.
Well, why would I write to Subway otherwise to tell them I like their sandwiches?
I don't think so.
So they did, and that was written in one of the articles.
I do have a copy of that, but I'm sure that it can be found easily online if you look.
But, you know, it's very interesting.
I've had some people approach me, you know, through Messenger or whatnot.
And, you know, a couple individuals, it was maybe three or four, they thought I did this for the money.
Well, I never got paid for my time doing this.
And somebody, one person had written, oh, you did this.
I bet you already are writing your book to make all this money.
Well, you know, that's a very small-minded person, in my opinion, because if I wanted to make money and that was the way I was going to do it, something so, you know, I don't even have a word to put to that.
But why not go to Subway and, you know, ask, tell them, well, I have information and I'm willing to settle out.
Or it's not about money.
It is absolutely a necessary.
Jared was a rich man.
You could have gone to him.
Yes, of course.
And that's very clear if you watch the arc of this story.
But you should write a book because people need to know.
I mean, this is a fascinating story and there's a lot to be learned.
Banning Books and Necessary Truth00:04:38
And that leads me to my next point we mentioned at the beginning: the grooming behavior.
So he would say, you know, you were sort of pretending that you were fine with his predilections and, you know, how could you be of assistance to him with that?
And you were trying to learn about his methods.
And you did learn.
So the part of the grooming, as I understood it from the film, was he wanted you to make sure, like you, in grooming kids for him, you talked about inappropriate sexual things in front of them.
So can you talk a little bit about that?
Sure.
Well, first, he was always wanting to make sure I dressed accordingly, which I never did.
I let him know.
He wanted to know what kind of bathing suits I had.
Do I have a really tiny bikini and to prance around around the children when they're over and to pick out who I think would be best and their siblings?
So my children's friends and their siblings, the younger, the better.
And Jared initially, his statement to me was how hot he thought middle school girls were.
At the end, it went from there all the way to infants to prepuves of tape saying the younger, the better.
Wrestling with your own ears.
Tickling.
Sorry, go ahead.
Tickling and wrestling and gradually getting closer to the private parts and then doing like a daring to so it turned it into a game.
He used his popularity, his, you know, himself being famous because there was such an allure and the children were so drawn.
They get to meet someone famous.
And I saw that all the time.
But he says in one of the clips about the one from the broken home.
He was always, he had it figured out.
And what he didn't, he would go with it and keep it as something that he just studied children on how to get closer and closer.
And that's what his focus was.
That was so disturbing.
So now moms or single dads who are raising kids by themselves now have to worry about their kids being singled out for targeting by a pedophile.
Because they're from a quote broken home, because they may have an extra sadness in their lives that some sick, twisted effort will take advantage.
I mean that's these are the realities that we have to wrestle with and as exposed by your reporting and this story um, but the inappropriate sex talk at a young age.
It is relevant, Rochelle.
I mean you know we're debating this right now on a national level about these books that are coming into the k through 12 education system and some say oh, they're banning books.
You know, and I think the truth is they're not banning, they're pulling books out of children's school libraries that are not age appropriate.
And this is people defending that action of pulling the books will say they're groomers, the people who want this in front of the children, and I see the point.
Inappropriate sex talk before in front of children isn't just improper, it can actually lead to very dangerous things in that child's future.
Oh, without a doubt, I mean that's just any any you know base level psychologist counselor will tell you that.
I mean a lot of us don't have a degree in in um mental health, but a lot of it is common sense and that has been removed too many times over it's.
It's interesting when you see what they do allow in and, but they are taking taking some measures to remove this.
But is it too far?
You know, too too little, too late?
I don't know now, if you look, statistically speaking um, over the years, homeschooling has grown dramatically as a personal choice.
Um, there's a number of reasons that people have made this choice but, from my understanding, a lot of it because has to do with, you know, you see, not just men but women also violating children um, your educators clergy, group leaders uh politicians, even law enforcement.
Um, I know that there's a just a small amount, but small is not none, and that's where we need to get right.
Victim Stories and Homeschooling Choices00:05:35
So these moms are like, i'm not putting my kid in the school and my kid's not joining the BOY Scouts and isn't going to be an altar boy.
I mean, I can relate to some of that to some extent.
It's just you're so, especially when they're really little and they can't really vocalize and they could be taken advantage of.
You have to be so careful.
So like, do we know about Jared, how he got this way?
Rochelle Is, has anybody been able to interview him?
Or, you know, did you ever ask him, like, was he molested?
I did ask him.
He said, no, he was not.
But I think there's a lot of people, if they were, I don't think they're just going to come out and say that, even if he was comfortable with me, that if he was, perhaps that just hit too close to home.
I can understand that.
But I think personally that it's just within his genetic makeup.
I think that there's a default in how he's wired.
I think that's just whether it's an illness, I kind of think that it is.
I would hope that it is in the sense that, you know, hopefully we can find a fix for it later at some point.
But he doesn't even acknowledge that there's a problem.
And you asked me, you said about anyone interviewing him in this docu series.
I gave the producers and directors the idea.
I said, well, why don't we close the docuseries with a face-off between Jared and I at the facility that he's in, because I would like some closure.
I would like to say a few things to him.
But they did send the request and he declined.
But that is something that I would have been interested in doing because, you know, there's nothing easier than gauging somebody by their body language.
Does he have any ongoing relationship with his parents?
Do you know what that situation is?
I don't know.
I believe his mom was a teacher.
His father's a doctor.
Probably retired now.
But from all information that has been dispersed out there is he had a very good upbringing.
You know, prominent family, really no money issues.
So they didn't have that aspect.
So I don't know why Jared has done what he's done, but I have heard, and this is secondhand.
So there, but people that went to school with Jared, college, for example, he would, I was told that he would sell pornography to make some extra money.
And he made quite a bit of doing that.
So they also talked about how he was morbidly obese from a young age, that he had no friends in high school.
You know, there's a reason he got famous for losing 245 pounds.
He had it to lose.
And then some had, you know, enough left over.
It's like 245 pounds.
What's left?
A large man.
So he was very, very large.
And I do think there's, when you're that kind of an eater from a young age, there's an issue.
There's an issue there.
I don't know what went on in that family.
But, you know, you see your kid is, what, 350, 400 pounds and has absolutely no friends.
That's that's not a good parent.
That is not a good set of parents.
Something, something was wrong in that house.
All right.
So a couple questions for you as now we're thinking about his release.
Do we know if there's any chance he's getting out earlier than 2029?
No, he cannot.
He's not allowed to get out earlier according to the stipulations the judge had set down.
Is there any chance he could face other charges?
You know, I know I've seen you reaching out saying, if you are a victim of Jared Vogels, reach out to me because there may be children who have been molested by him who haven't yet come forward.
Absolutely.
In my mind, and from my experience, that is an actual fact.
There are.
They're adults now.
Perhaps they're just trying to, you know, keep it in the shadows, in the recesses of their mind.
That is not healthy.
You will not be all you can be, and you won't have a truly fulfilling life unless you address what had happened.
And the fact is, is that it did happen.
And if you come out and you step forward, you know, I could be and give you my shoulders, my strength, my voice to help to be able to disseminate and set this into the areas.
I know the FBI has a great place that you can go on their website and report things.
But if anyone is hearing this and they are a victim of Jared Fogels, please, I really, I really must insist that you please step forward and share what happened because it can make a difference.
It can keep him behind bars where he needs to be because the day he is released is the day society is going to be in grave danger.
And I truly believe that.
Child Advocacy and New Media00:02:25
Me too.
So you're, what are you doing now?
Are you still doing radio and journalism?
It seems like some of your work has shifted to advocacy on behalf of kids now and writing books to help sound the alarm for families.
Yes, I had stepped away.
The FBI had asked me or told me two years ago.
I had to leave my business and eliminate all my original contact information so that, because Jared had that same contact information, so all of that had to go away when Jared was arrested because they actually was before Jared was arrested, when I ended my work with the FBI.
So everything had to end.
And so I went off into a different arena for a while.
And then I had fallen ill for quite a while and was bedridden for about three years.
But what?
Yes.
Yes.
I slipped at a job that I was doing.
I was team leader for Keller Williams in Sarasota.
And I had slipped, broke my ankle, and I came down with RSD, which is now reflex sympathetic dystrophy.
It's aka the suicide disease, the world's most painful chronic condition.
I've learned to disseminate the pain.
And that's another book that I'm working on actually on how to teach people how to do what I've done because I still have it to this day.
But what I am now doing, and I am going to start doing podcasts and get back on terrestrial radio again because and TV, if possible, that's really where I did my best work and where I would like to be.
Since this docu series, I'm under contract, so it's one year from the date of airing before I can do any of that.
But in the meanwhile, I am writing, I have three books pertaining to child advocacy for child sexual abuse that goes from, it goes one about the story, you know, in the mind, the mind of a monster.
And that's going to be all these other areas that I haven't been able to share because there's just not enough time.
Whistleblower Status and Ongoing Work00:04:09
So I'm going to be, that's all in that book.
And, you know, all the behind the scenes and, you know, everything that happened during my time with the FBI.
But then the other, another book that I'm writing is for children.
And it's going to be, it is actually, because I'm about halfway through, but it's about, it's a workbook on how to strategically position themselves to be their own superhero.
And, you know, between knowing the signs of a predator and what good play and bad play is.
I actually am going to be putting it on my site, just the outline of where I'm at and exactly what is happening with my writing so that I, because I'm still in the process.
So I would love feedback from the public.
So I will share some of that so that it can be written into the best possible workbook out there that I'm hoping at some point, not just for personal use, but that can also be implemented in school criteria as well.
And then another one is for caregivers and parents to know the warning signs because when someone is being abused, whether it's the elderly or they're manipulated or a child, they're very silent.
You don't recognize what's really going on in most cases.
A lot of times you do.
You just see something that's off.
But it's like asking the right questions, looking for certain markers.
Are they uncomfortable when this particular person is approached?
Do they fight when you say, oh, you get to stay over their house tonight?
There's a lot that I think can be very helpful.
And there's a lot of elderly that are not only abused by personal caregivers in their home, but in facilities as well, trusted employees that people are putting hidden cameras in the rooms because they sent something as off.
Well, this is all great work.
I mean, this clearly is your life's work.
This is going to make a difference in people's lives.
I do have to ask you, you know, now with him in jail, with the story out there, any regrets?
Like, if you had it to do over again, would you?
Oh, absolutely, without a doubt.
There's other cases that I'm working on.
As a matter of fact, they're not child sexual abuse cases.
They're very diverse in nature.
But there are other cases that have presented themselves to me.
I'm all in.
And, you know, law enforcement has always been, you know, open arms with me.
And I am so happy that I am received that way because when I came out after Jared was initially arrested, I felt as though, wow, you know, whistleblower, that, you know, they're going to want keep me at arm's length.
They're going to think less of me.
And years pass, and I have come to find out because they've told me themselves, absolutely not, that they greatly respect the work that I did.
And, you know, and I still continue my work today.
I'm so glad to hear that.
And I'm so glad to meet you.
Rochelle, thank you for telling your story and for all that you've done.
Oh, I appreciate you, Megan, very much.
And I want to thank you and all your listeners for the opportunity to be here today.
Thank you very much.
All the best to you and your family.
Thank you.
Isn't she amazing?
This is the story.
My God.
The Wrong Car and Missing Daughter00:15:26
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I'm going to take you back now to July 15th. 2008, when Cindy Anthony of Florida first reported her granddaughter Kaylee missing, a fact she only learned one month after the child had disappeared.
Cindy had no idea that her grandchild was missing because that child, she believed, had been with its mother, Casey Anthony.
Casey Anthony had been claiming that she and her little girl were on a trip together.
When grandma called, she just kept telling grandma that little Kaylee couldn't talk.
But then a fateful event took place.
You see, the car that Cindy, that's the grandma, had lent her daughter, Casey, wound up in an impound lot.
Cindy and her husband, George, the parents of Casey, were called by the towing company.
They thought Casey was off on vacation with little Kaylee.
They didn't understand why she'd be separated from the car.
But they went to the lot, they examined the automobile, and suddenly their minds were flooded with questions.
A few phone calls later, and they realized Casey had been lying to them.
She had not been on a vacation somewhere.
She had been staying with some boyfriend.
But where was Casey's child, their granddaughter, Kaylee?
The answer to that would take another five months and would end in a dark and gruesome discovery.
Two-year-old Kaylee was dead by homicide, and Casey had known that she'd been dead for weeks.
My guests today to discuss this case are Chaney Mason and Beth Karras.
Chaney is an attorney who served as co-counsel on the Casey Anthony defense team and who wrote the book Justice in America: How the Prosecutors and the Media Conspire Against the Accused.
And Beth is a former prosecutor and journalist who covered this trial from 2008 to 2011 for True TV.
Welcome, Chaney and Beth.
So good to have you both here.
Thank you.
Hello.
Hi.
So, first, let me tell you this: Beth, I'm so happy to see you because I remember being a young reporter at Fox News and following you and following your coverage on court TV, now True TV, whatever.
And I just always admired you and thought you were such a straight shooter and really smart of the law.
So it's fun to have you on.
Thank you for being here.
Well, thank you very much.
Thank you for that introduction.
Of course.
And Chaney, you're the man.
You and Jose are the ones who tried this case and managed to get this acquittal, which shocked the nation.
And I'd love to get into all of it because I'd love to take an honest look at what's real and what's not.
We just went through this with, for example, Amanda Knox and compared what was real in her case to the way the media covered it.
And there was a very wide delta, right?
So I understand your point, Chaney, that you can't just go by media reports.
So we'll get into all of it.
Okay, so let's start at the beginning.
We're at the point where Cindy, I mean, it's confusing for the audience that doesn't know the case forward and backward, but Cindy's the grandma, Casey's the daughter, and Kaylee is the little two-year-old granddaughter.
Cindy Anthony is the matriarch, and she's letting her daughter, who was only 22 at the time this all went down, live with her.
She's got it.
She's an unwed mom.
She's a single mom.
She's got little Kaylee with her.
And they tell her, Casey tells her that she's going off on vacation.
She's going to go to a couple towns, going to take the daughter, the granddaughter.
Okay, fine.
Then we talk about how she discovers that wasn't true.
She goes to the car impound lot and she winds up calling the 911 operator.
At first, what she really thinks this might be about is maybe there was a stolen car and then she realizes that it's worse than that, that something smells wrong with that car and she doesn't know where the granddaughter is either.
Here's soundbite one.
My daughter finally admitted that the baby's in the store.
I need to find her.
Your daughter admitted that the baby is where?
But it said it took her month together that my daughter's been looking for.
I told you my daughter was missing for a month.
I just found her today, but I can't find my granddaughter.
She just admitted to me that she's been trying to find her herself.
There's something wrong.
I found my daughter's car today, and it smells like there's been a dead body in this wrong car.
Okay, what is the three-year-old's name?
Kaylee.
C-A-Y-L-E-E, Anthony.
And I'll start with you on this, Beth.
So that's, we were off to the races because now what we learned on that day is that you've got a young mother who hasn't, who by her own admission hasn't seen her child in a month, who tells investigators she decided to handle it herself and was only caught because the mother was called to that impound lot.
Go from there.
Right.
So I know when we look back in hindsight, we know what the defense explanation for that was at that time.
But when we were looking at this, unfolding in real time, people who were following it, and I started following it with court TV from the very beginning, it looked really suspicious.
Like, why is she looking for this child herself?
Why isn't she calling the authorities?
She ultimately tells the police she didn't trust them.
She wanted to look for her daughter herself.
But we learned that what she's doing in this 30-day period from June 16th to July 15th was, I mean, what's documented, photos of her and other memorializations and text messages, whatever, don't seem to be consistent with looking for her daughter, right?
She's partying.
She got a tattoo.
She's in a hot body contest.
And it's like, really, is this woman grieving her daughter?
Is she in a panic?
Is she looking for this toddler who was two years old and 10 months at that time?
So it was very suspicious.
And she ultimately gets charged with child neglect, like failure, crime.
Well, Chaney will have to tell us the exact crimes, but it was like failure to report her child.
It was like neglect charges, nothing to do with homicide.
That would be down the road.
But that seemed to be right because it didn't make sense what she was saying.
And she's lying to the police.
She's sending them in all these tangents that were going nowhere because she knew the truth and she wasn't telling the police the truth.
Let me ask you this, Chaney.
One of the questions, and we'll get into it with the audience, what your defense was and how that went.
But at this point in the case, under your theory of the case, when Casey's confronted by her mom, Cindy, you know, where's Kaylee?
What's the deal with the car?
You know, this is July 15th.
Under your theory, Casey knew at that point that her child was dead, correct?
No.
And your facts about how the car was found are wrong.
The car was found in a parking lot of a shopping center.
George found the car.
George drove the car home.
Cindy, at some point after that, made the call, the infamous call.
It smelled like a damn dead body was there.
Five deputy sheriffs responded to the house, to the car on the same day, inspected it, trunk open, doors open, and every single one of them testified under oath that they did not smell anything.
So that's another one of these examples that made it made it imaginary.
It's not true.
Wait a second, Chaney.
Wait a second.
George drove the car home from the pound.
It was towed from the lot.
It was towed from that parking lot where she left at the end of June, June 26, I think.
And by the time the Anthony's got the paperwork from the pound where it was, it was already July.
It may not have been the 15th, but it was early July.
It was July.
And then they go to the pound.
And that's where George, as he approached the car, he said he really feared he smelled something that was very familiar to him because he's a former police officer.
He really feared when the trunk was open, he was going to see something you didn't want to see, but that didn't happen.
But the man at the pound said to him, oh, yeah, I know that smell because somebody else, there was an abandoned car there.
Maybe it was a salvage yard.
I can't remember a pound salvage yard, but there was an abandoned car that had a dead body in it.
He said it was a similar smell.
I know that.
I know what you say is they didn't smell anything.
That's true.
But there's other evidence of odor closer in time to the car being detained by the Anthony's.
Once again, we'll disagree.
That's not the facts.
The car was found and George said they had thrown garbage over the fence to a dumpster.
Okay, that's not what was on the impound lot.
And they came and they did not smell anything other than garbage.
Then the car was taken.
After they had the car to the home and they had the statements from Cindy, the sheriff's department took it and they kept it and it never was returned.
It was kept in the sheriff's department for forensic evidence the whole time.
Even thereafter, months later, I was in the case.
It's not like it's all that important.
The bottom line is there was the initial claim by Cindy.
There's no dispute about that.
And the state tried to bootress her statement because she was a nurse and she knew what body spelled like.
That was ridiculous because nurses don't know what bodies spell like because they don't keep them in the hospital.
Okay, but we're getting hung up.
I mean, there's no question Cindy said on that 911 call.
She, she, that it smelled like there'd been a damn dead body in the trunk.
We all heard that.
I've heard George give interviews.
I've heard George give interviews where he says it smelled like a dead body.
He's, he has said that on camera.
And the head of the tow lot, it was the towing company and the man's name was Simon Birch.
That's the company that impounded Casey's car in June, testified that he had encountered multiple vehicles with dead bodies during his three decades in the business and that the smell from Casey's car was consistent with those past experiences.
So let's not get too hung up.
We don't know whether it was in fact Kaylee Anthony that created the smell in that car.
And I understand that the authorities would argue that.
But we don't need to get too hung up on whether people said it because they did say it.
Whether or not that was the smell would have to be proven at trial.
Go ahead.
Saying it is one thing.
There is no forensic evidence to support that it is any unique odor to the decomposition of a human body.
So when they took a look at this different.
I got it.
When they took a look at the trunk, there was not a dead body inside of it.
The grandparents open up the trunk and there is no dead body.
There is, however, large amounts of trash and it's the hot Florida sun, right?
I mean, I've seen the garbage bags.
Are you disputing that too, Chaney?
Why are we getting so confused?
No, no.
It had been in there before she had any contact with it.
The garbage bag was thrown out of the car over the fence to a public dumpster site.
There's no question that Cindy said what she smelled.
And that made it a very, very alluring claim about the case.
And as a matter of fact, that's when they had the air sample test and the forensic scientists testify that what was and was not.
It's not really important to the turn of the case, in my opinion, other than it led to causing the attention to the case right from the beginning, exactly as you said.
And it could very well be under any theory of the case that Kaylee's body was either not in that trunk at any point or was not in that trunk for long or was there and was removed.
I mean, what we do know is Kaylee was killed, that Kaylee is dead, and that ultimately her body would be found, not in that car, but we'll get to that point in the story.
But when we learned about Casey Anthony's version of the story, she was at the opening argument, the opening statement at trial.
And we'll get to all of that.
But under her version, under her version of the case, she George, her dad, killed, well, didn't kill, but was with little Kaylee when she drowned.
Okay, she drowned.
So when that's not correct, that's not correct.
George found her.
Okay.
There's no evidence that George was with this child when she drowned.
He found her and brought her in from the pool and confronted Casey.
Look at what you did.
There is no evidence that he did anything.
Right.
I know.
I'm aware because most of us don't think he did.
But when did that allegedly happen?
Well, I'd have to go back to the specific dates that you probably haven't.
Well, you just told me it hadn't happened at the point she said.
I've been with her for a month and I've been out.
You said it hadn't happened at that point.
So when did it happen?
I don't know.
Well, then why are you telling me that it hadn't happened yet at the point?
Yeah, go ahead.
What I'm telling you is, and you said that George was with the child when she died.
There is no evidence.
No, no, but you're disputing.
I'm going back to my first point.
So you don't know.
My point is when she was out dancing and getting the tattoos and Bella Vita and doing all the crazy stuff for that 30-day period, did she or did she not know that her child was dead?
In my opinion, she did not know.
In my opinion, that child had been found and had been disposed of in some capacity long before she was ever brought into any kind of inquiries of whatever.
Casey, this is where, and you justifiably, and so many other people believe, Casey, you would think, would have known immediately about her daughter.
I don't think she did.
Our experts didn't think she did.
And the jury didn't either.
The bottom line is that Casey went into what I have previously characterized as Casey World.
She was in a total some sort of state, psychotic state, not acknowledging the child was gone, dead, and just fabricating whatever she had to fabricate about it.
And it was clear to me, I can tell you, whoever watched the trial besides the jury, when we had a grief expert testifying about how people grieve differently in different circumstances, and she talked about it during the trial, the last part of the trial, Casey broke down.
Casey World and Psychotic State00:15:19
I was sitting right next to her.
That, in my opinion, was the first time that she absolutely clearly accepted and knew that this child was dead.
How did, I mean, she realized that her child wasn't with her for a month, right?
You know, I don't know what she realized.
That's what I'm trying to tell you.
We know from facts and videotapes and witnesses, as you described.
She was out on a couple of occasions to young people's clubs and doing shopping and going around and just kind of in another world.
And so, what she actually knew, I guess none of us will ever know.
Well, I mean, when her mother asked her that day that they were reunited, where's Kaylee?
And she said, She's missing.
The babysitter took her, and I've been looking for her on my own.
So she clearly knew that she was missing.
I'm sure she, yes, that she knew something, but it wasn't connecting in her brain.
It didn't connect in her brain until we were in trial at the end of the trial.
That's the problem with it.
And it's hard to understand that.
And most people don't want to understand that.
Most people don't.
I mean, you can understand it and then not and just not believe it, right?
I mean, it's secret option number two.
Right.
I think the normal, most expected reaction from people was: if you found your child drowned, you would call 911.
Or you do something.
That's the normal and reasonably normal expectation of people.
Would be for me.
Would be for you.
But this is such a weird and unique situation.
But are you now saying that she found her?
That she found her child drowned?
I did not say that at all.
Okay.
You said the normal expectation would be if you found your child.
And that's not the posit here.
The posit is that George, the granddad, found her.
If I found a child and/or if you found a child, probably the first reaction like that would be a call for help.
I know, but we were talking about Casey, and then you jumped to George's state of mind.
And that's we're talking about Casey's state of mind.
I'm not talking about George's state of mind.
There's no evidence about his state of mind other than the position was that George found the child on that Saturday morning.
She was drowned on I don't remember the date.
No, but I mean, are you talking about the beginning of the 30-day period or the end of the 30-day period?
At the beginning, at the beginning.
Beth may know the dates, but you know, from looking at June something, wasn't it?
Yeah, so the last photos of Kaylee are on Father's Day, 2008, which I think was June 15th.
And then the 16th, she had a fight with her mother the night before, and then she left the next day.
And George saw them walking away.
He remembers what they were wearing.
That's father, Kaylee's grandfather.
And so that was a Monday.
She's walking away with them.
And my understanding is that the defense position was that the drowning of Kaylee was right around that, like very short time after that.
Either the night, early morning, night, we had the photographs of the child being able to go out to the pool by herself and do that.
And so all that we know, our position is: look, I wasn't there.
You weren't there.
We don't know who was really there to know this, but you never do in any part of your life.
The bottom line is that our position has been from the beginning through the end, it still is.
George found this little child.
She was drowned.
She was deceased.
He brought her into the house.
He confronted Casey because Casey was still asleep.
She had been out the night before or whatever the case would be and told her, Look what you've done.
Your mother is going to be really mad at you.
And that is it.
And she left.
And we don't know what happened.
See, this is where there's a big gap.
And a jury found a gap as well.
Did George dispose of the body?
I don't know that.
I can't prove he did.
I wouldn't accuse him of it.
Something happened.
And both of you know that something happened contrary to what the ordinary experience would have been.
The ordinary experience would have been call 911.
Ordinary experience would have made the whole thing right down resolved.
And for whatever reason, it didn't happen.
And all I can tell you is that I doubt that the case will ever be solved any more than it has been.
That's why you're still interested in it, and people will be and will continue to be for a long, long time.
I don't know what else to do about that.
Well, sure.
I mean, this has been, it was a very salacious trial.
It happened at an interesting time in our country's history.
And, you know, it involves an unthinkable crime that we genuinely sincerely do not wish to even think about.
But when it happens, those responsible must be held to account.
In this case, no one ever has been.
Beth, I know you want to say something.
I'm going to get to you right after this quick break, pay a bill, and back to our guests in two minutes.
don't go away.
Beth, you were itching to get in there at the end.
Go for it.
Well, yeah, I was wanting to point out, I just looked at my notes, and June 16th, 2008 was a Monday.
So Father's Day was the day before it.
So it was that Monday was the last time George saw her.
And it was the defense position that the drowning was that day, I believe later that day.
The other thing I just wanted to look at the big picture here because I know we're going to go through the timeline, Megan, but Casey does get charged with murder in October and Kaylee hasn't been found yet.
And then she's found in December.
Her remains are found and within a few months, the prosecution decides to up to Auntie and charge her with capital murder, right?
Seeking death.
So for the next three years, there are all kinds of pretrial hearings and lots of motions are being filed.
And all the while, Casey is sitting in a jail cell.
So for three years to her trial in 2011, 2008 to 2011, she's locked up.
And I don't understand if this was an accidental drowning.
Maybe there's some sort of negligent theory of some kind of crime that Casey could be charged with, but nothing like capital murder.
If the facts are what you say, Chaney, I don't understand why you wouldn't go to the prosecutors and say, look, this is an accident.
And we have proof.
This is an accident.
Why let her sit in jail for three years?
Or am I being naive?
I've never been a defense attorney, but it just seems like, but, you know, prosecutors are not unreasonable, at least in my experience.
We do justice.
We do not just seek convictions.
We want to do the right thing.
You shouldn't overcharge if you, you know, you should never overcharge.
I should put it that way.
Well, I know you don't believe that all prosecutors are the same way because we know better than that.
The bottom line in this situation is that this case was ongoing for a long time before I was brought into it.
I was a citizen of Central Florida all the time with all the news medias and the, you know, every night or every day, all the channels said, you know, more about Casey Anthony, news at six, pictures at six or whatever like that, every day for a long time.
I was a citizen like everybody else until Mr. Baez asked me to come in.
I don't know, and you may have a better time of when the charge was.
I happened to have been in an NBC studio on a totally unrelated matter when the people there got all excited because the sheriff was there doing something, got a call, and he came into the studio and he like they found a baby with tape all around her head.
And we believe that's going to be Kaylee.
And that was the first time there was any ability to prove that there was a death.
So there could not have been any criminal charge of homicide against her at that time.
They had no proof of death.
They had other things.
And I don't remember what they did.
No, no, just to jump in to set the record straight.
According to my timeline here, it was October, as Beth points out, she was charged with not with murder, but with child neglect and some other small charges first.
That's kind of how they got her into custody.
She was declared a person of interest with respect to Kaylee, but she was not yet charged.
That's when she posted her bond and the bounty hunter, Leonard Padilla, came in, and all that happened.
And then on October 14th, 2008, she was charged with first-degree murder, aggravated child abuse, aggravated manslaughter, forecasts of providing false information to law enforcement and so on.
And then it wasn't until December 11th, 2008, two months later, that the skeletal remains of Kaylee were found.
So two months after she was charged with murder.
Yeah.
And then they seek death after that because that was the change circumstance.
We now have a body.
We believe tape was around her mouth and nose.
And that was the change circumstance.
That would just be.
Yes, and we'll get to the condition in which they found the remains, which was the part of the prosecution's case.
But let's just go back to the days, the 30-day period that she was not with Kaylee and not with her parents and lying to her parents and out and about, as we all would wind up seeing.
I remember seeing it on Greta Van Cestron's show every night, you know, the pictures of that would be on earth from her social media, you know, her dancing, her looking like having a great time.
She's got that big smile on.
And people looked at this in retrospect and said, that is, she must be a sociopath.
You know, her daughter's missing.
She's not, she's clearly not looking for her.
She's having the time of her life.
And that was the prosecution's theory that she was, she got pregnant at 19.
She didn't want this baby.
She didn't want to be a mother.
And she wound up either neglecting the child or intentionally getting rid of the child to the point of death.
So she takes the police during this time, Chaney, on some wild goose chases that I want you to help me understand.
If we're going into why are you shaking your head?
Yes, she did.
Oh, you said wild goose chases, plural.
That's not true.
Okay.
So did she or did she not take them to the fake apartment of some nanny who never existed?
There was one, the beginning occasion.
Yes.
She did just.
And did she or did she not take them to Universal and pretend to work there when she, in fact, hadn't worked there for two years?
Did she or did not?
That was the one so-called chase.
The police knew she didn't work there.
They picked her up at six o'clock in the morning at the Anthony Renaissance.
They drove her to Universal.
They checked in Universal.
They already knew from security that she didn't work there.
She walked from there about 700 feet down the sidewalk and around the corner into an office building.
And she was still carried on going to show them her office.
And they took her into the building and got to a small office.
And she turned around and said, okay, I don't work here.
I am correct.
I am correct.
That's at least two.
Those are wild goose chases.
You need to slow your roll, sir, because I've got my facts.
And you and I are not going to do that.
This is not that kind of show.
Okay.
Trust me.
I've done my homework.
So she took them on a couple of wild goose chases.
And you tell me why this young mother with no consciousness of guilt whatsoever, because she's in this confused fugue state, not realizing her kid's not with her, would do those things.
You tell me.
I don't know why she would do it.
She did not know, I believe, at this time that this child was deceased.
She still had in her mind this myth of where the child was.
And that's why the police didn't do anything else at that time to arrest her or charge her or anything, because they couldn't other than to prove the child was missing and they didn't believe her.
So why was she making up that she worked at Universal and making up that there was a nanny and taking them to the fake apartment of the said nanny?
I'm not sure that I know.
She had worked at Universal.
She did work up there to a few months before this occurred.
I can't tell you.
This is one of the things that we'll never know as to what went in through her brain to do that.
It was so obvious to the law enforcement officers, they knew damn well that she did not work at Universal.
They had already through the night confirmed that.
And so when she said she did, they said, okay, we'll go along for this little charade.
And that's what they did.
They weren't fooled.
They weren't surprised whatsoever.
And that's when we got into a whole issue about whether she was mirandized or not, whether her statements could be used, and how the appellate court dealt with that and reversed two of her misdemeanor convictions.
Beth, why don't you tell us about the wild goose chase involving Zanny the nanny, who was the one you heard on that very first day that her mother and she called, well, her mother called the police and put her on with police.
She was an unwilling participant.
She was like, why would I want to talk to them?
But she gets on and she claims that she left the daughter with the babysitter and you take it from there.
Right.
So in opening statements, Linda Drain Burdick does recount almost every single one of those 30 days.
There is something, whether it's a text message, an email, a MySpace posting, some communication, something, a photo that will document what she was doing during that time.
During those 30 days, she does tell the police that, you know, Zanaida Gonzalez, there is really a Zanaida Gonzalez.
There's really a person.
There are a lot of Zana Gonzales.
Right.
But I mean, there's a person by that name who applied for an apartment, for a vacant apartment in that complex.
And so there's a, you know, a theory, I don't know if it's ever been proven true, that Casey may have seen that application, may have seen that form, you know, and got the name from it because this is a woman who did apply to live there.
And not a nanny and not Casey Anthony's nanny working to protect her.
There's no connection between them.
There's no connection between them.
But like where Casey was telling her parents that she was going to work, they did believe that there was a nanny, Zanny the nanny.
They did believe that.
So it's very curious, like where, where was this little girl?
Like, was she accompanying Casey?
And where was Casey going?
She wasn't even prior to the 30-day period.
That's prior, but even during the 30-day period.
Now, during the 30-day period, Casey is saying a couple of things, right?
She's up in Jacksonville, or she's in Tampa, and then her car broke down, and she was in a car wreck, or maybe there was a hospital at some point.
I can't remember exactly everything she relates.
Body Found and Nanny Lies00:14:54
But Cindy, Casey's mother, Is really getting frustrated because she's, you know, she wants to see her granddaughter.
She needs to see proof.
The two of them had fought, as I said, the day before, you know, on Father's Day that night.
They had fought.
And, you know, there was some talk about Cindy saying, if you don't get in better shape as a, you know, take care of this child, you know, I'm going to file to adopt her.
Let me say, though, that at trial, there was the only evidence about Casey as a mother was good evidence, like she was a very doting, good mother.
However, Cindy may have begged to differ only because I think that Kaylee was left with her grandmother a lot, that Casey was gone, especially closer in time to when the child disappeared because Casey had a new boyfriend and it was sort of a new life and he was working at a club and it was kind of a new life and she maybe she wanted her freedom.
That was part of the prosecution.
Well, didn't he testify that she that he said he did he had no interest in becoming the father, a father?
Correct.
Right.
Also, right.
Now, around July 5th or so, she got a Bella Vita tattoo, beautiful life tattoo, which also is something that the prosecution pointed out.
You know, their theory being, look, you know, maybe she knows her daughter's dead and she's celebrating her daughter's life through this tattoo.
She's in a hot body contest.
I seem to recall around June 20th, something, the hot body contest.
She's wearing that short blue dress.
So these are the things she's doing that she says.
But if I could just jump back.
I'm actually looking for my daughter.
Let's just jump back to the to Zanny the nanny, because what she did, she told the police, I left her with this Zanny the nanny, and then I went to pick her up and she was gone.
And I, you know, I've been looking for her.
And so the cop said, do you know where Zanni the nanny lives?
And she says, yes.
And they said, okay, would you take us there?
And she took them to an apartment.
They went to an apartment and it was empty and it hadn't been leased for months.
There wasn't a stitch of furniture in there.
So there had been no Zanny the nanny living there in that apartment and nobody had been living there for months.
So, you know, this is not, none of this is consistent with a woman who, in fact, had the experience she was claiming to them.
Then she told them that she'd been working at Universal, as I mentioned, and they said, okay, let's go.
I think she said she needed her keys or something from Universal.
So they said, okay, let's go.
Let's go to Universal and we'll get them.
Okay, fine.
But she didn't work at Universal.
So she managed to talk her way through the front security guards with the police with her.
They get through, they get in.
She gives them all sorts of names.
I worked with this guy.
I worked with that guy.
These are made-up names.
They would later find out.
She was making up names.
And then she got past a couple more people and said, oh, yeah, where's my office?
She gets turned around.
And then, as Chaney points out, she was at one point where she got lost.
She went down a corridor.
There was no way out.
She turned around.
She gave it up and said, I don't work here.
And yes, they knew.
But the point is, lies, at every turn.
And this is what one of the many reasons, it's not just I smelled a dead body.
It's her behavior, her deceit, her throwing the police into the wrong direction time after time, her total seeming lack of empathy or concern for her child, who you're telling me she may or may not have known was dead or alive at that point, right?
So all of this goes into our perception on the outside, Chaney, of Casey Anthony.
And is, you know, I don't, so far, I don't see where we're going wrong.
I'm open-minded.
I'm wanting you to walk me through it because I'm much as I think she did it.
I'm open-minded to a different story.
I'm not saying that your perception is wrong because I saw it nationwide, if not worldwide.
People believe the same sort of things about her.
There's no question about that.
There's no question that she did not tell them the truth about a lot of things.
The question is: Is why and how conscious was she of that?
You said something I want to correct about going into Universal.
The Universal people had already been informed by the sheriff.
They knew what they were doing.
They were waiting for her to come out there and do that.
What I'm always you raised earlier is another coincidence.
I've never understood Zaneda Gonzalez.
Where do you get a name like that?
And then have a coincidence that there was a person by that name that had applied for an apartment at this place of all other.
That never made any sense to me at all.
Well, there's a whole lot of things that make sense to me of all these things that matter.
Why are you even raising that?
Are you suggesting still to this day that there was a Zaneda Gonzalez who had babysat Kaylee and then what?
Then Kaylee went home and drowned in the pool after that?
Like, why are you even mentioning that?
How is that relevant?
I'm not saying it for that reason.
I just thought that when you raised the issue about the Zaneda Gonzalez, if nothing else, it's a hell of a coincidence.
There is no evidence.
It actually turns out to be a very common name.
No, my point is, we know that's a lie.
You don't have to dispute, debate me on whether that's a lie.
We know that's a lie.
Even according to your side, that's a lie.
The child was killed, according to you, in the swimming pool.
She drowned, and George found her.
I said in the intro, died by homicide, because that is what the medical examiner said.
But according to you, she died in the swimming pool.
So there was no Danny the Nanny who ran off with little Kaylee, right?
Yes, but it's not proper for you to keep saying she was killed.
She died.
She died by homicide, is what the ME said.
Homicide by indeterminate means.
What?
By indeterminate means, correct.
But what I said, once again, Chaney, was 100% correct.
She died by homicide.
Check the report.
Much more with Chaney and Beth Karis coming up.
We're going to get to the trial, this infamous trial that would rock the nation for a long time.
This is one of those things where people could tell you the names of the attorneys.
We're dying for information about the jury and so on and so forth.
We'll pick it up there in a minute.
We'll pick it up there in a minute.
And she's charged with first-degree murder, but they haven't yet found a body.
And then they do.
Beth, can you take us to because you know, the there, weirdly, the man who found the body, who was a meter reader, would wind up becoming a central figure for a time in this case.
There were all these reports about him, and it was like, I remember asking myself, why is he anything other than the man who found the body?
Like, how did he become more interesting than that?
So, can you explain that?
Explain how he found little Kaylee's remains.
Yes, indeed.
I'm pulling a lot of this from memory, so you might have to show in a couple of facts here.
But his name is Roy Cronk.
Now, that day was December 11th, 2008.
There was a hearing in the Casey Anthony case that day.
In fact, I seem to recall that was the day that Jose Baez waived speedy trial.
And not unusual for the defense to do that.
I mean, in my experience.
But we were all in Orlando, like the media was at the courthouse because it was yet another hearing.
I remember being at a little cafe next to the courthouse where all our satellite trucks were.
And there was a TV monitor on the wall.
And all of a sudden, like a breaking news story comes on, a body found, and we all turn around, we're staring at it.
I was with Carrie Sanders from NBC, and they're like, Katie may have been found.
We all went racing out of that place.
I couldn't up and leave with our satellite truck.
We were parked there, so I had to wait.
Everyone else and NBC and others are on their way to the scene as close as they could get to where the tents were being set up and a grid was being created.
And it would be days of sifting through this property, this wooded area a quarter mile from where Casey Anthony lived with her parents.
And that's where the remains were found.
Now, the man who called it in, this meter reader you're talking about, Roy Cronk, claims that he had actually found the body in August, or a skull or something in August.
And he called it in a couple of times in August, and he wasn't being taken seriously.
Like a deputy showed up and did a cursory search.
This is like a really dense wooded area, which, by the way, had been full, there had been a storm that summer of 2008.
And that area had been flooded at one point, but it was no longer flooded by December.
And Roy Cronk, you know, goes back there.
He says to relieve himself because there was an elementary school just down the street across the street, but down from where the body was found.
And so he now has reported again having found a skull and it's now taken more seriously.
I'm not quite sure why there wasn't a more thorough search before.
It might have been because it was flooded.
Maybe the deputy was afraid of the snakes or whatever.
But she should have been found a lot earlier than December 11th.
So Roy Cronk, it's suspicious.
I mean, he does call it in months earlier and finally calls it in again on December 11th.
So that's a little weird.
But there is evidence the body wasn't actually moved.
There were scattered remains.
I mean, she's skeletonized and they're just, she's in pieces, regrettably.
But she had the loss of evidence, like the DNA and so on over that time.
It would have been much more useful to have it in hand earlier.
Sure.
And her remains were spread because of animal activity.
But there was a laundry bag, a cloth laundry bag with her that matched one because it had been a set of two that matched another one in the Anthony home.
So it came from the home.
And I don't think anyone's really disputing that.
In fact, you know, the defense facts that they are their version that they put forth from openings on was that, you know, yes, she died at home.
It was an accidental drowning and her body was disposed of.
So not really refuting that the bag, you know, belonged to the home, but that was pretty clear.
So, I mean, but there was something else much more important that they found on the body than the bag, which was the duct tape.
Get to that.
The tape.
Yeah.
So, so, you know, when Shaney described how somebody from the sheriff's department came to the local TV station and said it was wrapped around the head, I mean, it really wasn't like wrapped around the head like that.
I only saw photos.
I didn't see the actual, you know, skull.
I only saw photos.
But her hair was in the back.
She had long hair.
Hair was in the back of the skull.
And there was like the lower jaw should have come up, should have been separated from the rest of the skull, right?
Because everything is composed, but it wasn't.
And the tape was kind of holding, holding it together.
It seemed like the tape and the hair was all stuck together there.
So it was in the front, you know, but there's a lot of slippage.
But like, why is there tape there?
You know, like that, that was what really got the problem.
They're like, prosecution was like, yeah, there's no reason to put tape on a skull.
And wasn't there a heart sticker?
No.
Yeah, I mean, well, there was a criminalist who was looking at the tape and saw the shape, but this heart shape, but then it like went away, right?
It was like, it was like seen and but not captured on a photo or anything.
So it was just a testimony, is my recollection.
And I think that it was never like, I don't know if it was proven.
I don't know, somehow it was disposed of, you know, disintegrated or something.
I can tell you about that.
The heart-shaped sticker was found on a piece of trash about 40 feet from the remains and more closely across the street from the elementary school.
It was never connected to this forensic scene, but other than it was found and talked about.
And Beth is right about the slippage.
The duct tape was not all around the head.
The duct tape happened on the top of the bag.
And when the decomposition happened and the skin material and the hair, there was a part of the hair that had tape, duct tape on it, but there wasn't any actually on the skull.
And Dr. Werner Spitz testified about all of that and about the body.
One thing that you said wasn't important, I think I think both of you are pointing out was why was Mr. Kroc not taken seriously about finding the body?
He did.
I think, Beth, it was three times, if I remember correctly, that he called and reported and said, hey, I'm out here.
I found this.
Looks like a skull to me.
And they just ignored him.
And it was like the second or third time they finally sent a deputy.
I don't remember his name, and I don't think it's in my book, but a deputy came out to meet him.
Beth, you'll remember this.
The deputy slipped on the wet grass and he fell down and he sold his uniform.
And he was mad about that.
And that was the end of that investigation.
That exact spot, just so you'll know, was 17 feet and nine inches from the curve of Suburban Drive.
And that's a very short distance to not been found.
It had been searched by horseback people, as we call it, the Kissimmee boys on four-wheel drives.
Father Accused and Short Distance00:15:15
Numerous volunteer walkers and searchers had covered that area and every square inch of it for a long time.
But can I, I mean, I see the point you're making, Chaney, which is like, why wasn't it found if it had been there the whole time?
But what the reports were that they had that they had massive flooding during that period that we're talking about, that four months, and that there was as much as four feet of water in which the body may have been immersed for a lengthy period of that time.
Well, that was suggested, but that wasn't the testimony.
The hydrology expert that the state had from the University of Florida came and tested all around all of that geographical area and did not find that.
We don't know.
And I'm only 78 years old and I'm still don't know and I'm not going to know how that body was there, if it was there all that time.
There's a certain reason to believe that the body had been moved and brought back there.
Can you ever prove that?
No, because in order to be able to prove that, you'd have to have evidence of who did it and how they did it.
Can't do it.
All I can say is it's unreasonable to expect that the body was 17 feet and nine inches from the curve of the road, which was a half a mile from the Anthony house.
That was searched by hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of people during that whole circus event and didn't find her.
My recollection was that there was actually like plant material growing up through the skull, which indicates it was there the entire time, but it had not been moved.
I don't remember that that is the case.
I remember Dr. Spence talking about how there was at the base of the skull inside there was some dirt.
There may have been some, I don't think there's anything going through the skull, but I could be wrong about that.
But there was some growth around it.
So let me just back up and say this on behalf of the Sheriff's Department.
They have basically suggested they were overwhelmed with tips from, you know, this case is getting national attention.
They had tons of people calling.
They had kooks calling.
They had legitimate people calling.
And this guy says, Hey, I work for the city.
I'm a meter reader.
You should be listening to me when I call in.
Obviously, it would have been much more helpful to have the remains earlier rather than later, but it's just a piece of this case now.
And for better or for worse, that's when they did ultimately find her.
So they go to trial.
And can we just spend a minute talking about Jose Baez?
Because I had not seen him on the national stage.
I was pretty young in my reporting and legal, well, older my legal tenure, but young in my journalistic tenure.
And my understanding is, maybe, Chani, you can speak to this, but my understanding is when he got on the Casey Anthony case, he wasn't one of the most storied criminal defense attorneys in town.
Like what put Jose Baez in perspective for us then at the moment he came on to represent her.
Jose was a young lawyer.
I think he had only been a lawyer about five years.
It may have been, I think that's accurate.
He had worked at a public defender's office in South Florida.
He was up here and he was working.
He was taking cases and going to court.
You know, that's all young lawyers do routinely.
I had never heard of him, never met him, never knew anything about him until he started calling me for suggestions and strategies and questions and so forth.
And that evolved into finally asking me to get in the case.
And, you know, I've made mistakes before in my life, but I agreed to do this and I thought it was a good one.
When I met this young lady, I did believe she was guilty.
I've seen her several times since then.
You did or did not?
No.
Did not.
And I know her well enough to some extent like that.
She came to my wife's funeral a few months ago and I spent some time talking with her.
My attitude has not changed about her.
My explanations are never going to satisfy you and millions of other people.
And I got it.
I can look.
Well, now, listen, I have my beliefs, having covered it and having had some experience as a journalist and a lawyer, but I'm giving you an open mind to convince me.
That's why we're doing these stories.
So you have somebody who's probably more open-minded than most of the people you're going to get in the journalist chair.
And I appreciate you doing this.
We're going to pick it up on the opposite side of this break.
Much, much more with Cheney Mason and Beth Karris.
away.
The Trials So you get brought in by Jose Bias Cheney, and you, you actually were very well known.
were former president of the Florida Association of Criminal Lawyers, had been selected by Florida Monthly Magazine as one of Florida's top lawyers.
And you, I read, were disgusted by the local media coverage about the relatively inexperienced Jose Baez, saying that you had been offended by it.
It was one of the reasons why you wanted to get involved.
Why?
What was wrong?
Well, I detailed that, by the way, in my book, because the Orlando Sentinel newspaper had published a story next to Zay on Jose's personal life, being behind in alimony payments or something, and criticizing him.
I thought was very unfair.
I didn't know him.
He was just a young lawyer, and I'm a senior lawyer.
And I felt like it just simply wasn't fair.
So I said, wait a minute.
Let me respond to this because at that point in time, the prosecutor being listed as the lead prosecutor was Jeffrey Ashton.
In reality, the lead prosecutor was Linda Drain Bertie.
But Mr. Ashton, they were talking about how he was missed a good guy and all these sort of things.
Well, I pointed out to them that he had been personally criticized in several appellate court opinions, reversing convictions because of his misconduct professionally.
And Beth will tell you that political courts don't mention the names of the lawyers when they reverse them.
It's pretty rare that they'll actually identify the person they say did wrong.
So I wanted to press, you know, treat this kid fairly.
That's all.
He's one of my people.
You know, treat him fairly and go to trial.
Well, I mean, what's so extraordinary about it is he wasn't that well known.
It wasn't like, you know, Robert Shapiro or, you know, whatever, Alan Dershowitz.
It was like, who's this Jose Baez representing this defendant on the biggest case in the country at the time?
And as we now would, as we all now know, that he managed to secure an acquittal, which left the nation slackjawed.
I mean, speaking of Robert Shapiro, that was the other case that was probably of equal notoriety, like where somebody got found not guilty and the country just couldn't get over it, couldn't accept it, couldn't believe it.
Beth, can you, I'll give you this one because I want to, then I want to get Cheney to sort of put some meat on the bones.
But take us to the moment of Jose's opening statement because that was the moment.
I mean, that was the moment I would say the case was one for him, lost for the prosecution.
They never seemed to recover their footing.
Right.
It's my understanding the prosecution got worried about maybe six weeks before the opening statement about what their position was going to be, maybe not quite that much time, but that it was going to be an accidental drowning.
Jose Baez, the whole defense team, played their cards very close to their vessel.
So people did not know where they were going.
You know, this was a case where there weren't many surprises because the law is so liberal and open about documents being made available to the public, right?
It's the sunshine state.
So we knew the media, we all had like 25,000 pages of discovery.
There weren't going to be any surprises from the prosecution's team because we knew what the investigation was.
So the surprise came from the defense when Jose said she wasn't murdered, that she drowned, that it was an accident, and George found her.
And people were like, what?
Like, where is this coming from?
And that's when I was like, there's no way he's going with this, like, because she's been sitting in jail for three years.
There's no way he would have, you know, he's going to go with an accident defense.
But, you know, what do I know?
And I have to say, you know, Jose could not have tried this case alone because I don't think the law allows it in any state.
You know, in a capital case, you have to have two lawyers, but also he wasn't, he wasn't credentialed enough, right?
Five years, three, five years as a lawyer, you have to practice longer in some states to handle a capital case, but you can tack onto your team some more experienced people, which is why Cheney was critical.
I credit Cheney with the acquittal in his summation, but I'm getting ahead of myself.
But when Jose said in the opening that it was an accidental drowning, and then he started talking about Casey being sexually abused by her father.
Now, wait, because the audience at home is like, wait, what?
Right?
Like, they took it.
It was a huge turn.
Our audience at home just had the same turn we all had at the time, which is a wait, what?
But, and that's no, that's what the prosecution got word of in advance, a few weeks in advance.
And I think that they were considering, you know, you know, was it too late for them to file any charges against George?
Probably, probably it was, but if this, you know, were the truth.
But yeah, so we hear that George has been sexually abusing Casey since she was a little girl.
And that, I mean, he said this in opening.
He said, like, she would be a little girl and she would have his penis in her mouth and then she'd get on the school bus.
And that she learned how to live a life of lies.
She learned how to be a really good liar because of that.
Okay, so he's like opened this whole can of worms.
And I remember speaking to him when he was speaking to me that night saying, Wow, you're putting Casey on the stand, you know, because how are you going to get this stuff in?
Because, you know, George was the first witness right after openings and he denied it.
And he's like, well, no, not necessarily.
I'll put it on through the psychiatrist.
I said, yeah, no, you won't.
You got to put Casey on.
So anyway, I never reported any of that.
But that was a discussion I had with him because based on his opening statement, I was sure that Casey was going to testify.
We've seen defense attorneys say certain things in openings and then not follow through because they have a right to do, you know, not to call their client and you can't comment on it, you know, as a prosecutor at the end because a defendant has a right to remain silent.
And that's what happened here.
He made us think that Casey was going to testify.
And then maybe Cheney talked him out of it or something, but she didn't testify in the end.
And that proof of sexual abuse was never put before the jury, sexual abuse by George.
He denied it on the stand, and the judge said, you cannot sum up on that because you didn't put on proof of it, even though you rang the bell and opening statements.
And as they say, you can't really unring the bell.
And that taint was there on the prosecution case on George Anthony throughout the trial.
I suspect jurors didn't like him because they had just heard Jose's opening and then George gets on the stand.
Did the prosecution move for a mistrial after that?
I mean, I realize normally it's the defense that does that, but the prosecution can do it.
Did they?
I don't recall that.
No.
Okay.
And at that point, they're still thinking maybe you're going to put Casey on the stand and she's going to bring it together.
I don't know.
And they're still thinking they're going to win.
I mean, they're thinking, like most of us are thinking, it's a slam dunk case and they're going to win.
They don't want a mistrial.
They're fine with this one.
Win something.
I mean, there are a lot of counts and there were lessers.
I mean, maybe not capital murder, but maybe some lesser degree of homicide.
But I just remember on that first day thinking, wow, Casey, for them to put this stuff on, I mean, Casey's got to testify.
How else are they going to get it in?
Yeah.
And there was no, so just to be clear, a lawyer's opening statement is not a lawyer's closing argument.
They're not evidence.
That's not, that's just sort of a directional offering for the jury.
It's not considered evidence.
So technically, the jury shouldn't have been thinking about that when they went back into the deliberation room.
But, you know, the seed had been planted.
As Beth says, it's hard to unring that bell.
Now, I know, Chaney, that you wrote, I think, a story in your book about telling George.
I got to give you a heads up.
We saw some, because there were some letters I think Casey wrote to like some guards in jail accusing him.
And he later said, George gave an interview saying he claimed it was Jose Baez who said, I'm going to throw you under the bus.
So, did you guys, what's your recollection of what you said to George about what's coming?
I told George in my office with the permission of his lawyer.
And then a few minutes later, also Cindy gave them notice that what was going to happen, that George is going to be accused of sexually molesting his daughter.
I wanted to see his reaction.
I can tell you that if someone accused me of molesting my daughters or all my granddaughters, there would be a real issue.
It would be me bonding out of jail for having gone across the desk and kicked her ass.
But so I felt the need to tell it.
All George did was just look and sigh, put his hands on his laps and no other on his legs and no other response.
I thought there was a peculiar response for a father having been accused in some situation like this by a lawyer of, you know, kind of officially, you know, this is what's going to happen.
I want to let you know this.
And I did.
I thought it was the ethical thing to do, and I did.
I don't know what impact the whole thing had or didn't have.
I will tell you that when Jose made the opening statement the way he did, I was surprised.
I guess I was pretty good at keeping my old face calm, but I wasn't surprised as many people because I did the same analysis that both you and Beth have.
You make that kind of accusation, you got to prove it somewhere.
And it's a really bad situation for a defense lawyer or either side to make promises to a jury that they cannot deliver on.
Jurors remember it.
And while you can say that opening statements and closing statements are not evidence, that's all book BS because jurors listen to it and they do a lot of things they're not supposed to do.
Jury Verdicts and Prosecution Promises00:15:58
And they do it for every trial.
Hello.
Yeah, sorry.
I was just adding, and the lawyers have authority.
They have a relationship with the lawyers.
Oh, yeah, yeah.
Well, and the point is that we give, if we really, really wanted to have pure jury verdicts that were reliable, every juror would be sequestered in every case, and they wouldn't have any access to any of the information except what was in the courtroom.
Well, we can't do that.
I mean, I've tried a whole bunch of cases, but probably no more than a half a dozen out of 350 plus that were sequestered.
And you have to sequester them from the moment of the crime all the way through to the beginning of the trial.
That's when they take in all the spin.
Well, you're never going to get that done, are you?
So we do the best we can with trying to give instructions.
And I mean, if you went back, went back to the selection of the jury in this case, it was an interesting process.
600 people we interviewed, and there was a lot of bias and prejudice and all kind of stuff that we had to weed out to get a jury at all.
So, yeah, I don't know there's a perfect system.
I don't know how to do it.
So let me ask you this, because I've talked to a lot of the lawyers in OJ and other cases, but the OJ case, I watched a lot of it was going down while I was in law school.
And I think O.J. Simpson murdered Nicole Brown Simpson and her friend Ronald Goldman, but I can see how that jury reached its verdict, separate and apart from a nullification issue.
I can see how they could have honorably, honestly found that the prosecution did not prove it beyond a reasonable doubt.
I don't agree, but I can see it.
What do you think it was, Cheney, about this case that had the same effect on this jury, right?
Like, what do you think your best facts were or your best pointing, poking holes in the prosecution's facts were?
Well, I don't know.
I can say there was a major difference.
1991, the OJ case, there was no internet Facebook on all this social media, was there?
It was just starting, yeah.
To get to Casey Anthony, and it was dominating the news basically all day of every day for a very long time.
And so people were focused on it.
I've been asked so many times why this case is opposed to others.
This was because there was a young, cute mother with an absolutely adorable little baby victim, and they were white.
And all the improper things to say and I do, I'm telling you that I know from my 51 years of trying cases that had a major impact on this case.
If it probably had been a young African-American mother and child, it may have been in the newspaper.
It may not have been.
It never in hell would have been what this case is.
I also think class matters.
I think that if it's a family of means or a family that, you know, you can see sort of has its act together overall, people are more interested.
If you see, you know, like a family that's got a lot of criminals in it, white or black or any other race, it's like, oh, it's unfortunate, but okay, I think we all know what happened here.
This one seemed to be a nice family.
You know, the dad was a former sheriff's deputy, the granddad, I guess.
Yeah, there seemed to be a loving set of parents to Casey.
She seen, she looked like an all-American girl in terms of like smiley and bubbly and, you know, hadn't been a career criminal in any way.
So it's like, okay, there's a real mystery here because the daughter's missing, right?
It was like, we all need to pull together to find the daughter.
So it had a lot of elements that would attract news coverage.
You know, and I understand the whole missing white woman syndrome arguments.
And it's not, they're not totally wrong, but I do think class plays a lot into it as well.
And these people, they weren't lower socioeconomic class.
They were sort of middle class and not at all the kind of family that you normally see enveloped in this sort of a deep crime.
I want to talk to you about that moment, right?
Because we all watched it.
It was like the O.J. Simpson, you know, we the people find that case of Orange Ornthal J. Simpson.
She stumbled on it.
I can remember where I was.
This one, I actually was in the newsroom, but the moment this happened and they read it, I'll just take the top of this is soundbite number four.
It's kind of long.
I'll cut it off after the first one, but let's take a look back at that moment.
As to the charge of first-degree murder, verdict as to count one, we, the jury, find the defendant not guilty.
So say we all.
Dated at Orlando, Orange County, Florida, on this fifth day of July, 2011, signed for person.
As to the charge of aggravated child abuse.
Then they go on.
You can see the relief flood over her face, obviously, as anybody would be.
What was going through your mind at that moment, Chaney?
Were you shocked?
No, I really wasn't.
And because I have some secrets about looking at jurors when they come into courtroom, and I've been there so many hundreds of times that there are certain things they do or don't do that are pretty revealing to some old coots like me.
What'd they do?
Well, they look at the defendant.
They won't look at the defendant if they're guilty.
One or two of them might, but when they come in and do that, you can say I certainly wasn't confident about it.
When the before the jury verdict was read, remember, it's handed to the clerk who hands it to the judge, and the judge read it.
And I'm reading his face, and it was very clear that he wasn't real happy about this verdict.
He spoke out about it later.
He was on Dr. Oz saying he definitely thinks she's guilty.
Well, he said and done a lot of things he probably shouldn't have.
But like you said, with the defense lawyers, like car salesman or something, I don't know where the hell he got that, but the bottom line is that the clerk, you didn't play all of it, because of course you can't.
But the first thing when she first started reading it, she stuttered over the not guilty part of it.
Oh, my lord.
And briefly, but you know, you're so tense there.
I mean, look, I'm not sure of the statistics.
My wife had kept a calendar on stuff.
And I remember her best estimate was I have tried something in excess of 350 criminal jury trials in state and federal court.
That's a lot.
And fortunately, I've done pretty well.
The bottom line was that I was not shocked at the verdict, but I sure wasn't cocky about expecting it to be that way.
When they first kept thinking, well, maybe one of the others, maybe one of the others.
And then, you know, three boom.
And then, of course, the four counts of lying to the police.
Who cares?
I mean, at that point, four misdemeanors, and she'd already served three years in jail.
Yeah, so that was done.
And the jury came to its verdict quickly.
For them, it was an easy decision, though.
They are now speaking out.
That's where I want to pick it up after this break.
What the jurors are saying, it's fascinating to me.
And also what she is up to now.
I'll leave you with this thought.
It's very bad to stumble on the word not when reading a not guilty verdict indeed.
But that clerk is in good company.
I'm thinking about Chief Justice John Roberts when he messed up the oath for Barack Obama.
Remember, they had to do it again privately behind the scenes.
It happens to the best of us.
Okay, stand by.
Much more with Cheney Mason and Beth Karras coming up two minutes away.
So I guess I should ask you, too, Beth, for your your best take on what was the evidence you felt like the jury either ignored, refused to see, didn't get to hear that the rest of us did.
Because the vast majority of America is convinced that she did it, right, and does not agree with this verdict.
Right.
So, you know, we asked jurors to use their common sense, right?
And really, when you can't, I understand where the prosecution was coming from because it sure looks like Casey is responsible for something.
She should not have been acquitted of everything, even neglect.
I mean, I think one of the charges was neglect or lesser.
So that was surprising to me.
So I think the jurors simply ignored this mother who didn't report her daughter missing.
You know, there's something in there besides those four misdemeanor lying to police officers.
I think there was a lower level felony she could have been convicted of.
But what was insurmountable for the prosecution was this allegation of sex abuse by George, which was never proven and the jurors were told not to consider it, but that was there.
That was the elephant in the room.
But also, Cheney's summation to the jury was very effective because he wasn't talking about the defense proof.
He's talking about the prosecution's proof because that's what mattered.
Did they prove every element of every crime beyond a reasonable doubt?
And he kept hammering to the jury that the prosecution did not give the jury evidence of how Kaylee died, where she died, when she died, who was with her when she died, but really it was how she died and when she died and where she died.
And he just kept hammering that.
And that had to have been effective with the jurors.
I never spoke with the jurors.
But the other thing I wanted to say, two more things, is that a finding of not guilty is not a finding of innocence.
It just simply means the prosecution did not have proof beyond a reasonable doubt.
Secondly, I was sitting in the balcony of the courtroom.
There was a balcony in that courtroom.
It was a courtroom at the top of the courthouse, I think, that's sort of designed for media coverage and high-tech stuff to present to the jury with evidence.
And so we were relegated to upstairs, a small balcony.
So I'm there, sort of craning my neck, watching the jury on the left and Casey and the defense team on the right, the judge straight in front of me, but from above, bird's eye view.
And I didn't, you know, I couldn't, I didn't have Cheney's point of view, so I couldn't see jurors, you know, but I was aware that the man who became the jury four person, he connected with Casey.
I'd seen that on a prior day as jurors were filing out a courtroom.
He was in the back row and he stood there and he stared at her and he lingered looking at her.
And I thought, oh, that doesn't bode well for the prosecution.
Anyway, when I heard the first not guilty, I thought, surely there's going to be a guilty somewhere.
And I just leaned back and took a deep exhale and thought, oh my God, I was as surprised as everyone that there wasn't some guilty of some level of felony.
Can we just round back to two other points I neglected to mention, which get raised on why people think she's guilty?
The chloroform, there was testimony that the guy who tested the trunk test found the odor of decompensation, found one hair that was consistent at the edges with Kaylee's hair and may have had some decomposition on it.
And then there was an allegation that there had been Google searches on the family home.
I mean, I've heard everything from a whole litany of searches of like, how do you kill somebody?
How do you make homemade weapons?
To for sure, they testify that there was a search done for chloroform.
For chloroform, you know, there was a search on chloroform.
And to the point where Cindy Anthony had to take the stand and say, it was me.
It was I who searched for the chloroform.
And I don't know if the jury bought that or not, but can you just speak to the evidence of like the forensics?
I'll give it to you, Beth, and then I'll let you respond, Chaney, which I can see you want to.
So this was a faux pont, I think, on the part of the prosecution.
Not that they introduced this, that they didn't do enough because only after the trial, I think it was in Jose's book, but I heard Jose talking about it.
He knew, the defense team knew that there were a lot more searches for chloroform than what the prosecution knew because the prosecution only checked one search engine.
It didn't check Firefox, only check Mozilla, or vice versa.
And Jose, and I assume you too, Chaney, knew that there were a lot of searches for chloroform, but it didn't come in because they didn't, the Sheriff's Department did not search all of the search engines on Casey's computer.
And when Cindy got on the stand and said, I was searching because, I don't know, one of my tree, something chlorophyll, chloroform, it was it just sort of defaulted to the wrong word.
I recall her saying it didn't make sense because she was punched in at work at the time she said she, you know, at the time of the search, she was actually at work.
So, you know, that didn't fly, you know, with some people, but then they found some, didn't they bet?
They found some chloroform in the back of the trunk.
No, I don't remember what I call that.
No, okay.
I thought that there was some evidence.
I'll look it up.
There's something to that effect in the record.
I'll pull it up for you.
Go ahead, Guteny.
Handle the chloroform and the searches.
As far as the searches are concerned, you're talking about computer stuff.
And I'm not the best guy to do that.
I like my generation dealing without them.
The bottom line is, in my book, I have made it very clear that the man who was in charge of all that corrected the error that the state had made and said there was only one search, one for chloroform.
Secondly, the odor of the trunk or whatever there was from that.
Not only did I go and sit in the trunk and smell it and do as the rest of the spy experts did, I hired a forensic expert, college professor, PhD, who did studies of the air samples that had been taken.
And what they found on the graphs of the analysis was not chloroform.
It was surprisingly gasoline.
There was no detection of chloroform.
Now, there was this guy who studies roadkill.
I know his name, I'm not going to repeat it.
It's in the book that had talked about how he had all these body farm issues.
And we went up to go through all that in Knoxville, Tennessee, and what odors were.
And they captured odors and they tried to show us that there was a graph produced that showed spikes of chloroform or something.
And that turned out not to be accurate.
And there was never any chloroform found in any way, residual or otherwise, anything to do with this case, no matter how many labs and government officials tried to do so.
Chloroform Evidence and Roadkill Expert00:06:56
And the reason they did.
But can I just ask you, if we're talking about the same thing, this is where I got it from.
This is an ABC News report, June 22nd, 2011.
A forensic chemist, I think this is your guy, whose name you were searching for, Michael Sigmund.
Yes.
He testified in the Casey Anthony trial.
He said today the car belonging to the mom accused of murdering two-year-old Kaylee did not test positive for human decomposition.
He is a chemist at the National Center for Forensic Science.
He said that air samples from Casey Anthony's car trunk tested positive mainly for gasoline.
Chloroform and two other chemicals were present.
So there was chloroform, but the question is, from what and what does that tell us?
Okay, so what it did tell us, it was such a minimum amount, they used another car that was bought at random from the prosecution.
I can't remember where it was now.
Same make model of car year and everything, and they brought it in and they tested it and they cut out carpet from the trunk.
The same and they got the same readings from this random car as there were in Casey's car.
So unless there's just a lot of people hauling bodies around in old fords, and just it just was not, it was not reliable.
Did the owner of that car do searches for chloroform on the internet?
No, the government did.
Can I add about what Cheney said about the searches on the computer?
He's right that a witness got on the stand to correct the record, and it was actually one search, but that was on one search engine.
There was another search engine that the prosecution didn't discover that Jose Baez talked about after the trial that had a lot of more.
How do we explain that?
How do we explain the multiple, multiple searches for chloroform?
Well, there weren't.
That's why she's trying to tell you.
Yes, there were.
She's saying there were.
Yes, she's no, she's on my side.
Another search engine, on another search engine.
Yeah.
There were more searches.
And there might have been for more things, too.
Yes, homemade weapons.
Is that breaking a neck?
Yeah, breaking a neck.
It's a, hold on, I wrote it down.
Something like chloroform, how to make breaking a neck, suffocation, undetectable, how to make homemade weapons.
That's pretty good evidence for the prosecution.
Pretty speculative evidence with no forensic connection whatsoever.
They had first claimed there were 84 searches for chloroform on this computer.
I know you said that, but I think that was the number.
And then the people that did that correctly said, no, there wasn't.
There was only one.
And when you put it up on the one search agent, but you can get multiple search engines on one computer.
That's what that's trying to say.
So on the one, they had overstated it on this one search engine and they had to take it back down to just, oh, sorry, just one on the one search engine.
What she's saying is, according to Jose's book, and I've read this in news reports as well, there were multiple searches for chloroform on the other search engines on that computer.
They were very interested in that house in chloroform and other ways of killing somebody.
And they never found any chloroform anywhere.
That's the important part.
Except the trunk of the car.
She's saying, I know your point about the other car, but this one has extra circumstances.
All right, I get it.
Listen, I get it.
Let me talk to you about this juror.
I found this fascinating, fascinating.
A male juror spoke with People magazine, I think it was.
Yeah, People Magazine, right after the trial.
And then the trial was the verdict was in 2011.
And then they just spoke with him again, 10 years later in 2021.
And just let me read part of it to you guys and to the audience because I'm sure not everybody's seen this.
A month after he said to people, look, none of us liked Casey Anthony at all.
She seems like a horrible person, he said.
But the prosecutors did not give us enough evidence to convict.
They gave us a lot of stuff that makes us think she probably did something wrong, but not beyond a reasonable doubt.
10 years later, writes people, the same juror has been rethinking the case.
Quote, I think of the case at least once every single day.
It was such a strange summer.
I knew that there was public interest in the case, but it wasn't until after I was sequestered that I realized the whole world was watching.
Then it says, the juror said he found the prosecutors to be arrogant.
They did not like the prosecution.
Man, it really is important what the lawyer's relationship is with the jury.
While lead defense attorney Jose Baez was the one in the room who seemed like he cared, they said the other lawyer, Cheney, can be argumentative at times, but winds up being a charmer.
No, that was me, Cheney.
He goes on.
His focus now is on little Kaylee.
Every time I see her face or hear her name, I get a pit in my stomach.
It all comes flooding back.
I think about those pictures of the baby's remains they showed us.
I remember Casey.
I even remember the smell of the courtroom.
And then says this: The enormity of the acquittal bothered them in the jury room.
And then we sat there for a few minutes and were like, Holy crap, we're letting her go free.
Everyone was just stunned at what we were about to do.
One of the women jurors asked me, Are you okay with this?
And I said, Hell no, but what else can we do?
We promised to follow the law.
Now, this juror says he might have done things differently.
This is your point, Beth.
My decision haunts me to this day, he says.
I think now, if I were to do it over again, I'd push harder to convict her of one of the lesser charges, like aggravated manslaughter, at least that, or child abuse.
I didn't know what the hell I was doing, and I didn't stand up for what I believed in at the time.
Whoa.
What do you make of that, Cheney?
I'm not surprised.
People rethink, question themselves about things they do in their daily life all the time.
And I understand that fella talk about now he has second guesses.
Well, people, like I say, do that about their own personal lives all day.
Oh, I wish I had said that.
Or I wish I had thought of this.
Well, the other thing is, then he gets out and there's all sorts of blowback, I'm sure.
You know, the jurors remain anonymous, but you get all this blowback, and you're thinking, oh my God, maybe I got it wrong.
And we see more evidence and different evidence and experience these cases in a different way than the jury does, which is why we have to respect their decision.
You can't, you can, you can second guess it for yourself and say, well, I don't agree with it.
That's fine, but you have to be treat the jury with honor because, unlike the rest of us, they sat there and had the experience, the best we can offer as a justice system.
I'm going to see one that does better than we do.
Godt levert gir deg lyden av kyllingbrust med ris på en seng av drømmer.
Military Deprivation and Second Guesses00:15:05
Så hva skal vi dra på en ferie snart?
Pappas store drøm er jo å dra til Trondheim.
Ikke i land.
Jo, det er hva er det du skal si?
Min store drøm er å rette trist av sammen.
Den drømmen skal vi innvilge.
Middagen sammen høres godt ut.
Det er matkasse fra Godt levert.
Godt levert, godkjent av livet.
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For today's episode of Hot Crime Summer, we are diving deep into the world of cults with two former cult members.
Later, we'll be joined by Dr. Stephen Hasson, one of America's leading cult experts.
And we'll be joined by Dr. Stephen Hasson, and we'll be joined by Dr. Stephen Hasson, and we'll be joined by Dr. Stephen Hasson, and we'll be joined by Dr. Stephen Hasson, As a former cult member himself, he'll tell you how he got recruited.
He was a totally normal guy.
He was an adult.
He was like in his 20s when he got lured in.
He now helps individuals and families who have been trapped in cults.
But we begin with the story of Michelle Dowd.
Michelle was born into the ultra-religious cult called the Field, run by her maternal grandfather.
He convinced generations of followers that he would live 500 years and ascend to the heavens when doomsday came.
Michelle spent 10 years of her childhood living on a mountain, suffering from all sorts of abuse and severe poverty.
There, she was forced to learn skills necessary to survive.
Michelle eventually gained the strength to flee the cult at 17 years old and is now a professor and author and totally candid about what life was like for her in that environment.
She tells her story in her new book, Forager, Field Notes for Surviving a Family Cult.
I'm fascinated by your entire story.
If you don't mind, I'm sure you've told a million times, but if you don't mind, let's start at the beginning.
So you were born into a cult.
So how did that happen?
Well, yes, indeed I was.
In fact, my mother was born into the same cults.
My grandfather was a young man from Oklahoma, was orphaned in his teenage years.
Some debate on how old he was because he often exaggerated the truth or sometimes completely misled people.
But in any case, he came to LA, Hollywood area sometime in his teenage years and began working as a Boy Scout leader.
When he was unable to have the control that he wanted as a Boy Scout leader, then he left.
He kind of segmented off and created his own organization, which by 1931 started to show up in newspapers.
So I was able to look back at that.
So for sure, they were an organization by then.
And he started taking boys up to the mountains.
Then he started a Bible band and he started giving young boys opportunities to, I don't know, just like to be part of a community if they didn't have a sense of belonging.
So in the 1940s, my father was, he came to California with his mother, who was a single mom who was running away from an abusive husband.
And she was hiding in California in a chicken coop, actually.
And my father joined my grandfather's cult when my mom was a young girl.
And so they were married off to each other later.
And I came along a couple of decades later along with, I was the second of four children.
So this cult had been around for a very long time before I was born into it.
And you were, where did you live?
It's hard for me to understand because I know when you were little, I know you lived sort of more in, I don't know if we would say a city environment, or I remember reading it was like nearby a town dump.
So you were with people and things and access to, you know, things that we all know in our towns for some time before you went to this just remote mountainous area.
Absolutely.
My grandfather actually started the organization in Pasadena, which is just east of LA.
We were living when I was a baby and into my early years until I was seven on the border of El Monte.
So there was a dump that we lived next to.
And there was also a area that they kind of dug out at the end of a cul-de-sac where even before I was born in the 1950s, my grandfather leased land from a business owner.
So it was private land that he leased.
And my father was one of the teenage boys who literally constructed the buildings there out of cinderblocks.
So I was raised on the border of that until I was seven.
So I went to public school when I was five, six, and seven.
And then after a fire and some other occurrences, we had nowhere to go.
And so my grandfather, who had leased a mountain property, I believe in 1947 from the government, then moved our nuclear family up onto the mountain.
And I stayed there until I finally left the cult.
So you'll have to read the book to find out.
Yeah, no, no, right, right.
But that was about 10 years later.
Well, yeah, I stayed there for 10 years until I got out.
It's crazy to me how you lived.
You know, part of me, I speak only of the survival skills here, but part of me was envious of all the things you learned about how to take care of yourself.
And then there was the sexual abuse and other abuse and lack of love and all the other things, which we'll talk about.
But can we just spend a minute on the survival skills and how you did survive up there and how your mother knew all of this to teach you?
I want to pay tribute to my mother who passed last year for teaching me how to not only survive in the wilderness, but how to appreciate the great intricacies and interdependencies of the ecosystem that is north of Los Angeles.
And that has served me in many ways throughout my life, not because I any longer need to survive in that way, but because I know that the earth can provide for us.
And it is also just a wonderful gift to be able to recognize different birds, different animals, and many, many, many plants.
My mother's knowledge was self-taught.
She was, I guess, obsessed would be the word.
She was obsessed with learning every single thing in our ecosystem.
So she was so skilled, in fact, and knowledgeable that government workers at the ranger station that was not too far away, we weren't allowed to go there, but my mother did when the men weren't around.
So let me just go back one second and say that it used to be an entirely male organization.
And my mother was born into this 100% male organization.
She had three older brothers.
And so she was very used to figuring out how to get around whatever the rules were.
And her father actually did find her unique and intelligent.
And he gave her more leeway, I think, than anyone else had in the cult.
It's tough for a cult that has only men to survive.
So they eventually brought in women.
But yes, you're very astute at that.
But let me say that at the beginning, my grandfather just had followers that he demanded be celibate.
So in the 1930s, he had some young men who followed him who stayed with him all the way until his death in the 1980s.
And so I know for a fact, because I knew these men, they, I can't attest for sure that they're celibate, but they were alone and they stayed with him for a very long time.
And it wasn't until my mother got into her 20s that I think he recognized that he needed to allow women to be in the organization.
So she married one of his early followers.
And after she was the very first marriage at the fields, and there were women who then married into the organization afterwards.
And there were lots of girls, still male-dominated, but there were girls and women after my mother got married.
So how did you live?
Were you in a tent?
Like describe your living circumstances to us.
Well, when we first came to the mountain, which was in the fall when I was almost eight, we lived in a mess hall.
So a mess hall is, you know, that's what it was called, kind of a military quarters, but it was one room and there was a big stone fireplace.
So we were not out in the cold.
We had an outhouse down the hill.
So I don't know how far away the outhouse was, less than a quarter of a mile.
And we would walk down to the outhouse and there was a sink.
So there was some running water in the kitchen and the kitchen and the great room and all these army bunks.
It was all in one room.
And so we slept on army bunks.
And what were you eating?
Because I know food was always an issue.
Well, interestingly, and I have this a little bit in the book, we did forage for acorns and other lots of nuts.
We were not killing animals.
We were living off of plants, so plant-based diet.
But the government actually gave us surplus.
So there were times, not immediately, but I don't know exactly how long in where they would come by and unload from a truck, whatever was available.
So cans of peanuts or carrot syrup, sometimes fruit cocktail, and Sometimes blocks of butter and sometimes cheese, depending on what the government had as surplus at the time.
So it's very interesting that we were living on government land, even though the government didn't know what we were doing there.
Yeah.
And that must have felt like such a delicacy to get some fruit cocktail and some cheese after foraging for acorns.
Absolutely.
I don't even know if we were supposed to eat it, but we used to go into, there was kind of a dug-in walk-in, and my sisters and I would sneak in there and get the food because we had a can opener.
So we would, yes, it was an incredible delicacy.
And I'm very grateful to the government actually for that program, at least at that time.
So it was, we have an army Jeep that my father also got from government surplus.
So he had been drafted and he was very militaristic.
He that was the training that he got that he believed helped him become a man.
And so he trained all his children, girls, and the one boy that he had to work in a military system, you know, which we were not military, but we were trained to behave as if we were.
Well, I was going to say that the deprivation was a feature, not a bug.
So can you expand on that?
Because it was a life of deprivation.
Thank you for noticing that.
You have very astute observations.
It was a feature.
It was intentional.
The deprivation was to help us, for one, lead the army of God in the time of the apocalypse.
So they believed that there would be a thousand years of a reign of terror on the earth and that we would have to live without.
And that as we were hiding in the rocks of the mountains, that if we could survive on very little, then we would be able to outwit the, I mean, honestly, it was, I think, a little psychotic because, well, very psychotic, but they both received things from the government, but they also feared the government.
So they thought that whatever political leaders might be coming next would be our enemies.
And so we would need to survive without having access to the things that ordinary citizens had access to.
Beyond the food, a very strange approach to love, tenderness, affection, even by your parents toward their children.
Yes, you know, they would not have called it a cult.
They did not call it a cult.
They called it a community.
And my younger brother, who I call Danny in the book, he came to me after reading this book.
He hasn't read a book since he was a teenager, and he got a copy in the mail.
And he read it the first night.
And then he drove to my house from Santa Barbara.
And he said, you know, the one thing you got wrong is it's not that they would sacrifice us, it's that they did sacrifice us.
And so he was able to have a conversation with our father and who is still alive.
And our father said, it's not a cult and he won't read the book or have anything to do with me.
But my brother stood up and he said, but dad, if grandpa had told you to put us all in the mess hall and set it on fire, you would have done it.
And he said, yes, I would have, but I didn't.
So it wasn't a cult.
So my father knows that he was absolutely at the mercy of whatever our grandfather, which was not his father, remember, it was his father-in-law, who he didn't really call that.
He called him Mr. But he really truly believed that our grandfather would tell him, he was God's prophet and he would tell him how to behave in the world.
And my father resigned all forms of critical thinking.
He just gave up any sort of alliance to us, any sort of caretaking.
And my mother as well, they believed that God was in control and that God's word would be given to them through grandpa.
When you're, you spoke a little bit about this, but when your dad arrived into the relationship with your mom, like what was what had been his background?
mentioned military, but what had been his background that he was, I mean, I suppose we're going to get into this later, but like that made him susceptible to that.
Well, first, I think almost anybody is susceptible to the kind of mind control in these high control groups that really charismatic leaders know how to orchestrate.
But in my father's particular case, he was 12 years old when he met my grandfather.
My father came from the East Coast.
He came from Connecticut with his mother on a bus.
He didn't know where he was going because they were running away from an abusive man who my mother was married, or sorry, my grandmother was married to.
His father was abusive to him and to his mother.
And so they ran away and they came to California and they were living in a chicken shed when my father met my grandfather.
So my grandfather provided a father figure and also provided someplace for my dad to go because his mother was working in a factory.
She was the only woman working in a post-World War II factory in the 1940s when they arrived here in California.
And I don't think she knew what her son was doing.
I think she was a wonderful, she did her best to be an attentive mother, but she just didn't have the time.
She had an eighth grade education.
That's the furthest she ever got in her life.
She lived to be in her 90s.
And I had the great blessing of being with her during her death.
But at the time, she just didn't have any resources.
And so her son went and joined this cult.
And she tried to get him out later when she realized it when he was like 18 or 19, but he wouldn't leave at that point.
Grandfather Figure and Grooming Tactics00:15:26
It was too late.
Yeah.
And this particular cult preyed on only children.
So they didn't, you couldn't be an adult who joined the cult.
They pulled from at the time only boys, but they had an after school program and lots of boys joined.
Not all the boys were hurt by the organization.
A lot of boys, I think, got training, sports training that was really useful in their lives.
But if a parent was capable of seeing that it was a high control group, a lot of times the kids would play for two or three or four years on the sports teams.
And then the parents would say, that's enough now.
We're going to go to high school or, you know, whatever they were going to do.
And they were allowed to leave.
But it was the boys who were compelled and who worshipped my grandfather and who really found their greatest sense of belonging there who were taken through layer after layer of testing and basically training to be bullies.
And they would not be allowed to then, they signed commitment for life forms.
They couldn't sign those until they were 18 years old.
But nobody could come there at 18.
They all had to be groomed during their early years in order to get to the point where they really would sign their lives over as adults.
I mean, you were born into it, but how are they getting girls?
Well, the word I used was groomed, but the women were also, they didn't get girls until my mom was of age.
So they would just be celibate.
They didn't get married.
But my father was the very first boy, they called him.
He was almost 30, but he was the very first boy who was allowed to marry at the organization.
And so he married my mother, who's the founder's daughter.
And that was kind of a royal wedding.
They had it at the fields.
My grandfather officiated.
I've seen all the pictures.
And then I was the second child born out of that marriage.
But there were no, there weren't marriages before that.
And so once we were born, then there had to be something, they had to figure out what to do with the children.
And so they allowed marriages then.
And those women were the sisters of the other members.
And they were also then groomed to be wives and mothers.
And to be fair, some of those women had access to resources from their parents.
We didn't because my mother, you know, was born there.
And then my father didn't have any resources.
His mother, after he was 19, I believe, she moved to the East Coast and we didn't see her for decades.
But My understanding and my knowledge of the other families were there were families who were there that their parents, sometimes, especially if there were children involved, would send the grandkids money for food and other things.
We just didn't have access to that.
And the other cult members who were raised there, I'll just give you an example.
The first nine kids that were born there.
So even though I was the second in my family, I was the fourth oldest child who was born into this cult.
And of the first nine of us, which were all within two years of age, the other eight are all still there, just to put that in perspective.
How many people were in the cult when you were there?
So there were about 150 in the inner workings of the cult, but they were pulling from about 1,500 boys at any given time.
So they would bring boys in and they wouldn't stay, you know, and they also would hide what they were doing from their parents.
And I don't think this is happening anymore, but at the time, it had been happening for decades.
So this, of course, helps explain to some extent some of the sexual abuse.
I mean, just the sheer numbers of boys versus girls.
And you were one of very few.
It's interesting how you write about it and how your mother talked to you about it.
Again, there's like a tinge of affirming life advice in here, but it doesn't discount the overall trauma of the event.
Like you were sexually abused repeatedly from what you write in the book.
And tell us how, let's talk about that first, then we'll talk about your mother's messaging to you on it.
So I am aware that I was not the only one who was abused, but I also am aware that it was not something that happened to all the girls.
In our particular case, we were very vulnerable because our mother would go on these trips, which she'd be gone for two to three months and she would go with the men.
So like all the men would go, but she would go with her husband.
So she was protected on these trips.
She was also with her father.
And we were often left with.
I have since since I read the book, some of the caregivers that I had when I was a baby have come out of the woodworks who left the cult and have written me letters and asked to meet me.
I went to coffee with one recently.
She was only 15 when she left the cult, but she was my caregiver when she was, you know, 12, 13, 14, 15.
Until my mother's no longer allowed girls to take care of us.
But in any case, our particular family was very vulnerable because we just didn't have any other relatives other than the ones who were there.
And the boys, they called them boys.
I believe, I do not believe anyone under 18 ever assaulted me.
I believe that the youngest one that I know of, who I did know very well, was 19 at the time I was seven.
And I think that they were babysitting us and they had access to our bodies.
And I don't know that it was condoned, but I think that it was overlooked.
And these young men, really honestly, I'm not, I'm not obviously condoning it, but they were very unhealthy and they did not have access.
They were not allowed to masturbate.
For example, my grandfather was adamant about that.
So like very strict and like vocal requirements that they stay chaste.
And then they just sort of like put them around young girls.
So again, it was a really unhealthy environment for them.
And I feel that, you know, they were, I do feel that they were victims too.
You know, it was a different kind of victimhood, but I think they were.
Yeah.
May I ask how often this happened to you?
Well, I went through this frequently for about a year when I was seven.
I don't know that it happened before that.
I don't have memories of really being younger than seven, but the thing about being seven was there was a big fire.
A lot of things happened.
And this type of abuse ended for me at that point because we left to go up to the mountain.
And when we first got to the mountain, it was just our nuclear family.
And my father was not sexually abusive.
So my father was very militaristic and could be unkind, but he was not sexually abusive.
And neither was my grandfather to me, at least.
So we were separated from that culture.
And then we had a lot of young men living with us.
And things were, I would say, inappropriate, but I did not get physically violated.
I think it was just sort of an emotional thing after that.
And I'm very, very, very grateful for spending the time we did on the mountain because it removed me from the really most damaging effects of the cult.
Can we talk about what your mom said?
Because the reason I said there's like a tinge of something positive you could take away if, you know, God forbid you find yourself in this situation.
And it was, it was basically to try not to think too much about it.
And I know that sounds absurd.
That sounds absurd.
I realize.
Trust me, I know enough sexual abuse victims that it sounds absurd.
But if you can do it, it's a very useful coping technique for a lot of people.
And I know somebody, a Hollywood star, who told me this story about when she was young and she was raped by a few boys in the neighborhood and sexually assaulted.
And she didn't really understand what it was fully.
You know, she didn't totally understand what had happened to her.
And her mother told her, you just forget about that.
Like that, don't give that any mind.
You know, that's what boys do, some boys, whatever, but like that doesn't have anything to do with who you are.
That wasn't nice of them, but don't dwell on it.
And I was like, when I heard the story, I'm like, that's terrible.
My God, the amount of damage that must have been done.
And she was like, no, it actually really, it gave me this box to put it in.
I managed to put it in there and I was fine after that.
So that's when I was reading your story.
I'm sure a lot of people have the same reaction of like, oh my God, that's horrible.
But were you able to compartmentalize?
Because your mother was very dismissive of this.
I definitely compartmentalized.
And I think that there is value to that when you need to move on and survive.
And so there were, yes, I had compartmentalized.
I had boxes for everything, including literally a box where I kept my writing, which I was able to finally break the lock on literally when I was getting ready to write this book.
And I had not read what I had written in, you know, 35 years or some ridiculously long period like that.
But when it comes to, and I'm not going to make a claim for what is healthy for anyone else, but I will say for my healing process, the fact that my mother made it seem as if I was not damaged, but that it was, again, a byproduct, as you said, of sort of what boys will be boys.
There is something that is useful about that because you don't blame yourself.
Later, I ended up blaming myself because I got very sick and there was a lot of complications about that.
But at the time, it really helped me see myself as just kind of a vessel, which sounds horrible, but like I was a vessel for God's will or whatever, but it looks like I'm a vessel that the boys used.
And then, you know, they were done.
And so then I became myself again.
And even at seven, Michelle, I mean, seven is a baby.
Yes, yes, it is.
It is.
And I'm not saying there was no damage, you know, but at the time I was able to function.
And it wasn't until later in life that, it's not that I had memories.
I mean, I always had the memories, but I also felt that there was a lot of deprivation and a lot of difficult things.
And I just put them all in boxes.
And I think that it came to me later.
And this is a story I know I've written about that I couldn't sit still.
I had an inability as a young adult to sit still.
I had children very young.
I moved through life very quickly, the stages of adulthood.
And it wasn't until I first sat still that I had to deal with the ramifications of sexual abuse.
Yes.
Okay.
So that's one of my questions.
If you're born into a society that doesn't attach, you know, the obvious negative labels to that and help you understand how wrong it is morally in every other way.
Does the damage still happen?
Do you carry it forward?
How does it manifest?
Well, you know, I did exist in a wider society to some degree.
And certainly by the time I was 17 and moving, for example, when I moved into a co-ed dorm in college, then that I was very afraid of men because I did not know.
I didn't know men that were strangers in any other way than violent ways.
And so it was very scary to me, even though the boys in college did not hurt me.
I was scared.
Right.
That's the irony.
This is not something that it's not something boys do.
You know, I mean, some sick criminals do it, but like most boys would never do it.
Right, right.
And so there were wonderful young men at my college, but I was afraid of them.
And so I had all sorts of, they called me the ice queen.
I was very distant.
I was very careful.
So there were those ramifications at the beginning, just that I didn't know how to have normal social relationships.
My God, were you like, I was raised in a cult?
What's wrong with you people?
Don't give me such a hard time.
It's a miracle I'm here.
You know, I didn't talk about it.
I was very ashamed of where I came from.
I mean, there was a lot I didn't know, Megan.
There was a lot of things like I didn't know songs.
I didn't know pop culture.
I didn't know movies.
I didn't know the things that other young people knew.
So I just listened a lot and started gathering all that information.
And I don't know.
Was there no schooling?
No, but I can see why you had no pop culture.
I'm not sure there's no TV, but was there no schooling?
So after I was seven, so I went to public school through second grade.
And then after that, we were not officially homeschooled, but they did have this when we would be at the field.
They had a seriously one-room schoolhouse.
It was in the church.
And they would put kids five through 12 in this room together, the kids that were at the field.
And we had some sort of instruction.
We had, we played a lot of flag football.
We listened to stories of the Bible.
And as I talk about in the book, I read the Bible cover to cover when I was eight.
And that is an education in and of itself.
You could learn a lot from that.
And I did have access to my mom's brothers who I could ask questions about the Bible.
And I started cross-referencing as a very young child.
And so by the time I got to college, I could understand the language of Shakespeare, for example, really well because it is the same language of the King James Bible.
But is it true you never learned, for example, the presidents?
I did not know the presidents.
I still don't know the presidents.
Wow.
Like, do you know the big ones?
You know, you probably know the big ones.
I know the big ones.
I don't really want to be tested on it, but yes, I could tell you the big ones.
Right, right.
Like, like, I'm not going to quiz you on Martin Van Bureau because nobody cares.
Okay.
So I wouldn't answer those well.
So you're living this existence and part of the problem was your mother did not show you really any love.
I mean, that was one of the saddest parts of the story, which was, I mean, yes, there was the physical and sexual abuse, not to diminish that, but doesn't a human being come into this world needing affection, a baby, a toddler, a little one, needing to be told they're loved and to feel loved.
I would say that not having my mother's love was the greatest heartbreak of my life.
It was the love I was seeking my entire life.
I know a lot of women go around seeking love from men, but I felt that I wanted a mother figure.
I wanted a maternal figure.
I wanted that kind of affection.
And I worked very hard to try to get that from my mother.
To be fair to her, she was raised in a very rigid high control group, right?
So this, she was raised in this cult and she gave up her children upon giving birth.
She handed them over to the group.
And I think that she had to put armor on to keep herself from loving what she thought would be taken away from her.
Seeking Maternal Love and Armor00:03:38
My grandfather thought that the world would end in 1977.
So my mother had these babies that she thought she was just going to have to give over in 1977 when they were like little children.
And again, she believed this.
She really believed it.
And so she was not able to attach because attaching, I think, would have been wrenching for her.
And again, not excusing her coldness, but understanding it.
I just don't think she really wanted to risk attaching to something that she felt she had no control over.
So she didn't attach.
You're 54 now?
Okay, so you're two years older than I am.
So you're born in 68, right around there.
So you were alive and cognizant in 1977.
And so what happened when the world did not end?
Nothing.
Nothing interesting thing, right?
The first thing my grandfather said is that they got the years wrong because he said that when it was all based on when Jesus was born, you know, the understanding when Jesus was born, but because of Caiaphas and, you know, he gave all the names of the Sanhedrin and just different people who would have controlled Pontius Pilate.
And his understanding then was that the years were off.
And so we were on the wrong calendar.
Okay.
That's, I mean, that's how it works, I think, in a lot of these cults when the end of the world doesn't come.
Let's talk about how you got out because it's a miracle you got out.
I mean, talking to you now, you're perfectly normal.
You're dynamic.
You seem happy.
Forgive me for being so judgmental in that implication there.
But I would have expected you to appear more damaged given this childhood.
So talk to us about how you got out.
Well, first of all, thank you for the compliment.
I don't know what damage looks like.
And also I have had many years in the wider world to not just, I don't know, I haven't spent that much time in therapy really, but I have spent time doing what I would consider healthy work.
My profession has been one of service.
And I felt that working with young people has done a world of good for me, understanding the ways that many people are damaged by their upbringings.
And not to the same, you know, degree necessarily I was, but there are many people who struggle with upbringings that didn't serve them.
So I will say, first of all, that we all have something to recover from and that we are capable of recovery.
I will also say that reading books and being in a profession that enables me to talk about those things has been very useful.
And as far as how I left, I think that one of the main ways that I got out really was using the advice that my mother gave me.
So while she wasn't able to give me the affection I needed, she was able to give me the skills that would help me really scrounge.
And I mean, we can use the word forage, it's true, but like I used the foraging for words and the foraging for, you know, how to find what you need anywhere if you know what you're looking for.
So once I knew that I wanted to get out, I had all the skills to do that.
And I owe that to my mother, not because she necessarily prepared me for that purpose, but it did indeed serve me.
And I'm very-side effect of all the other things she was teaching you.
Leaving Home with Mother's Advice00:10:00
Yeah.
And so the book Forger, if any of you have a chance to read it, does actually go into the details of to some degree what led to me leaving.
But the details of what it was like right after I left, I'll have to say for the next book because, well, I can give a little bit now, but that was a long process.
And I felt like it is a story in and of itself, because I did not naturally acclimate to, I was very fortunate that a college took me in, that I was living there at 17, that I was able to have the ability to learn and a passion for learning.
And I was really grateful that it led me straight to grad school and that I was able to get a teaching job very young and I was able to support myself.
But emotionally, I think I was very stunted and it took me a long time to figure out how to make connections with other human beings who are healthy.
And that was all miraculous.
I mean, it's truly miraculous that this happened.
I do recall there was an injury, not an injury, there was a disease.
You came down with an autoimmune disease that landed you in the hospital.
And I wondered, like, were there big medical problems in, quote, the field, you know, like where you were living that would have required you to go to the hospital?
Did your family support modern medicine and understand that certain things?
You're like, you break a femur, you got to go get a cast?
Well, to some degree, yes, and to some, no, there's a lot of modern medicine that we didn't have access to.
We didn't have insurance, for example, or money to pay for things.
We actually didn't break bones, interestingly enough.
So that none of my siblings ever broke a bone, neither did I.
And we didn't need antibiotics.
You know, there's just some kids who get through without that.
But I had an autoimmune disease called idiopathic thrombocytopenia propura, which was and is still of unknown origin.
It doesn't have a genetic component.
There is some speculation that perhaps, well, I'll just say what the disease is, is your body is coating lots of cells and platelets with antibodies so that your organs like your spleen filter the blood and kill off what they perceive as invaders.
In the process of killing off what they perceive as invaders, the spleen and the liver and kidneys and this filter out the platelets themselves that are necessary to clot blood.
So in my case, I really was down to nearly zero platelets.
So like even a little cut, I could have bled to death.
Now, what this comes from is very uncertain, but when I got to the hospital, they didn't know what it was.
And I've had, you know, some public a little bit critique into saying that wouldn't the hospital recognize that I was a victim of abuse?
And I would say no, not in the late 70s and the early 80s.
Those questions weren't being asked of young children.
And once I was in the hospital, my parents were very busy.
And that was also normal, that if you had a working mother and if you had other children in the family, I was in a children's hospital and there were other children, not all, but there were other children who were left without their parents during their duration of their stay.
And the nurses and the doctors were working on our bodies and helping us understand what was going on while we were present in the hospital, but not necessarily concerned with our mental health.
I just don't think that that was something people talked about in those days to children.
You were at least it was very tough love.
I know you wrote your mother was like, there'll be no crying, period.
And again, you know, I think a lot of us can look at some of these little hints and say, well, you know, you do want to raise tough children.
You want your children to be resilient.
You don't want them licking their wounds and feeling sorry for themselves all the time.
But as with all of these examples, it just, it was next level and it was at a place, you know, if you get really hurt, you're going to cry.
If you get raped, you're going to cry if you've got the right context for what's happening to you.
So, how do you see that now?
That sort of very tough love, I guess.
I went through, I would say, about 14 years from the age of 11 to into my 20s without crying ever.
And my mother strongly believed you do not cry when you get hurt.
You do not cry when you get raped.
You do not do those things that you act like nothing happened because then you will not become a perpetual victim.
There was also mental illness in her family that I later found out from her.
And my editors didn't want me to reveal medical things about the family because, you know, that could be a violation of their privacy.
But my mother knew that there was mental illness, not her own or her father's, but other members of the family.
And when I asked her later in life, why she didn't let us know this, if we were really honestly being put in danger, and she said, Well, I didn't want you to worry that that would happen to you.
And she's, and she just really, truly believed that you wouldn't become mentally ill if you didn't know that it was possible.
And so she thought that kind of toughness kept you.
And I think it's really old school, but I think she just felt that being really tough, which again, I'm not advocating.
I'm just putting it in the context that I don't think she saw that as being abusive.
I think she saw that.
So it's kind of an interesting experiment.
I mean, I'm not recommending it, but now that you've been through it, it is interesting to ask, like I was saying about abuse, if you don't know what file to put it in, is it less damaging in some way?
If she doesn't tell you about mental illness, is she right?
It can't manifest.
That doesn't sound, none of this sounds right, but you were part of an experiment.
Yes.
And Southern California, by the way, was a mecca of small cults.
This one was particularly successful, honestly, but there were a lot of people in California who were experimenting in communities with what would happen if you lived alternatively to the wider culture.
And a lot of those cults were religious, but not all.
There were just people who had very strong ideologies.
And what made them cults is that they had a high control group mentality led by a charismatic leader who would then make mercurial decisions about what was or wasn't allowed within said cult.
So yes, we were very experimental.
And I think after my grandfather's death, it got a little bit more rigid, which just happened to be really vulnerable years for me.
But then the cult softened because it couldn't continue to maintain that.
And since we were the very first children born there, it was an experiment and it was kind of a failed experiment.
And I don't think, for example, my mother would not have told you that I turned out well.
She would have said that I was like a bad seed and that I had made choices to leave and to leave the calling that she believed I was always meant to be, which is to be a leader at the field.
And she thought the work that I do, I teach college, that I work in a secular field and that is negative for, she thinks it's just very negative to teach people secular worldviews.
And so she was not ever proud of what I did and she couldn't bear to hear a word of it.
You started to stray a little in your behaviors and beliefs and it just led to, as I understand it, irreconcilable differences where they didn't want you and you didn't really want to be there and you left at a relatively young age.
I mean, how did you get into college?
Like, how did you even know to pick up an application?
You know, to that there could be, you know, a dormitory and a food and beverage service.
You know, like, how did all of this come to you?
Well, I was a house cleaner.
So because we didn't have any money, I started house cleaning when I was very young.
Right when I got out of the hospital, by the time before I even turned 14, I was cleaning a lot of houses.
And I went by word of mouth and I started working in wealthier areas because I got paid more.
And I-were you still, where were you when you were doing the house cleaning?
Okay, so my family still lived at the mountain.
We had no other home, but my parents would go away on these long trips.
And so I would sometimes stay down with my grandmother, especially after our grandfather died.
She was alone.
She was a widow.
And I would stay at her house on the couch with all her dogs.
And then I borrowed one of the girls I knew, one of her bike.
I bought it, and it wasn't one of her bikes.
It was probably her only bike, but I borrowed a bike and I would ride secretly.
And nobody really was around.
My grandmother had Alzheimer's and that wasn't diagnosed as Alzheimer's.
She later went into a home, not that much later.
She was sort of just pushed aside out of the field.
But at the time, she had Alzheimer's.
She was alone.
I slept on her couch and I took a bike and I went and did house cleaning jobs and I stored the money.
I got cash and I put it in this cup and I like put it up on the top of her shelf and she couldn't reach it.
And I just was very secretive about it.
So I did house cleaning as much as I could.
So I couldn't always, you know, once my parents were in town and we were up on the mountain, I couldn't house clean, but it was something that I was very good at.
And one of the women whose houses I cleaned and I'd been working for her for quite a while, she gave me a college application and I filled it out in pencil.
And it just so happens that, yeah, it's so interesting.
But anyway, the end result was I went to a very experimental college.
It's called Pitzer College and they started in the 60s and they didn't have general ed, for example.
They, I mean, they, they were an accredited institution, but they were private and they really liked that I had an alternative education and they did test me on things.
But I was a wonderful writer.
I went to an event recently.
One of my college professors was there and she was saying, oh no, from the moment I met you, you were just, you know, a wonderful writer.
I didn't teach you a thing.
That can't be true.
But it is true that I tested out of writing and I had very strong math skills from all the stuff I did with selling and from astronomy and from building because we would weld and we would build, you know, buildings.
Experimental College and Alternative Education00:04:53
And it's a lot.
You can learn a lot with hands-on education.
Sure.
Yeah, that's how it used to be done in this country.
So can I just ask you?
So now you're, are you married now?
I know you've got a family of your own now.
Yeah, my family is.
So no, I have my, I got married to a guy who was at the cult.
I had all my children with him.
And then they are now, so we stayed married when we raised our children, but they are now just, I just launched my youngest daughter.
And all of my children now are in their 20s and partnered.
Actually, my oldest just, I have twins that are my oldest and they're 30 now.
So they are.
You raised them outside of the cult?
Like the husband came with you?
He did.
Yeah.
Well, we got married outside of the cults.
And, but we knew each other.
We grew up together.
He's older than I am, but we, he was one of the boys who used to stay at our house and take care of us.
So it was kind of, you know, a brotherly figure to me.
But I was young.
I was with him starting, let's see, when I turned 18 and I was with him after that.
But you had a lot of, you didn't stay married.
No, we wanted to possibly where you look at that, you think there's no way more than 50% of marriages end in divorce, just like the odds are against you anyway.
But then with all this in your background, but I was just wondering what it would be like, you know, to meet somebody who wasn't in the cult and try to fall in love and try to trust.
And I assume you've had other, you know, boyfriends and so on after your marriage.
And has that been strange to you?
Or you were living enough sort of in the real world with your first husband that you got used to that before you had to date strangers.
Right.
So I've only had one husband and he we stayed together for a very long time and we are still close because we have really shared experiences and we have shared family and we have nieces and nephews and we have, you know, our children.
So we also really understand our various forms of trauma.
And he would say and has said to me, he's so grateful for the book that his trauma that he experienced there was more psychological abuse.
He was not born and he came there at age seven.
So since then, I have had, yes, I've had difficulty with understanding necessarily how relationships are.
I can understand short-term relationships really well, but longer-term relationship, it's difficult for me to trust.
And that's something I'm working through.
Why is it awkward when I ask you if you are married and have a family?
I just think that one of the things that I said when I was coming into this, I guess, this, I don't know if you call it tour, but talking about the book is that I would keep my personal life private.
That was just something I made for a boundary for myself and also for the man I married and also for my children because they do feel really awkward about our past.
I think that it's just maybe an area we didn't explore a lot.
And so the children had a traditional upbringing, like you raised them outside of the cult.
Yes.
All my children went to public school.
They've done very well.
They all got out of college rapidly.
They've been, they're all partnered.
Two of them are married.
Two of them.
That's funny how you keep saying that.
That's from the cult, right?
The part, they're all partnered.
We say married.
Okay.
Well, they're not all married.
So some of them, my children have long, they're have really, they're in relationships.
I could say it that way, but they're not all married.
And I don't mean to belittle it, but it's just, it's like I said, you're just, you seem like such a powerhouse.
So it's, there's something kind of sweet, these reminders of all that you've overcome in the way you speak and so on.
It's just, there's something endearing because you seem like just a very strong person and you must be.
So like, you know, that resilience is still in you.
I did read that you can't see your sisters, like that seeing your family of origin brings it all up for all of you.
So can you talk about that?
Are they, are they out of the cult?
And what's that like when you're all together?
So we're not all together really anymore, except for we were at our mom's services.
So that was honestly wonderful.
I don't know if it was something I'd written earlier.
I think we all had really difficult times being together for most of our adult lives, but especially since the book came out, my younger brother and my younger sister, and all four of us were all born within five years of each other total.
So we're all the same age.
Family Reunion After the Book00:02:00
My younger brother and sister came to the book opening.
They come and stayed at my house.
My sister flew in from my younger sister from the East Coast.
And so we have had wonderful, long conversations.
And I have already had a relationship with my younger sister.
We never really broke relationship, but she's lived on the East Coast ever since college.
So we haven't lived in the same town any time during our adult life.
And my younger brother also came and just talked about the book, said that he is unable to talk to it.
He was unable to talk about it during his own marriage, and that it has been so healthy for him to be able to be part of this conversation.
So I've spent a great deal of time with my younger brother and sister since this book came out, which is very recent.
And then our older sister is the only one who chose to stay in the community.
And she would say the community is very different.
But they don't welcome outsiders.
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Jo, men det er vi.
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Middager sammen høres godt ut.
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Belonging Needs and Church Changes00:10:01
Is it, I mean, are there children being raised in this right now who are underweight and possibly getting abused?
No.
No, I mean, there are still children there, but that organization has changed.
And it is certainly, I mean, physically, I think that the children are very healthy.
I am not there, and it was very difficult for me to understand how to put the parameters on my conversation because I don't really know all the details.
But it certainly doesn't exist in the form.
There's nobody who is being raised the way I was raised.
That is for sure.
Certain.
But our sister, my sister, does, I call it our sister because she's all of our sister, but she is the one who then now has a school, but it is accredited now.
And she runs the school that raises the kids there.
And she says it's a really different place than it used to be.
And I do know that they have, you know, accreditation people come in.
So people are checking on it in a way that did not happen when we were young.
Accreditation, but what about division of child and family services?
I mean, is there anything and what and how are people living now at the field?
Are they living in mess halls still, or what's the facility like?
So my understanding is that families are now allowed to have regular jobs and that they are allowed to, so it is more of a church now and they do have a strong faith system.
I think that many churches believe different kinds of interpretations of the Bible.
I'm not justifying their particular interpretation, but they do use the traditional Judeo-Christian Protestant version of the Bible.
And my understanding is that the families have their, they are now allowed to be nuclear families.
And I will also say that my sister is married to a boy that, or a man that grew up with us as a boy.
She's been married her whole life to him, and I knew him all growing up.
And that they have two children, my niece and my nephew, who seem by all accounts, they went to college.
They're in, you know, they're in their 20s now.
So it seems that it is a place where it is still a real tight community, but that it would be no longer abusive.
Is it up on a mountain?
Is it still in the same location up on a mountainside in California?
So they have the mountain location, but they rent it out now to outside groups so that they can make money.
Okay.
So it is not being used in that same capacity, but they do still have that lease.
How are you still religious?
No, I would consider myself a spiritual person.
And I did raise my children in a faith community in a United Church of Christ Congregational Church because I thought it was really wonderful for them to get the opportunity to see healthy people who are have a faith and believe in something.
And I thought it was really great.
And I did teach church school there.
I know the Bible very well.
So I raised them there, but I don't identify directly anymore because I feel that for me, it is a source of a lot of anxiety and tension.
So yeah, I mean, this is where now I'll quiz you on Martin Van Buren and you won't know much.
And you quiz me on the Bible and I won't know much either.
So that, you know, one of us has studied a certain area and one of us has studied the others.
Like we all have our deficiencies and how we're raised and what we focus on.
Though my mother would not be happy to hear me admit this about the Bible.
I won't tell her.
Yeah, she's probably not listening.
So I think we're safe.
So can you just explain to me, like, because one of the things we're going to talk about is getting out of a cult, like whether it's possible and how many challenges it poses.
You know, listening to you here, it sounds like it was kind of easy, but that's probably not true.
So I think it's certainly possible to get out of any cult.
It is always a process, though.
I do not think anyone, because it's, I feel like it's a little bit like leaving an abusive relationship.
You can leave the relationship and still have the behaviors that put you in that abusive relationship.
And a lot of people enter another abusive relationship.
So I guess I didn't know that I was making it look easy.
I think that I was trying really hard with the book not to just focus on the negative aspects and not to just sort of pummel people with the pain of the experience because I do think that we do all have a need for belonging.
And the reason cults are so attractive to people is because they do provide a source of belonging.
And not that they do it in a healthy way, but that that need is something that is innate and that we do need each other and we do need community.
Leaving was excruciating for me.
I married far too young.
I was not an adult.
I wasn't able to think clearly for myself.
When I had my own children, I did tons and tons and tons of research to figure out how to raise them, but it did not feel natural to me.
I felt the love was extremely natural.
I did all the things, you know, breastfed and was very into attachment parenting and was there with them.
Even when I worked, I would bring them on my belly.
You know, I put my baby on my boss.
I mean, after your mom never hugging you, this must have been so special for you.
It really was.
And I think that I was very fortunate that I was able to give birth to them in a hospital and to have, I was in Boulder, Colorado, where I was in grad school.
And I was able to, you know, just have, there was just like tattoos and consultants and things like that around.
So then by the time I, you know, became a mother a few times, like I was just really, really good at it, you know, at least the parts that were about physically caring for them and being able to be emotionally present.
It was just wonderful to be able to give up.
That's a miracle.
That is a miracle that you had that to give despite not having received it, Michelle.
I mean, so few people have that story.
There's, you know, something in you that made that happen.
Hard work, determination, the sparks of knowledge, and certainly your resilience.
But your story is a testament to human resilience and strength, despite many odds against you.
Thank you.
I think sometimes we teach what we most need to learn, you know, and I think that being able to offer my children that kind of attachment really gave me the attachment that I needed so much.
And even at my mom's death, I was able to physically be present for her and lie down with her.
And even giving her, she was in a hospital bed, but she died at home on hospice.
I was able to physically be present with her through the whole process of dying.
And I was able to give her the same sort of comfort I needed from her in the hospital.
And I think it was like that with my kids too.
Like I gave them what I needed.
And I think because I needed it so badly, I knew, you know, I just knew how important it was.
Do you ever have a moment where you're like, stop crying?
Like, do you know the remnants?
Yes.
You know, my oldest daughter is a marriage and family therapist.
And she tells me, she said, you had a problem with crying.
And I said, I tried not to.
And she said, well, you know, it's really healthy for children to cry.
And I said, I'm so sorry.
I probably, probably was not as welcoming of that as I could have been.
I mean, not that I forbade them from crying, but I do not think I was that tolerant.
No, it's understandable.
Yeah.
But they were very close.
They are very, all very close to each other.
And I think that's another wonderful thing.
And they have not been victims of abuse, which I'm also very proud of.
And when my twins were little, I was breastfeeding both of them.
They never took a bottle.
And I just felt so deeply committed to really just being 100% there.
So I'm just really grateful.
Michelle, when you go, now you're a successful writer and we're teaching to college.
Like when you go to a cocktail party for the first time and you're meeting people, they're like, hey, where'd you grow up?
I mean, how do you short form this?
I've never been good at this.
I think that's why I wrote a book because I hate that question.
So I'm just here, read this.
And even in the book, I didn't really cover it because I really ended up focusing on my story and not really fleshing out the community entirely.
So maybe I'll do that later.
But I just say I had an unconventional childhood or complicated.
Yeah, it's really not an easy question to answer.
Yeah.
Wow.
Well, I thank you so much for telling your story and for being so open.
I'm grateful to know you.
And I'm so grateful that you're out there as an example to others who may be struggling with childhood issues that somehow they believe are going to define the rest of their lives.
And maybe not.
Maybe if you read Forager, field notes for surviving a family cult, it might be helpful to you, even if you weren't in a cult, right?
Even if you just had some massive challenges that you don't think can get past.
Michelle, all the best to you.
Thank you for coming on.
Thank you so much for having me, Megan.
It's been a pleasure.
I appreciate all your insights.
Oh, thank you.
Pleasure for me too.
be continued.
So I know that you were listening to Michelle's story, and I thought it was a very astute observation.
And what I know is true from your writings that there's something about a cult that provides a sense of belonging.
It's a sense of community.
There is a reason people are attracted to these organizations.
It's because you hear about the abuse, you hear about psychological torture and so on.
You think, why?
Well, it doesn't start off like that.
And it does provide some pluses that are alluring.
Yeah, so I want to just comment that there are some real differences then with people who are born into a authoritarian cult, as Michelle was, versus someone like myself who was recruited at age 19 while I was a college student through deceptive means into a cult, the Moonies.
And And I'd say as a generalization, the public tends to look too much at the person who's involved and too little at the deception and the control of social influence variables.
Moonie Recruitment and Normal Childhood00:15:05
But as you correctly said, there are always positives, even in the worst of situations.
Right.
And I'm fascinated by your story, too.
So you seem to have had a relatively normal childhood, and you seem to have been a rather well-adjusted young man, and yet you got lured in.
And I remember growing, I remember hearing about the Moonies, and they sounded like a bunch of kooks.
So I don't know much about them, but looking at you now, thinking, you were in the Moonies?
What?
Explain.
Yeah.
So I should say that I was dumped by my girlfriend in 1973 in the Christmas time.
And I got recruited in February of 1974 at Queen's College.
And that was the same month, by the way, that Patty Hearst was physically abducted by the Symbionese Liberation Army, just for your listeners who are of an age to remember that.
But when I got recruited, nobody knew anything about the Moonies.
They didn't really get public until later that year when the group was fasting for Nixon during Watergate.
And I was part of that fasting that God wants to forgive, love, and unite, no matter what Nixon did at Watergate.
And then the media dubbed them the Moonies.
And some young moon who claimed to be 10 times greater than Jesus Christ or any other religious leader loved that we were being called Moonies.
And I was promoted to a pretty high rank as an American leader.
Not that I had any power at all, but I was kind of a front person who was used to recruit and indoctrinate people.
But wait, before we got to your promotion, there was the luring in of this college.
Women flirting and lying and pretending that they were students and complimenting me and doing what's called love bombing.
And I had bicycled cross-country when I was 16.
I should say I was raised in a middle, middle class family.
My father had a hardware store.
My mom was an eighth grade art teacher.
I have two older sisters.
We lived in the same house in the same community, conservative Jewish upbringing.
I had bicycled cross-country when I was 16.
I was very anti-group, anti-authoritarian.
I skipped eighth grade because I was deemed a good tester or whatever.
So, yeah, I had no belief that anyone could con me or brainwash me.
It didn't enter my mind that anyone could brainwash me.
But I became a fascist.
I became a total fanatic that needed a formal deprogramming intervention after a near-fatal van crash before I started going, what?
How could I believe who was the greatest man in human history?
You went to the first meeting where they just said, hey, come on over.
Let's hang out.
You went fine.
And as I understand it, you had an instinct.
This is a little off.
And you said, is this a religious group?
What is this?
No, And you left kind of determined not to go back.
And then they all ran outside and the love bombing went, kicked off in earnest.
And most of us, We're susceptible to flattery and compliments and that kind of love from people who want to accept you, especially if it's coming from a beautiful member of the opposite sex.
Exactly.
We're all human beings and we all love to believe that we're special and that we're smart and that we can contribute to the world and make the world a better place.
But if I said, I did ask them, are you part of a religious group?
Oh, no, not at all.
And they claimed to be students, which they weren't.
But this was part of heavenly deception because members believe the world is controlled by Satan.
And therefore, we need to use deception to trick Satan's children into doing God's will.
And justify the means.
Yeah.
What were the Moonies about?
And what did Mr. Moon get out of all this?
So the Moonies, well, I should say that the stereotypical cult leader playbook is they all want power, money, and sex.
And it's always power.
Usually money brings more power.
And often they're sexual perverts.
And Moon was all three.
The teachings varied based on who the cult was trying to influence to recruit.
As a recruiter, I was taught to categorize potential recruits in terms of thinkers, feelers, doers, or believers.
So if somebody represented the spirituality and religion as something important, then we would shape the recruitment that way.
If they were someone who was a feeler, then we talk about how we're one unified family and we're brothers and sisters.
And we have this idyllic view of the restoring the earth to the Garden of Eden, etc.
So, and the idea with influence and mind control is if you think about the influencer and the influencee, there's this relationship of someone has a vulnerability and everybody wants to improve themselves, it seems, or make the world a better place, some human need.
If you're schizophrenic, cults will not want to recruit you, or if you have, or you're absolutely apathetic, they don't want you either.
They want people with talent and abilities and passion who can work long hours for little or no pay.
Try to raise money and give it to the cult.
So power, money, and sex.
So for me, I was mostly recruiting and doing public types of influence things, but they had full-time fundraisers who were bringing in around $30 million a year cash, lying to people saying they were recruiting for Christian drug programs or whatever.
And the money was then used to buy property, and then loans were taken out against the property to buy more and then invest in businesses.
And there was a congressional subcommittee investigation in the 70s that I wound up being an expert for looking into Korean CIA activities in the U.S.
And as they were researching the Moonies, because they were part of that plan, the researchers said, this is a group with hundreds of front groups.
Let's just call them the Moon Organization because they're all following Sun Young Moon.
And Sum Young Moon was best known at that time for mass weddings where he would assign men and women to marry.
They often didn't know each other or even speak the same language, but they believed that he was God's greatest man on earth, sinless, and he had the power to match you with your ideal mate.
And so he had the, I think, the Guinness Book of Records, 30,000 couples at one time.
Were you, did you believe that?
Did you think he had these powers and believe in his ability to just find the right mate with people who had never 100% trained to not allow negative thoughts because I was programmed to believe negative thoughts were coming from demons?
And we were literally taken to see the Exorcist movie when it came out.
And then Moon gave a lecture how God made this movie and it was a prophecy of what would happen if we left.
So one thing I want to explain to you and your listeners is that mind control is best understood as a dissociative disorder.
So the old Steve Hassan, son of Milton and Estelle Hassan, got replaced by Steve Hassen, son of Some Young Moon and Hak Jahan, the true parents of the universe.
I was still in there, but I was being suppressed.
Think about a computer virus that hacks your computer and takes over your operating system.
That's an easy analogy for what it's like.
And in my case, because I almost died in a van crash due to sleep deprivation and was away from the cult and then wanted to prove to my family I wasn't brainwashed, I agreed to meet with ex-members and learn about Chinese communist brainwashing, etc.
The real me popped out.
And I had all these memories of things that should have made me run from the cult.
But again, this cult identity that had been programmed into me was in executive control.
People think maybe this is just a small niche thing.
It's not.
There are a lot of cults in America, even today.
And I know, I mean, I've talked a lot about Scientology on this show and the other shows I've had, but they have a lot of the features where you buy in at this level and then you have to pay all this money to advance to the next level.
And that's also, I know, a feature of cults.
Moreover, them learning what your weaknesses are in these little sessions that they have where you've got to like pour your heart out through these little Campbell's soup cans, the soup cans through the string, like we used to do when we were kids.
And then the other person knows all your vulnerabilities, which get used against you.
But like the cult Michelle talked about, like the Moonies, there's something for you in there.
The Scientology messaging of don't associate with the negative people.
They're suppressive people.
Move on.
There's no reason to bask in that negativity.
You just get rid of them.
There's something attractive and there's something positive about it.
So there's always something, right?
They do have something good to reel you in until you learn about all the other stuff.
But by that point, they're hoping it's too late.
So I want you to be clear and understand in your listeners that people don't understand what the group is and what the beliefs are or what's going to happen to them.
If there was actual informed consent where people understood what the beliefs were, people wouldn't get involved in the first place.
In my work and in my doctoral dissertation that I did, I talk about behavior control, information control, thought control, and emotional control variables.
I call it the bite model of authoritarian control.
And I go through a laundry list of the most common techniques that all types of cults, political cults, therapy cults, religious cults, cults, one-on-one cults even, use on people.
And what's missing for the public is to have an understanding that influence exists on a continuum from ethical influence to unethical and what to watch out for.
So preventive education, and that's why I'm so grateful that you had Michelle on your show and that I'm able to do this show is because people don't want to be lied to.
They don't want to be tricked.
They don't want to be mind controlled and abused or trafficked.
And if they understood how to reality test for themselves, whether they're in a mind control environment, then they'll, you know, won't join or they'll get out if they're already in.
Yes.
So I've had a long interest in this, including interviews in depth with Catherine Oxenberg, who's she was a famous star.
She is a famous star and was very big in the 1980s, and her daughter, India Oxenberg, who was lured into this cult, Nexium, which is from my hometown, Albany, New York.
You wouldn't have thought, I wouldn't have thought it could happen in an upstate New York community.
People are very sensible.
You kind of always think it's not going to be me.
It's not going to be my hometown.
Where to sense?
No, wrong.
It can happen anywhere.
And here she is, this glamorous, absolutely stunning woman, you know, very well known, and her beautiful daughter.
And they went for a like self, like female empowerment.
That's what they were told it was going to be about, you know, start a business for female leaders.
And her daughter thought that was attractive.
And Catherine thought, sure, I'll go.
I'll support you.
And they went and then they took like maybe another seminar and then maybe a third.
And then Catherine was like, I'm good.
And India was getting more and more into it.
And of course, you did need to buy up to the next level of courses.
And it had all the features, right?
It was like they revered the one guy, Keith Ranieri, this short, unattractive, disgusting man.
They always are.
It's never the Robert Redford, Brad Pitt type who's at the center.
All the women, as it turns out, were having sex with him.
The women wound up being branded within this weird little sex cult that was like baked into the cult.
Anyway, it was such a story as Catherine tried to get her daughter out of this, thank God, successfully.
But the pulling out is so much harder than the pulling in.
Yeah, exactly.
I would say that I knew about Keith Ranieri when he got busted by 20 attorneys general for his multi-level marketing cult, Consumers Byline.
Multi-level marketing cults, you know, promise the pie in the sky, you'll make a fortune, but it's all about behavior, information, thought, and emotional control to make people dependent.
He was forbidden from doing an MLM.
He recruited Nancy Salzman to be the front person and did an MLM for coaching.
And so the whole Nexium program, I have a lot of information on my freedomofmind.com website about Nexium and all the techniques they've used.
And I'll also add, after my deprogramming in 1976 from the Moonies, I befriended ex-Scientologists and started learning.
Critical Mind Bypassed by Cults00:05:31
I befriended Paulette Cooper, who was unmercifully attacked by Scientology.
And I got labeled a suppressive person.
And I'm very close friends with John Atak, who's written the best books on Scientology, being a former member himself and brilliant.
People need to understand it can happen to anyone, and it makes a lot of sense for preventive education, consumer awareness.
Again, why I'm so grateful, Megan, that you're doing this show.
Well, how do you know, right?
Like I know lots of people who pay to go to a self-help workshop, or I don't know, you know, you learn how to do some sort of stress management techniques, what have you.
There's all sorts of things out there.
And they bounce from one to another, but they never get drawn into a cult.
Like they don't wind up giving their money.
They just sort of test different things.
But is there a personality type who is more likely to be susceptible to this?
Personality type.
I would say probably if you're oriented to being a people pleaser and you haven't been taught how to be assertive, to say no, you're going to be more likely susceptible to being manipulated, especially by trained recruiters who know a lot of social influence techniques.
But I want to state categorically that everyone is situationally vulnerable.
Death of a loved one, an illness, a breakup in a relationship, losing a job, moving to a new city, state, or country, that throws you off balance, where somebody can come in and start telling you with certainty how much your life can get better or how you can help to save the world and make the world a better place.
With Scientology, it's more about power than saving the world.
There's an element of clearing the planet and getting rid of all the evil mental health professionals.
I'm one of those.
But mostly it's a situational vulnerabilities and lack of awareness that it could happen to you.
So if you're walking around thinking, oh, it only happens to weak people or stupid people or uneducated people, then you're really very, very vulnerable.
Think again.
What is it about Keith Ranieri or Sun Yeon Moon or L. Ron Hubbard and now his disciple, David Miscavige of Scientology?
What is it about them that makes them so good at persuasion that makes them, you know, you talk about Keith Ranieri, he's just some loser.
I mean, this guy never accomplished anything in his life.
So how does he have these enormous powers of persuasion to get so many people to follow him?
That's a really good question.
So I want to cite Eric Frum, who is brilliant, wrote in the 40s.
He talked about malignant narcissists.
And I have said in my books that this is the stereotypical profile of cult leaders, the grandiosity, the certainty, the need for attention, but the lack of empathy, but also thinking that they're above the law, the pathological lying.
And there's a whole list that I have on my website.
So certainty is something that the average person tends to go, hmm, they're so sure, maybe they know something I don't know, as opposed to this person has a personality disorder.
They're a narcissist.
And I should be more skeptical of anyone with that level of certainty and such.
But I also want to comment that I just finished two chapters for a textbook on hypnosis about the dark side of hypnosis.
And I wrote about Hubbard being a hypnotist and that the entire system is based on hypnosis.
And Corneri learned neuro-linguistic programming, which was based on the work of Milton Erickson, who was the penultimate hypnotherapist, psychiatrist.
So what I want to say to your listeners is that human beings go in and out of altered states of consciousness all day long.
And hypnosis is not sleep.
It's about a focusing and narrowing of your attention, which makes you more suggestible to ideas.
And this is a great superpower for people who are super successful to enter into this kind of flow state where they're able to super concentrate.
But if you're in an environment with someone with a hidden agenda who can start putting in beliefs and ideas like you've lived before or that, you know, the world is filled with body thetans, which is part of Hubbard's sci-fi ideology, the critical mind gets bypassed.
Fear of Criticism and Information Control00:12:27
So again, the critical thing always to protect yourself is look at the source, look for credibility, look for credentials, and always be open to listening to critics and former members.
And if you're in a group that says, don't ever listen to ex-members or critics, automatically you should be going, that's information control.
I'm an intelligent human being.
Let me hear what the critics and former members have to say, and I'll decide for myself whether or not that has validity or not.
This is why I say when I was in Fox News, I was in a cult.
And it's not to say it wasn't a real cult, but there were cultish elements in that once you leave, you are otherized.
That is it.
You don't leave.
Like you did, once you're out, you are banished.
You know, you're shunned.
And when I was there, it was all about the reverence to dear leader, who was Roger Ailes, who ran that place with an iron fist and would absolutely be telling you not to listen to anything the libs said.
You know, that was his political bias, but also there was something different about it.
And just the way like the people would talk about Roger, like I hear remnants of it when I hear stories about Scientology, about how, you know, well, Roger approves of this.
Well, Roger likes that.
Well, Roger thought this, you know, as if he was this deity that somehow had, you know, greater divine knowledge than the rest of us.
And so where do you draw the line between, well, they just love the guy because he was a genius and he built a really powerful news organization.
And this is getting culty, right?
Like I still don't know exactly where that line is.
So it's a really important point.
I just put up on my podcast an interview with a leadership professor of business about Elizabeth Holmes and Tetheranos.
And he did a journal article talking about corporate cults and the qualities to evaluate.
And it comes back to the charismatic figure who cannot be criticized, who is held up and not accountable, not transparent, doesn't apologize and say that they're wrong, but the control of behavior, information, thoughts, and emotions in order to make people dependent and obedient.
And so to stay in your job, you need to adopt the corporate identity, keep your thoughts to yourself and follow the rules or be ostracized and criticized.
And that's the opposite of healthy corporations and healthy groups where they want dissent.
They want to hear other points of view.
The leaders, if they screw up, they say sorry and they really make policy changes.
But if you're an authoritarian, you want total power and control.
Well, the NBC might be a cult too, because they didn't want opposite points of view from what they're, you know, that's a news problem.
That's a media problem.
The important thing about my work is I'm against authoritarianism on the left and the right.
I'm against, I want human rights for all.
I want to support human rights, women's rights, gay rights.
I want people to be free to think and not just conform and follow in lemming-like fashion whatever they're being told.
You know, I would say my own experience, and this may be one of the reasons why I'm so interested in this subject, is it took years after leaving Fox for really that second skin to come off.
You know what I mean?
Like, it took a long time.
Even to be honest with you, I was a knee-jerk defender of Fox News for a long time.
Like, no, they didn't.
No, that you're wrong.
Well, don't criticize them like that.
Well, that's not true.
And to this day, I have some fear in criticizing them because I was there for some 14 years.
Like, I have a bit of a emotional hangover from these problems.
So this is a really important point that you make.
And when I talk about the bite model and the E is emotional control, emotional control includes feeling awe and reverence and feeling special and chosen, but mostly it's about fear and guilt.
And the universal mind control technique is what I call phobia indoctrination, which is the inculcation of irrational fears that if you ever leave the group or criticize the leader, terrible things are going to happen to you.
And the way to get out of phobia programming is to think back who you were before you got involved and to use your critical frontal cortex to evaluate what's an actual danger where you should have fear and what's an irrational fear.
And I deal with traffickers, sex traffickers, pimps, as well as labor traffickers.
And unfortunately, with some of these criminal enterprises, people should be afraid of speaking out against them because they can be harassed or harmed physically.
But most religious cults, most cults, I would say in the United States, it's a psychological imprisonment.
And why it took time for you is time brings perspective through experiences outside of the totalist environment.
The more contact you have with normal people and other frames of reference.
And also, I would suspect your interest in Scientology and Nexium and other things, that gave you some tools to start thinking and getting perspective on Fox would be my.
No, I remember I was at NBC.
We were covering Nexium.
I was neck deep on that story.
And I was doing an interview on what a cult is and what are the defining characteristics.
And I said on camera, oh my God, I was in a cult.
It was the aha moment.
I think I watched that interview, actually.
Yeah.
It was, and truly, I don't mean to be completely, this isn't my cult hangover, but I don't mean to be completely disparaging of this place that gave me all these opportunities and I made a lot of money there.
But it's more than just a normal news organization.
There's just no question about it.
And it's not that, and the more is not healthy.
So, all right, enough about me.
How, how do we extract somebody who we know?
I mean, like, this actually happened to my friend Catherine Oxenberg.
She had to extract India, and India did not want to hear anything negative about Nexium or Keith Ranieri from Catherine.
Catherine had been otherized.
Catherine had been made the outsider and a threat.
So it's a very ginger, delicate process for someone like Catherine or a loved one like your family trying to extract the loved one.
Right.
So I want to say that I was extracted after a near-fatal van crash in 1976, and I got involved for a year with extracting other people from the Moonies called deprogramming.
And I realized this is not healthy.
This is traumatizing.
And then it became illegal when judges stopped giving conservatorships to parents.
So I just turned my back on that approach, but I still wanted to help people involved with cults.
So I embarked, and now it's 47 years later, but I embarked on a process of wanting to understand the programming elements and what are the patterns that have helped people to get out and to reality tests.
And that's why I've written four books on the subject and have a course that I've just put up for mental health professionals, especially to help their clients.
And what works the best is empowering people to reflect and reality test for themselves versus trying to persuade them that the group is wrong or bad or the leader is wrong or bad.
And it's about warmth, respect, asking questions and understanding the methodology involved with creating this dual identity or dissociative disorder to get the person back in time before they join to start remembering what did they think their life was going to be when they went to that first session.
And if you knew then what you know now, if you could go back in time and you were being arrested as India was under threat of arrest, you can start to activate the person's core identity.
And as you educate them about Chinese communist brainwashing or pimps or traffickers and explain the influence continuum and the bite model, you're asking them questions and pointing out these other areas or other cults that they would say are brainwashing people.
And people exit themselves, is what I'm trying to say, Megan.
But if you can create a team of family members, friends, former members, and that's why I loved Michelle is doing this book, Forager.
There are so many other former members who were born in cults or recruited in cults writing books.
What I love about this is it's people sharing their stories will help to destigmatize the idea that only weak, stupid people are in these groups, right?
And that it's a and that many people have life after cult or life after group, so they can have a future in their mind where that's happier.
Yeah.
So the what percentage of attempted extractions work, would you say?
Like, what's the success rate?
So, again, I don't think of extractions.
I have what I call the strategic interactive approach.
And unfortunately, it's labor-intensive and time-intensive.
So, families who want to just write me a check and tell me to go get their loved one, I don't take those clients.
I work with people who love their son or daughter or their husband or wife or their mother or father.
And I coach them on how to interact.
So, it happens over time.
And I would say the earlier you can start in this project to the person's recruitment, the faster they're going to exit.
If you start this process 10 years later or 20 years later, there's in a way it's easier to get them to think critically because they've had a long body of negative experiences that have been suppressed, but it's harder to re-socialize.
And again, you want a face-saving exit for people to say, We love you, we want you in our life.
And again, the idea isn't to try to control them or to tell them what to think or to tell them what they're doing is wrong, but to ask them to think over what it is they're doing and persuade you perhaps to why it's so good that you might consider to get involved yourself.
It's a very powerful frame.
Oh, I hope you enjoyed this show as much as I did.
Cults are fascinating.
They're so fascinating.
Are they fascinating to you?
They probably are if you're sitting here listening to this.
Thanks for listening to The Megan Kelly Show.
No BS, no agenda, and no fear.
Godt levert gir deg lyden av pepperoni-pizza med aromasopp og alt på bordet.
Det er vi som skal invitere til vennigruppen.
Mamma!
Jo, men det er vi.
Hei, Gud, og Leara skal smitte dem.
No BS, No Agenda, No Fear00:00:42
Du har spist opp, du har veldig tom tarke, men det ligger alt sammen på bordet.
Det er deilig pizza.
Middagen sammen høres godt ut.
Med matkasse fra Godt levert.
Godt levert.
Godkjent av livet.
Triple Tex er et fleksibelt regnskapsprogram som passer perfekt for IT-selskaper.
Ja, og restauranger.
Og hundefrisører.
Ja, kom da.
Og alpinanlegg.
Og barnehager.
Og klesbutikker.
TripleTex is very good for shops.
And Urmakere.
And Kaffebare.
Yeah, it was a double latte for soya.
And of course, Bilforhandlere.
Yeah, you've surely seen it now.
But all the more story drifters for the tripletex here in Northern Ramska program.