February 6, 2025 • 41 mins
Journalist Abby Ellin’s next big story was living in her own home. You can find Abby’s book Duped here and you can read more of Abby’s work at her website.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Hey, it's Andrea Gunning. Our season of weekly stories is
coming to an end, but don't worry. We'll be back
soon with more episodes. So if you have a story
of your own that you'd like to share on the podcast,
email us at Betrayal pod at gmail dot com. In
the meantime, we want to do something new and exciting.
This month, we're taking short creative essays submissions from listeners.
(00:22):
The theme is resilience in the face of a devastating betrayal.
We want to hear the story of how you healed
scars and all. Here's the catch. The limit is a
thousand words. If your story stands out, it might be
featured in a bonus episode. Please save your submission as
a PDF and email it to Betrayal pod at gmail
dot com. Okay, now onto the episode.
Speaker 2 (00:47):
If he can lie about that, he can lie about anything.
I mean, he used his dead mother's name, he used
his dead father's name, he used I think his aunt,
he used my name, all these people. It was absolutely
crazy making.
Speaker 1 (01:14):
I'm Andrea Gunning, and this is Betrayal, a show about
the people we trust the most and the deceptions that
change everything.
Speaker 2 (01:24):
Listen, I've always craved drama, and I got it. I
got it. That's Abby Ellen.
Speaker 1 (01:32):
She's an independent journalist where outlets like The New York
Times in Washington Post.
Speaker 2 (01:37):
Yeah. I'm in my fifties and I have been a
freelance writer since I'm like twenty two.
Speaker 1 (01:45):
Storytelling comes naturally to her.
Speaker 2 (01:48):
Even as a kid, I was interested in people's story
I was interested in gossip. I was interested in people's lives.
I just wanted to know how things work. And I
also was always interested in getting to the bottom of things.
Speaker 1 (02:03):
To say, she's curious as an understatement. When she was
in elementary school, Abby was on a children's show called
Romper Room. It was popular in the nineteen seventies. On
the show, the host would hold up a magic mirror
and through it she would pretend to see straight into
living rooms across the country. She'd named dozens of children
who were watching the show. Kids at home thought she
(02:26):
was talking directly to them through the mirror. As a kid,
Abby knew the magic mirror was faked, and when she
was on the show, she was determined to figure.
Speaker 2 (02:36):
Out how well they would put the kids in the
control room and you could see all of the monitors
and you could see what was happening, and I remember
pointing to that with the kid next to me. I
was like, check it out, like there's no magic, and
he was really upset. He was like, I don't want
to know that, you know, And I was like, see,
(02:56):
I got to the truth.
Speaker 1 (02:58):
Fifty years later, she's still that same person.
Speaker 3 (03:01):
I hate magic tricks.
Speaker 2 (03:02):
I hate going to magic shows. I need to know
how they do things.
Speaker 1 (03:07):
That dogged curiosity has motivated Abby's work for decades. When
she first started her journalism career in New York.
Speaker 2 (03:14):
City, I could have gotten a job like in The
Devil Worst Prada.
Speaker 3 (03:17):
I could have gotten a job as an assistant to
an editor.
Speaker 2 (03:21):
But I thought, what am I going to learn about
writing from picking up some of these dry cleaning Nothing?
What am I going to learn about like from faxing
their correspondence nothing. I didn't want to do that.
Speaker 1 (03:31):
Instead, she got her start writing for women's magazines. It
was the nineties when magazines still ruled the media landscape,
and Abby had to start at the bottom.
Speaker 2 (03:42):
Of the ladder. The women's magazines had you do like quizzes,
is he a jerk? Are you a control freak? I
mean those kind of things. I didn't give a shit.
I mean, I hated that stuff, and I just got
terrified that I was going to get stuck doing that.
Speaker 1 (03:56):
She wanted something more hard hitting, so she started cold
pitch stories to The New York Times, and she finally
got a story accepted. It was an expose on simulated
military boot camps for civilians.
Speaker 2 (04:09):
And I wrote a big story about that. It was
a full page of The New York Times. I framed
it and I thought, that's that never going to happen again. Well,
the editor who I wrote that for called me up
one day and he said, we're starting a column. He
wanted Abby to write for it.
Speaker 1 (04:26):
So for the next five years, she wrote a column
about young people and money for the Business section of
the New York Times.
Speaker 2 (04:33):
She was in her late twenties.
Speaker 1 (04:34):
The stars were aligning for her career and she was
building a life for herself.
Speaker 2 (04:39):
My mother is really a super feminist and has always
been profoundly independent and has always been like, what women
need is their own money, no matter what, they all
need their own money, you know. So she wanted me
to always have my own space.
Speaker 1 (04:54):
On her mother's advice, Abby bought her first apartment. It
was a loft in New York City. She had everything
she wanted. Even dating came easily for Abby.
Speaker 3 (05:05):
Oh God, men were everywhere, men were everywhere.
Speaker 1 (05:09):
In her twenties, her relationships usually ended because he was
more into her and she was into him. I, you know,
had my boyfriend, then we broke up, and then I
had other boyfriends.
Speaker 2 (05:20):
And I continued to work, and I continued to travel,
and I kind of never really wanted to get married,
per se, that wasn't my agenda. Didn't want to be
tethered to somebody all the time.
Speaker 1 (05:34):
In her thirties, she dated more seriously, but none of
the guys were quite right.
Speaker 3 (05:39):
One was a guy on me in Peru.
Speaker 2 (05:42):
He was a furniture maker and he was great, but
that didn't work out. A couple guys in the.
Speaker 4 (05:47):
Theater, I mean just different nice. I mean they were fine,
they were fine people. But I wanted something that mattered.
I wanted something that mattered.
Speaker 1 (05:58):
Abby had traveled the world, reported for prestigious publications, and
made friends in every corner of the city, but there
was one thing she still hadn't experienced.
Speaker 2 (06:09):
Again, I didn't care if I got married, but I
wanted to be mount in love. She wanted to be
madly in love.
Speaker 1 (06:16):
By the time she was forty, she started looking for
love in new places.
Speaker 2 (06:20):
If you've been single little while, you know, sometimes you're
just like, oh God, maybe I should go out with
somebody who I never thought i'd be with, just because
maybe I'd been barking up the wrong tree all this time.
Speaker 1 (06:30):
After a string of relationships with struggling artists, she thought
she'd try something more traditional. First, she went with the
conservative Wall Street type.
Speaker 2 (06:40):
Then she thought, I'm Jewish. I was brought up Jewish.
I thought, I've always dated non Jewish guys. Maybe I
need to be with somebody who's Jewish. Maybe that's what
I need.
Speaker 1 (06:51):
On a lark, her friend recommended a psychic. Apparently she
had great insights on love.
Speaker 2 (06:57):
Oh god, Carmela is psyching from younger, that's what she said.
I like.
Speaker 1 (07:01):
But Carmela saw something in Abby's future, a man.
Speaker 2 (07:06):
And she was like, you're going to meet somebody you're
gonna move. His first initial is going to be RP,
B or D and all when he's gonna wear a uniform.
And I said, I don't know anybody in uniform other
than the FedEx guy.
Speaker 3 (07:19):
And she was like, no, that's not a FedEx guy.
Speaker 1 (07:23):
Around the same time, Abby was working on a piece
for The Times.
Speaker 2 (07:27):
I was working on an article for the New York
Times about detox diets and whether or not they had
any validity or whether they were just kind of bullshit.
And somebody suggested I call this guy who worked in
Beverly Hills, California, who was a doctor there.
Speaker 3 (07:41):
He had written some articles or studies about detox diets.
Speaker 1 (07:46):
This Beverly Hills doctor gave Abby a great quote for
her article. We're going to call him Richard.
Speaker 3 (07:52):
I quoted him and we had a nice conversation and
that was the end of it.
Speaker 1 (07:55):
A few months later she had to call Richard again
to fact check the article.
Speaker 3 (08:00):
And I said, are you still in Beverly Hills And
he said, no, I'm in the Navy.
Speaker 2 (08:04):
I'm a Navy doc.
Speaker 1 (08:06):
Richard had been a Navy seal in his twenties, then
left to go to medical school. After decades of private
medical practice, he rejoined the Navy to work on special projects.
Speaker 2 (08:16):
He was working on opening up a hospital for kids
with cancer in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Speaker 1 (08:23):
At the time, Abby wanted a new beat. She wanted
to report on international relations.
Speaker 2 (08:28):
I was looking to do something different to expand my career.
I wanted to do international reporting, and even if possible,
I wanted to do war correspondence.
Speaker 1 (08:38):
Richard was a good source, someone who might have stories
and connections she would need.
Speaker 2 (08:44):
I said, well, tell me, bet you know, keeping posted
on how this goes, this is right up my alley,
and he did.
Speaker 3 (08:51):
He capped keeping me posted. He kept telling me what
was going on.
Speaker 1 (08:55):
At first it was regular updates about his job in
the Middle East.
Speaker 2 (09:00):
And then we began talking more and more.
Speaker 1 (09:04):
They started writing to each other every day, and she
learned more about Richard's personal life.
Speaker 3 (09:10):
Apparently he had been divorced since I met him.
Speaker 2 (09:13):
His two kids lived in California, and he was liddy
in Jacksonville, and he was going to move to Washington.
And I thought, well, isn't that ironic because I was
going to move to Washington too to go to grad school.
Speaker 1 (09:24):
Abby had just been accepted to an international relations master's program.
It was in Washington, d C. Where Richard was headed next.
By this point, their conversations veered into flirtations. So when
they found out they were both moving to the same.
Speaker 2 (09:39):
City, it seemed almost. You know where there's a word
in Hebrew beshert, which means meant to be, And I thought, okay,
this is meant to be.
Speaker 1 (09:49):
Their flirtation expanded into late night phone calls and surprise deliveries.
Speaker 2 (09:54):
And he called when he said he would, and he
sent flowers. And he wasn't like a suffer bring artists
and paint splattered jeans. You know, he was really a
good guy. Richard was mature and accomplished. He was a doctor.
Maybe this was the guy she'd been waiting for. I
was forty two, so I wasn't a kid, and he
(10:16):
was fifty eight, so he wasn't a kid.
Speaker 3 (10:18):
But it didn't matter because he was nice to me,
and he was good to me.
Speaker 1 (10:22):
After months of talking, have you emailed him a poem?
Speaker 2 (10:26):
So I thought, all right, I can woo. I'm gonna
send it to him.
Speaker 1 (10:31):
She knew this poem was his favorite.
Speaker 2 (10:33):
I'm going to read it. It's very short. This is
just to say by William Carlos Williams. I had eaten
the plums that were in the ice box in which
you were probably saving for breakfast. Forgive me. They were delicious,
so sweet and so cold, and I sent it to him,
and he wrought me back three words, I love you.
(10:56):
And I thought, all right, it's a little fast, but okay.
Speaker 1 (11:00):
She'd only been talking to Richard for a few months,
but when she got his reply, she smiled. Richard was
scheduled to be in New York the following month. Abby
hadn't started school yet and was still in town, so
they decided to meet in person for the first time.
Speaker 3 (11:17):
He said, I've got to be in New York to
give his talk at the eun So I'm going to
be wearing my outfit, my navy uniform, and he said,
let's go somewhere celebratory.
Speaker 1 (11:29):
He made a reservation for them at the Four Seasons restaurant.
It's now closed, but in the early two thousands it
was one of the most glamorous date spots in New York.
Speaker 2 (11:40):
It was a very CNBC kind of place. There was
a giant pool in the middle of it. Then it
was just very expensive and swanky and ritzy, and it.
Speaker 3 (11:53):
Was just kind of the place to be.
Speaker 1 (11:57):
On the night of their date, Richard met her in
the lobby, wearing his white Navy officer uniform. As he
walked towards her, she realized this was the man in uniform,
the one the psychic had foreseen. Richard even brought her
a gift.
Speaker 3 (12:15):
He brings what is called a cover, but it's a
navy cap.
Speaker 2 (12:19):
You know, it's the hat I brought you one, he said.
Speaker 1 (12:23):
They walked into dinner hand in hand, Abby wearing his
white navy cap.
Speaker 3 (12:28):
And at dinner, he was so funny and he was charming,
and he was good to me, and he was charismatic, and.
Speaker 2 (12:34):
You know, he kind of wound me. He was wooing me,
and I like that. It was after dating all sorts
of shit has it was nice to be with somebody who,
you know, seemed to be who they said they were.
Speaker 1 (12:48):
That was the beginning of Richard's regular visits to New
York to take Abby out on romantic dates.
Speaker 3 (12:55):
He comes to visit for a weekend or maybe overnight.
Speaker 2 (12:58):
I mean, he always reading me with a big kiss,
and he'd tell me how beautiful I was.
Speaker 1 (13:03):
When he met Abby's friends, he impressed them too.
Speaker 2 (13:07):
He cared about people, He cared about the world. He
was always picking up tabs, he was always doing things
that made people really like him.
Speaker 1 (13:16):
Richard had two kids by his first wife, and even
though he lived apart from them. He was still a
family man.
Speaker 2 (13:23):
He was very close to his son, so that that
was nice and daughter. He talked to his kid, his
son all the time.
Speaker 1 (13:29):
And then there was his illustrious military career. He was
constantly traveling for work.
Speaker 2 (13:34):
He always said that he had certain things that he
did that he wouldn't be able to tell me about,
and then he would often go off on these sort
of secret missions and he couldn't tell me what he
was doing, and I was kind of intrigued by that.
Speaker 1 (13:49):
Abby was the kid who needed to know how the
magic mirror worked, and now with Richard, she wanted to
know about his classified military projects.
Speaker 2 (13:59):
It drove me mad that I didn't know what he
was doing, and a friend of mine said, well, that's
obviously a lesson. You need to learn that you can't
know everything.
Speaker 1 (14:08):
Her intrigue turned to concern when Richard began having horrible nightmares.
Speaker 2 (14:14):
He would just have these screaming nightmares, and so he
had to sleep with the lights on and the TV on.
Speaker 1 (14:21):
When she asked, he brushed it off. All he would
say is that he had bad memories, things from the
military that he couldn't talk about.
Speaker 2 (14:29):
I thought badly, and I thought something must have happened,
but I didn't know. I didn't know what it was.
Speaker 1 (14:36):
Before long, his career began bumping up against their relationship.
Speaker 2 (14:41):
Anytime he broke any plan, which we began to do
pretty regularly, it was it's a secret mission. I can't
tell you anything more about it. That's it.
Speaker 1 (14:51):
Abby nicknamed him the Commander. It was a joke at first,
but it stuck because Richard couldn't seem to escape his career.
Speaker 2 (15:00):
The commander told me that we were being followed by
the Secret Service.
Speaker 1 (15:04):
This was jarring for Abby and she demanded a reason
why they were being followed. To her surprise, the commander
began revealing some details about his career.
Speaker 2 (15:15):
He said that he had been a doctor at Guantanamo.
Speaker 1 (15:20):
He had been recruited to be the head doctor for
prisoners at Guantanamo Bay. This was the mid two thousands,
at the height of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.
The commander explained that there was intense infighting with personnel
at Guantanamo. It had to do with classified information that
wasn't being delivered up the chain. That's why he was
(15:41):
being protected by men in black SUVs.
Speaker 2 (15:45):
And he said, when I was at Guantanamo, all these
guys are after me. They hate me, and they threatened
me and my family. So my loved ones are being
followed by the Secret Service.
Speaker 1 (15:58):
Abby tried to play it down to act casual, but
this was a big disclosure.
Speaker 2 (16:05):
And I remember I said to him, well, you know,
next time, why don't you ask them if they can
give me a ride so I don't have to call taxis.
It was just like, this is absurd.
Speaker 1 (16:14):
She wasn't even sure if she believed his story about
the Secret Service. But then one day his son called
from California.
Speaker 2 (16:24):
And there was a car outside and said, Dad, is
that your guys? Why are they outside the house? So
I remember, I thought something really must have happened.
Speaker 1 (16:33):
Now Abby needed answers. What had really happened at Guantanamo.
Speaker 2 (16:39):
I need to know everything.
Speaker 1 (16:41):
Eventually Richard confided.
Speaker 2 (16:43):
In her and he said that one of his patients
was a very high level terrorist. And I said who,
and he said Osama bin Laden And I said that's insane,
and he said no, it's not. And he began to
list all the physical problems that have been Lauden had.
Speaker 1 (17:05):
This was two thousand and eight. At the time, the
military claim to be actively searching for bin Laden, so
him being held at Guantanamo just didn't make sense.
Speaker 3 (17:17):
And I said to him, that is a stupid thing
to to tell a person.
Speaker 2 (17:20):
I said, that's also not possible because the president, it
was Bush at the time, that he was never let
this happen without getting it out because it was a
big deal and you know, it would have helped Republicans,
so he would never have been quite about that if
he knew where bin Laden was. And he said, no,
(17:40):
the President doesn't know. I said, that's impossible. He said,
there's a lot of things that they don't know. And
I remember thinking, Okay, this is insane, but maybe here's
a story here.
Speaker 1 (18:12):
Abby's new boyfriend, Richard, made some pretty surprising claims, biggest
of all that Asama bin Laden was being held at
Guantanamo and that he had treated bin Laden for medical issues.
This was the early two thousands and bin Laden was
one of the biggest fugitives on the planet, so Richard's
story was hard to believe. But Abby knew for a
(18:33):
fact that the commander worked in the Navy with a very.
Speaker 2 (18:37):
High security clearance.
Speaker 1 (18:38):
At that she'd met some of his colleagues, so like
a good journalist, she wanted to verify the commander's claim.
Speaker 2 (18:45):
I was trying to do my own checkups because I
was feeling crazy and I couldn't call up the CIA
and say, hey, do you have this guy on your payroll?
I mean, you can't do that.
Speaker 1 (18:57):
So she started asking around using vage details.
Speaker 2 (19:01):
My brother in law said that doesn't make sense because
he was in the Navy, and he said he wouldn't
tell you about that. I had another friend who said
the same thing. They're not supposed to tell you.
Speaker 1 (19:11):
She doubted the story, but wasn't prepared to write it
off entirely. Even if there was a remote possibility it
could be true, it would be the biggest story in
the world, and as someone who wanted to be a
war reporter, that was undeniably enticing. She hit a dead
end trying to fact check the bin laden story, so
instead she decided to fact check Richard. She started with
(19:34):
one time when he said.
Speaker 2 (19:36):
That he had a vault full of medals for operations
that didn't really exist. They were unofficial, you know, like
homelandy kind of things that you're not supposed to know about.
Abby asked her new professors. If this could be true.
Speaker 3 (19:50):
I would ask my teachers, you know, is that possible?
Speaker 2 (19:53):
They said, yeah, absolutely this.
Speaker 1 (19:57):
If that checked out, Richard's other classified projects could exist
as well. Abby realized she could in fact check the
bin Laden story, and after Richard shared that he never
talked about it again. He wanted a relationship separate from work.
After all, the rest of his life is pretty tame.
Speaker 2 (20:19):
I met his family, I met his son, I met
his brother, met his aunt, I met some friends, I
met everybody, you know, so it just seems kind of normal.
Speaker 1 (20:31):
And he met her family. Abby introduced him to her mom.
Speaker 2 (20:35):
He was a Jewish doctor. What's not to like.
Speaker 1 (20:38):
As their lives began to merge, Abby was ready to
bring up a big topic of her own.
Speaker 2 (20:43):
I wanted to adopt, and I had said to him
at some point, listen, I'm gonna want a kid.
Speaker 1 (20:49):
When she told Richard this.
Speaker 2 (20:51):
Basically he was willing to do it. He said, I
love you, I'm in love with you. I'll do anything
you want. I'm gonna ask you to marry me, So
whatever makes you happy makes me happy.
Speaker 1 (21:04):
That conversation brought their relationship to a new level. It
was like an unspoken marriage proposal.
Speaker 2 (21:11):
I'm forty two, he's fifty eight. We're not kids anymore.
And we would discuss that.
Speaker 3 (21:14):
He said, you know, his father always said when you
know your no, and I've heard that before.
Speaker 2 (21:22):
So then he began he would visit me in New
York and he would come and he would say, ah,
I just went to Debiers and I was looking. I
was looking at rings there and I thought, okay, great,
that's cool. But one day he says to me, you know, Abby,
I'm really upset. I can't afford a thirty thousand dollars ring.
Forty thousand dollars ring. You know. I said, I don't
(21:43):
need a forty thousand dollars ring, which is true. I didn't.
Speaker 1 (21:49):
After six months together, Richard officially proposed. She said, yes,
it's true. The ring was nothing extravagant, but they both
knew they wanted to be to again. And then, keeping
with their low key attitude, Abby began planning for a
small wedding maybe the next year. They weren't in a rush.
Speaker 2 (22:09):
I had never really expected to get married. That wasn't
my goal, so it was very odd buying a dress.
I decided I would just do something very small, like
a dinner or something, just something chill.
Speaker 1 (22:21):
They made plans to move in together in Washington, DC.
Speaker 2 (22:25):
Eventually we found a place at the Watergate, which you know,
was obviously very famous.
Speaker 1 (22:33):
The apartment was being paid for by the Navy. But
even still, Abby didn't like the Watergate or DC.
Speaker 2 (22:41):
It was just sort of bleak and the Watergate was empty,
and I didn't find Washington to be an especially hospitable town.
Speaker 1 (22:50):
It didn't help that the commander was always traveling for work.
Speaker 2 (22:54):
Sometimes go in Afghanistan, sometimes going to Iraq. Sometimes he's
doing all these things that I can't.
Speaker 3 (22:59):
You didn't I'll tell you when there's a secure line,
is what he would say.
Speaker 1 (23:03):
And when he came home, he struggled to keep his
eyes open.
Speaker 2 (23:06):
He's a drag, like falling asleep early. He'll fall asleep
at dinner. We're at dinner at like six o'clock and
he's at the table like falling asleep.
Speaker 1 (23:18):
She chalked it up to him being a bit older
and traveling so much for work, but Abby still had
her mindset on the future.
Speaker 3 (23:26):
Well, I had put don money to adopt by myself,
so I was all going to do that.
Speaker 2 (23:31):
As time went on.
Speaker 1 (23:33):
Richard wasn't so into the idea.
Speaker 2 (23:36):
Anytime he talked about adoption, he always would say, you know,
I'll do it if that's what you really want to do.
But a lot of those kids really have problems. And
I thought that was a really callous thing to say.
I thought that was awful because I know a lot
of kids who were not adopted who had problems.
Speaker 1 (23:51):
He was changing. He wasn't the accommodating and doting man
she'd met. That guy was rarely around.
Speaker 2 (24:00):
And one day I was talking about something about getting
married and we didn't even have a date, but he
started breaking down. He's like, I'm so overwhelmed. We have
to push the wedding back.
Speaker 1 (24:11):
Maybe he was stressed out with work, or maybe he
was having cold feet. Shortly after this conversation, Abby confided
in her mom.
Speaker 3 (24:19):
And I told her about the bin laden thing, and
she said, something's not.
Speaker 2 (24:24):
Right to Abby. She said, that doesn't make sense, I said,
and I got mad at her. I said, why isn't
it possible that there are things that you don't know
that we don't know and we don't know the answer yet.
And I got so mad at her. I was like,
you're so suspicious.
Speaker 1 (24:36):
Abby was defensive in the moment, but her mom's suspicion
rubbed off on her.
Speaker 2 (24:42):
So then I kind of went back and would ask
him questions, you know, more targeted.
Speaker 3 (24:48):
And he would get mad at me.
Speaker 1 (24:52):
One night, at dinner with Abby's parents, the commander made
a big show of complimenting a meal.
Speaker 2 (24:59):
We're at a restaurant and he raves about the Brussels sprouts. Right,
these are the best Brussels sprouts ever. Okay, my parents,
that's nice. They didn't make it, they didn't care.
Speaker 1 (25:08):
But as soon as they were alone, he told Abby
the exact opposite.
Speaker 3 (25:13):
And he said, that's I think the worst meal I've
ever eaten.
Speaker 2 (25:17):
And I just thought to myself, what I said, Why
did you lie? Why did you lie? They didn't care,
he said, I wanted it to make them feel good.
It just was too discordant. You can't verify the CIA,
you can't verify navy seal, you can't do that. But
that was something tangible that I could verify, and I
just thought, I can't do this anymore. I just can't.
I can't do this. This is insane. If he can
(25:37):
lie about that, he can lie about anything that.
Speaker 1 (25:40):
Small lie about the Brussels sprouts broke something inside of Abby.
It was proof that he felt the need to compulsively lie.
She was disgusted with him, but she wasn't prepared to
call off the wedding. That was until a few weeks later.
Speaker 2 (25:58):
It was Christmas and we were spending it with his
brother and sister in law in their big house in Georgetown,
and his son and daughter were there, and I overheard
the son saying, what's that ring on Abby's finger?
Speaker 3 (26:12):
Is that from you?
Speaker 2 (26:14):
And I didn't hear the response, but I remember thinking
to myself, this kid doesn't know that we're getting married.
Speaker 3 (26:23):
The son had no idea that he had proposed to me.
Speaker 1 (26:26):
Richard had told Abby that his kids do and that
they were happy about it.
Speaker 2 (26:30):
The commander told me that when he told his son
that he had proposed to me, his son said, well,
what took you so long?
Speaker 1 (26:37):
And now she had proved of a very consequential lie.
Speaker 2 (26:42):
You're lying to me and I can't there's something I'm done.
I'm out of here.
Speaker 1 (26:50):
That night, she called off the engagement, and the timing
turned out to be pretty convenient.
Speaker 3 (26:57):
About two weeks later, he came over and he said, listen.
Speaker 2 (27:01):
The Navy, who was apparently paying for the apartment, needs
the apartment, and they're shipping me out somewhere else. I'm
leaving Washington, so we have to pack up everything and
get out.
Speaker 1 (27:13):
So Abby packed up and moved back to New York.
Speaker 2 (27:16):
And I didn't know what I was going to do
because I again was going to school. I ended up
commuting to Washington from New York City and I finished
my degree.
Speaker 1 (27:24):
In the wake of the breakup, Happy second guest yourself.
Speaker 2 (27:28):
I felt bad.
Speaker 3 (27:29):
I felt maybe I overreacted.
Speaker 2 (27:31):
You know, every time I would interrogate him, he'd be like, well,
that's why you're single, because you always question and you
don't trust and you interrogate. That's why. That's why you've
been singles all this time. And I thought, well, maybe
that's right, you know, maybe that's right.
Speaker 1 (27:46):
A few months after the breakup, she was in DC
for school and one night she was in a cab
driving by the watergate.
Speaker 2 (27:54):
And the light was still was on in the apartment,
and I called him. I said, are you you in
the apartment? He said, you know, it was a comedy bearers.
I got everything moved, and everything was in storage, and
everything was great, and I was ready to be relocated,
and then the Navy said, no, you got to move
back into the apartment. You got to stay in Washington.
Speaker 3 (28:15):
We're keeping you here. So remember I'm Nancy true.
Speaker 2 (28:20):
I'd said, well, I need to pick up my cookbooks
that are in the apartment.
Speaker 1 (28:23):
I left the cookbooks, so she told the cab driver
to pull over. She wanted to investigate.
Speaker 2 (28:30):
I didn't have a key, and I said to the doorman,
I'd like to go up to the apartment, and the
doorman said, you're not allowed up.
Speaker 3 (28:37):
I have a note, Abby Ellen is not allowed up.
Speaker 2 (28:40):
So I called the commander. I said, wow, what's up
with that? Like, why was I there was specifically a note?
And he said, oh, somebody was assaulted in the buildings,
so they're being really careful about who they let in.
I said, I don't believe you.
Speaker 1 (28:55):
She told Richard she needed to get a few things
she left behind, so we let her out.
Speaker 5 (29:00):
Up.
Speaker 2 (29:00):
I looked in the house and the cookbooks were exactly
where I had left them.
Speaker 1 (29:05):
It wasn't just the cookbooks.
Speaker 2 (29:08):
His baseball glove was exactly where it had been when
I left, and there was a sliver of soap in
exactly the same place, the same sliver that had been
there when I left. And I looked at him and
I said.
Speaker 3 (29:21):
You didn't move and he said, oh, yes, I did.
Speaker 1 (29:28):
There was no way he moved out of the apartment
and put a tiny, used up sliver of soap back
in the exact same place, stuck to the same bath tile.
Speaker 2 (29:39):
And I thought, you're nuts, And that was it. That
was it. I didn't really talk to him after that.
Speaker 1 (29:45):
She knew he was a liar, but how big of
a liar She wouldn't find out for another year and
a half.
Speaker 2 (29:54):
And then I got a phone call. It's a two
two area code. The only two two area code I
knew was the Commanders, So I thought, okay, I don't
know why he's calling. And I picked it up and
it was Special Agent Dan Ryan with NCIS.
Speaker 1 (30:30):
Abby hadn't talked to Richard in over a year. When
a DC number cold called her, she assumed it was him,
but to her surprise, it was a special agent with NCIS,
the Naval Criminal Investigative Service.
Speaker 6 (30:45):
And he says, there's a doctor who's writing prescriptions for
narcotics for vicodin, and your name is one of the
names he's been using.
Speaker 1 (31:00):
Abby's name had shown up on a list of falsified
narcotics prescriptions, scripts written by a Navy doctor named Richard.
Speaker 3 (31:10):
I said what, and he said, yeah, he's been writing
prescriptions for drugs.
Speaker 2 (31:14):
Do you know him? You have a prescription? And I said, no,
I know him, and I do not have a prescription
for Vicadin. You know, I prefer valuume. I mean.
Speaker 1 (31:23):
The phone call didn't upset Abby. In fact, she was
excited because maybe she was finally going to get answers
about Richard.
Speaker 2 (31:31):
I thought, maybe this is the culmination. Everything's kind of
coming to a head. CIA and Navy Seal and all that.
You know, everything is just coming together.
Speaker 1 (31:40):
It turned out Richard wasn't working with Special Forces on
secret missions. He was actually a Navy doctor working at
the Pentagon.
Speaker 2 (31:48):
But while he was there.
Speaker 3 (31:51):
People he worked at the Pentagon he had used their
names to forge drugs.
Speaker 1 (31:59):
He forged hundreds of opioid prescriptions using the names of
his coworkers and his family.
Speaker 2 (32:06):
He used his dead mother's name, he used his dead
father's name, he used I think his aunt, he used
my name. All these people.
Speaker 1 (32:15):
He'd been caught filling scripts at the Pentagon's pharmacy. It
was a brazen scheme. What was he doing with all
those painkillers?
Speaker 2 (32:24):
I asked if he was selling and Dan Ryan said no,
we have no evidence of that.
Speaker 1 (32:30):
Presumably Richard was taking the pills himself, at least that's
what he later claimed to a judge. Abby thought back
to dinners with the Commander, the ones where he was
falling asleep at the table. In hindsight, that was her
only clue that Richard could have been taking opioids.
Speaker 3 (32:51):
So why kicked into journalist's mode.
Speaker 2 (32:54):
She tracked down Richard's ex wife and gave her a call.
Speaker 1 (32:58):
His ex wife knew Richard had a girl friend, but
it wasn't Abby. She was one who told me about
the girlfriend. Abby would call one woman who told her
about another. It was like a phone tree of Richard's
ex girlfriends. That's how she found a woman who'd been
engaged to Richard at the same time Abby started dating.
Speaker 2 (33:18):
Him, and her name was Christine.
Speaker 3 (33:22):
She was a doctor, She was awesome, and he proposed
to her right.
Speaker 5 (33:26):
Around the time he started beginning corresponding with me, and
he one day said to her, I've got to go
off on a secret mission.
Speaker 2 (33:37):
I'll call you when I come back, and he never
came back.
Speaker 1 (33:40):
Christine never knew why Richard disappeared. Abby had the other
half of the story, and.
Speaker 2 (33:46):
The secret mission was Operation Abby.
Speaker 1 (33:49):
But Richard's romantic con took an even darker turn. The
last woman he'd been seeing was named Gail. Richard had
been her college boyfriend. When Gail was diagnosed with breast
cancer in her sixties, he reappeared she was getting divorced.
He had reached out to her, and.
Speaker 6 (34:10):
You know, and I never stopped loving you after thirty years,
blah blah blah, all this stuff.
Speaker 1 (34:15):
He swept Gail off her feet. He even claimed he
could help her beat cancer. After all, he was a doctor.
Speaker 2 (34:22):
He was helping manage her cancer, but she was one
of the names he was using to get narcotics as well.
Speaker 1 (34:31):
Gail was the last woman Richard kahnned before he got caught.
Speaker 2 (34:35):
And then I called up Gail, who was basically was
dying at the time. She had cancer. She had breast cancer.
Speaker 1 (34:42):
When NCIS informed Gail about the fraudulent prescriptions in her name,
she was so angry she flipped on Richard immediately.
Speaker 5 (34:52):
She wore a wire and he admitted that he had
been forging signatures and everything he admitted to her, and
she got them in trouble.
Speaker 1 (35:00):
Gail passed away shortly after that. Her story is the
one Abby still thinks about. If there is a hero here,
she says, it's Gail. Richard ultimately pled guilty to two
felony charges of prescription fraud. In his sentencing hearing, he
(35:20):
told a judge that he'd become addicted while he struggled
to cope with his girlfriend's terminal cancer diagnosis. Between that
and his history of military service, the judge went easy
on him.
Speaker 2 (35:33):
He was sentenced to I think two years in one day.
Speaker 1 (35:38):
After Abby found out about Richard's crimes, she began parsing
out every lie he ever told her. Ben Lawden, Richard
never treated him at Guantanamo. The Secret Service wasn't following
him or his kids. He had never been a Navy
seal because Abby found a Navy seal impersonation expert military
(36:00):
records and confirmed it and those screaming nightmares Richard had,
while the seal expert said fake nightmares are a common
feature of con artists like Richard.
Speaker 2 (36:11):
Abby had been duped.
Speaker 3 (36:13):
After this happened, I was like, now I got a book,
thank you.
Speaker 2 (36:17):
She titled her book Duped.
Speaker 1 (36:19):
Once she got started on it, she realized it was
about much more than just her own experience. It was
about the experience of being lied to.
Speaker 2 (36:29):
It's not a straight out memoir, It is really an investigation.
We decided to focus on the victims. What is it
like to be deceived? What is it like to be duped?
What is it like to not have all the facts
and that the life you've been living is not the
life you thought you were living. So that was my book.
Speaker 1 (36:50):
Abby never blamed herself for believing Richard's lies.
Speaker 2 (36:54):
You know what's the worst thing you did.
Speaker 3 (36:58):
The worst thing is you trust somebody, and we.
Speaker 2 (37:01):
Have to trust. Society works on trust.
Speaker 3 (37:04):
You have to stop at the red light, you have
to stop at the stop light. You have to trust
that the pilot knows how to fly the plane.
Speaker 2 (37:09):
You have to trust that that cop is really a cop.
Speaker 3 (37:12):
You have to and if you don't, society will fall apart.
Speaker 1 (37:17):
Working on her book, she researched experts on deception like
doctor Jennifer Fried who coined the term betrayal blindness.
Speaker 2 (37:25):
And it was just about you know how when children
are being abused by their caretakers. They don't see it
because they need that caretaker. They can't believe that that
person was working against them. And it's the same thing
in any relationship, whether it's somebody you're a business colleague
or your romantic partner. You don't want to believe that
(37:46):
someone's going to do this to you. You can't believe it,
and it's to your benefit not to see it because
of your life that you built up.
Speaker 1 (37:53):
And she even explored this stigma around being deceived, that
feeling of self blame and stupidity when we've been lied to.
Speaker 2 (38:01):
So then I found this study that said, actually, smarter
people are more susceptible to being duped because they don't
think it would happen to them.
Speaker 3 (38:07):
So actually people who've been duped are smarter.
Speaker 2 (38:13):
They tend to be smarter, specifically because of fatal overconfidence.
It would never happen to me.
Speaker 1 (38:19):
Abby turned Richard's betrayal into a story, a story for
herself and for the world.
Speaker 2 (38:26):
I never felt ashamed, I never felt embarrassed.
Speaker 3 (38:29):
To me, it was a story and it was a
great story.
Speaker 1 (38:32):
Instead of covering international relations today she mostly reports on fraud.
Speaker 6 (38:39):
I think it's fair to say that it changed the
trajectory of my career.
Speaker 2 (38:44):
That began reporting on different things. I became somewhat of
an expert on fraud. I guess read a book about
white color fraud, and I did a podcast which led
into a documentary that I did with The New York
Times called to Live in Die, Alabama. So it did
change my.
Speaker 1 (38:59):
Life, and thanks to her experience with Richard, she's learned
a few things about herself.
Speaker 2 (39:05):
I always knew I was resilient. I always knew I
was strong, but I don't know that I realized just
how capable I was. That's nice to know.
Speaker 1 (39:17):
We end all of our episodes with the same question,
why are you sharing your story?
Speaker 2 (39:23):
I think it's very important for people to know that
they're not alone and that this happens to other people.
It's very easy for it to happen now with technology.
You're not a terrible person, You're not a stupid person.
Lots of people are in this situation and don't feel
like an idiot, because, again.
Speaker 3 (39:41):
What's the worst thing you did? You trusted, that's okay.
Speaker 1 (39:51):
On the next episode of Betrayal, I said, well, I'm
not a suspicious person, and he said, maybe you should
be more suspicious, you should ask me questions.
Speaker 7 (40:06):
At this point, my heart dropped and I feel like
I'm going to vomit. The betrayal felt so intentional and
possibly like it was a long time coming.
Speaker 1 (40:23):
If you would like to reach out to the Betrayal team,
email us at Betrayalpod at gmail dot com. That's Betrayal
Pod at gmail dot com, and be sure to follow
us on Instagram at Betrayal Pod. We're grateful for your support.
One way to show support is by subscribing to our
show on Apple Podcasts, and don't forget to rate and
(40:44):
review Betrayal. Five star reviews go a long way. A
big thank you to all of our listeners. Betrayal is
a production of Glass Podcasts, a division of Glass Entertainment
Group and partnership with iHeart Podcasts. The show is executive
produced by Nancy Glass and Jennifer Fason, hosted and produced
by me Andrea Gunning, written and produced by Monique Leboard,
(41:05):
also produced by Ben Fetterman. Associate producers are Kristin Mercury
and Caitlin Golden. Our iHeart team is Ali Perry and
Jessica Kriintech audio editing and mixing by Matt del Vecchio,
additional editing support from Tanner Robbins. Betrayal's theme composed by
Oliver Bains. Music library provided by mybe Music and For
(41:27):
more podcasts from iHeart, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts,
or wherever you get your podcasts
Hey, it's Andrea Gunning. Our season of weekly stories is
coming to an end, but don't worry. We'll be back
soon with more episodes. So if you have a story
of your own that you'd like to share on the podcast,
email us at Betrayal pod at gmail dot com. In
the meantime, we want to do something new and exciting.
This month, we're taking short creative essays submissions from listeners.
(00:22):
The theme is resilience in the face of a devastating betrayal.
We want to hear the story of how you healed
scars and all. Here's the catch. The limit is a
thousand words. If your story stands out, it might be
featured in a bonus episode. Please save your submission as
a PDF and email it to Betrayal pod at gmail
dot com. Okay, now onto the episode.
Speaker 2 (00:47):
If he can lie about that, he can lie about anything.
I mean, he used his dead mother's name, he used
his dead father's name, he used I think his aunt,
he used my name, all these people. It was absolutely
crazy making.
Speaker 1 (01:14):
I'm Andrea Gunning, and this is Betrayal, a show about
the people we trust the most and the deceptions that
change everything.
Speaker 2 (01:24):
Listen, I've always craved drama, and I got it. I
got it. That's Abby Ellen.
Speaker 1 (01:32):
She's an independent journalist where outlets like The New York
Times in Washington Post.
Speaker 2 (01:37):
Yeah. I'm in my fifties and I have been a
freelance writer since I'm like twenty two.
Speaker 1 (01:45):
Storytelling comes naturally to her.
Speaker 2 (01:48):
Even as a kid, I was interested in people's story
I was interested in gossip. I was interested in people's lives.
I just wanted to know how things work. And I
also was always interested in getting to the bottom of things.
Speaker 1 (02:03):
To say, she's curious as an understatement. When she was
in elementary school, Abby was on a children's show called
Romper Room. It was popular in the nineteen seventies. On
the show, the host would hold up a magic mirror
and through it she would pretend to see straight into
living rooms across the country. She'd named dozens of children
who were watching the show. Kids at home thought she
(02:26):
was talking directly to them through the mirror. As a kid,
Abby knew the magic mirror was faked, and when she
was on the show, she was determined to figure.
Speaker 2 (02:36):
Out how well they would put the kids in the
control room and you could see all of the monitors
and you could see what was happening, and I remember
pointing to that with the kid next to me. I
was like, check it out, like there's no magic, and
he was really upset. He was like, I don't want
to know that, you know, And I was like, see,
(02:56):
I got to the truth.
Speaker 1 (02:58):
Fifty years later, she's still that same person.
Speaker 3 (03:01):
I hate magic tricks.
Speaker 2 (03:02):
I hate going to magic shows. I need to know
how they do things.
Speaker 1 (03:07):
That dogged curiosity has motivated Abby's work for decades. When
she first started her journalism career in New York.
Speaker 2 (03:14):
City, I could have gotten a job like in The
Devil Worst Prada.
Speaker 3 (03:17):
I could have gotten a job as an assistant to
an editor.
Speaker 2 (03:21):
But I thought, what am I going to learn about
writing from picking up some of these dry cleaning Nothing?
What am I going to learn about like from faxing
their correspondence nothing. I didn't want to do that.
Speaker 1 (03:31):
Instead, she got her start writing for women's magazines. It
was the nineties when magazines still ruled the media landscape,
and Abby had to start at the bottom.
Speaker 2 (03:42):
Of the ladder. The women's magazines had you do like quizzes,
is he a jerk? Are you a control freak? I
mean those kind of things. I didn't give a shit.
I mean, I hated that stuff, and I just got
terrified that I was going to get stuck doing that.
Speaker 1 (03:56):
She wanted something more hard hitting, so she started cold
pitch stories to The New York Times, and she finally
got a story accepted. It was an expose on simulated
military boot camps for civilians.
Speaker 2 (04:09):
And I wrote a big story about that. It was
a full page of The New York Times. I framed
it and I thought, that's that never going to happen again. Well,
the editor who I wrote that for called me up
one day and he said, we're starting a column. He
wanted Abby to write for it.
Speaker 1 (04:26):
So for the next five years, she wrote a column
about young people and money for the Business section of
the New York Times.
Speaker 2 (04:33):
She was in her late twenties.
Speaker 1 (04:34):
The stars were aligning for her career and she was
building a life for herself.
Speaker 2 (04:39):
My mother is really a super feminist and has always
been profoundly independent and has always been like, what women
need is their own money, no matter what, they all
need their own money, you know. So she wanted me
to always have my own space.
Speaker 1 (04:54):
On her mother's advice, Abby bought her first apartment. It
was a loft in New York City. She had everything
she wanted. Even dating came easily for Abby.
Speaker 3 (05:05):
Oh God, men were everywhere, men were everywhere.
Speaker 1 (05:09):
In her twenties, her relationships usually ended because he was
more into her and she was into him. I, you know,
had my boyfriend, then we broke up, and then I
had other boyfriends.
Speaker 2 (05:20):
And I continued to work, and I continued to travel,
and I kind of never really wanted to get married,
per se, that wasn't my agenda. Didn't want to be
tethered to somebody all the time.
Speaker 1 (05:34):
In her thirties, she dated more seriously, but none of
the guys were quite right.
Speaker 3 (05:39):
One was a guy on me in Peru.
Speaker 2 (05:42):
He was a furniture maker and he was great, but
that didn't work out. A couple guys in the.
Speaker 4 (05:47):
Theater, I mean just different nice. I mean they were fine,
they were fine people. But I wanted something that mattered.
I wanted something that mattered.
Speaker 1 (05:58):
Abby had traveled the world, reported for prestigious publications, and
made friends in every corner of the city, but there
was one thing she still hadn't experienced.
Speaker 2 (06:09):
Again, I didn't care if I got married, but I
wanted to be mount in love. She wanted to be
madly in love.
Speaker 1 (06:16):
By the time she was forty, she started looking for
love in new places.
Speaker 2 (06:20):
If you've been single little while, you know, sometimes you're
just like, oh God, maybe I should go out with
somebody who I never thought i'd be with, just because
maybe I'd been barking up the wrong tree all this time.
Speaker 1 (06:30):
After a string of relationships with struggling artists, she thought
she'd try something more traditional. First, she went with the
conservative Wall Street type.
Speaker 2 (06:40):
Then she thought, I'm Jewish. I was brought up Jewish.
I thought, I've always dated non Jewish guys. Maybe I
need to be with somebody who's Jewish. Maybe that's what
I need.
Speaker 1 (06:51):
On a lark, her friend recommended a psychic. Apparently she
had great insights on love.
Speaker 2 (06:57):
Oh god, Carmela is psyching from younger, that's what she said.
I like.
Speaker 1 (07:01):
But Carmela saw something in Abby's future, a man.
Speaker 2 (07:06):
And she was like, you're going to meet somebody you're
gonna move. His first initial is going to be RP,
B or D and all when he's gonna wear a uniform.
And I said, I don't know anybody in uniform other
than the FedEx guy.
Speaker 3 (07:19):
And she was like, no, that's not a FedEx guy.
Speaker 1 (07:23):
Around the same time, Abby was working on a piece
for The Times.
Speaker 2 (07:27):
I was working on an article for the New York
Times about detox diets and whether or not they had
any validity or whether they were just kind of bullshit.
And somebody suggested I call this guy who worked in
Beverly Hills, California, who was a doctor there.
Speaker 3 (07:41):
He had written some articles or studies about detox diets.
Speaker 1 (07:46):
This Beverly Hills doctor gave Abby a great quote for
her article. We're going to call him Richard.
Speaker 3 (07:52):
I quoted him and we had a nice conversation and
that was the end of it.
Speaker 1 (07:55):
A few months later she had to call Richard again
to fact check the article.
Speaker 3 (08:00):
And I said, are you still in Beverly Hills And
he said, no, I'm in the Navy.
Speaker 2 (08:04):
I'm a Navy doc.
Speaker 1 (08:06):
Richard had been a Navy seal in his twenties, then
left to go to medical school. After decades of private
medical practice, he rejoined the Navy to work on special projects.
Speaker 2 (08:16):
He was working on opening up a hospital for kids
with cancer in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Speaker 1 (08:23):
At the time, Abby wanted a new beat. She wanted
to report on international relations.
Speaker 2 (08:28):
I was looking to do something different to expand my career.
I wanted to do international reporting, and even if possible,
I wanted to do war correspondence.
Speaker 1 (08:38):
Richard was a good source, someone who might have stories
and connections she would need.
Speaker 2 (08:44):
I said, well, tell me, bet you know, keeping posted
on how this goes, this is right up my alley,
and he did.
Speaker 3 (08:51):
He capped keeping me posted. He kept telling me what
was going on.
Speaker 1 (08:55):
At first it was regular updates about his job in
the Middle East.
Speaker 2 (09:00):
And then we began talking more and more.
Speaker 1 (09:04):
They started writing to each other every day, and she
learned more about Richard's personal life.
Speaker 3 (09:10):
Apparently he had been divorced since I met him.
Speaker 2 (09:13):
His two kids lived in California, and he was liddy
in Jacksonville, and he was going to move to Washington.
And I thought, well, isn't that ironic because I was
going to move to Washington too to go to grad school.
Speaker 1 (09:24):
Abby had just been accepted to an international relations master's program.
It was in Washington, d C. Where Richard was headed next.
By this point, their conversations veered into flirtations. So when
they found out they were both moving to the same.
Speaker 2 (09:39):
City, it seemed almost. You know where there's a word
in Hebrew beshert, which means meant to be, And I thought, okay,
this is meant to be.
Speaker 1 (09:49):
Their flirtation expanded into late night phone calls and surprise deliveries.
Speaker 2 (09:54):
And he called when he said he would, and he
sent flowers. And he wasn't like a suffer bring artists
and paint splattered jeans. You know, he was really a
good guy. Richard was mature and accomplished. He was a doctor.
Maybe this was the guy she'd been waiting for. I
was forty two, so I wasn't a kid, and he
(10:16):
was fifty eight, so he wasn't a kid.
Speaker 3 (10:18):
But it didn't matter because he was nice to me,
and he was good to me.
Speaker 1 (10:22):
After months of talking, have you emailed him a poem?
Speaker 2 (10:26):
So I thought, all right, I can woo. I'm gonna
send it to him.
Speaker 1 (10:31):
She knew this poem was his favorite.
Speaker 2 (10:33):
I'm going to read it. It's very short. This is
just to say by William Carlos Williams. I had eaten
the plums that were in the ice box in which
you were probably saving for breakfast. Forgive me. They were delicious,
so sweet and so cold, and I sent it to him,
and he wrought me back three words, I love you.
(10:56):
And I thought, all right, it's a little fast, but okay.
Speaker 1 (11:00):
She'd only been talking to Richard for a few months,
but when she got his reply, she smiled. Richard was
scheduled to be in New York the following month. Abby
hadn't started school yet and was still in town, so
they decided to meet in person for the first time.
Speaker 3 (11:17):
He said, I've got to be in New York to
give his talk at the eun So I'm going to
be wearing my outfit, my navy uniform, and he said,
let's go somewhere celebratory.
Speaker 1 (11:29):
He made a reservation for them at the Four Seasons restaurant.
It's now closed, but in the early two thousands it
was one of the most glamorous date spots in New York.
Speaker 2 (11:40):
It was a very CNBC kind of place. There was
a giant pool in the middle of it. Then it
was just very expensive and swanky and ritzy, and it.
Speaker 3 (11:53):
Was just kind of the place to be.
Speaker 1 (11:57):
On the night of their date, Richard met her in
the lobby, wearing his white Navy officer uniform. As he
walked towards her, she realized this was the man in uniform,
the one the psychic had foreseen. Richard even brought her
a gift.
Speaker 3 (12:15):
He brings what is called a cover, but it's a
navy cap.
Speaker 2 (12:19):
You know, it's the hat I brought you one, he said.
Speaker 1 (12:23):
They walked into dinner hand in hand, Abby wearing his
white navy cap.
Speaker 3 (12:28):
And at dinner, he was so funny and he was charming,
and he was good to me, and he was charismatic, and.
Speaker 2 (12:34):
You know, he kind of wound me. He was wooing me,
and I like that. It was after dating all sorts
of shit has it was nice to be with somebody who,
you know, seemed to be who they said they were.
Speaker 1 (12:48):
That was the beginning of Richard's regular visits to New
York to take Abby out on romantic dates.
Speaker 3 (12:55):
He comes to visit for a weekend or maybe overnight.
Speaker 2 (12:58):
I mean, he always reading me with a big kiss,
and he'd tell me how beautiful I was.
Speaker 1 (13:03):
When he met Abby's friends, he impressed them too.
Speaker 2 (13:07):
He cared about people, He cared about the world. He
was always picking up tabs, he was always doing things
that made people really like him.
Speaker 1 (13:16):
Richard had two kids by his first wife, and even
though he lived apart from them. He was still a
family man.
Speaker 2 (13:23):
He was very close to his son, so that that
was nice and daughter. He talked to his kid, his
son all the time.
Speaker 1 (13:29):
And then there was his illustrious military career. He was
constantly traveling for work.
Speaker 2 (13:34):
He always said that he had certain things that he
did that he wouldn't be able to tell me about,
and then he would often go off on these sort
of secret missions and he couldn't tell me what he
was doing, and I was kind of intrigued by that.
Speaker 1 (13:49):
Abby was the kid who needed to know how the
magic mirror worked, and now with Richard, she wanted to
know about his classified military projects.
Speaker 2 (13:59):
It drove me mad that I didn't know what he
was doing, and a friend of mine said, well, that's
obviously a lesson. You need to learn that you can't
know everything.
Speaker 1 (14:08):
Her intrigue turned to concern when Richard began having horrible nightmares.
Speaker 2 (14:14):
He would just have these screaming nightmares, and so he
had to sleep with the lights on and the TV on.
Speaker 1 (14:21):
When she asked, he brushed it off. All he would
say is that he had bad memories, things from the
military that he couldn't talk about.
Speaker 2 (14:29):
I thought badly, and I thought something must have happened,
but I didn't know. I didn't know what it was.
Speaker 1 (14:36):
Before long, his career began bumping up against their relationship.
Speaker 2 (14:41):
Anytime he broke any plan, which we began to do
pretty regularly, it was it's a secret mission. I can't
tell you anything more about it. That's it.
Speaker 1 (14:51):
Abby nicknamed him the Commander. It was a joke at first,
but it stuck because Richard couldn't seem to escape his career.
Speaker 2 (15:00):
The commander told me that we were being followed by
the Secret Service.
Speaker 1 (15:04):
This was jarring for Abby and she demanded a reason
why they were being followed. To her surprise, the commander
began revealing some details about his career.
Speaker 2 (15:15):
He said that he had been a doctor at Guantanamo.
Speaker 1 (15:20):
He had been recruited to be the head doctor for
prisoners at Guantanamo Bay. This was the mid two thousands,
at the height of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.
The commander explained that there was intense infighting with personnel
at Guantanamo. It had to do with classified information that
wasn't being delivered up the chain. That's why he was
(15:41):
being protected by men in black SUVs.
Speaker 2 (15:45):
And he said, when I was at Guantanamo, all these
guys are after me. They hate me, and they threatened
me and my family. So my loved ones are being
followed by the Secret Service.
Speaker 1 (15:58):
Abby tried to play it down to act casual, but
this was a big disclosure.
Speaker 2 (16:05):
And I remember I said to him, well, you know,
next time, why don't you ask them if they can
give me a ride so I don't have to call taxis.
It was just like, this is absurd.
Speaker 1 (16:14):
She wasn't even sure if she believed his story about
the Secret Service. But then one day his son called
from California.
Speaker 2 (16:24):
And there was a car outside and said, Dad, is
that your guys? Why are they outside the house? So
I remember, I thought something really must have happened.
Speaker 1 (16:33):
Now Abby needed answers. What had really happened at Guantanamo.
Speaker 2 (16:39):
I need to know everything.
Speaker 1 (16:41):
Eventually Richard confided.
Speaker 2 (16:43):
In her and he said that one of his patients
was a very high level terrorist. And I said who,
and he said Osama bin Laden And I said that's insane,
and he said no, it's not. And he began to
list all the physical problems that have been Lauden had.
Speaker 1 (17:05):
This was two thousand and eight. At the time, the
military claim to be actively searching for bin Laden, so
him being held at Guantanamo just didn't make sense.
Speaker 3 (17:17):
And I said to him, that is a stupid thing
to to tell a person.
Speaker 2 (17:20):
I said, that's also not possible because the president, it
was Bush at the time, that he was never let
this happen without getting it out because it was a
big deal and you know, it would have helped Republicans,
so he would never have been quite about that if
he knew where bin Laden was. And he said, no,
(17:40):
the President doesn't know. I said, that's impossible. He said,
there's a lot of things that they don't know. And
I remember thinking, Okay, this is insane, but maybe here's
a story here.
Speaker 1 (18:12):
Abby's new boyfriend, Richard, made some pretty surprising claims, biggest
of all that Asama bin Laden was being held at
Guantanamo and that he had treated bin Laden for medical issues.
This was the early two thousands and bin Laden was
one of the biggest fugitives on the planet, so Richard's
story was hard to believe. But Abby knew for a
(18:33):
fact that the commander worked in the Navy with a very.
Speaker 2 (18:37):
High security clearance.
Speaker 1 (18:38):
At that she'd met some of his colleagues, so like
a good journalist, she wanted to verify the commander's claim.
Speaker 2 (18:45):
I was trying to do my own checkups because I
was feeling crazy and I couldn't call up the CIA
and say, hey, do you have this guy on your payroll?
I mean, you can't do that.
Speaker 1 (18:57):
So she started asking around using vage details.
Speaker 2 (19:01):
My brother in law said that doesn't make sense because
he was in the Navy, and he said he wouldn't
tell you about that. I had another friend who said
the same thing. They're not supposed to tell you.
Speaker 1 (19:11):
She doubted the story, but wasn't prepared to write it
off entirely. Even if there was a remote possibility it
could be true, it would be the biggest story in
the world, and as someone who wanted to be a
war reporter, that was undeniably enticing. She hit a dead
end trying to fact check the bin laden story, so
instead she decided to fact check Richard. She started with
(19:34):
one time when he said.
Speaker 2 (19:36):
That he had a vault full of medals for operations
that didn't really exist. They were unofficial, you know, like
homelandy kind of things that you're not supposed to know about.
Abby asked her new professors. If this could be true.
Speaker 3 (19:50):
I would ask my teachers, you know, is that possible?
Speaker 2 (19:53):
They said, yeah, absolutely this.
Speaker 1 (19:57):
If that checked out, Richard's other classified projects could exist
as well. Abby realized she could in fact check the
bin Laden story, and after Richard shared that he never
talked about it again. He wanted a relationship separate from work.
After all, the rest of his life is pretty tame.
Speaker 2 (20:19):
I met his family, I met his son, I met
his brother, met his aunt, I met some friends, I
met everybody, you know, so it just seems kind of normal.
Speaker 1 (20:31):
And he met her family. Abby introduced him to her mom.
Speaker 2 (20:35):
He was a Jewish doctor. What's not to like.
Speaker 1 (20:38):
As their lives began to merge, Abby was ready to
bring up a big topic of her own.
Speaker 2 (20:43):
I wanted to adopt, and I had said to him
at some point, listen, I'm gonna want a kid.
Speaker 1 (20:49):
When she told Richard this.
Speaker 2 (20:51):
Basically he was willing to do it. He said, I
love you, I'm in love with you. I'll do anything
you want. I'm gonna ask you to marry me, So
whatever makes you happy makes me happy.
Speaker 1 (21:04):
That conversation brought their relationship to a new level. It
was like an unspoken marriage proposal.
Speaker 2 (21:11):
I'm forty two, he's fifty eight. We're not kids anymore.
And we would discuss that.
Speaker 3 (21:14):
He said, you know, his father always said when you
know your no, and I've heard that before.
Speaker 2 (21:22):
So then he began he would visit me in New
York and he would come and he would say, ah,
I just went to Debiers and I was looking. I
was looking at rings there and I thought, okay, great,
that's cool. But one day he says to me, you know, Abby,
I'm really upset. I can't afford a thirty thousand dollars ring.
Forty thousand dollars ring. You know. I said, I don't
(21:43):
need a forty thousand dollars ring, which is true. I didn't.
Speaker 1 (21:49):
After six months together, Richard officially proposed. She said, yes,
it's true. The ring was nothing extravagant, but they both
knew they wanted to be to again. And then, keeping
with their low key attitude, Abby began planning for a
small wedding maybe the next year. They weren't in a rush.
Speaker 2 (22:09):
I had never really expected to get married. That wasn't
my goal, so it was very odd buying a dress.
I decided I would just do something very small, like
a dinner or something, just something chill.
Speaker 1 (22:21):
They made plans to move in together in Washington, DC.
Speaker 2 (22:25):
Eventually we found a place at the Watergate, which you know,
was obviously very famous.
Speaker 1 (22:33):
The apartment was being paid for by the Navy. But
even still, Abby didn't like the Watergate or DC.
Speaker 2 (22:41):
It was just sort of bleak and the Watergate was empty,
and I didn't find Washington to be an especially hospitable town.
Speaker 1 (22:50):
It didn't help that the commander was always traveling for work.
Speaker 2 (22:54):
Sometimes go in Afghanistan, sometimes going to Iraq. Sometimes he's
doing all these things that I can't.
Speaker 3 (22:59):
You didn't I'll tell you when there's a secure line,
is what he would say.
Speaker 1 (23:03):
And when he came home, he struggled to keep his
eyes open.
Speaker 2 (23:06):
He's a drag, like falling asleep early. He'll fall asleep
at dinner. We're at dinner at like six o'clock and
he's at the table like falling asleep.
Speaker 1 (23:18):
She chalked it up to him being a bit older
and traveling so much for work, but Abby still had
her mindset on the future.
Speaker 3 (23:26):
Well, I had put don money to adopt by myself,
so I was all going to do that.
Speaker 2 (23:31):
As time went on.
Speaker 1 (23:33):
Richard wasn't so into the idea.
Speaker 2 (23:36):
Anytime he talked about adoption, he always would say, you know,
I'll do it if that's what you really want to do.
But a lot of those kids really have problems. And
I thought that was a really callous thing to say.
I thought that was awful because I know a lot
of kids who were not adopted who had problems.
Speaker 1 (23:51):
He was changing. He wasn't the accommodating and doting man
she'd met. That guy was rarely around.
Speaker 2 (24:00):
And one day I was talking about something about getting
married and we didn't even have a date, but he
started breaking down. He's like, I'm so overwhelmed. We have
to push the wedding back.
Speaker 1 (24:11):
Maybe he was stressed out with work, or maybe he
was having cold feet. Shortly after this conversation, Abby confided
in her mom.
Speaker 3 (24:19):
And I told her about the bin laden thing, and
she said, something's not.
Speaker 2 (24:24):
Right to Abby. She said, that doesn't make sense, I said,
and I got mad at her. I said, why isn't
it possible that there are things that you don't know
that we don't know and we don't know the answer yet.
And I got so mad at her. I was like,
you're so suspicious.
Speaker 1 (24:36):
Abby was defensive in the moment, but her mom's suspicion
rubbed off on her.
Speaker 2 (24:42):
So then I kind of went back and would ask
him questions, you know, more targeted.
Speaker 3 (24:48):
And he would get mad at me.
Speaker 1 (24:52):
One night, at dinner with Abby's parents, the commander made
a big show of complimenting a meal.
Speaker 2 (24:59):
We're at a restaurant and he raves about the Brussels sprouts. Right,
these are the best Brussels sprouts ever. Okay, my parents,
that's nice. They didn't make it, they didn't care.
Speaker 1 (25:08):
But as soon as they were alone, he told Abby
the exact opposite.
Speaker 3 (25:13):
And he said, that's I think the worst meal I've
ever eaten.
Speaker 2 (25:17):
And I just thought to myself, what I said, Why
did you lie? Why did you lie? They didn't care,
he said, I wanted it to make them feel good.
It just was too discordant. You can't verify the CIA,
you can't verify navy seal, you can't do that. But
that was something tangible that I could verify, and I
just thought, I can't do this anymore. I just can't.
I can't do this. This is insane. If he can
(25:37):
lie about that, he can lie about anything that.
Speaker 1 (25:40):
Small lie about the Brussels sprouts broke something inside of Abby.
It was proof that he felt the need to compulsively lie.
She was disgusted with him, but she wasn't prepared to
call off the wedding. That was until a few weeks later.
Speaker 2 (25:58):
It was Christmas and we were spending it with his
brother and sister in law in their big house in Georgetown,
and his son and daughter were there, and I overheard
the son saying, what's that ring on Abby's finger?
Speaker 3 (26:12):
Is that from you?
Speaker 2 (26:14):
And I didn't hear the response, but I remember thinking
to myself, this kid doesn't know that we're getting married.
Speaker 3 (26:23):
The son had no idea that he had proposed to me.
Speaker 1 (26:26):
Richard had told Abby that his kids do and that
they were happy about it.
Speaker 2 (26:30):
The commander told me that when he told his son
that he had proposed to me, his son said, well,
what took you so long?
Speaker 1 (26:37):
And now she had proved of a very consequential lie.
Speaker 2 (26:42):
You're lying to me and I can't there's something I'm done.
I'm out of here.
Speaker 1 (26:50):
That night, she called off the engagement, and the timing
turned out to be pretty convenient.
Speaker 3 (26:57):
About two weeks later, he came over and he said, listen.
Speaker 2 (27:01):
The Navy, who was apparently paying for the apartment, needs
the apartment, and they're shipping me out somewhere else. I'm
leaving Washington, so we have to pack up everything and
get out.
Speaker 1 (27:13):
So Abby packed up and moved back to New York.
Speaker 2 (27:16):
And I didn't know what I was going to do
because I again was going to school. I ended up
commuting to Washington from New York City and I finished
my degree.
Speaker 1 (27:24):
In the wake of the breakup, Happy second guest yourself.
Speaker 2 (27:28):
I felt bad.
Speaker 3 (27:29):
I felt maybe I overreacted.
Speaker 2 (27:31):
You know, every time I would interrogate him, he'd be like, well,
that's why you're single, because you always question and you
don't trust and you interrogate. That's why. That's why you've
been singles all this time. And I thought, well, maybe
that's right, you know, maybe that's right.
Speaker 1 (27:46):
A few months after the breakup, she was in DC
for school and one night she was in a cab
driving by the watergate.
Speaker 2 (27:54):
And the light was still was on in the apartment,
and I called him. I said, are you you in
the apartment? He said, you know, it was a comedy bearers.
I got everything moved, and everything was in storage, and
everything was great, and I was ready to be relocated,
and then the Navy said, no, you got to move
back into the apartment. You got to stay in Washington.
Speaker 3 (28:15):
We're keeping you here. So remember I'm Nancy true.
Speaker 2 (28:20):
I'd said, well, I need to pick up my cookbooks
that are in the apartment.
Speaker 1 (28:23):
I left the cookbooks, so she told the cab driver
to pull over. She wanted to investigate.
Speaker 2 (28:30):
I didn't have a key, and I said to the doorman,
I'd like to go up to the apartment, and the
doorman said, you're not allowed up.
Speaker 3 (28:37):
I have a note, Abby Ellen is not allowed up.
Speaker 2 (28:40):
So I called the commander. I said, wow, what's up
with that? Like, why was I there was specifically a note?
And he said, oh, somebody was assaulted in the buildings,
so they're being really careful about who they let in.
I said, I don't believe you.
Speaker 1 (28:55):
She told Richard she needed to get a few things
she left behind, so we let her out.
Speaker 5 (29:00):
Up.
Speaker 2 (29:00):
I looked in the house and the cookbooks were exactly
where I had left them.
Speaker 1 (29:05):
It wasn't just the cookbooks.
Speaker 2 (29:08):
His baseball glove was exactly where it had been when
I left, and there was a sliver of soap in
exactly the same place, the same sliver that had been
there when I left. And I looked at him and
I said.
Speaker 3 (29:21):
You didn't move and he said, oh, yes, I did.
Speaker 1 (29:28):
There was no way he moved out of the apartment
and put a tiny, used up sliver of soap back
in the exact same place, stuck to the same bath tile.
Speaker 2 (29:39):
And I thought, you're nuts, And that was it. That
was it. I didn't really talk to him after that.
Speaker 1 (29:45):
She knew he was a liar, but how big of
a liar She wouldn't find out for another year and
a half.
Speaker 2 (29:54):
And then I got a phone call. It's a two
two area code. The only two two area code I
knew was the Commanders, So I thought, okay, I don't
know why he's calling. And I picked it up and
it was Special Agent Dan Ryan with NCIS.
Speaker 1 (30:30):
Abby hadn't talked to Richard in over a year. When
a DC number cold called her, she assumed it was him,
but to her surprise, it was a special agent with NCIS,
the Naval Criminal Investigative Service.
Speaker 6 (30:45):
And he says, there's a doctor who's writing prescriptions for
narcotics for vicodin, and your name is one of the
names he's been using.
Speaker 1 (31:00):
Abby's name had shown up on a list of falsified
narcotics prescriptions, scripts written by a Navy doctor named Richard.
Speaker 3 (31:10):
I said what, and he said, yeah, he's been writing
prescriptions for drugs.
Speaker 2 (31:14):
Do you know him? You have a prescription? And I said, no,
I know him, and I do not have a prescription
for Vicadin. You know, I prefer valuume. I mean.
Speaker 1 (31:23):
The phone call didn't upset Abby. In fact, she was
excited because maybe she was finally going to get answers
about Richard.
Speaker 2 (31:31):
I thought, maybe this is the culmination. Everything's kind of
coming to a head. CIA and Navy Seal and all that.
You know, everything is just coming together.
Speaker 1 (31:40):
It turned out Richard wasn't working with Special Forces on
secret missions. He was actually a Navy doctor working at
the Pentagon.
Speaker 2 (31:48):
But while he was there.
Speaker 3 (31:51):
People he worked at the Pentagon he had used their
names to forge drugs.
Speaker 1 (31:59):
He forged hundreds of opioid prescriptions using the names of
his coworkers and his family.
Speaker 2 (32:06):
He used his dead mother's name, he used his dead
father's name, he used I think his aunt, he used
my name. All these people.
Speaker 1 (32:15):
He'd been caught filling scripts at the Pentagon's pharmacy. It
was a brazen scheme. What was he doing with all
those painkillers?
Speaker 2 (32:24):
I asked if he was selling and Dan Ryan said no,
we have no evidence of that.
Speaker 1 (32:30):
Presumably Richard was taking the pills himself, at least that's
what he later claimed to a judge. Abby thought back
to dinners with the Commander, the ones where he was
falling asleep at the table. In hindsight, that was her
only clue that Richard could have been taking opioids.
Speaker 3 (32:51):
So why kicked into journalist's mode.
Speaker 2 (32:54):
She tracked down Richard's ex wife and gave her a call.
Speaker 1 (32:58):
His ex wife knew Richard had a girl friend, but
it wasn't Abby. She was one who told me about
the girlfriend. Abby would call one woman who told her
about another. It was like a phone tree of Richard's
ex girlfriends. That's how she found a woman who'd been
engaged to Richard at the same time Abby started dating.
Speaker 2 (33:18):
Him, and her name was Christine.
Speaker 3 (33:22):
She was a doctor, She was awesome, and he proposed
to her right.
Speaker 5 (33:26):
Around the time he started beginning corresponding with me, and
he one day said to her, I've got to go
off on a secret mission.
Speaker 2 (33:37):
I'll call you when I come back, and he never
came back.
Speaker 1 (33:40):
Christine never knew why Richard disappeared. Abby had the other
half of the story, and.
Speaker 2 (33:46):
The secret mission was Operation Abby.
Speaker 1 (33:49):
But Richard's romantic con took an even darker turn. The
last woman he'd been seeing was named Gail. Richard had
been her college boyfriend. When Gail was diagnosed with breast
cancer in her sixties, he reappeared she was getting divorced.
He had reached out to her, and.
Speaker 6 (34:10):
You know, and I never stopped loving you after thirty years,
blah blah blah, all this stuff.
Speaker 1 (34:15):
He swept Gail off her feet. He even claimed he
could help her beat cancer. After all, he was a doctor.
Speaker 2 (34:22):
He was helping manage her cancer, but she was one
of the names he was using to get narcotics as well.
Speaker 1 (34:31):
Gail was the last woman Richard kahnned before he got caught.
Speaker 2 (34:35):
And then I called up Gail, who was basically was
dying at the time. She had cancer. She had breast cancer.
Speaker 1 (34:42):
When NCIS informed Gail about the fraudulent prescriptions in her name,
she was so angry she flipped on Richard immediately.
Speaker 5 (34:52):
She wore a wire and he admitted that he had
been forging signatures and everything he admitted to her, and
she got them in trouble.
Speaker 1 (35:00):
Gail passed away shortly after that. Her story is the
one Abby still thinks about. If there is a hero here,
she says, it's Gail. Richard ultimately pled guilty to two
felony charges of prescription fraud. In his sentencing hearing, he
(35:20):
told a judge that he'd become addicted while he struggled
to cope with his girlfriend's terminal cancer diagnosis. Between that
and his history of military service, the judge went easy
on him.
Speaker 2 (35:33):
He was sentenced to I think two years in one day.
Speaker 1 (35:38):
After Abby found out about Richard's crimes, she began parsing
out every lie he ever told her. Ben Lawden, Richard
never treated him at Guantanamo. The Secret Service wasn't following
him or his kids. He had never been a Navy
seal because Abby found a Navy seal impersonation expert military
(36:00):
records and confirmed it and those screaming nightmares Richard had,
while the seal expert said fake nightmares are a common
feature of con artists like Richard.
Speaker 2 (36:11):
Abby had been duped.
Speaker 3 (36:13):
After this happened, I was like, now I got a book,
thank you.
Speaker 2 (36:17):
She titled her book Duped.
Speaker 1 (36:19):
Once she got started on it, she realized it was
about much more than just her own experience. It was
about the experience of being lied to.
Speaker 2 (36:29):
It's not a straight out memoir, It is really an investigation.
We decided to focus on the victims. What is it
like to be deceived? What is it like to be duped?
What is it like to not have all the facts
and that the life you've been living is not the
life you thought you were living. So that was my book.
Speaker 1 (36:50):
Abby never blamed herself for believing Richard's lies.
Speaker 2 (36:54):
You know what's the worst thing you did.
Speaker 3 (36:58):
The worst thing is you trust somebody, and we.
Speaker 2 (37:01):
Have to trust. Society works on trust.
Speaker 3 (37:04):
You have to stop at the red light, you have
to stop at the stop light. You have to trust
that the pilot knows how to fly the plane.
Speaker 2 (37:09):
You have to trust that that cop is really a cop.
Speaker 3 (37:12):
You have to and if you don't, society will fall apart.
Speaker 1 (37:17):
Working on her book, she researched experts on deception like
doctor Jennifer Fried who coined the term betrayal blindness.
Speaker 2 (37:25):
And it was just about you know how when children
are being abused by their caretakers. They don't see it
because they need that caretaker. They can't believe that that
person was working against them. And it's the same thing
in any relationship, whether it's somebody you're a business colleague
or your romantic partner. You don't want to believe that
(37:46):
someone's going to do this to you. You can't believe it,
and it's to your benefit not to see it because
of your life that you built up.
Speaker 1 (37:53):
And she even explored this stigma around being deceived, that
feeling of self blame and stupidity when we've been lied to.
Speaker 2 (38:01):
So then I found this study that said, actually, smarter
people are more susceptible to being duped because they don't
think it would happen to them.
Speaker 3 (38:07):
So actually people who've been duped are smarter.
Speaker 2 (38:13):
They tend to be smarter, specifically because of fatal overconfidence.
It would never happen to me.
Speaker 1 (38:19):
Abby turned Richard's betrayal into a story, a story for
herself and for the world.
Speaker 2 (38:26):
I never felt ashamed, I never felt embarrassed.
Speaker 3 (38:29):
To me, it was a story and it was a
great story.
Speaker 1 (38:32):
Instead of covering international relations today she mostly reports on fraud.
Speaker 6 (38:39):
I think it's fair to say that it changed the
trajectory of my career.
Speaker 2 (38:44):
That began reporting on different things. I became somewhat of
an expert on fraud. I guess read a book about
white color fraud, and I did a podcast which led
into a documentary that I did with The New York
Times called to Live in Die, Alabama. So it did
change my.
Speaker 1 (38:59):
Life, and thanks to her experience with Richard, she's learned
a few things about herself.
Speaker 2 (39:05):
I always knew I was resilient. I always knew I
was strong, but I don't know that I realized just
how capable I was. That's nice to know.
Speaker 1 (39:17):
We end all of our episodes with the same question,
why are you sharing your story?
Speaker 2 (39:23):
I think it's very important for people to know that
they're not alone and that this happens to other people.
It's very easy for it to happen now with technology.
You're not a terrible person, You're not a stupid person.
Lots of people are in this situation and don't feel
like an idiot, because, again.
Speaker 3 (39:41):
What's the worst thing you did? You trusted, that's okay.
Speaker 1 (39:51):
On the next episode of Betrayal, I said, well, I'm
not a suspicious person, and he said, maybe you should
be more suspicious, you should ask me questions.
Speaker 7 (40:06):
At this point, my heart dropped and I feel like
I'm going to vomit. The betrayal felt so intentional and
possibly like it was a long time coming.
Speaker 1 (40:23):
If you would like to reach out to the Betrayal team,
email us at Betrayalpod at gmail dot com. That's Betrayal
Pod at gmail dot com, and be sure to follow
us on Instagram at Betrayal Pod. We're grateful for your support.
One way to show support is by subscribing to our
show on Apple Podcasts, and don't forget to rate and
(40:44):
review Betrayal. Five star reviews go a long way. A
big thank you to all of our listeners. Betrayal is
a production of Glass Podcasts, a division of Glass Entertainment
Group and partnership with iHeart Podcasts. The show is executive
produced by Nancy Glass and Jennifer Fason, hosted and produced
by me Andrea Gunning, written and produced by Monique Leboard,
(41:05):
also produced by Ben Fetterman. Associate producers are Kristin Mercury
and Caitlin Golden. Our iHeart team is Ali Perry and
Jessica Kriintech audio editing and mixing by Matt del Vecchio,
additional editing support from Tanner Robbins. Betrayal's theme composed by
Oliver Bains. Music library provided by mybe Music and For
(41:27):
more podcasts from iHeart, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts,
or wherever you get your podcasts
Host
Andrea Gunning
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