00:02:50.960Oh, it absolutely was. I mean, I think one of the biggest surprises I had researching this book was that every crime that was eventually convicted of had some echo in the past. And that includes like violence against women or overtures of violence against women. That includes insurance fraud.
00:03:08.860Like by the side of the road, there was an act of insurance fraud that started the family dynasty, stealing from clients, drug trafficking.
00:03:17.180There were echoes in the past for every single crime we're talking about, even a boat wreck that caused really a traumatic injury.
00:03:33.380I mean, it really does show you, you know, if you have a family, a father, a grandfather who are committing crimes and teaching you either explicitly or implicitly that that's OK, your odds of becoming a criminal are obviously much higher.
00:03:48.580But hello, women of the world, pay attention, pay attention to your your spouse, the guys you're dating.
00:03:54.160It can work the other way around, too. And what they come from, who they come from.
00:03:58.620So his great-grandfather, Randolph Murdoch Sr., basically committed suicide and insurance fraud at the same time?
00:07:40.680Old Buster, Ellick's grandfather, was charged with leading this entire ring in Colleton County.
00:07:46.100And he was accused of taking a cash bribe in the hallway of the Colleton County Courthouse, which is the hallway that we went in and out every day of Ellick's Murdoch trial.
00:07:57.100He was accused of intimidating witnesses, buying off witnesses, and eventually of tampering with
00:08:05.380the jury by buying off the foreman. And he was one of the only people in that entire weeks-long
00:08:10.680federal trial that was acquitted. So there's a history of, you know, Alec Murdoch was convicted
00:08:19.080of drug trafficking. His grandfather was credibly accused and narrowly escaped being convicted of
00:08:25.640bootlegging. So again, there's echoes in the past. Tell us about the mistress who got on the wrong
00:08:30.280side of Alec Murdoch's grandfather. So there was testimony in Alec's trial, as you remember,
00:08:38.180there was testimony that Alec was somewhat of a philanderer. And that certainly is a history in
00:08:43.660the family going back generations. His grandfather, Old Buster, had a mistress, several, but one in
00:08:51.940particular, who he was in touch with for many, many years. And her name was Ruth Fox. And Ruth
00:08:57.620Fox was married to a local, like a Northern baron who came down and bought a plantation. And she was
00:09:05.120from one of the nation's first families, a really impressive woman in her own right. And she had
00:09:11.120been in the Navy during World War II, like training pilots, which is kind of wild to think
00:09:17.600about what kind of woman was doing that in the 40s. And she met Buster and asked for his help
00:09:22.100in getting out of her obligations. He's like, I know everybody. I'll know all U.S. senators. I'll
00:09:26.180help you get out of this out of this bind. They got to know each other. And what you know, a year
00:09:31.440later, she is pregnant with his child. She goes to it's just such an incredible story. She goes to
00:09:37.320the house and we're talking about the same house that Alec went to the night of the homicides at
00:09:42.560He goes, she goes to the house, knocks on the door, speaks to Alex's grandmother and says, you know, you have a son.
00:09:50.160I have a son. These boys should meet. And the grandmother says, you know, don't let my name come out of your mouth ever again.
00:09:56.460Go away. And it was it was a stunning thing because she had survived, essentially, when she had told old Buster that she was pregnant.
00:10:06.900He had tried to have her killed. He had a fixer, the story goes, he had a fixer of one of many
00:10:12.960who laid in wait underneath her porch one night and got a little bit too drunk and fell asleep
00:10:19.000and didn't kill her. So there was just like this incredible, incredible echoes throughout this
00:10:23.200story. Isn't it amazing? Yes, it is amazing. I mean, I cannot, you must've been just slack-jawed
00:10:29.200when you read up about the direct line from which he came and it makes sense of everything.
00:10:35.600So it didn't stop there. It didn't even skip a generation.
00:10:39.480Alec's father also had a history of paying people off to cover up a boat accident, which, of course, would set off Alec's own story with a different boat accident as well.
00:10:52.080Well, there was certainly a terrible boat accident in 1998 from the same island, like Murdoch Island, where you'll remember the tragic boat wreck that killed Mallory Beach in 2019.
00:11:05.900They took the Murdoch family boat from the family compound, which is called Murdoch Island.
00:11:10.860Back in 1998, Alec's younger brother was having a party on Murdoch Island.
00:11:17.220There was a boat there, and it's incredible.
00:11:19.300I couldn't believe it when I saw the documents.
00:11:20.940It had been seized in a drug raid by the solicitor's office, so by Old Buster, and he liked the boat.
00:11:27.540So he kept it for his own use at the island, and everyone, the family used it.
00:11:53.860They hit a shoal and stopped and then immediately started back up and didn't realize that one of the guests had fallen overboard and it got run over by the motor and sustained a traumatic brain injury.
00:12:05.820And, you know, I've got hundreds of pages of documents from the state that show that the Murdochs were involved in trying to make that wreck go away.
00:12:16.380even some of the same DNR, the natural resources officers, even some of the same officers who were
00:12:22.800involved in the Mallory Beach Rec were, and they were working that night as well. So the echoes in
00:12:28.580the past are just, sometimes I couldn't believe it. I really was gobsmacked many times in a row.
00:12:33.300Yes, same. I'm having the same reaction just sitting here. So then of course we get to Alec
00:12:39.500and this whole thing that we watched, this double murder trial in which he was found guilty,
00:14:37.900spits in her face, goes back to the wheel of the boat and floors it, the equivalent of 28 miles
00:14:44.840an hour. And they're going through a very narrow, very shallow path and hit a bridge that fast. And
00:14:50.160Mallory is thrown overboard and never resurfaces. And what all the evidence, I've got thousands of
00:14:56.140pages of documents, some of them public, many of them not, not many of them that had not been
00:15:03.100reviewed before that just showed that there was when elec got to the hospital that night where
00:15:08.900these young people had been on the boat was he went room to room to room trying to get everyone
00:15:13.220on the same page he had his his his grandfather old buster's badge outside of his pocket pretending
00:15:20.280to be a law enforcement officer and i have his cell phone records and have tracked his path that
00:15:24.840night do you remember when he testified that he put blue lights blue lights and siren on the
00:15:28.980suburban that he was driving. It was almost physically impossible for him to get from
00:15:34.960Moselle, where he and Maggie were living at the time, to the hospital unless he was going
00:15:41.100fabulously fast, 80 or 90 miles an hour. And I think it stands to reason, and I argue this in
00:15:46.400the book, that he almost certainly used lights to get to the hospital before the other families and
00:15:52.060get everyone on the same page. But it really was his undoing. The reason that he said he wanted
00:15:57.200to live in old Buster's time is that, you know, there was so much evidence in the video cameras
00:16:02.160in the hospital that night, so many statements, there was so much, everything is recorded, right?
00:16:07.060You know, and he could not outrun modernity. And in the end, that night and his actions,
00:16:13.620the night of the boat wreck really was the beginning of the end of the family.
00:16:17.480For among other reasons, he was then sued by the Beach family. And that in the course of
00:16:23.660that lawsuit, he would have to produce discovery, speaking to his economic status, his financial
00:16:30.040data, and so on. And he was, we know, separately now, running a massive fraud, stealing from his
00:16:35.980law firm, had a massive drug problem, or so he testified, and was very worried this was all
00:16:42.140going to come out. He would be exposed. And at the same time, his law firm, was this coincidental?
00:16:48.500Was this coincidental, Valerie, that the law firm started an investigation of Alec at the same time
00:16:53.360for possible ethical breaches, or were those two things related, the lawsuit and the law firm
00:16:58.840getting interested in him? Well, it's all kind of woven together. And what happened in the
00:17:03.480immediate aftermath of the boat wreck is that Mallory's family was having a tough time finding
00:17:08.760a lawyer to represent their interest. And Renee Beach, Mallory's mom, tells the story of being down
00:17:14.860at the landing where the boat had come to rest and wanting to go down there and see
00:17:21.280where her daughter was, where she was the last time she was spotted. And the police were very,
00:17:27.840very kind, but said, I'm sorry, you can't go down there. Here's a case of water for you and your
00:17:31.880family while you wait. And there was a moment where Randolph Murdoch III, Alec's dad, and Maggie,
00:17:38.540his wife, came down in their pickup truck. And he waves at the officer and waves him through.
00:17:45.520And Renee Beach realized then, oh my gosh, this is not a vigil. I thought I was at a vigil
00:17:50.540mourning my daughter. This is a crime scene. And the family that's been the law in this area for
00:17:57.440100 years is in charge of it. I need a lawyer. And she made a critical decision, which is to
00:18:03.020hire a lawyer to represent the family's interest. And that lawyer was a key player and a big
00:18:08.340character in this book. And his name is Mark Tinsley. And there's no enemy like your former
00:18:13.860friend. He was very close to Ellick. He knew the playbook. He had a card key to get in and out of
00:18:20.100Murdoch Law Firm at will. And he recognized those relationships. He's like, oh, I know he knows
00:18:25.540these particular officers because of my own personal information. And once he decided to
00:18:30.480take the case, take the Beaches case, he was relentless in showing that Alec and potentially
00:18:38.720the officers who were involved in protecting the scene were really, really protecting Paul
00:18:45.740from charges. And so he filed a lawsuit in very short order. And that lawsuit sought, like you
00:18:51.320said, all of Ellick's financial records. It's just a standard part of a civil lawsuit to say,
00:18:55.320how much insurance do you have? What resources could you potentially pay if there was a judgment?
00:19:00.240And Ellick knew more than anyone else that he had been robbing his personal injury clients,
00:19:06.460the poorest of the poor, for more than a decade. And he knew what any serious inquiry would do.
00:19:11.820And so he had to stave that off. And in the end, it was his undoing.
00:19:17.640So he killed his own wife and his son, Paul, who had been at the helm for that boating accident.
00:19:25.520And it was an attempt to garner sympathy, like to make him a sympathetic character so that his law firm would move away, would stop investigating him.
00:19:39.280so that the lawsuit involving Paul would be less strong
00:19:44.580because, you know, the main culprit would be gone
00:19:48.120and who would put this poor man now through the torture
00:19:59.440No, I think the prosecution argued that very effectively.
00:20:04.080And one of the things that I think that Mark Tinsley said
00:20:07.280on the stand is, you know, personal injury lawyers don't think like other people. Their gift,
00:20:14.640their understanding of a successful one is understanding emotion, like what might motivate
00:20:20.220a jury to pay blood money and a lot of it in a case. They understand what makes people tick.
00:20:28.360And he knew that, you know, the day of the homicides, June 7th of 2021, and I'm sure we'll
00:20:34.780talk about this, he had been confronted over some of that missing money that he had been stealing,
00:20:38.920$792,000, not a small amount. He knew that the law firm was on to him. And he knew also that his
00:20:47.340father was dying, the patriarch of this family who had also loaned him a million dollars over time,
00:20:53.420and who he had just been texting with his buddy at the bank, oh, I'm going to get another loan
00:20:57.580from my dad for some money he was short. And his dad was dying. He knew this lawsuit was pending
00:21:04.100about his financials. He had been confronted over the missing money. And he also knew that Paul was
00:21:08.880a mess. I mean, sadly, and may he rest in peace, Paul's actions, drunken actions, did not cease
00:21:17.240with the boat wreck. There's testimony that even just 10 days before he was killed, he was on a
00:21:23.840boat drinking, taking some people out, and he had to call his father to get out of it. So Paul's
00:21:29.580behavior was not de-escalating. If anything, his behavior is getting worse. So yes, I think that
00:21:36.020the state made a really effective argument that he needed to do something to become, instead of the
00:21:41.140object of suspicion, an object of sympathy. And what more would do that except becoming, instead
00:21:47.300of somebody, a potential thief, a grieving father, a grieving husband, someone who was the victim of
00:21:55.320horrible crime. And for months, he was right. It completely changed the subject.
00:22:01.020And he had, prior to getting arrested, done what I guess it was his great-grandfather did,
00:22:09.360which was attempt to create a suicide situation that would lead to an insurance payout. I mean,
00:22:15.360now it's like kind of all connecting. It's all connecting. And it really is extraordinary. So
00:22:21.020over the course of the summer of 2021, he did almost get away with the murder of Maggie and
00:22:26.020Paul. He really did. And he almost got away with the thefts that he's now admitted to
00:22:30.540dozens and dozens of people, millions and millions of dollars by borrowing more money,
00:22:36.840borrowing money from his best friend, Chris Wilson, borrowing money from getting fronted
00:22:42.040money and trying to repay the $792,000 back to the law firm, which he did. And they stopped,
00:22:48.400They kind of let it go until, and that goes in July and in August, until the Thursday before Labor Day weekend, his paralegal is in his office looking for some paperwork, which she knows he doesn't like, but she really needed it.
00:23:02.760She lifts up this folder, finds the check that was missing that proved that he had been stealing.
00:23:08.900So what happens then is the gig is up.
00:23:11.040Alex confronted by his brother, his law partner, and many other law partners. And they say,
00:23:16.560you've been stealing, we've got evidence you've been stealing from the firm, you have to go.
00:23:20.080So he gets fired that Friday of Labor Day weekend. And what happens the next morning?
00:23:24.520Saturday morning, he tries to fake his own death on the side of the road. And what he said was an
00:23:29.720insurance fraud attempt to get money for his surviving son, Buster. But what really looks
00:23:35.740like another way to change the subject just like he had done back June 7th with the homicides of
00:23:41.140his wife and son. It really is stranger than stranger than fiction.
00:23:53.100Getting ready for a game means being ready for anything like packing a spare stick. I like to
00:23:58.500be prepared. That's why I remember 988 Canada's suicide crisis helpline. It's good to know just
00:24:04.680in case anyone can call or text for free confidential support from a trained responder
00:24:09.460anytime 988 suicide crisis helpline is funded by the government in canada
00:24:14.440do we think he did not intend to die then when that that guy who was next to homeless i mean
00:24:23.980that guy seemed you know not like a sophisticated character when he got him to quote shoot him but
00:24:30.000just grazed his head. That was always so confusing to me. And I'm like, was this some sort of a
00:24:35.000sharpshooter? How did the guy manage to actually barely connect with him to the point where it
00:24:40.520looked like he actually had been shot at, but not so much that he actually killed him?
00:24:46.560Yeah. No, there are many theories about what happened actually at the side of the road,
00:24:51.720but the man you're talking about, Curtis Eddie Smith, will tell you, and he said it. He's like,
00:24:57.120if I'd shot him, he'd have been dead. So that what he believes happened is there was a struggle,
00:25:02.780there was a struggle over the gun. And he has said, he thinks that Ellick was trying to frame
00:25:08.240him, that they were, they were struggling over the gun and maybe Ellick was going to,
00:25:12.480Ellick was bigger, like 6'4", 200 pounds. I mean, can he overpower this? And Curtis Eddie Smith,
00:25:19.960his cousin Eddie is a smaller guy. He's been out on disability for a number of years. Ellick was
00:25:24.840a disability lawyer, and then frame him. And you remember when Dick Harpoulian and Jim Griffin,
00:25:31.220Ellick's lawyers, they said in court filings, they're like, you know, the real killer is Eddie
00:25:36.160Smith. He was the one who killed Maggie and Paul. And so one of the theories is that Ellick may have
00:25:43.260been trying to kill Eddie and then say, see, he was coming after me to kill me the same way that
00:25:47.760he killed my wife and son. And it's strange. I don't know if you remember, but he was paying,
00:25:52.660Eddie was cashing a lot of checks for ELEC over a number of years, and the checks accelerated that summer, the hundreds of thousands of dollars that ELEC was effectively paying Eddie in a way.
00:26:05.640So was he going to say, he was blackmailing me, look at these payments?
00:26:08.920There are multiple ways to look at what actually happened there.
00:26:12.420But one of them is that if you look at the photos, and the defense released the photos, they signed a HIPAA release and released all the photos.
00:26:21.480there are people locally that say, that's not a cut in his head. He fell, and that's the gravel
00:26:28.560on the side of the road that caused him to be cut. But one thing I should add about Cousin Eddie
00:26:34.580is that he's actually a cousin. I could not believe it, but if you go back more than 100
00:26:41.480years to the Civil War, Ellick's great-great-grandfather, so Randolph Sr.'s father,
00:27:45.980Like, it seemed like he claimed he just spent it on drugs.
00:27:49.300But the conclusion by many was always how many drugs could that could he possibly have taken?
00:27:56.340He took in more than he could ever have spent was the layperson conclusion on the on the funding.
00:28:03.440No, and I think I think, you know, one of the key voices in the book is Blanca Simpson, who was the house, the housekeeper at Moselle for many years.
00:28:11.300And I think the evidence establishes that Alec was using drugs.
00:28:14.740But I think there's no evidence that he was using the amount of drugs and opioids in particular that he says he was.
00:28:21.460And I had the benefit of 10 years of spending.
00:28:25.060I could see his through some federal exhibits.
00:28:27.440I could see what he and Maggie spent over the course of 10 years down to like when they when they would go to the Honey Baking Ham store at Thanksgiving.
00:28:34.620You could see what that expenditure was and what was so shocking about it.
00:28:39.340And I think we probably know people like this in our own lives is as soon as money came in the door, it went out.
00:28:45.640He was he was overdrawn tens of thousands of dollars multiple times in a year.
00:28:51.240Maggie would have to call him and say, can you call the bank?
00:28:54.580I need to be able to I'm at the grocery store.
00:28:56.160I need to be able to cash this chain to be able to pay for my groceries.
00:29:03.800It was, you know, they would take a private plane to a USC bowl game instead of flying first class.
00:29:11.520Or, you know, Blanca told me, and there's farm equipment out on Moselle, which is 1,700 acres, a huge, huge property, twice the size of Central Park.
00:29:22.320And rather than fix, you know, a big piece of heavy equipment, they would just put gallons of oil in it every day.
00:29:27.920So he was spending hundreds of dollars on oil.
00:29:29.860It was just, it's hard to even understand where the money was going.
00:29:35.760But there is missing money, you know, millions of dollars, the feds say that's still missing.
00:30:25.500This all comes out. There is the moment he is found guilty. Actually, we have that. Let's just watch that.
00:30:34.980The state of South Carolina, County of Colleton, in the Court of General Sessions, the July term of 2022, the state versus Richard Alexander Murdoch, defendant, indictment for murder, SC code 16-3-0010, CDR code 0116, verdict guilty, signed by the four lady.
00:31:00.880okay and that's interesting for a few reasons one he was found guilty two old becky hill
00:31:08.620reading the verdict would come to play a major role in this story which no one knew at the time
00:31:15.100but becky almost got this verdict thrown out because of her behavior behind the scenes with
00:31:22.540the jurors and could it still her behavior get this verdict thrown out is that totally settled
00:31:29.920I know that we had a hearing in which a different judge said, no, I'm not throwing out the verdict.
00:32:50.400So it's surreal for Becky to be the center of so much scrutiny.
00:32:55.340But what that scrutiny is about is her relationships and potential talking out of school with members of the jury, many of whom she knew beforehand.
00:33:04.660And many of the jurors knew each other.
00:33:50.300But Becky's grandmother and grandfather and her uncle, who was a teenager, were charged, federally charged with felony with felonies in that bootlegging ring.
00:33:58.540They were on Buster's payroll. And everything is connected.
00:34:02.280Everything's connected there. But to your question, Megan, I think that we did have a first answer.
00:34:07.600There was a hearing back in January where the former chief justice of the Supreme Court, Jean Toll, was asked by her former colleagues on the Supreme Court to take a listen to this request for a new trial.
00:34:19.020She denied it, but the defense is appealing it back to the Supreme Court.
00:34:24.680They've agreed to hear it, even though it seems unlikely they will overturn their own special, the person that they trusted with this decision.
00:34:33.320And then also they're very close allies with Judge Newman, who presided over the initial proceeding.
00:34:39.440He's very tight with the Chief Justice, Don Beatty.
00:34:45.380I saw him recently in Columbia, Dick Harpootlian, and they see their best chance at a new trial at the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals in Richmond, just a little bit further removed from South Carolina, which is such a small state.
00:34:57.040And getting fresh ears at this idea of not just did Becky Hill say things to the jurors that were prejudicial, but also did the state apply the wrong standard?
00:35:07.740And it was a degree that was it's a measure of degrees.
00:35:11.320Like, yes, we acknowledge that she talked with a jury, but did it did it move the needle?
00:35:15.660And so what they hope is that the federal court will apply a different standard.
00:35:20.580Yeah, that they they're going to argue they were held to to too high a burden of proof to prove jury tampering and that a lower standard should have been applied, which would have allowed them to prove jury tampering, which would allow him to get a new trial.
00:35:33.800The Justice Toll was great when she came in and held that hearing over Becky Hill.
00:35:38.300The allegations against Becky Hill just got weirder.
00:35:40.700And Justice Toll, I will say, was, I'm sorry, she's just such an extraordinary figure in
00:40:10.160And not this past summer, but summer of 22, they, I'm sorry, summer of 23, they received a payment largely from Parker's convenience store, this convenience store where Paul bought beer, on the order of $14 million.
00:40:24.260So it was a significant civil judgment that, and I learned a lot about personal injury law in the course of this, of reporting this book.
00:40:35.040But, you know, this was considered, you know, what was Mallory's life worth?
00:40:43.720And so it's a difficult fact of personal injury law that the more money that you get paid is a reflection of what, you know, a jury might think your loved one's life is worth.
00:40:55.820I'm sure it's a special form of sentencing for you because every time you get into the car that money bought or the bed that money paid for, it's got to make you feel awful.
00:41:10.220And they will tell you, and they will tell you, Mrs. Pamela Pinckney, Hakeem Pinckney's mother, Hakeem was the paraplegic teenager who died in a nursing home and was robbed by Alec Murdoch twice.
00:41:23.820She would tell you, she would give back all of it for time with her son.
00:41:29.580It's just, it's the proxy we have in our judicial system to make a family as whole as possible, knowing that nothing really ever will.
00:41:38.420So what, if anything, is happening with the other piece of this story, which is the possible murder by Buster, Paul's older brother of a young gay classmate who was killed on the road.
00:42:00.380But there's just only speculation that it was Buster Murdoch, not actual proof.
00:42:05.080And they were going to reopen that investigation in the wake of all of this.
00:42:51.080And he's even sued some of the documentary filmmakers who he alleges have said that he had a role in some way, shape, or form.
00:42:59.740They certainly have laid those breadcrumbs.
00:43:02.720But it is, you know, you can go through, you know, it's 90-some pages of a police report where the name comes up over and over again in very strange ways.
00:43:12.960So there's always been a rumor that the Murdochs were involved somehow in his death or in making it impossible to find out who killed him.
00:43:23.080But I can tell you that the state grand jury has still been meeting over this case and is eager to figure it out.
00:43:30.040It is one that still haunts Hampton County.
00:43:33.100So we may never know, but it won't be for lack of interviews and lack of trying because they're actively working the case from what I understand.
00:43:40.880so in the time we have left what's what life like right now for buster murdoch the one who
00:43:48.920the son whose entire family is has been killed or is now in jail and for alec murdoch who is living
00:43:55.760this life of excess and now is convicted of double homicide not to mention all the fraud
00:44:00.420charges that were brought against him separately which he was also found guilty on
00:44:04.080no it's very poignant i was i've mentioned i was in hampton last week and went by the cemetery
00:44:10.740And I saw, it took a while, but Maggie and Paul's gravestones have been put up, and people will leave flowers there.
00:44:18.660There's a ceramic dog that looks like Bubba, the yellow lab that belonged to the family that's there.
00:44:25.060And most pointed of all, it's, you know, on Maggie's headstone, it says, you know, Margaret Branstetter, Murdoch, mother.
00:44:33.500And on Paul's, it says, Paul, Terry Murdoch, son.
00:44:36.280And it's incredible that that is how you'd be defined.
00:44:41.400But the person I was with said, what happens to Alec?
00:44:44.740You know, where is he in this picture?
00:44:55.260He has acclimated to prison life well, according to what I'm told.
00:45:02.920And by that, I mean, he has, Alec Murdoch is the type of a person who works the system and he has, he has relationships. He does, he's, he's a disbarred lawyer, but he's a law, he knows the law and he helps other inmates with their questions.
00:45:18.240He's he's using his notoriety to. To to to his benefit, he he was, you know, accused by or, you know, the prisons system of prisons found that he had been, you know, essentially bribing other inmates to let him use their pin number to make phone calls.
00:45:39.220He's figuring things out on the inside, but he will never, ever see the light of day, even if there's another trial in the homicide case.
00:45:48.600The state effectively got an insurance policy.
00:45:51.280You remember back in November when he pled guilty to those dozens of financial crimes and they got a sentence that will take him, keep him in prison until he's roughly 80 years old.
00:46:01.280So regardless of whether the homicide is ever turned.
00:46:04.480As for Buster, my understanding is, you know, he's living in Bluffton, a community just adjacent to Beaufort with his fiancée is a woman who was in court with him every day, his girlfriend from law school, who is a lawyer.
00:46:20.740He got a substantial settlement from his mother's estate, roughly $500,000.
00:46:26.620There's a payment, I document in the book, where he participated in a documentary and got several hundred thousand dollars from that.
00:46:34.480So he has a small amount, not a, sorry, not a small, but, you know, a significant amount of money to, you know, start a life.
00:46:43.960Although it is difficult to see how he does so separate from his family because his last name is Murdoch and he's got that red hair.
00:46:52.860He's so just, he, he, it would be hard with that, that name and that hair to make an, make a new life.
00:51:14.340a very pregnant Megyn Kelly in that clip. But that gets to it, right? I mean, the thing,
00:51:22.040because I've been asking myself, Mark, what is it about the Jodi Arias case that kept people so
00:51:27.420riveted? And in part, it's this mousy little woman who committed one of the most heinous
00:51:35.660murders that ever came before the national eye. You left out one thing, which is obvious,
00:51:41.600and maybe you intentionally did it, but Americans like pretty packages. Okay. If she wasn't pretty
00:51:49.020and I put that in quotations, I mean, it's not how I feel, but there is some type of objective,
00:51:54.320you know, in Hollywood, what people look for, people found that she was attractive. And if she
00:51:59.920wasn't, and she looked differently, I don't know if people would have been as interested. So let's,
00:52:05.020let's bring that out. That's, that's gotta be something that you concede, right?
00:52:08.180and the sex i mean it was like an r-rated trial it was like cinemax back in the day
00:52:15.660oh yeah no there was a lot of that yes and and she really threw punches i mean she really you
00:52:24.420know dead man can't tell tales he was dead she was free to say whatever the hell she wanted
00:52:28.600so whether it be you know allegations of him being involved in kitty porn which he can't defend
00:52:35.000or him wanting to do, which really was documented because you heard those horrible audio tapes of
00:52:42.880him, some of the things he would do to her, which weren't meant for public viewing. It was just
00:52:47.180horrible. All right. So let's start at the beginning. These two meet in 2008, I think it
00:52:55.420was, 2008 at a business convention. And 2006, sorry, these two meet in September 2006 at a
00:53:03.640work conference in Las Vegas, Nevada, Jodi Arias and Travis Alexander. And then they start dating
00:53:12.140out a few months after that. As far as I can tell, Mark, they were only dating for like four months,
00:53:18.700but they continue to sleep with each other. Yeah. It sounds like it became very physical,
00:53:26.160very quickly. And, you know, she's the manipulative type, right? So I can't imagine
00:53:31.720this was pure love. I think this was lust. I think this was her, you know, playing the angles,
00:53:37.160looking to manipulate him. And she jumped all in real quick.
00:53:41.580Did we have any evidence that prior to that relationship, because I think she was like
00:53:45.36028, he was a couple years older than that, that she was some sort of a psycho, that she had,
00:53:51.380you know, problems with other partners in turning into a stalker or any other criminal history?
00:53:58.560I don't remember hearing anything like that. I heard little stories, but, you know, everybody comes out of the woodwork on high profile cases. Nothing that I attributed as credible and believable.
00:54:11.180So he was a Mormon and she wasn't until after she met him. Right. Right. Right. She became a drive through Mormon. You know, all of a sudden I'll convert. I'm sure that was, you know, again, to somehow take one step further into his good graces.
00:54:28.560So they meet. Yeah, here she is getting her, you know, I don't know. Is it a baptism into the
00:54:35.700Mormon faith? I'm not exactly sure how we would refer to this, but they date from February of
00:54:40.2802007 to June 2007. And then they break up and maintain a physical relationship. One year later,
00:54:47.320one year later, she appears to stage a burglary at her grandparents' house. This would become
00:54:54.800important because it was one week before the murder. And what happened in that burglary?
00:55:01.100Yeah, next level stuff. She's thinking, okay, they stole a gun from my grandparents. So that
00:55:08.620gun's out there in the criminal world. So that's the gun, however, she'd like to use to potentially
00:55:14.780execute her boy. This is relevant because she would later claim when she was on trial,
00:55:21.320a bunch of different things, intruders, accident, self-defense. And if she intentionally staged a
00:55:28.940burglary at her parent, her grandparents' house a week before the murder, then it's very clearly
00:55:33.980a premeditated act. Absolutely. The best she's got is, well, I brought it with me for protection.
00:55:39.880I was going on the road, whatever. I didn't mean to kill him. I had it with me. Doesn't necessarily
00:55:43.980mean she wanted to kill him, but it's strong evidence of it. But I got to go back. There's
00:55:48.280something that's bothering me and it'll bother me tonight, Megan. I had brought out that she has a
00:55:54.280pretty shell to many people. Did you concede that? Is she what you would call attractive?
00:56:01.240And I'm not talking about her soul. I'm not talking about, I'm just saying, don't you think
00:56:04.960that that played a role in why people cared so much? Why the media? Yeah. Oh, sure. Yeah. If
00:56:11.460you have an attractive defendant or victim, I mean, I think she was prettier when things started.
00:56:17.020And then when she took the stand, when she was at trial, she tried to make herself look
00:56:19.960very plain Janey, mousy, you know, but like the blonde and, you know, the naked pictures,
01:06:43.280What do we glean from the level of violence?
01:06:46.300It goes back to what I keep trying to do in my head, maybe as a defense lawyer, as a compassionate soul, to believe that something went down before that happened, that he said something that set her off.
01:06:59.460I find it hard to believe, although I'm not relating to this type of person, that she, and this is probably what she did, that she had the whole plan.
01:07:07.120And this was, as you say, her goodbye love session.
01:07:10.200And then I'm going to get him in the shower.
01:20:10.060So once she takes the stand, and was it a surprise? Do you remember? Because the prosecution went on for two weeks before the defense had to offer its side. Was it a shock when she took the stand?
01:20:22.080I don't think I was shocked. No. In fact, the type of person that she was, very outspoken, very passionate. I think she needed to. I think that she, I think it was expected. I don't think I was shocked.
01:20:34.240okay because somebody's going to have to say what happened inside of that room and she's going to
01:20:40.180have to admit she was there now thanks to the photographic evidence yeah and also anytime
01:20:46.080there's any element of self-defense which is pretty much what she was saying that she was
01:20:49.640attacked and then she you know had to do something that that can't be brought out by a lawyer you got
01:20:55.040to put them up there okay because because she started with intruders to inside addition uh she
01:21:00.180continued with home invasion uh and you know i was an innocent victim that saw him you know get
01:21:05.700attacked and then she switched she switched to travis attacked me and i killed him in self-defense
01:21:14.860she in august of 2010 she submitted a request to the court to have letters allegedly from travis
01:21:22.320alexander admitted into evidence the letters were meant to help prove her new theory of self-defense
01:21:28.340The prosecution objected, saying the defendant argues that the letters are relevant to her claim of self-defense and that she was a victim of previous sexual and physical abuse by Mr. Alexander.
01:21:37.620But they denied that and they said these letters should not be allowed.
01:21:42.780Her new theory was that Travis Alexander became angry when she dropped his camera and she was forced to kill him in self-defense.
01:21:53.100That was ultimately, Mark, what she did claim in front of the jury, was it not?
01:29:10.020she would have looked just as bad without the opportunity to then explain, humanize,
01:29:17.640go on and on. There's no need for that. There's no reason to take a risk on a single question.
01:29:24.680Good lawyers carefully craft everything. We think about everything we're doing. These guys look
01:29:30.800like they were winging it and they were. That's unacceptable. And you stay in control the whole
01:29:35.540time. You're the one who's speaking. The witness is just there to say yes or no. That's it. You
01:29:39.380You are the one who's telling the jury the story.
01:29:40.980They're really listening to the prosecutor.
01:29:43.240With limited exceptions, when I know no matter what they do or say, they're hanging themselves.
01:29:49.940So every now and then I'll throw that in just to switch it up, because I know there's not a single answer that's going to score points for them.
01:30:00.260Well, here's let's let the audience get a flavor of Juan Martinez.
01:30:04.700is here is uh the prosecutor one trying to have jody demonstrate travis's alleged attack because
01:30:14.540she's claiming i dropped his camera then he came for me he chased me that's why i had to kill him
01:30:20.380here's just a little bit of that exchange and then i'll play the feisty one ma'am if you would
01:30:25.240mind stand up go to the left and show me the posture of uh mr alexander immediately before
01:30:32.920he rushed you according to you um as he was running just show me that's what i'm asking you
01:30:38.900to do not talk show me show me the linebacker pose he got down well show me show me the linebacker
01:30:46.720pose that's what i'm asking for you to do okay he went like that and he turned his head and grabbed
01:30:51.680my waist just like that correct pretty much and he grabbed your waist right i can't say it's just
01:30:56.500like that but that's what i remember just just i want it without talking just show me the pose
01:31:02.260he got down like that like that all right go ahead and have a seat
01:31:07.380he's already annoying megan let me add him okay first of all nobody likes a bully
01:31:16.420and i'm telling you i i've actually doing jury selection excuse jurors one woman i saw when i
01:31:23.760was speaking, because I was like, you know, I turned to this woman, I said, you know, you said
01:31:27.200you could be fair to my client. But I'm really wondering, ma'am, I get a sense that and I really
01:31:32.580questioned her very firmly, because I really wanted her out if she wasn't going to be on board
01:31:36.820with the plan of being fair. There was a tear that fell down from her eye. And I realized in that
01:31:43.440moment, I asked her, go, is everything okay? She goes, I don't know, it's just your energy. Like,
01:31:47.940I feel like you're and I realized, oh, my God, I'm too much for people at certain times. Similarly,
01:31:53.760What Juan Martinez is doing is being so overly aggressive unnecessarily that that has to turn
01:32:00.640certain jurors off. There's no reason to be that way in a case like this. That's the first
01:32:05.420criticism. I've got more with what I just saw. Okay, there's more coming. I'll play another
01:32:10.480soundbite and then you can resume. There was this tense moment where she got after him for his
01:32:15.700style. You know, it got to the point where she actually had to call him out. Here's a little
01:32:19.780bit of that on SOT7. What factors influence your having a memory problem? Usually when men like
01:32:28.340you are screaming at me or grilling me or someone like Travis doing the same. So that affects your
01:32:32.860memory problems, right? It does. It makes my brain scramble. So you're saying that it's the cool,
01:32:38.680basically what you're saying is Mr. Martinez's fault that you can't remember things that are
01:32:42.940going on. It's not your fault. I'm not saying that. You're saying that, isn't it? No, I'm not
01:32:47.720saying that is there something about a certain decibel of the voice that creates problems
01:32:52.920decibel tone content sort of a combination of those factors
01:33:00.760go ahead god it's so horrible and the public doesn't understand because
01:33:08.680they don't see great cross-examinations when they're watching these high-profile cases i
01:33:13.640haven't seen it recently there's been some examples there's some exceptions none that
01:33:17.300come to mind right there johnny depp johnny depp's lawyer with uh what's that which one
01:33:23.840johnny depp's lawyer cross-examining amber heard very effective probably i'm trying to remember
01:33:30.940remember i can't remember her name she became a star she's now an nbc contributor but she did it
01:33:35.620exactly the way we're discussing it was textbook mark it was isn't this true isn't that true and
01:33:40.140then you did this and then this isn't that true misheard your honor please direct the witness to
01:33:44.840answer my question and not not to go on like this you know like she controlled the witness
01:33:49.080what's what's her name steve camille vasquez yeah she was good she was solid i agree so two things
01:33:57.340one in the first clip that you played you're asking the defendant now to give her version
01:34:04.660again giving her another opportunity to then display for the jurors why she's not guilty i
01:34:12.900would never do that. I just make fun of it. And the second clip, you look at him, he doesn't have
01:34:18.420those questions prepared. He's just winging it. That's what a rookie lawyer does or someone who
01:34:23.560doesn't do cross-examination. It's not to say there's not room for spontaneity, but I plan
01:34:29.320my spontaneity. I know that sounds like a contradiction, but that's what I do.
01:34:33.980You sound like a great person to hang out with for a wife.
01:38:23.480you're doing this to this individual after you have already shot him right
01:38:29.240what do you make of that credit again megan that was her whole theory she was admitting that she
01:38:43.160did the abhorrent acts for which she's accused if anything he could have artfully said all right
01:38:49.980just so these jurors are crystal clear, the first stab that went into his body, you did that. Not
01:38:55.860two strangers that you initially said, these two intruders, right? Then another jab, and then
01:39:01.740another jab. This one over here by the heart. That was you, not somebody else. And then he could
01:39:06.740have gone on and on and on about every stab that she did. And then to really highlight the brutality,
01:39:13.040especially since he's going for the death penalty after. So you really want to highlight it. The
01:39:18.400best he had was you stabbed him in the torso. Yes, yes. No, 27 times. And then you did this or
01:39:25.540whatever order he wants. That was you're giving him credit. And yeah, OK, he did that. But again,
01:39:32.080it was wasn't the most effective. He lost a huge opportunity. That's a good point. Drive it home.
01:39:37.540And I found the medical examiner's testimony that I was looking for earlier. Kevin Horn
01:39:41.560testified about the stab wounds and said the slash wound to Travis's throat was three to four
01:39:48.180inches deep and went to the spinal cord in the back of the neck had two major vessels that had
01:39:53.880been sliced he would have lost a great deal of blood very quickly and then lost consciousness
01:39:59.460within seconds and died a few minutes later and then of course she shot him as well but he talked
01:40:06.040about the wounds to Travis's hands that must have been before the fatal injury so the guy fought for
01:40:10.640his life. He must've been terrified. This person he trusted who was, you know, he was undressed
01:40:16.900with, had had this interlude with surprises him in this place that's supposed to be, you know,
01:40:22.240inviolate, the shower, my God. So you're right. And his failure to bring home the brutality did
01:40:27.960come back to haunt him at the penalty phase. Yeah. I'm still actually thinking of ways that
01:40:34.240I would have done this differently. I would have said, I'm sorry, Ms. Arias. I see that you're
01:40:37.820crying. Do you need a moment? And by the way, Ms. Arias, were you crying? Stab number seven.
01:40:43.080Were tears running down your eyes then? When you did this, were you crying then? Okay. Do you need
01:40:48.400time? I'll ask the judge if you need a few minutes, but I'm not going to let her hide her face in that
01:40:53.220tissue and put on that act. Ms. Arias, can you look at me? I'm asking you some questions. If you
01:40:57.920need time, I'll give you some time. She's hiding her face. The jurors need to judge her credibility,
01:41:02.660your honor, assuming the judge wouldn't allow me to control her that way. I'd go sidebar and say,
01:41:07.820judge. They're judging. She's hiding her face. I want them to see her face. She needs time.
01:41:12.240I'll give her time, but I'm not going to let her bury her face when I'm asking her to talk about
01:41:17.140the most intimate of brutality that she committed. No way. That's a good point. Does anyone have a
01:41:23.020scrunchie? Who's got a scrunchie? Let's get that hair back. No, you're right. That was clearly a
01:41:30.060tactic. Well, the jury didn't buy it because after she'd been on the stand for, they say,
01:41:36.54018 days, 18 days between direct and cross-examination. Many felt that was a tactic by
01:41:42.140her defense lawyer to create a bond between Jody and the jury to where they could not
01:41:47.060vote for death. Do you agree that was a strategy?
01:41:51.040A hundred percent. And let me just say this. I just finished a federal trial.
01:41:55.600My client wanted to take the witness stand. My direct was extremely long. Number one,
01:42:02.280I'm humanizing my client. Number two, there was a lot to talk about, right? Number three,
01:42:08.640it is difficult when they don't know who your client is. The prosecutors will always call
01:42:13.660him the defendant. I'm here to humanize my client. And yes, in that case, they want to slaughter her.
01:42:19.140They want to kill her, right? The ultimate sanction. So that serves a purpose. Kudos
01:42:24.060for the defense lawyer, not the prosecutor, the defense lawyer. I don't care how long he takes,
01:42:29.500As long as it's productive and it's routine, they've rehearsed it all, it's choreographed, she could look great on direct, long, long, long, long.
01:50:16.360Another reason why I was looking forward to doing this. This really bothers me. So he writes a book, A Tell All, and included in that book are intimate details that she shared with him while he was representing her.
01:50:30.800he then writes this book and you know she's objecting to it naturally and apparently
01:50:37.760they knew about it the bar did and said listen you're either going to for putting this out there
01:50:43.960your idea of two options one will suspend you for four years but you cannot then put this book out
01:50:49.580there or you can lose your law license forever give it up and then you know obviously then you'll
01:50:57.280be free to publish that book. He chose option number two. And I'm not going to out anybody,
01:51:01.780my wife, who said, good for him for putting that out there. Because I'm sure many people feel that
01:51:06.580way. And I was so upset about that. Because yeah, do I care that Jody Arias' thoughts are put out
01:51:14.480there? No, because I don't like Jody Arias. But it's so much bigger than that. He is eroding the
01:51:19.700attorney-client privilege where now either my clients or other future clients feel like, wait,
01:51:25.500is this going to be the lawyer who liked that guy, that Nimrod?
01:51:28.940You're going to put it out there in some book to capitalize?
01:51:31.720And then that doesn't give any confidence when anybody goes to speak to an attorney.
01:51:38.620I mean, it's amazing that two of the main characters in this cast wound up disbarred.
01:51:44.580And the third, the true star, is behind bars for the rest of her life without the possibility of parole.
01:51:49.900There have been some reports that behind bars, she's in a medium security prison.
01:51:55.500She's been making friends and lovers and tattooing her name on her jail cell mates.
01:52:05.960Lifetime is actually just now, 10 years later, coming out with a docudrama about Jodi Arias and the case and gets into some of that, like her life in jail.
01:52:15.200We managed to pull a clip, Mark Iglarch, for the entertainment of the audience.
01:53:23.820social media posts, all sorts of bad stuff. Good casting. I mean, you know, I was like,
01:53:31.000wait, that looks like her. What happens in a medium security prison? How are you able to
01:53:36.120make friends and, you know, tattoo one another and do social media? Yeah, she's probably living
01:53:42.620a pretty damn good life. Number one, medium security. She wasn't high. They brought her
01:53:46.720down to medium. So that's much better for her. Orange is the new black, you know. And then
01:53:51.400secondly, she didn't kill any children. In the pecking order, she killed a man that many think
01:53:58.320might have done something bad to her. At least that was her story. In prison, she's at the top
01:54:04.240of the pecking order. With her manipulation and beauty, she's probably living large. When I say
01:54:10.540beauty, I use that in quotations. I'm talking about objectively to others. I know she's using
01:54:15.680that for her own benefit. Is it possible to have a co-ed prison? Because this is where I get
01:54:22.680confused. They said she met somebody named Donovan Baring while serving time. Donovan was serving
01:54:30.540time for accessory to arson in the Maricopa County Jail, where they were cellmates for six months.
01:54:37.040Oh, they're both girls. Okay. Then this duo became really close and stayed in touch.
01:54:40.640afterward, Donovan, who I guess is a girl, and Jodi. They stayed tight. Then they were at Estrella,
01:54:47.260another prison, where this other gal, Tracy, met Donovan for the first time. They got romantically
01:54:53.020involved. They say by their own admission, Jodi used her good looks and sexuality to get what she
01:54:57.820wanted and inserted herself into their union as well. Although they never engaged in actual sex
01:55:03.420acts together, she once delivered a striptease with Tracy for Donovan and then often refused to
01:55:10.220leave their cell when they wanted alone time together, from getting them to manage her social
01:55:14.920media accounts, again, why does she have them, to ultimately officiating their wedding ceremony,
01:55:20.400she did it all for the couple, quoting from thecinemaholic.com. So all of this is documented,
01:55:28.980I mean, on and on it goes, Mark, once a master manipulator, always a master manipulator.
01:55:34.800She does, and she has nothing but time on her hands, so she's playing all those games,
01:55:39.020And I, too, by the way, found it confusing at first. I'm like, Donovan, she with a dude? How'd that happen? No, Donovan's a female. And then you play it along and you figure out what happened. I think as an aside, I read she's got something going on with a guy on the outside. And that's easy to do because there's nut jobs out there sending letters, wanting to be with her phone privileges. Right. And then eventually she's looking to get married to get the conjugal visits. That's all going to happen.
01:56:05.360And we saw that with Lyle and the other Menendez.
02:02:25.940And what I've learned is that my story was an extreme version of something that happens to people a lot more than people realize.
02:02:34.000And I know this now from all the messages I've gotten in my DMs since the show came out and since it became much more public is that this type of manipulation can happen a lot more than people realize.
02:02:45.280And it also can happen to men and women alike.
02:02:50.420And so part of my telling of the story is to, you know, is to really help educate people how it happened. And that was the most important part that the show on Netflix left out and that the filmmakers left out is any explanation of how this happens, which is what would allow people to help protect themselves.
02:03:09.880And which is so unsatisfying, because what's most interesting about the story to many of us is how someone as sophisticated and well-educated and successful as you would fall for this guy's lies.
02:03:26.020That's what we all want to know, right?
02:03:27.820Because in our heads, we want to say, oh, I would never.
02:03:31.040But I mean, I have covered enough of these stories to know.
02:03:33.340don't ever say that because nine times out of 10, the person being targeted has a bio not unlike
02:03:41.140yours. For some reason, these con men go for the sophisticated smart types. Yeah, absolutely. It's
02:03:48.520similar with cults. They actually need somebody who's got a certain level of intelligence because
02:03:54.840it's almost like you can't train a... You need somebody who's got a certain level of intelligence
02:04:02.060to be able to pull off this long, slow manipulation.
02:04:06.780And I mean, I've spoken to people who have PhDs
02:17:39.160would he be able to just give me that money
02:17:41.980or would that be taxable and how could we do that and um he sort of jokingly but half seriously said
02:17:51.220well you should just marry him and then he can give you the money without without it being taxable
02:17:56.700in a taxable situation and very quickly it was like the next day we went and got the license
02:18:01.580they have to wait 24 hours and it was like boom 24 hours we did it and got married
02:18:05.480we got married in november of 2012 so it was close to a year that i had known him
02:18:12.800oh so you you're married now yeah and this was one of the parts where they edited they i mean
02:18:21.760there was a whole there was two totally different parts of the interview so it wasn't that the
02:18:26.780accountant said that and then 24 hours later what we were married what i had said was that he had
02:18:31.660later subsequently really pressured me and badgered me to marry him saying that I would
02:18:38.600be protected and it would make everything easier and it was a whole different part of the interview
02:18:43.200where I and then I made the point that so I finally agreed like fine I'll marry you and we
02:18:49.280went to city hall to get the license and then 24 hours later we were married so this wasn't even
02:18:55.520one of the most egregious examples of where they changed the narrative but this was it was just one
02:19:01.160that in a way it made me look a bit suspect to the audience because it made it seem like I just
02:19:06.680married him for the money that I thought he had when in reality it was later on and he really
02:19:12.520badgered me to marry him for uh for other reasons what did you think he did for a living
02:19:19.520I mean that's a good question I write about it in my in the memoir how you know what he did was
02:19:27.720always vague. And anytime I asked him questions, I would always get vague answers. And what he did
02:19:34.660was drop, you know, he would say things in a very word salad-y way. So you get an answer, but it's
02:19:40.200not a real answer. And you're almost left to connect the dots and figure it out on your own.
02:19:44.820So I know that sounds weird, but that's kind of how he addressed every question that I had about
02:19:51.300everything so you know and again later on what he did was almost irrelevant because you know he
02:19:58.600spun the delusion to such a extent that you know he kind of had me believing that there's you know
02:20:04.940parallel realities and nothing is real anyway um so yeah what he did was almost irrelevant
02:20:12.420mm-hmm so he kind of spun a bunch of bull and but like how long into the relationship did he start
02:20:22.720asking you for money because he definitely said he was very very wealthy and that you know you
02:20:27.140were going to be super wealthy too but the money only ever went one way from you to him yeah so
02:20:32.680how early on in the relationship did that start um it took a while before he ever asked me to
02:20:38.360for money. And the first time it was as if it was an emergency, like some last minute thing,
02:20:43.380and there would be dire consequences and he needed my help. And I, so I, you know, again,
02:20:50.560I'm the type of person where if you need my help and I can do it, I'll do it. And in retrospect,
02:20:55.860it was a way of getting me tethered because then he never paid me back. And then, you know, he
02:21:01.300It was another way for him to get me, you know, what the show didn't cover adequately, too, is that this took a really long time.
02:21:11.580And multiple times after I first got to know him, I thought, all right, well, this is it.
02:21:16.500You know, something feels off about this guy.
02:21:18.840And my gut was telling me something feels off about this guy.
02:21:21.800And so I'd tell myself I'm going to cut off communication or I won't see him again.
02:21:25.800But once he borrowed that money, it was like a tether.
02:21:28.160So then he would say, well, I'm going to pay you back. So, you know, let me come back and see you this weekend because he didn't live in New York. So he always when he came, he was coming from out of town. Let me come back. I'll pay you back. And so I'd agree. And then he'd do whatever, you know, mind sorcery he did that somehow by the end of the weekend, I'd have loaned him more money.
02:21:49.420um and and over time i just got in deeper and deeper and you know he always had these ever
02:21:55.480changing stories about how he was he had money but he didn't have access to it or he was gonna
02:22:01.640have it and again it just got deeper and deeper when you had given him i mean the the final number
02:22:11.960is a lot bigger than this but when you realize you've given him more than a million dollars
02:22:15.560did the light bulb go off like was there any point when the numbers got huge that you were like
02:22:20.920what am i the bigger the numbers got the more terrifying the whole thing was and again part
02:22:27.860of what these people do is they they weaponize fear and so you know the deeper in the hole i am
02:22:36.540the more i need him to get me out or the way that he's promising he's going to get me out of it and
02:22:42.060So it's almost like, you know, it's a terrible analogy because I'm not a gambler, but it's like, if you think that if you just keep going, it's all going to be absolved and you'll get out of it.
02:22:54.420If you just keep going, that's part of how they, you know, he got me trapped is I just, I mean, how, and by that point, I couldn't even explain what happened.
02:23:04.960And so if I had walked away from him and gone and ran to somebody and said, look, I need help, I'm in a bad situation, and they said, well, what's going on? What happened? I wouldn't even know how to explain it.
02:23:16.120And that's the part that, you know, it takes, it almost takes having been through something like this to really understand how it happens. So, again, that's, you know, why I'm writing, why I've written this book is to try to help people understand so they can hopefully avoid it or potentially recognize if it's happening to somebody that they care about or a loved one and be able to help them sooner.
02:23:40.180Because people around me knew that something was wrong, but they didn't know what was wrong.
02:23:43.880i'd love to believe that your book can do that and that this segment can do that i have my doubts
02:23:50.400i think people make their own mistakes for all sorts of deep psychological reasons they need to
02:23:56.140pursue this terrible pattern of choices and most people have to learn individually it's
02:24:03.020unfortunate but maybe you know we have a shot maybe we'll get one or two who are happy to hear
02:24:07.700us and read the book and feel differently when they get approached by a guy like this
02:24:12.020Can you just put some color on how he was reeling you in?
02:24:17.160You know, like when I talked to Benita, she talked a lot about how this doctor was just over the top with like the rose petals and the gifts.
02:24:26.300And she had tape of him like, my love, my love.
02:24:29.180And she thought he was this world class doctor saving lives with this, you know, brand new breakthrough technology.
02:24:35.340You know, so you could kind of see how, you know, any young woman to be like, oh, this is a pretty good catch.
02:24:41.160He's hanging out with the Clintons and the Obamas, allegedly.
02:24:44.880But I remain somewhat mystified about what this guy had to recommend him, like how he mind wormed into your psyche.
02:24:54.040One is that because I met him through Twitter, now X, DMs, there was at least a month or more before I saw him in person.
02:25:04.040And so he was able to sort of do a number on me before I even met him, which was smart on his part, because if I had met him, a lot of things in my intuition might have told me that he wasn't right.
02:25:14.600But by that time, he'd gotten me sort of hooked on this fantasy.
02:25:19.780And what he really did was weaponize my ambitions, because I really believed in my business and what we were doing for the world.
02:25:28.380And he effectively love-bombed me with validation.
02:25:32.200and knew what I wanted to hear and saying that he believed in me
02:25:37.160and that my business was so important to helping the world
02:25:42.200and helping to heal people and helping to change the way people eat.
02:25:58.880But when you look back at how you were when you were a little girl, have you, in retrospect, been able to explain your susceptibility to that kind of, you know, your need for that kind of outside flattery and, I don't know, building you up?
02:26:16.540I mean, I've done a lot of my own psychoanalysis to try to figure these things out.
02:26:20.800And I always tell people the most important work that you can do is this sort of this deep self-reflection and looking at your childhood and whatever your specific wounds are, because even if you grew up and had good parents who weren't, you know, abusive or cruel in any way, shape or form, you know, perhaps they're, you know, emotionally unavailable in some way or you're not getting the validation you want.
02:26:43.040or, you know, for whatever reason I grew up, you know, I might present a certain way, but I really
02:26:49.240was also probably deeply insecure in a lot of ways and needed that sort of validation. And then on
02:26:57.320the other side of the show, one of the things that happened on the other side of this show coming out
02:27:02.220is that people bombarded me asking me if I'd ever had an autism diagnosis. And I thought like that
02:27:09.320had never occurred to me and so I went and got a an evaluation and ended up getting a diagnosis
02:27:15.180it used to be called Asperger's and now they call it autism one for whatever reason but that's
02:27:20.840another thing that shed a lot of light on whatever it is about my particular wiring that makes me
02:27:26.780um you know that sort of allows for that paradox of being objectively reasonably intelligent yet
02:27:34.860also unable to see certain things that other people might have seen. Right. It's almost like
02:27:41.360a social, uh, I don't want to say handicap, but like a social struggle that when you have Asperger's
02:27:48.000social, it does not come easy to you. Yeah, absolutely. I mean, and I can, again, and women,
02:27:52.780I think are, are better at masking. So people don't see it as easily. You know, I can, I can
02:27:57.940go out there and talk to people and nobody would necessarily think, oh, she has Asperger's, but yet
02:28:02.880certain things, you know, I, certain things, I don't clock people's intentions as well as other
02:28:10.800people might, or it takes me a little bit longer sometimes to process things. And I just walk into
02:28:16.380interactions and have a default setting that I trust people and that I assume that they would
02:28:23.000operate the way that I would, which is in good faith. And so I just don't see,
02:28:28.000you know there's a thing called betrayal blindness and very very very silly i have to trust no one
02:28:34.580yeah no one's operating in good faith no no i have the same deficiency in some way so i can
02:28:38.860understand yeah and i mean i it this wasn't an isolated event this has happened to me there's
02:28:43.740like that saying you know fool me once shame on you but for me it's like i have to take
02:28:50.200responsibility for the fact that this has happened to me over and over and over again and so i really
02:28:55.860have had to do a lot of deep analysis on understanding the how and the why. I mean,
02:29:01.080even what happened with the filmmakers, I blindly trusted that they would make an accurate show and
02:29:08.260that they wouldn't have done something that was on the other side of it, such a betrayal.
02:29:13.740But, you know. I mean, they do it all the time over on Netflix.
02:29:19.880Yeah. I mean, in this case, the filmmakers made the show and then sold it to Netflix,
02:29:24.200but netflix and their market well but netflix has a responsibility they're the error of it like
02:29:28.680that they're the ones putting it out there like i'm sick of this because netflix has done so many
02:29:32.900people who even i know it's a pattern do not believe the word documentary when netflix slaps
02:29:38.760it on any film it's always going to be docudrama that i will never believe them when they say
02:29:44.280documentary ever uh just given what i've seen but let me go back to the the fraud because
02:29:50.420near as I can tell, he was taking all this money from you and he was telling you like he needed it
02:29:55.860for an emergency. And he talked about like there being kind of like another side. There's some
02:30:01.120sort of family that sounded more like an ethereal family, not like a mob family, not like a family
02:30:06.020of origin, but like some quote family that was evaluating you and you had to pass these tests.
02:30:11.460And this was after he had ratcheted up the trust factor. He didn't just drop that on you on email
02:30:16.100One, but eventually he got you believing that your sweet dog, Leon, a pit who you adopted, who was absolutely beautiful and very sweet and who you were in love with, that he could somehow provide immortality for for Leon.
02:30:40.540what eventually happens is that anthony promises her that if she just followed along with the
02:30:47.060program he was suggesting kept going along with what was instructed he is going to make both
02:30:52.320sarma and her dog immortal just like anthony is there was some magical force in play here
02:31:02.260and he's already in this special ethereal world because he's passed through the tests
02:31:08.280into this new state of being it's like some fantastical magical future where my dog is
02:31:17.980going to live forever and like this reality didn't really matter because it would all be
02:31:22.100reset to some sort of utopia his happily ever after that he always referred to
02:31:28.720now when people watching this say oh come on right like that would be a bridge too far
02:31:36.520Everyone knows there's no such thing as immortality. How do you explain that?
02:31:40.980Well, what I would say is that, you know, I think unless you've been through it, the effects of things like cognitive dissonance and over time, a ratcheting up level of dissociation.
02:31:54.840It's not that it's not that I believed things he told me necessarily, but they were things that you can't disprove.
02:32:02.520disprove and so i didn't not believe him i just didn't know what to believe and again he he had
02:32:09.200gotten me in so deep that i didn't see a way out and so you start to cling to whatever
02:32:14.380solutions and fantasy that they operate you because by this point you're desperate
02:32:19.140so again it wasn't so overt that he said you know leon's gonna live forever my dog but it was all
02:32:27.580things that he implied. And I think that the more afraid I got, the more I dissociated and wanted
02:32:34.000to believe that none of this was real because I was in so deep financially. I mean, the most
02:32:39.320painful part is that this wasn't my money. It's not like I had this money saved and he got it.
02:32:44.580That would have been, you know, for me, comparatively, that would have been great if that
02:32:48.660was the only consequence. The most painful part is that this was money that came from the business,
02:32:54.020which ended up destroying it and you know all of these other people that were hurt through me was
02:32:59.980the most painful grueling part of this whole situation because you had investors you had
02:33:06.260employees yeah and yeah you were not the only one who would go down as a result right and he got
02:33:12.320money out of my mother your company had to close twice not one but twice one time because of all
02:33:17.700the money he sold then you reopened and then it happened a second time and that second time was
02:33:21.740the last time. Yeah. Yeah. Well, and because he took me away. So when he took me away from the
02:33:28.080city, I mean, when I was arrested a year, almost a year later, nine months later, if you had told
02:33:33.620me that people had stepped in and the restaurant was still running, I would have, I would have
02:33:38.480been relieved. But the point is that the entire time that I was away, I never Googled what happened
02:33:44.660or, you know, whether or not the restaurant had closed or what happened after I left.
02:33:50.580And, you know, again, that's something I go into detail in the book
02:33:55.520so people can better understand how it happened.
02:33:59.360Because eventually, as—and by the way, we should cover this.
02:34:03.220Do we believe that he was taking all those, you know, $10,000, $100,000, $14,000 checks
02:34:08.420you were sending him, and eventually your mom was sending him and just gambling it?
02:34:14.020I believe so. Again, because I think people like him, it's not about the money. It would all make
02:34:20.160much more sense if he had been stashing the money somewhere and then had just dumped me and gotten
02:34:27.000on a plane and traveled, left the country, but he didn't. Again, I think the point was the
02:34:33.960takedown. In some ways, it almost feels like the point was to destroy me, to absolutely obliterate
02:34:41.760me and to, you know, beyond just the financial side of it, but it's almost as if he wanted me
02:34:47.320to be so utterly humiliated and broken and to have burned all of my bridges so that any chance for
02:34:54.260me to recover and come back and rebuild would be, you know, as small as possible. And I'm still
02:35:00.280trying to do that, but he made sure it would be as difficult as humanly possible.
02:35:06.680Because not only did he destroy your business, but he destroyed your reputation.
02:35:10.240and no investor is going to give you money.
02:35:38.260I got the amount of money that the employees were owed, which was just about $75,000, and all of it went to them because that's the part that weighed on me the heaviest because, you know, of course, that they are not getting paid is more significant than, you know, maybe a wealthy investor being out some of their money.
02:35:55.900I mean, that weighs on me as well, but what happened with my employees weighed the heaviest.
02:35:59.740And, you know, all of those people that work there, the ones who are available want to come back if I can reopen.
02:36:06.620You know, I'm I'm in contact with. So they forgave them. Yeah, because they knew. I mean, the people that work there and the people who were longtime customers of the brand, they knew me. They knew that whatever happened, they knew something really crazy happened, but they knew that I would never, ever, ever hurt that business or the people who work there. It's the other way around. I would have sacrificed myself for them and for that business. So they knew that it didn't make sense.
02:36:33.800so then eventually this this i'm still unclear even having watched the show
02:36:42.960this guy gets you to go kind of on on the run with him you leave new york for 10 months you
02:36:51.060guys are down in like tennessee for some of it by dollywood you changed your name well not legally
02:36:58.720but you started to go by Emma instead of Sarma. And he went, he changed his name. You covered up
02:37:04.560your tattoo that had the name of your secondary restaurant on it. So what did you think during
02:37:10.480those times? Did you think I'm on the lamb from the law? No, I had no idea that I was that, you
02:37:17.240know, I was being sought after. And at the time, I wouldn't have even, you know, of course, the what
02:37:23.700what happened with the money was incredibly unfortunate, but I would have thought it's
02:37:28.020more of a civil matter not criminal because you know again you think that to to be a criminal
02:37:34.480you have to have criminal intent and I had the opposite of criminal intent in this situation
02:37:40.540so I didn't think that you know I wasn't aware of being sought after by um by the police but
02:37:49.940what I write about in my book and what really didn't come through is that by the time he took
02:37:54.280me away, I was so broken that there's a scene where he drives me away and I'm screaming in the
02:38:02.920car. And by scene, I mean, I write about this part in the book because it's almost the last
02:38:07.080memory I have is being in the car. And when he tells me we're driving away, I was screaming my
02:38:13.180head off, which is very unlike me, but like almost like a wild animal just screaming. And he just let
02:38:19.560me scream and then I wore myself out. And it's as if that was the moment when I just slid into a
02:38:27.200deep, deep level of dissociation. And from then on was in a sort of autopilot. And so if you saw me
02:38:38.120during that time, I could function, I could, you know, talk to a barista at Starbucks, but it's
02:38:45.640like I wasn't there. And that's the part that, again, it's really hard to know how that might
02:38:51.920feel unless you've been through it. And so, to answer the question, what was I thinking or what
02:38:56.320was I feeling? I wasn't thinking and I wasn't feeling. It's like, that's what dissociation is.
02:39:00.900You're thinking and your feeling is detached. So, you're just almost like a zombie on autopilot.
02:39:07.660And then the really gut-wrenching part is when I finally was arrested and I write in my book that
02:39:13.040it took getting arrested to set me free. You know, I have warm, fuzzy feelings for the detective who
02:39:18.580arrested me, who's a lovely person, and I think he could see what was going on. The prosecutors in
02:39:24.200New York, different story, but the detective who arrested me, he recognized the dynamics of what
02:39:28.580was going on. And then once I was arrested, it was the slow process of waking back up into
02:39:36.720a level of sanity and coming back into the real world.
02:39:43.040to me it's it's like breaking a horse yeah you know it's like once the horse is broke
02:39:49.200it does stop bucking it stops trying to get out of the corral like or it's a different horse yeah
02:39:54.400or like the elephant that you know they don't realize that they've been set free they've just
02:39:59.200been so trained to walk in this one area that they don't or they don't realize that they could break
02:40:03.600away you know it is it is like breaking an animal in that way so what what was he getting out of
02:40:11.840having you in this condition and just with him during these 10 months on the lam because you
02:40:18.500were out of money now i know your mom started to get he started hit her up for dough and she did
02:40:24.260it because she was so worried about you but what was why keep you in other words once like you were
02:40:29.300kind of bankrupt and i have the same question more to get like you would think that by that point
02:40:34.560he would have just i mean he could have just dumped me somewhere and he could have gone on a
02:40:40.720plane and left the country and nobody would have ever probably gone after him, but he didn't. And
02:40:47.080so, you know, I don't know the answer to that question. I do know that he was, you know, when
02:40:52.600he took me away, he then also took full control. He had access before, but he took full control of
02:40:58.840my phone, my devices, my email. So I was unaware of him using my phone to text people and using my
02:41:05.640email to reach out to people and ask for money, which is incredibly humiliating when I eventually
02:41:12.920got back into my email, you know, nine months later, however long it was. So he was still able
02:41:19.540to get some money out of people through me. And I think that in the end, he realized that somehow
02:41:26.560the game was over. And I can't really explain this, but I think he, it's almost as if I think
02:41:33.420he might have gotten us arrested intentionally, which I know seems like it doesn't make any sense,
02:41:37.860but I, my gut tells me that that's what happened because he said to me either the day before or
02:41:43.140even that morning, he said to me, there's going to be one more gut shot. And I was terrified
02:41:49.440because I didn't know what he meant by that, but he, it's as if he was telling me you're going to
02:41:53.260have to endure one more really painful thing, um, before this is over. And then boom, you know,
02:42:00.520we were arrested and you know which reminds me of speaking of things he made me endure there's a
02:42:06.020whole sexual abuse component of this story that they asked me about and I spoke about in my very
02:42:12.020long interviews for the for the series but they left it out which felt really strange to me I
02:42:18.600didn't understand it at first but I think had they left it in then the audience would have
02:42:23.040sympathized me with to the extent that they wouldn't have able to create sort of a twisty
02:42:28.420ending and cast doubt on whether or not I was complicit. What was the nature of the alleged
02:42:35.060abuse? Well, I think that you might have spoken to people in the NXIVM cult in the past
02:42:42.440on your show. And so a similar thing happened with Keith Raynery. And, you know, they create
02:42:49.620this dynamic where it's almost as if they make you believe that the sexual stuff is necessary
02:42:55.960and something that you have to endure for your own benefit it's really twisted and hard to explain
02:43:01.060but i i go into sort of grotesque detail in a chapter in my book about about what he did
02:43:07.420because you know i was so repulsed by this man this is another thing that people didn't understand
02:43:13.860and that didn't come through in the stories i was so repulsed by him the last thing in the world i
02:43:18.300want to do is have sex with this guy who by the way just by which point by what point were you
02:43:24.220repulsed by? I mean, it happened over time, but it was reasonably at some, you know, certainly
02:43:31.100when we got married, it wasn't like we were a married couple and having sex. By that point,
02:43:35.600I'm sure I had stopped wanting to have sex with him. And I don't, I think that happened pretty
02:43:40.020quickly, but he, you know, so eventually it was something that he started to force me to do in a
02:43:47.440really disgusting manipulative cruel way and it was um you know i mean it was incredibly painful
02:43:55.120but it's something that cult leaders do as well and i think it's another it's like another element
02:44:01.380i haven't read the book i only saw the documentary so i wasn't aware of that but
02:44:05.700what can you provide any color on that like what what what was so awful about i mean i accept that
02:44:11.680sexual abuse is awful but if you could just help us understand what you're talking about
02:44:14.280Yeah, well, you know, he basically told me that I had to do things. I mean, there's a chapter in my book that goes into some gross detail about this, where I come home, you know, I'm exhausted working my ass off getting the restaurant reopened after it closed because of, you know, the actions that he put me through.
02:44:35.740And I miraculously raised money, got the restaurant reopened. I'm exhausted. And I think that he felt me pulling away a bit where maybe I sensed at that point I could get away from him. And so he needed a way to exert even more dominance over me.
02:44:51.900And so, you know, he told me to bring a bottle of wine home from the restaurant one night,
02:44:57.320and I didn't know why, because he didn't drink a lot, and he wanted me to drink because he told
02:45:04.100me that he was going to have to force me to do stuff, and it was for my own good. And, you know,
02:45:09.300he had this whole long explanation, which I don't even necessarily recall. But by that point, it
02:45:15.200was, you know, he had created this dynamic where I have to do what he tells me to do, otherwise
02:45:20.140there's going to be horrible consequences. You know, again, what didn't come through in the show
02:45:27.020and what people don't understand about situations like this is fear. There is so much fear that you
02:45:32.940feel like you have to do what these people tell you to do. So it's as if he, it's as if somebody
02:45:40.560said, I'm going to have to, you know, I don't know. I feel like sometimes if you use the R word,
02:45:47.900it's screws with the tv but it's like somebody says i'm going to have to now sexually abuse you
02:45:53.600and you have to let you have to let me and so that's you know that's what happened and that's
02:45:58.300what i describe in the book did did you get a response to that allegation when you published
02:46:04.020the book from him uh i mean i haven't gotten any response from i can't even imagine he's he's off
02:46:10.560doing what he did to me to somebody else right now there was a show called toxic that was on
02:46:15.320discovery hbo um that i i ended up i didn't want to participate at first but i did participate
02:46:20.960once i learned that they were trying to track him down and figure out where he is to potentially
02:46:25.080hold him accountable because at that point we knew that he was doing this to other people and so they
02:46:30.800do track him down and he is doing what he did to me to somebody else and he'll continue to do that
02:46:36.320he always this is post-prison time i should make clear these are allegations we do not have the
02:46:40.920proof of that as an independent broadcaster, either of the sexual abuse or that he's doing
02:46:45.160it to somebody else. But these are Sarmer's allegations.
02:47:10.920confidential support from a trained responder. Anytime. 988 Suicide Crisis Helpline is funded
02:47:16.660by the government in Canada. He's already been to prison because at the end of this 9-10 month
02:47:23.540stint in Tennessee, you did get arrested. It made headlines that it was after ordering Domino's.
02:47:30.220I mean, the short form of this, as I recall, was like, she's not even a vegan. They ordered
02:47:35.860chicken wings and a pizza from Domino's. Like she's the whole thing is a fraud. She's a fraud.
02:47:41.540That's where your critics went with it. Yeah. Well, I want to speak to the Domino's.
02:47:45.080That was a tabloid narrative. And I'll point out that even the lovely detectives who arrested me,
02:47:50.280who, again, I feel very warmly towards, they pointed out to tabloids that were calling him
02:47:56.320that I was in a different hotel room than him. I didn't even know about the pizza. I wasn't in the
02:48:01.380same room as the pizza. And so, you know, even knowing that information, it's sort of too juicy
02:48:07.020a headline for tabloids to claim that, you know, this New York City vegan was arrested because
02:48:13.540of a pizza. Again, I didn't even know that a pizza existed until a girl in jail when I was
02:48:20.720in the holding cell in Tennessee. And she had seen me on a news program. She came into the
02:48:25.920holding cell after me and said, ain't you that girl that was on TV? You know, you got arrested
02:48:30.680because of the pizza and i was like pizza i didn't know anything about it so again that was just a
02:48:36.900way that the tabloids want to make a story juicier for attention to diminish you yeah some of the
02:48:43.940abuse not sexual but verbal is captured in the netflix film we have some of the the language he
02:48:51.600used over the phone with you captured in the following soundbite here 55 you know what the
02:48:57.720fucking deal is here if i say to do something do it no no no no that's not how it works
02:49:03.660i already gave you 200k on top of everything else i thought you were going along with everything
02:49:10.040you wanted to happily ever after and now you're talking about this stuff it's fucking real
02:49:15.680this isn't real none of this is real those wires are bullshit i took you in the fucking box
02:49:23.700i fucking told you what was going on i did all your fucking hate you're fucking falling apart
02:49:29.340you're fucking coming on who's making all these fucking threats telling me this and that you're
02:49:33.700gonna go do this and you're gonna go do that because now i fucking talk to you who's threatening
02:49:38.360who so i love you i'm threatening you if i tell you to take all your money out of the bank and
02:49:45.880yeah i got i got chills listen i haven't listened to that in a long time so hearing his voice and
02:49:59.340uh yeah i mean i've i've like goosebumps right now um i think these people have a certain power
02:50:07.080that's really hard to understand it's it's there's something about it where it's like they get you
02:50:12.680under a spell and in my case one another paradoxical element about this whole situation
02:50:19.260is that i was i kept pushing back on him and yet he'd end up dragging me in and overpowering me
02:50:24.580over and over again yeah he was not intimidated by your pushback yeah and and by the way there's
02:50:30.340an ex-wife in the documentary or whatever we're calling it on netflix who says he did this to her
02:50:36.540too, except she had a baby. Yes. And she claims in the film that he said to her, you know, if you
02:50:44.040give a baby salt, it will die and it won't be detectable in an autopsy. And she said, I never
02:50:50.360let him be alone with a baby after that. I mean, like, again, we don't know whether that is true.
02:50:55.860It's an allegation by an ex. But if so, then this guy's got a dangerous pattern here. And
02:51:00.740one might argue you should consider yourself lucky to have just escaped with debt, the loss of your
02:51:07.580business, self-esteem, some anger from employers and investors, and a short stint in prison. I mean,
02:51:14.580honestly, this could be the lucky outcome. Yeah, I mean, there, I, you know, I say this in all
02:51:18.940seriousness, there were times where I wished that he had killed me because when I came out of the
02:51:24.580other side of this, the consequences and everything being destroyed, I just felt like what, what is
02:51:30.720there left for me to live for and um yeah and he was never held accountable for what he did to me
02:51:37.620he spent a year in jail and i ended up having to go serve four months after he was released so he
02:51:43.240was out free clean slate and i had to go in and do four months um and then he only get a year for
02:51:50.020all of this he stole 1.7 million dollars minimum from you yeah i mean i saw you know the ultimate
02:51:56.020damages were higher than that but like how does he only get a year in jail for that that's a good
02:52:00.440question you know i i was prosecuted aggressively he was it's almost like he was an afterthought
02:52:06.420because the prosecution focused on the business loss and but there was no he was never charged
02:52:14.600for what he did to me or to my mother and this happened you know this was 2016 so i would think
02:52:22.500that perhaps if it happened now, it might be different. On the other side of, for example,
02:52:27.140Keith Raynery getting prosecuted for what he did and the way he was able to manipulate people,
02:52:32.160I think maybe now it would have been different or had it been a different prosecutor or just
02:52:36.440different circumstances. Did he plead guilty to something or was he found guilty of anything?
02:52:43.200Well, he pled guilty. We both pled guilty. There was never any trial or anything like that. I mean,
02:52:48.980And, you know, I think anybody who's been through the criminal justice system knows that pleading guilty is something that people do all the time because it's a better alternative than getting dragged through, you know, a trial that you can't afford or the prospect of the stress of a trial and, you know, perhaps things not being admitted into evidence and you end up with even more time.
02:53:14.680and not to mention not being able to afford a trial so um you know i ended up pleading guilty
02:53:20.380which was really painful because however they made it look i'm a deeply honest person and so
02:53:26.160to stand there in court and have to plead guilty to something that i had no intention of ever doing
02:53:32.160um you know what did you plead guilty to yeah i've almost like blacked it out but you know
02:53:38.960the words fraud and grand larceny were involved. And that's not me. I mean, I'm like the goody
02:53:45.520two-shoes who never got in trouble in school, you know, respects authority, does the right thing.
02:53:52.240You know, we ran the restaurant. I had an accountant once who I was talking to about
02:53:56.920doing our taxes. And he said, well, how many of your employees are on versus off the books? And
02:54:01.740I said, well, they're all on. He said, no, no, really tell me how many are off. I said, no,
02:54:06.780they're all on the books like we did everything by the book that's kind of just just the person
02:54:11.100that i am and so well the thing that's strange about it is normally if you're committing larceny
02:54:17.480you take the money and then you get a gain with it you do something i lost everything that will
02:54:23.460help your life or you know i don't know help someone you love but what happened here was
02:54:29.360you were taking money that he was demanding and giving it to him which he appears to have
02:54:34.660gambled away which you do not appear to have benefited from at all in fact it was at great
02:54:39.360cost to you and the things that you cared about you know like there's they don't have some rolex
02:54:45.500watch right that you you got or some penthouse that you got you weren't taking this money and
02:54:52.800lining your own pocket with it you were giving it to him yeah and even so i mean people know me
02:54:58.120know that that kind of stuff doesn't matter to me what mattered to me was the business and
02:55:02.400and wanting to protect it. So yeah, I mean, he's the only one who benefited. I didn't.
02:55:12.460That's a nightmare. I mean, this is just a nightmare. I very much feel for you. I know
02:55:16.920some people are mad at you because they don't believe that you were mind manipulated, but
02:55:21.120I believe you. I've seen this happen with enough people. I believe you.
02:55:24.920I really appreciate that. And, you know, I at least was lucky enough to recover enough of my
02:55:31.800communications with him that I have all the backup you know it's like I naively thought that with my
02:55:37.900prosecution the more evidence they dug up and the more they were able to recover that it would help
02:55:42.760me they recovered a journal of mine where I was writing about what was going on and when I was
02:55:48.640given a copy of it I thought oh okay finally like this exonerates me because surely they wouldn't
02:55:55.340think that you know nothing logically made sense why would I have torched my own life
02:56:01.240and um but you know that's not how he's got a history yeah he's got a long criminal record of
02:56:07.620impersonating police officers like a very extensive criminal record and i was completely
02:56:14.160the opposite um but i just got very unlucky with the the prosecution in my case
02:56:19.120mm-hmm so sorry to bring this up but is leon still alive oh no he passed away a year and a
02:56:30.600half ago um i was with him when it happened and you know he had a long life he was a pit bull
02:56:37.120and he was 14 and a half when he passed away but at least i got to be with him
02:56:43.000and um yeah that's him you gave him a lot of love yeah a lot of love but it was here in this
02:56:49.720apartment yeah yet another i mean obviously no like the deluded version of you chose to believe
02:56:57.300that maybe he could save your beloved pet forever and of course it's yet another lie that he told
02:57:02.720you and so now where where are you and where is he you think he's still doing this to yet another
02:57:09.060person because he's out of prison I would imagine the Netflix film would make that a little tough
02:57:14.180for him but who knows women do what they're going to do and and what about you what are you now what
02:57:20.620for you um good question i uh was moved back here to new york which was you know where what i always
02:57:27.360felt was home to reopen the business in the same location and then um what i said before about you
02:57:34.900know i have to take responsibility for somebody that unfortunately makes a good target and is
02:57:40.860able to be deceived by some dishonest people it's happened uh sad to say again and so i've been
02:57:47.880a bit reeling on how to move forward but I still have some things in the works and I
02:57:53.980you know one of the things that these people look for in a good target is somebody that won't
02:58:00.360give up and uh and will keep going and that is something about my personality is that I will
02:58:05.540keep getting up and I will keep going and keep trying and believing in what I wanted to build
02:58:11.720the first time around. And, um, so I may be able to pull it off for it to happen again. Um,
02:58:17.940and, and maybe not, but that's really what I earn. If you personally can earn enough money
02:58:24.000to fund yourself, no one can stop you. I mean, that would be a great outcome here. Even if you
02:58:29.960have to do catering, whatever, like do something to use your skills to earn enough money to open
02:58:35.600something up even if it's not in Manhattan um that could be yeah and I think you know another
02:58:41.820going forward now my my mission always was around food and clean eating and healthy living but I
02:58:49.160think also on the other side of this it's really meaningful to me to be to have my story be as
02:58:54.040useful as possible through my book and through speaking out about what happened and um this type
02:58:59.840of manipulation that again a lot of people don't realize that it could happen to them
02:59:03.720And hopefully so that they might also recognize if it's happening to somebody, to a loved one or somebody that they care about and be able to intervene and help prevent somebody going through as extensive as a nightmare as this.
02:59:29.060He was like kind of played an early role on this.
02:59:30.920In a way, he was responsible for you meeting this guy.
02:59:33.340He's got a lot of money. He met Elaria at my restaurant. So, I mean, I ended up getting I adopted my dog because of him.
02:59:42.040And so that's another story that's in the book. But there's a weird connection there.
02:59:45.600And it's not, you know, it's it's a lot of things just need to go right.
02:59:50.740But for me, it's a matter of finding the right partnership and people that I can trust, because, you know, it's not that I necessarily would need somebody else to oversee the money.
03:00:00.060It's that I need, I need guardrails. I need people that are trustworthy and honest and forthright and that I could work collaboratively with and move forward. So that also so that I'm, well, I think, I think it's not, it's not for you that you need somebody to control the finances. It's that anybody who is going to be associated with a restaurant is going to want to see that it's not you controlling the finances.
03:00:22.040Yeah. Or that nobody could get. Yeah. For this next phase out, you know, maybe when you're at this for 10 years and everybody sees you're you're good. You don't need that. But I think that's all part of rebuilding trust and telegraphing to the world that, you know, what happened and you acknowledge it. And but you're going to earn back trust. I think that would be a great start. Anyway, I'm going to text Alec Baldwin. I'm going to tell me. No, but I do think he should help you. And if not, then you help yourself. And you you'll you're very capable. You're well educated. You have a lot of skills.
03:00:51.940I think you're, you're, you can earn money and help give yourself the next big start you need.
03:00:57.460I hope you do it. Thank you for telling your story. I'm sorry this happened to you.
03:01:00.820Thank you so much. I appreciate being here.
03:01:04.280All the best. And we'll see you again. Thank you, Sarma.
03:01:09.040Wow. Unbelievable, right? Like what a crazy story. Um, the book again, that she mentioned
03:01:14.600is called the girl with the duck tattoo. And that's where Sarma aims to set the record straight
03:01:19.720by laying out what she says is the real story.