The Megyn Kelly Show - Shock Lawsuit Against ＂The Tell＂ Author, Kouri Richins Bombshells, and Nancy Guthrie Investigation Mess, with MK True Crime Hosts ｜ Ep. 1271

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00:00:45.820 Welcome to The Megyn Kelly Show, live on Sirius XM Channel 111 every weekday at New East.

00:00:51.240 Hey, everyone. I'm Megyn Kelly. Welcome to The Megyn Kelly Show.

00:01:00.280 We are on day four now at a remote location where my family is celebrating spring break,

00:01:05.260 but I am not because I am with you fine people, and that's exactly where I want to be.

00:01:10.280 It actually has been working out well because we normally do the show live 12 to 2,

00:01:13.680 but we've been taping it in the mornings 10 to 12, and then I can spend the day with the fam.

00:01:18.220 And as you know, I kind of feel like the show is my therapy most days, and if I don't do it,

00:01:23.500 I actually feel off. I start twitching, start developing tics. So thank you for allowing me

00:01:29.440 to behave like a normal human after I finish this. I'm also drinking my coffee, staving off my

00:01:34.700 Alzheimer's, and it's delicious. Highly recommend. I am so looking forward to today's show.

00:01:40.900 It's a Kelly's Court, and we have the most interesting cases. I kind of feel like it needed

00:01:46.980 to be a four-hour show, but it's only a two-hour show, and it's going to prove that truth is

00:01:51.120 stranger than fiction. Okay. Well, first—well, not first. We're going to get to the Corey Richens

00:01:56.960 trial in Utah. She is the mom. She has three children. She wrote a children's book about

00:02:02.300 dealing with grief after her husband, their dad, tragically died. It was very sad. She was such

00:02:07.740 a caring mom. Well, now she's charged with his murder. I mean, you, of course, saw it coming.

00:02:11.680 I mean, MK True Crime has been covering this thing and live streaming every minute of the

00:02:16.600 trial, which is underway. We'll get into it. But first, we have got to bring to you the

00:02:21.260 story of Amy Griffin. Disclosure up front, I know her. Okay. Pretty much anybody in New

00:02:27.880 York who's well-known or who has sort of a ton of money in financial circles knows Amy Griffin

00:02:35.120 because of her husband, John, who is literally probably the richest man in New York. Big hedge

00:02:41.700 fund guy worth something like $6 billion, and she is his wife. This is relevant to the story.

00:02:50.440 She didn't really have her own thing going on, but then she took John's money, obviously. It's

00:02:56.400 their money now, and started investing in companies like Meghan Markle, Spanx by Sarah Blakely, which was

00:03:04.280 already well-established. But my estimation is well-established female companies where she 1.00

00:03:10.460 could say she had participated, but most of these people already had their own thing going

00:03:13.640 on, like Reese Witherspoon's company. Okay, whatever. That was her thing, and she started

00:03:19.140 calling herself an entrepreneur, kind of like founder, whatever. It's what a lot of rich wives 1.00

00:03:25.400 do. She was trying to contribute. But apparently that wasn't enough, and she decided to write

00:03:31.340 a memoir. I'm going to use that term memoir in quotes. Just consider air quotes around

00:03:36.220 that from this point forward. And she did write that book called The Tell. In this book, The

00:03:42.200 Tell, she claimed that she underwent MDMA therapy. That's an illegal psychedelic drug. And she said

00:03:50.740 using the drug unlocked years of memories, including of being sexually assaulted by a middle school

00:03:58.640 teacher more than 30 years ago where she grew up in Amarillo, Texas. She came from a relatively well-off 0.65

00:04:05.600 family, from what I know. And this was like a horrific memory, a couple of them, of being abused by this

00:04:14.100 teacher. Well, kind of extraordinary to see somebody of that amount of privilege and connection and wealth and all

00:04:21.300 that come out with such a memoir. And the descriptions were harrowing. And it seems like sort of a raw

00:04:29.000 thing to reveal about oneself. And therefore, you're not going to be surprised to learn, she was

00:04:33.960 universally embraced and praised by many of the same women in whose company she had invested, like

00:04:41.280 Gwyneth Paltrow, Reese Witherspoon. She went on the Drew Barrymore show. She didn't invest in anything

00:04:49.140 Drew has as far as I know. But there was no bigger booster than Oprah Winfrey. This is an Oprah book

00:04:57.100 of the month. It was her book club. She featured it. She lavished praise on the book and on Amy

00:05:03.540 Griffin. And she began, when she had Amy on her show, by telling a story about Amy's daughter that

00:05:12.480 Amy purports to recount in the book. Just watch this. And then one night, her young daughter tells

00:05:20.540 her, Mom, you're really nice. You're here with us, but you're actually not here. And then she starts

00:05:26.840 to embark on this incredible journey that leads to the discovery of a childhood secret. That's how

00:05:34.040 deeply the secret was buried, that she didn't even remember the secret. And as she struggles to find out

00:05:40.080 what's true and not true, she discovers how silence and shame fueled her obsessive need to always be

00:05:47.220 perfect. I was just floored when I read Amy's story. What she discovered about herself, about her past,

00:05:54.560 made me recognize how powerful the desire to forget is, and also how powerful the desire to remember is,

00:06:02.940 and how your life can change when you reconcile the two.

00:06:06.520 Pretty amazing, right? I mean, what Oprah forgot to do in much of that little recitation was to 0.57

00:06:15.200 attribute the claims to Amy Griffin. And that is something we are pretty vigilant about in the

00:06:23.500 journalism business, which Oprah's not in, because we don't know when we repeat allegations like the

00:06:29.860 ones in Amy Griffin's memoir, whether they are true. We only know that the author says they are.

00:06:34.620 So typically you would say, Amy says she suffered this terrible abuse. Amy tells a story about, Amy says,

00:06:40.700 Amy writes, you got to be careful. You do. We're not always perfect at it. And, you know, I'm wondering

00:06:48.080 whether Oprah would like to have some of that phraseology back. Because last week, a woman who goes only by 1.00

00:06:55.300 Jane Doe in the lawsuit filed a complaint in Los Angeles Superior Court against Amy Griffin, her publisher,

00:07:03.360 and the man believed to be her ghostwriter. This is a classmate of Amy Griffin's back in Amarillo,

00:07:10.400 Texas. And she alleges that the sexual assault described in the tell actually happened to her,

00:07:18.300 not to Amy. And she is heavily suggesting that Amy stole this entire story from her and that

00:07:29.220 she willingly stole it, that it wasn't an innocent recovery of memory by Amy that happened to dovetail

00:07:36.760 uniquely with this woman's story, but that she met with this woman shortly before publication,

00:07:43.740 and that she may have sent a private investigator to go meet with this woman to get her story, 0.62

00:07:51.960 you know, down, down pat. And then came the book, The Tell, without any attribution to this woman,

00:08:04.060 crediting that it's actually her story, but instead, allegedly, according to the plaintiff,

00:08:08.680 stealing this woman's stories of sexual assault, because she did know her when they were kids in

00:08:14.220 Amarillo, and pawning them off as her own. She says, again, she remembered it while under this

00:08:22.360 psychedelic therapy. Well, the plaintiff alleges in the lawsuit that, quote, the book also acts as a

00:08:28.860 de facto advertisement for the efficacy of MDMA therapy, which the author concedes she and her

00:08:34.160 husband have a financial interest in. Her husband, John, is a big investor, apparently, in this psychedelic

00:08:38.860 industry in a drug being offered. So Jane Doe is now suing for intrusion, invasion of privacy,

00:08:47.060 publication of private facts, negligence, and infliction of emotional distress. There's a lot

00:08:51.100 to unpack here, and we're going to do it with our legal panel in just a minute. But we are going to

00:08:55.860 begin with MK Media's own Maureen Callahan. She's host of The Nerve with Maureen Callahan, and The Nerve

00:09:04.120 deserves a ton of credit, because it was Maureen Callahan who first smelled a rat. On this story,

00:09:12.020 Amy says there's no rat, no rat to be smelled. She says she's telling the truth. We'll get to all that.

00:09:16.720 But Maureen is the first one who said, this does not ring true to me. And you guys who listen to The

00:09:24.160 Nerve know that. And then the New York Times wrote an in-depth piece about it. I'm sure that, and we've

00:09:30.460 long suspected that there are writers at The Times who love Maureen's show. There's a lot of evidence

00:09:34.360 of it, actually. But sure or not, The New York Times got interested, wrote a long, in-depth piece

00:09:39.740 kind of blowing the lid off of this, because originally Maureen, when she reported on this,

00:09:44.180 did not know that these might have been stolen memories. The active thought, I think, at the time

00:09:50.140 was like, this is probably just made up, which she denies. She says they're real. But The New York

00:09:55.520 Times added a whole new layer in back in September saying, there's a woman who does have these stories 0.94

00:10:01.260 who she grew up with. Now, they stopped short of saying she stole them. But now we get the lawsuit

00:10:06.420 from the woman saying, I think she stole this. She stole these memories from me. And it's not just

00:10:13.740 my supposition. I had a meeting with her in 2019. The book came up in 2025. And some PI who alleged he

00:10:22.360 was a Hollywood talent agent saying he really wanted to talk to me about my very compelling

00:10:26.580 life story, and who then took off when she asked for his identifying information and suggested that

00:10:34.800 she wanted to bring her own lawyer in to look at everything after he'd already gotten all the

00:10:38.460 details, many of which she alleges wound up in the tell. Relief Factor loves hearing from pain-free

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00:11:29.700 in getting out of pain. Maureen, this is unbelievable. It's not unbelievable to you because it didn't take

00:11:38.620 much for you to sniff around this story and say, this doesn't seem right. So why? What was it that

00:11:43.880 made you say, hmm, I'm not sure about this one? Two things. One was Amy's deliberate depiction, 0.77

00:11:53.060 my opinion, in her quote-unquote memoir as just being a regular child of regular means.

00:12:00.920 And she depicted Amarillo, which I've never been to, as a very small town, rural, like she's some

00:12:09.420 hick. And I learned pretty quickly that Amy Griffin came from one of the most prominent

00:12:16.180 families in Amarillo. Amarillo is a cosmopolitan place that's full of money. Predators typically

00:12:24.920 do not go after children of means and prominence. It's too dangerous. They look for the broken ones. 0.64

00:12:32.620 They look for the neglected ones. They look for the ones that are like quote-unquote soft targets.

00:12:38.660 Secondly, she recounted violent incidences of sexual assault. I mean, one in which she said

00:12:48.480 what she calls a teacher she names Mr. Mason, it's a pseudonym, she says, threatened in a school

00:12:56.720 bathroom to knock her teeth out. Violence that would leave a child with bruises, marks that would raise 1.00

00:13:08.320 alarm among adults in this child's orbit. She also depicted these, again, violent, violent sexual

00:13:17.900 assaults in public places in the school. And, you know, classrooms, again, bathrooms, locker rooms,

00:13:26.240 places where at any moment a janitor could have walked in, another classmate, a teacher. None of it

00:13:31.940 rang true. None of it felt true. And even just the way she wrote about it, if anybody knows anyone who

00:13:40.500 is a survivor of sexual assault, especially childhood sexual assault, or knows somebody,

00:13:47.740 the way she wrote about that trauma, it just, it didn't sit right. And it felt like this third rail

00:13:55.020 in the media, especially because it had the backing of someone like Oprah Winfrey. And then this

00:14:00.660 constellation of powerful, famous women that Amy Griffin, in my opinion, has purchased. The Gwyneth

00:14:07.900 Pouchers of the world, the Reese Witherspoon, et cetera, et cetera. And so nobody wanted to say,

00:14:12.440 hey, wait a minute, this doesn't sound right. This isn't adding up.

00:14:17.220 Yep. And she's married to such a rich person that, you know, I'm sure many of these people

00:14:22.400 also thought, I'll get sued if I say I call bullshit on this. 0.99

00:14:27.600 Exactly. And the final thing is, if you are truly, truly recovering these memories,

00:14:35.980 and you believe there is a violent sexual predator targeting children, I think especially a woman of

00:14:44.960 means like that, you do everything in your power to bring that person to justice. Because as we all

00:14:49.720 know, child abusers, sexual predators, they're not, you can't rehabilitate them. There's no 0.90

00:14:55.320 therapizing them. No, it's not a one-time deal. So she alleges, the point I'll give her in her

00:15:02.500 favor is that when she, reportedly, according to the Times, when she shopped this memoir, again,

00:15:08.360 air quotes, she did name the teacher. In the book that tells, she calls him Mr. Mason, which she says

00:15:14.500 is a pseudonym. But reportedly, when she shopped the memoir, she named the teacher. And the teacher

00:15:20.080 is still alive. And by the time they actually got to the memoir, she didn't name them. She changed the

00:15:23.880 name, him. So I mean, that, that is in her favor, because that would be a reckless thing to do. If you

00:15:31.380 knew you had just stolen this story. And by the way, I left out an important detail. The woman Claudia, to

00:15:38.200 whom this actually did happen, says Claudia, says it wasn't Mr. Mason. It was a different teacher who then

00:15:46.000 left the school shortly after that, after the sexual assault of Claudia. And so, you know, that's

00:15:52.460 pretty bold. Like, that's an Amy's defense, don't you think? I'm of two minds about that, really. I mean,

00:15:58.380 I'm very skeptical of this woman. I think, on the nerve the other day, I called her an amoral husk of a 0.99

00:16:04.820 human being. And I think she is. She's been swanning around Paris Fashion Week while this lawsuit breaks 0.98

00:16:11.560 with Oprah and Gayle, just looking at any given camera and waving and smiling like she is not a

00:16:17.920 care in the world. This is, if this is, if this book is a lie, and if she, in fact, did steal Claudia's

00:16:25.100 sexual assaults, and has, in fact, accused an innocent man who is under a pseudonym in the book,

00:16:33.160 but who everyone in Amarillo knows who this guy is. That's reported. The New York Times reported that

00:16:38.380 she has committed a moral injury for the ages, and not just against these people, not just against

00:16:44.900 Mr. Mason, Claudia, but against every survivor of childhood sexual abuse, especially those who find

00:16:52.360 the courage to come forward and confront their abusers and take them to court. This is disgusting.

00:16:57.500 And here's the thing about book publishing, I think that a lot of people don't know. You wouldn't know 0.76

00:17:01.680 unless you're in the industry. Any author of any book, a memoir, a nonfiction book, I've had to do

00:17:09.260 it. You have to spend your own money to hire a fact checker. Book publishers do not fact check books.

00:17:15.600 So if she's floating a real name in the proposal stage, it means nothing.

00:17:20.020 That's exactly right. Doug, my husband, who writes nonfiction books, and they're in-depth. I mean,

00:17:28.820 he has so much to research. He has to fact check them, and he fact checks them to high heaven.

00:17:34.200 It takes him forever. It's his least favorite part of the book. I mean, he's done the research along

00:17:38.920 the way, but before you actually hit print, then you've got to go back again and make sure that

00:17:43.360 everything is shored up, that you've got a citation for every claim. And the publishing company may say,

00:17:49.340 you need a citation here, you need a citation there, but they're not the ones who are going

00:17:52.240 to go run it down. And in a memoir, they just rely on you. Like you say you were sexually assaulted by

00:17:58.520 Mr. Mason. Okay. Which is crazy. But then they do say, if we get sued by Mr. Mason, you author have 0.60

00:18:07.680 to indemnify us, the publisher, like in this case, it's Random House. So that'll be a cross claim

00:18:13.740 asserted because Random House has been dragged into the lawsuit too. For sure, Random House and the

00:18:18.220 Ghostwriter are going to cross claim against Amy Griffin, whether they think she's guilty or not,

00:18:23.480 because they're not going to want to have to pay for this. And it's Amy who's been making the

00:18:27.700 allegations. So the thing that's such a crazy turn on this though, Maureen, because I remember when

00:18:35.300 you did this on The Nerve, because I know this one, right? So it was like, oh my God, what's going on

00:18:38.800 with her? And there were these reviews on Amazon of the tell after a hit by a lot of women who

00:18:46.820 actually had survived sexual assault saying, this does not ring true. And also saying what you said,

00:18:51.960 which is they never pick the richest girl in town. They don't pick the prom queen. And she was very 0.99

00:18:58.160 popular, very rich, very well connected. And then it turns out what you didn't know at the time was

00:19:04.000 that there actually is a Claudia who was sexually assaulted, says Claudia, that the New York Times

00:19:10.660 would later manage to track down. And that Claudia is saying, not only did Amy steal the story from

00:19:18.640 her, that these are her memories, but now we learned from her lawsuit, they met. Like, it can't even be,

00:19:25.040 we'll see what Amy has to say about this. But to me, it looks like Amy can't even get out of this by being 0.99

00:19:29.900 like, I knew this story somehow from when I was 12. And I guess these, this drug brought it out as

00:19:36.500 my memory, when really it belonged to another girl, to Claudia, who I mentioned in the book is

00:19:41.120 just an associate of mine. Because Claudia is alleging, Amy went and found her in 2019. And

00:19:49.040 they sat down and they chatted. And Amy writes in the book about a postcard that she received from

00:19:53.100 Claudia, like later, or no, or it was unsigned, I think she says. And then the person who wrote the

00:19:58.560 postcard was just like, it happened to me too, or suggested it happened to her too.

00:20:02.900 But meanwhile, we find out from the lawsuit that this girl with whom she met and who she knew at

00:20:07.800 Amarillo was given the postcard when Amy met with her in California in 2019. And like, oh,

00:20:14.300 wouldn't it be cute if we each mailed each other a postcard? And that's, so this woman did mail her 0.99

00:20:19.500 a postcard, which she says said nothing about sexual assault. And then it winds up being misrepresented,

00:20:24.880 she alleges in the book. And on top of that, two years later, an alleged talent agent calls Maureen

00:20:31.400 wanting to meet with Claudia and get the specifics of her life story, which, you know, he allegedly

00:20:38.320 heard from somebody in Amarillo, I guess. And she gave it all up only to then read about it in the

00:20:43.560 tell. This is very damning. Doesn't that happen all the time, Megan? A small town girl with no

00:20:49.540 connections out of the blue gets a call from a big time talent agent. And something as like,

00:20:56.440 and I hate to say it, but it is like childhood sexual abuse is all too common. So what would

00:21:02.540 differentiate you? You have to be an Amy Griffin to get a book deal like that. You have to have all 0.91

00:21:07.100 apparently in her proposal, Amy name checked all of her very famous, powerful friends, including Oprah 0.85

00:21:15.140 Winfrey, because part of the deal when you're trying to get a book deal in this world now is

00:21:20.340 you have to prove that you're marketable, that you're commercial, that you have a built in audience,

00:21:24.960 whether that's on social media or elsewhere, what's truly diabolical, diabolical, and I think

00:21:30.800 will be the key part of this lawsuit is Claudia being able to prove that Amy solicited her for this 1.00

00:21:39.460 launch back in 2019 to extract all of these details, because I think the diabolical nature of

00:21:46.540 this, just my opinion, how premeditated it is for Amy to claim in the book that these memories came

00:21:54.380 back after an MDMA trip guided, though it may have been allegedly by a therapist. That's kind of a

00:22:01.520 shield, right? Oh, but it was drug induced. So I don't know, maybe I did in a drug haze. I conflated

00:22:07.560 Claudia, oh my bad, like no harm, no, no, there's a lot of harm. There's a lot of foul. In the book,

00:22:14.860 I think I said in the original NERV segment, you know, Claudia returned the dress that Amy had loaned

00:22:20.700 her for this dance, the dance at which Amy says she was sexually assaulted. But at that dance,

00:22:27.200 Claudia was the one allegedly who was really sexually assaulted. And that dress had a stain on 1.00

00:22:32.540 it from that assault that Claudia says she returned to Amy. So not only did Amy take the dress back,

00:22:39.220 but she took the story back with it. Allegedly. I hope that also Mr. Mason, who everyone in Amarillo

00:22:47.880 knows, who is apparently a married father, children, possibly grandchildren, he will have no problem

00:22:56.240 finding a shark of a lawyer who would take his case pro bono and, you know, launch a lawsuit against

00:23:02.620 Amy Griffin too. I would love to know, Megan, love to know. Do you remember when Oprah took James

00:23:08.960 Fry to the woodshed over a million little pieces, a million little pieces? And all he did was like

00:23:15.180 exaggerate his drug addiction. Is she going to do the same thing to her great friend, Amy Griffin,

00:23:20.520 if this turns out to be a complete lie? Yeah, we've, first of all, I definitely want to comment

00:23:25.940 on that. But first, I just want to point out the irony here is that to Claudia, the one to whom this

00:23:30.400 stuff actually did happen, says Claudia, is from the other side of the tracks, grew up in foster care,

00:23:37.340 had no connections, no real parents, and no money. Or like, I'm sorry to say that is the profile of

00:23:45.140 someone to whom this would happen, unlike the Amy Griffin childhood profile. And now she lives in,

00:23:53.060 I think, how was it? Palm Springs, like the area of Palm Springs, California. And I don't know what

00:23:59.520 she's doing, but it doesn't sound like she's made it big in the way that Amy Griffin has, marrying one

00:24:04.460 of the richest men on earth. And so like, if this is true, if Amy Griffin really did this, there is

00:24:11.080 zero chance she can let this go in front of a jury. Zero. Because there is no way they are going to

00:24:18.020 like her, right? Like, you've got this one girl to whom this actually did happen, or so she's been

00:24:22.940 saying her entire life. And she had proof at the time of a stained dress with the guy's semen, 0.95

00:24:28.580 and who now gets taken advantage of by this rich lady with all the connections and Oprah. 1.00

00:24:33.600 And the Oprah Winfrey thing, Maureen, here she is. We pulled it of her after the interview with James

00:24:40.140 Fry, who, yeah, it was found to have exaggerated some of the details in his book. You know, with

00:24:45.120 her mea culpa, she was so upset. Here's that moment. I don't know what is true, and I don't know what

00:24:51.500 isn't. So first of all, I wanted to start with the smoking gun report titled The Man Who Conned Oprah.

00:24:58.540 And I want to know where they write. I think most of what they wrote was pretty accurate,

00:25:05.800 absolutely. I did that show, and I was pretty defensive. I was defending my turf and defending

00:25:13.100 every single viewer who had bought that book. I am standing here on behalf of the reader who's pissed

00:25:22.280 off that it wasn't what we thought it was. Yeah. Looking forward to her doing that here, 0.65

00:25:29.340 or at least alerting her readership to the fact that there has been a lawsuit and now two New

00:25:33.220 York Times articles raising questions about whether any of this is true. 1.00

00:25:38.020 Oprah's so full of shit. Number one, by that point, she was a big player in the publishing industry, 1.00

00:25:43.420 right? Every publisher, every author wanted to get chosen as Oprah's book of the month.

00:25:47.860 So Oprah would well know that one of the trends in publishing at the time was memoir. And publishers

00:25:56.160 were often pushing novelists who submitted books. They would say, it's good, but it won't sell. You

00:26:03.800 know how we'll get it to sell. We'll frame it as memoir. So just try to reframe it that way. That's

00:26:09.540 what happened with James Frey. It was a publishing industrial media complex plan to make this book

00:26:18.440 break through and make money, which in that world is really the only thing that matters. And it's the

00:26:22.780 only thing that matters to Oprah, who we cannot remind people enough, is a self-proclaimed survivor

00:26:30.400 of childhood sexual abuse. So this either is sacred to her or it is not. And it's so important that the

00:26:38.380 media stays on this story because I think you're exactly right. There's no way Amy Griffin and her 0.82

00:26:43.240 husband aren't going to cut a big fat check to make this go away. Amy, this is probably, I'm going

00:26:49.880 to guess, again, just my opinion, a calculation in her head that were the worst to happen, that were

00:26:56.140 these people, unlikely though it may be, with no means to come after her, well, that she could just

00:27:04.620 cut a check because her friends in the media aren't going to prosecute the case and her husband's a

00:27:09.420 billionaire. And so even those of us who maybe aren't in the inner fold of her world, people like

00:27:15.980 me in the digital lane might be cowed by her husband's money for daring to say anything. I think

00:27:22.000 that's exactly what somebody like this is relying on. Well, we will stay on it. I mean, because look,

00:27:28.640 I didn't cover it when it first came out. I wasn't sure what the story was, but now we've had,

00:27:32.480 I mean, not one, but two New York Times articles, deep dive. They found this woman and now she's 1.00

00:27:38.220 sued and it's fair game. Amy Griffin is denying it. I'll read you her lawyer statement, but I know

00:27:43.280 Maureen's got to run. Thank you so much, my friend. Great job. Thanks, Megan. Okay. Here's,

00:27:48.800 this is what her, she's hired Tom Clare of Clare Lock. And this is like the best defamation law firm

00:27:55.500 you can hire. Of course, she's got all the money in the world to buy the best that money can buy. 1.00

00:28:00.460 And I wonder who Claudia, quote unquote, is represented by. It's going to have to be a

00:28:06.600 good lawyer. So this is what Tom Clare told the New York Times because they wrote up the lawsuit

00:28:12.640 when it hit last week. We look forward to exposing these meritless claims in court,

00:28:16.980 as well as the deeply flawed New York Times reporting that is at the center of it,

00:28:20.440 referencing back to that article they had in September. Just like the New York Times

00:28:24.340 manufactured a false narrative about Amy Griffin and the tell. It also engineered the premise for 0.57

00:28:30.560 this absurd lawsuit. After two New York Times reporters instigated this whole situation by

00:28:35.160 bringing the book to her attention, the plaintiff made her own choice to publicize her narrative to

00:28:40.500 a global audience. Okay. I guess by suing, which is by the way, under Jane Doe. For its part,

00:28:47.520 the Times took full advantage of publicizing this inaccurate narrative, despite receiving many

00:28:52.600 red flag warnings. Daniel Rhodes Ha, a Times spokeswoman, said in response,

00:28:57.820 we're confident in the accuracy of our reporting. So just before I bring in my legal panel, I want to

00:29:04.840 just tell you, I just want to spend a minute on the media around this, okay? Because it was ubiquitous

00:29:10.720 in terms of these high-powered women who are in Amy Griffin's circle. And you really do have to be 1.00

00:29:18.460 careful when you're dealing with somebody with this kind of money and these kind of connections

00:29:22.580 that you don't get used and made a fool of. And really, truly, like if this had happened to me,

00:29:28.800 if she had come on this show and now we had seen these allegations, I would absolutely come on the

00:29:34.020 air and say, I have to tell you that this lawsuit has been filed. I wouldn't take a side. That would

00:29:38.620 be, I wouldn't feel the need to stab somebody who had come on the show in the back or a friend in

00:29:42.520 the back. But I would absolutely feel the obligation to tell you that there's now been a woman who on the

00:29:47.660 record is making allegations that this entire story was stolen from her. And it's not just a

00:29:52.640 random allegation. The woman says she met with Amy in 2019 after having not seen her for 30 years at

00:29:59.480 Amy's request, that Amy bought a postcard and had her and filled, Amy's the one who filled out the 0.96

00:30:05.100 address and said, oh, please mail it to me, which would wind up in the tell being misrepresented as

00:30:10.840 somebody like secretly postcarding her saying, you know, kind of me too, which this Claudia, again,

00:30:17.000 that's not her real name, we don't know what her real name is, says, was not what the postcard said

00:30:21.020 and also was all orchestrated by Amy. And then that two years later, three years later in 2022,

00:30:27.880 she, quote Claudia, was contacted by someone claiming to be a Hollywood talent agent

00:30:33.280 and pumped for all the details about her story, which she gave to this person under the auspices of

00:30:40.020 potentially selling it to him. He said he might want to buy it and make a book out of it or a movie

00:30:43.840 out of it and that he would pay her for the rights to her life story. But then she eventually

00:30:49.880 contacted a lawyer of her own and that lawyer said, let's get this in writing, let's get a contract and

00:30:53.840 let's make sure this guy is who he says he is. And she alleges he disappeared. Now, who was that guy?

00:30:59.520 There is an allegation in the complaint that they know his name. It's Dominique something,

00:31:03.760 I'll pull it up. And that in fact, he was a private investigator hired by Amy Griffin. Well,

00:31:09.100 we're going to know all that. We are definitely going to get to the bottom of that. And if it

00:31:13.980 comes out that Amy Griffin hired this guy, and she admits in the book that she hired private

00:31:17.300 investigators to help track down some stories, and that she sicked him on an unknowing Claudia

00:31:25.320 and had him lie about what he really was. A private investigator working for Amy Griffin,

00:31:31.580 trying to find out what, you know, stories in Amarillo versus talent agent who was misrepresenting

00:31:37.140 what he wanted the story for to this woman who grew up in foster care so that actually it could 0.99

00:31:44.100 be stolen by Amy Griffin, allegedly, she's fucked. Sorry. She's just like, that better not have 0.99

00:31:51.760 happened. She denies it. She says the woman's the liar. That's quite an elaborate lie by so-called 1.00

00:31:59.900 Claudia. That's quite an elaborate lie to make up that they met, to make up that this person who's,

00:32:07.980 she has phone records for her, who's going to be identifiable. Again, there's a name in the

00:32:11.900 complaint. We're going to know whether this is a real person and whether Amy hired him. This is like,

00:32:17.460 the defense is going to have a different story to tell. But in any event, you can see that the

00:32:21.060 story, speaking of red flags, has red flags all over Amy's story. Amy's story. They say it's all

00:32:26.660 over Claudia's complaint. But let me just give you a little bit more, a sample of how she was treated 0.68

00:32:33.620 by the media. She went on Drew Barrymore. I got to tell you, I like Drew Barrymore now,

00:32:39.960 notwithstanding the fact that I've made fun of Drew Barrymore with her Dylan Mulvaney interview. I got

00:32:43.700 to admit it. I met her on vacation a couple months ago. She could not have been nicer. She was

00:32:49.200 actually very cool. And we actually kind of talked about politics a little. I'm not going to repeat

00:32:54.540 what she said because it was private, but she was quite reasonable. And I've developed a fondness

00:32:59.820 for her. I'm not going to lie. But I am going to show you her interview of Amy Griffin because I'm

00:33:03.360 trying to make a point about the media treatment she received on her book tour. Here it is, Satu.

00:33:09.360 It reads like the most compelling mystery, while it is also the most relevant,

00:33:17.140 relevant, relevatory, can't even say the word, journey. I have chills. Literally,

00:33:23.320 my God, you wrote the most fascinating book. It is a literary masterpiece, how it unfolds.

00:33:30.520 The book was a gift to myself to realize that vulnerability is actually power. The power that

00:33:38.040 I have in the vulnerability of sharing this. They're so afraid to tell our secrets,

00:33:42.400 especially the traumas that have happened to us in a very unjust way, such as it has to you.

00:33:51.080 How taking that wall down, telling that truth is what has brought your family together in ways

00:33:59.120 that are so powerful. And you were the age that your daughters were. It's like, God,

00:34:08.760 we just, if we've been through stuff, we're so worried for our kids to go through those things.

00:34:13.880 We just think, how can we protect them? We have, we even dealt with the stuff that has happened to

00:34:19.620 us. And the way that you walk through this is so, again, it's such an incredible, compelling read,

00:34:28.900 but it is, it is also, I think, going to really, truly be a catalyst to others finding the bravery

00:34:40.040 to come out with their truths.

00:34:44.080 Okay. Again, Drew Barrymore is not a journalist and I actually feel bad for her because her empathy

00:34:50.520 was clearly taken advantage of if this is true. If Amy Griffin made this whole story up, she took

00:34:55.400 advantage of what she knew would be Drew Barrymore's empathy and kindness toward her. And, you know,

00:35:00.640 they're not, they don't operate on that show under journalistic standards. You're not required. You

00:35:04.560 would never get a note from a producer saying, this is not, you're not being fair. We better test this

00:35:08.400 story a little, right? In a talk show. I think I've told you this, that one of Tamron Hall's producers

00:35:18.140 tried to get me on that show once. Obviously it was a no. But in trying to lure me over there,

00:35:23.080 they were saying, don't worry. It's not, she's not a journalist. Like she'd crossed over to talk

00:35:27.740 show host. So we can give you all the questions in advance. You know, we can stay away from anything

00:35:32.360 that's sensitive for you. I was like, what is this? Like, that's not how I operated my show at NBC.

00:35:37.560 That's for sure. But that's how they book guests. Like, don't worry, there'll be no hard questions

00:35:42.600 and your story won't be tested. And here are the questions in advance. So that's just so you know

00:35:47.780 what you're watching when you watch these so-called talk shows as opposed to journalistic

00:35:52.180 shows. Jenna Bush Hager, she was deeply problematic as well. Jenna Bush Hager does work for a news 1.00

00:36:00.680 organization and her show I think is considered under the news umbrella of NBC. And NBC, trust

00:36:06.660 me, they are going to need to comment on this. We're reaching out to all these people, Oprah,

00:36:12.200 NBC, Gwyneth Paltrow will go down the list. And we will ask what, if anything, they are going to do

00:36:18.280 to alert their audience that there's been this allegation now that this entire story is made up.

00:36:23.060 But here's how Jenna Bush Hager and Brooke Shields, I guess who was in for her co-host at the time, 1.00

00:36:28.800 interviewed Amy Griffin in SOT 3. They're obsessed with that same story about the daughter.

00:36:34.360 It's one of the hardest conversations I've ever had in my life. But it was that moment when my 10-year-old

00:36:38.600 said to me, Mom, I need you to participate in our life in a way that you're not right now. And so in

00:36:44.120 that moment, she was parenting me. And it was a wake-up call for me. Think about the beauty of that

00:36:50.800 kind of parenting. You put her in a position to feel like she could say something that vulnerable to

00:36:55.840 you. That is a testament to you as a parent as well. Don't lose sight of that. I think that idea of

00:37:01.900 giving our kids agency is like wildly important. Okay, that's because in the story, she writes a book

00:37:07.600 about her, she writes a story about how her daughter came to her and basically said, Mom,

00:37:12.600 where are you? You're here, but you're not here. Like, I'm looking for you and I want to know you,

00:37:18.240 but you're never around. She writes, Mom, Gigi said, I don't know how to say this, but I feel

00:37:22.000 like I don't know you. Know me, I said. What do you mean? I don't know, said Gigi. I feel so

00:37:26.640 disconnected from you. Really, I said, after all that I do for you? My life revolves around trying to

00:37:32.080 keep you safe and taking care of you. Mom, she's trying to tell you something, Gracie interjected.

00:37:36.660 She was 13 and reminded me of myself at that age, serious, driven, focused. We know you do

00:37:42.340 everything for us, but we don't feel like we know who you are, said Gigi. You're nice, but you're not

00:37:46.900 real. Do you have any idea how hard it is to have you as a mother? You do everything perfectly. You

00:37:52.980 make everything look so easy. How are we supposed to relate to you? I'm just trying to be there for

00:37:58.340 you, I said. You're here, but you're not here, Gigi cried. Where are you, Mom? All right, this is what

00:38:05.120 the kids call the humble brag. It's the daughter being like, you're so perfect and you're such an

00:38:10.260 amazing mom, but I just want to know you better. This allegedly led to her journey of self-reflection

00:38:17.480 and discovery. This reads like self-aggrandizement to me. I can't imagine myself writing such

00:38:25.740 passions in a book about myself and my daughter and such a private conversation that makes me look

00:38:30.740 like, coincidentally, this wonderful mother who just needs to let down her veil of perfection 1.00

00:38:34.880 so that she can bond with her child. And let's face it, let me just tell you, these two live

00:38:41.480 a jet-setting life, jet-setting, where they travel all over the world. And there is a question,

00:38:48.900 I'll just leave it at that, about why the daughters don't feel they know their mother. And I don't think

00:38:53.460 it has anything to do with her alleged veneer of perfection. She also happens to be like best 1.00

00:38:59.740 friends with Savannah Guthrie. So yet another reason why the Today Show is going to need to

00:39:04.820 comment on how they put this person on the air without any questions. And it appears many were

00:39:11.080 necessary. Again, Amy Griffin says, no, they aren't. My entire book is true. And by the way, in my book,

00:39:17.240 I disclosed that my memories might actually be fake. And it's even possible that I borrowed them from

00:39:22.800 someone. She actually does write that in the book. Like, gee, disclaimer, it's possible this isn't true

00:39:28.340 because it's discovered under this psychedelic drug. And maybe I borrowed them from somebody.

00:39:32.620 Okay, so that's supposed to save her. You can't just steal somebody's story. We'll get into that

00:39:36.000 with our legal panel. I want to show you one more. Here's Gwyneth Paltrow in SOT 10.

00:39:43.500 A journey that started with listening to her inner knowing and taking the brave leap from there.

00:39:52.560 So I'm really deeply thrilled and honored to have Amy on our podcast today. It's an unbelievable book.

00:40:02.060 I'm so deeply proud of her. And that's what's been so amazing about watching you go through this process

00:40:07.220 is like the real you, this you that we have now that is just like this strong, amazing, integrated

00:40:15.580 person. Unbelievable process that I've been so honored to witness.

00:40:20.500 I cannot encourage you all enough to order and read the tell. It's available for pre-order now.

00:40:28.300 And I found it personally life-changing.

00:40:31.980 Okay. She owes it to her audience as well. I'm sorry, but if these women actually do care about 1.00

00:40:38.320 survivors of sexual assault, then they owe it to quote Claudia to update the audience that a serious

00:40:45.320 allegation of theft, of theft, you know, there's stolen valor in the, in the military. What is this

00:40:53.200 like stolen victimhood allegedly denied by Amy? Um, they, they have an obligation to their audience

00:41:00.500 and to the actual victims of sexual assault to update their audiences that this has now happened.

00:41:07.300 There's been an in-depth New York times piece, which none of them updated their audience on in

00:41:12.900 September. They got away with completely ignoring it back then. And now we have the lawsuit. What's

00:41:17.360 it going to take? Uh, what if, and if, and when there's a civil judgment or more likely a settlement,

00:41:22.060 then do you update your audiences that someone has come forward saying all of these exact same

00:41:27.900 things happened to her and that some, some alleged Hollywood talent agent came into their lives the

00:41:34.220 year or two before Amy wrote this book and got all the details that just happened to wind up in Amy's

00:41:40.140 book as Amy's story. Come on. This is so if I'm sorry, but in my opinion, this stinks to high heaven

00:41:49.140 and she better not have fucking stole this woman's story. And these so-called journalists or TV hosts 1.00

00:41:54.680 better get out on their shows, exactly the forums in which they promoted this story and tell their

00:42:00.480 audiences that there's been a massive and material update and they can include Amy's denials about

00:42:06.300 Claudia's allegations as well. And I remain open-minded to hear her innocent explanation for how all of

00:42:12.980 that happened. It was a man named Dominique Price. The allegations of the complaint say the individual

00:42:19.480 who contacted Claudia claiming to be a talent agent, um, gave a phone number and that they called this

00:42:26.180 phone number. It is connected to a quote, Dominique Price, who according to California's secretary of

00:42:31.660 state records is the registered manager of sleeved LLC, a California LLC company with its principal place

00:42:37.880 of business at the following place in Marina del Rey, California. If that person is in fact connected to

00:42:43.800 Amy Griffin and was sent by her to go contact Claudia, she's toast. She's toast. She's going to have to

00:42:53.000 settle this case, in my opinion. Maybe Amy's going to say, I disclosed in the book, even that I used

00:42:58.980 private investigators to help me nail down my story. Your story? Your story? Like that might be fine if in

00:43:06.680 the book she said, I wasn't the only one. I can't prove that Mr. Mason alleged, uh, sexually assaulted

00:43:12.720 someone other than me, but I can tell you that I know of at least one other girl who was sexually assaulted 0.68

00:43:17.860 at the school. I don't know by whom. And here are some details of her story that you're already out on the

00:43:22.720 nice, if you offer the details without getting the woman's permission. But what happened here allegedly is

00:43:27.640 she stole Claudia's details, retold them as her own sexual assaults and made Claudia a periphery character. 0.99

00:43:36.080 They are just to support Amy's narrative about what happened to Amy. This is crazy. Uh, all right. I want to bring in

00:43:42.300 our legal panel and talk about the legalities of this because it's going to be a rather big lawsuit.

00:43:47.540 We're going to take a quick break first and they come back on the backside with our MK true crime

00:43:51.540 hosts. And then we are going to get into a couple of other big cases today. I want to tell you about

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00:45:16.160 We're going to stay on the Amy Griffin case and this bombshell lawsuit with our legal panel,

00:45:20.340 the hosts of MK True Crime, Dave Ehrenberg, Phil Holloway, and Ashley Merchant. Go to

00:45:25.780 mktruecrime.com to subscribe on YouTube or wherever you get your podcasts. If you love true crime,

00:45:31.320 you're going to want to check out MK True Crime. They've got the best cases and literally,

00:45:35.700 truly the best legal minds to dissect all of this stuff for you. Guys, great to see you all.

00:45:41.460 This case is really stunning. I mean, it's really crazy if you think about it. And I have to say,

00:45:47.500 I feel like we're in a privileged position to discuss it because I think most of the mainstream

00:45:52.320 media is afraid of John and Amy Griffin and they don't want to step on the toes of a couple of

00:45:59.160 multi-billionaires by repeating the allegations of this complaint or repeating the allegations in

00:46:04.180 the New York Times. And to the New York Times' credit, they did break this story. Maureen broke

00:46:08.360 the story, but they did then follow up and do an in-depth piece, and they found the woman. They

00:46:13.480 found Claudia. And now Claudia is pissed. Okay. I do want to read one thing that's in Claudia's

00:46:22.660 complaint. Again, not her real name, about Amy. She writes throughout the memoir, defendant Griffin

00:46:29.340 questions the validity and accuracy of her own memory. She further writes that she is not only

00:46:35.020 uncertain whether her memories of abuse actually happened, but that she is also unsure of whether

00:46:41.700 her memories are her own or Claudia's or are her own projections. So I'll start with you on it,

00:46:49.160 Ashley. Does that save Amy Griffin from this lawsuit? No, not at all. I mean, this is atrocious. 0.97

00:46:55.620 What this woman did is horrible, and I don't think it saves it from the lawsuit. You know,

00:46:59.300 and I think what's interesting, you were talking earlier about how this comes down to money. I think

00:47:02.660 this does come down to money, you know, and the fact that there was a plaintiff's lawyer out there

00:47:06.240 that was willing to take this, and I think it's important for the viewers to understand what

00:47:09.520 plaintiff's lawyers do, how they evaluate cases. They don't get paid. So the lady hired a lawyer, 1.00

00:47:15.120 and this lawyer believed enough in her case that he's taking this, and he doesn't get paid unless

00:47:19.340 she wins. So you counter that with Amy Griffith's lawyers who are fighting hard for her, but they're

00:47:23.700 being paid per hour. She's paying them to fight hard. So it's very different to me, and I think

00:47:27.860 that's very telling about the success, the likelihood of success of this lawsuit. But there's really three

00:47:33.260 big issues that they have to prove that's going to decide these lawsuits. Whether or not there was a

00:47:37.280 misappropriation of her life story, which is really better explained as an invasion of privacy,

00:47:41.940 whether or not there was fraud. And what does that mean? That means this whole fake agent

00:47:46.200 allegation, you know, this person who called, which is awful, that called her and tried to pry these

00:47:51.900 stories out so that they could use them for a book, you know, was that deceptive. And then also this

00:47:56.480 defamation, and that's going to be the hardest one, obviously, you know, as you were talking about

00:48:00.200 these false memories, but that's going to be the biggest issue and where this case really comes down

00:48:04.060 to, Megan. The fraud, here's another allegation on that, which I forgot about, and this is actually

00:48:09.920 quite relevant. They, they allege in the complaint, this is quote, unquote, Claudia, or now Jane Doe,

00:48:17.260 alleges in her complaint that in Amy's memoir, defendant Griffin states that she hired private

00:48:24.500 investigators via her husband's hedge fund after her MDMA therapy in order to track down information

00:48:32.340 and find corroborating witnesses who could help prove that her alleged repressed rape memories

00:48:39.160 were true. So Amy's story, I guess, will be that she went under psychedelics, Phil,

00:48:46.140 recovered the memories of her own rape, which just weirdly happened to dovetail perfectly with what

00:48:50.660 allegedly happened to Claudia, then hired a PI who contacted Claudia and Claudia, oh, oh my God, 0.98

00:48:57.400 had exactly the same details, which then Amy wrote all about as her own story without mentioning that

00:49:02.220 it was also Claudia's story. And she had sent a PI to go specifically steal this story from her.

00:49:06.620 I mean, I don't like, I think to me, this reads like somebody, Amy Griffin, who was writing the

00:49:11.600 memoir, understanding she could get pinched on some of these things. Like Claudia could come out upset 0.99

00:49:17.080 and that she was going to own some pieces of what she did, but not the theft. But you tell me your

00:49:23.500 take on this case. Yeah. So it's going to be interesting, Megan, to see what the defense to this

00:49:28.960 lawsuit is. We haven't seen the answer yet that will be filed. According to the complaint for damages,

00:49:35.660 and it says, quote, the memoir depicts Claudia as being aware she was speaking with investigators

00:49:41.600 working on behalf of defendant Griffin, voluntarily providing information for use in the memoir and

00:49:48.700 supportive of the publication of her private traumatic experiences. So look, if these investigators,

00:49:56.640 and I'm just going to use the term loosely, look, if the answer says, all right, here's the documents

00:50:03.480 that this Jane Doe signed stating that she knew that she was, you know, we were investigating this and

00:50:10.120 it's all on video. And so if the defense did their homework and they were smart about the way they

00:50:17.760 interviewed her, then maybe they can successfully defend this by portraying the lawsuit as being

00:50:25.740 untrue. But I seriously doubt that they're going to have that level of documentation to back up what

00:50:32.840 they're saying happened in researching this book. And I'm going to use the term loosely, but can we just

00:50:38.240 go back to the very premise of this just for a minute? Because anybody who thinks it's a good idea

00:50:44.380 to write a book, especially one on this subject matter, and they're going to say that they are

00:50:52.620 recovering memories using MDMA. Look, on MK True Crime, we've talked in many instances about junk science

00:51:00.880 and how junk science has no place in courtrooms. I'll go a step further and say junk science has no place

00:51:08.860 in writing of books. Because look, the science that we have seen says that the risks of, you know,

00:51:15.960 recovering memories with MDA, it's been shown to increase the rate of false memories. There's

00:51:21.740 increased suggestibility. Users under the influence of MDMA, even on this supposed guided therapy, they're

00:51:29.460 often more open to suggestion, which leads them to unintentionally fill in gaps. And there's also

00:51:36.000 impaired detail recall. So look, I think that the risk of using MDMA to try to recover repressed

00:51:45.900 memories is just, you know, a bad idea. And certainly to write a book and claiming that these

00:51:50.940 things are what truthfully, in fact, happened, it's just a bad idea to start with.

00:51:56.200 Very risky for the publisher. Yeah. So she claims she went under the therapy. All these memories came

00:51:59.760 flooding back. Claudia says, I told her those stories earlier when we were kids. She knew this happened to

00:52:05.440 me. And then she sent a PI my way. Stand by. We'll back more. We'll hear what Dave thinks. Don't go

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00:53:10.560 Back now with our guests, Dave Ehrenberg, Phil Holloway, and Ashley Merchant. Dave Ehrenberg, former

00:53:15.980 prosecutor for Palm Beach County, your take on this case.

00:53:20.320 Yeah, good to be back with you, Megan, with my cohorts, Ashley and Phil. So I was wondering what the

00:53:25.820 defense would be. And we discussed it a bit. And I think it's going to be subjective sincerity that

00:53:31.620 she's not lying. Amy Griffin's not lying because she genuinely believes the memories are real. So

00:53:37.140 she'll frame the book as more of a journey of therapy rather than a forensic report that so that

00:53:43.740 she can talk about that this is an internal experience, which is harder to litigate as a factual

00:53:48.420 lie. But the problem is that MDMA and other psychedelics can cause suggestibility. You get a

00:53:56.180 mix of real emotions and false details suggested by the environment or previous stories that you've

00:54:02.220 heard. So you could say that her brain didn't actually recover a memory. It absorbed one. And

00:54:07.980 also as a high profile author, she has a duty to fact check her recovered memories against school

00:54:13.700 records before publishing them as a definitive memoir. And she also has a problem in that if she

00:54:18.980 did, in fact, speak to the real victim here, which is what the evidence tells us before her MDMA

00:54:25.700 session, then the whole repressed memory defense sort of looks like a calculated cover for plagiarism.

00:54:32.700 Well, here's what I think we know, that they knew each other in school and that she allegedly may

00:54:40.560 have learned of the plaintiff's stories back then when they were children, because that dress that

00:54:46.520 got the semen stain on it from a different teacher committing allegedly a sexual assault against

00:54:51.880 Claudia was Amy's. And this girl, according to Amy's memoir, returned the dress to Amy, you know,

00:55:01.460 at the time. So there is reason to believe Amy knew the girl's story when they were kids.

00:55:06.280 Then it looks like Amy had the MDMA therapy and then sent private investigators out to meet with

00:55:14.920 this woman under false pretenses. These are the allegations as spelled out in the complaint.

00:55:19.920 And also, it seems like before Amy's MDMA therapy, she did herself meet with Claudia. She flew out to

00:55:28.940 Palm Springs and allegedly was like, oh, you know, Amarillo girls, let's get together. But at that meeting,

00:55:34.360 there doesn't seem to be an allegation they spoke about sexual assault. But Amy clearly like

00:55:38.680 re-established contact with this girl. And that's when Amy was like, let's buy postcards and send

00:55:44.340 each other a postcard. And each gal filled out her home address on the postcard and gave it to the

00:55:48.780 other. And this gal, Claudia, actually did allegedly send Amy the postcard. And she said, let's see, 0.98

00:55:58.380 defendant Griffin told plaintiff Doe that after writing a message in the postcard, she should put it in

00:56:01.800 the mail. A few days later, plaintiff Jane Doe wrote a brief sentence on the postcard related to 0.98

00:56:05.260 their mutual church youth group and placed it in the mail. She did not receive a return postcard

00:56:09.780 from defendant Griffin. However, to her knowledge, she never received contact from defendant Griffin

00:56:14.440 again after that meeting. But now in the tell, Amy spins this postcard is like evidence that Amy

00:56:21.720 wasn't alone. And there's another girl who got sexually assaulted. So this woman's like, what kind of

00:56:25.520 bullshit is this? This whole thing was a setup to steal my story. That's how it's going 1.00

00:56:30.300 potentially to look to a jury, Dave. Yeah, I agree. You know, you see, there's a lawsuit and

00:56:36.840 they're claiming that Amy Griffin used the woman's life story for commercial gain without consent. And

00:56:43.420 this is sort of like the stolen valor of trauma here. And if the plaintiff can show the specific

00:56:49.720 details are unique to her and were used to sell books, then yeah, you have a strong argument for

00:56:54.720 commercial theft. The thing on the other side, Amy Griffin could hold up the First Amendment, 1.00

00:57:00.320 which does provide broad protections for memoirs. And courts are generally wary of owning

00:57:05.980 facts or historical events. But if you can show manipulation that you sent an investigator in

00:57:11.720 there under false pretenses, you have these conversations that you're really mining the

00:57:15.220 information and then hiding behind your psychedelics as a way to explain it all. Yeah, I think a jury is

00:57:20.620 not going to like the defendant in this case. But Phil, if it is other than as alleged in this

00:57:27.700 complaint, if Amy Griffin sent a PI to go meet with Claudia, Claudia willingly shared the details of 0.72

00:57:33.900 her childhood story. Maybe she even potentially signed something saying, here are the rights to it.

00:57:38.440 Now, this is just me making things up. That's not been specifically alleged by anybody. But let's say

00:57:43.280 Amy Griffin's got a signed document from this woman, Claudia, saying, here's what happened to me. And yeah,

00:57:46.960 you can use it. And Amy's like, you know, I said in the book that these might actually be Claudia's

00:57:53.280 memories. Is she going to be okay legally? Yeah. So if they have that kind of bulletproof sort of

00:58:01.360 defense where, you know, they've papered everything and they've got, you know, Jane Doe's signature on

00:58:07.160 everything, that would fly directly in the face of all of the claims in the lawsuit. And in that

00:58:12.840 situation that you've presented the hypothetical, then, you know, Jane Doe and the lawyer who filed

00:58:19.240 that lawsuit would be on the hook for money for, you know, filing such a frivolous claim. I want to

00:58:26.460 touch, though, also... Then they would get sued for defaming Amy, right? Correct. They sure could.

00:58:31.580 They're going to be liable for defaming Amy. But the conversation between Jane Doe and Griffin, you know,

00:58:36.820 that is why we see, though, I think to me that's one of the more compelling claims in this lawsuit

00:58:42.380 because that gives rise to what we call the false light tort, okay? And this requires proving that a

00:58:49.920 defendant has publicly disclosed with actual malice a highly offensive false representation of the

00:58:56.340 plaintiff. And in that situation, they have to prove that there was public disclosure, that it was

00:59:00.780 widespread, that there was a false, that the information was false or it created at least a

00:59:07.020 false impression, and that it's, you know, highly offensive to the reasonable person. And if the

00:59:13.400 claims can be proven regarding that in-person meeting between those two, between the plaintiff and

00:59:22.100 Griffin, then I think that's one of the more powerful claims in this lawsuit. So as you pointed out

00:59:28.020 when you started this question, it's just going to depend on who has the receipts that they can

00:59:32.780 bring to this lawsuit. Megan, can I ask? Thank you. Phil, you, Phil mentioned actual malice,

00:59:39.600 but I always thought that actual malice only applies to when the party is a public figure. Jane Doe is not

00:59:46.200 a public figure, so I would think. No, but in California, that's what it requires. Oh, even if it's not

00:59:50.880 for false, even for a false light privacy claims. Oh, interesting. So that's a high bar, but I mean,

00:59:56.560 you might, you might be there. I mean, what she's alleging, the thing that the audience needs to know is

01:00:01.060 that Claudia's alleged two sexual assaults by a different teacher, not Mr. Mason, are identified

01:00:07.600 exactly by Amy Griffin as her own. When you read the complaint, you read the allegations of what

01:00:14.860 allegedly happened to Claudia by this other teacher. It's dark. It's extremely dark. It's harrowing.

01:00:23.240 And it appears in the tell as Amy's story. Plaintiff Jane Doe alleges in this lawsuit that she was 1.00

01:00:31.500 sexually assaulted in a closet by one of the school's teachers, that she was seen by numerous

01:00:35.700 attendees of the dance leaving the dance area. This is where she borrowed the dress from Amy.

01:00:40.340 At the behest of this teacher, she was seen by numerous attendees returning to the dance with

01:00:44.460 her dress soiled and her hair tussled. Plaintiff Doe was too scared to report the sexual assault to 1.00

01:00:48.680 authorities at the time. Soon after the school dance, just prior to one of their church youth

01:00:53.020 group meetings, plaintiff Doe brought the dress she had borrowed from defendant Griffin and returned

01:00:56.600 it to Griffin. Said dress was still stained with bodily fluids from the teacher who had sexually 1.00

01:01:00.840 assaulted her. And then she goes on to say that during the said church youth group meeting, which

01:01:07.560 both plaintiff Doe and defendant Griffin attended with a number of others, plaintiff Jane Doe asked for

01:01:12.220 Jesus's forgiveness due to the sexual assault by the teacher at the Sadie Hawkins dance. So she's 0.99

01:01:17.200 alleging Amy Griffin knew from the church group meeting that this girl, Jane Doe, Claudia, was the

01:01:22.500 one who got sexually assaulted by a teacher that Amy knew that from their church group meeting. She

01:01:26.240 writes that approximately one month later, plaintiff Jane Doe was again sexually assaulted by the same 0.82

01:01:30.320 school teacher. Again, this is not Mr. Mason. This time in the bathroom of the Stephen Austin Middle

01:01:34.940 School. This assault was more violent. And during the incident, the teacher put his boot on her back, 0.96

01:01:39.520 stuffed a bandana in her mouth, which later caught on her braces, slammed her against the wall and

01:01:44.180 whipped her with a belt. Plaintiff who was only 12 at the time and was living in a children's home was

01:01:48.540 too scared to report the details. Plaintiff alleges that these sexual assaults were also falsely

01:01:53.600 attributed by defendant Griffin to a different perpetrator who she calls Mr. Mason. And then

01:01:59.420 she said we'd had no contact for 30 years. Then Amy contacted me out of the blue, said she wanted to

01:02:05.480 meet just to go over like what life was like in Amarillo in late 2019. We did meet and discussed that

01:02:13.580 we'd been part of this church group together. She doesn't say that she disclosed all of the

01:02:17.600 details again of the encounter. She says that Amy Griffin explicitly referred to herself in the

01:02:23.260 meeting as a girl boss and then told plaintiff Doe that she was a girl boss too. Then they did the

01:02:30.700 thing with the postcards. Then she says in April, 2022, she plaintiff was contacted by telephone by

01:02:37.780 someone who didn't say he was an investigator, but said he was a talent agent and said that he had

01:02:43.060 heard from an unidentified third party that she led a fascinating life and expressed an interest in

01:02:47.380 using her life story for commercial exploitation. The phone number which was provided to her was

01:02:52.180 rooted back to this California corporation, which I mentioned, and that the individual in question

01:02:56.880 spoke with plaintiff Jane Doe for multiple hours a day, a few times a week over approximately a one

01:03:01.400 month period, soliciting detailed stories from her about her life, including her childhood in Texas,

01:03:07.060 which she discussed with him under the understanding and belief that her info would remain private unless she

01:03:10.760 entered in an agreement with him for her life story. Obviously, she was considering selling it to

01:03:16.200 him depending on the price, depending on the terms, but she says that after multiple phone calls and

01:03:20.980 soliciting stories from plaintiffs past, a female individual called her plaintiff to schedule a 1.00

01:03:28.260 meeting in Los Angeles, and then she contacted a lawyer and she asked for more information and they

01:03:33.080 ghosted her. They ghosted her and she couldn't find any information online about either of these

01:03:38.440 individuals. So she was starting to suspect they weren't who they said they were. She also says

01:03:43.940 she didn't tell anybody else, no third parties about her sexual assaults, and then was shocked to read

01:03:49.300 about them in Amy's book as her own. In the book, Defendant Griffin states Claudia is the key link to

01:03:56.420 understand and confirm her own drug-induced suppressed memories. Her first journal entry after her first

01:04:01.400 MDMA session involved Claudia in a borrowed dress. Through the prism of Claudia, I had experienced the horror

01:04:07.500 of what was being done to me, which includes all those same details, you guys, about the alleged Sadie

01:04:14.060 Hawkins dance, about the alleged bandana, about the alleged boot on the back, and quotes about

01:04:22.980 knocking your teeth out, all of which Claudia says are hers. This is quite devastating if it's real,

01:04:28.860 and there are two issues here. The legal issues, which will be fought in court or more likely settled if

01:04:33.520 there's any semblance of truth, and the journalistic issues on how the media fell down, and just giving

01:04:39.260 a complete pass to this story without pressing, and then didn't update its audiences once this came

01:04:45.080 out by the Times in September, by the Times again this month in the wake of this bombshell lawsuit.

01:04:50.260 Okay, let's move on, because I know you guys over on MK True Crime have been covering the Corey

01:04:53.800 Richens case, which is also extremely compelling. So this woman, by the way, this story has been blowing

01:04:58.720 up on MK True Crimes. You can watch the trial live every day with great coverage by all of our team

01:05:03.700 here. She's a Utah mom of three. She self-published a children's book called Are You With Me? in March

01:05:09.400 of 2023. It was two months before she'd be arrested for the murder of her husband. She said she wrote

01:05:14.820 that book to help children, hers, deal with grief after losing a parent, a father. Her children did

01:05:21.540 because she allegedly killed him. This was not disclosed at the time when she wrote it, but two months

01:05:25.900 later she was under arrest, and this was one year after the passing of her husband, Eric, the father

01:05:30.840 of her kids. Here is this woman promoting Corey the book in April of 2023 on Salt Lake City's ABC

01:05:37.980 affiliate. Corey, I want to start with your story. What happened in your personal life? So my husband

01:05:44.780 passed away unexpectedly last year, so it's March 4th was a one-year anniversary for us, and he was 39.

01:05:53.140 It completely took us all by shock, and we have three little boys, 10, 9, and 6, and, you know,

01:06:02.840 we kind of, my kids and I kind of wrote this book on the different emotions and grieving processes

01:06:10.440 that we've experienced last year. Well, I opened up your book, and one of the first pages I saw is a

01:06:14.860 little boy. It looks like he's standing in a hallway at school, and he's saying, are you still here?

01:06:18.740 Yes. Yeah, and it's, you know, and that was like the first day of school, and, you know, all the nerves

01:06:24.400 that kids face on the first day of school with Nuke, you know, and just hoping, you know, dad, like,

01:06:30.360 walk with me, like, help me get through today, like, give me the strength to do that.

01:06:34.920 Unbelievable. There was definitely something off about her affect there, and just over a month after

01:06:40.700 that clip, she was arrested and charged with aggravated murder for allegedly poisoning Eric to death.

01:06:46.520 She allegedly put five times the lethal dose of fentanyl into a Moscow mule, which she is accused

01:06:54.880 of serving him in his bed. Like, he was in bed, she gave him the drink, and he was dead by three in

01:07:00.580 the morning. So back now with our panel. Here's the thing I wonder about, Ashley. Where does a housewife 1.00

01:07:07.700 in Utah get her hands on a ton of fentanyl that she could just slip into the drink of her husband 0.73

01:07:15.300 and kill him?

01:07:17.420 Well, that's one of the many mysteries in this case that we really don't have answers to. I mean, 0.82

01:07:21.460 this is not really a murder mystery. This is a group of people who are deeply unreliable,

01:07:26.240 and they're trying to explain this very chaotic situation around someone who has a drug problem.

01:07:31.220 The husband had a drug problem. He has this medical history where he has been doctor shopping,

01:07:36.220 essentially. He said he had Lyme disease, nerve pain, mysterious allergies, all of this stuff,

01:07:40.740 which are the type of diagnoses that are notoriously difficult to verify, but they're very useful in

01:07:46.560 getting doctor shopping for pain pills. So we know he had an addiction issue. So the real question is

01:07:52.040 whether or not she's the one that put this pill in his Moscow mule, in his sandwich, in whatever it is 0.72

01:07:57.580 that they're saying that she did, or whether or not this was just an overdose. And the problem,

01:08:02.060 what you're asking about the credibility of who gave these drugs, it's a cast of characters.

01:08:05.660 You've got the wife, you know, you've got Ms. Richards who is struggling with his house flipping

01:08:09.300 business. You've got the business partner. You've got the cleaner. You've got a sister.

01:08:13.520 You've got the doctors. Everybody has different stories. None of them add up. None of them make

01:08:17.300 any sense. You've got paranoia in the husband who died. You've got financial stress. You've got this

01:08:23.340 man. He believes that he's, you know, got all of these issues. He believes he's being poisoned.

01:08:27.500 I mean, this is just crazy. So you got to ask yourself at the end of the day, is this really a case

01:08:31.880 about a murder? Or is this a case about addiction? Is this a case about a drug overdose? And all of

01:08:37.100 these people who are giving him pills, helping him get pills, but maybe nobody actually had a motive

01:08:41.820 to kill him. Maybe he just overdosed. She's doing a good job, Phil, of defending Corey Richens. But I

01:08:50.120 think we all know she did it. Okay, that's my opinion.

01:08:54.920 She totally did it. 0.97

01:08:55.980 No, she did a great job of laying it all out there. I think that all those things can be true

01:09:02.580 that Ashley Merchant just said, but also it can be true that Corey Richens is a cold-blooded killer

01:09:09.120 because, look, now we have hush puppies in this case, Megan, that were given to Corey Richens'

01:09:17.380 long-time boyfriend the day before her husband died. And the boyfriend suddenly blacks out, 0.55

01:09:26.860 loses track of time for a number of hours, and finally comes to around 11 p.m.

01:09:32.900 Phil, what is a hush puppy?

01:09:35.400 Oh, you don't know what a hush puppy is. Okay, it's a little ball of succulent, delicious bread

01:09:40.320 often served with fish.

01:09:41.900 It's deep fried.

01:09:42.520 When he comes to his mind the next time, I'll make sure you get some.

01:09:45.320 No, I don't like fish. Wait, are you using it like metaphorically or an actual hush puppy?

01:09:51.300 It's a food dish. It's called a hush puppy, right? So she fed him.

01:09:54.560 So she gave it to her boy, because she had a boyfriend. I neglected to mention Corey was

01:09:57.260 definitely having an affair with somebody, and they were loving texts.

01:09:59.440 Long-time affair with this guy, and yes, and so there's that. And then there's also

01:10:04.560 the Valentine's Day prior to the husband's death. There's the allegation, the claim is that she

01:10:12.400 tried to do a trial run or maybe attempted to murder her husband on Valentine's Day by spiking 1.00

01:10:19.120 his food, a sandwich, and so he got sick after that. And so we have all these things. And then

01:10:26.420 you've got the financial crimes, which are legion in this case. We've got insurance fraud. We got bank

01:10:32.240 fraud. We got loans taken out in his name that he didn't know anything about. You know, all these

01:10:37.480 things that she's accused of doing, now they're not tried in this case. They're going to be a

01:10:43.080 separate trial. But this woman is facing eons in prison just on the financial crimes alone, which 1.00

01:10:50.000 appear to be also a slam dunk case. The only problem that the prosecution has that I see proving her guilt

01:10:58.480 in this murder case is tying Corey Richens directly to the fentanyl that we know killed her husband.

01:11:05.800 And what the issue is, is the housekeeper, who was supposedly the go-between, who Corey contacted,

01:11:13.320 and of course she contacted another guy. Well, that other guy, who's the actual supplier of the

01:11:18.540 alleged drugs in the case, he's a convicted felon. He's back and forth, he's talking out of both sides

01:11:24.820 of his mouth about whether or not he provided oxycodone or did he provide fentanyl. And he's given

01:11:31.460 different accounts at different times, depending on who you asked. And so if there's reasonable doubt

01:11:36.700 about the fentanyl being connected all the way back to Corey Richens, then it's probably going to

01:11:42.000 be a not guilty. But if they can get over that hump, the rest of it, particularly the circumstantial

01:11:47.280 evidence is, I think, really, really compelling and she'll be found guilty. I am using my housekeeper

01:11:54.560 all wrong. I just have her clean. I had no idea you could be getting oxycodone and fentanyl

01:12:03.280 through such a person. So here is in SOT 18, this is the housekeeper, Carmen, claiming that Corey

01:12:11.680 did okay her purchase of fentanyl. What, if anything, did you ask Robert Crosier for?

01:12:19.820 If he knew anybody who had any pain pills for sale.

01:12:25.660 And how did he respond?

01:12:27.700 He said he would reach out to a couple of people. He said he had a buddy that had some fentanyl pills.

01:12:34.120 What then did you do?

01:12:39.660 I had texted Corey back and told her that I had a friend that could get them, but they

01:12:47.680 were fentanyl pills.

01:12:52.660 So you told Corey you had a friend, a hookup for fentanyl pills?

01:12:56.960 Yes.

01:12:58.400 How did Corey Richens respond?

01:13:00.540 She said, okay, go ahead and get them.

01:13:04.120 Is that good enough, Dave?

01:13:06.300 Yeah. This case is not hard. You have a young woman who had a lover, who wanted money, was

01:13:15.060 desperate for money, so clear motive, who hated her husband, and who tried to poison him previously.

01:13:20.740 She's also being charged for that. She made him a sandwich. He felt sick, and he called her,

01:13:26.240 and she said, don't go to the hospital, just sleep it off. And he survived. And then weeks later,

01:13:31.480 she managed to finish the job with a Moscow mule because she went to the housekeeper and said,

01:13:36.420 give me some of that Michael Jackson stuff. Now, that's what she wanted. So they've got this. Plus,

01:13:41.320 there's this letter called the Walk the Dog Letter. And in this letter, it was found in Corey's jail cell.

01:13:48.360 She instructed her mother to tell her brother to testify that he knew that Eric, the victim, got pain pills and fentanyl from Mexico and that he gets high every night.

01:14:01.480 So they're fabricating this whole drug abuse thing. There is no real evidence that Eric was a real drug abuser. In fact, business partners and medical experts have not supported it.

01:14:12.800 So I think she's going down for these crimes. And it really does take a lot of chutzpah. And that's a technical legal term, Megan, for her to go on TV and write a book and say, you know, please support me in my grief.

01:14:23.720 It's like the story of the child who kills both his parents and throws himself on the mercy of the court because he's an orphan.

01:14:33.060 Right. We have that a little bit about the Walk the Dog Letter. So first of all, why is it called the Walk the Dog Letter, Dave?

01:14:39.540 It's it's it's I think there's some talk they talk about, hey, make sure you walk the dog in there.

01:14:46.480 And that's just I guess that's why it mentions it. But it's really a smoking gun because of the other stuff that's in there.

01:14:52.140 All right. Let's listen to a little bit of the testimony about this, about Corey Richens Walk the Dog Letter about her husband, Eric, allegedly getting fentanyl in Mexico.

01:15:03.080 This is Detective Jeff O'Driscoll on the stand.

01:15:06.000 It's not 26.

01:15:06.680 Is this an accurate depiction of a six page letter to Lisa Darden written on either September the 12th or 13th, 2023, that investigators recovered on September the 14th, 2023, from a book that was among Corey Richens personal possessions?

01:15:29.880 This is that letter. It has redactions. But yes, this is that letter.

01:15:34.780 Letters go to one walk the dog, but take vague notes. So you remember.

01:15:39.340 Here is what I'm thinking, but you have to talk to Ronnie. He would probably have to testify to this, but it's super short.

01:15:50.000 Not a lot to it. He will need to tell Sky at the meeting next week upon information and belief.

01:15:56.080 Just like they say a year prior to Eric's death, Ronnie was over watching football one Sunday and Eric and Ronnie were chatting about Eric's Mexico trips.

01:16:06.940 Eric told Ronnie he gets pain pills and fentanyl from Mexico from the workers at the ranch, not to tell me because I would get mad because I always said he just gets high every night and won't help take care of the kids.

01:16:26.560 So there we have the letter. That's from Corey Richens to her mom, Lisa Darden, saying, hint, hint, it would be great.

01:16:36.920 This is the allegation. It would be great if we could get this testimony that Eric, my husband, loved fentanyl and got it in Mexico, Ashley.

01:16:43.720 That's what's happening there.

01:16:45.120 It is. And he did. He loved fentanyl. He was a pain addict. I mean, that's the elephant in the room.

01:16:50.460 He was addicted to pain pills. He had been since he was in high school. That addiction had not gone away.

01:16:55.800 He hadn't been treated for it. And I mean, what happens is paranoia goes along with opioid addiction.

01:17:01.660 So it's very predictable that he thought he was going to be poisoned by a sandwich.

01:17:05.000 And quite frankly, you asked about the credibility of this housekeeper.

01:17:07.280 I think the only reliable witness in this entire case might be the actual sandwich.

01:17:10.940 I mean, there is no reliable witness in this case. They're not.

01:17:14.740 The business partner is not reliable. The housekeeper is not reliable.

01:17:17.800 Nobody is. This drug dealer is not reliable. I remember giving fentanyl. I don't remember giving fentanyl.

01:17:21.920 Yeah, it was fentanyl. I mean, they're not.

01:17:23.480 And that's who the prosecution is bringing to prove this. And they have a significant motive issue.

01:17:28.280 I mean, why would she kill him? Their whole motive is, oh, it's for money.

01:17:31.420 He was funding her house flipping business. Her house flipping business, it was not doing well.

01:17:35.700 But he was the one funding it. That's all she had. Why is she going to go and off him?

01:17:40.320 You know, it just it doesn't make any sense.

01:17:41.920 What makes sense, what's the most reasonable explanation is he got fentanyl from the housekeeper.

01:17:46.740 He got fentanyl from someone. He was addicted.

01:17:49.280 He's going to take whatever meds he can. He's saying he has Lyme disease. He's saying he has this mysterious allergies.

01:17:54.660 He is pain pill shopping. He's going to put whatever he can in his body because he was addicted and he overdosed.

01:17:59.940 Here is the prosecutor, Brad Bloodworth, in his opening statement saying, in addition to allegedly murdering Eric for his money because she was $4.5 million in debt on her house flipping business and thought her husband was worth $4 million and that she'd get his life insurance policies, etc.

01:18:16.000 There was another motive, which I've now alluded to, and here it is in Sot 12.

01:18:20.080 March the 3rd, 2022, the defendant, Corey Richens, her husband, Eric Richens, and their three children, 9-year-old Carter, 7-year-old Ashton, and 5-year-old Weston, are at their home in Camas.

01:18:43.880 Eric Richens, Eric Richens, live for his three boys.

01:18:51.420 At 7.22 p.m., Corey Richens' boyfriend, Robert Josh Grossman, texts Corey Richens an image of two people romantically kissing.

01:19:07.400 The image is captioned, love you.

01:19:10.240 At 8.36 p.m., Corey Richens replies, love you.

01:19:21.160 The boys go to bed.

01:19:24.280 Corey Richens makes Eric drink and takes it to him in their bedroom.

01:19:29.720 He drinks on the bed.

01:19:32.080 She departs the bedroom.

01:19:33.160 Corey Richens returns to the bedroom at about 3 o'clock a.m.

01:19:41.780 She feels that Eric is cold.

01:19:44.980 She nudges him.

01:19:46.900 He does not respond.

01:19:48.660 Well, Dave, he's not exactly a font of personality, our friend Brad Bledworth.

01:19:56.720 But I get it.

01:19:58.280 You know, he's getting it done.

01:19:59.200 He's getting the facts out there.

01:20:00.180 Is there proof that she is the one who brought him the drink?

01:20:02.980 I mean, is that—does it come down to that?

01:20:04.840 Like, or do we—does everyone admit she brought him the drink and it's just a question of who put fentanyl in it?

01:20:10.740 Yeah, I didn't think there was any dispute over who brought him the drink.

01:20:13.720 She made him a drink, and then her argument is that he spiked it with fentanyl because he was such an addict.

01:20:20.380 Apparently, there was five times the lethal dose of fentanyl in his system.

01:20:24.340 I mean, who does that?

01:20:25.180 I mean, even if you are addicted to opioids, do you really do that?

01:20:28.640 In fact, they didn't find any other, like, drugs in the place when they searched the place.

01:20:33.200 They didn't find that he was a drug abuser, and Ashley's an excellent criminal defense lawyer.

01:20:38.000 She really is, but I don't know how you can—

01:20:39.960 She is. We know that.

01:20:41.140 She's the reason the whole case against Trump and the other defendants went away by Fannie Willis. 0.79

01:20:45.340 So, yeah, she is very good. Keep going.

01:20:47.420 Yeah, but I don't even think Ashley Merchant can pull the rabbit out of this hat. 1.00

01:20:50.860 I mean, when we're talking about that walk the dog letter, I mean, why do you put walk the dog on that letter?

01:20:57.040 It's like code, you know?

01:20:58.720 There's nothing to do with walking the dog.

01:21:00.080 And you know what her explanation was for that is that, well, this was a manuscript she was writing,

01:21:05.960 that she was writing, like, another book, like the fake book she wrote the first time,

01:21:10.620 and it was a fictional mystery novel, even though she used the actual names of her real family in there.

01:21:15.440 So she just can't help herself, this defendant.

01:21:19.160 She's pathological. That's how it seems to me.

01:21:21.420 All right, well, we shall see. Where are they in the case, Ashley, and when do we expect the jury to get it?

01:21:27.040 Oh, my gosh. This case is going on forever.

01:21:28.800 It looks like we have about two more weeks of testimony.

01:21:31.100 They think that they're going to wrap it up probably the end of March, so it's about a three- or four-week trial.

01:21:35.940 There's been a lot. There's been a lot of witnesses, and every single one has credibility issues.

01:21:39.980 So I think it's going to come down to whether or not the jury believes this motive,

01:21:44.340 and I think it's going to come down to whether or not they believe these witnesses that have problems.

01:21:47.840 She hasn't taken the stand, right?

01:21:49.960 She's not.

01:21:50.400 She has not. No, she has not taken the stand.

01:21:52.860 That'll be a very interesting decision.

01:21:55.780 I can't wait to see if she does take the stand and see how she comes across.

01:21:59.200 That's a very tough decision.

01:22:00.980 This thing has given Alec Murdoch vibes.

01:22:02.980 It's given Alec Murdoch vibes.

01:22:04.240 She's in all sorts of financial trouble.

01:22:06.840 In her case, she's got an affair partner, which is sort of a different wrinkle,

01:22:11.160 but that she allegedly bumped off the husband to get money. 0.98

01:22:14.440 I mean, Alec did it for sympathy so that people would not continue looking into his financial crimes.

01:22:20.240 She seems pathological to me.

01:22:22.580 All right.

01:22:22.840 Everybody can continue following the Corey Richens trial on MK True Crime.

01:22:27.280 It's a podcast.

01:22:28.020 You can download it wherever you get your podcasts for free.

01:22:29.940 It's also a YouTube show.

01:22:31.660 If you go to mktruecrime.com, you will see all the info,

01:22:34.820 and you will get to enjoy our guests and their great legal analysis as well as live coverage of the trial.

01:22:38.560 Thanks, guys.

01:22:39.580 Coming up next, Mark Garagos and Matt Murphy, two other contributors over at MK True Crime,

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01:24:31.960 Now we turn to the latest in the search for Nancy Guthrie,

01:24:34.540 which has entered day 40.

01:24:36.480 We've got some of the best here to discuss the very latest,

01:24:38.800 and that's Mark Garagos,

01:24:39.840 criminal defense attorney.

01:24:40.840 We have yet to hear his take on this case.

01:24:42.620 And Matt Murphy,

01:24:43.420 former homicide prosecutor.

01:24:45.060 Both are hosts at MK True Crime.

01:24:47.460 And we have some big announcements over there coming soon.

01:24:50.580 So, Garagos, 0.98

01:24:51.160 I haven't heard your take on the Nancy Guthrie case.

01:24:53.660 What is it?

01:24:55.240 Not that different from my friend and partner,

01:24:58.860 Matt Murphy.

01:24:59.980 This sheriff,

01:25:00.660 I think all roads lead to this sheriff.

01:25:03.660 And I think that,

01:25:05.300 you know,

01:25:06.840 it's not a surprise that I have some criticism of law enforcement.

01:25:11.120 But in this particular case,

01:25:12.600 this may be kind of a blueprint for how you don't investigate a case,

01:25:17.940 how you don't handle the messaging around a case.

01:25:20.920 And it's a tragedy.

01:25:23.160 Anyway,

01:25:23.820 everybody has their heart goes out to it.

01:25:25.980 But the sheriff has just been atrocious in my opinion.

01:25:30.100 Do you have any theory,

01:25:31.440 Garagos,

01:25:31.780 just given your lifetime in,

01:25:33.260 you know,

01:25:34.260 criminal defense work on whether this was a likely kidnapping,

01:25:37.560 a likely murder,

01:25:39.080 you know,

01:25:39.480 and then removal of the body?

01:25:41.980 I always thought that the focus on the family first,

01:25:45.460 which I understand.

01:25:46.660 And I get,

01:25:48.720 but I thought that being a bi-coastal elite and living between LA and New York,

01:25:54.920 I missed what people were saying initially who were on the ground there that,

01:25:59.700 look,

01:25:59.920 this is,

01:26:00.640 you're very close to the border.

01:26:02.400 These things happen.

01:26:03.480 I think there was another,

01:26:05.100 I will call it similar case,

01:26:06.840 but something that had kind of the earmarks of a,

01:26:09.940 of an abduction and that it probably was a stranger abduction.

01:26:14.660 Or abduction for money at a certain point.

01:26:17.760 And it spiraled out of control because of the supersizing of the case itself.

01:26:23.020 Interesting.

01:26:23.800 Okay.

01:26:24.000 So Matt Murphy,

01:26:24.600 you have been covering this from the beginning.

01:26:26.420 And yesterday here on our show,

01:26:28.960 we dropped a bit of a bombshell ourselves where we found video of Nancy Guthrie's bedroom,

01:26:34.900 which aired on the today show in 2013.

01:26:38.460 I mean,

01:26:38.560 we were stunned to see it ourselves.

01:26:39.820 We're putting together this Nancy Guthrie bit and we were doing some deep research.

01:26:43.540 And there it was in 2013.

01:26:45.800 There's Nancy. 0.78

01:26:46.600 Look at this standing in her bedroom.

01:26:48.300 This is in the house from which she was taken back in 2013 though.

01:26:52.820 And it shows her bed.

01:26:54.400 It shows the nightside table.

01:26:55.920 It shows the window right next to the bed.

01:26:57.800 Very tight quarters there.

01:26:59.120 And in this long back and forth she did with the today show anchors on the set of the today.

01:27:03.560 And to me,

01:27:04.600 I wondered whether law enforcement even knew this existed because you and I,

01:27:09.140 after having looked at this,

01:27:10.180 could credibly convince law enforcement that we knew what Nancy's bedroom looked like,

01:27:17.280 how it was set up.

01:27:18.280 And if we wanted to write,

01:27:20.160 let's say a demand for ransom in Bitcoin and send it in and sound credible,

01:27:25.980 we might take a detail from the outside of the house that was readily identifiable to anybody,

01:27:30.220 like the floodlight that was dangling,

01:27:32.060 and couple it with a few details from the inside of Nancy's bedroom,

01:27:35.440 which we had seen thanks to a little bit of research prior to sending our notes,

01:27:40.440 and convince somebody that we were the kidnappers.

01:27:42.500 Well, that's right.

01:27:45.700 I mean, there's, as they say, the internet lives forever, right?

01:27:49.280 And, you know, I think that, number one, I totally agree with Mark,

01:27:53.480 that all roads lead back to this sheriff.

01:27:56.640 And look, I want to be fair, Megan, 0.98

01:28:00.420 but this has been a clown show from day one.

01:28:04.800 You've got really good law enforcement on the ground, especially in the FBI,

01:28:08.740 but I've dealt with Pima County on a big murder case out of Orange County,

01:28:13.400 and they were top-notch.

01:28:14.800 They were absolutely professional.

01:28:16.560 I don't know what has happened to Pima County since—

01:28:19.760 Well, reportedly a bunch of cops fled and did not like working for him,

01:28:22.560 and that he's lost a lot of his more experienced homicide investigators.

01:28:24.520 Well, yeah, who could have ever guessed that based on the performance that we've seen?

01:28:27.920 I mean, it's just—I mean, I think Mark put it perfectly.

01:28:31.400 It's just—it's so sad.

01:28:33.620 But, yeah, all—so many of these, I think all of them,

01:28:38.620 but if not every single one of them, most,

01:28:42.680 all of these ransom notes were all fake.

01:28:45.720 All the stuff to Mark's front and Harvey Levin, I think those were all fake.

01:28:50.380 And the Nancy Guthrie home video adds to that possibility.

01:28:53.920 That's my point.

01:28:54.440 It's like, did they know?

01:28:55.700 Of course.

01:28:56.280 Did the sheriff know that—because they were like,

01:28:57.300 oh, they had a detail, like where her watch was.

01:28:59.200 I mean, I could easily say her watch was on the small bedside table right next to her bed

01:29:03.380 with the old-style sort of lantern-looking lamp

01:29:08.420 feet away from a window that was over a bookshelf that had electronics on it.

01:29:13.680 I mean, I guarantee you Chef Nanos did not know about that video

01:29:17.600 and could easily have bought the whole thing as credible evidence that this guy had been in her room.

01:29:23.440 Well, Chris Nanos demonstrated to the entire nation that he didn't know what a DNA mixture was

01:29:28.100 in one of his interviews, which when he said the lab is having problems with the mixture in Florida,

01:29:32.500 which is there's some lab director who's pulling his hair out or her hair out when they heard that,

01:29:37.640 which is just—it's absurd.

01:29:39.040 So this guy's—you know, I don't know how old he is.

01:29:42.100 I don't know what the deal is.

01:29:44.440 But it just—there are hardworking, you know, women and men in law enforcement on the ground level on this

01:29:51.220 that probably haven't slept a full eight hours since this thing started,

01:29:54.940 and they're being misserved.

01:29:56.100 I think the family's being misserved.

01:29:58.720 And, you know, you call on the media.

01:30:00.420 You've got to expect, you know, the loonies are going to come out and say the vampire's abducted

01:30:04.780 or you've got a lot of well-meaning people that are going to come in with tips trying to help

01:30:08.960 that almost never go anywhere.

01:30:10.660 And Mark and I have dealt with a million of those where it's like I heard noises down the street

01:30:14.420 and it turns out it's the raccoons in the trash can again.

01:30:16.480 Or I heard a lady screaming, but it could be my neighbor's wife.

01:30:19.340 You know, you deal with all those.

01:30:21.140 You've got to devote resources to those.

01:30:22.580 And now in the modern era, we have scammers who attempt to take advantage and profit from

01:30:27.260 the apoplectic grief of families that are going through the worst thing that a family

01:30:31.880 can go through.

01:30:32.700 And at the helm of this, you know, sinking ship is this guy that keeps taking to the microphones,

01:30:42.060 although I think he stopped doing that a little bit.

01:30:44.140 He's doing one-on-one interviews.

01:30:46.100 And now he's coming back blasting the media on stuff.

01:30:49.680 He brought the media in at the very beginning of this, and I've got no criticism of that.

01:30:53.760 But it's like, dude, you've got to be prepared to answer some questions,

01:30:59.000 know your evidence, and take a little bit of heat and criticism.

01:31:02.080 That goes with the job.

01:31:04.220 I mean, honestly, every missing person, their family in this nation would give anything to

01:31:09.400 have the kind of media coverage of the case that Nancy Guthrie has received.

01:31:13.660 The media is a blessing, not a curse.

01:31:15.660 There's some downside of it.

01:31:16.640 I don't deny that.

01:31:17.260 But it's way more upside in having this much media attention on the case because they require

01:31:22.440 400 officers.

01:31:24.220 That's how we got 400 officers on Nancy Guthrie. 1.00

01:31:26.320 It wasn't just because Savannah was the daughter.

01:31:27.960 It's because the media was constantly out there, constantly peppering them with demands

01:31:31.500 for more information.

01:31:32.380 So please spare me on the media blame.

01:31:34.540 And I don't love the media, even just because I'm a part of it.

01:31:36.800 I wouldn't say this if I didn't actually believe it.

01:31:39.640 But speaking of the media, there's been a report now by Radar Online, but they're citing

01:31:46.680 Rob Schuster, who's a British-American celebrity reporter and Royal Insider.

01:31:50.960 He's a frequent guest of The Nerve and our pal Maureen, and he hosts his own show called

01:31:54.820 Naughty But Nice.

01:31:56.160 And he had reported this, and now Radar Online is reporting it as well, that Savannah Guthrie's

01:32:01.640 family is actively exploring the possibility of legal action against our pal Ashley Banfield

01:32:08.460 following Ashley's exclusive about the brother-in-law, Tommaso Sione, who's married to Savannah's

01:32:17.300 sister, Annie, being, at that time, maybe, she said, the prime suspect in this case.

01:32:23.880 Here's the reporting of February 3rd, Sot 28.

01:32:26.980 But they have towed Annie Guthrie's car, and there is some connection to Annie Guthrie's

01:32:39.200 car and Nancy Guthrie's son-in-law.

01:32:43.580 That would be Annie's husband, Tommaso Sione, age 50, from Tucson, Arizona, married to Annie

01:32:51.740 P.

01:32:52.160 Guthrie, Savannah's sister.

01:32:53.280 And my law enforcement source tells me that Thomas Sione is the prime suspect in this case.

01:33:02.680 Again, law enforcement source tells me that Nancy Guthrie's son-in-law, married to Annie

01:33:10.000 Guthrie, Savannah's sister, is maybe, maybe a prime suspect in this case.

01:33:16.080 At the very least, let me tamp that down, because sometimes it's the first person you're looking

01:33:22.420 at, not prime as in there's no one else, okay?

01:33:25.820 So let's be really mindful of that.

01:33:27.520 When anything happens like this, familial abductions, the families looked at first, and

01:33:31.540 Annie and or Tommaso Sione were the last people to see Nancy Guthrie at 945 at night.

01:33:38.420 But it's very distressing to think that they, that this law enforcement source is telling

01:33:42.440 me that Tommaso Sione is maybe a prime suspect in this case at this point, and that the car

01:33:48.460 belonging to Annie has been towed and impounded and is in evidence.

01:33:55.640 Now, I have not been able to confirm that the Guthrie family wants to sue Ashley Banfield,

01:34:03.920 but I have confirmed that Savannah is livid about that report and definitely does not

01:34:11.760 suspect her sister or her brother-in-law.

01:34:14.500 Can you blame her?

01:34:15.280 I mean, that's, of course, you know, she loves her sister.

01:34:18.120 I'm sure she loves her brother-in-law, and I'm sure she genuinely doesn't believe they

01:34:20.880 had anything to do with it.

01:34:21.800 That all of us are in a different boat, you know, we have to be more objective in assessing

01:34:25.740 the possible suspects, the possible people connected with it, and law enforcement certainly

01:34:31.140 does.

01:34:32.000 And Ashley based this claim, Mark, on what she said a senior law enforcement source who

01:34:38.160 had been a source for her for years, who she described as an impeccable source, told her.

01:34:43.940 She's, you know, so do you think there actually could be a, it would be a defamation claim by

01:34:48.960 the Guthries against Ashley Banfield?

01:34:51.800 Let me tell you what I would do if Savannah came into my office or called me and asked 0.97

01:34:56.440 me that question.

01:34:57.460 I would say, look, I know you're out of your mind about this.

01:35:00.560 I know you can't believe that this is being reported, but the tape that we just watched

01:35:07.020 together couldn't be more protected under the law.

01:35:11.600 And there is no way this, any thought that you have about suing any claim that you think

01:35:19.340 you have is going to be met by, depending on the jurisdiction that's brought in, what's

01:35:24.440 called an anti-SLAP, which is a strategic lawsuit against.

01:35:29.340 What that will do is it will freeze the case and a judge when he gets it or she gets it

01:35:35.380 is going to rule that you have no ability to pursue a claim that as framed, by the way,

01:35:43.600 Ashley framed it.

01:35:44.700 There's it's dead on arrival, pun intended in terms of any kind of legal action.

01:35:50.260 There's no way there because you have the ability, number one, because it's you could

01:35:57.380 find any judge who's looking at this.

01:36:00.520 Any lawyer who's involved is going to tell you, of course, they're looking at the family

01:36:04.160 members that it would be malpractice not to.

01:36:07.720 And that's exactly what Ashley said.

01:36:09.960 Number two, the media is as long as they are reporting and they have source protection,

01:36:16.180 you're never going to be able to disprove what Ashley Banfield said source protection.

01:36:21.920 This has been, by the way, Megan, one of the great frustrations when I'm trying a high

01:36:26.560 profile case, when a judge gags me and says, you, Mr. Garragus, your team and the prosecution

01:36:32.920 team as lawyers cannot comment on this case.

01:36:36.300 You can hear this is attorney's eyes only on some discovery.

01:36:40.120 Well, what ends up happening?

01:36:41.480 What ends up happening?

01:36:42.320 The law enforcement leaks the information.

01:36:45.060 How do I ever prove that?

01:36:46.900 I can't because there is source protection.

01:36:50.480 So that source protection, which is robust, is always going to be a wall that you're never

01:36:55.600 going to be able to climb over.

01:36:57.980 So what about it, Matt? 0.99

01:36:59.500 I mean, what if what if they did sue saying this turned into a complete shit show where 0.98

01:37:05.700 this poor guy who is a victim, as the sheriff said, when you do this kind of thing, that 0.98

01:37:10.000 somebody who he may not be the prime suspect, he may actually be just a victim who is a

01:37:14.840 victim, had all this focus on him?

01:37:17.520 I mean, everybody, yours truly, Brian Enten, everybody who's been in depth covering this

01:37:21.580 story started talking a lot more about the brother-in-law as a result of that report.

01:37:26.000 And if they say we don't believe her, we don't believe her law enforcement source, we think

01:37:30.460 she made it up or we think her law enforcement source ought to be sued as well because that 0.95

01:37:35.180 was complete bullshit from the beginning that caused us to come under undue scrutiny. 0.85

01:37:39.260 Might they have a case? 0.98

01:37:41.780 Well, I think Mark's exactly right.

01:37:44.400 We both dealt with this in California called anti-slap.

01:37:47.780 I don't know what they would call it in Arizona.

01:37:50.140 But basically, what did she say?

01:37:52.120 She said he's a suspect.

01:37:54.780 Maybe.

01:37:55.720 Maybe.

01:37:56.320 Yeah.

01:37:56.720 What exactly is that?

01:37:59.140 He was the last person to see her.

01:38:00.560 That's not Ashley's fault.

01:38:03.500 Well, and full disclosure, I really like Ashley Banfield.

01:38:07.520 Same.

01:38:07.780 I know her personally.

01:38:09.300 I think she's a great journalist.

01:38:11.280 She's a solid reporter.

01:38:12.300 And what she's doing is she's reporting what a source told her.

01:38:15.640 She doesn't say he did it and here's why.

01:38:18.320 She says, I've got information from a law enforcement source who says he is a prime suspect.

01:38:22.520 And even though we've heard that, I think there's even TV shows called Prime Suspect at one point

01:38:26.840 or another.

01:38:27.440 What exactly does that mean?

01:38:28.920 What is a suspect?

01:38:29.620 A suspect means it's somebody that the police are looking at that they suspect is right

01:38:34.540 there in the word might have done it.

01:38:36.520 And the entire world is a suspect in a whodunit like this.

01:38:39.640 And and Mark's right.

01:38:40.780 It goes it goes nowhere.

01:38:42.280 These are incredibly emotional situations for the family.

01:38:45.280 Wouldn't be the first time that radar online has been radically wrong.

01:38:48.940 But again, going back to what Mark said originally, and I think he's exactly right.

01:38:52.480 All roads lead back to the sheriff.

01:38:54.080 If this is a leak from his shop, it's kind of rich that the guy who brought the media in

01:38:59.880 his department is leaking information.

01:39:03.400 I mean, it could be the FBI, but still it's his show.

01:39:05.960 He wanted to be at the helm of the ship.

01:39:08.160 He's responsible for that at the end of the day.

01:39:10.280 And and I had a great quote once on a high profile case I was working on where high, high

01:39:16.720 place people in the Orange County Sheriff's Department kept leaking information under an old

01:39:21.060 sheriff who actually wound up going to federal prison that Mark knows all about.

01:39:24.960 They kept leaking information on my Samantha Runyon case and was driving everybody crazy.

01:39:28.960 And my old boss pulled me in and he said leaks are like ghosts.

01:39:32.300 They seem really scary at first.

01:39:33.860 At the end of the day, they'll never hurt your case.

01:39:36.480 And chasing them is like chasing ghosts.

01:39:38.580 You're never going to catch one.

01:39:39.680 Nobody's ever going to admit it.

01:39:40.860 But at the end of the day, who who is responsible for the integrity of this investigation?

01:39:46.680 It's the same sheriff that's complaining about it.

01:39:49.020 I think Mark's right.

01:39:50.180 It goes nowhere.

01:39:51.380 I would also counsel them.

01:39:53.300 You know, this is a terrible situation you're in.

01:39:55.020 You're very emotional.

01:39:55.960 Of course, they're going to look at everybody in the family.

01:39:58.580 This is not a hill to die on, guys, because they're not it's not going to go anywhere.

01:40:02.260 They would lose, in my opinion.

01:40:04.680 And then it winds up there even more brokenhearted because now, in addition to all the horror that

01:40:10.760 they're experiencing, they can throw a, you know, a tanked lawsuit on top of all that.

01:40:15.580 But I would give them.

01:40:17.080 You have two things.

01:40:18.260 First of all, you have the fact that he's he was the last person to see her alive.

01:40:21.620 And also, they towed the car that he and Annie Guthrie drive, and it's remained in police

01:40:28.500 custody this entire time.

01:40:30.140 In fact, just yesterday, Brian Enten reported that they may be getting ready to release that

01:40:34.160 car back to them.

01:40:35.000 And they searched their car in the dark of night with flashbulbs going off, or they were

01:40:41.900 photographing a bunch of stuff.

01:40:43.020 The media would have asked itself whether these two were under scrutiny by law enforcement

01:40:48.800 from day one, as soon as we found out that they towed that car, which happened to be the

01:40:53.160 same day that she said Tommaso was a prime suspect at the time.

01:40:56.940 It's like this was not this was coming with or without Ashley Banfield.

01:41:00.240 And the other thing, Matt, is if they did, let's say they said, we don't care, we're

01:41:04.960 suing anyway.

01:41:06.840 I got to be honest, it's kind of a dream for a person in Ashley's situation, because then

01:41:11.860 I get all sorts of discovery from you on whether what I said is true.

01:41:16.440 Now I'm now I'm really going to get up in your business and find out everything law enforcement

01:41:21.560 knows about whether you, in fact, may have done this.

01:41:24.540 Yeah, I hope they don't go down that road.

01:41:26.760 I really I really do.

01:41:28.340 It's such a it's it'd be a tragic distraction to all of this.

01:41:32.460 But but also, look, if they didn't tow the car, Megan, we'd all be wondering why they

01:41:37.780 didn't tow the car.

01:41:38.960 You know, he was he dropped her off.

01:41:41.300 You know, he's presumed innocent.

01:41:43.140 And I certainly have no information to indicate that he's anything but.

01:41:47.020 But somebody sure did this.

01:41:48.680 And the police must, in order to exercise professional competence, they've got to systematically

01:41:53.900 eliminate everybody, including Savannah Guthrie, including the sister, including every 0.92

01:41:58.260 gardener, every neighbor.

01:41:59.580 They've got to it's it's like concentric rings of eliminating potential suspects.

01:42:03.880 That's how you investigate these things.

01:42:05.600 And the idea that he's one of those people that has to be eliminated isn't shocking that

01:42:09.940 that is a rare moment of professional competence that we've seen in this.

01:42:13.660 I was actually pointing out that radar online often reports so and so is considering legal

01:42:17.900 action.

01:42:18.420 They even said it about her at News Nation against Chris Cuomo and News Nation.

01:42:22.820 And she's like, it's a lie, you know, so big grain of salt.

01:42:27.120 But yeah, I agree with you.

01:42:28.360 There's no lawsuit there.

01:42:29.480 I know, Matt, you got to run.

01:42:30.860 Mark, I want to talk to you about our last case.

01:42:32.600 I have to take a quick break.

01:42:33.480 We'll continue on the opposite side.

01:42:35.040 But there's been another mix up at an IVF clinic.

01:42:38.680 And this is just a nightmare.

01:42:40.260 We'll get to it right after this break.

01:42:41.400 Don't go away.

01:42:41.920 Thank you, Matt.

01:42:42.300 Hey, everyone.

01:42:44.140 It's me, Megan Kelly.

01:42:45.200 I've got some exciting news.

01:42:47.440 I now have my very own channel on Sirius XM.

01:42:50.560 It's called the Megan Kelly Channel.

01:42:51.960 And it is where you will hear the truth unfiltered with no agenda and no apologies.

01:42:56.700 Along with the Megan Kelly Show, you're going to hear from people like Mark Halperin,

01:43:00.060 Link Lauren, Maureen Callahan, Emily Drushinsky, Jesse Kelly, Real Clear Politics, and many more.

01:43:06.020 It's bold, no BS news.

01:43:08.000 Only on the Megan Kelly Channel, Sirius XM 111, and on the Sirius XM app.

01:43:17.200 Mark Garagos remains my guest.

01:43:19.420 And Mark, there's been another IVF clinic mix up.

01:43:23.280 This is every parent's worst nightmare who goes through any sort of fertility help.

01:43:28.860 This one is out of Orlando in Florida, the Fertility Center of Orlando.

01:43:35.280 That's what it's called in Longwood, Florida.

01:43:36.980 The doctor is Milton McNichol.

01:43:39.620 And he's now getting sued, along with his clinic, by Tiffany Score and her husband, Steve Mills.

01:43:45.400 They had a baby girl through IVF on December 11, 2025.

01:43:51.000 So just, you know, two months ago or so, three.

01:43:54.540 And after the baby was born, they realized this little girl, Shay, was not theirs because their baby is not white, and they are. 0.77

01:44:06.920 We're showing a picture for the listening audience where you clearly have, I don't know if the child is Indian or black, but definitely has dark skin, and the parents are as white as I am.

01:44:16.700 And this is just a nightmare.

01:44:18.720 Now, the mother knows she's—the mother's already in love with this child, very clearly.

01:44:22.460 You carry a baby for nine months.

01:44:24.160 You deliver it.

01:44:25.000 You think it's yours.

01:44:25.880 It needs you just as much as a baby that would be biologically yours. 0.62

01:44:29.440 You're probably breastfeeding it. 0.95

01:44:30.700 And, like, the horror of this—and, by the way, it would take a few days to know, because I'll tell you something.

01:44:35.480 One of my children was very dark when I first gave birth to her, my daughter, and we were laughing. 0.99

01:44:41.500 We're like, my God, you know, she's also IVF. 1.00

01:44:44.120 We're like, oh, no, uh-oh.

01:44:45.420 She wound up—like, the skin got much lighter in the first week of her life.

01:44:49.220 But, like, it would take a few days for you to realize, okay, this is not just birth-related.

01:44:53.540 This child actually is darker skin than we are.

01:44:56.340 And sure enough, Shay is not biologically theirs.

01:44:58.740 They did have the test done.

01:45:00.860 And they alleged that they were able to produce and store three viable embryos at this clinic.

01:45:08.760 They even know that there was one male and two female embryos, all of which are viable, right?

01:45:14.820 So they must have had the genetic testing done on them before they froze, I guess—I don't know how many they had put in them.

01:45:21.880 Well, actually, they say they produced one viable male and two viable female embryos,

01:45:26.640 which have been frozen and stored all this time.

01:45:30.920 I mean, I guess the others.

01:45:32.240 I don't know how many they put in her to get a baby. 1.00

01:45:35.160 Sometimes they'll put more than one inside of you.

01:45:37.500 But they thought that they had at least two other embryos in storage, I think.

01:45:42.040 And now they're told there's only one embryo in storage.

01:45:45.260 And it's not even confirmed whether it's really theirs.

01:45:48.200 So they don't know what happened to their three embryos.

01:45:50.860 And they don't know whose embryo this is.

01:45:55.220 And they've gone back to the clinic saying, please go out and, like, find all the couples who were going through IVF when we were going through IVF.

01:46:02.540 But that doesn't necessarily answer the questions.

01:46:05.080 Because I guess potentially it could have been, like, a frozen embryo they got from somebody else.

01:46:09.060 And their embryos could have been frozen.

01:46:11.160 You know, there may be thousands of frozen embryos at the clinic.

01:46:13.700 Like, how do you even begin to sort this out?

01:46:18.100 Well, look, this is, as you mentioned, kind of your worst nightmare as a parent.

01:46:23.360 I've got a close friend who's going through this right now.

01:46:25.940 I know the amount of genetic testing that they go through before they do any of this.

01:46:33.580 So my guess is here that there probably is a way for them to get to the point where they can kind of unravel all of this.

01:46:43.020 But what a heartbreaking situation to be in.

01:46:47.360 And, by the way, from a legal standpoint, this is not going to end well for the clinic.

01:46:55.780 I can tell you what's going to give you a preview.

01:47:00.020 They either have to settle or the insurance company is going to have to settle or it's Katie bar the door there. 1.00

01:47:08.100 The liability and damages is off the charts in a case like this.

01:47:13.020 I wonder whether they even have insurance.

01:47:15.820 Do you think insurance companies are even insuring IVF clinics anymore?

01:47:19.980 Well, they probably would defend under what's called a reservation of rights.

01:47:24.580 And then they'll try everything possible, as insurance companies do, to try to exclude providing coverage.

01:47:31.660 But I can't imagine that the insurance companies or that the hospitals and the clinics would be able to go forward or move forward in this area unless they had some kind of insurance, usually with a high retention or a deductible.

01:47:47.840 But I would be shocked if they were operating in this area without insurance.

01:47:53.520 And I will tell you the scary thing about this, the frightening thing about this, is you hear about this all too often in this area of medicine.

01:48:04.860 We've had in our backyard, literally in Matt Murphy's backyard, there was a horrific scandal involving these kinds of things.

01:48:14.180 And this is, you know, it's almost meme.

01:48:17.240 If it wasn't just such a tragedy, it's a throwback to so many memes and so many stories.

01:48:24.140 But in this case, you, I think, put your finger on it and gave kind of the opening statement that I listened to is,

01:48:31.980 can you imagine being a mother and having that bond and then finding out it's not your child and that they, and that potentially your child is out there with somebody else?

01:48:42.720 I mean, that's the other, the flip side of the coin that just makes this heartbreaking.

01:48:47.320 Well, that, that's what, that just happened in California.

01:48:49.840 Maybe that's the Casey reference because we did a long, long piece about it here on the MK Show because a California couple, same thing.

01:48:58.400 They gave birth to a baby.

01:48:59.840 They were very fair and the mother at least was a redhead and they had a darker skinned child who looked slightly Asian.

01:49:08.600 And then somewhere nearby, there was a family in which one of the parents was Asian and they gave birth to a baby that was very fair with red hair.

01:49:18.860 And their baby was much larger and the Asian baby was much smaller. 1.00

01:49:22.740 And sure enough, there had been a mix up at the IVF clinic.

01:49:25.360 So the parents were absolutely devastated, not making light of that at all.

01:49:30.260 But at least when it was all said and done, they did switch the babies.

01:49:35.960 Everyone had a baby.

01:49:37.480 And then it was actually kind of crazy because they wound up kind of agreeing to co-parent as a foursome because the mothers and the dads loved the baby that they had had, that they had given birth to so much, even though there was no biological relation.

01:49:49.360 But here, this family has no idea whether their biological child has been born or where their three IVF embryos even are.

01:50:02.320 So, like, who would have the rights to this baby?

01:50:07.720 Because there could be a family out there that didn't have any luck on having their embryo implanted.

01:50:13.640 You know, maybe there's another couple that had this woman's embryo implanted in her. 1.00

01:50:17.560 It didn't take.

01:50:18.820 There's no baby for this complaining couple, Tiffany and Stephen.

01:50:22.160 And I think the law says they're going to have to give up this baby to its biological parents, even though Tiffany carried it. 1.00

01:50:28.720 No?

01:50:29.860 No, that's exactly right.

01:50:31.480 And that's it.

01:50:32.200 Imagine what you have to go through as the parents.

01:50:36.620 I mean, not only have you bonded with the child that it turns out is genetically not connected to you, but you also have this constant nagging thought that that child could be taken away, that your child, you could have a child that's out there that is bonding with somebody else.

01:50:55.180 I mean, it's a horror story.

01:50:58.140 And not to mention, like, the genetic concerns.

01:51:00.600 You know, I think about it when we get these stories about the weird IVF clinic doctor who uses his own sperm on untold numbers of the female patients.

01:51:09.220 And, like, down the line, you know, that means your daughter could wind up dating her biological brother and having no idea, right?

01:51:17.680 These situations lead to, like, very fraught societal situations, especially when the kids are going to grow up in the same town not knowing.

01:51:27.100 And, like, so far they haven't solved the mystery at this clinic.

01:51:29.640 So far they do not know what happened to the other three embryos or who the parents, the actual parents are of the darker skinned baby born to Tiffany and Stephen.

01:51:38.700 And, by the way, this is not the amount of genetic testing, as you know, that's connected to this and the amount of testing itself.

01:51:47.760 This is not a heavy lift for somebody who wants to do the genetic investigation here to get some answers.

01:51:55.820 And the fact that they're not working overtime 24-7 to get those answers and then to explore databases and to explore DNA and bone marrow registries and other sorts of things.

01:52:10.060 I mean, there's a world of ways that you can do this investigation and you can do it fairly quickly.

01:52:16.960 And I don't know if they have, but if they haven't, that's another layer of incompetency to what's already at Horrific's.

01:52:24.700 Yes. The parents are complaining that it's taking too long.

01:52:27.880 Here we are three months later, and they said, this is taking too long.

01:52:32.220 You're slow rolling this investigation, and the IVF clinic said, we're working as quickly as possible, that we have sent notices to other patients, that some couples have been asked to undergo genetic testing and to waive certain confidentiality protections.

01:52:49.600 I mean, let me ask you this, Mark.

01:52:51.100 What if a family comes to you and says, Mark, we had a baby right at this same time, you know, December, and we don't know whether it's ours, but we do not want to submit to genetic testing because we don't want anybody taking our baby.

01:53:09.720 We don't want Tiffany and Stephen claiming that our baby is their baby.

01:53:13.780 We don't want any genetic testing done of our child.

01:53:15.840 We don't want to submit to it just because this clinic messed up Tiffany and Stephen's situation shouldn't involve us at all.

01:53:22.580 Maybe they're scared, right, that this is the only baby they're ever going to have, and that if this isn't theirs, they don't really care.

01:53:30.740 Like, can you make them?

01:53:33.460 No, but understand if somebody comes and wants to explore this, but they don't want to get the answer, so to speak.

01:53:42.260 I want to do this, but I don't want to expose myself.

01:53:45.180 No, you're not going to go down that road legally because through discovery, unfortunately for you, you're going to, that's precisely what they're going to ask for, and your case is going to be tanked if you don't do it.

01:53:56.920 But it strains credibility for me to believe that based on at least anecdotally what I know about this area of medicine, that they don't have test results already that in their position, possession.

01:54:14.080 With those test results, there is a world of things that they can do.

01:54:18.360 I have, I'm closely connected to bone marrow registries, having founded a group 25 years ago, the Armenian bone marrow registry, because of the genetic, also because of the genetic tightness and connection in the Armenian community.

01:54:34.860 You have all kinds of registries that you can immediately avail yourself of.

01:54:41.620 When you have a disease, for instance, and you need to do a, for instance, a bone marrow transplant or some kind of an organ transplant, one of the first things you do is look for a genetic match.

01:54:52.420 You have the ability to do that.

01:54:54.060 Yeah, but that's, that there's just not some national database of baby's DNA.

01:54:59.080 Like, I think they'd have to ask the parent before they took the baby's DNA after the, and by the way, the IVF clinic's not even there.

01:55:05.320 When you give birth to your baby, you're in a hospital.

01:55:07.400 They're not like coordinating back with the IVF folks.

01:55:10.300 When they were doing the testing prior to, in the run-up to the implantation, they would have done all kinds of, there's requirements that they do all kinds of industry requirements.

01:55:22.560 They do all kinds of genetic testing, number one. 0.99

01:55:24.960 Number two, you then go to genealogical databases, and you can, you know, we've actually talked about this, Megan, in terms of the genealogy testing that is being used that's on the forefront of cold cases.

01:55:39.160 There are ways that you can go, and here you're not looking to get it admissible at least initially.

01:55:45.760 You're looking to solve a problem or solve a question.

01:55:50.300 You can go, and you can take the DNA of the baby first.

01:55:55.700 Oh, I see.

01:55:57.260 I see what you're saying.

01:55:58.200 You're saying, for example, Tiffany and Steven can take the baby's DNA, the baby they have that she gave birth to, and whether the parents are agreeing.

01:56:07.900 Like, the parents might be out there raising a different baby, and they might not know this is their baby, and they may not want to volunteer to get involved in any of this.

01:56:14.580 And you're saying, Tiffany and Steven are going to be able to find the biological parents of this baby.

01:56:18.800 Oh, I'm going to be able to, within a matter of, I don't want to say days, but very quickly, I'm going to be able to give you kind of the family, at least dynamic or circle genetically, if you will, of where this baby is coming from.

01:56:39.220 And from there, it's old-fashioned private eye work to figure out, if you've got the genetics of the baby and you've kind of done your investigation, you'll be able to find and reverse engineer who is the most problem.

01:56:55.120 Well, here's the problem. Here's the second problem. Let's say they figure out, okay, we found this baby's biological parents, and those parents don't have a baby.

01:57:04.340 They had an implantation. It failed. She didn't get pregnant. They're still childless.

01:57:10.740 Now you know you're going to have to give up your baby. This is not your biological baby, and you don't have a right to it. 0.53

01:57:16.520 Possession is not nine-tenths of the law when it comes to this situation.

01:57:19.440 Now, how are you ever going to figure out whether it was your embryo that they put in this woman that failed, or whether they put your embryo in a different would-be mother, and it succeeded?

01:57:35.380 And that would-be mother is raising your child right now. 1.00

01:57:38.300 The only way would be to go look at the clinic for all the mothers who had implantations from the day they harvested your eggs and created the embryo, from that day forward. 0.99

01:57:52.000 You have to go to present day because the clinic seems in disarray.

01:57:55.920 You don't know whether they would have implanted your embryos in another woman on that day or on any of the days thereafter.

01:58:01.020 It's been nine plus three months, right?

01:58:03.340 So we're 12 months later from when they created her embryos.

01:58:06.700 You have to test all of them to figure out what happened to your baby.

01:58:10.560 You know, it's a brilliant observation that, ironically, the place that you would think would have the best records,

01:58:18.920 the place that you would think you would have the easiest time of tracing, is actually, given the disarray that's been reported,

01:58:27.260 that would be the most difficult part of this nut to crack.

01:58:31.580 The, the, it seems to me you'd have a lot more, a higher likelihood of figuring this out with the DNA of the baby that you have,

01:58:41.900 and then figuring out who the biological family is, as opposed to-

01:58:46.840 And just pray that it was a, it was a tit for tat mix up.

01:58:49.360 She got yours and you got hers. 0.84

01:58:51.800 And then if you're, if, you know, quote, lucky, I realize the whole thing is unlucky, she did have a baby and it's yours.

01:58:57.580 I don't even know what you'd be rooting for.

01:58:59.020 Would you be, I think you'd probably did not, but you'd be rooting for your three embryos to still be in the test tube that you could go back and have yourself.

01:59:05.540 I don't even know that there's a static way to understand it.

01:59:10.800 Meaning I, I think one minute you could think, I want this.

01:59:14.040 The next minute you could say, no, I want this.

01:59:16.380 That's what's such a, what's such a conundrum about this.

01:59:20.220 I mean, what kind of an emotional rollercoaster or, or cluster F you're in when you're in this situation?

01:59:27.720 It's almost, it's almost one that's worth millions.

01:59:30.560 Don't you agree?

01:59:31.280 I mean, if you were representing this family, millions, there, there is no ceiling on this.

01:59:36.200 None.

01:59:36.720 Yeah.

01:59:37.320 Yep.

01:59:37.900 This, this IVF clinic will not be in business much longer, which again, is kind of scary because if you're a parent that has embryos being stored there, or you went through this clinic, you've suddenly learned a lot about them.

01:59:50.060 That's going to be very disconcerting.

01:59:51.500 These things, I mean, it's crazy.

01:59:53.580 We've all had babies.

01:59:54.480 We all know how like when you're the mother in the delivery room that they check that little wrist thing and match it against that baby 20 times a day.

02:00:02.420 You know, it just seems, it's funny because I was in news, being in news.

02:00:06.400 And as you know, prior to that in law, both of these things make you paranoid about weird things happening to you.

02:00:11.540 I was convinced we were going to have a switch to birth situation, you know?

02:00:15.040 And so I bought non-toxic nail polish.

02:00:18.280 And as soon as each of my kids was born, I, I painted their big toe with this non-toxic nail polish so that I know it's overcompensation, Mark Garagos, you know, but like we get paranoid in our business.

02:00:31.300 If you haven't been through law school and the experience of having torts drilled into your head and that what torts does to your brain as a lawyer, I, I get it.

02:00:42.920 I, I feel your pain.

02:00:45.660 Oh, anyway.

02:00:46.580 Well, we'll continue to follow it and see how this winds up saying prayers for all the families involved, because this is a lot of pain from people who just wanted to have children.

02:00:54.580 I mean, just wanted to have a kid.

02:00:56.440 Mark Garagos, a pleasure, my friend.

02:00:57.980 Great to see you.

02:00:59.300 I miss you.

02:00:59.920 Bye-bye, Megan.

02:01:00.620 Oh, I miss you, too.

02:01:02.300 Okay, we're back tomorrow with our pal Sagar Anjeti.

02:01:05.280 It's been a while since he's been on the program, but we love him and are very much looking forward to talking to him.

02:01:09.980 Thanks to all of you for joining us for an extended Kelly's Court.

02:01:13.400 It had been too long, had it not?

02:01:15.240 Talk to you soon.

02:01:17.880 Thanks for listening to The Megyn Kelly Show. 0.94

02:01:19.980 No BS, no agenda, and no fear.

02:01:30.620 Go from this, go from this, to this, in no time.

02:01:38.780 Find last-minute deals on thousands of stays in Canada with Vrbo.

The Megyn Kelly Show - March 12, 2026

Shock Lawsuit Against ＂The Tell＂ Author, Kouri Richins Bombshells, and Nancy Guthrie Investigation Mess, with MK True Crime Hosts ｜ Ep. 1271

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