Believe Her

Summary

Podcast Summary: RISK! – “Believe Her”

Date: October 8, 2025
Host: Taj Easton (guest hosting for Kevin Allison)
Guest: Andrea Dunlop – Author, podcaster (“Nobody Should Believe Me”)
Main Theme: A raw, deeply personal exploration of Munchausen by proxy abuse, how it ravages families, and the struggle to expose the truth amid denial and system failures. Andrea Dunlop candidly shares her journey from personal trauma, through family estrangement, to ethical storytelling and advocacy.

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Episode Overview

In this gripping, unfiltered conversation, Andrea Dunlop joins guest host Taj Easton to share the astonishing real-life origins of her acclaimed podcast “Nobody Should Believe Me.” The episode confronts the harrowing realities of Munchausen by proxy (MBP) — a form of medical child abuse — and exposes how denial, media failures, and institutional shortcomings enable perpetrators. It’s part personal memoir, part true crime investigation, and consistently emphasizes the need to believe and support survivors.

Content Note: This episode deals with heavy topics including child abuse, family estrangement, and murder, but is described by Taj and Andrea as hopeful at its core.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. Andrea’s Personal Connection & Motivation

• Roots in Family Trauma:
  Andrea’s journey began when her own sister was investigated for MBP, leading to family estrangement and deep personal questioning ([04:43]–[10:12]).
  • “We felt like we were the only family in the entire world that had ever been through this.”
    — Andrea ([05:47])
• From Fiction to True Crime Podcasting:
  After a novel based on her experience, Andrea found community and validation at the American Professional Society on the Abuse of Children ([08:50]).

2. The Challenge of Telling MBP Stories

• Media Complicity and Denial:
  Andrea’s sister was featured as a falsely accused parent in news coverage, severely compounding the family’s pain ([11:20]).
  • “They included a whole bunch of pictures of my niece in the hospital... but didn't mention any of the evidence against her, which I found out later was extensive.”
    — Andrea ([11:33])
  • Inspired to “fight podcasts with podcasts” by countering misleading narratives ([13:13]).
• Common Patterns in Cases:
  Andrea describes chilling commonalities across MBP cases — including fake pregnancies, unnecessary feeding tubes, and medical fabrications — often overlooked or misunderstood by professionals and families alike ([13:13]–[19:45]).

3. Confronting Perpetrators and Reckoning with Hope

• First Major Interview with “Hope” ([16:53]):
  • Hope, a convicted MBP perpetrator, became central to the podcast’s first season. Andrea describes an emotionally complex meeting, where manipulation and genuine emotion are almost inseparable.
  • “As she was saying, 'Oh, I regret it,'... I was just like, no. I think she regrets that she was caught and that her life fell apart because of it.”
    — Andrea ([29:03])
• Seeking Closure / Redemption:
  Andrea admits she initially hoped her podcast would pull her sister “back,” a “final Hail Mary” for reconciliation, but ultimately realizes some wounds cannot heal ([19:46], [29:44]).

4. Systemic Failures & Denial

• Survivors and Systemic Neglect:
  Andrea discusses multiple cases where MBP perpetrators were allowed to resume parenting, work in health advocacy, or manipulate their narratives for sympathy, despite clear documentation of abuse ([32:25]–[35:48]).
  • Notable case: “Lisa,” convicted for poisoning and suffocating her daughter (caught 50 times on video), later worked as a patient advocate and had access to children again.
• Obstacles to Justice:
  Child protective services and family courts are often ill-equipped, and the media frequently sides with accused parents — reinforcing dangerous patterns ([61:42]–[65:53]).
  • “Doctors are really concerned...they just did nothing.”
    — Andrea ([61:39])

5. Second Major Confrontation: “Lisa” ([41:37])

• Journalistic Tenacity:
  Andrea and journalist Meredith Anderson directly confront Lisa, who attempts to deflect, minimize, and obfuscate. Andrea applies her accrued expertise to debunk Lisa’s explanations in real time ([45:38]).
  • “For the first time in my life, I was getting to cut through that and just in real time...be able to just call her on that.”
    — Andrea ([45:45])
• Post-Confrontation Fallout:
  The investigative reporting led to Lisa’s firing but not to disclosure to concerned communities. Lisa continues to evade accountability, and Andrea describes wrestling with ongoing threats to children ([51:53]–[52:52]).

6. Psychological and Societal Barriers

• Why Isn’t MBP Recognized?
  Andrea and Taj unpack why families, professionals, and society resist seeing MBP — it upends core beliefs about motherhood and safety ([65:53]–[70:24]).
  • “People don't want to live in that world...It's much nicer to live in the world where this couldn't possibly be happening.”
    — Andrea ([66:15])
• Motivations of Perpetrators:
  MBP isn’t always about money or material gain; the emotional gratification, attention, and power drive the abuse ([68:57]–[71:37]).
  • “They get a thrill from lying to people...Their brain is not wired that way.”
    — Andrea ([70:25])

7. The Role of Storytelling & Ethical True Crime

• Responsibility and Intent:
  Andrea stresses the importance of ethical, survivor-centered narrative in true crime — not glamorizing the abuser, but shining light for families and survivors.
• Sense of Hope:
  Despite grim realities, Andrea describes the therapeutic power of telling the truth and building community for survivors ([72:09]–[73:02]).

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• On feeling isolated:
  “People would have no idea what I was talking about. To tell it to a room full of people who were nodding their heads...was just such a revelation.”
  — Andrea ([06:54])

• On media narrative failures:
  “There’s this terrible media narrative that I’m up against about how Munchausen by Proxy isn’t real, or it’s so rare that none of these cases are real.”
  — Andrea ([16:33])

• On confronting a perpetrator:
  “I'm here to get that information. I'm at the end of my investigation...If you have something you need to tell me...now’s your chance.”
  — Andrea confronting Lisa ([48:36]–[49:59])

• On the limits of empathy:
  “If you feel empathy, I don't know how you can do that to your own child.”
  — Andrea ([29:44])

• On the challenges of believing abuse:
  “People don't want to live in that world...You have to go into the darkness to accept that this is happening.”
  — Andrea ([66:15])

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Timestamps for Major Segments

• [00:30] – Taj Easton introduces Andrea Dunlop and content warning
• [04:32] – Story begins: Andrea recounts her family’s MBP crisis
• [13:13] – Launching the podcast, first cases explored
• [16:53] – Interviewing “Hope,” the first MBP perpetrator on the show
• [29:44] – Aftermath: Emotional revelations and the limits of reconciliation
• [32:25] – Founding “Munchausen Support” and the Lisa case introduction
• [41:37] – Andrea confronts Lisa with evidence; real-time fact-checking
• [51:53] – Consequences: Job loss, continued risk, advocacy
• [53:19] – Five years of podcasting, reflection on early warning signs
• [61:42] – Systemic failures, denial in the face of overwhelming evidence
• [66:15] – Why society resists believing MBP; psychological comfort
• [70:25] – Why perpetrators do it: Emotional drivers and compulsions
• [72:09] – Impact of telling these stories, evolution of public understanding

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Additional Moments

• Praise for Taj Easton by both Kevin and Andrea, with lighthearted banter ([00:40], extended at episode’s end [80:42]).
• Behind-the-scenes on the all-female staff of "Nobody Should Believe Me" ([73:18]), with Taj humorously lamenting his outsider status.
• Closing reflections:
  Andrea: “Thank you so much for having me.” ([76:15])

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Tone, Delivery, and Takeaway

The episode is unflinching, compassionate, and at times darkly humorous. Andrea’s honesty and vulnerability—about her own pain, mistakes, and hopes—anchor the story. Taj’s empathetic questions give space for nuance and catharsis, while not shying away from the brutal truths at the heart of MBP cases. Listeners are left with a deeper understanding of this “hinterland” of child abuse, the insidious power of denial, and the imperative to both believe survivors and demand systemic change.

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For Further Listening & Support

• Listen: “Nobody Should Believe Me” Podcast (by Andrea Dunlop)
• Support: Munchausen Support non-profit – Peer support and resources for survivors and families

“If you have money, give it to us. Simple. Patreon.com/Risk...We need money. As much money as possible, please!”
— Taj Easton ([76:19]), closing out the episode in classic RISK! style.

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End of Summary

Transcript

[A]

Hey, folks, this is Kevin. As you've been hearing me saying, I have finally moved to Thailand, but I'm still getting settled. So today I'm gonna let our beloved editor, Taj Easton do some guest hosting for me on this episode. It's fitting because Taj happens to have a relationship with today's story and a friendship with today's storyteller. So without further ado, here's Taj.

[B]

Thanks, Kevin, y'. All. World traveling expatriate son of a bitch. Everybody, on this week's episode of Risk, you'll hear Andrea Dunlop.

[C]

You know, I was working with Taj on the sixth season of my show, and he's so wonderful.

[A]

Oh, for sure.

[C]

He's just a wonderful person.

[A]

Incredible, handsome, beautiful.

[C]

Such a talent.

[A]

Holy shit.

[C]

I'm a pro Taj person. What the fuck is happening?

[B]

Oh, my God. Sam. Hey, everybody. This is Risk, the show where nobody would believe the things we thought they'd dare to share. I'm Taj Easton, and this is one of our conversation story episodes. And this one is a hot whip crack of a conversation story. We have got Andrea Dunlop. The most ass kicking, high powered, fascinatingly effective, endlessly compassionate, tireless. You're gonna have to see for yourself. Andrea's a fucking force. Showrunner of the amazing, heartbreakingly incredible podcast Nobody Should Believe Me. I believe this is a pretty singular treat for anyone who is interested in storytelling, in ethical true crime, or in being engaged in what you are hearing. Andrea Dunlop. Coming up, if you are not up for hearing about murder and child abuse, this is not the episode for you. This story is dark and heavy, but it is told beautifully and it is not oppressive. Different people have different sensitivities. But I think if you're not tuning out, you are in for a gripping hour of audio. This is an important story. Brutal as all of this stuff you're about to hear is, I believe that this story has a very strong thread of hopefulness running through it, simply because Andrea Dunlop is Andrea Dunlop. Now, if you're hearing this on our podcast feed and you want to watch this episode, if you want to see the breathtakingly beautiful and charismatic faces of our very own Kevin Allison, and Nobody Should Believe Me's Andrea Dunlop and their expressive, charming mugs, there's a link to watch that video in the show notes. But all of our episodes going back 16 fucking years are at risk-show.com or anywhere you get your podcasts. All right, we're going to take a quick break and then we will hear Andrea's story.

[D]

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[B]

Experian.

[C]

We're back.

[B]

I now present this week's story. Believe her.

[A]

Oh, my goodness. All right, let's settle in.

[C]

Here we go. So, Kevin, if I can, I'm gonna just take you back to kind of where the whole story of this show began. You know, I'm the host of Nobody Should Believe Me. Been on the air for a couple of years, but I started making this show in. In the absolute depths of the COVID pandemic. This was one of those ideas that I think had been percolating for a while. Before I was a podcaster, I was a fiction writer, so I was a novelist. And in 2019, I had my third novel, We Came Here to Forget come out, and that was based on my story with my older sister. We had this series of events in my family that had just blown my family apart, where my sister was investigated twice for Munchausen by proxy abuse. So that, for those who don't know, is a form of abuse in which a parent, usually a mother or caregiver, induces, exaggerates, or invents illness in their child for the purpose of sympathy, attention, the thrill of deceiving others, et cetera. So this was something that had been a part of my life. The first investigation caused us to be estranged from her. There was a second investigation that involved the police, and I found out about four days before my novel came out that she'd gotten her kids back. And eventually that police investigation came to nothing, probably because of that court decision. So I had been on this journey to understand this abuse that had happened in my family, because my family and I felt really strongly that this abuse was happening. After the book came out, I'd connected with these professionals as part of the American Professional society on the abuse of children, and I had gone down there to their annual conference right before the pandemic started, January of 2020. And that had been such a revelation because I realized we felt like we were the only family in the entire world that had ever been through this. Nobody knew what we were Talking about, we couldn't find any information. None of the professionals who were trying to intervene seemed to know anything about this abuse, and everyone just treated it like the biggest mystery. This was also at a time when a lot of the projects about Gypsy Rose Blanchard were coming out. So folks know those. The act, the story of a woman who was a victim of this abuse and then conspired with an Internet boyfriend to murder her mother. Obviously a very sensational tale. So that was kind of a big moment in pop culture at the moment my book came out. So that was the first time. 2019, when that book came out, was the first time that I had ever talked publicly about what had happened in my family, and that it happened back in 2010, 2011. So it was a few years old at that point. So it's interesting, when you have something this big happen in your life, you sort of go through many different stages of processing it over the years. And I had also had my first child in 2018, so it was very much back on the surface. All of those connections to remembering my sister's pregnancy and also my sister's fake twin pregnancy that she had that started this escalation really came back to haunt me. And I think, probably even if it's not that dramatic, I think most people, when they become parents, find themselves reckoning with whatever their family history, family trauma. You know, you face yourself in a new way, and you think, who am I gonna be as a parent? And face all of those fears. And so that pregnancy was intense. And so, you know, this was all just sort of happening. And really was. I just became very sort of caught up in this whole thing and meeting these other people. And I met Detective Mike Weber, who's the law enforcement expert, biggest law enforcement expert on this abuse in the country. I met him at this conference and heard him talk about his other cases, and I was just so struck by how similar they all were. I came in and I thought, I have this crazy story, because anytime I had tried to tell people about what had happened in my family before this, before I went to this conference, people were shocked. Sometimes people would burst into tears, which is not super helpful if you're trying to process your own trauma. Right. You end up sort of, like, comforting other people and being like, no, no, no, it's okay. I mean, it's not okay, but it. But, you know, people would have no idea what I was talking about. So to. To tell it to a room full of people who were nodding their heads and going, oh, yeah, you know, we've Heard it was just such a revelation because I thought, like, you know, these stories are so similar and if people could see what I'm seeing right now, they would understand what this abuse is and we would be able to better help families and protect children. And also I think just that value of not being alone with the story. Right, right. And that was the first time I had ever felt that. So all of these things were percolating. And then I joined this committee with the American Professional Society on the Abuse of Children. Incredible group of experts. You know, you've got doctors and psychologists and psychiatrists, law enforcement and child abuse professionals of all kinds. It's multidisciplinary. And I sort of thought, well, what is my role as a novelist with a bachelor's degree? Not fancy 18 PhDs like the rest of the room. What could my role possibly be here? And I was like, yeah, to get these stories out of this room and into the world somehow.

[A]

Wow.

[C]

So that was all percolating. And then pandemic happens. An intense time for every single person everywhere, including myself. You know, I had an 18 month old daughter when we went into the pandemic. I'm at my parents house, open my podcatcher on my phone. Love podcasts. Big podcast listener, was already kind of thinking like, this might be something I want to try. I do like to talk a lot and so was very drawn to the art form. But I pick up and I see a promotion for Mike Hicksonbaugh's podcast, Do no Harm. And I just hit the roof because Mike Hicksonbaugh is a longtime nemesis of mine. So this whole thing had happened with my sister in early 2020, before the police investigation into her was wrapped up, which it wrapped up In April of 2020, she got some media coverage from a journalist called Mike Hixenbaug. Mike Hixenbaugh has written an entire series about parents who he presents as being falsely accused of abuse.

[A]

Oh.

[C]

Now I've looked into a bunch of his stories that do not, upon closer examination, look like stories of parents that have been falsely accused. And one of the people he featured was my sister.

[B]

Wow.

[C]

So he collaborated with a local journalist, Taylor Mifendareski. They were on my local television telling their sad story about how they were falsely accused by this evil doctor, et cetera. Didn't mention any of the context, didn't mention any of the evidence against her, which I found out later was extensive. But of course, for my family, seeing her presented this way and, you know, they included a whole bunch of pictures of My niece in the hospital and, you know, in these vulnerable medical situations and really just presented my sister as this heroic parent. I tried to reach out to this journalist at the time when it was happening and say, there's a lot here that you don't know. We've known this for years. There was a whole history of behavior even before the first investigation into her never responded. This just really compounded the pain around this whole thing to not only see her get her children back yet again, but then turn around and be presented as heroic. And, you know, with this form of abuse, that's what people want. They want to be valorized. They want attention and sympathy. So just to watch this otherwise seemingly respectable, you know, national NBC journalist, he's been nominated for a Pulitzer for his other work, Give her that and Give her that platform, was so upsetting. And I said, well, maybe I'm going to fight podcasts with podcasts. So then I thought, well, maybe these stories that I've been thinking about how to do should be a podcast.

[A]

Right?

[C]

I hook up with a producer and really just set out on this journey to make this show. And I dig into a bunch of these cases, and the first season is all centered around this woman, Hope, who was a case of this detective that I'd met, Detective Mike Weber in Texas. And it was one of the cases that hit me the hardest because of the similarities not just with the pattern of abuse, which looks similar again in so many of these cases. Right. She had said that her daughter had cystic fibrosis and that she couldn't eat and that she was having this escalation in feeding tube surgeries, which is something that both my niece and nephew went through and is, like, almost ubiquitous in these cases. In Hope Story, she had had a fake twin girl pregnancy that she dramatically lost and memorialized. And that same thing had happened with my sister. That was sort of the first big sign that something. I mean, there were other signs, but that was the first huge sign when we were in our twenties that something was really wrong. My sister had faked this whole pregnanc. She'd shown us ultrasound pictures. We'd had a baby shower. I mean, it was the whole thing. And then when we were all out of town, told us that she, you know, was going to the hospital and she lost the pregnancy, and she'd named them, and I fully believed that they were real, and then found out very quickly that the whole thing had been a hoax. So that detail, you know, really stuck out to me. And the other detail that stuck out to me was that Hope had this really lovely, loving family. And I think we have sometimes when people grow up to commit horrific acts as Hope did, you know, she was ultimately convicted and served 10 years in prison for draining blood from her daughter, which caused life threatening anemia. For poisoning her daughter. She was a chemist, so she got pathogens out of a lab. I mean, just really horrific. Really horrific. Very easily her daughter could have died. Fortunately, because of the interventions of the doctors and, you know, law enforcement and everything else, she was safe. And those kids are doing great. But I think a lot of times we assume, oh, if someone grows up to be this person, you know, this quote, monster, which is not a terminology I like, I don't think it helps us to sort of look at anyone that way, including perpetrators of horrific crimes. But they must have had something horrible happen to them. Right? They must have had a traumatic childhood. Like, those are the stories that we sort of reach for. And there was just nothing in Hope's history that would have led her to become this person that you could point to. It's like, there's no trauma. She had a really nice family. They were tight knit, they appeared really loving. And of course, you can never know, you know, what someone's individual experience was, but there's just nothing that like stuck out, you know, I spent a lot of time with Hope's family. I really loved them. Her younger sister was the very first interview I did for the podcast and we talked for three hours and it was, you know, the first time I'd met someone who'd had just like seeing such a similar experience with not just, you know, going through this case, but also having it be their sister and someone they looked up to and just trying to reconcile all of that. And then I spent a bunch of time with her brother and her dad, and the more I got to know his family, you know, it finally sort of let me let go of this idea that my family had done. Cause I, you know, we had, as far as I knew, you know, my sister and I had a really lovely childhood together. And, you know, we're really close in age. She's like a little less than two years older than me. We had, you know, nice upper middle class upbringing. Parents are still married to this day, just, you know, again, nothing obvious. So it kind of let me just recognize that like, oh, Hope's family is this nice, loving family and they didn't do anything to make her this way. And so maybe that can be true for my family as well.

[B]

Right.

[C]

So this all leads up to, you know, what ends up being the finale of the first season. Because, of course, the person I most want to talk to is Hope. Because as I'm setting out for this first season of the show, as much as I think, you know, it's been almost 10 years since this happened in my life at this point, and I sort of think, not. I'm over it, but, okay, I'm sort of ready to take this on. And what I didn't realize until I was making the show, till I was sitting in these rooms, until I was, you know, trying to get Hope to agree to an interview, which we went back and forth for months. She made up a fake lawyer that she had to talk it through with. And then, you know, so we, you know, had this endless sort of text exchange about what it would look like. And I realized that I went into it with sort of these intentions that were on the surface. Right. This is something I want to explore, something I want to unpack. These are stories people really need to hear. There's this terrible media narrative that I'm sort of up against about, like, how Munchausen by Proxy isn't real, or it's so rare that, you know, none of these cases are real and whatever else. And so I had these sort of, like, stated goals that I had in my head. And what I realized was under the surface for me was that this was this final Hail Mary to my sister, because even though we were estranged, that wasn't a choice that I made. She cut me off after she got her son back. You know, originally she said to my parents, either you help me sue Children's Hospital for falsely accusing me, either you guys all get back on board with my narrative, or you're not seeing me or my son ever again. And so, needless to say, did not get back on board with her narrative. So. And then all these years later, I sort of realized that part of what I was doing, as strange as it sounds that I'm doing, obviously she's not. I knew she wasn't going to appreciate me doing the show. I had talked a little bit about her in the media before, very carefully, and she had not appreciated that. That it was sort of this message to her of, like, if you want to stop, I can help you. I've gotten to know all these experts. I figured this all out. You can come back. You know, and even though that sort of. To say it now, it sounds delusional, but, you know, like, our emotions are not logical. Right. One of the many things I've learned making this show for the years. Like, we don't make logical decisions, especially when it comes to people we love. And so I think I realized that I was, like, sort of putting this out there as a way of like, saying, like, I've done all this work to understand why you did what you did and to figure out if there's any hope. Is this treatable?

[A]

Right.

[C]

You know, because a lot of people have a conception of it, and I. I don't look at it this way anymore, but of this, like, oh, this is a mental illness. People are mentally ill when they do these things. People aren't mentally well when they do these things. But just like anybody who commits horrific abuse is not mentally well, but they know difference between right and wrong. They're not delusional, and it's not, on the whole, terribly treatable. There are these stories kind of here and there, but, you know, people have to take full accountability, and you're sort of in recovery for the rest of your life, so it's not very attainable. But I think, you know, there's just that little part of me that was like, maybe this ends with her coming back. There was all of these things that I wanted to say to my sister that because she cut me off, I never got the chance to say. And because I didn't have any understanding of what was happening when it was actually happening in our lives. Right. I realized that this conversation with Hope that I was trying so hard to make happen was really like kind of a proxy conversation that I wanted to have with my sister, because I think she reminded me so much of her in that. Also, Hope is very smart. She'd had this really nice life, and she was working as a lead chemist. You know, I mean, she did get that job on a fake degree, but nonetheless, you know, she'd always been really smart. She's all done well in school. She was working this job. She had this handsome husband and these three beautiful children and this family that loved her. And, I mean, that was not her life anymore. By the time I talked to her, she'd been in prison for 10 years, and she was living in this tiny town in Idaho, just kind of on the fringes, you know? So after months of back and forth, I felt finally kind of nail her down, and it's, let's just meet up and talk. Like, regardless of whether you decide to record, let's just talk. So I head out, get on a plane, go to Idaho, go out to this little town with my producer. We drive an hour out to this. Just, like, Tiny little town. We meet in like the one diner, you know, it's like 1950s burger joint in town. And I'm waiting for her to show up. And meanwhile, you know, I've talked to Detective Mike who investigated her all these years ago, and he was like, do not be alone with her. And I was kind of like, oh, Mike. You know, and he was like, I'm serious. Because she had also like poisoned a co worker of hers. Oh.

[A]

Oh.

[C]

And I think even then, even though I knew how dangerous she was, it was still sort of hard to conceive of her that way because she just looks like a normal middle aged mom. And I don't think we have an easy time reconciling that with being a dangerous person. I'm a woman, I know who I instinctively feel is dangerous, right. And I think for a lot of people, they have trouble reconciling that with like what we think of as a mom and even me, even what I'd been through and what I'd seen. So, you know, I'm sitting at this diner with my producer just like eyes on the door and I have no idea if Hope is gonna show up, right? Because it would be very in character to just be like, oh, I'm so sorry I crashed my car or so, you know, whatever, make up some dramatic story and just like leave me sitting there. Like that seems equally as. You never know when it comes to like interviewing people like this because it's not going to make them look good, probably, right? But like at the same time, they can't resist attention and they can't resist drama and they can't resist another chance to like maybe fool someone. So I was like equal parts. I could see her just absolutely ghosting me, coming up with a huge story and being like, ha ha, I made this lady come out and fly out and sit in a diner and wait for me all day. Or I could see her showing up. So in fact she shows up, she walks through the door, she has super long hair, she's wearing a tie dye shirt. She just looks like an absolutely like benign mother next door, middle aged lady. So she walks in, I say hello to her, and immediately she starts crying and just sort of emoting. For the first part of the interview, she's pretending to be deaf, which had been a ruse that she'd kept up for over a decade. And I was warned that she would do that, so I was ready for it. So she pretends she can't hear. And so we kind of play along and we're like, the one thing I was not gonna try and do in this interview was try and get the truth, the sort of capital T truth, from this person, because it's just like a fool's errand. And I didn't need to know what happened in the case. We knew what happened in the case. It was adjudicated. There was records. There was just no question about what she'd done. And so immediately, she starts crying, and then just, like, really very emotional. So, you know, we ask her, like, is it okay if we record? And she says, yes, you can record. So we get out, the interview's rolling. It's all above board, and we have this really intense conversation, like, for a couple of hours. And I had sort of compartmentalized while I was talking to her what I knew she'd done, because I knew. I knew what she was capable of. I knew what she'd done to her daughter. It was horrific. The details are horrific. I'd spent a lot of time with them. I'd spent a lot of time talking to her family members about the effect that it had on them. I mean, I just knew she had just wreaked absolute havoc and devastation on, like, this entire community. She scammed a whole bunch of people. The level of betrayal, trauma that happens to everyone surrounding someone like this is so intense. But, you know, I wanted to be there in the moment with her. And I think it's just, you know, if you're a person with regular levels of empathy, you're there, someone is crying, they're emotional. It's like, you just are in the moment with them.

[A]

Right, Right.

[C]

And I was really emotional because I sort of. I realized that, like, I had these questions about why, and I was never going to get to ask my sister, and I was never going to get to say to her, I can help you. I got to ask Hope. You know, what do you think. What do you think that this was all about and what she told me. You know, Hope told me a lot of lies in this conversation, including pretending to be deaf. Everything else that sort of came out of her mouth, I was like, I don't know if you really have a dog or work at Walmart. I mean, it's like, you really have to check. But, like, I think there were a couple of, like, really true moments. And, you know, I asked her, like, what do you. Why do you think you did this? And she said, I did it because I wanted to be loved, and I never felt like I was loved. I think that's true. I think that's so sad. You know, obviously, she's done horrible things, but I do think that there's some truth to that that comes from this just deep need that sort of can't be met. And she kind of said these other things. I always felt like an outsider, and it just wasn't how anyone else had described her. And so then we had this completely surreal moment. Cause at some point, Hope's boyfriend showed up, and he was a whole character unto himself. But so he's sitting here for part of the interview, and. And we're like, do you want us to play this tape of your brother, you know, talking about you? Cause he had said some really nice things. And then the boyfriend goes, oh, she can't hear it. And we're all kind of like, right, she can't hear it. You know, kind of playing along. And we're like, well, we'll turn it up. And she's like. She just is quiet. And I'm like, I know you can hear. You know, you can hear. I don't know if your boyfriend thinks you can hear, but, like, this is just a whole charade. So you play that for her. And it was a really. It was moving to sort of see her reaction. And she talked a lot about how much regret she had and how much she regretted hurting her children and hurting her family and how sorry she was. But I also asked her, I said, what do you, like, if you could go back and talk to yourself before this all escalated, before you sort of crossed that line, what would you have done? And she said, I would have told my mom, because I think my mom would have done anything to help me. And I had never gotten a chance to meet her mom because her mom passed away before this happened. But I had read a lot about her. I'd listened to interviews with her, you know, with the police, and talked to her family members about her. And I was like, I think that's right. I think she would have. And it was just sort of this, like, really poignant moment of, like, oh, there was this other path that maybe she could have taken.

[A]

Wow.

[C]

Before she did all of these things. So, you know, there were these moments, and as she was saying, oh, I regret it, I'd do anything to have my family back and my children. I love them more than anything. And I said, well, it's not up to me, obviously. I was like, but if you do want to get help, I know at this point, like, the best professionals in the country who do have a treatment model, like, there's a way, but it'd be really hard. Oh, yeah. I'll do anything, you know, anything it takes. I know it's going to be hard, but, like, you know, all this talk. So, you know, we have this really, like, intense, sort of cathartic conversation. I even, like, I hugged her before I left. You know, it was a cathartic moment. And then I walked out of the diner. My producer and I walked out of the diner, and we go to, like, the corner. There was two other friends that had come with us. We met them for, like, a debrief. And just the second I walked out of the diner and the sort of, like, my head cleared, I just was like, oh, I think that was almost all bullshit. There were, you know, those couple of moments where I thought, like, maybe I got a grain of something real. Yeah, but, like, the crocodile tears, all the talk about the regrets and how she loves her children, and I was just like, no, I don't think. I don't think so. I think she regrets that she was caught and that her life fell apart because of it.

[B]

Right.

[C]

If you feel empathy, I don't know how you can do that to your own child. You know, he's a new mom, and I'm reckoning with this. And that had come into such clear focus for me when I had my own child, that I was just like, how gone do you have to be to not feel that intense, protective, like, I will kill a bear with my bare hands, feeling towards your child? So I just thought, like, I don't think I'm ever gonna hear from her again. And I didn't, because I was like, well, you've got my number. Call me when you're ready to do the hard work. And of course she didn't. Of course she didn't call me. But nonetheless, I'm so grateful. I'm so grateful that she agreed to have this conversation with me because it really helped me. And I realized at that moment, like, as I was processing what I had to do was say goodbye, there was still this part of me that thought, when this goes out, you know, maybe Megan old, sort of. Maybe she's exhausted. Maybe she sort of. There were pieces of this that I didn't understand. There was pieces of this. You know, I had this very different memory of my sister as a kid and as a teenager where, like, she was fun and she was so smart and, like, I had a lot of good memories of her that I just couldn't reconcile with this person that she had become. I think I was just sort of, like, holding onto the idea that that person that I remembered was like, still in there, right? If I could just say things the right way and if I could just say the exact right thing and if I could just lay the case out somehow, that would, like, break through. So I wrapped this up. I ended up selling it as a limited series to a big distributor who by shant name. Then I got pregnant with my second child. And it was supposed to launch originally in the spring of 2022. I had my baby in June of 2022. So I'm very pregnant while this whole thing is going on. So it's supposed to launch. We have a trailer. It's all over my social media. And my sister did not see this as an opening to reconnect. She saw this as an opening to try and sue me. So the day before it's supposed to come out, I get a legal notice that I had told everyone, including the distributor was probably coming. And I'd done all my due diligence and da da da da da da. But nonetheless exploded that collaboration. And I very quickly realized that if I wanted to make the show I wanted to make, I was gonna have to do it independently.

[B]

Oh.

[C]

So we sorted it all out. I had a baby. And then in the fall of that year, I finally released the show just independently. I was like, I don't know if anyone's going to listen to this. I worked so hard on this. We had this big distributor, my sister messed it up, whatever, and lo and behold, it was a hit. It really took off. So for the last several years, making the show has been my full time job. So this brings me to my second confrontation with a perpetrator. So this is now our sixth season of the show. And this season, this story is an absolute doozy. So it's a story I'd actually known for years before I even started the show, when I was getting involved with that committee. And back in 2020, when I was sort of thinking, how can I be useful in this space? One of the other things that I did was launch a very small, scrappy nonprofit called Munchausen Support that's dedicated to survivors and their families. There was no place for people to connect. There was no place for people to get information. So I knew I wanted to launch that before I did anything public so that we could sort of have a place to send people in. A bunch of my colleagues from the committee who are professionals, you know, got involved with that, and it's been wonderful. And so one of the things that we do in that organization is peer support. Groups. When we did our pilot one, I was in it. And so was Michelle, who is the daughter of someone called Lisa, who was convicted of medically abusing her middle daughter. So Michelle's younger sister, way back in 1999, she had been caught on video poisoning her daughter's IV line and attempting to suffocate her, her 18 month old daughter. There was 50 instances. It was caught on video. One of the most horrific and straightforward convictions I've ever seen in now years of research in these cases. Right. It was just very cut and dry. It's horrible. There was no question about what she'd done. So she was convicted, but she was essentially given a slap on the wrist. She served eight months in a women's detention facility, and she ended up getting her children back.

[B]

Wow.

[C]

And she had another child, her son Colin. For a couple of years, he was fine, but then when he was five years old, he was diagnosed with a very rare autoimmune condition called nmo. And four years later, he died. Lisa had managed to completely bury her past, and she had gone on to work for a place called the Guthy Jackson foundation, which is a high profile foundation that was created by this billionaire family because their daughter had been diagnosed with this thing. So she goes on to work as their director of patient advocacy for 13 years. This story was so complicated and so harrowing and so high stakes. And I'd known Michelle for five years, and we'd talked for years about doing this story. And what finally put her over the edge was that her younger sister, who'd been the original victim, had now moved back in with Lisa and was living there with her two young children.

[A]

Oh, my gosh.

[C]

And, you know, you've talked to a lot of abuse survivors. The stories are not always as straightforward as we would like them to be, right? Where we're like, of course they're gonna get away from that person and everything else. It was really complicated. But Michelle was very concerned for her nephew. So eventually we decide to embark on the story together. And I met just like a really different place in my life and career by the time I have this conversation. Right. Because when I set out, you know, I had developed a lot of expertise in Munchausen by proxy because I'd been reading everything, I'd been working with these experts, a lot of whom I've interviewed on the show, and I'd really, you know, and obviously I had my personal experience and I had experience as a storyteller, but I would not have called myself a journalist, but I had spent you know, months and months researching this case. And there was another journalist called Meredith Anderson, who is a television journalist who lives in Georgia. And a couple of years ago, when I was covering a different case, she had emailed me and said, hey, I found your podcast. I really like your work. I know you're not very impressed with how the media usually covers these cases, but this is really interesting, and if you ever have a case in Georgia, let me know. And so I said, oh, girl, do I have a case in Georgia. I have the case in Georgia. So she ends up covering this with me, even though there'd never been a police investigation, because no one had ever seen this as a suspicious death. Well, people had seen this as a suspicious death, but no one had sort of reported it, despite this person's history. She'd moved across state lines with her son in Georgia. They had suspected her because that's where she abused her daughter. And so she had this history. So when the heat started getting turned up with her on her son, she moved him to Alabama. So she was just able to Slipped through every crack in the system and then had built this entire life. She was now a public figure as an advocate for this disease, speaking at conferences and educating doctors and working with patients, and just was sort of the. Sort of the final boss of this whole thing. Right. Had just taken it to this level that I'd never really seen another perpetrator take it to in terms of like, building an entire life off of this story. She had also written a blog documenting almost every day of her son's treatment for four years. It was 170,000 words long. So I had just done such a deep dive on this. So we're in this little town in Georgia. It's my second trip there for the show. We're getting ready to go talk to Lisa because I'm working with this other journalist, and she's been trying to figure out, how do I approach Lisa for an interview? Obviously, I want to talk to her. I always want to hear from the person. And you're about to release something that's going to really impact someone's life. Obviously, that is the right thing to do also. And so I had been mulling over sort of how to reach out to her. And, you know, because her daughter was our. One of our main sources for the show, she had told her it was coming. She told her months before, I'm doing this. They're gonna reach out to you, et cetera. So finally, the day comes, and Meredith and I decide that we are just Going to go up, knock on her door. She lives a couple streets away from her daughter. She's gonna get in the car, we're gonna go up there, gonna see if she will do an interview with us. And this time I'm just in a really different space than I was when I was interviewing Hope. When I interviewed Hope, I was just so deep, still in my own feelings and still wrestling with it. And actually, even though I knew what I had personally seen about what my sister had done, I didn't have a ton of information about what had happened in the second case. I was out of her life by the time that happened. But after I interviewed Hope and as I got into the second season of my show because of my sister's legal challenge trying to launch on the show, you know, I really did like just a ton of due diligence about what I could say, what I could lean on, you know, how I could support whatever statements, all that good stuff that you do when you're trying to avoid being sued for defamation. And so I got the police records from the second investigation and I hadn't known what my sister had actually done. I'd known a little bit, but it's very different to read the whole thing in detail. And because I had spent so much time looking at these cases, I could interpret what I was reading in a way that I couldn't have before. And so one of the main things they pointed to about my sister's case was that they had caught her on video dumping medication that she was supposed to be giving her daughter. And then her daughter had a life threatening blood clot. There's almost nothing a good defense attorney can't explain on the stand. I don't know what happened, how, how that one sort of slipped through. But, you know, as I was reading the rest of the this history that was captured in the police reports, there were these other details that stuck out to me again as being so similar. One was that her child had ended up in the hospital with polymicrobial sepsis, which is when you have multiple organisms in the blood that can't be explained otherwise. It is an absolute hallmark of Munchausen by proxy abuse. And that is what Lisa had done to her first child. And then there was a ton of these instances that she had documented in her blog with her son. And that made me face the fact that my sister had likely been poisoning her child also. So I had worked through a lot more and really reckoned with what I believed my sister had done and how similar she was to Lisa.

[B]

Wow.

[C]

So as I'm rolling up with this other journalist, I'm sort of preparing for like a very different conversation, right? Because no one other than this thing that happened 25 years ago that she really got away with, right? I mean, she got a slap on the wrist, she carried on, no one had ever confronted her. And so this journalist, Meredith and I, we knock on her door. I'm nervous because this is the first time I've done this. This is the first time I've just approached someone for an interview. And she answers. She's got like sweats on and she's just frizzy hair. She's like working from home and she's about 10 years older than me. She's like, just looks like a middle aged, like normal mom, grandma, you know, it's surreal because I've spent so much time thinking about her, reading her words, listening to interviews with her, watching videos of her, because of course, she's been so public about this whole story. She comes out, she closes the door behind her. We tell her why we're there, we're talking about your story. We really want to hear from you. We want to give you an opportunity to tell your side of things, to have a voice. And there's kind of a lot of back and forth about, well, I feel very bombarded and sort of like, well, I understand that, but also like, I felt I owed it to you to do this in person, right? This didn't feel like an email. We're going back and forth about this whole thing. And she sort of tries to give this, you know, well, this all happened such a long time ago. Why are you bringing this up now? And I've worked so hard to make it right. She's talking about the original abuse conviction gone to so much therapy. And I said, that's something I'd like to hear about, you know. And I kind of explained briefly, I'm like, I have a sister that's a perpetrator and I, if there's a way to heal from this, I'd like to know that. And she kept saying, well, you'd never believe me anyway. You're just going to believe what you're going to believe. And I was like, that's not true. I was like, I'm here to get that information. I'm at the end of my investigation. There's no other way I can get any additional information except to talk to you. At this point, this other journalist, Meredith, says, well, there's actually also a lot of questions about Colin. And then Lisa Pulls out her phone and starts texting. And then her husband comes out. And her husband, Carrie, has been a collaborator. He's always supported her. He's always defended her. He defended her in court. In the original video, evidence that was caught of the abuse. He was in the room, so he knew. He knows he's been there by her side the whole time. So he comes out, and the first words out of his mouth are, let me guess, defects, which is Georgia's child protection workers. So that was his first guess about who we were, which was pretty telling. And so Lisa looks at him and just with a truly venomous tone, says, no, it's the podcaster. And so he immediately goes into this whole thing about, it was so long ago, and I don't know, you're digging this all back up, and she's gonna get fired from her job, and are you okay with that? And I said, well, she said, they're not just here about that. They're here about Colin. So we go through this whole thing, and she tries to say that there's nothing suspicious about Colin. And she says, well, all of the doctors who treated Colin had my back. And I said, well, actually, Lisa, that's not true, because we have a recorded phone call with his main treating physician saying that she wasn't sure that he had nmo, this disease that he allegedly has, and she's not sure how he died, and that actually his death haunts her. And she said, well, that's not what she said to me. And I said, I understand, but we have a recorded call. And actually, Lisa, you yourself on your blog said that there were a lot of questions about his diagnosis towards the end of his life.

[B]

Life.

[C]

So she just kind of looks at me, and then she says, well, what about the blood test that came back positive for nmo? And I said, oh, right, you're talking about the one. The study. And I named the UT Southwestern study, and I named the organization because I was aware of it. It was a real study. I knew the doctor who'd collected the samples. She goes, yeah, that's right. And I said, well, so the thing about studies like that is they don't return individual diagnostics, so you wouldn't have gotten a test result for him from that. And then she said, kind of sputters, and she goes, well, but they didn't use it for the study. And I said, okay, well, in that case, you reported the test result nine months after it was taken. And so unless they're using the freezing technology they have at a university like that you couldn't get a blood test result that late. And she goes, well, I don't know how long it was. And I said, I do because I've just been putting my timeline together so. And what I realized was by getting to confront her on these facts, which is so hard to do in these cases because they have an answer for everything and they lie about everything, so they just wrong foot you at every turn. And that's part of how they pull it off is they just deluge people with information and you just go blah or you can't. You know, I always used to describe with my sister, it was like there was reality distortion field around her. I would be away from her and I'd go, wait a minute, this doesn't add up. And then I'd try and talk to her about it and she'd say something and I'd be like, yeah, that sounds right. And then I'd walk back away and be like, wait, no, that doesn't make any sense. So finally, like really, for the first time in my life, I was getting to cut through that and just in real time because my brain was so shoved full of details about this case, be able to just call her on that. We talk for 45 minutes and she finally says, well, I know what this looks like, but he was really sick. And I said, that is what it looks like, meaning that this was you, not his illness. And I said, you know, yeah, you're a convicted perpetrator and your son died of a mysterious super rare illness. That is what this looks like. And she said, well, what would you need to put the questions about Colin's death to rest? What do you want his medical records? And I said, yeah, that would certainly answer a lot of questions, but I couldn't accept a single medical record. You'd have to give me access to the whole thing. And I'd need a HIPAA release so that I could talk to his doctors. Her husband says, well, you'd never have time to read through all that. And I looked at him and I said, oh, I would, I would, I'd make time and if that meant moving my deadlines, I would do it. And I said, listen, I'm at the end of my investigation. I've come up with all of the documentation that I can find about all of this, interviewed all these people and if you have something that you think I need to see to tell this story properly, that's why I'm here. If there's documentation you can share with me, if there's something you need to tell me if there's another person you think I should talk to. That's what I'm doing here. And I realized that I was, you know, yeah, for the second time, saying things that I wished I'd gotten a chance to say to my sister. I wished by this point I did not feel this sort of like tiny morsels of hope and longing that I felt for her in the beginning when I was talking to Hope. This sort of like, I can help you. Please come back. It's not how I feel anymore. And the thing I wished I could say now that I was getting to say to Lysa and look her in the eye is, I know what you've done. I see you, and I'm going to say what I know. And so if you have any explanation now, now's your chance. And so eventually we left them with our cards. We said, you know where to find us. And nothing yet.

[B]

All right, another quick break and then we'll get back to it.

[E]

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[C]

Hey, buddy.

[D]

A big home improvement reunion.

[C]

Welcome.

[B]

Oh, boy.

[C]

That guy's a tool.

[B]

Shifting gears.

[D]

New Wednesdays, 8, 7 Central on ABC and stream on Hulu.

[C]

We're back.

[B]

Wow.

[A]

Is that a whole season?

[B]

Yeah.

[C]

I have never released anything that's opened a Pandora's box like this.

[A]

Yeah.

[C]

So we are continuing to report on it. My next call when I got home was to call the Guthy Jackson foundation and say, I need to speak to someone about something really important. We have some really sensitive information coming out about someone who works there. So they fired her. However, they have not told anyone in the community that they fired her or why. They mentioned it once, sort of vaguely, publicly. So we're now dealing with sort of all the fallout. A lot of people have come forward. A lot of people have sought me out. And Lisa, for her part, has moved. She left town. She went to another town close by to care for an elderly relative.

[B]

Wow.

[C]

With still her daughter and her two sons.

[A]

Oh, my gosh.

[C]

It's a very scary situation, and we're really encouraging law enforcement to investigate. So there's a lot of moving parts behind the scenes. But needless to say, if Lisa has anything that makes this look like not what it looks like, she's not sharing it.

[B]

Wow.

[A]

Holy shit. How long has this journey you've been on with the podcast now? How many years?

[C]

Like five years.

[B]

Wow.

[A]

And are you able to talk a little bit about how you began to be aware of your sister's situation?

[C]

Yeah. Yeah. So, you know, really, it was a behavior pattern of behaviors. And I've learned this is really typical. That started really early. And there's kind of my first memories of it, which were really as a teenager. She, when we were in high school, started losing her hair, and that was obviously a big deal. You know, you're a teenage girl, your hair starts falling out. There was a lot of attention. And then my mother took her to a dermatologist, and the dermatologist pulled her aside and said, she's not losing her hair, she's shaving it.

[B]

Wow.

[C]

So that was my first sort of dramatic memory of something. My parents have memories that go back all the way to when she was a kid and said that she needed glasses. And then they took her to the optometrist and they were like, she does not need glasses. But, you know, I think, like, those early incidents, it's pretty easy to brush them off, especially because otherwise she seemed normal. Right. I mean, she was. She was smart, she was good at sports, she had lots of friends. She was not like this really troubled child. Also, like, you know, I have a six year old and a three year old. They do weird things. Like, you know, my daughter for the last several days has been saying that her back is broken. You know, it's like kids always do like a little bit of light malingering. Like they always, you know, it's like, so you just never know. It's like, you know, I always make the, like when I'm trying to explain this behavior to People and sort of how there's like a normal spectrum of lying about health stuff, right? It's like, yeah, like everybody like pretends they're a little sicker than they are to like stay home from work today or you want to stay home from school when you're a kid, right. So we sort of all understand. But you get out of that, right? It's like, oh, people take a little extra care of you or they like, you know, you get out of doing something you don't want to do or stay home and chill. And it's not that shocking, looking back, that maybe those incidents didn't stand up to us more now if we'd known that this was like a thing that people do and why they do it, I think that my parents reaction would have been really different when this started happening. And that's been part of why, why I did open up about that experience and why I do want to talk about. Especially in like, I always really appreciate talking to family members that go way back. You know, we talked to Lisa's younger sister, like, what was this person like growing up? What did they do earlier that like, maybe now looking back is sort of a precursor to this. And then things really escalated when she and I were in our 20s and she had been with this fiance. He ended up breaking up with her cause he had a young son and he was concerned about her with his son. He'd seen some behavior around his son that he didn't like in terms of like her yelling at him and kind of grabbing his arm roughly. And then when he told her he was leaving, she said she was pregnant. And she worked for an OBGYN at the time, so she had lots of access to, you know, things that you could use to pull off a fake pregnancy.

[B]

Oh.

[C]

And so she carried on this ruse that she was pregnant with twins. And I completely believed it. You know, I thought I had two nieces coming. Like I still remember what their names were supposed to be and everything else. And then she lost the pregnancy super dramatically. And then we quickly figured out that it wasn't. Things weren't adding up. She told everyone a bunch of different stories. And then we talked to the ex fiance and he was like, so that kind of all fell apart. And obviously that was a lot more difficult to move past. But she just could never kind of nail her down. You know, it's like I made one attempt to kind of confront her and she just cried and said, I was just so upset and I lost the pregnancy earlier, but I didn't know how to tell you. And, you know, just kind of, again, like, usually they answer trying to confront them with lies, with just, like, other lies. Right, right. There's never a coming clean. There's never an accountability. And. And so I think just the thing that maybe people underestimate going in these situations. And, you know, I'm in a position now where I talk to a lot of people who are in this first stage of disbelief. And, like, especially when the show comes out, like, when a season comes out and people just hear it, and they're like, oh, my God, I've believed this person to be this other person for years. And especially with Lisa, right, Because she's working in this position where she's like, director of Patient advocacy, and she had a bunch of access to people's medical records, and they're like, oh, my God, you're. Now I've just learned who this person is and so horrible. And people feel really foolish a lot of the time, right. They're like, how do I not see it? How do I not know there's something off? And I'm like, because you don't. They're very manipulative. And also, like, when you care about someone, whether that's someone who's your family member or your spouse or your friend, like, you give them a lot of grace.

[A]

Yeah.

[C]

You know, and so, like, I didn't want to believe that my sister had just lied about a pregnancy to sort of mess with all of us and get attention and get off the hook for whatever other thing she was doing. And so I just believe, like, oh, she must be really upset. She's really depressed. Or her ex boyfriend was a jerk, you know, which. This poor ex, like, he didn't do anything wrong. And I'm just like, it must have been him. Right. Very convenient. But you just kind of go along with their narrative, because that's actually like, way more comforting than to just, like, really look at what it would take to do that to people that you love.

[A]

Right.

[C]

And lie about something like that. And to the point where you have photos and you're telling this, you know, because it's very dramatic. Right. It's like she was narrating to me on the phone, going to the hospital, and they're attempting to save the babies and all this, you know, very, very dramatic. And I was so upset, you know, I thought this was really happening.

[A]

Yeah.

[C]

That really set the stage. But then she sort of seemed like she turned things around after that. Like, she, you know, met this other guy, and he seemed really Nice. They got married, and they had this big, beautiful wedding. And she kept her job at the nurse's office. So we were like, yeah, she went through a rough patch, you know? And then she had her son. And she had her son early. Premature births are almost ubiquitous in these cases. It was on the anniversary of the supposed loss of the twins. And then her son was born early. He did okay initially, but then he just had all these issues that didn't make any sense. Wasn't gaining weight. Diagnosed failure to thrive, which, again, I've almost never seen a case of Munchausen by Proxy that didn't involve this, because it's one of the easiest things to manipulate. You bring a child into the doctor, and you say, I don't know what's happening. I'm feeding them. They're not gaining weight, or they're spitting everything up. But the reality is, behind the scenes, that they're just not feeding them.

[B]

Wow.

[A]

Oh, my gosh.

[C]

Of course, I didn't know this at the time, but me and my parents just had this, like, bad feeling that, like, just something was, like, deeply not right. And then when this whole trajectory escalated to the point that she was wanting to have surgical feeding tube put in her son, like, in his stomach. G tube, it's called. That really freaked everyone out. And coincidentally, for the most part, she would not let other people go to the doctor's appointments with her. But for some reason, she had let my mom go to this one. And my mom had heard the doctor say, we don't want to go forward with the surgery yet. Let's wait. And then my sister immediately reported to me that the doctors were really pushing her to have the surgery, so she thought she was gonna go forward with the surgery. At that point, my parents went to talk to our family doctor, who we'd known for a jillion years, and just told her their concerns. And obviously, you know, there's this big history of this other behavior that really, you know, set this up. And so she told them this sounds like Munchausen by Proxy, and sort of explained what that was. And then they came home, and I was living with them at the time. Cause I just moved back from New York, and they came home and told me, and I just felt like my world just, like, split in two.

[B]

Wow.

[C]

Because I was like, oh, that sounds exactly like what we're seeing.

[A]

Oh, my God.

[C]

And if we accuse her of this, she will never forgive us. Like, this is the end of my family as I know it. Right. And so my mom very bravely went in and talked to the doctor that she had been in the appointment with and told him their concerns and this history. And so he said to her, do you think it's time for an intervention? And she said yes. Thinking what they meant was, like, we're all gonna get in a room and we're gonna be like, okay, you gotta cut this out. And like, let's get you on the whatever. I don't know. We're sort of envisioning like, okay, all right. They see there's a problem, we see there's a problem. We're this family that can help and we can circle the wagons, whatever. Of course, that's not what they meant. It got escalated to their child abuse team. And then, you know, we got this call when I was in the same house that I was describing. They had some vacation house in California. I went down there. My sister and her son were supposed to join us the next day. And when my mom and I are driving from the airport to their house in California, we get a call, panicked call from her husband that CPS just came and took my nephew.

[A]

Oh, my gosh.

[C]

And they revealed cps, which they are not supposed to do this, but CPS does a lot of things they're not supposed to do. They revealed to my sister and her husband that my mom had spoken to the doctor. And so they then treated us like the enemy. And how could you think that she would ever do this? This was our first experience with family court and that whole system. Wow. So we naively thought, like, okay, well, they're gonna do something, right? I mean, doctors are really concerned. Like, they just did nothing. You know, they basically, like, ultimately recommended that my sister get some mental health care help, which is woefully insufficient. Wow. In a case like this. And so it just really was so devastating. And we thought, like, well, we just blew our family up for nothing because now we're estranged and we can't even see the child because she knows we're onto her. And they didn't do anything. They didn't do anything to protect the child. And then when there was a second investigation years later for my niece, we thought again, stupidly, we thought, okay, well, this time the police are involved because there isn't in child abuse investigation. I don't know if people know this, but, like, there aren't always police involved. Like, a lot of times it just gets handled through CPS and family courts and that sort of whole trajectory. And so this time there was a police investigation, and we knew they had this video evidence against her. And we're just like, okay, this is the second investigation. They have to take this seriously. Like, how could anyone look at this situation? You know? And she'd also had a baby that had died in between. In between having her son and her daughter. Wow. That she'd posted pictures of on Facebook. And so we would hear these things, you know, just from afar. We just thought, how could anyone look at this situation and think this is all a coincidence? This person's just so unlucky that these things keep happening to her. And now I'm not surprised looking back. Right. Because here it's like Lisa's story is kind of the ultimate story of this. She had a conviction, she fully went to jail. And still people were like, this seems fine. This lady can have her kids back. Oh, her son gets this mysterious super rare illness. This is. This is fine. Nothing to see here. So now I have a much fuller picture of our. The depth of our denial about this form of abuse.

[E]

Yeah.

[C]

And the media is complicit. Here we have this award winning national journalist who looks at the same set of facts and says, yeah, this is the mom who got falsely accused. This is all the doctor's fault. And, you know, when I learned what this doctor had done, the doctor who intervened in the second case, I will go to my grave believing that my niece is alive because of that doctor.

[B]

Wow.

[C]

And that was so reinforced by this season's case. Michelle. The older surviving siblings called the doctor who had treated her brother and recorded the call and gave it to us completely of her own volition. And this doctor said, I'm not sure what he really had. His death will haunt me till the day I die. And basically spelled out this pattern that I'd seen. Because there's all these red flags in Lisa's story, right? Mysterious gastrointestinal issues where he's having all these interventions and blood infections that he keeps having that are so clearly. I mean, you're just. You're reading it and you're like, this is the exact pattern that she already got caught on video doing. Like, why is this a question?

[A]

Oh, my God.

[C]

And this doctor, Dr. Ness, had received a phone call from a doctor in Georgia saying, we're concerned about this child, and this person is a convicted perpetrator and she still didn't report.

[B]

Wow.

[C]

And the doctor who reported on my sister, she got excoriated in the media and just dragged through the mud. And it had a horrible impact on her life. And my sister attempted to sue her. And it was just a whole Mess. So it really, like, I had to become the media because I couldn't get the media to, like, tell the truth about what's going on in these cases. And. And then when we had this original deal with the distributor, the minute my sister sent a legal challenge, they wanted me to take everything about her out. And I was like, I have this all documented. Like, what are you talking about? Like, no, it's like, if I'm gonna bother to do that, I'm gonna tell the truth. Like, that's the whole. Otherwise, what's the point?

[A]

You know, I feel like one of the reasons that that denial must be so easy for people around the perpetrator is that it just seems like you said, it seems unimaginable. You're not conditioned to think of a parent being like that, you know, and.

[C]

Goes against the most basic things of what we understand a mother to be, you know? Yeah, yeah. And people don't want to live in that world. You know, one of the landmark papers that first talked about this abuse in the academic sphere, which is back in, like, the 1970s, he called it the hinterland of child abuse. And I actually kind of love that as a metaphor because I'm like, you have to go into the darkness to accept that this is happening. And because this happened while I was a full adult, I've, at this point, you know, work with survivors and talk to a lot of survivors, and it's, like, very different when they've just been steeped in this other thing and just psychologically manipulated for their entire lives. But for me, you know, I was reckoning with as an adult, so, like, I remember a time when I didn't know about this abuse. Learning so many disquieting things about the criminal justice system, law enforcement, the child protective apparatus, learning how common child abuse is, period, end of sentence. Learning how woefully unprepared we are to deal with it. Learning how the media regularly publishes stories of parents who are falsely accused. And then you read the police report, and you're like, what are you talking about? I remember living in the world before. I remember living in a world where I didn't have to reconcile with, like, what people were capable of doing to children.

[A]

Yeah.

[C]

And like, now I live in this other world, right? And it's like, so. So I get why people want to stay on that side. Like, that's a much nice world to live in. And I think especially for people who are parents, right? Because I think, like, we want to believe that you can send your child out in the world and they'll be safe. My brother in law has stood by my sister. He had a couple of moments where he sort of almost the lights came on and then he just went right back in denial. And now at this point he'll never come out because now he would have to reckon with the fact that he's supported her through all this. But like, I've thought a lot too about why spouse is different. You're just like, you've been presented with so much evidence, like, how could you possibly think. But it's like, because people retreat to this emotional truth because to have to reckon with the fact that like your spouse is doing that to your child or like that you were fooled by someone. I mean, these are all really hard emotional barriers to get in. I think it's fair to say, Kevin, that we have learned a lot about how susceptible people are to conspiracy theories in the last few years.

[A]

Yep, yep, yep, yep, yep.

[C]

You think like, how can people believe this? But it's because, like, people can just sort out facts as they want to, like, suit a narrative that is more comforting to them. Yeah, that makes emotional sense to them. And I think there are some biases that sort of play in, that make these stories easy to construct even in the media. Right. Like where people have really bad experiences with the healthcare system. So if someone's saying, I had a bad experience with the healthcare system, we're like, well, yeah, like that happens all the time. Right?

[D]

Sure, sure.

[C]

They didn't listen to me. They didn't. Didn't take me seriously. They didn't look, you know, they jumped to conclusions. Like, yeah, that all sounds right because that's happened to a lot of us. Or like, you know, the child protective system is messed up. It is messed up. It's not messed up in that specific way. But like these fit into some existing narratives that we have. And it's like, yeah, the health care system does suck, but it doesn't suck because doctors are scheming across five different hospitals to take a child away from a parent. Like, that's not a thing that happens. There's just a lot people can cling to. And it's like when you can cling to those things that sort of make more sense to you than the idea that a mother would do this to a child just for their own needs. I mean, I think I also, people don't understand like malingering cases, which is when someone does it for money, there's usually a lot of financial elements in these. But like, the main draw Is like, just the emotional gratification, the recognition, fooling people, getting power. I think people can sort of be like, oh, they did it because they were scamming people out of money. They can sort of understand that piece, but, like, the other piece, because they're taking on something that would be hell for the rest of us. Right. Like, as a parent, the idea of your child being sick is so awful that you're like, well, why would you ever put yourself in that position? It's because. Well, it's awful to us. It's not awful to them. They're thriving in that situation. They light up in that situation. They're getting what they need from that situation.

[B]

Wow.

[C]

That's the other thing that, like, has been a revelation. These people's lives fall apart eventually, right? Like, you meet them 20, 30 years down the road. They're alone, they're isolated. There's a lot of addiction. Like, we. We've covered some stories of adult survivors, and, like, they end up on the fringe. A lot of other people around them end up mysteriously sick or dead. So it's not a good trajectory. They don't end up happy people. However, I think this idea that I had that, like, oh, maybe my sister really misses us and maybe she wants to get better. Maybe if we just gave her the opportunity, she could give it up. This must be exhausting. Like, you look at what it is to keep a lie, all these lies going, you're like, to me, that looks exhausting, that looks miserable. Like, when normal people, when we lie about something, we're really uncomfortable. Their brain is not wired that way. They get a thrill from lying to people. So it's like, whereas you and I, if I was, like, having a cancer hoax and was trying to convince everyone in my life that I was sick, like, that would be extremely stressful.

[A]

Yeah.

[C]

And I don't know that it's not stressful, but it's also, like, they get a lot out of it. So it's like, that's a huge barrier, obviously, to, like, sort of any kind of treatment is, like, they would have to want to stop, and they don't want to stop.

[A]

It's such a compulsive behavior that is wild. And I also so appreciate what you were bringing up before about, like, we said, see, cult or brainwashy or gaslighting sort of stuff going on all around us. And I think that is also a big part of what makes shedding light on cases like this so that we can all just have a fuller awareness.

[C]

Yeah. There was a wonderful person who was involved in the first investigation of my sister. And, you know, she really advocated for my nephew. And she's just a. She's a wonderful person. And this all happened in 2011 was when the first investigation into my sister and it was a different world in 2011.

[D]

Yeah.

[C]

People could remember back that far. It was like Obama, we didn't even like. It still played as a joke if someone talked about Donald Trump being president. It's like such a different world. And I remember she said we were in the sort of. I think it was before COVID but it was in the first Trump presidency when we were sort of revisiting this together. And she was like, I think people understand a lot better now watching this ascent, how people can lie and lie and lie and get away with it.

[B]

Yeah.

[C]

And they have a better framework to understand how they this happens.

[A]

For sure.

[B]

For sure.

[A]

Yeah. Fascinating. Holy.

[B]

That's it, everyone go to your podcast app and subscribe to Nobody Should Believe Me. Each season of Nobody Should Believe Me is focused on a different case involving munch housing by proxy. You will cry, you will rage. You will bite your lips. You will call your congressman. You will punch your pillows. You will punch your pillows and yell at your dogs. You will basically engage in every human emotion in response to what you're going to hear there except boredom or indifference. Please subscribe to Nobody Should Believe Me. If you listen to season six, you're going to maybe notice a bit little of the Taj flavor sprinkled throughout there because I was a consulting producer or something like that, which means I did kind of not that much, but I got to be in on the staff meetings. I'm going to let you guys in on a little secret. Andrea runs an all female staff and nobody should believe me and. Except for me. And that I. Now that I mention it, maybe that's why I'm not. I haven't been at a staff meeting for a while. I gotta reach out to her about that. I might not be employed anymore, but let me tell you, if you haven't ever been on one, just imagine it for a second. Quietly take a second. It's heaven. It's paradise. It's kind of like obvious being on an all female team led by Andrea Dunlop. It's surreal. If you've been part of poorly managed organizations where emotional honesty is discouraged and inefficiency is the norm and people cook fish in the microwave and stuff. Oh my God, I wish Andrea could hire everybody. Except then there would be guys on the team and then it would suck. Having an all female staff is so good. It's so much better. I don't know how I'm gonna go back. Anyone out there who's running an organization or if you're dissatisfied with your job, if you're a guy, quit anyway. I'm gonna see if I'm gonna see. See if I can convince Kevin to fire everyone but Hope and Cindy and jc we would be way better. That's probably why we're broke all the time. Oh, my God. I'm gonna send an email. So if all goes well, I will not see you next week. I will be cleaning my house and trying to collect unemployment. Okay. Andrea's got an Instagram. Have you heard of this? You can post photos and all your friends can see them. It's Instagram. She's Ndrea Dunlop.

[C]

Thank you so much for having me.

[B]

I have an announcement to make. We are broke and extremely poor. We are suffering greatly financially. And I am so sad and I'm afraid. I'm scared I can't work a real job. If you have money, give it to us. Simple. Patreon.com Risk Risk, the gayest podcast there is. If you have money, transfer as much as possible to risk. Go to patreon.com risk and press all the numbers till you fill up the text field with your whole bank account amount. And then press Enter and you'll get a fraud alert from your bank and put ignore. We need money. As much money as possible, please. We are in our bedrooms and basements and closets. I'm scared, scared, scared, scared, scared. So sad. It's something. It's like Risk. Patreon Risk. It's a website. You have to go on the the web to access it. I don't know. Okay, enough fundraising. Let's get back to the fundraising. Taj, what in fuck is happening? Kevin is in the middle of moving to Thailand. Send him your warm. Not getting homesick? Not freaking out. Not getting detained. Thoughts? If you've got a story that's related to horrific s or anything else at all that is much less awful, send us your pitches. Just go to risk-show.com submissions and send us your pitch. Thank you, everybody. This has been Risk. Kevin's away, but we're keeping it gay. All right, that's it. I am not good at this. Anyway, folks. My dog's licking its chops. My roommate's banging around in the sink. Sounds like a jelly jam jar. Remember, today's the day. Take a risk. Risk, risk, risk.

[C]

Take a.

[B]

So when we Record these conversation stories. We leave the mic running, folks join, they get in the room, they chit chat, they say kind of compliments and praise. Oh, I love your show so much. Oh, wow, that's great. Thank you for having me on. It can all be a bit samey if you've done a lot of these sessions. They'll talk about the weather or they'll talk about how cute their kids are, and it's. It's so boring. I sometimes fall asleep, so I keep my screen off a lot so nobody sees that I'm sleeping. But in this conversation between Andrea and Kevin, we caught a little bit of tape that was a true exception to that common pattern. Andrea and Kevin had a moment of real, genuine connection. Raw, vulnerable, and not afraid to be on honest. I think we can all learn from Kevin and Andrea here at the Risk Show. Let's listen in.

[C]

Yeah, I'll just make sure my.

[A]

Yeah, let me stop the recording and then.

[C]

Yeah, right, yeah.

[A]

Oh, my gosh.

[C]

Yeah, absolutely. Here we go. What the fuck is happening? Oh, my God. Is that right? Yeah. You've been at this for 16 years now. Yeah, that is like 150 years.

[A]

That's true.

[C]

Yeah. This is really typical.

[A]

No.

[C]

This seems fine.

[A]

Anything you like me to say?

[C]

You know, I was working with Taj on the sixth season of my show, and he's so wonderful.

[A]

Yeah, I feel the exact same same way.

[C]

He's just a wonderful person.

[A]

Oh, yeah.

[C]

Such a fun person.

[A]

Incredible, handsome, beautiful.

[C]

Such a talent.

[A]

Holy shit.

[C]

I'm a pro Taj person.

[A]

Oh, for sure. He's been great. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. We've had fun with Taj. So wonderful.

[C]

Kevin, you just get on the mic and you're like, blah, blah, blah.

[B]

Mm. That was Andrea and Kevin speaking honestly and truthfully. Quite perceptively, I would say.

[A]

Taj, don't you just dream at night of being more like me?

[B]

Hi, Andrea. Hi, mom and dad. Kevin let me record today. Hi.