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This episode of the Jordan Harbinger show is brought to you by booking.com here's the thing, most vacation rental hosts don't even realize they can list their properties on booking.com and if you're not on the platform, your rental is basically invisible to millions of Booking.com travelers worldwide. After all, they can't book what they can't see, right? Don't miss out on consistent bookings and global reach. Head over to booking.com and start your listing today. Get seen, get booked on booking.com this episode is brought to you by Lufthansa Lufthansa Allegris is an innovative, elevated travel experience across all classes, focusing on each person with their own individual and situational needs. Look forward to your own feel good moment above the clouds. Visit lufthansa.com and search for Allegris to learn more. Lufthansa Allegris all it takes is a yes. Coming up next on the Jordan Harbinger
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show, when the perpetrator is someone that you love, impossible to overstate how terrible it feels to come to the realization that they could be harming their child. To be the person who confronts it, who says something, who reports it is so psychologically and emotionally difficult that many people are not willing to do it. Many people will concoct any sort of conspiratorial world to avoid looking at what's in front of them. And that's just humans. Some people can be shown something like video evidence and they will still explain it away. They're putting their own comfort above the safety of the children.
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Welcome to the show. I'm Jordan Harbinger. On the Jordan Harbinger show, we decode the stories, secrets and skills of the world's most fascinating people and turn their wisdom into practical advice that you can use to impact your own life and those around you. Our mission is to help you become a better informed, more critical thinker through long form conversations with a variety of amazing folks from spies to CEOs, athletes, authors, thinkers, performers, even the occasional money laundering expert, astronaut, hacker, real life pirate or special operator. If you're new to the show or you want to tell your friends about the show, I suggest our episode Starter Packs. These are collections of our favorite episodes on topics like persuasion and negotiation, psychology, geopolitics, disinformation, China, North Korea, crime and cults, and more that'll help new listeners get a taste of everything we do here on the show. Just visit jordanharbinger.com start or search for us in your Spotify app to get started. Today on the show, we're diving into something that sounds fake until you realize that it is very, very real and way more common than anyone wants to admit. And medical child abuse. Yeah, strap in. This is not your garden variety bad parenting. This is calculated, methodical, performative abuse where a parent, usually the mother, makes their child sick for attention, sympathy, and a dopamine hit that would make a vagus slot machine blush. We're talking unnecessary surgeries, feeding tubes, chemo drugs, kids being medically tortured while the parent plays Saint on Facebook and racks up GoFundMe donations. And the wild part, a lot of these people, they're not delusional. They're not hallucinating these things for themselves or acting in good faith at all. They know exactly what they're doing. Today we break down Munchausen by proxy. What it is, how it works, why it's so hard to catch, and how these people manipulate doctors, families, and entire systems designed to protect kids. Also, how social media basically turned this into a competitive sport. If you think there's no way this happens that often, buckle up. It is underreported under diagnosed and happening way more than anyone wants to admit. Here we go with Andrea Dunlop. Okay, a not so fun, but super important topic today, medical child abuse. I have to say, a heck of a thing to become an expert in and has to be kind of emotionally exhausting investigating this for a living. What do you think it is?
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I will say we are expanding in our upcoming season to covering other cases of child abuse that are not medical child abuse, because I have found that there is actually so much crossover with how these are being treated and specifically with their intersection with the medical system and in the rise of misinformation about medical. Everything is really affecting both spheres. But obviously that is not a more cheerful topic in any way. But it's definitely emotionally heavy, but it is also very purposeful and intellectually very interesting. And I have gotten to meet so many incredible people in this work that I would never have met otherwise, who have really dedicated their lives, mostly in a pretty quiet, unheralded way and even, unfortunately, increasingly, in a way, if you're talking about child abuse, pediatricians in particular, they are actually being excoriated in the media for their role in protecting children, completely unfairly, but who've dedicated their lives to doing some of the hardest work imaginable that I think most people would not survive a day in, in order to protect children and in order to make children's lives better and safer. And that is such A deeply gratifying thing to come into contact with in a time when I think it feels as though not hyperbolized here, but our country's lost its moral compass completely.
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Well, yeah, I don't know if that's hyperbolic.
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You know, I mean, I think, like, as we see all of these institutions, that felt much more trustworthy. I think, Jordan, when we were growing up, to see people who really have a strong, purposeful ethic about what the right thing is to do, regardless of whether they get credit for it, regardless of whether they're punished for it, but, like, people who really have a backbone and a strong moral compass. And I will say I've talked to so many of those people on the show. Social workers, child abuse, pediatricians, crimes against children, detectives, people who've really taken a lot of hits for doing the right thing in a difficult situation to protect a child. I think that is something that I feel really lucky to come into contact with. So, yeah, there's a lot about the work that's really challenging, but I will say it's never boring. And I have a pretty deep fear of being bored in a job. I feel lucky that I found something, especially, you know, getting into my 40s. That's really given me a lot of purpose.
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A
So I think we should back up and define what Munchausen really is, because, one, it's rarely diagnosed, and I think a lot of people know about it because Eminem talked about it once or something in a song lyric, and people were like, what is that? I actually think that might be where I heard of it first back in the 90s or whenever that was. This is not something that's usually in the Zeitgeist. You're changing that. But I think most people probably don't know what this is.
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Yeah, Awareness of it is pretty low. And I think people's regular touch points. Yes. Eminem song Cleaning Out My Closet, he mentions Munchausen by proxy abuse. I should say he hasn't talked about it really publicly in any other wider context of, like, his experience of that, but he does, of course, allude to it. And then the Gypsy Rose Blanchard case is the one that really broke through that a lot of people know about. So that is the case for those who don't know of young woman who was in an abuse situation and ended up meeting a boyfriend online, conspired to murder her mother. Dede Blanchard, went to prison for seven years. Got out a couple of years ago, and that was just like, a huge story. There was a couple of big media properties about it. There was an HBO documentary called Mommy Dead and Dearest. There was a Hulu series called the Act. It was a dramatized series, but it was just this like massive moment of cultural recognition that was pretty mixed because of the sensational nature of that story. And I think the idea that this was sort of a one off, strange thing that happened to one person and Gypsy Rose Blanchard has become this monolith for the whole thing, which is obviously quite complicated. But so Munchausen by proxy abuse, and that is is the terminology that I and many other experts and professionals have started to use. There's a whole sort of terminology debate, but because it's mostly known by people who know it for the medical elements. So the basic definition is Munchausen by proxy abuse is when a caregiver fabricates, exaggerates or induces illness, usually a mother, usually with a small child for the purposes of their own emotional gratification. So to get attention, to get sympathy, there's often a lot of fundraising involved, but that's not thought to be really like the primary motivator. And it's also referred to as medical child abuse. And when you're talking about it in a criminal context, that's the terminology. The reason I've gone back to using Munchausen by proxy abuse as a more encompassing term is because it often involves other forms of abuse beyond the unnecessary surgeries and the treatments and the medications, which those are obviously very serious, those can be life threatening. It's a particularly deadly form of abuse. But it also encompasses a really deep and persistent psychological abuse, emotional abuse and educational abuse. These kids are often not in school for long periods of time. They're not allowed to be around their peers in a normal way. Those elements are so serious as well. Even if the medical abuse doesn't actually sort of reach the life threatening threshold.
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So basically, let's say a mother says my kid has some kind of cancer and gives him chemotherapy and cancer drugs and a brain shunt or whatever, and the kid is miserable, but he doesn't actually have cancer. The whole thing is designed to get her attention.
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Basically we see a lot of things that fall into these kind of more mystery illnesses, a lot of neurological conditions, things that cannot be tested one way or the other.
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It's vague, right? It's like, oh, they have this. And you're like, okay, what's the definition of that? And I find myself Gemini chatgpting and it's a series of pain in various parts of your body. And it's like, okay, so the Kid's saying that it hurts or like mom's saying, the kid's saying it hurts and he's getting drugs. Right.
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B
Anything that's susceptible to a lot of interpretation on part of the caregiver is especially worrisome in these cases. And they often pick these sort of extremely vanishingly rare neurological disorders where there's one expert in the entire country. And so they go on this whole odyssey. We do see other things that are a little bit more well known. Cystic fibrosis is one that comes up quite often partly because that's a pretty easy test to mess with. That's tested by putting a patch to collect a child's salt content of their sweat, called sweat test. And so we've had one of the first perpetrators that we covered on the show, Hope Yubara doctored that test essentially with nasal spray that has salt in it. There are things like that where they're actually messing with the test. But there are many other cases where they have some condition where there isn't a blood test or a genetic test or some really easy sort of black and white this kid has or they don't. And of course there are a lot of things like that in medicine. There are a lot of legitimate conditions that don't show up on a test like that. So unfortunately, I think most people don't realize how easy it is to pull this abuse off. You do not have to be a mastermind, you just have to be a person with Google.
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A
Yeah, it's surprising to see that the baby will get a feeding tube because they'll be like, he's not thriving, you're starving him to death. But of course you're not telling the doctors that. So they get a feeding tube or an IV line. Like there was a case on your show where a mom was caught putting feces in the baby's feeding tubes or something like that. And so the kid would constantly get really sick or they would put saline in there. So the kid would turn blue and they'd be like, oh my God, he's choked. So then the ER would go, oh, we just had to suction out some fluid. Why is there so much fluid going in there? And it's like, I don't know, something else must be wrong. And it's no, you're putting frickin contact lens solution into the tube and like not telling anyone and rushing back. And it's. Why do people abuse their kids like this? Because this isn't like parent can't control emotions. Hits kid when they get angry. This is far more planned and sinister.
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There are a couple of elements about this abuse that make it particularly disturbing to people. And I want to highlight that this abuse is characterized by intentional deception. So there are parents who over medicalize their kids or take their kids on some weird medical odyssey because they're having anxiety, because they've been come into contact with a strange anti vax adjacent group that's given them some bad ideas about what to do medically for their children. Those things are harmful as well. Those are different situations that need to be handled differently. So I just want to say that because there is a lot of confusion about, well, does a parent really think their kid's sick? Are they having a delusion about their child being sick? Some parents do have that, but that's not what Munchausen by proxy abuse is. It's exactly what you said. It's very premeditated and it's very much a pattern of abuse. It's committed over a long period of time and it's extremely persistent and it looks different at different stages. So often you see premature birth, for example. That comes up a lot in these cases. We strongly believe in most cases that's something that the parent causes. We have perpetrators who have fessed up to that, to inducing birth early. And then of course the child has legitimate issues. If a child's born early. A lot of these feeding issues that you mentioned where they get a failure to thrive diagnosis, but they're just actually not feeding the child, then they're lying about it at the doctor and they're saying, oh, the child is spitting up everything I feed them. And so then you end up with children having invasive procedures. This procedure called a Nissan fund application comes up a lot where they're actually having a surgery to correct reflux that isn't happening. You get the feeding tubes, so you get a lot of that stuff when the children are young and then when they get a little bit older might switch to something like a behavioral disorder or one of these neurological disorders. And yeah, I think in terms of why people do it, what's been really interesting, Jordan, is as I've gotten into these other cases looking at physical abuse, abusive head trauma, which is another issue that there is just an unbelievable amount of misinformation about in the media right now. Unfortunately, you see the degree to which even though Munchausen by proxy is this strange and disturbing phenomenon, it is also they are abusers and they abuse for the same reasons. Because they want power.
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A
Power? Yeah, because this is a baby like you want power over A baby. I don't understand. I just don't understand.
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B
Yeah, it's taken me sort of a long time of sitting with this, looking at different cases, processing all of this information, to sort of come to this revelation that it's much more about power than I initially realized. Because I think the usual descriptions of this as though it's about the parent wanting sympathy or wanting attention, and it is about those things.
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That's what I thought. Or they get a dopamine rush or something and they get addicted to that. I don't know.
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And I think, like, most of us can understand the basic mechanism of what they're getting out of it, which is that, like, even though we would never lie about our own health or lie about our child's health or abuse our child to get this, but I think most of us can kind of understand what the basic reward here is. When you have a crisis, especially if it's something around your children, people rush to your aid, they treat you differently, and you might have a celebrity come visit your child in the hospital and you get all this special attention and you get to have a pass for anything that you're supposed to be doing in your real life. You see a lot of parents in these situations quitting their jobs and just devoting, oh, I have to be at my child's bedside. And so it's sort of this attention and special treatment and outpouring of love that you get for having a sick child. Part of the reward. But the other element that I think has really become clear to me, as I've seen and really talked to people who are survivors and have been in marriages with these perpetrators and really seen what these dynamics are like long term. And of course, I have a perpetrator in my family, which is why I got interested in this, is that it's really about controlling the people around you. So, yes, it's about controlling the child, but obviously it starts when children are very young. And I think the child is really an object and that's where it shares a lot with other forms of abuse. Right. They're not seeing the child as human, particularly, and they're not really feeling a bond with that child. They're seeing the child as an object to get what they want, which is control over other people, control over their spouse, over their family members, over the doctors, to sort of be able to pull one over on people. And I think part of the reason I've thought a lot about the gender dynamics of this abuse, because it is such a high percentage, something like 96.7% of offenders are female. And I think the reason it shows up there is not because there's something specific about the female brain that makes people do this. I think it's because abusers abuse power where they're given power. And one of the only places we really give women unchecked power is over their children. And so that's where abusers who are female identifying are going to leverage that power.
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If people have multiple kids, do they usually do it to all the kids or do they just like single one kid out?
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There's often an escalation as they have multiple kids. So in our season six case, for example, this is a pretty typical dynamic I've seen, especially when people have three children. The first child, Michelle, who was the survivor that we really explored the case with, she was not subjected to any medical abuse that we know of. Her second child, who was born in the late 90s, went on this sort of typical pattern that we see in these cases where she was born very premature. Again, that's something we believe Lisa caused from the feedback of her sister who we spoke to.
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How do you cause a premature birth?
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Oh, lots of ways. Right. So you see people throwing themselves down the stairs.
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Oh, my God.
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Lisa was reported to have tripped a whole bunch of times and kept falling on her stomach and then went into premature labor. Obviously these things to some extent are going to be speculative. It just doesn't seem likely that it's unrelated. In cases where people have access to medication, a lot of perpetrators are nurses or work as medical assistants or somewhere in the medical field. It's not difficult to get one's hands on a drug that could make you go into labor prematurely. Most people wouldn't try and do that, obviously, but it's not actually so very complicated. So in this case, Angelyn was born really dangerously premature. I think it was 26 weeks or something like that quite early. So did have some issues then. Lisa was eventually caught poisoning her in the hospital. She went septic many times, which is having a blood infection. They ended up catching her on video. So that was a quite clear cut case. You don't usually get that clear of evidence in these cases. It usually is this, again, pattern of abuse. And it was in that case they just happened to catch her. I believe it was something like over 50 instances of her poisoning.
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The child caught 50 on video.
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Yeah.
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Wow. So she just didn't know the camera was in there and had the same routine every time. How did it take 50 times before they were like, hey, she's Wiping poop in the tube.
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That's a bit of a persistent question. This was in the late 90s when this happened. And every hospital has different things that they're equipped with in terms of video monitoring. They may not have the staff to monitor it while it's happening. They may be reviewing the tape later, which is, I believe, what happened in this case.
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Yeah, this is the era of, like, security videotapes. I was thinking it was recent because I'm like, you can go into your whatever system and like, when it's the third time and be like, yo, just sanity check this for me. This is three times. What the heck? And they're like, oh, there's poop in the tube. And then you can look at all the other. But like, 50 times they're like, wait a minute. Call the security guy who has the key to the thing that we never open. That's for, like, when the place gets robbed. And look in this room, if there's a camera in this room, and they're like, oh, yeah, pull all the tapes. OK, she's doing it every time. So the 90s, that makes way more sense. Otherwise, if that happened now and it was 50 times, it's like you're filing a lawsuit for straight up, negligently allowing this to happen 50 times on your premises without checking the tapes.
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Well, unfortunately, Jordan, we have the exact opposite kind of lawsuit happening. So there's a case in San Diego right now at Rady Children's, where parents are suing a hospital partly for using video surveillance. And there is a lot of pushback from parents rights groups in particular about the idea of using this kind of video surveillance in a hospital. And I think people should understand that hospitals, for many reasons, not just for abuse reasons, but for many, many reasons, because of what happens in hospitals. Hospitals are not private spaces. They really can't be. They can't be for doctors to be able to do their jobs.
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And so I don't want my surgery to be not filled. I want you to film it. Because if I die, I want you to see the surgeon, like, leaving to go get a cup of coffee while my chest is propped open. Like, I want the tape. I don't care if you see my wee wee. Come on, man.
- [20:59]
B
There's limited expectations of privacy within certain parts of a hospital, but for many very understandable reasons, this is not a private space. So, yeah, unfortunately, we've got the opposite kind of pushback right now, but in this case. So with Lisa, you were asking about the progression. If they have multiple children. So unfortunately in Lisa's case, even though this was an extremely clear cut case, she got a very light sentence. She did eight months in a women's correctional facility. Certainly could have killed her daughter multiple times during this whole thing was putting her daughter's life at significant risk on a consistent basis. And she eventually got custody of her children back and she had a third child who went on to be diagnosed with a rare neurological disorder.
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Speaking of a pathological need for attention, let's hear from our sponsors. We'll be right back. This episode is also sponsored in part by BetterHelp. Financial stress isn't always just about not having enough. Sometimes it's about feeling like no amount is enough. It's comparison pressure and that voice in your head telling you that you should be further along by now. That stuff can wear on you. Even when from the outside everything looks fine. Even I fall victim to that. I look what I built. Instead of thinking like this is great, my brain goes to yeah, well why didn't you build something even bigger, Jordan? Why isn't the show 10 times larger? That's the trap. And therapy can help you sort through that. Not because it's going to tell you how to make more money, but because it'll help you deal with the stress and anxiety that come from tying your value to to achievement. Better Help matches you with a licensed therapist based on a short questionnaire. And if the fit is not right, you can switch anytime. I've done it myself a couple of times. They have over 30,000 therapists, they've helped more than 6 million people worldwide, and live sessions have an average of 4.9 out of 5 based on over 1.7 million client reviews. When life feels overwhelming, therapy can definitely help. Sign up and get 10% off@betterhelp.com Jordan that's better. H E L P.com Jordan this episode is also sponsored by Boll Branch. Upgrading your sleep really doesn't have to be complicated. A lot of the time. The easiest way to make your bed feel dramatically better is to change the part that's actually touching you all night. That's actually what we did when we upgraded our sheets with bowl and branch. They make everything your bed, signature sheets, pillows, blankets, comforters, and it's all designed to feel breathable, soft and comfortable the second you get into bed. We started with the sheets, which is what most people do. You can feel the difference right away. They're incredibly soft without feeling heavy and the whole bed just feels cooler, cleaner and oh so inviting. What's also True, and I can say this from experience, is they really do get softer with every wash. We wash ours every week and somehow they still just keep getting better. We actually own several sets now that we can rotate them, which tells you a lot about how much we like them. We also added the waffle blanket too, and it really completes the bed, really ties the room together.
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- [23:55]
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- [25:19]
B
No one should. No one should assume that this is what's happening. But especially anyone who works with children. I mean, especially in a medical setting. But teachers, other parents, like people who are around children, should be aware of this abuse because it's one of those things that once you see it, you can't unsee it. And I will say, like, the pattern is very dramatic. It is not this sort of subtle gray area thing. It's quite obvious once you have all the information in front of you what is happening. It is really a challenge for doctors because, of course, pediatric doctors are completely dependent on parents to give them a faithful history. And, you know, does that mean they're going to be 100% of the time? And they might say, oh, the kid had 102 fever when they really had 101. But that parent's like that sort of gray area of exaggeration that exists for all things. A doctor asks you, how many drinks do you have a week? And you say two instead of five. Like, doctors understand that two normally, but
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A
that's on an average. You have to stretch it out three months because I had 15 last weekend. But we don't count that. Right, right.
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B
And so it's like, doctors understand that there's like, a normal level of exaggeration, and this abuse is so far beyond that. And it really makes doctors jobs difficult, and then it's really horrible. And pediatric doctors in particular, these are some of the most lovely people you'll ever meet in your life.
- [26:36]
A
These are not cops who go into everything going, I'm suspicious of everything you're telling me. Right. They're going in with the opposite. Like, I'm just here to help you. I got into this profession to help kids versus a detective who's like, I'm looking for inconsistencies in your story because I don't trust you since you're standing in front of me.
- [26:52]
B
Exactly. And it's a totally different job. Pediatric doctors are there because they love kids and they trust parents. That relationship with the parents is really important to them to be able to do their job and help that kid. So that's what they're always looking to do. And so when a parent misuses that trust and uses them to harm their child, the doctor is the weapon in these cases. And so that is a horrible revelation. And some doctors will do whatever mental gymnastics possible to not recognize that they've been used in that way.
- [27:23]
A
Right. I can sympathize with that, though, like, learning that you have been a pivotal part of a child's medical abuse would not be a comfortable realization to have.
- [27:32]
B
Oh, horrific. The thing about this abuse in everyone that gets pulled into it, because there usually is quite a blast zone. So you've got the family members, the non offending spouse or the collaborating spouse in some cases, unfortunately, the other family members, the community members, the church members that donated money and the people who brought casseroles and the doctors. Everyone that gets pulled into this is. It really does demolish your ability to trust both other people and your own instincts. And that's really part of the long term psychological damage. And doctors are included in that to find out that you've been used to do unnecessary surgeries on a child, that you've made a child suffer not by any fault of your own. Because of course, many doctors in these cases are not at fault. They are trusting what a parent is saying and the parent is lying to them. But of course that doesn't make it any better when you've learned that you've done that.
- [28:23]
A
You mentioned the complicit or maybe ignorant spouse. What are the husbands doing? And it's usually the husband, right, who's not directly involved. I guess it seems like it would be really easy for a busy dad or a dad who's at work all the time or something like that. I leave my kids in charge of my wife, they're the mother of my children. So I probably wouldn't be like, oh, the doctor said he has this. That's probably not true. I'd be like, oh my gosh. But the guilt involved with leaving your child to be tortured by the mother and just not knowing for years, that guilt must be crazy intense.
- [28:54]
B
You really have a spectrum with the partners. Again, much of the partners in abusive head trauma cases where that's usually a woman and you get everything from someone who acts in a very protective manner. And the minute that they have the information that they need to put it together, the minute that compelling evidence has been placed in front of them, they will do everything they can to protect their child. You have everything from that spectrum to people that are completely checked out. And this is not terribly uncommon with the gender dynamics of marriage and parenthood in our culture. You see these dynamics a lot in these specific situations where, you know, maybe you have a dad who's in the military or they travel a lot for work, so maybe there's a reason that they're not as involved in the day to day, or they're just completely checked out for their own reasons. And they go, oh, the kids are her thing. And so they don't know for a long time. And then you get these other situations, which we've had a couple on the show where the dad is enabling to the point where I consider them a collaborator.
- [29:55]
A
I have to say there's another one that we didn't really touch on. But personally, I don't know if I would want to even admit to the investigator that I let this go under my nose because I was tired or I was busy working, or I didn't know my wife was abusing our kids, or I was on the road a lot. This is weird that I'm saying this, but not in the situation. But it's like I would almost pretend I was more involved with my kids lives than I actually was because I'd be embarrassed and ashamed to admit that I didn't know my wife was actually a psycho child abuser who was abusing our kids. I would almost fucking fudge. Like, oh, I took him to the doctor last week, I think, oh, that was last year. My bad. I don't know. I feel an element of shame that might cause me to actually be harmful to whatever investigation was going on, if I'm really honest with myself.
- [30:40]
B
Yeah. And that's extremely common. You'll talk to doctors and again, these are kids that are going to the doctor all the time. So it's not, oh, my wife took him to the pediatrician for their annual last year and then I took him this year and those two visits were like months or, you know, a year apart. Right. They're going to the doctor all the time. They're going to different specialists, they're in the hospital all the time. So when the police are interviewing the doctors and they say, hey, what's going on with dad? Like, how much of your interaction? And they're like, oh, when he's here, he doesn't talk. He's usually not here. We don't see him barely at all. It's all Ben, the mom, and then they interview the dad. And it's exactly what you say. They're like, oh, well, I, you know, I am also involved and I also take them to their appointments and I
- [31:19]
A
take notes on everything. My wife actually writes the notes. But I'm there. I, I just, I'm looking at my
- [31:24]
B
phone and I think, again, this is like a gendered thing that plays into this abuse is just the idea that it's something that's very human and that I really empathize with. But I think there's Also, this idea of I let this happen under my roof. And I think there's a lot of guilt, and there's also a lot of shame when you feel like someone has fooled you. Because if you feel like your spouse has also completely manipulated and fooled you, people don't love to admit that they bought into something that wasn't real. That's a very bad feeling.
- [31:55]
A
One thing I noticed from your show and from researching this a little bit on my own is that often these abusers, they start with, like, a fake miscarriage or even a fake pregnancy, and then a fake miscarriage and then a real pregnancy. And I wondered, is that just because pregnant women are up on a pedestal, you treat them differently, and then you treat them special because they're tired and their back hurts, you treat them really well, and you throw a party for them. And then when they lose their child, everyone's like, oh, my God, like, it's really serious, and everyone rallies around you. That's like, the earliest these kinds of people can get the type of attention that they seem to be looking for is before the child is born.
- [32:35]
B
That's right. And oftentimes, not always, but oftentimes Munchausen by proxy behavior, which is when you are abusing someone else to get your needs met. So either a child or a vulnerable adult is preceded by Munchausen behavior, which is when people are doing it to themselves. So a lot of cases that we look at, the mother before they ever had actual children, had, as you said, fake pregnancies, fake miscarriages, or at least dubious ones, and then oftentimes a long history of their own medical oddities, crises that were not real. And that was the case in my family. My sister had a fake twin pregnancy that she dramatically lost, that we later learned almost certainly she was never pregnant at all. And if she ever was, she certainly didn't lose it six months in, as she claimed. But before that, there was a history of. She had a back surgery that looks pretty questionable in the rear view. She had a knee surgery where they went in, the doctors went in, and they couldn't find anything wrong. And she was complaining about pain, et cetera. She had an instance where she was losing her hair as a teenager, and it turned out she was shaving her head. And so she had this pretty, like, long history of weird medical stuff that we just didn't really have context for at the time that preceded this. That's pretty common. There was the case, Hope you borrow, which was the first case we covered on the show. Hope's was very dramatic. Hope Ybarra had a eight year long alleged bone cancer that she had two remissions from and two huge remission parties. And that just didn't turn out to be real at all. And that's sort of what tipped her family off to what was happening.
- [34:06]
A
These people abuse themselves first sometimes, then
- [34:09]
B
yeah, oh, that's pretty common. And if it's not medical abuse like we saw in, you know, the Lisa McDaniel case, which was the one that we covered last season, she didn't have a history so much of medical stuff. But they do have a history of lying. So it will be these elaborate stories in which they are always the victim. So you see fake robberies, fake arson, or them causing arson and saying they were the victim of it. I've never seen a case where there wasn't a pretty significant history of deception that is outside of the normal behavioral range.
- [34:43]
A
I'm guessing it's not a crime to lie to doctors and hospital staff about your kids health. And I don't know what that crime could even possibly be.
- [34:50]
B
So it's not a crime. And there's some legislation in Texas that they've been trying to get past. In the current climate, it is hard to imagine that making much progress because there are people who are very against any such laws. Specifically people who are very strongly anti vaccine and want to preserve their ability to not disclose the fact that they have not vaccinated their children, for example. And obviously it's something that a law that would have to be carefully written. But what I want people to understand about these cases is we are not talking about subtle things. We are not talking about a parent saying they vomited three or four times when they vomited twice. They're not saying, you know, a fever was a point higher than it was. These are dramatic. Saying that your child tested positive for cancer when they didn't. It's blatant lies. It's over a period of time. This is not an easy crime to even detect, let alone prosecute. So I think right now we have no laws against Munchausen by proxy abuse. And so when people are criminally prosecuted, which is extremely rare, they are prosecuted under laws that are injury to a child or aggravated child abuse, depending on the state and the statute. Where they essentially have to prove some physical harm to the crime then is not the abuse itself, it's that they took blood out of their child and
- [36:22]
A
caused anemia or they put feces in the tube.
- [36:25]
B
Like yeah, they poisoned their child, they suffocated their child it has to be some pretty extreme physical intervention and even more than, you know, laws. Because child abuse, how we handle it in this country, there's sort of these two tracks, right? Where you're looking at the child welfare system, which is social workers and dependency and family court and that kind of thing. And there's only a couple of states that even have this as a designation. So what frequently happens when CPS is investigating these cases is they put it under medical neglect, which is not the same thing at all. And then someone who doesn't have any idea what this abuse is, looks at it and goes, they're not medically neglecting this child, they're taking them to the doctor all the time.
- [36:58]
A
They're here all the time. Yeah, exactly.
- [37:00]
B
We don't have a lot of sort of official recognition of this abuse on any level.
- [37:05]
A
It's also just gotta be so hard to call bullshit on somebody who is pregnant. And then they say they get mugged and then they say they're getting stalked and their house gets broken into supposedly and their car gets vandalized and people feel bad for you. It takes a real skeptical SOB like me to go like, OK bro, this is getting a little ridiculous. You're laying it on a little bit thick over here. There was an example in your show where I think it was like the husband of the sister and was like, how could a baby be fine one day come home from the hospital and the next day they're so sick that they have to go back. Could your sister be doing something? And the wife was like, don't you ever say anything like that. Don't you ever say anything. And then later on she's. And I was wrong and she was totally abusing the kid and it's like she felt really bad about it. And the husband I'm sure also was like feeling pretty bad that he accused his sister in law of abusing the kid and had his wife react like that. But it's like somebody's got to say something. But you don't want to, right? You don't want to be the guy who's like, I don't know. That's all a little sus. Who has that type of bad luck. What are the odds your sister's kid has this like 1 in a 10 million neurological disease and doesn't show all the symptoms? That's a little weird. What do you think?
- [38:07]
B
Yeah. So the situation you're talking about is with our last season's case and that was Sabrina, who is the younger sister of the perpetrator which is obviously that's a role I'm familiar with. And I can tell you that when the perpetrator is someone that you love, impossible to overstate how terrible it feels to come to the realization that they could be harming their child. And to be the person who confronts it, who says something, who reports it is so psychologically and emotionally difficult that many people are not willing to do it. Many people will concoct, unfortunately this has been the case with my brother in law and his family. I think they will concoct any sort of conspiratorial world to avoid looking at what's in front of them. And that's just humans. That's just whether or not someone has the emotional courage and whether they've been given the information. I mean I will say, you know, even with Sabrina in that case, once she was shown the video of her sister doing it, she recognized what was happening. And, and some people don't. Some people can be shown something like video evidence and they will still explain it away. And they're putting their own comfort above the safety of the children. And I think like it is hard because you're talking about a mom who's saying that she has a sick child. They are exploiting probably the most sympathetic figure anyone could think of because who is more sympathetic than a sick child and a parent of a sick child. If you just think about that, that's something that we're all very conditioned to respond to and that's what they're exploiting. And I had a wonderful gal on the show, Challice, who was very close friends with the perpetrator Sophie Hartman, that we covered in season five, found the show while we were reporting on it, reached out to us and she described kind of her process of coming around on it. And she said she'd been in Sophie's life through this entire investigation and gone to court with her and defended her to everyone she knew. She described it as when Sophie was her focus, when the perpetrator was her focus. She could believe all of it. The doctors are out to get her, she just has. Everyone's got her wrong, you know, buh, buh, buh. They just don't understand her kid's unique health issue. And she said but once the children came into focus then she couldn't believe any of it anymore. And she actually looked at what the children were being put through. And so I think that's what everyone in the situation needs to do. Think about what the child is actually experiencing here.
- [40:35]
A
When CPS takes the kids away, which I know is rare, but, like, also happens. CPs usually don't. They place the kids with family, which. That seems dangerous to me because of access. Like, these people are so manipulative. They pulled the wool over so many professional and family eyes. And then it's like, all right, that's it. We're taking your kids away and giving them a grandma and grandpa. And it's like, okay, she can come over every day and see them. So what is the functional difference here?
- [41:01]
B
Yeah, that is extremely common. That's what happened in my family. And this was during the second investigation into my sister for her second child. And they were placed with family members who were not protective and did not believe that my sister was abusing her kids. They told the police. The grandfather on that side told the police, this is a witch hunt, just like last time. So really couldn't have been more clear that they were not going to protect the kids from Megan. And indeed, what came out was they were letting Megan spend 11 hours a day at the house, even though she was supposed to be separated from them. She's feeding them, she's changing their diaper. Just was letting her have full, unfettered access to them. And, yeah, I mean, that really messes with an investigation because then you don't have a clean separation test. And one of the best practices is to separate the child and see, hey, do all these issues around feeding and symptoms that the mom is saying happen? Do they all disappear when. Or get remarkably better really quickly when the mom is separated? And if that's the case, then you have a pretty clear common denominator. And also, if that's not the case. Right. I mean, I've interviewed many professionals who have a lot of experience, experience with this, and they've talked about cases where there was a suspicion. There was one bjorker who's a former psychiatric nurse. One of her first cases was a case where a child was having this symptom where he was bleeding from his ears, and he had a sibling that had died previously. And so there were some red flags about abuse. They separated him from the mom temporarily, and the child's symptoms persist. So right away they knew that the mom was not the cause of it. And he did turn out to be one of these rare cases where he had some rare genetic disorder that had killed his sibling. And so that was a case where then they were very quickly reunited and that suspicion was gone.
- [42:36]
A
If your biggest red flag is impulse buying stuff you might not totally need, you're doing great. Let's refine the habit. We'll be right back. This episode is brought to you in part by Lufthansa. When people talk about travel, they usually focus on the destination, the hotel, the restaurants, all the stuff that happens after you land. But the flight is part of the experience, too. Just like a great hotel can shape an entire trip, so can a great flight. That's exactly what Lufthansa Allegris is built around. On a long haul route, comfort matters more than people realize. If you're cramped, tired, and can't relax, you feel it the second you land. But when a flight is comfortable, you can actually stretch out, rest, work, or just enjoy the ride. It changes the whole trip. I was thinking about that on my recent Intercontinental Lufthansa flight. I got so comfortable, I honestly didn't want the flight to end. Which is not something you say very often after a long international trip. That's why Lufthansa Allegris stands out. It's built around the idea that people travel differently. Lufthansa Allegris Business class has five seat options.
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B
You can.
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A
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- [45:38]
B
Yeah, it absolutely is. And I think one of the things that in getting to know adult survivors, you know, one of the things that has really become profoundly obvious to me is just the toll of the psychological damage. Because when the person you're supposed to trust above all people in the world, I'm really close with my mom. I still trust my mom more than almost anyone. Right. Like the person who's supposed to teach you about who is safe in the world is telling you the exact opposite and is telling you only people who side with their abuser are safe people. And anybody who's trying to protect them from their abuser is an evil person who's trying to kidnap them or what have you. And so there is this very intense splitting of anybody who is on to that perpetrator. They will take them out of that doctor's office, they will remove them, they will separate them from that family member. They will absolutely just immediately excommunicate anyone who is suspicious of them.
- [46:34]
A
Do your parents still have contact with your sister then? Because obviously that would mean that. Okay. No, because if you're separated from people that don't believe you, but you still talk to your mom, it's hard to be, like, in between, right? It's hard to be like, oh, yeah, one of our daughters totally knows and proved on the show that you're doing all this and did a whole thing about it. And our other daughter is abusing our grandkids. There's not, like, a gray area where you could be okay with both of those things.
- [47:00]
B
And in my family, which I think this is pretty typical, this all happened over 14 years ago. This came to a head in my family, which was after my sister was investigated for her older child. My parents and I, once we recognized what was happening, with the help of our family doctor, who helped us give a name to it, we were very aligned. Not that we wanted to take her kids away or even wanted her to be punished. I don't think any of us was in that mindset at the time, but just that her child was in danger. And so we were quite aligned on that once we had, again, the information. And because of that, Megan cut us all out of her life. So that was her decision to cut us out. And it was very much this. Either you get on board with my warped version of reality where this is the hospital's fault, and she wanted my parents to help fund a lawsuit against the hospital, and they said, no, thank you. It's a very much. Either you're with me or you're against me, and that's it. You're not seeing your grandchild ever again.
- [48:02]
A
It seems like there can't be a cure for this kind of thing, right? I heard on your show Munchausen by Proxy, it's not a delusion. If you're a mother and you have crazy delusions, like you think your baby is Satan and you're trying to poison her, they can get you medication and they can treat you, and you really are like, oh, my God, I'm mentally ill. I need to stay on these pills. And when you stay on the pills, you're a safe parent again, like, maybe CPS comes just to make sure, like, everything. But you're like, oh, my God, I can't believe I was a totally different person because I was dealing with schizophrenia, whatever it is. But in Munchausen by Proxy, this is like a compulsive behavior. It's a recovery model, right? It's like anorexia. There's not, like, a cure. You can't take a pill and go, oh, yeah, you know what? When I take this, I don't feel the need to abuse my kids.
- [48:42]
B
Yeah, no, you're quite right. And it is very Distinct from parents who are having delusions and who are having something like postpartum psychosis, which is very serious and obviously requires an intervention. But that's something where you're right, exactly. As you said, if a parent has the proper support, they absolutely can be a safe parent. And this is why I and many other experts have really leaned away from the idea of describing this as a psychological condition. There is a psychiatric diagnosis that is associated with it. Factitious disorder imposed on another. It is in the dsm. I really have come to believe that the utility of that psychiatric diagnosis is worse than zero, because I think it often creates confusion about this being a mental illness that someone can be treated for. There is a treatment model. It has been effective in very rare cases, and it begins with a full acknowledgement of the behavior. Right. So not what you usually see in cases, which is that the person only acknowledges the behavior in the context of a criminal investigation, and they only acknowledge what they've been caught for. So, for instance, in Lisa's case where she was caught on video doing this, right? You think, how could anyone explain that behavior? She did. And she said, oh, I was so worried. And this is a pretty common framework that perpetrators give when they're backed into a corner. I was so worried that my child was actually sick, but the doctors weren't doing enough that I poisoned them so that they would have these extreme symptoms. I mean, you can't really make it make rational sense. But unfortunately, this is something where people really want to sympathize with the perpetrator and think, oh, they didn't mean to do this, or they were having a bad moment, or they were in some kind of mental crisis. And then what happens is they get a therapist and they go to a few sessions of therapy, and they're like, whoa, okay, well, that's fixed. And that's not an adequate intervention. And it often also leaves a lot of room for perpetrators to get their own psychological evaluation and have someone come in and say, oh, no, they tested negative for Munchausen by proxy. That's absolute nonsense. It's not something that you can psychologically test for. It is a pattern of abuse, and there either is evidence of that abuse or not. The other big headline case, which ended up with a huge judgment in court on the civil side that just got overturned, the Kowalski case, you know, Beyona Kowalski had a psychologist.
- [51:07]
A
Oh, was that the documentary?
- [51:09]
B
The Take Care of Maya case? So this is a case where there is unbelievably extensive evidence of abuse. Very severe, very high Probability that this would have ended up in a fatality. In my opinion, having read thousands of pages of court documentation and interviewed the doctor and they had a psychologist that came in and evaluated, said, oh no, Bianca Kowalski does not have Munchausen by proxy. And that's not something that you can get a psychological test for. And unless someone is willing to fully account for their behavior and then be in recovery for the rest of their life, that's not a treatable person. So the vast majority of perpetrators are not going to be treatable. And even if someone is in treatment, I tend to believe that there are certain lines that if you cross them with your behavior with children, you are no longer considered a safe person and you should not be around children anymore. So I think in the cases where someone has suffocated their child, poisoned their child, really put their child's life at risk, I just don't think that's someone who should be alone with children anymore. But they may be able to be treated and have some kind of reckoning for their behavior with their children, have some kind of well monitored relationship with their children. Again, that's very rare cases. But this isn't something where you send someone to therapy and parenting classes and you leave the children in the house and they're going to be safe. They're absolutely not.
- [52:27]
A
I don't know if you can call it this word. I'm probably misusing it. Recidivism with Munchausen by proxy.
- [52:33]
B
Yeah, because it's a crime. If they keep doing the crime, that's recidivism.
- [52:36]
A
So it's. The rate of recidivism has to be astronomical then just given what you've said,
- [52:41]
B
as far as I know, I don't think you could ever say 100%, but I mean, certainly like I've never seen a case where the behavior is halted.
- [52:48]
A
How common is this? Because this is one of those things where it's, oh my God, it's so rare. There's 10 documented cases per state and then it's like. Or just nobody's investigating it and reporting it and writing Munchausen by proxy. They're just writing like, seems a little sus in the chart, but it's not like going into a database anywhere.
- [53:06]
B
Yeah, we don't have great data on this. There are people, when they. Media outlets frequently describe this as much more rare than it actually is and they give this sort of old statistic that was from a British study that is from a long time ago and didn't use gray methodology. So that's a thing that happens a lot with science writing. Unfortunately, there are some more recent studies. There's one from Seattle Children's that put it at about a third the rate of abusive head trauma cases, which is the most common form of child abuse of young children. We think it's a lot more common than what is currently recognized. There are many barriers to getting good data on it. It's not something that people are going to self report. Survivors may self report later. There's one long term study by my colleague Dr. Kathy Ayoub, who's been following a number of adult survivors for a long time, but she has not compiled or released that data yet. So I think we may get a better picture as there is more public awareness of it. Part of the problem and a lot of abuse statistics, because we don't necessarily catch it, doesn't necessarily end up in CPS database or criminal database. Child abuse on the whole, not something that is highly prosecuted. Most people unfortunately just get away with it. And a lot of the data that we have on child abuse as a whole is collected from adult survivors. The barrier to that with Munchausen by proxy abuse is many adult survivors, first of all don't know who to tell once they realize they are abuse survivors and may not realize until they're in their 20s or 30s or beyond that they even were abuse survivors. They know there was something going on. They know there was something wrong with their childhood. But the process of discovery can be quite onerous for survivors.
- [54:45]
A
What do you do? You're in therapy and then suddenly you go, hey, whoever, add me to the stats for 1996. Because that's what was going on and it's where do you sign up for that? What do you do with that? The problem is it seems like doctors, let's say I'm a doctor and I don't know much about this and I look at the stats and I go, oh, Munchausen by proxy is like 1 in 5 million. Okay, it's probably not that because I'm looking at the stats that are reported and da, da, da. So it's rare. So I'm like, oh gosh, what are the odds? It's that versus actually this weird rare neurological disorder. They're both equally rare. Well, I guess it's a 50, 50 chance. Meanwhile, Munchausen by proxy is 100 times more common, but it's not showing up in the stats, so I look for it less. Does that make sense?
- [55:24]
B
Yeah, it does. And I think unfortunately that public perception is doubled down on by A lot of media outlets and the coverage of the Maya Kowalski case, it mentioned in that context, oh, well, it can't be this because this is so rare. Meanwhile, the mother is claiming in that case that her child has whole body CRPs, which is not a condition that exists. CRPS does exist. She was told by three world class hospitals that her child did not have that, that her child had conversion disorder. And she kept looking for this diagnosis of CRPS until she found a doctor with a all cash ketamine clinic who did give her that diagnosis and prescribed all of these ketamine infusions for her daughters. If we're talking about probabilities here, it doesn't matter. Like even if you think Munchausen by proxy is pretty rare, this is such an obvious case of it. So I do think doctors do a lot of that questioning and self doubt and also just because emotionally it's so uncomfortable. And now you have this added thing of doctors, and especially doctors that handle child abuse, or really doctors that work in pediatrics are very aware of what happened in the Kowalski case and some of these other lawsuits. So not only are they now pausing to think, could it be this? Because how common is that? It's not an everyday thing. But I think anyone who's working in pediatrics long term is going to see cases. I think anyone who works as a school nurse for 20 years is going to see cases. And so now they're not only pausing to think, oh, are my instincts leading me wrong? They have to think too. If I report this, is it going to end with me as the villain of a Netflix film, getting constant death threats, harassment, being driven out of my career, et cetera, which is not a position we want to put doctors in, I assure you. And there's a lot of press about false allegations of child abuse. And the thing I want to make sure people really understand is that if you are concerned about parents being falsely accused of child abuse, you want as many child abuse pediatricians as possible. Because the data shows us that they rule out half of the cases they evaluate and they are only called in when there's already a suspicion by other doctors of abuse. And so we drive all the child abuse pediatricians out of their job, which is something that a bunch of people are trying to do. You will end up with more families falsely accused of abuse, not less.
- [57:44]
A
That's quite interesting. I assume when people want to get a diagnosis for something, they move across state lines. And I notice a lot of these abusers, they move across state lines, they say it's like, oh, there's one special doctor we want to see because he's an expert. But it seems like the real reason is this hospital has me on their radar because they kind of know something's up. And that caseworker who's assigned to me from this area, they know something is up and the police are in. EMS is like, hey, again. So we kind of need a clean slate. I've got a better plan now to get caught later than I did this time. Here's a mistake I made in San Jose. Let me move to SoCal and try it down there. Something like that.
- [58:19]
B
It seems like that's what's happening 100%, you're correct. And most of the major cases that I've looked at have crossed state lines in some capacity. And, you know, it's really for all those reasons that you've said, I think, again, rather than looking at these perpetrators as, oh, this lady has this weird psychological condition that's making her do these things, they are abusers, they're opportunists, and they're grifters. For example, in our season six case, which was one that moved dramatically across state lines, and usually it's almost always the same reason, right? Oh, my child has this rare thing, and there's this one special doctor that we have to go and see. The reality that came to light about that move, of course, was she was convicted of abusing her middle child. And so that had happened in the area of Georgia where she lived. So that hospital was onto her. The local dfax, which is their cps, was onto her, and they investigated. Originally, when her son was born, they didn't end up doing anything. But this was a case where people were onto her and also in the community. She lived in this small town, Hazelhurst, Georgia. She had done a whole bunch of scammy fundraising when her daughter was sick. She'd gotten money from and support from the church community. So obviously, after she was criminally convicted. This is a small town. People talk, People were onto her. So the well was dry. You kind of have to move on to a new community of people to keep the scam going. And it is shocking the extent to which child abuse investigations, allegations, convictions do not follow people across state lines. There is not good communication. And also, because this is happening so much in the medical system, creates additional barriers. Right. Doctors who are seeing a patient for the first time are not going to go on some odyssey, make sure everything the parent's telling them is correct. They could not do their jobs. That's not plausible. And so now the doctor in that specific case absolutely did have suspicions of abuse that she didn't report. And that is the rare doctor who I feel like is extremely culpable for what happened to this child. A lot of doctors, they're just doing their jobs the way they do their jobs. And perpetrators are extremely canny about exploiting all of those weaknesses within the system.
- [60:33]
A
I noticed a lot of the perpetrators sort of worm their way into social slash otherwise inappropriate relationships with hospital health staff, doctors, nurses, everything.
- [60:43]
B
Yes, this is again, a really common thing and it's part of the sort of profile of abusers is they do this kind of love bombing behavior with people that they want on their side. And so they do that really do a lot to ingratiate themselves with a particular doctor. And doctors are humans. Some of them are more susceptible to this behavior than others. And they're very good at finding the doctors that are the doctors that want to be the hero. The doctors, they'll come in, they'll tell them, all these other doctors have not been able to figure out what's wrong with my child. And you're the only doctor and you're so brilliant. And they are writing all these social media posts about them and they're sending them gifts and they're bringing them cookies and they get their cell phone numbers and they're calling them. And I think Dr. Ness from the season six case, this is my favorite kind of anecdote about this, is that when the child ends up on hospice care, Dr. Ness is in the apartment, celebrated pediatric neurologist, for some reason cleaning the mom's oven. Yeah, again, like, I think doctors have to be really careful with their boundaries. And there's all kinds of reasons parents in more benign ways might try and bulldoze a doctor's boundaries or just because they're just a regular pushy parent or, you know, or obviously, like, I think we've all, you know, having been through pregnancy and childbirth twice, you know, you sort of like baby duck imprint on the doctors that help you deliver your child. And I think there is a genuine emotional connection, I think, between parents and doctors. Oftentimes that is like, lovely. But this goes way beyond that. Obviously.
- [62:10]
A
One thing that's sort of counterintuitive to me is that medical neglect, which you mentioned earlier, and Munchausen by proxy go hand in hand. So you see kids that have lice or something where it's like you need special shampoo, like, why do you have lice? Your mom works from home or like stays with you all day. You have long term untreated conditions, yet you're at the doctor five times a month or whatever. Five times a week for all I know. I don't know. I don't understand how those things go together. Like you think this kid would be, aside from there being abused, would have the cleanest teeth? I don't get it.
- [62:43]
B
Because there is no actual care for the child.
- [62:47]
A
I see. So getting help for the kid is not the point.
- [62:50]
B
Obviously not the point. So yeah, they're treating that child like an object that they're using for their own purposes. So they don't care about the child. That's the bluntest way to say it. They're not behaving like a loving parent and they're not caring for their child and they're depriving their child. There's often medical neglect. They're just not doing the regular sort of checkup things or their child might have some condition that they're just not all that interested in. And so they're not actually getting the child treated for that thing. And also, you know, they're causing issues in their child developmentally by not letting them be around their peers, by telling them they can't do certain things, but by starving them, by pulling them out of school. So the neglect is intense. I was talking about that sort of CPS designation of medical neglect being different. And I think we do need that separate medical child abuse, the over medicalization piece as a designation so people understand that. But yeah, there is often medical neglect and emotional and psychological neglect that comes along with this abuse.
- [63:47]
A
How does social media interact with this sort of thing? You would think this is gasoline on the fire, right? Because you get a ton of sympathy online. People are already addicted to social media, right. Getting likes, sort of like support and comments on a photo. So imagine if it's your Munchausen and you're like, my baby's in the ER again, like photo of child with tubes everywhere. And also I would imagine if I'm a con artist, which is essentially kind of what these people are like, half con artist, half abuser. Right. It's like kind of a blend of those things. I'm looking at like support groups on Facebook and Wikipedia and like for the bad actor, there's like a training course basically online for what to look for this symptoms, people's experiences at the hospital with doctors, an abuser, con artist, whatever could just reverse engineer a lot of that and then feed their addiction or whatever this is.
- [64:34]
B
Oh, absolutely. And I mean Munchausen by Proxy abuse is not a new phenomenon. It got its official name in the 70s, but it's probably been around since time immemorial. However, in the modern era, it is so much easier to pull off. Used to be that most people who are perpetrators worked in the medical field because those were the people that had the knowledge to pull it off. Right. And those were the people that could go and get medical textbooks and describe symptoms. Now anyone can do that. Right. Pretty instantaneously. And online search history comes up a lot in the police investigations of these cases and can be very relevant. Right. And so the Sophie Hartman case in particular, I remember she was googling all of these conditions. She was googling what looked like her plans for the next condition she was going to bring up and that kind of thing. And so you can just see how that makes this absolutely runaway thing. I'm very interested in how this phenomenon has spilled over into people that do not have Munchausen or Munchausen by proxy behaviors, but everyone's sort of self diagnosing online, people seeing TikTok videos and becoming convinced that they have some condition or another. I think we're in like just an overall terrifying moment of medical misinformation, especially with the RFK junior Of it all. So I think it's an interesting context to be talking about this, but I think for people who are doing it deliberately, not only do they have all the medical information you could possibly ever want to pull this off at their fingertips, they have an endless well of attention because if they have burned out the people in their family or community or local church, they can go online, they can find these support groups. An extraordinary element of the Lisa McDaniels story was that she ended up working as the director of patient advocacy for a very prominent foundation, the Guthy Jackson foundation, that was dedicated to the disease that her son allegedly had. She worked as their director of patient advocacy for 13 years. And this was someone who had been convicted of Munchausen by proxy abuse with her older child. And so she really embedded herself in this community, and that's really common. And I think it's horrifying to think about these communities online that are really such a vital resource for parents whose children do have this disease or for people who are suffering from a disease to then be infiltrated by people who are using all of that information to abuse their children. And it's a really scary thing. And I think anybody involved with a rare disease foundation needs to be on the lookout for it, because Lisa is not an isolated phenomenon. And Then beyond that, you have. The other thing that I've become especially interested in is that there are groups where it's just a very much a legitimate group that's a support group for a legitimate disease. And then there are other groups that really appear to be built specifically for perpetrators to give each other information to figure out how to evade child abuse allegations, to figure out how to fight them in court, which specialists to go see to give you this wacky diagnosis. Unfortunately, the medical expert witness field is lucrative for doctors who have lost their moral compass or never had one. So any parent with the means, and this is child abuse, period. This is not just medical child abuse, but also abusive head trauma, broken bones. There's this cadre of doctors, unfortunately, that any parent with the means can come testify for them in court and say, oh no, this wasn't abusive head trauma. This was macrocephaly or one of these sort of conditions. They go, oh, this wasn't broken bones. This child has low vitamin D. So they probably just have rickets. These things are not scientifically sound, but it doesn't mean that they're never effective in court and they're certainly effective in the media. And just because you can get a doctor, an unscrupulous doctor to say that your child has X, Y or Z, and actually that's the explanation for this entire thing. It's not abuse, it's CRPs or it's not abuse, it's XYZ. And so this is a resource that parents are sharing online very actively. And some of these parents are quite politically active. So it's really terrifying.
- [68:32]
A
This stuff is dark.
- [68:34]
C
Geez.
- [68:35]
A
Let's lighten the mood with some ads. We'll be right back. Don't forget about our newsletter, Wee Bitwiser. It's very specific, practical. It'll have an immediate impact on your decisions, your psychology and your relationships. In under two minutes every Wednesday, if you haven't signed up yet, I invite you to come check it out. It really is a great companion to the show. Jordan Harbinger.com news is where you can find it. Now for the rest of my conversation with Andrea Dunlop. You mentioned earlier, like nonprofits that are just magnets for these people. They're celebrity adjacent. There's money, there's lots of attention. There's also this huge field of people to manipulate. Right. If you've got like an organization that runs, I don't know, a run for Raised for the Cure. And it's like your child's one of the poster children for this thing that's just a lot of exactly what these people are looking for. And the woman in one of your latest seasons who essentially kills her son, rebrands herself as this advocate for parents who have sick children. That's super gross. And she begs her still living daughter not to go on your podcast because her career would be ruined. And I'm just like, oh, my God, that was shocking.
- [69:43]
B
And she did get fired, fortunately. And yeah, that was a case where she was really exploiting her son after his death in a way that is really chilling. And was heralded as this advocate and was, according to their website, had educated thousands of medical professionals about his condition. Imagine being the doctor who was like, yeah, this lady came and had lunch with us and explained all about this neuromyelitis optica, which is a real condition, but we do not think that her son had it. After our extensive research into that case and speaking to the diagnosing doctor, and you watch these videos of her of Lisa presenting on the topic. And I met her, I went to her doorstep to tell her that we were reporting on this. And we always give people a chance to tell their side of the story. You would never know. This is not someone who you just immediately, you talk to them and you clock them as you're like, whoa, that person gives me the creeps. She just seems like a super lovely Southern mom. She's got her statement necklaces and she's perfectly presentable and you would not clock it. And, well, I think this foundation should have done, obviously, some more due diligence, considering that she did have a criminal record. But I also see how she snuck past the gates. 100% sure.
- [71:05]
A
Yeah. A lot of the sharing from the parents is crazy to me. Like, way overly detailed. Oversharing. It's like medical porn.
- [71:14]
B
No. 100%. That's the word we use. Yeah. Deliberate. Quite deliberately.
- [71:18]
A
Parents, they'll take photos and they're like, they're dressed in scrubs and it's like, why are you dressed in scrubs visiting your kid? Like, you're not treating the kid. You're. You're visiting your kid. I don't know. There's gofundmes, obviously, right. And the funds are being used by the parent, not the kid. And they're like, it's going to be terrible to lose him. We need to do a make a wish thing. And it's.
- [71:35]
B
Hold on.
- [71:35]
A
This is like a disease that might take his eyesight slowly over time. Why are you talking about him dying? Why do you need a make a wish trip to Disneyland, like, what is happening? That has to be really terrifying to watch if you suspect that something is going on because you're like, wait a minute, like if my kid is sick, I am not blogging about it and I am not saying when they die or if they die. I'm like, I don't even want to think about that. Let's not do that at all. These parents are like the opposite somehow.
- [72:02]
B
Yeah, it is. And I think that's the behavior that we talk to people who were in and you know, around these cases and involved. It's like they had a gut feeling something was off. And a lot of people had a gut feeling that something was off, but they didn't have a name for it. The doctors gave this diagnosis, they presumed, so they don't want to say, well, it doesn't seem like your kid really has something to be. Again, it's just incredibly awkward and emotionally difficult situation to be in if you're someone that suspects abuse is happening. And as you said, the behavior is so off. And I think because Lisa was their season six perpetrator because she was so active online, that's really a lot of what helped me put the pieces together in that case is that throughout the four years of her son's illness and up through his death, Lisa kept a very detailed blog on Caring Bridge almost daily throughout his journey. And so we were able to use that information versus reality, both the memories of the people who were around him and also sometimes videos. And like she says, the kid's in a wheelchair and we have a video of him on that same day running around. So there was a lot that we were able to connect the dots from her social media and I interviewed some people who. Her son ended up on hospice care at her request from a non fatal illness and died there. I'd interviewed a few people on background who work in pediatric hospice and again, I have so many conversations on the show where I'm like, that is a job I could never do. I'm so glad there are people that have the emotional fortitude to be able to do that job because it's really important. And Jordan, both you and I are parents. That's our worst nightmare. Right? I think there's a real reluctance on people watching this situations to judge. Right. To say that seems weird. It seems weird that you're talking about your son in the past tense when he's still alive. It seems weird that three days after his death you're posting about what you should do about the funeral plants. It seems weird that you seem so excited about all of this. All of that stuff that is striking people on a very gut level as wrong and is wrong. People have a real reluctance to call that out because you just think this person's child is dying. Who knows how I would behave, right?
- [74:19]
A
You go like, grief is so weird. Grief makes you do weird stuff. You don't think this person doesn't seem to care about their kid. That's freaking psycho.
- [74:27]
B
I would just urge people, I think so much of this is about trusting your instincts. Something feels really off. Don't ignore it. And I know that puts people in a really uncomfortable position. But when you're talking about life and death of a child, it's worth being uncomfortable. And in Lisa's case, because she was posting so much on social media and on her blog, she was posting a lot on Facebook. She had these various groups that she was messaging contemporaneously while her son was on hospice. There was a lot of just like really strange behavior. And I think I also want to flag for people because this has come up in a bunch of cases. This was in true of our season five cases and true of the Biota Kowalski case, which was featured in the Take Care of Maya Netflix film. When a parent is saying their child has an illness that is not fatal. And I want to also point out to people that the existence of an illness. We don't think Colin McDaniel ever had an NMO.
- [75:18]
A
He's the kid from your latest season.
- [75:19]
B
He's the kid from season six. We don't think that that was a legitimate diagnosis. Maya Kowalski, because of the way that diagnosis came about, which was that her mom decided that was the diagnosis and then found a doctor to give her the diagnosis. I don't think that diagnosis was accurate. Many medical professionals testified that they did not see any symptoms that would match up with CRPs. But there is a part of that that's a red herring because Maya Kowalski could have had CRPs, Colin could have had NMO. Those are not fatal diseases. And their parents were talking about them as though they were going to die persistently. In the lead up to, in Colin's instance, the death in Maya Kowalski's situation, luckily her being separated from Biata Kowalski went into the hospital and said, if you don't give her this massive amount of ketamine, I will take her home and put her on hospice so that she can finally die. She doesn't want to live like this anymore. And Beata, furthermore, was an infusion nurse who had been giving her daughter ketamine and other drugs at home. There was no reason to believe that she wasn't going to follow through on that. And I've seen multiple perpetrators follow through on that threat. So when a parent is talking extensively about how their child is going to die when they don't have a terminal diagnosis, that should absolutely scare everyone and we should take that really seriously because I am of the opinion that they are telegraphing an intention, or at least you cannot be sure that they're not.
- [76:46]
A
That's interesting. Yeah. The other red flag, that's a really big red flag. In addition to the others, like doctor shopping, moving around, not accepting a diagnosis, aiming for a certain diagnosis. One interesting anecdote was these women who had reported another woman to cps. They were saying that in a Facebook group, one of the things she was doing, if someone posted about their sick kid, the perpetrator, the mother with Munchausen, she would post something like, my kid was even sicker, his symptoms were even worse. He was in the hospital even longer. It's like a weird game of one upmanship, like a contest because of the attention and sympathy given to one mother. They're like, no, no, no, we can't have that.
- [77:18]
B
That's for me, I need that 100%. That's a huge piece of the pattern, just from beginning to end. And again, that's something that if you're talking to like a sibling or a family member that's been around that person since they were younger, that they'll just say, like, anytime the attention is on someone else, they have a crisis to redirect the attention to them. And so they continue this behavior into the abuse. And so, yeah, that one upsmanship is something that you see a lot. And it's with Colin. And again, same thing with Maya. There's a lot of this chatter about their child being our season five case as well, the Sophie Harmon case, their child being the most rare and the most serious case of this that's ever been recorded, which I think is just something that, like a normal parent doesn't want their child to have. The worst version of this, but this is not a normal parent. This is a parent. There's this always leaning into this drama, right? This drama of having the rarest case, the most severe case, the case that is baffling all of these doctors, and that's where they can sometimes really play into a susceptible doctor's ego because they're saying, like, oh, you have this zebra, you have the most rare case. And they're going to write studies about it and there's going to be a medical breakthrough because of my kid. And that's really about the parent. That's really about the parent's ego and them sort of wanting the attention of having this super rare case that people are going to write papers about and that kind of thing.
- [78:42]
A
Doesn't this mess with the science, though, because if you're like infiltrating a rare disease advocacy group and you're going to all the specialists and they're like, huh, usually people with this have this kind of thing in their blood, this rare case. This guy, he doesn't have it, we gotta add him to the sample size. And then it's just screwing up all of the science. You're polluting the sample pool. Doesn't that happen at some level? Because it's rare. If you have 10 samples and one of them is bullshit, that's a problem.
- [79:08]
B
It's a real concern, certainly with Lisa McDaniel being so involved in the NMO community, and she talked about her son donating samples to their biorepository, which we do believe happened. Sophie Hartman, again, that was her daughter, allegedly had hc, which is alternating hemiplegia of childhood. Again, I don't believe that diagnosis is accurate because I read a sworn affidavit from a neurologist that was not the diagnosis. She was taking her to this specialty clinic at Duke Hospital. And yeah, there is a real concern about polluting the science with these rare diseases because if you have, as it's exactly as you said, if you have a very small sample, again, most people, even in these disease communities are not going to be abusers. But I think rare disease communities and studies and doctors who treat those rare diseases are such targets for these abusers that I think many of them do find their way into these sample sizes.
- [80:06]
A
It's amazing to me that doctors and judges go along with it. Even when in your case, in the latest season, another doctor calls and says, this is what's happening. It's medical child abuse. And then the doctor's like, oh, okay, I don't know. The lesson really, and you say this a lot on the show, is that people believe their eyes. They believe their eyes over everything else.
- [80:25]
B
And judges are also human beings, and judges are not necessarily medically knowledgeable. It's not their field of study. So if you are in a situation, particularly if you have parents with resources who can go into court and say, this happened in my case, this happened in. Happened in many other cases. This happened in the Kowalski case, right? They had these Other experts testifying about CRPs. A judge is not necessarily going to know sitting on the bench who's credible and who isn't. Right? These doctors are saying one thing, and now these other doctors are saying other things. So I don't know who am I to be the tiebreaker? And so unfortunately, that means that prosecutors who prosecute child abuse cases really need to be knowledgeable about this cadre of experts. That's part of the solution. The solution is obviously complex. Part of it is just that confusion about this abuse. If you don't even understand what Munchausen by proxy abuse is, and you're sitting on the bench, which is unfortunately really common, you're looking at someone who appears like a sympathetic mother. And they get up there and they tell you a sob story and they cry in court and they say, these horrible doctors have accused me of abuse and I just have this sick child. And look at everything I've done for my child. I quit my job to take care of my child. And they're looking at something like often is not where the child does have a diagnosis. Now, that diagnosis was achieved by fraudulent means. If you don't understand what this abuse is, you're going to be like, but this child was diagnosed with this condition. It's just that absolute lack of knowledge by everyone involved really just lets the vast majority of these cases fly by. I've met a number of adult survivors. At this point, I only know one who was actually separated from their abuser, and that was because Detective Mike Weber was involved.
- [82:13]
A
Be on the lookout, folks. This stuff happens right under our noses. Really scary and really sad. It's pretty heroic you're exposing this. I bet you are deeply unpopular with certain groups of people. Holy cow.
- [82:25]
B
Oh, thank you for saying that, Jordan. And yes, I am correct. That's been something to get used to. Certainly. I think that especially started as I did cover this higher profile case which ended in a big court judgment and was in subject of a very sympathetic to their cause. NETFLIX FILM fortunately, that verdict was vacated by the Florida Court of Appeals. That's been an interesting case to follow. But yeah, I mean, I think, like, I'm talking about something that makes people really uncomfortable. Parents rights groups are extremely active in this country. They are extremely well funded and well organized. And they don't like me, as you can imagine. And that's all okay. I'm really, really at peace with that. I have interviewed many child abuse pediatricians on the show, including Dr. Sally Smith, who got the worst public treatment of any of them. And Their fortitude in doing the right thing, despite all of that, is something that I admire so much that I figure, like, people yelling about me online is nothing to worry about.
- [83:36]
A
Thanks, Andrea, for your work on this and for coming back on the show today. Really interesting. And of course, people will link to the podcast in the show notes so people can get into the weeds on this if they're interested.
- [83:46]
B
That was great. And you're such a great interviewer. You always do such a nice amount of homework and it shows. So I appreciate you. Thank you so much, Jordan, for having me back on. Always a pleasure to talk to you.
- [83:57]
A
You're about to hear a preview with Ken Burns, who says the real American Revolution wasn't a clean break from Britain, but a messy, violent civil war whose contradictions we are still debugging 250 years later.
- [84:08]
C
A good story neutralizes the binary yes and no. You know, you're bad. Left, right, young, old, rich, poor. Whatever the dialectic is you're involved in, a good story can sort of neutralize it and go, oh, wow, I didn't know that. There's no test we'd share with you our process of discovery. So all the stuff I've said about the revolution, I had no idea going in. And I am so overwhelmed with the joy of acquiring it that giving it away feels even better. The ideas are really, really powerful at the heart of this. The idea that you could be a citizen, that you could have a say in your government after your family has worked the land for a thousand years for somebody else, and all of a sudden you come here and you own some land and farm and you can do this, and you're literate. Democracy is a really messy form of government, but it's better than all the other forms because the other forms involve a kind of tyranny, authoritarian certainty. Democracy is messy because you actually have to listen to people that you disagree with and you have to compromise. When that breaks down, then you lose the possibility of having it. America comes out of violence. It's born in violence. What would you guys do? What would I do? Would I be a loyalist? Would I be a patriot? What would I be willing to fight for? What would I be willing to give my life and all that I've accumulated in my life, my fortune? Would I do that? We mutually pledge to each other our lives, our fortunes, and our sacred honor.
- [85:37]
A
For more on what else we've been getting wrong about our own origin story, check out episode 1238 with Ken Burns. This episode forces you to confront the version of America, you didn't learn in school. So yeah, this is one of those episodes that's going to stick with you because once you see the patterns, once you understand how this works, you realize how easily it can hide in plain sight. The oversharing, the constant medical crises, the need to one up every other sick kid story in the room. And the scariest part, the systems designed to protect kids can actually be used to protect the abuser, especially when they're charming, manipulative, and very, very convincing. So the takeaway here, it's not paranoia, it's awareness. Because this isn't some rare fringe disorder. It's underreported, under, diagnosed and evolving. Especially with social media pouring gasoline on the attention economy. Big thanks to Andrea for coming on and doing the kind of work that makes a lot of very dangerous people deeply uncomfortable. This stuff does not happen in dark alleys, folks. It happens right under our noses. All things Andrea Dunlop will be in the show. Notes on the website, advertisers, deals, discount codes, ways to support the show, all@jordanharbinger.com deals Please consider supporting those who support the show. Don't forget about six minute networking as well. Over at 6minutenetworking.com I'm @jordan Harbinger on Twitter and Instagram. You can also connect with me on LinkedIn. This show was created in association with podcast one. My team is Jen Harbinger, Jace Sanderson, Robert Fogarty, Tata Sidlowskis, Ian Baird, Gabriel Mizrahi. Remember, we rise by lifting others. The fee for the show is you share it with friends when you find something useful or interesting. In fact, the greatest compliment you can give us is to share the show with those you care about. If you know somebody who might be affected by this or would be deeply interested in this, maybe medical personnel needs to hear this. Share this episode with them. In the meantime, I hope you apply what you hear on the show so you can live what you learn. And we'll see you next time.