Believe in Magic - Episode 8: The Mother of All Cons

Episode Date: May 31, 2026

New revelations in the extraordinary story of a teenage girl and her celebrity backed charity.Jamie Bartlett’s back to shed new light on to some of the questions he and producer Ruth Mayer were left with at the end of the series.After the final episode was released, people who knew the family got in touch offering to share missing pieces of the puzzle. So Ruth carried on the investigation, joined by a documentary team. For the past three years she’s been working on a new BBC2 TV series about Megan, her mother Jean and their charity “Believe in Magic.”Now she and Jamie can answer some of their lingering questions. What did Megan’s best friends see? What did Megan herself think about her illness? And, what is Jean doing now? But, above all, they wanted to know what really happened between Megan, Jean and the doctors. Insights come from a close family member who has been granted access to Megan’s medical records.The Mother of All Cons is out now on BBC two and iPlayer now in the UK. In the US you can find it on BBC Select and BBC.com as Believe in Magic: The Mother of All Cons.Believe in Magic is a BBC Studios production.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

BBC Studios. It's been three years since we released our podcast Believe in Magic. It told the story of Megan Bari, a teenage girl who set up a charity to grant wishes to seriously ill children. I just wanted to do something to sort of give them the magical experiences back. She was like a fairy godmother to these children. Megan worked night and day to create magical moments for the children, all while battling a life-threat.

brain tumour herself. I've been in and out of hospital, I just sort of realised how much the other children were going through. With the help of her mother, Jean, Believe in Magic attracted the attention of celebrities, including Harry Stiles, Louis Tomlinson, and the rest of the One Direction Boys. Tweet by Harry Stiles.

Everyone should follow and support at Believe in Magic. It's a great cause. As she worked to help others, Megan's own condition worsened. When she needed urgent life-saving treatment for her brain tumour in the US, One Direction and Meg's supporters rallied round. £120,000 raised in less than two days. But in the background, a group of parents started questioning just how sick Megan really was. To me, it just all sounded very, very strange.

And as I'm reading, I'm trying to see where she's being treated, who a doctor is, where the hospital is, and then we should know information. These parents start investigating. And just as Jean and Megan are appealing for more money for Megan's treatment, they track her down. Not to hospital, but Disney World Florida. Busted, she's there.

Megan's in that room. When they go public with what they've uncovered, most people don't believe Megan Jean could be lying. They turn on the worried parents. instead. I'm disgusted with what's happening. Some scumbags just being asshole. I would trust these ladies with my kids' lives, let alone a flipping child.

You not are either mentally ill and need medical support yourselves or you're just generally evil, evil people. As the parents try to expose Megan and Gina's fraudsters, tragedy strikes. While already in hospital, Megan dies. She's just 23 years old. old. The producer Ruth and I are granted special permission to listen to her inquest. The pathologist at the inquest made no mention of a brain tumour. And we find that Megan was likely the victim of a little understood form of abuse called fabricated or induced illness, also known as Munchausen by proxy. This is where a parent or caregiver exaggerates or deliberately causes symptoms.

of illness in a child. And the parent or carer involved in Megan's case was her mother, Jean. If you haven't listened to the full series, I'd recommend you hit pause here and go back to episode one. Because in this new episode, we have answers to some of the questions we were left with at the end of the series.

The story of Megan Barri was one of the most complex and difficult I'd ever worked on. Producer Ruth Mayer and I spent a year trying to piece together scraps, little clues here and there. Any time you put a story like this into the world, it's never the whole picture. And three years on, I still think about Megan a lot. I still have unanswered questions. Whether she really understood her situation and the danger she was in. What the doctors told her.

What became of her mother, Jean, who is still out there somewhere, and has never been charged with any crime. Usually when you make these stories, those questions remain unanswered. But sometimes people hear your story, and they get in touch, and they tell you things you didn't know. And if you're really lucky,

they might even have the missing pieces of the puzzle you've spent years trying to fit together. This is Believe in Magic. Episode 8, the mother of all cons. After the series first went out, Ruth and I were overwhelmed by the response. We heard from care and health professionals

who told us they now felt empowered to ask more questions if they suspected Munchausen by proxy. A Wikipedia page about believing magic was set up and Reddit threads debated theories about what had really happened between Meg, Jean and the doctors. People who knew Megan wrote to us, offering to share their experiences. I became tied up with several other stories, but Ruth decided to stick with it and carry on trying to get to the truth of what happened.

Can you just tap your mic for me, Jamie? That's Ruth, the producer. Thank you. She spent the last three years continuing to investigate, and she's part of a team that has just released a new, documentary series about Megan and Believe in Magic. It's called The Mother of All Cons. It's out now on BBC 2 and IPlayer here in the UK.

In the US, you can find it on BBC Select and BBC.com as Believe in Magic, the mother of all cons. Once upon a time, a little girl lived with her mother in a small stone cottage on the edge of a great forest. The little girl was poorly, but all she thought about was helping other poorly children. It's been the most incredible year, really. The leaving magic has grown so much, and more than really we ever dreamed it could. So I've been working on the documentary for about three years now.

I have been working with a new team. And so it's been very much a joint endeavour of trying to get loads of extra details that answer, I hope, some of the links. questions that we had at the end of the series. When we were making the podcast, we heard all about the incredible things Meg did and the terrible things she went through, but I always felt I didn't really know Meg as a person.

I didn't really know what she understood of what was happening to her. This was partly because Megan's old friends didn't want to speak to us back then. They still believed that Megan had died of a brain tumour, and they thought those parents, who tried to expose her were malicious trolls. It was all just too upsetting. So we always thought that people closer to Megan would have been able to tell us a different side.

Maybe they had seen things. If Megan didn't have a brain tumour, was there something that Megan was doing that would have let slip that this wasn't true? Beth was Megan's best friend from childhood. There was one day that I just opened my Instagram and I had a message from Beth. and it was like getting a message from a massive celebrity.

I was so happy to hear from her. I think we had a sense of how upsetting this was to her. She was incredibly nervous. But she just told us all sorts of things we would never know about Megan. I never forget the first time I met Meg. We were 10 years old, two very small, quiet, well, one quiet, 10-year-old and Meg. It was the two. us against the world.

It was just a constant whirlwind of madness and chaos. You never knew what to expect. It's lovely to get all of these types of details from Beth and just to hear about all the really silly things that they did. Megan loved Wagamama. She always ordered the cats who curry. They had sleepovers with face masks. She loved making pancakes, but it would make a huge mess.

She had a side, which was really nice to hear about, which is the sort of normal teenage life. Yeah, a real person. There were periods where she was, she wasn't a real person because we never got that side of her. Just what had happened to all the bad stuff. Yeah, and obviously there's so much sadness

about the story and what happened to Meg. It just felt really good to know Megan had a friend like that. Yeah. Beth, you know, she'd doored Megan. And they called each other soulmates and they message each other hundreds of times a day. Beth knows Megan before she gets ill and then she sees as she starts to get sicker and sicker

and at the beginning Megan is sort of talking about when she's going to get better and then gradually as time goes on it seems that that's never going to happen when Megan's charity started to grow and she and Jean started to fundraise for her own life-saving treatment in America Beth became aware that a group of concerned parents

were questioning Megan's story. And Beth felt terrible for Megan, and she knew how much this would upset her. She just couldn't understand the parents who were questioning Megan's illness. Yeah, I can understand. Because on the one hand, you think, oh, a best friend must have known.

But when you actually think about it, how would you? Yeah, exactly. When we spoke to Beth, we said, what did you see? Did you ever see anything? anything at all that made you think that Megan wasn't ill and she said no everything to her made sense

going to her bag gets bottles of morphine pill pot after pill pot she had alarms on her phone to schedule what she should be taking when never missed a dosage got some photos of for when I went to visit her in hospital I guess she was just sat in hospital bed with like a valve

coming out of her skull. Megan had told her friends that she was going to have major brain surgery on her tumour. So these are some photos of Megan in hospital. Oh, wow. She's got a sort of oxygen mask on, I guess. Is that an oxygen mask?

And this is a sort of... Why, sort of coming out to a little device that is attached to the top of her head. I mean, it looks pretty serious, doesn't it? It looks... If you saw someone like that, you'd probably believe whatever they told you about it because she really does have all this medical equipment on her.

But this picture I've just shown you is not major surgery on a tumour. So I know now that that valve was to measure the pressure in her brain because Megan was diagnosed with a condition called idiopathic intracranial hypertension. So she had high brain pressure. And periodically the doctors had to measure the pressure in her brain to make sure that it wasn't getting too high. So that is actually what Megan was in hospital for at the time her friends visited her.

But the friends didn't know that. But why would Beth question it? Especially if Megan herself really believed it, that's the thing. So he asked Beth, do you think that Megan herself believed she was ill? And she was like, absolutely. I fully believe that Meg thought she was as ill as they were saying.

I mean, if your mum tells you you're ill, you believe her. She doesn't think Megan was knowingly lying about what had happened to it because she thinks that Megan genuinely believed that she had a tumour. Although we have this whole question as to, you know, what did Megan know? Was she lying? Was she not lying? I sort of came to the conclusion that whether or not she was lying didn't really have anything to bear on whether or not she was a victim or not. Some people do genuinely believe they're sick if that's what their parent is telling.

telling them. On the other hand, some people do know that something is wrong. They do know that there is some kind of untruth or some kind of lie, but yet they're still trapped by that lie. For many years, Megyn Jean appeared, to the outside world at least, like they were incredibly close. When they were young, Beth noticed that Jean always wanted to know exactly where Megan was. Beth put that down to Jean being a devoted mother with an unwell child. But as they got older, Beth started to see Jean and Megan's relationship differently. We were 10 and Jean just came across. It's like this doting mother.

And obviously with the illness, I think like that doting turned into controlling. Always wanting to know where Meg was, what she was doing, who she was with, when she'll be home. I think Jean hated when I... when I got my driving license on a car, because I then gave Meg a bit of freedom. Summer 2014, when Meg was 19, like Meg was at her lowest point that summer,

like just mentally. She was really suicidal. She just wanted to end at all. Start of that August, Meg ran away. She came to mine. got a message one morning begging me to pick her up Meg was like

I need to leave I need to get away from my mum She was absolutely terrified of being alone with Jean Meg stayed for a few days didn't land too well with Jean

that she wasn't at home every now and then she would park up outside her house and just sit in her car outside. Beth remembers that Megan ran away for about two weeks before going back to Jean. She didn't quite understand what had happened, but she knew that Megan didn't have many options.

She hadn't been in school. She couldn't support herself as a young adult, and she was still completely dependent on Jean. While we were working on the podcast, social services for Kingston, the area in southwest London, where Megan lived, published a short summary report into Megan's case. Although it was anonymised, we worked out it was about Megan.

They said Megan's case was likely to have been fabricated or induced illness, FII, or Munchausen by proxy. They have still not published the full report, but one of the authors later said that her case was in the category of FII characterized by serious situations. involving a carer deliberately inducing signs of illness by direct and deliberately harmful means. After the podcast went out, I stayed in close contact with Megan's older sister, who in the podcast we had called Kate. She had cut off contact with Jean, her mother, years ago,

after she'd confronted Jean about Megan's supposed illness. So after Kingston published this report, obviously you and I went to see Kate to tell her what we'd found. I remember. I think it was hard for her to know how to react because she was reading something on paper that she suspected for a long time. I think like seeing it in writing, she was a bit shocked. Yeah.

And then over time she thought about that report, alongside quiet suspicions that she'd already had about what was going on, and she started to look back at all the confusing and upsetting things that had happened over the years involving Megan and her mum. She wanted to be able to speak openly. So she decided to take part in the BBC documentary using her real name, which is Nina. One of the things that she'd been thinking about was an email that Jean had sent her. Five days after Meg died, Gene sent me and my older sister an email.

And it's like this weird diary entry to Meg. Oh my darling Meg I have never been a vindictive person But I hope with all my heart That the vile people responsible for your death Are so ashamed at what they have done I have a plan I think it's a good one

On Saturday I forced myself to go to the travel agents To see if I could get a round-the-world ticket I will scatter your ashes In all the places I know you love What I'm going to do What I am going to do is sell some of your things. So you can help me pay for our big adventure.

How can anyone think that as your mum, I would exaggerate how you were? I'm just so devastated that you had to lose your... This is the line, this is the one. I am just so devastated that you had to lose your life for everyone to know that everything we have ever said and done has been true. That line really stuck out for me. I was just thinking, well, she didn't. She didn't have to die.

It made me ask so many more questions. After learning, Megan was likely a victim of FII or Munchausen by proxy, Nina wanted more answers. She wanted to understand the scale of her mother's lies. When Jean told the world about Megan's illness, what did she really know? She realised that as Meg's close family member, there was another way she could get answers.

She applied for Megan's medical records. She got them and she shared them with the documentary team. Quite a lot to show you. What have you got? I've managed to get hold of a lot of Meg's medical records. I didn't realize there would be so much. And what I found really interesting was there was repeated visits to doctors and hospitals. Going back to 2002 and Meg would have been seven, they're going to the doctors for clicky joints.

abdopane, feels hot but no temp, going to the hospitals for laboratory testing, scans, headache, headache, sore throat, sore throat. It's almost like Jean wanted the doctors to find something wrong with Meg. When we were making the podcast, I desperately wanted to see Megan's medical records to understand exactly what was discussed between the doctors, Jean and Megan. Finally, I can.

So Nina wanted you to see these. This is from... From Great Ormond Street. That's from Great Ormond Street. Yeah, University College Hospital. Oh man, there are loads and loads of them. It's like thick... This isn't even all of them?

Oh, no. Oh, my God. Well, that shows you the amount of time she was in and out of these institutions just constantly. It definitely feels quite intrusive. I mean, I understand why they're not just handed out to journalists, but I don't know. It probably is the only way we were ever going to get to the real truth of what had happened.

And I'm glad it came through Nina. What Ruth and I had always wanted to know was did doctors ever mention a brain tumour? Because that was the core of the lie. For years, Megan and Jean claimed that Meg had a life-threatening brain tumour. It was the lie that led them to set up believing magic, to meet one direction, to raise £120,000 for treatment that Meghan never had and never needed. It was the reason Meghan and Jean told the world that she was so ill.

Although we were confident this was a lie, we were never totally certain. Could Gene have just made an honest mistake? Could the pathologists have missed it somehow? In the notes, there is an answer. In the summer of 2010, doctors at London's Great Ormond Street Hospital do investigate whether Megan might have had a benign tumour in her pituitary gland, a gland that controls hormones in the body.

Because the pituitary gland is located in the brain, they are classified as brain tumors, although they're not typically cancerous and not typically life-threatening. However, very quickly, doctors do more tests, and on the 27th of September 2010, they write a letter to Megan and Gene saying that the results do not show any evidence of pituitary dysfunction, and we have concluded that the big pituitary gland is not a tumour, but most likely enlarged secondary to puberty. The letter concludes, overall this is good news in that we have not found anything serious or sinister

to account for your ongoing symptoms. Megan does not have a brain tumour, and there is nothing serious or sinister going on. Yet a few months later, Gene Twilmese, Wish you could follow my 16-year-old daughter who has a brain tumour. Shortly after this, Jean and Meg set up believe in magic and the brain tumour story takes off in public and never stops. There's another mystery.

So many people saw Meghan take large amounts of medication, swigging liquid morphine from a bottle. Ruth and I had always wondered how she had managed to get so much of it. I can see from these medical notes that for a period of time Megan was prescribed a lot of liquid morphine called Oramorph on the NHS because she kept reporting debilitating headaches

and she had been diagnosed with high brain pressure. When she looked through these medical notes Megan's sister Nina was shocked by just how much Oromorph Megan was prescribed. So this is a list of all of Meg's prescripts. So you see here from beginning of January of 2012, she starts getting Orimorph, a week later, Oramorph, a week later, Oramoth, and another week later, Oramorff.

And then we go again, we go, Oramoroth, Orimorph, Orimorph, Orimorph, Orimorph, Orimov, Orimov, and we're still going. Oromorph is a controlled drug. It's prescribed for cancer and surgical patients and for acute and chronic pain. It's also used in end-of-life care. Megan's medical notes show that at the start of 2015, the NHS stopped prescribing morphine. But friends told Ruth that Megan continued to take liquid morphine long past this point. When Ruth and I listened to the coroner's inquest,

we'd learnt about a forged prescription for morphine, which had been presented to the pharmacy at Harrods, where Megan and Jean often shopped. In the documentary, the staggering scale of that fraud and Jean's part in it is finally revealed. I contacted the coroners and asked if they would send me all of the evidence that was submitted. to them. And I'm so pleased I kept pushing and pushing for that because the inquest didn't contain

half of this. Flaugnant prescriptions like the above appear to have been administered from April 2017. And it goes on for eight months. The crazy thing is, Jean was contacting the wholesalers that supply Harrod's pharmacy, pretending to be Harrod's. pharmacy and bulk ordering morphine. This is a whole other level. And this is quite clearly gene doing this. This says it here. This is gene.

What earth does she need hog cell morphine for? There was a crime reference number as well. So this was being investigated as a criminal case. So the actual forged prescription is in the medical notes. It's a repeat prescription for 6,400 millilitres of oromorph per month. That is more than three times the recommended maximum adult dose. There's a huge amount of morphine for one person to take.

One specialist I spoke to couldn't believe that she had been taking that much herself. But at one stage, Megan told her friends that she was taking about that amount. Oh, that is more serious than I thought. I thought they were just turning up with a little piece of scrap of paper that they pretend was a Note from the doctor. Much more significant than that. I don't think I realised it was the fact that it had been really investigated either. Wow.

So sometime after Megan's death, Gene was interviewed by the police about this. And according to a Met Detective, Gene placed the blame firmly on Megan. I mean, everything, the Oramorph and everything else you found. I mean, it's all pretty serious stuff. Did you actually manage to speak to Jean in person? So we still don't know where Gina's living but obviously it's really important that we put these new allegations to Jean

so we wrote to her recently giving her a chance to respond and so far we haven't heard back from her. Yeah I've always just obviously wondered all this time what is she doing now? Where is she? How does she feel about this? Does she feel sorry for what happened to Megan? So towards the end of the podcast we heard from Jean and she had denied the allegations that we'd put in the series.

After the podcast went out, she went very quiet. She deleted her Twitter account that she'd used to gain all of that celebrity support online. And then some months afterwards, she reappeared using a new identity. And she's actually recreated another supportive online community similar to what she had with Believe in Magic. So this is Jean under her new alias. Oh wow. Just with a totally random new name. So she's still out there writing, creating some kind of online community.

She's got a lot of articles. Yeah. Sort of a lifestyle thing, isn't it? Life stuff. Older women? Does she say anything about Megan on this blog? So we've read pretty much every post that she's written. and there's all sorts of advice given to people

about building relationships and looking after your house. But the only mention of Megan that we could find was in this one article where she talks about having overcome a very sad situation and caring for somebody for over 10 years until they passed away. And as far as I can tell,

that's the only time she must be referring to Megan. That's sort of quite infuriating. isn't it? She's just in passing a little comment and has now just reinvented herself and talks about her excellent life and how interesting it is and all these wonderful things that she's doing in the community she's built. And it's just recent, she's doing it,

she's still on there now. Having learned all this, Nina says she wants her mother, Jean, to be formally investigated. What I want and what I hope for is that Meg gets that justice that she does. deserves. She was a child when all of this started. This wasn't her fault. For a long time, I really wanted to get some answers from June. But then I kind of realized she was never going to

tell me the truth. I feel like with everything that I have, all of this information that I've got together, I should be able to take this to the police, that someone should listen and take seriously. But above all, Nina wants to make sure the things her sister went through might one day help others. And she hopes Megan's story can help raise awareness about Munchausen by proxy. She didn't really have a voice, but what I can do is make people listen to Meg's story and be that voice for Megan. So that nobody has to go through even a fraction of what Meg went through. Again, the full documentary is available on EyePlayer in the UK

or BBC Select and BBC.com in the US. There's more in there than we could include in this episode, plus never-before-seen footage and photos of Megan, including an interview with two pilots who reveal a terrifying emergency transatlantic, flight with Megan on board. I really loved working on the series. I got to work with an amazing team. So big shout out to the series director, Luna Tondoro,

the producer, Eloise Millard, and our executive producer, John Smith, and our extremely hardworking line producer, Michelle Clinton. Everyone worked extremely hard to dig out all of this extra evidence that you've just heard about in this podcast, and I'm really proud of it. So I really hope that people go watch it. And above all, I hope that it does raise awareness about fabricating induced illness,

about munchausen by proxy, and that by telling the story about Megan and new in a different way and with new information really changes things for people who might be going through something similar. Believe in Magic is a BBC Studios podcast. It was written and presented by me, Jamie Bartlett. It was developed, series produced and written by Ruth Mayer. For this episode, the production manager was Debbie Waddell, and the executive producer was Joe Kent. Archive from the BBC Archive. For the series, the executive producer was Inis Bowen.

The producer was Lucy Greenwell, original music by Jeremy Wormsley. The sound designer was Peregrine Andrews. Production manager was Elena Boateng. Production coordinator was Juliet Harvey. Production executive was Laura Jordan Raoul. For the documentary clips in this episode, the line producer was Michelle Clinton and the production executive was Sarah Podmore.

The film editor was Charlie Harrell-U. Producer was Eloise Millard, producer-director was Ruth Mayer, and series producer-director was Lee Ned Tondari. The executive producers were Georgia Mosley and Jonathan Smith.