Betrayal Weekly - Knowing | EP 7 | Ashley's Story

Episode Date: June 29, 2023

As Jason Lytton’s release date grows closer, Andrea learns more about the psychology of perpetrators. We listen as Ashley and her therapist Jessica Baum consider how Jason’s arrest forced Ashley to confront other painful aspects of her life she had tried to suppress.  If you would like to reach out to the Betrayal Team, email us at [e-mail].   To report a case of child sexual exploitation, call The National Center for Missing and Exploited Children's CyberTipline at 1-800-THE-LOST  If you or someone you know is worried about their sexual thoughts and feelings towards children reach out to stopitnow.org  In the UK reach out to stopitnow.org.uk  Where to Find Jessica Baum and her book Anxiously Attached: www.jessicabaumlmhc.com/anxiously-attached See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

This is an IHeart podcast. Guaranteed Human. When a group of women discover they've all dated the same prolific con artist, they take matters into their own hands. I vowed, I will be his last target. He is not going to get away with this. He's going to get what he deserves. We always say that trust your girlfriends.

Listen to the girlfriends. Trust me, babe. On the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or web. wherever you get your podcast. What's up, everyone? I'm Ego Vodam. My next guest, it's Will Ferrell. Woo, woo, woo, woo, woo.

My dad gave me the best advice ever. He goes, just give it a shot. But if you ever reach a point where you're banging your head against the wall and it doesn't feel fun anymore, it's okay to quit. If you saw it written down, it would not be an inspiration.

It would not be on a calendar of, you know, the cat, Just hang in there. Yeah, it would not be. Right, it wouldn't be that. There's a lot of luck. Listen to Thanks, Dad, on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

In 2023, Bachelor star Clayton Eckerd was accused of fathering twins. But the pregnancy appeared to be a hoax. You doctored this particular test twice, Ms. Owens, correct? I doctored the test ones. It took an army of internet detectives to uncover a disturbing pattern. Two more men who, who'd been through the same thing. Greg, a lesbian, Michael Mancini.

My mind was blown. I'm Stephanie Young. This is Love Trapped. Laura, Scottsdale Police. As the season continues, Laura Owens finally faces consequences. Listen to Love Trapped podcast on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Topics featured in this episode may be disturbing to some listeners. Please take care while listening.

When I think about him getting out, You know, I'm anxious. There's a tightness I get in my throat and in my chest. The closer gets to him getting out, I'm kind of at a point where I'm scared. I'm Andrea Gunning, and this is Betrayal Episode 7. Knowing. We've listened to three different stories of women confronted with the terrible reality that their partner was mixed up in this awful dark underworld of child sexual abuse material.

Getting through the arrest, the court system, and sentencing, the whole experience has been emotional to navigate. The other factor that weighs on all three families is what happens once these offenders are released. As we heard in episode five, Mandy Hale was at work when the FBI called to tell her that her house was being searched and her husband was being arrested as part of an international sting. He was involved with one of the worst child sexual assault material websites in the world. Now, her ex wants to see their daughter, but he has not been forthcoming about the rules of probation. In episode six, we met Erin, a woman who felt so unsafe in her home, she fled with her two kids to another state, once discovering her military husband was hoarding a stash of illegal photos of children. At the time I record this episode, Ashley Litton is starting to face the reality of what it means for her soon-to-be ex-husband Jason to be a returning citizen.

Earlier in this series, you heard Jason being sentenced for two counts of voyeurism and one count of sexual exploitation of a minor. With his time served applied, he will be back in the community soon. Ashley expressed her anxiety to therapist Jessica Baum. You're about to hear a part of her. part of one of their sessions. Jessica and Ashley allowed us to record their conversations for the project. Jessica is a psychotherapist and the author of Anxiously Attached, becoming more secure in life than love.

We're dropping into the middle of their session here when Ashley is talking about Jason, calling his daughter from jail. I allow him to call her. I have him called my phone so it's on speaker and I can hear it and monitor their conversations. But about a month ago, he told her something, and it really, really scared me. He'd said to her, I now know that God sent me here so I can spread the gospel. And I was like, what the fuck? No, he's there because he chose to be a creeper.

That's it. What's the fear? She just doesn't get it. I feel like he's manipulating her to think that, like, his time there is for him. He'll tell her, God's working through me, to spread the gospel and stuff. And I'm like, no, you're there because you're a pervert. Yeah, so not taking any, like, ownership or accountability ever. No.

In denial of his own sickness. Yeah, and I just think that that denial is dangerous. Yeah, so dangerous. Yeah. I mean, it's so valid. I mean, your fear and concern makes sense. And whatever you can do legally, but also just, education-wise and awareness-wise to stay aware and alert is needed to protect your kids.

Ashley's fears are justified. When I hear them, I start to go down a major rabbit hole. Will these men go back to re-offending? I'm assuming the system will eventually grant visitation of some kind, even if it's supervised. Will the children be safe? I have done hours of research, reading and interviewing professionals, trying to understand the motivation of these offenders and what these women are up against once these men are released. I often think of what Ashley's close friend Emmy said to me. Her husband and Jason were best friends. She was really there for Ashley.

Before sentencing, Emmy submitted a letter to the judge, where she expressed fear for the future. He is a threat, a danger to everyone around him. Each day, he is in the presence of what could be his next victim, a child. walking to her from school, a child at a grocery store, or even a gas station. That thought haunts me to my very core, every moment of my life now. I have seen the devastation his actions have caused. I pray that justice will protect this young family and allow them some semblance of peace to pick up the pieces of the lives Jason has shattered.

Today, it's Ashley and Mandy and Aaron's family, but we're all living in communities with people looking at CSAM. Do a quick internet search for child pornography and arrest. It's a sobering experience. I'm not an expert. I'm just someone who wants to root out a growing problem. It starts with understanding what drives these offenders, how people access CSAM,

and why our government is struggling to get a handle on it. I started by speaking with some people to help shed light on the psychology of offenders like Jason. Dr. Jonathan Bone has spent years studying and assessing sex offenders for nearly two decades. He has worked for the Federal Bureau of Prisons, as well as in county jail. I met him in his office in Salt Lake City. I'm a clinical psychologist with expertise in forensic psychology. Dr. Bone has worked with many child sexual exploitation offenders. I asked about the correlation between consuming CSAM

and pedophilia. He could say that somebody who is consuming child pornography and masturbating to that and acting on their sexual urges and trading that or downloading it that they could be classified as somebody who has a pedophilic disorder. When I met with Dr. Bone, he showed me the definition of a pedophilic disorder straight out of the diagnostic and statistical manual of mental disorders, the DSM. But the DSM does not speak to consumption of CSAM specifically. Much of the general public assumes that those who watch CSAM are people with pedophilia. But the dialogue around the topic is nuanced.

and it falls under both psychiatric and behavioral. And there appears to be a leading school of thought about the behavior, the why people consume this material, pornography, and its pervasiveness. Tom Squire is the clinical director for the Lucy Faithful Foundation in the United Kingdom. They are a charity whose sole mission is dedicated to preventing child sexual abuse. Through the foundation, Lucy Faithful runs Stop It Now, a deterrence campaign regarding the viewing of indecent images of children on the internet. Tom is a cognitive behavioral treatment specialist, who has also worked with sex offenders for 20 years.

Thousands of the people who contacted us at Stop It Now have reported that their starting point was accessing adult pornography, and then from there, their online behavior and their sexual behavior escalated, and they crossed those thresholds and boundaries into abusive behavior involving children. There's also some research about the nature of adult pornography, which focused upon the way in which it was described. So rather than its content, the language that was used to describe it on adult science, you know, very common terminology might be for teenagers or might be about kind of incest-themed pornography or voyeurism and so forth. What was once considered taboo, incest pornography, step fantasy, school pornography, is now readily available and it's free. The availability of pornography feels like it's kind of turned the dial a little bit within society about kind of where the boundary lies between positive and healthy eroticism

and what I think most of us would view as harmful and concerning legal adult pornography. But also there's something about that boundary becoming much more porous. And it's that that then means that some people's decision making and they're responsible for it. But it feels to them like an easiest thing. to take because of the nature of the adult pornography that they might have been looking at already. And when someone watches a lot of this kind of pornography, Tom says wires can get crossed. School pornography says plus 18, but most of the girls are styled to look like school girls. And with repeated choices like this, interests can start to shift.

From, you know, my experience facilitating groups with men who've offended in this way, I would expect perhaps two or three of them to say that they'd always struggled with the sexual interest in children. And then I would expect most of the rest of the group to say, actually, no, for me, my sexual interests always felt pretty normal. I've had kind of relationships with appropriate partners. However, in the context of the internet, I started to kind of cross these thresholds and to seek out. Content that held my attention or that gave me a stronger emotional reaction or conversations with children where I could feel a sense of. of kind of influence and control in a way that I couldn't have adults. So our experience at the foundation, and through our work,

suggests that perhaps the more common story is this kind of route via adult pornography. But it's not the only story by any stretch. There's two golden rules that any man should live by. Rule one, never mess with a country girl. You play stupid games, you get stupid prizes. And rule two, never mess with her friends either. We always say that trust your girlfriends. I'm Anna Sinfield, and in this new season of the girlfriends,

Oh my God, this is the same man. A group of women discover they've all dated the same prolific con artist. I felt like I got hit by a truck. I thought, how could this happen to me? The cops didn't seem to care, so they take matters into their own hands. I said, oh, hell no. I vowed. I will be his last target. He's going to get what he deserves.

Listen to the girlfriends. Trust me, babe. On the Iheart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast. I'm Ago Wode. My next guest, you know from Step Brothers Anchorman, Saturday Night Live, and the Big Money Players Network. It's Will Ferrell. Woo, woo, woo, woo, woo. My dad gave me the best advice ever.

I went and had lunch with them one day, and I was like, and Dad, I think I want to really give this a shot. I don't know what that means, but I, I just know the groundlings. I'm working my way up through, and I know it's a place that come, look for up-and-coming talent. He said, if it was based solely on talent, I wouldn't worry about you, which is really sweet. Yeah.

He goes, but there's so much luck involved. And he's like, just give it a shot. He goes, but if you ever reach a point where you're banging your head against the wall and it doesn't feel fun anymore, it's okay to quit. If you saw it written down, it would not be an inspiration. It would not be on a calendar of, you know, You know, the cat just hang in there. Yeah, it would not be.

Right, it wouldn't be that. There's a lot of luck. Listen to Thanks, Dad, on the IHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast. In 2023, former bachelor star Clayton Eckerd found himself at the center of a paternity scandal. The family court hearings that followed revealed glaring inconsistencies in her story. This began a years-long court battle to prove the truth. You doctored this particular test twice in so much. I doctored the test once.

It took an army of internet detectives to crack the case. I wanted people to be able to see what their tax dollars were being used for. Sunlight's the greatest disinfected. They would uncover a disturbing pattern. Two more men who'd been through the same thing. Greg, a lesbian, Michael Marantini. My mind was blown. I'm Stephanie Young.

This is Love Trap. Laura, Scottsdale Police. As the season continues, news, Laura Owens finally faces consequences. Ladies and gentlemen, breaking news at Americopa County as Laura Owens has been indicted on fraud charges. This isn't over until justice is served in Arizona. Listen to a love-trapped podcast on the Iheart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. But Dr. Bone sees it differently.

If a 15-year-old kid starts to look at pornography, I don't think that there's going to be this devolution of DV. or this evolution of deviance. I think that there's something else that's already in there that then we have access to all the stuff that's out there that gets tripped. I think that for the most part, that's more of an urban tale.

My theory of pedophilia is that there is something biologically cross-wired that's going on either through development or genetics or poor evolution. Like something has occurred that would trick that person into wanting to consume that kind of pornography. You then get these other guys that just consume everything that there is. A child is not a sexual creature in our minds.

But some of these men and women develop such a distorted way of seeing the world and seeing other human beings that they either believe or they convince themselves that that five-year-old was coming on to them. In Tom's experience, he has found that adult pornography has been the gateway for a illegal content. But Tom isn't focused on the why as much as the how, as in how did you get to this place, and how do we stop it before it starts? And you might be surprised who stop it now asked for help. Mind Geek are the owners of a number of mainstream adult pornography sites. Mind Geek owns Pornhub and U-Porn, among many other adult porn entities. The team at Lucy Faithful persuaded the biggest purveyor of pornography in the world

to post a warning message when someone searches for video content with children. That might be asking for young teenage pictures. A message would then appear on their screen to let them know that their search terms were both concerning, but also, crucially, to let them know that confidential help is available through us at Stop It Now and that people could be directed to our resources.

So for us, that was a really attractive option because we're interested in preventing people offending at the earliest possible opportunity, and ideally, before they have committed an offense. We want to get the message out to this very hard to reach group of people, that there is help available and that there is a different decision that they can make, which would minimize the risk of children being harmed. In a 2014 paper on the treatment and management of child pornography use, the author's Michael Cito and Adakunle Ahmed classify different types of offenders who consume child sexual assault

material, also known as CSAM. They found that in some cases, CSAM use might be motivated by hypersexual or compulsive sexual behavior. In other cases, its use may be a result of reckless or impulsive behavior or accidental access or curiosity. This suggests there are different types of CSAM offenders, a parapheric group comprised of individuals who would meet the diagnosis of pedophilia, a sexually compulsive or hypersexual group who would need assessment and treatment regarding their sexual self-regulation,

a group of impulsive, risk-taking individuals who require more general intervention regarding their self-regulation, and a relatively low need group of accidental or curious users. Depending on the classification, different recommendations, assessments, and diagnoses apply. I thought about Jason, Michael and Joel, husbands and fathers. Which type of offender do they fall into? I think it's interesting to note they all said it wasn't sexual. What else would they say? Maybe by saying that, they thought it would get them off the hook.

Maybe make them less evil? So I asked Tom, what does someone get out of viewing CSAM? There are lots of needs at play, and I think your audience would assume, rightly, that a key need that's being met through the behaviour is a sexual need, one of sexual pleasure and arousal. But that's not the only need, and in my view, there's almost always some emotional needs that are met through the behaviour. The examples of that might be that it might provide someone with a form of escapism from the challenges of their day-to-day life, from the difficulties that they're experiencing. Perhaps those difficulties generate strong feelings

for them of feeling inadequate in some way or might be affecting their sense of self-worth. So engaging with this sexual content, be it adult pornography or sexual images of children or abusive conversations with children online, provides this kind of solace to people's sense of themselves, their sense of kind of worth in many ways, and provides them with this escape. And the escape then helps them manage their feelings. Other examples might be for some people, this might be the one part of of their life where they can experience themselves as being influential and potent, where they can feel like their decisions and behavior are kind of shaping their experience and also

shaping the experience of someone else. In addition to being convicted on one count of sexual exploitation of a minor, Jason was also convicted of two counts of voyeurism for filming a vea. I asked Dr. Bone why someone would engage in that behavior. I think that there's an element oftentimes of the sneakiness and getting away with, and I'm checking you out, and that's kind of turning me on because you don't know that I'm looking at you. And there's like some of the power there and there's just like sneakiness. The Utah prison system has a rehabilitation program that starts with one of the toughest things for an offender to accept. Accountability.

It is a process of confronting all prior bad acts, even the ones nobody knows about. So they get immunity, but they have to disclose everything that they've ever done. And they get it out. And it takes 18 to 24 months, typically the treatment that Utah does. So it's basically this immersive experience where they literally have to confront everything they've done. They have to write out their disclosure and then read it to their group. It's kind of a pure accountability component to it. I wasn't sure what the point of that was or if people would be honest.

But Dr. Bone sees a lot of value in the disclosure. Part of any use disorder, so alcohol or porn use disorder, there's a tremendous amount of guilt and shame. But I think that divesting oneself all this stuff in a forum where you know you're not going to get into trouble is probably very relieving for them. The statistics are staggering. According to the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children, there are more than 29 million reports of suspected child sexual exploitation annually. That is over a half a month. million reports weekly. When we started this series, we were appalled at what we perceived as short prison sentences.

In Joel and Michael's case, they did not serve their full time, and Jason's was comparatively low. I spoke with former Utah U.S. attorney John Huber about what he was up against when he was in office. The problem with child pornography is it is improper in our social mores, if not the law and regulations to talk about it for what it is. I mean, to say rape of a child, sodomy of a child, that's really gruesome. And yet it doesn't capture the impact of that offense on that child.

And it's an impact that that child and their family live with for the rest of their lives. You can't erase that experience from a child. And we know from social studies that that child will have a very, very difficult time in life. Why? Because someone stole their childhood from them. I asked John what he would like to see happen legislatively in Utah. Where could they do better? In Utah, it's not like the legislature is taking a pass on

holding child offenders accountable. In fact, let me give you an example. If a person videos themselves or has someone else film them in the act of sexually abusing a child, those people directly involved in that crime face 25 years to life in prison, minimum mandatory penalty

in the Utah state prison under Utah law. That surpasses the possible sentence that you could get in federal court for that same offense. So they take this very seriously as anyone would and should. My concern is with the run-of-the-mill cases. This goes on constantly. Dozens upon hundreds of cases where you have these images and collections and trading images and bartering them like their baseball cards.

It's those offenders. that I am so concerned about because they're not getting the attention in court or according to state law that I believe they should. When he says run of the mill, he's referring to cases like Jason, Joel, and even the one his office prosecuted, Michael. Individuals who aren't necessarily hands-on or creating their own content. But these offenders are perpetuating the trade and production of CSAM by, consuming the content. By doing so, they are sustaining and promoting an ever-growing market, which means more sexual exploitation, more child abuse. You think about the world of child pornography and the waves of offenders that are sweeping through our courts across all the states,

do we say, well, there's so many we can't do anything? Do we need to think of a different way to handle these offenders because there are so many or because some view it as an addiction problem. To me, there's a huge difference between someone who gets caught in a cycle of addiction and abuse of drugs and their life spirals out of control and they make very poor decisions. The risk associated with that person, even if they succumb to overdose and they pass away, that price seems different than shifting the risk onto the community to say we'll do our best on this vector of child pornography and we'll try to give them chances to rehabilitate and such. The risk there is to their next child victim. How can we say we can absorb that risk as a community or a family?

The price is too high because. because the price is a child's life and their family and their friends and that burden that they're going to have to carry because an adult took their innocence away from them. There's two golden rules that any man should live by. Rule one, never mess with a country girl. You play stupid games, you get stupid prizes. And rule two, never mess with her friends either.

We always say that trust your girlfriends. I'm Anna Sinfield. this new season of The Girlfriends. Oh my God, this is the same man. A group of women discover they've all dated the same prolific con artist. I felt like I got hit by a truck. I thought, how could this happen to me? The cops didn't seem to care.

So they take matters into their own hands. I said, oh, hell no. I vowed. I will be his last target. He's going to get what he deserves. Listen to The Girlfriends. Trust me, babe. On the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you.

you get your podcast. What's up, everyone? I'm Ego Wadam. My next guest, you know from Step Brothers Anchorman, Saturday Night Live, and the Big Money Players Network. It's Will Ferrell. Woo. My dad gave me the best advice ever.

I went and had lunch with them one day, and I was like, and dad, I think I want to really give this a shot. I don't know what that means, but I just know the groundlings. I'm working my way up through, and I know it's a place that come look for up-and-coming talent, He said, if it was based solely on talent, I wouldn't worry about you, which is really sweet. Yeah. He goes, but there's so much luck involved. And he's like, just give it a shot.

He goes, but if you ever reach a point where you're banging your head against the wall and it doesn't feel fun anymore, it's okay to quit. If you saw it written down, it would not be an inspiration. It would not be on a calendar of, you know, the cat. Just hang in there. Yeah. It would not be... Right, it wouldn't be that. There's a lot of luck.

Listen to Thanks, Dad, on the IHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast. In 2023, former bachelor star Clayton Eckerd found himself at the center of a paternity scandal. The family court hearings that followed revealed glaring inconsistencies in her story. This began a years-long court battle to prove the truth. You doctored this particular test twice, Ms. Selle is, correct? I doctored the test one.

It took an army of internet detectives to crack the case. I wanted people to be able to see what their tax dollars were being used for. Sunlight's the greatest disinfected. They would uncover a disturbing pattern. Two more men who'd been through the same thing. Greg Alesspian and Michael Marantini. My mind was blown. I'm Stephanie Young.

This is Love Trap. Laura, Scottsdale Police. As the season continues, Laura Owens finally faces consequences. Ladies and gentlemen, breaking news. at Americopa County as Laura Owens has been indicted on fraud charges. This isn't over until justice is served in Arizona. Listen to Love Trapped podcast on the Iheart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. The price is high, and there is trauma all around.

While no damage can possibly compare to the victims of sexual exploitation, the women we've met really are victims themselves. There's a growing body of research that perhaps the majority of partners in this situation would meet the diagnostic threshold for post-traumatic stress disorder, that the impact of police investigations has huge detrimental effect, potentially on all aspects of their life, their employment, their family relationships, where they're living and so forth, and that family members too share this fear of public exposure and stigma and shame by association. because in the majority of cases, there is no reason why other family members ought to have known or ought to have suspected this. Absolutely. I'm sure Erin, Mandy, and Ashley would all love to hear someone say it out loud. On this side of the pond,

I don't think any of them felt that they were treated as victims with PTSD. This kind of metaphorical bomb going off in people's lives and this moment of discovery that the person who was, their partner, their husband, their adult son, their father, has been behaving in a way which typically they'd never imagined in their wildest dreams might be the truth of the matter, with devastating consequences for them. So there's a recognition in recent years, and we're keen to kind of promote that awareness about the impact and needs of these people in their own right. I hope in the spirit of recognizing those impacted, family, friends, and children continue to be a focus

of support. Like Tom said, a bomb went off in Ashley's life and she has been left picking up the pieces. She's been doing a lot of work in therapy in an effort to not let this whole experience break her. She can't change what happened. But in this session with Jessica, they talk about what she has learned. I think, I decide that's what life is. It's just a series of fires that we just constantly put out. Really, really hard lessons. I'm like, okay, I have the school of life. If I've taken enough lessons for a little while, I'll need a little break. Yeah, I'm like, universe, give me a week. Like one week.

Right. Just let everything go smooth. Yeah. I realized that I really don't let myself cry. Because I think in any moment in my life when things have been really hard, I'm able to, like, disassociate a little bit. Yeah. And some of that dissociating is, like, healthy in order to get through life.

And then in the right environments with the right people, it's okay to let that down because it's not about feeling sorry for yourself. It's about forming compassion and empathy and understanding. But there is one area where Jessica noticed Ashley would get emotional when it came to Jason. One of the things that came up for me was when he was in the bedroom and kind of distancing himself from you for months. and you were just trying harder and harder and harder to get back into connection. That's where a lot of the sadness came up. Yeah, that makes a lot of sense

because I was like, what's wrong with me? Like, what am I lacking that he doesn't want anything to do with? And so I did a lot of, like, self-hate and really not good self-talk and things like that. But I was just like, like, you need to be kinder to me. Yeah, and so when we're being rejected, instead of seeing a problem with what's going on in their world, we internalize it. And it can be called developmental shame.

But then this inherent sense that something is wrong with me has actually been there our whole lives. And it shows up in our romantic bonds when we don't get the love and exchange that we want. We make it about us. We turn it in once. And there was a lot going on in Jason's world that Ashley was internalizing. We heard about the drawings, missing work, and sitting out of family parties. How many years of disconnection was there? I feel like it was kind of off and on.

It started when I was eight months pregnant, and he had an affair. That's when I really took those rose-colored glasses off and just started noticing things. But that's when I really started to see things changing. And then the last three years of our marriage, He was a completely different person. He's always played on flag football leagues, and he was a gamer, so he had game, and all that stop. Every season for the University of Utah football games, we had season tickets with all of our friends. All of a sudden, he sold our tickets off, and he's had him for, like, 20 years.

And then there was no adulting. Like, I couldn't have a conversation with him about anything serious. I don't know, like teenager response. and behavior and everything. If I found out on a Tuesday that that following Saturday we were going to be going to dinner with our family or something,

I wouldn't tell him until maybe the morning of because he just could not handle the anxiety of it and he would make my life hell. Also, he started taking a lot of baths and would be in the bath for hours. And then we weren't intimate at all at this point. And then I started serving him, like, his dinner in bed. Like, he'd just be in the room.

So I'd bring it to him in the room, and that was it. So he was completely isolating himself like that. I feel embarrassed almost because I was giving it my all in those moments. I feel foolish. Like, I was on a whole different planet than he was. Nothing would have been enough. I'm so happy that you can see. that now and the experience of giving, giving, giving, and self-abandoning is an adaptation

that we learn to try to get into connection when we're terrified of losing connection to someone that we've been relying on. Yeah. I think you're helping women by doing your own work, looking at your fears, looking at your trauma, understanding your adaptive strategies, the denial system that you had in place, what you were really scared of facing. All of us, myself, included, we stay in situations sometimes longer or longer than our intuition is letting us because there's an underlying fear around losing our life or losing that attachment. That's very valid. So a lot of these women, while the behavior out there is obvious, the fear of facing

ourselves and starting over and facing our fears, it takes a courageous person. And sometimes it takes a really horrific event to say, okay, enough is enough. if this is my bottom, I need to move forward and detach. And it can be very hard. Yeah. I'm so proud of myself. Yes, you should be. On the next episode of Betrayal,

a teacher in one of the country's best school districts is caught posing as a teenager online to solicit sexually explicit videos from an underage girl. If you would like to reach out to the betrayal team, email us at Betrayalpod at gmail.com. That's Betrayal P-O-D. at gmail.com. To report a case of child sexual exploitation, call the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children's Cyber Tip Line. At 1-800, The Lost. If you or someone you know is

worried about their sexual thoughts and feelings towards children, reach out to stopitnow.org.org. In the United Kingdom, go to stopitnow.org.org.com. These organizations can help. We're grateful for your support. And one way to show support is by subscribing to our show on Apple Podcasts. And don't forget to rate and review Betrayal. Five-star reviews go a long way. A big thank you to all of our listeners. Betrayal is a production of Glass Podcasts, a division of Glass Entertainment Group in partnership with IHeart Podcasts. The show was executive produced by Nancy Glass and Jennifer Fasin, hosted and produced by me, Andrea Gunning, written and produced by Kerry Hartman, also produced by Ben Fetterman and associate producer, Kristen Melkerry.

Our IHeart team is Ali Perry and Jessica Kreincheck. Special thanks to our talent Ashley Litton and production assistant, Tessa Shields. Thank you to Jessica Baum, Dr. Bone, Tom Squire, and the Lucy Faithful Foundation. Audio editing and mixing by Matt DaVecchio, betrayal's theme composed by Oliver Baines, music library provided by MyB Music,

and for more podcasts from IHeart, visit the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your music. podcasts. When a group of women discover they've all dated the same prolific con artist, they take matters into their own hands. I vowed, I will be his last target. He is not going to get away with this.

He's going to get what he deserves. We always say that trust your girlfriends. Listen to the girlfriends. Trust me, babe, on the Iheart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. What's up, everyone? I'm Ago Wodom. My next guest, it's Will Ferrell. My dad gave me the best advice ever.

He goes, just give it a shot. But if you ever reach a point where you're banging your head against the wall and it doesn't feel fun anymore, it's okay to quit. If you saw it written down, it would not be an inspiration. It would not be on a calendar of, you know, the cat. Just hang in there. Yeah, it would not be. Right, it wouldn't be that. There's a lot of luck.

Listen to Thanks, Dad, on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. In 2023, Bachelor star Clayton Eckerd was accused of fathering twins. But the pregnancy appeared to be a hoax. You doctored this particular test twice in so much, correct? I doctored the test ones. It took an army of internet detectives to uncover a disturbing pattern. Two more men who'd been through the same thing. Greg, a lesbian, Michael Mancini.

My mind was blown. I'm Stephanie Young. This is Love Trapped. Laura, Scottsdale Police. As the season continues, Laura Owens finally faces consequences. Listen to Love Trapped podcast on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. This is an IHeart podcast. Guaranteed human.