Betrayal - Divided Justice: Family Court vs. Criminal Court — Bonus | Ashley's Story

Episode Date: May 9, 2024

The Betrayal team checks in with Ashley about her ongoing divorce, her custody battle, and the challenges navigating the legal system as she fights to keep her family safe.  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 See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

This is an I-Heart podcast. Guaranteed Human. Hey, it's Joel and Matt from How to Money. If your New Year's resolution is to finally get your finances in shape, we've got your back. Prices, they're still high. And the economy is all over the place. But 2026 is the year for you to get intentional and make real progress. That's right.

Yeah, each week we break down what's happening with your money, the most important issues to focus on. And the small moves that make a big difference. Kick off the year with confidence. Listen to How to Money on the IHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. I'm John Polk. For years, I was the poster boy of the conversion therapy movement. The ex-gay who married an ex-lesbian and traveled the world telling my story of how I changed my sexuality from gay to straight. You might have heard my story, but you've never heard the real story. John has never been anything that gay, but he really tried hard not.

to be. Listen to Atonement, the John Polk story on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. This is Dr. Jesse Mills, host of the Mailroom podcast. Each January, men promised to get stronger, work harder, and fix what's broken? But what if the real work isn't physical at all? I sat down with psychologist, Dr. Steve Poulter, to unpack shame, anxiety, and the emotional pain men were never taught how to name. Part of the way through the Valley of Despair is realizing this has happened, and you have to make a choice whether you're going to stay in it or move forward. Our two-part conversation is available now. Listen to the mailroom on the IHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your favorite shows.

I'm Andrea Gunning, and this is a betrayal bonus episode. We know a lot of you have been wondering about Ashley, where she is now and how her divorce is going. Well, we sat down with her to find out. What you're hearing in the background is a TV crew. Podcasts up the code, take one mark. I'll explain later. But right now, we're here to get an update from Ashley. I'm so excited to be doing this in person.

We haven't recorded in person in like a year and a half. Yeah, it's like a different lifetime for me. So much has happened, but today I really want to focus on the major updates in your life. And that is the topic of divorce. Tell me a little bit about what's going on. We've been in mediation for a little over two years now because of how I was represented in the very beginning. There were some things put into the divorce that put me at a really big disadvantage now this late in the game. Wait, so just as a point of clarity, you've gone through two attorneys for this.

So the first one, you weren't aligned. No, no. We looked around and I found a new attorney, Laura. She's been fabulous in her team. But what it looks like to me, as long as Jason is fulfilling what the criminal court said he had to fulfill. And he's meeting all of those expectations and requirements to be rehabilitated and to be able to integrate into society, then the family law recognizes that as him no longer being a threat. He can have unsupervised visits with our youngest daughter within six months.

So on the criminal side, he has stipulations of his probation? I don't get to know all of that because of HIPAA privacy laws. Even as far as his like psychosexual evaluation, I don't get to see that. Which is court mandated therapy. Yes, court mandated therapy that he will graduate in August of this year. Wow. Yeah. And so what they're wanting is just to go by like regular family court, like every other weekend.

half holidays, things like that, like even sleepovers. I imagine not really having insight on how the process is with therapy. You're really in the dark. It's a big leap of faith to ask somebody to take. I don't have a choice. And to me, it seems reckless that any court would allow this, but he has rights as a father. And there's nothing I can do about it. Our court system is putting a 10-year-old.

in the position of possibly being a victim, how terrible is that? How are you emotionally dealing with all of this? It pisses me off. It makes me angry. Like I've said over and over and over to anyone that will listen is, you know, I didn't get the chance to protect Avea. I didn't know I needed to. I know I need to protect my youngest daughter. I don't get that opportunity.

So what I am doing is giving a 10-year-old. as much age-appropriate information I can to make sure she's aware of her surroundings and she knows what it would look like if something was weird and what would she need to do next. Did you ever imagine having to have a conversation like that with your kid about their own father? No. I mean, she loves her father. He's so much fun. And they do all these really great things together for her to see that and then to hear like you need to be aware. You need to put your guard up. I can't believe you have to carry that. And I can't believe a 10-year-old has to carry that responsibility. Yeah. And I think her being so young now, that's why it's so important to have some type of guardian ad litem there to make sure that she's represented appropriately.

I don't think a lot of people know this. But what is a guardian at lightum and why did you decide to work with one? What I was struggling with in the beginning when I first hired my new lawyer was I want to do what's best for my youngest daughter. So the guardian ad litem essentially comes in and acts as a lawyer for my daughter. He looks at the facts, takes an account what's safe for her, what's best for her mental health. He'll put in a suggestion and say, I recommend this. Do I feel like that was a good idea at this point? No. I'm not saying guardian ad litemes aren't valuable because they absolutely are, but they can only act as far as the law will let them. And I didn't realize that. I really thought there was going to be more of like a human to human parent to parent type of thing in there. And it's not. I'm really sorry that you're navigating that. What's going on with the house, what's going on with the financial aspect of everything? Early on in the divorce, there were things that were drafted and agreed to that I just didn't know.

Things like you pay your legal fees, I pay my legal fees. The resource that I was using for my divorce was a free service. At that time, that seems like a no-brainer because my legal fees are nothing. Another thing that's interesting is Jason had signed the deed of the house over to me right after he was arrested. I had been working on a refinance on the house already, getting our credit where it needs to be, fixing his, yada, yada, yada. During that time, I had received a notice that our home had a pending lien on it in his name. I went to the gel and told Jason, I'm going to lose this house. If the mortgage stays at the payment that it's out right now, I had already at this point taken out as much of my 401k and my Roth IRA that I could to pay.

pay off any debt that we had, his medical bills, credit card bills, everything, tens of thousands of dollars. So how is this coming to play in the divorce if you're on the deed and it's your home now? Because it's still marital asset. Okay. It doesn't matter whether it's debt or income. Those are shared things. And so he wants me to sell my home. And in his words, he wants a fresh start. Where am I going to go when the homes around my area are going for three times the amount. There's nowhere for me to go with my children. He's all this support to get his life back together and on track. You've had to pick up yourself by your own bootstraps since everything went down. Right. And don't get me wrong. My family has been wonderful. I'm supposed to be established. It's not what I was supposed to be doing. It's not what was in my

plan. None of this was a part of what I was supposed to be doing. If he was truly sorry and remorseful for what he's done to you, Avea, your family, what do you think that would look like? What he could do if he cared about our well-being, he would just walk away. Anything that comes your way I know you can handle. Will you make sure to give me an update when your divorce is finalized so we can tell the audience? Absolutely. Hopefully we're cheering. You can have a glass of champagne where you're at and I'll have one where I'm at. I'll send you a bottle of Vuv. Done.

Okay. Okay. I really hope we can send her an entire case of champagne soon. And as soon as there are updates, we'll keep you guys posted. In the meantime, we'll get an update from Ashley's attorney, Laura, next. New year, new goals. And in this economy, a better money plan is more necessary than ever. I am Matt.

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IHeart. Follow Sacred Lessons with Mike DeLauce and start listening on the free IHeart Radio app today. I always have to be reminded that family court and criminal court operate separately. So Ashley and I wanted to sit down with her attorney Laura and understand how those two separate systems are impacting Ashley and her divorce, specifically when it comes to custody. Hi, Laura. Hi. So glad to have you. I wanted to introduce you to Andrea. Hi, Laura. It's so nice to meet you. Hi, Andrea. Nice to meet you too. So just to give you a little backstory, Andrea is the gal who did the podcast with me. And, been like a huge part of just my overall journey through Jason's criminal case and even with my divorce. So I wanted to get you guys introduced so we could have a conversation about how our

divorce is going. Yeah, when Ashley first wrote in, I think the subject line was my future ex-husband. And that was two years ago. And you're still working through the divorce. But I just wanted to ask you about where you guys are now and what you're currently working to negotiate for Ashley's behalf? Sure, no problem. What are the things that you guys have to navigate in terms of custody and financials? Just give me a little bit of a background of all the things that you guys have to take into consideration and why family court is different than criminal court and why they're kind of treated separately. So the way it works in Utah is similar to most states where there are separate court systems for criminal cases than civil cases.

So family law, divorce cases, custody adoption, they fall under the category of civil law, which means that they're heard by a district court. Now, that same court can hear criminal cases, but they're entirely different cases. They don't get linked together. And then they are just different systems. They have different standards. They have different laws that are applicable, and they don't cross. So there's not really a mechanism that you can join the two cases together. Ashley's case is a little bit easier in that we have a criminal conviction.

we have criminal charges that he served time for. And so that helps in terms of the standards that we apply for determining custody. But unfortunately, it doesn't really translate over to the money side of it, which is very frustrating in this case. What are some of the hurdles that you guys have faced in this divorce? Ashley started this divorce off with a different law firm. So by the time we came on the case, there already were a lot of things in motion. There were already a lot of things that we couldn't go back and fix and change.

So it's always an uphill battle where certain things have already been decided. It's also been a really difficult case because I think Jason and his attorney were making representations to Ashley and to our firm that Jason was agreeing to certain things. You know, for instance, that Ashley could have the house without there being a problem and all the equity in the house. And then when it came right down to it and we were drafting it up, all of a sudden he had changed his mind. And he's insisting that he be entitled to half the equity. We have different strategies in place on trying to figure out a way that she can keep the house and pay him out a portion of his equity or equity over time or trade it for something else. So I have confidence that she'll be able to stay in the house.

You know, that's our goal to keep some stability for her and stability for her kids. What else are you guys pushing for in the divorce? The other area that I think is the biggest area of contention is whether or not he's going to at some point be allowed unsupervised visits. He's been pretty insistent that he thinks that should happen relatively soon and that he's not a risk and now is using a not surprising tactic of saying that this was like a one-off thing that's never going to happen again because of some interaction of some medication he was on at the time, which is relatively common in cases that we're dealing with. There tends to be blame oftentimes placed on something else or someone else. It's unfortunate because I think there's been a perceptible shift in his attitude where now he's trying to place blame and not take responsibility and accountability. And part of that has been him pushing for unsupervised visits. So I think our goal is to try to keep visit supervised for as long as possible.

And then if we transition to unsupervised visits to make sure that those visits are safe moving forward. You guys are going to trial, but you may not have to go to a full-blown trial. What's the difference? There's all sorts of issues that have to get resolved to get a divorce. So like custody and parent time and dividing retirement accounts and dividing house equity. In this case, some of those things we either have agreements on or we're pretty close to agreements on. So if we can avoid trial, that's always ideal because trials are really expensive and just really, in a sense, they cause victims or individuals to relive trauma. In my view, you know, after doing family law for 20 years, trials almost always make it more.

difficult for people to move on with their lives just because it's so conflictual and doesn't really allow for healing to occur. So if we can get items settled where the parties come to an agreement, everyone feels better about it. And people are more likely to follow orders that they agree on than orders that a court just dictates. Do you feel like you guys are close to coming to a middle ground to avoid trial? I would give it 90% odds that we agree without going to trial in terms of the timing, who knows when that's going to happen, my guess would be at some point during the summer. I don't know if personally you've dealt with cases that are similar to mine in nature as far as, like, you know, his criminal case really doesn't have any say in like what happens financially

and a divorce. Is that usually pretty common? Yeah, I think there is a lot of surprise that people have. They just kind of assume that courts are about creating fairness and about creating sort of equal situations. And to be clear, courts do have a lot of discretion. So they can award things differently than 50-50. But the majority of the time, it's just equal, regardless of the reasons for the divorce, or who was that fault, or who had criminal charges. Like, it just really doesn't impact the money part of it. And it feels very frustrating and not fair because it's not. And Ashley's done just an

amazing job in terms of really pulling herself up and fighting to support her family and keep them stable through this entire process. There's a lot of women and a lot of victims of crimes that aren't able to do that. And I really respect that. And I think you've done a great job in that regard. Well, I appreciate it. I said this to you and one of your colleagues, not too long ago, but I told you that you guys should wear capes because you guys are superheroes to me. I'll be patiently waiting to see how everything gets resolved. So, Laura, thanks for joining us today. I really appreciate it. Yeah, thank you both of you, and thanks to you guys for being so supportive of Ashley and helping to have her story be heard.

I think it's so important. So thanks, everybody. It's complicated, and thankfully, Ashley now has someone truly fighting for her. I wanted to thank all of you, our betrayal listeners, as we prepare to launch another season of betrayal. And in addition, we have big updates for the betrayal community. First, we're thrilled to announce what's coming your way in season three of the trail. When Stacey laid eyes on Dr. Justin Rutherford, she was sure that she was looking at her soulmate. They fell in love and life was perfect. But this family doctor, beloved father, and treasured husband had dark secrets. The man who had sworn an oath to do no harm would go to great lengths using any means necessary to save himself.

Listen to Betrayal Season 3 on IHeart Radio or wherever you get your podcast on May 23rd. Second, the response from the first two seasons has been overwhelming. Many of you have shared your stories of betrayal and deception. After reading thousands of your comments, messages, and emails, we're pleased to announce the launch of Betrayal's weekly series about the people we trust the most and the deceptions that change everything. This new series debuts end of July. Lastly, because of your overwhelming support, Betrayal Season 1 became the number one podcast in the world and was turned into an ABC News Studios and Hulu docu-series.

We are excited to share that Ashley's story has also been turned into a docu series that like season one is a must watch. Stream Betrayal Season 2 this summer on Hulu. If you want to contact the betrayal team, email us at BetrayalPod 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 Stop It Now.org. 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 Fasen, hosted and produced by me, Andrea Gunning, written and produced by Carrie Hartman, and also produced by Ben Fetterman, and associate producer, Kristen Mulcuri. Our IHart team is Ali Perry and Jessica Crinecheck. Audio editing and mixing by Nico Aruka and Matt Dalvecchio. Betrayals theme composed by Oliver Baines, music library, provided by My Music. For more podcasts from IHeart, visit the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, wherever you get your podcasts.

Hey, it's Joel and Matt from How to Money. If your New Year's resolution is to finally get your finances in shape, we've got your back. Prices, they're still high and the economy is all over the place. But 2026 is the year for you to get intentional and make real progress. That's right. Yeah, each week we break down what's happening with your money, the most important issues to focus on, and the small moves that make a big difference. Kick off the year with confidence. Listen to how to money on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever.

you get your podcasts. I'm John Polk. For years, I was the poster boy of the conversion therapy movement, the ex-gay who married an ex-lesbian and traveled the world telling my story of how I changed my sexuality from gay to straight. You might have heard my story, but you've never heard the real story. John has never been anything that gay, but he really tried hard not to be. Listen to Atonement, the John Polk story, on the I-Heart Radio, radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. This is Dr. Jesse Mills, host of the Mailroom podcast.

Each January, men promise to get stronger, work harder, and fix what's broken. But what if the real work isn't physical at all? I sat down with psychologist Dr. Steve Poulter to unpack shame, anxiety, and the emotional pain men were never taught how to name. Part of the way through the Valley of Despair is realizing this has happened, and you have to make a choice whether you're going to stay in it or move forward. Our two-part conversation is available now. Listen to the mailroom on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, for wherever you get your favorite shows.

This is an IHeart podcast, guaranteed human.