Betrayal - E1 – Stephanie, Part 1

Episode Date: July 25, 2024

Stephanie thinks she knows her husband. Then, she takes a look at his computer. What she finds, changes everything.   If you would like to reach out to the Betrayal Team, email us at [e-mail]. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Hi, it's Andrea Gunning, the host of Betrayal, and I'm excited to share episode one of the Betrayal Weekly podcast with you. I'm even more excited to tell you that you can listen to this and new episodes 100% ad free and one week early with an iHeart True Crime Plus subscription available exclusively on Apple podcasts. So head to Apple podcasts, search for I Heart True Crime Plus and subscribe today. Back in 96, Atlanta was booming with excitement around hosting the Centennial Olympic Games.

And then a deranged zealot willing to kill for a cause lit a fuse that would change my life and so many others forever. Rippling out for generations. Listen to Flashpoint on the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Welcome to Good Game with Sarah Spain, your one-stop shop for the biggest stories in women's sports. Every day I'm bringing you the stakes, stars, stats, and stories to keep you up to date. Good Game is where we go to celebrate, debate, and dissect the teamwork, competition, and

rivalries that we love to watch. Join us. Let's have some fun. Listen to Good Game with Sarah Spain on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Presented by Elf Beauty, founding partner of iHeart Women's Sports. One of the things that I kept a screenshot of was the one that I thought was the worst. It's a collage.

It's almost like a Christmas card. There's some writing on the top and the bottom and then all these different photos. The photo in the top corner is a picture of my face. And then the rest of the pictures are nudes. And they become ever and ever more close up. And across the top it says something along the lines of, slut wife alert. Do you know this woman?

And that's out there. And I can't ever get it back. I'm Andrea Gunning and this is Betrayal, a show about the people we trust the most and the deceptions that change everything. Here at Betrayal, we've received hundreds of emails, messages from listeners telling us their own shocking stories. And we knew we had to find a way to share them. So I'm excited to announce that every Thursday, we will be bringing you new fascinating stories

of resilience in the face of devastating betrayal. Some stories may be told over a week or two weeks, some more. And we knew where to start. A listener who emailed us in the summer of 2023. She wrote, I've been in this betrayal club for over two years now. When I discovered your podcast, I was intrigued. We were the couple that all the other couples envied. We were best friends, walking down Main Street, holding hands and giggling like newlyweds after two decades together.

The email explained that she didn't just love her husband, she liked him. He was the love of her life, or so she thought. It's funny how so many of these betrayal stories start the same way. Beautiful, long-term relationships that aren't what they appear to be. This is Stephanie's story, although that's not her real name. All the names you'll hear in this story have been changed or censored to respect her privacy. We got married in 1998. It was a second marriage for both of us. I came with four

boys. He had a boy and a girl. Our kids were already friends and were thrilled about us being together. Stephanie and her husband, I'm gonna call him Greg, lived together in a tiny Midwestern town. It's the kind of town where everybody knows everybody. It's like a small town that you would see on a movie or a sitcom. I didn't want my husband to go to the grocery store with me. It just would take so long if he went with because we knew every person at the store and everyone would have to stop and visit with him. Their big blended family was well known in town. Picture a modern day Brady Bunch.

At least that's the feeling I got from a photo she shared with me. It's Stephanie, her sons, and Greg's kids, all six of them standing side by side on the beach smiling. Their family takes up the whole 3x5 photo across. They're arm in arm having the best beach vacation. It's really sweet. He was the absolute ideal husband.

He was my best friend. He did housework. He cooked. He played with the kids. And when the kids were little, we would go in and volunteer at their elementary school and help with their reading groups, which was super fun. And like what their dad does that? I mean back in those days, he was the only dad who volunteered. And the kids all loved him. There's another photo of Stephanie and her husband in front of a waterfall in a forest with his arms wrapped around her.

The sun lights her face and she looks relaxed and blissful. He was very kind, very generous, very interested in hearing what I had to say. He very much lifted me up. He made me feel seen and he made me feel like I was smart and competent. They had great chemistry. They made great partners, not just in marriage, but in business. I just ended up working at my husband's optometry practice because, you know, it was a small

practice, just him. He always had three employees and one quit. And I was kind of in between jobs, so it's like, oh, could you just fill in? Stephanie did a lot more than just fill in. She started managing her husband's optometry practice, pushing insurance claims through and making the business more profitable than ever. They had a clear vision for their future. We certainly were not rich, but we were very comfortable.

We had our own resort in our backyard. We had a large in-ground pool, hot tub, basketball court. I have this great photo of Greg on his giant pool lounger watching the Masters Golf Tournament on our outdoor big screen TV. We had just begun a plan of getting the house absolutely perfect and maintenance free for when we retired. Of course, there were hard moments, bumps along the way, and a 22-year marriage, that's par for the course. At one point, he admitted that he hadn't been paying the taxes at his business. And there was a possibility we could lose the business, our house, he could go to jail.

That's a pretty big bump. It's like I've invested everything. I've put my life and my kids' lives in this man's hands. So that was tough, but we worked through it. in this man's hands. So that was tough, but we worked through it. They agreed to a payment plan with the IRS and moved forward as a team, back on track for a happy retirement.

As the kids got older, Stephanie and her husband adjusted well to the empty nest. When the kids were grown, things were almost even better. We would leave the office and walk hand in hand down the street to the local cafe and go to lunch together. And sit and talk and laugh through the whole lunch, not sit and scroll on our phones like other couples.

And then we would go back and work for the afternoon. And then we would go home together and make dinner, watch our favorite game shows, and play a board game. Even during the 2020 pandemic, Stephanie and her husband got along. So you know, during COVID, I'd hop on a Zoom call with like six or seven girlfriends, and we're pretty much all empty nesters. So we're all just stuck in the house alone with our husbands and my friends have good marriages and still there was a lot of like I don't know how much longer I can take this I'm really bored and I'm going gosh you guys I feel bad because you know what, we're

having a blast over here. We're trying new recipes. We've got this whole game thing going on. We're doing all these puzzles. We're having so much fun. When COVID restrictions lifted, the couple took the opportunity to spend even more time together and enjoy a warmer climate. Kind of on a whim, we were like, hey, things are opening up. We didn't get to go on our winter vacation to our time-sharing Cancun. Let's go down there.

So we had gone down the first week of April and had a fabulous time as we always do. But on this little COVID getaway, she could tell that something was off with Greg. She first noticed it when they were lounging by the pool. One of the things that really struck me as weird on that trip was that we had kind of sat in this same spot a couple days and there was someone else sitting a couple chairs down from us, another husband and wife.

And the guy made me really uncomfortable. You know how some guys just look at you weird, you know, when you're hanging out in your bathing suit, whatever. And the guy just kind of made me uncomfortable. And I told Greg that. I said, you know, that guy is just kind of creeping me out. Can we sit somewhere else? And he said no. That was totally out of character for him. He was always so accommodating to me and never wanted me to feel uncomfortable. I mean does it matter if we sit over on the

other side of the gorgeous infinity pool looking out at the ocean. So yeah, it just struck me as a little weird. It was weird. But Stephanie didn't think much of it. That night, the couple indulged in a long romantic dinner. This was always part of their vacation, a few dinners where they could really treat themselves. Many, many courses and lots of different drinks and wine

and all of that. The next morning, Stephanie was in a fog. I was very out of it. Like it was really hard to wake up. I had this feeling, it was almost like I was at the bottom of the lake, and I could just see light way up ahead, but it was so hard to try to get there.

And then I would just feel so awful, like very cotton mouth, very dehydrated, headache, miserable. Waking up shouldn't feel like that. But Greg was there to help take care of her. Last night you had a lot to drink and we were out in the sun a lot. I'm sure you're dehydrated. Let's get you some water, let's get you some coffee,

let's try to stay out of the sun a little bit today. You know, very comforting, very kind. And Stephanie was determined to make the most out of the rest of her vacation. We got home and on the airplane, I had seen somebody was watching, you know, you can kind of see other people's screens. I could see somebody was watching something

with Nicole Kidman and I was like, ooh, that looks kind of intriguing. I gotta look that up and see what they're watching. So I figured it out that they were watching this show called The Undoing. The Undoing was a fictional TV miniseries about a pediatric surgeon played by Hugh Grant. The character is warm and charming,

but is ultimately suspected of a violent crime. It's at complete odds with the man his wife knows. When Stephanie got home, she binge watched the show. In that first episode, he is just so engaged with his child and he's so fawning over Nicole Kidman about, you know, just how beautiful and wonderful and perfect she is. But he doesn't want to go and like socialize with other people and go to the party. Eerily, this character reminded Stephanie of Greg.

He just wants this little bubble of his little family, and he loves being adored by his patients. Just this really engaging, charismatic personality, but yet doesn't necessarily always want to be social, unless he can be the center of attention. As it became more and more clear that the Hugh Grant character had this tremendous secret. It just made this feeling in my gut say, hmm, you know who else has secrets? Your own husband. It started with a backpack at the 1996 Centennial Olympic Games. A backpack that contained a bomb.

While the authorities focused on the wrong suspect, a serial bomber planned his next attacks. Two abortion clinics and a lesbian bar. But this isn't his story, it's a human story. One that I've become entangled with. I saw as soon as I turned the corner, basically someone bleeding out. The victims of these brutal attacks were left to pick up the pieces, forced to explore the gray areas between right and wrong, life and death. Their once ordinary lives, and mine, changed forever. It kind of gave me a feeling of pending doom.

And all the while, our country found itself facing down a long and ugly reckoning with a growing threat. Far right, homegrown, religious terrorism. Listen to Flashpoint on the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Welcome to Good Game with Sarah Spain, your one stop shop for the biggest stories in women's sports. Every day I'm bringing you the stakes, stats, stars and stories to keep you up to date. If you're new to women's sports, welcome. Can't wait to show you around. And if you've been around,

let's make things nice and comfy for our new friends. We want Good Game to be just like women's sports, the best of the competition, teamwork, and rivalries that we love, minus the toxic masculinity and drunken brawls. Where else but women's sports? Do we see a player passing her ex-wife on the WNBA's all-time leading scorer list

and then watch her new fiance, teammate, and MVP candidate talk about it afterward on SportsCenter? Shout out to Duana Bonner and Alyssa Thomas. The tea, y'all, the tea is so good. Good Game is where we go to celebrate, debate, and dissect those stories and all aspects of women's sports. Join us. Let's have some fun. Listen to Good Game with Sarah Spain on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever

you get your podcasts. New from double asterisks and iHeart Podcasts, a 10-part true crime podcast series. Emergency 911. This is a fire in my partner life. This court is on fire. series. In the early morning hours of September 6, 2016, St. Louis rapper and iconic Ferguson activist Darren Seals was found shot dead. Every day Darren would tell her they are going to try to kill me. A young man in 2016 was killed on this block. I'm a podcast journalist.

I'm a former state senator Maria Maria Chappelle-Nadal. I was in the movement with Darren, and I've spent two years with co-host Ray Novashelsky, investigating his death. Even if I did want to tell you something, that's a dangerous game to play. FBI did this to myself. They've been following him for months.

That's enough proof right there. All episodes available now. Listen to After the Uprising Season Two, The Murder of Darren Seals on the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. It's unsettling to see a depiction of a violent and manipulative character on TV and think, hey, that reminds me of my husband.

That's exactly what happened to Stephanie. There was a nagging feeling, a twist in her gut that felt distantly familiar. Stephanie had felt this before, after one big fight she'd had with Greg. Years ago in 2016, Stephanie had found out about a secret her husband was keeping. Here's what happened back then. On this particular weekend in 2016, it was just a weekend trip with another couple.

The guys had been golfing all day, us girls had been hiking and sightseeing, and we got back to the hotel and got ready and went out for dinner, the four of us. And after dinner, I wanted to take a picture of the four of us. And I was like, oh, my phone is somewhere in the bottom of my purse, just give me yours. So I grabbed his phone and I opened the camera.

In the bottom corner, it showed the last photo he had taken. And the last photo he had taken was of me getting ready in our hotel room, nude from the waist up. I had no idea it had been taken. So I see this photo of me on his phone, I had no idea it had been taken. So I see this photo of me on his phone and I don't want to say anything in front of our friends. So we take the picture. I say I'm not feeling well.

We go back to the room. I hold onto his phone the whole time until we get up there and I'm like, what is this? What the hell? Stephanie enjoyed the physical intimacy of her marriage. She thought it was in a healthy place, but there were boundaries. I did not ever consent to that. I did not ever say I would do that. And he also knew that there had been a few times throughout the years when he had asked about taking pictures, and I very adamantly said no,

and talked with him about things like, what if the kids opened your phone? I just don't wanna take the chance that anything would ever get out there. And here's the thing I told him, I'm live and in person, you see me, you see my body every day. And I wanted to have sex with my husband. I felt like that was an important part of our love and our marriage.

Shouldn't that be enough? Instead of respecting her boundary around pornography and nude photos, Greg had used it against her, twisted it to explain away his own indiscretions. He knew that I was adamantly opposed to pornography. And the reasoning he gave for taking pictures of me The reasoning he gave for taking pictures of me was he felt that he shouldn't look at pornography and instead he would create his own just for himself. He ended up telling me, I've only ever done it a couple times. There's only a few pictures. I wanted it to make sense because I couldn't breathe without him.

When they got home from that vacation back in 2016, Stephanie moved into the guest bedroom. She was mad. It stayed that way for a few weeks. They still worked together and kept the same routine, but they slept in separate bedrooms. Greg worked hard to earn her forgiveness. One evening in early September, after this had been going on for a few weeks

that I was in the other bedroom, I was sitting in the family room watching TV and he came over and he knelt in front snot and the whole thing just poured his heart out at how terrible he felt that he had ever done anything like that and that he would never do anything to jeopardize our relationship because I'm the most important thing in the world. Our marriage is the most important thing in the world. Our marriage is the most important thing in the world. He can't live without me.

And there is nothing he wouldn't do for my forgiveness. And so I forgave him. Under a few conditions. The one thing that I made him agree to was that I had access to all of his devices anytime I wanted, all his passwords, everything. And I could check them whenever I wanted, without question. He absolutely agreed to that.

And she lived like that for six years, checking his phone and devices three times a week. So the trust was in a really tenuous place after 2016. But now balance that with everything else is perfect. She believed her husband when he said it began and ended with that photo he took of her on vacation. Like she says, everything else about their life was fantastic. So slowly, they worked through it.

During hardships, trust, love, and bonds are often forged even stronger. It just was this very grounding feeling that as long as I had that relationship, as long as we were together, there really wasn't anything that I couldn't handle, that I couldn't get through. And as much as I talk about how great and how content and how wonderful everything felt, I always had an eye and an ear out for anything to be off.

The couple resumed their normal routine. Every night, Stephanie went to bed early to read, while her husband would stay up late, fiddling around with his guilty pleasure, fantasy sports. And I mean a lot of fantasy sports. He would participate in 10 or 12 fantasy football leagues every year. He would do fantasy baseball and golf.

And so he would spend a tremendous amount of time. Sometimes I'd wake up at one, two in the morning and be like, are you coming to bed? Because he was still on his computer doing fantasy football. But he wasn't. That's not what he was doing. After the break, Stephanie makes a life-shattering discovery. It started with a backpack at the 1996 Centennial Olympic Games. A backpack that contained a bomb. While the authorities focused on the wrong suspect,

a serial bomber planned his next attacks, two abortion clinics, and a lesbian bar. But this isn't his story. It's a human story, one that I've become entangled with. I saw, as soon as I turned the corner, basically someone bleeding out. The victims of these brutal attacks were left to pick up the pieces,

forced to explore the gray areas between right and wrong, life and death. Their once ordinary lives, and mine, changed forever. It kind of gave me a feeling of pending doom. And all the while, our country found itself facing down a long and ugly reckoning with a growing threat. Far right, homegrown, religious terrorism.

Listen to Flashpoint on the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Welcome to Good Game with Sarah Spain, your one-stop shop for the biggest stories in women's sports. Every day, I'm bringing you the stakes, stats, stars, and stories to keep you up to date. If you're new to women's sports, welcome. Can't wait to show you around. And if you've been around, let's make things nice and comfy for our new friends. We want Good Game to be just like women's sports. The best of the competition, teamwork, and rivalries that we love, minus the toxic masculinity and drunken brawls. Where else but women's sports? Do we see a player passing her ex-wife on the WNBA's all-time

leading scorer list and then watch her new fiancé, teammate and MVP candidate talk about it afterward on SportsCenter? Shout out to Duana Bonner and Alyssa Thomas. The tea, y'all, the tea is so good. Good Game is where we go to celebrate, debate, and dissect those stories and all aspects of women's sports. Join us. Let's have some fun. Listen to Good Game with Sarah Spayne on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

New from double asterisks and iHeart Podcasts, a 10-part true crime podcast series. Emergency 911. This is a fire in my partner's life. This court is on fire. In the early morning hours of September 6, 2016, St. Louis rapper and iconic Ferguson activist Darren Seals was found shot dead. Every day Darren would tell her, they are going to try to kill me. A young man in 2016 was killed on this block. Well, I'm a podcast

journalist. And I'm a former state senator Maria Chappell-Nadal. I was in the movement with Darren and I've spent two years with co-host Ray Nowashevsky investigating his death. Even if I did want to tell you something that's a dangerous game to play. FBI did this to myself. They've been following him for months. That's enough proof right there. All episodes available now. Listen to After the Uprising Season 2, The Murder of Darren Seals, on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. There is a photo of Stephanie on vacation with her husband. She is staring into his eyes.

The two look madly in love, infatuated almost, smiling so big it's like they just started dating, not 22 years into their marriage. Looking at that picture, I think, good for them. They persevered through a tough financial crisis with their business, but made it out the other side. They were coasting into retirement. And they even worked through a major trust issue, the fallout after Stephanie found a naked photo of her on her husband's phone.

But intuition is an interesting thing. That twist of the gut. Six years had come and gone. She had forgiven her husband. They had a happy life. Yet something still churned inside Stephanie. On an unseasonably warm day in April, 2021, she was home alone while Greg was out golfing with his friends.

I had that feeling. I was like, I gotta check all his stuff while he's gone. I saw his laptop was sitting there by his recliner. I picked it up and I took it over to the kitchen counter. And that was where I was sitting and I literally just lifted it up and it was there. The pages were open. He had a Flickr account filled with nude photos of me.

Hundreds of pictures. Lots and lots of them that were like the one I saw him take. Me getting ready, showering, bathtub, that kind of stuff. Lots of photos taken when we were at our time sharing Cancun from angles that I would never have agreed to. To make it even more disturbing, there were captions under the photos of Stephanie. Disgusting captions. It's uncomfortable for me to even read this, but it shows just how degraded

Stephanie felt. One caption read, "'Major Wife Eat My Cum.'" These photos were live, posted on the internet for anyone to access. In the moment, Stephanie was panicked. I'm in the account and I'm deleting, deleting, deleting, deleting. And then something in me went, I gotta have evidence of this. At that point, not even thinking it was illegal, like, I can't even believe this. No one is ever going to believe me.

So I took some screenshots and then deleted so that I deleted all the naked pictures out of his account. She was in reaction mode, horrified and angry. She confronted him right away. I texted him a screenshot of that picture of me in the bikini. And with that picture, she typed out a message. In that message, she called Greg by his online alias.

You see, on all of his accounts, he didn't use his real name. Instead, he used the name of one of his patients, a patient who was a mentally disabled adult. So on the morning of the 11th, I sent this text, we need to talk, you better come home. So he knows he's busted. He comes flying home, and it's all there on the computer. There's no backing his way out of it this time. His reaction is 100% different than it was the time before. He readily confessed to all of it.

No tears, no remorse, no regret, no care whatsoever. He talked to me like he was telling me I went to the store and got a gallon of milk. In addition to the photos of herself, there were photos of other women. What was this? And why did he have these photos? He said, I have those pictures of those other women because I trade. Like kids trade Pokemon cards. I would trade your image. Stephanie is usually a very calm person.

She can count on one hand the times she's ever raised her voice at her family. But on this day, she lost it. I was screaming, taking pictures off the wall, and just smashing them. I took the kitty litter box and dumped it in his bed. I mean, I broke a lot of stuff, completely out of character. I was screaming and breaking things to the point where it set off the house alarm because we had glass break sensors and because there were so many things being smashed and so much screaming, the sensors went off.

On the day she found out, she was so mad she couldn't even process the bigger question. I mean it really took me about 24 hours to get to the point of looking at that and going, I don't understand how he could take those pictures without me knowing. She squinted at the photos, trying to remember when and where they were taken. There was a series of photos of me on the bed at our timeshare. And I'm fully naked, spread eagle on the bed. And there's close-ups. There's no way you can get that angle on a person without them knowing you're there. There was only one way it could have happened. I know what happened.

He drugged me. Yeah, he drugged me. There was 22 years of marriage. The vows they'd taken, the business they'd grown together, the children they'd raised, their plans for retirement. And then there was this stranger, this man she slept beside, a man who was drugging her, posting photos of her nude body on the internet. Photos with her face in them. Photos captioned with her real first name.

All for his own enjoyment. On the next episode of Betrayal, Stephanie runs for her life. At 5 a.m. they were on the phone and said, get out, get out. We are afraid he is going to kill you. This is a huge secret. He is not going to want anyone to know you are in danger. Get out. Don't take anything. Just get out right now. Next time Stephanie starts her own investigation. She finds out what her husband was really doing online and what she discovers is worse than she could have ever imagined.

If you would like to reach out to the Betrayal team or want to tell us your betrayal story, email us at betrayalpod at gmail.com. That's betrayal, P-O-D, at god.com. Also please be sure to follow us at Glass Podcasts on Instagram for all Betrayal content news and updates. We're grateful for your support. 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 Faison. Hosted and produced by me, Andrea Gunning. Written and produced by Monique Laborde. Andrea Gunning. Written and produced by Monique Laborde. Also produced by Ben Fetterman. Associate producers are Kristen Malkuri and Grace Bollinger. Our iHeart team is Ali Perry and Jessica Kreincheck. Special thanks to Stephanie. Audio editing and mixing by Matt DelVecchio. Betrayal's theme composed by Oliver Baines, music library provided by My Music.

And for more podcasts from iHeart, visit the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Ready to hear more? Remember you can get access to 100% ad-free episodes with an iHeart True Crime Plus subscription, available exclusively on Apple podcasts. Plus, you'll get access to new episodes one week ahead of everyone else. So open your Apple podcast app, search for IHAR True Crime Plus and subscribe today. Back in 96, Atlanta was booming with excitement around hosting the Centennial Olympic Games.

And then, a deranged zealot willing to kill for a cause lit a fuse that would change my life and so many others forever. Rippling out for generations. Listen to Flashpoint on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Welcome to Good Game with Sarah Spain, your one-stop shop for the biggest stories in women's sports. Every day I'm bringing you the stakes, stars, stats, and stories to keep you up to date. Good Game is where we go to celebrate, debate, and dissect the teamwork, competition, and rivalries that we love to watch.

Join us. Let's have some fun. Listen to Good Game with Sarah Spayne on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Presented by Elf Beauty, founding partner of iHeart Women's Sports.