Cold Case Files - I SURVIVED: A Two-Foot-Long Machete

Episode Date: November 4, 2023

When a deranged attacker arrives at her elementary school, principal Norina is the only thing standing between her kindergarten students and the man’s machete. She risks life and limb to protect her kids, and bring down the violent assailant. Sponsors:PDS Debt: PDS DEBT is offering free debt analysis to our listeners just for completing the quick and easy debt assessment at www.PDSDebt.com/survived  AMCN: Visit airmedcarenetwork.com and use offer CODE: ISURVIVED when you join 

This is Episode 12, A Two-Foot-Long Machete. This episode contains descriptions of violence. Listener discretion is advised. Another song that Ann Murray had sung was Lord, I Hope This Day Is Good. I used to listen to that on my way to work prior to 2001. And that is a very important song to me because I always said, you know, February the 2nd, 2001 was a good day because we were all still here to talk about it.

Norena Bensel grew up in rural Pennsylvania and was practically destined to go into education. Both my parents were teachers. My father taught English at the high school level. My mother taught elementary school. So I was raised in a background of education. So being a teacher just kind of came naturally to me. And so, yeah, so I went to Penn State University. And I went, actually, I started at Red Line from the very beginning after I graduated.

So I taught there for 36 years. I was 18 years, I was a teacher, and then the second 18 years I was an administrator. In 2001, Norena lived with her husband, they were high school sweethearts, and their three kids in York, Pennsylvania. February the second Groundhog's Day, 2001, and my oldest son was, I guess he was just getting ready to turn 16 years old. My daughter was 13 years old and my youngest son was six. He just turned six years old. Though Norena was the principal of North Hopewell-Winterstown Elementary School in nearby Red Lion, Pennsylvania, her youngest son was in kindergarten

at a school closer to where they lived, something she would be thankful for on February 2, 2001. This is I Survived, the podcast where we talk to women who have lived through the worst things imaginable and all the tragic, messy, and wonderful things that happen after survival. I'm Caitlin VanMol. Well, I was in my office and I looked at the clock. It was exactly 11.23, I remember, on the clock. And I had a very, very strong, compelling need to make a phone call. And basically, I had no idea why I

needed to do that because that was very atypical of me. I'm an elementary school principal. I don't have time to just frivolously make phone calls. She called her youngest son at the babysitter's as he was about to head to afternoon kindergarten. I told him I loved him and told him to have a good day in kindergarten. And as I was talking to him, I was looking at the entrance of my building, and I did notice that a man was tugging on the right-hand door, which is permanently locked. You can't get in that door. She thought the man might be a grandfather of one of her students,

so she left her office to go help him. He wasn't super tall. He was probably about 5'5", 5'6", maybe. Now I'm only 5'2", so to me that was taller, but he was a little chunky at the time. He was dressed very much, he reminded me of a grandfather. I mean, that was really what was going through my mind. He looked like a grandfather coming in to maybe pick up a grandchild, but he didn't look like anything out of the ordinary for somebody who might come into my school. Before she could reach the door and help the man, a parent with a security pass entered the school, and he followed inside.

Well, I left my office, and my intent was to go find him. I went to the right after I got out of the office area in our lobby area. I thought that's where he would be. When I got there, he wasn't there. But something else told me to turn around and look down the hallway to the left. And so I did. And when I looked down there, he was standing in the hallway outside of our kindergarten classroom, just kind of peeking in the door from the hallway. And I decided to approach him. And when I did, I obviously startled him. I don't think he anticipated anybody was coming up behind him. I said, excuse me, sir.

I said, is there someone I can help you find? He immediately turned to me and started kind of digging around the left side of his stomach area and almost instantaneously pulled out from his left pant leg what I now know as a machete. That was our first encounter and he started striking me immediately. As we maneuvered backward, I kept walking backward as he was hitting me. He didn't say a word at this time. He just was striking me over and over and over again. I don't know that I ever really felt the blows of being hit. I did not register any fear whatsoever. I was not afraid that I can recall.

I don't remember any pain. He just seemed intent on wanting to hurt me. I screamed three things. The first thing was I screamed no. My mind was basically saying to him, you know, you don't do this in an elementary school. What are you doing? Stop. So I screamed no and then call 911, lock down. I really felt that it in my environment it was just he and I. I did not feel like there was anyone else around that could help me at this moment in time. Norena kept backing away from the man, but he kept advancing with the machete.

When we got just to about the door of the office area, he stopped, and he took the machete across my stomach area. I jumped back, and I had a key card hanging on my neck and that actually took the blow of that swipe across my midsection. From there, he ran from me. I went in the office area because I knew how to lock down my school. My thinking process is, I just have to stop this man. The Columbine school shooting had happened two years prior, and the school had put lockdown procedures in place.

Yeah, well, back in 2001, active shooter drills didn't happen. The only, the things that we were starting back then were just lockdown drills. Our district was just getting into the idea that an intruder could come into the building and actually want to harm us. They told us not to have it with students because they didn't want to have a lot of anxiety with the kids, which was actually a mistake back then. The lockdown procedure called for any teacher with a cell phone. This was 2001 when everyone didn't necessarily have a cell phone, was to call

911 even if they didn't know exactly what was going on. Once she put the school in lockdown, Norena came out of the office and tried to find the man. He had entered one of the kindergarten classrooms. He went directly for the children, and he started taking his weapon and banging it on the tables to make loud noises, and he started striking the children directly. He was using the back side of the machete, the blunt side, to strike the children. The teacher, once she saw what was going on here, she did intervene, and she told him to stop hitting the children. She put her hand up to stop the machete from hitting her in the head and got cut across the palm of her hand.

She told the children to run at that time, and of course in an elementary school, we're always telling children not to run, so this was quite, they weren't sure what to do. Some ran. Some clung to their teacher because she was their security. Some hid under tables in the classroom. Some ran out into the hallway and ran down the hallway.

Some ran out of the front of the school. Many of them had bruises all over their bodies, some on their heads, their backs, their legs, their arms. The only thing I recall is their screams over and over again. Those are things that don't easily disappear from your head. And to this day, that happens at school. When kids are screaming, it just kind of sends chills up and down you, really. All of these children in my school, they're kids. This man was coming to hurt us. I didn't want that to happen. So I think my motherly instinct was probably taking over

more than anything else. I just needed to keep everybody safe. She hurried the children running out of the classroom into the nearby nurse's office. About that time, then, the kindergarten teacher came into the office area, and she propped herself up against the door and let the children, there were several kindergarten children running in, they were screaming, and they were running away to get away from him.

He was directly behind them with his machete raised at them. They tried to shut the door before he reached them, but they were too late. His arm went through where the opening of the door was before we could get it closed, and in his rage, he pushed that open. When he did, he came in on me for the second time. He was in a rage at that point. You could see it in his face. His face was very intent.

He wanted to kill me. I needed to defend my head. All I had was my bare hands. So I put my hands in a crisscross position. In his strikes, what he was doing instead of getting my head is he was hitting my arm, my left arm and my left hand. How many of you wish there was a better solution to paying off your debt? Well, PDS Debt has customized options for anyone struggling with credit cards, personal loans,

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They can help protect your family and your finances. Visit airmedcarenetwork.com and use offer code ISURVIVED when you join. That's ISURVIVED with no spaces. While he was attacking Norena, a teacher got the children into the office bathroom out of harm's way. Then, the man inexplicably turned away from Norena, and she seized the opportunity. Nothing really even went through my mind about that at all. This person came to hurt my students, my staff, and me, so I needed to just stop him. I actually jumped on his back and yelled to the other people in the area, help me get him down. And so I wrapped my arms around him really to hold on to him as tight as I could for two reasons basically.

One, to try to get him down. And two, after we stumbled over to the nurse's desk, I really held him real tight because I wanted to calm him down. And I started talking to him to try to get him to just relax and stop what he was doing. At that point then, he lost the machete. So I wrapped my arms as tight as I could around him, but I had a lot of injuries at that time as well. While Norena was still on the attacker's back, she heard him drop the machete.

A staff member grabbed the weapon and hit it out of sight. I have a vision of my attacker. He had moved from where we were at the nurse's desk about three steps back. There was a chair sitting right outside the health room bathroom. He did not try to run. He did not move from that chair. Really, the life in him disappeared the moment I jumped on his back. I did feel the energy in him drain totally to the floor. It was a most amazing feeling. I had never felt that before and never felt that since. I talked to him at this point.

I said, relax, calm down, it's over. Once the attacker was subdued, it became clear he was in a confused mental state. Well, his mental stability was obviously not complete, and he did not speak to me until that point in time. But when he started talking to me, he said some bizarre things. He mentioned a local senator from Pennsylvania by name, and he said that that person made him do this. And I looked at him, and his face was really right next to mine because I was holding him. And I asked him what he said again, and he said the exact same thing the second time.

He mentioned this senator's name, and he said, he made me do this. And at that point, I knew that his mental facilities weren't quite intact, obviously, from all the other things as well. But that's really all he said to me. I believe he was trying to make it sound as if, you know, he was made to do this by somebody else, obviously. It seemed he wasn't going to do any additional harm. And this calm after the storm allowed her to escape to her office to survey her injuries alone. When I looked down, we were basically laying in a large puddle of blood. I saw my injuries. I saw my finger, my small finger on my left hand, was laying pretty much detached from my hand.

It was only held by a small flap of skin between my small finger and my ring finger. So I knew that that was amputated. I knew that the machete had lodged itself about halfway into my left hand. I had a very deep cut to my forearm here. I think I was in a state somewhat of in and out of shock at this point in time. During the second set of blows in the nurse's office,

her left arm had been over her right in an X, so that hand and arm received the most damage. None of her fingers had been completely detached, but she was holding her left hand together with her right hand. During this gruesome survey, she looked up to see she wasn't alone. In front of me were approximately five kindergarten children, and they were sitting there holding hands, just sitting on the floor looking at me as I'm laying in front of them.

Luckily, a parent who was an EMT happened to be at the school at the time of the attack. And so she came in and kneeled down next to me. And she was kind of trying to keep me going until the ambulance crews arrived. And once the ambulance crews arrived, you know, I was taken out pretty fast because I was, I had lost 50% of my blood there at the school. The police arrived and arrested the man, William Stankiewicz. Norena and the other injured students and teachers were taken to the hospital. Well, before I left the school, I told my secretary to call my husband and have him meet me at the hospital. And so she did that, and he worked in Lancaster,

so that was a 45-minute drive for him. But he actually made it to the hospital before I did. When they put me in the ambulance, because of my severe injuries and I had lost so much blood they were trying to put an IV in my arm and they couldn't get it in my veins were collapsing and they were very I can remember them talking they kept stopping every so often on the road to give the EMTs a little bit smoother time to do that. And they kept saying, no, we can't get it, go.

And they would go a little further, and then they'd stop again, and then they'd try again. And they stopped a few times, and finally, I remember them saying, we got it, go, and they took off and got to the hospital. So once we were there, then they just started reevaluating, you know, what was going on with me because nobody really knew exactly how I, where I was injured, how I was injured, what was going on. They x-rayed different parts of my body because even though I wasn't cut in some places, he had struck me so many times in certain areas, like in my left wrist, that the bones were just like in shattered pieces.

And once they did that, then they also determined that they probably wanted to send me to a more hand-centered facility. So they decided to fly me by helicopter down to the Curtis National Hand Center in Baltimore, Maryland at the Union Memorial Hospital because they were one of the best hand centers on the East Coast. And so I was very lucky for that. The attack was all over the news, which was how Norena's sister heard about what had happened, and she rushed to the hospital. She was with me, sitting next to me. My husband, I knew that he, this wasn't going to be good for him because blood and he didn't

go together very well. So I had told the nurses that he wasn't going to be able to handle this very well. And so they kept kind of taking him out and asking him different things. Of course, the media was all around and they were trying to get hold of us and get a hold of him and talk to him. And so it was kind of a crazy place. So happened my minister happened to be at the hospital at that moment. So he kind of just walked into the room and he was with me. So I had quite a support group. She was prepped as much as possible for surgery at the local hospital.

And then she was flown by helicopter to Curtis National Hand Center in Baltimore. I told them not to put the blanket over my head, though it was very cold out. And they kept wanting to put the blanket over my head. And I told them not to. I said, I don't want anybody to think I'm dead. I said, just leave it down so they can see that I'm still alive. Norena was in surgery for six hours with two teams of doctors, one for each hand. She was still in the ICU the next day when detectives first came to talk to her.

My one sister was sitting there with me and the detective came in. She said he wanted to talk with me. Now I was very fearful at this time. First of all, I didn't know this man that attacked me. I didn't know why he attacked me. I didn't know what he, you know, what was his purpose. So when this man came, this detective, I became very cautious with him because I didn't know what he wanted necessarily. And the fact that a man just tried to kill me didn't make men my favorite people. So he was at the end of my bed sitting and before he got started, I said to my sister who was sitting there, I said, I want to see his badge. I want to make sure that I'm talking to, you know, a police or a detective. And so he showed her the badge, and she brought it over to

me, and then I was okay with that. They still didn't know the motive for the attack or if Norena was the target. They actually had me in a private room and they had me by the name of Jane Doe and only a few people even knew I was there as far as the staff of the building went of the hospital. Anybody who came to see me my husband had to okay before they were allowed in. At his arraignment, Stankiewicz said he paid for his ex-wife and her two daughters to come from Kazakhstan and he felt used. The daughters had attended North Hopewell Winterstown but were now in high school so it's unclear what he was trying to do. What was clear was that Norena wasn't the target of the attack. After five days in the hospital, Norena went home. Her arms were both in splints, but she was desperate to return to school. I wanted to be there for the students

and my staff. I felt that if I could be there, that they could believe that everything would be okay and we were going to work through this together somehow. We were a very connected group. The teachers and I had a great relationship. My students and their families and I had great relationships. It was very difficult for me to fathom not being able to go back. I cried for quite a long time. My husband got the brunt of all that, and I cried because I felt like this man had taken away my job. On top of that uncertainty, with both her arms in splints, she couldn't do much for herself, let alone her children. My children and I had a discussion when I came home from the hospital.

I basically told them, and my youngest son, Joshua, he was pretty little. He was six years old, so he wasn't understanding all of what was going on, but the other two understood. And I sat them down and I told them that it was going to take me some time. They're going to have to give me some time to, you know, get better and to come out of all of this. And they weren't very understanding. And my daughter was very helpful in getting us back to normal, some sense of normalcy. And she took care of the little guy.

And my oldest son made the statement one day that he felt the world, the weight of the whole world was on his shoulders for a period of time. So it was hard for them for quite a while. Norena had to spend three weeks at home, unable to even hold and read a book. I couldn't manage anything for myself. I was really taken from a state of complete independency to a state of total dependency on people. That in itself was hard. All I could do was pretty much lay in bed. So I started to go to music, and music was very important to me.

So I would listen to music all day long, and it became my music is really what got me into a better emotional place and cognitive place. And there was one song specifically that I listened to over and over again. It was called The Other Side by Anne Murray. And in that song, it basically said that, you know, there's another side to everything in life. Even though you can't control everything, you certainly have things that you can control. And so that song said to me, I am in control of the fact that I can manage my life and I can go back to work when I want to. Norena needed four surgeries on her hands and a lot of physical therapy.

But two and a half months after the attack, she went back to work part-time. So the first day I went back, my husband went with me. A man that I got to know in the behavioral health services area went with me. A man that I got to know in the behavioral health services area went with me, and my former principal was there. However, I will say it was very hard to get back into the building. I had to take it just kind of one step at a time. The first day I went back, I went into every classroom, and I took lollipops. And I went into every classroom and I took lollipops. And I went into every classroom just to show them, classroom by classroom, that I was okay. Now, my arms were still in splints, but they could see that I personally was okay. Of course, the parents of the kids who were actually injured were just very gracious.

They were hugging me all the time and crying with me. People didn't know what to say to me, basically, though. They didn't know what to say because they didn't want to say anything that would hurt me in any way. They were just thrilled that I was alive and that I took such, you know, good care of their kids that day. It was this enormous support system of parents, students, her family, and even strangers that helped Norena start to heal emotionally. People have to understand that you can't do it yourself. You have to have a good support system or find a support system that can help you because these things are way beyond what you've learned as a child or learned in school. Nobody prepares you for, you know, having to fight a man with a

two-foot-long machete in your school while you're trying to protect your students and your staff and stay alive. Nobody teaches you those things. So getting through them is a process, and support systems help tremendously. I mean mean I had a huge support system, my church, my family, the the community of my school, other administrators, my friends, you know it was just phenomenal. The local behavioral health services came to my rescue. The thing that meant the most to me is that, that people that go through trauma, the commonality in every time it happens, what I see the common factor is, it's this, it's the response of the people who come to rescue you. People come to rescue you from all facets of life.

I had people, I had military personnel write me letters. I had poets send me things. I had people from Ireland send me things. It was just, it was phenomenal. William Stankiewicz pled guilty to two counts of attempted murder, 16 counts of aggravated assault, and a weapon charge. His guilty plea meant there would be no trial, but Norena was still able to give a statement.

Yes, I got on the stand and I spoke directly to him. He was about 10 feet away from me, and it was like he and I were having a conversation. It was about 30 minutes long I spent telling him what I thought and how he couldn't have the children in my school, he couldn't have had the adults in my school, and he certainly couldn't take my job away from me. And that was very important for me to talk to him directly. Being able to confront the person that attacks you is very important to have a voice. What happens is you feel at the beginning, you feel like your voice has been taken away. You feel like you've been overpowered and that you have no power anymore. The day I spoke

to him, I took back my power over top of him. At one of the court events, he said that when he attacked us that day, he felt like a thousand pounds was relieved from his shoulders. And the day I spoke to him, I told him that I took that thousand pounds from him that day he attacked us. And I gave it back to him that day in the court proceedings. William Stankiewicz was sentenced to 132 to 264 years in prison. He was also ordered to undergo psychiatric treatment. I'm okay with that because when he came into my school, he was in his 50s. So he has to serve half of the least amount, which is about 66 years. He's never going to get out of prison. And so I'm okay with that.

And when they sentenced him that day, the next day I went back to school, and we had an assembly. And I told our students that they didn't ever have to worry about this man ever hurting them again. And that was a very important day for us. So I'm okay with his sentence. Many times people had said to me that they thought that he should be put to death. I never felt that. My sadness for him is that somewhere in his 50-some years of life that nobody ever came to rescue him from a place that could take

him away from coming into a school and attacking children. That's my sadness for him. I wish we could have a system where we could find these people before they do these events and get them to understand that it's not the way. It's not the way you do this. It would be nice to say that after a short healing period, the school district went back to normal and everything was fine. But in 2003, just two years after the attack at Norena School, their community had another tragedy. Yeah, just about two years later, an eighth grade student walked in in the morning off of the bus and had a backpack with three weapons in it. And he, the principal, who was just an awesome person, used to connect with the kids every morning by welcoming them to school.

And when he walked into the cafeteria that day, the student just got the gun out and shot the principal. And he died shortly thereafter at the hospital. And then the boy took another handgun and shot himself in front of many of my students who were at Winterstown, had been at Winterstown for the machete attack. And so they were very much right there when this all happened. So it was a difficult, very, very difficult event because in this event, we lost two people. We lost the principal and also the student. This happened at the district's middle school,

while Norena was prepping for her day at the elementary. The morning that that happened, I got a phone call, and the person on the other end said, if you have nurses or guidance counselors at your building, send them to the junior high. And so I was like a crazy person running around my building. There was nobody else in my building but me, and I knew that. The junior and senior high started before the elementaries, and so the kids were at the junior and senior high before my staff even got to my building. So, but my mind couldn't fathom this whole thing, so I was like a crazy person running around my building trying to find a guidance counselor.

One attack in a school district is too many. Two is unfathomable. Well, it was definitely a long process. They had an open community day, one day where the teachers and just anyone from the district, staff-wise, would be out in the community walking around in the streets, and they were meeting with students and meeting with parents. And that was an important day. I did not attend that day. I just, it would have been too difficult for me to attend that day. But they had that. They also, the district put together lots of things and gave them out. Like, they wanted to show the community that these events were very atypical. Two happening in a row like that is, the odds of that happening are very, very rare. And so they would give out teddy bears, and we had a slogan, We Believe. And so we started to continue to show the community that we believed in Red Line. The one thing that I liked the best, it was the coolest thing, it was a dog tag.

And we had a rival school district next to us, Dallas Town. Well, the student council at that Dallas Town school district put together these dog tags. And the dog tag says, red line, we're holding your paws. And I thought that was the cutest thing, and it meant a lot to me, and I still have it. But yeah, it's a long process to get back to normal. When I spoke to Norena, it happened to be the one-year anniversary of the Parkland shooting. All the events that have been happening have been very upsetting to me. Every time a new event happens, it kind of goes through me and I relive basically, you know, what I was through. But all of these events are just very, very sad. And we've got to try to teach people

better ways of understanding that human nature, you don't hurt other people. I mean, there's other ways to solve your problems. It's not through gun violence and machete attacks, bombings. It's a crazy world. It is. And sadly, it's happening more and more in our society. But what you can do and what we found that you can do is it's sort of like a tool belt. And you give kids tools that they can put in their tool belt and then they can pick and choose what's the best tool at that moment in time. So the lockdown drills and the active shooter drills are very similar to that. So you explain to them that they have options. If they need to run away, that's an option. If they need to throw things at a person, that's an option.

And that they are allowed to do that. If a bad man or a bad person comes in to hurt them, that they do have options, and it's okay to do those things. Back in 2001, our kids didn't know that stuff. They didn't, in fact, we were always telling kids not to run in the building. So when the kindergarten teacher told her students to run, they didn't know what to do. So we certainly have evolved over the last 18 years as far as trying to get to a place where you can teach and train people in at least some of their options of what they could do if somebody came to hurt them.

So as new events crop up, I feel just so horrible for the people involved, especially if there are deaths, because in my event, you know, no one died. And that was a salvation that I could hold on to. And the other salvation that I could hold on to was in my event, I was the most critically injured. It wasn't my students. It wasn't my staff. It was me. And so that was a salvation to me because had it been different, I'm sure I would process it way differently as well.

I was the person in charge. These kids were in my care and it was on my shoulders. Norena spent most of the rest of her career at her school and retired in 2017. Retirement is awesome. I highly recommend it. I'm also an adjunct professor at the local college, and I supervise student teachers, which is good for me because it keeps my hand in education. I get to visit different schools now. I have two grandchildren now who are awesome, and I have three children. So as a family, we spend a lot of time together.

I actually have two meals every week for my entire family. And we know that it's important for us to be together. We've learned the hard way that you want to consider every day as a gift. So in my retirement, every day is a gift. I appreciate every day. But, you know, I do things at church. I'm on the consistory at my church. I'm the president of a women's educators organization, so I keep myself pretty busy.

I'm a woodworker also. I like to work with organization, so I keep myself pretty busy. I'm a woodworker also. I like to work with wood, so I make things. I make stools and I route signs. My father taught me that as a young girl, so I'm in the process of making my youngest son a bench right now. She's also in the process of writing a book about her experience. Well, you know, I guess I've learned a lot about trauma and a lot about healing and working through it at your own pace and doing it in a way that makes sense to you is really the only way people can get through it.

But I certainly have learned a lot about the process of getting through crisis, and I'm hoping that my book can help others. So someday, maybe in the next two years, if somebody can publish my book and people can read it and it can help them get through their trauma, whatever that looks like, and it doesn't have to be school trauma. It can be any kind of trauma. That will mean a lot to me. Yeah, each individual kind of has to find their own path and their own journey. I look at it as a chapter in a book. You know, it's another chapter in your life, and you have to get through it as best you can because that's what you were dealt with for whatever reason that we don't

understand. But there's got to be something that good that comes out of these things or they're pointless in going through them. So, and I've always said that about our event, you know, if I had to go through the horrific things that I went through and that my students and staff went through, there's got to be something positive comes out of it. And so I'm going to continue to search for those positive things. And maybe this podcast is one of those. I may never know the impact of what the reason is, but I keep doing things because I don't want to miss it. I'm Caitlin VanMol, host and senior producer. Our producer is McKamey Lynn, and our executive producer is Ted Butler.

Our editor and sound designer is Steve Delamater. I Survived was originally produced by NHNZ. To hear more I Survived, please subscribe, rate, and review us wherever you listen to podcasts. seven and unsolved mysteries with thousands of free crime movies and TV shows. Pluto TV is the true home of crime. Download the Pluto TV app on all your favorite devices and start streaming true crime on live channels and on demand. Pluto TV stream now. Pay never. I'm Lola Blanc and I'm Megan Elizabeth.

And we're the hosts of Trust Me, the podcast about cults, extreme belief, and the abuse of power. Now on Podcast One. We're real-life cult survivors. And we're here to tell you anyone can join a cult. If you've ever dived headfirst into a new self-help program. Or believed wholeheartedly in a spiritual practice. Or even just trusted someone with your life. Guess what? You're just as susceptible as everyone else.

No one is safe, especially not Megan. I'm the most susceptible. We want to debunk the myth that people who join cults are uneducated or naive or broken. Because anyone can be manipulated by a narcissist or feel good in a new group they've joined. And we should know

we both have been. Join us every week as we explore the world of extreme belief, talk to survivors and experts, and share our own experiences with cults and the abuse of power. Don't be fooled. You might be next. Get new episodes of Trust Me every Wednesday on Podcast One, Spotify, Apple Podcasts,

and anywhere you get your podcasts.