Nobody Should Believe Me - The Mother Next Door: Medicine, Deception, and Munchausen by Proxy

Episode Date: February 4, 2025

It's pub day!! The Mother Next Door is officially out in the world. Thank you to everyone for all of your support! For our amazing podcast listeners, we have a very special treat for you: a 40 MINUTE exclusive excerpt of the audiobook! Enjoy! *** Order The Mother Next Door: Medicine, Deception, and Munchausen by Proxy https://read.macmillan.com/lp/the-mother-next-door-9781250284273/ Catch Andrea and Mike at their Seattle Book Launch Event: https://www.eventbrite.com/e/andrea-dunlop-and-mike-weber-the-mother-next-door-tickets-1097661478029 Catch Andrea and Mike at their Fort Worth Book Launch Event: https://www.instagram.com/p/DE0ynPhxLOo/ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

True Story Media Hello, it's Andrea. Today is the day. After many years of work, The Mother Next Door, Medicine, Deception, and Munchausen by Proxy, my first ever non-fiction book that I co-authored with Detective Mike Weber is officially out in the world. You can buy it right now wherever books are sold. And if you are in Seattle or Fort Worth, please come see Mike and I at our launch events on Tuesday, February 4th and Thursday, February 6th respectively. You can find all of that info on where to find us and the book in our show notes. And today I have something

very special for you, which is an excerpt of the audiobook, which I am the narrator of. This is the first time I've ever read one of my own audiobooks, and it just feels really special on this one to get to go with you for this part of the book's journey. So without further ado, here is an exclusive excerpt from The Mother Next Door from Macmillan Audio. Enjoy! Introduction It was a rainy night in Seattle in July 2019. The global pandemic that would reshape life as we knew it was still several months in the future, but my life was in its own dramatic state of flux. I was a first-time mom trying to navigate the exhausting back and forth of being a working

parent. My daughter, Fiona, was eight months old and I was launching my third novel, We Came Here to Forget, at one of my favorite local bookstores. It tells of an Olympic skier whose relationships and career are turned upside down by a family catastrophe. Book publications, with their touring demands, media pushes, endless social media shilling, and alternating waves of excitement and dread, are always draining. But this one was like nothing I'd been through before. The book

was fiction, yes, but it was heavily based on events that had destroyed my family. I'd never written anything that made me feel so vulnerable. Overall, the launch was not going especially well. If you are lucky enough to publish more than one or two books in your life, as I have been, you are sure to have at least one where everything goes wrong. This was mine. For one thing, my beloved editor had left the publishing house some six months earlier, leaving me orphaned. Since then, there had been so many staffing changes that no one who had worked on my previous books was still in place by the time this had come out. Worst

of all, instead of spending publication day trying to relax before the launch event that night, I had spent it alternating phone calls with my lawyer, agent, and therapist. The cause was an eleventh-hour cease-and-desist I had received from my sister Megan, attempting to halt the publication of my novel and insisting I stop discussing my personal connection to one of the central themes of the book, Munchausen by Proxy. Megan had always denied the abuse allegations, and now her lawyer was demanding that I retract my previous statements to the media and cancel my tour. In essence, she wanted me to shut up and go away. I wrote the majority of We Came Here to Forget while I was pregnant with my daughter. I always knew I'd write about my sister eventually. Writers are prone to working out their traumas

on the page. When motherhood came into the picture, it suddenly felt necessary to write about the tragedy that had devastated my own family. Some book ideas take forever to coalesce, while others, like this one, arrive fully formed and feel so urgent that you ignore them at your own peril. My life was in a good place when I wrote the book, but you don't get over becoming estranged from your only sister, especially when that separation is due to something as terrifying as suspicions of child abuse. At best, it's a wound that changes over time, and just when you think it's closed, it splits right open again. For me, the experience of becoming a mother brought my history with my sister to the surface

in a way that I was no more prepared for than anything else about new motherhood. I feel the loss of my sister particularly acutely during life milestones. I always imagined she'd be the first person I'd call when I found out I was pregnant. Even now, I can imagine the conversation vividly. I can hear her telling me how excited she is, soothing all my fears, and talking me through the endless list of pregnancy do's and don'ts. She used to work as a nurse in an OB-GYN clinic. So she would have been the perfect person to ask about my dreadful morning sickness and all of the paranoia that accompanied a first pregnancy. It would have

given me an opportunity, increasingly rare as we grew into adulthood and our lives took different paths, to feel close to her again. She would have been so great on that call. But she wasn't there on the other end of the line to take that call, just as she wasn't there to celebrate with me when I got my first book deal. She wasn't standing next to me on my wedding day. She wasn't holding my hand in the delivery room. Her absence has fundamentally altered the life I thought I would lead. I was sure we'd raise our kids together. I took for granted that she'd be there to help me cope as our

parents age when they inevitably pass away. I imagined us having lunches together as old women, comparing notes on our grandkids. As it stands, I can't imagine she'll ever even meet my children, much less their children. Her absence has hardened into a permanent thing that feels like a death, only less complete. In July 2019, I hadn't seen my sister in almost a decade, and as the years had gone by, what once seemed unimaginable felt increasingly likely that I would never see her again. Until that rainy night of the book launch.

Thankfully, a dear friend, humorous Geraldine DeRoyder, was moderating the event, so I didn't have to sit alone at the microphone after being rubbed raw by the emotions of the preceding days. As she finished introducing me, I smiled, trying to appear calm as my eyes scanned the room. This was my hometown event, so there were lots of familiar faces in the crowd. My parents and my husband and daughter were sitting in the front row, along with some other family members. One face in particular moved me so deeply that I almost lost my tenuous composure right away. Stephanie was my sister's best friend growing up,

and a second big sister to me. We'd only recently reconnected, but she was there, heavily lost my tenuous composure right away. Stephanie was my sister's best friend growing up, and a second big sister to me. We'd only recently reconnected, but she was there, heavily pregnant with her second child, sitting with her own mom. Between these friends and the subtext of the book, it felt like my sister's ghost was hovering in the front row as well. The ghost of the sister who should have been there. For a moment, I let myself imagine her, somewhere on the edge of the store. All day, a small part of me had wondered whether she might try to disrupt the event, but when I didn't see her in the audience, relief washed over me.

Most writers share an alternating fear and fantasy about our books drawing people out of the woodwork to see us triumphant in our success. Maybe the crowd will part and an old lover will try to win you back, or your high school bully will approach, chagrined and apologetic. When I launched my previous books, I confess there was some small part of me that hoped my sister might show up, full of pride that I'd accomplished what had always been my lifelong dream. But this was before I ever went public about her. On that night, I knew that wherever she was, she wasn't feeling anything close to pride. Regardless of what she thought, I didn't write We Came Here To Forget to settle a score.

I wrote it because I needed to. And the reason I went public about my own connection to Munchausen by proxy, also known as medical child abuse, wherein a parent or caretaker fabricates, exaggerates, or induces illness in their child, was that I wanted to authentically portray a family coping with its specter. The media pays little attention to this topic, and when it does, it sensationalizes it. At the time of my book launch, I had never spoken to a single other person who'd navigated the bizarre lonely waters of an investigation. Back when my family was imploding, it would have meant so much to me to talk to someone who could understand. It would have helped to see the story reflected with empathy and dignity, rather than as grisly fodder for true crime drama. My third novel could be my chance to live that adage. Write the book you want

to read. I wanted to be that voice for someone else. A few days after my book event, I had lunch with Stephanie at a pub on Seattle's East Side. Stephanie is so deeply entwined in my history that her voice feels familiar to me in the way a family member's does. More of my memories growing up include her than don't. It meant so much to me that she and her mom came to the event and that she read my book. I filled her in on the surrounding legal drama, eager to talk to someone else who'd known and loved my sister. I was up there just waiting for her to burst in and disrupt the event. I finished, now able to laugh at my paranoia. Stephanie's

eyes got big. There's something I have to tell you," she said slowly. I didn't want to say anything the night of, but I went to the ladies' room right before the event started. She paused. Meg and I walked right by each other. I froze. My sister had not just been a ghost in the room. I was instantly grateful I hadn't seen her and also deeply spooked that she'd been there watching, no doubt waiting for me to misstep, to say something that she and her lawyer could use against me. She could have been inches from my baby and husband, who would not have recognized her.

Like everyone else who once knew Megan, every member of our family, each friend from her formerly tight-knit circle, Stephanie hasn't spoken to my sister in years. That night, the two women who'd been inseparable as girls didn't say a word as they brushed past each other. When I got home from lunch, I told my husband that Megan had been at the event, and I watched his face go white. He had never met my sister, yet she was an inescapable presence in our lives, looming large in her absence. In that moment, I could see in his expression that the horror story of my past had suddenly become real. That night marked the beginning of the next phase of

my complicated 40-year journey with Megan. We'd been sisters, then we'd been strangers. And on this night, we'd morphed into something new, something I had been fighting to avoid, but which suddenly felt inevitable. Now we were enemies. I first met Detective Mike Weber at a Munchausen by proxy, MBP, training in January 2020, mere weeks before the COVID-19 pandemic would make the idea of sitting in a room full of unmasked strangers in a hotel ballroom all day unimaginable. I was attending the American Professional Society on the Abuse of Children's annual conference in San Diego at the invitation of Dr. Mark Feldman, an author, professor, and psychiatrist who is one of the world's foremost experts on Munchausen by Proxy and

other factitious disorders in the world. A quick search of his name produces hundreds of interviews with him on the subject, as well as his significant contributions to the literature, including four books and innumerable research papers. He and I had been introduced by journalist Devorah Myers after she'd interviewed both of us for her excellent longreads piece, The Disease of Deceit, about a friend who'd faked having cancer. Mark and I became fast friends and began pairing up on interviews. He asked me to come to San Diego

to meet with ABHSAQ's MVP committee, a cross-disciplinary group of child abuse professionals who represent the only cohesive effort to combat a form of abuse so taboo and misunderstood that even many of the most hardened social workers, detectives, and psychologists want nothing to do with it. By the time I met with the committee, I was an experienced public speaker. Yet, as I paced

my hotel room, inhaling the ocean breeze and trying to find serenity in the waves that crash just beyond the line of palm trees, I was nervous. Previous attempts to tell this story hadn't gone well, and I didn't know what to expect from the committee. I wasn't sure how receptive a group so packed with advanced degrees and professional accolades would be to a novelist whose sole qualification in the arena was her own sad story. In the hotel's conference room, I was immediately met with warmth and appreciation as the group gathered around the big table with hotel pastries and hot coffee. It felt like a meeting of old friends more than stuffy academics. In the rare instances when I tried to explain to someone what had happened in my family, I had been met with dropped jaws, wan faces, and, occasionally, tears. I had never encountered nodding heads and knowing looks. It was the

first time I understood that what I'd witnessed in my family was not a bizarre outlier, but part of an eerily consistent pattern of behavior. I'd been utterly alone with this story for almost a decade. Then, all at once, I wasn't. This feeling deepened the next day as I sat in the front row listening to Mike Weber and Sheriff Bill Webern unpack the case of Brittany Phillips, which we'll cover in this audiobook, for a rapt audience. I'm not a religious person, but sitting in that nondescript hotel ballroom, I was overcome by the powerful sensation that I was exactly where I was supposed to be." Bill Weyburn and Mike Weber are straight out of central casting. Whatever comes to your

mind when you think Texas sheriff, Bill embodies it. He stands a towering six feet four, not counting the additional inches of his signature ten-gallon hat, and sports a glorious mustache and a gleaming belt buckle. I could imagine him being intimidating under the right circumstances, likely a job requirement, but he also exudes warmth. When I first introduced myself after his presentation, I asked if I could give him a hug and found myself fighting tears. Bill was the first person I'd ever met who'd had a case of Munchausen by proxy in his family. His story had left very few dry eyes in that crowd. His was also the first story that gave me any hope.

Mike hadn't been present at the committee meeting, but I knew he was a member, and Dr. Feldman had spoken highly of him. Tall with a flat- top haircut, in a no-nonsense suit and tie, Mike was an endearing combination of tough and humble. I complimented him on his presentation, and his response was an aw-shucks-just-doing-my-job mumble that I've come to expect from him, and that belies the truly remarkable work he's done over the course of his career. I quickly discovered that Mike has an extraordinary capacity to run headlong into the hornet's nest of cases that make other seasoned detectives run for the hills. I told him I was an author, and he mentioned bashfully that people were always telling him he should write a book. He'd structure it around the three cases that had

stuck with him the most, the ones that gave him a full understanding of the complex issue he'd spent the last several hours educating the audience about. You should, I said, and meant it. Oh, I don't know. I explained to Mike that I'd worked in book publishing for almost 20 years, and a great many people had told me their book ideas. They're almost never good, I emphasized, but this one is good." Mike's serious detective exterior cracked as he let out a full belly laugh. By the time I met him, Mike had worked on approximately 30 medical child abuse cases and secured more convictions than anyone else in the country by leagues. But these three women's cases

had made such a deep impression on him that they forever shaped his understanding of this abuse. Hope Ybarra, Brittany Phillips, and Mary Welch. These were the ones that introduced him to what Munchausen by proxy could look like, how it could masquerade as love, how it could manifest online, and how a case could fall apart in the hands of the wrong official, no matter how strong the evidence. Hope Yabara was Mike's first full investigation into medical child abuse. He'd never seen anything like her, a con artist so committed to her version of reality that it went on for the better part of a decade before anyone caught on. The facts of the case were so chilling that he realized nothing was off the table when

it came to these types of offenders. But if he was expecting every perpetrator to be a master manipulator, Brittany Phillips, a person who fooled exactly no one, would prove him wrong. Brittany brought home for Mike how important an offender's digital footprint could be. The phenomenon of social media has exacerbated munchasm by proxy in unimaginable ways, and in the early 2010s, when Mike investigated Brittany, it was only beginning to emerge how dramatic the coming shift would be. And with Mary Welch, Mike would see just how inept the systems around medical child abuse truly are,

and how money and the soft power of charm and beauty can blur all the lines. Mary was the archetypal perfect upper-middle-class mom, impossible for many to view as a criminal. At first, I'd plan to help Mike with a book proposal, introduce him to some agents, and then bow out. But before I knew it, I'd gone through the looking glass, too, and offered to write it with him. I'd spent years trying to avoid analyzing what happened in my family, but by the time I met Mike, I was deep into the process of trying to understand it and to hopefully help others do the same. It was a fateful meeting that would launch not only the creation of this audiobook, but my podcast, Nobody Should Believe Me, which as of this writing,

has been downloaded more than 5 million times. Before we go any further, some lexicon. The disorder is underlying what are colloquially known as Munchausen syndrome, factitious disorder imposed on self, and Munchausen by proxy, factitious disorder imposed on another, are grouped together under the umbrella of factitious disorders and are characterized by intentional deception around medical issues for the purposes of attention and sympathy. Munchausen syndrome was first coined by Dr. Richard Asher in The Lancet back in 1951, after Baron Munschhausen, a character from a 1785 novel who told tall tales about his

explets. Munschhausen behaviors do not always lead to Munschhausen by proxy abuse, but they are certainly considered a risk factor by every expert I've spoken to, and we will see ample evidence of both disorders in this book. considered a risk factor by every expert I've spoken to, and we will see ample evidence of both disorders in this book. It's worth noting that on its own, the Munchausen phenomenon is baffling and complex and causes very real harm to the people it ensnares, even as the risks are less horrific than child abuse.

Consider one example. In 2015, Australian food blogger and author Belle Gibson caused a national firestorm when it was revealed to be a hoax all along that she'd cured numerous forms of cancer with her diet. The cascade of fallout included a fraudulent claim that she had donated $300,000 to various charities. Bell was ultimately convicted in the Federal Court of Australia for breaching consumer laws and was fined more than a quarter of a million dollars, which as of this writing she still has not paid. According to news reports, numerous people came forward with their stories of foregoing traditional treatment for their very real cancer diagnoses in order to follow Bell's regimen. In a disquieting interview with Australia's 60 Minutes, Bell maintains she believed her

diagnosis to be real and that she was fooled by unscrupulous doctors, another claim that was swiftly proven false, and evades taking responsibility for her actions. But even in more quotidian cases than Bell's, the damage done to those involved is often deep and long-lasting. The story of Sarah Delashmet, a woman who falsely claimed to suffer from a host of ailments, including muscular dystrophy and breast cancer, was chronicled first by Sarah Treleven for Elle and then further explored by the podcast Sympathy Pains, which focused on the emotional, financial, and psychological fallout for her primary victims. No one who is ensnared in such a lie is ever the same.

Delashmet was ultimately sentenced to 18 months in federal prison after pleading guilty on several counts of fraud. It's important to understand that factitious disorders are characterized by deliberate deception and are not cases of someone who is simply anxious or even having outright delusions about illnesses. It feels very worth noting here, too, how enmeshed this all is in our deeply flawed and often biased medical system. People do suffer from ailments that can be difficult to get to the bottom of, and if

someone feels they are not getting adequate care, they have every right to continue to seek help and move on from doctors who aren't listening to them or treating them properly. Medical gaslighting, the phenomenon of doctors wrongly blaming a patient's symptoms on psychological factors or denying their symptoms entirely, is especially prominent with female patients, due to age-old biases in the medical community about women and pain. Medical misogyny is real, and I don't know a single woman, myself included, who hasn't experienced it, who hasn't been brushed off or had their experience of their own body questioned at least once by someone in the medical establishment. Add in any other marginalized identity, and the problem gets worse.

Black people receive worse care, the mortality rate for black mothers in the U.S. is nearly three times what it is for white women, as do fat people who are routinely denied care because of their size, and trans people who face innumerable barriers and biases to receiving care. Most doctors get into the profession to help, but they are still human beings with biases, and they're operating within a system originally designed to serve the needs of cis white men first, with everyone else as an afterthought. We are still in the nascent stages of reforming those ideas. Take, for example, the Body Mass

Index, BMI, developed 200 years ago by a Belgian astronomer and mathematician, not a physician, as a way to determine the average white Belgian man, which he considered a social ideal. Despite its problematic history, this metric is nonetheless trotted out for bodies of all genders and races and used as though it is an infallible metric of health. Or consider that women were generally excluded from clinical trials until the 1990s, based on an earlier medical ethos that they were just men with boobs and tubes.

Black Americans have a particularly horrifying history with the medical system, including the 1932 Tuskegee study of untreated syphilis in the Negro male, wherein black male participants were not told they had syphilis and treatments were intentionally withheld. The study went on for 40 years until an Associated Press exposé put a stop to it. There is also the grim history of Dr. J. Marion Sims, the so-called father of gynecology, who conducted gruesome experiments on enslaved women, forgoing anesthesia. These examples are the tip of the iceberg in terms of why many people have a rightful mistrust of the medical system and find themselves needing to be dogged about

receiving care, perhaps even to be a bit more dramatic about their symptoms than they'd prefer. But Munchausen is not seeking a second opinion, or even hamming it up a little bit to make sure the doctor takes you seriously. It's a pattern of deliberate, often extremely well-researched deception, perpetrated for the intrinsic reward of sympathy, attention, and, to a degree, the sheer thrill of fooling people. These same motivations and behavior patterns underpin Munchausen by proxy, but because it involves child victims, who often cannot speak for or defend themselves, the consequences are far more severe.

The term Munchausen by proxy was first coined by the British pediatrician Roy Meadow in 1977. MBP has never been used in either the International Classification of Diseases, ICD, or the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, the DSM. In fact, the term MBP is used descriptively rather than diagnostically. It encapsulates both the act of deliberately falsifying, exaggerating, or inducing illness in a child and the underlying psychopathology of the caregiver who does so. This confusion over terminology is at the heart of our immense cultural bewilderment

over the issue itself. One of the questions Mike and I get asked most frequently is whether Munchausen by proxy is a crime or a mental illness. The answer is both. MBP is used interchangeably to describe the act of medical child abuse, a term coined by child abuse pediatrician and nationally recognized expert Dr. Carol Jenney in her book so titled, published by the American Academy of Pediatrics in 2009, and Facticia's Disorder Imposed on Another, which is the

official DSM diagnosis for a caregiver who subjects a child to unnecessary medical care for the purposes of attention, sympathy, and emotional gratification. We'll be using all three terms throughout this book, but MBP is still the most widely used, including by doctors, the legal system, and experts. Mike, who had worked in crimes against children units for years when he got his first medical child abuse case, has a helpful way of cutting through the confusion that arises here.

Munchausen by proxy is used the same way pedophilia is often, incorrectly, used. To describe both the act of child sex abuse and the DSM diagnosis of pedophilic disorder, which are related but separate. I find the comparison helps those new to the topic, both in understanding the relationship between mental illness and actions and also in grasping the seriousness of what's happening. In both cases, children are being victimized by abusers who, though they may struggle with their mental health, are still culpable for their actions and understand the difference between right and wrong.

More study on offenders is sorely needed, but what we do know about the profile of MVP offenders paints a complex and challenging picture from a mental health perspective, as there is a high rate of comorbidity, i.e. coexistence, with certain personality disorders, borderline, narcissistic, and histrionic, as well as high rates of severe depression. The mental health of offenders is fascinating and worth exploring, so long as we never lose sight of the safety of the victims. When we discuss MVP offenders, we're not talking about overly anxious parents or those who are suffering from delusions. We're talking about parents who knowingly deceive others and put their children's well-being, and

often their lives, at risk in doing so. These two unspeakable crimes of child sex abuse and medical child abuse form a sort of dyad in our cultural conception of child abuse. In cases of child sex abuse, the vast majority, 88%, of perpetrators are male. In cases of medical child abuse an even more overwhelming majority, 96%, are women. There was a time when society believed child sex abuse to be extraordinarily rare, but with the myriad scandals surrounding organizations ranging from the Catholic Church to the Boy Scouts of America, we've undergone a reckoning that it is far from unusual, and that it is most frequently committed not by some menacing

stranger but by someone known to the victim. Medical child abuse is equally damaging and even more intimate, as most perpetrators are the mother of their victim, the one person we're meant to be able to trust above all else. In both cases, abusers seek the cover of a trusted position in the community. Who is going to question that nice t-ball coach all the kids love? Who would be so cruel as to question a mom of a child with cancer? Yet millions of dollars are dedicated each year to the worthy cause of preventing child sex abuse. The resources dedicated to medical child abuse?

There is some support given to individual hospitals, CASA, Court Appointed Special Advocate, and GAL, Guardian Ad litem, programs, or community care-based organizations that certainly help. But in terms of organizations focused only on MVP, there is only one. Munchausen Support, the small 501c3 nonprofit that I founded in 2021. In the Tarrant County Sheriff's Office, where Mike currently works, there are four

officers and a sergeant assigned to the Human Trafficking Division. For medical child abuse, there's Mike, who works these cases in addition to a full load of physical and sexual abuse cases. And that's one more dedicated officer than anywhere else in the country. Mike is the only detective in the United States who has made this a focused area of expertise. This is why he's tapped by child abuse professionals nationwide, as well as the FBI, for direction on these complex investigations. As author and actor Jeanette McCurdy said in an interview with New York Magazine

about her 2022 memoir, I'm Glad My Mom Died, with dads, everybody can flippantly say, ug, never mind him, you know how dads are. There's so little acknowledgement and so much fear around saying anything negative about moms. Over the years, pop culture has made sporadic attempts to depict Munchausen by proxy on the big and small screen, beginning with The Sixth Sense, in which a little girl ghost portrayed by Misha Barton takes the young protagonist of the film, Cole, to her own funeral. There, her mother sits weeping like a martyr, despite having caused her child's

death. In 2019 alone, the year We Came Here to Forget was published, a spate of prestige television dramas depicted fictional MVP narratives. These ranged from HBO's Sharp Objects and Netflix's The Politician to The Act, which depicted the sensationalized story of Gypsy Rose Blanchard, a victim who conspired to murder her abusive mother. There was also an HBO documentary on the Blanchard case, the more responsibly made production, in my opinion, Mommy, Dead, and Dearest. In terms of real-life cases, few have captivated the public's imagination like Gypsy Rose's, with its unbelievable twists and turns and just plain bizarre characters and details.

When she was released from prison in December 2023, Gypsy Rose's social media followers ballooned to millions in a period of days. Gypsy Inc. was in full swing, with a book and a lifetime series and a slate of press appearances already in place. This was an unprecedented moment of visibility for a survivor of Munchausen by proxy, but it was treated like an entertainment story, with Gypsy Rose as the Roxy heart of it all. For those of us who work with MVP in the professional sphere and those who've been personally impacted by it, this was both a welcome moment of interest and a precarious

balancing act as we watched one traumatized young woman become a monolithic representation of survivors in the public's imagination. Even more incredibly, Gypsy's release from prison came directly on the heels of the Maya Kowalski trial, in which the Kowalski family won an unprecedented quarter-billion-000 verdict against Johns Hopkins All Children's Hospital. The hospital denies the charges and has filed an appeal. The Kowalski family alleged that the hospital had unjustly kept Maya from her mother due to suspicions of medical child abuse. Unlike the Gypsy Rose case, this time the public's sympathy largely fell with the suspected perpetrator,

Beata Kowalski, who died by suicide before an investigation could be completed, with the media positioning it as a case of medical kidnapping. The innumerable chilling parallels between the two cases have been largely obfuscated in the popular imagination. Before anyone paying attention, there was a moment of whiplash as the public demanded to know why Gypsy's doctors didn't intervene to stop the abuse, even as those who did exactly that in the Maya Kowalski case now faced reputational ruin and fiscal punishment. Whether this confusion is a sign of our profound dissonance that some mothers are capable of doing unspeakable things to their children, or the messy beginnings of a cultural reckoning on this type of abuse remains to be seen. In general, any media coverage on MVP tends to focus on the medical horror

and to sensationalize the deranged nature of the perpetrators. Viewers could be forgiven for walking away from these stories with the comforting assurance that this could never happen to anyone they know. Only a monster could be capable of such crimes, and of course, we'd readily recognize such a monster if we met her. The heavy gothic horror of Sharp Objects and the outlandish portraits of Dee Dee Blanchard and her eccentric southern relatives suggest this abuse would never happen in an ordinary family, that decades of trauma and dysfunction must precede such behavior. In fact, in most of the cases I've researched, the opposite is true. The mother at fault appears not just normal, but especially warm and devoted

to her children, and, as often as not, the family she comes from is as loving as one could hope for. Horrifyingly, MBP cases tend to make the news only after a child has died, as was the case with Olivia Gant and Garnett Spears. Olivia Gant was killed in 2017 by her mother, who needlessly placed her in hospice care and removed her feeding tubes. Garnet Spears was poisoned by his mother with table salt, finally dying in 2014. But this abuse is believed by many to have one of the highest death rates of any form of child abuse, at around 9%. These gaps in both cultural awareness and media coverage leave us less room to look at how systems might be improved, to study cases where the child was successfully protected,

to examine what the system looks like when it does work. Yet there is such a place, Tarrant County, Texas. Detective Mike Weber is a big part of why children in this one county may currently be safer than anywhere else in the country. But he's not working in a vacuum. Several key people, some of whom you'll meet in this book, play a role in making Tarrant County a microcosm that can show us how common medical child abuse might really be, and can instruct us on how to fix it. The societal issues intertwined with Munchausen by proxy could hardly be more contentious

than they are in this moment. I was holding my nine-day-old son when in June 2022 the Supreme Court's Dobbs decision overturned the decades-old precedent set by Roe v. Wade. Strict abortion laws in numerous states have currently made it next to impossible for the women who live there to receive necessary obstetric and gynecological care, leading to a flood of doctors moving elsewhere. What has always been fraught territory has now become explosive. Likewise, the intertwined systems of the criminal courts and the police are the subject of voracious debate, much of which is beyond the scope of this book.

Mike and I have different politics, rare for friends and collaborators these days, but we are in alignment on issues surrounding medical child abuse. And however I may feel about the criminal justice system in our country, I have nothing but respect for Mike's work. He's worked for decades in crimes against children and has taken many reputational hits in order to do the right thing when others are unwilling. Many of Mike's cases have impacted him,

but these three particular women, Hope Yabara, Brittany Phillips, and Mary Welch, and their interactions with three of our most essential institutions, the medical system, social services, and the courts, gave him a thorough education in what it takes to protect a child from this kind of abuse. They also illustrated how, even with the best efforts of all involved, the systems that we count on to take care of us can fail.

These three cases go back more than a decade, yet very little progress has been made within the organizations that handle child abuse. If anything, public awareness is moving in the wrong direction. As dramatic stories of so-called false accusations make headlines, and the conspiracy theory of medical kidnapping, the idea that child protection teams that work with hospitals are snatching children away

from their parents for mysterious motivations, is going mainstream. NBC journalist Mike Hixenbog's expansive 2020 series, Do No Harm, lambasted doctors for their role in separating children from their parents and insisted that they wielded too much power. Lehigh Valley Health Network in Pennsylvania is currently the subject of an investigation that claims to have uncovered systemic overdiagnosis of medical child abuse. Yet what Mike has found in over a decade of working these cases, as I have found in my years of research for my podcast, is that this abuse is far more likely to be underreported,

under-investigated, and under-recognized than the opposite. If any one place has what might be viewed as an overabundance of cases, it's much more likely that it's just the only one actually catching it, like Tarrant County. The women at the center of this book are ostensibly very different from one another. They're from different types of families and different social classes, and they have different backgrounds and professions. Though these three cases concerned white offenders, no expert I spoke to felt there was any correlation between MBP and race. But despite their distinctions, the parallels

between Hope Yabara, Brittany Phillips, and Mary Welch are staggering, from their overall patterns of deceit to the extremely specific details about the alleged medical issues their children suffered. I was struck by the sense that there was some sort of playbook for these offenders, that they were learning from each other. It would turn out that suspicion was more accurate than I could have imagined in the Brittany Phillips case. Unfortunately, these same details echo throughout both my experiences with my sister and the documentation I've uncovered about her case, which I discussed in detail in the second season of my podcast.

Since Nobody Should Believe Me hit the air in fall 2022, I've been overwhelmed by the response from listeners. People pull me aside at parties and book events to tell me about their aunt, their friend, that one lady on Facebook who's always posting about her kids being sick. I've received hundreds of messages from survivors and family members reporting their shock at hearing their own story reflected back to them in someone else. These messages have a common theme. I thought I was the only one. In my experience, once people see the pattern of MVP abuse,

once they accept that it's real, they cannot unsee it. And they shouldn't, because children's lives depend on us seeing it. So as we take you through these harrowing stories, we ask of you one thing. Open your eyes.