Something Was Wrong - S22 Ep2: Increasingly Strange

Episode Date: October 23, 2024

*Content Warning: mature themes, false reporting, sex abuse of a child, sexual abuse, rape, threats of violence, sex trafficking, scams, fraud, emotional abuse, stalking, disability abuse. E2 Sources: Elwood teen's involvement in politics spans nearly half her life, by Matt McCutcheon for 13WTHR (Published: April 28, 2016 - Updated: July 21, 2016): https://www.wthr.com/article/news/local/elwood-teens-involvement-in-politics-spans-nearly-half-her-life/531-afe62aa1-e251-41ef-9a2b-6119658cbd9b Lawmaker wants to lower the age to run for the General Assembly, By Brandon Barger for TheStatehouseFile.com (Nov 14, 2019 -  Updated Oct 1, 2021): https://www.thestatehousefile.com/politics/elections/lawmaker-wants-to-lower-the-age-to-run-for-the-general-assembly/article_31eb550e-9e20-546e-a83d-e3d4f8d3a135.html?utm_medium=social&utm_source=email&utm_campaign=user-share Indiana legislator wants to lower age requirement for lawmakers to 18, by Kayla Sullivan for Fox59 (2019): https://fox59.com/news/politics/indiana-legislator-wants-to-lower-age-requirement-for-lawmakers-to-18/amp/ High school student focuses on way to change Indiana constitution, by Christpher Stephens for The Herald-Bulletin (April 6, 2016): https://www.southbendtribune.com/story/news/local/2016/04/06/high-school-student-focuses-on-way-to-change-indiana-constitutio/46629093/ Alleged sexual encounter between Brian Bosma and an intern: What we know, by Ryan Martin, Kaitlin Lange and Tony Cook for the IndyStar (October 10, 2018): https://www.indystar.com/story/news/politics/elections/2018/10/10/brian-bosma-alleged-sexual-encounter-intern-kandy-green-what-we-know/1537453002/ Resources:Free + Confidential Resources + Safety Tips: somethingwaswrong.com/resources   Theme Song & Artwork: Thank you to NeonHoney and GIBBANEZ for covering our theme song, Glad Rags’s original song U Think U this season. NeonHoney’s IG: https://www.instagram.com/neonhoneymusic/ NeonHoney’s Website: https://neonhoneymusic.comGibbanez IG: https://www.instagram.com/@gibbanezmusic/ Gibbanez Linktree: https://linktr.ee/gibbanezmusicGlad Rags: https://www.gladragsmusic.com/ The S22 cover art is by the Amazing Sara StewartFollow Something Was Wrong: Website: somethingwaswrong.com  IG: instagram.com/somethingwaswrongpodcast TikTok: tiktok.com/@somethingwaswrongpodcast  Follow Tiffany Reese: Website: tiffanyreese.me  IG: instagram.com/lookieboo 

This podcast is intended for mature audiences and discusses topics that may be upsetting. For a full content warning, sources and resources, please visit the episode notes. Opinions shared by the guests of the show are their own, and do not necessarily represent the views of myself, broken cycle media, or wondering. The podcast in any linked materials should not be misconstrued as a substitution for legal or medical advice. Megan Stoner's responses to these allegations are addressed within this season. I'm Tiffany Reese, and this is, something was wrong. My name is Chloe and Agnos. I am a Indianapolis area resident.

I'm pretty involved in the center right in terms of politics, policy, and kind of the nonprofit space. I got to know Megan, I would say almost 10 years ago, I met her at a parade in Carmel, Indiana. I think it was the Carmel Fest parade, and this just happened to be the Fourth of July parade. And I was walking with the Republican Party of Hamilton County, which is where Carmel is. It's a suburb just north of Indianapolis. And I was just super concentrating on the float. The big thing is, you know, you put up yard signs and then you have a bunch of candy, right? And so my job at parades in those days before I kind of moved up the ladder, so to speak, in the like political and campaign consulting world was to be the keeper of the candy.

My job was to just hand candy buckets out to folks. And I think Megan was volunteering with Susan Brooks, who was the congresswoman at that time in that area. And I was just introduced to her. Someone said, hey, this is Megan. I said, hi, I'm Chloe. Nice to meet you. And that was it.

She didn't really talk to me. She just walked, handed out candy like a normal volunteer. The big thing with those types of events is that you just need someone, hey, hand out t-shirts, hand out candy, hand out bottles of water. you finish walking, you go home. It's not super complicated. I will say, however, though, when I met her for the first time, I thought she was like 40 years old. Like, I thought she was a lot older than me. I don't mean that to sound mean at all. She just looked a lot older than she actually was. At the time, she was probably only 16, maybe 17 years old. I thought she was an older volunteer. She just was like a typical everyday volunteer, and I didn't really think much of her. And it wasn't until, I started going to some more dinners and working registration tables. And in the political world, especially when you are a college student or are just graduating from college,

no one's going to hire you right off the bat. And it's kind of like any industry, right? No one's going to say, hey, you 20-year-old person, I'm going to have you consult on my campaign. Like, no, you need to earn your stripes, right? So I did a lot of work with my boyfriend at the time, who's now my husband, working registration tables, organizing parades, handing out t-shirts, calling volunteers, basically doing a lot of the grunt work that college students typically do. And Megan would come around to some of these events, fundraisers, different conferences,

and most of the time it's just the typical boring, hey, reception, free drink, heavy orde-vores, you write a check, you go home. Nothing that's super fancy or super exciting. Run-of-the-mill stuff. around 2016, I had just graduated from college, and my husband was a year behind me in school, but was the one who was leading a campaign at this time, a statewide campaign for Attorney General. And I have to be clear because he tells me all the time, well, when you tell the story, sometimes it sounds like you're the one who's actually working on the campaign,

and you have to make it clear that you never got a paycheck. I never got a paycheck. I was just roped into volunteering to manage all of the other volunteers, as a lot of passion projects and side projects for spouses go. So he actually was running the campaign for this guy named Curtis Hill. Well, then Megan came along and things got weird. But what had happened was the way, and it's important for people to understand that campaigns like this in Indiana are different.

When you have an elected official who is not the governor, so think lieutenant governor, treasurer, auditor, attorney general, stuff that's not really on the news or in the, the limelike, just executive people that they have a specific job and it's an important job, but you don't read about them in the news. Like they're not everyday household names. We don't run those campaigns like a typical primary where everybody in the Republican or the Democratic Party can go and vote. We run them as a convention. So what we do is your political party, kind of like the DNC and the RNC that was just on TV recently. You have your people in your state.

They go to Indianapolis and they have a convention and they say, hey, these are the people that we're putting up. And you, 1,800 delegates, you get voted in by your county party. You come in here and you basically get to pick who you want to be our party's nominee in the fall. So it's a lot like you have these people who are very like grassroots like, hey, you know, come over, vote for this person, vote for this person. And you're moving around the room trying to whip votes. It's almost like you're running for mayor of a small town. It's 1,800 people that you have to convince to vote for your candidate. So imagine that you're making phone calls to 1,800 people saying, hey, who are you voting for? Can we get your support? What can we do to change your mind? And then we have

multiple rounds of voting. So when you know that, okay, Chloe and Agnos from Madison County is going to be a delegate, but she doesn't have your first vote, she's got your second vote, you're trying to get that person to give you their support the whole way through if voting goes two, three, sometimes even four rounds. So it's like hyper-localized grassroots campaigning. So my husband, senior in college at this point, is like, hey, I got to lead the grassroots for all of this. This is a lot of work. And so I was helping him manage some volunteers. And I think Megan had reached out to either him or myself. I can't remember who it was, but said, hey, I know you guys are working on Curtis Hill's campaign for attorney general. I'm interested in helping. And we said,

okay, great, we need all of the volunteers that we could possibly get, and we need you to make phone calls, because again, we need data on 1,800 people, right? That's a lot of phone calls to make. So I said, hey, I need you to call through all of the past delegates from the second congressional district. That's the part of Indiana that's kind of closest to Chicago, think University of Notre Dame, South Bend, Indiana area. I said, I need you to make about three to 400 phone calls and go through the script. Who are they voting for? Are they planning on to attending the convention. If they're not going to get Curtis's first vote, can we have their second? It's easy. Like, as long as you can make a phone call and not freeze up on the phone, you can ask these

questions and record them into a Google sheet. I expected that it should have taken her maybe a week, maybe two weeks to make all of those phone calls. I mean, you're leaving voicemails. People are having to call you back. I kid you not. She emails Kyle and I back maybe two or three days later and says, oh, made all the calls, here they are. I was like, oh, all right, that's cool. She gives me back a spreadsheet that marks that every single person was not home didn't answer their phone. 300 to 400 people. Do you know how statistically impossible that is to not get a single person to answer their phone? I was absolutely baffled, absolutely floored. And I said, well, great. I said, she's never going to volunteer again because she's messing with our data. This is ridiculous. So I said,

I guess I'm just going to have to redo all of her work because I was going through, and I think at the time I was calling the fourth congressional district. So that's when I knew that something was wrong, very, very wrong with this person. Political campaigns, no matter your party, whether you are Republican, Democrat, independent, your goal is to get young people to volunteer, to get involved, to get engaged. And so when you have this young person who's hungry and says, I want this opportunity, give me whatever work that you have. You're like, oh my gosh, this is a unicorn. This is awesome.

You get super excited. But then to have them completely fumble the ball like this, it's very disheartening. And it's not just because, oh, it's, hey, you know, the data for the campaign that she messed up. But it's like, hey, you are a hungry person who shows ambition and who shows at least some initiative. And you're just completely screwing yourself over. And now 10 years later, I'm no longer an intern or like an entry-level person. I'm nationally a marketing director for a center-right nonprofit, and my husband's a state rep, and we have been blessed to have a lot of opportunities and like to pay that forward.

So somebody like Megan Stoner is not going to be the first person on our call list when we need help. That was probably my first really negative, weird interaction with her. She did reach out to my husband a couple times, and again, not my husband at the time, but she did reach out to Kyle a couple more times like, hey, do you have any more lists that you need? is there anything else that you need help with? I think we just ignored her because it's like, hey, how do you, you know, we're Midwest nice, right? Like we don't want to piss people off or make them feel uncomfortable, but at the same time, it's like, hey, you do more harm than good.

We don't need you to volunteer for us anymore. And I do remember she did go to the convention. I can't recall if she was a delegate or not. I remember that she was there. But I'll tell you what, Tiffany, one of the other really weird things about Megan Stoner is that she was always around, but would never interact with people. For example, those events, those receptions, you know, just your basic cocktails, heavy appetizers kind of things. The goal is to go around, shake hands, kiss babies, talk to all of your people, catch up with folks.

Like, that's the goal. She would literally go to stuff like this, and I remember this convention, too, she would go and she would sit in the corner and she'd sit on her phone the entire time. And it's like, hey, the point of this stuff is to be social, to bump, belbows with people to make connections. And it just always felt very odd that she would say stuff like, oh, I was at this convention or, oh, I was here on social media. And it's like, well, I didn't know that you were there unless you posted it on Facebook or Twitter or something because I literally would only see you in the corner or I wouldn't even see you at all. And then the other thing that she would also do, and I think if you talk to other folks in kind of the Indiana Republican political scene, she would very

often talk about going to the state house. Oh, I'm working at the state house. Oh, I'm going to, you know, meet a client at the state house, all this BS. And she would basically just go and hang out. She didn't actually have a job there. She didn't have any kind of real reason to be at the state house. Now, every state house across the country is a public building. It's the people's state house. Like, hey, if you want to go and sit there and read a book all day or eat Taco Bell or, you know, do whatever. you can't like that's within your right but for her to just go and dress up and be in a suit and post on social media oh you know I'm going to meet so and so about this bill we're going to try to get this bill done blah blah blah and now that my husband's our state rep here and as part of

the process I kind of understand like why in the world are you there for 10 hours a day if you're not working there that makes absolutely no sense and I think a lot of it stems back to obviously the fact that she has something going on mentally and just had to keep up this facade that she was an important person. I think the next time I encountered her after that, she had added me on social media. And back then, I was kind of one of those people that was like, oh, you know, I had met you at some point and you added me on like Facebook, sure, I'll go ahead and accept you. And I think that's what a lot of people did 10 years ago. It's like, oh, have all the Facebook friends, right? And And then now, because I have kids, it's pretty locked down.

And it's like, hey, if I don't know you in real life, I don't want you to look at my stuff. She had reached out to me and said, hey, I know you work in downtown Indianapolis. Do you want to get lunch? I'm interested in learning more about what you do, blah, blah, blah. And I was like, gosh, she's an odd one. She messed up this data. I think she's just young and needs some guidance. So I thought to myself, okay, again, Midwest nice, fine.

And we ended up getting lunch. We went to a little place by the state house. She was asking me, you know, like, hey, I know you went to Ball State University. You studied journalism. Now you work kind of in like digital media with politics, campaigning and nonprofit, the advocacy space. How'd you get involved in that? And so I just kind of gave her my basic pitch. Like, I'm just two years out of college, but I really find that wink, wink, nudge,

if you show up and do the work, opportunities will come your way, right? Like that's in any industry. She had said, oh, I might be interested in going the middle. media route. And I said, well, all states, you know, the best in the state to do that and is the closest to downtown Indianapolis and there's a lot of opportunities for internships. So I said, you know, why not do that? It was weird because we're sitting there eating lunch and she's asking me for career advice and whatnot. And then I start to talk and she's just on her phone the entire time. And I don't know if anyone else has ever felt that way, but it's like, hey, hello, woo, I'm over here

trying to impart a little bit of wisdom on you and you're not paying attention. And it just felt really strange. And I know that I'm not the only person that she's ever done that to. It was just odd. It was just really, really odd. And she's one of those people. And I don't know if you've ever felt this way, but there's people that you come across in your life where you're like, I can't figure that person out. Like, I just cannot figure this person out. And she will always be one of them. She's probably like number one person I just cannot figure out. And then I think the next time I interacted with her after that, and okay, this is, this is a little petty of me. But I like to say that sometimes I can be the mayor of Pettyville.

She had started a public Facebook page for herself because I think she wanted to really, you know, work on her personal brand and she had a Facebook page. So she was inviting a lot of people to like it. And at the time, I was running a Facebook page for center-right political nonprofit that was based in downtown Indianapolis. And I was posting a lot of like memes talking about policy. like, hey, taxation is theft, like don't let the, you know, end the Fed, just very like red meat kind of libertarian, conservative-leaning political stuff. And then any blogs that our website

had, I would repost those. And then I noticed that Megan on her page had started to post a lot of my graphics that I had posted on this Facebook page in the exact same order that I had posted mine. So in a sense, she was copying all of my content. Now, I, I will say none of it was copywritten, but it was annoying. That's like, okay, I know you copied my school project. Can you not? Like, this is really weird. And she would copy my captions, too.

Top libertarian on Facebook, like, you know, just even down to the hashtags. She would copy all of it. And it's just a very, like, small interaction, but you can kind of see how a lot of the stuff just like builds and builds and builds. And then she got in a Facebook argument, and this, again, is just so petty and small, but she got in a Facebook argument talking about, I think it was like food stamps or government assistance. And she basically insinuated on a Facebook status that she's super tired of seeing people at her

grocery store use food stamps and use benefits and they're eating better than her. And I'm just thinking to myself like, wow, that's a really crappy thing to, one, complain about, regardless how you feel about conservatives or Republicans. Do we want everybody on government assistance? No, but like it's there as a safety net when people need it. in the short term, right? Like the long-term goal, obviously, is to help people pick themselves back up and, you know, find employment and all of that good stuff. So I just thought it was a very, like, unempathetic thing to say. Talk about the irony, which is just wild there. But the other thing,

too, is that it was ridiculous that she started to get in the comments with one of my coworkers who was like, hey, this is not a really nice thing to say, and I think was just trying to nicely booper on the nose and say, like, hey, if you're really thinking about wanting to get involved and, like, apply to internships and whatnot, you shouldn't say stuff that's super polarizing. A wild thought almost 10 years later, oh, people saying stupid stuff on the internet. It happens. I think it's important, especially during these very polarizing times, to note that most of the time, Republicans and Democrats in the statehouse, get along really well. We all know each other. I think we all have the same goals. We just believe in different ways to get there. And she started to get super defensive and would use this line a lot

that really irked me. And she would say something along the lines of, I'm glad an 18 year old can ruffle your feathers, something like that, always talking about how, hey, I'm young. I'm the youngest person in the Indiana political scene. I've got a thousand Facebook followers. I'm young. I'm glad an 18-year-old could ruffle your feathers, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. But then when someone would call her out, she'd say like, hey, I'm only 18 years old, okay? I'm still learning and I'm still growing. It was very much that hypocritical, like, hey, you can't have it both ways kind of thing. That's around the time where I was like, hey, I don't want her. I don't feel like she should be on my Facebook anymore because she's just, she's just a drama, but it's also one of those things

where it's like the drama is very interesting and I like to watch it, as is I think most people with Megan Stoner. The only other interaction that I can remember having with her around that time before she started to get blackballed by a lot of organizations was that she would post a lot of the vague booking that you see a lot of boomers do now, where she'd say like, today was the worst. Today was just terrible, really going through it, just really strong. struggling right now. And so again, trying to be nice, thinking to myself like, okay, maybe if I kind of take her under my wing, maybe if I just continue to be nice to her, she just needs a friend. So I DM her on Facebook and I said something along the lines of, hey, is everything okay? Like what's going on? And she's

like, can't talk about it. Okay, well, if you can't talk about it, why put stuff out on the internet, but it is what it is. And then she said something along the line of, oh, I'm going through a breakup. up. And I thought to myself, all right, well, I've never seen you post a picture with a boyfriend or anything. So this is kind of interesting. But that's definitely foreshadowing all of the fake relationships that Megan Stoner has had. And then I think one of the last times I saw her in person, I was trying to remember before this interview like, gosh, what are all the weird instances that you've had with her in person? She reached out and let me back up to, you know, I had reached out and I said, hey, are you doing okay? and she said, oh, you know, break up, something like that. And I said, okay, well, you know, if you need to talk, you know, I'm here, blah, blah, blah.

Well, then like a week or so later, she reaches out to me again on Messenger and says, hey, Chloe, are you around? I need some help. And I was driving at the time. I was going to downtown Indianapolis for a board meeting for this nonprofit that I had worked for at the time. And I said, yeah, I'm around. What's up?

She said, well, can I call you? And I said, okay, sure. I said, you know, here's my cell phone number. I'm driving. You know, that's better. And she says, hey, I'm trying to check. into this hotel downtown and they won't let me check in because I'm under the age of 21. And they're not letting me check in and I've got something important that's going on.

I need someone with an ID who's over the age of 21 to check me in. Can you help me? And I was like, okay, sure. Thinking to myself, why are your parents not there checking you in? That's odd. You're 18 years old in a hotel by yourself. A little strange, but okay. And I said, all right, well, let me know what hotel it is and I can check you in really quickly. but I said, you know, it has to be quickly because I'm on my way to something. And I get there and she's just puffing and puffing won't even like look at me. She's sitting down with her arms crossed. And I go over to the front desk and I said, hi, I'm under the impression that I need to give you my ID to check her in. And she's like, yeah, I do. And I said, okay, well, does she already have a credit card on file? Because I said, I'm not comfortable giving you mine for any incidentals because I don't know her very well. And it's a good thing that I ask because she's like, oh, well, I don't even know if she has a credit card. And so I said, hey, Megan, come over here, like, I'm happy to check you in, but we need to get this sorted out. And she did give a credit for a debit card. And Megan was just very huffy, puffy, and just was acting like she was super entitled at the time, which, as we now know, not uncommon for Megan. And I was

just making small talk with the receptionist. She's like, okay, she's all checked in, all good to go. And Megan just storms off and didn't even say thank you to the receptionist or to me. And I was like, wow, okay, you are an entitled brat. This is very strange. So again, I should have known then that something was wrong. But I didn't see her again or hear from her for a while. I had taken a couple of contracts working out of the state, and so I was kind of always in and out of Indiana around that time. Then I had heard through the grapevine,

I heard that she was coming around in the spring of 2016, which is typically when the Indiana primary is. And for folks who are not from here, Indiana always has a relatively late primary when it comes to presidential election years. And it was at this time that Indiana was actually going to have a say in terms of the Republican Party in terms of who the nominee was going to be. So you saw a lot of people who were campaigning here who were still in the game. So that was at the time Carly Fiorena, Ted Cruz, and then John Kasich out of Ohio. And then, of course, Donald Trump, but I don't remember him having a big

fundraiser here, at least one that was publicized. But I did hear from some friends, that when Carly Fiorena was in town that Megan had attended, and if you look on her social media, you can scroll back and find a picture of Megan wearing a bright pink sweater, getting a picture with Carly Fiorena. And it's important to note that those dinners are normally anywhere from like $1,000 to $5,000 a plate. It's very expensive to attend. And so I always thought to myself, like, wow, how in the world was she able to pull that off? That's very expensive for a teenager. to go to something like that and come to find out that she had written a bad check and that it had bounced. And that, to my knowledge, is not the only time that she's written checks to

fundraisers or to other things where it's like, hey, you have to pay a fee. To go to the convention, to be a delegate, it's normally like $100. And I do know for a fact that she still owes $100 to the Madison County Republican Party for her delegate fee, I think, in either 2016 or 2018, which is wild. So that's the first that I had heard about her writing bad checks. And so I remember around this time, too, she had started to volunteer, and this is where the bad data like goes a step further. She was volunteering on the general campaign for Todd Young. And that was a very, very close race. And so one of the things for bigger races like that, what they ask volunteers to do is they say, hey, can you come in to our party operations or to our campaign headquarters? We've got

all of these folding chairs and tables and we've got these phones, an older like office phone that's courted and we need you to run through this script. You're going to be making phone calls to people that we've identified as either independent or non-confirmed voters. And basically you're saying, hey, my name's Chloe. I'm a volunteer with Todd Young for Senate. He's a pro-life, pro-gun Marine who's focused on X, Y, and Z. Can he count on your vote on November 7th? like that. Very simple pitch. And then you go through on the computer that's attached to the phone and you mark like, okay, did I speak to Bob or Becky Sue, whoever it is that lives here, to confirm that that indeed is the voter that you talk to. Were they home? Yes. And you kind of go

through the prompt. And then it says, like, are they voting? Are they not voting? Do they hate Todd Young? Or are they like, oh, yes, he's the best ever. Mark us down is voting for him. And, oh, by the way, we'll take a yard sign. And then you give that information over to another volunteer and they'll drop a yard sign off. It's the front lines of information gathering, but it's very important. We had heard, because my husband and I had volunteered to, we had done some phone banking, everybody in the political scene, no matter who your candidate is, we all kind of run around and help whoever it is that's up for election or reelection or who needs the most help. We had heard from some folks on the campaign that Megan Stoner had gotten into trouble when she was

making phone calls. And we were like, oh man, what'd she do? And we had heard through the grapevine that she went through and had marked on this tablet that's connected to this phone, not home, not home, voicemail, voicemail, voicemail, voicemail. I could probably sit and make, in the span of like three to four hours, if people are actually home on like a weekend or something, I could probably make 100 meaningful phone calls. She went through those three or four hours. and had made a thousand phone calls, something astronomical where it's like, hey, lady, that data does not check out.

That does not make sense. And so what you're doing is you're making all of this extra work for the campaign because now they have to go through those records and figure out like, oh my gosh, well, who did she talk to or who did she hang up on? Those are actual people that we could have talked to and made an impact and tried to get them to vote for us or vote for our side or at least figure out where they were so that we can mark them off the list. So I had heard that she got caught doing that and was told by campaign leadership,

hey, we know that you fubbed these phone calls. We know that you fake them. If we catch you doing it again, you're not going to work with us anymore. You're not volunteering. You're not being an intern, whatever it is that she said that she was doing for this campaign at that time. And I will get to what her actual title is because that's also an interesting story. And I had heard that she said, okay, okay, you know, I'm sorry, I'm sorry I did it.

It's not going to happen again. Well, then they said, hey, Megan, we need you to go out in your hometown, which is Elwood, Indiana, maybe an hour and a half north of Indianapolis over in Madison County where I live, maybe 30, 25 minutes for me. And they said, hey, we're going to set you up on this app that will show you where registered voters live. It will show you who the Republicans and the independents are. And we need you to go through and knock doors and basically say, hey, I'm Megan, I'm door knocking for Todd Young. He's a pro-life, pro-gun Marine who's going to do X, Y, and Z. Can he have your vote? Hand them the palm card, walk away, and Mark, if they were home, if they said that they were going

to support him, or if they're like, hey, I'm not voting or no, I'm never going to vote for him anyway. Again, the front lines of collecting data for the campaign. Very easy, very important. The interesting thing, Tiffany, about the app that those campaigns use is that it will use your GPS data to tell the campaign if you're actually walking those doors or not. So when they get a spreadsheet back that says that Megan Stoner knocked down 100 doors while she was still sitting in her house, what do you think they figured out? That she was marking, not home, not home, not home, didn't answer. She was doing it again. And so then she was called in and said, hey, you dummy, we saw that you did this again and you're out. You're done.

It's not going to happen again. And we had heard, again, through the grapevine that Megan Stoner was told like, hey, you're done, you're not volunteering, you're not doing this ever again. And the funny thing was she put on social media that she had to quit this job and she had to quit this internship that she had had. but, you know, it was the right step for her. And it's like, hey, no one's asking you. No one's asking. No one's paying attention to this. You're just acting a fool and everybody sees through it.

My name's Justin. I have known of Megan since the fall of 2016. I first became aware of her. I was volunteering on the Indiana Senate race in 2016, which was a very expensive, very nationally profiled race. race that drew a lot of attention and was a big thing to be a part of. I was a part of the Indiana University College Republicans at the time, and we basically spent almost every weeknight that summer volunteering for the future senator because we ended up winning that race, Todd Young.

And I was made aware of Megan because one night we were doing a lot of work and, you know, folding envelopes, making phone calls, that type of work that unpaid interns, you usually get. And somebody said, you guys are such good interns. You're much better than the one we had in our Indianapolis office. We were like, oh, what happened? And they told us the story of Megan Stoner. Essentially what she did on the campaign for Todd Young was she got involved. To my knowledge, Megan first got involved with Republican politics around 2014. She would have still been in high school at the time. So she'd been around a couple years. And so she was able to get an intern position with the campaign. And And her first couple of days, she, like, shattered the record for, like, most phone calls made to the point that it just looked a little fishy. Like, who is this girl? Why is she so good at this? It just wasn't quite plausible the numbers she was putting in. So they sent her out door knocking the next day because when you use the app that we used for door knocking, you could see where the responses were submitted because there's a geolocator on that app.

on the phone call app, you don't have that. Obviously, she shattered the record for door knocks as well, and they found that she submitted all the responses from her house. So she wasn't out knocking doors, she was just making up responses. And if you've ever done any work on a campaign, you would understand that the data is a very big part of a modern campaign. So if we see, like, women between ages, you know, 20 and 40 are swinging more this way than that way, that really does affect the messaging.

And so to just be making up responses and putting them into the campaign's wider database is a huge problem. So after like a week of her being on the campaign, she was asked to leave. And so this was the story I was first told of, Megan. This was the first I ever became aware was that story. That would have probably humiliated anyone else and made them kind of tuck their tail and move on to something else besides politics. But that fall, I went to several events in Indianapolis for the campaigns. and Megan would show up and we knew who she was

and she would very, it was very peculiar, she would like come in, sit by herself, towards the back, take a lot of pictures and then leave. She was kind of

that she was laughing stock to us at the time. And then she would usually make a Facebook post like a day or two later about, oh, I attended this event and got to sit with the governor

and always just like elaborate stories. If you were there, you were like, she came in, she was there for 15 minutes and she left. That was my knowledge of Megan for the first couple of years.

Hello? Hi there. This is Tiffany Reese. How are you? I'm not bad. How are you? That's Faith, a former friend of Stoners. Well, I appreciate you so much making the time and speaking with me, like I said,

briefly over email. It sounds like you're another victim of Megan, unfortunately, and I'm very sorry to hear that. It sounds like she's been at this for a question. quite a long time. Oh, yeah, she has been. How did y'all meet? I was in a young adult civic type Facebook group that was mostly through the online college I was attending.

It's just like a club, basically, on Facebook. And somehow, I have no idea how it, but she ended up getting added to that group. We started talking. We both saw we were from Indiana and into politics and had a bunch of mutual friends, so we ended up adding each other on Facebook. This time she was 16 and I was about 18. We became friends, just started chatting and whatnot. And yeah, that's how it kind of started.

So it sounds like it was mostly an online relationship at first. Well, I have actually never met her in person. We had a lot of mutual political connection. She was friends with all the right people. She would just friend every politician and then they'd see, oh, this other person is friends with her. they'd friend her. And she had a huge Facebook network, frankly. I was still getting into politics at the time, but I had a few connections that I knew were legitimate people working in the state

politics. At the time, at least, when you're working in politics, you had to friend it. That's just how to work at the time. And she was friends with all the right people, so I friended her, and yeah, we have a lot of mutual connections through that. And then the funny thing is, she goes through and finds your friends and asks them. So, like, she found a bunch of my friends through this online college program I was in, and she became friends with them through there. And so she created a network of friends. So we had a lot of mutuals.

Gotcha. It sounds like that's something that quite a few people have reported, too. So that must have been how she just kept building upon friending this person and friending their network and their network. And I imagine, like, Indianapolis in general, sure, it's a lot of people, but. in certain pockets or groups, obviously things feel smaller. Yeah, exactly. And, you know, the political scene in any state, but specifically in Indiana, is very small and tight-knit. And so everyone knows everyone.

So what happened was, and I do think my relationship with her and my situation is pretty much entirely unique, to be honest. But so, you know, we, like I said, we became friends on Facebook. We started talking a lot, had a lot of similar interests. We just talked on a regular basis. She was talking about wanting to get involved more in politics and eventually wanting to run for office. We were friends, had a lot of inside jokes, different subjects we talked about.

She and I were often on different ends of the political spectrum. Well, not the spectrum, but we were both Republicans, but she was one side and not as the other. So we would tease each other about candidates and whatnot. It was then in about 2017 that she started sending me information, like saying that stuff was happening to her. And she'd all along kind of hinted that she'd been sexually assaulted, and I had no reason to doubt that. And I still kind of don't doubt it a little bit. But she started telling me about that.

And then she had brought in another friend of ours, a mutual friend, and had had her feeling, with the situation as well. And basically she told me that the Indiana Speaker of the House had assaulted her starting at, I think she said, the age of 11 or 12, and was doing it on a regular basis, and it just grew from there. I don't know if you're familiar with the Pizza Gate scandal. Basically, the concept is that there's basically a cabal or cartel of political figures who are pedophon.

That's the idea behind it. It was widely disproven. this kind of happened, not exactly at the same time, but around the time. And so basically she's telling me the story, and it came to the point where she was saying that basically every politician was sexually assaulting her on a regular basis. So from Donald Trump to Hillary Clinton to local state representatives. She said that all of them had sexually assaulted her. Yes. So at this point, I didn't believe everything she was saying, but there was.

was enough that she could say that I could see happening in the world that made me believe her someone. It was also at a point where I just switched to hub from different time slots, so I had gone immediately from working from 3 to 11 to 9 to 5 and was very tired. But also, the way Megan works is she overwhelms you. So she was texting me constantly all throughout the day while I was at work, while I was at home while I was doing other activities, and then she would talk to me for anywhere from one to four hours every night on the phone. And so I was staying up to all hours the night

talking to her. At one point, my brother, who was on our cell phone plan, commented about how much time I was spending on the phone. So it's just constant talking, telling me all this stuff, telling another friend, we'd have group calls all the time. So yeah, that's kind of how it snowballed into that mess. Did your friendship continue over the years or what was your sort of history leading up to her criminal activity? So we were friends and again, like I said, I've never met her own person. We just never ended up connecting.

We'd both be in the same area at times, but never ended up connecting. We were friends. She would send me, you know, different political stuff. We didn't talk every day, but we just chat here and there. So after this point, in 2017, big part of my story happens at this time. When she's telling me all this stuff, she's eventually at some point told me that somehow, at some point, she had slipped up and told the speaker about me, or Brett Posma. She told him about me. And at that point, I started to get texts from Google members claiming, and I never said it directly, but she would claim that he was going to text me.

and then I'd get this text. And then it spiraled from there. Other politicians were supposedly texting me. And these texts were just extremely graphic, like pornographic stuff, talking about how they were all going to come and do to me what they've been doing to her, essentially, you know, a regular gang rate.

So she would just send these text messages, and I don't know how she does it because she'd be talking to me on the phone, and I'd be getting texts from like four different numbers. She's got some sort of superpowers. or texting, I don't know how that works. She was sending me these extremely graphic messages, supposedly from politicians.

I now know they're from her. And then enough pieces began to fall apart that me and my friends figured out, we don't think this is true. We'd already been suspecting it for some time. Then it all fell apart. At this point, I told her, I don't think you're telling me the truth.

I'm not going to participate in this anymore. I stayed friends with her on Facebook because she had spoken many times of wanting to run for office. And so I didn't want that. I don't want her running for office in the state I live in. So I stayed friends with her on Facebook just to kind of monitor what was going on. Our relationship definitely took a downturn from there. We didn't talk hardly at all. You know, we'd still chat about political stuff. She told me different things.

the state of Indiana, there's a political mailing list and it cost money to be on it. And I didn't want to do that, so she would send it to me. So that was basically our relationship, chatting here and there about stuff we were similar to interested, but not really talking since, so that was about 2017. Do you remember besides Basma any of the other politicians' names? Yes, so one was Mike Pence, Eric Hocom, who's the governor of Indiana, several other state representatives. They can't remember all their names.

Mike Lee, the senator from Utah. Donald Trump at one time, I did not believe that one. Obviously, that was a straight-up. I'm like, that's not happening. At one point, it was like Sarah Palin, which was so bizarre. Yeah, so those people, for sure. And there's a few others I can't recall. You said that they were contacting you with sexual messages, like, taunting you?

you? Yes, really. It was saying basically along the lines of, I'll help you get involved in politics if you do these things. And then when I was not cooperating, they would get violence. A lot of the times I would block these numbers. Sometimes I wasn't sure what was going on, so I wouldn't block them. And yeah, it was a huge mess. I was raised very conservative, very sheltered, And so that is not something I had a lot of experience with. So, like, I didn't even fully know what was going on half the time. And I did, yeah, I definitely did not have the knowledge of how to handle that. The politicians would have been like 2017-ish.

Yes. So while Trump was sitting president. Yeah. She's trying to convince me that the president of the United States was flying to Monticello, Indiana. And it's texting you about abusing you basically or that he had abused Megan. Yeah. And the thing is she was very smart about it because

she knew I didn't like him. So she chose the people I didn't already didn't like to let him pass. To make you, yeah, to be like, oh, you hate him now, just wait. Yeah. And then it was interesting because she then started tying in people I did like. like I had previously worked for multiple tense in his campaign. Don't know him well, but like I'd worked for him.

And then Mike Lee at the time I was a big fan. And so she started in with people I didn't like, but then began adding people that I did. Essentially, in my opinion, I'm not the therapist, but in my opinion, she started with people I didn't like and then started making it so I didn't trust anyone except for her. That was her goal, I think. Mm-hmm. How long do you think that went on, the text went on for?

The whole situation started around Easter of 2017 and went through maybe July. I couldn't tell you exactly the date, but kind of the earth spring and summer of 2017. The text itself were not the whole time, but were much of that time. So maybe two months. Wow. Okay. So they were texting you on your phone, but it was. obviously from like Google numbers basically is what you're saying yeah okay gotcha gotcha which is in keeping with what you would expect if a politician was doing things they weren't supposed to be right and it's like she did have all these pictures with some of these people and such did that make it feel like it was more potentially true or did you kind of think it was BS the whole time

I would like to say I thought it would be us the whole time I didn't I never believed her fully because I already did know that she was prone to exaggerating. But I did believe her in certain parts, again, because I was not a fan of Brian Bosman, so I believed what she said about him. And there's also, like, I'm not going to throw dispersions on his character, but there's an old story about him having inappropriate relationships

with an intern way back. Like, it's a thing that people know. I knew she was involved in state politics in some way because people I knew knew her. and she had these pictures. So it did add legitimacy because I could tell that she's actually been there. And it's not the easiest thing in the world to get a picture with the politician. Hi, I'm Alex Brewster.

I am 30 years old and from Portland, Oregon. I met Megan through a Facebook group of women who are all roughly millennial age, Gen Z, called Spice Girls. And it's just a Facebook group where we talk about life, talk about issues with partners and parents and rental agreements and how to find departments and all of that fun stuff. And that's where I initially met Megan. Would you consider yourself at any point close with Megan? So I wouldn't say I was necessarily close with Megan, but she did peak my interest, if that makes any sense, that whenever she would. she would post something or say something, I would sort of take note of it. My first initial impression of Megan was that she was very, very young.

I believe at the time she had just graduated from high school. I perceived her to be afraid of the world, so to speak, afraid of failure, overwhelmed. Just somebody who needed a little bit more guidance. To be honest, there was nothing about anything that she said that I found personally interesting are personally relatable, but she's in this group now. She's one of us. I need to do my best, in a sense, to be sort of an older sister in a way. I have one younger brother and all of his friends are just as lost and confused as I perceived Megan to be, and I sort of have taken them under my wing and have treated them as one of me. And that's how I kind of saw a lot of the people in the

group. So my sort of closeness with Megan was there was a group. chat created by one of the admins of the group because Megan's posts became so consistent and constant and a bit draining on the group. So there was a group chat created and I was one of the people who was added to the group chat. The goal was to try to give her the support and interaction that she desired from the group without bringing the entire group down with her. And what kind of things was she posting about? She started posting about the most mundane things. Everything from, has anybody pinned their bangs back with a bobby pin? These very mundane things. There's a lot of fashion advice. She really was interested and trying to find every opportunity to wear a blazer. So she would

post outfits and say, you know, what color of blazer should I wear with this even if it didn't call for it? A lot of things like that. And things started to get increasingly strange. It got to, I need advice on how to communicate with my therapist. And then my therapist is out of town. And I have a stand-in therapist and now the stand-in therapist is stalking me and I'm being sexually assaulted by my mentor or my manager. And things just started sort of spying. spiraling into great intensity. We all try very, very, very hard to be very supportive of one another, even when it's hard. This group has done incredible things for each other. There was a girl whose daughter passed away from a horrible genetic condition and we all came together and fundraised for a headstone for her. We've done a lot of really great things. I met two of my bridesmaids through the group. There was a girl in the group who drove an hour to my college town to sit with me one night because I was having a really bad night. So everybody really tries to be really supportive to one

another and that is really the spirit of the group. So with Megan's post, it was a bit cringy at first and so it was a lot of like, oh, oh honey, oh goodness, trying to empower her to be a little bit more independent, a little bit more, I would say, aware. But it got to a point where we were scared for her. We were really concerned about her. We were trying to get her help that she needed. And then it just ended in anger. It was a very high stress situation near the end. Next time, on something was wrong. Ultimately, what we discovered is that we were in a strange sense we were being catfished by her. She would have these very consistent and very intense traumatic situations. She got into this really deep feud, or I always say it was a pissing match with

Itown, which is a very big church. This is now the third disabled person that you've targeted of multiple thousands of dollars. This is what we like to call a pattern. Thank you so much for listening. Something Was Wrong is a Broken Cycle Media production, created and produced by me, Tiffany Reese. Thank you so much to our associate producers Amy B. Chessler and Lily Rowe. Thank you to our audio engineer, Becca High, and our social media marketing manager, Lauren Barkman of luxury media. Additional thanks to our partners, Grant at Wondery, Marissa, Travis, and our team at WME, Jason and Jennifer at KSCO, our Cybersecurity team, Darkbox Security, and my lawyer, Alan.

And to all of you who make our show possible with your support and listenership. Special shout out to Neon Honey and Gabonnas for covering our theme song, Gladrag's original song, You Think You, this season. For more music from them, check out the episode notes or your favorite streaming app. In the episode notes, you'll always find content warnings, sources and resources, with links to our websites and social media as well. Thank you so much to every survivor and ally who has trusted us to help share their stories. We are forever grateful. Until next time, stay safe friends.