The 13th Step - The Litter Police

Episode Date: June 6, 2023

What does it take to catch a predator in the addiction treatment industry? We hear about a case in California where the CEO of a network of treatment facilities was convicted of sexual assault and massive insurance fraud. It required years of work – and two women who banded together and refused to give up. The 13th Step is a production of New Hampshire Public Radio’s Document team. More at 13thsteppodcast.org. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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I have to walk fine line to not be a squeaky wheel. You know, I just knew that the cards were stacked against me, so I felt like I was on a mission to find somebody who could represent better than I could. Deb, though, she has a way of, like, when I, if I go off a little bit too much in, like, the wrong direction, she just kind of, hmm, you know, she just just, huh. And that's my way of being like, okay, maybe I need to reel it back in a little bit, you know, back down to earth. But she was so great and she was so disturbed by what was happening and passionate. I mean, she really kept going and going and going and going.

And I just love her. And I don't know when it turned in or how it just turned into a friendship, you know. And I still tell her all the time. I hope I am you when I grow up, you know. I want to be a dab. And then she reminds me I'm in my 40s. This is the 13th step. I'm Lauren Chulgin.

And by the end of this episode, two women are going to catch a bad guy, a guy who was a big deal in addiction treatment in Southern California. So far in this podcast, we've learned a lot about why that often does not happen. So I was really curious to hear about this guy named Chris Batham. He was the owner and CEO of a substance use disorder treatment company in Los Angeles.

He called himself the rehab mogul, and he will likely be in prison for the rest of his life, for sexual assault and insurance fraud. Hundreds of people worked at or attended Batham's facilities, so there are lots of people out there who could tell you about Batham and what he did. But I found two women, named Rose and Debbie, and their experience in all this taught me more about how. how to catch a predator than anything else I've read or heard. So let me tell you about Rose Stahl. In 2013, Rose was living in Los Angeles,

and she was talking to a friend about how she was thinking about drinking again. Rose had been in recovery for a while at that point, and this friend was like, oh, you should meet this guy, Chris Batham. He's a therapist, this friend said. He specializes in addiction, and he might take you for free. Free sounded especially great. So Rose started seeing Batham for weekly therapy sessions. What was he like?

It's funny, it's hard for me to answer that question straight out without saying I am fully aware that many, many other people saw right through him right away. But for me, he was just really brilliant. And I always walked away every session just feeling this sense of ease that. okay, okay. Everything's okay. I met Rose at her home in Austin, Texas. That's where she lives now. She has two little dogs that are obsessed with her. One of them, Audrey, is loud. You will hear her throughout our conversation. At one point, Audrey sat on my recorder and turned it off. Audrey is the handful I never wanted. No, we love her to dead. That's my record.

I was immediately struck by how vibrant and expressive Rose is. She beams this happy, chaotic energy. I was barely out of the car when she hugged me. But like so many of us, Rose also knows the depths of depression. She was in a real tough spot when she met Batham. Rose was separating from her husband, trying to find her way through the world as a single mom, without any family close by, no job, and they were all those swirling questions about her sobriety. But she says her sessions with Batham felt powerful and thoughtful. She bonded with him quickly. So for over a year, she'd drive to his office for an hour or 90-minute session and walk out feeling relieved. Although sometimes, sometimes he did say things that Rose thought, whoa, what? He did offer eventually to drink with me in a bar as a therapeutic

tool to assess my, am I an alcoholic or not? A therapeutic tool. Drinking with her therapist. Rose says it instantly made her feel nauseous. She didn't take him up on it, but she heard him out. Because Batham wasn't only a therapist. He was the founder of a growing substance use disorder treatment company called Community Recovery Los Angeles.

He ran facilities in many of the fanciest corners of L.A., like Malibu and Calabasasas. home of at least one Kardashian. Batham would eventually own more than 20 sober homes and outpatient clinics in Colorado and California. So surely he must know what he's talking about. Yeah, he just casually the way that he does where there's no care in the world, he's got everything figured out, said, well, you know, I think that it would be a good idea for me to assess your drinking. But it was also in a way, Batham was great for Los Angeles because Los Angeles is full of those moments. moments, you're all the time, you're like, whoa, what? Who did what? And it becomes, you become

almost desensitized from this kind of stuff. And so at that point, I think it was more like, yeah, actually, maybe everyone, you know, should do this. And, uh, rose's sigh there contains so many feelings, because this moment is really far from the end of her experience with Batham. He would end up consuming so much of her life. We're now going on a decade. So in retrospect, that moment could have been a bright red flag. She could have walked away, found a new therapist.

But of course, that is so hard to do. Instead, Rose would end up working at community recovery, Batham's treatment company. They call it CRLA, and most people refer to Chris Batham as Batham, so I will too. Batham offered Rose a job at CRLA during one of their therapy sessions. Rose definitely knew that was weird, but Batham convinced her they'd keep their distance from each other and stopped doing therapy together. Plus, CRLA was growing rapidly. It seemed on the outside like a place you wanted to be a part of if you cared about addiction.

Batham was seen as a visionary, a guy who was always talking about systems and theories. It felt like he was thinking differently about this. seemingly unsolvable problem of addiction. So you really think that rehab's fraud? For the most part, I'd say that's the case. I wouldn't say that's always the case. But I think that most of the work that's being done and the money that's being spent is wasted. This is an old radio interview, Batham did, before opening CRLA, where he's calling out other treatment providers. They very much are focusing on the next client and the next client's cash and how the next client's cash is going to make the thing better. And it's very much like a person who's selling something in a dixing in that selling process or a person who's gambling.

And anything goes as long as the client comes in. And I think that's pretty sick. CRLA was all built around Batham's big idea that the best way to solve substance use disorder is with more affordable, longer-term treatment. He was also known for his holistic approach to treatment, like using sound baths or meditation sessions in sweat lodges. And there are still people who say that CRLA was the thing that finally helped them stop using. Batham felt like the usual 30 days of rehab weren't enough, so he'd keep clients for 90 days of inpatient treatment. He didn't invent that, by the way. Longer residential treatment is an idea that's been around for a long time. Batham even found ways to keep clients after their 90 days. He would offer clients paid internships, quote unquote, where they'd do odd jobs.

and chores at CRLA. And then after only six months of interning, clients could be hired as CRLA staff. Batham hired Rose to help open a new community center, which would be the main hub of CRLA. And given how tumultuous her life had been lately, this new job felt like a fresh start. I was making decent money, you know.

It was enough for me to support myself and my daughter with the help of like a little bit of child support. So it was awesome, actually. It was self-sufficient. I didn't have, you know, any worries. Rose could tell pretty quickly that CRLA was expanding. One minute, she's working on the new community center, and then the next she's talking with a contractor

about a new medical clinic. And she remembers being in meetings where staff members or clients would come up with these other ideas of things that CRLA should have and how it felt like almost immediately those ideas would just have. happen. That was kind of how the coffee house. So a coffee house became a thing because we thought, okay, we can open up this coffee shop and give people jobs. A music studio eventually, you know,

came about. And I think that was actually in the beginning stages already because Batham's daughter wanted to be a singer. And so he wanted to do this music studio and maybe start producing artists out of Sierra Leic. It's just true. It's hard. But it seems so, it was like, oh my God, this is so revolutionary and this is amazing and in some ways it still is a great idea it's just anything is possible with unlimited free money unlimited free money at the time rose had no idea how a rlaa was funded she didn't think much about it but in a small office 35 miles away a woman named Debbie Herzog was starting to get an idea. So is it better if we sit next to each other? We can't do that. Do that? It's just fine. Okay. Is your kidding around? He's sleeping on my bed,

but if he awakens, he's very loud. Debbie and her very loud cat, who will also make an appearance in this podcast, they now live in Tucson, Arizona. Debbie was a federal prosecutor for nearly two decades. It's a key part of who she is, despite many of the other prestigious jobs on her resume. For example, she also investigated fraud for some federal agencies like NASA and the Postal Service. So suffice it to say, not much gets by Debbie Herzog. In 2013, as Rose was in therapy with Batham, Debbie left government work and started a job as an insurance investigator at Anthem. It was a lot of bill collecting, way more than she had. hoped. But then one day, she ran out of assigned work to do. And when that happens, we're supposed to

try to come up with our own, and the best way to do that is to pick a certain procedure, a certain billing code, and run it through the computer and ask the computer to find the providers that build that code the most and see what pops up. So Debbie thought, why don't I try the code for preventative medicine. That covers things like a primary care doctor sharing information on how to prevent a heart attack. Or things to avoid so you don't get cancer. So I stuck preventive medicine in and community recovery popped up at the top of the list and had hundreds and hundreds and hundreds more billings than any other provider on the list. And it's a drug and rehab center. Why are they billing for preventive medicine.

Hundreds and hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of billings. At CRLA, Chris Batham's Place. Debbie realizes she might be on to something here. So I started looking at the patients that Anthem Blue Cross had at community recovery. And I could pull up the patients and see the different things that they were built for. and it was just all kinds of stuff. Smoking cessation, group therapy, individual therapy, all kinds of services that actually should have been covered under the umbrella of drug treatment.

So if you check into a treatment center, they tell you it's going to cost $30,000 a month. And that $30,000 is going to cover all services at that facility. So if those services are being billed individually as well, that's double billing, and that's fraud. Fraud. Basically, patients were being billed once for all their treatment and then build again and again and again and again for each individual service, which they'd already paid for. And can we pause here for a second? Because it is insane that Debbie even found this. She says there are like 10,000 billing codes and countless.

medical providers that use those codes. This isn't a needle in a haystack. This is like the back of an earring in a cornfield. You know, some of the codes are so specific that it would be so apparent if they were being wrongly billed. So I tried to find a code that could look benign, but really wasn't within a certain practice. And preventive medicine is not a benign billing code in drug and alcohol rehab. It's just not. God, and imagine if you hadn't done that? I know. I just remember, okay, I'm going to dig. Debbie starts digging hard.

She tries to drill down to see just how deep this problem goes. Turns out there was much more than just the double billing scheme. Chris Batham, the guy who owned community recovery, had opened up places in Colorado pretty recently. And I discovered looking at these individual patient patients. billings, that some of them were being billed for services rendered in Southern California and Colorado on the same day. That's not possible. Right?

So there was triple billing. And then I started running these patients through social media to see what I could find out about them. And on Facebook and on LinkedIn, they listed their jobs as, jobs at community recovery. So he was billing for interns, billing for full-time employees, billing for part-time employees, as if they were all patients. Chris Batham was taking out insurance policies in the names of his employees, as in creating accounts for them and then billing those fraudulent accounts for addiction treatment services that no one was actually receiving.

And to add another layer, it was sometimes former clients hired to work in the CRLA billing department who did that paperwork. What did it feel like to see that? Wow. I found not just paper fraud. You know, it's kind of a dull case paper fraud, but really interesting fraud. I mean, fraud that might get somebody's attention. Or so she hoped. What did you know about the recovery world at that point?

Unfortunately, more than one might expect, I had a son who was in recovery at the time. I had just sent him away for the first time for treatment and was well aware of the expense, the billing, what services were provided, and the longer he was in and out of recovery, the more I got to know. It was actually just about a month or so into Debbie's new job at Anthem, when her only son, David, came to her and said, Mom, I'm in trouble. David was addicted to opioids. Debbie was shocked.

She started panicking, scrambling to figure out, how do I even get him help? You know, if you Google rehab in Southern California, you come up literally with thousands of rehabs. Like, how do I even know where to begin? Somebody recommended a consultant, a woman whose job it was, to help place kids in behavioral treatment. And a few thousand dollars later,

she gave me two recommendations for treatment. She said, how quickly do you want to do this? I said, within the next 48 hours, or I'm afraid I'll change my mind because I was terrified of sending him away. He had abandonment issues from his. biological father anyway. And I had to also hire two guys to come get him in the middle of the night. He wasn't going to be violent or anything, but he was 6-2 and 185, and I wasn't going to be

able to get him in a car, let alone on a plane. So they came and got him and took him up there. How old was he at the time? 17. And I had to do it quickly because at 18, I was going to lose the ability to be able to send him anywhere. So it was kind of like now or never. It's kind of amazing to me, or maybe I shouldn't be amazed at this point in my research, but given your background, you know, you're pretty on top of things and that it's a whole new world to you that you had to learn and find a consultant for. I feel like it says a lot about the state of the industry. Yes. I mean, I prosecuted tons of people for drugs and didn't think about what happened to them afterwards. My job was over.

very limited vision I had. After I sent my son to treatment, I started calling myself the prosecutor with a perspective because it was a complete, you know, I mean, I'd look at this kid and think. I said, I sent people to prison for things you did, my child. Yeah, and I had, I was clueless. I mean, clueless. So in 2014, while she sat in her new office, clicking through fraudulent billing after fraudulent billing by CRLA, an addiction treatment provider, all she could think of was David. I mean, I'm thinking this could be me. This could be my kid who's supposed to be getting services that he's not getting. Yeah, I was completely on my mind, and I think that's why I was so rabid about the whole case and still am about the whole industry.

All right, is that anything else you want to sniff? You sound really good in my ears. Okay, wait a good. Okay, now I can sit with my mom. Okay, so... Rose didn't stumble on a gold mine of data like Debbie did. She was on a different journey. She was close with Batham.

She was working for him. But then she started to hear some rumors. A friend comes to Rose and says, A client had come to her and basically said that there was some questionable behavior coming from Batham. This is the part of the story where we will start to talk about things that are especially hard to hear. The rumor was that Batham was having sex with female clients and that he was using drugs with those clients. There was also word going around of some fraud that Batham had defrauded a former investor. And at that point, it was like, what?

What the f? It was so, I mean, I really had kind of a little mini-nervous breakdown. There are a lot of choices you can make when you hear such a wild rumor. You could dismiss it, shrug it off. You might spread it around, see what other people say. Or you could be like Rose and think, I need to confront Chris Batham about this right now. Oh, it wasn't an option not to. That, like, that's just kind of me.

I mean, there was no freaking way I could not investigate and find out. Rose told me she's always been like this. She has to intervene. She's a rule follower to the extreme. Her mom once told her, you've always been a little whistleblower. There was one story, she told me, that I'm potentially obsessed with. Rose was six, maybe seven, and she has a vivid memory of being deeply disturbed by other kids littering. I remember being like the litter police, you know, like some kids were littering and we had this commercial.

I was like, don't mess with Texas. And I were just remembering like, don't mess with Texas. Rose was not the kid that pretends they don't see the ice cream wrappers on the ground. Rose was the kid that yelled out, hey, you can't do that. And I think they like kicked me or something, you know, like, shut up, you twerk. The litter police thing never left her. Like in her 20s, when she was going to AA meetings in Austin, the minute a guy made a move on someone in early recovery, Rose would pounce. Her friend still joke. She was like the 13th step police.

It was a joke, but it was true that I was always getting in the way or handling or we would have a new guy from out of town. would make me move in and I would immediately be like, all right, motherfucker, like, here's the deal. I got my eye on you. This is what's happening and what's not happening. So, when rumors were spreading that Chris Batham was having sex with clients and using drugs with them, the biggest question for Rose was, what's the best way to confront him? Rose had a friend named Jane who was living with her at the time, so they processed all this together. I can imagine Rose pacing in their small. apartment in Hollywood. Her friend Jane is sitting on the couch, totally blown away.

I was telling Jane, you know, this is just crazy. I don't know, but I have to confront him. And so Jane was like, well, my ex-wife worked in the field and maybe we can talk to her about it. And she, because Jane had told me years before and even she had, I remember when I met her, she was going through it with this place. And she was like, the owner of smoking crack with clients, sleeping with clients, trying to give the staff drugs. It was really, insane. So Jane, she figures might as well shoot my ex-wife a text. Who was that old boss you had who slept with clients? Meanwhile, Rose gets up the courage to send a text to Batham. She thought back to their therapy sessions and realized she had the perfect way to lure him to meet immediately. Rose

started typing. I was panicking and I was just like, I'm feeling like drinking. Like can we meet? And he said, actually, I think a drink is a good idea. Batham and Rose make plans to meet at a restaurant. Jane offers to drive Rose there. Jane and I get in her car and we're driving there and it's kind of a long drive and she's really uneasy about me confronting my boss and I'm just like, I don't care. I got to do it because she's like, what if it's true? Like what then?

And I must have really held out hope that it wasn't true. Well, no, I did. because right as we're pulling in to the restaurant and I see him standing in these shorts, which was weird, I'd never seen him in shorts, just kind of waiting for me outside. The ex-wife text, Chris Batham. As in, oh, that former boss I had that slept with clients? Chris Batham. No.

Yeah. Yeah. So what did you do? Unfortunately, I end up believing him. Rose sits down at the restaurant bar with Batham. They ordered drinks. Rose said he looked mildly nervous. But when Rose confronts Batham about everything she's heard,

he denies it all. And he's got an explanation for everything. The person who passed along the rumor, she's unstable. The person who started the rumors? It's that former investor. Batham says he's been trashing him, making all sorts of accusations online. Rose had actually seen the investor's posts on social media.

And then over the next few days, Batham had the company's CFO tell Rose how absurd the whole thing was. I was crying a whole lot, and then I was feeling mortified because that was part of it was like this really good man. I felt so conflicted and so bad for doubting him before I asked him. And then once he convinced me that they weren't real rumors afterwards, I mean, I just felt so bad. And so I'm crying.

How are you ever going to trust me? Scared that I changed our wonderful dynamic, you know, all of it, wondering if my job is at risk now. You have to understand. Batham had an incredible power over Rose. She felt he knew her inside and out. He gave her free therapy. He gave her a job when she was in crisis. No rumor or coincidental text message could change all that. Plus, now he was forgiving her. He even moved her into a new role at CRLA. Batham asked her to be an investigator. Gather information about this investor, who he said was harassing him. She would be saving the company so they could help more clients. That was the idea. What I was being told was that the investor was even like hiring people to come work at Sierra La,

hiring people that poses clients and things like that. And so I really was passionate about stopping this guy from putting out these rumors. They're sick and hurting people. And the rumors kept on coming. As Rose is doing her investigating, she comes across a video on social media with a big allegation. There are two people in this video. One of them is the former investor. He's standing beside a young woman.

The video is only 14 seconds long, and it's alarming. But it's also really weird. Hey, Haley. Hello. Now, Haley was a client over at Chris Batham's place, and would you mind saying on camera that you were drugged and raped? I was drugged and raped by Chris Batham. That's it.

That's the whole video. Rose watches it, and she still doesn't believe it, because she's focused on the investor. He seems to be prompting this client to speak. And Rose thinks, wow, what insane length this guy is going to. Making up a rumor about sexual assault, he's going to stop. I had the fear that other clients or other staff would have the same just wildly bad reaction to hearing the rumors. and relapse. Batham has redirected the litter police.

He's convinced Rose, he's not a bad guy. He's the good guy. Debbie Herzog had made a wild discovery. Hundreds and hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of fraudulent billings by CRLA. Fake insurance policies taken out for employees billing for treatment in two states. And as an Anthem insurance investigator, when you find stuff like this, the next step is to punch a report and send it off to the state. In this case, California. So I wrote up what I had, sent it in, and it was declined, which kind of stunned me. So I had my boss, called the boss over

there, and they said, fine, we'll give her an investigator. And the poor guy they gave me had only worked workers' comp cases, you know, which is I can't work because my back is out. This guy just was in over his head. I mean, he had no idea what to do with this thing. Not a great start. All right, Debbie thinks. Maybe I'll have better luck with my old colleagues, the Feds. Debbie, again, used to be a federal prosecutor, so she takes the case over to them, tells them how deep it seems to go. And that doesn't work either. In L.A., they're really picky about the cases they take, and they're only looking at really, really large dollar cases. And it wasn't a large dollar case yet. And when I say large dollar case, I mean, they're looking at a million

dollars or above, and I was probably in the thousands at the time. I was really curious about this. Here's clear evidence of a bad thing in the middle of a public health crisis. Some law enforcement authority is going to want to shut it down, right? Why would they be so picky? Because there's so much fraud in the world. There are so many criminals and so many crimes being committed. There are not enough resources. So you have to prioritize and go for the biggest ones.

So then I went to other insurance companies and said, hey, you know, look at the this, check out your billings and started getting the other insurance companies on board. The dollar amounts obviously started getting higher as we got more community recovery clients from other insurance companies, but it still wasn't reaching the threshold for federal investigation or prosecution. I thought it was kind of stalling and her call came at the right time. Rose did that investigator-type job at CRLA for months. She'd attend group sessions with Batham and other programming with clients. But a lot of her workday was spent talking about the investor.

One day in February of 2015, she and Batham were in his Tesla. Batham was driving, Rose in the front seat. I don't remember what the investor was doing at the time, but it was something that was really upsetting to Batham. And so we were driving in his car. And he He told me that he had basically in a roundabout hired someone to murder the investor.

What? Yeah. Yeah. He's like, you know, wouldn't it be better if he were just gone? Well, yeah, it would. Of course. Well,

wouldn't it be, you know, what about him having a car wreck? What if he had a car wreck in two weeks? I'm like, what the fuck? Rose's mind starts moving fast. Is he joking? What is he saying? A car wreck? Is this some weird therapy thing? It was like he was trying to literally coax me into buying into and agreeing with having the investor murdered. And so I said directly, I said, are we talking about murder?

and I looked at him in the car and then I saw it for the first time. I was like he's high. And it was just like, oh my God, like the rose-colored glasses shattered in that moment. Like my brain and body can't handle the possibility almost. Rose could see it in Batham's face, beads of sweat, eyes wild, twitching, things that before she just wanted to see as Batham's mannerisms. Now it was obvious. Rose was scared, but she's also Rose, the rule follower, the litter police.

She was determined to find out if she was right. So the next opportunity she gets to use Batham's car by herself, she takes it. It's days later. She hears Batham asking a client to go charge the Tesla for him. Rose intervenes. Let me charge it for you. So she gets in Batham's car alone and starts driving. I was just looking around.

I was looking while I was driving, looking down, and you could see it. You could see little devices like pins that had sometimes people would use like smoking heroin or meth. I think with like they could instead of a straw use a pen. And you could see those like broken apart everywhere. She's like, oh my God. So when I finally parked the car, it was like some lingerie in the backseat and this hand. on the window that was in a bizarre position where it looked like it was like a handprint placed in a way that no natural position nobody would ever sit while the car was moving and so

of course I was like it looks like a sexual position um yeah it was fucking devastating rose also found drugs in the car methamphetamine she took a short video and some pictures It was one of those moments that seemed so obvious when you finally notice it. And yet it was so easy to miss or maybe ignore when you just weren't thinking that way. And then suddenly, Rose remembers the rumor about the client, the client who made a video where she said, I was drugged and raped by Chris Batham. My first thought was, oh, my God.

Oh, my God, she was probably telling the truth. and I have been for however many months a part of the machine that is trying to make people believe that she's a liar. Rose calls a manager at CRLA and tells them what she's found. And maybe because she's found hard evidence. This manager takes her really seriously.

Batham is kicked out of the company. But that is not where the story ends. At first, Rose says it seemed like all the remaining managers were a unified front against Batham. Everyone agreed what he did was wrong, and if he tried to come back, Rose says, they would go to the police. That lasted, Rose says, for maybe three days. Rose learns Batham still has access to the company's systems, to the clients, even when he wasn't at his facilities. He was looking on the video, the surveillance cameras, and contacting clients texting female clients, like,

I see you on the camera. And so when I, you know, I thought that that would be handled. I was made aware that that would not be handled. There was nothing we could do about it. So Rose becomes an investigator again. But this time against Batham. She confronts other members of Batham's team, trying to get someone, anyone in management,

to take her seriously. She's pushing a lot of people, asking a lot of questions. But it doesn't seem like anyone cares. They didn't. believe her. I was well aware that I would no matter what usually be looked at as crazy just for my even being a woman, let alone being a woman who gesticulates wildly and get, you know, whose heart rate elevates easily and who talks in big words, not big intelligent words, just big exaggerated words. You know, I just knew that the cards were stacked against me, so I felt like I was on a mission to find somebody who could represent better than I could.

But you're the litter police. I'm the litter police. I'm the litter police, but, you know, I have the body of a woman. Rose starts saving everything she can get her hands on, and I mean everything. When a colleague leaves the company and takes his laptop with her. him, Rose tracks him down to see what data he has. And then that former colleague connects her with another CRLA employee, and they both claim Batham is running an insurance scam. Rose will believe anything at this point, so she starts collecting documents. She's pulling string wherever

she can find it. She knows she needs to call someone else outside the company for help, someone with power. But who? Who do you call if your boss is threatening to murder someone and maybe running an insurance scam and is also using drugs and is sexually assaulting the clients of his treatment center? I mean, at the time, I had no idea. I had no idea. And I had called, I had tried to call the FBI hotline one day. But it was funny because you get down to doing it and there's the question of like, wait, how do I call the FBI? And so I had like found a number on Google while I was driving. And I think I left a message for somebody. They didn't get back to her. So what about the state of California, Rose thinks, maybe there's some licensing body that I could turn to and file a report

about Batham. So she starts researching. And then it was a devastating blow to realize, oh, he's not even a therapist. Chris Batham was not even a therapist. In fact, he wasn't personally licensed to do anything. All he had was a certificate for hypnotherapy, hypnosis. He didn't need a license to be a CEO of a drug and alcohol treatment center in California. So there was no licensing board to report him to. Rose says that was one of the most interesting, infuriating, and frustrating things about this case. Whatever else had transpired in those couple of weeks, it had become very evident that nobody in the company cared to stop him from having sex with all of his clients

and nobody outside of the company could care in a way that mattered. Rose was stuck. She thought hard. She started flipping through old paperwork and documents, like the evidence she had compiled to prove that the investor was harassing Batham. And that's when Rose stumbled on a screenshot. from the investors' Facebook. He had posted a phone number for an anthem investigator, a woman named Debbie Herzog. Where were you when Rose called?

At my desk in Thousand Oaks, California. And Rose talks fast. So she was kind of throwing out a lot of stuff. And she was an insider. And as a prosecutor, you know you always need an insider to have a successful prosecution. You need a talker. You're always looking for a talker.

And so I was really anxious to get in touch with her. And we agreed to meet for coffee. And I did kind of a 10-minute Google search to try to figure out who she was because I was also concerned that Batham had planted her to try to find out what we knew. And I couldn't tell if she was legit,

or not just by, you know, seeing what her background was. So I met with her. Where'd you meet? At a Starbucks. And we sat there for hours. Rose begins with the story she heard from her colleague that there might be insurance fraud. She starts handing over documents, screenshots, emails that she collected. I had all my papers and I'm like trying to, I have no idea about insurance fraud, but I'm like, look at my little case that I put together and I'm trying. And then, That moment, though, of watching her kind of sift through the limited amount of paperwork that I had was that fear and anticipation and anxiety of what is she going to say when she looks up.

I mean, I was just scribbling, taking down notes and listening to her at the same time. And she looked up and she was like, I think we got. I think this is something. I think this is something, Rose. And then she told me about the girls and the information she had about sexual assaults or possible sexual assaults. What was it like to hear that? Pretty horrifying. You're talking about one of the most vulnerable populations, you know, addicted young women.

And so it's easier to take advantage of them because the predator knows. that nobody's going to believe them. It's going to be an addict's word against theirs. So that makes them much more vulnerable and much easier prey. And not that they're not smart women, but if they're in active addiction, their brains are not functioning properly. They're just not.

It felt like I had officially blown that whistle that I had been threatening to blow and that it was now in the right hands and that it would be only a matter of weeks. And ta-da, everybody would be safe and protected and he would be gone. Except. Except that was February 2015. And Batham wasn't convicted until February 2018. In the moment, Rose and Debbie's Starbucks meeting,

felt like such a breakthrough for both of them. And yet, they still had years of work ahead. We've talked a lot about the serious risks of going public with an allegation of bad behavior by a powerful, wealthy person. You now know how rare it is to find someone like Rose who is willing to continue barreling forward, despite so many obstacles. And Rose definitely faced her share of obstacles.

I went from being this, like, in the first of, great position to support my daughter and I and having everything we need to standing in the welfare line. CRLA fired Rose around this time. Rose believes it was retaliation for investigating Batham, in part because Batham faxed a three-page letter of threats to Debbie's office at Anthem entitled, Please Give to Rose Stahl. And yet, despite all of this, Rose kept going. spent months after the Starbucks meeting going back and forth with the health department. She'd write reports, submit documents, find other CRLA people to submit documents. There were like a hundred emails. Just the red tape and the evidence and the was, it just seemed never ending. Everybody

always had somebody above them who needed more. So you get the health department, whoever their supervisor is, needs more, more, more, more, more. And so you get more, more, more, and then her supervisors like, oh, now we need more, more. Debbie, meanwhile, focused on law enforcement. She hoped because of her background, she'd have an in there. She asked Rose to put her in touch with the client who said in that video that she was raped by Batham. She and I met for coffee as well.

And after I finished getting all the information from her, I said, are you willing to go to the police? And she said, yes. And I remember this. We're literally standing on the corner outside the Starbucks. that we met at and I started dialing like standing there and I dialed and dialed and dialed for days and weeks and months and could not get anybody to work with me on the assaults. Why?

First reason, drug addict victim, not reliable. Second reason, many of the victims, after I spoke to other women, many of them were assaulted in different towns. Some were L.A. City. Some were L.A. County. There's different, you know, county is the sheriff's department. City is LAPD. If they're out in the burbs, it's a local police department. And they kept saying, well, we can't do that. You know, we can only investigate what's in our thing. I said, I don't think so. I mean, you know, bank robberies across jurisdictions all the time, and you guys investigate those. Well, then you're going to have to call. the first place that it happened. So then I call the first place that it happened. And nope, nope, nope.

We had a couple of retired law enforcement officers on our investigative staff at Blue Cross. So I went to one of them. I said, I can't be doing this cold calling. Nobody's listening to me. I need a name. Can you give me a name of a sex crimes detective? I can call. So he gave me a name, a woman. I was all excited. Like maybe somebody will listen? No. She gave me the same run around. And I was going bonkers. I mean bonkers, like literally banging my head against the wall. Like how can nobody be paying attention to this? Why doesn't anybody care? And at some point, I, um, come on up. Come here, kitty. Come here. I mentioned at the beginning of this wild journey that Debbie lives with a loud cat. His name is Spice, and he has terrible timing. And he doesn't like

it when I'm distracted by other living things. Spice, we're getting right to the heart of the story. But Debbie, Ever the prosecutor, presses right on. Anyway, yeah, so I have all these spreadsheets and all this stuff showing all the fraud and thinking, okay, you know, if I can get them at least interested in the fraud, get my foot in the door and the fraud, which was really all I could pitch to them, given my job at the time. And I literally walked myself into the DA's office, asked to see the head of the fraud section, and sat down with her and her deputy for hours and laid out this scheme, and they took it. And they eventually got the sex crimes over to the sex crimes unit, and they took that. Finally, finally,

enforcement is listening. The LA District Attorney's Office takes the case. And over the next few years, multiple agencies would get involved. The FBI, the California Department of Insurance, the L.A. County Sheriff's Department, and what they found, it's almost beyond comprehension. The total amount of fraud? $175 million. Batham and his chief operating officer were charged with leading the scheme. It was one of the biggest health care fraud cases in California. And 13 women came forward and said Batham sexually assaulted them. The trial was gut-wrenching, filled with traumatic, agonizing testimony from women in their 20s and 30s who hoped to finally find recovery at CRLA. Batham sexually assaulted one client during a guided group meditation in a sweat lodge. Many

women said Batham gave them drugs, heroin, meth, and cocaine. In 2020, five years after Rose and Debbie first met at Starbucks, Batham was sentenced to 52 years in prison. In the sentencing memo, the LA district attorney wrote, The crimes committed by this defendant impacted so many lives and is a shadow that will likely continue to follow the victims for the rest of their life. I told Debbie and Rose, how much their experience taught me about what it takes to catch someone who sexually exploited their clients. And they both told me, unequivocally, that the insurance fraud was a huge part of it. I do now fundamentally believe that the fraud is what's fueling a lot of this. It's affording it. It's paying for it. It made the sex crimes easier. It made each of them

easier when they were dependent on one another. Like here's a guy who will lie through his teeth to get millions and millions of dollars. So why should we believe that he wasn't sexually assaulting people? You know, you kind of needed the fraud to turn him into the monster that he was and have people actually believe it. It's also, obviously, because of Rose and Debbie. It's because of who they are, and they know this. The litter police, a former prosecutor who, by her own admission, hadn't really understood the toll of addiction until it happened to her own son. I mean, I knew I had some streetcreds because I was a retired federal prosecutor. So when I called the DA's office and say, hey, listen, I'm a retired assistant U.S. attorney working at Blue Cross now I've got this massive fraud

case and I have to talk to her about it. And that got me through the door. And I would not trying toot my own horn here, but that case never would have been prosecuted if I hadn't walked it in. It just wouldn't have been, wouldn't have gone anywhere. certainly would have never known about the sexual assault side. I mean, my case would have been a fraud case. That's it. And I'm not sure that anything else would have come out if it hadn't been for Rose. And the information that Rose was able to provide from inside, yes, and the passion that we shared just drove this thing. I mean, neither of us could have done it alone. In order for someone to be caught for sexually abusing clients of a treatment center,

the thing that client needs most, Debbie says, is someone to stand up for them. People with substance use disorder already face so many obstacles, like shame, stigma, not being believed. And there's only so many times you can get beaten over the head and you just stop complaining. So somebody needs to be their advocate. That's the key. An advocate. Yes. Somebody needs to be their advocate. Debbie and Rose talked almost every day for years. And over the course of that time, they formed a deep friendship.

They even went on vacation together to Hawaii. Rose brought her mom and her daughter. Debbie says it's the first time she's befriended a civilian, so to speak, while she was working a case. We were both so passionate about this thing, and it was so disturbing and stressful. So we had our moments of, you know, where we just had a laugh. And when we laughed, we laughed and laughed and laughed. And just got to be really close.

I keep trying to coax her into moving to Austin. That was the only disappointing thing where I've ever felt like upset with Deb was actually when she moved away from Illinois. I don't think I ever told her that. It's been good for both of us. It really has, you know, the way we bonded and how we came out of it. Like, you know, the job's over, but we're not. Next time, on the 13th step.

We catch up with what Eric Spofford has been up to, and we'll let you know what happened to that lawsuit he filed against us. And I'll take you to a place where women in recovery are heard and feel safe. If you're curious to learn more about the Batham case, the LA Weekly story that started it all was written by Hillel Aaron. There's also a podcast called The Opportunist that did a five-part series on Chris Batham. The 13th Step is reported and produced by me, Lauren Chulgin. Jason Moon mixed and scored these episodes. He also wrote the music you hear in this show.

Alison McAdam is our editor. We also had lots of editing help from senior editor, Katie Culinary, and our news director, Dan Baerick. Donya Suleiman is our fact-checker. Sarah Plourd created our artwork and our website, 13th Steppodcast.org. That's the number 13. Our lawyer is Sigmund Schuetz. NHPR's director of podcast is Rebecca Levoy. And special thanks to Casey McDermott, Taylor Quimby, Ariana Like, Max Green, Andy Lelling, and Greg Dorchack. The 13th Step is a production of the document team at New Hampshire Public Radio. Hello, this is Jack Wilson, the host of the History of Literature podcast. For the past 10 years,

I've been talking to novelists, biographers, and scholars about the greatest books in the history of the world and the men and women who wrote them, like our recent episodes on Dante in Love, a starter pack of 10 Indian classics, the pop culture that influenced Sylvia Plath and a talk with scientist and novelist Alan Lightman about the wonders of nature. Join us at the History of Literature Podcast, wherever you get your podcasts.