The Binge Cases: U R NEXT - Baby Broker | 6. Don’t F**k With Parents
Episode Date: March 10, 2025Parents sick and tired of Tara Lee’s lies join a Facebook group to share evidence and bring her down. One family stands by her, even after the Feds raid Tara’s home and more secrets come to light.... Binge all episodes of Baby Broker, ad-free today by subscribing to The Binge. Visit The Binge Crimes on Apple Podcasts and hit ‘subscribe’ or visit GetTheBinge.com to get access. The Binge – feed your true crime obsession. A Sony Music Entertainment & Perfect Cadence production. Find out more about The Binge and other podcasts from Sony Music Entertainment at sonymusic.com/podcasts and follow us @sonypodcasts. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
Transcript
Discussion (0)
Listen to all episodes of Baby Broker ad-free right now by subscribing to The Binge.
Visit The Binge channel on Apple Podcasts and hit subscribe at the top of the page.
Or visit GetTheBinge.com to get access wherever you listen.
The Binge. Feed your true crime obsession.
The Binge.
Last October, I was in the recording studio with Mike and Teresa Mathini,
the couple from Atlanta who adopted Stephanie's son.
We were taking a break.
drinking coffee, when Mike asked me.
Did you ever see the documentary Don't Fuck with Cats?
I have not seen it, no.
Guy starts out hurting animals online and ends up killing a human.
It's like this group of normal people come together online
where they're like putting together pieces of the puzzle,
like the rapper from the cigarette and the picture on the wall and the hotel
to track this guy down and they eventually give like Interpol
what they need to find this guy.
I feel like it's a good analogy for sort of,
of our little Facebook group. The rule of the group was once you're admitted, you know,
you have to sort of write out your family's story with how you connected with Tara. And there
were so many lies. It's like you're almost able to piece things together in your story based on
the information in other people's stories. Yeah. There was like someone that said that, you know,
Tara collected eight, 10, $15,000 or whatever, you know, on October 25th. And we're like,
we were with her in the hospital that whole day. So it's like where she was clickety-clacking on her
cell phone, it's like she was in there
robbing people blind.
While our son was being born.
From Sony Music Entertainment and Perfect
Cadence, this is Baby Broker.
I'm Peter MacDonald.
Episode 6.
Don't fuck with parents.
Want more true crime?
Subscribe to the binge to get all
episodes of my mother's lies
add free today
and get instant access to over
50 other jaw-dropping
true crime stories. Plus,
Subscribers get a binge drop of a brand new series on the first of every month, every month.
Search for TheBinge channel on Apple Podcasts or head to getthebinge.com to subscribe today.
The Binge, feed your true crime obsession.
By September of 2018, the Facebook group Courtney Edmund helped start had evolved into a crowdsourcing juggernaut of Tara Lee's pissed off former clients.
By October, members of the Facebook group were telling their stories to FBI agent Matt Slus.
By November, Sluss's investigation had swelled to include 150 couples, all of whom felt Tara Lee had misled, defrauded, or swindled them.
Courtney's Facebook group was the seed from which the investigation grew.
I want to zoom in on a moment in early October before the FBI got involved, when the seed took root.
Julie Falkenberry, one of the three women who started the Facebook group,
told Courtney that she wanted to cold call Talia Getting and Tanya Carrado.
They were the two lawyers who represented many of the couples in Tara Lee's adoptions.
Here's Courtney.
She did.
She called them, and after a couple hours of Julie talking to them,
Julie called me back, and she's like, I don't know if they're involved.
Like, I don't know what's going on, but it doesn't seem like they are.
I was like, oh, no.
She's like, listen, I have another call with them.
later, I'm going to add you in, but you stay on mute. You listen. So I just listened in to the call.
And they did sound pretty distraught. They did sound like they had no idea what was going on.
They were scared for their business. They were scared for the families.
When I talked with Talia getting, one of the lawyers, I asked her about this call with Julie.
Tully said Julie yelled at them and accused them of fraud. But Talea swore she had no idea who Julie
Falkenberry was. Telia told me it was only when Julie said her adoption with Tera Lee had failed,
that she knew why she'd never heard of her. Tera Lee would send out all-inclusive adoption contracts
with Talia and Tanya's names and fees on them without ever telling them. If an adoption failed,
they often never knew. Tera Lee usually only called them when one succeeded, usually at the 11th hour.
Taliah told me she hated that Tera Lee did this and reprimanded her, but it did no good.
When I shared all this with Rob Kirsch, he was appalled.
He's an attorney who knows how adoptions are supposed to work.
That was the problem with Tara Lee, is that these poor adoptive parents
trusted that she was doing it right and she was experienced,
that I'm sure she talked a good game and made them feel comfortable
that she was the expert at it, and she took advantage in them.
Her scheme worked in part because no one was looking for criminals,
con artists, and fraudsters,
in the adoption industry.
Because not only was preying on people involved in adoptions unconscionable,
it was unimaginable.
Even the feds, at first, needed a minute to wrap their heads around what she'd done.
Adoptions, by the way, are regulated at the state level.
So, while there is oversight and there are rules, they differ.
In Michigan, Tara Lee knew what the rules were,
and she flagrantly violated them.
The state had even told her to stop doing adoption.
But she didn't.
On the phone, Julie Falkenberry told Talia about the baby boy she was adopting through Always Hope.
It was a closed adoption, meaning Julie had no contact with the birth mother.
Tara Lee told her that the birth mother went into labor unexpectedly, and the baby had died,
minutes after birth.
Julie deeply mourned the loss.
She now suspected, though, it was all a lie, that Tara Lee had made up the baby and
the birth mother.
that it was all for money.
While Courtney listened in,
Julie told Talia and Tanya
about their Facebook group
of Tara Lee's former clients
and all their failed adoptions,
a graveyard of failures.
When they hung up,
it was early evening in Detroit.
Talia and Tanya had a million questions.
This was serious.
This was potentially criminal.
It was also, Talia told me, personal.
Talia had been adopted,
and she had an adopted daughter.
She said Julie's accusations,
not only scared her, they upset her.
That night, Talia remembered that Tara Lee had given her access to Always Hope's email account.
She wasn't sure if the login would still work, but it did.
Talia and Tanya began reading over 4,000 emails Terri Lee had sent and received from her clients.
They created a spreadsheet of names, dates, and payments.
Leaning against their office wall was another piece of evidence, in a frame.
Tara Lee's diploma for her master's and social work from Northwestern.
Months earlier, Talia said she'd asked Tara Lee for proof of this degree.
And after weeks of these requests, she said,
Tara Lee presented them with the frame diploma for display.
But the FBI would discover that the diploma and her degree were fake.
Pure fiction.
Talia and Tanya shared what they found with another attorney,
Maria Penchenko, who represented the birthmothers in many of Tara Lee's adoptions.
They took matters into their own hands and together reached out to the FBI's Detroit field office to report Tara Lee.
Days later, they were sitting with Special Agent Matt Sluss and Assistant U.S. Attorney Sarah Woodward.
And that's how the three prongs of the investigation, the Facebook group, the lawyers, and the Department of Justice, came together to stop Tara Lee.
For three weeks in October, agents Matt Sluss and Mark Krieg conducted as many interviews with adoptive parents and birth mothers as possible.
The evidence piled up.
Agent Sluss's butcher paper chart morphed into a huge digital spreadsheet.
Sell by sell, it documented the traumatic stories of more than 150 couples in 24 states,
and dozens of birth mothers from Detroit.
Many of these couples kept good records.
So they could give us contracts.
They could show us exactly how much and when they paid.
By early November, Agent Sluss and the...
the U.S. Attorney's Office had enough evidence for a search warrant. On November 9th, multiple FBI
agents drove to a middle-class neighborhood in New Haven, a semi-rural suburb north of Detroit,
and parked their unmarked cars in front of Tara Lee's two-story house. Someone connected to
the Facebook group, whose name remains private, had been tipped off about the raid. They parked
out front, too, their cell phone camera aimed at the door. Three, two, one.
The agents got out and went in.
She was there.
As the FBI went in, the person secretly recording the raid from her car
began posting snippets of video to the Facebook group.
Word traveled fast.
Many of the couples Terrily had defrauded
signed on to watch the raid in real time.
And she's like, oh, now they're bringing in more people,
or, oh, they're taking out boxes.
And we would be like, hey,
What are they doing now?
Courtney Edmund watched from her kitchen in Colorado Springs.
She'd been through two failed adoptions with Tara Lee
and had slept in the house that was being raided.
Teresa Mathini, who'd driven from Atlanta to Detroit in a panic
to save her adoption, watched too.
Everybody has speculations on what's going to happen,
a lot of emotions.
It was a big moment for all of us.
It was emotional.
It was exciting.
It was, oh my God, we were actually.
right? She's really doing this stuff.
While Courtney watched, she was holding a baby she'd just adopted from another agency.
It was the best.
It was the best.
So we heard about this FBI raid and sent out a daily crew and got the video of the federal
agents going in and out of this home. And that's literally all we knew.
That's Heather Katalo, an investigative reporter.
for WXYZ Channel 7,
a popular TV news station in Detroit.
Heather didn't know who owned the house
and why the FBI was there.
She just knew that whoever lived there
was being investigated for fraud.
And she wanted to find out why.
I think that when you've been bamboozled,
you want to know what happened.
I mean, I've covered horrible crimes.
I've covered public corruption.
I've covered a lot of awful things.
and this is in its own category.
The FBI hold out box after box from Tara Lee's home,
but they were most interested in one small item.
A sophisticated criminal who needs to communicate with their victims or associates
might use a burner phone, text and code, use a pseudonym, and delete everything.
Tara Lee's fraud depended on communication, and she'd saved everything.
Every text change she'd monitored, every sketchy or fictitious update she'd
sent to anxious adoptive parents, every credit card payment she received on an app, was visible
on her iPhone.
When Assistant U.S. attorney Sarah Woodward read through it, she saw the individual strands
in Tara Lee's web of fraud.
She definitely wasn't cautious.
I mean, she was constantly texting.
And so you can see, in chronological order, what the user is doing.
So for a particular couple or a particular victim, I could see the beginning, I could see maybe
the first failed match, the second.
failed match. She also saw how Tara Lee used her personality to bamboozle people.
Her personality was sort of like, I'm a foul-mouthed tattooed woman, but I'm doing adoptions,
and you wouldn't expect that. And I know how to relate to people. And I can kind of give you
the real talk that you're not getting other places. And I think that personality maybe
helped people ignore some red flags that they might have otherwise.
seen. Tara Lee had invented a lot of stories, lies rather, to make her fraud work, because her
con took so long. Here's Matzluss. In most fraud schemes, you've made the lie, you've taken the
money, the communications are often done. In this particular situation, you have a whole pregnancy
now where you have somebody on the hook for fraud early on, that you have to continue to
continued to make misrepresentations
and continued to make
something very sensitive feel very
real for months.
One of the ways Terrali made
fake pregnancies feel real
was by sending out ultrasound images
purported to be of the baby the couple
was adopting.
The ultrasound image she sent to Tammy and Nick
Granath of Sabrina's baby is an example.
It wasn't actually an image
of Sabrina's baby, because
Sabrina didn't exist.
Terri Lee found these images on
line, and she'd repurpose them for different families.
Matt Sluss traced them to a website selling ultrasound images for pranks.
But these images were the middle, not the end of her lie.
At the end of those, you know, six to eight months, now Tara has a problem because there's no baby.
And she has to lie to them again in order to end or fail that adoption match.
Her most common lie was that the birth mother changed her mind and was going to keep the baby.
It's believable because it happens.
If it was a closed adoption, Tara Lee just told the lie, like she lied to the granites about Sabrina.
But if it was an open adoption and the baby wasn't real,
or if she diverted a baby to another family in a double or triple match,
Tara Lee might impersonate the birth mother in fake texts,
saying she was keeping the baby.
Terri Lee would send the devastated couple a screenshot of the fake texts as proof the match failed.
And then she'd commiserate with them.
In other situations, she'd say the birth mother miscarried.
She even paid a woman to pretend to be pregnant.
I think the real reason Tara Lee wanted to limit communication between the birth mothers and adoptive parents
was that when it came time to lie, she had to control the narrative.
All of Terri Lee's lies were agreed.
but some were extreme.
Remember when she told the Grannis
that she couldn't come to Chicago
to have dinner with them
because a birthmother named Roshonda
and her baby had been murdered in Detroit?
Tara Lee matched Roshanda
with a couple in Georgia,
who paid her about $15,000.
She also sent them details about Roshanda
and photos.
And then over the next months,
as Ther typically would do,
she would provide updates about the pregnancy,
making the adoption situation feel as real as she could.
In this particular situation, Tara failed the match by telling the adoptive parents
that Rashonda, the birth mother, had been shot and killed, and the baby died in utero.
And Tara Lee took it a step further.
Tara then even solicited funds from the adoptive parents to help cover a funeral costs.
agents less tracked down the real person in Tara Lee's photo.
Her name wasn't Roshonda.
She wasn't pregnant.
She had never been shot.
Terri Lee just found her photo online and invented the rest.
This opportunity was completely fake.
If a match failed,
Tara Lee often tried to roll the couple into another one.
I think she developed a sense of how much money each client had,
how far she could push them.
She knew where they lived, the kind of house they had,
the way they reacted when she matched them and asked them for $14,000.
She profiled them.
While the FBI was figuring out what Tara Lee did,
who she did it too and how,
the question of why she did it permeated everything.
The answer is complicated and in a way unknowable.
But inside the drawers of Tara Lee's house and on her credit card statements,
the FBI found many ways Tara Lee had benefited.
While some of her birth mothers lived in squalid conditions with their children,
keeping food in the snow, sleeping on the floor,
Tara Lee spent $30,000 to renovate her kitchen.
She leased a boat.
She flew first class.
She bought a Rolex.
She had countless velvet baggies of David Yermann jewelry.
She had sunglasses and reading glasses from Prada, Valentino, and Tiffany's.
She had more jewelry than anyone could find occasions to wear.
Some were unopened.
The tags still on them.
The FBI took photos of all of it.
After the raid, the cat was out of the bag.
But the FBI hadn't made anything public.
So, reporters like Heather Catallo were scrambling to figure out what Tara Lee was being accused of.
Meanwhile, couples in the Facebook group were anxiously waiting for Tara Lee to be charged.
But there was one Detroit couple Tara Lee had worked with, Adam and Kyle Bells Thomas,
who refused to join the Facebook group,
because they were convinced that Tara Lee was completely innocent.
Oh, we were 100% side Tara.
They felt this way even after Courtney and the Facebook group
tried to get them to see the truth.
Even after the FBI raided Tara Lee's house,
even after Heather Catallo's news reports
alleging Tara Lee was a fraudster,
and even after they'd been through three failed adoptions with Tara Lee,
because every night they put their adopted son to bed
was a reminder of what Tara Lee had done for them in the beginning.
Their gratitude for that successful adoption blinded them to her manipulations.
Adam and Kyle lived just 30 minutes away from Terri Lee and had become very close friends.
As other couples bonded over the shared trauma of being defrauded by Terri Lee,
Adam and Kyle bonded with Terrily over her trauma of being investigated.
If a news report came out that Heather Katala was doing,
as soon as it aired,
she would call us and be like,
this is crazy,
this is the person that's going after me,
this is the person that's feeding it,
Courtney's name was brought up,
Julie Falkenberry's name was brought up,
all of these people were the enemy.
It would take a lot of time
for them to see past what they wanted to believe.
It would take reading her indictment to realize
they weren't all that different
from the other couples she'd defrauded.
The couples they thought were the end.
enemy, to realize they'd been duped.
She can tell a wicked story.
The dupe began in 2017.
Adam and Kyle had just gotten married.
Kyle had gone to middle school with Tara Lee and heard she facilitated adoptions.
They hadn't talked in years, but he reached out to her.
Weeks later, Tara Lee matched them with a 22-year-old birth mother who was pregnant with a boy.
She was homeless, staying on people's couches, and living out.
out of her car. They helped her move into a rental house. They got her furniture, and they sent Tara
Lee $14,000. That was a lot of money for them. Kyle works in IT. Adam had a job at a local
bank. They put some of it on their credit cards. And it worked out. Adam and Kyle were in the
delivery room when their son was born, and they had a close relationship with their birth mother.
Absolutely amazing feeling. To have this little tiny human in your arms.
I got to change his first diaper and got peed on.
We got to do the first feedings.
We got to do everything.
We spent the next 48 hours in the hospital, sharing a room with the baby.
Loar him in the back seat.
I sat in the back seat while Kyle drove about 20 miles per hour up the highways out of Detroit to get us back home.
He was a nervous wreck.
I kind of was a nervous wreck.
Introduced him to our dogs and started our family.
It was wonderful, and we're eight months after we got married, and we expected us to take years.
Adam lives in the semi-rural plains north of Detroit.
I met him at a recording studio above a Walgreens near his house.
He drove there in an old pickup truck after dropping his son off at school.
Adam's a visual artist, like his mom.
He's around 40, kind, and outgoing.
He had a coffee from Tim Hortons, the Canadian Starbucks.
Adam explained to me how after their successful adoption,
he and Kyle became close with Tara Lee.
They broke bread with her husband and children.
Her oldest daughter babysat for them.
Her husband fixed their HVAC.
And they talked and texted with her almost every day,
the way you do with your closest friends.
Then, in early 2018,
Tara Lee told Adam and Kyle that their son's birth mother was pregnant again.
and that she wanted us to adopt this baby as well.
And we weren't sure that we financially could do it.
But Tara Lee didn't like that answer.
She flashed aside of herself that they hadn't seen before
and questioned their love for their son.
And what are you going to tell him down the road
when he finds out that you could have adopted his sibling,
but you chose to pay your bills instead and pay off your credit cards?
so we decided to jump on board again.
They looked the other way and put it on credit and got excited again.
And they broke the great news to their family.
It was all going well until the delivery,
when, to their surprise, Tara Lee said the birth mother had changed her mind.
A decision's made and she's no longer yours.
And it hit both Kyle and I extremely hard.
And she right away said, listen, I understand this is really hard.
this isn't over.
I have birth moms and different opportunities coming all the time.
We need to keep going forward with this.
We can get you another baby.
She matched them again.
They put $9,000 more on their credit card to cover the woman's living expenses.
But when they found evidence that the birth mother was using drugs during her pregnancy,
they backed out of the match.
Tara Lee said any money left over would be rolled over to the next match.
they recommitted.
The next match happened fast.
The birth mother had been through an adoption before.
She knew the steps, and she was due soon.
Adam and Kyle felt good about it.
A few weeks later, though,
Terry Lee told them that the woman had stopped returning her calls.
So Kyle, the IT whiz and armchair sleuth,
got on Facebook.
And he found a profile of the family
who'd adopted the woman's previous baby.
And their posts showed them celebrating the adoption
of her next baby.
The birth mom had even liked the posts.
Kyle sent the family a message.
Hey, not sure if you know what's going on,
but we were under the impression that we were adopting this baby.
He got a response from the birth mother's boyfriend.
Back off. This baby's not yours.
I don't know who you are or what you're doing.
When Adam and Kyle told Tara Lee this,
she expressed shock and outrage.
But the match failed.
Adam and Kyle were emotionally and financially exhausted.
Days later, the FBI raided Tara Lee's house.
When Adam and Kyle found out about it, they called her.
And despite all the trauma they'd been through with three failed matches in a row,
they were still on side Tara.
And they listened, as Tara Lee explained to them what, in her mind, was really going on.
It was these crazy women who had failed adoptions who were out to get her.
She said the lawyers, Talia and Tanya, were out to get her too.
And they wanted to steal her business, and everybody was making up all of this stuff about her.
Terrily asked Adam to write her a letter of support.
He did, and he focused entirely on their successful adoption, leaving out the three successive failures.
He wrote, Tara was up front, honest, and trustworthy with every penny that she spent to help our birth mother.
Seven investigator, Heather Catallo, is here now with.
how authorities are closing in on this Macomb County mother.
Heather?
Families across the country are reeling after learning the woman who promised them babies
isn't licensed by the state to do adoption work.
For weeks, WXYZ Channel 7 aired Heather Catallo's investigative reports about Tara Lee,
including this one about a birth mother named Mariah.
Mariah says as soon as she found out she was pregnant,
she turned to her longtime friend Lee because she believed Lee was a social worker.
She had me signing papers at five or six weeks pregnant.
Adoption experts say legitimate agencies never match birth moms with adoptive parents until at least 12 weeks due to miscarriage concerns.
Marias's Lee told her to lie to the adoptive parents about her due date.
Why do you think she wanted you to lie about how far along you were?
Because the moment I matched, she could start charging people for money.
Every time one of Heather Catallo's news reports came out, Adam said,
Tara Lee would call them and rant.
And then, one night in December,
they got home from work
and found a note from Heather Gattalo taped to their door.
It terrified them.
Heather was the enemy,
and they did not want to talk to the enemy.
They circled the wagons.
And then, a few nights before Christmas, 2018,
Tara Lee called them and sounded excited.
My in-laws were over for dinner,
so I answer it,
because again, we're in the middle of all of this.
and it is Tara facetiming us sobbing in her car,
thrilled because she just got a call from her lawyer
and the case was being dropped.
That they had proven that she was not guilty of any of it,
that she was clear.
Was that story a lie?
100%.
After New Year's, Tara Lee called them with the opposite message.
And she tells us that she's got to go to court tomorrow.
And this is absolute bullshit.
And I can't believe this is happening to me.
By the way, I interviewed Adam in two different places on two different mics.
Sorry.
You'll notice it.
The day of the court hearing, Adam texted Tara Lee.
Good luck today.
We were here for you.
Her response was I didn't do anything, Adam.
I am so sorry I let all of you down.
I never meant for any of this.
My response was, you haven't let us down.
You just have to keep dealing with the bullshit in these bitches.
Carmel will turn just a matter of time.
We trust and believe you.
We are in your corner.
Stay strong.
Be the tatted, foul-mouthed woman we love.
Adam sent the text and went to work.
Meanwhile, at the FBI's Detroit field office,
Agent Matt Sluss clicked Save
on the 31-page criminal complaint he'd written.
He'd distilled all the evidence
into one monstrous story of probable cause.
She's taking adoptive parents to the point
that they're remodeling their houses to create nurseries.
People are raising money through church fundraisers.
They're cashing out their retirement funds.
You have birth mothers that are being coerced, pressured into giving up their babies
or dealing with the loss of their children.
You have adoptive parents that do have kids,
and these kids are expecting to be a big brother or a big sister.
And now you have to explain to them, you know, why that's not.
going to happen. You know, terror would bring people to the point of traveling across the country
to Detroit, Michigan, to complete my family, and then that doesn't happen. Here's Sarah Woodward.
They were a sophisticated, well-educated group of people that were adept at navigating the world
and successful in life. And that's what made it so heartbreaking because she knew that they
would do anything for the hope of having a child.
On January 11, 2019, Sarah Woodward and the FBI made their evidence public.
Tara Lee turned herself into the FBI this morning, and this 31-page criminal complaint against
her was just unsealed.
The allegations in here are shocking.
And the FBI took Tara Lee to court the same day.
For a call's case number 19-3015, United States of America versus Sarah Lee.
Ready.
Good afternoon, Your Honor.
Sarah Woodward on behalf of the United States.
Good afternoon.
Will the defendant please state her name to the court?
Tara Lynn Lee.
All right.
Let me make it very clear that you will not be leaving the country.
You will not be going to Ghana, and you will not be using your passport or your visa.
No.
For any purposes.
Miss Lee, you are here this afternoon making your initial appearance on a federal criminal complaint.
You are charged in the federal criminal complaint with wire fraud.
Have you seen a copy of the complaint?
I did, Your Honor.
And have you read it?
I did, Your Honor.
Miles to the north, Adam Bell's Thomas was at his desk at work.
But all he could think about was that the criminal complaint against his friend Tara Lee was about to be publicly released.
When it was, Adam printed it out and asked his boss if he could take a short break.
And I drove to a parking lot near my office.
And I read every word and felt my life fall apart.
Because everything, everything that she had done in this document is all stuff that had happened to us over the last year.
And everything had been alive, all of it.
I called Kyle.
He was at work.
And I said, Kyle, she did this.
She did all of this.
You have to stop talking to her.
And he's like, I've already talked to her.
She's already called me today.
Kyle, every bit of this is what she's done to us.
This is our life for the last year in a document issued by the government.
He had a really hard time believing me.
But we were so manipulated and we were so brainwashed.
And she had us.
I couldn't drive away from that parking lot for two hours.
because I sat there and cried.
Because how does someone do that to someone else?
And not fucking care.
That night, after they put their son to bed,
Tara Lee called.
Reluctantly, Kyle picked up.
Terrily ranted.
They listened.
And then they hung up forever.
And we called the FBI.
The Federal Bureau of Investigation.
We were ready to take her down.
Please hang up and dial 911.
Adam told me that in their conversations with the FBI and the two lawyers to Leah
Getting and Tanya Carrado, they learned their matches didn't fail for the reasons they
originally thought.
The birth mother in their second failed adoption wasn't even pregnant.
Images, doctors, notes, faltersounds, everything was stuff that she was reusing from
the first pregnancy couple years prior.
And in the last failure, the birth mother said she told Terrily that she was not going to give
her baby to Adam and Kyle.
But Tara Lee never gave them the message.
Pretty rough weekend, to say the least.
In federal court, Tara Lee was charged with 18 counts of wire fraud and freed on a $10,000
bond.
She was forbidden from doing any adoption work and from contacting birth mothers and adoptive
parents.
But then, an unforeseen consequence of Tara Lee's alleged crimes surfaced.
Talia Getting, the lawyer, called Tammy and Nick Granith in Chicago.
Tammy was sitting at her kitchen island, holding her infant daughter, May, when she answered.
And she said to me, I have to tell you that you and a few other families may not be able to keep your babies.
Next time, on Baby Broker.
There's no way they're coming and taking my child from me.
Tammy and Nick and other couples fight to keep their babies,
and Tara Lee goes to court.
This is federal court.
We don't play games in this court.
I agree with Ms. Woodward.
This was a flagrant violation, an egregious violation.
One of Tara's favorite sayings was,
I can't make this shit up.
She would say this all the time,
when actually she was making everything up.
Nick was in the back of the courtroom and heard us read our impact statement,
and he was the one that made the connection that, oh my gosh, this is the family that was matched with Stephanie.
Baby Broker is an original production of Sony Music Entertainment and Perfect Cadence.
It was hosted and reported by me, Peter MacDonald.
I'm the executive producer, along with Catherine St. Louis and Jonathan Hirsch of Sony Music Entertainment.
Stephen George recorded the narration at the Invisible Studios West Hollywood.
We used music from audio network and a few tracks from Epidemic Sound.
News clips are courtesy of WXYZ7 in Detroit, Michigan.
Our production managers are Tamika Balance Kallosny and Sammy Allison.
Our lawyers are Allison Sherry and Kathleen Farley.
Special thanks to Steve Ackerman, Emily Rassick, and Jamie Myers.
