The Skinny Confidential Him & Her Podcast - Believable: The Coco Berthmann Story

Episode Date: July 13, 2023

589: On this short episode Lauryn and Michael sit down to discuss a recent show Dear Media has produced featuring Coco Berthmann. In 2021 Lauryn and Michael interviewed a woman named Coco Berthmann who claimed to be a victim of sex trafficing and child abuse. Many listeners may remember this interview as it was one of the most intense interviews they had ever done with one of the most incredible stories they had ever heard. As the years went on it would be revealed that the story they heard may not have all been true. Introducing Believable: The Coco Berthmann Story. A podcast by Dear Media. Be sure tune in everywhere you get your podcasts.  To listen to Believable: The Coco Berthmann Story Click HERE    

Hello, everybody. A little bit of a different announcement on the show today. This will be quick, but it is also a big announcement. For longtime listeners, many of you may remember an episode that Lauren and I did with a woman named Coco Berthman. We did this episode back in January of 2021. It's episode number 325. So it's obviously been a little while. For new listeners, you may have never heard it. For old listeners, you may remember it. If you haven't heard it, I definitely suggest you go back and listen to it to get the full context about what we're going to announce. The description of the episode was titled Coco Berthman, Survivor and Counter Human Sex Trafficking Specialist, Working to End Human Trafficking

and End Sex Slave Trades. Obviously, a very heavy subject. And we found Coco. Lauren, how did we find Coco? So I was on Instagram scrolling one day and she popped up and I couldn't believe her story. I fell into it on Instagram and I thought to myself, I have to interview this person. I'm constantly looking for people on Instagram that will make compelling guests. And after hearing her story through captions and videos, I thought we have to bring light to this on the podcast. So I reached out over DM to interview her about her story of being human trafficked. She responded and we got her on the podcast, booked and interviewed her. Yeah. And here's the thing.

It was an extremely heavy interview. And this wasn't just... We didn't just find a random person on Instagram. I mean, she was a very vetted person. She was a TEDx speaker. She'd been on other platforms. She's been on mainstream medium. She was also vetted by our team. This is a person that had a lot of credibility to talk about human sex trafficking. Or so it seemed. And when we did the episode, as many of you that heard it remember, it was really one of the harder episodes we've ever done. It was very emotional. We just had our first daughter the year before. You have this young girl

coming on the show. She looks so young, so innocent. And she's telling us the story of all these atrocities that supposedly happened to her. We got through the episode. And as months went by, it got a little bit weird. I started personally getting some DMs, which you'll hear about later, asking about sponsorship, kind of asking strange questions. The type of question that comes in online where I guess my radar was up that was kind of saying, hey, this is not normal. Essentially, after all of that, we ended up ending all contact. Lauren and I stopped talking to her. And that's when the wheels started to fall off Coco's story.

Without giving too much away, I want you guys to hear a trailer that I'm about to share with you that we at Dear Media just produced for a show that's called Believable, the Coco Berthman story. After hearing the trailer, you might understand why we felt so compelled as a media business to produce this show. So with that, cue the trailer. A Dear Media original podcast. Her name is Coco, which I think is just the cutest name, first of all. Is it a nickname? No, it's not. For a while, it seemed like Coco Berthman was everywhere. I'm here with an incredible woman, an incredible survivor and advocate, Coco Berthman. And with every interview, Coco's influence grew.

There was this incredible story about this girl from Germany who had been trafficked in a most horrible way. But she had escaped. And now she was speaking out in hopes of saving other children from having to go through what she went through. Coco presented a unique opportunity to be kind of a face for victimhood. She looked good, she spoke well. She had a following and people loved her. Did you feel that she could potentially do a lot of good? Um, for a brief second. Looking back with the benefit of hindsight, there's a lot in Coco Berthman's story that just seems, well, it seems too terrible to be true. Witnessed a murder, a forced abortion, a baby taken from her at 13. Just horrific, horrific things.

You're taught to just, you know, not question stuff like that. But this got to a point where it was just absurd. She's making a mockery out of some real things. She said, well, my parents were very wealthy. We had a private helicopter. It was like, wow, I've never heard anything that fantastic. Who makes things up like this? But in early 2022, Coco took it a step too far.

She announced to her followers on Instagram that she had been diagnosed with stage four mantle cell lymphoma. What's another thing you're going to get sympathy for? Now you have this terrible cancer. Pretty quickly, people started questioning everything that Coco Berthman had ever said. Is she even from fucking Germany? Is her name even fucking Coco? Like, we don't even know that. But something unexpected happened when we started investigating Coco.

Sure, we were definitely able to prove that a lot of the things that Coco says are lies. We kind of knew that we were going to find that. But the thing about Coco's story that surprised us? We found there are parts that might actually be true. How shocked were you today? Oh my god. Didn't I send a text to you that said, oh shit? You did, and I wrote back huge at the exact same moment, in all caps. I'm Sarah Gannon, and this is Believable, the Coco Berthman story, coming July 13th from Dear Media. Find it wherever you get your podcasts. So as you can hear from that, Coco may not have been everything we thought she was when we first

interviewed her. This is a wild story. It gets wilder as it goes along. Get ready, Believable, the Coco Berththman story coming soon to every podcast platform brought to you by Dear Media. And be sure to check out all the episodes as they will live on their own separate channel. It won't be on the Skinny Confidential channel. This will be its own believable channel on every major podcast platform. Hope you guys enjoy. Hope you guys come to your own conclusions. And I hope you understand why Lauren and I felt it was important to produce this show alongside Dear Media.