EP. 228 — Rescue Mission To America

[00:00:06] CHRIS: Hello to everybody looking at your platypus in your creek. It’s Beautiful Anonymous. It’s one hour. One phone call. No names. No holds barred.

[00:00:15] THEME MUSIC: I’d rather go one-on-one. I think it’ll be more fun and I’ll get to know you and you’ll get to know me.

[00:00:28] CHRIS: Hi everybody, Chris Gethard here. Welcome to another episode of Beautiful Anonymous, a show where we let people tell their own stories in their own words. And one guy sits and listens, and then all the listeners listen too because by definition, that’s what listeners do. And our listeners are particularly empathetic and kind. If you want to hear your stories, hello. A couple of quick things to mention before we get into the episode today. One, Philadelphia, I’m coming to do some shows, September 3rd, 4th and 5th at the Punch Line. There’s venues that are figuring out how to do some outdoor shows, socially distanced. I read into the safety requirements before I agree to do any of these. I did some shows in Brooklyn a couple weeks ago. Very meaningful shows, provided catharsis for me and the audience. And the Punch Line, it’s only selling 50 tickets per show. I’ll be down there all weekend, we’re gonna have a bunch of laughs. We’re going to keep it safe. Going to be a good time. Maybe I’ll see you there, if you’re in the Philly area. I also wanted to quickly plug a thing a friend of mine is doing. If you like my work and specifically if you enjoyed my public access show, I got a friend named Jake Fogelnest and he was the originator of this. He used to do a show out of his bedroom when he was a teenage boy. And for the first time in 20 years, he’s releasing a bunch of the old episodes, Squirt TV, and he’s doing it through Patreon. It’s good. I mean, he’s like a child interviewing the Beastie Boys. It’s awesome. And you’re going to want to check it out at patreon.com/jakefogelnest. Plug for my buddy. Glad everybody liked the episode last week with The Gong Show. Here’s how I know it was a funny one. My girlfriend from high school contacted me and said she was laughing while driving, and particularly because she kept a book of aliases of all the guys she dated. And I wrote back and said, I am terrified to know what my alias was and luckily I did not have an alias. So that’s good. Hello, Teresa. I always love catching up. Okay, this week’s episode is one of the most intense ones we’ve heard in a long time. This is the story of a mother and a grandmother who had to do everything to look out for her family and I mean everything. Her daughter wound up in a really messed up, abusive situation. So brace yourself for that. And this is what happens when a family has to unravel a relationship that goes wildly in that messed up direction. Caller had to uproot their whole life, had to spend a ton, a ton of money, had to go to the absolute ends of reason to look out for her kid and her grandkid. It’s a really eye-opening, somewhat scary one. That being said, it is a story of hope and a story of family. And I, I hope you get something out of this one.

[00:03:22] PHONE ROBOT: Thank you for calling Beautiful Anonymous a beeping noise will indicate when you are on the show with the host. [Beep]

[00:03:30] CHRIS: Hello?

[00:03:32] CALLER: Hello, Chris.

[00:03:34] CHRIS: How are you?

[00:03:37] CALLER: I’ve got to tell you, your voice is one of the most, my favorite things in the world. I can’t believe I’m hearing it.

[00:03:46] CHRIS: Well, that’s awful nice of you.

[00:03:49] CALLER: It’s a true story.

[00:03:50] CHRIS: My voice is one of my least favorite things in the world. So I’m happy to hear it makes you happy.

[00:03:54] CALLER: No way. It’s a kind voice and that’s important. It’s a beautiful voice.

[00:04:00] CHRIS: Thank you so much. I like your voice as well, immediately.

[00:04:04] CALLER: Well, I hope you can understand it.

[00:04:06] CHRIS: Absolutely.

[00:04:07] CALLER: I have had situations where Americans just give me really blank looks as I speak and it’s obvious they can’t understand a word I’m saying.

[00:04:19] CHRIS: I’m shocked by that. Are you, so let’s, are we talking Australia, New Zealand?

[00:04:24] CALLER: Australia. Down under.

[00:04:27] CHRIS: I thought so, just wanted to make sure. I have found that Americans, at least me, have very little trouble with the Australian accent.

[00:04:40] CALLER: Well, I was living on the other side of America in San Francisco so, they’re strange over there, right?

[00:04:50] CHRIS: Now, the Scottish accent and the Northern Irish accent, God bless you, those are tough, those are tough.

[00:04:56] CALLER: I hear you. They are, aren’t they? And especially if they speak really quickly, yeah.

[00:05:02] CHRIS: Yeah. And I’ll tell you, I feel like you don’t meet many South Africans on the east coast of America. But every time I do, I’m like, where, I just instinctively am like, where is this from?

[00:05:16] CALLER: I know, I’m the same, and I’m usually, well, once upon a time I was really good at accents. I could do accents, but I’ve never been able to do South African. It’s like it’s just strange to my ear.

[00:05:30] CHRIS: Mm hmm. How’s your American go? Can you bust out the American?

[00:05:34] CALLER: Oh, my God. It’s so bad. That’s another one I’m really bad at. One of the things I used to do, I would order a sub at Subway and in Australian, in my normal voice, I would ask for a tuna sub and they’d just look at me. And then I realized I’d have to say a “toona sub, six inch”. But it comes out like some sort of twisted mix between Texas and something else. It doesn’t sound good. But I did learn Australians don’t, we’re really lazy the way we speak and we don’t pronounce our Rs. So like, for example, if I go in and one day I wanted a lighter, to light a candle, right? Do you know what I mean?

[00:06:22] CHRIS: OK. I will say initially I did not.

[00:06:26] CALLER: Yeah, yeah. It’s the same way when we talk about down by the water will say we’re going to the harbor, not the harb-err. So I learned when I was getting that blank look that I had to really over pronounce my Rs. So I said, they said, we don’t know what you’re talking about. I said, a lighter, I want to light a candle. And they’re going, oh, a light-err. Well, yeah. So, yeah, I learnt that way. Strange.

[00:06:53] CHRIS: Now I do want to apologize to you and any listeners noticing this. I have not had power in my house since Tuesday. So I’m running, I’m running a gas [Australian accent] generator outside and if you hear a rumble, it’ll fade into the background. But if you hear that, that’s what that is. Do you like how I tied that in?

[00:07:12] CALLER: You mean a generator?

[00:07:14] CHRIS: A generator. I tied it right into our convo.

[00:07:17] CALLER: You sure did. Yep. Yep. Well done you. Oh no, that’s a bit harsh. No power.

[00:07:22] CHRIS: Mm hmm. We got hit by tropical storm.

[00:07:28] CALLER: Oh, wow. OK. And that’s Jersey you’re in isn’t it?

[00:07:31] CHRIS: Yeah, but I moved out pretty far. It’s pretty, it’s like right on the edge of suburban and country.

[00:07:40] CALLER: Nice.

[00:07:41] CHRIS: Yeah, but when things, when the infrastructure falters, it takes, it’s not like New York City where they’re like, OK, and everything’s back up and running 17 minutes later. It’s been down since Tuesday and it’s not going to be back up until next Tuesday. One week, one week of it. I had to figure out how to change the oil on a generator today. Who is this? Everybody who’s been listening for a while knows that’s not me. What? That’s not me.

[00:08:14] CALLER: Oh, that’s very country. That’s impressive. You’ve got skills now man.

[00:08:20] CHRIS: We’ll see. They’re going to take time to develop. But I’m diving, I’m diving in head first.

[00:08:27] CALLER: That’s awesome. I love it.

[00:08:28] CHRIS: Now, I’m sure you didn’t call today to chit chat about accents and gas generators.

[00:08:35] CALLER: No, but I do love how organic your conversations are. I think I’ve listened to every one of them. No, I was going to, what struck me was this particular experience I had and it involved America. And yeah, I thought I’d share that with you, so, you know, when you have major events in your life and things get categorized into before and after, it’s one of those kind of huge things that happened. So where to start, I’ll start at the beginning. So, I’ll start when, the night that it became the before. So I, I went to choir, I live in a little town. It’s a very small place, little community, and we have this awesome choir. And when I got there, everyone was really excited because I just returned from America and where my granddaughter had been born and I was showing photos and I got a text from my daughter and I just couldn’t make sense of it. I stared at it for ages going, what? And she’d written very cryptically, he’s taken her, I couldn’t stop him, I’ve called the police. So what, who, what, what? So, of course, I rang her straight away and she didn’t answer. The only person I could think of she was talking about was her daughter who was three weeks old. And her husband. Yeah, so my daughter was sending the message and her daughter was three weeks old.

[00:10:21] CHRIS: Oh my goodness.

[00:10:22] CALLER: And I was like, so anyway, I jumped in the car and I came home and I kept ringing her and I kept ringing her and it kept going to voicemail, sending messages saying, what’s going on? You’re terrifying me, what’s happening? And after about four hours, she sent me a message saying, I can’t talk, the police are here, he hurt me bad. And I asked, so where’s my granddaughter? We can’t find him, we can’t find them. And it was a very long night. Oh my god, it was one of the longest nights of my life.

[00:10:58] CHRIS: That’s a nightmare as a mom, that’s a nightmare as a grandmother. That’s an absolute nightmare.

[00:11:04] CALLER: You got that right. And then when the details started to come through, she was in an ambulance on the way to hospital. He’d knocked her out and he was drunk. And he’d taken off with her in the car, drunk. And he didn’t take, she was purely breastfed, didn’t take any diapers, and they couldn’t find him. So I kept saying it’s okay, the police can find him by his mobile phone. She said, no, they can’t. They can’t. They’re triangulating it, but they can’t find the exact location. So, anyway, it was I think seven hours. And he rang her and said, I’m coming to get you. By that stage she’d been released from hospital and she was with the only person she really had a relationship with in America, and that was his ex-girlfriend. So, the police were waiting for him and they arrested him and then the details came out. He’d choked her, threw her down the stairs where she was knocked out, my daughter that is, and my granddaughter was OK. But she was her nappy was, her diaper was really soiled. And she was exhausted from, she was well overdue, probably ten hours had gone by since her last feed, because she was due for a feed when he took her. So yeah, she was, she was OK, but obviously hadn’t been cared for in that time that he’d been away. So the nightmare, yeah, sort of continued. We just had this crazy idea, all right, well, if he’s done something like that, just come home, just come home. But of course, she didn’t have a passport for her daughter. And you need two people to sign for a child’s passport. And he wasn’t going to do that. So, sort of fast forwarding a bit, to complicate matters, not complicate matters but just the way things were at the time, my husband and I, who had been together more than thirty years, had recently separated, but we were living on the same property, in different houses. Anyway, he decided he’d go over and get them, get my daughter and granddaughter and bring them home while I looked after the farm. So off he went and it became apparent fairly quickly that wasn’t going to happen. So I went over and we got an apartment and we got a lawyer. And we got some mace. And the saga began and we learned a whole lot about the American legal system and the family law side of things, and there was the criminal side of things. And we also found out that he had a long history of violence. There’s a thing you can do over there called TruthFinder, where you can actually look up people’s records and I looked up his and it was aggravated assault with a deadly weapon, theft, DUI. And his previous girlfriend, who became a very close friend, she told us that, yes, that was, the same sort of thing had happened, and then we got in touch with another girlfriend, the girlfriend before her. Same thing. He was a man who likes to choke his victims and I got an education in domestic violence and found out that not many people seem to know this, but men who choke their victims are seven times more likely to kill them. So when you are dealing with someone who was a serious offender… Before I left Australia, one of my really good friends ran a women’s shelter for people fleeing domestic violence. So I rang her and said, you know this is way out of my league. I’ve never dealt with this. Not as an adult anyway. What do I do? Give me your advice. And she immediately sent me a list of, it’s a lethality index. So it’s a whole lot of questions. You tick the box yes, no. And if you have more than I think it was 11 points, then it’s a serious risk. Maximum, I think, was about 16 and he, he ticked 15 of the boxes. So, yeah, things were pretty bleak. We hired a lawyer. We got an apartment in San Francisco and began the long, long, long, arduous task of trying to get home. And he just threw up roadblocks. So he, every time we had court was booked, he would do something to cancel it, either he didn’t show up and we thought, yay, you know, he’ll be jailed and that didn’t happen. He’d sack his attorney the day before trial and we’d be put back another six months. He did that twice. And he completely ignored the restraining orders. He didn’t know where we were, which was really good, at least he didn’t know at first. He would just keep contacting my daughter constantly and mounted this massive smear campaign on Facebook where he told everybody she had postnatal psychosis and that he had been defending himself against her when she went crazy. And now she was claiming he hit her and of course, he would never do that. The really interesting thing was, though, and this is where it felt so insane, the things he was saying, one of the weird things he did, he did this with all his victims. He filmed the incident. He filmed it on his phone, so what he would do, routinely, they all testified eventually in court. First he would beat them up. And he would taunt them by calling them horrible names, like really awful names and telling them they were fat or they were ugly or they were worthless and get them to the point where they were quite hysterical, then he would turn his phone on and film it and he would say, what’s wrong? Hey, honey, I’m just trying to help you. And they would, of course, be like, [crying] fuck, you know, why are you treating me like this. I don’t know what you’re talking about. Look, we can get you help. Look. it’s okay. And he would then say to them, you know, I’ve got evidence that you’re a crazy bitch. However, on this particular night, it really backfired because the video showed he was drunk. It showed her neck was all scratched up and bruised. Well, it wasn’t bruised then, but it was all red. He tore chunks of hair out of her head. I think her eye was a bit swollen, like you could see that she’d been physically attacked. And you could tell by his voice that he was drunk. And you could also see at one point, you didn’t actually see it directly, but you saw a reflection of him grab her and throw her down the stairs, you saw it reflected in the fridge because he wasn’t holding the phone particularly well. You know, he was drunk. So we had that. And the other thing we had, apparently the violence had begun fairly early in the relationship, which is just awful to hear, you know. And he would say to her the next morning, I don’t remember, it was a blackout, I was just too drunk. I’m really sorry, but I don’t remember. So she believed him and she started to record the incidents. She knew they were coming because he would start drinking early in the day, he wouldn’t eat and he’d start picking at her, you know, something simple like why do you wear your hair like that or, you know, what the fuck is this dinner, like, that’s shit. I’m not going to eat that shit. But it didn’t matter. She said it didn’t matter, it could be anything. She tried, she was really on eggshells, do anything she could to appease him. But when he was on the way to one of those particular night, she knew it. So she started to record the incidents so that she could say to him, you know how you say you don’t remember? Well, this is the sort of thing you say to me. You know, this is the awful kind of stuff. So she recorded six months worth of him. And I heard a bit of it, Chris, and uh, woah, just, it was just awful. Yeah. And then one day when he was in a really good mood, she said, you know how you can’t remember these nights, these things that happen, yeah, well, I’ve recorded them, I thought you might want to listen to them. You can imagine how that went. So he took her phone, you know. Gave her a talking to and every time after that, in one of these alleged blackouts, he would take her phone from her. But my smart daughter had actually emailed them to herself, some of those sound bites. So she had evidence of the way he spoke to her, the things he did and often the violence, he had at one point, got an axe and threatened her with it and smashed a coffee table up in front of her. But anyway, it was a hell of an education. Certainly from my point of view. Nothing he did was particularly unusual for a predator, for a narcissist, which he clearly was. Everything he did was pretty much by the book. He denied, so the day after the incident, he sent me a long message saying, I’m really sorry, you must think I’m a monster. It’s all my fault. Well, now, actually, it was alcohol. I’ll never drink again. That really quickly morphed from it was my fault, it was the alcohol to yeah, there was something wrong with your daughter. There was something wrong before the baby was born. She wasn’t right in the head. She probably doesn’t even know it. You probably don’t know it, but yeah, she’s making this shit up. I would never hurt her. The good thing was it was all in writing and you could, when you read them chronologically, it was just the most crazy shit because it went from him saying, you know, it was me, to no it was her, to actually I never did anything it was all her. And he did contradict himself quite a bit. He also wrote to a lot of family members in Australia and said, you know, she’s crazy, she’s psychotic. I just want to get her help. I love her to bits, you know, she just needs to stop all this silliness and come back to me and we’ll sort it out. Meanwhile, telling the world that she was mad and that she was trying to take his child from him to the point we were getting, my daughter was getting messages from women she’d never met, calling her a bitch, saying, how could you take your child away from this beautiful man? He just loves you so much. She only responded to one of those women and she said, look, I know he’s told you a whole lot of stuff, but all I’m trying to do is to keep my daughter and myself safe. That’s all that matters. And the woman wrote back, I saw you together, you were like the perfect couple. You’re a lying bitch and I hope you rot.

[00:23:31] CHRIS: And look, we’re going to pause there. Why? Because we, we have to pause somewhere. It’s how the show works. Sometimes we do these and I make like, oh, that was a, let me make a pithy comment about that last thing I said, no, I’m not doing that. You take a break, we’ll be right back.

[00:23:50] [AD BREAK]

[00:23:52] CHRIS: Break over, everybody. Let’s get back to one of the more intense phone calls we’ve had on this show.

[00:24:00] CALLER: And the woman wrote back, I saw you together, you were like the perfect couple. You’re a lying bitch and I hope you rot. Yeah, so yeah, he was very good at manipulating people and just twisting the truth. Yeah, so within a few months, he had organized supervised visitation, so we had to take my granddaughter to meet him at a visitation center and that was a hell of a trauma because over time, as she got older, she didn’t want to be there and she’d scream, and it was my job to pry her fingers off her mother and hand her over to the supervising staff, knowing that she was going to spend an hour with someone who’d risked her life and really didn’t, she’s just an object to him, but of course to the world he was making out he was a model father and, yeah, it was tough, it was really tough. So we had lots of court cases, I became really familiar with the inside of a courtroom. He brought a few frivolous kind of cases to court that we had to spend money to defend. He also threatened his ex-girlfriend and said, you know, you can’t go to court, you just stay out of my business. So she took out a restraining order against him, the next day he took out a restraining order against her. And when that went to court, the judge just said, look, I’m immediately suspicious at this retaliatory restraining order. What did she do to scare you? I was there at that court hearing, it was gold because the judge just saw right through him, threw that out, threw that out of court and kept the ex-girlfriend’s restraining order. Then, of course, we had the situation where he found our address, that was because his attorney gave him a piece of paper with our address on it, so the DA called us and whipped us into witness protection. That was two years after, almost two years.

[00:26:35] CHRIS: Two years you were in America dealing with this?

[00:26:39] CALLER: Two years, yep. Two years of hell, two years of constant harassment from him, it never let up and we got to know the police force, they were fucking fantastic, I’ve got to tell you, my god.

[00:26:54] CHRIS: Good.

[00:26:57] CALLER: And I wrote them a big letter when we left and said, my, you guys, the first time we reported a restraining order [bleep] turned up. That was the cop and he was just fantastic. We were really nervous because the restraining order was for like, there was supposed to be no contact except to talk about the granddaughter in a peaceful way. But he couldn’t stick to that, of course. And he had gone off and said to my daughter, you know, you’re not thinking straight. I want you to come back. I love you all this stuff. But it wasn’t threatening violence. So when we reported it, we weren’t sure how the police would take it. Yes, it was technically breaching the restraining order. But were they going to take it seriously or not? They sure did. He just said, look, no, this is black and white. This guy is not supposed to do this. He’s written you a four letter, a four page bloody letter that’s got nothing to do with your daughter. So, absolutely, we will tell him he’s breaching restraining order. So we got to know [bleep] quite well because it was nearly a weekly thing calling him to say, yep, he’s done it again. He’s done it again. But he didn’t face any consequences. When we went to the visitation, he would, he used to call my daughter a penguin when she was pregnant. It was his pet name for her. So he started putting penguins, stuffed penguins on his car and at the door of the visitation center, you know, to send a message to her. But that wasn’t considered a violation. Even though it was a direct message to her. Yeah, so he just got away with it again and again. There didn’t seem to be much that we could do about it. We did find out – that was so, I got so angry at this. So there were two, so there’s two legal systems we’re dealing with. We’re dealing with the family court and the criminal court, and they don’t talk to each other. They’re completely unrelated. And the family court were the ones that would decide whether we could bring them home to Australia, but they refused to see the matter, have it in court until the criminal matter was over. So he just kept on delaying the criminal. But there are also two restraining orders, one in the family court and one in the criminal. But my daughter never got a copy of the criminal one, so we were acting on the family one. And I think it was about the fourth or fifth violation and it was a different cop and he was quite a stern, unsmiling fellow. And he said, where’s the criminal orders is [bleep] on it? No. And he said, well, you should, and she said but I don’t know really what you’re talking about. Anyway, he radioed back, he got the information and he said, you should not be having any contact with this man. None, zero, zilch. You shouldn’t be taking your daughter to visitation because the criminal order says no contact at all and it supersedes the family order. And we were like, um, why has nobody told us this and we found out why. So the criminal order had been mailed to her old address and guess who was living at her old address? He was.

[00:30:25] CHRIS: Come on.

[00:30:27] CALLER: Yeah. And he never forwarded it. And our lawyer never said anything, two lawyers we had. The DA on the criminal side and our own private lawyer on the family. So that was a brief and wonderful respite from visitation and contact. Well, he didn’t, sorry he didn’t stop contacting, but at least, you know, we didn’t have to go to visitation for a little while. And we just kept reporting, you know, he would send fifty messages in a row, boom, boom, boom to my daughter. But it was only counted as one violation. So she called the cops, the cop would come, she’d say, you know, he started sending me messages about an hour ago – bing that message number thirty two, bing thirty three, bing thirty four. And by the time the cop left, you know, it’d be fifty two messages. So, yeah, we had, I actually, I’ve written a book on it, on our experience and my editors told me I need to delete most of his messages because they’re boring and crazy. He said no one would want to read that shit. I said it’s really hard to. I want people to know what we went through. She said no, it doesn’t make good reading, darling. And it was sixty thousand words I had to cut. That’s what he sent over that period.

[00:31:55] CHRIS: Sixty thousand? That’s almost an entire book in its own right.

[00:31:58] CALLER: It is indeed. Yep. Yep. And it was very repetitious. It was very delusional, really. And he kept on saying, you know, I’ve done nothing wrong here. It’s like, well mate, we’ve got the video of you throwing her down the stairs. We’ve got pictures. Her neck went black and blue over the next week. And you’re telling me self defense, I don’t know of anybody who strangles someone in self-defense, it doesn’t work that way. You know, he is over six foot. My daughter’s nowhere near that. There was a big age difference too, he was more than ten years older and he picked her, they met on the internet, he picked her really well, because how easy is it to isolate someone when they’re in a country where they have no friends and no family?

[00:32:47] CHRIS: How long had your daughter been in America before they got together?

[00:32:53] CALLER: Not very long. Yeah, she wasn’t, they met over the internet. He came to America, sorry to Australia and met us in a kind of a whirlwind week. We saw him for a few days. Then he went back to America and she went over there for a few months and then announced they were getting married. And we were like, whoa, whoa, whoa. You’ve only known this guy for like less than a year. Why the rush? Oh, you know, we’re in love. Red flag, in retrospect, there was a lot of red flags. And I was so determined, Chris, to like this guy, I was so determined that okay, this is the man my daughter has married, then he’s family and I’m just going to make sure he knows I love him and I accept him and that’s that. And consequently, any kind of niggly doubts I had, any uneasy feelings, I’d just tamp those right down because, I was going to be a good mother in law, I was going to yeah, so there were a few little strange things. Like I said he was this famous, famous in the dog world, and he was going around doing seminars all around the world. But when we got over there to where they were living, he was living in a really poor part of San Francisco, one of the most violent areas, in a one bedroom. Very… not a very nice area. There were gunshots at night and stuff, and I stayed there when the baby was born, they had these gates that they kept locked, it didn’t add up. He had a really old beaten up car, and yet he was supposed to be this super successful guy. Yeah, anyway. That’s kind of the story. In the end, we did live happily ever after, there was a criminal trial, so once he had been given this piece of paper with our address on it, the DA applied for him to be taken into custody and brought forward the fact that you know, by that stage, I think there had been so many violations, it was ridiculous. And the judge basically said, look, it’s clear that you don’t take any notice of the law. So we’ll remand you in custody until the trial, which then gave him incentive to actually allow it to go ahead because he was in jail. So the criminal trial took two weeks and my daughter was on the stand for days. He never took the stand, which to me, I know it’s your fifth amendment rights and everything, but you know, he’s the criminal here. I had to take the stand because we had to bring forth all of the, because he never stopped contacting me, he never stopped sending me a long, long, long, repetitious emails, all saying the same thing. I love your daughter. She’s not right in the head. We can sort this out. Just stop doing all of this and we can be a family again, and various. It was a pattern we noticed, so he would send that first and then there’d be no response and then it’d get nasty. He’d say things like, you know, what sort of person would do this and deprive a good man of seeing his daughter, you know, how dare you and say, you know, I’ve only seen her nineteen hours in the last number of months. And, you know, what sort of awful person does that? Yeah. All these I could quote you because reading the book, too, I had to go back over it all, it’s just like bleugh, writing the book, so. Court was, it is like in the movies, you know, the judge is sitting up there much higher than everyone else, you sit there in the stands looking across all of these jurors going, what’s going through your head, you know? And I was worried they wouldn’t understand what I was saying. So I was trying really hard to speak slowly so that, because when I’m nervous, I do speak quite fast. And anyway, the day came when the jury was to give their verdict and my daughter said, Mum, I can’t be there. So she stayed at home with her daughter and one of the wonderful things about the American legal system is we were allocated a court advocate. She was an angel. She literally held my hand. She was able to tell every step of the way what was happening, she was just this incredible support. I’ll be forever grateful for that woman and for the DA, who was just amazing. But the day came and we were called in, sitting down and all of a sudden the back doors open and I looked to see if it was the jury and it was four guards. And they came down the middle aisle towards where our lawyer was and she looked up and said, hey [bleep] what’s going on? And I could only see the side of his face and he said, what do you mean? She said, what’s going on? And she pointed to all the guards and he said, oh, it’s business as usual and winked at her. And she got this big smile on her face. And so I said to [bleep], I’m sorry, the court advocate, what’s, what’s going on? She said, oh, there’s a lot more, there’s a lot more guards than normal. And I said, oh my god, oh my god, so that must mean he’s guilty, right? She said it doesn’t mean anything. She said there was an incident recently where someone was found guilty and he jumped the bench and tried to punch the judge. And I said, so that’s, surely that’s the only reason, and she said we don’t know. Don’t get too excited, just hang in there. But I was excited, I couldn’t help it. I was like, oh, this must, no, no, you know this self talk you give yourself. Don’t get excited, no, it could just be anything, all that kind of stuff. And the other thing though they don’t tell you, in the movies, when the court clerk reads out, you know, in the charge of aggravated assault, blah, blah, and penal code four, five, six, whatever, it’s that quick. And then they give you the jury, the verdict. God, it’s so not like that. There’s pages of shit they read out and I’m like, I haven’t been breathing properly, I’m sitting there in the chair going, just get to the point, is he guilty or not guilty? Please just get to the point. And eventually she did. And there were two counts. One was child endangerment and one was the domestic violence assault charge. First one guilty, second one guilty.

[00:40:11] CHRIS: Nice. Let me go ahead and say – nice.

[00:40:17] CALLER: Nice. The funny thing was I’d been pretty, pretty strong up until that point. I lost it in the courtroom. My legs went to jelly. I started sobbing. I was hysterical. And it was so, I was so not ready for that response and poor [bleep] trying to go shh, we’re still in court, come on, hold it together. I couldn’t. So she had to more or less pick me up and take me out of the court. It was just such a relief. And as all of the jurors filed out, I just said, thank you. Thank you. And the other thing I said to them, you only got such a small amount of evidence because, and this is going to shock you, I would imagine, because it sure as hell shocked me. When they decide what evidence can be given in court, there was so much. They said, no, we can’t have that, we can’t have that, we can’t have that. And you know why? Because it was too inflammatory. So if he said something like, I’m going to smash your head open like a pumpkin and it was a recording, the judge said, no, we can’t let the jury hear that. So a lot of the very bad things that he said and did to her was never, never came out in court because the idea being if the jury hears that, they will assume he’s guilty. Well, no shit, that’s because he is.

[00:41:48] CHRIS: Yeah that’s evidence. That’s what evidence is meant to do. Proves guilt or innocence.

[00:41:55] CALLER: Yeah, a lot of the evidence, the really heavy, awful stuff was denied. We couldn’t, our attorney wasn’t allowed to present it because it would influence the jury and make them think that he had done this. And yes, they would, because he had, but that was really, that really did not sit well with me. I thought that surely, that also means they are not given all the information. They weren’t allowed to be told that he had previous DUI convictions. Because that would be another reason for them to think that, the other thing, he wasn’t given a sobriety test by the cops when he came back on the night, when he came back with our granddaughter because he didn’t appear drunk. Well, of course he didn’t, he’d been out for seven hours. And the reason he’d been out for that long was because he was pissed and he didn’t want them to see it. But his lawyer used that, kept saying he wasn’t drunk, who says he was drunk? Well, he did in the message to me. He went and got a tattoo of the date of his sobriety. And she’s trying to say, it was also midnight when the incident happened, that he went and took a sleeping baby out of her bed. And they were trying to say that he wasn’t drunk and on the stand when they were cross-examining me, his lawyer was saying, you have no evidence that he was drunk, basically.

[00:43:32] CHRIS: Let’s pause there. This is driving me nuts, but the evidence stands, let’s do… oh god I’m ripping my hair out. I’m going to take a break. You should take a break, too. We’ll be right back.

[00:43:43] [AD BREAK]

[00:43:51] CHRIS: Break’s over everybody. Let’s finish off the phone call.

[00:43:58] CALLER: His lawyer was saying, you have no evidence that he was drunk, basically. There’s nowhere in there that he says he was drunk. And anyway, I ended up saying it was 11:30 or 12 at night and he’s a self-confessed alcoholic, who isn’t drunk at that time at night when they’ve been drinking? And they had it struck, strike that from the, from the records, you know, jury’s not supposed to take any account of that. And I was like, what about his tattoos? What about his, his messages to me where he says it’s the alcohol? Well, he says it was the alcohol, but he didn’t say he was drunk, you know, that kind of thing. Typical lawyer shit. Anyway, then we came down to sentencing. And he was given three years. With the non-parole period of fourteen months and he was out in eleven months.

[00:44:59] CHRIS: That’s it, that’s all you get for effectively kidnapping a child? Eleven months?

[00:45:05] CALLER: That and like his two ex-girlfriends took the stand and told all about the number of times he choked them, assaulted them. Abused them physically, sexually, financially, socially. He’s a predator, and he had been doing that, it was a pattern of behavior. But he still didn’t get the maximum time and the reason the judge didn’t give him maximum was because he had two little flying monkeys. I don’t know if you’ve ever heard that term. But yeah, there’s a whole language around narcissism when you start reading about it, because they, like I was saying, they have this typical pattern. So what they do is they recruit people to do their dirty work, to be there. And it’s based on The Wizard of Oz movie. Apparently, the Wicked Witch sent out these flying monkeys.

[00:46:04] CHRIS: Yes. That’s the only context in which I’m familiar with flying monkeys.

[00:46:08] CALLER: Yeah, well, he had a chief flying monkey and she routinely would write to [bleep] saying things like and we’re pretty sure he wrote it, but she would send it by her e-mail saying things like, well, you know, this one really made us both laugh. But what if he finds another woman? How are you going to feel when this other woman’s got this perfect life?

[00:46:31] CHRIS: Concerned for her, that’s the answer. Severely concerned for her.

[00:46:37] CALLER: That’s precisely what we said. Heartbroken for this poor woman and what she’s got to go through. So this woman, to this day, still supports him. Continuously, she would write to me as well and say, look, you know, can’t they, can’t we just put this all aside? He’s a changed man. But, yeah, she didn’t, she was also a witness in the court, so she didn’t get to see a lot of the evidence because when you’re a witness, you can’t see other people’s testimony, you can’t talk to them about it. So she only had what he was telling her. And, of course, that would be a very skewed version of events. But she stood up in court and said he was a wonderful man, that she’d been living with him for the last two years. She’s about my age, by the way, so we don’t think it was a physical relationship, but maybe it was, who knows. And yeah, he was, he was sober, he was kind. She’d never seen any indication of violence or anger issues. Yeah, he was just this model citizen, so thanks to her, he didn’t get the maximum sentence. And yes, she’s still his chief flying monkey to this day, so tomorrow, today actually, I get the joyous duty of Skype visits with him and my granddaughter. Because that’s what the court ordered, once a week.

[00:48:08] CHRIS: So your daughter doesn’t have to, your daughter’s off the hook?

[00:48:12] CALLER: No, she doesn’t. She is, she’s yeah, she still has an active restraining order. And she’s since written a book of her own. And it’s completely, it’s a nonfiction book on a particular aspect of dog training. And she’s a really, really good dog trainer. And she’s got a thriving business. She’s doing very well here. But of course, immediately he started contacting people in Australia, telling them that she was going to be going to court, he was going to take her to court. That was the other thing that he threatened all the way through, that he was going to charge her with domestic violence and he was going to charge her with theft. He impersonated a police officer. At one point, because we were struggling financially, it cost us more than half a million dollars in those two years.

[00:49:04] CHRIS: Oh my goodness.

[00:49:06] CALLER: Yeah, well, that was accommodation, food, legal fees. And I had to fly back to Australia frequently to meet the visa requirements. So yeah, it was full on. And yeah he would often claim that he was going to take her to court and he was going to charge her and he was going to charge me and blah, blah. And he was forever, and he still does it, he actually, my daughter had a seminar booked and he wrote to the person who she was going to be presenting, wrote to the business owner who had hired her and said, you know, you shouldn’t deal with her. She’s a, she’s a liar, she’s a dangerous woman, she’s unstable mentally. And of course, you know, I’d love to say we could charge him with slander or something like that, but it’s almost impossible. He’s still violating the restraining orders now. My daughter’s rung the police, who say, well, contact the court and the court says, no, you have to call the police. So she hasn’t even been able to file all the restraining orders since we’ve gone back, come back to Australia and no chance of bringing any kind of slander or anything like that against him. So just and he’s gotten on Amazon, given her books and one out of five reviews. And his chief flying monkey even used her own name to leave a one out of five review, all the others with fours and fives. But yeah, so we’re still dealing, but good news is because he’s a convicted felon and his sentence was more than 12 months, he can never come here to Australia.

[00:50:43] CHRIS: Nice, once again, nice is my response to that.

[00:50:50] CALLER: Yeah.

[00:50:52] CHRIS: Now we have about 13 minutes left.

[00:50:56] CALLER: Oh, that went quick.

[00:50:58] CHRIS: Yeah, I mean, that was an epic tale. A truly epic tale. I’m so sorry you went through all of that. You and every member of your family. I have some questions, if that’s OK.

[00:51:10] CALLER: Please, yes.

[00:51:12] CHRIS: OK. Because I’ve been taking notes all time.

[00:51:15] CALLER: You were so quiet, I was aware that I was blah blah blah. Thank you for letting me spill those beans.

[00:51:21] CHRIS: Yeah, well I’m not trying to jump in and interrupt that story, you know what I mean? I’m gonna let you get it out there. So a couple of things. First, some logistical questions. I got to get all these questions in in 13 minutes. So when you said that, you know, because I know that from having a son that we both have to be present to get him a passport, I’m very, very shocked that there’s not a failsafe in place for that in situations of domestic abuse. And also, between that and you having to go back and forth for the visas, I’m also wondering, does the Australian embassy get involved at some point because passport stuff, visa stuff, it feels like that’s a place where they could help you too.

[00:52:10] CALLER: The Australian embassy were the opposite of helpful. They were so difficult to deal with. In the end, we got an American passport because they were so, oh my god, I can’t even tell you. And as to there being a failsafe, it’s actually the opposite. If we had managed to get a passport somehow and take my granddaughter and my daughter home, she would have been charged with child abduction under The Hague Convention. So that’s another hour conversation that there are many women in my daughter’s situation, who didn’t have family who could afford to support her, who could, you know, go through the legal system. They become homeless and the child is given to the abuser.

[00:52:55] CHRIS: Woah.

[00:52:57] CALLER: It’s a whole other thing that I could tell you about, it’s horrific. There is, it’s all over the world, if you marry somebody from another country and you go there and he can beat you black and blue, but if you jump on a plane and go home to your home country, you will be charged with child abduction and you will be flown back and face court. And more often than not, it doesn’t, they don’t take into account domestic violence. I know that sounds insane, but that’s reality.

[00:53:28] CHRIS: And do you feel like that’s, I mean, you say it happens all over the world, but do you feel like that’s almost like, it feels a little bit like countries lean towards the home team advantage of they’re going to give more of a chance to their resident than to the foreign resident?

[00:53:46] CALLER: It does depend on, it depends on the country. There’s yeah, there’s been some awful, awful stories of people being forced to go back and being murdered by their perpetrator. And The Hague Convention is really outdated. It doesn’t recognize domestic violence and safety for the child or the other spouse. All it recognizes is equal parental rights regardless.

[00:54:16] CHRIS: That seems like, like not, not in the top list of priorities in situations like this of protecting parental rights first seems like that’s something you sort out once everybody’s safe, especially a three week old baby.

[00:53:31] CALLER: Yeah, you’re singing to the choir here.

[00:54:33] CHRIS: Yeah, of course. Yeah. There’s no world in which I say that and expect you to go, well, actually, I do think differently on that. I actually, actually on that one, I kind of see his point. There’s no world in which I expect you to say that. It’s just these reactions I’m having. I want to ask you sort of from the emotional side. And this is a question that could go in either direction or which you might actually go, it doesn’t really work like that. But does this scare you/hurt you/all those emotions. Does it do those things, do you feel more affected as a mother or as a grandmother, or is it a mix of both? Do you know what I mean?

[00:55:23] CALLER: Oh, yeah, I do know what you mean. That mama bear thing rears up for sure. And it was equal, I think, maybe, maybe even a little bit more for my vulnerable granddaughter, like she was defenseless and, that the injustice of it all was the most, the hardest thing, I think to deal with and the constant exposure to his nastiness and the lack of support. Emotionally, it was extremely draining, the high adrenaline for two years, basically, because every time the phone gave a little buzz, you’d go here goes, and sure enough it would be him. Yeah, it was a roller coaster, and the number of times we’d think we’re finally going to get to court, and he would do something to make sure it didn’t happen. It was exhausting. It was traumatic having to listen to my, not to, but occasionally it was talking to the DA, some recordings of her screaming for mercy, and that’s like a PTSD thing for me, I, I can’t ever really. You’d know as a father, like hearing a child scream and knowing that the man who was supposed to love her was inflicting not just physical, but extreme psychological nastiness on her all the time, and he would make sure that she put Facebook posts up saying what a great guy he was and how happy she was with him, and if he didn’t, if she didn’t do that, she’d cop it so that when it did hit the fan, people were disbelieving, going oh you seemed like a perfect couple. Yeah, funny that. And that was the other reason, like a lot of people are like, why didn’t she leave? Well, she became an illegal immigrant because they were applying for, I don’t know, the spousal, you know, being a wife of an American. And he kept refusing to give her his tax returns so they couldn’t complete the application. So she was technically an illegal immigrant and he would tell her that if she tried to leave, that ICE would get her, the immigration control, and she would be put in like a Guantanamo Bay situation and it would take them ages to process it. So she believed that. And she felt there was no escape.

[00:57:57] CHRIS: So like using actual human trafficking techniques, where you hear about these human traffickers who take someone’s passport from them and say, well, now you’re stuck here and now your passport’s expired and we’re not going to. It’s, I mean, couple of things I want to get on record. First, a statement, and then another question. The statement I want to say is, I have to say, hearing you say that there was one cop, [bleep] I think you said [bleep bleep], hearing that [bleep] did you right, hearing that the court advocates, I have to say, it is both strange and in some ways, a relief to hear about someone who has had positive experiences with the powers that be in the American justice system right now, because it’s not a thing, I think there’s so much venting, so I’m like, oh, thank God for the good ones out there. There’s some good ones out there.

[00:59:03] CALLER: Yeah, all of them are great. One of them was a bit, the one who said, you know, where’s the criminal order, he was a bit abrupt and not very friendly, but he still did his job. The rest of them were just fantastic. They made us feel safe. That was the most important thing, they would often as they left, they said, don’t you hesitate. Don’t you hesitate to contact us, any time. And that meant the world. There was one stage where there was an active shooter in our street.

[00:59:31] CHRIS: How much do you have to put up with it?

[00:59:36] CALLER: I know. It was just as a fucking helicopter outside of our apartment with a bloody, this guy yelling with the big bullhorn going, remain in your apartment, do not leave your building.

[00:59:46] CHRIS: That’s embarrassing as an American, I feel like that’s like the nightmare. Like the stereotype don’t go to America, there’ll be an active shooting on your street and then it happens for you.

[00:59:57] CALLER: Well, the guy had actually killed his partner and then gone and he had a shotgun and he was sitting at a service station on the corner of our block, which, and we were in a really safe part of [bleep] by the way. But this stuff still happens, so, yeah, no we did, we did really have a wonderful experience with the police and with the DA, she was our champion.

[01:00:22] CHRIS: That’s, that is a, I think for many of us Americans listening probably a moment of like, oh, a glimmer, a glimmer of positivity. And here’s another thing, so, one of the moments that I think probably a lot of listeners had a moment like myself and I didn’t want to interrupt, you just sort of offhandedly at one point said, you know, he was really pretty big in the dog world. And I think all of us in unison probably thought, wait, did she say dog world? But I didn’t want to interrupt the story. And then you talked about how your daughter works in that world. So connecting the dots, he’s 10 years older. It’s shocking to me and tell me if this is one of those situations, because I’ve seen it happen in comedy and you hear about it everywhere, these abusers and these master manipulators who figure out a way to be a big fish in a very specific subculture or a very small pond where in one corner of the world they can have high status and the rest of the world doesn’t necessarily care about that world on a large level. But within that world, now this guy is able to manipulate people. Is that part of on the romance that swept your daughter up off like, oh, this guy who’s into what I’m into?

[01:01:37] CALLER: Spot on. Oh, very much. She’s, yes she’s only, I used to say I don’t think my daughter will ever get married. She’d have to meet somebody who is equally obsessed with dogs, because she was from a very early age. She read every book, watched every video, completely obsessed. And it was really, and it still to this day is her main topic of conversation. She has a t-shirt that says introverted but willing to talk about dogs. And that is so true. So yes.

[01:02:06] CHRIS: So, this guy comes along, sweeps her off her feet, says all the right things, gets her in a different country and puts her in a position where she’s defenseless and has no community. And it’s game on for this, I don’t, I don’t know if he would be diagnosed as a psychopath, sociopath, I don’t know. But something.

[01:02:24] CALLER: He is definitely one of those pathologies. I don’t know either, he used to swing between sociopath, narcissist, personality disorder. But regardless, he’s evil.

[01:02:35] CHRIS: Beware the people who become the big shots in a small corner of the world. I saw it, I, I came up in a very small corner of the comedy community where I could have been that guy. And I’d like to think that I didn’t use my status for ill, but I saw it. Oh, you see it. And it’s messed up and you do your best to stop it and call it out.

[01:03:02] CALLER: I’ll just say, people ask the questions, the people saying, you know, how can you deprive this man of time with his daughter? Why weren’t they asking how, like what, the law was depriving him? Why didn’t they just probe a little bit deeper? Don’t, don’t be, if one dude says, hey, I never hurt her, hey I’m a great guy, just question it. Question.

[01:03:28] CHRIS: Of course, of course. And at the very least, at the very least, recognize that someone in there is lying, someone in there is struggling with something, and it’s at the very least no longer healthy. So don’t be the person who goes go back to it, what’s wrong with you? Something’s broken. So even if you’re not sure who to believe, why encourage it to continue, because somebody’s, somebody’s lying. So figure that out first and protect the person who needs protection.

[01:04:03] CALLER: Good point, yeah.

[01:04:05] CHRIS: Now we’ve only got about 20 seconds left, so I do want to say thank you. This was an intense story to share. Not easy to relive. So glad you’re OK and your daughter is OK. And I think obviously, thank God your granddaughter had a support system because maybe, maybe this guy won’t have as much of a chance to mess her up long term, and that’s because you and your family teamed up and that’s, that’s, what a, what a deep sigh of relief it makes me take thinking about that.

[01:04:47] CALLER: Wow, glad to hear it. Thanks, Chris. Thanks for listening.

[01:04:51] CHRIS: Thanks for sharing that one. That’s, that’s one of the most intense ones in years.

[01:04:58] CALLER: It was an intense experience. We’re happy now. We’re living a great life. My granddaughter runs around, feeds the chooks, eats vegetables out of the garden. She’s a happy, healthy, fantastic kid.

[01:05:10] CHRIS: Do you say feeds chucks?

[01:05:13] CALLER: Oh chooks. We call chickens chooks over here.

[01:05:16] CHRIS: Oh chooks. I thought the cop, I thought the cop moved with you and your granddaughter feeds him.

[01:05:23] CALLER: We’ve got seventeen chickens and she feeds them and collects the eggs and yeah, she’s now surrounded with love.

[01:05:30] CHRIS: Okay we’re going long but I do have to say, well no it’s all good, but you know, hearing that you’re running around with animals, that in my mind I think Australia and I think there’s animals everywhere. So you’re validating that one.

[01:05:44] CALLER: We’ve got a platypus in the creek and we’ve got five dogs.

[01:05:48] CHRIS: You’ve got a platypus in your creek?

[01:05:50] CALLER: Oh, yeah. I see it nearly every day.

[01:05:52] CHRIS: Ooh, I just let out a shiver. Those things freak me out.

[01:05:56] CALLER: Oh, they’re beautiful.

[01:05:58] CHRIS: Maybe I’ll see one someday. Change my tune. Thank you. Thank you for talking and I’m glad everybody turned out relatively OK.

[01:06:08] CALLER: Yeah, we’re, we’re thriving. We are. And thanks for listening, it’s been an absolute joy to chat to you. [ring]

[01:06:22] CHRIS: Caller, once again, that’s not an easy story to share, and you broke it down every step of the way. It’s terrifying. And I just want to say you may have helped some people. And if anybody out there is listening and you are a victim or you feel like you’re being put in a situation that you need to escape from, please hear this story. Understand that in this case, the authorities did help and that if you’re being manipulated into thinking that there’s more danger in getting out of there, you just heard a story where that was very untrue. So I really hope that anyone out there who needed to hear this, hears this. Caller, thanks for sharing it. Thanks to Jared O’Connell and Anita Flores in the booth. Thank you to Shellshag for the music. If you liked the show, go to Apple Podcasts, rate, review and most importantly, subscribe. If you’re someone who just checks in with the show and you know, listens based on the, on the title each week, it would help so much if you subscribe right now. It would be a huge favor to me. If you want to hear the back catalog, StitcherPremium.com/stories, for more details.