S21 E16: (4/4) [Annie + Lauren + Rachael] This Can Happen to Anyone
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Me, you do do.

Here's any not .

only did I not know who this person was, but his friends didn't. Nobody knew what he was doing. So I posted everything on instagram on my stories, and I start getting messages like, I can't believe this.

Oh my god. Here's Rachel IT .

was like a sunday night I remember vividly because I had made up pizza and I was sitting down to watch my show, and then I get a text from my cousin l saying, go on any stories and instagram. And this information about deep fakes on there are not really sure whats going on, but you need to go look at IT. I wasn't following any here, anything.

I had never even looked at her instagram, so went on to instagram and there was a lot of information on there that any had posted and was trying to just piece IT all together. I eventually got on the phone with all, and we were talking about IT for a significant period of time, trying to figure out exactly what was going on with this situation. I personally had never heard of the term deep bag.

I had a google, the term, what Allan I talked about was that basically, and I was saying that josh had taken all these photos of her, myself, a ton of our other friends, and had put our faces into pornographic videos. At first, I was just so overwhelmed in complete shock. I almost went into a fight state.

Essentially the genre is going as this is happening, and he keeps posting more, and we're looking at more and talking about IT. And then I talk to my mom on the phone, and then I talk to l on the phone again. And I was also simultaneously taxi and unversed people, because this was a bomb shower.

My mom was lived, as you can expect a mother to be. My mom decided that he was going to tex. Josh SHE actually texted him and said, if you ever do anything in the slaves with either Rachel or my nieces photos again, mr. And myself, i'll be pursuing legal action against you. So this is actually how josh found out that any posted anything .

did he respond?

No, he never responded.

Here's any he .

calls me and he says, anne, what did you do and I said, I don't know, what are you talking about and he said, why is and I believe that was Rachel calling me and telling me to stay the f away from her ls. And I said, I don't know, josh, why would you do that? And he screams, you ruined me.

You ruined my life. He says, you did this to me. I'm going to kill myself. Just make sure my mother gets my sports cards. He had baseball and football and basketball.

He told everybody that these were worth a lot of money and that that was going to be his downpayment on a house in michigan. I got them a praised in their worth, nothing. He tried to blame somebody else.

He tried to blame IT on a an addiction issue. None of that work. So, okay, well, i'm just going to kill myself. It's the last resort I called nine one one.

Immediately the police are like, oh, if he calls you back, trying get a location so he calls me again, he's streaming at me that all his friends are gonna hate him now and my fault and I suggest, rush, where are you because where am I am at rock bottom and then the hangs up the phone and then I get attacked from her sister. He said, call me when you have a momento I said, I don't really want to talk on the phone. I'm dealing with the police and SHE said, that's fine.

I understand your hurting. I've been there. Please take those posts down. It's no one's business, but your guys is. At the end of the day, your heart may hurt, but this is going to ruin his life and potentially end IT.

And that's not okay, his mother said to me, Joshua is broken right now, not hard broken, but broken like he doesn't feel like he can after everyone knows his deepest secrets that have been made public. I believe when we choose to do these things, there should be an n game in place. What is your end game? Shaming and humiliating him is not going to get him to help he needs.

I know you're not concerned about that. I know you're hurting. That's understandable. But most people wouldn't have known he did this until you made IT public.

So are you wanting to make sure people are aware you're the victim of a bad boyfriend? Or is IT that you really want me to bury my son? Because I fear that if this continues, that is going to be the end game.

I blocked her after that. There was a couple friends that message me that was like, please take this down. You're going to kill him, stuff like that.

There was much more support for me than there was not. So the police are looking for him. Then they end up calling me.

And they said to me, we found his car. We can find him. Then I get nervous like all did he really do something? I don't want that to happen to him.

I'm angry and i'm hurt, but I don't want him dead. They said it's part in a hotel or a motel, but they can't find him as as possible. He's with somebody else and I said, I doubt t IT.

He doesn't have friends here the girl he was talking to, our overseas, they're like, we talked to the motel, they said, is not here but I calling him the wrong name and I kept for correcting them know his name is Joshua I drove over to the motel with my friend and we went to the front desk and I said, is a josh walk car and they said, all we talk to the police and I said, yeah. Can you just look for me and they said, oh yeah, he's here. So I call the police back and I said, he is here so they come and they have a whole swat team because he is threatened suicide.

He is a weapon. There's ambuLances and fire trucks and cop cars everywhere. And they're trying to get him to come out. They're calling us phone.

They have like a megahed thing asking him to come out and his friends are calling him because some of them are messaging me, people that we're defending him. We're talking to me and I got we just want anything to happen to him. We're trying to talk home to him to come out as they will tell him the police are here and he needs to come out.

So he ends up walking out of the motor room with his hands in the air laughing. And he says to the cups, she's just dramatic. The police said to me, everything seems fine, so there's nothing we can do. We have to let him go as so.

Can you just ask him if I can get my knife back in the cuff said, I wouldn't recommend that I go home that night and I message his landlord or x landlord and I said, did you ever have a tenant named Joshua and he said, I did. He left about two years ago. Just stopped paying rant.

Never heard from him again. I left papers outside the door. They just SAT there. We ended up getting into the apartment, and there were hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of bags of garbage everywhere.

And he had been calling and calling, and he couldn't get a hold of him. And I told him the city, he said he was sorry, and he seemed like a Normal guy for what I was worth. And he had no idea his apartment would look like that, or that this would be going on.

So that confirmed department was alive. Immediately after messaging the landlord I E message laun, I gave her a brief front down and said, did he ever do anything like this to you? I'm just trying to make sense of this. And he ended up messaging me back.

Here's laun.

I'm like living with my boyfriend now, Fiona, at the time, and i'm in a very healthy, stable, fun, great relationship. But I know who andy is because, like any Normal human being, I creep all of my x boyfriends on the internet. SHE looked so q and I was just like, yeah, this is great.

I was genuinely so happy for him. I kind of have this attitude about him when we broke up and took a while for me to realize how problematic and harmful my relationship was with josh, how much IT impacted me as a person. And so I like, look at us.

I'm happy. He's happy. We're all happy. Then I get A D M. From Annie on instagram hey, girl, I know you don't know me, but I did a Joshua for a long time and recently found out he was spending thousands of dollars on snaps, chatting girls and getting them to pretend to be his girlfriend news and making deep fakes so they look naked. And I feel insane.

I wanted to know if he ever did anything like this to you. This comes in at five thirty P. M.

But I saw at five thirty the morning I woke my boyfriend up. I was like, you will not believe this. You gotta look at this. So we were like, oh god, what is he talking about? I gave her my phone number and then we started texting.

One of the first things I asked, and I was like, sorry to be weird, but was there anything of me? And she's like, there were not any deep fix. She's like, but there were photos of you.

SHE was saying some things that were deeply concerning to me and I was really concerned about her safety on I was check again and he would keep me posted on any updates of things that we're going on because all of this was unraveling, like in real time. When I was taxing her, eventually he had brought up Rachel, and josh had tried to say that anne was responsible for him and Rachel falling out. And I was like, that's really weird, because Rachel, a girl's girl, that was very shocking to me.

That doesn't sound like the Rachel. I know I honestly fell out of touch with Rachel. Not for anything bad. Josh was kind of a anker in our friendship. But Rachel, one of those people that you could call ten years later and pick up right where you left off.

So I reached to Rachel, and I was like, have you heard about this? And so he was like, dude, yes, instantly we started talking and that eventually any. And Rachel gotten touch after we realized that everyone was comfortable with that, and they cleared up all the information that josh was spreading about any Rachel to each other.

Here's Rachel.

I was just like wide awake taxi people having phone conversations with people sunday night. My mind was just the the next day and day born reached out to me monday during the day I was talking over text with learn about IT, and we were shot and could not believe what was occuring. Another day or so passes, and I was talking about with clean, one of my good friends from college.

And I said, I think I need to reach out to ane. I cannot stand seeing another woman in such pain and not reaching out to her and checking in with her and making sure that she's as OK as one can be in a horrific situation like this. So I ended up reaching out to any the instagram, and then he gave me a phone number and we started. And then in a certain point, any learn and I we're just all on a group tax together. And this is when the PC together of everything really started.

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Here's any. Eventually.

Rachel ended up messaging me, asking me how I was doing and said, this is also crazy. I remember thinking IT was weird because he told me Rachel hated me, that Rachel said I was which, and he stopped talking to Rachel. L, he used that as like a defense if my friends said anything about him or questioned all.

I'm not friends with people who talk bad about you, so you shouldn't be friends with people who talk about about me. Rachel, I have talked about that things that never happened. She's like, I wasn't talking about you because I didn't even know he was still seeing you.

I got him a love island sweat chit for Christmas, and he said would take a picture of me in my love island's future. I was sended to Rachel. I want to show the gifts you got me so I took a picture of him and he senate and he says, oh, Rachel said, you did such a good job at the present and I asked her about that. He said, oh my god, he told me his sister bought that for him. I was wondering what how he was in.

Why do you think he lied about IT to Rachel?

I think the main reason was just control. He didn't want me to be friends with his friends because then it's harder to lie. I think he didn't want Rachel asking about me because would had a conversation early on, and I would have caught on black quicker, and he didn't want that to happen after everything, he was staying in a different motel closer to work.

Me and my friend had driven over there to make sure he wasn't coming back towards my house. I saw him outside of the motel smoking, and some of his friends that we're defending him from michigan had driven down here, and we're standing outside with him. I don't know if he saw me, but I saw him and I was relieved to know he was actually at this motel and people were there with him.

And that was last time ever saw him. There were a couple friends that were standing by him, defended, you know, the classic, he's a nice guy. Josh would never do this.

There was a girl, too that was defending him to me. She's like, oh, I know it's disgusting what you found, but he doesn't deserve this. He's such a good guy.

No, what do you think constitutes being a good guy? He was nice to you a couple times. That doesn't mean he's a good person.

You can be polite. That doesn't mean you're a good person. Anyone I captain contact with that was his friend doesn't identify as his friend anymore. There a lot of people hearing directly .

from him what .

was the response from your male friends who knew josh?

There was a divide between where half of them believed IT and were very disgusted and what had absolutely nothing to do with him gun. And then there was another half of them that supported him and were very boys clubby. And we're even making fun of any IT was surprising the ones that rally around him, they were ones that I would never say we were good friends at all, I would say, like more acai tanks who had mutual friends.

IT also raged me and similar anew. Sly IT feel somewhat hopeless because they were just violently denied these cold, hard facts that were being handed to them on a platter. All the ground worker laid had a huge impact on them, not believing any. And I can say that because I feel as though I was a victim of the groundwork he laid as well in the whole manipulation .

of the picture. When someone's only giving you little scraps to make the person look really terrible, it's onna make you feel some type away because you trust your friend and you have no other reason at that point not to trust them exactly.

And if you've known someone sense you were in kindergarten, I get, from a psychological standpoint, IT would be extremely hard for them to face this reality. And at the end of the day, IT is the reality that he did all these things. IT just makes me so angry that they are willing to avoid and turn a blind eye and justify some of these things, all as a means to maintain a friendship.

I haven't had any contact with him every time I go home. I do get a little bit nervous about what if I was to run into him. However, I think at this point, he's honestly scared of me what SHE should be.

Here's laun.

One of josh's friends texted me after everything happened with Annie and word got out to people in his social group. He had my number from when josh I dated. This is someone who I really have nothing but nice things to say about.

I get a taxi, says, hi laun. I'm sure you've heard all the ship going on with him and Annie, what he did Annie's terrible and he didn't deserve that. I'm working with his family to get him home and start getting him some help.

I wondering if you'd be up for a quick call. I'm wondering if you ve had a similar here. Is any with the abuse of stuff pantheia is porn stuff not withstanding?

I've never known him to be that way, but i've also never been in a relationship with him. I'm just trying to figure out what we're dealing with when trying to get him help. You don't want to talk slash, get involved like conflict, understand? And apologies if this is bring up any painful memories.

This really pissed me off because I took that as why do you need me to co labor ate everything than any is saying, why do you need multiple sources to confirm that this person is treating women in a bad way? I basically wrote a small essay to him. I was rereading IT.

And I like, this is a nice summer of how I feel about the whole situation. I said, hi, yeah. I'm caught up on everything that has been going on. And I ve been talking with any for last several days about everything.

I know you've good intentions, and I have always liked, respected as a person, but I should warn you that you probably aren't going to like what I have to say about the truly horrifying situation. I have to be honest that I don't think any information or insight I give to you about my relationship with josh is relevant to any his experience or relevant to how he can be helpful. IT feels like anything I would or could say regarding my relationship with him could be used to invalidate ann's reports about he treated her and or how he treats women in general, which I don't appreciate.

To be clear, I have no interest in contributing to josh as being, but because I feel like I am in a unique option, is likely the only other person who has gotten to know john a romantic way. Alan questions also, I will always gladly take any opportunity to educate others about the difference between mental illness and predatory and abuse of behavior to answer your questions more directly. No, I don't think that josh treated me as poorly as he did any.

However, I can say with one hundred percent certainty that he would have if I had said with him longer. Josh is a text book manipulator. He is charming, well, like easy going fun to be around.

He also has a long group of genuinely solid good people in his life. And to meet, at least having great friends is such a Green flag when dating someone, to be honest. Initially, after we broke up, I kind of just thought that josh had a little bit of a drinking problem, that he was a mature and just not one for me.

However, IT took me a while after breaking up with him to realize how truly miserable I was with him and what the reality was of how he treated me. He constantly lied to me about small things. Big things didn't matter. He would often get drunk, start fights with me, typically about how he didn't trust me. These fights almost always ended up in me, apologizing to him as he was skilled and twisting my words, changing the narrative and using his insecurities in low self steam as an excuse for his behavior and to manipulate me in a feeling empathy for him.

Over the months, he would become more and more controlling about how often I checked in with him and about where I was and who I was with any attempts that I made to communicate with him when I was feeling upset about something, always ended up in a big blob argument, where my words were twisted and I was gassed by him, relevant, sly, and was always ended up apologizing and feeling guilty, ultimately leading to feeling like I was walking on eg. Shells around him all the time, and that I had to be careful about what I said and how I acted. I didn't piss him off.

I think you and I both know that is not love, that is abuse. Also, turns out the evidence of his online relationships, women in frequent payments, sex workers, goes away back to twenty fifteen. So turns out he was shooting on me too.

Josh came in my life at the perfect time when myself, a seam was at my absolute lowest. I'm whole hardley believe. That is why I tolerated all of the fighting and gas light for so long.

The person that I am now, or that I was before I met him, would have never tolerated IT. To me, this is even further evidence that he, like other abusers, has a set of skills and picking out vulnerable people. He shows Annie next right for COVID, which was the absolute perfect PPT unity for him to hide her from all of his friends into islay her and destroy herself worth.

I can even begin to express how much rage I have, knowing that josh is likely using his quote code addiction and alleged mental health issues as a tool to distract his friends and family from the reality of who he really is in an attempt to save his reputation. The reality is that josh lies, sheets and exploits others without, and he takes women's photos and turns them into pornography without their consent. That's not mental illness or addiction.

That's sociopathic and predatory behavior that, in my professional opinion, that I fully acknowledge no one ask for, is not going to be improved with therapy, medications or whatever. And IT most certainly should not be enabled or tolerated by his friends or family. Deeply worried about any safety, as all the evidence demonstrates that the type pick next steps for abuse ers like josh is for the verbal emotional abuse to ask late to physical violence.

To be honest, I was also super hesitant to even send this you out of fear that I would get back to him. I know he still has explicit photos of miana phone, and i'm sure he would be capable of and willing to use against me in some creative way. If he knew what I was saying about him, my biggest here though is what else he has hidden in his phone that Annie wasn't able to easily find.

I don't really have any interest in talking on the phone. Are getting involved any further with this other than to support any and any of his female friends who were deep fake violated by him. Anyway, again, I know you are an apathy and a good hearted person and really hope that you can at least try to understand where i'm coming from since I imagine that you primarily have josh's side of the story.

amazing. No notes did he respond? He did.

He had a good response, like IT was what you would want. He was apologize. And but he did, of course. Fan, like he is making excuses, trying to gure him. I know her responded, I believe in every word of that, and I sent him to any two beforehand because I wanted to make sure he was OK the things I was saying.

Hey.

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Here's any. He was .

still admire working, and he was staying at a hotel in the area. My friends were wrong there because because I thought he was gna come back and try to hurt me, so they were trying to keep an eye out for him. At one point, somebody tried to hack my email, and I know that was him, because he was trying to figure out what I knew.

I think in a couple weeks later, I got a message from a user on snaps. C A T, I D, never seen before was called like mam. I think I was him.

So I said, who? The efforts? And there are a girl. Listen, we know Joshua Samuel from the APP, the woohoo o APP. They must have gotten my user name from Chloe because I had message her before on my own.

Snapp IT was a group of these girls that had talked to him, and they told me that he still on the APP and he's still spending money. He told them that there is a crazy girl that's obsessed with him trying to ruin his life. And if they hear from a crazy girl to block her, I asked them how old they were, and they ouldn't answer me.

I asked them if they were safe, and they said yes. They told me that he's famous on the APP because he spends so much money, and that he says he's a rich kid from california who's a real estate agent. He has two dogs and a cat, and he's just lonely because he's so busy taking care of his sick, dying mother that he doesn't have time to go out and spend all his money.

He was telling these girls that he was only twenty eight years old. I told them the truth. I said, no, he's thirty five years old.

He works at a grocery store. He lived in my house. Those were my dogs and my cat. His mom might be sick, but he lives five, six hours away from him. He does not take care of her vict he told me he was sending her money and he wasn't SHE was sending her money, which was something I saw his phone SHE was sending him money frequently, not a whole up, but a hundred box here in there I asked them to explain the gifts. He sent seven thousand, five, trying to gifts to nata.

And I said, how much does a gift cost? And they said, it's twenty, forty, sixty, eighty or one hundred and they said to me that he spent at least three thousand dollars a begun, some girls, and he was sending very, very expensive gifts all the time. I did the math, even if he was sending twenty dollar gifts at seven thousand five hundred, twenty two gifts are looking at over one hundred fifty.

He was making forty eight year, not one hundred and fifty thousand. He told me he was the manager in the meat department, but I found out that he was a supervisor in the meat department, which is a big paid difference. He was in charge of inventory reviews to make sure all the orders were coming in.

And he started to tell me towards the end of our relationship that his numbers weren't adding up. And IT was my fault because I was keeping him up late and exhAusting him and he wasn't adding things in the right way. And packages were missing.

All this money was missing, and I was my fault. I worked a Normal ninety five. He started at three A M, and he would go to like newish. So he was home for a good chunk of the day.

When I wasn't, I asked him, when are you finding time to talk to all these girls? He said, what I talk home on your and I talk to them when I met work on break in my car. These girls, they log on a snapp chat and message me, and then they disappear for long periods of time.

And they logged back on the message me again and then disappear. So this wasn't like their more snaps chat. This was something they logged into. IT seems specifically talk to me. So I was strange.

They said, what you should do is make a fake profile and get on this APP and go into this chat room and they all the name of the chat room and who ran the chat room that he will be in there, and I should expose him because they all hate him because he has hurt them greatly. I asked for details, and they said they would tell me later. They message me a couple times, saying he's online now.

He's online now, when I was at work, and I couldn't be on a boohoo o APP while I was at work, I had a friend who was a sex worker, and he was like, this is so not Normal. This is not typical like you have clients who are in relationships but you don't ask and it's not your business and you don't involve yourself with IT. And if something goes down, you walk away.

You don't have a connection to that that for him to work out like it's so bizarre that they would message you and that they were so hurt and invested in this. There's something odd about that. I know that he was probably a large chunk of their income.

These girls seemed very Young too. I don't know if he promised some things, the woo hoo o APP. They have a board intimacy boards.

So if you are more intimate with someone, which means you're spending more money on them, you get to the top of the board. And he was strange shot at when he was at the top of the board with girls. And they have like a group chat.

They caught multiple am room where you can paid to be the man that's talking to all the women, because everyone who works on the is a woman. When you're looking at the room, there's all these girls. And the video cycle through.

And then a guy will be at the top in a video talking to them. So he pays for the amount of time he wants to talk. And then he's the star of the show.

Essentially, they're all talking to him. There are private rooms. You can have private chat and you can talk with them and Snapchat too.

So if you're in a girl's room, you just see her and you're like typing, but you can also enter a private chat where you are video chat. The apis shown on the APP store is using filters with friends. But when you open IT, it's all video chatting and a lot of IT is sexual. There's no nuon IT, but it's like girls and little or there in tank tops and they're jumping up and down or they're chatting with guys about sex stuff.

Here's Rachel.

That's a whole other thing that blew my mind with that will hoo up where he was talking to all these women and foreign country is and spending tens of thousands of dollars on regularly. And any showed me some of their pictures and they definitely could be under eighteen, which is also very I hadn't heard of any of these apps at all. Were you aware .

if you took any pictures of you when you would hang out with him.

he would often times want to get a picture of us together. I mean, if you're good friends with someone IT makes, there was this one incident. The lincoln park zoo has brew with.

The zoo is a beer festival every year. That's really fun. We went just the two of us together.

We were riding the mark around because they leave IT open, and all these adults get so excited to write them. It's really funny. But we were doing that, and he kept taking pictures of me doing that.

He man thought about that, but that's the only time I remember him doing anything like that. I think IT was a lot different then what he was doing with any of morn in terms of taking pictures. There were times where in a group chat with him or something like that, he would send a picture of him and ee together from college.

And now looking back on IT, I realized he was collecting photos. That's why he had these old photos from, like, two thousand eight. That was a really creepy feeling for me that he has been collecting photos of me since I have known him and collecting photos of my friends since they've known him as well.

There were also a lot of photos collected of his Young is, which absolutely discussed me. IT took me, maybe a day or two, to really start to grasp the reality of the situation in the fact that this person that I thought I knew very well was a completely different person, probably a month. So, and I was just so beyond angry, some of the adrenal from the situation, and that initial shock had worn off.

And I was so angry about what he had done to my cousin out to me, to these two women loran, and then any who has since become my friend. I felt as though he had wished his way out of so many things in the past. And I was just so enraged that I kept thinking, is there any way that we can get him held accountable for things he's done, not only for, but also to prevent this from happy to other women? Because he is a danger, he is a risk to women that he is around without question.

So I started expLoring what could be done in terms of taking some sort of action against him. And IT seemed the best option we had for this, was reporting him to be in possession of child pornography. I ended up submitting something to the F.

B. I. And calling did as well. We summited general ticket to the FBI. And I got routed through michigan because he was currently in michigan at that point.

Because after all of this blow up, he had where to go, besides back to his parents house and his lancing. They reached out to both of us relatively quickly about the situation. I ended up speaking with A F B I S.

The woman that I spoke to both times seem very interested. He wanted to gather all the information. We went through everything that had occurred, and they said that they were trying to figure out if I would be pursued at a day or federal level.

I did verify with him that even if IT is a deep fake, if you are putting a minor faith on any sort of pornography that still does qualify as pornography, they ask questions about the deep fakes in terms of us as adults. But they did say that due to michigan law currently, that there wasn't anything that could be done about that. On my last call with her, SHE said that I did sound like IT would be pursued out of federal level.

We found out that he was picked up for questioning and held for twenty four hours. I have not heard that any churches have been brought against term at all. Had I had the ability to pursue pressing charges against h. finites. No, I here's any.

I was surprised .

how .

easy IT was to do this, like josh is not a tech savy guy and he was able to create these. It's scary. It's not even about being careful about what you post online because he took regular cl fees, regular group pics where no one we're showing any and IT was just their face and they were smiling with their friends or their family.

I didn't even know what a deep fake was till of couple years ago. He was the one that explained to me what a deep fake was. My friend sent me is essentially a deep fake. But they put your face on like john y depth body, and you're empire to the carribean now I was like, this is funny wow, this really looks real and he goes, yes, is a deep fake he's like, is usually used for porn and I said, what? Why would you do that?

What you mean? Here's laun. I don't think there's really any way to make sense of IT. Ultimately though, this is a unique new way for abuse ers to take advantage of other people, and it's really fucking terrifying.

Another thing that really concerns me is how I imagine that there are people out there who might try to confuse this type of behavior with a pornography addiction, or something less harmful than what IT is, using A I to create pornography without someone's consent. That is a whole different thing. The type of person who would do that type of thing would also have the resources and the savings.

Ss, to manipulate others into thinking that, oh, just because I have a pornography addiction, oh well, it's just because I have a tal illness. We need to see IT for what he really is, which is abuse and it's really growth. I think he's so foolish shit.

I just don't buy anything that he is trying to sell, and I think he can't take responsibility for anything. What's hard about this whole thing is that we don't know what exactly the extent of what he was doing on the internet was. Every driver my being knows that he is a predator and that he is not a safe person to be around, and he is an opportunity.

When I look at the way things escalated with me, and he was really demonstrating those controlling and abusive behavior towards me at the end, when him and I broke up, he had a perfect opportunity to pick things up with Annie. And the pan diamond I think of really, really helped with that. Any of his excuses are crash and IT infuriates me to my core. I have never felt a rage about someone in about a situation than I have with this.

Here's Rachel.

I'd have so much empathy for what they went through with him. I also feel somewhat guilty that I didn't recognize more was going on. Granted, I get.

How could I have? And at the same time, I wish that we had been able somehow put these pieces together a little bit sooner. But the reality is he knew what he was doing.

This was so beyond strategic. At the end of the day, he wasn't able to isolate lain. I have as much control over her as he wanted to, partially because he was friends with me. I will fully admit that I do not think I was well enough informed on this topic at all prior to this happening. My biggest thing is I think there needs to be legislation around this. And I know some states are in the process of that or have recently passed things that do address this, but there really needs to be a crackdown on this, because I can see how that would be so detrimental and incredibly tremaine to so many individuals to could experience something like this. The availability based on social media and like apps we have on our phone IT almost feels as though anyone could do this.

I agree legislatively, we really need to see something at the federal level because our laws are already behind when IT comes, things like dating apps in the internet. So we definitely need to get caught up quick, especially when we consider the child sex abuse material.

That to me is so alarming, the fact that there's these symbol apps where people can just take pictures from people's social media and then impose them in such a harmful discussing in and in general, like how online kids are these days, and trying to figure out those things not only as a person who works in this field, but also as a parent myself. The more I know, the less I share online when I comes to my family in any capacity. I didn't used to always be that way, but I am now. What has IT been like for you connecting with laun .

and Rachel? It's been good. It's been nice to have, especially with laun, somebody who can confirm the things I went through because he experienced them to an extent to like SHE fully understands what I was like talking to him.

We would just went back and forth talking about the different lives. He told SHE told me about weird instances where he lied to her. We were kind of bonding over the way that he lied in the way that he talked to people that hadn't changed.

He had told me a story about her. He said that he was just really difficult, and that's why they didn't work out. He was such a good guy that he went to pick her up from the dentist ones, and he called her in uber.

And he was so ungrateful for IT SHE text them all these things about how awful he was after. And that was the last time he ever saw her. And I ask, learn about IT.

He was supposed to drive me home from the dentist, but his car was so full garbage that I couldn't get in IT. And I was drugged up and had a tooth pull. And he sent me home and in uber.

And I am saying, josh, I can see your car. It's right there. And he said, not.

I like my car. That sounds way more like josh than the story he told. I told her about the apartment, how I didn't have IT anymore. And that's when he told me that he was her sisters s friend who was the landlord and that laun had actually helped him get that apartment. SHE was never really invited over there much either.

He had walked in there one day, and the ceiling above his dining room table had collapsed pieces of IT all over the table, all over the floor. So he took a picture of IT and asked him, what the heck happened here? Because all that happened a while ago, SHE said, josh, you have to tell the land, lord Rachel.

We had conversations about times he would lie to her, and weird things that would happen. Been really nice to have people who understand what he was like. I repeat the story some times, and I go, he said this and this, and people don't understand why I stuck around, but they get IT because he was so manipulate tive.

Rachel s are bad. As he was one that reached out to the F, B, I SHE reached out to you. He was like, i'm gonna talk to Tiffany race.

We need to be on this podcast. The amount that we have all been through is incredible. I've never heard anything like this. I'm reaching out term.

I I go for IT. What advice would you give to somebody who is navigating perhaps a similar relationship?

I would say it's OK to just walk away. You don't owe them anything. You don't need to hear their explanations.

If you don't have to make people understand you. If they don't understand you, that's fine. You can just leave. I wish so badly.

I wanted just walked away earlier when we were arguing, and I was trying so desperately to explain myself to get him to understand my side or to admit the he was wrong. I didn't need that. I started a new job a couple months ago and I get to go back to school for free.

So that's exciting. I ve just been working on myself, and i'm just happy without him. He feels like a weight has been lifted. Here's Rachel.

I am somewhat less trusting, in particular when IT comes to man. I do a little bit more due diligence in terms of making new friends. I am more attuned to small things that I definitely wasn't when I was Younger and college.

And before this, I most definitely have a therapist. He is wonder. I have to be very mindful in terms of when I am working with clients with trauma.

There are some specific modalities that i'm specialized in, one of them being coordinate processing therapy. And there have been points where I have had to take a break from doing that with clients in order to manage my own stuff. This was definitely one of those times where I did have to put that on pause for a little bit. Well, this was consuming so much of my head, space and energy.

Here's laun. I was hesitant to talk about this .

because I think as humans, and especially as women, we tend to like do that thing right or well, my experience wasn't nearly as bad as person's experience. We're tending to have minimize them and compare them. Ultimately, it's not a competition about who how IT works.

It's more about the shared feeling of being able to relate to someone, which is empathy. Listening to other people on this podcast has really helped me process not just my relationship, josh, but also lost my dad. And grief in all of these emotions are super complex and weird.

Even in the varying experiences that have been shared, I always feel like I can relate to a feeling or an emotion that someone else is describing in their story. And there are so much power and healing in that what I would want others to take from this is that just because someone else is experience can be so objective ly like more horrific and traumatic than yours doesn't mean that your experience wasn't harmful or traumatic. There are behaviors and relationships that even though they might not be explicit, verbally or physically abusive, they can be just as harmful and impacts on your life.

Another thing to is it's really easy to say, trust your gut, try to keep an eye out for red flags, but in reality, it's not that easy all the time. It's really hard to spot things like love bombing because they're perfectly healthy relationships out there with expressions of love and thoughtfulness, without altering motives. I've heard time and time again from clients are even just like talking to friends, how I supose to know what i'm having, a gut feeling.

Those gut feelings are so obvious sometimes, and you know that when you feel, but sometimes not, and your brain functions to protect you. So IT won't always say run or fight right away in a bad situation, and might try to make sense of the situation and rationalize IT. Unfortunately, I think the best way to get to know your intuition and your god is by experiencing IT and all were getting older and knowing yourself more. I would want people to cut themselves some slack if they struggled that because I think it's something that people experience lot more than we think.

to your point, trauma. It's not a competition. There is no empathy bank that's dwindling away. Actually, the more we give IT other people, the more empathy just continues to bloss them around everyone.

Yeah, some of the things that don't get talk about as much or that can get written as you overreacting. So if you find yourself questioning in your reality or having an instinct to to document or record conversations to use later to define yourself, being afraid to bring up certain topics, constantly feeling like you, they want to zing for bringing up certain things, feeling like others are constantly need to provide admiration, validation when people say really daring or embarrassing things about you in front of a group of friends, or just things that you thought you guys had discussed, confidence, those types of things.

I would just want folks to stop and take a moment and reflect on your relationship in the situation that you're in because it's those subbed smaller things that sneak up over time and really become frequent Normal ized without a even realizing IT those of the things that really can ask into more intensive and abuse behaviors. Lastly, I really thought that is someone who has diagnosed them a many personality disorder and feels like I have a very generally good understanding of others and abilities to be in touch with other people. This can happen to anyone.

It's not about you. It's about the abuse in the manipulator in the situation. What you're doing is, so god dam important because people don't talk about these things.

They don't. I mean, we all people that we trust in love, but these are situations that very three of lex ivy, but it's so powerful for people. I'm just so thankful .

to the three of you for being willing to share, especially given how much people are thinking about this top and looking at legislation.

This was a great experience. I truly can't thank you enough.

If you do suspect that someone has created these types of images or have found images of yourself online, that you are looking for assistance and help removing the FBI internet crime center, I see three dot org is the FBI internet complaint center.

Thank you so much for listening until next time. Stay safe, friends. Something was wrong is a broken cycle media production created and hosted by me, tifany rees. If you'd like to support the show further, you can share episodes with your loved ones, leave a positive review, or follow something was wrong on instagram at something was wrong podcast, our theme sung was composed by glad rags. Check out their album wonder under thank .

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