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A Dear Media original podcast. A note before we get started. In this episode, we will be using an AI clone of Coco's voice to read some of her actual written words. And we're also using an AI altered voice for the translations from German to English. And a warning. This episode includes mention of some pretty tough stuff, including sexual violence against children, self-harm, and suicide. Listen with care.
We might not have ever known the true story of Coco Berthman's childhood if not for veteran Utah journalist Lynn Packer.
He came across one of Coco's videos on YouTube. It was sometime in 2020. I found the story pretty unbelievable. Lynn says he only watched about five minutes, but that was enough. But I had no reason to follow up to see if it was true. I asked Lynn why he didn't believe Coco's story. And it turns out that we both spotted the same red flag.
Oh, immediately raped 10 to 50 times an evening. Lynn says he found himself trying to imagine what he calls the parade of pedophiles coming through Coco's suburban neighborhood every night.
Logistically, it just did not ring true. A year and a half later, in the summer of 2021, Lynn came back to Coco Berthman's story. And it turns out Lynn was really the perfect person to investigate it. He was raised in the LDS church, so he has connections to many of the people who had supported Coco. And he speaks German. He served his mission in Germany, and he had even spent 10 years as a consultant for German television. ♪
Lynn had access to a bunch of Coco's records, like her birth certificate and her visa application. He got them from an unnamed source, and even though we've become pretty chatty over the last few months, he still hasn't told me who his source is, which is no real surprise because a good journalist never reveals their sources. But through those records, Lynn was able to find a phone number for Coco's biological father. And one evening, Germany time, he called
He called it. I'm speaking German and I said, this is Lynn Packer. I'm doing a story about a Coco Earthman. Do you know who that is? This might seem like a funny question to ask Coco's father, but people had been questioning Coco's name for years.
Yes, Coco is her real name, but it is not her birth name. She legally changed it after she turned 18. So to her father, Coco Birthman is actually Sandra Roof. And I was fully expecting him to say, I will not engage in a conversation, but he did. He said, what's this about? So Lynn told him, your daughter moved to Utah and she's been telling people that she was sex trafficked by her mother.
He was blown away. He had largely lost contact with Coco, and he was just flabbergasted. He had also lost contact with his ex-wife, Coco's mom, Renata Roof. So he gave Lynn the phone number for Coco's brother instead. And his name is Mike. Lynn called the number right away. And he was out walking his dog. He really didn't want to talk about it that much. He just, here's my mother's phone number.
Lynn started talking to Renata, and she shared documents that made Lynn believe that Coco's story was a big lie. It was clear that it was a hoax because of the records she sent. I mean, they were voluminous. Coco had started telling people that she had not had any contact with her mother since 2009. But Renata sent Lynn photos taken with her daughter years after Coco says she cut off contact.
There were photos at the airport as Coco left for the U.S. There were photos of mother and daughter in New York, where Coco served her first au pair assignment. And there were other documents, including some official-looking German records, that proved many of the details of Coco's story simply could not have happened. For Lynn, this was all pretty convincing.
But of course, we wanted to talk to Renata ourselves. Lynn told us that she was pretty upset that American media had totally ignored her, and she was eager to set the record straight. Since we knew that she didn't speak English, we brought on Kerstin Silm, a German journalist living in L.A., and we asked her to reach out.
But then, somewhat surprisingly, the first message that we got back was not promising. Hello, Ms. Tsien. Thank you for your message. This is actually Kerstin, but we used an AI to alter her voice so it's not confusing. I deliberately distanced myself from everything because the whole thing makes me sick. And now here you come and approach me. This is all so awful.
No matter how bad the things are that my daughter has done, all it does is break my heart. Take care. Venata Hulse. I thought this was a done deal. That's producer Karen Gibbon. Karen, Kerstin, and I got on a call to debrief about everything that went down after that email. Lynn gave us her contact information, and I thought she was expecting us.
That's Kerstin. Kerstin immediately tried to smooth things over. Right.
Renata said that she was still unsure about talking, but she asked Kerstin to switch over to WhatsApp and chat there. And as soon as Kerstin did, the voice messages from Renata started rolling in. She was like, oh my God, this is getting worldwide attention. I can't believe this. And I don't know how to deal with this. And I have even contemplated suicide.
She was very, very frustrated that people had been listening to her daughter, who she calls Sandra. Nobody had asked her and she feels like she has been, her life has been basically destroyed for a couple of years because of that. And she said she doesn't want to talk, that she wants to stay away from it and she doesn't want to do anything.
She downloaded all that in that first, I think it was almost four minutes of audio message to me. And then like 30 seconds later, there was another message. And then there were a few short ones that sort of repeated what was in the first one. And it was always like, I really don't want to get back into this because it's just so hard.
I think I remember Karen saying, she says she doesn't want to talk, but she clearly wants to talk. So let's give her some time. Yeah, and that's what it felt like also. I mean, I was texting and calling with her more than I do with my family. It was... Oh, that's so intense. Yeah, it was a little intense. As it turns out, intensity runs in the family.
Renata did eventually agree to talk to us, and we spent a lot of time throwing every possible question at her. We talked to a lot of other people, too, searching for evidence that Coco was, as she said, "sex trafficked" by her family for 15 years. And we didn't find anything to support those claims. But we did find a lot to suggest that Coco's childhood was difficult.
And I did truly start to feel quite a bit of empathy for that little girl who would eventually become known as Coco Berthman. This is Believable, the Coco Berthman story. Episode four, almost everything she says is true.
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Hello. Good morning. Hello.
When producer Katerina Felke and I visited Renata in her home outside of Stuttgart, Germany, Renata and I were on good terms. She had made me a table full of Polish pastries along with my personal favorite German treat, Butterbrezel. But our somewhat friendly relationship started out much more tense.
In fact, our first few interviews over video chat were pretty awkward. Part of it was the language barrier, but part of it was not. I could tell that Renata was unsure about talking to me, and so I tried to start with easy questions. Can you tell us about Sandro? Even though her daughter legally changed her name, Renata requested that we not reference her as Coco, and we respected that request when we were talking with her. Plus, during this period of time...
Coco wasn't Coco. She was Sandra. When she was a kid, what was she like? On one hand, she was very affectionate. On the other hand, she was very guarded.
That's the AI altered voice reading the translation of Renata's words. But again and again, she was the center of attention. She lived with her parents in a suburb of Hanover, Germany. When the kids were born, we had an apartment with two rooms, but we moved quickly into a house next to a farm. We had a whole house there. And who lived there in terms of siblings of Sandra's?
Mike, the little brother, and Magdalena, the big sister. A nice life, if you just look at that, but the father was always drinking. In January of 1997, Renata separated from her husband.
But it wasn't an easy divorce. I had to leave and I moved with protection of the youth authorities and police. They made sure that nothing happens to us while we secretly escaped when he was not home. Now Renata was a single mom with three young kids. And she says she was trying to do her best by them. I moved again. I moved to Celle, 20 kilometers further away.
In Celle, I moved a few more times because the kids did not like the apartments and some I could not afford. And after that, I moved from Celle to Hannover, even further away. Do you feel when Sandra says that she moved around a lot as a child, that that's pretty accurate?
This seemed like it would be an easy question, but Renata did not like it. She didn't answer right away, and then there was a little back and forth between her and Kerstin, who's translating. Okay, she just is a little concerned at the moment that this is all, you're going into a direction that makes her look like she's a bad mother because she has been moving around.
so much. And she tries to get that out of her head. She just wants to address it, that it makes her feel uncomfortable. I understand. I'm sorry you feel that way. It really is more just about us trying to figure out what of the things that Sandra said are rooted in truth and what things are not. So when she talks about her childhood and being upset about moving all the time, we just want to know, is that part of what she fabricated or not?
Almost everything she says except for the trafficking accusations is true. Almost everything except for the trafficking is true? It seems impossible that she would say that. But as we start going through more questions about Coco's early years... Did she ever talk about what she wanted to do when she grew up? Who she wanted to be? A lot of it does add up. Yeah, she always wanted to be a mayor.
She always wanted to go to New York. That sounds about right. Renate is wondering whether you ever saw a video of her singing. Renate mentions a lot of the things that Coco talks about. There was something like a farm close by where the kids from the town went horseback riding.
But Renata says that things seemed to change for young Sandra around age 12. That's when the family moved from the Hanover area to Stuttgart, a city in the south of Germany. Renata says that Sandra did not like it there. She felt like she didn't fit in. And that's when Renata says the trouble started.
When Coco talks about this time in her life, she always mentions two major events. First, there's the death of her sister, Anna. She says her mother and her mother's boyfriend killed Anna in front of her after Anna tried to tell a teacher about their abuse.
And then there's the story of her first suicide attempt. She says she took a bunch of pills and she woke up in a hospital bed. And before I was waking up in the hospital, my mother is a master manipulator. Master manipulator. This is something that Coco often calls her mom. She says that's how her mom got away with such brazen abuse.
This is Coco's real voice, by the way, from the Skinny Confidential podcast. She talked to all the doctors and made it about her and her victim. Like she's trying so much as a mother, blah, blah, blah. Bottom line is when I woke up, the only thing that the doctor asked me at age 12, attempting suicide, why are you doing this to your mother? She's doing so much for you.
Renata tells a different story about what happened when her daughter turned 12. She doesn't mention the suicide attempt. Instead, she says that Sandra was fainting all the time in class. She'd end up in the emergency room several times each week. And Renata says,
Renate says she didn't have a lot of friends. People kept their distance. She started cutting herself in the arms. There were problems at school. Whenever she came back home, she kept to herself. Renate says she tried to ask her daughter what was wrong, but she never got an answer. At one point, I lost it. I regret that until today, but I totally lost it. I
I grabbed her and said, "Enough!" Two minutes later, I regretted that, of course, but it was a moment where I was completely overwhelmed by what was happening.
Renata says she took her daughter to see doctors, but they didn't help. In the beginning, they told me a lot of her behavior had to do with puberty. Our primary doctor even told me the child will be just like she was before puberty, eventually. And that was my hope, that everything will change again someday.
By the way, if it seems like we're going too far out of our way to believe Coco, it's because of something we've started calling the Master Manipulator Theory. Even though Coco has been caught in a lot of lies, we still need to consider whether her mom really was the bad guy in her story.
I don't want to sound extreme, but after Coco's arrest in January of 2022, the pendulum swung from everyone believing everything Coco says without question to no one believing anything she says without question. And the only way we felt we could toss the extremes and find the nuance was to believe that anything is possible until proven otherwise.
I talked to Renata several times, and each time I felt like we got a different version of her. Once, she was really sad, barely able to answer my questions. We kept taking breaks so she could compose herself. And then there was the happy, welcoming version of Renata, who joked with me about my own German grandmother. But then another time, she seemed angry and annoyed.
So for some of the tougher stuff, I decided to ask her a series of yes/no questions. I thought it would be less painful this way because when Renata says that everything except the sex trafficking is true, I'm not sure she really understands the extent of some of the other accusations her daughter has made. But to my surprise, Renata did not like this idea.
There's no other option to do that. We'll just get it over with and then it'll be done. And I'll know the answer is no.
Eventually, she reluctantly agrees. So I start asking. Sandra has told people she had two older sisters. We know about Magdalena, who was Renata's first daughter. But Coco always says there was another sister who was in between the two of them. Is that true?
Kerstin asks Renata and then translates her response. No, she's not aware of it. I have to ask, was there a sister who at any point was murdered? No, she doesn't know about the sister. No, it's not true.
When Sandra says she was sold for sex starting at a very young age by her mother, is that true? This time, when Renata responds, Kerstin does not need to translate. No, I'll give you a minute if she needs a minute. I'm going to smoke half a cigarette, okay?
She's going to smoke half a cigarette if it's okay. Okay. Renata leaves the room, and the rest of us, we don't talk. But I think we're all feeling the same way. Either this woman did not do it, or she really is a master manipulator. When Renata returns, she tells us that in May of 2007, she sent her two younger kids, Sandra and Mike, to stay with their older sister, Magdalena.
Because I work so much, I said, I send the kids to Magdalena in Hannover. I can work in peace and they are taken care of. They can have their vacation. In May 26, I will never forget that date because in Poland it's Mother's Day.
I received a call maybe two, three hours before the flight. I looked at the number and thought, oh my God, it's the youth authority. The youth authority is basically the Department of Child Services in Germany. And she said to me, Frau Ruff, your daughter at this moment is transferred into custody.
She's afraid to go back home. For now, she cannot tell me why, but Sandra will be taken into custody. That's when the whole circle started. Doctors, therapists, foster families and so on and so forth.
We have reached out to Sandra's social worker, but privacy laws in Germany prevent her from talking to us. We do have access to a few of the records from her time in state custody. And through those records, we were able to prove that despite what Renata says, a lot of what Sandra has said about her childhood is not true.
true. Here's a good example. She often talks about standing outside of a Celine Dion concert in Stuttgart. Here's how she described it in a Facebook message to an LDS church member. It was the day when Celine was in Stuttgart and giving her show of her Taking Chances world tour.
That would have been July 16th, 2008. And yes, that's the AI reading her exact words. But then, suddenly I heard her.
But official records state that Sandra had already run away months before that concert in Stuttgart.
and she was living with a cousin four hours north in Hanover. And if you think, okay, Sandra could have caught the fastest train and made it down to Stuttgart in time to stand outside that concert, there's still this. One of Coco's most horrific stories is from when she was 14 years old and she says she got pregnant by one of her abusers. Oh,
But when my stepfather found out, he took me to a very, very dark place with another really deal man waiting for me inside a scary room. This, again, is the clone Coco reading her Facebook messages. They chained me up and with all the violence you can imagine, they took my second heart out of me. They took God's gift away from me. They hurt me so badly with knives and their evil hands. They took it away. They murdered my child.
Quite simply, that could not have happened. Sandra wasn't living with her mother at the time, and any interaction with her family was monitored by the German Youth Authority. No matter how many times we prove that the details of Coco's story are lies, we still haven't actually proven that she was never sex trafficked, and we probably never will. It's almost impossible to prove a negative.
But we can't help but feel that there must be something going on here. We heard this over and over and over again from almost every person we interviewed. Deep down inside of my heart, I do believe something happened to her. Clearly, something horrible happened. Something definitely got to her. Something must have happened if a normal person doesn't act the way that she did or does. Do I believe, going only by what I can imagine seeing this, having a psych degree, seeing how completely messed up she is? Yes.
This is Believable, the Cocoa Birthman story. Hey listeners, let's take a break from the Cocoaverse for just a second. This investigation has caused many late nights.
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Figuring out what, if anything, actually happened to Coco Berthman has not been easy. Privacy laws are incredibly strict in Germany. That's part of why it's been so hard to get to the bottom of all of this. We've tried social workers and teachers and therapists, and none of them are allowed to talk. We've had a hard time getting contact information for people, like the cousin that she lived with in Hanover, or for Magdalena, Coco's older sister.
For some reason, Renata did not want to help us get in touch with either of her other children, Magda or Mike, which frankly I found suspicious. These were probably the only two other people who would have had first-hand knowledge of what was going on in Coco's childhood home. To me, this seemed obvious. Renata should be begging us to talk to them.
I pressed her on the importance of reaching her children, but she said the whole ordeal had left everyone estranged. And instead, she put me in contact with a friend who, frankly, did not know much. And again, master manipulator theory? If Renata really is the person her daughter says she is, it's not completely out of the question that she could convince someone to lie for her.
So I spent a lot of time in Germany searching for just one person who's not connected to Renata who could tell us what Sandra was like as a child. And finally, I found someone. I sent a text to producer Karen Given right away. It was noon in Germany, which means it was 6 a.m. in Boston where Karen lives. I really wanted to call her, but I exercised some self-control. We got something amazing. Ooh, hello.
What did you find? Yeah, we made AI versions of our voices, and that's what's reading our text messages. And I have to say, the AI is really good. It even captured my sinus infection. It's too complicated, but it's background from a very well-knowledged source. Call when the sun is up, LOL.
Karen and I debriefed a bit later on the phone. So this is us for real. All right. So you can't tell me where you found this person or how you found this person, but tell me what this person's reaction was.
You know the nature of my work. You know privacy laws in Germany.
Stephanie could get into a lot of trouble for talking to me, which is why we're being so careful not to say anything that would give you a clue about who she is. And then she started telling me the story. She said, when you reached out,
I got goosebumps like I've never gotten before from my toes all the way to the tips of my fingernails. And then she showed me her arm. She like reached her arm out and she had goosebumps and they were prominent goosebumps. Wow. And she said, and let me just tell you, I can't tell you very much, but I was very, very busy for one and a half years.
Eventually, we agreed to go on background, which is a journalistic term that means I can tell you what was said, but I can't tell you where I got it. What I can tell you is that Stephanie works with troubled youth. She worked with Sondra and she kept detailed notes on her case, but she really did not need them to remember what happened. I was like leaning on this chair and she just stopped like Miss said, she goes, this is so crazy.
I can remember all of this so clearly, even though it was 15 years ago. I can picture her. She sat right there in that chair. I can remember her sitting there talking to me. Stephanie told me that after I reached out to her the first time, she Googled Coco Berthman, and she saw some of the same videos that we have seen, some of the same things that you would see if you Googled her today.
And there was one thing that really bothered Stephanie. Coco often says that nobody saw her abuse, that it was hidden in plain sight, and that no one helped her or took action. But Stephanie did take action.
And the most important thing that Stephanie told me was why, why she took action. The Coco that we know today, she is very blunt, very descriptive about her past. But Stephanie says that Sandra never told her that something was wrong in her home. It wasn't overt, but it was definitely obvious.
She said, well, you know, some kids get really, really quiet. Some kids start talking a lot. Some kids start making stories up that make no sense.
Some kids stop eating. Some kids eat as much as they can possibly eat. Some kids stop showering so that they are not attractive, not appealing. She said in this particular case, one of the things that made her really suspicious was that like clockwork, when the weekend was coming or when the services that she was providing would no longer be available, Sandra would just start to freak out. Whether it was like fainting or just hysterics, she would
like clockwork every Friday afternoon, she would have a meltdown. Sandra never told her anything specific, which is so opposite of every other interaction that she's ever had with anybody. Completely. She's very specific. Yeah, very detailed. Detail after detail after detail. Yeah. It was so different from everything else we've heard. It felt really important. Yeah, part of it is definitely the age, right? So...
Knowing what we know about her, it's easy to imagine that her at 18, 19, 22, 23 is making up stories. But it's really hard to imagine a 12-year-old making up
this kind of behavior, like not even making up a story, but knowing what behavior you have to show for people to think that that's what's happened to you. She never came out and said anything because this person would be a mandated reporter, would have had to call the police.
She started working with nonprofit groups in Stuttgart that work with sexual assault victims, child sexual assault victims. So not only did she suspect that something bad was happening to her, she suspected it was sexual.
There's something that strikes me about Stephanie's story. On the one hand, I'm even more convinced that something happened to Coco. But it's becoming even harder to believe Coco's story. That she was covered in bruises. That she was kept severely malnourished so that she could appear to be younger than she was. Stephanie is someone who is trained to see the physical signs of abuse in children. And she was actively looking for them in young Sandra.
If Sandra had been covered in bruises or severely malnourished, Stephanie would have seen it. And she most definitely would have done something about it.
But I hadn't quite finished telling Karen everything that I had learned from Stephanie. The person she suspected, she knew his name. And his name was Gregor. This was not the first time that we heard the name Gregor. In fact, Gregor is the part of the Coco Berthman story that I have always felt was the most believable.
I thought this especially after I read a document that Coco called the draft chapter of her book. It's one of her early writings. And while there's no mention of sex trafficking in this book chapter, Coco does talk a lot about Gregor.
As a reminder, that's the AI clone reading Coco's actual words. I was the happiest little girl in the world.
For the first time in my life, there was somebody who paid attention, who loved me. I suddenly had a dad. This person who Coco was talking about, this is Gregor. Coco sometimes calls him her stepfather, but he and Renata were never married. He even listened to my cheesy music with me and sang along. It was the best time ever. February 2004 was when he stole the light inside of me for the first time. He did horrible things to me and I was so scared. When he was done, he terrified me and I didn't say a word to anybody."
Renata knew about this allegation. She says the first time she heard it was in the fall of 2008, six months after Coco had run away to Hanover. She says one day the police knocked on her door. I had no words. By that time, Renata and Gregor had broken up and he had moved out.
They did not really search my house, they just interrogated us. Me, Mike and his girlfriend at that time. And on top of that, I was at the police station for a few hours. That's where I said, if I had known anything, I would have killed the man.
And the officer told me to be careful what I'm saying, otherwise she might have to put handcuffs on me. Apparently they searched his computer and the whole apartment for any kind of proof. Maybe pictures of naked kids or something? I don't know. Do you think it's possible that Sandra really was sexually abused by that boyfriend? Up until today, I don't know.
I noticed a few things that I still think about today. For example, one day we were in the kitchen and he looks at Sandra, she was a young girl then, and he said to her, your breasts are growing. I went ballistic and asked him what's wrong with him. How can he say something like that to a teenage girl? You don't do that. I still remember the corner he was in when he said it, and as if he said that just yesterday.
And Renata says that during this time, Gregor was not working. He was injured. And so he was often home alone with Sandra. Up until today, I tell myself something must have happened. But I don't know what, and I will never find out. After Sandra ran away in May of 2008, she never again returned to her mother's custody. She did live at her mom's house briefly in the fall of 2009, but it was a short stay. And
And that's when she made her infamous middle-of-the-night escape while listening to Celine Dion's Taking Chances. And that story, by the way, is mostly true. Sandra really did run away again, this time in the middle of the night. And she really did take a train across Germany to check herself into a clinic that treats children who have had traumatic experiences. But what Coco later refuses to admit is that after she graduated from the German equivalent of high school, she and her mom reconciled.
They developed a relationship again. And like all of Coco's relationships, it was all-consuming. Everyone called me a helicopter mom. And that's why I don't understand how my child can do this to me. And not only to me, but the whole family. My children are not talking with each other. To them, I'm a terrible mother because I was always there only for Sandra. I spent 70% of my time related to Sandra.
Renata says she and Sandra never really talked about the allegations against Gregor, except one time, when Sandra was living in Las Vegas. This is around the time she was sending all those Facebook messages to that LDS church member. She told me that she was always afraid I would not believe her. And whatever I believed at that time, I told her, yes, I do believe you. Always. I didn't want to bring her down even more and add to her pain.
Renata shared all of the WhatsApp messages between her and her daughter from this time. And it's probably not going to come as much of a surprise, but it's intense. It was Kirsteen's job to sort through it all. There were days where they had 6,100 per day and they were referring to things that they were doing on Facebook or in other groups and look at this and that. And I'm like, what?
What are these people doing? In 2017, when Coco took au pair classes in Salt Lake City, she sent her mother photos and also what appears to be a video of the Tabernacle Choir in rehearsal.
And Renata often replied with voice messages, tons and tons of voice messages. Sometimes it was like just three seconds, five seconds or something. Like Renata from her car driving home saying, I'll be home in 20 minutes, then we can talk. Inhalt Colin, nicht so wie du international. Weiss das LOL. Ha, mach ich. Sandra, du wirst gerade bei Renata. Ich weiß nicht, ob das geht. Okay, hab dich lieb.
We asked Kirsteen to pay special attention to the day when Coco said that she and her mother had been in a big fight, and the day that she said that she cut off contact for good.
But there was nothing. Nothing out of the ordinary happened between Renata and her daughter on those days. There were so many messages. It took Kirstein days to go through all of them. There were like two or three times where it was a drama. Like, oh my God, oh my God, this is happening, this is happening. And it's like the worst thing in the world that could have happened. And not even one day later, because I looked, is that the same day that now they're talking about whatever, buying bathing suits or something? It's not.
It's not like, oh my God, I'm still so distraught because this happened. No, it's like, it was the biggest drama and I was getting anxious just reading it. And then it's like, whatever. It's exactly the same in her messages with Emily and all of these people that she's going back and forth with. That's producer Karen Given again. Something horrific happens, like...
she's raped by a stranger in the desert. And then the next morning, look at this, Celine Dion. Yeah, it's very strange.
The last time Coco Berthman sent a message to her mother was August 28th, 2017. It was right around the time she started disclosing her story of abuse to members of the LDS ward in Hanover. She sent Renata a text over WhatsApp. It's in German, but we're going to have the AI read the English translation. Hi, I won't be home the next days.
Renata responded, "'That again.'"
Renata showed me that text while I sat in her living room one day in March. We were looking at pictures of a very fat and very cute baby Sandra. Oh, she will not like that one. It's very adorable though.
Coco had always said that there were no photos of her as a baby. She said it was proof that her mother had once abandoned her at an orphanage in Bulgaria. But her mother has dozens of photos of Coco, and of Mike, and of Magdalena. There are no photos of Anna, the sister who Coco says was two years older than her. But, you know, the master manipulator theory here again? Renata could have gone through all of her photo albums before we arrived and removed any evidence of a third daughter.
Let me be clear. At this point, I really don't believe that Renata murdered anyone. I'm not trying to make light of the situation. I really do just want to remind myself that it's easy to assume that Renata is a victim of Coco Berthman. I don't see any evidence that she's trafficked her children or murdered Anna and then erased proof of it. But I am not just going to accept everything that Renata says about Sandra's childhood as truth either.
Of course, I do suspect that she's telling us a version of the story that makes her look good. That's what people do.
I also think it's plausible that Renata had a relationship with a man who abused Sandra. And I'm not yet sure how much Renata really knew about that, because she's still being kind of shady with us at times. I'm sitting on her living room rug. It's white and fluffy, the kind of rug I could never have because my kids would destroy it. I'm admiring its cleanliness, and I'm nervously pulling at the long faux fur piles. I'm
I'm nervous because we've been here for a few hours now, eating Polish danishes and talking and searching through old boxes and photo albums. But I've been saving one last question until the end.
We've been asking Renata to help us find Gregor. We've been asking for months, but she always says no. But now, sitting on her floor, I'm hoping she'll reconsider. Renata, can we talk about Gregor for a second? Do you know where he is? I explained to Renata that I don't want to do to Gregor what so many people did to her. I don't want to assume that he's guilty without hearing his side of the story. And we go back and forth for a while about this.
I ask her to give us his date of birth. Because in Germany, if you have someone's date of birth, you can petition the registry for their address. Renata listens. But in the end, Renata says she just can't remember it. Okay. Okay, we'll figure it out. But if we're being honest, producer Katerina Felke and I have been trying to figure it out for months. It's super frustrating. These German privacy laws, man, they are no joke.
After we leave Renata's house, we go to the only address we've been able to find for Gregor. It's a business address, and it's in a corporate park behind a locked gate. We flag someone down on their way in, and Katarina asks them about Gregor. So basically the guy we just ran into was like, yeah, yeah, he was here. But I think he left like some time ago. I'm not sure where he is now. But I mean, he remembered him. Which is significant. I mean, the address was not wrong, is not wrong, but...
As we drive away, Katarina gets more and more frustrated. No, I feel like, you know, I've spent so many hours looking for that guy and he just doesn't show up. And then you find like a tiny bit and he's not here anymore. So he moved to another place, but no one knows where dad is. No one knows where he's to be found. It's frustrating. Yeah, totally.
Actually, this whole entire story is frustrating. As soon as you think you have Coco pegged as a liar, something pops up that's true. And as soon as you think she's telling the truth, then you're slapped in the face with another outrageous lie.
And just when I was feeling like Renata must be hiding something, Katarina made a breakthrough. She got a working phone number for Coco's brother Mike, and she got him on the phone. He was about to hang up, but I thought this might happen, so I had given her three questions, and I said, "If he says he won't talk, just beg him to answer these."
He was like, "No." It was just like plain saying, "No, that's not true." No. Never existed. He was like, "This is such a sensitive thing." She lied about so many things. So my gut feeling tells me it's not true.
But at the same time, I don't want to say it's impossible. Because there are things that just can happen in secret and I was like a little kid back then. So how would I know?
This thing about Gregor feels really significant. If Coco really was groomed or abused by her mother's partner, that could explain so much about all of her behavior since then. Of course, it would not excuse the lies she's telling, but we thought it might help to explain them. And I really hate to tell you this, but I think it's really important that we talk about this.
but I left Germany without finding Gregor. So while we try to find another way to reach him, we're going to turn our attention back to what was happening in Utah in 2019. Because the more well-known Coco Berthman became, the more potential she had to actually do some good. But that's not what happened. That's horrifying. Why is she wearing a wedding dress? It's absurd. That's next time on Believable, the Coco Berthman story.
Believable, The Cocoa Birthman Story is a Dear Media original series. It's reported and written by me, Sarah Ganim, and our showrunner, Karen Given. Additional reporting was done by journalists Kerstin Silm in Los Angeles and Katarina Felke in Berlin.
The managing producer is Rosalie Atkinson on behalf of Dear Media. Technical production is by Amanda Vandekar. Original music was composed by Pete Redman. Mixing and mastering, editing and sound design is done by Karen Given. Story editing is by Nadia Hamdan. Fact-checking by Haley Milliken. A special thanks to Aseel Kibbe.
Consulting producers are Simpatico Media and Infinity Rising. Executive producers are Jocelyn Falk and Paige Port for Dear Media. And finally, we know this podcast hits on a lot of difficult topics. If you or someone you know is struggling, see our show notes for a list of resources.