Episode 3: Unforced Errors
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We're going to be using an AI clone of Coco's voice to read her social media posts and her text messages. But as always, we will remind you when we do. And a warning. This episode includes mention of some pretty tough stuff, including suicide, rape, and sexual violence against children. Listen with care. So, like, take me back to the first meeting you had with Dear Media. Oh, my God. Yeah.

It's the end of a long reporting day. Producer Karen Given and I are reflecting on how far this investigation has come, and she has turned the tables on me. I'm being interviewed. Okay, so I put my notes in an email. Do you want me to read it verbatim? Sure.

Side note, I had the most annoyingly persistent sinus infection for like two months this spring. So sometimes you're going to hear that in my voice. Like now. I wrote, Hi ladies. First, let me say that you've already done a lot of great digging on this.

Before I joined this project, Dear Media sent me a 22-page packet with all the basics of the Coco Berthman story. Things like how she claimed to have been sex trafficked for the first 15 years of her life, how she escaped only to be abused again by a therapist who sometimes locked her in a basement. I wrote an email with my first reactions. Karen had not seen it before, so I read it to her.

The more I read, the more skeptical I was of her story. Here are some reasons why. It changed a lot, and a lot is in all caps, but mostly these were my two major red flags. The first red flag was something that Coco repeats over and over again almost every time she tells the story.

I found this really hard to believe. And I told Dear Media that in my initial email, which I'm now reading back seven months later.

Not to get too graphic here, but the physical toll of being raped 10 times per day, especially on a child, would be severe. I cannot imagine that her parents could have hidden that in plain sight, as she asserts. Number two. The timeline of her life in Germany seems outrageous, to be honest. I mean, to escape 15 years of sex trafficking only to be locked in a basement by a therapist...

It sounded absolutely terrible, but also really suspicious. It just doesn't line up with what we know to be true about these kinds of circumstances. I mean, it certainly is true that women who are assaulted once are more likely to be assaulted again, that those kinds of statistics are real. But for something so dramatic and terrible to happen to her...

Over and over and over again, just didn't, from the beginning, it felt like a really big red flag to me. On the other hand, and this is really important, it's extremely rare for someone to lie about this kind of thing. So I have worked on hundreds and hundreds of sexual assault and commercial sexual exploitation and trafficking cases. And I have almost never, ever come across somebody who made it up.

That's Valiant Richie. That's a great name. I love it. Thank you. You can also call me Val. Most people call me Val. Val worked for the OSCE, the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe. And when we spoke to him, it was his job to help the OSCE's 57 member nations do a better job of combating trafficking.

Val knows about Coco's story because Coco actually spoke at one of his conferences. She was invited because her story has a lot of believability, like the idea that she was trafficked by her own mother. We see a lot of familial trafficking, both in the United States and in Europe. I mean, everywhere. This is real, real common.

Is it common that it occurs out of a household? Harder to say. I've probably seen less of that, but it certainly wouldn't surprise me. And then there's the small star tattoo on Coco's ring finger.

She says it was put there by her traffickers to identify who she belonged to. This is such a massive problem that when I was in the United States and working on this issue, we were actually contacting tattoo parlors to see if they would give pro bono tattoo removal. And the idea that survivors don't usually come forward with their whole story at first or that they get details wrong, Val says that's common too.

You have to get comfortable with the fact that people will share things in phases and they will conflict and they will say things differently. But that doesn't mean it didn't happen. That doesn't mean that it's not possible that somebody could make something up. That's absolutely possible. But I have very, very rarely seen that.

And actually, the reason people are questioning Coco's story, I don't think it's because of her claims about being sex trafficked. After months of investigating, I've come to the conclusion that it was actually the smaller things, for lack of a better term, the silly lies that she told. That's what led us to wonder if Coco is telling the truth. ♪

I figured this out by talking to people like Emi, a survivor herself who followed Coco on Instagram and was confused by the dancing videos that Coco would post. "This is not her, like this is clearly not her, but like why is she sharing it as it is?" And Matthew Kennedy, who dated Coco for a while. He was suspicious about the drawings that she posted on social media.

So I did a reverse image search, found the artist that actually drew them. Or Amanda Frisbee, who was Coco's friend. One time she tagged me in this video that showed someone's hands playing the piano and singing. And I said, is that you singing? It doesn't sound like you. And she immediately deleted the post. Didn't say a word.

Coco deleted a lot of her posts over the years, but you can still find some of these videos of Coco singing, and none of them sound anything like her. Like this one on her YouTube. It's filmed in black and white. There's a large microphone in the foreground, and Coco is singing a Celine Dion song. Or at least, she seems to be singing a Celine Dion song. ♪ I would be lying if I said I'm fine ♪

I'm going to be frank. Things like this really get Karen and I worked up because we're trying to answer a very important question. Was Coco Berthman actually trafficked by her mother? It's a question that a lot of people have just stopped bothering to ask. Karen and I talk about this a lot.

videos of her singing Celine Dion songs, like who cares? Here we are like the last two people who are trying to figure out if there's any truth in her story when everyone else just wants to believe that everything is made up. It's just, it's so frustrating. There's no reason to lie about that stuff. And every time she does, it makes it more difficult for us to believe the important things. If she had just been more honest and truthful about herself, she'd probably still be an advocate.

You know, and instead, like, she brought herself down with these, like, unforced errors. And not all of them were just silly things, like pretending to sing a Celine Dion song. In fact, at least one of them was a matter of life and death. I'm Sarah Ganim, and this is Believable, the Coco Berthman Story. Episode 3, Unforced Errors.

Becky McIntosh learned the hard way that sometimes Coco Berthman lies. Coco went to live with Becky on July 5th of 2019, after Becky saw Coco share her story on social media. And was just so intrigued by this young woman

Beautiful girl that was being so courageous. Coco was a recent convert to the LDS church, and Becky says that was part of what drew the two of them together. They became Facebook friends, and then quite quickly they met for lunch. And during that very first meeting, Coco told Becky that she was looking for a new place to live. I said, well, we've taken in many people into our home over the years, and some have stayed months and some have stayed years. And we are currently empty nesters.

and you're welcome to move in while you find a place. So she did. One day, Becky and Coco were sitting in the family room. All of a sudden, she jumps up, she's looking at her phone, and...

She says, oh my goodness, I've been invited to have lunch with the prophet. The prophet is the head of the Latter-day Saints. He's considered to be the only person on earth to get revelations from God that are meant to guide the entire church. This is really a big deal. Coco tells Becky that she's allowed to bring two guests to meet the prophet, and she invites Becky and her husband, Scott. She would text me and say, oh my goodness, can you believe we're going to have lunch with the prophet? And what are you going to wear?

The day of the lunch, Scott wears a suit to work. He's in the construction business, so that's a little odd attire for him. But just 10 minutes before Becky is planning to leave to pick up her husband, she gets a text message from Coco. Just got off the phone. That's an AI clone of Coco's voice reading from the messages she sent that day. The lunch today needs to be postponed. I knew this was too good to be true. You know, the prophet's a busy man. Hmm.

And we have to postpone the lunch.

Even now, looking back, there's still a part of her that can't let go of that dream that she was going to get to meet the prophet. Like, I really thought, no, this is true. Like, this has to be true. Why would she be lying about this? But the thing is, there were a lot of things that Coco lied about when she was living with Becky. That first week when she moved in, her mother died. Not true. And then two days later, her brother died. Not true. And she cried for hours.

One time, Coco wasn't feeling well, so she laid down in the backseat of Becky's car. And then she started having what appeared to be a seizure. She started to fall off the seat because she's having this grand mal seizure. And then she puts her hand down and catches herself and pushes herself back out of the seat. And I thought...

Okay, this is not real. Coco fainted twice before she even moved in with Becky. She fainted a lot, actually. And Becky noticed that every time when she was about to wake back up, the same thing would happen.

Her eyes would open and her eyes would kind of flip back and she'd flutter her eyes. But a couple of months after Coco moved in, they were talking about silly things that people can do. Some people, you know, wiggle their nose or twitch their ears or whatever, you know. And she said, oh, and I can do this. And she did that eye thing. Becky thought, this is what Coco does when she faints. I didn't call her out on it. I just said, oh, okay.

Becky was not naive. She raised seven kids. She has 16 grandchildren with another one on the way. So she knew that Coco was lying, but she thought she understood the reason for the lies. Because of what she had been through as a child, those horrific things and witnessed a murder, a forced abortion, being raped up to 50, five zero times a day, she claimed it

It would be impossible to be normal and act normal. So a lot of these things were just put aside. Like, she lies because of this. And we just need to keep loving her and creating that safe space for her to feel safe to heal. But now looking back, Becky sees it as something else. I think the whole thing was a manipulation. That everything she did and said was

Coco didn't wait until she moved in with Becky to start the manipulation. It began while Coco was living with another LDS church member, a mom named Annette Colert.

Like Becky, Annette regularly let people stay in her home when they needed to get back on their feet or make a transition in life. People are always coming and going. We talked to Annette back in September. We take whoever needs a place to stay, let us know and we have a bed.

Coco was staying in a room in Annette's basement. And on the third floor, the Colerts were housing another person, a man named Tony. He was fighting cancer and needed a place to live while undergoing chemotherapy. See, before that, Coco was like the main attention getter at the house.

But then once Tony moved in, we're like, oh my gosh, Tony has six months to live. We've got to do all this fun stuff for Tony. We all went to Disneyland, but Coco couldn't go that weekend because she was speaking somewhere. So we just arranged a lot of fun things for Tony. And I think she just felt like she wasn't getting the attention anymore.

And so with the Colerts focused more on Tony, Coco turned to Becky. Nights were really, really difficult for her because that's when she would be trafficked. And so she had a lot of anxiety at night and she would text me a lot for reassurance that she was safe and that she should live, that her life was of value. One night, Becky and Coco were texting.

Right now it feels like God is hating me so much and he wants nothing more than for me to just disappear. That's the AI clone Coco reading her exact words.

I feel like the worst and most unlovable person on this earth. Becky and Annette did not know each other. They had never met. But that night, Becky started to get really worried about Coco. I can't bear it any longer. I just can't. It's too much. Becky was convinced that Coco was considering suicide. She wanted to find somebody who could intervene. So she searched on Facebook and found Annette.

And I didn't know if she was going to see it. This was late. Like, is she asleep? Is she going to see this? But I just texted her and said, I'm chatting with Coco. She is extremely suicidal. And immediately she said, you know, this happens a lot. She said, no, no, go down and check on her and just make sure.

And so I go down and it's midnight. And I knock on her door and I said, Coco, I have this lady called me, this Becky McIntosh, and says that you're telling her that you're going to kill yourself. And she said, oh, no, no, I was talking about someone else. I wasn't talking about me trying to kill myself. I was talking about someone else trying to kill themselves. So I just called Becky back and said, she's fine. She said she's talking about someone else. I'm kind of thinking, wow, she's really insensitive because Coco, she's this...

survivor. Like, she's been through so much. Annette just came in. Coco was not happy. I should have not told you anything. I'm not suicidal. Please don't text my host family. I just lost big trust.

A little over a week later, Coco moved out of Annette's house and she moved in with Becky. And that's when the manipulation really ramped up. The first few weeks, like every night, she'd ask me to come and sleep in her room. Coco told Becky that she didn't trust herself to be alone. She's in her bed under the covers and I am on top of the covers, not even in my pajamas.

And while Becky was waiting for Coco to fall asleep, the floodgates would open. Oftentimes she'd say, you're the first person that I've ever shared this with. One horrifying story after another, like her sister's murder. She would say, and I can still smell the blood. And the time her mother locked a dozen kids in a basement in Eastern Europe and then forced Coco to watch as they were all killed.

A gun being put up to each one of their heads and shooting them. Or the time she was forced to kill her younger brother by holding a pillow over his face. And she had to hold it down until he stopped moving. And I would think, oh my gosh, what am I to do with this? How do therapists function when they hear these things?

And what scared Becky the most was the possibility that she would fall asleep lying there next to Coco. What if she wakes up and she forgets that it's me that's here to keep her safe and she thinks that I'm one of the predators and chokes me or puts a pillow over my face. By the time she made it back to her own room, Becky was often too terrified to get any sleep herself. And often in the mornings I would wonder, like,

Is she alive? Like, did she take her life? It was exhausting. Do you recognize that as a form of abuse? I didn't there. But like when you say that, like, yeah, it's emotional abuse and manipulation. Like she never threatened, like verbally threatened me. But I felt threatened from the stories that she would share with me. It was scary.

I would witness how her personalities would change at night, and she would go from so sweet to all of a sudden just stern and abrupt. She would just blow up and be angry at just crazy little things. So at night, when my husband was at home, so I would lock the door, and then I had this big mirror that I would pull over in front of the door, and oftentimes I would cry in my room and think, oh my gosh, I feel like I'm a prisoner here.

But once the sun would rise and Coco would check her social media feeds, everything seemed to change. She loved the growth that she was experiencing, the people that were following her. She felt like she could be an influence for good. She loved that she was bringing hope to people. She loved people say you're such an inspiration person.

And she would write these big, long, beautiful posts. This is AI Coco reading an Instagram post from around this time. Here is one of the biggest lessons I have learned within the last 10 years. Freedom is a choice. You can choose to be handcuffed by your fears, numbed by the unknown, and tortured by unfulfilled dreams. Or you can go to your fears, sit with them, stare at them. Your fears are your friends.

Your fears are your friends. That part was in all caps. She loved to read the comments and she'd gain 100 plus followers a day. And she kept track of those numbers. I was just constantly trying to build her up and feed her self-esteem and self-confidence and how needed and loved she was and how talented she was and how her

Gifts and talents and ability to influence people could be used for so much good. Coco had been public with her story for a while now, but her posts were starting to get attention from a very important group of people, the community of survivors.

I was raped, sexually abused since I was five years old, then again at nine, then from 16 to 25. So this is a very personal matter for me. That's Somi Ali. She's a Bollywood actress turned advocate. Somi started the nonprofit No More Tears. It gives survivors of sexual and domestic abuse the things that they need to restart their lives.

When I get a case, I work with them for three months from immigration attorney, family law attorney, driving school job, English lessons, everything under the sun. Somi started noticing Coco Berthman's posts.

Everything I extrapolated about Coco was from her Instagram. She was posting everything about human trafficking. She was posting statistics that were very accurate because I checked them. Somi sent Coco a text asking her to be the main speaker for the No More Tears annual fundraising gala. We need a guest speaker. She's a very good speaker. She's knowledgeable. She's

And allegedly, the House family had vetted her. The fundraiser was held at a Miami ballroom. Think modern, flashy, lots of sunlight. Becky went along because Coco said she was afraid to travel by herself. It was very, very fancy.

Everybody very dressed up. The fashion gave very Florida vibes. I can say this because I'm from there. Brightly colored dresses, funky prints, strappy sandals, a visual contrast to the rather dark topic at the center of the event. There were name tags at each table. The program also had your name on it and she was loving it.

She was identified in that program as a human trafficking rescue specialist. Did that strike you as odd at the time? Yeah, it did. There was parts of me that would question, but like, no, this has to be real. Yeah.

Of course they vetted her. In case you missed that, Somi was under the impression that Becky had vetted Coco. Becky was sure that Somi had done it. But in truth, nobody had vetted Coco's story. Even with all the Miami glitz and glamour, Coco, as she often did, stood out.

She was definitely very attractive, you know, a petite, blonde-headed girl. I believe she was wearing red that day. That's Melissa McCune. She works alongside Somi. I don't want to say she was showy, but, you know, you definitely noticed her in her room.

She was really nervous. And that was a lot of people. It was probably her biggest audience. But Melissa did not notice Coco's nerves. She noticed something else about the way that she spoke. Very theatrical in the detail. Graphic in the detail. Look, I can tell you there was a lot of tears. My husband was crying because of just the story that was told. You know, basically your own mother trafficking you.

is just unfathomable. There were several people there that wanted her on their podcast. So she made a lot of connections there at that event to further sharing her story. This is Believable, the Coco Berthman story. Okay, let's talk about Tony. So my very first lunch with Coco...

She talked about Tony. Tony, if you remember, is the man with cancer who was staying on the third floor of the Colerts' home while Coco lived in the basement. In Annette Colert's version of the story, Coco was upset because Tony was getting all of the attention.

And then shortly after she moved in with us, she told me that Tony had just been put on hospice. Hospice. That usually means that someone has less than six months to live. And so I would ask her quite frequently, how's Tony doing? And every time I asked her, she would say, oh, I was just talking to him. He's such an inspiration. Here he is dying, but he is...

And then one weekend in October, Becky and her husband were driving to L.A. to attend a charity event, and they decided to take Coco along. We were on the road maybe an hour, hour and a half, when she looks at her phone and says, Oh, I just got a text from the Colerts, and Tony's dying.

And she said, I'm so glad I talked to him last night. Like, we had such a good conversation. And then on the way home from the event... Again, we were on the road maybe an hour, hour and a half. And she says, oh my gosh, Tony died. Tony just died. Oh, Coco, we are so, so sorry.

Coco lays down on the middle seat of Becky's car. She puts her earbuds in and pulls a blanket over her head. She's grieving. She's feeling sad. So Becky decides to give Coco some space. But a few minutes later, Becky's phone starts to ping with text messages from her daughter and from other people who know Coco. And they're all asking Becky the same thing. How can you be so cruel? Coco is grieving the death of her friend and you're just ignoring her?

And I just thought, oh my goodness, okay, this is what she does.

Becky turns around to see if Coco wants to talk, but she appears to be asleep. So I take a picture of her and I send it to the people who are messaging me and I said, look, she's got a blanket pulled up and her eyes are closed. I'm not ignoring her. She's asleep. But they keep messaging. That's really weird because she's texting me right now. Becky decides to just let it go. Coco is upset and she's creating drama. That's what Coco does.

And soon, Coco posts a long message to Facebook talking about her grief. Today, I lost one of my closest friends. He lost his life. He fought hard to battle the illness. He asked me a long time ago to not share his name or specifics of what he suffered from. I want to respect his wish. Yep, that's the AI clone Coco reading again. I miss you more than I could put into words. I want you to know this. And

And I want everyone to know how special you are. I know you are fighting from the other side of the veil now. Thank you for teaching me what a true friend really is. And she just had hundreds of hundreds of comments under there. People just, you know, sharing their support to her. Coco told Becky about the funeral, but she said she didn't go because funerals make her nervous. And then a couple of days later,

She sends a text that says, oh my gosh, I read the text wrong. It's not Tony who died. It's his friend from the treatment who died. I can't believe how stupid I am.

And I thought, this is making no sense, no sense at all. I was just so confused. And so that's when I reached out to Annette again. And she wrote back and she said, Tony does have cancer, but he's doing well. He is not on hospice, never has been on hospice. He doesn't have a friend who died of cancer. He doesn't even have a friend that has cancer. And he says he hasn't talked to Coco since the day she moved out.

And I just went, oh my goodness. This is so in line with the game she plays every day, but how do you call her out? How do you express that to people when she has such a big following? Why would they believe me?

Becky and her husband decide it is time to ask Coco to move out. They pick a day when Scott will be home, the Saturday after Thanksgiving. But it was the Monday before Thanksgiving and my husband was away. She came in and asked if she could talk to me.

I had started to set up my Christmas tree. So I came into the room to talk to Coco and she said, well, I told my therapist that I can feel that there's kind of a wall that's forming between us. And I'm thinking, yes, because I've learned to set healthy boundaries. She said I had told him that I was feeling that it was time that I needed to move out. I said, we're feeling that same thing.

And I said, I've unraveled some lies. And she immediately like, what lies? Her eyes went really big. What lies? And I said, well, the most recent was Tony. And she said, oh, I thought I cleared that up. It was his friend that died. Would you like to see the text? And she starts scrolling through her phone like she's going to find the text. I said, Coco, you lied. And you pulled a lot of people into that.

And then she just said, I'm so sorry. I did. I am so, so sorry. And she said, what other lies? And I said, well, I says, no. I said, you tell me. You come clean to me. Because I know that there's many things that you've lied about that I want you to share because you're sincere in wanting to come clean. She says, OK, I will. And I wish I had let her just share to see what she had shared. But I said, no, wait.

Will you wait till Scott gets home so that you can share with both of us? And she said, yes, yes, I will do that. And then she stood up and she gave me a hug and went upstairs. And I thought, wow, OK. And about an hour later, she comes downstairs and she's holding up our house key. And she said, here's your key. I'm going to put it right here on the table so I don't forget to give it to you tomorrow.

Coco moved out the next morning, and so Becky never got another opportunity to confront her about all the other lies, or to ask her the burning question that Becky and Scott were dying to know. The question we're all dying to know. Were all these small lies part of a big lie? Did your mother actually sell you for sex, murder your sister, and a dozen other children too? Becky never got the chance to ask. The

The opportunity walked out the door the day that Coco moved out. What do you feel like she took from you? Like, was it just your attention or was it something more? Trust. And I don't want to be a person that doesn't trust others, trust and believe. But there's a part of me now that is hesitant to be so quick to trust somebody and what they share. She just played so much on my kindness and compassion and empathy. Just...

When she left that day, like, I just, I just cried. Like, I just let it out. Like, it was just such a cry of joy, like relief, because it was so hard. I find myself thinking about this interview a lot. What would have happened if Becky had just let Coco talk that night instead of asking her to wait for Scott to come home?

What would we have learned? Because right now, it feels like we're unsure of everything. Karen is convinced that she found the moment that Coco started telling people her sex trafficking story. It was in 2017, in a Facebook message to Emily, the woman who Coco called her "spiritual mom." And it seemed to be a direct response to Emily telling Coco about a brave group of sex trafficking survivors.

But some of our recent reporting made me start to question whether that was actually Coco's first disclosure. And then we met Sarah. How shocked were you today? Oh my God. I think, didn't I send a text to you that said, oh shit? You did. And I wrote back huge at the exact same moment in all caps. I thought I had figured it out. I thought I had figured out the source of the story.

So can you just tell me, as much as you are comfortable, who you are, where you live, like something that we can use to kind of get to know you? Yeah. My name's Sarah. I'm 27 years old. I'm from Hanover. I went to school with Coco. Sarah is an architect. She lives with her husband. They were already dating back in high school. And like a lot of people who we talked to for this podcast, Sarah asked that we not use her last name.

But we were able to confirm that, yes, she did go to school with Coco. They met in 2012. Coco was two grades behind Sarah.

One day, very soon after they met, Coco invited Sarah over to her apartment. She was living all by herself, only with another roommate. So that was kind of odd for me because I was used to teenagers living with their parents. Sarah says Coco told her that she wasn't allowed to see any of the other rooms in the house. Maybe she could go into the bathroom, if absolutely necessary. And she says that Coco's room was pretty much what you would expect of a teenage student.

totally normal aside from the fact that she was in high school and living alone. That's why I asked her why she doesn't live with her parents and then she pretty much told me the whole story kind of.

I have so many questions. So it seems that Coco is actually older than you, but you're saying that she was grades younger. Did you understand why? No, she didn't tell me that. And I didn't realize it at the moment. She was talking like other people my age. But sometimes,

But something was off. Even in Coco's bedroom, Sarah was told that she couldn't go poking around. There's some sensible information you shouldn't see. And then I was like, OK, sorry, I'm not going to have a look. I think she wanted me to ask her something. And then she said, it's about my name.

And I was like, oh, what is with your name? And she said, it's not my real name. And these are the papers that just came that confirmed that Coco is now my official name. And these are the papers for that. So I asked her, why do you have a different name? And she said, because I was being trafficked and nobody is allowed to know my real name.

This is the moment when Karen texted me. Oh, shit. And I replied in caps. Huge. Karen and I chatted about it after we hung up. All this time, we have been under the impression that Coco never told anyone that she was sold for sex before she moved to the U.S. Absolutely new for the timeline for 2012. Yeah. I mean, 2012? Like, what? Not to get super technical, but did she use the word trafficked?

10 years ago, you know. I know. I'm very sorry to ask such a specific question, but it's kind of important to the story. So I'm just trying to figure out. I think she said her mother gave her to friends. That was what she told me. But yeah, she didn't use the word trafficked. Sarah was 16. So unfortunately for us, she didn't ask a lot of follow-up questions.

You know, she didn't have too many friends or I didn't know that she had any other friends. And so I thought, OK, she may feel alone and maybe she's new to the school or something. And she's just finding her place right now. And she really needs someone to talk. And I was fine with that. Sarah says she stayed friends with Coco for about a year until one day they went to a party.

She was annoyed that there were friends of mine at the party as well. And I wanted to catch up with them and talk a bit with them. And she didn't like that at all. And that was pretty much always the case when I wanted to meet other people. She was not jealous. I would say she was just pissed off. It was just strange. And on that night, I was just chatting with them like for 10 minutes. And she was totally...

Soon, Sarah says Coco started texting her. She said someone had put something in her drink, she was at the hospital, and it was all Sarah's fault. This was just the

the final straw. Like, it was always my fault. And he was calling in the middle of the night telling me she wanted to kill herself and if I wouldn't get on my phone, she would do it and I needed to take care of her. And I was 16 years old. And the whole story, all this mental terror, you could say, there was always something going on with her and it was just too much for me. And so I...

cut off the contact and never really talked to her again. I think there's like two camps of people who know Coco. The camp of people who think she lies about trivial things because she was abused and then the camp of people that believe she made up everything. And I'm curious where you fall. So I think I'm in the middle.

So I know she lies a lot, but I'm not a psychologist. I have no idea why she's doing it. There are so many things about her whole life story she can't fake, like the fact that she was living alone at age 16.

I don't want to say that the human traffic story is fake because that's just too much to lie about. Would it be surprising to you to hear that in 2012 she was actually 18? Did you believe she was 16? 18. I don't think I knew that she was 18, no. Would it have been weird, though, that she was in a lower grade and then she was older?

Yes, and that's part of the reason why I won't say that I don't believe her. Something's off there. Pretty much as soon as we hung up with Sarah, Karen and I jumped on a call to debrief. Because, well, this was just so unexpected. I'm so confused. I'm really confused. I was, I don't know how I feel about that phone call. But just yesterday we were like complaining that there wasn't enough mystery in the podcast. And so...

I don't know, we're like back to square one. From the beginning of this project, I have been telling people that allegations like these are difficult to prove, and sometimes even more difficult to disprove. Generally speaking, sex crimes happen behind closed doors, between two people, with no witnesses or very little proof of who is telling the truth.

But most of us agree that when in doubt, we should believe survivors. And for the most part, that's a good thing. As I've said before, the vast majority of people who make accusations like this are telling the truth. And so with that in mind, I know that it's time to start making some really awkward video calls to Germany.

Your daughter tells American media that her mother trafficked her because her mother, you, was trafficked herself in Poland. Is that true? No.

That's next time on Believable, the Cocoa Birthman story.

Believable, the Coco Berthman 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 Kerstine 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. ♪