Episode 7: No Drama Mama
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A Dear Media original podcast. A note before we get started. We are using AI-generated voices in this podcast. And a warning. This episode includes mention of sexual violence against children, of rape, suicide, and disordered eating. Listen with care.

When our composer Pete Redmond first sent us this particular piece of music, I was on a train between Stuttgart and Hanover. It's the same trip that Coco Berthman says she took on November 2nd, 2009 when she was just 15, and in her version of the story, running away from home for the first time. As I sat on the train, listening to the score in my earbuds and looking out over the German countryside, I wondered what it must have been like for Coco to take this journey all on her own.

Here's how she told the story on the Skinny Confidential podcast. During the night, I think it was like three or four in the morning,

I woke up and it felt like somebody was literally behind my back saying, you got to go and you got to go now. Coco really did run away that night. Her mother, Renata Roof, confirms it, or at least she confirms a lot of it. While I'm talking, it's just like being there again, my heart beating so fast. Opened my door quietly, tipped on down the spiral staircase. Did you even have a spiral staircase? I know this sounds silly, but I just want to know.

Kerstin Sillum is translating for me as I talk to Renata over video chat. So, no, they had straight stairs, no spiral staircase. So Coco snuck down the regular staircase. Put in my iPod and put on Celine Dion's Taking Stances song, opened the front door, and I just ran. And I ran as fast as I could. I didn't feel my legs. Only felt the color in my face and the music playing. ♪

For the record, Renata says there was no reason for Coco to escape in the middle of the night. She had permission to leave home that day. She had packed her suitcase and told me she had to go to a friend from school to Bad Urach, which is about 30 kilometers away from Filderstadt.

This is actually Kerstin reading the English translation of Renate's interview. But we used an AI to alter her voice so it's not confusing. She told me the friend has cancer and is in the hospital. No, she said the friend was in the hospital, but that day would be released home for a treatment break. And that she wanted to visit her. And I believed her 100%. But Coco did not go to see a friend. Instead, she went to Hanover.

There I am at age 15, never been traveling alone. And I had to change my train in Frankfurt main station.

If you have ever been in Germany to any train station, especially that one, you know it's madness. It's big, it's chaotic, it's so many people. I've been to a few German train stations before, and if anything, my experience was that Germany was way more organized than other places I'd been. But I'd never actually been to this particular station, so I decided to book my flight through Frankfurt and check it out for myself. Okay, so I've arrived at the Frankfurt train station.

It is a busy train station. I mean, this is a major city. But it's not madness. It's not chaotic. It's a train station.

But then I also thought, I'm an adult living in New York City. I'm not a 15-year-old traveling alone. So I've kind of got to give Coco the benefit of the doubt on this one. When Coco arrived in Hanover, she checked herself into a clinic that treats traumatized children. We've actually seen some of the documentation that appears to be from that hospitalization.

We can't actually verify it because of privacy rules. But seeing that document led us to believe that this next part of Coco's story is not true. I did not say anything about my mother. I only said that I was abused by my stepdad.

Coco had already told authorities that her mother's ex-boyfriend Gregor had abused her. But according to the document from the clinic, she did accuse her mother when she got to that clinic in Hanover. She said that her mom was active in the rapes, or at least that's what the doctor wrote on the form. Renata denies this allegation.

Coco stayed at this clinic for about six months, and after she left, she says she was completely alone, in hiding from her family, working at night to afford to pay her rent while she went to high school during the day. And she was just 16. That's when, in Coco's story, she says she encountered her next abuser, a therapist named Sebastian. ♪

The way Coco tells it, she developed an emotional dependency on Sebastian. She sometimes described it as being in love with him. It's something that she says happens to trauma survivors quite a lot. Very normal. Good therapist, know how to handle that. But this Sebastian character was not a good therapist. To my surprise, when I told him what I'm feeling, he said, oh, I feel the same way. We should stop therapy and start a private contact.

I was over the moon because I was like, oh, there's somebody that cares about me. After just a few weeks, Coco says Sebastian had another idea. He's like, I feel really bad that you're 16, going to high school, working at night, going to school in the morning. Why don't you come move in with me? And you don't have to worry about rent and like the logistics. So Coco says she moved in with him.

Publicly, when she tells this story, she says that she did not ever want a romantic relationship with Sebastian. But sometimes, when she told the story more privately, she would just say that she wasn't ready for a sexual relationship yet, that she was still too traumatized. One night, I was taking a shower. He just walked in and I was shook. I was like, what are you doing? That was the night when he started abusing me for the next two years.

Coco says that Sebastian would lock her in the basement for weeks and months at a time. She says he took her childhood abuse to the next level. But after two years, she says she escaped and told the police what Sebastian had done. Here she is on the podcast Consider Before Consuming. They went into his apartment, found out that he had another apartment with another woman held captive, arrested him, and he was charged not guilty by insanity. So he wasn't convicted? Well, he's in a mental hospital.

These details are really important because with them, we should be able to find proof of Coco's story. If a therapist had been tried and sentenced for kidnapping two women, sexually abusing them, locking them in two separate basements, it would have made the news. There would have been newspaper and TV reports, plus court records. There would have been a lot of evidence to corroborate Coco's story.

But we looked and looked, and we found no such evidence. What we can say for certain is that there was a therapist who treated Coco when she was a teenager, and that therapist did allow Coco to live with them after she was released from the clinic. Coco told several people that she was in love with this therapist and that she had been pressured to have sex with them. But the therapist was not a man named Sebastian.

It was a woman named Caroline. I'm Sarah Gannon, and this is Believable, the Coco Berthman Story. Episode 7, No Drama Mama. ♪♪

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The first time I heard about Caroline Rochman, I was interviewing Coco's mom, Renata, and we were talking about her daughter's escape on November 2nd, 2009.

When Coco didn't return from visiting her friend, Renata called and texted, but she didn't hear anything back. I thought something is wrong. And the same evening I went to the police station and told them she went missing. Renata asked the police to check around Hanover, where the family used to live. And the police called youth facilities in Hanover and it turned out that the youth authorities had taken her into custody.

Or more precisely, Frau Rochman, who was a secret therapist in Hannover I knew nothing about at that time, she brought her to Hannover. Frau Rochman was not exactly a secret. According to the Youth Authority records, Coco had been seeing Caroline Rochman once a week while living in Hanover. But it seemed that their contact did not end.

when Kogo moved back in with her mother in Stuttgart. And there was a youth counselor on the phone with the police and they were both on speakerphone. And the youth counselor said in front of the officer, Frau Hof, you have to urgently intervene with this therapist, Frau Roschmann. Something about her work is fishy. What was it that she was doing that didn't seem to be right?

Renata says she has never seen the documents from the clinic, but we have. And so we know that Coco told the clinic she planned her escape with help from her therapist. Veteran Utah journalist Lynn Packer even reported that the therapist met Coco at the train station in Hanover. But that's not something we've been able to independently verify.

This is a woman named Becky Rasmussen. Not to be confused with Becky McIntosh, who you met earlier, but a second LDS mom named Becky. Becky's audio recording quality is not great, so we'll jump in if something isn't super clear.

By the time I spoke to Becky, I was pretty sure that Sebastian did not exist. But then she said something that made me second guess myself. Sebastian had this home and she showed me the home. She actually showed you his home?

Becky has an amazing memory, and she was able to find the building that Coco says was Sebastian's home on Google Maps.

It was the same street that Coco mentioned in a message to someone else also describing Sebastian's home. So we sent producer Katarina Felke there, and it basically cleared up any and all doubts because the owner of the home has lived there for more than 40 years. And she said no one named Sebastian has ever rented from her. No male therapist has. And she says she's the only person with access to the basement. ♪

But Coco Berthman told Becky Rasmussen a lot of other details about these therapists. So the first therapist that she met with was a woman and she was at first kind to her. So she brought her home and she lived with that woman for a few months. Her name was Caroline Rashman. It was like the first time she'd had a mom and they were so tight. Like,

Like they had this wonderful mother-daughter relationship that was so healing for her after having a mother that sex trafficked her. And then that woman started dating someone and she got engaged. And then suddenly she didn't want to have a daughter anymore. When Becky started comparing notes with other people who knew Coco, she found that there was another version of this story. One where Coco did not have a mother-daughter relationship with Caroline. She had a romantic and sexual relationship with Caroline.

We've heard that version, too. In fact, in one instance, Coco even went as far as to say that Caroline lured her into her bed as a condition of allowing her to stay. I have been saying for a while that I think Sebastian is really Caroline. Producer Karen Given and I have debated this idea a lot. There's no way to prove that.

But my theory isn't that Caroline locked Coco in a basement or raped her or brought friends over to rape her or did any of the horrible things that Coco says Sebastian did. But I do think that maybe Coco split off another character who has a lot of the same characteristics as Caroline.

and occupy the same amount of time and the same chronological time as Caroline. But for whatever reason, is a man instead of a woman. Karen is right. In the stories Coco tells, Caroline and Sebastian have a lot in common. They were both therapists who treated Coco and then invited her to live in their homes. And that in and of itself is very unusual.

Coco says she had a non-consensual relationship with both of them. And sometimes she says Sebastian helped her change her name before locking her in the basement. And sometimes she says Caroline is the one who suggested the name change. She has even said that her middle name, Vera Jean, came from Caroline Roshman. I feel like at the very least, she's conflating two people.

The obvious way to prove that Coco was never held captive by a therapist named Sebastian would be to figure out where she was actually living for those two years between the ages of 16 and 18. But that's been more difficult than you might imagine. We have records from the German Youth Authority, but only through the spring of 2009, before Coco ran away from her mother's home and checked herself into the clinic. We've asked Renata where Coco lived after she was released, and Renata says she doesn't really remember.

We pressed her on it multiple times, and this is the closest that we've come to an answer. There was only like under supervision, maybe, and the damn Miss Rochman. She said the damn Miss Rochman. Yeah, I got that. I got that.

We looked for clues on Coco's Facebook page from this time when she was still Sandra. Math is such crap. Or I'm too blonde. It was originally in German, but the AI is reading the English translation. Trying desperately to teach myself that damn math. Result, I'm still as dumb as before. Such shit.

Starting with that post in February of 2010, Sandra checks in regularly. Most of the posts are in German. When she posts in English, it's usually song lyrics. Woke up in the morning feeling like P. Diddy. It's clear that Sandra is still in contact with her family at this point. There are comments from her mother and her brother Mike. And every once in a while, Sandra will post something vaguely concerning, but it usually comes across as relatively normal teenage drama. It

In July of 2011, she posts about her upcoming summer plans. "Pollan, too cool!" And in three weeks, Egypt. This summer is going to top it all.

And that's the last thing she appears to say on Facebook before the page goes silent. But this still doesn't get us any closer to figuring out where she was living. Until Sarah, her friend from high school, visits an apartment she was sharing with a roommate about six months later in the winter of 2012. By this point, she's calling herself Cocoa.

And just a little aside here, Coco did graduate from high school two years behind schedule, but there's an explanation for that. In Germany, students choose between multiple paths. Renata says Coco planned to stop her schooling after middle school, but then she changed her mind and decided to go to the German equivalent of high school. And when students do that, it's not uncommon for them to repeat a year. And with Coco's various illnesses and hospitalizations, it's

It's pretty easy to see why she would have graduated two years late. But it's hard to be exact about all of this because we don't really know. And, well, Karen is really struggling with that. Here we are like six months into this. I think more, Karen. I think it's seven months. Seven. Seven months into this. Turns out Karen and I are also bad at math. What?

When we recorded this conversation, it had been almost eight months. We can prove that if she was held hostage, it wasn't for two years. But we have no confirmation other than her mother's word of where she was living after she ran away on November 2nd, 2009.

But there's one more detail in Karen's "Sebastian is Caroline" theory that I haven't told you about yet. Renata says that after Coco moved out of Caroline's house, she moved into the home of another therapist. This therapist's name is Silke Modell, and her husband's name is Reinhard Papa. Coco told people that Silke Modell took her in because she felt responsible for Sebastian's abuse, because Sebastian and Silke worked in the same psychiatry practice.

But we can find no record of Silke ever having shared a practice with a man named Sebastian. She did, and still does, share a practice with Caroline Rashman. There is, of course, someone who could clear all of this up. And that is Caroline Rashman. So I found myself spending most of one day waiting outside of her office in a town called Hemingen. It's a suburb of Hanover. This is what I really hate. Ha ha.

It was not a great place for a stakeout. It was in a neighborhood where a random person just standing around waiting looks really suspicious. I don't mind knocking on people's doors. I mean, I don't like it, but I do find it to be really effective. But when it's this awkward. I thought an email would ruin my chances of catching her. So instead, I walked in circles around the block, ringing her doorbell periodically, hoping that she might answer.

Eventually, I found a park bench and called her office number with the help of our German team member, Katarina Felke. Can I loop you in and we can call her together? Sure. We got Rashman's secretary on the line, and I told her I was there, hoping to talk to Caroline. But Caroline never called back. I waited around for most of the day, but I never got her. So when I got home, I emailed a detailed list of questions. But still, we have not heard back in any way.

But even without actually speaking to Caroline, I did feel like I got a few answers. And it came when I went to her second office in another part of town, the office that Caroline Rashman still shares with Silke Modell.

I didn't record it because German laws require that you get permission first. But I called Karen immediately afterward and told her what happened. Hey, Sarah. Hey, how's it going? It's good. How are you? If Karen sounds a little sleepy, it's because she was still in bed when I called. We don't make it call you back in five minutes. I'm just kidding. Let me leave with good news. I just talked to Silky Modell. No. Yes. Really? Really. So she did not want to talk to me. No.

And it was a very short conversation, but she said, enough, way enough. Silke answered the door, and even though she had a patient waiting in the room behind her, we stood there doing this awkward doorway dance that sometimes happens when reporters knock on doors unannounced. She clearly was not interested in chatting, and every time she inched the door shut,

I threw just another question in to try to get her to stay. As soon as I said Coco, she was like, Caroline's not going to want to talk to you. And I just like, I said like, oh, are you Silke Modell by chance? And she's like, yes. And I said, well, then you knew Coco too. And she's like, we don't want to talk about it.

Silke Modell was very polite during our little exchange, but it was also so clear that she really wanted me to go. So I jumped right into the big questions. I said, do you believe her story? Do you believe that she was trafficked? And Silke said, yes. And I said, why do you believe it? And she said, because I could see that she had a disassociation with reality.

I'll admit, I was surprised by that answer. At that point, we hadn't talked to anyone who still believed that Coco was a victim of sex trafficking. And I said, do you believe that she was trafficked by Gregor? And she said, yes. And I said, do you believe she was trafficked by other people? And she said, maybe.

but definitely that she believes she was trafficked by Gregor. I really would have loved to dig into this more, but the door was nearly closed at this point and I had other things I really needed to get to. She said that they don't talk to Coco. They don't want to talk about her because they feel let down by her. They gave a bunch of money to her and tried to help her and then she cut off all contact with them. And I said, listen,

I just got to ask you this like burning question because obviously it was like clear I wasn't going to get much in. And I said, like, I just need to understand this. Like, how is it OK for Caroline to live with Coco when she was her patient? And she said, well, it was after she was her patient. I said, oh, that makes it OK. And she said, yeah, then it's fine. But is it? Because we know that Caroline Rashman started treating Coco when she was a minor, just 15 years.

And now we have confirmation that at some point, Coco did live with her. And while we can't know exactly when Coco moved in with Caroline or how long she stayed, it does all seem, to use Renata's words, a little fishy.

But I wanted to run this all by someone professional, plus someone who would understand this from a German perspective. So we called Sabine Mauer. She's a psychotherapist who specializes in treating children and adolescents. She's based in Western Germany in the state of Rheinland-Pfalz. And she's particularly knowledgeable about the ethics of this work because she's the head of the Chamber of Psychotherapists. Does anyone understand what that is?

No, can you tell us? Thank you. Everyone thinks of Harry Potter. I talk about chambers, chamber of horror and so on. In this case, chamber means an association, like the Chamber of Commerce in the U.S. We set rules for psychotherapists, how to do your job properly.

And some of those rules have to do with the relationship between a psychotherapist and their patients. The main principle when it comes to patient-therapist relationship is called abstinence requirement. We are not allowed to have any private contacts with patients. We're not allowed to go for a coffee outside or meet at a party or something like that. It's very strict.

And I think it's right that it's very strict. And the reason for this rule is really simple. It's a very intense process and you get lots of very private information about your patient and you're not on the same level, kind of. It's not your friend. I'm the therapist, the other one is the patient. And so we have, we call it a power imbalance.

We've mentioned the privacy laws in Germany before. They're strict. In the U.S., a doctor can get into trouble for sharing private information about a patient. But in Germany, a doctor can get into trouble for simply hearing private information about a patient. We actually learned this the hard way. We had to scrap an entire interview that we really wanted with an expert on medical ethics because we shared too much personal detail about the story. So this time, we all agreed.

no names, just hypotheticals. I'm going to give you a little hypothetical here. If a child was seemingly in danger, if you as a therapist believe that a child was in danger, like an imminent danger in their home, could you perhaps understand a situation where a therapist would help that child to run away?

Would that be considered acceptable? No, never. Because we have strict rules how to deal in these cases. We have these cases every day where there's imminent danger in the home. A psychotherapist would never help a patient to run away. Of course not.

Sabina says that instead, the psychotherapist would work with the police or with a youth authority to get the child to safety. Would you pick this teenager up at a train station if you knew that they had a runaway? We're not allowed to do that, no. We're not allowed to take them into our cars and so on. Yeah, I mean, I was trying to put myself in this person's shoes. Like, if a child told me that they were...

let's just say being raped every day at their home, I can understand why another human being wouldn't want to help them get out of there. Of course, it is understandable. But another risk is that not all psychotherapists are good persons. And of course, we have like sexual abuse by a psychotherapist, not very often, but things like that happen. Is there a situation where

where living with a client would be acceptable? Never. This is the answer. It's never acceptable to live with a client, to take them in for one night. They don't have a bed to sleep anywhere or something like that. This would be a heavy breach of the code of conduct and would have serious consequences for the psychotherapist.

But the abstinence requirement does not last forever. There's a recommendation in our professional code of conduct that it's at least one year after finishing therapy. Sabina says, in her opinion, it would still be ethically wrong. But there wouldn't be any legal consequences to living with a former client if at least one year had passed.

Maybe it would be different if it's a child or a minor. Germany has rules about how people in all sorts of professions, teachers, doctors, therapists, deal with kids. And if Coco was under the age of 18 when she moved in with Caroline, Caroline could have been breaking one of those rules. What if they were emancipated? Coco has said that after she checked herself into the clinic in Hanover, her mother took her to court to try to force her to come back home.

She says she fought that in court and won. And after that, she was legally on her own. Is there a process for making a child legally an adult? No. Producer Katerina Felke double-checked, and Sabina is right. There's no such process in Germany. Okay. Karen, am I missing anything? I have one more hypothetical. I love hypotheticals.

If that child has a history of making accusations of sexual misconduct, what is the therapist risking by moving that child into their home? Yes, I mean...

Why would you do that? This is so stupid of a therapist. Because I think it would be unethical for every patient or ex-patient. But you know some patients are special. They have special histories. They have special problems. And then you should be even more careful for the child and more careful for yourself, of course.

All of this is really messy. And the fact that we can't nail down the timeline is not helping. We cannot say with certainty that Caroline Rashman actually broke any rules by allowing Coco Berthman to move into her home. But we can say that every mental health expert that we have spoken to has said it was a very bad idea.

And I was able to get some finality to the Caroline Rashman story. It came from Becky Rasmussen, the LDS mom who showed us Sebastian's house. This is Believable, the Coco Berthman story.

At first glance, Becky Rasmussen has a lot in common with all the other LDS moms that Coco scammed, with one, or actually two, very notable exceptions. I have a mother who is a clinically diagnosed paranoid schizophrenic, and I have a father who's a compulsive liar. And so when I listen to everybody, I listen with this filter of, is this their perception?

Is this a lie? Is this the whole truth? Is this an exaggeration of the truth? The first time Becky emailed me, she described herself as a no-drama type of mama. And so it makes sense that Becky was suspicious of Coco's story pretty much from the very start. But still, it took her a while to really unravel Coco's lies. ♪

Becky met Coco in July of 2017, right before her au pair visa expired and she had to move back to Germany. Coco was flying out of Salt Lake City and Becky's nephew offered to give her a ride to the airport. So Coco stayed with Becky and her family and joined them in their 4th of July celebrations. They went to the Stadium of Fire in Provo and kayaking in Tybal Fork Lake. Coco

is very energetic and she's very spontaneous and she is absolutely delightful and fun to be around, like at first. Becky has a daughter, Aaliyah, who was studying German in high school and so she and Coco became fast friends. Coco explained that she wanted to come back to the U.S. on a student visa, but she needed to find a sponsor. And so my daughter explained the situation and I'm like, sure, we'll do it.

So when Coco moved back to Germany with the idea of taking her ACTs and applying for college at Brigham Young University, she and Becky stayed in touch. And this is when Coco first started telling Becky the details of her story.

But from the start, Becky says she was skeptical. Like when Coco told her about Sebastian and how he held her in the basement. So I was like, so how did you use the bathroom? She just started crying and she's like, I don't want to tell you because I don't want you to like imagine it and think less of me.

She talked about how the scars all over her body and her legs and whatever were so bad she could never wear shorts. And I was like, Coco, you were wearing a swimming suit at Tibble Fork Lake and I saw your legs and there weren't any scars. We were FaceTiming at the time. She was like, you know, her whole face like stopped like,

She's like, well, they're getting better. At first, Becky says she was just checking in with Coco every month or so to make sure that her application to BYU was still on track. But Coco was falling behind. So then she started saying, it's just that I've been really sick. And she started sending me photos of like her back or her ribs being like really anorexic and emaciated. And

And it looked so bad that I wasn't sure if they were images that she had downloaded online. Just a note here. Many of the people we talked to said that Coco really did seem to have an eating disorder. She would sometimes go a really long time without eating.

Becky does not still have these photos that Coco sent her, but we have seen photos that Coco sent to someone else around the same time, and we ran a reverse image search on two of the photos, which proves that yes, these are images Coco downloaded off the internet. They're not actually photos of Coco.

Becky didn't do that same reverse image search that we did, but she did email a woman at Coco's LDS ward in Hanover to find out if it was possible that this could be Coco. I can't tell if she's just doing this for attention or if this is really her. Can you verify for me that she's this thin? And the woman replied. She said, Coco sent these to you? Like, that was the first thing. She was like, yeah, I actually feel like...

She does a lot of things for attention and she doesn't look unhealthy.

That December, Becky had planned on a vacation to take her daughter to see the Christmas markets in Germany. And she invited Coco along for part of the trip. I just told my daughter, I don't know how much of what she says is true and how much is for attention. And I need you to know that I'm not trying to be mean, unkind or unsympathetic. I'm just trying to not encourage drama.

Becky and Aaliyah met Coco in Berlin, and they all drove to her apartment in Hanover. That first morning, Coco had a big, impressive breakfast for them. Becky showed me a picture. It actually reminded me of the meal that Renata had waiting for me when I arrived. As soon as we were done eating breakfast, she brought in this folder or binder with a bunch of documents, and she was showing me

what school she went to in Stuttgart and her grades and that she's been a good student. This was all part of Coco's application to BYU. And then she showed me her legal name change document. We have seen this document too. It shows that Coco's name was changed on June 20, 2013, six months after she turned 19. But according to her story, Sebastian had had her name changed several years prior.

And so I just pointed to it and I said, Coco, this doesn't line up with your timeframe at all. And her whole face just looks stunned and she slammed the binder shut. That moment I knew she's hiding something.

I want to pause here for a moment because this name change document is also part of how we were able to debunk the Sebastian story. The earliest version of the Sebastian story, at least the earliest version that we've heard, is the one that Coco told an LDS church member back in 2017. PS.

P.S. Not sure if you're interested to know this. Today, November 22nd, marks five years of when I escaped that therapist and his basement. That would put Coco's escape in late November of 2012. And that lines up with the timing of her hospitalization and the age that she says she was when she escaped. But there's part of the story that does not line up. Coco says she was so desperate to get away from Sebastian that she attempted suicide. So she was in a coma for a week. And let me just tell you, waking up from a coma...

It's not as pretty as we see in the movies. This is Coco's real voice again from the Skinny Confidential podcast. Coco says that after she woke up, the doctors and nurses were concerned that she was all alone. But they noticed her Celine Dion keychain and bought her Celine's latest album. Super cheesy part, but the very first song is called Love Me Back to Life. And I listened to it and something happened. And I went

The problem is that album didn't come out until November 2013, a year after the album was released.

a year after Rococo says these nurses bought it for her. She later changed the story and said she escaped from Sebastian's basement the same month that the album came out. But that doesn't add up either, because she claims Sebastian helped her change her name before he took advantage of her. And with this timeline, she would have been petitioning the court while chained up in his basement.

Becky says all she needed was to see the look on Coco's face when she was challenged. And that told her everything she needed to know about whether the story was true. That night, she had a fake seizure.

And I just got up from the couch, threw a blanket over and said, goodnight Coco. And I went to bed. This happened more than once. Coco would faint. Becky would ignore it. She actually sent us a couple of photos of Coco splayed out on the floor pretending to be unconscious. One time we were driving down near like the Rhine River and Coco started having a fake seizure in the car. And

So I like woke up Aaliyah and I'm like, Aaliyah, it's singing time. And we just started like singing church songs really loud to like overpower the obnoxious singing happening in the passenger seat. She was just grasping at straws, trying to get my attention. I mean, we're

We're here with her, giving her all this attention, and she still just wants more. She can't get enough. At the end of the trip, Becky and Aaliyah were staying in an Airbnb in Berlin. They had an early morning flight the next day, and Coco was returning to Hanover by train. We dropped her off at the train station, and she just looked miserably sad. You could tell it really upset her that Aaliyah and I were going to be together forever.

she was going off alone. Becky didn't have cell service in Germany, so she didn't hear from Coco again until she was back on Wi-Fi. She had sent several messages saying that she was freezing because it was so cold on the train. And she had a nice heavy coat. We'd been outdoors all day. And I

I'm like, I'm sorry, button up your coat. We're not really in a position to help you. And it won't be that long until you're in Hanover. When the freezing cold train car didn't grab Becky's attention, Coco upped the stakes. She started saying somebody was chasing her through the train cars. Her mother had sent somebody to try to kidnap her. I knew at this point that she was a compulsive liar.

But I didn't know if that was a symptom of this really terrible past. My biological father was beaten brutally by his mother, and he's a compulsive liar. And it comes from a place of...

Becky's audio gets really bad here, so I'm going to paraphrase it for you. She says that her father lies because he's insecure. He wants to be extraordinary, but he's not. So he tells ridiculous stories that no one believes. And he just won't stop.

So I recognized that about her, but I didn't know if something really had happened because there's no family figures around her. In fact, the only support Coco had, as near as Becky could tell, was a man that Coco called Roger. It didn't take us long to figure out that his name was actually Reinhardt. He's the ex-husband of Silke Modell. ♪

According to texts that Coco sent her mom, Reinhardt and Silke broke up while Coco was in Las Vegas. And when she returned to Germany, Coco lived in an apartment owned by Reinhardt. It was across the hall from his own place, in a brownstone in Hanover. Coco talked to Reinhardt often while traveling with Becky and Alia, only she always called him Roger. Coco told Becky that both Roger and Silke were therapists, even though all records indicate that Reinhardt's actually a businessman.

But it is true that they were the only visible support for Coco at this time. And it was clear they believed her story, which made Becky more inclined to believe that something about it must be true. It lended a credibility to something happened to her hair.

But as Becky and her daughter made their way back home to Utah, Coco's lies kept coming. And we're like literally trying to board our flight. Coco's telling me she's running down the street outside of her apartment. Somebody kidnapped her. So she's texting me while they're chasing her. They're chasing me. I'm like, go to the police. And she's like, they've caught me. Like what kidnapper lets you keep your phone?

We asked Becky if we could see these text messages, but they were sent over WhatsApp more than five years ago, and Becky says she's since gotten a new phone and can't access her archive.

She is texting me that they're actively raping her. I'm like, if you've got your cell phone and you're texting me, you can also dial 911. At this point, I'm like, this is so pathetic. She should be embarrassed. But it wasn't over yet, because when Becky's plane landed in Salt Lake, her phone was ringing. Coco starts calling me.

And she's sobbing. She's so scared. And they raped her, but they let her go. And they told her they're going to get her again. I'm like, where are you now? And she says, I'm in my apartment. And I said, have you told Roger? And she said, no. Did you go to the police? No. And I'm like, well, I don't want to hear anymore until you talk to the police. I am home with my husband. He hasn't seen me for over a week. I'm going to be with him. And then she was like, you're going to abandon me?

me now and you're going to choose him. And it became this choice thing. How can you choose your life over me? She just started crying and calling me heartless. She thought I would be different. She thought that I would be there for her and I was abandoning her.

This was Coco's M.O. Attention was the currency that she was always seeking. And no matter how much was given to her, it was never enough. To this day, whatever Coco's after, I don't believe it's money. I 100% believe she has two main objectives. One of them is to be famous. And the other is...

is she is obsessed with developing relationships with mother figures and seeing if she can have more power over them than their children or their husbands.

And this is where Coco went wrong. Because when Coco chose LDS moms as her marks, she chose women who were predisposed to believe and forgive. But these women would never choose Coco over their own families. Time and time again, among the LDS mothers we have interviewed, this has been the breaking point. They would help until it endangered their relationships with their families, and then they were out. I basically told her,

I cannot place you in a position where one of my sons or my husband's character could be called into question or imprisoned based on a false accusation. And I said, I am still willing to sponsor you.

Yeah. I said, I want you to go through a year of therapy and a year without telling me a single lie about a rape or some new chase scene or anything else. And if you can make it a year, then we'll still sponsor you. But I only want to hear from you once a week.

And I will not give you more than an hour of my time each week. And she got really angry and upset about that time limit. And soon it wasn't just Coco who was upset with Becky. I started receiving email from Roger, like three email a day telling me I was causing her damage and

And with his professional background, he advised me to immediately provide her with a loving, nurturing support that she needed.

Becky's husband is a network security engineer, and he was able to determine that the emails coming from Roger were actually coming from the same IP address that Coco was using. So Becky wasn't swayed by those emails. But messages kept coming. Next from Coco's friend, a man named Matias. According to his Facebook profile, Matias is a tall, handsome brunette.

But Becky now believes that profile is fake and it was actually created by Coco. Coco's life is a special case and a crazy one, but it's not made up in any way. That's an AI altered voice reading from one of those messages. I tried to see all sides and all opinions. And in my point of view, Satan is trying real hard to take Coco away from Utah and becoming the daughter of God she is supposed to be. Finally, Becky had enough.

Becky told Coco she believed that Coco was sending all of these messages herself, not Roger, not Matias. And she issued an ultimatum. If Matias reaches out to me one more time, if Roger reaches out to me one more time,

Or if any other random person decides to communicate your agenda on your behalf, the deal is off. I will not sponsor you. And she just sobbed and said, I promise I'll get help. I'll go to therapy. I promise I can't help it. There's a reason I lie and I hate it and I'm working on it. And she just cried really pathetically.

She admitted to lying about all of her Celine Dion stories. She admitted to lying about being chased through the train cars and through Hanover. She admitted to lying about the rape that happened in Hanover after we left her. And she admitted to telling lies about Caroline.

Caroline had not lured Coco into her bed. She didn't have a sexual relationship with her. Coco admitted to Becky that none of that was true. But Coco still insisted that she had been abused by her parents, and she said that most of what she said about Sebastian was also true.

No drama mama was over it. She wasn't going to listen to any more of Coco's stories. I just said, I don't want to give you an opportunity to lie about any of it. I'm just telling you, if there are any more lies, I'll bet they're off.

Of course, Coco did not stop telling lies. She just stopped telling lies to Becky. Coco did this a lot. Once she got caught, she just moved on. And less than a month after that last conversation, she was back at it with new victims. A couple she met in Las Vegas. She came up afterwards and said, oh my gosh, I'm so excited, blah, blah, blah. I love Celine Dion. My mom trafficked me, blah, blah, blah, Celine Dion. She wasn't happy with just Beth alone. Never. I had to be a part of it because...

Because to her, Nicole is the access point to Celine. Correct. Yeah. That's next time on Believable, The Coco Berthman 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

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 Jennifer Corrin. 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.