On the Record
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Just a reminder, we are using AI to create audio of written words. We'll let you know when it happens. And a warning, this episode includes mention of sexual violence against children, rape, and suicide. Listen with care.

If you want, you can go right here. Okay. Go to the right, and then that'll take us to Temple Square. The first time I came to Salt Lake City, Lynn Packer gave me a tour. He's the veteran Utah journalist who first exposed some of Coco Berthman's lies. This was really fun. Lynn knows this town really well. He's been covering it for a long time. Right over there is where I interviewed Robert Redford the night that he had finished shooting

Lynn is in his late 70s and he has great stories. And I can't tell you how much I love hearing journalism war stories. I could listen all day.

I covered Ted Bundy's trial when he was on trial here in Salt Lake. For the past nine years, Lynn has been working on a different kind of story, one about an organization called Operation Underground Railroad. It's known as OUR. It's a Utah nonprofit that sends out what they call jump teams around the world to rescue purported

child sex slaves. - OUR and its founder, Tim Ballard, are the inspiration for this summer's surprise hit movie, "Sound of Freedom." And if your social media feed is anything like mine, you've probably already heard about it. - Here at the drive-in in Maryville, Tennessee, finally about to watch "The Sound of Freedom." - All over TikTok, people talking about it. - A life-changing movie about a man who makes it his life mission to save children. - You realize that this is happening.

It's happening. And I'm just telling you right now because that movie was a fucking masterpiece to go watch it. Please, I'm literally begging you. I will pay for your fucking ticket. I don't care. Go watch it. But the New York Times and a bunch of other reputable news organizations have spoken to experts who say the movie's depiction of child sex trafficking is misleading and that the whole thing serves as a recruiting tool for the far right.

And Vice News has reported that just before the movie came out, Tim Ballard stepped down from OUR after an internal investigation into claims made against him by multiple employees, one who had just returned from one of these rescue missions. Lynn Packer was not surprised by this development. He's been reporting on OUR and Tim Ballard since 2014, and for the past five years, he's been releasing his findings on YouTube.

I'm Lynn Packer. This is my video op-ed about Utah's flim-flam man, Tim Ballard. Lynn has pretty much made this his beat. It's the thing he reports on the most. I'm Lynn Packer with part two of my- Part three of- Part seven. Part nine. Part 16. Number 20 in a series. For two and a half years, OUR was being investigated, reportedly for misleading donors and the public. But that investigation was closed with no charges.

For a while, it seemed like every time I spoke to Lynn, he had just released another report. Until at last count... Lynn Packer here with my 30th episode about the now-terminated criminal investigation into Operation Underground Railroad. Yep, 30 episodes. Some of the reports are more than an hour long, so admittedly, I have not watched all of them.

But Coco Berthman spent some time with OUR, and so I needed a primer on what was going on. I asked Lynn if he could give us the very briefest of summaries, starting with how OUR was founded by Ballard, a former Homeland Security Special Agent. Sure.

So the original concept was to do a reality TV series. Reality TV with a side of sex trafficking. Ex-Green Berets and such, Army Rangers, macho guys going into foreign countries where kids are being trafficked, rescuing them, videoing it from every angle.

equipping everybody with pen cameras, GoPros, you name it. Like most reality TV shows, this was a for-profit idea. But Ballard couldn't find anyone to fund it. So he revised his concept and started accepting private donations to fund his rescue operations. And that fundraising, Lynn says, proved to be incredibly successful. If you want to scam somebody, then you talk about

abusing puppy dogs or kids. And so if you have a story that you rescue sex-abused children, that's a winner. I think that's one of the reasons that OUR has brought in so much money. And I would guess it's a record amount of money. Is he doing good? Any kind of good with this? Oh, he's doing far, far more harm than good.

For Lynn and many others, OUR is the mega version of the dangerous exaggerations that we talked about last episode, the Hollywoodification of child sex trafficking.

OUR has come under a lot of criticism from people like Lynn, who say that the organization is putting children at risk with its made-for-TV-style rescues and a lack of focus on aftercare. Many of the people I've spoken to have expressed concern that OUR has been pulling resources from organizations that are better positioned to actually fight child sex trafficking. In fact, some of OUR's backers have broken with the organization in recent years.

Lynn mentions one in particular, a millionaire named Paul Hutchinson. Paul Hutchinson was turned off by Ballard wanting to become famous through this.

As near as we can tell, Coco Berthman's involvement with OUR was very, very short-lived. They had a public falling out in the summer of 2020. We haven't been able to find anyone who actually knows what started the rift, but it went public when Coco started telling friends that Tim Ballard was a fake. And she posted some of her concerns to Instagram. I've been seeing Underground Railroad a lot. This is from a podcast called The Final Wake Up. But I also saw...

According to Lynn, Tim Ballard had a plan to smooth this all over. Ballard was going to introduce her to M. Russell Ballard, who was a Mormon general authority, apostle,

Is that a family member or just happens to have the same last name? Coincidentally, the same last name. For an active member of the LDS church like Coco, meeting M. Russell Ballard is a big deal. He's not just an apostle, but he's president of the Quorum of Twelve Apostles and second in line to become president of the church. It's hard for people outside to comprehend how important or amazing or wonderful it is for an

an active member of the church to go to the church office building and meet an actual apostle or general authority. But that's not how Coco saw it. OMG, guys. This is the AI clone reading texts that Coco sent to friends. Tim went too far. He contacted the church and now the brethren want to sit down with me. I am so pissed.

He said, if I am against OUR, I'm against the church, and now Elder Ballard wants to sit me down. I can't believe the church falls for his bullcrap and would even consider meeting because of a post I made that is protected by the Constitution. Freedom of speech. This man is so idiotic.

Does he really think he is the savior and has no accountability? I mean, it kind of seems it seems clear that this is from my conversation with Lynn. And this is like from armchair quarterback standpoint. But it seems pretty clear that Coco and Tim Ballard were never going to be able to get along to work together. I mean, they both they're kind of they're too similar. They both crave the spotlight.

And they're both exaggerating their own advocacy work. Yeah, I think you've nailed it. It would be an overlap that wouldn't work. I think you're right.

A year after Coco's public split from OUR, she actually went to the investigators who were conducting the investigation into Operation Underground Railroad to offer testimony. And then she accused one of the operatives, one of the Operation Underground Railroad operatives of molesting her.

Coco was telling people that her visa to stay in the U.S. was about to expire, and Lynn believes she saw an opportunity. His theory goes like this.

She was smart enough to understand that if you become a witness in a criminal matter, your stay is extended. It doesn't have to result in charges. She doesn't have to be on a witness list. She just has to be involved. Lynn knows more about this than he's telling us. But like I've said before, a good journalist never shares their sources. So about the rape accusation, the only thing I would say on the record is that I've heard about it.

So we're just going to have to figure it out another way. This is Believable, the Coco Berthman story. Episode 6, On the Record. Canva presents your work horoscope for this week.

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How did you first meet Coco Berthman? So, the most random encounter. I was working at an ice cream shop. We're going to start with Amanda Frisbee. She met Coco in the summer of 2019 while she was working at Brooker's Founding Flavors ice cream shop.

Coco's connection to the ice cream shop started with the owner's daughter.

and some of her friends. Oh my gosh, it makes me so mad thinking back on it because those sweet girls. Oh my gosh. We think at this point, most of Coco's media appearances had been on podcasts or at events that were at least loosely connected to the LDS faith.

But what happened with those girls at the ice cream shop got Coco attention in the mainstream media for really the first time. There was an article in the local newspaper and a six-minute spot on Salt Lake's local Fox affiliate.

I want to bring in Coco Berthman, who has now been out of sex trafficking for 10 years. And you just celebrated that fact recently, just a couple weeks ago. Yeah, that's right. So I escaped at age 15. Coco tells her story, the sex trafficking, the escape in the middle of the night, and a lot about her love of Celine Dion. And then the host turns to eight teenage girls on set. They're all around age 15.

The host explains Coco had given a talk at the girls' high school, and the girls decided they wanted to do something special. And we just said, what can we do to help her? We felt like we wanted to do something to just thank her for being such a light, even after such an

traumatizing experience. She's obsessed with Celine Dion, so let's raise some money and present these tickets to her. So we all just pitched in. Was it like babysitting money? How did you guys? I did babysitting. I took money out of savings. Each of us did different things.

At Coco's 10th anniversary party, they presented her with two tickets to see Celine Dion. And after that, Coco would sometimes come back to the ice cream shop to hang out. I thought she was, you know, really cool and interesting and inspiring. Oh, she's this cool, like, influencer girl. Like, you meet and within a very short period of time, you're really close. Or is that, am I off here?

No, you're absolutely right. Coco has this tendency to just like suck people in really fast. So I was the one who was kind of like, I don't know about this. Like this is, you're kind of pushing my boundaries and there's like weird stuff going on. But she was the one who was like, no, we're best friends. And I was like, oh, okay.

Okay. Like, it's like that TikTok sound. It's like, is it just me or are we best friends? Is it me or are we best friends? Yeah. I mean, I'm definitely your best friend. That's great for you. It was a little bit like that where I was like, oh, okay. Like, she must really like me, I guess.

Amanda says their friendship really started growing around the same time that Coco moved in with a local millionaire. He lived in this giant mansion with his girlfriend and her daughter. And the name of that millionaire? His name was Paul. Sorry, Paul's last name?

Oh, shoot. Why do I always forget it? By this point, we actually do know who it is. But I don't want to put words in Amanda's mouth. I need to make sure it's the same guy who I think it is. So I awkwardly wait. Hutchinson. Paul Hutchinson.

Paul Hutchinson made his fortune in real estate, and he was living in Sandy, Utah, when he invited Coco Berthman to stay with him and his girlfriend. And he started telling friends about this young woman named Coco. One of those friends was Richard Paul Evans. This is Coco Berthman. She was trafficked by her parents. She fled Germany after her sister was murdered.

Richard is a best-selling author and a movie producer. When his first book turned out to be a rather surprising hit, he and his wife wanted to do something meaningful with their money. They decided to found a non-profit organization called the Christmas Box House. It's a charity that builds shelters for kids who are victims of abuse or neglect, kids who are homeless, and kids who have been trafficked. Kids like Coco. The Christmas Box House has been helping children

trafficked children for decades, but we never really positioned ourselves in that way.

And so we were watching just the explosion of Operation Underground Railroad. I started seeing how much money they were bringing in and how few children they were actually helping. I was disturbed because it was sucking up a lot of money from other organizations. Kids are being rescued, but they just go back into it because their life hasn't changed. So it's like, that's a lot of money to not really do anything that's sticking. And it's like, we've been doing this for decades longer than them. We've helped thousands and thousands of more children than they have.

we should at least acknowledge that that's what we do.

And so Richard started talking to his friends about how to get the word out. And he also wanted to talk about prevention, how to keep kids from being trafficked in the first place. And it was during this time that one of them said, there's this really remarkable young lady who escaped trafficking in Europe. Her name was Coco Berth. I assumed they had vetted her, but everyone assumed that. A meeting was set up and we went to lunch. It was September 2020. It was a bright, sunny day. It was.

It was at the Kobe Sushi House. Coco could be really charming when she wanted to be. We've heard that from a lot of people. You know, she wanted to get to know me better and, you know, knowing I'm an author and said, let's work on a book together. Richard was intrigued because as someone who works closely with survivors, he knows how important it is to get the word out. The thing about like with our children, we help with the Christmas box house. We've helped more than 135,000 children.

We can't show their faces. We can't say their names. It's all very, very hidden. While most survivors are reluctant to tell their stories, Coco was eager to share hers. Coco was very open. She wanted to talk about everything. And so Coco started telling Richard the story of her abuse. Only this time, it was a little different. She said, well, you wouldn't recognize it because my parents were very wealthy. We lived in this nice home. We had a private helicopter.

It was like, wow, I've never heard anything that fantastic. It's ironic that Tim Ballard had just come under fire for taking a private helicopter to an event. And it's like, it was interesting because that was about the same time that Coco had to have a helicopter too. Richard says this wasn't the story he was used to hearing about kids who are trafficked. Most of the kids he worked with were poor or homeless or in the foster care system. But that didn't mean that he was questioning Coco's story. The storyteller side is, oh, this is great stuff.

I mean, what a great story. Hidden in plain sight, wealthy family. It's like it has all the titillation of a Jeffrey Epstein story. It would be an interesting book, no doubt. But soon, Richard would have a reason to doubt. I posted a picture of us at lunch on my Facebook page. And that's the first time I started hearing from people saying, wow.

Watch out. Oh, really? Immediately I started hearing, she's not everything that she says she is. And then all of a sudden, his friend Paul Hutchinson, one of the people who vouched for Coco, stopped talking about her. And then when I asked him about her, he said, she doesn't live here anymore. We had a falling out. And everything's not quite the way it seems. And there was one more thing that worried Richard. He got a call from OUR's Tim Ballard. Tim called like six times.

He was really upset and really nervous about something Coco was saying. This was months after Coco had been calling Ballard a fraud. This was something new. In all of our reporting, we've only found one person who would tell us what exactly Coco was allegedly saying. And that one person was an OUR supporter who used to date Coco. His name is Matthew Kennedy, and we should say that he does not believe these accusations to be true.

According to Matthew, Coco wasn't just saying that Tim Ballard was a fraud and a fake. Her accusations were much more serious.

Him being a ringleader and like, you know, like just the most outlandish possible thing. Tim himself was a perpetrator? Yeah, that he was involved in the trafficking. That he like, you know, used the charity and rescuing people to then traffic other kids. And as near as we can tell, Coco was doing her best to make these allegations big news.

You remember Chris Hansen, best known for his work on To Catch a Predator? Why don't you have a seat right over there, please? Like Lynn Packer, Chris Hansen was also working on a story about OUR. Vice had done some stories. There had been some local stories. There was a local investigation raising questions about tactics and

You know, was this all about glorifying Tim Ballard as the leader or was it really about saving kids? And were these kids really being saved? Were they really in danger with some of this being staged? And we are in the very early stages of looking into this. And Coco had come to him with some information that was vital to Chris's reporting. So we had talked to her about potentially being a character in that story. Chris Hansen will not tell us what Coco said, only that she was making allegations that were really significant.

He doesn't want to repeat them because he no longer believes them to be true. When I tell you that she went into graphic detail, step by step, as to how she was allegedly sexually abused, if you could hear the detail that she used in my phone conversations, it was mind-blowing.

And so for a while, Chris and his producers spoke to Coco often. There were at least a dozen phone calls, if not more. For a period of time, we really thought that there was a serious journalistic project here of merit. And she was a significant character in it. But there was something off about the things Coco and the people she said she was working with were asking for.

They made a lot of requests that we weren't going to honor. Journalistically, we didn't feel it was appropriate. You want to make sure that she's going to get appropriate compensation and she wanted a position within the show so she could get her citizenship. She was very concerned about getting citizenship.

This was all long before there was anything out there criticizing Coco. But she was starting to make Chris uneasy. So he did something that up until this point nobody was doing with Coco's stories. He decided to fact check her new allegations. If she's going to say so-and-so did this to me in a dark room and drug me or whatever the scenario was, then you really got to bear down before you identify that person.

So Chris Hansen started calling people. In conversation after conversation, it just, it didn't hold up. People I trusted in this world were vouching for the people that she was accusing. And there's something else Chris was learning about Coco. Every time that something didn't work out in one of her living situations or financing situations, she would then accuse them of some wrongdoing. I mean, horrible wrongdoings.

Chris couldn't shake the feeling that there was something wrong with Coco's story. Day after day, it was gnawing at me. You ever have one of those stories that wakes you up at two or three in the morning and you go...

And something just ain't right about this. And we better run this down really, really well before we spend thousands of dollars of production companies' money on a deal and try to take this thing out to networks and sell it. We can't do this. It's done. Pull the plug. Chris did not regret his decision. And a lot of production companies and networks were looking to do something with her. You know, the industry, as you know, is pretty small.

And people were calling and saying, hey, are you doing something with Coco Berthvin? Hey, are you doing something? I said, well, we were looking at it, but, you know, I'm uncomfortable with it. Yeah, I was going to tell you, maybe you should be careful. And so, you know, people started to pick up on it pretty quickly. What ended up happening with the Paul Hutchinson situation? Oh, boy. This, again, is Coco's friend, Amanda Frisbee. One thing that Coco was very good at was...

finding people who weren't perfect. I mean, obviously nobody was, but she would find people who had their own skeletons in the closet and then she would really lean into that.

What Amanda's trying to say, in the nicest possible terms, is that Paul had a few skeletons. Lynn Packer had written about them back in 2017 during his first round of reporting on OUR. It was mostly related to a nasty custody battle with serious allegations flying from both sides.

The most serious are unverified allegations that Paul touched two girls inappropriately while undercover as a buyer with OUR. So at first glance, it wasn't so shocking that Coco made an accusation against Paul Hutchinson. But Amanda says Coco did this with everyone, not just millionaires with questionable histories. You know, it's like,

if she stole $20 from you and then she comes up to you and says, you stole $20 from me. And you're like, what are you talking about? You just did that to me. I watched you do it. And she's like, no, you're just saying that because I'm saying it. Does that make sense? It's a form of gaslighting for sure. Yeah. So Coco was living with Paul and his girlfriend and her daughter until one day she just suddenly announced that she was moving out.

I can't remember like what her reasoning was for suddenly just packing up and moving, but it was just something really lighthearted. Like, I just need my own space. But after a while, Coco started telling Amanda a different story. And Amanda reminded us multiple times that this was just the story that Coco told her. She had no evidence to suggest that it was true. According to Coco, they would basically all just get high together, this man and his girlfriend and the daughter. And then they had a

like a shaman lady there? I don't really know. So she did some kind of herbal journey thing. This was the first time she had

joined them in one of those and she said that they gave her this one drug that they all had but then they also gave her a piece of chocolate that had something else in it and wouldn't tell her what was in it and so I was just like huh they just drugged you that's super not cool like I'm all for holistic healing and stuff but even I draw the line at some point and this is a little much for me

So she starts like tripping so hard and doesn't remember what's going on. And just that at one point they were all naked, weren't wearing any clothes except for him. But she was pretty certain that she had been sexually assaulted by him. So shortly after that, she's like, I'm going to go to the hospital and get checked because I probably got raped, right? So she goes to the hospital. And then again, this is just what I was told later.

That Paul called the hospital and was like, she's insane. You need to send her to a mental institution. And they listened to him for some reason. And so according to Coco, she spends the night in the psych ward of the hospital. But then she wakes up the next day and a nurse asks her why she's there. And Coco's like, I have no idea. And they're like, huh, okay, well, I guess you can just go.

So the whole thing was very strange. Yep. Definitely strange. Somehow he had called the pharmacy and switched her anxiety meds to something that was causing her to have withdrawals. And I was like, how, how is that possible? I don't understand. And she would just say like, I don't, I don't know. Somehow it happened. Like you would try to ask questions and she would just be like, I don't know. Isn't it crazy?

She starts saying, like, I keep seeing his car driving past my house. Like, he's watching me. He's following me. He's yada, yada, yada. At the time, was it believable? Yes. It was all very confusing, though. I was like, why does he care where you live now? Why would he send you to the mental hospital? Why would he...

change your meds. Like, none of this makes any sense in the real world. And again, she would just be like, I know, it's crazy, right? And you're like, yeah, it is. In March of 2021, when Vice News published an investigative report on OUR, Coco sent Amanda a series of text messages. Nothing about Paul so far. I so hope Paul goes down. He is a pedophile who assaults children as well as young women, including me. I'm so frustrated. I'm so frustrated.

Coco tells people that she's working with the FBI to take down Paul, and they've offered to put her into witness protection. She even shows a business card for the FBI agent she says she's working with. We emailed the agent on that business card, and we were told, yes, Coco did come in and make an accusation, but there was no indication that she was going into witness protection.

The agent told me she was referred to the local Sandy, Utah police department, which is where Paul lived. So she starts talking about how he like is in contact with her mom and her traffickers now. Somehow he had contacted her mother and given her her location. And so now her traffickers were after her again. And so it's like this whole big conspiracy that he's after her, right? Oh, wow. I cannot believe I believed any of this. I just like.

It's so wild. But with Coco, sometimes there is a tiny kernel of truth inside the wild conspiracy. She would just constantly talk about how he's friends with the attorney general. He's a very powerful man, has a lot of influence. And so like he's never going to be held accountable for anything, basically. Paul Hutchinson is a very powerful man. He does have a lot of influence and he is friends with the attorney general. Quick background on me.

And we know this because he told us. I had a successful real estate career and about 10 years ago, the attorney general in Utah called me and introduced me to the darkest thing I could imagine, which was child trafficking. This is Believable, the Cocoa Birthman story.

Let's take another break from the Coco verse for a second. I have two little kids and we're traveling a lot this summer and it seems like everywhere they go, they ask for ice cream. But I found a mom hack for this because I've been giving them smoothies instead. That's

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Learn more at klaviyo.com slash BFCM. I did not expect Paul Hutchinson to talk to me. We first reached out in January after Richard Paul Evans told us the story of his wealthy friend who told him that everything is not quite the way it seems with Coco. But back then, we didn't get a response from Paul. And then, just as we were sitting down to write this episode, we tried again. This time, Paul replied almost immediately, yes, he would like to talk.

And Vanessa, his partner, would like to talk too. And they were available right now, actually. So we canceled our plans for the afternoon and hopped on a video call. As it turned out, they were on their honeymoon in Mexico. I'm Paul Hutchinson, and I'm all of Vanessa's husband. That's what I do. We got married four days ago. Four days ago. We're newlyweds.

Oh, congratulations. We actually met in Haiti doing charity work. Paul was following up on some rescues. He has his own foundation now, but he first started rescuing kids alongside OUR. I was recruited to be a part of

The movie had already been filmed by the time that Paul and Vanessa met Coco. It was the summer of 2020. They think it might have been in July. She came to us with this beautiful story, a super sad story, very eloquently written.

told story about her being trafficked by her mother. I mean, the stories were cruel that they put her in a forest and

And they had several children and they were kind of like men hunting them. She had to run for her life. And we know it happens, you know, so we believed her. Do we know that happens, though? I mean, some of the stories Coco told have happened. They just didn't happen to her. But this particular one, it seems too outrageous. It's almost theatrical.

But Paul and Vanessa believed her. She said, look, I'm going to be starting school in New York in a few weeks. And so we said, hey, you know what? We're actually driving to New York in the motorhome in a few weeks. Because I was moving from New York to Utah. So we were driving with a trailer and we were going to take the trailer empty and bring it back full. So we're like, we'll give you a ride.

Two days later, she calls us. She goes, I'm excited about going with you guys to New York in two weeks, but I have to get out of my apartment like today. And so I need a place to stay for the next two weeks. Can I stay at your home? And we had we had a beautiful home with lots of extra rooms. And we're like, yeah, no problem with that. Why don't you come and you can stay here for a couple of weeks till we go. After a couple of weeks, everyone piles into the motorhome and off they go to New York City.

It's about a 32-hour drive. On the way to New York, I don't know what happened in her mind where she thought that maybe we were a better option than New York. By the time we got there, she decided that she wasn't going to go to school in New York and wanted to know if she could ride back to Utah with us.

So they pick up Vanessa's stuff, everyone climbs back into the motorhome, and then they drive back to Utah. We had no problem with it. No problem, zero. Then all of a sudden other things came up. Hey, I really need some money for tuition. If she wasn't in school, then she couldn't stay in the country. Another one was that she got raped in her car.

When we first started researching for this story, we started a list of the number of times Coco Berthman claimed to have been raped. But we haven't been able to come up with anything close to an accurate count. Mostly because the stories she tells are always shifting. Like sometimes she says she was raped by six homeless boys in Las Vegas.

But other times she'll tell the same story and instead it was three black men. And then there's the version that she told Paul and Vanessa. She was driving and she saw a little kid sitting on the sidewalk of a parking lot and she felt bad so she approached them. And when she approached them to get him help, four guys came and they shoved her in the car and they all raped her in the car.

So every time she was going to get in the car, she would have a panic attack. So she needed a new car. So we bought her a car. Something was wrong with her teeth. And like, she was in a lot of pain and she would complain all the time. And so we, you know, we sent her to our dentist and they took care of her. Yeah, but she always had a story. It was her laptop. It was her phone. It was her...

And, you know, we felt bad because we thought she had been alone and she had gone through so much that we wanted to help. When describing this project to people, we're always saying that it wasn't about the money. But maybe we should start saying that it wasn't only about the money. Because we've been asking people how much money they spent on Coco, and the tally is adding up to a rather large number.

Of course, Coco also wanted fame and attention. And Paul and Vanessa helped with that, too. Vanessa is an actress. She had a successful career in Colombia. And so she was in a good position to help Coco. Vanessa and Paul produced one of her music videos, the one that we talked about at the end of last episode. You know, the one that we were all pretty disgusted by. She's in a white dress. She's in a white dress and she's getting abused and chased.

You can't tell from the recording, but the Wi-Fi in Mexico was terrible, and our call was constantly freezing or completely dropping. So it was really hard to converse in real time, and I never told Paul and Vanessa what Aaron Albright said about their video, but they confirmed that they were the ones who made it. Basically, we took what she said was her story, Vanessa being a producer and an actress, and

wrote the script and Vanessa put it together. I believed her. I believed her and I wanted to tell her story. And I put my entire heart into it. That one video. Blew her up. It blew her up. Yeah, she had like 200,000 shares in a couple of days. But those weren't the only things that Paul and Vanessa paid for.

Paul had a therapist on a $100,000 retainer, someone that any member of his family could talk to whenever they needed. And Coco was taking up a lot of her time. Like every day, like kind of a little bit obsessive, you know. When Paul got the final bill, he says more than half of the therapist's hours were spent on Coco, roughly $25,000 worth of therapy.

Paul and Vanessa might have spent more money on Coco than anyone that we talked to, but money was not what upsets them the most. She takes something that is so delicate and so sacred and so sensitive as children being trafficked and raped and she wants to profit out of it. It was hurtful.

But even after all the strange and perplexing stories that people had told us about Coco, I was still genuinely shocked, something I didn't expect to happen this late in our reporting, by the story that Paul and Vanessa told me about the day that Coco moved out of their mansion. A friend came and said, hey, you have a little bit of a problem. Coco just told me that she was doing heroin with her boyfriend in your house.

This seems really out of character for Coco. And not necessarily because she might be doing drugs. Some people have told us that she did experiment with recreational drugs. But because she's telling people that she's doing drugs. And not just any drug. A hardcore drug like heroin.

Remember, Coco was trying to maintain the appearance of being a devout member of the LDS church. That means no alcohol, no nicotine, definitely no drugs, not even a cup of coffee. But Paul is talking so fast and our connection is so bad that I let him finish the story and I jot it down in my notes for Karen and I to come back to later. So I pulled her in. I said, Coco,

is it true that you were doing heroin in our house? No, no, that's not true. I said, well, is it true that you told these people that you were doing heroin in my house? She goes, well, yeah, I told them that. I said, so that's a non-negotiable. That's a non-negotiable. Paul says that he also heard from multiple people that Coco had been making allegations against the family therapist.

So he confronted her about that, too. She goes, well, yeah, I told him that. I says, has she? Well, no. That's non-negotiable number two. And there was more, because earlier that same week, he says Coco checked herself into the hospital because she was feeling suicidal. But instead of staying...

She checked herself right back out again and came home. Non-negotiable number three is the fact that I don't have the ability to help you if you're suicidal. We love you. We want to help you recover in whatever way possible. But if it's to that point, I'll help pay for it, whatever we need to do to get you the real help that you need. Let's check you in somewhere. Well, she slammed something down, went straight upstairs, packed her bags and walked out the door. We never heard another story from her.

Producer Karen Given and I talked a lot about this afterward. We were so confused by this heroin story. If Coco really was lying about using heroin, why? Why would she do that?

Karen said she thought maybe it was what Amanda Frisbee was saying earlier, that Coco wanted to make Paul and Vanessa look like they were the ones who were making things up. They were the liars in this scenario. But honestly, I am not so sure. Because the thing she accused Paul of doing, it was serious. It was serious enough to make it all the way up to the state attorney general.

The attorney general called me about a month and a half later. The attorney general calls me and said, Paul, you've got a problem. I'm like, really? What's the problem? He said, Coco's going around to different police departments telling them that you and Vanessa were grooming her, that the reason why you bought her a car, the reason why you paid for her dental work, the reason why you paid for her schooling is because you were grooming her so that you could traffic her.

To be clear, no charge ever came of this allegation. Paul says he now believes that Coco was never trafficked by her mother. But he didn't seem very angry about Coco's lies when we talked. This is, I'll be on record forever on this. I think that there was probably something that happened to her. I don't know, okay? Here's the sad thing. This kind of abuse is damning, right? I actually...

Love her. We love her. As a human being, we love. And I'm super sad to see that somebody is so broken that they would use something like this to try to get more money or more attention or more whatever. There's something super broken there. And it makes me sad. You know, here's what we heard. This really made me wonder.

Do they really know all the stuff that Coco was saying about Paul? Because they seem a little too understanding. So I relayed everything that Coco told Amanda Frisbee, her friend from the ice cream shop. And then she says, I know this is a lot, but I'm just going to keep going until we get through all the accusations. I told them about the herbal journey, the shaman lady, the unknown drug in the piece of chocolate, the rape. And when I was done, Paul and Vanessa, they had the same response.

Well, I appreciate you sharing that. We've, we use cacao. If you're familiar with cacao, a cacao ceremony. In fact, we had one for our wedding four days ago. You know, it puts you into a very soft heart space and so that you can kind of work through some things.

I was not familiar with a cacao ceremony, so Karen looked it up. And as you might guess from the name, cacao is literally just the main ingredient in chocolate. I can assure you that she was never given weird drugs and she was never high to the point where, you know, somebody would assault her no, no time ever. This is a non-negotiable. Yeah, she absolutely, in every situation, was held in the highest respect. In fact...

what's super interesting is multiple times she would call me and say, hey dad, can you come up to my room to talk really quick or whatever?

Yeah, she was calling him dad and he was cool with that. I said, no, you can come down to the kitchen to talk really quick or we can come up there together or whatever. And so I never, ever once I made sure just because I know how these things end up, I made sure that nobody was ever in a compromising position where they were alone with her, period. Did the police ever like say that they were seriously investigating it or how did that go? Never once.

They never came and like asked you questions? Never, never even ended up with a phone call to me. Never, ever ended up in any kind of investigation whatsoever. I reached out to the Sandy Police Department and they did not respond. I never worried about it. But yeah, it's super sad that somebody would go talk crap like that. Super sad.

After this frankly confusing conversation with Paul and Vanessa, we got some screenshots of text messages that Coco sent to Amanda Frisbee. And one of them was this, sent on the day that Coco moved the last of her things out of Paul's house.

Man, that was a scene. This is the AI clone Coco reading excerpts from the long message that Coco sent to Amanda Frisbee that day. I'm decorating my new room and I have mixed feelings all over. Grief, relief, anger, disappointment, hope, sadness. It's all mixed up to this ball of something. I'm mostly just so sad that all of them came together and built a narrative about me that makes me the bad guy and them the hero. And they genuinely believe the story they tell themselves.

Coco Berthman has made a big mess with all of her lies, but we still tried to take each one of her accusations seriously. That was our approach for this entire podcast. And Paul has this messy, complicated history. He denies any wrongdoing. He calls Lynn Packer's report a hit piece, but it's out there. And we can't help but wonder, what is it that she's doing?

What if Paul made up this heroin story as a cover in case people ever questioned whether there was something more in that piece of chocolate? But Coco Berthman has told so many fake stories that if there's a real accusation in there somewhere, how would we ever know?

Is there any part of her story that you believe or that today that you still believe could be true? No. That's author Richard Paul Evans again. You think she made the whole thing up? Yeah, I think she's a pathological liar. I've met pathological liars. It's almost like the bigger the story they create, the more believable it is. Because normal people just don't do that.

When somebody tells you a story like this with such conviction, it becomes believable. When Chris Hansen and I spoke, we talked a lot about the part of Coco Berthman's story that hits close to home, the failure of journalism. Barely anyone who published her story made any attempt to fact check it. You know, I've been around a long time and I very rarely get hoodwinked.

And it's a reminder to all of us that, you know, you need to make that extra call. You know, what's so hard about calling Germany? We know how to call Germany. You know, to me, the next time it happens, I'll call Germany. But as you know, not only have I called Germany, I went there. And I'm still confused. I still don't feel like I really know the truth about Coco Berthman.

So despite our rapidly approaching deadline and at the risk of instilling panic in our budget keepers and in producer Karen Given, who is trying to keep to schedule, I am going back to Germany. Let me leave with good news. I just talked to Silke Modell. No. Yes. Really? Really. And it was a very short conversation, but she said enough. Way enough. 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 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 Gorin. 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.