Stuck In The Desert With Satan
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A Dear Media original podcast. A note before we get started. We will be using an AI of Coco's voice to read her emails and Facebook messages. While Coco's voice is sometimes computer generated, her words are 100% real. And a warning. This episode includes mention of rape, sexual violence against children, and of suicide. Listen with care.

There's no better place to start figuring out Coco Berthman's story than in Temple Square. It's basically like the Vatican of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.

And back in November, when I visited Salt Lake City, Utah for the first time, I basically landed at the airport and came straight here. So do you want me to just give you a lay of the land? Yeah. And then I came back a few months later to show producer Karen Given what Coco experienced here back in 2017, the first time that she stood in this place. Oh, I hear the music. Do you hear the music? Yeah, I hear the music.

miss it? Coco told her story on Saints Unscripted. It's a video channel for all things LDS, or Latter-day Saints. It was in February 2017, yeah. Coco was 23 years old at the time, and she was living in Las Vegas, more than 400 miles south of Salt Lake. That was an au pair. So what you do, you live with host families, take care of their kids, do some college credits. She had come to Salt Lake for a special au pair weekend, four days in the classroom to meet the requirements of her visa. And we ended up

On Sunday, on Temple Square, just to listen to the choir. Temple Square is a sacred place for members of the LDS Church. You probably know it as the Mormon Church because for many years, that's what people, including church members, called it.

On the day of Coco's first visit, there was a special President's Day performance of something called Music and the Spoken Word. It's the church's weekly radio and television broadcast. There was a short sermon about Mount Rushmore. It was a bold, daring, almost impossible endeavor. But then, so was America itself. But then, as they always do, the choir takes center stage.

When the performance ended, Coco took a tour of Temple Square. Here she is again on Saints Unscripted. I started to have jilts. I started crying. And then it just started to feel like somebody's pouring warm water over my head and it just started to flow. And I was like, something is really wrong with me. And then I kept having that voice in my head over and over, you're home. You're home. You're home.

Now, if Coco's story ended there, no one could say that it wasn't true. But of course, the story did not end there. Coco's conversion to the Church of Latter-day Saints would become the foundation of her platform. And I don't think it's a stretch to say that her life story as she told it kind of depended on this moment.

The day after she had this revelation in Temple Square, Coco's au pair group attended an American history class at a local college, and it was taught by a woman who we are going to call Emily. Emily's not her real name. Even though this all went down six years ago, she's still pretty upset about what Coco did. Coco says she and her friends went up to Emily after the class. She looked at me, she's like, can we connect on Facebook? And I was like,

Sure, whatever. And then Coco went back to Las Vegas. But she kept thinking about Emily, how inspired she was by that history class. So she messaged her on Facebook. And like a long story started and we started to create like a friendship over weeks. And I started telling her a little bit about what I experienced on Temple Square and

And so she kind of became a spiritual mom and she planted the seeds one by one. Coco and Emily quickly became online friends. Emily would often talk about her faith. Coco would share how much she loved singing and listening to music, especially Celine Dion.

Coco seemed to confide in Emily, and Emily in Coco. And so after a few weeks, my attorney actually from Germany called me and he's like, hey, Coco, can you sit down? I was like, that's not a good sign. Coco's lawyer had apparently found something that was simply incredible about her past.

Coco would later tell the story like this: that she had always believed that she was born in Germany, but now this lawyer was calling to say that he found documentation that actually she was born in Bulgaria, left in an orphanage, and then picked up again months later by her mother when her mother realized she could make money selling her young daughter for sex.

Coco got off the phone and needed someone to talk to. So she turned to Emily, her new friend in Salt Lake City. So I called her and told her and she started crying. I was like, "Why are you crying? This is my drama." She's like, "No, you don't understand." I was like, "What?"

She's like, "I served my mission in Bulgaria." And I was like, "That's odd." Long story short, we found out that she helped me as a baby. And I called the missionaries. I was like, "I need the lessons." Oh my goodness. So yeah, a few weeks later I was baptized and here I am. The hosts of this video channel are young church members who regularly interview people who are new to the faith.

They talk about what led people to convert. And so to them, Coco's story was absolutely believable. And it just makes me realize how aware God is of each and every single one of his children. Even before you were a member of the church, he would be aware of you and your situation. I'm Sarah Ganim, and this is Believable, the Coco Berthman story. Episode 2, Stuck in the Desert with Satan. ♪♪

For Emily, teaching the President's Day weekend au pair class was nothing out of the ordinary. The class was like an hour or two or an hour and a half. American U.S. history...

and the foundations of volunteerism. Students would often come up and talk to her after class, just like Coco says she did. I actually don't have any memory of meeting her at that point. What she does remember is that about a week later... Coco reached out to me through Facebook Messenger and just had a really sweet message about...

This is Coco. I hope I don't bother you. I just had a little thing I wanted to let you know, and I really hope it is okay. That's the AI-generated replica of Coco's voice, reading the message that she sent Emily that day. And anytime you hear excerpts of Coco's Facebook messages or emails during this podcast, they're going to be read by her AI clone. And don't worry, we're as shocked as you are about how good the clone sounds, so we will remind you from time to time.

Your class about American history is still on my mind, too. And all this really moved me. There was nothing particularly out of the ordinary about that. And I encouraged her, said, thank you. Oh, my goodness, that's so nice. And she continued to share some Facebook messages and share now initially more parts of her story.

I'm a survivor. I survived seven years. I hope you know what I mean and you don't think I write in secrets. Let me know if it is otherwise. At this point, Coco was a nobody. She didn't have a platform on social media. She wasn't an advocate. Heck, we don't even think she had shared details of her past with anyone in the U.S. This conversation with Emily, this was Coco dropping her first breadcrumbs. And what she shared next, I just want to warn you, it starts to get pretty intense.

It's Coco again. I hope I am not bothering you. The message came in on March 7th, 2017 at 2 a.m. She sent me sort of what she was saying was part of a book. Yeah, none of that felt really...

abnormal or unnatural. When you print it, it comes out to six and a half pages long. I don't remember all of the details of it. Coco describes a lonely childhood. She says that her father was an abusive alcoholic. Her mother left him when she was three.

For a while, Coco's mother dated men who had no interest in her or her siblings until Coco turned nine. She then met this incredible guy who played with us for hours and paid attention to us. I was the happiest little girl in the world. For the first time in my life, there was somebody who paid attention, who loved me. I suddenly had a dad. But Coco says her joy turned to horror. Just

just a few months after her 10th birthday. February 2004 was when he stole the light inside of me for the first time. He did horrible things to me and I was so scared. Coco disclosed some other things too. She talked about the therapist who had abused her, the one who she says locked her in the basement for weeks at a time. I mean, I wasn't really like processing everything at that point. I just was in between things sort of, oh my goodness, you know, like,

This is horrific, and I am so sorry to hear all of this. And there was a lot of talk about Celine Dion, how she had held Celine Dion's hand during a concert in Las Vegas, how she had this chance meeting with a member of Celine's band. I will say from the get-go, I didn't really...

Coco tells Emily that despite everything, she's still in contact with her family because she doesn't see the point in being angry for the rest of her life.

It never crossed my mind, like very obviously, never that she was making any of that up. But in all of those pages and pages describing Coco's 23 years of life, she never mentions being sex trafficked.

It takes Emily a few days to reply to Coco's six-page letter. But once she does, Coco and Emily go on to exchange about a thousand pages worth of Facebook messages in just over six weeks. Emily only sent us excerpts. And still, it took producer Karen Gibbon more than eight hours just to read them all.

Plus, there are photos and memes, even audio files of Coco singing. And I was like, oh my gosh, this girl has an amazing voice. And speaking of Coco's voice, Coco told Emily that there was someone else who she had sent a recording to, someone who she had been talking about a lot lately.

I got a call this morning. I am invited to meet Celine here in Vegas. And she also asked me to sing with her this summer when she's in Berlin. She's telling me that Celine had heard her voice and heard about her backstory and that Celine cared about that and wanted to champion that.

The backstory, as Emily knew it, was that each time Coco was abused by her stepfather, she would write a letter to Celine. And then when she escaped, she was listening to a Celine Dion song.

My heart is so happy. Everything is becoming true. I can't believe it. It's happening. Everything I have ever imagined, all of it. And from the beginning, Emily had encouraged Coco to share her story so that other victims could be inspired by her bravery. And I'm not like giving 24-7 thought at this point to everything either. So it's sort of coming in. I'm hearing it. I'm like kind of shelving it. Do you know what I'm saying?

For the next few days, Coco was as excited as you might expect any 23-year-old would be in this kind of a situation. She's basically freaking out at the idea that she's about to meet her lifelong idol. She messaged me, like, what should I wear, right? You know, I've got these outfits, like, sort of normal things. And on the day that it's all supposed to go down... She called me from the bathroom, like, really nervous, and, oh my gosh, it's about to happen. I'm going to meet her, and I'm kind of trying to, okay...

You know, take a deep breath. You've got this. This is what a cool opportunity. Like, this is amazing. It's like the Celine Dion, right? Emily was proud of Coco, proud that she had the courage to sing on stage with someone as famous as Celine Dion, proud that she would have an opportunity to share her story and hopefully make something good come of it.

Coco even sent her a picture of a door moments before the meeting was to happen, saying that this was the door that separated her from Celine Dion. At this point, nothing has ever occurred to me that she's like making all of this up. She also like at this point lives in Vegas and it's all very plausible. It totally seemed plausible to me. A few hours later, Coco sends Emily a long message about what happened on the other side of that door.

She is amazing and so, so loving and caring. Such a good soul. But, she tells Emily, all of this has got to stay secret, at least for now. I still don't feel ready to go public with my story. And I only told four people about all this right now, you included. But she's not done talking about it. Two days later, Coco tells Emily even more, saying that Celine wants to meet Emily, too.

That night, Coco and Emily stay up late chatting over Facebook Messenger, and Coco begins disclosing more about her abuse.

At one point, Coco goes quiet. She stops responding. When she comes back, she says that she had blacked out.

She says it happens every time she talks about her stepdad. But the conversation is moving fast, jumping to so many different topics with so much intensity that Emily doesn't have time to question what's going on. Not about the blackouts, not the Celine Dion story. She barely has time to process, barely has time to think.

And these things keep getting more and more intense. As I recall, she had gone to think and read or maybe pray. I don't really remember. In the desert. This time, Coco tells Emily that Celine Dion's team has offered her a contract. Yeah, like a contract to sing with her. And she's reading it right now as she's typing to Emily.

So yeah, I'm just sitting here in the car, somewhere in the middle of nowhere, crying my eyes out, having this contract in my hands, and I am just about to realize what happened. A record deal, out of nowhere. Lord, take it easy.

Coco tells Emily that she even called her mom back in Germany to tell her about the contract. That's how pumped she is. But if she takes the record deal with Celine, her story will be out there in the world. And so far, only a few select people know. And Coco says that she has this understanding with her family. Basically, they'll leave her alone if she leaves them alone. ♪

My family told me if I go public, they are done. And now I am sitting here with this contract. This is a joke. Seriously. Over the next 30 minutes, Coco sends dozens of messages as she wrestles with this decision. At 10.14 p.m., she writes, But you know what my mom said when I told her? You can't sing, girl. You never did, and you will never, ever. And then at 10.17, And she even told me if I tell about what happened between my stepdad and me, she will say I wanted it. And then at 10.33,

I have to give up my family to help all these souls. My nieces, my nephew, I don't know if I can pay that price. And 1102. He is taking over. I don't mean God. It sounds kind of funny now, but at the time, I just thought it was really happening, right? That she was alone in her car somewhere in the desert. I feel the bad, the evil around me. Satan himself. I feel him.

Emily is trying everything she can to keep Coco from spinning out. She tells her to play music, to sing, to imagine the light inside of her shining through. I mean, here's this person that I'm like having conversations with, but I'm not connected to in any kind of real way with her real world in Las Vegas. So it's not like I can call anyone to sort of elicit help for her in a practical way. Until finally, at 11.46...

It sounds kind of sarcastic when the AI says it, but Emily reads the message and starts to worry. She asks Coco to send her a pin of her location so that she can send help. There's actually someone pulling over.

He's giving me a ride. And I'm kind of in the background starting to panic and my heart rate is elevating. I'm like, Coco, like, are you going to be okay? Like, what's happening? Okay, got my stuff. Jumping in his car now. And then, as I remember it, just she kind of went silent.

Emily asks Coco to text her when she gets home, but Coco doesn't respond. For 49 minutes, there's no word from her. And then at 12.51 a.m. A friend is with me. I'm home. We'll call the police. Need to shower first. Satan won tonight. I don't know what to say. I just need to wash it off. And then we'll decide what to do. I thought this poor girl had just been raped. I'm just horrified that

and devastated. And as a mom, you're just processing this, like, what if this were my own daughter? And I'm literally worried of what she's going to do, right? Like, is she going to make it through the night? Like, what's going to happen? Who's going to be there to help her? That kind of experience, like, bonds you to somebody isn't quite the right word, but it just does, right? Like, I start caring about that and I want to help with that.

Coincidentally, during all of this, Emily got an email from a friend who works with sex trafficking survivors. And so in her conversation with Coco that same night, Emily started to share. Oh my goodness, like you're not going to believe like who just reached out to me and gave this like message of hope. I asked Emily if getting a message from her friend at the exact same time that she was talking to Coco felt like fate, but she used a different word.

Serendipitous. I definitely, definitely felt that. It pulled Emily further in. It made her more invested in Coco and her story. And Coco latched onto that.

Over the next few days, Coco took Emily on a journey that can only be described as emotional whiplash. At first, she said the rape in the desert was a sign that she should not break ties with her family and perform with Celine Dion. And then she said that it was a sign that she should.

And then when Coco said she finally did sign the contract to perform with Celine, she told Emily she had to cancel all of her rehearsals because the rape had left her unable to sing. Coco told Emily that she went to see a priest to try to get help, but he only made things worse.

He asked me what I was wearing last night. I told him jeans and a shirt. He told me I shouldn't be in the desert at night by myself. It's like asking Satan to take your soul. The conversations between Coco and Emily had always included talk about religion. But after the meeting with the priest, Coco started asking more specific questions about Emily's faith. I'm a member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, and I love sheep.

sharing about my faith, it felt really natural to answer it. And I mean, I've thought a lot about this, right? Like in hindsight, hindsight is sort of everything. And I think that questions about faith generally are a little more

intimate, if you will. That touched my heart. And oh gosh, I want to be present for that if I can. Plus, it all just feels like it's meant to be. Emily reminds Coco of this. She tells her again about her friend who works with sex trafficking victims and how he got in touch at the exact moment that Coco needed help. And that's when Coco just so happens to have another story to share. She starts slow.

But Emily didn't catch the hint. So two days later, Coco tries again, this time with more buildup.

I want to pause here because this is a really big deal.

When we talked to Emily, we had interviewed and talked to dozens of people who had known Coco. And near as we could tell, this was the first time that Coco Berthman told anyone that she had been sex trafficked as a child. This is Believable, the Coco Berthman story. Malibu was ruled by one man, Mickey Dora, a surfer, a conman, a menace.

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By mid-March of 2017, Emily and Coco had been Facebook friends for about a month. But in that short window of time, so much had happened. There were incredible highs, like how Coco got to meet Celine Dion and even got invited to join her on tour. And then really terrible lows, breaking ties with her family back in Germany, being raped in the desert by a stranger.

And through all of this, Emily was at Coco's side. Or, to be more exact, the other end of Facebook Messenger. "If something ever happens to me, would you continue to share my heart, my story? Give women and girls the light back into their eyes and love into their heart? I know it's a big request.

But you're the only one I could possibly ever ask because you have that light." "I'm like one of the only people who she's been able to sort of confide in and to talk to about this." Emily felt a sense of responsibility toward Coco. But at the same time, this was way more than she had signed up for when she started chatting with this student from her au pair class.

I'm in between like work and life and all these different things, just trying in a moment to kind of show up in a positive way, right? The more Emily tried to show up for Coco, the more Coco took from her. Night after night, Coco kept Emily up late, sometimes chatting on Messenger, sometimes talking on the phone. And if Emily gently suggested that she needed to get some sleep, that she had a big day at work or a fundraising meeting for orphans in Bulgaria...

I did feel that there was like a pattern where if I couldn't show up or I didn't have time, she would, something traumatic would happen. I cannot even tell you how many nights she would get suicidal and just needed me to stay on the phone with her to help her through it. And all of a sudden the, you know, she's doesn't know she's going to make it. And I,

the phone would go dead and I'm on pins and needles till I like hear from her again to know like what's happened. I couldn't even do that anymore, right? I mean, I literally could not do that anymore. I couldn't stay up till one or two in the morning to try to help support her and still do everything that I needed to do. And so I had to figure out some kind of plan or solution. Emily tried connecting Coco with mental health professionals in Las Vegas, but whenever she mentioned it,

Coco would shut down. Even though I felt like empathy toward her, I wasn't in a position to be able to create really a team of people who could help her with that. On April 8th, just a little more than two months into their Facebook friendship, Coco told Emily that she had attempted suicide. I had already started to question. I mean, I knew that things weren't lining up.

I mean, there were two, at least two rapes. There was supposedly one in Canada. She'd gotten pregnant. There was a miscarriage. There were multiple suicide attempts. Coco said she called 911. She said she'd been treated and that she was fine now.

But this time, Emily was not just going to take her word for it. She saw an opportunity to really find out if Coco's stories were real. They knew the timeline from when she said that the ambulance had been there. It was like impossible that they could have come, treated her, and she'd somehow be okay now. So Emily called 911. She gave them Coco's address and she told them what happened.

911 dispatchers are limited by privacy laws, and they can't tell a random caller like Emily if someone else, like Coco, was treated. But some details about ambulance calls are public record. Details like the address where the ambulance was dispatched. And there had been no, like, ambulance visits in that window, right? So I knew that...

That hadn't happened. And that was really an important night for me because I was experiencing some level of my own kind of guilt around even doubting her, to be honest.

So that was really the moment that it shifted and that I knew that at some point I would need to, for her own benefit, help her confront what she was or wasn't making up. I get it. Even if you're pretty sure that someone is faking a suicide attempt, it's probably not something that you want to call them out on. Emily needed something else to challenge Coco with, something with lower stakes.

And luckily, Celine Dion presented the perfect opportunity. ♪

Well, not the real Celine Dion. By now, I'm sure you realize that the Celine in this story is a fantasy Celine who only exists in Coco's imagination. She spent Easter with Celine Dion's family that year. Celine wanted to adopt her. All these different things. I have to admit, as Emily described the details to us, we couldn't help but giggle a little bit. In hindsight, this all just seems so ridiculous. From what she told me...

Selene had connected with Ellen and with Oprah. Coco refers to them as E and O. And there were going to be conversations with them as part of a way to share her story and her platform. And then on April 18th, the very day that Coco has arranged for Emily to actually meet a member of Selene's team in person...

Coco calls the whole thing off. She backs out of the concert in Berlin, of the tour, of the record deal, the appearance on Ellen, and the book deal from Oprah. She even says that she no longer wants to follow through with her lifelong dream of having Celine Dion adopt her. I'm at this point where I know not everything that she's saying is actual.

but I don't know what completely is yet. And I don't know the cost of me totally trying to call her out on everything yet, like to her own well-being, because I'm still kind of weighing that out with everything, right? Emily and Coco go around and around for a while. Emily tells Coco she just doesn't understand. Why would she give it all up? And at first, Coco responds like, well, like my four-year-old responds when she's caught in a lie. Okay.

I'm totally honest, I swear.

I would never lie. She starts sending Emily documents that Emily never asked for. Documents that don't prove anything. She sends her birth certificate, her vaccination card, and documents from when she legally changed her name back in Germany. Of course, none of those papers prove that Coco had any contract to perform with Celine Dion or that she was in talks with Ellen or Oprah. But when Emily asks to see that proof, Coco lashes out. Are you sure?

Are you doing all this just because of Celine, Oprah, Ellen? If I choose not to do it, you will leave. I get it. Emily recognizes this as gaslighting, and it doesn't faze her. By the end, I was trying to get her to sing in front of me because I wasn't even believing that it was her voice and she never ever would. I've never heard her sing in person. Three days after Emily finally confronts Coco, Coco sends Emily a lengthy email. The subject line reads...

The truth. You were right. Until now, I haven't been forthright with you. But at first, it doesn't seem like much of an admission. Everything I shared about my past, it's true. There are even more parts, but I think it's not the time now. And this list of truths goes on. I was raped twice. I got pregnant. I had an early miscarriage. My family broke down contact, which I guess isn't too bad. But then... Okay, here it comes now. Truth. Truth.

After a lot of buildup, Coco finally admits it. She's never had any personal contact with Celine Dion. She was never invited to sing with her in Berlin. She's not even sure if Celine knows about her story.

But, Coco says, the lies were not her fault. The woman that she had met, the one who played in Celine Dion's band, she's the one that put these ideas in Coco's head. So this is all her fault for making Coco believe it.

Emily still wholeheartedly believed that Coco had been sex trafficked by her mother. Because who would make something like that up? But for everything else...

Emily had spoken with a friend who works with people who have lived through trauma, and that friend told her something important. Sometimes people going through trauma will like fabricate sort of a reality that they kind of in fact live in. I still felt like she'd been through a lot, and I just still wanted to try to show up for her in a supportive way.

So Emily doesn't cut off contact with Coco completely, but she does start setting boundaries. So Coco might message that it was life and death, and I wouldn't respond back for a day or two. In May of 2017, Coco was baptized into the LDS church, and it's not surprising that she invited Emily to attend. But Emily was still cautious. I so did not trust her.

I did never want to be alone with her. Really? By the time you got her baptism, you're like that skeptical. Oh, a hundred percent. I knew her level of fabrication. And by that point, multiple adult figures that she had communicated to me about, she had also communicated that they had sexually harassed or abused her in some way. You did not want to become one of those people. I did not want to be one of those people.

But still, Emily went to Coco's baptism in Las Vegas. In the photograph we saw, Coco is wearing the traditional white jumpsuit. She's smiling really bright. And it's seemingly a genuine moment of happiness. When Coco joins the church, it means she's safe. That's Lindsay Hansen Park.

She describes herself as an American Mormon feminist blogger and podcaster, and she's the executive director of a nonprofit called Sunstone Education, which is an open forum for discussing all things Mormon. We called her because we wanted to better understand what this moment may have meant to Cocoa.

We actually have a doctrine of atonement in our baptismal covenant. So when you baptize into Mormonism, we believe any sins, any dishonesty, any problems that you had before gets washed away in that water. And now you're clean. You're a clean slate and you're one of us and we trust you.

After the baptism, there was a lunch, and Coco asked Emily if they could talk privately for a moment. I brought someone in with me to speak with her about it for like two minutes, right? I like literally was not going to be alone with her. And as we were going to leave, sure enough, we're in the parking lot, I think at the restaurant after, and she had like one of her fainting spells. I had been through probably dozens of these.

like online with her. And I knew it's because I needed to leave. And I, the two individuals from Vegas, as I remember, were like so stressed, so shocked, super worried. I could tell that they felt like I was really sort of cold and I'm not, there's nothing about me that is cold. You will not meet a person in my whole life that would ever think I'm cold. But I was like, you guys, I'm going to leave because she's doing this because she wants me to stay.

The whole saga of Emily and Coco might have ended there, but it didn't. And the reason? Well, it goes back to that interview that Coco gave to the Saints Unscripted video channel.

the one where she talked about the woman that she met during that au pair weekend in Salt Lake City. So she kind of became my spiritual mom and she planted the seeds one by one. That's Coco's real voice again, by the way, from that interview. Long story short, we found out that she helped me as a baby and I called the missionaries. I was like, I need the lessons. Oh, my God.

My babies are crying. Oh my goodness. From reading through their correspondence, it's clear that working with orphans in Bulgaria was a huge part of Emily's life, and she was proud of it. She talks a lot about it when she talks to Coco. She says things like, "'Gotta go get some sleep now because I'm working on a fundraiser for orphans in Bulgaria.'"

One time in particular stands out. Coco was struggling with her feelings of anger toward her mother, and Emily mentioned the Bulgarian orphans as an inspiration. She thought it was something that Coco could focus on instead of her own pain. And then the very next day, Coco told Emily that she just got some amazing news. When she was very young, just a baby, her mother had briefly abandoned her in an orphanage in, you guessed it,

Bulgaria. You know, this is just pure Coco. As you make something up to make it look like you have some sort of connection. That's Lynn Packer, the veteran Utah journalist who was the first to investigate Coco Berthman's story. Lynn doesn't see Coco's conversion to the LDS church as some sort of a miracle. In fact, he sees it as the opposite, as part of a long con. It's something he's witnessed before as a Utah journalist.

You have swindlers who know that if they align themselves really closely with the church, that it will disarm people. And that's called Mormon fraud. And he's not alone. Several people who I interviewed for this story say they feel the LDS community can be a magnet for scammers. And the numbers back that up.

Utah has more multi-level marketing companies than any other state. It has more fraud than any other state when compared to population size. Utah has developed the reputation for being the fraud capital of the United States.

The apocryphal story is often that, you know, watch out, someone is going to try to marry the missionary because they want their green card. That's Lindsay Hansen Park again. It's hard because it's one of the best things about my culture and community is this idea of just like wanting to bring everyone in, wanting to love everyone. We see the best in you. We see the greatest potential. There's something really beautiful about that.

And I imagine it's very seductive to someone who is very damaged and broken like Coco appears to be. Unfortunately, one of the greatest parts about Mormonism is one of the most easily exploited.

In 2019, two years after Coco saw Emily for the second and last time, Coco answered an open casting call for LDS Living magazine. The media organization was looking for people to share inspirational stories of their faith in two minutes or less. Coco told them this story about how she learned that Emily had held her as a baby, and it inspired her conversion to the faith.

The video was a hit, so LDS Living sent a reporter to interview Coco and tell her story in more detail. But while Coco mentioned a number of people by name in the story, LDS Living did not call any of them to confirm what she was saying. I mean, the Coco story was just a

a great story and why spoil a great story with fact-checking? Emily wasn't mentioned by name, but there weren't very many LDS missionaries in Bulgaria in the early 90s, and Emily was kind of known for it. So it wasn't hard for her friends to figure out that Coco was talking about her in this article. I had some people who started to text me to say, oh my goodness, are you the individual that...

Coco spoke about in this video. So it was actually the video that I watched first. Emily couldn't prove that Coco had made up this story about the orphanage, but she felt pressure to say something because the story was getting bigger. Something to the effect that we went back to Bulgaria and did some research and found out that I had helped her as a baby, which is totally not true. Mm-hmm.

By this point, Emily says, Coco was becoming a bit of a darling in Utah. And despite their falling out, Emily still believed that Coco had been trafficked. And I was still proud of her for having the courage and voice to create awareness around this really important issue. And I didn't want to cast doubt on that. My intention wasn't to cast doubt on that.

So I really struggled, like, what do I do? Emily was really conflicted. She kept hearing from people congratulating her for her role in this inspiring story. It put me in this really uncomfortable position of having to tell people that that's actually not true. And that did cast doubt on her, right? So she sent an email to the editors at LDS Living. And I just explained, you know, I've had a history of...

her fabricating to me around a number of things. I encourage you to check your facts around this because even though she didn't name me, this part didn't happen and here's why. And I said, can you please redact this, the reference to me in that part of it?

As far as we can tell, LDS Living immediately deleted the part of the story that mentioned Emily. But that's all they did. They didn't run a correction that would have alerted people. And they didn't do any fact-checking to see if there were any other exaggerations or false statements in the story that they had printed. So most of the story was still there. And then a little less than two months later, they got another email. And this one was from Coco's mother. Yeah, her...

her real mom in Germany, the one who was supposedly her trafficker. She had a friend who speaks good English, a German friend. And so she and the friend would get together and compose emails and letters pleading with people, please take the stories down. This time, LDS Living took the story down completely. Once the evidence is irrefutable,

that it's a hoax, that this did not happen to Coco. There's no apology. There's no retraction. There's no correction. This is really important because journalists, look, we're humans. We make mistakes. All of us do. It's inevitable.

But when we make mistakes, we have a standard practice for how we should handle it. We're supposed to be transparent about what we got wrong. We're supposed to let people know that something about the story changed. And if we take a story down completely, we're supposed to tell people why.

I talked to the LDS Living editor who handled all of this at the time. She told me that they're a small organization and their mission is to tell inspirational stories about faith, not to do big investigative pieces. She also told me that they felt like they had conflicting information. They didn't want to be the ones to choose sides and decide who was telling the truth. But they kind of did choose.

And when they finally did take the story down, they didn't tell their readers why. And we saw the effect of this in the comments that people left on LDS Living's Facebook post. People seemed to think it was like a technical error, not a factual one.

It's absolutely appalling how they handle this. And it's one of the things that enables this type of fraud to occur over and over again. Would things have been different if LDS Living had printed a proper retraction instead of just disappearing the story? Would this have all ended two years before?

it actually ended. It very likely would have mostly ended, if not entirely. Because remember, she's pulling off an affinity fraud. It depends on her being perceived as an active Mormon.

And because LDS Living is a Mormon publication, it would have more credibility than if, say, the Provo Daily Herald had published one of her false stories and then retracted it and tried to correct it.

As we sit here writing this episode, we've been reporting this story for more than nine months now. And we've talked to dozens of people who have been hurt by Coco Berthman. People who were lied to, misled, as Lynn Packer would say, swindled. And we've reached out to dozens more who would not go on the record because they are very angry or bitter or just really embarrassed.

And to be honest, Emily did not want to talk to us either. But she decided that she would, and she wants you to know the reason. Despite everything, I feel like, for me, this feels really important to convey. I feel compassion toward her, and I feel compassion toward anyone who has experienced trauma and or mental health disorders. My hope is that the end outcome is that

Coco receives the help that she needs, that those who are true victims, those who have mental disorders, and those who want to help, that this creates important conversations around that. So I want that on record.

As we were wrapping up this episode, we had read through pages and pages of documentation. German youth service records, mental health clinic treatment forms, and thousands of text messages between Coco and her mother. And in none of them, not one, did she ever mention that she had been sex trafficked.

Everything pointed to one conclusion, that Coco Berthman did not start telling that story until Emily talked about her friend and his brave group of sex trafficking survivors. And then this happened. How shocked were you today? Oh my God. I think didn't I send...

A text to you that said, oh shit? He 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. Spoiler, Karen had not, in fact, figured it out. 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 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. ♪