Episode 10: Call Us Anytime
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A note before we get started. Yes, we are still using AI-generated voices in this podcast. And yes, we will let you know when we do. And a warning. This episode includes mention of sexual violence against children. Listen with care.

July 17th, in the Salt Lake City courtroom of Judge Randall Skanky. Coco Berthman is here to check in with the judge after pleading guilty to a misdemeanor wrongful appropriation charge.

and being ordered to pay back nearly $10,000 she raised with her fake cancer story. -Yes, Your Honor, she's paid everything she owed. She's taken the court. She submitted that. So she's done everything that was required of her. -She steps up to the podium with her attorney by her side.

She's wearing a flowy, seafoam green dress with a white headband and strappy sandals. Her whole look screams young innocence. At this time, we are requesting if the state would be amenable to early termination. I believe that was something we had discussed. Coco's attorney turns to the prosecutor, looking for confirmation. Oh, she's on top of everything, yeah. So, who's in line? Yeah, I'm on top of everything.

It's closed out as successful completion of the probation from the court. Okay. Thank you so much. And with that, the path is clear for Coco Berthman to have this case expunged, erased forever, meaning there will be no official record of Coco ever having scammed anyone.

But as you might imagine, after listening to 10 episodes of this podcast, there are a lot of people out there who are pretty upset about that. I'm speechless. I'm furious. I have no words. I cannot believe that our world and our society can let someone like this get away with what she has done. I keep asking myself, what if this had been a Black woman?

What if this had been a person of color? Had this had been me in her situation, I probably would have a lengthy sentence and I'd probably be in a lot of trouble. I'm sure actually the outcome and the whole process would have been different if she wouldn't be that blonde and pretty girl from Germany. And it just makes me so, so angry. And to see the look of relief on her face...

And she mouthed thank you to her lawyer. It's like, you know, she got away with something again. Just walking out of the courthouse like, oh, yep, I did it. I am disgusted and appalled. And I find all of this system disgusting.

complete bullshit system. I have electricity running through my body. As a survivor myself, I find it disgusting. She just walks away with not having a record and can continue with her life, probably coming up with some other scheme and doesn't even get kicked out of the country. Why fucking not? I fought so hard. I fought so, so hard to make

tell the truth and to protect other people and it feels like it feels like I just lost again. Just can't believe that she got away with it again. I'm so angry.

And it's not just that people feel that the court case fell short of acknowledging the emotional toll of Coco Berthman's lies. We can say really confidently that this prosecution failed to address the extent of her monetary fraud, too. The court case was only about the $10,000 that Coco Berthman raised through a GoFundMe account.

According to the police report, she spent that money on things like hair and beauty supplies and at places like the Apple Store and Chick-fil-A. But it does not account for the money that Coco Berthman collected outside of that GoFundMe campaign. The police records mention an additional $10,000 raised through Venmo, which doesn't seem to have ever been prosecuted.

Plus, at this point, we've talked to more than 50 people on the record for this podcast, and many more off the record. And I asked almost everyone we talked to the same question. How much money did you give Coco Berthman because you believed that she was who she said she was? Almost.

Almost everyone said they gave her something. From cars... I paid $8,000 for the car. Beth bought her a car, had her on her own insurance. Paid for her gas. To plane tickets and hotel rooms. And her damn food.

and her Uber to production services for her music videos. We used our people on payroll. Therapy bills. Wait a minute, I didn't spend a hundred grand on just our family. Phone bills. So not only paid for the iPhone, but the plan as well. 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. There were medical treatments. Took her to the doctors. Designer dresses, an iPad, an expensive hairdryer, makeup. One of those people who you just would not ever recognize, ever, without her makeup on. And almost everything that was spent on her big 10th anniversary celebration. They actually planned and sponsored that 10-year anniversary party.

Plus, many more people did not keep tabs on the meals they bought her or consider the cost of housing her for free. That would be at least a couple grand a month.

So the number we came up with probably still falls short. From the things we were able to gather from people we interviewed, the number hovers around $65,000. And on top of that, there's the money that Coco raised through public appeals on Instagram, money that she claimed was going to other survivors. She would post something like,

Let's surprise someone for Mother's Day, or let's buy Christmas gifts or school supplies for survivors. We reached out to the organization that Coco was supposedly giving this money to. It's called Safe House Project.

They told us that Coco made one donation, about $2,500 around Christmastime in 2020, to give survivors holiday gifts. But we know that's not all of the money she raised. Because Emmy, the survivor who documented Coco's internet activity, she sent us screenshots of Coco's Venmo history. It shows that Coco raised money for survivors on at least four more occasions after Christmas of 2020.

We counted 113 people that gave her money. The dollar amounts are not in the screenshots, and we also don't know how many people sent her money through PayPal instead. But we do know that Coco did not donate any of this money to Safe House Project. And none of the stuff that we just talked about ended up being part of that criminal case. As far as we can tell, it was never even investigated.

We've made multiple requests for comment from the South Jordan Police Department, and they have said nothing to us.

But the wake that Coco Berthman leaves behind is not just financial. She tore apart friendships, romantic relationships. She was actually intent on driving us apart. Some people stopped volunteering after their encounter with her. One of the women was like, I'm just done. I'm done helping people. One anti-trafficking advocate even stopped advocating against trafficking. I'll tell you why. She left.

was duped so badly. She is an expert in her field. And she fell off the face of the earth. And at least two other people changed their line of work, including Amanda Frisbee, who was earning money as an energy healer. I just, like, had no desire to do energy work anymore. I feel like the root of it is that I was like, how...

Could I have missed something this big? If I'm like all into these intuitive gifts and whatnot, like how did I miss this? Who am I? What do I do now? How do I move on from this?

At this point, a year into our investigation and more than 10 episodes for you all who are listening, I realize that it's really easy to just decide to hate Coco. She's the bad guy in this story, right? It's funny because we've heard now from a couple of people that Coco is going around saying that I'm out to get her, that I'm trying to get her deported.

I have to roll my eyes at that because in nearly every email I've written asking someone for an interview, I've written this one line, a reminder to myself as much as anything that I didn't want to fall into the trap of just hating Coco. It was a reminder that this story has nuance.

And I wrote the same line to Coco Berthman through her attorney back in September of last year when we first reached out for an interview. He didn't get back to me.

But then, as Coco's court case was coming to a close in July, I wanted to try again. So I wrote her a letter telling her how many people we'd spoken to, all the places we had gone, and a lot of the things that we had found. I told her about all of the people who were deeply hurt by her. And I told her that, overall, to me, this is a story about societal failures, the failure of safety nets that should have protected the people who she interacted with.

But it's also a story about the safety nets that should have protected Coco Berthman, that should have protected young Sandra Roof. There were many times during this process where I felt badly for you. I realize you did have a tough childhood and you never got the help you needed. And that isn't your fault. ♪

We talked to a lot of people who believe that the real trauma you experienced went untreated and led to some of the behavior that you are now infamous for. I told her that I came to this conclusion after going to Germany twice and talking to a lot of people from her past, including her mother's former boyfriend, Gregor. And the first thing I want you to know is that I have sympathy for you.

This is Believable, the Cocoa Birthman story. Episode 10, Call Us Anytime.

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In May of this year, I decided kind of last minute that I needed to go back to Germany, despite the fact that it was going to blow up our entire production timeline. But I just couldn't live with myself knowing that we did this story without exhausting every possibility of finding the first person who Coco Berthman accused of sexual assault.

Her mother's former boyfriend, a man named Gregor. After a bunch of detective work, we finally had what looked to be a current address for Gregor, and I had a plan. I wrote Gregor a long letter, essentially saying that we had a bunch of people telling us on the record that they long suspected that he abused young Coco back when she was still Sandra Roof. I printed three copies of the letter, and I brought along three envelopes. But then...

On my way to Germany, I spilled Diet Coke on two of the envelopes. And I know you're wondering why I'm telling you this. I promise it's important. He's not on the mailbox. When we got to Gregor's address, it appeared he no longer lived there, which was a huge disappointment because after all, I had just traveled like 4,000 miles to try to talk to him.

But a neighbor told us that she knew him and she would be happy to pass on our letter. So I handed her one in my one remaining dry envelope. But then she asked for another. And at the time, I didn't understand why, but producer Isabel Stenton explained it to me later. Why did she ask for a second letter? Because she wanted really one in his mailbox.

and the other one for the working place. So I gave her a second letter, without the envelope, and we went off to do some other reporting. Okay, super. Vielen, vielen Dank. Danke schön. Danke schön. When we returned a few hours later, we talked to more neighbors, and my recorder was still rolling when we got back in the car to try to decide what to do next. And just as we were sitting there with a hot mic, this happened.

A woman came up to the car window. It was clear she was upset, but with my very terrible German skills, all I could make out was that she was Gregor's wife. Isabel went back and forth with her for a bit, and then she stopped to fill me in. She was offended because we gave the uncovered letter to her.

Remember that Diet Coke that spilled on my envelopes? Yeah, I handed the neighbor a letter detailing Coco's allegations against Gregor. And with no envelope, all the neighbor had to do was unfold it to read it. I'm sorry about that. We had a covered one. She asked for a second. Suddenly, the woman motioned for us to follow her. Come, Simon, come. We can come to your place and just...

It turns out the address was wrong because Gregor had moved, but he had not moved far. So we followed his wife for a minute or so down the street and then up two flights of stairs, where she led us into the apartment she shares with Gregor. She told us to sit at the kitchen table and she poured us a cup of water while continuing to reprimand us for the uncovered letter.

Then she makes a phone call, and I don't need Isabel to translate to understand that she's talking to Gregor, asking when he'll be home. Minutes go by with no sign of Gregor. And then Gregor just appears. I'm actually not quite sure where he came from. He was just there. He sits down at the table and immediately launches into his story.

He says that after he and Coco's mom, Renata, broke up, the police showed up at his workplace and confiscated his cell phone and his computer. It was only on a Saturday.

It was all about some Saturday. She said I invited her to the small cafeteria I manage. This is an AI-altered voice reading the translation of what he said. I don't even know how she was supposed to have gotten there. Whatever. She said that I showed her a picture of her teacher on my cell phone. She said I threatened her with a knife and forced her to perform oral sex.

He says he can't remember all the details of what Sandra accused him of doing. But he does remember what made the police decide that he had done nothing wrong. That day I was in Hannover to pick up my son. The whole day. It was 1,200 kilometers. I always used to pick him up. My ex-wife in Hannover had to testify that I was there that day.

Gregor's wife steps in to correct him. In Fulda. You were in Fulda. Oh yes, right, Fulda. We always met halfway and at that time she had to go to the police station to testify with her partner, which was very, very embarrassing for me. The police took our cell phones and they searched for those pictures that I allegedly showed her.

They took our keys. They didn't find anything, no pictures, nothing. They looked for knives. I really can't remember all the details. I did not hear from the police ever again. I don't understand why they don't take this woman off the streets, how she can walk around freely. She's sick in the brain.

We have been trying unsuccessfully for months now to get our hands on the police report that was created when a teenage Coco birthman, who was at the time still Sandra Roof, told the police that Gregor sexually abused her. According to Renata, the police interviewed her and her son Mike, along with Mike's girlfriend, and determined that there was not enough evidence to charge Gregor.

Typically, when an investigation does not lead to charges, the documents are not public. But we thought that surely Gregor would have kept some kind of proof that the case was closed in his favor. It's part of why I wanted so badly to find him. The thing that would help us the most, does he have the documentation so that we can show that he didn't do it? But Gregor tells Isabel, no, he doesn't have any proof.

Unfortunately, I didn't get anything at that time. We drove to Esslingen to pick up our phones. They were sealed. Cell phones, laptops, even those belonging to my wife. There were a woman and a man at the police station and the woman said that they believed me, that they didn't find anything incriminating.

But without any documentation, we're in a really tight spot because Gregor's telling of the story is different from Renata's. And not just because Renata isn't sure if this was another one of Coco's lies. Gregor and Renata have very different versions of what happened. Renata is under the impression that Sandra accused Gregor of abusing her over a long period of time in the home that they shared, not just once in the cafeteria where he worked.

And Renata doesn't remember anything about a knife. But Gregor and Renata clearly had a bad breakup. There's a lot of stuff they're not on the same page about. That I didn't get along well with that woman is no secret. Otherwise, we might live together.

Sanna might have noticed some of our disagreements. But other than that, I don't understand why she made up all that stuff. She's been very aggressive, the mom. She had slightly violent tendencies, also toward the children. I don't mean to make it sound like she hicked them, but slaps in the face were nothing unusual. It was more physical. But maybe the mother also had many boyfriends. That might have bothered her when they were strangers all the time.

That family was not easy. The mother wasn't easy either. For the record, Renata denies all of this stuff. It's obvious that things were, and still are, contentious between Renata and Gregor, so I'm not sure either are reliable narrators about the other.

But it's also clear that Gregor has a lot of his facts wrong. At one point, he says Coco was much older than she actually was when she accused him of rape. I'm not sure it was the right decision to not take any action against those accusations, but I didn't know how. She was 17, 18 at that time. She was 14 or 15 at the time. And then there's this. One of the things that Renata said when we interviewed her, because I asked her what she thought about the allegation, and she...

Grecker's answer, it made me wince a little bit. I can't remember anything like that. No, no. But even if, that wouldn't be a crime, right?

She's just sick, mentally ill. Shortly before we broke up, she was in the hospital every other day because she fainted at school. Doctors made tests with her for weeks and weeks. They concluded that she has some sort of psychosomatic issues. That's all I know. His wife chimes in again. It's very hard for a man to be accused of something like this.

We assume that at that time the little girl, she's talking about Coco. Maybe she fell in love with him. Gregor told us that he wanted us to get a hold of that police report because it would verify his side of the story. It would be best for me to go to the police right now and tell them to hand over the documents to show you that she lied at that time. Everything was a lie.

But then a few minutes later, he sounds less sure. If you ask the police, I am 50 now. Maybe something from before shows up. Many people have accusations from before. A few days after our conversation, Gregor wrote to us in an email, and he said that he did call the police station and ask for the report, but they told him it was too old and no longer available.

I was kind of skeptical of this at first. Germany has this reputation for keeping meticulous records. But then producer Katarina Felke explained that there might be a plausible explanation for why even Gregor himself could not get these documents. So basically they tell me you have time limits in Germany when it comes to investigations.

So it's like required that like after a certain period of time, depending on the crime, the police has to remove all the records. Katarina has been trying for months to find these records. She tried police, prosecutors, even the state archive with no luck. And after she looked everywhere, the documents might've been stored. She was given another explanation for why they couldn't be found. So in Gregor's case,

They were saying, okay, this happened like a long time ago. So what they're saying is since they don't appear in the electronic file system, nor in any sort of like paper records, we assume that the time limits expired. They can even pin it down to a date. They say all the records would have been destroyed and deleted from the system in 2018. It's sort of like

a right to forget and I think that's just some sort of like mentality you know or just like some sort of like cultural approach that we're seeing here in Germany and I feel like especially in Germany you know like Germany was like a surveillance state in the 1960s going forward until the fall of the Berlin Wall so I feel like there's like a certain sensitivity when it comes to that aspect to that sort of like privacy and having the right to go on with one's life. Is it a

cultural misunderstanding on my part that I think it's weird that Gregor himself didn't hang on to those documents to prove. No, no. I'm sorry. I would always kept them. Like always. Like why would you get rid of those? Yeah, I mean, I'm with you, but I don't know. I'm not a real German. I'm a fake German. Me neither.

Katarina is actually Austrian for the record. So producer Kerstin Silm chimes in. I guess I am the real German. I'm also I don't think it's a cultural thing. I'm like on a personal I try to understand it. And I was thinking, does he just was he in a mindset that I don't want to have anything to do with this? I want this to be over with. I don't even want to look at it.

But that's nothing cultural. That's just me trying to explain. We had a bunch of American people tell us that. That's producer Karen Given. Like, oh, I had the chats with her, but I deleted them all because I don't want to see them again. That's true. But they don't exonerate those people of wrongdoing. That's true. This is a little different. That's true.

And this whole thing about Gregor not having documents is especially confusing to me because it seems to contradict the reason why he says he's so upset. If someone tells me or asks me, you stole something or something,

If someone would accuse me of stealing something, I could say, okay, no hard feelings. But stories like this need to be cleaned up. I don't even want them to be out there. I manage a cafeteria. I deliver food to kindergartens. I don't want this. It's sick. It's character assassination. I don't know what else to call this. I don't know what else to call this.

It's all sick stuff, that's all I can say. Sick stuff. She has a strong imagination. To me, she's mentally ill. A person like her has to be taken off the streets. She'll keep doing this until maybe innocent people end up in prison.

That's what I think. It's been 15 years since I was with Renata. It's really brutal. As we wrapped up in Gregor's kitchen, he said something to us. He said, hopefully everything will be clarified. Our team discussed this quite a bit, because when investigating Coco Berthman's story, nothing is ever really clear.

Isabel Stenton, who was there translating that day, thought Gregor came across pretty well. Karen and I talked about it later. She was like, oh, he was so honest with us and he seemed so genuine. And I was like, well, yeah, I mean, predators, a lot of predators have sat across from me and gave me stories that were plausible and believable and seemed genuine. Like they're not the creeps that you see on TV. And also, yeah,

Somebody who has, I believe, somebody who has the ability to do that to somebody else, to another human, also believes that they can, like they've convinced themselves that they can convince you of anything. You weren't getting very good translations in the moment. So when you walked out of there, what did you think about him? I think the first thing I said was like, wow, they were very hospitable given the circumstances. I did have moments where I...

felt empathy in that I felt empathy mostly for the wife. Like she's been dealing with this for 15 years. They kind of thought it went away and now it's back. And it was like back in a really sudden and aggressive, ugly way. And I'm not saying like saying he's guilty, but like

I don't think that just because he talked to us means he didn't do it. And there were these things that Gregor said that made both Karen and me suspicious. There is a moment for me that is like, what?

basically you're talking about, look, we really need to see the records of this. And he says something about like, well, I don't know about that. Cause they, they might just give you some records from something that happened years earlier. And I was like, what else happened, dude? That's the one that got me. That moment where he said, when I asked him about making a comment about her body, when she was changing during puberty. And he said, I don't remember that, but if I said it,

Would it be a crime? Like even sitting at the table when she translated that, I was like, bad answer. Not a good answer. He's being accused of something that we can't corroborate by a known liar. That's the thing about these kinds of crimes is like you can never truly know. This is why they're hard to prove before juries. Like, you know, it's one person's word against another person's word. And I think that's where we have to settle and just let people decide.

Even with everything I know about Coco Berthman, all the times that we've proved she lied, I still have a hard time believing that she lied about Gregor. Because despite everything, I still default to believing survivors. And I'm not the only one who feels that way. You don't just go out and claim to be a victim of violent sexual crime or rape. For fun. For fun. I mean, there's easier ways. There's better ways. Not this.

This is Believable, the Coco Berthman story. Let's take a break from Coco for a second. I'm sure you've had this feeling before. I have it all the time. Even though my closet is overflowing with clothes, I feel like I never have anything to wear. And then I found quints. And I've finally given my closet the upgrade that I desperately needed. I've been able to build out a capsule wardrobe with iconic pieces that can be styled for any occasion. I've been able to build out a capsule wardrobe with iconic pieces that can be styled for any occasion.

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On a hot summer night in 1988, Jane Borowski was stabbed 27 times by an unknown man. She was seven months pregnant. My name is Jane Borowski. I survived, and I remember everything. Jane is the lone survivor of a serial killer. I'm your host, Jennifer Amell, and this is Dark Valley. Join us in our search for America's unknown serial killer. Subscribe to Dark Valley. Out now.

During my first trip to Salt Lake City, I went to visit Elizabeth Smart at her foundation offices. Elizabeth's story captivated the nation when she was taken from her Utah home in 2002. For the next nine months, she was held captive and repeatedly raped by her abductor. And after she was rescued, she dedicated her life work to advocacy. Part of that is hosting a podcast, which in 2021 featured Coco Berthman as a guest.

Elizabeth said, as a condition of the interview, that she didn't want to talk about Coco, even though she was among those who elevated her story. But she did tell me why she thinks it's important to believe survivors without question. False reporting is actually so low, you will always be safer to believe. I mean, it's maybe 2%.

maybe 2% of cases are not true. This is a real statistic, by the way. There are studies that show that the rate of false reporting is between 2 and 10%. And actually, people are far more likely to just not report than they are to make something up. Because this is such a sensitive, delicate, difficult, difficult topic, I would rather be wrong. Like, I would 100% rather be wrong

and maybe be a little bit embarrassed for being wrong than turning my back on someone who really needed me. Like I would rather be wrong every day of the week than turn my back on a cry for help. I mean, I hope that I'm wrong. That would be better. Like it's better for it not to happen and for me to be wrong.

She also told me this, which really stuck with me in the months that followed as I crisscrossed the Atlantic searching for answers in Coco's story. I've had a lot of time to ponder on why did I turn out the way that I have? I mean, why...

for probably the most part, why am I okay? I mean, what happened was a nightmare. And thinking back through the details, sometimes I'm like, I don't know if I should be okay, but I think I am. I think I'm fine. And so what is the difference between me and a lot of other survivors who are

struggling in a much greater sense than I am. And for the vast majority, I have always been believed. I mean, I've had a few incidences where there've been some pretty rude people who have doubted me, but the vast majority of people have never doubted my story. They've always accepted what I said happened. And I feel like that allowed me to let go of it and move on with my life.

I never felt like I had to prove that it happened to me and I think that made a big difference for me.

This moment really made me reflect because Elizabeth's story was such a memorable part of my childhood. It was immediately on primetime news in everyone's homes. It dominated the news cycle. And she's right. Everyone did rally behind her. Over the years, as I've reported other stories of sexual misconduct, I've watched as survivors were ridiculed, questioned, harassed. And I've watched the impact of that. I've seen the depressions.

depression, the guilt, the fear take over and

In a lot of those cases I reported on, society failed to help survivors get the resources they need in order to be, as Elizabeth Smart said, okay. And for some people, that has major negative consequences on their lives. Not all of those manifest in the same way. If Coco Birthman really is struggling with her trauma, but it manifested in a different way, would we be more sympathetic to her?

And beyond all the time I spent thinking about Coco, which is a lot, I also spent a lot of time thinking about what this podcast would mean for other survivors. Would exposing her lies make it even harder for them? Would it make them worry that they're not going to be believed? It's something that Jose Alfaro has been thinking about too since the day that Coco was arrested. ♪

There were many posts that I had seen from survivors. They were hurt and they felt lied to. What I wanted to know is if everyone was doing okay. So Jose hosted a meeting on a social app called Clubhouse. He invited others to join him. How do we move past this? And how do we go forward together?

and continue to believe survivors. There were about a dozen survivors on the call, including Emi, the survivor who had been documenting Coco's social media accounts. And as they started to talk, Emi and Jose realized that they both had been doubting Coco. But for Emi, it wasn't necessarily because of the stories she told.

Emi says many of the things Coco said happened to her are real things that have happened to other people she knows. For Emi, it was because of the way that Coco was acting within their community, a space where support is supposed to be unconditional. There was a lot of talk about having a feeling that there was definitely something that was not right here. It was all about her. I don't remember any work that she ever did that was

not benefiting her climbing the ladder kind of. That was more actually involved in uplifting survivor voices. Did you feel like she could potentially do a lot of good? For a brief second. She actually wrote me a message saying,

And she was like, I want to start a new survivor series. And would you be willing for me to share your story? At that time, I was really chronically ill and wheelchair bound. She asked, you know, like, what do you what do you want to do? Like, what are your hopes and dreams? She's always a hard question to answer. But I said, well, right now, it's just getting out of my wheelchair, like, getting better walking.

and dealing with my chronic illness. Emmy has POTS. It's a syndrome related to blood pressure, and a mild case might cause someone to feel dizzy upon sitting or standing up. But it could also get much, much worse. In that first conversation with her, she said, well, the reason you're chronically on a wheelchair bound is because you're not doing the healing, you're not doing the work. Like, kind of shaming me for having a chronic illness. ♪

That wasn't a fun exchange. It didn't empower me. It didn't, like, make me feel good. Emi started watching Coco more closely. She noticed she was saying all sorts of problematic things. She had shared once that autism is cured by essential oils. Which bothered Emi because Emi is autistic.

And then, not long after Coco spoke to Emmy, Coco started telling people that she had been diagnosed with a health condition that caused her to faint all the time. Yeah, Coco now also had POTS. The way that she was speaking about it was so completely different than how she had treated me for being chronically ill. I was upset. I was like, really? Like, you were so mean to me about having POTS.

Jose Alfaro also did not have a good experience when he reached out to Coco. And I said, Jose told Coco that he had been watching in awe as her star was rising, wondering why he wasn't able to get the same kind of attention for his own story. I said,

I've been struggling because I feel like I've worked very hard to have my voice heard and to have similar achievements to the ones that you've had. And I said, I've been working over three years on my book. And at this time, she's sharing that she now is having her book published and she hasn't even written her book. I said, I've been feeling like I'm ignored or passed up on because of my sexuality. If we can talk or if you can help, please let me know.

Never responded. I felt like everything that Coco Berthman did was not for the help of other people. It was not to spread awareness on human trafficking. It was all for herself. It was all to get ahead.

Another survivor named Sinette Perry, who lived with Coco for a few weeks in a safe house in Utah, told us that Coco seemed to be mining other survivors for their stories. Ironically, she called me dramatic. Sinette is deaf, and so we interviewed her via text message and were using an AI-altered voice to read her text messages. She used to ask a lot of questions. Now looking back, she wanted them to make her own story.

She asked me how old I was when I first was trafficked and had my first baby, then asked was it fun to stay home from school. WTF. Sinette eventually complained to the folks who ran the safe house. She told them Coco was bossy and controlling, doing things that were triggering to other survivors. I tried to tell them Coco may have been looking for survivors to, you know, groom and exploit or something. They kept telling me to try and work with her.

I ended up leaving because they didn't believe me when I told them I suspected she was lying. This is something that Amanda Frisbee would later hear, too. Man, I am just outraged. When she started a TikTok channel devoted to Coco's scam. Like, she really picked the most vulnerable communities in our society and really kicked them where it hurt, didn't she? Like, that's not...

Okay. Last night, I just, I got another message from a survivor and was just like, holy cow. One person in particular was like, yeah, I used to be really close with her. We would talk on the phone and chat and message all the time and whatnot.

And I opened up to her about like my trafficking experience. And then very shortly afterwards, she started passing it off as her own story. And when I confronted her about it, she just blocked me. And so I had a few people reach out and say, yeah, she did the same thing to me so that she could have like the worst trafficking story of them all. She was the, the person you thought of when you think human trafficking survivor. Yeah.

And then there's Maribel Goldwyn. Maribel was a recipient of Coco's scholarship fund. This scholarship fund is the only tangible advocacy that Coco really did. But even Maribel didn't have a good experience. She made me feel so bad as an actual survivor. We reached out to Maribel for an interview, but she didn't respond. So this is an AI-altered voice reading from the comments she made on YouTube.

Maribel says that, like Sinette, she complained to the non-profit organizations who were working with Coco, trying to alert them that Coco was not who she said she was. But

But Maribel says they didn't believe her. "They literally ignored my communication with them when I provided feedback. It's terrible. Preying on an already vulnerable set of individuals, evil and incompetent from the standpoint of those who just took our word for it instead of looking deeper into our allegations."

This is something Emmy told us too. These organizations that trained her to go in and rescue survivors, giving her credibility, look what I've done, look what I do. They said, well, we're going to do live streams with her. We're going to do fundraisers with her. We're going to support her, which gives her credibility. I'm just very upset to know so many organizations knew what Coco was doing in terms of like, you can't tell me that

You didn't receive feedback you have from multiple survivors. Even after Coco's arrest, Emmy noticed that a lot of organizations distanced themselves from Coco, but they did it quietly. They didn't outright denounce her. In fact, when confronted, they hedged. I think that is most devastating to me. You're supposed to be fighting for us, working for us, advocating for us. We talk about holding perpetrators accountable, but you

But yet they allowed Coco to go into these spaces and be a perpetrator. That just made the entire space unsafe. And yet they ignored it. Maribel wrote about this on YouTube, too. There have got to be much better checks and balances for services that are allowed to be provided for such vulnerable populations as survivors of sex trafficking, especially survivors of familial sex trafficking from childhood. Too many people take advantage with not much punishment.

Jose, Emi, and many others who we spoke to, they all attributed Coco's special treatment to the same thing. Because she's white and because she's blonde and she has blue eyes, in a way she was like this perfect spokesperson for what a trafficking victim is supposed to look like.

She was blonde, blue eyes, very attractive, sweet girl. Attractive, camera ready. I won't even go into how if she wasn't a white girl, this would be a completely different situation. If Coco were a woman of color, I don't know that she would have gotten the traction. Here I am with a story that has been 100% proven, testified in a trial,

against my trafficker. He was sentenced to 30 years in prison. And not once did I ever have opportunities even remotely close to hers. It just felt like unfair. What was it about Coco Berthman that made her so special and the other survivors not?

Let's really put our money and let's do the work and help those that really need to be helped. Not someone that you are fangirling over. I just I can't imagine the number of people out there who don't even have food to eat. And Cocoa Birthman is taking $10,000 from people and ordering hundreds of dollars of Chick-fil-A.

On July 17th, the day that Coco Berthman's court case closed, I stood in the hallway outside the courtroom hoping to talk to her. Hey, Coco. Coco just kept walking. She walked right by me. I just want to make sure she knows that we're open to talking if she wants to talk. She was with her lawyer and with another woman who had been in court with her. The woman actually stepped in between us as if to protect her from me. What?

Okay, update. The hearing is over. I had some debriefs to record for Dear Media's social pages, so I stayed behind in the hallway. Actually, here she comes now. And a few minutes later, Coco, her lawyer, and the other woman came walking by again. As they walked by, her attorney put his hand up to signal that I should stay away. I'm not going to chase her. I just wanted to make sure she knew I was here. I'm not chasing her.

Coco clearly still has support. There are people who don't know about her arrest. One person who I talked to after the court hearing said she still gets messages from folks on the internet who believe Coco's cancer story is real. We have also heard that Coco has rejoined the LDS church.

She's joined a new ward, one where people apparently don't know her full story. And she gave testimony on something called Fast Sunday. That's the first Sunday of the month when church members fast for two meals and then donate the money that they would have spent on food to a fund for the needy.

And then there are those who know that she lied about having cancer and a lot of other things too. But they support her anyway. Like Amy Bowler, the woman who set up the GoFundMe campaign that led to Coco's arrest. One of Amy's close friends said that Amy no longer believes Coco's story, but she does believe that Coco is a child of God and deserves to have someone on her side.

But, of course, most of the people that we've talked to feel the way that former Bollywood actress turned advocate Somia Lee feels.

I do not have sympathy for her because you can't sympathize with evil. You can sympathize with people who are unwell and are not aware of what they're doing. But Coco is fully aware of what she's doing. She knows how to manipulate the system. And that's how she got away scot-free. This is giving survivors like myself and others suffering.

This is making life further more difficult for them. And this, she should be ashamed of herself for what she's done to all of us, to all the survivors and to do people and get money out of them. She is a disgusting human being and to lie about being trafficked. I feel bad for her parents and I have no sympathy for her whatsoever. I'm sorry. I sound harsh, but it is totally justified in this case.

We're going to see Coco again. She is not gone. Trust me, she is not going away. This is a con artist, a con woman. She's a fraud and she will continue using duping people as long as she can. Somi's prediction seems to be true. We know that Coco has not changed her ways.

Coco has always kept her Coco-verse small. It's clearly a tactic to keep people from comparing stories, but that's become harder and harder for her to maintain.

She made her Instagram page private, but she still has tens of thousands of followers, and some are silently sleuthing, taking screenshots and sharing them in group chats set up for the people who call themselves survivors of Coco Berthman. And that's how we found out what she's up to now. She's not being held accountable. I think she's still living her life. People like Emmy and Amanda have had to watch as Coco continues to post outrageous and suspicious stuff.

December 24th, right before Christmas. Like late last year, when she said she was preparing to be a surrogate. She posted, it's like a pill case with a cover. Yeah, like carry someone else's child. I know she was posting online about like,

IVF and egg retrieval and being paid from a couple in Australia to have a baby. Even though she has long claimed to have been deemed incapable of having kids, you know, because of the forced abortion. So she was making German cookies, which I can tell you right now, she never cooked one day when she was here. She didn't know how to cook. The claim she was making, this is their authentic German professionally baked goods that from a student who's just trying to go to school. There was some kind of...

Beth, I wish you could find it and show it to them. It's ridiculous. It's dumb. I know that as of pretty recently, she was still nannying. She's not thinking twice about it. Like she is not losing any sleep over what she did. That's pretty obvious. And that's also really sad because I think at most people deserved an acknowledgement that this happened.

As near as we can tell, Coco does not have a valid visa to live or work in the U.S. Many people have asked us, how did she manage to pay her rent and hire a lawyer and pay back nearly $10,000 in restitution in less than six months?

We're pretty sure she did not manage to do all of that by selling authentic German cookies, but we do know where at least some of her monetary support has come from. Coco's been working for a non-profit called Golden Heeler Service Dogs. We can see that she's getting paid because there are payments for consulting in her Venmo history.

Oh, and also because of this. He's like, I just pay her for like cleaning the kennels and doing a little marketing on the side and like for the work she does at Golden Heeler.

That's Sydney Abel. I'm from Arizona. I'm currently a PhD student. I'm 21 years old and I'm disabled. Sydney met Coco in May of 2022, after Coco's arrest, when Sydney won a contest for a free service dog. The contest was run by Golden Heeler Service Dogs, a Utah-based organization run by a husband and wife, Mike and Shawna Carlson.

But according to Sydney, Coco is very much also involved. Yeah, so I came in July to pick up my dog, and the first person I see when I walk in the door is Coco Berthman and her service dog, Juno. For the record, this is the very first that we're hearing about Juno allegedly being a service dog. In fact, one person told us that Juno actually bit a child. So if Juno is a service dog,

It's only on paper. And I was told when I was there that the only three remaining employees at Golden Heeler Service Dog are Mike Carlson, Shauna Carlson, his wife, and Coco Berthman. I found Sydney because she had what she calls a terrible experience with Golden Heeler Service Dogs.

The dog that they gifted her, she says, it wasn't a service dog at all. She posted about it in a GoFundMe of her own, trying to raise money for a legitimate service dog. Someone sent me that GoFundMe because it mentions Coco Berthman and her continued involvement with Mike Carlson. He did say he gave her money to just keep her going under the table. And he said that, like, nobody knows the whole story. So, you know, they felt bad for her. I

I might venture to say that I know the whole story. What was his wife's name again? Shauna Carlson. It's S-H-A-U-N-N-A Carlson. And I know she's online frequently responding to people saying things along the line of like, you should be more forgiving to victims and victims.

Saying that it doesn't sound like they're a victim because they're not forgiving. I just, I'm looking her up because I want to see if she's the person who was with Coco at her court hearing last week. I have videos of her with me. Yeah. Could you send me one? Yeah. Sydney later showed me the video. And yeah, it's the same woman who was with Coco in court on the day her case resolved.

I talked to two former employees of Golden Heeler Service Dogs, and they told me a lot of things that suggest that Coco Berthman has not stopped manipulating people. They told me that Coco and Shawna were close, and I witnessed that, too, at the courthouse.

But they also told me that Coco and Mike are close. They said Mike allowed Coco to handle the incoming donations despite her history of fraud. They said Mike wasn't just paying Coco here and there under the table, but that with the money that he gave her, she was able to afford a very nice apartment and another new car. They described many instances where Coco and her dog Juno received preferential treatment.

I called Mike Carlson to try to get to the bottom of this, and when he didn't pick up, I left a long voicemail. So a couple of things have come up that I think you deserve the right to respond to. One has to do with her visa status and her employment status with Golden Heeler Service Dogs.

I asked Mike how he was able to pay Coco. Coco's telling people she's here on a student visa, which would not allow her to work off campus. And also, people tell us there's no sign she's actually attending school. The other thing has to do with your personal relationship with her. Mike Carlson has not responded to my voicemail.

from the beginning of this project many of our interviews have ended with the tables being turned on us people will ask do you know what coco is doing now is she in jail will she be deported and the answers to those questions have almost always been a disappointment to the people who were harmed by coco berthman like we said at the beginning of this episode there was a lot that the prosecution never pursued in coco's case a lot more that could have been investigated

And so people ask me, what can be done now that Coco has gotten away with it? And it's not really a question that I'm qualified to answer.

But I happen to know someone who is. My name is Danny Savalas. I'm a criminal defense attorney and a legal analyst for NBC News. And you're leaving something out. And I'm your husband. That's right. That's the most important thing. Always. Yes, of course. Through the course of this reporting, I have felt many times actually like, seriously, I wanted to consult you because there are...

Some things that I will say are strange about the way this prosecution played out that I'm suspicious of, and I want to run them by you. I tell Danny about all those Venmo payments, the 113 payments I found in the screenshots from Emmy, and the $10,000 in payments noted in the police report.

Why would the prosecutor ignore all of those and go only after the $10,000 that was raised on GoFundMe? I don't know for sure, but if I'm thinking like a prosecutor and I want the easiest layup, the easiest case to make out beyond a reasonable doubt, that is a cleaner, tighter, easier case from an evidence standpoint to put in front of a jury. You put up a picture, here's her GoFundMe page, and here's the button you click to make a donation right underneath. And it could be the case that

that a posting on Instagram and then a subsequent Venmo donation, gift, transaction, whatever the case may be, might be hard to prosecute because it creates an extra step. You have to show that the Instagram call for action was the reason that the person made a donation or gave money on Venmo.

And Danny says a prosecutor might not want to take that extra step, especially if they were not very interested in the case to begin with. One of the signs that a prosecutor may not be very interested in a case is when they don't want to take on a challenging set of facts. There were many times where I'm

in Utah for a status hearing, I flew in there from New York. Like to me, this is a big deal. And prosecutors are like, huh? What, what case? What, who is this? What, oh, can I have a second please to like read in before we talk about it? And like, it was just so telling to me in addition to the fact that almost every time I went out there for a status hearing,

A new prosecutor had been assigned to the case. I took that as a sign that this wasn't a priority, but I wanted to run this by you. Am I wrong? I think your instincts are spot on. I think one of the hallmarks of a case that prosecutors don't want to touch, that is a hot potato, is when it gets handed off to different prosecutors.

Believe me when I tell you, state prosecutors, if they have a case that they think will lead to glory, that will lead to victory, that will lead to them ascending the ranks of the prosecutor's office...

they will keep that case. They will take it home with them at night. They'll stick it under their pillow. They'll think about it all the time. If they have a case that they think is a dog, that's the case that they keep handing off again and again to different, usually younger, usually newer prosecutors. So that, I believe your instincts are spot on. I've never been a prosecutor, but I really believe that it's very likely that this is a sign that the prosecutors are not that interested in this case.

Coco Berthman could still be prosecuted for the money that she raised on Venmo, but it doesn't seem likely. It doesn't seem like prosecutors are interested in pursuing those charges. And it could be, as Lynn Packer has suggested, that powerful Utah politicians are behind that. They're embarrassed by Coco, embarrassed that they had their pictures taken with her and spoke at some of the same events. They just want this whole thing to go away.

But there is a path forward that doesn't involve the state of Utah. The state authorities and the federal government are considered separate sovereigns, almost separate kingdoms.

So there are a few different ways that Coco Berthman could still be held accountable. And as long as the statute of limitations does not expire, there is still a chance. But, Danny warns,

Federal prosecutions are somewhat uncommon. The federal government doesn't have unlimited resources, so it necessarily is a prosecutorial body of cherry-picking. They have to pick and choose what they're going to prosecute. Federal prosecutors are kind of, you know, they're driven by things like, is it something people are talking about? Is it something that's on our radar? There are many cases of the federal government seeing something on TV and deciding to prosecute it. Those are documented instances.

A federal prosecution is a long shot. And Karen and I are feeling how I imagine you, our listeners, are feeling too. Unsatisfied with the end of the story. So unsatisfied that I even talked to our resident forensic psychiatrist, Dr. Shahom Das, about it. I'm very used to going into the weeds on a story. Long investigations. This one so far has been, I keep saying 10 months, but Karen, I think we're coming up on a year by the time...

this wraps up. And after spending a year on something, you know, I am typically used to sort of having an answer, like a more definitive answer than the one that we have here. And it's been it's been like it's taken me a minute to kind of come to grips with that. Like we actually may not actually be able to figure out what the heck happened to her.

what actually the truth is, despite having thousands of pages of documents and medical records and just like all the things you really hope for in an investigation. I mean, we have them all and we still don't feel like we really know. And it's,

That's been challenging. And I can you give us some therapy? No, I'm just like, what's the diagnosis? So I suppose your listeners won't know this, but you and I very briefly, I don't know if you remember this, Sarah, we discussed this during another previous call, which is that there's a thing called transference between a therapist and their client.

and a thing called countertransference. Transference is what the patient puts on the therapist. So if the patient is angry with their mother, for example, they might displace that onto the therapist and be angry with the therapist. And countertransference is what the therapist feels about the patient. Even when you've not said it directly, just speaking to you about this case, I can feel that there's some countertransference. And countertransference

forgive me for being a bit glib, but it feels like she's doing the same kind of emotional manipulation vicariously to you as she has directly to her victims. So specifically being quite frustrated at her

Also not really knowing where the truth is. So I think that was part of her power for her victims. When people were questioning things and pulling out untruths, she was trying to covering it up by this almost like camouflaging it with semi-truths and bits and pieces of pieces. Sometimes she took bits and pieces of other people's stories. Sometimes she told bits of truth within like a web of lies.

And that is part of the way that she has managed to carry out her actions and con people is by people not knowing where the truth ends and lies. And I think that's kind of what you're feeling.

So I'm not giving you any solutions. I've kind of just described the problem. Well, no, but this makes sense because I find myself, I find myself sometimes making excuses for her. Like I find myself being, I want to be empathetic towards her. I want to be nuanced about this. This is not like meant to be,

Coco is a big liar. She lied about everything. Hit piece. You know, I wanted to go into this really open to the possibility that a lot of things were possible. Yeah. But like, am I just making excuses for her? Like, is is am I like almost too sympathetic to her at this point? Are you too sympathetic to her?

No, because she had a traumatic childhood. We know that, but we don't know the extent to what happened. We don't know whether she was sexually abused and if so, you know, how many occasions, et cetera, et cetera. But she clearly had an unhappy, unstable childhood.

So I think that you're doing your best to uncover what that involved. I don't want to belittle your last year of work, but I don't know if it's possible. Not that you can't do it. Just I don't think anybody can do it. No, I don't think I can do it. I think you're asking the right questions, but you have to maybe be a bit realistic about the detail of the answer that's possible to get.

From day one of our reporting, I have told everyone involved in this project the same thing, that I didn't want this to be a sensational story, a headline grabber, where we just bash Coco every episode. That's kind of boring anyway from a journalistic standpoint. But also, it happens to be true that this is a story with nuance, a story about societal safety nets that failed to stop Coco Berthman from hurting so many people.

Remember how the LDS moms nicknamed Coco Hurricane Coco? They were right. This was like a hurricane of circumstances coming together. There was the very loving, yet sometimes too trusting Mormon community that embraced Coco without question. And partly that was because some of them chose to see only what they wanted to see. And they were not the only ones. The media in general was quick to buy into this narrative.

Media tends to favor the stories of people who look like Coco. One of the worst things about this story is how the media created a space where Coco's story was believed and other survivors were not.

The truth is, healthy skepticism was completely disregarded by most journalists in this case. And not because advocates like Elizabeth Smart are just to believe survivors. It's still our job to be fair and to ask questions.

But unfortunately, this is not always a reality in the sad, sad state of local news. And the sad, sad state of local news is a perfect place for the worst people on the internet to swoop in and take hold. Conspiracy theorists desperate for an outlandish narrative were salivating over the tales that Coco Berthman told.

But spreading lies does not help fight trafficking. All it does is perpetuate fear and victimize vulnerable people. And speaking of vulnerable people, what a mess our mental health system is.

We saw a lot of evidence that Coco did not receive adequate treatment, and maybe there is no such thing as adequate treatment in her case. But there were surely places where it was lacking. First, when she was young, but also now, because there was an opportunity to force her to actually participate in meaningful therapy, and it really baffles me that the judge did not order her into inpatient treatment."

And that failure is probably the second major failure of the justice system. The first one being back in Germany, when young Sandra Ruff accused Gregor of abuse. No matter which way you fall on Gregor, it's clear that not enough was done in that case. If the police believed her, they should have done something. And if they didn't believe her, they should have done something.

So here we are, with a bunch of people still hurting while she moves on to her next grift, which is apparently non-service service dogs. The stories we told will have happened somewhat in vain. Our society leaves them unaccounted for. All we can seemingly do is arm ourselves with the information about what's real and what's not. ♪

For the last few weeks, every time Karen and I do an interview, we say, this is our last interview. But people who knew or know Coco keep showing up wanting to talk to us. It's been especially interesting now that episodes are out, hearing people corroborate stories that we've told about her past, and bringing us even more evidence that Coco Berthman has not done anything to rehabilitate herself since her court case closed.

Some of the people we've heard from are people who Coco is currently talking to, currently friends with. And so we've heard that she's listening to this podcast. And even though Karen and I jokingly say, no more interviews, there is one more interview that we still want. Hi, Coco. This is journalist Sarah Ganim again. Coco Berthman, of course.

Now that the podcast episodes are live, and I am hoping you can see that we approached this with an open mind.

I wanted to reach out again and see if you've perhaps changed your mind about talking to me. And if not, the invitation will remain open if you change your mind in the future. I always want to make sure that people in my stories have the ability to tell their own narrative. So you have my number and my email from all the other times that I reached out to you. Feel free to call me or email me anytime if you change your mind. Thanks.

So for now, that's it. Unless she eventually calls me back, there is no next time on Believable, The Cocoa Birthman Story. Believable, The Cocoa Birthman Story is a Dear Media original series. It's reported and written by me, Sarah Ganim, and our showrunner, Karen Given. Additional reporting was done by journalists 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.