The Cocoverse Crumbles
55:20 Share

This Halloween, ghoul all out with Instacart! Whether you're hunting for the perfect costume, eyeing that giant bag of candy, or casting spells with eerie decor, we've got it all in one place. Download the Instacart app and get delivery in as fast

This Halloween.

Credit Karma makes building your credit straightforward and stress-free with help from our Credit Builder. Sign up today at CreditKarma.com and start enhancing your financial health. Credit Karma, your partner in building a brighter financial future. Credit Builder plan is serviced by Credit Karma Credit Builder and requires a line of credit and savings account provided by Cross River Bank member FDIC. A Dear Media original podcast.

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

There is a pattern to Coco Berthman's relationships. We've heard about it from almost everyone who knew her. But let's use Amanda Frisbee, Coco's friend from the ice cream shop, as an example. Step one, establish a friendship. Coco has this tendency to just like suck people in really fast. She was the one who was like, no, we're best friends.

Step two, make it clear that loyalty is paramount so that your friends don't accidentally talk to your former friends. She would mention stuff like that every once in a while. Like, yeah, I left that family that I was living with because of blah, blah, blah, blah. We don't talk anymore, you know? Step three, become really needy. It was just constant. Oh, can you pick this up for me? Do you want to come over tonight? Do you want to take the dogs on a walk? I'm not feeling well. Can you grab me medicine? Yeah.

Like, I feel like I'm not getting anything out of this anymore. Step four. When it seems like you're about to get caught in a lie, come up with a bigger lie. I cannot believe I believed any of this. Step five. Admit to just enough lying that people can feel like they walk away with some kind of closure. And I was just like, just tell me, tell me the truth. And then step six, the final step. Block them forever and find someone new.

We saw this pattern play out over and over again with the people that we talked to. But we also saw it play out on a larger scale. It seems like the world, Coco's world, her 60,000 Instagram followers, her 50,000 TikTok followers, and those who followed her on Facebook and Twitter, some of those people began to wonder if she was who she really seemed to be. And so Coco went on to step four, come up with a bigger lie. I found it.

Well, I found something in my neck a few weeks ago. In January of 2022, Coco announced she had cancer. And I refuse.

I refuse to die. After everything, this is not the way I'm going out. And you believe her at this point. You believe that she had cancer. I believe she had cancer. I did. Yeah. Even though we had such a complicated relationship, I was still so sad. Of course. At the thought of her dying. Like, after going through so much horrible things in her life. Like, I literally was, like, leaving, like, having to leave work early because I was just crying in the bathroom and couldn't stop. Oh, wow. Like, it was so sad.

Despite how exhausting Coco could be, Amanda wanted to be there for her friend, and that meant giving in to her extreme neediness. Get your butt over here. This is from a series of Marco Polo videos that Coco sent to Amanda.

I have period food we can eat, and then we can gossip about cancer. The audio quality is pretty bad, but also the video is just bizarre. Coco's wearing a white, fluffy robe, her hair is in a towel, and she keeps making these strange faces and talking in a weird voice. I don't know. I need somebody to cut us some.

But I also don't want to take advantage of the situation. So whatever you feel up to. But I do have donuts. Coco says she doesn't want to take advantage of the situation, but she's clearly trying to take advantage of the situation. Prognosis is pretty bad for Coco. Homegirls. Just having another thing. Amanda agrees to come over. Are you going to bring food?

Because apparently that's the thing now to do. Or bring flowers. Everybody's bringing me flowers. What the hell am I supposed to do with flowers? They're not going to help me anything. But thanks, I guess. I found it...

A few days later, Coco went live on Instagram to tell her followers more about her diagnosis. She says she needs help to pay for alternative treatments that are not covered by insurance. Within days, Coco's followers had raised more than $9,000.

But not everyone who noticed was feeling so generous. And it wasn't long before Coco got a call from a detective with the South Jordan Police Department. Coco told Amanda she thought someone had sent in an anonymous tip. I really was like, there's got to be some, like, misunderstanding. We can clear this up, right? Like, why can't this girl catch a break?

Coco told Amanda she just needed to show the officer her medical records and it would all be cleared up. She said she knew exactly who was behind all of this. She was like, it's because of Paul. Paul is Paul Hutchinson, the millionaire who Coco accused of rape. He's the one who sent in the anonymous tip he had to have. Oh, he wasn't. He wasn't at all. I know he wasn't. I know he wasn't.

She just like he in her mind, he was just obsessed with her and dragging her down. Coco all of a sudden is saying that she is very suicidal because of this whole I'm being investigated by the police. This is why survivors never come forward. I'm so tired of not being believed. Yada, yada, yada. And then on February 16th, 2022.

New at 4, a Utah human rights advocate is being accused of lying about having cancer. Coco was arrested for communications fraud, basically using the internet to raise money for cancer treatments for a cancer that did not exist. I'm at work and I'm just like, huh?

I'm sorry, what? What is going on? There has to be some kind of misunderstanding. That's what I just kept telling myself. Like, this does not make sense. But Amanda was on a group chat with Coco's landlord, Katie, and some of Coco's other friends. They had started it as a sort of suicide watch. And pretty quickly, it became clear that this investigation was not just a misunderstanding. So finally, Katie just says in the group chat, like, the short story is that she lied. She does not have cancer.

What feeling did you have when you learned that from Katie that it was fake? Was it anger or was it something else? Yeah, anger and just like disbelief at like, how could you do that to me, to all of us, to all of these good hearted people who have been supporting you and have donated money to you, brought you medicine, brought you food, brought you flowers, right?

Amanda was coming around to the realization that this was a lie, but she wasn't all the way there yet. She wanted to hear from Coco herself. Coco dodged her text messages for a while, but then eventually she agreed to talk. I have a recording of it because I was like, I don't trust anything at this point.

Hello? Hi. Amanda recorded the whole thing as a Marco Polo of herself talking to Coco on speakerphone. Okay, so... And as soon as the call starts, Amanda gets right to the point, demanding an explanation. And Coco seems willing to give her one. You know, step five, admit to something. Whatever I'm saying is not an excuse. It's just how it all developed, the way it developed. I became...

So, yeah, she says it was all part of this elaborate suicide plan. And so I thought, well, I have cancer.

She said that and I was like, no, there's no way. Because like after you died, we would all find out that you didn't have cancer. How long were you planning to keep this up? I didn't believe that for a second. She was so determined that this cancer was not going to kill her. Like...

I don't believe she was planning to kill herself at all during that time. I said, so what about the money from GoFundMe? And she said, never touch the money. All the money's returned. Which I later learned was not true. All right. What about the KSL article? KSL is Salt Lake's NBC affiliate. It's owned by the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. The KSL article said that you previously had had stage four cancer that was miraculously healed.

What is that about? So where did they get that information? I have no clue. I really don't know. Well, we know. We read about it in the police report. It came from the person who first tipped off police about Coco's GoFundMe page. Are you planning to address it at all or just like... Yeah, I will once I can share everything. We get to talk about Paul and whatever.

For the record, nobody was stopping Coco from talking about Paul. She could have talked about him anytime she wanted to, but she had to have known once she started talking publicly about her accusations against him that people would start looking into whether or not they were true. And I know you probably will question everything else I've ever told you, which is understandable and I don't hold against you.

If you need proof or anything, like, I'm happy to provide it to you. This is another part of Coco's pattern. Offer proof that doesn't actually prove anything. But Amanda did not take her up on it. She also didn't ask the question that so many people were asking at this point. Was the rest of her life story also a lie? I had my doubts about the trafficking stuff, but I was like, I don't want to get into that right now. Like, this is already a lot.

I don't know, I just feel like I've done so much for you and this has just been a huge slap in the face. Yeah, and I'm sorry and I don't hold anything against you. I understand that I would pass and hear, but I wanted to be honest with you so that you could move on. Yeah. Well, thank you for being honest.

But over the weeks and months that followed, Amanda would discover that Coco had not been completely honest. Not at all. Pretty much everything she said to me in that final conversation, except for the fact that I lied about having cancer, everything else was a lie. And I was just like, all right, I am done with you.

This is Believable, the Cocoa Birthman story. Episode 9, The Cocoaverse Crumbles.

We're going to take a quick break from the Cocoverse to talk about something else. This is a pretty chaotic time of year and human needs often go on the back burner, things like cooking. And because of that, sometimes my meals are more of a smorgasbord of what's left in my fridge and probably not super nourishing.

So instead of grabbing those random items left in my fridge, I get delicious, quick, and satisfying meals delivered right to my door with Daily Harvest. And I love that I can skip the shopping, chopping, and post-cooking cleanup.

Well, my husband loves that he can skip the post-cooking cleanup. By working directly with farmers, Daily Harvest secures the best ingredients and freezes them at peak ripeness to lock in that always-in-season taste and that just-picked nutrition. What you see is what you eat.

When it comes to better choices, Daily Harvest makes it easy. They support farmers who invest in improving biodiversity and the health of our soil. Even their recyclable and compostable packaging, where possible, of course, makes me feel like I'm making a positive impact on our environment. And all I have to do is eat and enjoy.

So keep yourself and your freezer full with hassle-free meals from Daily Harvest. Go to dailyharvest.com slash believable to get up to $65 off your first box. That's dailyharvest.com slash believable for up to $65 off your first box. dailyharvest.com slash believable. The nine months before Coco Berthman's arrest were eventful, to say the least.

This is the AI reading from an Instagram post that Coco Berthman made on April 26, 2021. As usual, she starts with a little humble brag. You know me as Coco Berthman.

And then she gets down to business. And yet, you hardly know me.

So Coco shares a little bit about herself. She says that she's weird. She sings loudly in the car. She dances obnoxiously in the house. And this one made me laugh. She says she often speaks before she thinks. But there's one more thing that she wants her followers to know. Truth also is, I'm bisexual.

This was not new to Coco's friend Amanda Frisbee. She had told me that she was bisexual and I was like, great, me too. Like, good for you. Cool. And she like obviously, of course, wanted to make this big deal out of it because that's what she does. Not that there's anything wrong with owning your sexuality and whatnot.

This wasn't the first time that Coco talked about her sexuality. Her mother says that even back in middle school, Coco thought she was in love with a female teacher. And Coco brought it up again after she moved to Utah, when she was living with Becky McIntosh. One night, she came out to my husband and I and told us that she was bisexual and that she had never told anybody that before.

But actually, Becky knew that wasn't entirely true because she knew that Coco had already confided in another LDS mom. And then the next morning she said...

You know what we talked about last night? Please don't ever tell anyone. And I don't want to talk about it again. Please don't bring it up. Please don't share it. And I don't want to talk about it. That other mom was Shirley Morgan. Coco never lived with Shirley, but they were pretty close. And they talked a lot about Coco's romantic relationships. She had been dating this boy. I think he was from New York.

And they were getting pretty serious. And then she calls me and she says, I don't know what to do because really I'm gay. You know, I'm gay. And I'm like, Coco, you need to talk to him about this. And she's like, you know, I can't talk to him about it. And she got really mad at me.

And accused me of things. Did it feel like she was uncomfortable with this admission? Like, was she uncomfortable with the fact that she... Totally. Totally. Totally.

Yeah, but that wasn't the first time she told me about her sexuality. Shirley sent us copies of her text messages with Coco. And to nobody's surprise, there were a lot of them, 197 pages worth. And in them, Coco seems to really be struggling with the issue. But what if happiness is not aligning with the gospel? Shirley asks Coco, because someone is gay?

What do you tell someone then? Choose the gospel and choose to be forever unhappy and have no family. Or choose to break the covenants and commandments in order to have family and happiness. Shirley tries to reassure Coco, telling her God will never abandon her. But Coco isn't believing it. I think I shared too much. Let's just forget about it. She wasn't coming out.

She was just saying, I think I am. Yeah, I am. I know I am. Like, I'm not one to shame or like, okay, okay, let's go with that. If you are, okay, but don't kill yourself over it. Do you mean that figuratively? Like, was she going to kill herself over it? Well, no.

It seemed like about every three nights she would try to kill herself. I'm in the bathroom. I've slit my wrist. I'm bleeding. Well, then we need to call the police. No, no, no, you can't call the police. So by the time Shirley and Coco had the I'm gay, you know I'm gay conversation, Shirley had simply had enough. And she was yelling at me and...

And I was like, praise God. And I blocked her.

But when Coco came out on Instagram in April of 2021, her post got a lot of attention. That spring and summer, Coco seemed to be at the height of her popularity. She recorded a TEDx talk, she appeared at events with Elizabeth Smart, and as usual, she captured hearts everywhere she went. "I met Coco at the most beautiful event for survivors. A room of 300 extraordinary people wept as Coco recounted the horror of her childhood.

This is an AI-altered voice reading an Instagram post made by a woman named Barbie Bush DeShazo. Barbie agreed to talk to us, but then she canceled at the last minute. And even though we tried many times, she never rescheduled.

A room full of kind, compassionate, generous humans embraced her, brought her into their families and lives. We wanted to talk to Barbie because her post detailed allegations that we had not heard before. Barbie says that Coco told her she was raped by a high-ranking Utah politician, and that because of it, the FBI was moving her to New York and putting her into witness protection. She asked,

You're probably already thinking this, but just for the record, if someone is going into witness protection, they cannot tell you where they're going. And they certainly don't need to raise money before they can leave. But if you're going into witness protection, you need to know where you're going.

Plus, Coco was telling multiple versions of this story. In another version, it wasn't a politician at all. Instead, it was Paul Hutchinson who was causing her to go into witness protection. But anyway, around this same time, Coco started posting photos with a woman named Jessie Funk. Jessie is somewhat of an LDS celebrity. Here's how she was introduced on a podcast called Mormon Stories. Long story short, Jessie Funk worked in kind of the Mormon community

slash EFY slash music entertainment industry for many, many years. EFY, that's an LDS program for teenagers, and it stands for especially for youth. Did three LDS albums and then a few. What were they called? First one was Clay in His Hands. Second one was Better Than I. The third one was called Everything Speaks His Name. But Jessie had recently left the LDS church. That's actually why she appeared on Mormon Stories.

It's a podcast that often challenges the church and, quote, religious orthodoxy. A lot of people think you will be struck down by lightning if you leave the church, if you're not faithful. And that's just not true.

If the pictures Coco posted to her Instagram account were any indication, Coco and Jesse were spending a lot of time together. And Coco told Amanda that there was a reason why. She basically told me, like, I have a crush on Jesse. I'm attracted to her. And I was like, oh.

Actually, a lot of people told us this, that Coco had a crush on Jessie and that she wasn't afraid to talk about it. And in June, Coco made another big announcement on Instagram. I made a decision to finally be who I really am on the inside. I belong to me. I don't belong to any person other than myself and my own beliefs. I don't belong to any religious institutions. Yep, this is Coco leaving the LDS church.

At this point, Jessie Funk was establishing herself in a new career as a life coach for troubled teens. She got a master's degree in social work, and she was putting on a summer camp for teens who had left the church. She called it Especially for Truth.

A play on especially for youth. I don't know how much you guys know about the Mormon community here in Utah. Amanda explained it to us. I grew up very Mormon, very religious. I have since stepped away from that religion. When you leave the church, you lose a lot of community. I mean, everyone in Utah is Mormon pretty much, you know? And so it can be really, really tough.

So that was her intent was to create this camp to help kids make friends with people who had experienced similar stuff in like the religious trauma sphere. So my sister-in-law, she left the church and she wanted her daughter to go to a camp.

and thought, well, it's nice that it's a therapist and that they do something with horses because my niece loves horses. And Coco was at this camp too. And I mean, it was a disaster. This is Susan Beckham. She's a German LDS church member who met Coco when they lived in the same ward in Hanover. Susan and Coco became friends. Susan even went to the airport in 2018 to see Coco off when she flew to the U.S. to start college.

But by 2021, they had fallen out of touch, which is part of why Susan was so surprised to hear the name Coco Berthman from her niece in Utah. Coco gave kind of like a fireside, a devotional about her story. And it was all about how can you notice that someone is being sex trafficked? How can you protect yourself?

And then she started to tell her own story in a very, very detailed way. Susan says her niece was just 12 years old. And for context here, Coco was 27. My niece didn't tell me all the details, but her mother was shocked. She said she is not going to repeat what she had told me.

Because it was so vivid and so detailed that she was really disturbed after camp. She had nightmares for a long time. And she's like, how can a person tell these stories? How can she tell every little detail? My niece said there were girls that were even younger than her.

For a while, Karen and I thought this was among the most disturbing things that Coco had done. But then we learned that, yet again, we were wrong. She was at a girls' camp and she was hanging out with, like, 16-year-olds.

holding their hands, being super friendly like you would with, like, your girlfriends when you're young. This is Emi. She's a child sex trafficking survivor who followed Coco on Instagram. She asked us not to use her last name. I just aged myself by saying girlfriends. But anyway, so, like, they were just hanging out. Coco and a couple of teenage girls. They maybe were by water. It kind of seemed, like, beachy. They had the phone out, and so they were laying, I believe, like,

in a row, kind of. And then Coco, like, turned to Janessa, who is Jessie's daughter, and, like, licked her face. Yeah, she licked her face. And Emi saw this all play out on Instagram because Coco posted a video of it. I was like, that is, like, a 15, 16-year-old girl. That is so inappropriate. Like, no matter how, like, close you think you are, like, it's just, to me, that was just, it was horrifying. Highly inappropriate. Yeah.

I screen recorded it and I got rid of it because I second guessed myself and I wish I hadn't because it was really inappropriate behavior. We asked Emmy why she deleted the video and she said she didn't know who to report it to and whether that person would find it as inappropriate as she did. And she says the video made her so uncomfortable, she just didn't want to hold on to it. What I've noticed a lot in the survivor community, we tend to second guess ourselves quite a bit. We tend to say, no, it's not what we think.

For Emmy, this moment changed her from a casual observer to a skeptical internet sleuth watching Coco's feed to see what would happen next. Her and Jesse were super close, so they were always posting together. And then I noticed, oh, they haven't posted anything together for a while. And so I just imagined that maybe that was part of why they weren't friends anymore. And then she said, OK, someone reported me. Someone had reported Jesse Funk to the Utah State Licensing Board.

Jesse was newly licensed, and so she should have been monitored while she was giving out therapy. But Jesse had been talking to a suicidal teen on Instagram, and his mother reported her. We dug up the records from the state board, and this is what she got in trouble for. But it wasn't just one teen's mom who had turned Jesse in.

Jesse decided not to give us an interview, but she did talk about all of this in a TikTok video. Emmy saved it and shared it with us. The second one was a woman who helped me with some camps last summer and did a lot of inappropriate things.

This whole ordeal was big on TikTok for a little bit. Jessie issued a series of video apologies, and this one appears to be apology number four.

Everyone's telling me just to stay off social media completely, but for my own anxiety, I just, I have to record one more video and I just want to state what happened. I want to take full responsibility and then I just want to delete this account next week and just totally disappear.

Jessie's license was suspended, and she told her TikTok followers that she had no desire to have it reinstated. I will never, ever call myself a therapist again. I will never step foot in the mental health field. I'm not going to run camps for kids anymore. Like, I've learned so much from this, and I'm so deeply, deeply sorry.

I read the documents the other day. You know, it's clear they investigated and it's clear there was some wrongdoing there. For sure. But it sounds like people believe that Coco's the one that called and reported it. Yeah, and I would believe that too. And I think that's why people are afraid of Coco. A lot of people have said that they were afraid of Coco. Afraid that if they spoke up, even now, that she would somehow do or say something that would turn their lives upside down.

But in this moment, in the late summer of 2021, it started to feel like Coco was the one who should be afraid. This is Believable, the Coco Berthman story. Let's take a break from the Cocoverse for a second. I think I told you a couple of weeks ago that my husband and I were double paying for our subscriptions, which obviously I really hated. But that's also why I'm so happy that we found out about Rocket Money.

This blew my mind when I found it out, but did you know that over 80% of people have subscriptions that they have forgotten about? Seriously, think about how many free trials you've subscribed to that you've probably never canceled. In fact, I just signed up for two this week. I know I'm going to forget about them. That's why I'm such a big fan of Rocket Money. Rocket Money is a personal finance app that finds and cancels your unwanted subscriptions. It monitors your spending and helps you lower your bills all in one place.

Most people think they're spending $80 on their subscriptions when in reality, the number is closer to $200. When you're signed up for so many things like streaming services you've used to watch one show or free trials for delivery you don't use, it's easy to lose track of what you're paying for. With Rocket Money, you can easily cancel the ones you don't want with just the press of a button. No more long hold times or annoying emails with customer service.

Rocket Money does all the work for you. Rocket Money can even negotiate to lower bills for you by up to 20%. All you have to do is take a picture of your bill and Rocket Money takes care of the rest. Stop wasting money on things you don't use. Cancel your unwanted subscriptions and manage your money the easy way by going to rocketmoney.com slash believable. That's rocketmoney.com slash believable. rocketmoney.com slash believable.

Rex Hurman is a demon that walks among us, a predator that ruined families. The Lisk podcast team was shocked by the recent news of Rex Hurman's arrest in connection with the Gilgo Four murders. After more than a decade of searching, law enforcement officials finally pieced together enough evidence to bring formal charges against him.

I'm your host, Chris Moss, and the List podcast will be releasing new episodes every week to unpack how Howerman was caught. We'll track developments in the case, as well as conduct interviews with officials and witnesses familiar to all the troubling details. We are relieved by the arrest, but with new information coming to light every day, there's still so much to learn. Look for new episodes every week, and if you haven't already, please listen to seasons one and two of List's Long Island Serial Killer wherever you listen to podcasts.

I have to be careful with what I say because I want people to know that more times than most, my initial reaction to stories is never to think that they're not true.

Jose Alfaro is a child sex trafficking survivor and an advocate. His abuser was sentenced to 30 years in federal prison. Although I think it's important to say that a survivor's story does not need to be proven in court in order to be believed. Absolutely, I think that you should believe survivors. 100%.

But when Jose started following Coco on Instagram, he almost immediately had doubts. It did not seem realistic. You know, I just had so many questions and I wanted to know why the professionals and the people who were supposed to look into this weren't looking into it. Jose found himself talking about all of this with a fellow survivor. And I said, there's something very odd about this girl and I don't believe her and I don't believe her story. And this person says...

Coco Berthman blocked me. She blocked me after I asked her for help and asked for support within this movement.

And then, August 2nd, 2021, veteran Utah journalist Lynn Packer released his first YouTube report about Coco Berthman. People who had been waiting for someone, anyone, to call Coco out on her lies were riveted.

I was actually doing laundry, running around my apartment, and I literally stopped. I sat on my bed, and as I watched it, I was just checking the boxes. So, how much of Berthman's story is true? Prostituted by her mother from birth to 15 years old? Raped by pedophiles 10 to 50 times a day? Watched her sister brutally murdered while she was trying to escape sex trafficking? None of it. Yup.

thought that. Yep, that's what I thought.

And then when they shared her actual name. She changed her name. Her first name from Sandra Renata to Coco Veragine. I think that was the biggest validation for me. I knew that her freaking name was not Coco. I knew her name's not Coco. Like, how is that not a red flag for anyone? And literally, I kid you not. I said, excuse my language. I fucking knew it. I fucking knew it.

There's no mention of Lynn's report in any of the screenshots that we have from Coco's social media pages. But three days after it came out, Coco posted on Instagram, once again, with some big news. This time, she was describing the day that she got a phone call from a woman named Rose, asking if Coco would like to give a TED Talk.

My heartbeat stopped for a good second or two. In that moment, I remembered how friends of mine made jokes years prior to this phone call saying things like, watch out, one day Ted will call you. I thought no one gets called by Ted. Who does this happen to? No one. Just people who are famous and special and have something important to say.

Actually, Coco had been invited to record a TEDx talk. It's the local independent version of the global conferences that you've seen on YouTube. But regardless, Coco had been talking about this TED talk for more than a year. I'm staying up late to work on my TED talk or I can't hang out tonight because I'm writing my TED talk, stuff like that. It was part of what gave her credibility. She told Chris Hansen about it. She was about to do a TED talk.

And she left podcast host Michael Bostic with the impression that it was already done. When we had her on the show, I think this is off the backs of her doing a TED Talk. To be fair, some of this was not Coco's fault. She was scheduled to speak at the TEDx conference hosted by BYU in March of 2020, but it was canceled because of COVID.

Instead, Coco's speech was videotaped in March of 2021, with a release date set for a few days later. But the video did not drop according to schedule. My heavens, it goes through one level of fact-checking after another. That's Lynn Packer. Lynn says the organizers of the conference had received an email from Coco's mother, Renata. And we've seen a copy of the letter. An English-speaking friend who we spoke to helped Renata write it.

And in it, Renata lays out all of the reasons why her daughter's story simply cannot be true. And at first, it seems like the conference organizers are taking this information seriously. Her broadcast is even delayed for a couple of months while they fact check. And then all of a sudden, OK, it passes after she complains, after one of her supporters in New York complains, oh, I guess we better broadcast this.

I'm a survivor of child sex trafficking, and I was trafficked for the first 15 years of my life by my own family. Lynn used a long clip from the TEDx talk in his report. I grew up in Germany, taking dance lessons, going horseback riding, and listening to Celine Dion. However, once I closed the doors to my home, everything changed. While other children grew up with monsters under their bed, I had to grow up with the monsters in my bed.

Coco didn't mention any of the delays in her Instagram post. She only said that she was thrilled to have her speech out in the world. This is the AI again, by the way. I am in awe that I get to Google now Coco Berthman TED Talk and the first thing popping up is my speech. But don't go running to Google right now to plop in those same search terms because you're not going to find Coco's speech.

Two and a half weeks after his first Cocoa Birthman expose dropped, Lynn Packer produced a second YouTube video, this one specifically calling out BYU for mishandling Cocoa's TEDx talk. Despite getting evidence Birthman's story is a hoax, BYU continues to keep her TEDx speech online.

And then the TEDx talk was taken down with no explanation. They just made it disappear. So like this world that she had built was starting to crumble a little bit.

At this point, Amanda Frisbee says she still believed that Coco had been sex trafficked, and she was prepared for Coco's skeptics. In fact, she says she knew Lynn Packer's report was coming because Coco texted her right after Lynn called Coco for comment. I just received a call from a reporter who left me a voicemail. Panic over here. I think it's Paul. He is trying to play the whistleblower, I bet. Paul?

Paul is Paul Hutchinson again. Literally everything that happened to her, she was like, oh my gosh, it's Paul. Amanda watched Lynn's videos when they came out. And I was just kind of like, you know what? It's not my business. I'm sure that there are sketchy things she's had to say and do in order to stay alive.

Coco's reaction was about what we've come to expect from her. Oh my gosh, this idiot no-name journalist made this video about me and I was like, Lynn Packer is not a no-name journalist. Like, I hate to tell you this, but he's like, does very good work.

But as often happens with Coco, Amanda did not really have a lot of time to sit back and think about the things that Coco was saying. There were like so many things going on. So she's being put into witness protection. In the version of the story that Amanda heard, it was because of Paul. But she's also being sent to New York to film a documentary about this whole Paul situation. The documentary was with Chris Hansen. But on the way there, she's also going to stop in Chicago.

I cannot keep up with this girl. Like, what are you talking about? All of this travel would cost money. And Coco's on a student visa. She's not allowed to legally work off campus.

Many of the people who have been supporting Coco in Utah have now seen or heard about Lynn Packer's video. Some of them are now feeling confident enough to comment under her social media posts and share stories of the lies she told them. With the Cocoverse crumbling around her and her lies spreading across the internet, Coco turns to some of her more influential contacts. The message popped up when I was like posting Instagram stories.

That's Lauren Everts Bostic. Lauren and her husband Michael had interviewed Coco on the Skinny Confidential podcast in January of 2021. The DM was like a copy and paste to a lot of people, and so I just didn't open it. Michael got this message too. I actually have my DMs open right now. That's the one she sent me and said I hope it works.

finds you well. Yeah, it looks like we both got the same message where I was like, hope this finds you well and I hope I'm not overstepping by asking, have you ever considered sponsoring someone? Michael sent us a copy of the message. You know, I have found myself in a very terrible situation with going to school and also going currently through this re-traumatizing criminal prosecution against my perpetrator, whom I was assaulted by last summer.

Koko explains that because she's on a student visa, she's only allowed to work 20 hours a week on campus and only while she's enrolled in school. And that's true. But she says she can't be enrolled right now because of the prosecution of her predator and

And that part is a lie. The last few months have become extremely stressful for me to the point of making me more and more sick. It goes on and on. But essentially, it became a multi-paragraph message asking me to sponsor, which I did not respond to. You think she was asking for money? Is that what she meant by sponsor? Yeah. I think it was like, basically, can you send me money? And not to a cause, but

Like personally, my antenna perked up and said, huh, this is strange. And nobody on the show has ever come back around and asked us to sponsor them. Nine days after Lynn Packer's second YouTube expose dropped, Coco posts again on Instagram. I've been getting countless messages on here asking if I'm OK because I've been so quiet. Thank you so much for caring and checking in on me and for not letting my quiet go unnoticed. I am OK.

Jose Alfaro saw the post. I knew in my heart, I'm like,

You're guilty and you're running away from the problem and you don't want to face it and you don't want to address it. And so you're going to make up a lie and say that you're so depressed and you're going through stuff and that you you got to go away and you got to go away for treatment in Chicago. OK, so tell us this the Chicago story then. This is from my interview with Amanda Frisbee. What is she going to get done in Chicago? And do you believe that she actually got it done?

So there is a doctor. His name is Dr. Lipov, and he's located in Chicago. And he helped develop this procedure for people who have complex trauma called SGB. I don't know what it stands for. The procedure is called a stellate ganglion block. They do an injection at the base of your brain on one side for past trauma, and then they

And then the next day they do it on the other side for more recent trauma. And it really has helped and made a difference in a lot of people who have complex trauma. At this point, Coco is still telling people that she's going to New York to film a documentary, which we know by then had already been canceled. She's also still saying that she's going to be in witness protection, which again is just not how these things work.

But first, she says she'll fly to Chicago for this procedure. We've been told that her travel was covered by someone else. And Amanda doesn't think that Coco actually paid for the procedure either. But it's true that she got it. That part was not made up. From what I understand, Dr. Lipov invited her to come and get this procedure done. So yeah, she did actually go and get that done. I've had that confirmed by other people, one of Dr. Lipov's assistants, stuff like that.

Immediately afterwards, she's like, "Oh my goodness, I'm healed."

Everything is wonderful. Like, colors are brighter and smells are sweeter. And she's like, I'm not afraid anymore. Screw Paul. Screw the New York thing. I'm not doing it. I'm coming home. And I was like, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa. What are you talking about? So Coco returns to Utah with a new goal in mind. I want to get married right now. I'm ready to settle down and start a family. And I was like, oh, well, have you thought about dating women at all?

And she said, you know what? Since the procedure, I don't really feel that way anymore. And I was like, oh, come on. I'm sorry. What are you implying that you were cured of your gayness from this trauma surgery? That's really problematic. Yikes.

As near as we can tell, Coco stayed off of Instagram for a while. Well, less than two months, but that's a long time in the Cocoverse. And then, on October 19th, 2021, she was back. And she announced her return with a close-up photo of her face. A huge smile. Her eyes are almost sparkling. They look like they've been photoshopped. It is the feeling when you completely let go and allow yourself to belong to yourself for the very first time. When you look in the mirror and it is just you. Well,

Despite the controversy surrounding Coco at this point, the post still got close to 2,000 likes. But that doesn't mean people were believing everything that Coco said.

It was almost like a TV show by that point. Like it was fictional, people were just watching the show and they liked to see what was going on with her. That's Richard Paul Evans. He's the best-selling author who met Coco to talk about writing a book. Once you start down that rabbit hole of lies and fraud, where do you go with it? I mean, the lies have to grow. They have to become more. The stories have to become bigger.

So when Coco announced to her Instagram followers that she had cancer, Richard already wasn't believing it. I have friends in the hospital right now with cancer. It's not glamorous. They don't look like they just got ready for a photo shoot. By that point, I realized that she was very hungry for attention, very hungry for attention. We see a lot of people that way want to be influencers, want to be seen on YouTube. And it's like she was just kind of that on steroids.

This was especially insulting to the survivors who had watched Coco Berthman lie about the very real trauma that they had endured. Jose Alfaro still gets angry when he talks about it. I don't even know if I should say this, but I'm going to say it. I said to my friend, I said, if Coco Berthman does not die from cancer, she's a fucking liar. Right.

When she said she had cancer, nothing made sense. This is Emmy. I knew a lot about cancer and her stuff just didn't align. Every day she was posting about cancer. And she was also reusing old photos from various doctor's trips.

So, for example, Becky McIntosh, the LDS mom who Coco stayed with in 2019. Becky had taken Coco to the hospital after an ATV crash, and Coco used one of those photos from that visit to suggest that she was being treated for cancer. I started to screenshot them and everything that she was writing.

And then when she said she was going live, I just hit screen record and just recorded it. Well, I found something in my neck a few weeks ago that didn't sit right with me. This is the video you've already heard. The one where Coco rubs the imaginary lump in her neck. It's like a grape-sized ball that is just like sitting here. It was just there was so much misinformation. It was just so inaccurate.

How many weeks, months, how many posts do you think you saved before you quit? I saved all of them. I saved everything she ever posted on Instagram. I guess my whole thing was like, I'm not going to let this be swept under the rug is how I felt. And there was another group of people who were simply over Coco's lies. The LDS moms who had housed her and supported her. Some of them already knew each other, but Coco had worked hard to keep them apart.

When Lynn's video came out, he says, I think you guys would be a good support to each other. Like, you need each other. That's Becky McIntosh. She says the moms took Lynn's advice and gathered everybody together in a group text. Becky calls it HC. We don't like saying the name Coco. It's a trigger name. So it's HC for Hurricane Coco. Yeah.

Because everywhere she goes, it's like a hurricane. And when Coco announced that she had cancer, members of the HC Moms group were watching. So the minute that happened, I got a hold of Becky McIntosh. That's Shirley Morgan again. She's the mom who Coco hung up on after coming out as gay. I'm like, we've got to meet as this group of women.

because I am 99% sure this is a scam again. Shirley met Coco just three weeks after her husband died of cancer, and so they had talked quite a bit about what that was like. That was one of the things Coco questioned and questioned and questioned me about was my journey with cancer. The HC moms group all hopped on a call. I just said, somehow we've got to alert authorities that

that this is probably a scam and that this needs to be looked into. And they're like, there's no way this is true. And I said, you're right. That's another member of the moms group, Annette Kohlert. Kogel lived with her from the summer of 2018 until the summer of 2019. So I said, I'm calling the police. So I mean, what else do you do?

Coco lived with Annette for longer than she lived with anyone else we interviewed. And after just a few minutes of talking to Annette, I kind of understood why. Annette is super laid back. She doesn't show a lot of emotion. She's an engineer. She says she's got a pretty analytical brain. She doesn't seem to be too upset by the strange things Coco did while living in her home. But... Once she got stealing from people, that's the end of it. That's the end of it.

it. That's where I draw the line. I just submitted in writing everything to the South Jordan Police Department because you can't just call them and tell them you have to submit it online. And then the investigator called me back the next day and said, can I get some details on this? Annette told the officer that Coco had already claimed to have cancer twice while living with Becky McIntosh. She told him about Coco's other lies, too, and she gave him a link to Lynn Packer's videos. And I said, if she really has cancer, I'll donate. But

if you'll check it out. And I didn't hear anything back in over a week. And then the next thing I know, my phone is just pinging with, did you see Coco on the news? Coco Berthman had been arrested. I was on my way to the airport. I have the app notification to KSL and that was their number one story. It had popped up. And then people were just messaging me like crazy. Have you seen this? Have you seen this? Jose Alfaro lives in Boston, not Utah. And even he saw the news. I just started laughing.

And it sounds horrible, but I think I said to myself, finally, finally something's being done. For Amanda Frisbee, the news that her friend had been lying all this time was pretty devastating. And she told Coco about it on that phone call. Obviously, I'm upset about the way that this has affected me just over the last month. Like all of that heartache was for nothing.

And that hurts. But it also hurts even more the way that it's affected other communities, like the survivor community and like people who actually have cancer. And I don't know how to grapple with that. It just feels like you have this really, really deep need for attention and to be cared for. Would you agree with that? Not necessarily, but I see where you're coming from.

Not necessarily, but I see where you're coming from. Even though the call ended cordially, shortly after they hung up, Coco blocked Amanda on all platforms. Because, you know, step six, block them and find someone new. I was so offended again because I had been so kind. I, you know, I wasn't expecting to stay friends, but I also wasn't expecting her to completely block me.

And perhaps Amanda would have eventually started to question everything that Coco had ever said, but the fact that Coco blocked her right away, well, it really fast-tracked it. She's lying about everything. And I know that that can be hard to track, but some of the things she said, you should be able to verify. Like the fact that she said she had a therapist that locked her in a basement and abused her for months. She's claimed to have cancer multiple times before!

She has accused so many people of the most unspeakable acts and ruined their lives and their careers. She's not going to learn. She's not a puppy. She's not a baby. She's not a child. You have to start treating her like an adult.

or nothing's going to change. I know what you want from me. You want me to tell you that this story has a satisfying ending. That Amanda and Becky and Jose and Emmy and Beth and Nicole and the other Becky and Emily and Somi and Annette and everyone else who was used and abused by Coco Berthman got to see the justice system hold her accountable for all of the damage that she caused. But I can't tell you that because that's not what happened.

I'm speechless. I'm furious. I have no words. I keep asking myself, what if this had been a person of color? She just walks away and can continue with her life and doesn't even get kicked out of the country. Why fucking not? I just can't believe that she got away with it again.

I'm so angry. That's 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 Corrin. A special thanks to Aseel Kibbe.

Consulting producers are Simpatico Media and Infinity Rising. Executive producers are Jocelyn Falk and Paige Port for Dear Media. And finally, we know this podcast hits on a lot of difficult topics. If you or someone you know is struggling, see our show notes for a list of resources. ♪