Why is There a Helicopter?
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A note before we get started. We are using an AI-generated clone Coco to create audio of Coco Berthman's social media posts and text messages. But as always, Coco's words are 100% real. And a warning. This episode includes mention of sexual violence against children. Listen with care.

In the fall of 2019, Coco Berthman threw a party to celebrate the 10th anniversary of her escape from human trafficking. What was it exactly? Her anniversary for what? That's Somia Lee. I apologize. I am sorry that was brutal and cruel and not nice and ill-mannered. But in hindsight...

It's apropos. Somi, you'll remember, is the former Bollywood actress who runs the organization No More Tears. Coco spoke at a No More Tears event in Miami just a month before her anniversary party. And that event was a big success for Coco. She met people who helped her grow her career as an advocate. And Somi says everyone in the room really loved her speech.

Well, almost everyone. There was only one person in that entire crowd, and it was my ex-boyfriend. He's a lawyer for no more tears. His name is Josh. Josh was the only one. He was like, so me, if someone has their stomach cut up at 14 and they have a child taken out of them, he was like, what are you thinking?

I was like, stop victim blaming. He was like, I'm telling you, there's something off with her. And I said, I know there's something off with her. We're survivors and there's inevitably things going to be off with her. But Josh's concerns stuck with Somi. I started to question it.

I started to question it. And this is why Josh said, go to the event that she's invited you to and see what the hell is going on over there. So Somi flew to Utah for Coco's 10th anniversary bash. And No More Tears board member Melissa McCune went with her. When we walked in, it was quite an experience.

The room was lavishly decorated. People described it like a wedding. There was a lot of gold decor. Coco picked it out because she said that gold and yellow were her sister Anna's favorite colors. You remember Anna, right? The sister who, near as we can tell, never actually existed. I remember on each of the tables was a birdcage. The birdcages represented the golden cage the sisters lived in. It was very flashy, very showy.

But Somi was noticing something else. All I saw was a lot of guys with black suits and guns. I thought they were the FBI or Secret Service. I don't know who they were, but they had guns. And I was like, I don't want to get shot by a fucking gun. They were not FBI or Secret Service. They were volunteer security guards from a group called Adaptive Operations.

And I was like, all right, I'm going to die in the worst place in the world. Yeah, I have no filter. Eventually, if we do build a friendship, Sarah, you'll get used to that. I don't know why Somi thinks this is a problem. As a journalist, I love talking to people who have no filter. Somi told us that Coco greeted her and her friend Melissa, but it wasn't the warm welcome that they expected. Almost like she was embarrassed to see us.

It was very uncomfortable, very weird. It was like we were not welcome there. But we didn't understand because we were invited. Everyone had assigned seats, but Melissa was surprised that none had been reserved for them. Where we ended up sitting was literally off the stage on the very back row. I mean, you couldn't get any further up. I'm going, okay, we flew here for this? Thank you so much for coming, everyone. This is bigger than I've ever dreamed of.

This is a video taken from the audience during Coco's speech. It cuts off at the end, and so we're not sure if we have the whole thing. But we got to hear some of it. And in it, Coco talks about her time in New York working as an au pair. My neighbor was Ruth Willis. Every morning he's like, hey Coco. I was like, what up?

And at that point, Melissa and I were like, where the fuck is the alcohol? So I texted Josh and I was like, Josh, this shit is bat crazy. Like, this is like nuts. She's like talking about high-fiving Bruce Willis. Like, this is insanity.

There's one more thing that both Somi and Melissa remember. It's not in the video of Coco's speech, so we haven't been able to verify it, but we pressed both of them on it and they remember it really vividly. In fact, Somi says that Melissa reached over and pinched her when this happened. It has to do with Coco's forced abortion story, the one that made Somi's ex-boyfriend Josh question Coco's story in the first place. Okay, let's go back to Miami.

So in Miami, she was talking about how she was not given anesthesia and they took the baby out and then they trafficked the baby. Then in Utah, the baby was murdered in front of her. So I'm thinking, wait, was the baby trafficked or was it murdered? So that's when I texted Josh. I was like, listen, you're right on point. She's full of shit.

And then we were like, bye-bye. Get the fuck out of here. There is still a lot that we need to figure out about what, if anything, happened to Coco. But this thing that Somi is talking about, the forced abortion, we know this story can't be true. Coco was not living with her parents at the time. The state was her guardian. ♪

And when Somi tells this story, dropping F-bombs every three seconds, it all just seems ridiculous. But the truth is, none of this is funny. Because lying about this sort of thing, even exaggerating here and there, it has huge consequences for the anti-trafficking movement. And Coco Berthman is not the only one who is stretching the truth.

This is Believable, the Cocoa Birthman story, episode five. Why is there a helicopter? Okay, it's time to commit.

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All right, so thank you guys all for coming out. We got a pretty big group today and it's pretty cool. It's pretty awesome. It's early on a Saturday morning and producer Karen Given and I have joined dozens of volunteers in a parking lot about a mile from the Las Vegas Strip. We're with an organization called Shine a Light and we're getting ready to go inside the drainage tunnels that run beneath the city.

Every Saturday, Shina Light goes down there to bring blankets and other supplies to the homeless population that lives there. Someone will just be waking up. It's early.

And though it may not seem like it at first, the reason we're here has everything to do with Coco Berthman. Coco posted this video to YouTube in the spring of 2020.

The video has been taken down, but we were able to find it on one of my favorite places on the internet, the Wayback Machine. It takes snapshots of web pages and preserves them.

I am trained with an organization called Adaptive Operations that performs rescue operations of human trafficking victims. Adaptive Operations. That's the same group that was providing security at Coco's 10th anniversary party. This group is a Utah nonprofit, and this idea that they rescue survivors is controversial. One survivor said to us, "No, we rescue ourselves."

But getting back to those tunnels under Las Vegas... I went last night with adaptive operations and those heroic men to try to find trafficked children. As Coco tells it, the tunnels are a recruiting ground for child sex traffickers. And it's no wonder that those people who live down there, and mostly minors, become victims to human trafficking because they're so vulnerable. They have nothing.

In most of Coco's videos, at least the ones that we've been able to watch, she's calm and she's composed. But not this time. And I'm sorry that I'm being so drastic today, but it just broke my heart. This person come out of the tunnel yesterday when we walked in.

at midnight i could see his face and he was just broken he was so broken and we need to stop human trafficking so go ahead share this video learn something do something say something

This video went big. Really big. You can still find lots of links to it online. And there's a reason why this video was so popular. QAnon supporters, those people who believe that former President Donald Trump is fighting a cabal of Democratic pedophiles that are running the world, those people offered this video as proof, proof of their claim that hundreds of thousands of children were being rescued from underground sex trafficking rings.

And just to be totally clear, Coco doesn't actually say that's what she saw when she went underground, but in the months and years after Coco posted this video, she had lots of opportunities to set the record straight. And instead, she just added more and more detail to the horrors that she says she witnessed in the tunnels under Las Vegas.

Here she is on a podcast called Simply Chimane. It's hosted by Chimane Nugent, the wife of Ted Nugent, an aging rock star and well-known supporter of Donald Trump. I'm

I know there's been lately a lot about tunnels and I want to be cautious there to not feed more misconceptions. Basically what's going on in Vegas, under the strip, there's an entire tunnel system that was initially for flooding and those tunnels don't serve their purpose anymore. The tunnels don't only run under the strip, they run all across the city and they do still flood when it rains, although it doesn't rain very often in Las Vegas. A lot of homeless people do house and live down in those tunnels. There's a lot of

of drug trafficking and obviously a lot of vulnerability. This is true. And sex trafficking experts tell us that vulnerability, lack of housing, lack of resources, it is the biggest risk factor when it comes to sex trafficking. But here's where Coco starts to lose touch with reality. It feels like you're entering hell. It smells like hell because there are dead bodies down there. There's chains, dog barking, screaming, yelling, um,

It's dark. It's dirty. You can't touch anything because of nursery. You could get shot down easily. It's just a world for itself where a lot of vulnerability is happening in regards of trafficking. Most people seem to take Coco at her word when she says things like this, including Shemaine Nugent. Gosh, I don't know what to say other than God bless you and thank you so much again for speaking out. And why wouldn't someone take Coco at her word? She sounds like she knows what she's talking about.

But as we stand in that parking lot in Las Vegas waiting to see for ourselves, the volunteer leaders at Shine a Light, they're already assuring us that this isn't what's happening in the tunnels. You're going to come to find out that most of the stuff that they report about this is all made up. Karen and I load up with supplies.

We grab as many blankets as we can, and we set out to talk to as many people as possible about whether this could all be true. We spend hours with the volunteers. Many of them once lived in the tunnels themselves, and they all say the same thing. Never seen a dead body. Not once. Ever seen an organized sex trafficking ring? No, I have not. Definitely not.

We arrive at a place where multiple flood channels let out under an overpass. An older woman emerges and she introduces us to her dogs. "This is Diamond the Barker." "Diamond and Franklin? Alright, good name." We're told that it's not a good idea to go inside of a tunnel without an invitation, so our group leader starts by talking to one of the residents. His name is Louis. "I have a question. Can a couple of us go look at your camp?" "Like that?" "Yeah."

okay lewis leads us into one of the tunnels it's low and wide doesn't smell like much of anything certainly not like dead bodies there are no chains no sounds of people screaming it's strangely dark and peaceful we pass a lot of graffiti and a no trespassing sign some trash bags that look full we walk for a while stooped over so that we don't hit our heads on the low ceiling

And then we turn sharply to the right and squeeze through a small, low opening. It's very low, Sarah. We find ourselves in a long, narrow space that's tall enough to stand up.

Louis pulls back a curtain. It's actually a huge American flag, big enough to cover the entire space. And then after a little more walking, Louis invites us into his home. There's a kitchen area where Louis can cook his meals. And then behind a thick, dark curtain, Louis has created two small rooms. The first is his living room. Almost half of the floor space is taken up by two bright red padded armchairs that he's rescued from the trash.

They're pretty nice. I'm pretty sure they even recline. Someone has painted the walls white and put up photos. They almost look like travel posters. And in the middle of the main wall, there's a big mural of a heart with the words, Fuck Love.

The room is bright. It's lit by overhead lights that hang from a metal pipe. How'd you get the electricity in there? That one is the batteries. Oh, batteries. Wow. We also have converters we use sometimes. I have converters, but this is connected here. Okay. How do you keep the water out? Luis shows me the second room, where his bed is. Even when it rains, he explains, only a few inches of water get in.

I should say that no one else we encountered down here is living as comfortably as Louis. Some people had nothing more than a few cardboard boxes or tarps in a crate. It's a dirty and dangerous place to be sure. But it's nothing like the hell that Coco described.

After our visit, Karen and I made our way back to the Las Vegas sunshine. We're not sure what we expected to find in the tunnels, but it definitely wasn't Lewis's two-room apartment, complete with wall art, lighting, and comfy lounge chairs. The only thing Koga said that was true was the dogs barking, but the dogs were friendly. That's the only thing.

And it's not just about the tunnels. Over and over, Coco uses her relationship with adaptive ops to support some of her more outrageous claims, like this one on the anti-pornography podcast Consider Before Consuming.

Last weekend, I was in another training with adaptive operations, and I was fortunate enough to meet with some FBI agents. And as of that last weekend, I believed human trafficking is $115 billion enterprise worldwide. But I was corrected. It's a $53 trillion enterprise worldwide. That's awesome. $53 trillion? Mm-hmm.

Yeah, trafficking is definitely underreported, but that is not a real number. There's nothing we can find anywhere that would support a number that comes anywhere close to $53 trillion.

But every time she says something exaggerated like that, she gets more likes and views. Because she's stoking the flames of conspiracy, of the people who have made the issue of child sex trafficking a political one. There is a sense of anxiety and fear in our society. That's Robert Beiser. He works for a leading anti-trafficking organization called Polaris.

And the more that there's content to address that fear and make people feel more empowered by the information that they think they can access, the more people gravitate towards that content. They want to watch those things. They want to share those things. And trafficking is horrific. The folks on the fringes are...

becoming very loud, incredibly black and white about the way that they're seeing this issue. There's a massive overestimation of the size and scope of sex trafficking in this country. And there's quite a bit of people who think that government and Hollywood are specifically responsible for it. That's Joseph Uzinski. He's a political scientist at the University of Miami, and he studies conspiracy theories. Why does a story like Coco's

Making the assumption that what she's saying about her past as a victim of child sex trafficking in Germany is not true. Why does this story fit perfectly into this QAnon narrative? Because it gives them what they already believe. It reinforces their existing beliefs.

So if you walk around every day thinking that there's massive amounts of sex trafficking, and then this person comes out and says, oh, it happened to me, and I was trafficked to hundreds or thousands of men, it only reinforces their worldview. Robert Beiser at Polaris saw the consequences of this firsthand when conspiracy theorists insisted that there was a connection between high-priced products on Wayfair and missing kids.

And for some people, they couldn't imagine things being sold on Wayfair being so expensive. Polaris operates the U.S. National Human Trafficking Hotline, and they were completely overwhelmed by this. Calls, emails, text messages, web forums, giving us the same pieces of information over and over again. All saying that this was proof that Wayfair was selling children for sex.

And all of these reports made it difficult for the hotline to do its actual job, which is to connect victims and service providers with the help that they need. What happened when you challenged...

the Wayfair conspiracy. Simply put, when we said we couldn't validate this and none of our law enforcement partners could validate this, people just said we were wrong. It can be alarming, the level of aggression of people, because now they see us as, if complicit in trafficking, maybe possibly people that they want to target physically. And knowing that there was an attack on a place that someone thought

But trafficking was taking place in the basement of a pizza parlor that there was no basement of, which would be like silly and bizarre if the person hadn't brought a gun and shot. Remember Pizzagate? A North Carolina man arrested in a D.C. pizza shop after brandishing a gun, telling police he was there to investigate a conspiracy theory called...

This stemmed from a bizarre and completely false article claiming that Hillary Clinton was running a child sex ring out of the pizzeria. This is a lie. We all know the only people who are trapped in a pizza place are those robots at Chuck E. Cheese.

And so Robert Beiser and Polaris have a very simple strategy when it comes to talking about how to combat sex trafficking. We just want people to accurately understand what's going on. We don't need this to go viral. We want it to be very basic, like people learning about nutrition. We want them to learn how trafficking works in a very boring way. Coke.

Coco was never boring when she talked about trafficking. In fact, some survivors complained that the way she told her story was so graphic and so detailed that it was triggering for them. It made them uncomfortable.

But we should say that Coco is not the only person who is exaggerating the truth. Some people around her were doing it as well, and many of them still are. This brings us back to adaptive operations. Like a lot of people who worked with Coco Berthman, founder Eros Mackie tries to downplay his connection to her, but as it often does, social media exposes a different story.

Coco has a tendency to delete her social media posts, but we were able to find quite a few that reference Eros and the work that he's doing, and we were able to find even more of Eros praising Coco and her work.

A lot of what we learned about Eros, we learned from watching his TikTok. He posts under the name Eros Artemis. Artemis is his middle name. And the last time we checked, he had almost 14,000 followers who watch videos like this one. I get calls from devastated parents whose children are being trafficked and are lost. Each time, I don't think my heart can take another case. But I know I must once again enter dark streets and alleys and help these parents.

Eros' feed includes videos from the firing range, where he says he's training for recovery operations. There's one where he's off-roading in the desert on what the caption calls the Adaptive Ops patrol bike. There's even one where he's standing in front of a Huey helicopter and a Porsche SUV. Why is there a helicopter? Yeah.

That's Erin Albright. She's a lawyer who has spent 15 years training law enforcement on ethical tactics and anti-sex trafficking. I have never been involved in anything that has required a helicopter, for the record. We asked Erin to watch some of the videos with us to give us an analysis. Okay, here's another great one. Karen plays another TikTok. In this one, Eros is shirtless, treading water in a bay. The scenery behind him looks vaguely tropical.

True story. While on a mission to help trafficked children, I barely escaped kidnapping. I was hiding out in this beach area for a couple days where I got stung by a jellyfish, but by the grace of God, I made it home. Can I just say, first of all, my first thought was, where's your shirt? But also, if people don't listen to the whole thing, they're going to think that he barely made it out alive because of the traffickers, but it was just a jellyfish.

Eros posts videos that are fun to watch. And that's exactly the problem. Helping victims is not entertainment. It should never be entertainment. But in the world that Coco immersed herself in, all of this looked a lot like entertainment. The more outrageous the content, the more clicks, the more likes.

We've seen video of Eros from 10 years ago. Back then, he was sort of a classic conservative academic type. Pleated dress pants, button-down shirt. But on TikTok, Eros is different. He's macho, militarized, Hollywood-esque. You all remember when this article came out saying that child trafficking wasn't an epidemic.

I have seen it with my own eyes. This is a TikTok duet. Eros is in the foreground staring at the camera. He's got a military buzz cut, a week or two of stubble, and he's wearing a tight-fitting t-shirt that shows off how much time he spends in the gym. And behind him, the duet part of his TikTok duet, we see screenshots of news articles. All of them are suggesting that dozens, even hundreds of kids have been rescued from sex trafficking.

But Erin and the other experts I asked about this, they said those headlines are misleading. A couple of times during pandemic and right before there were some U.S. marshals were doing some ops. They get like all the warrants for missing kits.

And they go and they look for them. And the reality is a lot of those kids are literally at home and the warrant was just never closed. So there was a big one, if everybody remembers, in Georgia about like X number of kids found in like a trailer in Georgia. The story went viral online. 39 kids found in a trailer in Georgia. It's even one of the headlines that Eros used in his TikTok duet.

But it's not what really happened. We're at a point now where anytime someone sees a missing kid, they immediately go to trafficking. When rarely, if ever, would I say it's trafficking. Erin says these raids serve a real purpose because while most of these kids have been found safe at home, there are always a handful that were living in at-risk situations and maybe a couple who were actually being trafficked.

But there's a danger to overstating the problem. It perpetuates kind of this like stranger danger, sensationalized imagery that is not helpful because the reality is that most juveniles that are trafficked is by someone they know.

And then there are the adaptive operations fundraising videos. Sometimes Eros is sitting in a car and you can see an LDS temple in the background. Subtle, right? So subtle. We know how to navigate the anti-trafficking world and go hands-on.

If you desire your financial donations to go to an organization that is truly countering human trafficking and doing what other organizations can't or won't do, then we're the organization to support. You just said a bunch of words. What does any of that mean? Why you and not police? Why do we need to give you money to do this and be on the ground and not police? They're doing a lot of fundraising. For what, a helicopter?

Because I can tell you that whatever you paid to rent that helicopter for that publicity stunt, you could have probably paid for a couple months rent for a survivor that needed it. As someone who sits around and watches these groups raise thousands and tens of thousands and hundreds of thousands of dollars and is desperately searching for $100 to pay for a bus ticket for somebody, that's really hard.

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Coco Berthman attended a whole weekend of training with Adaptive Ops in August of 2019. It was held in St. George, a city in the southwestern corner of Utah, less than two hours from Las Vegas. She was thrilled to be connected to him. That's Becky McIntosh, the LDS mom who we met in episode three. Coco was living with Becky when she started training with Eros.

He wanted her to be a part of their rescue missions. They thought that these teens would be more comfortable or trust someone closer to their age and someone who had experienced what they had experienced. So that was Coco's role. But that wasn't the only reason Coco says she was really excited to meet Eros. She felt like her life was always in danger, that her mom was sending people to find her and bring her back to Germany or to kill her.

So Eros was going to, you know, teach her some skills and build her confidence surrounding that.

Learning now how to take someone down in handcuffs. That's the AI clone, reading from a text message that Coco sent that weekend. As you know by now, Coco was a prolific texter. She was always messaging someone in real time about her life or her imaginary life. And during this training, it was a woman who lived nearby. Just took down an FBI agent.

FYI, CIA is here now. By the way, there's no evidence that the CIA was actually at this training. Although we weren't really sure how to fact check that. Eros just told me we are on a short break. By the end of tomorrow, I will have made you a deadly weapon, LOL. He said because I am so petite and short, people wouldn't guess. And that's a good thing. Those guys are going to Iraq rescuing women, girls and boys from ISIS. This is what they train here for.

He told me he wants me to go to Iraq with them. Coco sent videos, too. In one, her arms are handcuffed behind her back. She fiddles around with a bobby pin for a little while until they open. There you go. In another video, a door swings open and a bunch of trainees bust into the room, guns drawn.

As the trainees stream in, a frightened-looking woman runs out the door past them. It looks a lot like you might imagine a police training video might look like. Except these are not police. Please, for the love of all things holy, tell me that his group is not doing that. If they are, it's worrisome.

We do not want vigilantes out there. And to be fair, that video was shared by Coco, and she might not be describing it correctly. So let's look at another video. This one was posted to Facebook by Adaptive Ops. So you know, Coco, some of these guys have been in very dangerous situations with me, helping victims.

In this one, Coco is standing in the bright sun at what looks to be a shooting range. She's wearing all black. Her blonde hair is in a ponytail topped by a black baseball cap. As the camera pans around, you see a group of seven men, plus whoever's holding the camera. One of their faces is blurred out.

Coco tells her life story again. And what strikes me this time is how dispassionate she sounds when she tells it, almost as if she's tired of hearing it herself. She repeats a lot of the things that you've already heard, including this. You know, "Lon Auto SVU" was like my way to learn that what happens to me is not right.

Coco tells the group that Mariska Hargitay, who plays Olivia Benson on that show, just followed her on Instagram. Awesome. I was like, yeah, Olivia!

As the video comes to an end, the camera angle shifts and we see Coco and seven men standing in a line, all holding guns. Coco's is small, most of the others are not. And on cue, all eight people raise their guns and fire. And...

In case you're wondering what the music is, it's called I Am Your Hunter, and it's the Adaptive Ops theme song.

We have watched and read a lot of shocking Coco content, but this stuff is among the most puzzling. We have so many questions. Who are these people? And what does any of this have to do with rescuing children from sex trafficking? So easy question first, just tell us who you are and what you do. Okay, I'm Eros Mackey. I'm the founder of Adaptive Operations. This is Believable, the Coco Berthman story.

So how did you meet Coco? Coco had been starting to get some popularity in the Utah area. Eros Mackey told us that he and Coco started getting invited to speak at the same events. And like a lot of people, he was impressed with her. I had some high hopes with Coco. She expressed to me that she wanted to help survivors. And I thought, you know, this girl could. She captures attention, people's attention.

People listen to her. She probably could really help survivors. We would speak maybe once a week,

She knew I was good at fixing cars and her car would break down often. And so I would fix her car for her, get the AC working or whatever. Arrow says that Coco mentioned she was in a tight spot for cash. So we paid her 50 bucks to create some social media posts for him. Arrow says he did a lot of these favors for Coco. I talked to therapists on her behalf and sent her to them. I connected her with Homeland Security. I connected her with the AG.

And even though she had a bigger social media presence than he did... Coco, if I'm going to speak more frankly, I always felt like she was just using me as a stepping stone. And I was okay with that. It's like, well, you know, if she can go do some good, then fine. In the spring of 2020, Coco announced her new foundation, the Coco Berthman Scholarship Fund, with a flurry of social media posts.

This is the announcement I've been waiting for my entire life. Let's end human trafficking one diploma at a time. The scholarship fund was a collaboration with Adaptive Operations. The money Coco raised went into a bank account controlled by Eros Mackey. There's nothing unusual about this. It's something that a lot of newer nonprofits will do because setting up a new organization is a lot of money and work.

So it's easier to sit under an umbrella organization for a while. But after the launch of her scholarship fund, Arrows says that Coco kind of disappeared on him. Coco started ghosting me.

more and more at that point. Coco's scholarship fund was still raising money, and after a few months, Eros started thinking that it was time to put that money to good use. He knew of a survivor in Colorado who was in need of some support. There was probably like five or six grand or something in that account, and I was like, that'd be really cool if Coco went to that survivor's door and gave her money to help her with her schooling or something like that. But

But Coco wouldn't answer any of my calls. I could not get in touch with her at all. I would send her messages. Hey, little sis, what's going on? You know, how are you? Where are you? No responses. About a year after her scholarship fund was established in April of 2021, Eros says Coco did finally get back in touch. And she asked Eros to transfer all that money to another nonprofit. And so he did.

Eros says he had a little bit of contact with Coco after that, but not much. After Coco was arrested, someone on Instagram asked Eros what he thought about her. And he said, quote, if she's a fraud, she can explain it to God. He said something similar to us. Here's the thing. If Coco Berthman was lying, shame on her.

If she wasn't lying, shame on everybody who says she was. I'm not in the business of exposing, I'm in the business of serving. We spent months reaching out to organizations that Coco Berthman was connected to, and many of them simply refused to talk to us. One founder said that Coco had already impacted her enough.

Others tried to downplay how much they interacted with her. One person told me he had nothing to do with Coco, even though she was on his advisory board, and a social media post described her as his organization's mentoring program director. Another person, a woman who had taken multiple photos at multiple events with Coco and had even been described as joining forces with her, told me over and over again on the record,

that she was not connected to Coco in any meaningful way. And back in October, when I first reached out to Eros Mackey, he told us that he appreciated what we were trying to do, but he said Coco really just was one of hundreds of students that he had taught, and he didn't have much to say.

But to his credit, he did eventually agree to talk to us. And he stayed on the call for almost two full hours, answering every question that we threw at him. Like Coco's claim that Eros wanted to take her to Iraq with him. I've never been to Iraq. I don't know. I don't know where that would have come from. And that money he raises in those TikTok fundraising campaigns. People don't really donate when I go out and ask for money. Yeah.

We looked into this, and according to the documents available on the IRS website, Adaptive Operations has never raised more than $50,000 in a single year. And Eros says that the training sessions Coco attended and posted online were not designed to prepare her to go on recovery missions.

He says they were something else. That's our private security licensing training for bail enforcement to private investigation to all levels of armed security. So when a group of armed trainees busts into a room where a woman is apparently being held hostage...

Arrow says that's not an anti-trafficking training exercise. No. In fact, I've never even been in a fistfight with traffickers. And when I'm doing counter-human trafficking work, most of the time it's in states that I can't even be armed in.

But even if Coco did misrepresent Eros and the work that she was doing with Adaptive Operations, our interview with Eros Mackey was the first time, as far as we can tell, that he publicly denied her claims. Hey, it's Eros.

I'm on the move again. I need your prayers and support to bring these souls... On TikTok, Eros seems like a guy who is flying all over the world rescuing children from armed perpetrators. But when I asked him to describe his work, it sounds much more mundane. I have a tactical homeless outfit. It's kind of like a disguise. Eros wears it when he's out on the streets. And this is how I collect my intel. I go and find people on the streets and make friends with them.

And then when I have a missing person in that particular area, I go find my old friend and show him a picture. Can you talk to me about your TikTok? Because I have to say, I didn't expect you to be this way in our interview. I kind of expected the other persona that I see sometimes on the internet, the other Eros. The TikTok you is not the you I seem to be having an hour long conversation with. And like, what's your, what's your strategy with that? So

So I had an intern. She was like, hey, you mind if I try creating a TikTok? There's a lot of vulnerable kids there. There's a lot of predators there hunting those kids. And I thought, you know, it's probably not a bad idea if we can create some attention and help educate. And I'm telling you, I have thousands, thousands of messages of kids that are like, hey, I want to be a part of stopping human trafficking.

But I gotta be honest, it's like not at all what the conversation has been like with you today. So like your TikToks come across as a little out there, you know, like helicopters and expensive cars and like you're waiting in water. And I'm wondering, like, what does a helicopter have to do with kids who are caught up in human trafficking? It's on the training side.

I mean, I'm not going to proclaim to be the best strategic marketer. I do find myself in very unique situations and it's like, you know, take a picture or whatever. But why create a public persona that's just not true? Especially right now, when doing something like that will only fan the flames of the conspiracy theory.

We promised to keep Erin Albright, the law enforcement trainer, no longer than one hour. But Karen reminds me that there's one more thing that we wanted her to see. Did you want to see the music video? Oh, yes, I do want to show her the music video. This is the last thing. We'll show you a small clip of this. Okay. We won't make you watch the whole thing. We'll just start it. No, the whole thing is nightmare-inducing, to be honest. Yeah, it's really bad. Karen hits play on this last video.

It's been taken offline, but a skeptical follower saved it and sent us a copy.

The video opens on a wide shot of Coco in a long white dress. She's standing in the center of what looks to be a large warehouse. The song is clearly a cover of Katy Perry's song Rise. And Coco is lip syncing it, but we don't think she's the one who is actually singing. At this point, we've heard a verified recording of her actual singing voice, and this does not sound like it.

The video is basically a visual dramatization of one of Coco's most horrific stories. It's the time she says her mother kidnapped a dozen children and held them in a basement in Eastern Europe.

And I think I have to say here, in fairness to Coco's mother, we have absolutely no evidence that this story could even be true. We asked Erin to describe what she's watching. It's sort of like the dark, foreboding little background of the music and then sort of a little more light music with her and the white clothes and the blonde hair and then the guys going into the basement and the kids and just...

showing sort of blurry-ish imagery of their faces and there's kind of bruises around their eyes. And someone comes in and literally yanks a kid out of somebody else's arms. I mean, I guess from a basic frame-by-frame analysis, is that your experience with combating child sex trafficking? Does it look like that? There's nothing that I just saw in that clip that is at all familiar to me.

That's all fantasy. That's all something dreamed up by somebody who's assuming what trafficking looks like. And you know, that's just not reality. One of the things that we work really hard against is to move away from this imagery of people being chained up or locked up or whatever, because that's not what it looks like. I do a lot of trainings on information and misinformation, and it's just like, that's what not to do. That's horrifying. Why is she wearing a wedding dress? It's absurd.

Erin says that in her 15 years of combating sex trafficking, she has never encountered a case where there were a bunch of kids locked in a basement. Which isn't to say that it doesn't happen, but it's not what experts say trafficking usually looks like. Again, that really misconstrues

what trafficking actually looks like and how it might be identified or what you might find. And so if the ones that we're amplifying and promoting and using in our trainings are all the really sensationalized ones that are once in a blue moon cases, again, we are not doing any favors to the public or to the victims or to our colleagues that need to respond because they're always going to be looking for the sensational.

Sex trafficking cases are notoriously difficult to prosecute. And Erin says these kinds of narratives only make it harder. What if someone was using psychological coercion, which is pretty much the dominant form of coercion that happens? And the jury is going to think, hey, what's going on here? I talked to this group, and that's not what they said trafficking was. So when Coco Berthman made up stories about her mother holding a dozen kidnapped kids in a basement in Eastern Europe...

She wasn't just defaming her mother. She was adding to the misconceptions that lead juries and law enforcement and the everyday person to miss the signs of actual sex trafficking. And hold on to your hat because Coco's stories are about to get even more intense. A friend came and said, hey, you have a little bit of a problem. Coco just told me that she was doing heroin with her boyfriend in your house.

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 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.