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There is another way. You've found Chameleon, Season 8. And this is Dr. Miracle. A production of Campside Media. Oh. The Bench. Hello, this is a collect call from... Robert Young. An inmate at... San Diego Central Jail. Robert Young is on a payphone in a room with white walls and linoleum floors.
Instead of his usual Italian loafers, he now wears orange plastic slides. But he still has his loyalist. In fact, he's on the phone with one of them now. This seems unlikely.
Good Morning America wouldn't want someone who was just arrested. Listen, we have gotten bombarded with people that want to interview you. So listen, we're just going to write Alex Jones want to interview you. You're going to be back on George Norrie. I mean, you name it, we're doing it. Alex Jones. We all know who that is. And George Norrie is the host of the conservative late night radio show Coast to Coast.
As Young continues chatting, his energy changes.
He grows irritated. He's complaining about the dirty accommodations and poor medical care.
That's pretty ironic. And I know this is being recorded, so you can all pass this on to the DA. Because this is going public. But the bottom line is, you know, just like what my attorney says, we are going to fight this and we are going to win.
Now, Young knows by this point that he's going to face an uphill battle in the legal case mounting against him. But he's confident. He doesn't just want to win the case. He wants to keep the Miracle Ranch business afloat and growing.
And it also becomes clear in these calls that Young sees these sick patients just as dollar signs.
Weak, sick, gullible dollar signs. They're all losers. They're all people that owe us money. Pretty quickly, he posts bail. And Robert Young is ready to fight back with everything he has. From Sony Music Entertainment, Campside Media, and Dorothy Street Pictures, I'm Larison Campbell, and this is Dr. Miracle, Episode 5. ♪
The DA's office officially charges Robert Young with multiple counts of practicing medicine without a license and grand theft. Theft because he took money from people and delivered something fraudulent.
Young is on house arrest. He hires a high-powered lawyer, Paul Finkst, a former San Diego County DA, to represent him for the trial. He's a good attorney, and he knows the law very well. Jim Clark, the investigator in the DA's office, says Young's lawyer had a lot of pull in San Diego. He's...
You know, you can be intimidating to go up against in a courtroom. Some people do not believe in alternative medical treatments. Other people believe in them very strongly. This is Young's lawyer talking to reporters. The state of California allows the patient to choose how they want to approach their healing process. Over the course of many months, Robert Young's attorney and the DA's office prepare for the trial with motions flying back and forth.
To get their witnesses in order, Jim talks to people around the ranch to see who will cooperate. Some disgruntled former employees, like June, were happy to talk. But others, like Mary the cook, didn't want to testify. The district attorney and her assistant, I went down there to the courthouse, and they took me in the room, and they asked me a bunch of questions. And I said, I can't do this. I don't want to do this. It's too—I'll just sit up there and cry.
I'm like, I can't do it. I'm sorry. Because when you tell stories about those people, it just upsets me. Meaning the people on the ranch who were dying and often in so much pain. You leave those gates and you sit out there and you cry. Because of the patients? Yep. And then you pull yourself together and go home. And then go back. Go check, you know, when you drop off the shakes and food. Some people would just be way worse.
And then when you just keep so busy, and then you drive out the gates again. But even though Mary felt this way, many of Young's followers still believed in him, even as they watched his patients get sicker. Jim Clark, the investigator for the DA, approached some of them, too. I did try to interview some of these people, and they were hardcore believers, just crazy.
On his side gave glowing statements about him saying, "I know what he's done. I've seen it. I've seen people improve. He does good work. He does great things for people. What you're doing to him is wrong. He is a doctor." When Dawn gets a call from the DA's office asking her to talk to them, she doesn't really tell them anything. She came across acting like she was cooperative, but she was holding back a lot of information. Dawn still believes Young was trying to help people.
Anyway, the trial isn't top of mind for her now, because Dawn is worried about herself. After Young had gone off on her in that microscopy class, Dawn was shaken. For the first time, she began to believe that she could really die. That fear was growing so big that it was starting to outweigh her fear of chemo and radiation. Finally, she booked an appointment with an oncologist.
I remember walking into the office. It was this beautiful office in San Francisco. It had so much beautiful art and just, you felt like you were in the spa. My aunt used to call the oncologist the devil. And my first thought was, this doesn't really look like the devil's office. The oncologist recommended a PET scan, but Dawn wasn't sure she wanted to do that.
She still trusted Young, even loved him. But it didn't seem like she was getting better. So she got the PET scan. I lit up like a Christmas tree. It was a distance metastasis, which makes it stage four. He said, you know, normally I'd be comfortable sending people home to think about it. He said, with you, you're in danger of just stepping out of the car and your hip snapping. He's basically saying he wanted to start chemo right that minute.
The first time I had chemotherapy was one of the most spiritual experiences of my life. It was because for the first time in my life, I was getting help. I was going to be, had a chance to live and be healed. I went and I sat in the chemo chair and within a couple hours, I was getting chemo for the very first time. I realized later that I was finally on a path that could actually save me.
And I had an amazing response to that chemo. The side effects were very minimal, none of which he scared me about came true. I went into complete remission. They call it NED, no evidence of disease. Finally, years after she first set foot on that ranch, Dawn is cancer-free.
But even though it's now obvious that the chemo worked and Young's protocol didn't, Dawn hasn't turned her back on him. She's not an angry person who blames others for her situation. And she still feels close to Young, still looks to him for approval. So she sends her scans to him. I sent him some photos of my PET scans that show before and after the
and it shows my back all lit up with cancer, and then the other one shows it all gone after the chemo. Dawn was worried that Young would be angry with her for getting conventional treatment. But he wasn't. Dawn told me that Young seemed genuinely happy for her, which was odd. I mean, she had done exactly what he'd told her not to do. So why wasn't he furious? Maybe he felt those fatherly feelings towards her.
Maybe they were reciprocated. Maybe he was relieved that someone in his orbit had been saved. Or maybe it was something else. Soon Dawn's scrolling on Facebook, and she sees something. Young has taken her private scans and posted them on his own page. He went on to say, you know, the reason she had this response was because she did the pH Miracle program.
He's selling Dawn's success story as his own. Now, he does say that she took Taxol, a chemotherapy drug. But he spends a lot more time in the post emphasizing that she was on the alkaline diet. He's saying he cured her. And in this moment, a switch flips for Dawn. She sees that he's lying. And as she continues her chemo, she finds more of Young's lies. I'm starting to...
realize, you know, as I'm going through treatment that all these things he said would happen to me didn't happen. What are the things? Well, just that the chemo would kill me. The chemo would make the cancer come back 10 times more aggressive. And I realized that after all that treatment, my hair didn't fall out. I didn't have side effects. All these things didn't happen. None of it came true.
At the same time that Dawn is facing treatment, she decides to face other problems in her life. She'd been drinking heavily, but now she started a 12-step program and got sober. It came very clear to me that in my AA life was to be honest. So when Dawn gets a second call from Jim Clark in the DA's office, she knows what to do. And if my job was just to be honest, then that's what I was going to do.
Well, me being honest was open up a can of whoop-ass on him. It was like basically all so much information. The DA couldn't believe that Jim Clark had let me get away the first time. And so they interviewed me and I just told the truth. Jim was recording their conversation. Here's part of it. I just kind of thought of him as, you know, like a saint or a god or something, you know.
She tells him that Young would give her IVs in secret because he knew he was under investigation.
Jim Clark is experienced, unflappable. He's been working on this case for years at this point. But even he is shocked at some of the stuff Dawn is telling him. He said what?
But as Jim listens to her speak, he realizes it's too late to incorporate all of her account into the criminal trial. So will the DA have enough to win against Young?
If somebody says the right words, promises the right things, anybody can become a victim. Since the early 2000s, millions of handwritten letters were landing at people's doors all across America. She truly believed that this was going to save her mind from going further astray.
into the depths of demand shut. I'm investigative journalist Rachel Brown, and I'm going to tell you the story of a scam unlike anything I've ever seen and the shape-shifting mastermind who evaded capture for more than 20 years. We never in our wildest dreams thought that these schemes were at this scale. They'd been without water for two months. All they wanted in return was whatever it was that Maria Duval was promising them.
From ITN Productions and Sony Music Entertainment, listen to The Greatest Scam Ever Written. Subscribe on Apple Podcasts to binge all episodes now, or listen weekly wherever you get your podcasts. The following interview is being videotaped at the Dade County Public Safety Department, Miami-Dade County, Florida. And sir, would you identify yourself? My name is Ronald F. Proud of 30.
In 1976, a man in Florida tells a cop he has a confession to make. Arriving in Miami, I proceeded to do certain things that I considered to be necessary to the crime that I planned to commit. I was looking for a hitchhiker, potential victim. But instead of becoming his victim, I became his confidant, one of the people closest to him, as he recounted and was tried for his horrific crimes.
From Orbit Media and Sony Music Entertainment, listen to My Friend the Serial Killer. Subscribe on Apple Podcasts to binge all episodes now or listen weekly wherever you get your podcasts. After nearly two years of back and forth and motions, in late 2015, Young's trial finally takes place in a downtown courthouse in San Diego.
Robert Young is the only one on trial. The DA's case against a couple of ranch employees didn't stick. And they didn't prosecute Shelly Young, even though she was Robert's business partner, the chef creating all those alkaline concoctions like avocado pudding. And according to Dawn, she did more than that. She lived off that blood money. You know, she got her breast implants. And when she would come to the ranch...
She would, everyone would scurry and hide. She was like, she hated having patients at the ranch. She hated having patients up near her house, in the pool. I mean, I was at the pool every day. Unlike Robert, Shelly didn't treat patients. In fact, it seems like she didn't want patients at the ranch at all. She just wanted to make her recipes and sell diet books and supplements.
According to Jim Clark, she didn't seem like she was involved with billing patients either, or day-to-day care, so they did not prosecute her. And by the time of the trial, Robert and Shelley's marriage was ending. By 2016, they were officially getting a divorce.
In the San Diego courthouse, the prosecutor says that Robert Young is a charlatan and a con man, a wizard of fraud. She argues that Young should receive a heavy sentence for leading so many people to sickness and even death. But Young's attorney says that this case is nothing more than an attack on alternative medicine, and people have the right to choose how to treat their own bodies.
During the case, prosecutors also reveal that this isn't Young's first brush with the law. As we said earlier, he had been arrested before. He was living in Utah then, about to publish his runaway bestseller, "The PH Miracle," when he was prosecuted for the same thing he's on trial for now: practicing medicine without a license.
And that was just the tip of the iceberg. There were all of his fake degrees, but there were also other run-ins with the authorities, like the time in the 1990s when he admitted to mishandling over $100,000 from a pension fund he managed. In the criminal trial, it became clear that Robert Young would lie.
Not just important stuff like whether he could cure cancer, but also really dumb stuff too. Like how he said he'd always been a star tennis player in college. He was good enough to make the team, but he wasn't good enough to be one of the starting guys. Each side calls up their witnesses. Former patients and their families, people telling their horror stories about getting sicker, dying, and people who still worshipped young.
The jury deliberates for a long time, two weeks. They agree that he should be convicted of practicing medicine without a license, but they are split on whether to convict him of grand theft, meaning stealing money from the patients that he was treating with his miracle cure. The jury was just... We had two jurors on there that were just not with the program, and I think one of them had a grudge against law enforcement, and another one just couldn't, you know,
They're deadlocked. This means there will be another trial. But rather than face that trial, Young is finally willing to make a deal. He's sentenced to three years and eight months in prison. But because he's been on house arrest for so long, he'll only serve five months. We were pretty disappointed in the trial.
Dawn was devastated by the verdict. Her life would be shorter because Young had treated her instead of a real oncologist. And now the guy gets only five months in prison? But some people are telling Dawn she has a chance to get justice. She can pursue a civil case and try to get a monetary settlement from Young.
She starts calling attorneys, like Bebe Fell. Before I met Dawn, the only thing I had heard about the alkaline diet was people pushing alkaline water, which was really expensive. Bebe Fell is an attorney in San Diego. Like Dawn, she's also a mom. She has three kids. My initial impression of Dawn is that she was just beaten up. I mean, she just seemed to carry the weight of the world on her shoulders. She felt very...
responsible and guilty for having gone through this. Bebe knew that winning the case would be a challenge. I mean, I knew that there were areas where Dawn was vulnerable. Number one, she participated in bringing other people to the ranch. So I thought that made her very vulnerable to a jury thinking, "Wait a minute, you're not a victim, you're part of the problem." Dawn had worked for Young. She brought more people to the ranch and to the diet and made money from it.
Bebe would have to work extra hard to convince the jury that Dawn was a victim and that Young had ruined her life. That was the first challenge. And then number two is that she was seeing medical providers who were giving her the right advice.
She had an initial surgery. They said the margins are not clear. You need to have another one. And then somewhere in relying on and trusting traditional medical, scientific-based advice, she took this left turn. The jury might look at Dawn and think it was her own fault for following Young.
So Beebe would have to make the jury understand and empathize with Don and her choice to originally skip the chemo and follow Young instead. I want to make him sound crazy, because he is crazy, but I don't want to make him sound so crazy that people fault Don for believing him. The civil case began on October 22, 2018, at the Hall of Justice, a courthouse in downtown San Diego.
From the outside, under a San Diego blue sky, the place looks more like a hotel than a government building. It's white and modern with long blue glass windows. The only thing that suggests courthouse are the big white columns that line the front of the building. We would walk to the courthouse each day and...
It was just like a TV court thing. The press was there. It felt so exciting, but at the bottom of it this time was something so tragic. Inside the courtroom, it was a weird scene, different from other trials Bebe had worked on. There were all sorts of moments where it was like, it didn't feel real. Like, we had all these very weak-looking people.
people, patients, come into the courtroom during the trial. And they were sitting there as Robert Young's little, you know, cheering squad, I think, to show, visually show the jury that Dr. Young was helping people. I mean, they are staunch supporters. They, like, believe him and follow him and think that he knows a secret that nobody else knows. We didn't talk to these supporters, but we know a lot of what Young's flock believes in from Rick Lorenzi, who we talked to on the phone.
He's the guy who made a feature-length video about his weight loss journey on the alkaline diet. As soon as you get notoriety, they will follow you, chase you, push you into a hole, or eradicate you. With Dr. Young, two court cases, two and a half years in court, six months in jail, for feeding people avocados, grapefruits, and take a drop of blood out of your finger and recommend a sodium bicarbonate drip. Rick is talking about the baking soda IVs Robert Young administered.
He sees Young's legal troubles as part of a vast conspiracy to keep the alkaline diet a secret and keep the population sick. Every decade, an AMA doctor or a holistic practitioner that found the link between alkalinity and cancer got attacked. You have to realize that there is no money in you being healthy. The only money is you being really sick but alive.
And right near death is when you spend the most on health care. So they want you really sick but alive, unfortunate but true. One reason Young's supporters were so devoted is because he's a good talker, charismatic.
And for Dawn and Bebe, that was a problem. I was worried that the jury was going to find him charming and find him believable. I mean, the other thing he does is he uses big words and he leans on quote unquote science.
Young took the stand and, of course, did a great job talking himself up and supporting his theories with quote-unquote science. So when it's Beebe's turn to cross-examine him, her strategy is to make him say as little as possible. My goal was to put him up there, ask him questions I knew he had to say yes to, and then get him off the stand. And it was impossible. I mean, he got up there and it was like...
He was on stage, right? He took every opportunity to grandstand, talking directly to the jury, blowing right over my questions and not answering them, instead using it as his own platform. So Bebe tries another approach. She cracks open one of Young's books, goes straight to the source of all his B.S.,
One of the things that was very unique about Robert Young's theory is that it really was like snake oil. It cured everything. It was the cure all. And so when I was reading through his books, I was like, oh, wow. Oh, it cures cancer. Oh, it also cures AIDS. Oh, it also cures obesity. Oh, it also cures diabetes. So it also cures hair loss was one of the things that he talked about in his book.
And so he's on the stand with a full head of hair. So Bebe is standing there, reading from Young's book about curing hair loss. She finishes the passage, closes the book, flips it over, and for the first time, she sees something she'd never noticed before. ♪
I just want to pause for a second here, because this moment in the case is kind of like that big scene in the movie Legally Blonde. Miss Windham, what had you done earlier that day? I got up, got a latte, went to the gym, got a perm and came home. What, you got in the shower? Yes. Isn't it the first cardinal rule of perm maintenance that you're forbidden to wet your hair for at least 24 hours after getting a perm, at the risk of deactivating the ammonium thiglocholate?
Yes. And if in fact you weren't washing your hair, as I suspect you weren't because your curls are still intact, wouldn't you have heard the gunshot? That is a lot like what happened with Bebe in that courtroom. So Bebe finishes reading a passage from Young's book, one that mentions curing hair loss with his diet. She closes the book, looks down at the back cover, and notices for the first time that the man in the author's photo is bald.
But the man sitting before her on the witness stand has a full head of hair. So I just asked him on a whim, did you use your theory to regrow your hair? And I showed the jury the picture of his bald head. Did you use your theory to regrow your hair? He was like, yes, but I also did get surgery. Of all the things I threw at him, of all the accusations that I made during the course of his cross-examination, that was the one that got him mad most.
When I pointed out that he used to be bald, he turned bright red. He was shaking. He was angry. Beebe had just shown the jury that Young knew the alkaline diet wasn't a cure-all. He knew it wouldn't make his hair grow back. That's why he had surgery. And if he knew the alkaline diet didn't grow hair, he probably also knew it didn't cure cancer.
As the trial went on, it became clear to B.B. Phil that what Young did wasn't just quackery, it was sinister. What that did was that that took people away from their families, brought them to the ranch, took them away from their medical providers, and then he took away their comfort. He took away their pain medication. So in my mind, he was literally torturing these people by torturing
taking them away from their support system and then causing them extraordinary amounts of pain that they shouldn't have had to go through. That went beyond anything that I could square in terms of why he does what he does. Like, why do that? I wouldn't think that got him more money. That seemed... To take somebody who is dying away from their family and then to take away their pain medications just seemed so evil. Beyond...
anything necessary for his fraud. There was zero humility to him, zero humility. And I asked him if he had any regrets about Dawn, and he said no. As for Dawn, all she had were regrets and guilt. And this had just been her normal state for so long. Beebe illustrated that for the jury by reading passages from Dawn's diary.
She'd written them while she was struggling to stay on the alkaline diet. She talks about how she's so mad at herself and what a horrible mother she must be to put food, those small morsels of food, over her kids having a mom. She believed everything that Young had said about her cancer being her fault for not following the alkaline diet strictly enough. Clearly, that's completely untrue.
But was Dawn's cancer her own fault because she did follow the diet instead of using conventional medical treatments? A lot of people say, how stupid are you that you followed this man? And how did you not know after seeing so many people die? Or how did you not, you know, like, how come it took so long for the wool to come off your eyes?
On the day that Dawn walked from her seat in the courtroom to take the stand herself, Beebe had to prove to the jury that Dawn was a victim of Young's. It was abuse, what he did, that he isolated you, he brainwashed you, and that's what he did to all his patients. Dawn was strong on the stand, and her oncologist, Garrett Smith, the one who had ordered her the PET scan, also gave a deposition.
Dr. Smith explained why the pH of our blood has nothing to do with cancer. And then Bebe asks him about Dawn's case. Was her cancer curable back in 2007 when she was first diagnosed? When she first began treatment with Dr. Young? Dr. Garrett Smith: If we had gotten Dawn early in the journey, her ideal treatment would have been an operation.
to remove the tumor from her breast, and then after surgery removed all of her cancer, then she would have been treated with a prescribed course, one year of a chemotherapy. But at the end of the year, she'd have been done, and she would have had a greater than 80% chance of being cancer-free forever. Then, Beebe asked about Dawn's prognosis. Dawn had responded very well to treatment, but her cancer was stage four.
Which means it would come back, and it would keep coming back, until the treatments eventually stopped working. So how many years did she have left to live? Dawn had never heard her prognosis before. She'd been taking things one day at a time. She said, you know, are you sure you want to be in the room? He's going to talk about your prognosis. And I was kind of froze, clammed up, didn't know anything.
And then I decided to be in the room. Dr. Smith said, I would estimate Dawn is looking at three to four years left before we lose complete control of her breast cancer. And then it is inevitable that she will die. It was at that moment that Dawn realized what her future really looked like. Plain as day, there was no more hope. Just this definitive prognosis from Dr. Smith. I was totally confused.
Freaked out when he said three. He said like three years. You know, you can't show so much emotion in the courtroom and, you know, it just kind of makes you feel a little sick. As difficult as it was, the trial was nearing its end.
Bebe told the jury what she thought one last time. And Bebe had done this unbelievable closing argument. And one of the things she said that really stuck with the jury was she was like, "Then he was in Utah, and then he went here, and then he came here in your backyard." Young had been pulling this, "I'm a doctor with a medical license, and I can heal you thing for years in two different states."
Bebe said it was time to punish him. And if they found him liable, she said that would send a message not only to him, but also to Dawn.
One of the things that we had to address in closing was Dawn's own fault. And we had to hit that head on because clearly she had some role to play in deciding not to get traditional medical care and not follow what her doctors were advising. So the way we cover that is by acknowledging that she felt guilty. And so I told the jury that the word verdict is actually from the Latin verdicto, which means to speak the truth.
and that there's nobody in the courtroom who needs to hear the truth more than Dawn, and that their verdict needed to tell Dawn that it was not her fault.
Finally, it was time to hear the verdict. So when we finally went for the verdict, we all went back and we're just all sitting there and I'm just all nervous as anything. And then we get a call that there's a question from the jury. And then I forget exactly what the question was, but it sounded like a question in favor of him. And we were just like, oh, we lost. Everyone was feeling like we lost the case. And we're just like, oh, it's
And then 15 minutes later, there's a verdict. We're just like, oh my God. Everyone was, oh my God. And we're walking back up that street, or she's just a block away from the courthouse. And we go in and one of the jurors looks at me and winks. Unlock all episodes of Chameleon, Dr. Miracle, ad-free right now by subscribing to the Binge Podcast channel.
Not only will you immediately unlock all episodes of this show, but you'll get binge access to an entire network of other great true crime and investigative podcasts, all ad-free. Plus, on the first of every month, subscribers get a binge drop of a brand new series. That's all episodes, all at once.
Unlock your listening now by clicking subscribe at the top of the Chameleon Show page on Apple Podcasts or visit GetTheBinge.com to get access wherever you get your podcasts. On the final episode of Dr. Miracle, we'll find out what the jury thinks and I'll meet up with Young too. This whole thing was a setup, a governmental setup, an FBI-CIA sting to take me down.
Is it of any benefit to give someone false hope? I think Robert Young is guilty of knowing that his treatments were fake. He played with every aspect of their life, and he preyed upon people who were weak and vulnerable and desperate. And he's still doing it.
Dr. Miracle is a production of Campside Media, Sony Music Entertainment, and Dorothy Street Pictures. The show was hosted by me, Larison Campbell. I reported it with Lily Houston-Smith, our producer, and also our field recordist. Shoshi Smolovitz is our managing producer and editor. Our executive producers are Vanessa Gregoriotis and me, Larison Campbell.
From Sony Music Entertainment, our executive producer is Catherine St. Louis. Our sound designer and mix engineer is Michelle Macklem. If you're enjoying the show, please tell a friend. It really does help spread the word.
