Speaker 1: You're listening to a MoMA Mia podcast.
Speaker 2: Mama Mia acknowledges the traditional owners of land and waters
Speaker 2: that this podcast is recorded on For MoMA Mia, this
Speaker 2: is no filter. I'm mea Friedman and I wanted to
Speaker 2: pop a little extra bonus episode into the feed this
Speaker 2: week because a lot of people have been talking about
Speaker 2: the new series called Fake that stars Asha Ketty, about
Speaker 2: a woman who falls in love with a con man,
Speaker 2: and today we wanted to bring you the true story
Speaker 2: of the woman in that series in an interview that
Speaker 2: I did with Stephanie Wood, who is played by Asher
Speaker 2: in Fake. I did this interview a couple of years
Speaker 2: ago with Stephanie. She's in her late forties or she
Speaker 2: was when she decided to go on a date with
Speaker 2: a guy she met online. And she'd been online dating
Speaker 2: for a while and had found it pretty unsatisfying, as
Speaker 2: many people do. So when she met this guy called Joe,
Speaker 2: who is handsome and charming and seemingly different from the others,
Speaker 2: she fell for him. She felt pretty hard and pretty fast,
Speaker 2: and she had no idea that it would change the
Speaker 2: course of her life forever now. Stephanie is an award
Speaker 2: winning journalist and an author. She's smart, she's experienced, and
Speaker 2: she does not stand for bullshit. But when she met Joe,
Speaker 2: all of that sort of fell away, because, as we know,
Speaker 2: love does funny things to the brain, and Joe turned
Speaker 2: out to be well, as the name suggests, a total fake.
Speaker 2: And fake also became the name of Stephanie's book, which
Speaker 2: is now the name of this new series on Paramount Plus.
Speaker 2: It stars Asha Ketty as Stephanie and David Wenham as Joe.
Speaker 2: It's being hailed as a love and lies fueled thriller,
Speaker 2: and this is the true story behind it from the
Speaker 2: woman who lived it. Here's Stephanie Wood. Steph When you
Speaker 2: met Joe, what was your first contact like with him?
Speaker 3: It was we met through online dating and we caught
Speaker 3: up for a drink at a bar in the city
Speaker 3: in Sydney. There were no sparks for me and I
Speaker 3: don't thin for either of us really, although who knows
Speaker 3: what he ever felt. I thought he was a little awkward.
Speaker 3: I thought he was a bit short, which he proved
Speaker 3: not to be. Must have been hunched and down in
Speaker 3: that chair. He talked a lot about himself, and women
Speaker 3: are pretty used to men talking a lot about themselves
Speaker 3: and I sort of peppered the conversation with questions, which
Speaker 3: as a journalist you learned to do to keep conversations going.
Speaker 3: I think we were there for a couple of drinks
Speaker 3: and said goodbye, and I didn't imagine i'd see him again.
Speaker 1: How long had you been online dating for and what's
Speaker 1: it like as a woman.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I hadn't been doing it for a long time.
Speaker 3: I've not done a lot of it because I find
Speaker 3: it so awful.
Speaker 1: Why is it awful?
Speaker 3: Oh, I guess the caliber of men you're meeting. I'm
Speaker 3: sorry to say, I find it hugely awkward. The sort
Speaker 3: of walking into a space, a bar, a restaurant to
Speaker 3: meet someone that you've never ever set eyes on before,
Speaker 3: and you have no context for who they are. It's awkward.
Speaker 3: They're usually incredibly disappointing. I think a friend pushed me
Speaker 3: into it right back in about probably around two thousand
Speaker 3: and five, when i'd broken up with the guy I
Speaker 3: thought I was going to marry. I think maybe it
Speaker 3: was just starting around then.
Speaker 2: So you're in your thirties then, late thirties, yeah, late thirties.
Speaker 2: If you're a woman in your late thirties, what kind
Speaker 2: of men are on the apps.
Speaker 3: Well, of course, it's widely variable. I was looking for
Speaker 3: intelligent guys, which I mean, is that okay? I mean,
Speaker 3: you know, I suppose I wanted someone who seemed to
Speaker 3: have a bit of wish about them and a bit
Speaker 3: of humor. I've never sort of had a physical checklist
Speaker 3: at all. If I were to be honest, I don't
Speaker 3: want someone who's short. But apart from that, I'm fairly
Speaker 3: open to, you know, physical imperfection.
Speaker 1: Did you decide who to swipe left on and who
Speaker 1: to see?
Speaker 3: Well, in those days it was a bit different. The
Speaker 3: tinder didn't exist, and I've only ever used hinder once
Speaker 3: in my life. It was just looking at what their
Speaker 3: interests were mainly, and their political leanings was important to me,
Speaker 3: I suppose, And how will they wrote?
Speaker 1: Yeah, tell me about that, because I imagine as you.
Speaker 2: Get more look at more and more profiles, you learn
Speaker 2: some some red flags and some green flags.
Speaker 3: I wouldn't know about red and green flags. It's more
Speaker 3: about what you like and what you don't like.
Speaker 1: I kind of more mean that like yeah, you go,
Speaker 1: oh yeah, I'm someone.
Speaker 3: Who speaks intelligent, writes intelligently, and well without spelling mistakes.
Speaker 1: High bar for a journalist.
Speaker 3: Well, it is a high barb. But is that such
Speaker 3: a high bar for someone I don't know? Isn't that
Speaker 3: a fairly for an moderately intelligent person. Isn't that half
Speaker 3: decent writing skills? Like I don't know. Maybe I am
Speaker 3: too fussy about that.
Speaker 1: I doubt yourself.
Speaker 3: But you like what you like, you like what you like.
Speaker 3: That was always important, And I guess I was looking
Speaker 3: for compassion, someone who was thoughtful and compassionate and sincere.
Speaker 1: Women in their.
Speaker 2: Late thirties are notorious for scaring men because of the
Speaker 2: whole biological clo of course situation. Did you find that
Speaker 2: that was kind of a subtext in all the.
Speaker 3: No, And this is incredibly weird. I imagine for women
Speaker 3: who are in their late thirties now to hear who
Speaker 3: was still looking. And I wrote an article for Good
Speaker 3: Weekend about this, probably in twenty sixteen. I think it
Speaker 3: was about not having had children. There was so little
Speaker 3: said back then about women's fertility. It really was. And
Speaker 3: I've googled, I've gone back through the archives of newspaper
Speaker 3: archives to see how much was written about women's fertility
Speaker 3: and declining fertility, and very little was written. I think
Speaker 3: I was probably little and I wanted to have kids,
Speaker 3: but I was a little like I wasn't. I don't
Speaker 3: think I ever had a surging biological clock, which I
Speaker 3: know a lot of women do. I was concerned. I
Speaker 3: did want to have them, but I don't I think
Speaker 3: I thought I could still have them in my forties.
Speaker 3: And as I said, there was just not a lot
Speaker 3: written about it. So you weren't necessarily looking for the
Speaker 3: father of you, you know. I don't which a lot
Speaker 3: of pressure was. Although the guy that I broke up with,
Speaker 3: who I had thought I might be with, he had
Speaker 3: some medical issues that could have affected his fertility, and
Speaker 3: we certainly had did talk to doctors about out what
Speaker 3: our chances might be. So it was obviously on my mind,
Speaker 3: but not in a panicked way, and I certainly would
Speaker 3: never have raised it. I don't think that was ever
Speaker 3: my thought. I don't think I ever went to any
Speaker 3: of these dates, and there would have only been back
Speaker 3: then about four or five six states, and I don't
Speaker 3: think it was on my mind. I think on my
Speaker 3: mind was is this guy nice? Is this guy decent?
Speaker 3: Is he someone I could spend time with. There was
Speaker 3: one really nice guy, but I don't think he was
Speaker 3: very much into me, which is okay, devastating blow at
Speaker 3: the time, but you know, you move on from these things.
Speaker 3: Like there was one that I think probably ended that
Speaker 3: period online dating for me. We met for coffee one afternoon.
Speaker 3: He wanted to tell me he wasn't particularly good looking man,
Speaker 3: and that was fine, but he wanted to tell me
Speaker 3: about his recent holiday to India where he had visited
Speaker 3: a tantric sex ashram. But it had to have STD
Speaker 3: tests on the way in, And I just sat there
Speaker 3: with my coffee in front of me, going in my head,
Speaker 3: are you serious? You really really want to tell me
Speaker 3: about this on our first date.
Speaker 1: Well, at least did have the test?
Speaker 3: Well you sure, we never got to check that out. Really,
Speaker 3: But the funniest thing about it was that he recommended
Speaker 3: I'm not I don't dabble in the share market. But
Speaker 3: at the end of that encounter he said, oh, I've
Speaker 3: got this great share tip for you. When I got home,
Speaker 3: I actually happened for a very rare moment, I had
Speaker 3: some money in my bank account. I thought, bargot, I'm
Speaker 3: just going to go and buy some of those shares
Speaker 3: and then they actually gent me a bit of money,
Speaker 3: which I've sold them since.
Speaker 1: But he's self alighting on that very bad.
Speaker 3: That was exactly exactly and I sort of was so
Speaker 3: amused by it as well.
Speaker 2: What was it about Joe's dating profile that appealed to you?
Speaker 3: Again, He's writing, He could write, and he could express himself.
Speaker 3: It was articulate. He seemed to have a love for
Speaker 3: the environment and nature, the things that are important to me, politics,
Speaker 3: the current affairs the world, and a curiosity and an
Speaker 3: interest in the world. And that came through really strongly
Speaker 3: on his dating profile.
Speaker 1: In that first date. Did he tell you he had kids?
Speaker 3: Yeah, so that the foundational story was that he'd been
Speaker 3: through a fairly ugly divorce. At some point, possibly second
Speaker 3: third date, he started to lead on that his ex
Speaker 3: wife was completely psycho and why wouldn't I believe that,
Speaker 3: You know, there are people out there who have mental
Speaker 3: health problems. He was Now in hindsight, I can see
Speaker 3: quite cruel about how he talked about her, but at
Speaker 3: the time I took it on face value. He had
Speaker 3: custody one week on, one week off with his ex
Speaker 3: wife of two children and told me he lived in
Speaker 3: a harbourside house, that he'd a modest harbourside house in
Speaker 3: a well known suburb of Sydney that he'd built himself.
Speaker 3: And what he told me he was an architect or
Speaker 3: retired from architecture and had gone into private equity, and
Speaker 3: that he had a small sheep farm south south of Sydney.
Speaker 1: Was he your age?
Speaker 3: He was about three four years older.
Speaker 1: Than me, and you were in your early forties by now.
Speaker 3: I was, no. I was in my late forties by
Speaker 3: this stage. Yeah.
Speaker 1: Did he ask much about you on that first day?
Speaker 3: Not really.
Speaker 1: Eventually.
Speaker 3: I was getting a bit frustrated by that, because to me,
Speaker 3: that's a bit of a sign that someone's not particularly
Speaker 3: interested or has very inefficient communication skills. I've been a
Speaker 3: food and I'm not writing about food right now, but
Speaker 3: in my background I was a food writer and a
Speaker 3: restaurant critic. And he eventually asked me a little bit
Speaker 3: about that, and he made a comment that was probably
Speaker 3: the biggest red flag of that first date. He said,
Speaker 3: you must be very well connected, well, not especially, and
Speaker 3: it's not something I seek out. I'd run for a
Speaker 3: mile from the opening of an envelope sort of thing,
Speaker 3: you know, it's just not who I am, my world.
Speaker 3: I find it tedious. I said, oh no, no, no,
Speaker 3: not at all, not at all. He then did this
Speaker 3: incredible backtrack and sort of reversal of position, which I
Speaker 3: can now see he often would do when he had
Speaker 3: said something that wasn't didn't meet with my approval. I
Speaker 3: suppose he said, oh no, I wouldn't like it if
Speaker 3: you're well connected, because I'm very private. Even when I
Speaker 3: was an architect, I didn't like my work, our work,
Speaker 3: the firm's work being published. And in hindsight, I've got
Speaker 3: lots of architect friends and that's the holy grail, to
Speaker 3: get their work published in architectural magazines, and it's how
Speaker 3: you get business as well. So it was such a
Speaker 3: dumb thing for him to say. But I don't know
Speaker 3: that you're analyzing as much at that point. You sort
Speaker 3: of your mind is so busy sizing them up, I
Speaker 3: suppose physically, and trying to think of things to say
Speaker 3: and trying to keep the conversation flowing without it becoming
Speaker 3: awkward that I send something wasn't quite right, but I
Speaker 3: moved on. You kind of have to to keep it
Speaker 3: going in a way.
Speaker 2: How did that first unremarkable date turn into a second.
Speaker 3: Well, i'd been single for quite a few years, and
Speaker 3: when you've been single for quite a few years, you
Speaker 3: start to hear things like, oh, you're too fussy. Women
Speaker 3: shouldn't be so picky, and I've been bored, Like I
Speaker 3: have a full, interesting life, but that's a fairly substantial
Speaker 3: part of life, and when it's not there, it's like, oh,
Speaker 3: here we go again, not another night. It would be
Speaker 3: nice to be with someone. And so I wasn't expecting
Speaker 3: to hear from him, but he did email me and
Speaker 3: asked to help me out again, and I thought, oh, whatever,
Speaker 3: I'll go. And I think maybe what happens is that
Speaker 3: when someone starts to show interest in you, and it's
Speaker 3: quite clear that it's interest, your head does do a
Speaker 3: bit of a yes, three hundred and sixty degree degree turn,
Speaker 3: and it was like, oh my god, he's interested in me. Okay,
Speaker 3: let's have another look at this. And I remember going
Speaker 3: to that second day and being quite beside myself with nerves,
Speaker 3: which I hadn't been on the first one, Like I
Speaker 3: was just a bit nervy on the first one, but
Speaker 3: the second one I was like, oh my god, he's
Speaker 3: interested in me, and it was like the moment he
Speaker 3: registered interest in me, all of a sudden, the game
Speaker 3: changed a bit, which is silly. It's so silly because
Speaker 3: of something we do. It's something we do. We should
Speaker 3: be sizing up constantly for a long time, whether they're appropriate, suitable, honest, decent.
Speaker 3: But instead, I don't think it's uncommon. The moment someone's interested,
Speaker 3: it often changes the way you view the whole thing.
Speaker 2: That's such an important insight, isn't it. And I think
Speaker 2: I think as women were conditioned, Oh if he likes me, yeah,
Speaker 2: I better be not grateful.
Speaker 3: But oh yeah, no, no, yeah, gratitude, it's not that
Speaker 3: might well be the emotion. And I was never like
Speaker 3: the hottest girl at school or the one that had
Speaker 3: boys following me, So it had always been a bit
Speaker 3: exciting when a guy did express in me. And it
Speaker 3: wasn't as if it was uncommon, But it wasn't. It
Speaker 3: wasn't every minute of every day, as you know, in
Speaker 3: my twenties and thirties, when I was in the height
Speaker 3: of mind.
Speaker 1: And it had been a while since, and it had
Speaker 1: been a.
Speaker 2: While, so yeah, after a lot of disappointing dates and disappointing.
Speaker 3: Them a lot of time on my own. A lot
Speaker 3: of guys that are not a lot of guys, but
Speaker 3: there were certainly a couple of guys who turned out
Speaker 3: to be really dishonest, And thankfully it never went beyond
Speaker 3: a couple few days. But then what odd guys who?
Speaker 3: One who proved it turned out to be married. I
Speaker 3: got the sense that he was estranged from his wife.
Speaker 3: Turns out they were still living together and, according to him,
Speaker 3: had an open relationship.
Speaker 1: I wonder if she knew that.
Speaker 3: I wonder if she knew it was an open relationship.
Speaker 3: And then another one who turned out to be living
Speaker 3: with a girlfriend and didn't tell me. Thankfully, they didn't
Speaker 3: go very far, and I was pretty upset when I discovered.
Speaker 3: But not it was not so I wasn't so embedded
Speaker 3: in the relationship that it was devastating. It was that devastating.
Speaker 3: I mean, it's I think they leave their little marks
Speaker 3: on you.
Speaker 1: So Joe was clearly single and that was important.
Speaker 3: Well, yes, on the face of it, Well, yes, as
Speaker 3: we thought at that time.
Speaker 1: Now did things accelerate quite quickly?
Speaker 3: No, we still did it around a bit. The third
Speaker 3: date nearly didn't happen because he made another strange comment that,
Speaker 3: in hindsight, I should have taken us another red flag.
Speaker 3: We were discussing which restaurant we should go to, and
Speaker 3: I said, do you want me to book and he said, yeah,
Speaker 3: that'd be good. You know, it'll be interesting to see
Speaker 3: how the waiters react to you if they recognize you.
Speaker 3: And again it was because I was a food critic,
Speaker 3: but I'd mostly been a food critic when I lived
Speaker 3: in Melbourne. I hadn't done so much in Sydney, so
Speaker 3: I wasn't that well known here and that suited me. Fine.
Speaker 3: If you've ever been recognized by my waiter or a
Speaker 3: chef and a restaurant who thinks they're going to get
Speaker 3: a good review or they can get some benefit out
Speaker 3: of it, it's awful.
Speaker 1: It's awkward.
Speaker 3: Yeah, it's horrible, and I don't like that. And I
Speaker 3: got really crossed with him and I just slammed. We
Speaker 3: were emailing at that stage. We hadn't got to the
Speaker 3: point of having comfortable phone calls. Of course, email opens
Speaker 3: up all sorts of ways of both disemb and manipulating
Speaker 3: the conversation, and if we'd been talking on the phone,
Speaker 3: I might have perhaps picked up things better, but I
Speaker 3: just flung an angry response at him and said, you know,
Speaker 3: you've misunderstood me. That's not who I am at all.
Speaker 3: And then he somehow in another email a few days later,
Speaker 3: I said, so, I suppose we're not going out Saturday
Speaker 3: night then, and I said, no, I'm going away actually now,
Speaker 3: and he said, I really stuffed up. That wasn't what
Speaker 3: I meant at all. And now, damn it, I can't
Speaker 3: find an email he sent me because I've kept most
Speaker 3: of them, but it was like, damn, I wanted to
Speaker 3: remember what he'd said, but he convinced me yet again
Speaker 3: that I'd misunderstood what his intentions were about that now
Speaker 3: or his interest in the waiters recognition. And so we
Speaker 3: eventually had a third date, and I think again it
Speaker 3: was the fact he was interested in me was making
Speaker 3: my bells ring.
Speaker 1: How soon did you go away for the weekend?
Speaker 3: That was after our fourth date. So we had fourth
Speaker 3: date where we kissed, and then he said, you know
Speaker 3: it takes message that night, I'd like to go away
Speaker 3: with you for the weekend.
Speaker 1: To seal the deal.
Speaker 3: Yeah, to seal the deal as it is as it was.
Speaker 1: I don't want to cry about that, but I do
Speaker 1: want to ask was the sex great?
Speaker 3: Oh God, no one's asking me that yet, And it's like,
Speaker 3: I don't want to talk about this. It was great
Speaker 3: because I hadn't had it for so long. I don't
Speaker 3: think guys get this that women just don't go on
Speaker 3: single Women aren't out there every night having casual sex,
Speaker 3: certainly not the ones I know. He was warm and
Speaker 3: loving in hindsight, very selfish. I won't say more than that,
Speaker 3: but at the time I was loving it.
Speaker 2: And I ask that not just because I'm voyeuristic and strange,
Speaker 2: but because when the sex is good in a relationship
Speaker 2: or that hadn't been sex for a while, that can
Speaker 2: be confusing as well for a woman. Yeah, that hard
Speaker 2: experience where that can change my brain chemistry and think,
Speaker 2: oh I.
Speaker 1: Really like you, And it's like, yeah, no, that was
Speaker 1: just good sex. It's doesn't mean you're a good.
Speaker 3: Person, or doesn't mean it was good enough that I
Speaker 3: think it was turning my head and altering my chemistry.
Speaker 3: And in fact, as I write in Fake, our brain
Speaker 3: chemistry when we're in completely changes.
Speaker 1: You use a norweg is it a noruig model?
Speaker 3: Skept and I don't pronounce that properly, I know, but
Speaker 3: it's the heady period of love where you're completely tied
Speaker 3: in knots with love and besides yourself and can't think straight.
Speaker 1: Quite bonkers, quite nuts.
Speaker 3: And there are scientific it's just almost a pop culture
Speaker 3: words as I understand it in Norway, there are scientific
Speaker 3: reasons for it. The ancient part of our brain, the
Speaker 3: limits system, is surging with neurotransmitters and hormones because this
Speaker 3: is fundamental to our biology. Isn't it to mate and
Speaker 3: to reproduce. It's so fundamental. And also it's fundamental to
Speaker 3: want to attach to somebody because that's how we survive
Speaker 3: in the wild, you know, in primitive primal, it's very primal.
Speaker 1: How much time did you spend together in those early times.
Speaker 3: I would see in probably two or three days or
Speaker 3: every fortnight, which of course is not much. But I
Speaker 3: was under the impression you had the children on the
Speaker 3: other week. I felt as if I was in the
Speaker 3: very delicate situation that he'd talked about the children being
Speaker 3: very fragile and him being very fragile as a result
Speaker 3: of the divorce, And I thought, you know, I can't
Speaker 3: go in like a bullet at gate here. I can't
Speaker 3: demand to meet the children. That's not right. You know,
Speaker 3: I've got to be sympathetic to this situation. And if
Speaker 3: I do get demanding and so I must meet your
Speaker 3: children and I must see your house, I could just
Speaker 3: ruin everything.
Speaker 1: Had you dated a guy with kids before?
Speaker 3: No? Never, never. I mean my instinct was go gently,
Speaker 3: go very very gently.
Speaker 1: So you didn't meet his kids at first? Did you
Speaker 1: meet each other's friends?
Speaker 3: He met a few of my friends, but not for
Speaker 3: a while. A couple of times he stood me out
Speaker 3: when there were events. I was going to a Christmas
Speaker 3: party at a journalist friend's home and he was meant
Speaker 3: to join me. Funny thing he didn't come. He didn't
Speaker 3: there was an excuse. And this pattern started very early,
Speaker 3: the cancelations early, probably within oh three months. I mean
Speaker 3: there was a period there where I actually went to
Speaker 3: the States for five weeks for work, and so it
Speaker 3: was all a bit truncated and remote distance relationship for
Speaker 3: a little while while I was away. But we sort
Speaker 3: of started to go out seriously, probably end of August
Speaker 3: twenty fourteen. But by November he was starting to cancel
Speaker 3: on me.
Speaker 1: What sort of reasons would he get, Oh, the.
Speaker 3: Most insane reasons. He'd been poisoned by sheep drench. He
Speaker 3: was in his loo, his duney on a hill on
Speaker 3: the farm where he just had a shack, which is
Speaker 3: apparently why I never got to see it, vomiting, he
Speaker 3: was terribly ill. He had a tooth infection. These are
Speaker 3: all not in chronological order. These are the sort of
Speaker 3: excuses that unfolded over the sort of fifteen month period
Speaker 3: we were together. A truck carrying his sheep had tipped
Speaker 3: over and there was chaos and carnage. His dog had
Speaker 3: been bitten by snake. His son had been running around
Speaker 3: a friend's pool and fallen over and been concussed. His
Speaker 3: daughter had asked me his daughter had fallen out of
Speaker 3: a tree and damage to collar.
Speaker 2: Bo.
Speaker 1: Yeah, a lot of bad luck.
Speaker 3: He had a lot of bad luck. I mean, I
Speaker 3: started to get incredibly at my suffer anxiety, as so
Speaker 3: many people do. This made me so anxious it was
Speaker 3: hard to separate whether there was instinct about something not
Speaker 3: being right or it was just my anxiety. You know,
Speaker 3: people say, oh, you should follow your instinct, but when
Speaker 3: you're anxious, so true, what's instinct? What's anxiety. I couldn't tell.
Speaker 3: I was so keen to try and make it work.
Speaker 3: At some point in the relationship, maybe six months, and
Speaker 3: he'd said it sold the little farm with the shack,
Speaker 3: and he was now looking to invest in a much
Speaker 3: much larger property, and he started to talk about this
Speaker 3: specific property. I think what happens in relationships is it's
Speaker 3: not just the person that you're in love with, it's
Speaker 3: the idea of the future that you're going to have
Speaker 3: together that you fall in love with. A love affair
Speaker 3: is about not just the person that you're in love with,
Speaker 3: but about the future that you've fallen in love with,
Speaker 3: or the idea of this future you might have together.
Speaker 3: And so he was looking at investing in this big property.
Speaker 3: It was such a spread, such a pile that it
Speaker 3: was on sotherby is real estate website. So it existed. Oh,
Speaker 3: it totally valid, absolute existed. I mean the detail that
Speaker 3: he talked about, the sale, the negotiations, the neighbors, the
Speaker 3: people he was vying with to get it. He talked
Speaker 3: about constantly going down there and having meetings with the
Speaker 3: owner to discuss what would be included in the sale
Speaker 3: and what wouldn't. There were council problems, and there were
Speaker 3: water rights. The detail was immense, and eventually he took
Speaker 3: me to see it. And it was not the sort
Speaker 3: of place that you arrive at on a Saturday morning
Speaker 3: and wander around and then leave, you know, without an invitation.
Speaker 3: It was an appointment only style, large multi bedroom, multi
Speaker 3: living area, a huge estate, and we went there and
Speaker 3: met the owners and we walked around and the wife
Speaker 3: took me on this tour and said, oh, I do
Speaker 3: hope he gets it. I do hope Joe gets it.
Speaker 3: I don't know what's going on, but I hope he
Speaker 3: gets it.
Speaker 1: So is he wealthy?
Speaker 3: Well, that's what I had been. He'd led me to believe.
Speaker 3: We never did anything lavish. But I also, I mean,
Speaker 3: I'm not design a handbag kind of person. And so
Speaker 3: he drove a beat up old land Rover Defender. He
Speaker 3: didn't wear particularly special clothes, and I just took that
Speaker 3: to be someone who had money but was understated and
Speaker 3: didn't care about the trappings of wealth, which I really
Speaker 3: liked that approach. He'd pay for meals, and with my
Speaker 3: restaurant habit, we went out for dinner quite often, and
Speaker 3: sometimes I'd pay, but I think probably he paid more
Speaker 3: than I did. He tipped taxi drivers, we'd go it
Speaker 3: for breakfast. He took me away three times to country cottages.
Speaker 3: Again nothing lavish, but he paid. I'd say he spent
Speaker 3: at least three, four or five thousand dollars through the
Speaker 3: course of the relationship on me.
Speaker 1: Did he ever ask you for money? Never?
Speaker 2: Never?
Speaker 3: And he gave me presents. He gave me pearls, He
Speaker 3: gave me opals. I make jewelry, and he gave me
Speaker 3: these opals. He gave me these little Victorian antique silver,
Speaker 3: beautifully engraved trinkets. There were never signs of great wealth.
Speaker 3: But he told me he was very sheepishly one day,
Speaker 3: as though he were almost embarrassed by it. He said,
Speaker 3: I've got a lot of money. I've got a disgusting
Speaker 3: amount of money, he said, And he sounded as though
Speaker 3: he was really embarrassed about it, and as though he
Speaker 3: were letting me into that secret slowly because it'd come
Speaker 3: to start to trust me. The idea of an understated
Speaker 3: multimillionaire is kind of nice. Yeah, yeah, I like that.
Speaker 3: I thought that was a really nice quality, that the
Speaker 3: money didn't really matter that much. It was. There were
Speaker 3: other things that were more important.
Speaker 1: Like you well as the future. Together in the future
Speaker 1: was like I imagine.
Speaker 3: You in the kitchen of the of Happy Valley, and
Speaker 3: which study would you like? The one down the corridor
Speaker 3: from mine or the one next to mine? Very sexy, enticing,
Speaker 3: kind of hints at what the future might be.
Speaker 1: That's very seductive for women.
Speaker 2: It's like that talking about the future, even perhaps before
Speaker 2: you're thinking of it or allowing it.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I wouldn't have allowed. He was the one to
Speaker 3: introduce the future, not me, because I was too cautious
Speaker 3: to do so. I probably was the first to say
Speaker 3: I love you and he said no, no, too soon,
Speaker 3: and then I pulled right back. But he was starting
Speaker 3: to paint these pictures that I embedded in my own
Speaker 3: brain and started to fantasize over. We all do that,
Speaker 3: don't we. You know, we start to imagine that beautiful,
Speaker 3: glorious thing lying ahead. I'm going to be lying, I said.
Speaker 3: If I said that the money didn't matter, I'm a
Speaker 3: journalist in an industry that is absolutely going down the toilet.
Speaker 3: I took a redundancy from Fairfax Media two years ago
Speaker 3: and quite frankly, I will probably never have another staff
Speaker 3: position and never get the benefits of superinnuation or any
Speaker 3: of the things that a staff position brings. And I
Speaker 3: don't honestly know how. You know, as a journalist you
Speaker 3: make your living these days particular, j Young is sort
Speaker 3: of writing I like to do, which takes a lot
Speaker 3: of time and is dense and research heavy. So yeah,
Speaker 3: it was this relationship promises me him and I'm in
Speaker 3: love with him. It promises me a farming future, which
Speaker 3: I'd always found appealing idea of, you know, growing vegetables
Speaker 3: and having animals, and I'll be able to write and
Speaker 3: not worry about how much I pay my way through life.
Speaker 3: So the money was important in that way for me.
Speaker 2: More of my conversation with Stephanie after this shortbreak tell
Speaker 2: me about him meeting your family.
Speaker 3: He stood me up for the first time. He was
Speaker 3: meant to come for a family barbecue at my place
Speaker 3: and just didn't show up. And it was only it
Speaker 3: was my mother and my brother and his family, so.
Speaker 1: He didn't show up.
Speaker 3: I know, and I should have been, well, you, I'm
Speaker 3: so close to my family that I didn't feel embarrassed,
Speaker 3: and we're close. I didn't feel embarrassed, but I was.
Speaker 3: I went into a complete state of anxiety and just
Speaker 3: bulled up on the couch.
Speaker 1: What reason did he give?
Speaker 3: He didn't. I couldn't get him, I couldn't find him.
Speaker 3: It was just before Christmas twenty fourteen. And I should
Speaker 3: have left him then. I should have said no, no
Speaker 3: one treats me like that. But I didn't have enough
Speaker 3: self esteem. I didn't have the resources to do that.
Speaker 3: I felt so immersed and entrenched in the relationship by
Speaker 3: that stage, and in love. And the next day I
Speaker 3: rang him or texted him, and he made some He said, oh,
Speaker 3: his daughter had asthma, and oh, yeah, that was a
Speaker 3: really bad thing to do. I'm sorry, and I sort
Speaker 3: of Over Christmas, I went to Queensland to my mom's.
Speaker 3: I started to prepare myself for the relationship beang over.
Speaker 3: I actually did a really good job of it. I
Speaker 3: stopped thinking about him, I stopped you clutching my phone
Speaker 3: looking for messages. But he kept texting me. He drew
Speaker 3: he drew you back in, he drew me back in,
Speaker 3: and so when I got back and then he arrived
Speaker 3: at my place with a string of pearls, and I
Speaker 3: was forgiven. Yeah, I was forgiven. Stupidly in hindsight, But
Speaker 3: what about meeting his kids. That happened maybe six seven
Speaker 3: months after I'd first met him, and it felt like
Speaker 3: a huge milestone in the relationship. I mean, I think,
Speaker 3: you know, if he's willing to introduce he talked about
Speaker 3: breaking the bubble. I want to break the bubble between
Speaker 3: my life and your life, you know, I want you
Speaker 3: to meet my kids. And I just felt like soaring.
Speaker 3: I was jubilant. And I met them one night at
Speaker 3: a Thaire restaurant. It was excruciating. They were very quiet
Speaker 3: and shy. God knows how many other women he'd introduced
Speaker 3: them to and they had to go through this or
Speaker 3: deal with I was nervous trying to make conversation with
Speaker 3: just becoming a teenage girl and her younger brother, and
Speaker 3: it was very difficult. At one stage, I think, I mean,
Speaker 3: I was blundering around with the conversation and I think
Speaker 3: I said to the girl, is it hard to remember
Speaker 3: to pack all the things that you need when you
Speaker 3: move between mum and Dad's place? I mean, terrible question,
Speaker 3: awful question. What was I thinking? But I felt like
Speaker 3: it was blundering around. But he very quickly wrapped up
Speaker 3: the night after that. My suspicion now is that he
Speaker 3: felt that we were getting into dangerous territory, where as
Speaker 3: I discovered much later kids had spent for a little
Speaker 3: time with him. This is here's the spoiler alert. He
Speaker 3: didn't live in the house on the harbor. His ex
Speaker 3: wife did.
Speaker 1: Still, well, I was going to ask you, did you
Speaker 1: ever go to his house?
Speaker 3: No? I didn't ever go to his house. And that
Speaker 3: was eventually what made me leave the relationship, because he
Speaker 3: canceled two nights in a row on me when I
Speaker 3: was meant to be going to the house, and I thought,
Speaker 3: this is I can't do this anymore. I was in
Speaker 3: such a mess by that stage. The excuses for not
Speaker 3: going to the house were They kept evolving. So initially
Speaker 3: it was I mean for the first say, five months,
Speaker 3: I didn't even ask because I thought too soon, too soon,
Speaker 3: And I was.
Speaker 1: One we spent time at your house?
Speaker 3: Well, yeah, we spent time in my apartment. I think
Speaker 3: my biggest fears were he may not be that into me,
Speaker 3: maybe there's another woman. Like the scale of what I
Speaker 3: discovered about him afterwards, I could never have imagined. I
Speaker 3: didn't know that these people really existed.
Speaker 2: You're an investigative journalist. The first thing I would have
Speaker 2: thought you would have done is google him.
Speaker 3: Well I did. I did google him, and I found
Speaker 3: that certain planks of his story were very true. He
Speaker 3: was the grandson of a very well known Sydney businessman
Speaker 3: who'd started a major Australian company, and there's no question
Speaker 3: about that. As a fact, he had lived in this
Speaker 3: I saw his driver's license with the address of this house,
Speaker 3: this harb Aside address. I saw it. When I researched
Speaker 3: the book, I came to discover some really interesting cognitive science,
Speaker 3: some work that well well not on cognitive science principles,
Speaker 3: and one of them is thing called anchoring, whereby you
Speaker 3: place importance in some facts at the expense of other facts.
Speaker 3: So I anchored my beliefs about him and my belief
Speaker 3: in him, the fact his story was true, in the
Speaker 3: fact that while his grandfather is X. I've seen his
Speaker 3: driver's license, so he must live there and let other
Speaker 3: things slip on by.
Speaker 1: You wrote lists, didn't you?
Speaker 3: Oh?
Speaker 2: Yeah?
Speaker 3: I wrote list to try and calm myself down.
Speaker 1: Like what would you write down?
Speaker 3: I was trying to steal my anxiety, and I thought
Speaker 3: maybe if I could rationally put things down in writing.
Speaker 3: I'd calm myself down. I'd write reasons why he's not
Speaker 3: lying to me, reasons why I shouldn't be worried, reasons
Speaker 3: why the fact he didn't turn up on the weekend
Speaker 3: shouldn't bother me. And when I look back at those lists,
Speaker 3: they are all things he said to me. I'm envisiting
Speaker 3: you with gray hair, I love you completely, I et cet.
Speaker 3: There were all things he said. They were not actions.
Speaker 1: They had seen a dog that he said was them.
Speaker 3: Oh yeah, I knew the dog existed.
Speaker 2: And there was such detail in his excuses exactly, and
Speaker 2: they were quite elaborate, weren't they was never just like
Speaker 2: I can't come. It's sort of you talk about it
Speaker 2: them unfolding in three acts.
Speaker 3: Yeah, yeah, in the most incredibly detailed way.
Speaker 1: Would they so well?
Speaker 3: For example, this weekend that he said he was his
Speaker 3: dog had been bitten by a snake. He was meant
Speaker 3: to come to my apartment on a Friday night and
Speaker 3: have dinner with me. Come up. He was down at
Speaker 3: the farm and he was meant to be coming up.
Speaker 3: And around about four in the afternoon, I got the
Speaker 3: text saying I can't find my dog, then another, and
Speaker 3: I replied to each of them with concern or questions,
Speaker 3: and then another one an hour or two later. Founder
Speaker 3: were at the vet. I'm not sure she's going to
Speaker 3: make it. She's been bitten by a snake with the vet, thinks.
Speaker 3: Then silence for the rest of the night, nothing till
Speaker 3: the next morning, but then a text very early the
Speaker 3: next morning saying, I think I'll be able to come
Speaker 3: up to town. We think, well, she'll make it now,
Speaker 3: there won't be any point in mess staying here with her.
Speaker 3: I'll come up, you know, I'll be there for lunch.
Speaker 3: Then a few hours later, I've actually got a friend
Speaker 3: who's a vet in another town and he's coming to
Speaker 3: look at her. And there were slight contradictions, but I
Speaker 3: wasn't seeing the contradictions because in the morning you're saying
Speaker 3: we think she's going to make it. Well, then if
Speaker 3: she's going to make it, why do you need to
Speaker 3: bring another vet? Like I can see all of these
Speaker 3: contradictions now. The text went on all weekend with updates
Speaker 3: and no, I'm not.
Speaker 2: Going to come confusing like being bombarded with details and bombarded.
Speaker 3: I think the effect the details had was simply to
Speaker 3: reassure me of the truth of the story. Why would you?
Speaker 3: It just seems so real. The vet friend arrived, they
Speaker 3: went back to his town with the dog. They had
Speaker 3: not seen each other for a long time. Their friendship
Speaker 3: had been a casualty of the divorce. Now they were
Speaker 3: catching up, and it was really good that they were
Speaker 3: catching up becoming friends again. So he's going to stay
Speaker 3: there the night, see tomorrow, I see you tomorrow morning.
Speaker 3: And then finally I saw him late on the Sunday.
Speaker 3: But the text went all weekend and kept putting off
Speaker 3: his arrival time.
Speaker 1: You must have thought you were going crazy.
Speaker 3: Oh I did, I did.
Speaker 1: Did you know the term gas lighting?
Speaker 2: No?
Speaker 3: Well, no, I didn't believe it or not, But I mean,
Speaker 3: I think that's This conversation about gas lighting is really
Speaker 3: only maybe I'm dreaming. I don't know. Maybe it was
Speaker 3: out there, but I don't think we talked about relationships
Speaker 3: like this.
Speaker 1: No, gas lighting is quite new.
Speaker 2: When I was in an emotionally abusive relationship, I didn't
Speaker 2: know that term until many years later, when I looked
Speaker 2: back and I went, oh, that's what it was.
Speaker 1: I wish i'd have read an article about that, because yes,
Speaker 1: you think, oh, this is just me.
Speaker 2: This is just the very specific dynamics of this relationship.
Speaker 2: And what you describe is so familiar to anyone who's
Speaker 2: been involved with a guy who's either a liar or
Speaker 2: a psychopath or an emotionally abusive.
Speaker 1: You start doubting yourself.
Speaker 2: Yeah, you don't think, oh, this guy's a dick and
Speaker 2: cut them loose, because even though it's from the outside,
Speaker 2: people look at you and go, what are you doing?
Speaker 3: But no one on my outside was saying that. On
Speaker 3: my outside, even your therapist, even my therapist who I love,
Speaker 3: and I do not blame her for this for a moment,
Speaker 3: because she wasn't in the middle of the relationship. I
Speaker 3: could in an hour session every couple of weeks or
Speaker 3: every week. I couldn't tell her everything that was going on.
Speaker 3: I can't remember what I missed to tell her. She
Speaker 3: wasn't seeing red flag. She kept on saying, a man
Speaker 3: with a difficult ex wife, two children, a farm, business interests,
Speaker 3: property development is going to have a complex, complex life,
Speaker 3: and it's so different from your life. I'm not seeing
Speaker 3: red flags.
Speaker 1: Steph.
Speaker 2: Did you find yourself protecting his image from other people
Speaker 2: by not telling people everything about how many times you cancel.
Speaker 3: Or I'm pretty open. So I was probably telling my
Speaker 3: friends the truth.
Speaker 1: At what point did they say the.
Speaker 3: Only one did? Most of my friends would go One
Speaker 3: friend said, stop being a weirdo, you know, until you've
Speaker 3: got a concrete evidence that he's lying, Stop being a weirdo.
Speaker 3: And my brother and sister in LAWA would say, you're
Speaker 3: going to ruin it. Relax, you're going to ruin it.
Speaker 3: There was one heterosexual friend, a guy who was then
Speaker 3: he's another phenomena for women of a certain age, my
Speaker 3: age and even younger. By this stage, I was in
Speaker 3: my late forties and he was in his mid forties,
Speaker 3: but he was seeing women who were in their early thirties. So,
Speaker 3: you know, even though it's only about two or three
Speaker 3: younger years younger than me, I was never, you know,
Speaker 3: a rare single man in his mid forties. He was
Speaker 3: separated with a young daughter as well. But I don't
Speaker 3: think he ever looked at, you know, would look at
Speaker 3: a woman my age with an eye to thinking I was,
Speaker 3: because there is you know, he's going out with thirty
Speaker 3: year olds.
Speaker 2: That's important to understand because that's the context for which
Speaker 2: someone who does show an interest in you and not
Speaker 2: a twenty eight year old. That's really flattering, and there
Speaker 2: is a level of gratitude for that appreciation of that.
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, and that's very real.
Speaker 3: Absolutely. But this one heterosexual friend, I think he knew
Speaker 3: me just from a very few things I said. He said,
Speaker 3: he was cynical. He didn't even need to ask me
Speaker 3: many questions. He didn't really. We sat in one night
Speaker 3: at a sushi bar when I was and I pulled
Speaker 3: my anxieties out to him and he said, yeah, yeah,
Speaker 3: when are you going to let this finish? When are
Speaker 3: you going to finish this?
Speaker 1: How long had it been?
Speaker 3: Oh? That was probably a seven months or so into
Speaker 3: the relationship. And he was ultimately the one that said
Speaker 3: you've got to end this. And he was the one
Speaker 3: that sort of picked me up and fed me I
Speaker 3: hadn't been eating at the very end, and said, you've
Speaker 3: got to end this. This is ridiculous.
Speaker 1: How did you end it?
Speaker 3: I email my ex and said, I don't know what
Speaker 3: sort of hollow man you are, but you're a hollow man.
Speaker 3: And I put my finger on it because now I
Speaker 3: can understand the psychology of what I was, what I'd
Speaker 3: been dealing with, which I didn't until I left the relationship.
Speaker 3: Oh he's a hollow man and I put my finger
Speaker 3: on it, and that email when I broke up with
Speaker 3: him before knew anything.
Speaker 1: So what happened after you decided to end it?
Speaker 2: Because you worked at Fairfax at the time, you were
Speaker 2: sitting next to one of Australia's leading investigative journalists, the
Speaker 2: extraordinary Kate mcclearmon, who said, who's brought down entire state
Speaker 2: governments through her investigative reporting? That would have been like
Speaker 2: just something she could have done before breakfast, exactly one
Speaker 2: of my tea.
Speaker 3: No, it was actually another colleague and another great colleague
Speaker 3: and Davies who now works the Guardian, who said to me,
Speaker 3: let's do some searches on him. And this is probably
Speaker 3: around seven months into the relationship, and I was expressing
Speaker 3: anxieties to her about it and I said, oh, no, no, no, no,
Speaker 3: this is a love affair. This isn't I mean, I've
Speaker 3: done my preliminary googles, and I knew the sort of
Speaker 3: searches that we could do, title deed searches to see
Speaker 3: what he owned, if he indeed was this multimillionaire, whether
Speaker 3: he owned the house that he lived in, bankruptcy searches,
Speaker 3: and about social media. He didn't have a very big
Speaker 3: social media. He had a Twitter account. It was pretty.
Speaker 1: Typical for a man.
Speaker 3: That's not a red flag. Oh that's not a red
Speaker 3: flag at all, and very little online about him. But
Speaker 3: just as I said before, you know enough to reassure
Speaker 3: me that his grandfather was who he said, and that
Speaker 3: he had had an architectural practice at one point. But
Speaker 3: I said to Anne Davies, I said, no, this isn't
Speaker 3: this is not a story. This is a love affair.
Speaker 3: And of course that wasn't really the real reason. I mean,
Speaker 3: it was part of it. I didn't want to be
Speaker 3: a snoop, but I couldn't better look at what the
Speaker 3: truth was. And that's not uncommon. It's called wilful blindness
Speaker 3: in psychological terms. And it's the same phenomena as the
Speaker 3: person that goes to tan on sun beds whose doctor
Speaker 3: says you shouldn't do that, that's going to give you cancer,
Speaker 3: or smokers, and it's the same phenomena. You turn your
Speaker 3: eyes away from what you fear, what you don't want
Speaker 3: to know about. It's not it's not convenient and convenient
Speaker 3: to look at it, and I was being wilfully blind. Sure,
Speaker 3: there was a part of me that didn't want to
Speaker 3: snoop and felt that was a betrayal, But it was
Speaker 3: more about I don't want to look, I can't look.
Speaker 3: I can't look.
Speaker 1: What made you decide to start looking a little?
Speaker 3: Well, after I dumped him. After I dumped him, and
Speaker 3: then my curiosity was like insatiable. I had to know
Speaker 3: what I'd encountered and can I keep some of the secrets.
Speaker 3: From what I discovered, I discovered that he wasn't who
Speaker 3: he said he was at all, that he was bankrupt,
Speaker 3: that he didn't live in the house that his ex
Speaker 3: wife did. That in fact, I think he had no
Speaker 3: fixed address. I think he moved, possibly between women. I
Speaker 3: think there was some suggestion that he squatted on boats
Speaker 3: on the harbor. Apparently there are any number of empty
Speaker 3: boats on the Sydney Harbor. Owners don't visit very often.
Speaker 3: I discovered he'd been with another woman from the very
Speaker 3: first day of our relationship. I discovered that he didn't
Speaker 3: have the custody of the children that he claimed he had,
Speaker 3: that there was no farm, and ultimately I discovered that
Speaker 3: he had been just simply a meddler in the Happy
Speaker 3: Valley purchase. Had presented himself as a buyer, but he
Speaker 3: had no money to buy it. And I eventually heard
Speaker 3: from the person that did buy it, who says he
Speaker 3: spent much much more money on the property than he
Speaker 3: should have because of Joe's meddling in the sale. So
Speaker 3: he fooled lots of other people as well, in business
Speaker 3: as well. It wasn't just me. He's a very clever
Speaker 3: con artist, really, But the thing is about it, it's
Speaker 3: so weird. The benefits were so few for him. Really,
Speaker 3: he didn't get I don't think he's got money out
Speaker 3: of his corn artistry. And I think what he got
Speaker 3: out of me and the other women that he's been
Speaker 3: involved with is an audience for his grand stories, which
Speaker 3: at the time I didn't see were grand stories. I
Speaker 3: just thought he's a busy man trying to buy a
Speaker 3: property and he wants to talk all about it. Now
Speaker 3: I can see it was just self grandizement. It was
Speaker 3: him going, look at me, look at me, I'm so successful.
Speaker 3: And I allowed him to help build his facade around
Speaker 3: the hollow shell by listening to him, and I suppose clapping,
Speaker 3: you know, I was the audience.
Speaker 1: Did you reach out to the woman he'd been with
Speaker 1: through your relationship? How did you find her?
Speaker 3: So her social media? I found evidence of her on
Speaker 3: social media, and eventually, long time, long time afterwards, I
Speaker 3: did reach chat to her.
Speaker 1: How did you discover that they'd been together through that time?
Speaker 3: That her social media revealed just endless photographs and on
Speaker 3: both Facebook and Instagram that all the dog the day
Speaker 3: that his dog had been bitten by a snake, he
Speaker 3: was in fact at a resort in the Hunter Valley
Speaker 3: with her, playing board games and drinking wine at various
Speaker 3: wineries and swimming in a swimming pool in between sending
Speaker 3: me text messages telling me about his dying dog, which
Speaker 3: presumably was it a vet hotel or a pet hotel somewhere.
Speaker 3: Her Facebook and Instagram gave me all the evidence I
Speaker 3: needed to see the pattern of lies. And once I
Speaker 3: knew the pattern of lies in that he had been
Speaker 3: lying to me at that level about her, about about
Speaker 3: what he'd been doing, I could see that clearly the
Speaker 3: lies didn't stop there, that this was a much bigger scale.
Speaker 1: I must have been devastating.
Speaker 3: It's funny, you know, I think it helped me start
Speaker 3: it began, and my recovery, it was like, how can
Speaker 3: I be surprised by it? That's the like I know that.
Speaker 3: The night that I sat there, I was on the
Speaker 3: phone to a girlfriend in Melbourne as I went through
Speaker 3: his Facebook, her Facebook, this woman's, other woman's Facebook, and Instagram.
Speaker 3: It was devastating and stunning, but not surprising. And I
Speaker 3: can't explain why I wasn't like something had to be
Speaker 3: up and I came to see that by the end.
Speaker 1: But was there a relief in learning that you weren't crazy?
Speaker 3: The relief came mostly not so long after that, when
Speaker 3: I started to google the words pathological liar and boyfriend.
Speaker 3: And once I'd done that, this whole world opened up
Speaker 3: to me, and it was pop psychology rather than medical psychiatry,
Speaker 3: but it revealed so much to me about who he
Speaker 3: was and why he was the way he was, and
Speaker 3: the existence of these sorts of people out there, narcissistic
Speaker 3: people with personality disorders most likely. And the Internet, if
Speaker 3: you've ever been, once you've started to google, it's like
Speaker 3: a rabbit hole. There's so much out there too, so
Speaker 3: many people telling their stories about these people. There are
Speaker 3: so many of them out there. It's terrifying. And after
Speaker 3: my original Good Weekend article, I got so many emails
Speaker 3: from people saying that happened to me, similar story, and
Speaker 3: they're just gobsmacking, like women who've tried to commit suicide
Speaker 3: after these relationships have ended and losing every scaic of
Speaker 3: money that they've ever earned, and that the husband somehow
Speaker 3: or the ex boyfriend or partner taking everything, turning children
Speaker 3: against them, and I should also women are capable of
Speaker 3: this behavior too. It's not just men. I've certainly heard
Speaker 3: from many more women than men, which is probably a
Speaker 3: symptom of the fact that women tell their stories more
Speaker 3: readily than men do. But I've heard from men to
Speaker 3: and one woman who I interviewed for my book who
Speaker 3: had a bad relation She's an American woman lives in Florida.
Speaker 3: She had a bad relationship with, funnily enough, an Australian
Speaker 3: sports person who'd gone to Florida to play in his sport.
Speaker 3: She now has this sort of account lean life coaching
Speaker 3: kind of service that she promotes through Instagram. Mainly, she
Speaker 3: says she gets fifty percent men contacting her about bad
Speaker 3: women in their lives. That's the only stat I can
Speaker 3: really offer, because this is not researched, and I don't
Speaker 3: know how you would ever actually research it. Because I've
Speaker 3: also got to be aware that a proportion of the
Speaker 3: people who contacted me after the original article and also
Speaker 3: after the book in the last couple of weeks, I've
Speaker 3: got dozens more. I think you've got to be aware
Speaker 3: that some of them might just be aggrieved. They might
Speaker 3: have blown out of proportion what their claims about their
Speaker 3: ex are. They're pissed off, they're unhappy, they've broken up.
Speaker 3: So I think you've got to set aside a few
Speaker 3: of those and go, that's a fair point. You know,
Speaker 3: you can't take everyone as fact. And I don't know
Speaker 3: how you to ever research the troop without going into
Speaker 3: these relationships in such detail. How do you ever prove
Speaker 3: the truth of them?
Speaker 1: People feel so stupid, yep.
Speaker 3: And if they tell one line that doesn't work, they
Speaker 3: move on to the next line. Yeah, and they can.
Speaker 3: They the most incredibly intricate stories, and they tell one
Speaker 3: lie after another, and you can see there are contradictions.
Speaker 3: But well I could see there were contradictions in his stories,
Speaker 3: and that bothered me. But yeah, I was just immersed
Speaker 3: in it, and I so much wanted it to work.
Speaker 2: More of my conversation with the real life Bertie Bell
Speaker 2: Stephanie Wood after this break, when your original Good Weekend
Speaker 2: piece came out, our mutual friend of Meilily Lester, was
Speaker 2: your editor on that story, and it was absolutely stunning
Speaker 2: and so powerful.
Speaker 1: And everybody was talking about it.
Speaker 2: I can see the cover of The Good Weekend in
Speaker 2: my mind's eye when I think about it. It came
Speaker 2: out on the Saturday, and on the Sunday I had
Speaker 2: lunch actually with a number of journalist girlfriends, and.
Speaker 1: We were all saying, who is this guy?
Speaker 2: We need to find out who this guy is? I
Speaker 2: imagine because you gave a lot a number of details,
Speaker 2: you were careful you didn't use his name. But did
Speaker 2: people recognize him and contact.
Speaker 3: You family members? Some of his family did.
Speaker 1: What did they say?
Speaker 3: They made comments about the fact it wasn't the first
Speaker 3: time they'd heard these stories.
Speaker 2: Did they feel bad? Yeah, they did, I suppose reaching
Speaker 2: out to you. They weren't defending him. Put it that way,
Speaker 2: they weren't defending What about Joe himself.
Speaker 3: I heard from him. Yes, after that original Good Weekend article,
Speaker 3: I got a couple of very odd messages that were
Speaker 3: really disconnected from reality. He talked about how he was
Speaker 3: with an inner new relationship there. It was sort of
Speaker 3: an apology, but it wasn't an apology. It's very difficult
Speaker 3: to describe just how weird the emails are. They're literate,
Speaker 3: the punctuation and grammar is right, but there's a nonsequential
Speaker 3: nature to them as sort of a discombobulating kind of
Speaker 3: effect to them. And as I talk about in the book,
Speaker 3: it's it was really disturbing for a while, but then
Speaker 3: I started to laugh and I heard things that he
Speaker 3: was saying about me, which were, I'm if I don't
Speaker 3: take my medication, I do some strange things. Last night,
Speaker 3: I stole money from my mother to buy my apartment.
Speaker 3: I am a lesbian. It just doesn't tell this to
Speaker 3: I hear it through a guy through a sauce.
Speaker 2: Yet, And have you stayed or did you when you
Speaker 2: reached out to the woman he was having their relationship with,
Speaker 2: was she angry? Was she still with him at the time?
Speaker 2: How did that conversation unfold?
Speaker 3: It was a really really terrifying moment when I reached
Speaker 3: out to her, because I didn't know whether they were
Speaker 3: in a relationship or not. And as I detail on
Speaker 3: the book, it was there were a lot of light
Speaker 3: bulb moments as we talked about was she open to
Speaker 3: talking to you? It's very open to talking to Had
Speaker 3: she ended the relationship?
Speaker 1: Maybe she had. She made a funny comment about a whiteboard.
Speaker 3: Yeah, when we started to compare stories, she said, you know,
Speaker 3: he must have had a whiteboard. And I got a
Speaker 3: picture in my head of him with different colored market
Speaker 3: pens and biting his lip and looking at his whiteboard
Speaker 3: and different columns. And I was blue when she was red.
Speaker 3: And he'd compared the stories of how he was lying
Speaker 3: to each of us, and he lied to us differently.
Speaker 3: There were different lies. There were things that he said
Speaker 3: to me that he never said to her. He had
Speaker 3: a different name for his ex wife, for her that
Speaker 3: he told to her to me out like and who
Speaker 3: knows why? Who knows why?
Speaker 1: A lot of stuff to keep straight.
Speaker 3: A lot of cut stuff to keep straight. And as
Speaker 3: a lot of people said to me, why why would
Speaker 3: you put yourself through that? The exhausting nature of that
Speaker 3: juggling act. It's just insane. Stephanie, how do you date
Speaker 3: again after Joe? I don't know me I really don't know.
Speaker 3: Will anyone want to date me? I don't know.
Speaker 2: Shut up, look at you gorgeous and smart and oh well,
Speaker 2: I mean kind and brilliant.
Speaker 3: You're very sweet. People might be scared that I might
Speaker 3: write about them, and I don't think anyone's ever going to,
Speaker 3: you know, come up to the standard of Joe in
Speaker 3: terms I think. And I think I'm done with writing
Speaker 3: about my personal life. I'd never wanted to write about
Speaker 3: my personal life, and it's just unfolded that I have,
Speaker 3: and it's ridiculous. They're the stories that get the most traction,
Speaker 3: and I right now want to pull away from doing
Speaker 3: personal stories completely. I never want to write another one.
Speaker 3: But as I say that, I know that they're the
Speaker 3: stories that make a difference in people's lives. I feel
Speaker 3: I get so many people saying, thank you, your book
Speaker 3: is my bible. Now you've saved my life. I understand
Speaker 3: what happened now, and that's enormously gratifying. You know, we
Speaker 3: don't live long in this world, and not many of
Speaker 3: us can actually make a difference. And so as I
Speaker 3: say I don't want to write more personal essays, I
Speaker 3: can see their power and how important they can be.
Speaker 3: But as for dating, I don't know. I just don't know, Like,
Speaker 3: how do you have an online date with someone? Now?
Speaker 3: Even if you're optimistic enough to think that there's someone
Speaker 3: online that might be half decent, what do you say
Speaker 3: to them when they ask? What do you do?
Speaker 2: Yeah?
Speaker 3: I write books about fakes that I meet online? What
Speaker 3: do I say?
Speaker 1: And I think they'd be fascinating?
Speaker 3: And also I think, and I don't want to make
Speaker 3: a big deal about this, but I feel a bit
Speaker 3: awkward about it. You know, once you have some sort
Speaker 3: of profile, I don't know, dating online it feels weird
Speaker 3: to me.
Speaker 2: I've got a friend who is who writes about sex.
Speaker 2: She's a sex kind of advice giver. But that would
Speaker 2: be hard to date.
Speaker 1: That would be really hard to date. Imagine taking that
Speaker 1: on board.
Speaker 2: And she's just got married recently in her what would
Speaker 2: she be, late fifties probably yeah her. Thank you for
Speaker 2: writing this book. I wish I could have read it
Speaker 2: a lot of years ago. I hope that a lot
Speaker 2: of women do read it.
Speaker 3: I hope a lot of young women do yes to
Speaker 3: stop them before they start a pattern of bad relationships,
Speaker 3: and to show them that they're worthy of great love
Speaker 3: from the beginning, and if someone's not giving it to them,
Speaker 3: you walk away, and that to be single is often
Speaker 3: almost always better than being in a bad relationship.
Speaker 2: You can see why this story was just crying out
Speaker 2: to be an on screen thriller. And what's really wild
Speaker 2: is that this happened to Stephanie quite a few years
Speaker 2: ago when online dating was actually online, that is, before
Speaker 2: the apps even and as you heard, she never even
Speaker 2: got into the Tinder and the bumbles and the hinges.
Speaker 2: So it's crazy to think about the cat fishing and
Speaker 2: the fraud that can go on now when there's AI
Speaker 2: in so many new ways that liars can manipulate and
Speaker 2: cover their tracks. And really that's why this story and
Speaker 2: now this series is really important, because this could have
Speaker 2: ended up in a much worse situation for Stephanie than
Speaker 2: it did. Women get hurt by men they meet online
Speaker 2: or on the apps. They get hurt emotionally, they get
Speaker 2: hurt financially, and sometimes tragically, they get hurt physically. And
Speaker 2: that's why Stephanie really wanted to tell her story.
Speaker 1: So if you're out there.
Speaker 2: Dating now, navigating the world of the apps, stay safe,
Speaker 2: follow your instincts, research your dates like you're a journalist
Speaker 2: or a detective, and if something in you says this
Speaker 2: guy seems too good to be true, maybe he is.
Speaker 3: The didn't
Speaker 1: Say