S11 E7: [Willow] Playing the Hero
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Some names have been changed for anonymity purposes. Opinions expressed by the guests on the show are their own and do not necessarily represent the views of myself or AudioChuck. Resources and source material are linked in the episode notes. Thank you so much for listening. ♪ You think you know me, you don't know me well ♪ ♪ Don't know who, don't know me well ♪

My name is Willow and I work in digital marketing and music. I grew up as an only child. I was really shy and I didn't really fully fit in for a while. In junior high, I started singing in front of people, which eventually led me to theater. It was there that I met some friends, one of them being a girl named Mila who would eventually inspire me to start participating in community theater outside of school.

We all lived in a small, somewhat conservative town. I'm half Asian and I didn't meet my Filipino family until much later in my life. So I grew up not being surrounded by a lot of other people like me. There weren't a lot of opportunities for belonging and theater felt like my safe haven. I think a lot of other theater kids probably feel that way.

At the community theater outside of school that my friends had introduced me to, I met my still best friend, Noah. Noah had taken private acting classes with an actor named Matt when he was young. Matt had a brief role in the early 2000s on a major television network. He was in an acting class with one of our absolute Broadway heroes,

He performed in New York regularly, and he had been in some movies in the early 2000s that we hadn't heard of at the time, but they were movies, and he had been on popular TV shows just with very short, brief roles. Matt's father died unexpectedly in May of 2006, and at that time, he returned to spend time with his family during the tragedy. Shortly after this, he started up an acting group based out of his mom's dance studio, which was in my hometown.

My friend Noah had already had this connection to Matt. So Noah knew all of us at the community theater, and that was one of the ways that Matt was connected to some of the theater kids. So he got to know a lot of my friends. Willow described Matt the theater coach as confident, handsome, and charismatic. He had this special thing when you met him because that's what we all wanted to be. We all wanted to be this seemingly successful actor.

He had somewhat come from a similar area as us. When you see that, when you come from a space like we came from, it makes it feel like it could happen. There's this possibility. So at this time, all of us are either in junior high or freshman in high school. And we think that Matt's in his late 20s.

I had met all my friends at the time at that small community theater, but we were slowly growing out of it. So some of my friends started joining Matt's class in early 2007. I had gone to see the first show that they did and I loved it. It was made up of kids from my hometown and a few surrounding towns. Some of those friends I did know from community theater and some were new to me.

The next year, I was 16 and I joined Matt's acting class. I had met him a few times before that, just through my friends and around town. And he had come to see a play I was in at the community theater before I joined his group. I think it's important to note, too, when I did community theater, most of the theater shows I was doing were the free ones.

I joined late enough so that in community theater, I wasn't aged in long enough to really do too many summer camps that costed money. And that's kind of where we were at. Like I said, I had a single mom. Money was really tight.

And so I did a lot of the theater that was available to me at that time. But my mom saved up some money and I joined Matt's group at the same time as two other friends of mine. One of them being my friend Mila, who happened to be one of my closest friends at the time. Matt's family ran the business together. He taught acting classes and his sister and mother led dance lessons. Initially, acting classes were just Saturday mornings from 8 to 12.

Early on, I was pretty combative with Matt.

He constantly put down the community theater that we came from and any other outside arts group that we were a part of. And at the time, I was still super protective of where we came from, and I was pretty outspoken. I remember a rehearsal where I was across the room running a scene, and he had just put it down one too many times. And me and Matt ended up having a blowout back and forth, and I ended up crying.

But somehow after that, I think it bonded me to him even more. I thought he understood and respected me more. Overall, we all really admired Matt. He was so smart and he was giving us this space that felt extremely transformative and real. As mostly teenagers, we all felt really validated in this space and really grown up. We were working with a lot of grown up material. We had our own lives.

and our really defined identities, but they were all tied up in the space. Our dreams and our goals felt really real. He had this phrase that was really relevant in our teaching about never playing an idea when it comes to acting, never playing an idea. And I think that part of that whole process was probably part of what took so long for me to realize that Matt was really playing

Shortly after Willow joined Matt's acting class, they performed an original play written by him. The play was a bit edgier than any of the other acting she'd done while in community or school theater. It was actually a follow-up to that first play that I had gone to see my friends in. In this play, my character is a little bit more of a character than I was in the original play.

dies. And the whole play, you're trying to figure out why I died. I didn't realize that this was the start of an us versus them mentality that was really present in that group. We were this entity, this group that was untouchable and everybody on the outside of that was in opposition to us. I was hooked and we were all really happy to be doing more innovative work.

Between when we joined the group and the summer of 2008, one of my closest friends in the group and I grew distant. We had been friends before we joined, but now we were in this group together. But in that time span, we grew really distant, and I wasn't sure why. They were a couple years older than me, and we were teenagers, and it felt for me like there was a lot of tension in this split.

I was more angry about it, and she seemed sad. I was a sophomore at the time, and she was a senior, and she was about to go away for school. And it was around this time that another friend in the group was convinced that she noticed that Matt...

was texting the friend that I had grown distant from. That fall, Willow auditioned for a role in the company's next production. And though she wanted to audition for a specific part, Matt pulled her aside to explain to Willow why he'd cast her in a different role. He said he had to cast her as a certain character because she was the only person of color in the acting company. I actually ended up loving that role because

I think it is important to be conscious about how we're casting roles, especially when it comes to identity. But I think that this was the first time I started really seeing the tokenizing and the roles that we all filled in the group. But I couldn't put that name to it at that time.

I was on the older end of the group at that time. I wasn't the oldest, but there were more younger people, younger as in two years, three years at the most. My whole creative process had started with singing, and I had taken a few voice classes with my high school chorus teacher, and I felt like I had learned some stuff. I was one of the only people in the group that had training. I remember innocently trying to give another member of the group a

who happens to be a person that Matt knew since they were little and really touted feeling like he created this person. But I remember trying to give this person a tip on breathing or vocal technique offhand. I thought it was an innocent thing that I was doing. And Matt immediately flipped out and took me down about how I sing and made it clear that I have no place having an opinion there.

Matt knew nothing about music at all, has no background in that. But this is a reinforcement of this process that started happening and would continue happening of Matt is the only person that knows anything about the arts. And we are so lucky to be learning from him.

So for us to dare come in and try to know more than he might know about something or try to bring in an outside teaching, that is not to be tolerated. That is wrong. And usually that was treated as something that was coming from a sinister place, which really we were kids and we were excited to be around other kids that were creative.

At the time, I was hurt, but I didn't really connect that Matt had no understanding of music and that he takes down anything that he doesn't teach himself. And this cycle, it presented himself to the point where any time someone...

had an idea that Matt didn't represent, he would turn borderline hostile. And he was the only one that could teach us correctly. And honestly, I think we believed it. Matt did have a few relationships with famous actors that he'd met during his time working in the industry. And he used those connections to introduce Willow and three other students to one of their acting idols. It was magical.

We already had tickets and we were going to go and see this person. But Matt was able to get us backstage. I notice more in hindsight now, the comfort he has around young people leading a room and the confidence and that space versus he still was putting on confidence around this person that was of his age. And I think he wanted to consider his peer, but it was different. There was something ingenuine too. I remember after this,

The newspaper in town came out. It had the picture of me and my friends that went to the show, as well as the Broadway actor and Matt all together. And the title read something along the lines about how an acting coach made students' dreams of meeting their idol come true. And Matt had submitted what he did for us to the paper. That spring, Willow was excited to be cast in another musical in Matt's acting company.

I actually have a great part. I was really excited.

And it was around this point where acting classes started taking up our whole weekends, many of our weeknights, and they just increased consistently over time. We still had our four-hour acting classes on Saturday morning, but now we also had required dance classes usually on Sunday night. And then you would also have, sometimes there were acting camps, but usually it was rehearsals.

We're paying for dance and we're paying for acting. But then we have all these rehearsals. And it was a lot, but I wanted to be there. I really did. I had a place. We were all getting really close, but we were kids. There were moments where I did learn things. After this musical, I had a cast party at my house. At that time, none of us drank. We played Never Have I Ever. And out of the 20-something people in the group, I didn't invite five of them.

They were younger. One of the people I didn't invite is now one of my closest friends. But looking back, I get a pain in my stomach of how that must have felt for them. I don't know what I was thinking. But the next day I got berated in class and I think I deserved it. But it was one of many public leaning into one of us that was to come.

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Maybe to set the scene, I should mention this dance studio was in the middle, not the center of our town, but it was like a pretty regular place in our town. It was just like this big building and the dance room we rehearsed in. There were three rooms, but usually on Saturday mornings, at least in the beginning, we'd all sit on the floor in the dance room and Matt would be above us in a chair talking down at us, chewing his ice so loudly and eating his bagel.

A lot of times we'd all be in leotards. We had different acting partners, scene partners that we would practice with and then come in and present to him. And those were the good parts. There was a lot of great information coming from that. And I think that that kept a lot of us going.

She recalls the group being so tight-knit that they eventually hung out exclusively with people in the group. And Matt highly discouraged group members from working with other teachers or coaches in the area. Due to the amount of time that me and everyone in the acting class spent together, a lot of our other friends had been cut off. Friendships outside of the group were looked down upon or judged not only by Matt, but also by his mother and his sister.

I talk a lot about Matt, but it's important to know that Matt's mother and Matt's sister were a huge part of our lives. We saw them almost every day. The three of them had very similar ways of communicating. And it was intense. Everyone lived in fear of the mother and even sometimes the sister who was younger than Matt. We all...

felt like Matt was our leader. He was our person. He had given us this life.

And we used to have this joke that anything bad, any shit you're going to talk about anyone in that family, within the next day, it'll get back to them somehow. We used to joke that they were hiding under the table, that they were with us at a friend's house. But it was this weird theme. I assume sometimes someone let it slip or somebody was in that beautiful glow of Matt's love and they were giving him what he needed to hear. And he, in turn, was keeping them on that pedestal.

Matt was pretty smart and he could trick us into telling him more than we needed to. But I don't really know how to explain it. Being a part of this group was very much an exclusive club. Even when new people would join the group, we were part of a culture and an environment where we were socialized like we were better than everyone else. And we fed into it. We loved it. And Matt fed into that too and loved it too.

If people came to audition for the group, they'd leave and we'd all rip it apart. And I would think it would be really hard to join that group if you didn't come with friends already in it. Because Matt hung out with us. If we would go to see plays with Matt, we would go to the movies. If we did stuff like that, we would all after have such a critical, judgmental conversation. Even if we went to see a movie with famous people,

Matt's word was gold, law, and religion. If you had family functions or school functions or work or personal responsibilities, they were all expected to come second to acting. And this is not an exaggeration.

In addition to owning the theater company, Matt's family also owned a shop, which was often staffed by older students from his acting classes. Willow was one of the few members of the group who didn't work at the shop, though many of her close friends did. So at that point, especially for those folks, if you weren't sleeping or at school, they were in that building.

When I was working, at least I was up the street. And not only that, but while they were supposed to be being paid for this labor, they were also paying for the classes and paying for any of the extra things we were doing and acting.

But anytime we would have long rehearsals, they would be short staffed so they wouldn't have folks on the schedule. So during our rehearsals or classes that we're paying for, they're sending members of the group next door to take 15 minute little shifts, take turns working essentially for free while they're paying to be somewhere that they're not actually able to be because they're working.

I wasn't a religious person, but whether it was skipping church or not being allowed to be in your senior play, everything was this group. And I do remember sometimes being met with resistance. If my mom was frustrated that I couldn't be at something, I would flip out because I have to devote myself to this. Isn't she happy that her teenage daughter is so devoted and regimented? This is my life. This is the only way I'm going to make it.

Please note, today's story includes discussion around disordered eating and body image abuse. Please use caution when listening. At the beginning of my senior year, we were doing more musical theater. We were in leotards more often. And I was the biggest girl in the group. I had had an eating disorder in the past, starting in sixth grade. But since then, I had gained a lot of the weight back. And...

I was around beautiful people every day. And at the time, my relationship with thinness and with fatness and with my body and my understanding of these words was a lot different. And I remember having to wear a black leotard all the time. And I started up an old eating disorder.

I would schedule it with acting. I would starve myself for days while also participating in intense physical rehearsals and dance classes. And when I did eat, I was obsessed with it and would only have tiny portions. I remember thinking to myself, if I cannot eat for this amount of days through this amount of rehearsals,

Me and my friends from the group had plans to go eat at a restaurant after rehearsal later that week. And I said, then I can get a meal at that restaurant at the end of the week. And that was what fueled how I was able to carry it out. On a particularly explosive night of COVID,

and his mom and his sister, they were fighting. They did that a lot. We were all sitting on the floor in the dance studio as we did, and they were fighting and they were blaming us, a group of teenagers, for their family's dysfunction. I specifically remembered Matt's sister looking at all of us and saying, "This is your fault." Those were the words. But during that fight, Matt got a call

And we found out that a major television network was interested in doing a show on us. The focus would be on this group of talented kids that Matt was saving from a small, closed-minded town. From the beginning, this show had to be this huge secret that we couldn't tell anyone about.

And that was one of the times that that was in those plain words. But also I think that that was this ongoing theme, the basic understanding within the group was what happens in here is between us. Unless it's us bragging about what we are, then everyone can know that. But this is our space and it has to be the most important space.

Around the same time, we found out that we had these really prestigious opportunities where we were going to fly somewhere and perform at this huge, really well-known place that felt like a dream. And then at another venue that people only dream of performing at. And there's award shows there. And it was just a place that I couldn't imagine ever being on that stage. I've mentioned that acting was our life.

But this justified all of the things that we're already starting to show. Of course, we had to go through this. Matt was working us so hard because these are the results that you can get when you work that hard. And these are the results that you can get when this is the only thing you care about. They were huge opportunities. This was life changing at the time.

And when these things started happening, I was still the biggest girl in the class, but it was around the time that I really was changing. It was around this time that they started calling us fat every rehearsal.

They wanted us to look good for the camera. And they started a workout club. It wasn't mandatory. And I didn't go to it because I was getting really thin on my own at that time in an unhealthy way. But they literally called us fat every day. And that's not an exaggeration. And I really want to state that at the time, my relationship with that word was really not a good thing.

And since that time, I've learned so much and I feel completely differently about that. But at the time, I was in a place where that was a little earth shattering. So to hear that and also to be the biggest girl in the class when they're telling all of us, even the smallest people in the class, that it set me on a path for sure.

And within the next school year, I would lose 60 pounds and I would go from being the biggest girl in a leotard to one of the very smallest. During my senior year, Matt's mom did start a rumor amongst the group that I had an eating disorder. I found this out after his mom had suggested it to a bunch of people without coming to me.

I did just turn 18, but we were all kids. I feel pretty comfortable saying that. And this woman in her 60s

Felt like it was more appropriate to fan that fire than just come to me. But when she did come to me, it was after she had already done all this. And she came to me in the parking lot with my mom. And I was really defensive. And my mom is really protective of me. And my mom believed me. And maybe that means that at the time she wanted to believe me. And once I denied it to Matt's mom's face...

She constantly praised me for my thinness. And there was this continued joke that she wanted me to take her to fat camp, that she was going to go to fat camp like Willow. It was just this ongoing joke. That's another important thing to highlight is that any kind of otherness was a joke. My Asian-ness, my identity as an Asian person growing up around all Asian

essentially mostly white people, that was a joke. A joke that I participated in at the time for sure. While preparing for their upcoming opportunities with the TV network and prestigious stage performances, the group also began working on another popular musical to perform locally. I remember specifically during the show, Matt praised my performance and was really proud of

I had played two different roles on different nights and they were both big roles. And to have Matt proud of me and to hold me up as an example in front of the class, which it's not that it never happened before. It was these moments sitting in his light that made everything worth it because you felt like you were on track and he could grant you the next step of your life. From the moment that we found out about

the major television network wanting to do a pilot on us. Matt constantly had a video camera on us. He was always filming us, whether it was in rehearsals, he always, always, always had a camera. He would film us in one of the rooms that wasn't the main room. He would take us and do like more personal interview style filming because it was all going back to the network. They had to decide the plot and the main focuses.

During that time period, the network came out to meet us all. And they talked to a bunch of people for interviews based on the videos that Matt had sent them. It was when I had lost a considerable amount of weight. And I saw right as they were leaving that they did physically see me and notice me. So they interviewed a bunch of people. Matt kept filming everything. They ended up graduating. And I'd say about a third of us

were out of high school and the rest were sophomore to senior. So everyone now was in high school. We'd all grown up a bit. Matt had been teaching some of us since we were 13 or 14. I was 16 when I joined.

Matt's family, they were forcing us. At the time, it wasn't viewed that way. We were participating in a lot of fundraising to be able to get to the two big performances that were out of state that we had coming up. We would do things like sell chocolate bars, the normal things like that, or they would have us have tag sales, which is fine.

I think it's a creative way that maybe it could have helped us save some money. But it was another one of those things where if you didn't have enough stuff from your parents to sell, then you must not care about the group enough. And whoever it was that didn't have enough tag sale stuff or had another thing to do that meant that they couldn't be at rehearsal all week and a tag sale. They were berated. They didn't care about their future or the group.

Willow also recalls a time where the group was told that they couldn't drink water until they got a dance number right, despite practicing outside in extremely hot weather. I remember my mom being there when they said that to us. She didn't say anything to them, but she said to me, no,

No, you drink water right now. Even though I was mad about the water again, I wasn't going to take water from my mom because they said we couldn't have it. And I think that that's another important thing. I think the parents fell in line a little bit too. I don't think we were telling our parents as much as was going on, but I also think there was a little bit of conditioning going on with some of our parents. And I think part of it too was our parents were so proud of us because we really were working so hard and putting out great things and things

so responsible. I remember that a parent spoke out and then when that parent left, Matt made us all say none of us agreed with that parent and the child of that parent that was in the group really wasn't in the group much longer because they were made to feel so shitty.

It was around this time that Matt started making us do this thing. Basically, you would have to move your body and dance as hard as you wanted, which sounds like there were all sorts of different creative processes. This could possibly open you up. I can see that. It can maybe lower your inhibitions. But the difference was he would put on this very specific song that was long and that was popular at the time. And when he made us do this activity, we would have to dance as hard and furiously

and thrashy and intensely as we could. And we were not allowed to stop until he said so. Instead of what maybe started as a learning tool, it ended up being a form of punishment for us. During these exhausting practices, Matt continued filming the group members to send to the TV network that they'd be filming their pilot with.

He's filming everything. He's asking us incredibly personal questions, which I think is an important point. Not only are we fully embedded in this group, but Matt also now had video of us talking about our most personal things. I think we knew that would be part of what would create an opportunity with this reality TV show. This story is my own. This experience is my own.

but it's also one that I share with a huge group of people. And I care really deeply about sharing my experience without speaking for or impeding on theirs. One night, Willow got a concerning text from Amelia, a close friend in her acting group. We had gotten extremely close, probably my best friend at the time. Amelia, it was her first time working at this business that Matt owned. It was her training night.

I remember getting a text from Amelia and she said, "I'm getting out of work. I have to talk to you right now. I need to see you right away."

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So she came in her car to my friend's house that I was sitting at. And I went outside and got in the car. And Amelia told me that while she was working at the shop, Matt had told her to follow another person in our acting group, another girl that we were friends with, to follow that person around all night for training. No matter what Amelia does, she should follow this person around.

But when she was doing that, she happened to follow this person and she did witness Matt and our friend, our underage friend, having a moment that made it very clear that they were having an inappropriate relationship. At the time, Amelia heard someone whisper, did they see us? But there was no confrontation. Amelia is unmoved.

16 or 17 and I had just turned 18. And it feels like maybe we should have known what to do from that point, but we didn't. The friend in question was definitely not 18. And at the time we believed Matt was 30. It was a big age difference and Amelia and I didn't know what to do. We kept the secret between the two of us for months, which obviously now I'm an adult. I feel really sick when I think about this.

And it feels like an excuse to say that we were kids and that we felt like we would be betraying our friend that was involved. And that I have to be honest, I think even if it was subconscious, a big thing was that we felt like we would be responsible for ruining the group and ruining the opportunities that we all had. We're on the cusp of with a TV show and all of this. And honestly, I,

We also just didn't know what to do. It's really easy when you're the same age as the people involved to think of it as this icky thing that you witnessed versus this really wrong, harmful situation. Another big thing that it came down to is that this fear of betraying Matt. And we made the decision to keep the secret between us at the time.

Anything I say, if I heard somebody else say it, would sound like an excuse. But I don't think we could put a name to the situation that we now knew about. I think we were just processing it as a relationship that wasn't supposed to be happening and was clearly supposed to be a secret. Obviously, we knew that it was bad. And even now, when I sit here and think about it and think of maybe what that could have changed for other people in my lives, I feel sick and I feel guilty.

We were kids and we were also really afraid of betraying our friend, I think, and ruining the group and all of the hard work everyone else had put in.

We finally had these big opportunities right on the horizon. What would this mean for that? Amelia and Willow began resenting being a part of the group and started distancing themselves outside of class. This constant battle for the two of us began about staying or going. We still have this TV show. We still have this performance, these two huge performances on the horizon, and we're already feeling resentful.

Matt, he always called our group Lightning in a Bottle. We were so special that we all came together at this time to make this art. And we really were this special group of people. And as long as we stayed on this path, everything we wanted was going to come to us.

Most people in our hometown, it's not that they were rich by any means. Some of them probably were, but they were very much middle class, upper middle class, nice houses. Whereas I lived in an apartment complex that was known for maybe the shadier stuff that happened there for most of my life. I remember somebody saying that, oh, it's so sad. Willow is going to be the one that never gets out of this town. Willow is going to be the one that never does anything with this town.

I do think that that played into the fact, where would I go if this all dried up? This is all I cared about. That battle kept going for almost two years, but there was always a reason to stay. And a lot of them were big life-changing opportunities.

She then began college while living at home and continued to work with Matt's group. Willow was studying music in college and making lots of new friends with similar interests. But I was still somewhat in the inner circle friend group of the acting group. But at this time, I was starting to experience functional and healthy relationships at school with teachers that were in the arts group.

And once I started playing open mic nights, Matt came out to get some supplemental footage. And I remember the video he took of me was me on stage. I was wearing a very short dress and boots and the video pans up from like my feet to the top of my head. It goes all the way up my body. That was sent off to the major television network.

The fall of my freshman year of college, we traveled for those huge performance opportunities. They kind of happened one after the other. This is not even six months after Amelia and I had decided not to tell anybody and had been carrying this with us. But while we're dealing with that, we're experiencing these huge experiences that we had never experienced before that felt like life-changing experiences.

A few of us were out of the high school and then there were a few that were still juniors or sophomores. I'm out of the high school, but during this school year, my first year out is when the kids that were still in the high school started dealing with being called a cult. And this is even like the teachers are making jokes about this group of kids that were enacting being a cult. It was a thing around town.

Matt really fanned that flame. Matt loved it.

It was another way to reinforce the us versus them thing. One evening, Amelia and Willow went to an acting classmate JT's house. Amelia and I realized that people already had a hunch about a relationship between Matt and this person that we were all friends with. That night, Amelia and I decided to share the information with a small group of people that were there. There were probably like four or five other friends there that were in the acting group.

Part of that was, oh my goodness, finally, maybe then they know what to do about it. Maybe this isn't something we have to just keep to ourselves. So we told them and we all decided not to do anything about it. None of us knew what to do, but I think that that confirmed something for people that were already worried about it.

The major television network camera and production crew flew out to Willow's small town to begin filming the group for a pilot that would be used to attempt to sell the show. It's been a long time coming. Because of this, Matt has full say on any tattoos, any haircuts, any piercings, our physical bodies.

I remember Amelia and I both get a haircut anyways, and I get a tattoo anyways. I think that was our way of rebelling. And for some reason, I get away with it. It kind of went with my image. Looking back...

I think that Matt didn't give me as much shit about my tattoo and let me get my pink streak. Maybe it really was because it went with who I was supposed to be in this reality show. But also maybe I got off a little easier because maybe somebody had been already telling him that I knew about him and our friend. Looking back, it's hard to not feel that way.

As the pilot is coming up, I find out that I'm going to be one of the main seven characters focused on based on those new videos that Matt had sent to the television network. Summer comes and that means it's time to film. The producer was a producer for a big television show that was huge at that time that all of us had watched. The filming process was actually really cool. It was a good experience.

We have auditions for the musical that literally made me want to be an artist. Aside from filming, now we were going to do this musical that meant more to me than anything, that opened me up to certain parts of myself. I'm coming fresh off of filming. You're seeing your dreams start to come true, especially at that age. Shortly after filming, I'm Filipino and we went to the beach and I got a tan.

And filming had wrapped. And Matt had said we couldn't change our appearance. What if we had to refilm something? And I get that. But I remember getting torn into that I dared get a tan at the beach. But the thing is, like, it's summertime. Like, I can't. I'm Filipino. I just get tan. This wasn't one of those big things. It was just another example of me being made an example. Matt continued this narrative that he was giving us.

all of our dreams on a silver platter. But I think the reality is that we were his ticket back to the life and the career that he was trying to convince everyone and maybe himself that he was a bigger part of than he really was. That's something that took me a long time to realize. We learned a lot from Matt, but also he was taking and taking and taking. And if this pilot got greenlit,

He was going to have more success than he had had, maybe not ever, but in a good long time. Shortly after that, Amelia leaves the group.

And I'm still in the group because we were still waiting to hear back about the pilot. And that kept me going, but I was so miserable in this group at this point. A few months after Amelia left the group, Willow arrived for her regularly scheduled Saturday morning acting class to discover Matt wasn't there. And neither is my friend that we believe he's having a relationship with.

This day is pretty blurry for me because I was so close to quitting anyways that when this all started to happen, it solidified it and I completely dissociated. But Matt's mom is there. She sits us all down in one of the acting rooms, tells us that it's completely over.

I can't remember if she says it's because she found out about the relationship. I have a hard time believing that she would have outed it because of the implications for her, but I knew that was why. It was implied heavily, but the group was over at that point, according to Matt's mom. And I remember that night, I was out with all of our friends. We were all together, and I made the choice that I was done for good, whatever that meant. Before I could call Matt, he called me.

He told me that he was starting a new group and that it was going to be more exclusive. And he asked me to be a part of it. I told him it was time for me to leave the group. I made the excuse that it was because I was focusing on my music. Before he hung up, he said, and Willow, I wanted to thank you. And that's not just coming from me. And that was the first time that I knew that for the past year and a half, or at least since that night at JT's, Matt had known that I was keeping this secret.

Even with the relief of leaving the group, that left such a horrible taste in my mouth and such a pit in my stomach. They had known the whole time that we were wrestling with that. And obviously I recognize that in the grand scheme of things, me and Amelia's experience with that situation is not the most important one. But it did torment us for a long time. It's around this time that we find out that Matt is actually in his late 30s.

Just a year before Matt had made a huge deal about turning 30 and how upset he was, but he was actually in his late 30s.

Despite not being a part of Matt's new acting group, Willow still had lots of friends in it and would occasionally run into him at social events. Not as our acting coach, but as the partner of my friend that Amelia and I had kept that secret about for so long. It's all out now. The acting group then heard back from the TV network that their project would not be greenlit. Despite this, they would still be able to view the pilot. We

We view the pilot at JT's house. I'm no longer in the group. The rumors are that the show couldn't happen because the dance studio was no longer available because Matt's mom had a problem with the relationship. Either way, the show never happens. One of my good friends from the group that I had grown distant to is in town.

And this is years after she left the group. And we decided to catch up. Over coffee, she asked me about the group and I tell her I quit. And then I tell her everything that went down. And it's then that I learn that she also had a relationship with Matt. And it was toxic. The last time that I talked to Matt in person is the year before I graduate college. He comes into the restaurant that I was working at and I have to serve him.

The fall of my senior year of college, I start noticing and experiencing really bad anxiety and I start developing depression. I started having panic attacks and putting a name to it. Right after this, I go to therapy for the first time. Somehow the whole first session becomes about Matt and the acting group. I don't think I realized how big of a part of whatever my brain was doing

was in relationship to my experience with that. Things were changing for me. I couldn't get through my vocal performance and technique classes without having a full-on panic attack and crying in front of people. I had really bad performance anxiety all of a sudden. I couldn't get through those classes without full-on breakdowns. And I ended up changing my major before the end of my senior year to focus on women, gender, and sexuality studies.

I use that major combined with my experience with music to kind of focus on performance activism. And for my senior show, my thesis project, I did a whole performance piece and one of the pieces was all about that. Different people in the group had different experiences and therefore a process that are dealt with it differently. And maybe some people don't feel like they left with a bad experience. But for me personally,

I've found empowerment by allowing myself to be candid about it and by allowing myself to include it in my art. And since then, I've gained a lot of weight back and I like that about myself.

I find a lot of power in who I am and how outspoken I am now. I have redeveloped my relationship with performance and I perform a lot. I mean, COVID kind of took that away for a while, but I've taken a lot of things back. I'm still really close with some of the people in the group. Some of them are still in the arts. People are happy and doing great. A good handful of them were just at my own wedding. One of them was the person that officiated my wedding.

When we get together, sometimes we joke that we can't help but take a minute to trauma bond because somehow we end up riffing about what happened and laughing it off or talking about it. Or a new thing will come up that we forgot happened. And up until recently, there was a listing online and it might still be there.

about Matt's work and how he was developing a new pilot for a TV show, a scripted TV show that was going to be a dramatized story based on the true account of him teaching a group of talented kids as he helped them get out of a small town. Thank you so much for taking the time and energy to share this story. There's so many elements about this group that resembles toxic, dangerous, cult-like groupthink behavior.

What do you hope others will learn from hearing your story? That they can recognize that a lot of these stories that are so important to be told aren't going to be these blockbuster hits that are blowing your mind because they could never happen. What can be really important to hear about is how ordinary these stories can be. You might never picture yourself giving your own power and your strength over seemingly

But there are scenarios where there are people in this world that are manipulative and you might not even realize it's happening, but you feel like you owe them something and you hand over your power to them. And I hope people listening, if they're able to identify something similar in their own life, they're also able to see there's resources and they have the power to make certain things happen for them without this really toxic, harmful presence in their life.

I think a lot about the parents' role in this. And I don't think that the parents were trying to turn a blind eye. And maybe it was hard for the parents involved to identify what was really going on because I don't think a lot of us did till later. Pay attention to like what feels right and what doesn't feel right.

And if it really doesn't feel right and it feels like this is the only thing that you have going for you, that's not true. If this was the best thing in your life, it wouldn't feel like this.

It's one of those situations where people are like, we're a family. And you're like, yeah, and your family is toxic AF. Absolutely. And I think that you're spot on. I mean, this happens at a lower level to a lot of people when they're working, this whole family mentality. That's such a real thing, especially at that age where we were still learning about the world. This trade-off of like...

well, you're so great and we're going to help you be so great. And we're your family, but you're great because you're with us. That's what earned you that. And it's all conditional.

That family thing doesn't go both ways. It's like, give us your whole self and let us be your whole family. But we're going to keep taking from you, even if we're going to package it in a different way. And I think in the industry, especially in the entertainment industry or in these sort of coach-teacher sports relationships, from my experience talking to other survivors who have been in similar situations, the abuse is so nuanced.

that it can be harder for others on the outside to identify, whether that be parents or other people around. But I think it's also very telling that your teachers at school and people at school could see and name the behavior, even if it was done in a joking way.

A lot of times you see or coaches people that are in those roles will dangle your ticket to success through them. And they position themselves in this place where it's like they have the power and ability to make your dreams come true if you only just do every single thing they say. And that can be very, very harmful.

Absolutely. Yeah, I think it's really interesting that when there were people that were trying to point out these things that were harmful, that just pushed us deeper in at the time. And I think that that can be really tricky because that somehow had become a power source to Matt and to what was going on.

I think a lot of times that blind devotion is equated to hard work. Yeah. Or commitment. Yeah. You have to, of course, be committed and work hard to achieve these things. But there's a certain point where, at least in this scenario, like you said, that ticket was being dangled in front of us.

But I think in reality, looking back through what was able to happen with the group of people, there was also a sense that it could have been a ticket back for Matt too. And I don't think that he wanted us to see that. There could have been an exchange and a share of power. I totally agree. Thank you again so much for taking the time to share your story.

Thank you so much for having me, Tiffany. I appreciate you sitting here tonight and listening to me talk about this. I also really appreciate the work that you do and the stories that are big and small and the care that you take with the people telling those stories. I think every single one can be learned from and that you've created a really beautiful platform for people to feel safe sharing their story with you. So thank you. It's an honor. Thank you so much.

If you or someone you love is struggling with disordered eating, please reach out to the National Eating Disorders Association. NEDA is the largest nonprofit organization dedicated to supporting individuals and families affected by eating disorders. NEDA serves as a catalyst for prevention, cures, and access to quality care. The National Eating Disorders Helpline can be reached at 1-800-NEDA.

931-2237. For 24-7 crisis support, text N-E-D-A to 741-741. As always, thank you for listening. Until next week, stay safe, friends. Something Was Wrong is an Audiochuck production. Created and hosted by Tiffany Reese.

Our theme song was originally composed by Gladrags, covered this season by Kenna and the Kings. So what do you think, Chuck? Do you approve? No!

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