S9 E5: Fabricated
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Confused after receiving what appeared to be a cease and desist letter from Artie, Kenji calls Darcy. And I'm like, what the fuck is this? And she tells me, I just got the same letter from him. And I said, what's going on? What is this all about? And she said that they had just gotten into an argument, they broke up, he left, and he had sent those text messages to us asking to cease and desist.

I hadn't gone out of my way to harass this guy or contact him or anybody. He had contacted me. You know, he came to my door at the middle of the night. He sent me videos of my ex getting his name tattooed on him. I wasn't harassing him. I didn't even know where he lived. So I couldn't go and harass him even if I wanted to. You know what I'm saying? So I was just confused.

I was reading through this and I'm looking at it right now, actually. And one of the things I immediately noticed about it is that the first line, it says, this cease and desist order is to inform you that your persistent actions, including but not limited to communicate with me or my family, Danielle and their daughter via any form of contact from you nor any third party on your behalf.

And immediately I thought, I've never tried to contact Danielle or their daughter or threaten them in any way. So I just thought it was interesting that he specifically named them in the cease and desist. You know, and then after reading it a few times, I noticed there's a lot of grammatical and spelling errors. It's kind of like he Googled some template online and filled it out and put his name in it and our names in it.

I get this. I'm clearly upset about it because I'm like, what the fuck's going to happen? You know, I'm thinking like this guy really is going to drag us to court. You're going to have to spend a bunch of money fighting this bullshit. And I don't know what to do with it. So I text Artie back. I'm like, I don't want any problems with you. I never tried to harass you or contact you. And then he basically says, you need to sign it or else I'm taking you to court. And I said, okay, fine.

I'll sign it, but where do I send it to? Because there's no return address on the letter. There's no information on where to send it. I asked him, can I have the name of your lawyer or your lawyer's address or whatever? And I'll send a copy there. And he says, oh, no, you can just send it to my personal email address. And that's when I knew like, something's not right here.

Suspicious, Kenji asks Darcy why Artie wouldn't share his lawyer's information. Darcy tells Kenji that Artie is just a private person. Long story short, I'd never sign the cease and desist. I just said, okay, well, there's nothing to cease and desist, so I'm not signing this shit. And I'm certainly not sending it to his email address because I had a strong suspicion that he would just take this and use it against me in some way.

After the cease and desist letters arrived, Darcy and Artie broke up for about 24 hours.

During this time, Darcy approached Kenji about the possibility of getting back together. She was like, oh, I think I made a really big mistake with Artie. What can we do to fix this and make things better? And I was pissed. I just went off on her and I told her, no, it's not going to happen. You fucked up and you fucked up big time. And it's not on me to try and fix anything. After that conversation, she dropped it and she got back together with him immediately and

Darcy, she calls me and tells me that I need to communicate with her over the phone, over voice and not over text. She can't text me anymore. And I ask her, why not? We have kids. I have to communicate some things with you, especially when there's things having to do with their schedule that are kind of hard to relay over voice. Darcy tells me that, well, she can't text me because Artie has access to her phone whenever he wants and can read all her messages.

She also tells me that Artie has used her phone on a couple of occasions to fabricate conversations to himself coming from her phone to use against her at some point, where he's making it look like she's done something to him.

I knew that it sounded extremely alarming that he had access to her phone. One, that he could read her messages. And two, that he was using it to fabricate conversations that he could potentially use against her at some point. I asked Darcy why she allows him to have access to her phone. And she basically says she has no choice. He demands it.

She has to turn her phone over to him to prove that she's not cheating on him, that she's being loyal to him. He wanted her to limit all contact with me, even though I'm the father of our children. It was obvious to me he just wanted complete control over her. And then he told her, oh, you just assaulted me and I have a dash camera and my car's dash cam caught it. So you need to apologize and do this or that or I'm going to take you to court and I have the evidence that you assaulted me.

On March 2nd, 2020, around 11 p.m., Kenji began receiving repeated phone calls from Darcy, again, who this time was frantic and clearly in distress.

I didn't pick the first one up right away because anytime she calls that late, it can't be something good. She kept calling and calling. So I pick up and when I talked to Darcy, she says she needs help. She says her and Artie had just gotten into a fight and he was threatening to call the police on her. And so I asked her, what the hell's going on?

She tells me that Artie took her phone away from her and wouldn't give it back. And he was trying to go into the settings and do a factory reset to erase everything off the phone, including like all our kids' pictures, videos, things that were irreplaceable because she's not tech savvy. She doesn't back up her phone regularly, so she would lose them permanently.

and then they got in a physical fight over it because she's trying to get her phone back he wouldn't give it back so i guess this happened in her living room and fortunately the kids were upstairs at her place asleep according to her they didn't hear any of this but she's trying to get her phone back he won't give it back he's about to reset everything on her phone so she ends up shoving her coffee table into arty's shins which i guess messed up his shins pretty good and got him to drop the phone

So she's able to get her phone back and then he storms out and says he's going straight to the sheriff's to file a police report. And then she's freaking out. She doesn't know what to do. She thinks she's going to jail that night. So she called me because she was like, hey, can you come over? The kids are here. If I get arrested right now, I need you to take them. And so that's where her head was at.

Worried for Darcy and his children's safety, Kenji recalls how upset he felt in that moment. I sound calm about it now, but in the moment, I mean, I remember I had a heated argument with her about this. Just like, what the fuck are you doing? Why are you letting him have access to your phone whenever he wants it? Why do you feel like you're the bad guy here? You didn't do anything wrong. He took your phone from you. And for him to try and call the police and say that you assaulted him, like, that's bullshit. Yeah.

So don't fall for it. You need to go to the police. You need to get ahead of this. You need to tell them what happened before he paints the story that you're this crazy woman who hit him with a coffee table and assaulted him and did all these things to him. I told her to call the police. She didn't. He did go to the police and file a report, which she showed me. He texted her a picture of him at the police station holding the police report.

I just felt like things were going to start getting to a point where this was going to get dangerous. And I knew that he was just going to continue to get more violent, more physical, more abusive, all of it. And the fact that my kids were there with her when this happened, that was also extremely concerning.

Each time something like this happened, I just thought, okay, this is going to be the turning point. This is where Darcy is going to snap out of it and kind of come to her senses. But she didn't. It was just like, look, it's about the kids. My main concern, my number one concern is about the kids and their safety. And I don't trust this guy anymore.

And why can't you see that? And she would always turn around and be like, oh, you're just jealous. She tried to paint me as like some jealous vengeful ex that was trying to get back at her and interfere with her relationship with Artie. When that wasn't the case, my concern was always and is still about the kids. Number one, first and foremost, I told her many times, if we never had kids and this all happened, I would have been gone. You would have never heard from me again. But

I can't. We have two kids. I can't. I'm forever tied to you. And so all the crazy shit you do, it affects me. It affects our kids. And I just wanted her to understand that. But again, you know, she wanted to try and gaslight me and paint me as the bad guy. And it's like beating your head against the wall, like trying to argue with someone who is so convinced that they're right. After Kenji learned that Darcy wanted to have a child with Artie, he

he became even more concerned with how that would tie Darcy to Artie long-term. He also worried about how it would impact their two children and their safety. Kenji's motivation to figure out who Artie really was only increased. So, you know, at this point in March, here's a plot twist for you.

I contact my brother-in-law, Mark, just to kind of tell him what's been going on and kind of see what he knows, what he's heard from his side, from my in-laws. When he agrees, like, this situation is crazy. He doesn't know what his sister's thinking. And he asked me for a picture of Artie. I send it to him and immediately picks up the phone and calls me. And he's like, dude, I used to work with Artie a year ago.

And I was like, what? He's like, yeah, this guy, that's him. I used to work with him a year ago. I was in shock. This doesn't make sense in my mind. And I'm asking him, okay, you got to tell me, like, what the hell do you know? And he tells me that Artie wasn't using the name Artie. He was using some other name. I said, well, what was the name he was using? He was like, I don't know. He couldn't really remember it.

And I'm like, okay. He's like, yeah. And he didn't have a British accent. He's not British. I'm like, what? He says, yeah, already spoke fluent Spanish at his job. And I'm like, okay, this is crazy. Like you're messing with me, right? And he says, no, I'm dead serious. You can call my old boss and he'll tell you. I'm asking him for more details. How long did you work with him? What the hell happened?

He tells me that Artie worked there for about a month or so before he got fired because I guess he demanded a raise or something. I'm not sure what kind of job he did. He did something with their website. I'm not sure. And he was threatening to hold their website hostage if they didn't give him a raise. And then the boss fired him apparently, and then Artie threatened to come after the guy. So the boss called the police and filed a police report with them. I never got the details of the police report, but...

Yeah, my brother-in-law Mark swore up and down that this was the same guy. Shocked by what he'd just learned from his brother-in-law, Kenji contacted Darcy right away to warn her. Kenji was surprised when Darcy seemed unfazed by this information. And as always, Darcy's like, yes, I know, I've heard this before. Artie explained the whole story to me. And I'm wondering, okay, how is he going to entangle this one, right? Shit.

She explains to me that Artie had gotten this job and did work with her brother. And he used a different name because he wanted to hide his true identity, right? He's a multi-millionaire, almost billionaire who was looking to start a similar business. And so he took a job there under this fake identity to try and learn the inner workings of this business so that he could take his vast wealth and go start a similar business of his own.

And me and Mark, we walk through this with Darcy and we try to tell her, well, how do you explain him speaking fluent Spanish and all this stuff? And she says, oh, that's because he went to school in Spain for a bit. So he picked up Spanish over there and just every excuse in the book she had an explanation for ended

And apparently, Artie had claimed back in the beginning that he had a fleet of sports cars, right? So one of the cars he claimed he owned was an Audi R8, which is a nice two-door sports car. And Artie had shown a picture of the car to Darcy, but he never brought it around, right? Darcy had never seen it in person.

Well, apparently that picture he had shown Darcy was one of the customer's cars at that particular business. So Mark told me, yeah, that's a customer car. That wasn't Artie's car. That was some customer who was here and Artie took a picture of it. And he's using the picture to claim that that was his car.

But still, for some reason, Darcy sided with Artie on this. And that's the point when Mark completely cut ties with Darcy. He was like, I don't know what's wrong with my sister. I don't know why she thinks I would lie to her about this, but I can't have anything to do with this. This just isn't going to be healthy for me to be involved with this.

So after talking to Mark, I get even more curious naturally because like, what are the odds that my brother-in-law used to work with this guy a year prior? And then he's giving me bits of information about what name he was using. So I had to find out who is this guy? Clearly he's not a British orthopedic surgeon and we're pretty sure that Artie isn't his real name at this point. So what the hell is his name?

Digging for more clues, Kenji makes a post on a local community crime watch group on Facebook, asking for help figuring out Artie's background. It's a group of people who report things that happen within the community. And they're not vigilantes, but they're actively involved in keeping the community safe. And they have ties to law enforcement, so they can get things done if they need. And the organizer is a guy who has a lot of ties to the police. He's got friends that work for LAPD, and he's well-respected within the community.

So I figure, well, I don't know what else I can do on my own. So let me send him a message. His name's Chris and see if he can help in some way. So I send him a message and I kind of explain the situation. And I say, hey, do you know anyone, any detectives, any police officers, any private investigators that might be able to help me find out who this guy really is? Because I'm concerned for Darcy and my kid's safety with this guy. ♪

And he responds right away and he starts to take an interest in the story just because he himself had gone through a crazy divorce a year prior. So he kind of felt like he needed to help me or wanted to help me just out of the goodness of his own heart. So he reached out to some of his law enforcement connections. We got a link to somebody who

we believed was his biological father, but still to this day, we haven't confirmed it. And then the last piece of evidence that Chris was able to confirm for me was that his red...

It wasn't registered to him. It was registered to Danielle, his supposed ex-fiance. I don't know about you or your listeners, but I don't know how many exes would keep a car registered in their name for you, especially if you were a multimillionaire British surgeon. Why couldn't he pay for his car cash? Why couldn't he put it in his own name? This is where things start to get really juicy.

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This Chris guy, he basically finds out that Artie doesn't own any properties in Manhattan Beach, that he's likely not British, and thinks, suspects that he had grown up either in Texas or east of LA here. With this new information, Kenji debates contacting Danielle, but ultimately decided against it at the time. Darcy had told Kenji that Artie had access to her phone anytime he wanted,

and he assumed the same might be true for Danielle. So he feared that if he did try to reach out to Danielle directly, it would likely be intercepted by Artie. I didn't want to put Danielle in a bad situation. I knew they had a daughter together. In an attempt to help, Kenji's new Facebook Crimewatch friend, Chris, offered to contact Darcy to warn her himself.

He reaches out to her and explains to her, hey, here's what I found out about Artie from my police contacts. At which point, Darcy kind of realizes, well, there must be some truth to this. And she decides to break up with Artie, which sends him into a flurry of

She tells him to come get his shit. He leaves. And then immediately he sends me a bunch of threatening text messages where he tries to get me to meet him at a park so he can fight me or do something. Then he also threatened to file a restraining order against me and send a copy to my work to get me fired from my job.

A restraining order for what? I don't know. I don't think looking up someone's identity is illegal or considered harassment, but this is just what psychos like him do. It seems like Darcy's really done with him at this point. And so I'm feeling like, okay, things are finally resolving themselves. This is coming to an end. I'm hoping that Artie's out of the picture.

But unfortunately, a few days later, on April 4th, Darcy drops the kids off to me for weekly custody exchange. And as she's bringing the kids inside, she comes in the door and immediately tells me, hey, I think I'm being followed. And I ask her, by who? Are you just being paranoid? And she says, I don't know, but there was a car following me when I got here, and that's why I came inside.

Decide to go check it out. I go to the front door. I peek out the window. I don't see anyone there. I decide to go out into the street and maybe see if there's a car hanging out on the street watching us, trying to figure out what's going on. As I go to open my front door, immediately I feel someone push the door into me and it hits me. And this person throws a stack of papers into...

my entryway and then just immediately turns around and starts running. And the whole time they're doing this, they have a camera or their phone pointed directly at me filming the whole thing. And yeah, they start running away from my doorstep. And immediately I'm like, hey, hey, what the hell's going on? So I chase this person outside. I try and stop them, just ask them, who are you?

What's your name? What are you doing on my property? And it's a girl and she refuses. She refuses to say anything. I try and grab her phone from her to stop her. She's continuing to record me. I do manage to physically stop her on the street and I'm holding her wrist a little bit and trying to get her to stop recording and tell me who she is. She won't say a word to me.

And moments later, I hear someone say, "Stop, stop, let go of my friend." And I look up the street and there's Artie on the sidewalk with a car parked in the middle of the street. He's telling me to let his friend go. I'm kind of confused. I didn't know what was going on at this point. So I let the girl go. She goes off running with Artie.

Artie says a few words to me and I tell him to come, you know, say them to my face. He doesn't, of course. He just stands there and tells me to come after him if I want a piece of him. But then he immediately turns around and just runs away with his friend. They hop into what I believe is her car...

And they take off. And the interesting thing was he was driving the car. And that was a car I'd never seen before. I get a picture of the car as it's leaving. I get the license plate number. And I told Darcy what just happened. And she's like, I've never seen this girl before. I've never seen that car. So Darcy immediately calls our new friend Chris for help because she didn't know what to do. And within a few minutes, Chris happened to be in the neighborhood. We gave him a description of the car. He says, OK, let me see if they're in the neighborhood still hanging out.

And he actually finds them at a nearby grocery store parking lot down the street. And they're talking to a couple of sheriff's deputies in the parking lot. Chris goes over and parks a couple stalls down from already in his friend's car. And he's trying to listen to their conversation to see what they're telling the police officers. And immediately, Chris calls me and Darcy and says, Hey, I'm...

Sounds like they're trying to file assault charges on you or something, saying that you assaulted his friend. And she's trying to say that she's got all these marks on her and all this stuff, which she didn't. I didn't hurt her or anything. I was just trying to stop her and figure out who the hell she was and what she was doing on my property.

But the other thing he immediately tells both of us is that, yeah, and didn't you say this guy's British? Because he wasn't using a British accent at all. And then we were both kind of floored when we heard that. My brother-in-law, Mark, he had said that Artie hadn't used an accent when he worked with him a year prior. And here we are with Chris saying basically the same thing. He was confirming that, yeah, Artie doesn't have an accent.

So that was like, okay, well, there's actual firsthand confirmation of that. After Artie and his friend talk to the police in the parking lot, they leave. Chris follows them. They go across the street to another parking lot in another strip mall. They go switch cars. Him and his friend go get out of her car, get into his car, and they just hang out and they just sit there in the parking lot talking for, I don't know, 45 minutes or an hour. And Chris is like, yeah, just from the looks of it, Artie's clearly in some type of relationship with this woman.

So about an hour later, Artie finally leaves to head home and his friend gets out, gets in her car, leaves also. They head their separate ways. Chris decides to follow Artie to see where he goes. You know, he's thinking that maybe we can finally figure out where Artie lives.

So Chris follows Artie for about 15 minutes and watches him as Artie gets out and walks across the street to an apartment building. And it turns out it was the same apartment building that I had found that Danielle had lived at when I looked her up a few months prior.

Chris continues to watch Artie and he sees Artie walk up to the apartment building. He's got a garage door opener of some sort, opens the gate, lets himself in and walks right into what I believed was Danielle's apartment at the time. I think for all of us at that point, that was confirmation that this is what Artie had been hiding this whole time about where he lived. He didn't want anyone to know that he was living with his ex-fiancee still.

I don't think I mentioned this earlier. I mean, he's also pretty much living with Darcy at this point. He's there all the time, almost every day. So while Darcy has her doubts, I mean, she's also kind of deeply invested into this relationship at this point. And given her personality and how stubborn she is, she also doesn't want to admit that she's wrong or that she made a mistake or that maybe this guy really isn't who she thought he was.

Later that evening, Kenji received a text message from an unknown number claiming to be Odie, the woman who threw the stack of papers at him earlier in the day.

And the text message basically said, hey, I'm filing a restraining order against you and I'm going to the police for the violent assault you committed on me earlier today. But the way it was written, it sounded just like Artie.

I'm guessing it was another woman he was involved with. And then apparently later that evening, you know, after receiving that text message from found out her name was Odie later on, Artie relayed a message to Darcy saying that we needed to pay him something like $15,000 or else Odie was going to press battery charges against me and get me fired from my job and all kinds of stuff. So this is where it was starting to fit together for me that this was kind of Artie's thing.

This is how he makes a living. He goes and he threatens people and blackmails them and tries to extort them out of money or steal money from them. I got a phone call and a letter in the mail from the police a few months later. And the detective I spoke to said, hey, just letting you know, you're having like this, I forget the CVC code, but it's basically a battery charge filed against you.

I'm shocked. This has never happened to me in my life. I've never had any charges pressed against me, never been arrested, never been in jail, anything like that. My record's squeaky clean. I kind of tell the detective the whole situation. Here's what's happening. Here's what this guy's doing. What do I do? And he was like, well, unfortunately, we see this kind of thing a lot. And from personal experience, he told me, you probably have nothing to worry about. More than likely, she's not going to show up to the arraignment hearing. So...

Your arraignment dates in October. I wouldn't really lose sleep over this until then. And then the day before your arraignment hearing, call the court and see if any of the charges have actually been filed because I guess there was another step she had to go through to actually formally file the charges against me.

So long story short, October comes around, I call the court. She hadn't filed anything the day before the hearing. So I go to the courthouse the next day and they just sign off and say, "Okay, she hasn't filed anything and here's your proof of appearance stamp."

go on your way she really had no case there was no evidence she wasn't bleeding I didn't hurt her she had no bruises no scratches nothing like that so it was just hearsay and she didn't show up it was just obviously to me now just a way to try and extort me and Darcy out of $15,000 or whatever they wanted

So later that evening, Darcy's kind of concerned for her safety. She's getting threats from Artie because he's pretty much been exposed at this point and she's afraid that he might retaliate. So I tell her, hey, why don't you go stay at your parents or go stay at a friend's house, just somewhere safe, just for, I don't know, a few nights until this kind of settles down a little bit.

After the confrontation, Darcy had been keeping her distance from Artie until April 9th, 2020, when Darcy saw a post on Artie's Instagram saying he'd been hit by a car and was in the hospital. The post was allegedly made to Artie's account by his friend, whom we will refer to as Alicia.

I find out from a friend that someone named Alicia had posted on Artie's Instagram story saying that Artie had been hit by a car and was in the hospital and he was in and out of consciousness and she didn't have a lot of information from the doctors, but she would follow up and reach out to everybody and let them know if he was okay. When Darcy sees this too, she immediately gets concerned and tries to reach out to Artie to see if he's okay.

I told her not to. This was clearly an attempt by him to try and grab whatever attention he could from anybody, including her. But, you know, Darcy's going to do what Darcy's going to do. And sure enough, she reached out to him and...

That was that. And they resumed their relationship shortly after that. And we looked and there was no evidence of any pedestrian collision or anything like that. He had no visible injuries when Darcy saw him a few days later. But yeah, this was his way of kind of roping Darcy back into this whole situation all over again.

So later that month, you know, in April, against my better judgment and against my therapist's advice, I continued digging into Artie because there's still a lot of unanswered questions about who this guy is.

And I still didn't know what the nature of his relationship was with Danielle this time. I had my suspicions, but no confirmation. So I was digging around on Facebook one night, and I don't know why I didn't see this before, but I found some old pictures of Artie tagged with a few different people from 8, 9, 10 years ago. One of them predominantly was a woman named Linda. She seemed to be in a lot of these pictures. And in fact, in one of the photo captions, she referred to him as Big Brother.

And clearly looking at the pictures, they look nothing alike. You know, I didn't think that he was actually her big brother, but my guess was that they were really, really close friends at that time. And looking at the pictures just based on eight, nine, 10 years ago, Artie's claiming to be a British surgeon. He's about 35 years old. And

These pictures would have put him to be about 26 years old or so. And he's not dressed like a doctor. He's obviously in California, hanging out, going to bars. I think he had told Darcy before that he had immigrated from the UK, I think five or six years ago.

So these photos I found, they all kind of contradicted his story. But they also got me curious. She must have been close to Artie at some point, must know quite a bit about him. Maybe she has some answers for me. So I decided to message her on Facebook and I asked her, hey, I know this is weird and I'm sorry to bother you, but I have some questions about someone you may have been friends with in the past and concerns the safety of my family.

And surprisingly, she responds immediately and says, oh, yeah, sure. No problem. Who are you looking for information on? And I give her Artie's name.

And almost exactly like nine or ten minutes later, I get a barrage of text messages from Artie saying like, hey, you asshole, you stop contacting my friends. If you do this one more time, I'm going to call the police and file another restraining order on you for harassment. He's clearly pissed. Kenji didn't hear back from Linda anymore after that. He did, however, hear about it from Artie.

So I get a bunch of threats from Artie saying he's going to call the police. They're going to come over right now and talk to me. And I calmly respond in the text messages and I say, contacting a third party isn't harassment. I didn't harass Linda. Kenji had learned, much to his frustration, that Darcy and Artie had gotten back together. Again, trying to get through to her, he sent Darcy copies of the photos that he had found.

And then I immediately called her, basically asked her like, what the fuck are you doing? Why are you still with this guy? No one understands it. You know he's not who he says he is. There's no way this guy's a doctor. Look at the pictures. Does this look like a doctor to you? He's 26 years old, clearly not at Oxford or in the military or anything that he claimed to be. And Darcy had no answers for me. She just told me to butt out of it.

One early May morning, Kenji got a text from their daughter's iPad saying, Hey, it's Darcy. My phone isn't working. So if you need to get a hold of me, email me. And I immediately responded and asked, what happened to your phone? And she tells me, oh, Artie and I got in an argument and he smashed my phone and left with it.

And I said, left with it? She's like, yeah, he took it. I said, he took your broken phone? She said, yeah, he took my phone. I can't get it fixed. He knows my passcode. I don't know what he's going to do with it. He says he's not returning it. So I'm like, okay, well, we need to get your phone deactivated. I need to go on iCloud, remotely wipe it, erase everything so he can't get any of her personal information off of it. And then she also tells me that a couple of weeks prior to this, during another argument, already had taken her Apple Watch and smashed it on the ground.

And I'm just like, what are you doing? Now Artie's starting to get more increasingly violent. Now he's destroying her devices. Now he's been controlling who she can hang out with. He's had access to her phone, reads all her text messages, reads all her emails. So I'm just trying to get through to Darcy and try and figure out why are you back with this guy? What good is he doing for you? And she doesn't have an answer really. The next day, Kenji took Darcy to get a replacement phone.

We reported her old phone stolen because I was concerned that Artie was going to use her old phone to SIM swapper, which is a technique to circumvent two-factor authentication so that he could get into her social media accounts, bank accounts, anything sensitive like that. So I was really concerned that if he got one of her bank accounts or one of our joint bank accounts that he would basically disappear with all the money.

We got that taken care of. And once again, Darcy says, oh, I'm done with him. I'm tired of this. But he somehow sucks her back in. Darcy was also telling me stories about how Artie had bragged about cheating on her with other women, had sent her explicit photos of himself with other women. And also she mentions during another conversation around that time that Artie is actively working to get me fired from my job.

And he's going to do it unless we give him $10,000. And then Darcy admits to me that she's been paying Artie small amounts of money here and there to kind of keep him quiet and keep him from going through with it. I'm just like, why are you giving him any money at all? That's exactly what he wants. But she felt some need to try and protect me. I told her multiple times I can take care of myself. I don't think there's anything Artie can do to get me fired from my job because I hadn't done anything wrong.

This is just what Artie does. This is how he makes his money. So at this point, things are getting kind of serious. Artie's getting more violent. He's getting more threatening. So I decided to hire a private investigator to see what they could find out about Artie and his identity. So I found a reputable one online, contacted them. And a few days later, they sent me a report of what they had found. They found out that Artie's name was...

was pretty much fake. I mean, there was no record of it before 2009, 2010. The identity just kind of appears out of nowhere. They found out that he had no assets, no liens, no judgments, you know, pretty much nothing tied to his name. No money, nothing.

He was also using the social security number of someone who we believe is a cousin or a distant relative of his. And in addition, also using a variation of that social security number with the last couple of digits flipped.

And the PI told me that this is a common tactic that scammers use. They'll go in and fill out a credit application or some form, you know, housing application, and they'll mistakenly, quote unquote, write down the wrong social security number and later come back and say, oh, I always get the last couple digits mixed up or something like that. Also, he found out that Artie had three other domestic violence restraining orders that had been filed against him in the past. In addition to the one that we had found against his ex-girlfriend, Tammy,

Unfortunately, that was the extent of what we found in the report. But the PI told me, yeah, I've seen a lot of people like this. This is how con artists operate. And so we pretty much knew, you know, based on what Chris had helped us find and then this private investigator, that Artie's identity was completely fabricated.

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After getting the report back from his PI, Kenji felt justified in his suspicions about Artie. But he decided not to take it to Darcy because he thought she would show the evidence to Artie and he would just come up with more excuses. However, he did share what he found with someone else.

I shared what I found out with her parents and some of her friends and our mutual friends and leaned on them and hoped maybe they could use that information and help talk some sense into her, but no one could really get through to her still. For this period of time through her relationship with Artie, she was also staying at home and he wasn't really working or he claimed to work here and there, but...

To me, it was obvious he didn't have a real job. So these past few months were kind of like a vacation for the both of them. They got to hang out and spend all their free time together. Neither of them had any real responsibilities to take care of. So finally, at this point, early June, Darcy finds a job because she knows reality is coming. She knows we're getting divorced and she needs an income. So she goes back to work after eight years as a stay-at-home mom. Her parents also thought that her getting this job would probably help her

distance herself from Artie. It would get her outside of being trapped in this bubble with Artie. She would get to interact with other people and start making some money on her own and seeing how difficult life is as a single mom when you have to support yourself.

Late in the evening of June 9th, 2020, Kenji's phone started blowing up with calls from Darcy once again. Kenji was half asleep when he decided to finally answer and see what was up. And Darcy's kind of frantic on the phone. She tells me that her and Artie had just gotten into a fight and he had thrown one of her cats. He had punched her in the face, kicked her in the stomach and then stormed out of her house.

And then on his way out, he had stolen both of her garage door openers. And then when he got into his car, he kind of like slammed his car door into hers, leaving a big dent and then took off. I'm alarmed immediately because my kids were with her when this happened. Thankfully, they were asleep upstairs, but still they were at her house when this happened.

So Darcy's frantic on the phone. She's asking me, what do I do? What do I do? I say, call the police. You know, why are you calling me? You need to call the police. And she says, okay, can you come over, watch the kids while I talk to the police in case they wake up? I don't want them to see the police here and freak out.

So I drive over there, check on the kids. They're passed out, luckily. I don't think they saw anything. The police show up shortly after. And then, I don't know, we spend the next hour or so taking a report because she's giving them all kinds of details about all these prior incidents she's told me about. And then also everything that's happened tonight.

They're taking photographs of the damage to her car. He had split her lip open when he punched her. And she had like marks on her hands and arms. And she's talking to the police. She's asking them, what do I do? How do I stop this guy? She's going through and telling them the whole story too. And they tell her, you got to get a restraining order. That's the only way to stop them.

So they grant her an emergency protection order that night. And they say, okay, this emergency order is good for five days, but you need to get to the courthouse ASAP and file for a domestic violence restraining order. And then they also tell her, unfortunately, we have to file a case with DCFS because this incident occurred while your children were present.

So the police opened a case with DCFS, which is the Department of Child and Family Services. And during all this, Darcy's visibly upset. I try and sit down and have like another conversation with her. I try and figure out what's going on here. Why are you continuing to keep this guy around? He's getting more and more violent. What's he going to do next? Next time, is he going to stab you, shoot you? Is he going to hurt the kids?

She agrees that, you know, she needs to get rid of him. She's done with him. But she says this whole time she's been under his spell, under his control. And she tells me, you wouldn't understand. You're not in a relationship like this. You know, you don't know what it's like to be controlled by another person.

Around 2 a.m., the police left, and Kenji finally felt a little bit of relief. I go to bed finally thinking, okay, this is all over. She's going to file a restraining order, and this is going to be done. So two days later, Darcy gets to the courthouse, files a restraining order. She has multiple pages of evidence and just details about all these different things that Artie has done to her that I didn't even know about.

In her restraining order, so what she describes happened that night. She said that her and Artie had gotten into an argument about ending their relationship. Artie was demanding that Darcy answer some questions. She doesn't specify what. And she says when she refused, he intentionally opened his car door forcefully to cause damage to her car. And she has the pictures of that attached. She walked away from him and he followed her back into her home. He grabbed her cat by the scruff and she screamed.

She told him to let the cat go and he threw the cat across the kitchen. And then he went to leave after she told him to get out. He slapped her in the face and cut her lip. He attempted two other times to punch her in the face, but she dodged those. She tried to close the sliding glass door to keep him out and he was trying to force it open. Eventually he got it open and then with full force kicked her in the stomach.

She stumbled back and told him he better leave. He went back to his car, slammed the car door again into her car, called her a bunch of names, then drove off. She asked him repeatedly to return her garage door openers that he had in his possession and he refused.

During the course of their argument, Artie took Darcy's garage opener and also hacked into her garage door keypad and reprogrammed the password. Darcy said that he also grabbed a container of motor oil, held it inside her car, and threatened to pour the oil all over her seats if she didn't answer his questions. Darcy also told Kenji that Artie had taunted her with text messages and pictures of other women that he had bragged that he had cheated on her with.

Then she goes on to document an argument that happened the night before, June 8th. During that argument, he spit in her face. He sprayed DEET spray, bug repellent, all over her car in an effort to damage the paint.

At one point, he went inside and grabbed my phone. He unlocked it and began deleting text messages, photos, etc. He refused to give it back every time I asked. He also logged into my Facebook account and drafted a post exposing personal and embarrassing medical info to all my friends and family and threatened to post it. He also grabbed my cat and threatened to kidnap him. Also, he threw my phone on the ground. So that was June 8th.

On June 6th, she says, during an argument he and I had while I was taking a shower, he unlocked my phone, he didn't have the password, and he

and he factory reset my phone, causing me to lose all my information. He also hacked into my iPad and laptop and reprogrammed the password so I couldn't use them. Then another incident June 5th. This is all happening days apart. We got into a heated argument. While discussing things, he attacked me and pushed me forcefully, causing me to fall into the floor, and my side was sore for two days. He repeatedly called me a cunt, a whore, a bitch, and berated me verbally."

He would then say I needed to do things like cut off contact with my friends, let him go through my electronic devices at any time he wanted, delete contacts and pictures of people he didn't think were good for me. He told me I had to record all pickups/drop-offs to my ex's house to verify I wasn't talking about anything that wasn't related to my kids. He made me provide my location on my phone at all times so he could verify where I was.

He prohibited me from going to my gym or talking about our relationship with my friends. In May 2020, he hacked into my Instagram from another location while I was at home and posted extremely embarrassing things in order to humiliate me. He also showed me a screenshot of my friends list and said he would contact every person on the list and tell them personal embarrassing things about me so he could let everyone know what a cunt bitch I was. He told me if I couldn't protect my ex from talking badly about him, he would have him fired and ruin my life.

He threatened to contact my parents and grandma and ruin their lives and stress them out so much they would die. He contacted my best friend after an argument and threatened to have CPS take her kids away because he claimed I had provided him with info that implied she was an unfit mom.

April 4th, 2020. He chased me down after seeing me on the street with his car. He repeatedly tried to run me off the road, including driving on the other side of the road, cutting me off and chasing me. We ended up in the parking lot of a 7-Eleven. He got out and stood in front of my car so I couldn't leave. Earlier in the day, he threatened to shoot me. I feared for my life and I called 911.

other incidents in April of 2020. He threatened me multiple times saying our conversations had all been recorded by his dash cam and phone. He threatened to serve me with a restraining order if I didn't atone for the mistakes I had made. He also said he could do whatever it takes to make sure I would lose custody of all my children, including planning a kilo of drugs in my car to have me arrested. He said he could do whatever he wanted and get away with it because all the judges were friends of his and also because money gets you anything, insinuating he would pay off any one it takes.

And that's the end of The Restraining Order.

This is written with her own handwriting. These are her words coming out of her mouth. So everything I've told you so far, this is the truth. I'm not embellishing this or making this up. There's no other side of the story. Her side of the story and my side of the story are the same.

Fast forward to June 18th, 2020. Kenji received an alarming email while at work. Artie had followed through with his threat. I received an email from our legal team at work saying that they received a complaint about me from someone named Artie and they'd like to set aside some time to discuss it with me. Sure enough, this was Artie's attempt to try and get me fired. So the very next day I met with our compliance director and the head of our legal team who

basically told me that Artie had filed a complaint stating that I'd used our company's database to look up personal information about him and his friends. The funny thing is, you know, our company, we don't really store a whole lot of personal information, email address, phone number, maybe an address, but nothing real sensitive, nothing that I didn't already know about him. And

In addition to that, Steve also told me that Artie had sent him a bunch of text messages. I think they were text messages that he had fabricated between Darcy and himself and Darcy and myself to, you know, make me look like some person who was going to come after her and hurt him and hurt her and all this stuff to try and paint me that way so that he could get me fired. So

So quickly, you know, I tell Steve, hey, I don't want to get into too much detail, but here's a rundown of who this guy is and what he's been doing to our whole family for the past six plus months. Fortunately, a couple of weeks later, I get an email from Steve saying that they basically couldn't find any evidence that I had ever searched for Artie's information in the company database. And I was basically cleared of any wrongdoing in the investigation. But still, I was very upset that Artie had even tried to contact my work to get me fired. And it was embarrassing, but...

It's kind of like, okay, what can I really do? I've been through so much at this point. We're also in peak COVID. So the world is just kind of crazy everywhere. Three days later, on June 22nd, 2020, Kenji received another set of texts from Artie.

He tells me that Darcy's been lying to me and she's still been in a relationship with him. Then he says he's going to have Darcy arrested in front of our kids because she's a violation of his restraining order. Again, I immediately call Darcy once I receive the text messages and ask for the thousandth time, like, what the fuck are you doing?

And then she basically says that she doesn't care if everything about him is fake. She doesn't care what we found out about him so far. She says she's in love with Artie and wants to have this child with him. And in my mind, I don't know what to do with that. I'm just kind of floored. This is the first time she's coming clean in six plus months and being honest about why she's keeping Artie around. I'm just furious. ♪

I'm already stressed enough from having to deal with this whole situation at work from a few days prior. We just had this big incident a couple weeks ago, you know, a week or two ago where he had beat her up and left and she filed this detailed restraining order that just recounted so many incidents of abuse from Artie and

and she's still bringing him around our kids. It just doesn't compute in my mind. My mind almost completely shuts down. I'm just like, I have no idea what to do. I'm literally speechless at this point. He's going to be around my kids for the next 18 years potentially. So I really need to know who this guy is. The private investigator wasn't able to dig up too much other than to prove he was fake,

But we still didn't know his real name. We still didn't know where he was from. So with that in mind, with all those concerns, I finally decide, well, the reason why he's been so protective of Danielle and their daughter is that Danielle must be one of his victims also.

And I highly doubted she was in on it with him. I highly doubted she was actively helping him do this. I really was convinced at this point that he must be doing the same things to Danielle that he was doing to Darcy. Controlling her phone, controlling who she talked to, what friends she was around, all sorts of stuff. So at this point, I'm like, screw it. I'm going to contact Danielle. That's next time on Something Was Wrong. Something Was Wrong

Something Was Wrong is an Audiochuck original. Thank you so much to our team. Executive Producer, Ashley Flowers. Coordinating Producer, Mike McDonald. Mixing and Mastering by Kyle O'Connor. Created, reported, and hosted by me, Tiffany Reese. Our theme song was originally composed by Gladrags, covered this season by Midwest Originals.

So what do you think, Chuck? Do you approve? If you like Something Was Wrong, you can listen early and ad-free right now by joining Wondery Plus in the Wondery app or on Apple Podcasts. Prime members can listen ad-free on Amazon Music. Before you go, tell us about yourself by filling out a short survey at wondery.com slash survey.

Scammers are best known for living the high life until they're forced to trade it all in for handcuffs and an orange jumpsuit once they're finally caught. I'm Sachi Cole. And I'm Sarah Hagee. And we're the host of Scamfluencers, a weekly podcast from Wondery that takes you along the twists and turns of some of the most infamous scams of all time, the impact on victims, and what's left once the facade falls away.

We've covered stories like a Shark Tank certified entrepreneur who left the show with an investment but soon faced mounting bills, an active lawsuit filed by Larry King, and no real product to push. He then began to prey on vulnerable women instead, selling the idea of a future together while stealing from them behind their backs.

To the infamous scams of Real Housewives stars like Teresa Giudice, what should have proven to be a major downfall only seemed to solidify her place in the Real Housewives Hall of Fame. Follow Scamfluencers on the Wondery app or wherever you get your podcasts. You can listen to Scamfluencers early and ad-free right now on Wondery+.