Ex-American Soldier Reveals The Conviction That Forced Him To Survive Military Prison | Sam Fye
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21 plus and present in Illinois. Must be first online real money wager. $5 deposit required. Bonus issued is non-withdrawable bonus pass that expires seven days after receipt. Restrictions apply. See full terms at fanduel.com slash sportsbook. Gambling problem? Call 1-800-GAMBLER. Sam, welcome to Locked In. Straight from Virginia here today. And thanks so much for coming. Well, thank you for having me.

You guys got snow last night? We got snow. We had a couple, a few inches, I think. There's snow here. We didn't get it at home. It's 64 degrees at home. Wait, what? Yeah. In Virginia? Yeah, that's right. We didn't bring coats or anything. How? We thought if it's 64 in Virginia, it's probably 54 in Connecticut, but that wasn't true.

Really? I thought Virginia was cold out that way. It is colder than a lot of other parts of Virginia, but it's warm today. Yeah, I mean, crazy times when, you know, down south it's getting snow and all these different things. Yeah, definitely. I would have figured it would be a lot of snow there. Yeah.

It does pretty good in the mountains, but nothing like the north. Interesting. Not at all. So did you grow up in Virginia? So I grew up in Virginia in the mountains of Virginia in the Blue Ridge Mountains. It's very, very rural area.

The place where I went to college, James Madison University, is getting a little bit bigger, but the area itself is pretty rural. That's a great school, right? Yeah. James Madison. Yeah. JMU. I had some friends that went there. Okay. Yeah. Love JMU. Love it. Who'd you grow up with? Like mom, dad, siblings? So we grew up just kind of a normal family. It was mom and dad. And I've got two brothers, an older and a younger brother.

And an older sister and grew up on a farm back on a dirt road. It wasn't another house in any direction that you could see. And my dad always said if he if he stood on the roof and could see another house, it was time to move. So had an outhouse.

Very, very rural area. So grew up like hillbillies. What do your parents do for work? So my dad worked at a factory, a good factory. And then he eventually became a plumber.

He started doing plumbing in the evening and then he kind of built a business and built it from literally an old van that he was driving around after work to into this big contracting company that he eventually sold for a decent amount of money, which, you know, that took 30 some years. But, you know, he did pretty well. And then my mom, we had a chicken farm.

which I don't know if you're familiar with, but the long chicken houses are about 300 feet long. My friend used to have a chicken house. Him and his dad built one. Yeah. So we had 10,000 chickens. You had 10,000? Well, we had one of the smallest ones there. 10,000 is pretty small. Holy cow. And yeah, so we collected the eggs. And yeah, when I tell people how we grew up, it sounds like I grew up in the 50s because it was –

Like I said, we had three channels that you got on an antenna on the roof and stuff like that. You know, that's really cool about your dad because you don't really hear the stories about how someone like worked for someone, a factory worker, and then, you know, switched, you know, later in life to owning their own business. That's really inspiring and inspirational. Well, yeah. And the factory he worked at was a really good factory. It's the Merck factory that makes all the drug company.

And so for him to make that leap was a really big deal, you know, because he was pretty stable at that factory. So the leave and not have benefits and things like that, that was a big challenge for the family. How would people describe you as a kid? So as a kid, I think they would say I was really funny. I was very outgoing and very –

i was always an entertainer and i think as i grew older i learned to be kind of like that that was i was kind of a peacemaker in a way um because there was some fight in between mom and dad

But I was always the one trying to make everybody laugh, and that was just something I did in school, too. I would try to make people laugh so I wouldn't have to do any real work, you know, things like that. But, yeah, I think people would describe me as being funny and entertaining. What did you want to do when you grew up? Did you have, like, that in mind as a kid? Um...

I didn't have anything specific. I remember once wanting to be a lawyer, but only because I thought they made a lot of money. Somebody told me once that lawyers made $80 an hour, which I thought, you know, in the 80s, that was like all the money in the world. And I'm like, I'm going to be a lawyer and have a Ferrari and stuff. Yeah.

Now, I've had so many lawyers in my life. I know they actually do make a lot of money. Yeah, some. I think if you got in the game a while ago, you're well off. Like my lawyer gets $400 an hour. Yeah. So my lawyers, they took, we paid them like straight fees. And it was always $20,000. And it's always $20,000. Like, yeah, and it's just $20,000. Like that's nothing. Like you just have $20,000 laying around. Yeah.

You know, and like, ugh, it's tough. Yeah, it really is. Did you go to public schools or were you homeschooled? I did, yes. Yeah, and the schools, the place I grew up was called Page County, Virginia. And very, very, I don't, not trying to be rude, but really bad school system. Like really bad. We didn't even have middle schools. The high school was really run down. It was a really old elementary school. So I would say I had a really...

inadequate public education to say the least. I did end up going to college when I was older and it was really difficult for me because school just hadn't prepared me for anything. What did you go to college for? So I went to college to be an English major and I was terrible at everything in school except English.

And I could just always, I just always knew how to write. Always. And I would know how a sentence was supposed to be written, even though I didn't know why. And I could just always do that the way that some people can just do math in their head. And I could do that. So I went and became an English major. And the English classes were relatively easy for me. And everything else was super hard. Anything math related was a nightmare. Like I had to get tutors and everything.

I'm like 23 years old in tears trying to figure out a math problem. But yeah, I was an English major. And then eventually I got a master's degree in education. So I was a teacher for 11 years. So I was in the military.

Then out of the military and I was a teacher for 11 years and then came back in the military. So you were in the military before you went to college? I was. I went in the military like almost right out of high school and I did three years and then I got out and then I came back and went to college and then I was a teacher for 11 years and then struggling with a teacher salary and then having two children and a wife.

I had to go back into military just for financial reasons. Why the military the first time? Why did you join that? It was really a spur of the moment thing. I've always had like a lot of depression for as far back as I can remember. And I was super, super depressed after high school and was drinking a lot and had nothing going on. And I decided one day that –

I was interested in the Army Reserves. I don't know why. I just think I thought it would be something to get my life together a little bit. And then I thought, you know what? I'm going to go up. I'm going to go talk to the Marine recruiter. And I went to the office building, and it was lunchtime. The Marine recruiter wasn't there. And I was walking out, and this guy, hey, you want to join the Army? I was like, no.

Yeah, I guess. I mean, that was, I know that sounds like an exaggeration, but that's really how it went. And I took like, just give me the next thing leaving type of deal and had this job in transportation and which is really low bottom of the barrel job. And I was stationed all of two hours from my house.

So I went to see the world and I was stationed two hours away. For those whole three years? Yeah. So I did three years like that. And was that counted as like one tour? One enlistment. One contract, three years? Okay. Yeah. And then you were able to leave peacefully to college. Yeah. And so I just got done with my three years. And while I was in, I actually got an associate's degree in

um because i just decided i was going nowhere in this military job and i'm like well let me at least get some schooling in and i started taking classes after work and um

I just became interested in them. And so when I got out, I did well enough in these community college classes to be able to transfer to James Madison. And looking back, I think I was pretty fortunate. But, you know, the military background and everything.

And having really inflated grades from a pretty easy program, you know, I was able to get into James Madison. And I did pretty well there. Now, did they pay for it, the military, James Madison? So back then, we had a GI Bill back then, but it was different. Like now the GI Bill will pay for everything. They'll even give you living expenses. And that's really cool. Back then you got about $600 a month to just do with whatever you wanted, which was great.

When I say back then, I'm talking about the mid-90s. Yeah, it wasn't nothing, but still it didn't do a whole ton for you. And, you know, I ended up taking a bunch of loans and things like that. Would you have been better off staying with the military just all the way through and never even going off to college and going into teaching? Well, in retrospect, I'd have been better off never going into the military. I don't – I am very, very –

Anti-military at this point in my life, you know, because of the things that happened and which, you know, we'll get into. And I don't think anybody should go into military for any reason ever. And I'm 100% adamant about that. And if I had a young person asking me for advice, that would always be my advice. I'd be like, if you absolutely are sure that you're going to go, then do A, B, and C, but don't.

do any other job other than the military. Because any job you could do, and I don't want to get off on too much of a tangent here, but any job that you start, if you started out at Walmart and worked 20 years at Walmart as opposed to 20 years in the military, you'd be better off. You'd be making more money. You'd have better benefits.

You'd just be in a better – and you wouldn't have all the sacrifices. Because at the end of the day, the military owns you, and you have to do whatever they say. Like there's no other job in the world where your boss will come to you and be like, I need you here at 3 o'clock tomorrow morning. And the only answer is, Roger, I'll be there. It's the only answer. There's no other answer you can give.

And you can get an email saying like, you're moving to Oklahoma tomorrow, not tomorrow, but you know, you're moving to Oklahoma and okay, we're moving to Oklahoma and that's it. And, uh,

And I mean, there's a lot more to it than that as far as like why I think people shouldn't join the military. But so to answer your question, financially, if all things being equal, I would have been better off staying in. But in terms of like philosophically, and I wish I had never been.

ever been in the military, ever. But it is integral to our ecosystem. Like it is a part of America having the military, people serving the country. It is. And again, I don't know how much of a tangent you want to get off on. The thing about our military is you do need a military. You don't need one that's as monstrously big as ours is. Like we could get away with it being half as big. If it was half as big, it would still be the biggest military in the world, which is impossible to believe.

And because we're just that big and the amount of money that we spent, like we spent, let's see, the newest budget is like $890 billion for one year for the military. We spend more in the military than anything. And, you know, if you cut that just by a little bit, you could fix every single problem in the country and then you wouldn't need all the prisons and whatnot. But yeah.

It's just that the end of the day, though, the military doesn't care about its soldiers. The military cares about the military. That's what it's designed to do. It's designed to destroy and kill things. It's not designed to take care of soldiers. And I think you'll see that as we talk more about my story, that there

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Ends 4-27-25 at 11.59 p.m. Eastern Time. So you join, you go to college, graduate, become a teacher. And how long were you doing the teaching for? So I was a teacher for 11 years and loved teaching. Absolutely loved it. I remember one of the most heartbreaking things when they read the verdict was,

One of my very first thoughts, even before I thought about going to prison, was, oh, my God, I'm never going to be a teacher again. And because I was going to get out of the military and the second stint, I was already I was done with my second stint, you know, because I'm not young. I'm way past retirement age and I was going to go back into teaching again.

And I'm like, wow, I will never, never be able to teach again, never be able to substitute teach, never get to do anything again. You know, even if the whole thing gets turned over on appeal, I'm never going to be a teacher again. And so I love teaching, like absolutely loved it. And it just paid so little. Like when people talk about how little teachers make, you just can't overstate it. This make nothing, absolutely nothing.

And, you know, I had a wife and two children and twins. So, you know, we got two at one time and she was just overwhelmed. So went back into the military for money. Did you get married before teaching or during teaching? What was that timeline? Very close to the same, same time, like technically a little before, but it was pretty much the same time. Okay. And what did your wife do for work?

So she was, she wanted to be a midwife. I met her at James Madison University, but she wanted to be a midwife. So we ended up coming up to Maine and we lived in Maine for six years and lived this like complete hippie lifestyle.

And we lived in a cabin with no running water in the woods of Maine. And she went to midwife school and had like flowing armpit hair. And like, she's going to love that I say that. But we had a bucket that we used for a bathroom and everything.

Yeah, we were living like the hardcore hippie lifestyle. So we did that for a while. And I was teaching then. I was a Head Start teacher. That was before kids? Before kids, yes. Wow, what a lifestyle. And you were okay with all that? You wanted that lifestyle too? Yeah, it was really exciting and different. And I just wanted to do something different.

And then she got sick of that lifestyle. I mean, we both did. I don't want to put it just on her. But she realized that like if she was going to do this midwife thing, that she was going to be making a lot of sacrifices. And we kind of weren't cut out for all this like hauling wood and dumping buckets and stuff like that, dumping poop buckets. And so she went back to school to become a social worker.

and at the university of maine and we moved to a a town an actual town and a house that you know had a dishwasher and things like that and um lived like normal people so but so the cold i've i've felt the cold before i don't miss it i don't miss it at all it's freezing up here but um

So when you went to rejoin the military, there wasn't any age barriers because you've had to have been, what, in your late 30s by that point? Yeah. Or maybe even later? This is kind of funny. I mean, I've got so many long stories, but I'll give you the shorter version of this. When I decided to go back, it was about 2010. Yeah.

all the wars and stuff were still going on. So as far as I could tell, they needed people from an outsider looking in, but from in reality, they weren't, they were trying to cut people. And you know, we, you don't see that necessarily on the outside. You just see like, well, this is what I see in the news. So you must need people. So that was a challenge. And I thought that I was going to go down there and tell them like, Hey, I was in the military before I've got a college degree. Now I want to be an officer.

And I just, I was going to tell them what I was going to do, you know? And they were like, no, you can't do that. What do you mean? No. Well, one, you're too old. And like too old. I was like 35. I was like, how am I too old? How is 35 too old? It's like 35 in the army is old. Like it really is like 30. You can retire at 38 if you come in at 18. So 35 is pretty old. And I was shocked. So I went from thinking I was going to tell them, you

what I was going to do. I went from that to, I'll just take whatever you got, man. I don't care. I'll be a private. I'll do any job. And they were like, no, we don't need people right now. So to speed the story up, I ended up, I tried for a really long time to get back in and it didn't work. And so out of frustration, I wrote a letter to the secretary of the army and

And I said, I think your policies are, oops. So I think your policies are stupid. I think you should let me back in. And this is the reason why I wrote it really, you know, I spent a lot of time writing it well. And I didn't just tell him he was stupid. I was like, you know, I think you should let me back in. I'm a really good soldier.

And it was from this recruiter who said he'd heard from the Pentagon. And they were like, yeah, he read your letter and he agrees. You should come back in. And I was like, what? The secretary of the army read my letter? And, you know, this is the guy who talks to the president. And he said, yeah, he read your letter and he agrees. You should come back in.

And he read my letter and was like, yeah, we should let this guy in. So that's how I got back in. And the underlying message here is always, you know, when life tries to show you something, you got to take it for what it is. Because if you didn't push to get in. Exactly. You never would have. We probably wouldn't have met right here. Well, we wouldn't be sitting here right now. That's crazy. I always think about that. You know, sometimes if you push things too much.

You land into something that wasn't meant for you. It's a great point because we're kind of we're always taught to like never give up, never give up, never give up. And that's what I thought I was doing. I thought I was like and in reality, it should have been like, dude, take the hint. Go do something else with your life. You know, that's what I should have taken from that. Because at that point, I had a master's degree. There's all kinds of stuff I could have done.

But I decided I wanted to be in the military and that was it. - I have that same mentality of never give up, but I've learned in my years, like, you know, going through everything I went through,

taking that you could take anything to the level and get it, you know, without giving up, but at what cost, you know? Yeah. Imagine you never gave up on a relationship and you just drove that person crazy, you know? It just, it'll have a negative outcome. So now when something, when I get the sign that something's not for me, I just walk away from it. Yeah. Yeah. And truthfully, the military, it was more like, um,

I've always had like kind of obsessive thoughts. You know, there's some mental health issues that I struggle with and obsessive thinking is one of them. And that being really determined and really obsessed was maybe very, very good in the military, but you can take it too far. And sometimes you're not, you're ignoring things that are right there in front of your face, like you just said.

And, um, but I think that's what happened. It's like, I got the idea in my head and I couldn't let it go. And it wasn't so much that I wasn't giving up. I just was like obsessed. And I decided I've got to be in the army. If I'm not in the army, then my life's a failure. It's like, and here we are today. So what did they have you doing when you got back in the same thing or were you? No. So when I went in, it was a terrible job as human resources. And, um,

It literally was, this is what you, take it or leave it. This is what we have for you. They call it S1 in the Army. It's human resources. And it's super, super mindlessly boring. And you sit in an office all day in front of a laptop just doing Excel spreadsheets, basically. And I hated it. And because I hated it so much, it led me to...

go out and find like there was a way out but I had to go and do the coolest thing that I could find which when I say cool like the hardest thing most challenging thing like so I had to go into special operations in order to get out so you have to go and you have to try out and it's really difficult

And if you make it, you're good. You're set. But, you know, it's a lot of work to make it. And that was my only way out. And so because I just like that job so much and because of that obsessive thinking, you know, like I was able to get up at three o'clock every morning and go run and study and all the stuff I needed to do to make it. And so, you know, I was able to make it in the special operations at the age of 39 years old, which is crazy.

Yeah, that's pretty impressive. And did you deploy anywhere? Yeah. So our job was really highly deployed. So I went to Jordan twice and I went to Syria. Syria has been all over the news lately and it was in about 2017 was when we went. And that's where ISIS was. And so that was a pretty –

It was a pretty intense deployment, but no, I loved it. As much as I disliked the military and the Army itself, I loved my job. I thought it was the best job in the world. It was like a job that was made for me because we did a lot of quote-unquote cool guy stuff. We had cool guns and got to grow beards and stuff like that. But we also had to write a lot, do a lot of reports and things like that, a lot of speaking, a lot of public speaking, things like that. So things that you don't think –

of when you start thinking about military jobs and absolutely loved that job. So I would throw in the caveat that if I could do that job, I would do that job forever because I really liked it. But I just philosophically, I disagree with the military and our military system. But again, that's a digression. Did you still have that philosophy when you were there and nothing negative had happened yet to you though? Or are you only saying that because of what's happened? No, it's because of what happened. Yeah, I don't.

I think I've always felt like we spend too much money on it. And that's not a super extreme thought, you know, for anyone to think that, you know, we spend more money on our military than Italy spends on everything.

So our budget for the military is bigger than Italy's budget. You know, so that's just an example. And it's easy to say that we spend too much money. But when I found out that the military wasn't going to be that supportive of me, you know, that's that's when things changed for me because I really thought like, yeah,

The military is – because they teach you when you come in. The military is going to take care of you. The Army always takes care of its soldiers. And it isn't true. It's just not. And so that becomes very true when you're in the system. You just keep hearing story after story of guys who –

Had bad trials and just a bad shake, and now all of a sudden they're in prison. How many years were you with the military into your second stint until what happened happened to you? So, oh my gosh, now you got me doing math, but it would have been about...

12 years into my second stint. Oh, another 12 years. Yes. So that's three, six, nine. So you reenlisted four times? Yeah. Yeah. A handful of times. Wow. So you were getting into your late 40s now at this point or mid 40s? Oh, yeah. Yeah. No, I was. Still doing special warfare? Yeah. Wow. Yeah. Good for you. So I got into special operations at 39. So that was the thing. You have to go and try out.

So you go to Fort Bragg and you do this thing called selection and you're trying out and you're competing with, sorry, I keep hitting your microphone. Oh, everyone does it totally fine. So you have to go and try out and it's a lot of physical and mental challenges that you do for like 10, I think it was 10 days. I can't remember. You don't sleep much and they do feed you a ton, but you don't sleep much.

And so I'm there competing against like 25 year olds and, and it's straight up competition. And I felt like they were blowing me out of the water and everything, but I guess I did okay. Cause I made it through and a lot of people didn't just only like 40%, 40% make it through. So, so yeah, that was pretty cool. Yeah. I was pretty excited. And then once you get into that world of special operations, it's,

Everything's just different. They treat you different. It's like it's a different type of army. So you don't have to worry about your hair as much and your uniform's not that important and things like that. So it's pretty cool. Now, were you getting ready to leave? I know you mentioned that earlier. You were coming to the end of your enlistment. I was, yeah. So I actually, I've got really, really terrible hearing. And they were going to let me retire early because of my hearing.

And so I was getting out and I was going to become a teacher. And I actually had already gotten a job teaching. I was going to be a preschool special ed teacher. And I was supposed to start in September. And then the trial came up.

and it wouldn't go away, and it wouldn't go away. And the investigation, which that's its own story, the investigation went on forever. And I finally told the people, I made up some story about my health, that I couldn't take the job because of my health. And obviously, I didn't want to let them know what was going on, and ended up not taking that position. But I was supposed to start in September of 21. Yeah, September 21, I had a job waiting for me to

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Sign up for your $1 per month trial at shopify.com slash special offer. Become a preschool special ed teacher. So tell us what happens. What got you into trouble, why you couldn't take the job, why you left the military. Oh, okay. So you want the whole story. Yeah. Okay. So I got out of a 17-year marriage and I got into another marriage with a woman who, when we met, she was quirky, right?

And I noticed things about her that were like just not quite right. But I just thought she's unique. And she struggles with some things and she's got some temper issues and things like that. But hey, we all do. And we were super in love. And it's really passionate love, which is this really, really unhealthy, obsessive type of love thing.

And it went from that to very abusive. Like she was physically abusive toward me, but I was a lot bigger than her. So I know it's weird to say, but like the hidden didn't bother me that much. But I mean, she would just as hard as she could like punch me in the chest. And I'd be like, why are you doing that? First of all, it didn't hurt.

But I would be like, if I punched you in your chest as hard as I could, like you just punched me, like you'd go to the hospital and I'd go to jail. Like you can't do that. Even if it doesn't hurt me, you can't do that. But the verbal abuse, the emotional abuse, and the sexual abuse was like the worst. And this is stuff that I think a lot of guys –

are going through in our country and very few talk about it, but just anecdotally, like, um, talking to guys when I was in prison, like it was something that a lot of them had suffered through. And it's, um, I don't think it's super uncommon. It's, it's much more common that women are abused than men. Like that's for sure. 100% true, but men are abused in this country. And so, um,

This, we were, we were only married for 11 months. Like that's how bad things were. And we shouldn't have been married 11 months. Well, we should have never got married. But the first time that she like, I mean, beat me up good. Like I had a black eye and a busted lip and we had only been married like six weeks. And, um, yeah, it was, it was terrible. So I'm in the army and, um,

Like I said, a lot of things happened within this relationship, but long story short, at some point it just got to be too much. So we got married in June and then the following May, finally, I came to my senses and I was like, I gotta get out of here. I gotta get my kids out of here 'cause my sons were staying with us and she's not the mom of my sons, thankfully.

But they would be at the house sometimes and they would see her act in the way that she would act. And it was very, very bad for them to be in that situation, obviously. And this is where it was very selfish of me to continue with that relationship and keep them there instead of thinking about like, oh, but I can't leave her, you know, because I love her so much and whatnot. But at the same time, I've got my kids in that situation, right? Yeah.

It finally just became too much. And I'm like, I got to get the boys out of here. Got to get them out of here. And literally, literally one morning, I threw them in the car. I took them to school. I'm just in my uniform. I've got nothing with me. And I just left. And I called their mom and said, hey, you know, you got to pick them up this afternoon. And they're not coming back. And I said, you know, I'll explain the rest to you later.

And she starts texting me. Second wife starts texting me. Her name is Samantha. Samantha starts texting me and said, you know, long, angry text. And finally, I just respond like, I didn't want to tell you this text, but I'm not coming home. And that's how I left her. And she became very silent.

So fast forward a little bit. I had bought a house for us and she was living in the house. I don't want the house. You know, no desire to have this house at all. It was too far away from work. It was too expensive. She loved the house. I'm like, babe, keep the house. You can you can have it.

Like, I don't need it. I can't pay for it. You know, you need to take over the loan, you know, pay for it. And because I've got to rent an apartment, I've got child support. You and I were only married 11 months. There's not going to be any alimony, especially after all the abuse and whatnot. You know, but you can have the house. I don't want it. I'm not going to fight you for it. You know, but you have to take over the loan. And she kept stalling on that and stalling on that.

And eventually she just told me like, well, I can't take over the loan. I said, all right, well, that's fine. Just make, as long as you make the payments, it makes my credit look good. Keep making the payments. Everything will be fine. Right? So this is getting to be about November and I had left in May. And then she, around November, she stopped making the payments. Just stopped. And didn't give me a real reason why.

But I would get calls from the bank and I would tell the bank, I'm like, foreclose on her, please foreclose on her and put her out. I don't care what you do to my credit, like throw her out. It's still on my credit report now, but it's like throw her out. I don't care. So yeah.

Eventually, I do have to go get a lawyer, though, because things are getting bad. And we got a lawyer, and I never intended to take her to court. The lawyer wrote a letter, a sternly worded letter. It was like, you need to start making the payments or we're going to have to take you to court. And we need to hear from you in five days. We gave her like two months to respond.

He said, we need to hear from you in five days. We gave her two months. She never responded. Finally, we were like, all right, well, we got it. We have to sue, you know? And when I say sue, it sounds a little more dramatic than it was. This was just a division of property. Like, cause we were still married at the time. Like we were waiting on our divorce and all it was, was like a distribution of marital property. That's it. Wasn't anything that significant. So on a Friday in, uh,

2020, July of 2020 on a Friday toward the end of the month, January 2020. We sued her and they got the paperwork and all that. And on Monday, she responded by telling the army that I had raped her three years prior and had sexually assaulted her another time and that I was like super abusive and all of this different stuff. And

I was kind of like, well, I sort of expected you to do that. So, cause it's just, it's a tool that people can use. And, uh, in the military, it's, um,

That was her response. And so – Did she write a letter or – did she write a letter or did she do it through an attorney? She had to contact somebody. She had to contact somebody and then once you contact the military, like they kind of took over. And so the problem with this was when I finally did go and talk to a lawyer, he thought –

This is the most ridiculous thing I've ever heard. You sued her on a Friday and she accuses you of rape on Monday and literally the next business day. Like, this is silly. Nobody's even going to look at this. Like, and so he went into this. Don't even worry about it. And he didn't try very hard.

And, and I mean, I wish he had just been like fighting like every tooth and nail. And he didn't, he's like, you got, you don't even need to worry about this. These, these fools told me even after I was found guilty that I wasn't going to prison. They told me, you know, they didn't say you might not be going to, that you are not going to prison is what they told me. Like word for word, like you don't need to worry about that. Like I didn't have anything prepared, like nothing, nothing was ready. Like,

Like I had a grocery list for that day at court. I had a grocery list. We're supposed to stop and get yogurt on the way home. You know what I'm saying? Like that's how much I thought I was not going to prison, you know, and so I'm jumping ahead a little bit. But what the Army did a two-year investigation.

And when the Army does an investigation, it's different from the civilian world in that they're not attempting to get to the truth. That's not what they want. They want to get a conviction for the Army. So by investigation, they never talked to me. They never interviewed me. Nothing. It's all one-sided. So basically, they have investigators that are working for the prosecution, and the prosecution is the Army.

So these are like actual military police officers who are doing an investigation to support the prosecution. So that would be like think about if the police officers were only doing an investigation to support the prosecutors. And to an extent they do, but they also want to try to get to the truth, you would hope.

And that's not what the military does. The military isn't interested in getting to the truth. The military is interested in getting to a conviction. But they told you you were under investigation. Yes. So they didn't have some type of initial meeting with you? Yeah. So what they do is they –

I'm going to try not to get too much jargon going here, but they flag you. And flag just means you're like you're frozen. You can't do anything. You can't get promoted. You can't deploy anywhere. You can't go to any schools. So it's not supposed to be a punishment, but it is a punishment. You can't get any awards. Were you paid still for those two years? You still get paid, yeah. Okay. Yeah, and that was kind of funny. What happened was I actually lost my security clearance.

And because at the time I directed, um,

My supervisors were very supportive of me and they didn't believe for a second that anything had happened. So I had lost my security clearance and couldn't come to work. But because they thought that I was getting a raw deal, they weren't mad about the fact that I couldn't come to work. So they just left me alone. So I went like eight months without working and just collecting a paycheck. And and the army pays pretty well, like better than you would think.

And so I was able to get a second job as a substitute teacher. So I was substitute teaching while getting my full army pay. And it was, I mean, good.

good life is a little bit strong, but it was a pretty good life because I had these lawyers, really good lawyers telling me like, nothing's going to come of this. And I had every reason to believe them and I'm getting paid and I'm teaching, which is what I wanted to do. So I was, I wasn't unhappy, you know, what would have happened if you just resigned when those allegations came? Oh, you can't. Yeah. They can get you. Um,

There were guys in the facility who had retired and gotten – and facility is my euphemism for prison. So I always call it the facility. There were guys at the facility who had retired and they brought them out of retirement in order to try them and put them in. Now, over these two years, are you talking to your ex-wife at all, your second ex-wife? No, no, no. So way before any of this happened, I told her we weren't to speak anymore. And –

This is before she made any allegations or anything. I was, we had, there was a disagreement over some tax returns or something. And I told her, I'm like, I cannot speak to you anymore. We're not speaking. I'm cutting you off entirely. Cause what was happening to me was I'd cut off all communication to her except for my work email. And, but then I thought, cause I thought we are still married. I do still own the house. Um,

If she needs something, I should, she should be able to contact me. And every morning I would come in and turn that computer on and I'd almost be shaken because not very much in this world scared me, scares me. But that woman, she terrified me. Like when she would be going at me about this and that, like I'd be shaken and sweating and like, she just scared me to death.

And so I would turn on my computer every morning and I would just be a nervous wreck waiting for the email to pull up to see if she had emailed me. And every morning. And so I finally blocked her on that, too. And so we can't speak anymore. And in the divorce decree or it's not a decree, but the divorce agreement agreement.

I put in there that she couldn't contact me, that she or none of her family could contact me or my family. That was one of the things that I wanted written down. And this was with her, with all this allegations that she had made that I had been abusive and this and this. I'd like to point out that I left her and I was always the one running from her.

And I had ceased all communication with her and I had put in the agreement that she couldn't talk to me, you know. But abusers don't like to let go of people and they don't like to let go of control. And the Army gave her a way to control me in a way that very few people have. And so she just took that. She's like, you're not going to leave me, you know. And if you try, this is what's going to happen. So that's basically it.

Basically what happened. So what happens at the end of the two-year investigation? So after the two-year investigation, so the investigation started in January of 2020. And then in the summer of 2021, they told me, they're like, well, we're actually going to go to trial with this. I'm like, well, what? Really? Yeah.

And so we had had this thing called Article 32 here, which is like an arraignment. It's the military's version of an arraignment. I go through this Article 32 here and they tell me there's no probable cause. And I know enough to know about law. I've watched enough shows. I know what probable cause means. There's no probable cause. They give me a memo saying there's no probable cause.

And I'm like, that's great. There's no probable cause. I thought it meant I was free. And then it says at the bottom of the memo, it says, however, your chain of command is still going to pursue the issue. It's basically what it said. And so they have the ability and the military to the general who is the commander. The commander can decide to pursue any case he wants, whether there's probable cause or not. It doesn't matter.

And the bad thing about that is because he makes that decision with advice from the top lawyer in the military, which is a guy, the JAG guy, Judge Advocate General.

So they'll make that decision behind closed doors and you'll never get to know because it's attorney client privilege. You'll never get to know why they made that decision. So why they decided to go forward with the case when there was no probable cause, like we don't know. It's just speculation and we'll never get to know. And so we went through the Article 32 arraignment. I thought it was good, but it wasn't. And then they said, well...

Your trial will be in December. I still wasn't worried about it. So what? Because I had this lawyer telling me there's nothing to worry about. And now is this a regular lawyer for the military or is this a lawyer in the civilian world? So he was civilian because they'll give you a military lawyer. Like in the movies and he's all dressed up in the military gear. Yeah, they give you a military lawyer, but he's basically a public defender.

And he's, they might be good, they might be bad. They're extremely overworked. They're very, very new, right out of school. But I mean, they're fully, you know, they're fully barred lawyers. They just happen to work in the military, right?

And like the guy that I had was from New Jersey and he was barred in New Jersey. And so he ended up being the co-counsel and I hired, the guy I hired as a civilian, but these guys will specialize in military law, even though they're civilians. So like mine, for example, was he had done 35 years in the military and he had been a judge at one point in the army. So he knew stuff, he knew stuff, he knew it backwards and forwards,

he definitely could have won the case but he was so passive about it because he thought he thought we had it won and he took that innocent until proven guilty like very seriously and that's not really a thing in the military the innocent until proven guilty but he thought well he's you're innocent we don't need to fight this that hard and he didn't want to push her on the stand because he didn't want we don't want to look like we're attacking her or we don't want to make it look

you know, like we're insensitive or anything like that. That was his whole philosophy. Prices keep going up these days. It feels like being on an elevator that only goes up. But not at Metro. We're pushing the down button.

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Babbel.com slash Spotify podcast. Spelled B-A-B-B-E-L dot com slash Spotify podcast. Rules and restrictions may apply. It was very, very wrong. Now, when you were arraigned, did they like arrest you officially, like put you in handcuffs, drag you out? Or is it very like formal because it's the military? Here's the paper. Here's your hearing. So you do get quote unquote arrested. It's very informal.

but there are guys who go to pretrial confinement. That's not uncommon. And then some of them get this kind of

like, house arrest type of thing where they have to be confined to the barracks and whatnot. And they didn't do any of that with me. Like, I had no restrictions at all. And were you done working at that point now? Yeah, because I didn't have a security clearance. And with the job that I was in, you can't even go into the buildings without a security clearance. And so that was kind of like my ace in the hole, be like, hey, I'd love to come to work, but I can't. Sorry. And...

The way they saw it was like, well, it's not his fault that he can't come to work. So they weren't mad about it. And so they left me alone. And then the other thing, I mentioned this to you when we've spoken in emails. So all along while this abuse and stuff was going on, because I didn't really think, I didn't think anybody would believe me. That was number one. But the second thing was,

I really, really love Samantha, like tremendously. And even when she was doing these horrible things, I thought she didn't understand what it was she was doing. And I thought she's got some kind of mental disorder and she just doesn't get it. She doesn't know how mad she gets and she doesn't realize what she's saying and what she's doing. So I started recording her and I've got.

almost 30 hours of recordings of her, like just saying and doing the most horrible things. And you can hear her hitting me. You can hear all of this stuff. And, and I really thought these recordings were going to save me. And I thought we were going to be able to play them in court and that I was going to be home free. So I never got to play them in court, but all of my, um,

The people who were over me, the administrators and whatnot, all of my supervisors had heard them. So they knew what the situation was. So they definitely were sympathetic to what I was going through.

And I mean, they saw me, I had come in with this horrible black eye and I lied and said it was like my son had kicked. I said me and my son were wrestling and, um, and I tickled him. He was eight years old and at the time, and I said, we were wrestling and I tickled him and he kicked me in the eye.

And I thought, that's a really good story. When you come out, you learn to lie really well when you're in those situations. And I was like, I was proud of myself. That's a good story. But so they knew what was going on. And so they were sympathetic to the situation and I didn't have to work. Now, are there plea deals in the military or is it just straight to trial? Yes.

And were you offered one? I was not. The vast majority of everyone got plea deals, which I did find out later that that's normal in the civilian world too, which I didn't know that.

The vast majority of guys there had plea deals. And I was never offered one and nobody knows why. Lawyer never said why. To this day, I don't know why. I wouldn't have taken one. But why I wasn't offered one, we don't know. I don't know if that's significant or not. What did your parents think of this? Well, so...

The whole situation was really embarrassing to me. So I didn't tell them for the longest time. One, because I thought the whole thing was going to boil over. The only reason I ever told my dad was because I actually needed some money from him. And, but I kept, when I did finally tell him, I'm like, but it's nothing. There's nothing to it. She made these accusations. There's nothing to it. And I don't know exactly what he thought about it, but this is terrible. But my poor mom,

didn't know anything was happening until I was already in prison. Because what in the military, which is different from the civilian world, and I noticed from you were talking in your story about how some things that happened to you in between the guilty verdict and sentencing. I know that was a big part of your story. With us, it's immediate. Like we got the guilty verdict. You get the guilty verdict in the morning and you get sentenced in the afternoon. Like you don't go home.

That's like how it is in some states. Yeah. Yeah, I guess. So for me, the guilty verdict came in on, let's say it was a Thursday. And they didn't come to – they did put the sentence in off to the next day. I had a night. That was it though. It was just one night. And went – go straight to prison.

And so nobody knew, nobody knew I was going. My kids didn't know like nothing. Like I didn't know I was going. And my girlfriend at the time who was with me was like, I don't even know how to get home. Like she didn't, she didn't know how to get home from the court at Fort Bragg. And, um,

I was like, yeah, it's not, you know, I'm trying to give her direct. I'm like, I'm getting ready to go to prison. I'm trying to give her directions to get home. You know what I'm saying? You got to get on, you know, you got to go down Williams and then take a right. You know what I'm saying? And all the while, like I'm in handcuffs because as soon as that guilty bird is read, like they cuff you up.

And shackle your feet and everything. And yeah, everything changes at that point. So what were your actual charges? So I had two accusations of sexual assault. I was found guilty on one and not guilty on another. And then domestic violence. And then drunken disorderly for no apparent reason whatsoever.

And I got no punishment for the drunken disorderly. And then the sexual assault and the domestic violence ran concurrently. Who was at the trial? Like is it a judge or is it like a general or who runs the trial? And for the jury, is it civilians or is it other military members? So it's – if you've ever seen A Few Good Men, it's actually pretty similar to that. So your judge is a lieutenant colonel.

And, um, but he's in a robe, he's not in his uniform. And then your jury, which, you know, your jury is supposed to be your, your peers. But for us, it's weird because they're, um, they're higher ranking than us, like by a lot. So you could easily make the argument that like, well, this guy's not my peer. He's a, he's a major in the army and I'm, I'm a sergeant. And, um,

And so that's different. The other thing that's different is they don't need 12. They can have eight. Eight's the lowest they can go. The big difference is they don't need to be unanimous. This need to be two-thirds unanimous.

have to say guilty. And so that's a huge point of contention that may, that may actually make it to the Supreme court, not for me, but for everybody. Because we're the last people in the federal system who don't have to have unanimous verdicts. And so, so a lot of it's similar, a lot of it's different.

But in terms of how the trial runs itself, it's pretty much the same. And how long was your trial? So it was six days long. And then just to make it just all that much more confusing, there was a 41-day break in between trial.

because the prosecution hadn't turned over several gigabytes of information and kind of found out like four days into the trial, like, oh, by the way, there's this like three gigabytes of information that we didn't turn over, like, sorry, and ended up having a break of 41 days. And this was a big problem because leading up to that break,

If it was, if you want to put it in the football game terms, like we were up 35 to 10, you know what I'm saying? Like we were killing it, just absolutely killing it. And which is another problem. Cause my lawyer again was like, nothing to worry about. You got nothing to worry about. Like, this is all, this is all good. You got nothing to worry about. And, um,

And come back after 41 days, everything was different. Like we were even in a different courthouse. That's how crazy it was. And it's just like, man, what happened? And I don't think the jury remembered what had happened the 41 days prior because they were – they're all higher ranking people. They got way more important things to do than deal with me. I was –

I was kind of in the middle in terms of rank. I wasn't at the bottom. I certainly wasn't at the top. I was right in the middle. And they weren't concerned about a mid-level soldier at all. Now, what was the evidence against you? Was it just text messages? Was it he said, she said? Yeah, it's just testimony. So no physical evidence? No physical evidence, which –

So for the longest time, I thought that was this really big deal. And then I would meet people and they would say the same thing. And then somebody had pointed out in one of the legal things that I was reading was that it's not correct to say that there's no evidence. If the person's testifying, that's evidence. Like if there was no evidence, the trial would be over. So there was tons of evidence, but it was all testimonies.

And the problem, one of the many, many problems was, I know I keep saying the problem was, there was many problems. One of the biggest problems was my lawyer convinced me, ultimately it was my decision, but he convinced me not to testify.

And I didn't testify, and that was a huge mistake. You definitely – I think in a case like this, you got to testify. You got to. You got to explain the whole story. Yeah, and I know. I remember you saying that you did. I testified, yeah. Yeah. I think that made a big difference with mine. It does. It does. I wouldn't – well, again, we wouldn't be sitting here if I had testified. There's no question because she was so –

and erratic and unstable on the stand. And I think if I could have just got up there and just talked to people and I mean, I feel like I'm fairly articulate and I speak pretty, I can explain things pretty well. And I think it would have changed everything, but it's a lot of different things I could have done. I could have got my, my sons could have testified. He convinced me not to do that.

And he's telling me, like, we don't need your kids. You don't want your kids up there testifying. Of course, as a father, you're going to be like, no, I don't want them to have to go through that. No, absolutely not. And they would have been great. They would have been fantastic on the stand. They're also really well-spoken. They would have been fantastic. So many different things we could have done. And, man, I spent –

most of my sentence, like staring at the bottom of that top bunk, thinking about like what I could have done differently. If all, if I had said this, if I had done this, if we had done this, if we had called this person, if we had just done this and it, man, I drove myself crazy thinking about that stuff. And I'm sure everybody does that. I'm like a hundred percent certain, but. How did you feel when the verdict came in? Um,

Yeah, just stunned, just absolutely stunned because and I don't know. So people have mentioned to me, I don't know if I'm clear enough about the fact that that the thing that I was found guilty of, like never happened, like never. And it wasn't a misunderstanding. It was an entire story that she had made up. And the first she had she made up two stories. The first story was so ridiculous that it didn't fly.

The second story was also somewhat ridiculous. I mean, I'll go ahead and tell you unless you don't want me to. Yeah, yeah, sure. So the first charge was that I had picked her up and thrown her on a table and digitally penetrated her or fingered her while she was on the table and that she screamed loudly for more than two minutes.

And for some reason in her story, my sons and her son were sleeping 10 feet away from the table. And there was no reason for that part to be in the story because we did actually have a trip where we went to a place where she said this happened and my sons had slept downstairs. So why she put them in the same room, I have no idea. I just don't know. And also the idea that like, I mean, she wasn't,

She wasn't huge, but she wasn't small. I mean, I wasn't going to be just picking her up and slinging her places. It just wasn't going to happen. And the jury didn't buy that one. They were like, no, there's no way you scream for two minutes. And the children didn't wake up. And I just didn't. All right. The second story, this is embarrassing, but has to be said. She says that I held her down and I gave her an enema.

and then held the door closed so that she couldn't go and use the bathroom and she had to use the bathroom on herself. And that was the story. Now, my theory on that is I think the jury heard that and was like, that's such a specific story that it sounds like something probably happened because it's so specific. But it just was a story. So none of these things ever happened, which was the other reason why I thought –

the truth is going to come out, you know, they're going to see. And there were other things that happened in the trial too, where we were able to show, like we showed a picture of her hand and her hand was like black. And they asked her, they said, "Is that your hand?" And she said, "Yes." And she could have said, "No." "Is that your hand?" "Yes." "Is that, did you get that bruise from punching the F-certified in the head?" And she said, "Yeah."

And it's like, that's okay. And we weren't able to play the recordings, but she could listen to the recordings and he could say, is that you saying blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. She didn't realize she could have said no, but she said, yeah. She goes, yeah, that's me. She said, did you say X, X, and X? Yeah, I said that. And so it really didn't feel like there was any chance of losing it.

And I wasn't thinking about prison at all. When he said guilty, it was a shock, but I still was thinking that it was because the lawyer told me he's like, you'll probably do like 30 days in county, you know, and I was still thinking that was probably what was going to happen. And I was like, and I think I was mad about 30 days. I was like, 30 days? Are you kidding me? Like, I was just furious about that.

And, yeah, and then he did three years. And I said, three years? Wow. So then they threw me in a van that night at Fort Bragg. It's nighttime. It's like 7, 8 at night. I was like, so where are we going, guys? They're going, you're going to Fort Leavenworth.

No, I know I'm going to prison, but where are we going like right now? You're going right now. And they drove nonstop through the night until we got to Fort Leavenworth at 6 o'clock the next day. Which is actually kind of a blessing. I know it's a shitty situation, but going directly to prison is very scarce in today's world. The only reason I did was because of COVID. Because a lot of the other guys got stuck in county jails.

And but the county wasn't taking anybody because of COVID. So they had to drive me. Do you think that the judge is the one, the colonel is the one that gave you the sentence, right? Yes. Do you think that a part of him felt that it wasn't correct? Because that's a low sentence for a rape case. Very low sentence. I mean, that's the same amount of time I got in prison, you know? Yeah.

Yeah, it's a very low sentence. And was there an option for a court, I mean a judge trial, a bench trial? Yeah. They have those? They had that, and I wish I had taken that because we wouldn't, I believe we wouldn't be talking right now if I had gone with the judge. Were there females on the jury? There was, yeah. Okay. Yeah. Interesting. Yeah. I don't remember the exact makeup, but I do remember specifically there was a female captain. It's a tough situation because you always want to believe—

the accuser. Like if they're genuinely telling the truth, you know? It is. And, and I understand that. And I, so I, I have lots of caveats. And one of my caveats is like, I am, I am one of the most liberal people you will ever meet. Like I'm, I'm completely woke and all of that stuff, like big time. And, and so I am not one of those, like I, I know women are treated terrible in this country in general. Um,

They suffer a ton of abuse, like just ridiculous amounts that they have to deal with. It's really bad in the military. 100%. And that, that type of stuff is true. But her case was so outlandish in the way she testified. And I don't, I don't think the judge believed her for a second. And the judge didn't like her a whole lot because she wasn't very respectful. And, um,

The jury, I just don't know about the jury. I don't know. I'm not sure what their thinking was. I think their thought process was like, I don't really know, but I think something happened. Let's just call it guilty and go with that. Now, there are a couple of different things about the military. You're not – you're technically innocent until proven guilty, but that's not –

really, really how it plays out. Just for example, and this seems like such a little thing, but it's not. So as soon as somebody makes an accusation, they become, they're called the victim. They're not called the accuser, they're called the victim. So they're referred to in all official paperwork as the victim. And again, that seems like

Well, it's just semantics, right? That's a little thing, but it's not. It's huge. It's huge. If you're sitting there and you're talking about the victim, the victim said this and the victim suffered this and the victim, this and this and this. It's like, how is she the victim? She's just making accusations at this point. And that stuff that like the jury hears and the jury picks up on and it starts to kind of drill into their head that this person is the victim.

And, um, there's a whole lot of, a whole lot of things going on in the military that a lot of people don't know about. Um, cases that like the military looks at cases that civilians would never, ever look at. Um, 90% of the cases the military looks at to, um, to investigate and takes the trial. 90% have been looked at by civilians ahead of time and just declined, um,

which is what happened with me. So it didn't, when she made her accusations, it didn't go to the army immediately. Initially, it went to the sheriff of the county that we lived in. And I did speak to the sheriff, which probably in retrospect was a bad idea because you should never talk to the police. But at the time, I didn't, I wasn't as wise as, as,

Or as wise to that stuff as I am now. But I did speak to the sheriff and he, there's nothing. They, they didn't do anything with it. They're like, this is nothing. Go on with your life. Have a nice life. Bye. And then the military picked it up. Well, it turns out that happens in 90% of the army cases, 90%. They go to the civilians first. The civilians say there's nothing here. We can't prosecute this because there's no evidence. There's, there's nothing. Okay.

And then the army picks it up at that point and the army somehow makes it work, you know, and then all of this. And I, if I'm telling you stuff, you already know, I apologize. But in around 2012 or so, they started this big crackdown on sexual assaults in the military. And you'll hear this all over the news that there's this sexual assault epidemic and they're just, there isn't, there isn't one. And, um,

I don't want to say it's made up, but the numbers are fudged basically. And what they've done is they've taken surveys of people who have come out and said, mostly women, who've come out and said, this happened to me once. It was a year ago. This happened to me in the barracks. And they're counting that as a sexual assault. And which would be the same as me saying, like, I was robbed in my home. I never reported it.

And now you're going to count my neighborhood as being a dangerous neighborhood because there's robberies there. But we don't do that. You have to investigate. You have to take people to trial. You have to like actually let the thing play out. You're like innocent until proven guilty. But they're actually counting these like stories as sexual assaults. So the military started looking really, really bad. And they needed – the way they decided they would start looking really good is that they started throwing people in prison.

So this facility that I was in, the Army has two facilities. They've got the disciplinary barracks, which is like for people who are 10 years and one day up to life. There's like people on death row at that prison.

That's the disciplinary barracks. And then there's the Joint Regional Correctional Facility, which is where I was. And that's for 10 years and under. So it can be any number of things. There's 85% are there for sexual type cases. So it really exists just for that.

And then every once in a while you'll meet a guy who like stole something. Or what about like AWOL or something? Yeah. Yeah. Occasionally, but very rarely, very rarely. But like I was saying to you earlier, like my story wasn't super uncommon, but it wasn't the norm. The norm was I met this girl. We were at a party. I was drunk. She was drunk. We hooked up. The next day she said it was nonconsensual.

And what we call regret sex, which happens like all the time. And not saying that shouldn't be investigated. It absolutely should be because you don't know what happened. But when you got guys doing five-year sentences for that, for stuff that just happens, you know, that's just, that's part of life. That's part of college life. That's part of the military barracks life. It is. It's just not...

Not saying that it should or shouldn't happen, but like people are doing like five years or more for that. That's just, that's ridiculous. But like going back to what you said, me only getting three years was really low. And I think it's because the judge didn't believe her. I really do. Now share with us your experience of military prison, being in that facility. So, okay. So it's really funny when I, when we first got there, I was in a van and I'm handcuffed and I,

We go around the side of the building and I see this whole pile of guys in their brown uniforms. And I got in my head that they were waiting for me. Like this group of guys were waiting for me and they were going to haze me as I walked in. Like I really thought that's what was going to happen. And they weren't. They were like taking the trash out and they were like hanging out and laughing for a few minutes after they had taken the trash out.

So then they get me to this, to the shoe, the special housing unit. I'm sure everybody that's watching this knows what the shoe is. They get me there and they're leading me up to my cell. Like I had finally gotten in process and whatnot. And they're leading me up to my cell. And this guy's like starts yelling at me like, Hey, Hey, where are you from? Where are you from? I was like, I'm coming from Fort Bragg.

Oh, yeah, man, I thought so. You look like you're from Fort Bragg. Man, how you doing? Point is, everybody was really nice from the start. First of all, all the guys that are there, the vast majority are there for some BS. And so they all sympathize with each other on that level. The other thing is the whole facility is run by soldiers. So all your guards are other soldiers. So

They're guards and you're an inmate, but it's still the fact that they're like, say, an E2, which is a private. So they're a private and you're a sergeant. It's still true. It's kind of hard to switch that off. And that's a bit of a challenge. But they tend to be like super respectful and super nice to you. Not all of them, but they tend to be. And so –

I don't want to make it sound like I had a ball there because I certainly didn't. I was not happy there at all. But overall, it was not miserable. It was one of the easier times of my life. Like there was very few responsibilities and definitely like all of your needs were taken care of. Like, I mean, I didn't have to get socks. I could order socks if I needed them. Like they just supplied you with everything. Do you pay for that?

No, you got $35 a month. That they gave you? Mm-hmm. The military gives you $35 to spend on commissary? Yep. And are there snacks? Are there... So if you want to buy the snacks and stuff, that's your own money. But your H&C...

Like your soap and shampoo and shirts and stuff like that. That's your $35 a month. Interesting. Yeah. Now are the inmates against people with like sex offender type charges or no? No, because they all have it. Interesting. But I mean there's still the – this sounds dumb because we always wonder like why are you –

Not we, but some of us wondered, like, it's kind of stupid for you guys to separate each other. But there were different levels. So, like, if you had hooked up into barracks, like, that was one thing. But if you had gotten caught with child porn, that was another thing. And so there was still the whole, like, chomo thing going on.

There was a minimum security house, which was Oscar House, and they tended to be the older guys. And they had a lot of privileges that we didn't have. So they were kind of looked down upon and called chomos and things like that, even though that might not even been why they were there. What about the guards? How did they treat individuals with sex offender charges? So they were good because they didn't believe it.

And that's the thing. If you talk to anybody in the military, and I don't know how often you come in contact with people in the military, but you can talk to them. They're all going to tell you. You're not going to meet somebody in the military who doesn't know somebody who got caught up in this type of stuff or they were accused of something at some point just because it's such an easy thing to do to make accusations against somebody. It's like –

so this is stuff like we we could do this interview for six seven hours i'm telling you there's so much to it so um along with trying to get these convictions what they've done is they've incentivized the accusations and the way they've incentivized these accusations is if you are if you're actually in the military which my wife was not of course but if you're actually in the military you get to leave your unit

So you can go to any unit anywhere as long as they have your job. So you can come in tomorrow and say, Sergeant Johnson,

touched me inappropriately last night and they will immediately move you to a different unit, to a different base if you want to go to a different base. Now, the thought process behind that is good. The thought process behind that is we don't want you having to work with somebody who abused you. You don't want to have to see your abuser every single day. That wouldn't be right. That'd be too emotionally stressful for you, right? But you can see where that gets taken advantage of.

If somebody's telling you like, dude, all you got to do is go in and say that this and this and this happened and you can get out of this crappy unit. And so that happens a lot. They get money for it. So my wife was paid the entire time that I was in. She was paid fourteen hundred dollars a month.

So which just happened to be enough to make the house payment. So so she got the house but didn't know any way to pay for it. And she was able to make fourteen hundred dollars a month and get her full benefits while I was in, too. So and then does that stop once you get out? Yeah.

Once I'm out, see, I'm not actually out of the Army yet. I'm still in the Army now. So she still continues to go. Yeah, absolutely. And even to this day, you're still technically in the Army? I'm still in the Army. I got my ID in my pocket. But they don't dishonorably discharge you right away after conviction? Not yet because it's still under appeal. Oh, so once the appeal's over, then they do that. Once the appeal's done. And the appeal goes on forever.

Wow. So now back to military prison. How are the cells? Are they actually bars? Are they locked doors? Are they cubicles? What does that look like? They're locked doors. They're very small. I would imagine they look like the same cells. They look everywhere. There were doors with windows on them, very heavy doors. The toilet sink is exactly like what you have in the other room.

two bunks bolted to the wall and then a footlocker bolted to the wall. And then a desk that served as like the steps to the top bunk. And, uh, that was bolts to the wall. And, and that was it. The good side, good for a lot of reasons is that the prison was actually on the empty side, which means they're not sending as many people there as they used to, which is very good news. It means stuff's kind of getting under control a little bit. And, um,

we weren't crowded, you ended up getting your own cell fairly quickly. I think I had to wait like eight or nine months. But by the time I left, like guys were getting their own cells within like two or three months. And that was pretty cool because it was tight in there with two people. It was really tight. How many hours a day are you in your cell? Like what's a typical routine day? Yeah. So lockdown was from

11 at night until 5 in the morning. You could be, yeah, you were free to be out of them after that in the common area, in the housing unit. You could be in the common area, which is what most people did. And then, of course, you had your job that you went to at least several days a week. And I started out with a really crappy job and ended up with one of the really good jobs. At the end, I was one of the recreation guys there.

who, um, I supposed to be maintaining the rec equipment, but basically I just got to work out all the time. But, uh, you can't tell the look at me now, but I used to work out like constantly and I don't, there's nothing else to do. But, um, so yeah, yeah. You had your jobs. Um, we had the, the textile shop where I learned how to use the sewing machine. It's just like, that's fantastic. But yeah, I'm great with the sewing machine right now. And, um,

People work in the kitchen, of course, and laundry, of course. I think all of that stuff is pretty typical of any facility. Did you have count time? Did they count you guys? Yes. Technically four a day, but only two that you're awake for. So it's just like the federal prison system. It all goes into that probably same database. Yep. Count was 11 and four. Yeah. Yeah. And somehow they, oh my God, the count always took forever. The count did take forever. Jeez. Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah, I miss that. But there's other stuff about it that you're not going to want to hear about, like the food. Yeah, tell us about the food there. I'm sure everyone's curious. Food was – because it was – so the kitchen was run by military people. It was run by an Army unit. So it wasn't a bunch of civilians. It was an Army unit that was cooking. And then they had the inmates who helped with the cooking. And –

So what they did was they had a decent amount of money for food anyway. Then they opened up this kitchen job. They opened it up to guys who had been cooks before in the military, like had been military cooks. So they actually knew what they were doing.

And they got kind of competitive with each other and like they wanted to make the best food because it was a big deal for us to get good food. But it was an even bigger deal. Like if you had made that good food and we knew you had made it, like you'd find that dude on, you know, at rec time. Like, man, did you make the hot dogs today? That was you. Oh, my God, dude, it was so good. Like that was a really, you know, huge thing of pride for these guys, right? So they started trying to outdo each other and like –

I'm telling you, like, I'm almost embarrassed to say it, but at Thanksgiving, we would have, like, steak and lobster tail. Lobster tails. I'm not kidding. I am not kidding. You got to go, man. I know, right? But, I mean, we had steak. Not a best cut of steak, but we did have steak. We had Cornish hen, but there was no lobster tails. I'll tell you that. I don't know where they got these lobster tails from. I have no idea. They were frozen. Well, most lobster tails are frozen. Yeah, let them.

Yeah, but – and then guys, man, the best collard greens I've ever eaten. I'm from the south. The best collards I ever ate were in prison. But again, the guy who made them, everybody knew he had made them and like he was the hero. You guys probably had some good grits then. Yes, cheese grits. Yeah, the first time I ever had grits was in prison. Yeah, the cheese grits were the best. The cheese grits were my favorites.

And, um, and again, like I say, it was a real, it would really, you know, brighten the guy's day when you found them and like, ah, man, that stuff was off the hook, man. That was so good. So they really started going out of their way to like make the food good. And, um, I don't honestly, I don't remember anybody complaining about the food, especially the guys who had come from County. The guys that come from County. They're in heaven. Yes. Now those dudes just by the way, um,

When you're in county, they had to keep them isolated. They weren't allowed to be with the general population. So that's a big thing with military. We're never allowed to blend with other prisoners for whatever reason. So I don't understand why that is. Now, were there fights at all in there? Very, very few. The fights that you would see would be just normal stuff like basketball games and stuff.

- But not like prison politics and-- - No, wasn't anything like that. No gangs or anything like that. Now, up at the disciplinary barracks, like absolutely, 'cause those guys were in there forever. But for us, everybody was doing pretty short sentences and nobody wanted to go to the SHU

And everybody wanted their privileges and whatnot. And, you know, they – I guess all prisons are probably this way. I don't really know. But they give you your good time ahead of time. Yep, and you lose it. You can only lose it. Yeah. So the only fights I ever saw were like just on the basketball court and stuff like that. And never anybody like too bad. But the shoe though, I have a funny story. I spent 29 days in isolation in the shoe. This is how –

How unserious the prison was at the time. I wrote a series of jokes about the guards. And I wrote it up and typed it up and put it out in our unit for people to read in our housing unit. And everybody read it and they thought it was hilarious. Even the guards thought it was funny, except for one. One got a hold of it and didn't think it was funny. I spent 29 days. Over the hat. Yeah.

In the shoe for 29 days. How'd they know it was you? Oh, I told them it was me. Oh. They saw, well, they had a camera and they said, it looks like you're sitting on a piece of paper. I am sitting on a piece of paper. I'm like, there's nothing wrong. These are jokes. I'm allowed to write these. And there wasn't anything in the regulations that said I couldn't, you couldn't do that. And they were just like, they decided it was harassment. Yeah.

Is what they call it. It was staff harassment. That's what it was. Now, was there contraband at all in their cell phones? Yeah. Shanks, anything like that? There was this mysterious cell phone that was floating around that they kept telling us, like, we know there's a cell phone and we're going to find it. Like, so you might as well turn it in now. But yeah, there were cell phones. Guys were making hooch.

Man, the dudes that were making hooch boy, they would go away to the shoe and like you'd forget they existed. Like they kept those guys down there for a long time. But they were like actually stealing the yeast and stuff out of the kitchen. No, I'm guessing most of these individuals in here, including yourself, have never had run-ins with law enforcement, had never been arrested. Like this goes zero to 100 because you need a clean record for the most part to get into the military. Exactly. You're certainly not a felon.

And that was the other thing that I mentioned to you when I was emailing you that I don't want to come off as sounding judgmental toward anybody, but I feel like my story is a little bit different in that I had no preparation for prison. I had no idea I was going to prison. I had no idea that anything was coming down the pipes, nothing. I would guess that a lot of people who are in prison are

Kind of kind of knew they were going to end up in prison at some point in their life, you know, or like they were doing things. Bless you. They were they were doing things that they knew might get them in prison someday, you know, things like that. And I mean, I went from a gated community. I had a punch in a code to get into my house. I lived on a golf course and.

I was a Sunday school teacher at the time. You look like one. Yeah. Didn't drink. I still don't drink. I mean, I am in recovery, but I had been sober for over two years by the time I got to prison. Like, I didn't do anything. Like, you know, for me to be awake past 9 o'clock at night was – that was unusual. So –

I was the guy always wearing cat t-shirts and stuff. Prison was not anywhere on my radar. And so...

And eventually we got to where like, we kind of joke about that in prison, like, you know, hashtag white people prison. Hey, honey, guess what? I joined a gang today. Now, speaking of clothing, I was the clothing in there. What would you guys have to wear every day? We had these brown uniforms. The same ones that you saw the people wearing when you came in? Yeah. These dark brown uniforms. They pressed them for us in the laundry, which I don't know if that's normal or not, but

But they were pressed and they – guys actually got – because it's still the military, like the way you look is kind of an important thing for guys. That's kind of drilled into you early on that like your appearance is super important. It's a military thing.

Yeah, we had them nicely pressed with lines on them and everything. Could you grow your hair out and stuff? No, no. So you had to shave in there too? Yeah. But you could have a beard or not? No beard, nope. Mustache? No. Oh, no, you could have a – so there's a military regulation for mustache. It actually looks just like Adolf Hitler. Yeah.

Exactly. It has to be trimmed down this way, right? And I'm guessing you had to make the bed a certain way too. Didn't have to make your bed. Oh, wow. I'm shocked. So they make you, they enforce your beard length, but not how you made your bed. Yeah, I know, right? In federal prison, you have to make it five days a week. So they don't, they really don't.

do a whole lot to you. When you get there, they just kind of leave you alone. And they would tell us, they were like, your punishment is to be here. Your punishment isn't the stuff that's going to happen to you here. Your punishment is that you had to come here. And me personally, if you'd given me the choice, I would rather have been in like a more

discipline barracks for less time if that had been an option. Like you can go and like have to get up and run every morning and stuff like we used to do in the military, but that's just not an option. Like a boot camp. Yeah, that would make more sense, but... Are there females mixed with you guys too or is it all male? It's all males. So they have a female side? There's a female...

Prison someplace. It can't be that big, though. How many years? Supposedly, there's like one army female in prison. So how many years do you do on a three-year sentence, like with good time? So I did...

I got a lot of time off my sentence. I was able to do that. So it's, if it's three years, it's two and a half before you even walk in the door. So I'm not going to be able to tell you the exact days cause I don't remember. But then I got another like four months off of that. And that was just by doing different programs and stuff. And, um,

I managed to get myself into different leadership roles and whatnot. And it's like, cause I was, I was a lot older than, I wasn't the oldest person there, but I was in the, I was one of the 10 oldest people there, you know? So people would refer to me as like Mr. Fi and things like that. And so I was in a lot of positions where like I facilitated different things and was like a,

What am I trying to say? Like an advisor sort of. And you were able to get time off your sentence that way. So like a program, any like I was in a Alcoholics Anonymous program and I was one of the leaders for that. And I would get to two days off a month for that, you know. And when I first heard about this, I was like two days off a month. That's nothing. But it did add up. You max out at five days off a month.

So, which again, doesn't sound like a whole lot until you start doing the math and you're like, well, that's, that's 60 days a year. That's two months a year. That's a lot. So, so that, yeah, that's the time. So what did you do about two years inside? I did two years in a month. So it was 25 months. What year did you go out? 2024? So I went in, in January, January 20th of 22, yeah.

And I got out March 9th of 24. So almost a year ago. Yeah.

Now, restriction wise, tell us about that. Like with probation, is it like the federal system? Do you have to register as a sex offender? How does that all work? Yeah. So it's it's a little I know I'm sitting here talking about like how great life was and it really wasn't that difficult. But as soon as you get out, it's you're dealing with all the crap that anybody has to deal with. Like you got a felony on your record. But the worst thing is being on the registry and.

And you end up having, you have to register on the sex offender registry, which that varies by state as far as like which states are strict and which states are not. I have no idea if Connecticut is strict or not. They tend to be stricter in the South than they are in other parts of the country. But you're on that registry, which means anybody can look you up at any time. For life? Yep. It affects where you live. It affects the jobs you can have.

Because I don't think that like a lot of places will deal with a felon, but they're not going to deal with people in the registry. They just don't want to deal with it. And which is why I say that like if everything got overturned in my appeal, then I'm off the registry and I don't have that felony on my record, but it's still going to show up on Google. So I'll never be able to teach.

Because that will always be there on Google for people to find and whatnot. And so, yeah, so that's that's the crappy part. Getting out is the crappy part. I was majorly, majorly, majorly depressed when I got out. And to the point where I low key wanted to go back because I'm like, man, life was so easy inside and like.

You know, Friday night movies was like the most exciting day of the week. Like, look, hey, man, they're showing Batman this week, man, I can't wait. And everybody would be so excited about it. And then you get out and you're like, everything sucks. And it's like, I got to find a job and I can't, I couldn't find a job anywhere. And I got really lucky to get the job that I did get.

And I got no place to live. I have to come home and stay with my dad because I've got no money saved up. I've got no car. I've got nothing. It's just crappy. So, yeah, I wanted to go back. Go back and at least I have my own little cell and I'm taking care. I felt like I was taking care of myself. Obviously, I wasn't. But you feel like you're taking care of yourself when you're in prison. I guess, you know, staying alive is taking care of yourself. But yeah.

But yeah, yeah, have to deal with all that, have to deal with all the parole. I just got done with parole in January. How strict was the parole with your charges? So it wasn't, but it's very, but it varies based on who you get assigned. And I just happened to get assigned a guy who was really laid back and he could have made my life really hard and he just didn't.

And, but we were talking a little bit before the show started about having to take the, I had to take lie detector tests. I had to take two of them. And apparently this was a really big deal. I didn't care either way. It didn't make any difference to me. And, but apparently it was a big deal. And I passed the lie detector test. And after that, they really left me alone.

And they were kind of, oh, you are telling the truth. I'm like, yeah, really? What kind of questions did they ask you? So the first test was all about the charges and did it actually happen. And you said no? No. Yeah, I said no. And you passed? And I passed. So why can't that be used towards? They're not admissible charges.

In court. Now, if I had known I was going to pass and if I known the thing was going to be that serious, we could have gotten one done on our own and, you know, and submitted that in the in the trial. But and just let people decide if it's important or not. But but, yeah, they still made me take it, even though it didn't matter. And but I will say after I passed it, they treated me very differently. Like they had a little meet in with my I had a state attorney.

a state assigned counselor who actually came to really like. And she and I met every other week and I came to kind of enjoy meeting with her. And she sat with the parole officer and they talked about the whole thing. And man, they left me alone after that. How are your kids dealing with this? They are interesting because they know Samantha because they were in the house with her.

And so first of all, they were super confused. They were like, dad, why are you in trouble? Sam's the one who did this, this, this, and this. And I would have to explain to them, like, she did do that, but she's not in the army. So the army can't do anything to her. And it wouldn't matter. She could murder somebody. The army can't do anything to her.

So I explained that to them. They wrote the best letters for my parole board. They wrote the best letters. I was so proud of them. But I told them, you know, you're always supposed to like not blame the victims and whatnot. And I told them, I said, you guys write whatever you want. I said, I don't care. You write whatever you want. And they were like, yeah, she did all this stuff and she was this and she threw this at them. And I was like,

So they were very confused. And they still, like, in terms of, I mean, I don't know how much of it sunk in. Like, hey, dad went to prison. But they don't think for a second that. And I haven't ever had anybody in my life for a second even question. And that's been really great. And a lot of that is because they knew Samantha.

And I think if they had known her, maybe they might have questioned me a little bit, but they knew her and they knew how she was and they knew some of the things that were going on. So I've never had anybody question. So I remind myself that all the time. I'm like, I would like to have my name cleared and all that. And I hope I win the appeal and all that stuff. But really, that's just so I can get a better job because all the people that mean anything to me know the truth.

And so, so I'm okay with that. Like, what do I care if like this person who I've never met before can look me up? I don't care. It's nothing to me. The people that I love and care for all know the truth, you know, but it would definitely make a difference in terms of jobs. You know, I mean, I've got a,

a master's degree and a full military career behind me. And I'm lucky that I'm making $23 an hour. You know, I'm very, very lucky to be in that position. Have you thought about what you would do if you lose the appeal? Because I know like I was in your position when I was appealing, you have all the hope in the world that keeps you going through like those really tough times, you know, but have you given a thought of what your reaction will be if you lose? Yeah.

So I think I've had the one advantage of it being drug out so long is that I have been able to think about that. If it had been quicker, I don't think I would have. But it has gotten to the point where I have kind of moved on with my life. So I don't think my life is going to look like super different. To be honest with you, if I won the appeal, my life would look super different because –

Again, this could go on. We could talk about this forever. But what happens is if you win the appeal, you go back in the military. You put your uniform back on. I have to shave, get my hair cut, and I have to go back in. And the good thing is they'll be paying you. And they'll give you – hopefully they give you back pay and all that stuff. So my life would change dramatically if I did win. And it really wouldn't change that much if I don't. So –

But as far as, you know, as far as what I'm going to be doing in a year or so, like I'll probably be driving trucks like I am now. What about restrictions? Like can you go into restaurants? Can you go to the movie theater? Like how does all that work? No, there's no restrictions on that stuff. You've got free movement. The only thing really is it's where you live is the restriction. Now where we are, it's so rural. It's not a big deal.

Because you're not going to – it's easy to find a place that doesn't have a school close to it or something like that. Now, if you're trying to find a place around here, like in Danbury or something, it would be much more difficult because you'd have to be – well, I don't know what the restrictions are in Connecticut, but most places it's 1,000 feet. You'd have to be 1,000 feet away from schools, daycares, things like that.

And, you know, you can see where in a bigger area like Danbury or whatever, like, for example, I've heard that it's almost impossible to live in like New York City, for example, like it's not possible. And and so there are guys who get stuck in prison there because they can't find a place to live. So they just they have to stay in prison. And so.

But where we live, it's a little easier. What about dating? Were you worried about that? Yes. Getting out? Yeah. Yeah. I just assumed I wasn't going to. I think it's easier to be a murderer than a sex offender, charge-wise. It is. It is. And so I met a wonderful, wonderful person. I had assumed I would – so what happened was I was very tired of –

never talking to humans you know other than my dad you know bless him but I was just tired of not talking to the humans who were more my age and so I went online and was dating and I just was chatting with people and then I started hitting it off with this woman and um

I tried to tell her early on. I'm like, no, no, no, just be careful. There's stuff, you know, I got history. And she's like, what is it? All right, well, let me just tell you. And I told her about the, that I have two ex-wives and the one was very abusive and all this stuff. I told her all about that. And then, yeah,

But I kept telling him, I just say, you know, there's actually more to the story. I just really don't want to go into it right now. At this point, we had been talking for like a couple of days, you know, so I just didn't feel like this was something I needed to tell her then. But we were getting really close really quick. So it had been like less than a week and we went to on a trip together to do Richmond, which is about two hours away from from where we live.

And we were in the car and I kept hinting, I kept telling her, I'm like, I don't want you to get too attached because there's stuff from my past. And she kept saying, it's funny to me now, like she goes, I don't judge people in their past. And I was like, okay, we'll see. We'll see. And then she finally said, she said of all things, she goes, well, just as long as you're not like, you know, a sex offender or something. And I was like, yeah.

Of all the things you would have said, that would be the thing you would say. I feel like that's a pretty common response. So I had to. Yeah, I guess so. But I had to. I mean, I get that a lot. And she's like, you're not. Are you? And I'm like, oh, my God. I think the top two for women are, you know, sex offender or killed someone. Yeah. You know, is what they'll say when they ask about your felony. Yeah. Yeah. And it's it's it's hard. It's just weird how we categorize everybody.

You know, we categorize everyone and we subcategorize them too. You know, like, oh, you're an ex-con, but okay, but wait, wait, wait, what, what? Oh, you just stole a car, then you're good. You know, like you just shot somebody, but they didn't die. Okay, no big deal. But, and so we had this really awkward ride home. There was still like 50 miles left to go. It was like a really long 50 miles, but- But she's here with you today. She's here with me today. And like-

one of the most wonderful women I've ever known. I'm probably tied with my mother for that. And it's just, you know, incredible. And I feel like when you get to know me, you don't have to talk to me too long before you know that like, all right, yeah, this never happened. That's what I think.

It doesn't hurt that I do have the evidence about all the abuse and whatnot. Like that doesn't hurt in terms of what other people think. It didn't help me in the trial. But but that's something I you know, I know I mentioned to you earlier on. That's something I'm.

if I have any kind of mission going forward, it's, it's that I want there to be more light shown on the abuse that men are suffering, that it's not a male female thing about people getting abused. It's like people are getting abused and that's, that's what I want to be out there for people. So, you know, that's usually that's something when I talk to people and unfortunately it's, it's so common that it happens to women that that's a point that we can kind of bond over. Um,

So that sort of helped me. But yeah, I think in general, I don't tend to tell people that I was in prison. I've never mentioned it at work, for example. Obviously, the people who need to know, know, but I never mentioned it. Never once. How do you feel about them finding out about this interview? I don't know yet, honestly. Yeah.

I really don't. There were some people like there are some people in my life who know exactly what this interview is. And there are some people in my life who think that I'm talking about PTSD for veterans. And so we're just going to have to see what happens. Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah, we'll see. I think like I'll talk to people and then, you know, they say I got to get it cleared with my boss or something. And their boss will be like, I don't think it's a good idea because it shines, you know, negative on the company. But yet I'm sure they're using them for.

credits for hiring a felon in that. So I don't like bosses that do that because I think that's wrong because you did agree to hire to that person if the person was honest with you about it, you know, and they're not naming your company and they're not, you're not doing anything like that. And a lot of people do name the company they work for, but the ones that don't because they don't feel comfortable, which is totally fair. I don't think it's fair for their boss to basically give them that ultimatum. Hey,

And you're not going to have a job here if you do that interview when you're sharing a part of your story. And it's in your past. It's not who you are now. Yeah. And then, I mean, all the respect in the world to the people that are open and honest about it because I'm –

I'm open about it when I need to be. I give you a lot of credit, man. It's, uh, you're the first person that's had your charges that sat in that chair. Oh, really? To, to talk about that, you know? Yeah. Um, and, uh, you know, it takes a lot to do that and I give you a lot of credit. Yeah. Well, and I don't think we, and that, that's the problem when, when you hear sex offender, uh,

you think it's a guy in a trench coat at the school, you know, that's, that's what people think. Or somebody who driving around in a van, looking at kids through binoculars and whatnot. And it's like, that's not what's happening. A lot of people are just getting caught up in stuff. And there's this huge percentage of people who are falsely accused. And, and it's there. I've read some article somewhere that said that,

It will get to a point in our life where every single person will have either been accused or will know somebody who's been accused. Like that will happen within like, say, the next 20 years. And, you know, whether or not that's true or not, the point is it's becoming so widespread that we do need to talk about it. And like everybody that's on that registry is not necessarily because they were, you know, caught at a kindergarten doing something horrible, you know.

And I have met a lot of individuals in your shoes that have reached out just to talk or say that watching the show has helped them. I've had parents and siblings because they take offense of

And I get their perspective to some of the ex-inmates that come on here and talk about beating up chomos and smashing chomos and this and that. And as a parent, you're going to feel some type of way because you still care and love for your child no matter what they did. But I just tell them, hey, that's that person's opinion. I don't go on here saying I smashed chomos or I'm against it. I give people a safe place to talk about.

about their situation. Yeah, that's part of it. That's just part of it. Yeah, but I get their perspective too, but also that's the reality of it. And there are different levels to it too, whether there's a child involved or there's just, there's so many different, you know, aspects to it. Yeah. But Sam, thank you so much for coming on the show today, man. Thank you very much for having me. It was a great trip. We've had a great time and

Should have wore a coat, but other than that, the whole trip seemed perfect. I can't believe you didn't bring a coat. I can't believe we didn't bring a coat. I cannot believe it. Well, safe travels back and, you know, maybe find a coat on the way home. And enjoy the rest of your time in the area. Absolutely. And, you know, great job today. So one real quick question. So the word on the street is that Connecticut now has the best pizza, that it's better than New York. That's the word on the street. Yeah. So.

I go to Stanziato's in Danbury. Stanziato's in Danbury? Yeah, that's my personal favorite. Okay, because we found one place that was somebody's name. Pepe's? Maybe. Sally's. No, it was like Bob Johnson. It was a person last name. No, no, no, no. But it was a coal-fired place.

And it had over 5,000 reviews. No, no. Go to Stanziato's. Stanziato's. Tell them I sent you. I believe you. Yeah. Go to Stanziato's. Tell them I sent you. Stanziato's. Yeah. Okay. And Danbury. Are you guys staying in Danbury? Yeah, we are. Yeah. So go to Stanziato's in Danbury. It's like 10 minutes from here. That's where we always go. It's really good. Well, hey, if you say, I'm glad I asked. Yeah. That's my go-to.

It's like personal wood-fired type pizzas, a lot of different flavors. They got some great appetizers too, great salads. And for dessert, great desserts and then donuts as well. Now barbecue, if you guys like barbecue, there's a great spot behind us too, Hoodoo Brown Barbecue. Oh, yeah.

I saw the name of that. I don't think we'll come from the South up to Connecticut to eat barbecue. But if you want some, that's a famous place. Those are our two recommendations we recommend to everyone, Stanziato's and Hoodoo Brown. Well, we're going to Stanziato's for sure. I've been looking forward to this pizza. Awesome. Well, I hope you enjoy them. And thank you again for coming. All right. Well, thank you very much.