S13 E20: [Arya] To Protect and Serve
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You think you know me, you don't know me. What about it?

Within about 30 minutes of me posting that, I got a message on Facebook from the woman that he was living with. She had apparently seen where it had been reposted and she looked at what I had posted along with it. And she sent me a message on Facebook and she said, who is Jim to you? Because I've been with him for the past 10 years.

I was totally freaking out in that moment because it was like, oh my God, oh my God, oh my God, I know who she is and now she knows who I am. I remember calling one of my best friends and being like, I don't know what to do. Should I respond to her? Should I ignore it? I don't know what to do. And at that same time, Jim was down here in my living room in a full blown conversation with my mom. And as I'm coming down the stairs,

I hear him say, hold on, I need to take this call. And he walks out the door and I can tell when he walks out the back door that he's kind of in this state of distress. You can tell by the look on his face, he gets off the phone and he's just going in on me. And he's like, why did you post this stuff? I told you not to do that. He was like, now my daughter's calling me and she's telling me I'm a bad man. So dramatic. It's so theatrical.

This woman, she's blowing my phone up. She's calling. She's sending text messages. He's telling me not to respond to her. He's definitely trying to diffuse the situation. But he's also saying that he has a dinner planned that evening with other individuals from the PD department. That's a celebration of his promotion. He's on cloud nine from having this promotion and then boom.

The walls just start crumbling down on him because now not only do I know about the person he's been living with, but that woman knows about me and she is relentlessly blowing him up.

He told me, block her. You need to block her on Facebook, block her on the cell phone. It was really at this point where everything started to really unravel. He never really seemed too concerned about me finding out about her. But once she found out about me, he was distraught over the situation. Seemed very overwhelmed. His whole demeanor changed towards me. This man, in all these months, and even sometimes in the back and forth that we would sometimes have,

This man never called me out of my name. He did this evening. It was like an aggressive side of him that I had never seen before. He was so mad that night. I didn't know what to think in that moment. I was starting to check out. But at the same time, he was still telling me like, I love you, but you did this. And now it's going to make things even harder.

I knew we had these couple of therapy sessions that were booked. The therapist that we were meeting with is actually my therapist who I've worked with for many, many years. So this woman knows me. She knows my life, my family dynamic very, very well. I have talked to her multiple times about the different things that were happening in mine and Jim's relationship.

It's like a week and a half later, all this has come to a head. I distanced myself from him. I would still hear him out, but he was the type, if I wouldn't respond, it would infuriate him and it would fuel the fire. Why aren't you responding? Where are you at? What are you doing? He would become very, very concerned if I would become unresponsive with him. We had a first session book. It was

It was mid-July. He participated in that session virtually. He told the therapist, he said that he had always loved me and he said he was committed to seeing our relationship through, that he was in love with me. He told the therapist that he couldn't stand the thought of living without me. Being away from me was really weighing on him every day because once this all went down, we didn't see each other for a good week and a half. He would try to blame it on work.

But it was really more so that this woman that he lived with had a hold on him and she really wasn't trying to let him out of her eyesight. Despite the struggles we were having and the feelings of confusion about everything that was going on on my end, after that first therapy session, I was still in this place of I'm committed to him. I believed him when he said he was willing to do the hard work to try to keep our relationship together. I really, really believed him.

After that first session, a week and a half later or so, I had gone down south to visit my mom for a few days because when she had previously been here, she took my son and my niece back with her to the state that she lives in. I had driven down south to visit her for a few days and the plan was to get the kids and bring them back with me. The day before we were supposed to leave, I was contacted by

by another woman who was also a member of the police department at a regional campus different from where I worked at, but she was at another regional campus. She was Jim's subordinate.

She reached out to me that evening because someone who we both mutually know, she had gone to lunch with this gentleman and at the end of the lunch looked at her and he said, Jim has a girlfriend down south and she works for this particular school.

And the woman was like, why are you telling me this? She thought that their relationship had been kind of kept under wraps, but there were definitely people that knew. So she was a little confused about why he was telling her that. But at the same time, she had been involved with Jim for quite a while.

She found me on Facebook and my number was listed there. And that's how she reached out to me. She informed me that night that she had been involved with Jim for just over two years. It was shocking. She told me stories of what their relationship had been like over the course of those two years. He really pursued her hard for a full year before she finally gave in and actually agreed to start dating him.

She was a patrol officer. So she actually direct reported to someone else. But essentially, everyone reported up to him. He was the number two in charge. That was another reason why the relationship had to be kind of hush hush, right? That's a subordinate.

He really pursued her for an entire year before she finally gave in and agreed to date him. She was about 11 years younger than him, a single mom with two young children. By the time she finally gave into her relationship with him, he had really convinced her, I'm going to marry you. I want to be there for you and your children. She said that the dynamic of their relationship was so similar to ours that it would kind of ebb and flow. And she would question at times,

Is it my fault? Is it something I'm doing wrong? So she got into this habit of recording a lot of their phone conversations. And then she would go back and listen to the conversations. And she was trying to critique herself, like, should I have said something differently or done something differently? Once he hooked her in, it was just an up and down all the time.

The dynamics of her relationship with him compared to my relationship with him, there were many, many similarities. The main difference was she was much more of an aggressive type with him. They would fight and cuss each other out, whereas my relationship was not like that with him. Up until May, he had never even called me out of my name. Even if we would have moments of disagreements, very rarely were there raised voices. It was always a tone of respect for one another.

He had met her whole family. He had been around her children. He would come to her son's baseball game sometimes. He had met her family, all of them. And some of those recorded conversations that she had with him, it would be like her trying to say, I can't do this. We're so rocky all the time. And he would profess his love for her over and over and beg her not to leave him. And again, the tears, the crying. I listened to several hours of the recordings.

It was haunting because the things that he said to her at times were nearly verbatim the same things that he would say to me. She would say, even though he was inconsistent at times and frequently consumed with work, she would overlook the red flags because she was sure that she could trust someone of his caliber. He's in this high ranking position. She's his subordinate. Why would she ever think that he would pursue her?

and be a predator that was set out to hurt her in some way. She said every time that she would try to walk away from the situation, he would be so devastated and he would sob. He would beg and plead with her that he needed her in his life. He did the exact same thing with me. This particular woman and I, we stayed in contact over the course of a couple of weeks. Jim was really outspoken. He did not want us talking. He again came to me and he said...

I don't want to be with her. That was way before you were in the picture. She won't leave me alone. That was a long time ago and she just won't leave me alone. She's obsessed with me. He was saying he didn't want us to be talking. He actually told her that he was in love with me and that he wanted her to leave him alone and to leave me alone because he was in love with me and trying to pursue this relationship with me and she was doing nothing but causing problems, bringing up an old relationship. He told her that.

I think me and this particular woman, in a lot of ways, we created this trauma bond with one another because we were both so devastated over the situation. I was still in this weird space. Somehow he had wrapped me into it. Like, we're going to work through this. We're going to be okay. And we're going to work through this. I'll never forget. I was driving home that next morning after she initially had contacted me. And the whole time I'm driving home and he's sending me text messages.

It was about a nine hour drive. He's like, I love you. Please don't let this destroy us. She's just crazy. And our relationship wasn't even serious. It was nothing. I told him I was done. I was like, I cannot do this with you. I don't know what is going on with you. I didn't know what to think in that moment. I had only slept like two hours that night too. And then I was driving a nine hour drive home. I was distraught, but I was trying to hold everything together because I had my child and my niece in the car with me. I was devastated.

so emotionally spent at that point. We've got COVID. We've got kids at home. I have a surgery. I get sick. I have another surgery. I find out about the woman you live with. And then I find out about another woman. I was just spent in that moment in disbelief. I felt so broken. I had shared so much of myself with this man and I had so much hope for us.

It was right around two weeks after this, another woman contacted me. This season, Instacart has your back to school. As in, they've got your back to school lunch favorites, like snack packs and fresh fruit. And they've got your back to school supplies, like backpacks, binders, and pencils. And they've got your back when your kid casually tells you they have a huge school project due tomorrow.

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This woman we have always referred to as anonymous because we were never able to figure out who she was. She did give some identifying factors and we did try to track down who it might be, but we were never able to figure out who she was. She revealed to me that she had also been involved with him over the course of about a year.

And she said that it wasn't real serious, that she had only seen him once a month or so over the course of the past year. She said she also lived up in the northern part of the state. She told me that he would contact her regularly. He'd send her pictures like he did the rest of us. He would send her flowers. I would always be like, I want to see you. This particular woman revealed to me she had found out that Jim had

been involved with another woman who worked up at one of the campuses in the northern part of the state for several years. She knew about another woman, and then she knew about another woman who worked at a different university within the state. I was devastated. I didn't even know what to think in that moment. I was just like, I have to get away from him. This man is psychotic. I literally did not know what was going on.

It was like an out-of-body experience. I had been on the phone with him a few minutes prior. We were having another one of these intense conversations about what he wants for us in our future and how he's committed to me and we're going to get through all of this. And I got this text message like 30 seconds after I hung up with him. I immediately text him, who is

is this? Because I didn't have a name for her. I didn't know what her name was or anything. I had a few identifying factors and I'm rattling off. And he's like, I honestly don't know who that could be. Like, that doesn't even make sense. I don't know. And again, it was this is a witch hunt. What is going on here? He was confused. Right. But he knew exactly who this person was because I was able to throw out so many identifiers. This particular woman found out about me because she had seen something on Facebook that

where I had reposted something from the PD and I called him babe in the post. At the time she reached out to me was in July. She had seen that post back in June and broke things off with him then. And he was telling her then back in June that I was crazy.

that we were not together. He didn't know why I was doing that. He was telling this girl that I'm crazy, that he wasn't with me. And that was also why he was so adamant about me removing anything that I had posted of him. Because now other women, we were all starting to find out about each other. It was ruining things for him.

This is a real pivotal moment for me because I was running off adrenaline. When this woman reached out to me, I immediately went into this mode of I don't care anymore. Like I'm going to get to the bottom of this. Something is really going on here. Something was really, really wrong. Like what is going on here?

The woman who worked at a neighboring university, I found her on Facebook. I reached out to her. And within a few minutes, she reached out to me. She said, can you call me? All these women that he was involved with, many of them were within the university because he had access to so many of us that way. We were all professionals. We all have really great jobs. We're in HR or we're in director roles.

We're all very intelligent women. We have bachelor's degrees. This particular woman that I reached out to that worked at this other university, I think she was almost 10 years older than me. And I was 40 at the time. So she may not quite been 10 years, but she was close to it. And she started talking about the details of her relationship with him.

My head is spinning. It's literally the same stuff. And we're all overlapping at different times. Like, okay, well, he said he was here on this date. Was he with you or was he with so-and-so? And we're starting to compare messages, making a timeline of things. It was pretty intense. She also told me about how at the time that she was involved with him, that they had flown out to another state on the East Coast. He was applying for other jobs. Then he would take her.

He would apply for these other jobs and get these other PD departments at these other universities to offer him a higher rate of pay. And then he would come back to our university and say, well, this is what they want to give me. Are you going to up the ante? She helped him because her job was actually in recruiting and she helped him with interview questions. One of the other girls that he was involved with, she revealed that she did his slide deck for him for his presentation at the Southern Police Department.

He had previously asked another girl to go with him. And when that girl couldn't go, one of these other girls went with him. It was a circus. All these things felt like a flip book in my brain. All these things all at once. I didn't even know how to absorb it in that moment. This woman who I reached out to that was at this other university, she went on LinkedIn and reached out to the other woman that was in the northern part of the state. And the two of them spoke.

That other woman had been very much involved with him for at least a couple of years. She actually took a job down here at the campus where I worked at.

she was going to be starting that job a few weeks later. Uprooting her life and moving down here almost five hours away, down south, I would presume to be with him. One of the other women that was a police officer, y'all are still friends, right? Yes. We became very, very close. We remain close to this day. We talk almost daily. We actually took a family vacation together last year with our kids. People

People kind of look at us funny, like, how did that happen? But it was almost like we were kindred spirits. Then this horrible event connected us. It was like, unless you were in it, you couldn't possibly understand. There's no one else in the world that could possibly understand the depths that this man went to to deceive all of us. In the end,

I want to say there were actually 10 women that he had been in serious relationships over the course of many, many years. Sometimes things would fall off like how it was with me and him in the very beginning, right? It would kind of ebb and flow and he'd be distant for a week or so and then come back into the picture. There were 10 women.

I was the most recent one and my relationship with him at that point was only about a year in. Some of these other women had years and years and years with this man. One of the women in particular who I never had an opportunity to talk with, I reached out to her because I wanted her to know what was going on. I felt like she needed to know. We found out later that she has a tattoo of his name on her.

She had a brother that passed away several years back and they listed her name in the obituary. Jim's name was listed in the obituary as her partner. But at that time, he was already in a relationship with and living with this woman that he had been in that relationship with for a very long time, the one that was taking care of his daughter.

It's my understanding that that girl is still involved with him somehow. And I'm still not convinced that the photographs of the baby that he sent me, I think he had a baby with somebody, but I don't know who. I fully believe that's his baby. I'm so sorry. I can't even imagine how shocking it must have been to unpack all of this. One thing that jumps out at me right away is obviously heartbreak for all of these women who are deceived. And then who has the fucking time to...

Who? How? What? How do you have the time to every single one of us said the same thing? We all spoke to him on a regular basis. If you think back to the early part of our relationship in the fall of 2019, when I told you he was kind of being a little distant.

There was one specific time where he told me he had to go out of town for a work trip. I later discovered that he was actually in Nashville on a little getaway with one of the girls that he had been with for several years. There was another woman who worked at a university on the East Coast. He met her at a public safety PD type event. That's how he met her. She flew in to our state on two different occasions and

and spent a whole week with him at his apartment. One of the occasions was a little bit before I met him. And one of the other times that she came was after I had met him. She was there at his place for like a whole week. Both times that she came, he would be there with her for a few days and then something would come up, an emergency situation with his daughter or something emergency with work and he would have to leave.

He left this woman in his apartment a few days at a time when she would come in to visit him. That same woman, the first time that she flew in because he was receiving an award from the city where he was from, they were essentially giving him a key to the city, giving him kind of like a 40 under 40 type award. She was like, I'm going to go to the city.

She flew in for that and he enlisted the chief of police at the northern campus location to drive down two and a half hours south to pick up this woman at the airport and drive her back so she could attend that award ceremony with him. This is a very public event.

high profile person. And he's in a relationship with a woman at that point for nine or 10 years, whatever it is. He's been involved with all these other women within PD at different locations. It's absolutely bizarre. This is all happening during the pandemic. Shit is so serious. Yes.

That's why I specifically bring up the part about how I had this, what was supposed to be a minor little surgery take place. Then it turned into a big ordeal. I ended up getting very, very sick with this blood clot and I'm on this medication and I'm having to have blood transfusions. There's no COVID vaccine at this time. It

It just goes to show you the complete disregard for life this man had because my immune system in that moment was so suppressed. My hemoglobin level actually had fallen to under four, which is why I ended up having to be taken to an emergency room and having a blood transfusion done. What if he would have given me COVID in that time while I was already so sick and my immune system so suppressed? No regard for my safety, for my health.

these 10 women, all of us entangled, who has the time for that? But there were other women who he had been involved with at various points at different times. Not seriously, though, just kind of like hookup stuff. We track down more women and

In total, I was able to track down something like 20 women over the course of a year. Between 2019 and 2020, there were over 20, 10 of which there were serious long-term relationships that he was involved in.

The woman who was the officer, as I mentioned, you know, her and I, we grew really close and we were really each other's sounding board. We spent many, many nights on the phone crying to each other, asking one another, how did we get here? How did this happen? Disbelief. I didn't know how to make sense of any of it. I really felt lost. I felt like I didn't know who I was myself. I felt like I couldn't trust myself, my ability to make decisions. I questioned a lot in that moment.

I eventually came to a point where I felt like I needed to disclose to university officials what was going on. There are a lot of people that would criticize me and they would say I was just a bitter woman scorned, but that wasn't the case at all. I became sick over it. I became sick that a person who is held in such high regard was

My life had no value to him. And it wasn't just me. It was all these other women too that he had set out and preyed upon. He was a predator. He was a full-blown predator. And that's the way that I started looking at it.

I felt like I could go one of two ways. I could never talk about it, walk away from the situation and wash my hands of it. And in time, know that I would heal. He would keep his job and just go on about his life. Or I could inform university officials of what was going on and let them know, you have a real predator on your hands. He is a liability for the university. He has to be stopped.

He has access to a lot of people, not just within the university, but also, as we know, outside of the university because of his role. He had roped in some of those women too. I went back and forth over the course of a few weeks,

about whether or not I would write a letter outlining my experience, letting university officials know something has to be done. I didn't know at that time, does this mean he's going to lose his job? I honestly didn't care at that point. Someone needed to know. I did not want them to sweep it under the rug.

I've been asked several times, why did I feel compelled to be the one to write the letter when obviously there were several other women who were involved in the situation. Several of the women that I connected with had expressed to me that the reason that they hadn't turned him in and that they hadn't turned over information was because they actually were scared of him. One of the reasons that they were scared of him was because, as I previously mentioned, almost all of us were in these sort of

professional roles. Many of the women conveyed to me that Jim possessed photographs of them. And these were photographs that were shared while they were in what they thought was a relationship with him. They were intimate photos.

Some of them were nude photos. There were lots of different photos that had been shared. And a lot of the women had expressed that he had threatened at various points that if they were to come forward with anything, that he would basically try to ruin their lives and try to put that information out there. For me, it was also something that I never offered to him because of that.

I felt like that was the reason why I needed to be the one to write the letter. There was nothing that he could use against me. I also think that's why he feared me the most out of all the girls, because he felt like he had something on so many of the other women that were involved, especially on the women who openly spoke to me about their experiences with him. That

That's why I felt compelled to write the letter. But it was scary. These women were legitimately scared to turn him in because of his position of power and how he threatened to use photographs and other things against them. And it was really sad. After three weeks of back and forth deciding whether I was going to do this or not, I

I finally, one night, I sat down at my computer and I typed out a 10-page letter outlining my relationship with this man, everything that I had found out about him and how he used his position of power to connect himself to all these women, not just within our university, but within other universities across the state.

I copied multiple people on it because I knew if I just sent it to one person, it could be hush hush and swept under the rug. And I knew that the university didn't want those problems on their hands. I knew that they wouldn't want that.

I copied his boss on it, Jim's boss, and Jim's boss's boss, who was at the top of the food chain right up underneath the president of the university. I also copied another vice president who was over diversity equity. And I also copied a female on it who was an executive assistant for one of the executive vice presidents because I felt like a woman needed to be copied on that as well.

It was like a weight lifted off my shoulders. Like it's done. It's over. They know what it is. And it's up to them for them to decide what happens from here on out. And maybe he'll keep his job. But personally for me, I hope I never have to see him ever again.

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In the end, it was pretty disgusting how he tried to twist things. In my last conversation with him, it was through text message. He said, the last few days have been wicked and evil and concerning. You defamed me and my character with my coworkers, my family, my friends. And he said, you say that you are broken over this situation, but that can be fixed. I'm destroyed by your actions.

This was actually a couple of weeks before I even wrote the letter that he was saying these things to me. He was like, I never said anything bad about you to anyone. Then he also got really religious with me. Life is too short and God has a plan for all of us because of our actions. There are consequences no matter how innocent we think we are. He was like, yeah, I wish you the best. And I'm tired of not sleeping because of all this messy drama that continues to go on. Completely in denial,

His behavior, it was predatory. It was full of lies. It was manipulation and deception on a level that I never imagined possible. I flat out told the university officials in the letter that I wrote to them. I said, I'm not a physician, but I'm certain that Jim suffers from deep psychological issues and a narcissistic attitude.

sociopath on a level I just didn't even know existed. Never seen anything like it in my life. And you have to think too, I uncovered all of these different women over the course of a year, but he had been acting out with this behavior for several years before that.

Because he had been involved with all these other women for years before I came into the picture. So imagine how many other women there are that are out there that went through this with him. My best guess is because he worked for the university for 10 years. If I were a betting woman, I would lay down every dime I own that I am not the first person that has reported him.

This is not a big state that we live in. There is someone else out there who has reported him, but they probably didn't know the chain of command or they only sent it to one person and that one person swept it under the rug.

One of the girls that we tracked down, she refused to talk to us about it. She had been involved with him for something like five or six years almost. Based off timeline, we were able to determine that she became involved with him while she was a nursing student at that campus up north. And he was the chief of police at that time. Did you ever hear back from the school? Yes. The top executive that I copied on the letter responded immediately. They immediately turned it over to legal.

There was an investigation by the university. Ethics was called into it and they interviewed every single woman that I named in my letter that was affiliated within the university. They couldn't really do anything about those that were outside of the university, but I want to say there were eight of us within the university. Some of us were at the same campuses and we actually found more later. Even after I wrote the letter, there were more women that we found. Some that were also affiliated with the university.

They did interviews with all of us. It wasn't interviewing us to essentially ask us, like, are we okay? They never offered any resources for us. They really only interviewed us to protect themselves. I think the reason why they decided to go ahead and do the interview portion of it was because one of the women that was at the Northern State Regional Campus

She explicitly disclosed to me that he manipulated her on a regular basis. He manipulated her into believing that he was the reason that she got her job. He would come into her office and lock the door. She didn't call it rape, but she basically said he would force himself on her and manipulate her into having intercourse with him in the office while he was there on duty.

I think that was the turning point for the university that they needed to do an investigation. They knew they would probably have a lawsuit on their hands if they didn't approach it. I wrote the letter, I think it was October 11th. A few days after that, four or five days, they allowed him to resign from his position instead of firing him. Because if they would have fired him, he probably wouldn't have been hireable at another police department. They allowed him to resign and he got a severance pay.

This man, every moment he was in a crisis situation, he made up lies that he had to take his daughter to a mental health facility. But it was all lies. You're making that up to cover for yourself was pretty sickening. This all kind of came to a head. It was all done by the end of October of 2020. And it was a good start.

seven months of pretty intense therapy almost once a week. She really helped me work through a lot and she helped me realize that the chances that I would ever meet another man who would be deceptive on this level would probably be one in a million. Having that reassurance from her

That there may be some sneaky men out there, but you're probably never going to have to go through anything like this ever again. That helped me. I really think the relationship that formed with me and the other female officer, we pulled each other through it. It was not easy. And even today, we still talk extensively. I would say it was a whole year of every time we would talk, just...

Jim's name would come up in conversation. We were deeply impacted by it. I did find myself in a new relationship about seven months after all of this happened. And I wasn't really looking for a relationship at that time, but it just sort of happened. And I think the love and care and support of that individual really helped me in a lot of ways also to be able to move on and know that not everyone is that way. That was reassuring. It

it's still, you know, it affects you in ways that you never could imagine. Sometimes I see things with my current boyfriend, it's like red flag, but it's really not his fault. I have to check myself sometimes and remind myself that just because this evil, horrible predator did these things, not everyone else is like that. I

I can't be so quick to assume that somebody's got a little bag of tricks up their sleeve because that's not always the case. Yeah, I totally think that's part of the healing process. Learning how to trust people again and trust ourselves again and rebuilding that. I cannot thank you enough for sharing that.

I'd love to get your thoughts on this. There's this really amazing organization that I recently came across. It's called the Consent Awareness Network in Pennsylvania, and they are working to define consent in the law. Essentially, they're trying to codify or make a law that defines consent to protect people from malicious means of coercion.

like force, fear, fraud, exploitation of incapacity, all of these things that we hear about all the time on the podcast. I wonder if you could relate to their sentiments that you can't consent when someone is lying to you, when someone is misleading you, lying to you about the amount of other partners they have during a global pandemic. Yeah.

Yes, I think there should be laws in place for that. Honestly, I had a former colleague reach out to me after she found out what had happened. And she said it might be worth a couple hundred dollars to go and consult the

with an attorney and find out if there are any legal ramifications with this situation. She was like, obviously, if you knew that he was involved with all these other women and he was sexually active with all these other women, you never would have been involved with him. My health was completely at risk. There's no way I would have been involved with him like that if I had known about all

all these other women. Now, I did find out about a couple of things and I agreed to stay with him and try to work through that. And that was my decision to do so. But then after everything started to unravel and realizing, I mean, we're talking like 20 something women over the course of the whole year I was with him. And those are just the ones I was able to track down and confirm. That's not even the ones that I didn't find.

My health was put at risk as a result of this, but then also this entire situation, how it impacted me mentally. And the fact that the university, they did their little investigation, but they didn't even offer any free resources for us, for any of us. We were truly victims. We were

We were victimized. None of us knew about each other until we did. And we would not have engaged in this relationship with him had we known about each other.

It was fraud. It was absolutely fraud. Maybe there's a better word for it. I'm not really sure what that word is off the top of my head. But this man is, he is a predator. He completely abused his privileged position and utilized that outreach portion of his job to connect himself to all of us. It was sad.

sick. The emotional damage you hear of court cases where people end up having to pay fines and fees because of emotional distress and whatnot. This was pretty emotionally distressing for all of us.

I absolutely think that there should be laws in place and that people should get charged. And the fact that the university allowed him to resign without firing him, again, another slap in the face. This man should have been fired. And honestly, his oath of ethics or I don't know what all the technical terms, all of that should have went up in some sort of state review board on whether or not he should even be allowed to be a police officer. Your job is to protect and serve.

You took an oath to protect and serve the communities in which you live and work.

My reasons for sharing my story, it was never about being vindictive. It was really humanizing the situation. And it was really to put it out there that it's not our fault that people like this exist in the world. You can be an incredibly competent, bright, wonderful person who does good in the world and does good for others. And unfortunately, these type of people just exist.

I felt like I had done my homework in researching about this man and trying to know as much about him as I possibly could. I was trusting of the situation because we had a mutual friend in common. And I know that mutual friend would have never connected me to Jim if he had known what was going on. He never would have done that. It's really just...

opportunity to be able to humanize us as women and understand that because we may find ourselves in these deceiving situations, we're not failures. I think the biggest lesson I learned out of this was probably to trust my gut. I had to learn how to really trust myself. Like how red do the red flags have to be? Don't put up with it. If you get that feeling in your gut and you know something's wrong, you need to go with that.

because nine times out of 10, I can guarantee you're probably right. I think too, you know, if a woman reaches out to you and says, Hey, do you know so and so? How do you know so and so? That's a clear indication that something is very wrong. I would encourage women to band together instead of divide in situations like this. I earned a true friend in this process. I

I never thought that that would happen. I just hope that my story helps someone else out there listening, maybe going through a similar situation. My advice is get out. Get out before it gets too bad. Because these men are just relentless. Thank you so, so much. I really appreciate it. Thank you. Thank you for letting me be a part of this and share my story. It's an honor. Thank you so much for listening. Until next time, stay safe, friends.

Something Was Wrong is a Broken Cycle Media production, created and hosted by me, Tiffany Reese. If you'd like to support the show further, you can share episodes with your loved ones, leave a positive review, or follow Something Was Wrong on Instagram, at SomethingWasWrongPodcast. Our theme song was composed by Glad Rags. Check out their album, Wonder Under. Thank you so much. I take my time every day.

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

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

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