Introducing: Aaron | Betrayal Weekly

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“- Hello, it's Andrea and I've got an extra treat for you today.”

The first episode of the brand new season

of Betrayal Weekly from our friends at Glass Media, the team who brought you Betrayal and one of my favorite new series, LoveTrap. This team does such an excellent job reporting these stories in a captivating,

thorough and responsible way. I love sending listeners their way and I know many of you already love their shows. Betrayal Weekly features unique stories of people dealing with deception and broken trust.

I love this show and I know you will too if you don't already. And let me tell you they are starting off season three with a bang. We'll be right back with the first episode

of season three of Betrayal Weekly. Be sure to subscribe at the link in our show notes

or wherever you get your podcasts.

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“- Hey, everyone, just a note before we begin.”

This episode discusses suicidal ideation. Please take care when listening. The trail weekly is officially back. This is season three episode one. Each episode tells a unique story of deception

and broken trust. And each storyteller has found their own path forward. Whether you've been with us from the beginning or you're just tuning in, welcome. We are starting this season with Aaron's story.

- I'm at work, just plugging away and I get an email notification on my smartphone. I look down and it's from the FBI. Arey information about Sabrina Taylor. (upbeat music)

- I'm a drag gunning in this is betrayal. A show about the people we trust the most and the deception's, the change everything. - My name is Aaron Ward. I'm a software engineer working in video games.

- Aaron spent his whole career working on popular video games. - I worked on Halo Infinite. I worked on Minecraft. I've worked on a bunch of little projects for Nintendo. One of my minor claims to fame

is I had the number one played game on Nick.com in 2008, which was SpongeBob Squarepants Refrumble. - Aaron's a third generation computer nerd. He grew up in rural Ohio with his siblings and parents who worked in computer science.

- My parents were what I would call upper middle class, both white collar working professionals. - Aaron's parents made enough money for their families who live comfortably, but a lot of people in their community struggle

to make ends meet. His parents tried to give back wherever they could.

- My parents always volunteered a lot.

They were very generous and they also helped lead a lot of local fundraisers. - His parents taught him to be generous with his money and his time. - My parents were a lot about honesty

and a lot about trying to help people that needed it. - Aaron spent most of his free time playing video games or reading about them. - I was a really big Nintendo fan and I had a subscription to Nintendo power.

- Nintendo power was a magazine all about Nintendo games. It had comics, game reviews, and articles. Aaron read every issue. And when he was in fifth grade, he read an article that sparked his interest.

- They mentioned the opening of the DigiPen campus. - DigiPen is a college near Seattle that specializes in video game design. Even though Aaron was only in fifth grade,

with my life.

“- Getting into DigiPen became Aaron's life goal.”

- One of our freshman year activities

when I was in high school was writing three things that you wanted to try to accomplish in your life. My three things were working on a triple-A video game title, graduating from DigiPen,

and being a Jeopardy champion. - As of this recording, Aaron is not a Jeopardy champion. Yet, but he's accomplished his other two goals. His senior year in high school,

he was accepted into DigiPen. He left the farms and factories of rural Ohio and jumped headfirst into a world of video games. It was exciting. And Aaron learned a lot, but DigiPen had one big short coming.

- DigiPen has a 95 to five male to female ratio. So, DigiPen was four years of having almost no female socialization as someone who had mostly female friends

“in high school that was a big change for me.”

- Aaron noticed how being in a male dominated environment was impacting the people around him. And he didn't like what he saw. - I had seen a lot of my peers at DigiPen starting to go down that path of misogyny

because they weren't being around women in their day-to-day lives. So, the only women they were exposed to were actresses or people in the media. Aaron didn't want to go down that path. So, he read books and worked with his therapist

to learn what healthy relationships really look like. - One thing I learned is to try to not be transactional in relationships. It's not about I do this for you. You do this thing for me.

Relationships need to be about the broader scope of caring for each other and being there for each other when stuff is hard. - After graduating from college, Aaron and some friends moved into an apartment together.

“He was working as a video game programmer”

and loved the life he'd built. He felt ready to meet someone. It decided to give dating and Seattle a try. - I was not super outgoing. I was not a god to the bars and meet someone kind of person.

And that's when I turned to internet dating. At the time, 2007, the iPhone is barely a thing. There's no Tinder. So, what I'm left with, the option why is our Craigslist versionals.

- Craigslist versionals was a subsection of Craigslist for people who were looking for relationships, romantic connections or friendships. You could post an ad about yourself and what you were looking for.

- I had noticed there was a glut of men looking for women ads. So, I mostly focused on responding to the few women that had posted their ads up. - One day, while scrolling through Craigslist, Erin saw an ad that caught his attention.

- The headline of it was about how white guys are scared to date black women. And it intrigued me enough to release read it. In the ad, she talked about how she was a nerdy black woman who grew up in a largely white Midwestern area

and how the white men of the Seattle area

had never seemed to approach her or approach her

in very poor ways. Erin responded to the ad. Apologizing a behalf of the white nerdy men of Seattle. The author of the post thought his response was funny and wrote him back.

- I found out her name was Sabrina. We exchanged pictures over email and had a couple of emails back and forth before we decided to go out on a date to the local off-leash dog park.

- On the day of their date, Erin headed to the dog park feeling nervous but excited. - She showed up looking just like her pictures with her pet Dalmatian satchel who was very sweet and we ended up taking a nice long

hour plus walk where we both lived through our lives and the things we have in common. She grew up in Iowa, I grew up in Ohio, so we both grew up in the Midwest. - Erin immediately felt relaxed around Sabrina.

We also talked about all our different nerdy interests. Video games, anime, television shows. We were both big sailorman fans.

We had both played basically every Nintendo game

that had ever been made, Mario's, Zelda's, final fantasies. - After their first date, Erin couldn't wait to see Sabrina again. He invited her to hang out with him and his friends at a pub they liked on the east side of Seattle.

He was a little nervous. - What's Sabrina? Click with his friends, but as soon as she showed up,

- She got along with basically everybody.

“She is magnetic and draws a lot of people around her”

to listen to her talk about whatever she's talking about. She's definitely the kind of person that can make friends very easily and a crowd. - Erin loved hanging out with his friends with Sabrina by his side.

- The fact that she was so charismatic was extremely attractive to me. It really helped fill in some of my gaps of getting conversations started and breaking the ice socially with new people.

- After that night at the pub, Erin and Sabrina had their first kiss. - We had great physical chemistry as well as having a lot of things in common. So that really felt like it was kind of a meant to be situation.

- They started spending more and more time together. Soon, they were officially boyfriend and girlfriend. They had long conversations about their backgrounds and dreams for the future.

“- She was an intern for the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation”

and she was finishing up her double bachelor's in public health and women studies with her end goal being becoming a doctor. She had big plans for her life going forward. That was something that was attractive to me

in a possibly forever partner. - With Sabrina, the world felt big. - We went on a couple of little trips to the coast and being with her just really got me out of my shell and got me out of my apartment with my roommates

and out doing things. Even if it was just shopping or wandering around the pipeline's market. - And of course, they loved playing video games together. - She would have a game that she really liked the story of

but wasn't quite extra enough to beat. And so she'd get it started and I would do the later harder levels for her

“so we could both see the ending of the game.”

- They were on the same team. - Sabrina really made me feel seen and appreciated in a way that I hadn't been for a while.

She always made me feel like I was a priority in her life

and I tried to do the same. - They began to talk about their long-term goals. - I wanted the stereotypical white picket fence, wife, two and a half kids, et cetera. She was looking toward medical school.

So kids and getting married and stuff that was down the road a bit. And I was okay with that. At this point, we're still early to mid 20s so we've got some time.

Aaron and his friends moved into a new house together in Seattle's capital, Hill neighborhood. - A month after me and my roommates had moved into the house, Sabrina comes to me and says that her apartment is going condo. Obviously she can't afford to buy it

and she's not making a lot of money as an intern at the Gates Foundation and she's still trying to finish up that last like month or two of school.

She basically doesn't have anywhere to go.

- So Sabrina moved in with them. - I was excited to move in with my girlfriend, even if it was on a slightly faster schedule than I was planning on in my head. I was happy to have her with the everyday

waking up with me, going to bed with me, just be proud all the time. - In true Sabrina fashion, she made the transition easy. She brought a lot of laughter and fun to the house. - She got along really well with my roommates.

She integrated very quickly into the friend group. It was just a lot of fun to have everybody living together. We all played rock band together and we could kind of be loud and crazy 'cause we weren't sharing a wall with anybody.

- But living in the same house, also meant seeing each other's daily struggles of close. Sabrina had been dealing with chronic back pain. Erin saw just how much of a toll it was taking on her. - And it got bad enough that she had to call on it

for a couple of days for it. - So I encouraged her to go to the doctor and kind of get this checked out. - Sabrina agreed the day of her appointment arrived. And when Erin came home from work, he was anxious to hear how it went.

- I come home and she's seated on the couch, looking very defeated. So I sit down and I hold her hand and that's when she tells me her doctor had diagnosed her as having multiple sclerosis. (dramatic music)

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“When Erin and his girlfriends Sabrina moved in together,”

Erin realized how much her chronic back pain was impacting her day-to-day life. He encouraged her to go to the doctors, and she did. But she came back from her appointment. Erin could tell right away that something was wrong.

- "So I sit down and I hold her hand and I ask her, "What happened that day?" And that's when she tells me that her doctor had diagnosed her as having multiple sclerosis. - " Erin held her close as Sabrina began to cry."

- She started talking about all the things that she might not be able to do, and I tried to comfort her the best I could. - Erin wasn't shocked. His grandfather, Harlan, had died of multiple sclerosis.

So, Erin knew how difficult MS could be. - I heard the horror stories from my dad about how bad it was for Harlan. I had known a couple of friends that had MS and had their lives cut pretty short.

I had a thumb in the air guess of her life experience seeing somewhere in the 50s maybe. If she was already diagnosed before we had turned 30, I wish she's devastated. - "They're shared dreams for the future.

"A house, kids growing old together, "crumbled in front of his eyes." - "I didn't know what to do. "The size just all her and tell her. "I promised to help her through.

"Whatever came up. "I was going to do whatever it took." - "Even though that only been dating a year, " Erin was committed to staying by her side. "Whatever their future held."

- "I never had the thought of not committing to it.

"It didn't scare me off. "I was in for the long haul at this point. "I wanted to be there for her. "This is the reality now. "So let's figure it out.

"Let's do what we can." - Sabrina had an undergraduate degree in public health. So I kind of let her take the driver seat as far as learning about the disease and letting me know what she needed for me to assist.

- Sabrina's first symptom was back pain, but over time, she started experiencing other symptoms as well. - Generalized, soreness and limb pain and casual exercise from like walking the dog was starting to bother her.

So walking the dog became entirely by responsibility. Then standing at all became a challenge. - So I took over a larger share of the housework

and basically all the cooking.

It was a little exhausting quite frankly. It's kind of just lucky I was still in my late 20s and I kind of still had the energy to do all of that. Lot of caffeine, a lot of sugar. - Erin did everything he could to make Sabrina

as happy as possible during this incredibly challenging time. I was paying for a lot of makeup, a lot of clothes. She had very particular tastes.

she has champagne taste in a beer pocketbook.

- Sabrina was working at a non-profit, but her symptoms quickly began interfering with her job. - She's been calling out of work a couple times a month at this point. One day, she calls me up and says, "Well, I got fired."

- Erin was immediately defensive of Sabrina. - What the hell happened? They can't just fire you if you're sick. - Sabrina explained that she had called out of work because she was having a high pain day,

but then she had to run an errand that couldn't wait and while she was out, she ran into her boss. - Her boss had seen her out shopping on a day when she was supposedly in so much pain, she couldn't get out of bed.

Erin was frustrated.

“- If you're calling out you need to stay home.”

- He told her to just let him handle the Erin next time. - After she's fired from her job,

she's basically stuck at home.

She talks about going back to medical school. I'm very encouraging of this 'cause she needs to have a job for us to function as a unit. I don't make enough money to support us both forever. Sabrina still needed a few more college credits

before she could apply to medical school. So she enrolled in community college classes. Erin was now the sole provider for both of them. But Sabrina's spending habits didn't slow down. Erin was left scrambling to cover the costs.

- I end up getting payday loans and spending a good chunk of every payday going to each payday loan place to pay the loan off and then immediately loan the money again. - He watched his credit card bills stack up.

Sabrina was still spending money on luxury items like make up and close.

“While they were struggling to make ends meet,”

it was unsustainable and stressful. Erin confronted Sabrina about her spending habits a few times. - It usually broke down into a lot of tiers and promising to do better and saying I should be able to live comfortably.

- Sabrina's symptoms were progressing. She wanted to make the most of the years where her quality of life was still relatively good. She wanted to experience the world and fill her days with things that brought her joy.

Erin wanted that too. But the financial pressure on him was mounting. He was also paying for all of Sabrina's medications. - After losing her job with a nonprofit, Sabrina struggled to maintain insurance.

She would tell me that, oh, I've got my insurance set up. It's fine. You can go in and it won't cost that much. - But when Erin went to the pharmacy and they ran Sabrina's insurance,

it often didn't go through.

“- So it goes from 20, 30 bucks to 300, 400 bucks.”

That was $700 that I usually didn't have every month. But I have to have the medication today because we're out. Medication is not something you can live without. - So Erin did whatever had to be done

to make sure Sabrina got her medications on time. - It often came down to borrowing money from people or paying bills late or the internet gets shut off for a few days, having the rent check bounce. Just to make sure that the medications were filled

on the day they needed to be filled. - As the months went on, Sabrina's MS symptoms worsened. She began using a cane for walking assistance. It was harder for her to keep her balance and she began venting frequently.

Her soreness and limping became more severe. - Because of all the pain she was having a lot of trouble keeping her energy level up. Seeing her struggles with the illness was definitely a major challenge for me.

- I didn't want to see her in pain. I wanted to try and make her life as easy as possible because I knew that this was gonna be a pretty rough ride for her. - He offered a support her by coming to doctor's appointments

with her, but the scheduling never worked out.

In the middle of a very challenging time, there was a bright spot. Erin got his dream job. - I got a job as a software engineer at Nintendo. This is my dream company.

I got business cars that say Nintendo and my name. It's a huge deal to me. - Erin and Sabrina had moved out of the house with his friends and into an apartment of their own. On top of starting his new job,

Erin was spending hours each day taking care of Sabrina. It was difficult. - By this point, we're much less romantic partners

I did all the dishes, I did all the cooking.

“We don't really have that romantic relationship anymore.”

We're always broke, we're not going out on dates.

- Erin was caring for Sabrina financially, and handling their household tours because her MS symptoms made physical labor painful. But Sabrina's quality of life was still good enough for her to spend time with friends and have independence.

And so her personal spending never slowed. She was going out with friends and often spending money we didn't have. She's buying new clothes all the time. Spending 100 plus bucks a month at the Mac counter

and Sephora packages from different delivery companies, somehow magically getting paid for. And this is on top of all the medications. - Erin felt powerless to stop Sabrina spending. As her MS symptoms worsened,

so did her mental health. She began struggling with suicidal ideation. - At first, it was, well, if we can't refill my meds on time and I have to go without a couple days, maybe I should just kill myself

so I don't have to experience the pain

“for that week until a paycheck shows up.”

- It felt like all of Sabrina's safety and stability rested on Erin. He worked hard to cover all of her medication costs, but his paychecks weren't enough and he was going into debt to afford everything.

Then Sabrina began calling Erin while he was at work. Usually there was something specific that she needed. - Often it was medication-related, but it started to expand beyond that.

There was an occasion where suicide was threatened if I couldn't come up with $500 to buy a custom cosplay outfit for convention. Sabrina's calls began taking up more and more of his workday. She was in such a delicate mental state.

It felt like it was unsafe to leave her alone. - All of this basically just drove me into a level of depression and exhaustion that I became unrecognizable to a lot of friends and family.

I was always eating cheap garbage.

“There were a lot of times where I, you know,”

skipped lunch at work for a week or more because I didn't have the five bucks I needed to go get lunch. - The cost of Sabrina's MS medications was impossible to keep up with. Erin tried everything.

- I filled up several credit cards, trying to cover everything. I basically sold everything I owned. I had a video game collection that in today's dollars probably would be worth $25 to $30,000.

And I was selling it for pennies on the dollar because there was something we needed now. It was always I need a couple hundred bucks now. I needed by medication tomorrow. I need to make sure the rent check doesn't bounce again.

- Erin was living in a survival state.

Always trying to keep up with the most urgent need.

Then after Erin had been racking up medical debt for a year, Sabrina heard about a new treatment from her doctor. It was a glimmer of hope. - The experimental intervenous treatment for MS came up the first time.

The medication was called interferon. - It was the early 2000s and there weren't as many treatment options available for MS as there are today. For the first time in months,

Sabrina seemed optimistic. This treatment could be the key to getting their lives back on track. Instead of the weekly and monthly payments, this treatment lasted a few months.

Her doctors were hopeful that interferon could help manage all of her symptoms instead of needing multiple prescriptions. I had the possibility to majorly improve for quality of life.

- If I could pay $700 every couple months, then we wouldn't need to be buying all of these other medications. This experimental treatment would be able to cover everything. Or at least make a significant difference in her well-being,

possibly to the point where she might even be able to go back to work. It felt like a God said, the possibility that we could actually start moving forward is equal partner to again, instead of just me taking care of for all the time.

- The way they were living was unsustainable. So Erin was willing to take a risk. - I decided to move forward with it. I got some help from my parents to help start the initial treatments.

He kept offering to attend Sabrina's appointments with her. But it never worked out. - They were always scheduled in the middle of the morning or in the middle of the afternoon on a work day.

Oh, they had to cancel in reschedule.

“- Erin had put everything he had on the line”

to help Sabrina access this treatment. It was becoming more and more concerning to him

that he'd never spoken to a doctor about it directly.

Every medical update he heard came through Sabrina. - I had been talking to my dad about it and he told me that I should start asking for receipts since I could never make a two-in-a-pointment. - So Erin asked Sabrina to see a receipt

for one of her interferon treatments. And when he did something strange happened. - I could kind of see panic on her face for about a half a second. - But the panic quickly disappeared.

And she told him... "Sure, I'll get you on." That became a weaker more and then over a month into a... with time for the next treatment.

- Erin knew something wasn't right but he was starting to lose the will to argue with Sabrina.

“- I think at this point I had just been beaten down”

emotionally so badly that I kind of just stopped caring. - I didn't even have the strength to fight and argue about just basic information at this point. - Erin and Sabrina had been together for five years and it had been four years since she was diagnosed with MS.

Paying for her MS treatments for years had been a huge strain on Erin. He was racking up debt and his mental health was getting worse. But Erin knew that having MS was a much bigger nightmare. - You'd watch Sabrina suffer for years.

And the idea of doubting any part of her experience made Erin feel guilty. - Who lies about being this sick? - One day Sabrina approached Erin and told him that her doctors were recommending

she started a new version of Interferon. One that she'd only need every six to nine months. But there was a catch. It cost $8,000 for each treatment.

“She was planning to ask a mutual friend of theirs for help.”

Up until now, Erin had been paying for all the Interferon treatments himself. - Not having to panic about it at this point was such a priority that I agreed to go along with it. - Erin and Sabrina went to their friend's house

to ask for his financial support. - The friend brings up, okay, so you wanna borrow $15,000 and I had to hide the shock on my face 'cause suddenly the number had changed. I didn't want to mess it up by confronting Sabrina

about it in front of him. So, after we leave, I confront her in the car about what's this extra $7,000 for. And she tells me, well, I wanna start school up again. There's a couple of thousand bucks for that.

I need to replace my computer and you know, I can only take a top of the line MacBook. So, that's another three or four thousand dollars. - By this point, Erin did not trust Sabrina to handle money responsibly.

- The first thing I told her was,

I know how you are about spending money. If you're gonna do this, go do the medical treatment first. Don't go lie the MacBook, don't pay for school stuff. You go do the medical treatment first. She said, yes, yes, of course.

Of course, I'll do the medical treatment first. - But Erin didn't feel comfortable just taking Sabrina's word for it. He needed to see for himself how she was spending this money. - Her computer was broken.

So, she had been doing some overwork on my computer. That meant that she had saved her bank login on my computer. So, after she deposited the check, I started watching the balance of the account.

- Every day, he checked to see if she had made the $8,000 payment for it to fear on. And every day, I would open the bank account and see a couple hundred bucks getting nibbled away and then big purchase at the Mac store.

Went to the mall and spent $1,500 on clothes and makeup. - Erin watched and horror as the bank account slowly drained. There was still some part of him that expected her to pay for the treatment. For a while, there was still enough in the account, $8,000 to afford it.

- It's getting smaller and smaller. I'm not seeing the big expenditure for the treatment. And then one day, we've passed below the line of what the treatment costs. That was the whole reason we were supposed to borrow

this money in the first place.

And she's spending two hundred bucks a week on my little pony-fone game micro transactions. It gets below half of what she supposedly needed for this treatment. And then it finally gets below a thousand dollars.

- Erin had woken up before Sabrina to walk the dogs. - I went in the kitchen. I grabbed a bunch of black arch bags from under the sink. She was still in bed. - He woke her up, handed her the trash bags

and told her to start packing her things.

At first, she tried to deny that she had spent the money.

And that's when I revealed that no, I had actually been watching her back again. And that's when the water to end all water comes out of her mouth. She tells me that she's been working the day shift at a strip club, while I've been at work in Nintendo.

She doesn't have a receipt for it, but she did get the treatment. And that's when she spent her strip her money on. - Erin wasn't buying it.

“- Honestly, I think this was the last time I ever believed”

to word she said. She managed to get me to not throw her out with crocodile tears claiming she would get me receipts. - Erin knew he should walk away from the relationship, but the reality was a lot more complicated.

- And a emotionally abusive relationship is like a cult of two people. - The cult leader no longer had control over me, but I also didn't have the emotional and financial strength to leave at this point.

- Sabrina suggested opening their relationship and seeing other people. Erin agreed in the months that followed Sabrina was still adamant that she had paid for the interfere on treatment.

- I could never get documented proof of it.

No receipts, no information from the doctor, no nothing. - Erin was trying to find a way to leave the relationship,

“but he was worried about what would happen to Sabrina”

when he left. She had been dependent on him for six years now. - I still believed that she had MS, but that she just wasn't nearly as bad as what she led on because I had seen enough visual indicators

to convince me that she was at least impaired somehow. It felt like she was just taking advantage of my family's history with MS to try and squeeze as much money out of my family as possible. - Since Erin and Sabrina had opened their relationship,

he started seeing someone named Kia. He loved spending time with her. She was like a breath of fresh air. One night while Erin was out on a date with Kia, he got in the alarming text from Sabrina.

- Sabrina had told me that she was in the bathroom, had taken a whole bottle pills. - Sabrina had made a suicide attempt. Erin began to panic. He knew Sabrina often lied and exaggerated things,

but if there was any chance at all that this was true, he had to help her. - So, Kia and I rushed home, we parked outside. While Erin and Kia were still in the car, the front door of the house opened.

- And Sabrina walks out with two of her friends to go out to dinner. - She didn't see him in the car. She walked right past him. For Erin, that moment changed everything.

- This was purely a power play to try and keep my attention. (gentle music)

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was lying about the severity of her MS symptoms to get financial support from him and his friends. Erin hadn't found a way to leave the relationship. He was still worried about her physical and mental health. One night Sabrina texted him that she had attempted suicide

and locked herself in the bathroom. - So, Kian, I rushed home, parked outside, and while we're sitting out there, Sabrina walks out with two of her friends to go out to dinner. - Erin was scared that Sabrina's life was at risk,

But here she was dressed up to go out, laughing with her friends.

“- This was purely a power play to try and keep my attention.”

After Sabrina came home, I told her that I saw her leaving and she tried to tell me that they were taking her to the hospital. I told her I knew that was bullshit. - For the last five years of their relationship, Sabrina had been convincing Erin

that she was on the brink of collapse, mentally and physically, and that he was the only person who could keep her safe. But now, the extent of her deception was becoming clear to Erin. This wasn't just exaggeration and bad spending habits.

This was emotional and financial abuse. - The following weekend, I invited one of my good friends over to kind of steal my resolve, and I sat Sabrina down on the couch and the living room, and I told her, we are not in a relationship anymore.

I'm not paying for everything anymore. I'm done. - The next weekend, while Sabrina was out of the house, Erin's friends helped to move out.

“- I read it into a apartment across town”

where she didn't know where I lived. I think she knew it was coming. She knew she was busted for the fake suicide attempt and she had just resigned herself to the fact that the spigot that was Erin is turned off.

- Sabrina and Erin still had a lot of mutual friends after the breakup. Erin distanced himself from their social group. - She told a lot of people that I was physically abusive, financially abusive, that I was the one pissing away

all of our money. Erin was isolated from his community, and left to deal with the impact of years of financial and emotional abuse. - I was left with significant psychological trauma

that I, unfortunately, didn't take the time to properly process. - A few years passed.

“Erin was trying to rebuild a base of stability”

in his life and pay off the debt he mounted while taking care of Sabrina. One day, Erin was on Facebook. When he saw that one of his old friends had posted a GoFundMe for Sabrina.

- I clicked on a link and gave it a read. She was in Japan. Someone had cleaned out her accounts while she was in Japan. And she was stuck there with no return ticket

and nobody, I posted her reply to the GoFundMe saying that if you're going to start raising money for Sabrina, how about you start raising money to pay all the people back that she took money

from and never paid back?

- The organizer of the GoFundMe criticized him for calling Sabrina's character into question. His concern was shut down in the comments, but other people had started catching on to Sabrina's lies. The friends she was hanging out with in Japan.

They collected evidence. Then posted their side of the story to Facebook. Sabrina posted that she had spent the day at the bullet train station trying to figure out what the best time to jump in front of the train was.

In reality, she had spent that day at Disneyland Tokyo spending hundreds or thousands of dollars. And at the same time, pleading poverty on Facebook. - Finally, Sabrina was exposed. The truth was out there.

And there was no way for her to talk her way out of it. Over the next week, I probably fielded a dozen or more apologies. Sabrina's scam worked great until people actually started talking to each other.

And then it all fell apart. - Other people began to come forward sharing their own stories of Sabrina borrowing money

and never paying them back.

- It felt gratifying to know that I wasn't the only one and at the same time, I was racked with guilt that if I had figured some of this stuff out sooner, maybe a lot of these other people wouldn't have lost all this money. - One day, something unexpected happened.

- I'm at work at Nintendo, just plugging away and I get an email notification on my smartphone. I look down and it's from the FBI, sorry, information about Sabrina Taylor. - The FBI was investigating Sabrina for fraud.

- I gave the agent a call and we spent about an hour going through all of the different parts of my time with Sabrina. Her MS treatments and diagnosis. - The FBI kept airing up to date on Sabrina's case.

She appeared in court for the first time in November of 2021.

“After that, Erin was able to see the case,”

the FBI had built against Sabrina. - It wasn't until I saw some of the evidence

that I was 100% certain that she had never had MS.

They had forged documents using doctors' letterheads. They had statements from multiple doctors that they tested her multiple times because she never had MS, 100% of it was a lie. - Erin had been paying for drugs

like Gabba Patton under the impression that they were critical in managing Sabrina's MS symptoms. But Gabba Patton can be used to treat a variety of more mild conditions. After learning the truth about Sabrina's help,

Erin did some research and learned that she was taking around three times over the maximum recommended dose of Gabba Patton. - I don't know what she was using it for, but the drug is often used off-label for anxiety

and if misused, it can be addictive. Sabrina tailored to fraud in numerous victims out of over $600,000. She stole this money from strangers but from people who trusted her

who were concerned about her diagnosis and who were willing to make compromises in their own lives to help her afford treatment and care. On July 1, 2022, she pled guilty to one count of wire fraud for a scheme to defraud friends and acquaintances.

“Her health wasn't the only thing she fabricated.”

Sabrina's entire identity was a lie.

- She'd never worked for the Gates Foundation.

She'd never graduated from UW and she never even got close to medical school and has mostly lived her life off the generosity of others at this point. - Here was one question all of her victims

wanted an answer to. - Where was the money going? - It was the kind of thing that was impossible to understand unless you watched it up close. Like Erin Had, watching Sabrina's bank account

drain transaction by transaction. He knew where the money went. - The truth is, the money was just going to traveling and shopping and not having to work. She was trying to live the lifestyle she thought she deserved

“and didn't care how many people she had to”

bleach off of to make that lifestyle happen. - When Sabrina pled guilty, the U.S. Attorney's Office for the Western District of Washington released a statement about her crimes. We've had a voice actor read sections of it.

- Taylor engaged in a sustained and calculated course of conduct that preyed upon her victims' best emotions. Taylor used a substantial portion of the defrauded funds to pay for luxuries, such as almost $60,000 for multiple trips to Japan and Korea.

Nearly $38,000 for online purchases from Amazon and Etsy. More than $29,000 for clothing, and nearly $16,000 for makeup. Taylor met some of the people she defrauded online, using shared interests such as Japanese anime, comic books,

or video games to establish a relationship. - Sabrina sentencing hearing was six months later in January of 2023. It was the first time Erin had seen her in over five years. He delivered a statement at the hearing.

- I laid out a lot of the trauma that had come with everything that my dad had basically worked an extra year to past when he thought he was gonna retire to try and cover all of my debts, essentially. I told the judge that one of her favorite tactics

was to threaten the commit suicide to get people to do what she wanted when she wanted it done. And I think, because of what I said, the judge rescinded her bail and sent her into confinement immediately, because he did not want her

to try to repeat that pattern. - Sabrina was sentenced to 27 months in prison. Assistant United States Attorney Joe Silvio released a sentencing memo. We've had a voice actor read part of it.

- Taylor carried out an extensive fraud scheme using deceit and deception that preyed upon human kinds better angels. Several of Taylor's victims suffered substantial financial hardship.

Some likely will never be made whole financially.

Equally is important, Taylor exploited

And many of Taylor's victims will continue to pay

“an emotional toll for many years to come.”

- I was definitely a lot less anxious during the time that I knew she was in prison. She has been returned to the Seattle area. I know she's still around here. Luckily I haven't run into her,

but that's definitely something that's on the back of my mind. - Even though Sabrina isn't in Aaron's life anymore, her financial abuse will affect him for a long time. It's hard to know the exact number

that Aaron spent on Sabrina, but he estimates it was at least $150,000.

His debts have virally impacted his credit

and he'll be paying it off for years to come. - The total number I end of online my mom was just short of $100,000.

“I've been paying back what I could in the years since”

and there is no way I'll be able to pay my mom back before she dies. I'm one of the lucky ones. I had someone that I could borrow that kind of money off of to get everything straightened out.

I very easily could have had to declare bankruptcy over this. - Sabrina was ordered to pay some of her victims for the restitution, but Aaron's name was not included in the list because of statute of limitations.

Aaron, this isn't a story about how we should entrust others.

- She is the outlier. For every Sabrina that's out there, there are 10,000 people who actually need the help. - To Aaron, this is a story about how we should trust ourselves. - If you feel like you're being taken advantage of

or if you feel like you're doing everything for this other person and struggling to keep your head above water, start asking for proof. That was really what Enravelled Sabrina's entire con was somebody asked for the receipts.

- The experience has given Aaron a new perspective on financial and emotional abuse. - This kind of thing happens to a lot more people than anyone realizes.

“And it's not something you should hold against anybody”

when it happens to them. This same kind of thing can happen to anybody under the right circumstances. I am a lot slower to trust people than I used to be, but it hasn't kept me from trusting people at all.

- We end every weekly episode with the same question. Why do you wanna share your story? These things do happen to men. And you're not less of a man for this having happened to you. And I really think that we need to be just as honest

as the women that are come for it with stories like these. If this story helps one person get out or helps their friend get out of a toxic abusive relationship, then this was all worth it. - On the next episode of "Betrial Weekly."

- How in the world could someone stoop that low? And go to that extreme where you two cowardly just tell me the truth? (upbeat music) - If you'd like to share your story on "Betrial,

please email [email protected]." That is "[email protected]." Please note that we are not a mental health organization. If you are in crisis or currently experiencing domestic violence, we encourage you to seek local help or dial 911.

Please contact organizations that offer immediate support. In our show notes, we've included a list of U.S. based resources. - You can follow us on Instagram @BetrialPod or find me @itsonjrayagunning. To access our newsletter and additional content

and to connect with the Betrial community, join our [email protected]. We're grateful for your support. One way to show support is by subscribing to our show on Apple Podcasts.

Don't forget to rate and review Betrial. Five star reviews go a long way. Big thank you to all of our listeners. Betrial is a production of glass podcasts, a division of glass entertainment group

in partnership with iHeartPodcasts. The show is executive produced by Nancy Glass in Jennifer Fasin,

written and produced by Olivia Hewitt,

our story editor is Monique LeBord.

Also produced by Ben Fetterman,

our associate producer is Leah Jablow,

“production management by Kristen Melchieri,”

booking support by Curry Richmond,

voice acting by Todd Gans and Carrie Hartman, our iHeart team is Ali Perry, Intersecate Crime Check, audio editing by Tanner Robbins

“with additional editing and mixing by Matto Bechio.”

Betrial's theme composed by Oliver Baines, music library provided by my music. And for more podcasts from iHeart,

“visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcasts,”

wherever you get your podcasts.