Master Manipulator and Commander: Trust Your Gut

Every case file, interview, and archive tells a piece of the truth. I'm Kylie Lo and on my podcast, Dark Down East, original reporting is at the heart of every case I cover. I don't just retail crime stories, I investigate them. I'm speaking with families, searching court records, and piecing together the facts that have been overlooked and forgotten with time. The result? True crime storytelling that digs as deeply into a case as you do. You can listen to Dark Down East wherever you get your podcasts. Oh, the beginning. So this is going back a long time already. This is going back to 2000 and I want to say eight. Maybe right around the time you moved to Brooklyn. You're hearing a conversation I had recently with Abby Ellen. I am a writer and journalist and podcast person and I was duped. Abby's told a story you're about to hear before. It kills at dinner parties and became the spine of a book she wrote that was published in 2019. The most interesting book on the subject that's out there, it's called Duped, Double Lives, False Identities, and The Con Men. I almost married and it was all about this wacko who turned out to be a pathological liar and went to jail. It's classic chameleon, a con, a double life, and a person left trying to make sense of it all. And this one feels particularly familiar. If you've been listening to this show, the signs will be easy to spot from the start. And like so many of these stories, the entry point is innocent, charming, romantic. I was doing an article for The New York Times, for whom I write and it was about wellness diets and juice cleanses. And I needed to find a doctor who could verify whether there was any validity to that, you know, any of these hot water and lemon juice, cayenne pepper bullshit things. Let's be clear, cayenne pepper and lemon water probably do have health benefits, but they don't cure cancer or take a decade off your face. Still, those were the kinds of wellness miracles being sold in the late 2000s. So I found the guy in California and he was a doctor and he gave me a really funny quote which basically was something to the effect of their bullshit and they amount to bullshit and everything's going to go right through you. He was a doctor with a fancy practice in a fancy town, Beverly Hills. It's ironic when you think about it now because he was full of shit. She called back to check a few details before it was due to come out and this doctor had news. He said I left my private practice in Beverly Hills and I am now in the military. He had rejoined the Navy and he was a Navy doc and he said I'm opening up a hospital for kids with cancer in a rack at Afghanistan. And I said fabulous, keep me posted. That's a story I'd like to write, you know. So they stayed intermittently in touch. Every so often he would drop me these emails, you know, just telling me what was going on in his world. I didn't understand what he was saying really. But okay, we were in touch. Some time passed and meanwhile Abby was feeling restless on a personal level. Maybe journalism wasn't what she wanted to do with the rest of her life. At the very least she needed a change. So she enrolled in a part-time degree program to study international relations. So I went to go get what I call my second useless masters and I went to Johns Hopkins. I was on my way there when he sort of resurfaced. Abby and this intriguing doctor found themselves talking more and more. We just we liked each other and we finally got together in person. He said I want to take you somewhere really celebratory. I'm going to be a New York City for business. I have to speak to the UN. I said okay. So he shows up and we go to the four seasons and he's wearing his whole little Navy uniform. He always wore his little outfit. That would be his dress whites. The most formal version of the US Navy uniform. Typically worn for official ceremonies. Who was Lieutenant Commander? What you have to understand is I am a nice Jewish girl from Brooklyn, Massachusetts. I don't know from the military. I don't know anything about this. So I see a guy in a uniform and I'm like cool. That's great. I don't know Lieutenant Commander commanders. I don't understand any of this. This is not my world. The farther south you go, the more normal that becomes. But it wasn't like that in Boston. It's really not like that in New York. For legal reasons and to protect others, we're not using this Lieutenant Commander's real name and neither does Abby. I call him the commander. Over that dinner and in the weeks to follow, Abby got to know this mysterious and charming military doctor a lot better. He was smart, accomplished. Maybe a little too accomplished. I knew that all he wanted in his life was to be a brain surgeon, but he didn't cut it, so to speak. So he ended up just being in general, like an internist and he had a degree in sociology, a master's in sociology and I think a PhD and he also had an MD. So he was not a moron. He had been divorced and he had two kids, but they were with the mother in California, but he saw them all the time. Up to this point, the commander had been living in Jacksonville, Florida, where he worked at the Naval Hospital. But he was asked to relocate for his work setting up that program in Iraq and Afghanistan. He was moving to Washington, D.C. to work at the Pentagon. The Pentagon. The Pentagon. Oh my God, that's like, wow, the Pentagon. So I'm thinking is really important. And what's not to like? He's a Jewish doctor who's like, you know, and he was funny and he was nice and he was charming and he was a little nerdy, you know, he was a little nerdy too, which was kind of interesting, but he seemed just decent. Decent and now would only be an hour's drive from where Abby was studying at Johns Hopkins in Baltimore. It would be an exaggeration to suggest that Abby was head over heels for this man, but he seemed kind, smart. And at 17 years or senior, apparently had his shit together. I mean, I think I was 41 at that point and I had been single for a long time, kind of happily, but I also thought, you know, maybe I should have kids, maybe I should move forward in my life. The option is I end up moving to Washington. He's in Washington. He's living with his brother and sister-in-law and there are two kids in Georgetown and we decide we're going to get a house together. Abby's relationship with the commander didn't last long, not even a year, but in that short time, she would discover a lot more about this man, including things she definitely wished she'd known before she reorganized her life around him. I'm Josh Dean and this is Camillean, the show about con artists and the webs of deception they weave. This week, a relationship that unravels fast, leaving a woman wondering what she missed and why it's so easy to fall for a con artist hiding in plain sight. Some cases fade from headlines. Some never made it there to begin with. I'm Ashley Flowers and on my podcast The Deck, I tell you the stories of cold cases featured on playing cards distributed in prisons, designed to spark new leads and bring long overdue justice because these stories deserve to be heard and the loved ones of these victims still deserve answers. Are you ready to be dealt in? Listen to The Deck Now, wherever you get your podcasts. You're listening to Camillean the weekly. Relationships with people who turn out to be scam artists, in fact, many relationships that end in a toxic dynamic generally often begin intensely and move quickly. Oxytocin is coursing through your blood. You're falling in love and looking to the future. And your new favorite person is doing everything possible to convince you you've struck gold. You're feeling very lucky, hopeful. And why not? Because sometimes it really does work out. My parents met in the cat skills after three months they were married. Sixty whatever years later, they're still together. You know, for better, for worse, there was maybe a lot of worse in there, but you know, they're still together at 88 and 85 years old. So people do that. So it happens. And I would say to him, this is rushed and he would say, well, you know, when you know, you know, and we're old and, you know, what's there to wait for? Yeah. So, okay, fine. I met his kid who was 12. I met his younger kid who was six at the time. I knew his brother, his whole family, his parents were both dead, but I knew his ant like who was in our 80s. I knew everybody. I knew his friends and everybody thought he was this macher. Everybody thought he was this big deal. But I'll check out. And so Abby took the plunge. He proposes to me. And my joke is that I've had larger pimples. Then the engagement ring, she means. And the reason that's significant is because he had made a big deal about getting me a ring. He had made a big deal about, I'm going into beers and I'm like talking to the people. And I'm, you know, I found a ring, but I can't afford it. It's like this $35,000 ring. And I said, you know, I don't need a $35,000 ring. $10,000 is fine. You know, and he ended up giving me something that looked like it maybe came out of a gumball machine. It was really, really kind of lame. So it wasn't about it being lame. It was about the build up to something that he was just over promised that he didn't have to make. When things are moving quickly, it can be easy to overlook the warning signs. Even if you sent something could be off, you don't want to risk being wrong and ruining a good thing. I guess the way to have a relationship is to not, you know, go into interrogation mode every time somebody says something to you. And in this relationship, there were a lot of things that felt just a little bit off. Abby's heart was open, but her gut, it was trying to tell her something almost from the very start. He said, I'm going to go back to Jacksonville and pick up my stuff that I had in storage there and move it back to Washington. I said, cool, let's go. We'll have a road trip. Now, I'm going to send some kids to do that. I'm too old. I'm not going to do that. You know, I'm going to send some people to pack up my belongings. And I thought that was weird. I thought he's hiding something. I don't know what, but he's hiding something. Niggling reservations aside, they did move in together into the Watergate apartment complex in DC. Yes, that Watergate. Where in 1972, security guard Frank Will's discovered that the locks on the Democratic Party headquarters had been tampered with, leading to the arrest of five operatives connected to Richard Nixon's Relection Committee, and ultimately bringing down his presidency. What a location for this story to be set. Not that this was remotely on Abby's mind. It's a nice complex and it worked well for them. It was close to the commander's work, just across the Potomac, and pretty close to Abby's school, plus that an hour's drive north and east. Best of all, the Navy was paying for it. So the couple settled in and got into the flow of their new life together, which didn't get off to the greatest of starts. He's kind of a drag. He has nightmares, screaming nightmares in the middle of the night. He sleeps with the lights on. He sleeps with the food network blaring because he had been held hostage in China and beaten mercilessly. And so he still had nightmares about that. So he needed to sleep with the lights on. And I thought this can't be true, but then he would scream in the middle of the night. And I thought, you know, nobody's screaming bloody murder for no reason. Like something must have happened. I didn't know what was up. I even talked to his brother about this and the brother would say, Abby, you gotta go easy on him. You know, he's very important. They all believe that he was a, like I like to say, Jason Borenstein. As in Jason born of the born books and films, dating a born or a born steam is exciting. But it's also problematic because they're always flying off on some spontaneous adventure that you can't ask about. You know, he'll go off on these kind of secret missions. I can't talk to you about them because, you know, we need a secure line. That kind of thing. I don't know. Okay. Sometimes he would say, well, I'm gonna take you here. We're gonna do this or we're gonna do that. And then that would never materialize. And he was always cancelling plans, you know, again, but I was a freelance writer. I can make my own schedule for the most part. I realize there are people who work for the military and the Pentagon and, you know, real jobs that actually have to adhere to a schedule. So I thought, okay, fine. I've got to say the military pilots, cabin crew, not the first time we've talked about people from these worlds on chameleon. It's the perfect job for someone who is leading a double life. You always have an excuse to be somewhere else. And Abby was starting to question things. Then the problem with that, you can't like call up CIA human resources and just say, hey, do you have this guy working for you? So I couldn't verify anything and I wanted to. I really wanted to because a lot of times things wouldn't make sense. And after that point, I thought I can't maybe interrogate him directly because that's not good, but I can do research. I'm suspicious. I'm at Johns Hopkins. I'm asking my professors whether it's possible to have medals full of super secret operations that don't officially exist. And they say, yes, it is. It's possible. And I should say here, the commander was genuinely in the military. He did work at the Pentagon. But these medals were fishy. He had a medals for operations that didn't officially exist. For example, he had met his ex-wife when he rescued her when she was held hostage in Iran. And I said, oh, when was that? He said, it was a secret mission. You wouldn't have heard about it. Must have been extremely secret because no American hostage had been rescued from Iran in decades. And the questionable story just kept coming. He had told me, and in fact, this is true, that he had been the medical doctor at Guantanamo at one point. He mentioned one very high profile patient in particular. A VIP prisoner named Osama bin Laden. Right. The Osama bin Laden who had been the world's most wanted man since 2001, who was never captured or held by US forces, who was in hiding until 2011 when a Navy SEAL team killed him in Pakistan. It's like, what the fucking fuck? I said, that is not possible. He said, yeah, it is. And he listed all these things that was wrong with the guy medically. And he said, you know, people don't know about this. Of course, it's super secret. And I said, well, two things. That's a stupid thing to tell a journalist. And B, you know, the president, it was Bush at the time, would not want that to be kept secret because everybody wanted bin Laden. He said the president doesn't know. And I'm thinking myself, this guy's either nuts or there's something going on that I don't know about. And my mother, I told her that. And she said, Abby, there's something wrong with this dude. She said, first of all, Jewish mother, first of all, what doctor would quit a job in Beverly Hills in private practice? And you know, secondly, like that's not right. No, they don't have bin Laden. And yet, Abby, at this point, just looked past it. And my madly in love, no. But I loved him, which is almost worse. Because I thought he, as I said, I thought he was decent. I thought he was kind. I thought he wasn't a liar. I thought he was like really an outstanding citizen who just wanted to do good in the world. Still, the science kept revealing themselves. We went out to lunch with Howard Buffett, who was Warren Buffett's grandson, who was lovely. And one afternoon, before we went out, the commander said to me, you know, Abby, don't tell him this because we're with his girlfriend. She won't want to know this, but I actually saved his life because we were on the metro in Washington, D.C. and somebody tried to kidnap Howard. And luckily, I was there to judo chop the assailant and I saved Howard's life. And I never asked Howard about that because I never had a chance along with him. But I remember thinking, I said, well, there's got to be video footage of that. You know, he had a 20-minute meeting with Obama in the White House. And he brought back a signed baseball that Obama had signed for his son. He told Obama about me and Obama really wanted to meet me. I'm sure at Barack Obama, there was no one else he wanted to meet but Abby on. There were all of these things that didn't make sense. One afternoon, I had called these people to come clean their house in the water gate and they came over and he was livid. Lived that I invited these people. They were Asian women who came over to clean it. And he came home from work early. And he said, you know, they're really triggering me because they're Asian and they remind me of the people who were keeping me hostage, right? But what I think it was that he had things hidden under the bed that he didn't want them to find. At this point, they've been together for a year. Christmas, 2010. I think, maybe it's 29, it's 2010. I overhear him and his son talking and the son said, hey, what's that on Abby's finger? Is that from you? And he said, yes. And that was it. And I remember thinking, that's weird. He knew we were engaged. So what the fuck? At that point, I was really fed up and he would always say to me, when I would confront him about broken promises or broken whatever plans, he would say, I'll do better. I'll do better next time like he was an oversized five year old. I was sick of hearing that. I mean, it just felt like he was playing me and I didn't like it. Abby couldn't ignore her gut anymore. Things were coming to a head. And the final straw came unexpectedly shortly after this. A couple of an ounce of dinner with Abby's parents to a fancy restaurant in DC. A recommendation from the commander who raved that they just had to try this one particular vegetable. He raved about the Brussels press. They were the best Brussels press known to man. And at the end of the meal, we got outside and he said, that was like the worst meal I've ever had. And I said, well, why did you lie? And he said, well, I wanted your parents to feel good. And I said, they didn't cook the food. They didn't care if the Brussels press were good or bad. You didn't have to say anything unsolicited. And I thought if he could lie so easily, so fluidly, so beautifully about something, he could lie about anything. And I was like, I am out. Abby still had another year to go at college and was also still working as a journalist, but she didn't have much cash lying around. She was done with this guy, but decided she was going to stay in the apartment until she could find a new place to live. And he comes to me one day and he says, you know, Abby, the military needs the apartment back. They're moving me around. I don't know where I'm going to be, but they're putting me in a different location. They're relocating me so we got to get everything out. So I'll help you send your stuff home. I said, OK. Abby moved in with her parents in New York. She was busy with school and didn't see the commander anymore. That chapter of her life was over, thank God. And she escaped with a few good stories. Only she does end up running into the commander again. And would soon learn a whole new set of truths. Revelations that would turn a collection of weird anecdotes about her ex into one really great story. That's after the break. Some cases fade from headlines. Some never made it there to begin with. I'm Ashley Flowers and on my podcast The Deck, I tell you the stories of cold cases featured on playing cards distributed in prisons designed to spark new leads and bring long overdue justice. Because these stories deserve to be heard and the loved ones of these victims still deserve answers. Are you ready to be dealt in? Listen to The Deck now wherever you get your podcasts. Welcome back to Camille Ilyan. One day completely by chance, Abby Allen is driving through her old neighborhood in Washington. As she passes her old apartment in the water gate, she notices the lights are on, which was strange, given that the commander, her ex boyfriend had told her he moved back to Florida. Nancy drew kicks into action. Call him. I said, what's going on? I saw the light on. He said, I know it was a comedy of errors. He said, I put everything in storage and I moved everything out. And then the Navy said, you know what? We need you to stay. This she told him was actually good because she left some cookbooks behind. Maybe she could swing by and pick them up. Which is true, but I don't cook. So I mean, like I didn't need them. I wanted to snoop around. Go up to the apartment. Everything is exactly as it was when I left. Everything from his baseball glove and on the shelf to my cookbooks to a sliver of soap in the soap dish. And I looked at him and I said, you never moved out. And he looked at me. He said, oh yes, I did. And I thought you are nuts. You are nuts. A few days later Abbie is sitting at home in New York when she gets a call. The guy on the phone says his name is Dan Ryan from the NCIS. That's Naval Criminal Investigative Service. If you don't watch the TV show or it's many spin-offs, Dan Ryan had some questions and some answers. There's a doctor who's writing prescriptions for drugs. And he's using all these people's names, including yours. Do you know this doctor and do your prescription for Vygetin? And I said, well, I know this doctor. And no, I prefer valium. So no, I don't. In the course of giving a statement, Abbie learns the whole truth. Her partner of a year, this allegedly decorated hero, Navy Doctor, had been falsifying records to prescribe himself narcotics. He had been using the name of people he worked with at the Pentagon. He'd been using the name of his dead mother. He'd been using family members to be using all these people's names to get drugs. The commander was eventually caught with the help of the people he had scammed, including a woman he dated after Abbie, who wore a wire. Now that Abbie had this new and extraordinary piece of information, she instantly saw her relationship and the commander in a whole new light. Remember when I said that he didn't want people in the house because they were going to look under the bed? I suspect he had been keeping the drugs there in the laundry bag. He remember I also said that he would fall asleep at night. He was on drugs. Remember I talked about the Navy's ill spray? I think he was crushing up the drugs, snorting him. The commander used other people's names to write prescriptions for drugs, which he was using. There's no evidence that he was also selling, but Abbie has her suspicions. Still, the fake prescriptions alone were enough to land the commander a jail sentence. I call my mother and I'm like, guess what? And she said she's like, I knew there was something wrong with him. She was really upset again because she loved him as a Jewish doctor. For Abbie, there was still a lot that didn't make sense. And if he could keep this from her for months, what else was he hiding? What was his story? I kicked into journalist mode and I began investigating. My mother would always say to me, you know, I wish you could call his ex-wife, but I guess you can't. Well, now I could. First port of call for investigator Abbie was the commander's old office in Beverly Hills. And we're like, we can't talk to you on the record, but unofficially he was completely erratic. And there was something like really off with him and we just didn't trust him. It quickly became clear she wasn't the only one who'd been hoodwinked. And then I called his ex-wife and she was like, yeah, I was never held hostage in a ram because I've never been in a ram. And I met him in medical school and he was married to another woman at the time. So then I called her the ex-ex-wife and she was like, yeah, you know, I was supported him and we were going to have a kid and then he met this other woman and you know. And then I called the woman he was living with in Jacksonville. Remember he didn't want us to pick up his belongings because he was living with another woman to whom he was engaged. He had proposed to her. She said yes. And then he said, I'm going to go on a super secret mission. And the super secret mission was Operation Abbie. He had no idea what happened to him until I called. He just disappeared. He evaporated. Poof. He left the Navy hospital, the Naval Hospital in Jacksonville. He left her and then he went up north and she never found out eventually and he left his belongings with her. And eventually she just gave him away to like a homeless shelter. If you want to hear this story from the woman herself, she spoke to Abbie on a podcast she made back in 2021. It's called Imposters, the commander. And then it, Abbie starts to pull together the various threads of the commander's complicated facade of a life, dissecting what happened to her in a whole cast of other partners and family members. People were devastated because they trusted him and they believed in him. And just like I did, they thought he was a really good decent guy. And the mother had to go and tell the son who was at boarding school that dad is not a hero. And then he said, Dad's like a pathological liar and I'm sorry. But like everything he's been feeding you all these years is just bullshit. And the kid was devastated. So I mean, all these people were just really traumatized by this. Abbie and all these other people were in the same boat. And it was a disorienting place to be. I think the technical psychological term is mind fucked. I was a mess because I was a gas lit. I couldn't trust my own instincts. There was one day when I had sent a birthday card to my friend's kid and I had asked him to mail it. This is when we were living at the water grade. And he said he did. And the kid never got the letter. And I was like, he's messing with me. He's messing with me. I would call my friend up. Did he get it? Did he get it? And eventually it came back to us. I had forgotten to put a stamp on it. Right? Of course. That's on me. But it was like, I just thought there was something that couldn't trust these little, nothing. I couldn't trust anything. I couldn't trust my own sense of self. And I couldn't trust my own perceptions. This is just a taste of what it can feel like to be close to someone who can't stop lying to you. You start to question your own reality. And that doesn't go away when the truth comes out. You're stuck asking yourself why you didn't work it out sooner. And more than that, why did you stay? I knew something had been off and I couldn't verify it. And then when I could verify it, I got out. But I thought I stuck around too long. I mean, there were all these questions about who I was, you know, that were really terrible. Abby's first thought was, if not revenge, then at least a confrontation with this man. There was a natural instinct for some sort of accountability. I'm thinking, you know, the way to handle it is for me and the woman from Jacksonville to kind of ambush him. You know, I'll call him up and I'll say, hey, let's get together, you know, and then she'll show up and we'll be like, surprise. And then I think to myself, why? What's the point? What's he going to say? What's he going to say to us? He's going to lie. He's absolutely going to spend the stories. He's not going to give us a reason. He's not going to tell us what was up to. He's going to double down because that's just like he did when I went back to the apartment. He's going to say, I moved out. The problem is people who are pathological liars, as seems to be the case here, they don't stop. They can't. And they very often charm, which is exactly what happened at the commander's trial. He charmed the judge. He charmed the judge and he ended up getting a very light sentence because he said, you know, I was very distraught by my, what I saw in Iraq and Afghanistan and I couldn't help but turn to drugs to help me ease my pain and she bought all that nonsense. Your real hero was her kind of attitude. The commander was discharged from the Navy at least and gave up his medical license voluntarily. However, you can call yourself an MD forever. It's like Harpies, you know, it just stays with you. So he uses his name and he writes papers and he is teaching it some medical school in the Caribbean, I think, and it's his name, MD. Abby has come to a conclusion. The commander isn't going to change. There will be no reckoning and she won't get an apology. He won't stop lying, not because he's unwilling, but because she suspects he can't. Even if the commander could see the damage he's done, she doubts he truly understand it. Think he's a psychopath or has NPD, narcissistic personality disorder. This is what I said in my statement to the Navy was that the fact that he was doing drugs was just something else that was wrong with him. But he's an unreliable narrator no matter what. And he's using this as an excuse. He had a drug problem. I hit a drug problem, but he's also insane. Something Abby noticed was that the lying wasn't really about the thrill of getting away with it. She was always aware of a deep-seated insecurity and a need to be special to somehow be more than what he was. Like I said, he always wanted to be a brain surgeon and he couldn't do it. And he always felt less than. And he was always looking to build himself up. Like when he told me that he was on an airplane and sitting in the back row and Hillary Clinton was in the front row and she requested that he be moved up to sit next to her. Like saving Howard Buffett, all this random stuff. And the sad thing is he didn't need to do any of this stuff. Like he was a good doctor. He was really smart. He was trying to do good work. I would see him or hear him on the phone. I think with real people, maybe it wasn't, trying to raise money for this hospital. Like he was really trying. I talked to people he worked with at the Pentagon. Like they loved him. So he didn't need to. So what is it? That's psychopath. That's people who make things up just because they can. But still, whatever his intentions, the commander did lie. And then the question is this, is this a diagnosis unto itself or is it a symptom of something else? And right now in the DSM-5, it's a symptom of something else. The DSM-5 is the official US psychiatric manual. It's been updated from time to time since it was launched in 1952. Abby thinks the commander fits somewhere under an umbrella of personality disorders. Narcissistic, anti-social, borderline, histrionic. Psychopathy and sociopathy are closely linked. But these are murky, overlapping categories. A collection of symptoms and behaviors clustered together. Anyway, identifying behaviors really only gets you so far. A bigger question is the why. There's little understanding or agreement about why people end up with these conditions. Are they the result of past trauma? Or are some people just born like this? Why are differently? I asked his ex-wife about this, what happened in his youth? And she said they were lovely people. They were lovely. Why did he have nightmares? Why did he scream in the early night? She said just because he had nightmares. There's no doubt that many people with these conditions suffer and really struggle. And in the commander's case, he was also a drug addict. An addiction is a terrible sickness too. This forces us to ask a moral question. If someone behaves a certain way because they're ill, if they didn't mean to hurt you necessarily, if at the end of the day they just can't help themselves, do we owe them sympathy or even forgiveness? Like where do we draw the line? I can accept that you one has psychological problems. I can accept that one is numbing oneself with drugs. I can accept that one does bad things when they're on drugs and think that they might not want to do or do when they're not on drugs. I still think they have to pay for it. Abby doesn't have answers to these complicated questions. And she doesn't think she'll get the answer she's looking for from the commander either. Everyone's in while I think what would happen now if I went to find him and say, hey, you know, just have like a little post mortem. He would still lie. He would just lie. I know he would. But asking them has helped her make sense of her experience. And ultimately, her real path to some sort of healing has come from looking at the only part of all this that she can control. That is her own role. Anytime there is an interaction like that, there are two people involved. I have talked to many people, women and men about their own stories and about Dupige. And usually they say, I knew, but I didn't know. I knew something was off, but I didn't quite know what it was. And I didn't want to know. And it makes you really question yourself and your motives and your behavior. I was complicit in my duplicity. And I mean that. And I was being duped and I was there. I should have walked out at the first sign of something being off. And I didn't because I didn't have anywhere to live. And I was at school and I didn't really have money. And I needed to be there. And I knew I was going to stick around until I could find out one way or the other what was going on. But I still believe that it takes a use the word complicit because I didn't quite want to see some things that were off. That's the word I use. People feel like I'm, and it's not a judgment. It's actually, I feel like it's empowering to say that because that gives me agency. I see what's going on here. I'm sorry it's going to overhaul your life. It's going to uproot your life. But you know what, get out. It'll be better. It will get better. And it did get better for Abby, which I think is an important message. As the show has evolved, we've had people get in touch to tell us that hearing stories of con artists and scammers has been helpful for them. Exposing the various types of chameleons and how they operate has made them feel seen. Abby has noticed something similar as she shared her own story. Part of my dealing with this whole thing was like, told everybody. Anybody I met, I was like, guess what just happened to me. Everybody I spoke to had their own experience. Or they knew somebody who'd been in some kind of relationship like this. And I thought, okay, and they didn't want to talk about it. They didn't want to use their real names. I would say, can I write, can I use your name to, you know, can I interview you? No, you can't use my real name. So I was like, I'm going to tell this story because what I realized was that what we've been doing all this time is lauding, celebrating the duper. And the victims are these idiots. And actually I want to lift us them up. This happens to a lot of people. This can happen to smart people. You put your disbelief aside. You don't want to see what you don't want to see, you know. So you can empower yourself, take responsibility for that, and also take responsibility. Or take comfort in the fact that there are crazy bad people out there who will take advantage of you. But it's not you personally, they'll do it to anybody and everybody. Please put the experience behind her. And she's now out the other side. I didn't lose money. You know, I made money. I lived for free. I, you know, was a year of my life. They were really not that much collateral damage other than a little bit to my psyche or a lot to my psyche at the time. She's even grateful. I look at it like it was the best thing that ever happened to me. It changed the trajectory of my career. You know, so I was happy about that. I've gotten a lot of mileage out of it. Abbie Ellen's not going to forget what happened to her, but she's also not going to let it stop her from living or from loving. Even though she knows it's a minefield out there. People have been lying in love forever. That's what you do. I mean, that's biblical. That goes, you know, it's everybody does that. It's not nice. It's the way it works. It's just that not everyone is like the commander. What I think is interesting is that a couple years after that, I started seeing somebody else who told me he was separated from his wife and they were separated the way we are by like a microphone. You know, they were like totally still together. And it was really interesting because it was a different kind of a lie. I was a lie. But the guy was just a guy who just was cheating on his wife. The commander just created this whole elaborate thing. I mean, that's a true con artist. This other guy was just a dick. Communion is a production of campsite media and audio check. It's hosted by me, Josh Dean, and was written by me and Joe Barrett. It was produced by Joe Barrett. Our associate producer is Emma Seminoff. Sound design and mix by Tiffany Dimack. Theme by Ewin Lattermuyon and Mark McAdams. Our production manager is Ashley Warren. Campside's executive producers are Vanessa Grigoriatus, Matt Cher and me, Josh Dean. And finally, if I can ask a few favors before sending you on your way today, please rate, follow and review Communion on your favorite podcast platforms to help spread the word. I know everyone says this, but it's true. Ratings and reviews really do help. And if you have any feedback tips or story ideas, you can email us at CommunionPod at campsitemedia.com or leave us a message at a special number we've set up. 201-743-8368. Add a plus one if you're outside North America. Thanks for listening. We'll see you next week. I think Chuck would approve.