Something Was Wrong - S19 E9: [WCN Presents] SWW S14 Updates // Part 1

Episode Date: March 7, 2024

*Content warning: domestic abuse, child abuse, domestic violence, and non-consensual pornography. Season Fourteen of Something Was Wrong began airing on October 20th, 2022 and the last episode aired on January 3rd, 2023. The season highlighted the narratives of Kaylan, Melissa, and Sara and their very toxic, abusive relationships with a man named Jake, as well as the abuse their children faced. As the season progressed, it included several accounts from other victims and acquaintances of Jake as well. Jake continued to leverage his professional connections in the media to add validity to his dating presence and in turn, victimized over forty women. On December 13th, 2022, the guests of Season 14 also participated in a SWW Live event on which they discussed the impact of the season & answered some listeners’ questions. One week later, a petition was created to call for Jake to face legal accountability. And despite the fact that less than a year passing since its release, quite a lot has happened. The Broken Cycle Media team is so grateful for Kaylan, Melissa, and Sara’s involvement, as well as the rest of the guests' of season 14, and the impact their sharing has made. We are also grateful to host this conversation with Kaylan and Melissa about all that’s come next since Season 14 aired.Season 14 of SWW https://somethingwaswrong.com/14-2/Change.org Hold Jake Accountablehttps://www.change.org/p/seattle-police-department-hold-jake-gravbrot-accountableThe Stranger on Jake Gravbrothttps://www.thestranger.com/cops/2023/01/06/78802686/after-months-spd-finally-responds-to-allegations-of-serial-sexual-assaultSeattle Times: Seattle police stopped investigating new adult sexual assaultshttps://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/times-watchdog/seattle-police-halted-investigating-adult-sexual-assaults-this-year-internal-memo-shows/Thank you again to THIS IS ACTUALLY HAPPENING for sponsoring this episode! Don't forget to follow THIS IS ACTUALLY HAPPENING on the Wondery app or wherever you get your podcasts, and you can listen to THIS IS ACTUALLY HAPPENING ad free on Wondery Plus.For additional resources and support, please visit:http://somethingwaswrong.com/resourcesSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

This episode is sponsored by the Audible Original Series Exposed, the Ashley Madison Hack. In the early 2000s, millions of people joined AshleyMadison.com, a dating site for married people to have affairs. But the promise of discretion was shattered in the summer of 2015, when anonymous hackers published millions of cheating spouses' information into a searchable database. Presented by award-winning Canadian actress Sophie Nalise, this new audible original explores the aftermath of the Ashley Madison hack. Dive into this real-world scandal to find out what happens when private affairs become public domain.

As you follow along the stories of those caught up in the hack, unearth societal concerns around privacy in the digital age. Join Sophie Nelisse for Exposed, the Ashley Madison hack. Listen now on Audible. Each week on the Mr. Ball and Podcast, now available wherever you get your podcasts, you'll hear strange, dark and mysterious stories about inexplicable encounters, shocking disappearances, true crime cases, and everything in between.

So go listen to Mr. Ballin Podcast, Strange Dark and Mysterious Stories, on Amazon Music, or wherever you get your podcasts. What came next is intended for mature audiences only. Episodes discuss topics that can be triggering, such as emotional, physical, and sexual violence, animal abuse, suicide, and sexual violence, animal abuse, suicide, and murder. I am not a therapist nor am I a doctor. If you're in need of support, please visit somethingwaswrong.com forward slash resources

for a list of non-profit organizations that can help. Opinions expressed by my guests on the show are their own and do not necessarily represent the views of myself or broken cycle media. Resources and source material are linked in the episode notes. Thank you so much for listening. Season 14 of Something Was Wrong began airing on October 20th, 2022, and the last episode aired on January 3rd, 2023. The season highlighted the narratives of Kaelin, Melissa, and Sarah and their very toxic, abusive relationships with a man named Jake, as well as the abuse their children faced at his hands. As the season progressed, it included several accounts from other victims and acquaintances of Jake's as well.

Jake continued to leverage his professional connections in the media to add validity to his dating presence and in turn, victimized over 40 women in and around the Seattle area. On December 13th, 2022, the guests of Season 14 also participated in a Something Was Wrong live event with Tiffany, on which they discussed the impact of the season and answered some listeners' questions. One week later, a petition was created to call for Jake to face criminal accountability.

And despite the fact that less than a year has passed since its release, quite a lot has happened since. The Broken Cycle Media team is so grateful for Kaylin, Melissa and Sarah's involvement, as well as the rest of the guests in Season 14 and the impact their sharing has made. We are also grateful to host this conversation with Kaylin and Melissa about all that's come next since season 14 has aired. Hey, this is Kaylin. As far as my story goes, it starts in 2007 and goes through my relationship with Jake and the six years of emotional, physical, psychological, sexual, financial abuse that he put me through. I knew that he had recorded us having sex and he was using it as blackmail with me and sending it to me and saying like, oh, this is all I watch.

When I'd asked him several times, please delete that. Sometimes it was videos I'd never seen before, and I know that with Melissa, the same thing happened. And then finding out that he cheated on me with 40 plus women, including Melissa, who he ended up getting pregnant, and the journey dealing with Washington and California's court systems, and how difficult it is to protect your kids from abusers.

I know that we started all of this and decided to go on the podcast in hopes to slow down Jake. Our collective story started with one of Jake's victims creating the Instagram account that included his name. Our hope was that if somebody was searching Jake's name on social media, that this other account on Instagram would come up and then they're warned. Whereas now if you search his name online, they are warned. You can't look his name up without seeing all of this information. And that really was the goal. As Kaelin said, I dated Jake actually for not very long. My whole timeline with him on a romantic level was only a few months, but dealing with the

family court system and all of the abuse that went on with that, there was a lot to it. I think a common misconception with our season was that we started out with the goal of trying to have Jake thrown in jail. That wasn't our purpose. We started just sharing our stories, hoping that we could dump it on that Instagram and leave it. Then if anybody Googled him, they would find that information and it would be there. It wasn't something that we even ever planned on continuing.

It just morphed as more women came forward. We started to understand that it was a lot worse than what we had even expected or thought. So the mission of all of it had changed over the months as we realized that he was definitely doing a lot worse stuff than we imagined that he had been doing for all of those years where we didn't have contact with him. 10 years go by and we're hearing from these other women that he's doing the same thing. I think that when around 40 women came forward

on the Instagram is when we really felt like this was a bigger story that we needed to share. He was traveling outside of the country. And so we were worried that there were women all over the place. At that point, we had an obligation to say something to protect women because he was clearly not slowing down. We were under the impression that things had gotten worse because there were times where he was seeing several women at a time.

There was an urgency there to speak out because I do think that this is something that he is continually doing. And if he deleted everything because of this podcast, then amazing. I do not want him having videos of me and or any of the other women that he's been involved with. I just want to make that clear because I think other people have said like, oh, now he's going to delete everything. And it's like, well, that's a good thing in my mind. I first became aware of the story via the Instagram. The account had added me and tagged me. I started watching the posts and I

started to see in real time women coming forward, sharing their stories and was like everyone else extremely disturbed by their encounters and experiences with this person. I think to Kailin and Melissa's point, this person has not only shown a pattern of predatory behavior for decades at this point now. He also didn't even care when he was called out by this Instagram account and so many people within the area seeing it, he still was so emboldened to continue. And I think that really speaks to his profile as a human being. And I think that really speaks to his profile as a human being. And I think that with certain abusers,

it's very evident by their pattern of behavior displayed through multiple survivors and years and years of abuse. When people are a danger to the public, I believe that Jake Gravbrot is a danger to the public. I believe that Jake Gravbrot is a danger to the public to this day. I think he has very little empathy, if any at all, for other people. And he has no impulse control. And he's dishonest, and I could go on forever. So for me, I was instantly curious about

the story and also just proud from a distance that these survivors were coming together and taking back into their hands a little bit of justice and accountability towards this person. I then connected via messenger or some way on Instagram and was told that a submission had been made through the website. So I went there and we set up a zoom pre-interview and the rest is history as they say. went there and we set up a Zoom pre-interview and the rest is history as they say. This was the first season where we were really breaking a story that hasn't been covered in the public previously. So legally there's a lot more implications and risk for the show. And so it felt like a really big decision to make.

But ultimately, when I had heard and learned about what had happened to the children, my main concern became, will this individual date someone with children in the future? Of course, his filming women and all of his other horrific things that he has done are mind-blowing, but this needs to be done. We need to warn the public. The survivors provided an insane amount of proof also was what made it possible to actually use this person's real name. The survivors, when I met with them, they had already collected the stories of 40-plus women. They were already having to create timelines and document things due to their own legal battles and legal abuse that they'll have to continue to deal with.

And so it was because of their work and their diligence, honestly, that we were able to create the season at all and warn the public. And to their point, they didn't come to me and say, Tiffany, we want you to go to Seattle PD and get this guy arrested. It was after we had recorded and after we learned everything that we learned throughout the season and how much evidence the survivors and I then collected, how many interviews were done. It was the most interviews I've probably ever done for any season, the amount of corroborating evidence was profound. So we thought, hey, here you go, SPD,

and we're gonna give you notice, which is honestly a risk as a journalist to do that, because then you have to worry about a gag order being placed on you. But again, we wanted that justice for the victims. We hoped that they would do the right thing, that they would act right away, they could get a search warrant, they would get his computers and hard drives and electronic devices,

which does happen, by the way, for some victims when they have the support of law enforcement. And I had just spoken with victims who had gotten that type of justice. Part of the process was reaching out to Seattle Police Department, weeks leading up to the season, starting and throughout the season with no reply. Will Casey at The Stranger Who's Amazing had been sent the podcast by a listener and had reached out. He was fantastic to work with. He spoke with the survivors who used their time and energy to help others and spoke with him too. He went to SPD and they finally returned my phone call. What I recall about that phone conversation that I had was I was very angry and questioning

the officer about what took them so long and how ridiculous it is that the survivors and I have basically done their job for them. She didn't say much, essentially said they were gonna return people's phone calls now. She had reached out to Kaylin at that point. But what Will Casey at The Stranger communicated with me was that they had done an article earlier on the subject of Seattle PD.

According to the Seattle Times article, Tiffany references, quote, Seattle police's sexual assault and child abuse unit staff has been so depleted that it stopped assigning to detectives this year new cases with adult victims. According to an internal memo sent to interim police chief Adrian Diaz in April, end quote. We also learned through this process that this entire city of Seattle had at the time one victim advocate that was expected to support

the entire city of Seattle's survivors, which is just insane. It's very perplexing and it's very disheartening. And honestly, it made me feel bad that this is the actual reality. It made me not even want to put that out there into the universe. Granted I learned that information after the finale, but even putting it out now in this episode, it's making my heart race, but it's also the reality of the situation that even

with all the evidence, all the bravery, all the time, energy, everything, it's also the reality of the situation that even with all the evidence, all the bravery, all the time, energy, everything, it's just like, sorry, and that's a really uncomfortable truth. The Live was December 13th. We had the Live and we hadn't even got to the Omari episode. The day that we recorded the Live, I was on the phone with Omari all day. Because Jake often used his link to the media to add validity to his persona, his job as a photographer was relevant throughout season 14.

Omari was the owner of the media company that Jake was employed by, that Tiffany also reached out to. Allegedly, they had cut ties with Jake, but we have reason to believe that he was still being employed by Converged Media. That's the only reason I remember that that episode was the episode that would be going out the next week. That was episode I think 10, so we still had two or three episodes that aired after the live. That's because people kept coming forward. Yeah, and then Omari waited till the day of the live to answer my emails, because we hadn't mentioned Converge yet.

Certain people hadn't responded to comment, and I also waited quite a bit. Then Jake pulled the legal shit. That's why we added the episode too, because right after the live, I remember us being on the phone. He was really mad about the live. He was like so mad.

He didn't want us doing the live. And then the season actually stopped airing the last week of the year. Before we get to the updates, I do want to touch a little bit on the release of the season. How did that feel to be able to listen back to your experiences? Was it healing? It was a lot of mixed feelings, hearing it all back. It's so easy for me to be really hard on

myself and feel like I was an idiot and listening to it. I think I had to forgive myself during it. My husband is hearing some of this stuff for the first time and my parents and people that know me from where I live now are hearing this for the first time. I think that it's hard to hear it back. I can see all the red flags now and I can see everything telling my story now. But when you're going through it, when there's limited on the internet 16 years ago,

we didn't have all these. Like gaslighting, I'd never even heard of that. I'd never heard of triangulation. I felt like I was being financially abused while it was happening, but I didn't even know that that was really a term. It just felt like he's fucking ruining my life. He's making it impossible for me to take care of my kid, barely scraping by. I had trouble buying food. Why doesn't he see that this is a shared responsibility? It definitely was one of those things

where I felt like I needed to hang on to it for some reason, and I don't feel that anymore. So that definitely, I feel like is the biggest positive to come out from the podcast. I got my wife back, if that makes sense. It felt like it had been lifted and I didn't have to hold it anymore because I think I was hanging on to some of it so that I could maybe not tell Emerson one day but so that I could try to explain to her

why her dad wasn't involved in her life. So it was pretty stressful, overwhelming, kind of in a good way. It was incredibly healing, I think, to share my story, but it was a lot. I think for both of us, that was the first time that we had really ever sat down and told the story in full, start to finish like that. I know for me listening back, it's like really hard to hear. I get why people are frustrated listening to it. I'm frustrated listening back to it, but

you talk about hindsight. Red flags and a cycle of abuse obviously looks different with hindsight than it does in the moment. Even when we're telling it back, we're laying it out and telling this is what happened. Obviously, I know where the red flags I missed were. I'm telling you, all of them. It would have been much easier for either of us to just leave some of that stuff out and we chose not to. We tried to tell our stories, the good, the bad, the ugly, everything in between. It would have been easier to sugarcoat some of it so we didn't feel like, yeah, I believed him when he told me this or I went back after he did this. I think probably anybody that has existed

within an abusive relationship can relate to that on some level. I mean, there's a reason why it takes an average of seven times for someone to leave. Like Kaelin, a lot of my family, a lot of my friends, they had never heard some of this stuff. I think the number one thing more than anything else was guilt and shame of all of it kept both of us quiet for so long. So being able to just own it all and say it out loud where we had felt silenced, you're taking that power back. In that sense, it was really healing. You're able to put it out there and release it. I think when you say things out loud or when you tell it as a whole, you look at it a little bit differently because we can now pinpoint exactly

where we should have left, things that were obvious red flags that we wish that we would have known, mistakes that we made for some reason. Even when you know all of the information, when it's all put together, the way Tiffany put it together, it's just so impactful. It was heavy though. It was a lot. My heart just broke week after week hearing everyone's stories side by side and being able to pick out the parts of other people's stories that I related with, the way that they felt at certain points and just remembering what that felt like, what the confusion felt like, the loneliness and the isolation and feeling like this is never going to get better when you're in that fog and you can't see past it. You can't really trust yourself. You've lost all sense of yourself. You've lost your sense of confidence in your own judgment, you can't even tell what is up or down or left or right anymore.

That's so disorienting to live in that space. I remember what it feels like. So when I hear other people talking about it, it makes me really sad. But I'm just really thankful that we're all in such better places and we've healed and we've grown. There's not one person that participated in the podcast that I feel isn't light ears better of a person for what we've all gone through. We've all grown so much. I think that just really speaks volumes about the type of women they all are. With all of our recording, we recorded 24 hours worth of stuff. There were times where I'm jumping around or we're talking and then I'm like, oh shit,

I totally forgot to tell you that. Let me tell you about that story. I think I thought, oh yeah, I can just shoot off the cuff and it'll be fine. I learned very quickly. When you're telling things that have happened like 11 to 16 years ago, it's hard to always remember everything or stay in line. I wish I had a diary during that time because I think that that would have made it so much easier.

It's so much to encompass, right? And to your point, it's like years and years before. So sometimes shit comes back to you while you're talking. If you're listening to this podcast, then chances are good, you are a fan of the Strange, Dark, and Mysterious. And if that's true, then you're in luck. Because once again, Mr. Ball and Podcast, Strange, Dark, and Mysterious stories is available everywhere you get your podcasts.

Each week on the Mr. Ball and Podcast, you'll hear new stories about inexplicable encounters, shocking disappearances, true crime cases, and everything in between. Like our recent episode titled White Dust. After a middle-aged couple failed to answer their daughter's messages and calls, the daughter drives the few hours to her parents' house

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by joining Wondery Plus. I think too because I have such a weird name that maybe I'm easier to find on social media, but I've had several messages from people going through something similar and asking for guidance, which I'm like document everything. That's my biggest, like I would tattoo it on me. Seriously, that's the best thing you can do for yourself when you're going through something like this. The other thing I had people reach out and say,

my sister or my friend is in a similar situation as you or I think she is and what should I do and how do I approach her? I obviously don't have all the answers. So I'm always like, well, if it were me, I would like you coming to me and saying, hey, I'm here for you, no matter what. No judgment, I'm here.

You don't have to tell me what's going on, but know that I'm a safe place. And if you need a place to stay, no questions asked. You come to my house, I don't care what time it is. You have a place to stay. Now, maybe that person isn't willing to do that. But I do think that the people that were close to me knew how bad it was, and they didn't know how to help me. I think if they just said, you don't have to tell me because I wasn't ready to share it all.

And just knowing that I would have a safe place to go to, I think that things would have a safe place to go to, I think that things would have been a lot different. I had people telling me about their stories that they've never told anyone. I get never telling anyone because I was always so afraid to tell anyone. I just cut all my friends off in Seattle for the most part and left because the people that I knew with him, I was afraid to tell. Since then, they've reached out to me and apologized for not hearing me when I did try to tell them. With the husband and wife that I was pretty close with, that Jake was also really close with,

I considered them family when I lived in Seattle. They all were like, I don't want to hear it. And since the podcast came out, they've all come to me and said, wow, I'm so sorry. Thank you for sharing your story and given me support and love. It's so cool to not have to tell everyone, one of them individually, how terrible things were. I'm glad that they listened and they gave us all a chance to tell what we went through with Jake. They allowed their perception to change. They listened with an open mind and it meant everything to me. I learned so much from listening to other people and talking with other people. We had so much support. Of course, there's a handful of people that are saying shit. Like when people are wondering, oh, why didn't she leave?

Or if this was happening, I would have just left and go where with what money? But a lot of it is that they either heard it wrong or they didn't fully understand or they don't understand how the court system works or they don't understand abuse because they've never gone through anything like that before. Being able to try to clear up some stuff, I felt like it was helpful and not hurtful. I already was so hard on myself hearing it all. Nothing anybody could say to me would have really hurt my feelings. The only time where I would get upset is when they were saying stuff about Melissa. It's hard when you feel like people are judging your every move under a microscope and I'm judging my every move.

I'm going to be my biggest critic and think, how did you not see all this? Especially when I'm laying it out so clear, it makes it hard. But I do think I probably should have gone a little bit deeper into the court systems and how difficult it is to protect your child. But I also think that sometimes people are listening, maybe not always for the right reasons. Like, oh, let me see this train wreck. But we definitely are hoping that education piece is there. I still think that there's so much we don't know about this type of abuse. The court systems haven't even caught up with it.

How can we expect listeners to be there? There are so many hard conversations that need to be had to be able to grow and understand things. I think it's just a product of media in general. People tend to sometimes forget that we're real people. The voices that you're hearing are real people. So the opinions that you're having about someone's choices or someone's life and you're posting them on the internet, you're talking about someone's actual life. Obviously, you're always going to have the people that are just there for the purpose of being cruel.

We know from our season that one of those people that was on there being cruel was most likely Jake because he had screenshots of everything and there were a couple of pretty sketchy accounts. I think our journey with participating in the online discussion, at the very beginning, it's really hard to not get defensive. And I think we had to get over that really quickly. But once we actually settled in and tried to understand

what people were saying, and what the conversation was, we learned so much in that process. There had been someone that had posted, why would Katelyn not just have the custody removed when he sent Emerson back with a sunburn and ate all her lunch? We were just like, that's not how that works. When there's a parenting plan, you have to follow it. This person finally had wrote back and said, Oh, I'm not a parent, I'm not from the US. So you start to understand that they form an opinion on it, or they don't listen carefully. And then they

fill in the blanks of what they didn't hear. As the season was coming out, we're like getting emails, and they're like, I work with Jake, and he just started at my job. Now I'm freaking out. And he's trying to go by Jacob. Like that's going to make things better. People aren't going to know it's him. Kaelin started off by saying that their mission was really to spread awareness and warn the public about this person.

They have been so successful in that. I think it's incredible the awareness that was able to be spread through the show and literally protect the women of Seattle. I just want to add something to that. One thing that I was really shocked at was how far the reach of the podcast was. I've had at least three friends that have contacted me. These are people that live in Seattle. They know me, but they had random relatives or friends

from the East Coast, one was in Europe, one was in Hawaii. They had listened to the podcast and knew that this person, their family member or their friend lived in Seattle and they sent them the podcast like, oh my gosh, look out for this guy. They contacted me like, how crazy is that? So they ended up telling those people like, oh, I actually know Melissa or I know Kailin. We had so many stories like that. How many people

have heard this story and how many people have seen the information and the evidence at this point is so far beyond anything that we ever could have imagined. At the beginning, we were hoping that we could just warn the women in Seattle. And then it became more and more evident that he's traveling. He's got upwards of, I think the most that we counted at one time was like 11 or 12 women that overlapped and they were in different states. He's all over the place and he's traveling now out of the country because he has his passport. We had no clue how many victims there could be all over the place. The fact that we were able to get it outside of even the Pacific Northwest,

but make it worldwide is absolutely insane to me. Somebody sent it to my husband and was like, do we know this fucking guy? Because he lived in Washington for quite a while, and so people have reached out to him, like knowing that I'm his wife and not knowing and saying, what are we going to do about this guy? And he's like, nothing, we're going to do nothing.

I'm like, yes, that is the correct answer. We are going to do nothing. Definitely got to a point. Towards the end of the season, I was just like, emotionally spent with all of it. I was drained from talking about all of it. The court stuff going on, the Omari stuff that was happening at the end,

and we're adding episodes. There were so many falls in the air by the end. You guys were such roompers. In the last weeks, and even right after we were done, we were getting messages from multiple people that have listened to the podcast and figured out that, oh my gosh, this is my friend's boyfriend. In regards to Jake's girlfriend's family and friends reaching out, it was from a place of concern.

I think that we spend a lot of time worried about her, about her son. We do think we talk to her via those other accounts, but we never reached out to her. I hope she listened, even though he's told her that we are all lying. I can't imagine how challenging things have been for her. We're getting all of this information coming in to the point where we all needed a detox. Kalin and I talked about towards the end of the season, we were like barely speaking. It wasn't out of anything other than we were just drained. We didn't really have a lot left in the tank because there was just so many different things being piled on in every direction.

We just needed time to recharge and so it's been good to be able to step away from it and focus on things other than Jake. With the release of the podcast and with some distance between it, Melissa and I have definitely had time to get back to our regular conversations that don't include Jake. So that's been nice to have each other back in our lives, but without Jake in the middle of that conversation. It's been nice to get back to normal life without talking about trauma every day because our relationship and our friendships have not actually been based on him. He would only come up in conversation when something happened or we needed to bounce

things off each other if there was court hearings or anything along those lines. It's nice for our friendship to get back to the regular stuff where we can just focus on our girls and focus on being there for each other. Also all the other women that we've met along the way, we've gotten to get to know them more on a personal level as opposed to just through the podcast or through the Instagram page, we were able to spend time with a few of them in Seattle, go out for drinks or dinner. So it's been really nice to get to see some of those women outside of the podcast and

talking about all of this really heavy stuff, just hearing about their lives and what they're doing, them going to school or their jobs or their families. And that's just been probably the best part of the last couple of months, the new friendships and all the positivity that's come from it. I feel like there were so many gifts within the season that people were able to take away.

Inspiring other people to start Instagram pages and Facebook groups groups like are we dating the same guy? Also, I will never forget something that Melissa said in the season. This is a dog that bites, sharing that piece from her therapist and that analogy. I can't tell you how much positive feedback we got about that. To Kallin's point about education, people are learning and they don't even know it. The survivors themselves are teaching one another, and I think that's incredibly powerful. I don't wanna miss on the opportunity to share that piece

because this is a dog that bites example, opened people's mind and gave them a very tangible example. They can now take that into their lives, just like Kaylin sharing the things that she experienced in the court system is going to help somebody that is currently in that fight. Tomorrow they have a court hearing that they're feeling nervous about

and they happen to listen. That's one of the fucking coolest parts about the far reach of the show. We will never even understand the full positive impact. It can be the smallest detail that y'all have shared about your experience and it can be a completely life-changing, unlocking mental moment for someone else. And that's so powerful.

I've had so many people say to me, I wish I would have done what we did with the Instagram. There's been so many people that have told Kailin and I and even Sarah that they have similar stories to us. It's like, oh, I connected with my abusive ex's ex-wife or ex-girlfriend and we're super close now and we've helped each other through it. It shows growth, I think, in our society because for so long women have been pitted against each other in so many different aspects of life. We're taught a little bit to blame other women,

rather than where Kalen's at, where she showed all the other women grace. She put the blame on Jake, who was the one that was actually doing all of these things. It's a way that as a society, I think especially women, are taking their power back with those things like the Facebook group where they're sharing their experiences with men and trying to protect other women. Women as a whole, I think, are starting to say, we don't have to sit in silence. We don't have to just not tell anyone because we're afraid no one's going to believe us. We're starting to believe each other and just support each other as women. And I think that's speaking volumes for how far those Facebook groups are reaching and how many women they're protecting.

You guys supporting one another to your point, Melissa, that was one of the things that definitely stood out from people from the beginning of the season was Kaelin's ability to not look at you as her competition essentially, but that you were able to come together. That's amazing. It's women supporting women and we definitely need more of it. Stay tuned next week for more updates from Kaelin and Melissa that you're not going to want to miss. The only other person that we tried to warn was Mike Herrera from MXPX. Kaelin's boyfriend had connection to him. We were concerned because he had already assaulted Ivy at that point, and Mike was bringing Jake in to stay at his house around his kids.

The most shocking part to me was within the first few sentences, I recall it saying something to the tune of, we've been expecting this message. I just thought, wow, that's your opener? It was so embittered. What Came Next is a broken cycle media production co-produced by Amy B. Chesler and Tiffany Rees. If you'd like to help support What Came Next, you can leave us a positive review, support our sponsors, or follow BrokenCycleMedia on Instagram at BrokenCycleMedia. Check out the episode notes for sources, resources, and to follow our guests. Thank you again for listening. something was wrong early and add free on Amazon Music. Download the app today, or you can listen early

and add free with Wondery Plus in Apple Podcasts. Before you go, tell us about yourself by completing a short survey at wondery.com slash survey.