Something Was Wrong - S21 E16: (4/4) [Annie + Lauren + Rachael] This Can Happen to Anyone

Episode Date: September 11, 2024

*Content Warning: alcohol use disorder, interpersonal violence, child sex-abuse material, deepfakes, ai-perpetuated abuse, sexual assault, verbal abuse, violence, suicidal ideation, mature themes, sibling sexual abuse, incest, rape, sex trafficking. For a list of related free and confidential resources, please visit: http://www.somethingwaswrong.com/resources FBI Internet Crime Complaint Center (IC3): https://www.ic3.gov/ Follow Something Was Wrong:Website: somethingwaswrong.com IG: instagram.com/somethingwaswrongpodcastTikTok: tiktok.com/@somethingwaswrongpodcast Follow Tiffany Reese:Website: tiffanyreese.me IG: instagram.com/lookieboo [e-mail] The SWW theme Song is U Think U, by Glad Rags. The S21 cover art is by the Amazing Sara Stewart.  See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

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the views of myself, broken-cycle media, or Wondery. The podcast and any linked materials should not be construed as medical advice, nor is the information a substitute for professional medical expertise or treatment. Thank you so much for listening. You don't know me. You don't know me. You don't know anybody until you talk to someone. Here's Annie. Not only did I not know who this person was, but his friends didn't. Nobody knew what he was doing.

So I posted everything on Instagram on my stories and I start getting messages like I can't believe this. Oh my God. Here's Rachel. It was like a Sunday night. I remember it vividly because I had made a pizza and I was sitting down to watch my show. And then I get a text from my cousin, Al,

saying go on Annie's stories on Instagram and this information about deepfakes on there. I'm not really sure what's going on, but you need to go look at it. I wasn't following Annie or anything. I had never even looked at her Instagram. So, went on to Instagram and there was a lot of information on there that Annie had posted and was trying to just piece it all together. I eventually got on the phone with Al and we were talking about it for a significant period of time trying to figure out exactly what was going on with this situation. I personally

had never heard of the term deepfake. I had to Google the term. What Al and I talked about was that basically Annie was saying that Josh had taken all these photos of her, myself, a ton of our other friends and had put our faces into pornographic videos. At first I was just so overwhelmed, in complete shock. I almost went into a fight state essentially. The adrenaline was going as As this is happening, Annie keeps posting more and we're looking at more and talking about it. And then I talked to my mom on the phone and then I talked to Al on the phone again. And I was also simultaneously texting a number of people because this was a bombshell.

My mom was livid as you can expect a mother to be. My mom decided that she was going to text Josh. She actually texted him and said, if you ever do anything in the slightest with either Rachel or my nieces photos again, Mr. D**k and myself will be pursuing legal action against you. So this is actually how Josh found out that Annie posted anything. Did he respond? No, he never responded. Here's Annie. He calls me and he says, Annie, what did you do? And I said, I don't know, what are you talking about?

And he said, why is, and I believe it was Rachel's mom calling me and telling me to stay the F away from her girls. And I said, I don't know, Josh, why would she do that? And he screams, you've ruined me! You've ruined my life! He says, you did this to me, I'm going to kill myself. Just make sure my mother gets my sports cards. He had baseball and football and basketball. He told everybody that these were worth a lot of money

and that that was going to be his down payment on a house in Michigan. I got them appraised and they're worth nothing. He tried to blame somebody else. He tried to blame it on an addiction issue. None of that worked. So, OK, well, I'm just going to kill myself. It's the last resort. I called 911 immediately. The police are like, oh, if he calls you back, try and get a location. So he calls me again. He's screaming at me that all his friends are going to hate him now and it's

my fault. And I said, Josh, Josh, where are you? He goes, where am I? I'm at rock bottom. And then he hangs up the phone. And then I get a text from his sister. She said, call me when you have a memento. I said, I don't really want to talk on the phone. I'm dealing with the police. And she said, that's fine. I understand you're hurting. I've been there. Please take those posts down. It's no one's business but your guys's. At the end of the day, your heart may hurt, but this is going to ruin his life and potentially end it, and that's not okay.

His mother said to me, Joshua is broken right now. Not heartbroken, but broken. Like he doesn't feel like he can live after everyone knows his deepest secrets that have been made public. I believe when we choose to do these things there should be an end game in place. What is your end game? Shaming and humiliating him is not going to get him the help he needs. I know you're not concerned about that. I know you're hurting. That's understandable. But most people wouldn't have known he did this until you made it public. So are you wanting to make sure people are aware you're the victim of a bad boyfriend?

Or is it that you really want me to bury my son because I fear that if this continues, that is going to be the end game? I blocked her after that. There was a couple friends that messaged me that was like, please take this down, you're going to kill him, stuff like that. There was much more support for me than there was not. So the police are looking for him. Then they end up calling me and they said to me, we found his car, we can't find him. Then I get nervous like, oh, did he really do something?

I don't want that to happen to him. I'm angry and I'm hurt, but I don't want him dead. They said it's parked at a hotel or a motel, but they can't find him. Is it possible he's with somebody else? And I said, I doubt it. He doesn't have friends here. The girls he was talking to are overseas. And they're like, we talked to the motel. They said he's not here. But they kept calling him the wrong name. And I kept correcting them, no, his name is Joshua C***. I drove over to the motel with my friend, and we went to the front desk and I said, is a Joshua C*** here? And they said, oh, we talked to the police. And I said, can you just look for me? And they said, oh, yeah, he's here. So I called the police back and I said, he is here. So they come and they have a whole SWAT team

because he is threatened, suicide and he has a weapon. There's ambulances and fire trucks and cop cars everywhere. And they're trying to get him to come out. They're calling his phone. They have like a megaphone thing asking him to come out and his friends are calling him because some of them are messaging me, the couple that were defending him, were talking to me.

They're like, oh, we just don't want anything to happen to him. We're trying to talk to him to get him to come out. I said, well, tell him the police are here and he needs to come out. So he ends up walking out of the motel room with his hands in the air laughing. And he says to the cops, she's just dramatic. The police said to me, everything seems fine. So there's nothing we can do. We have to let him go.

I said, can you just ask him if I can get my knife back? And the cop said, I wouldn't recommend that. I go home that night and I message his landlord or his ex-landlord. And I said, did you ever have a tenant named Joshua? And he said, I did. He left about two years ago, just stopped paying rent, never heard from him again. I left papers outside his door. They just sat there.

We ended up getting into the apartment and there were hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of bags of garbage everywhere. And he had been calling and calling and he couldn't get a hold of him. And I told him the situation. He said he was sorry and he seemed like a normal guy for what it was worth. And he had no idea his apartment would look like that or that this would be going on. So that confirmed the apartment was alive. Immediately after messaging the landlord, I messaged Lauren. I gave her a brief rundown and said, did he ever do anything like this to you?

I'm just trying to make sense of this. And she ended up messaging me back. Here's Lauren. I'm like living with my boyfriend now, fiance, at the time. And I'm in a very healthy, stable, fun, great relationship. But I know who Annie is because like any normal human being, I creep all of my ex-boyfriends on the internet. She looked so cute and I was just like, yay, this is great. I was genuinely so happy for him. I kind of had this attitude about him when we broke up. It took a while for me to realize how problematic

and harmful my relationship was with Josh, how much it impacted me as a person. And so I was like, look at us, I'm happy, he's happy, we're all happy. Then I get a DM from Annie on Instagram, hey girl, I know you don't know me, but I dated Joshua for a long time and recently found out he was spending thousands of dollars

on Snapchatting girls and getting them to pretend to be his girlfriend and getting nudes and making deep fakes so they look naked and I feel insane. I wanted to know if he ever did anything like this to you. This comes in at 5 30 p.m. but I saw it at 5 30 in the morning. I woke my boyfriend up. I was like, you will not believe this. You got to look at this. And so we were like, oh my God, what is she talking about?

I gave her my phone number and then we started texting. One of the first things I asked Annie, I was like, sorry to be weird, but was there anything of me? And she was like, there were not any deepfakes. She was like, but there were photos of you. She was saying some things that were deeply concerning to me and I was really concerned about her safety, honestly. I would check in and she would keep me posted on any updates of things that were going on because all of this was unraveling like in real time when I was texting her. Eventually she had brought up Rachel and Josh had tried

to say that Annie was responsible for him and Rachel's falling out. And I was like, that's really weird because Rachel's a girl's girl. That was very shocking to me. That doesn't sound like the Rachel I know. I honestly fell out of touch with Rachel, not for anything bad.

Josh was kind of an anchor in our friendship, but Rachel's one of those people that you could call 10 years later and pick up right where you left off. So I reached out to Rachel and I was like, have you heard about this? And so she was like, dude, yes. Instantly we started talking and then eventually Annie and Rachel got in touch after we realized that everyone was comfortable with that and they cleared up all of the misinformation that Josh was spreading about Annie and Rachel to each other. Here's Rachel.

I was just like wide awake, texting people, having phone conversations with people Sunday night. My mind was just spinning the whole next day on Monday. Lauren reached out to me Monday during the day. I was talking over text with Lauren about it, and we were shocked and could not believe what was occurring. Another day or so passes,

and I was talking about with Kaylin, one of my good friends from college and I said, I think I need to reach out to Annie. I cannot stand seeing another woman in such pain and not reaching out to her and checking in with her and making sure that she's as okay as one can be in a horrific situation like this. So I ended up reaching out to Annie via Instagram and then she gave me her phone number and we started texting and then at a certain point Annie, Lauren and I were just all on a group text together. And this is when the piecing together of everything really started.

Here's Annie. Eventually Rachel ended up messaging me me asking me how I was doing and said this is all so crazy. I remember thinking it was weird because he told me Rachel hated me. That Rachel said I was a witch and he stopped talking to Rachel. He used that as like a defense if my friends said anything about him or questioned him at all. I'm not friends with people who talk bad about you so you shouldn't be friends with people who talk bad about me. Rachel and I have talked about that since and that never happened. She's like, I wasn't talking about you because I didn't even know he was still seeing you. I got him a Love Island sweatshirt for Christmas and he said,

oh, take a picture of me and my Love Island sweatshirt. I want to send it to Rachel. I want to show her the gift you got me. So I took a picture of him and he sent it to her and he says, oh, Rachel said you did such a good job with the present. And I asked her about that and she said, oh my God, he told me his sister bought that for him. I was wondering what house he was in. Why do you think he lied about it to Rachel? I think the main reason was just control.

He didn't want me to be friends with his friends because then it's harder to lie. I think he didn't want Rachel asking about me because then we would have had a conversation early on and I would have caught on a lot quicker and he didn't want that to happen. After everything, he was staying in a different motel closer to work. Me and my friend had driven over there to make sure he wasn't coming back towards my house. I saw him outside of the motel smoking and some of his friends that were defending him from Michigan had driven down here and were standing outside with him. I don't know if he saw me, but I saw him

and I was relieved to know he was actually at this motel and people were there with him and that was the last time I ever saw him. There were a couple friends that were standing by him defending, you know, the classic, he's a nice guy, Josh would never do this. There was a girl too that was defending him to me. She's like, oh, I know it's disgusting what you found, but he doesn't deserve this. He's such a good guy. No, what do you think constitutes being a good guy? He was nice to you a couple times. That doesn't mean he's a good person. You can be polite. That doesn't mean you're a good person. Anyone I kept in contact with that was his friend doesn't identify as his friend anymore. There aren't a lot of people hearing directly from him.

What was the response from your male friends who knew Josh? There was a divide between them where half of them believed it and were very disgusted and wanted absolutely nothing to do with him again. And then there was another half of them that supported him and were very boys clubby and were even making fun of Annie. It was surprising. The ones that rallied around him, they were ones that I would never say we were good friends at all. I would say like more acquaintances who had mutual friends. It both enraged me and simultaneously it made me feel somewhat hopeless because they were just vehemently denying these cold hard facts that were being handed to them on a platter. All the groundwork he laid had a huge impact on them not believing Annie.

And I can say that because I feel as though I was a victim of the groundwork he laid as well. And the whole manipulation of the picture, when someone's only giving you little scraps to make the person look really terrible, it's going to make you feel some type of way because you trust your friend and you have no other reason at that point not to trust them. Exactly. And if you've known someone since you were in kindergarten, I get from a psychological standpoint, it would be extremely hard for them to face this reality. And at the end of the day, it is the reality that he did all these things. It just makes me so angry that they are willing to avoid

and turn a blind eye and justify some of these things, all as a means to maintain a friendship. I haven't had any contact with him every time I go home. I do get a little bit nervous about what if I was to run into him. However, I think at this point, he's honestly scared of me, which he should be. Here's Lauren. One of Josh's friends texted me after everything happened with Annie and word got out to people in his social group. He had my number from when Josh and I dated. This is someone who I really have nothing but nice things to say about.

I get a text that says, Hi Lauren, I'm sure you've heard all the shit going on with him and Annie. What he did to Annie is terrible and she didn't deserve that. I'm working with his family to get him home and start getting him some help. I was wondering if you'd be up for a quick call. I'm wondering if you had a similar experience as Annie with the abusive stuff Parentheses porn stuff notwithstanding. I've never known him to be that way, but I've also never been in a relationship with him I'm just trying to figure out what we're dealing with When trying to get him help if you don't want to talk slash get involved

I completely understand and apologies if this is bringing up any painful memories This really pissed me off because I took that as why do you need me to corroborate everything that Annie is saying? Why do you need multiple sources to confirm that this person is treating women in a bad way? I basically wrote a small essay to him. I was rereading it and I was like, this is a nice summary of how I feel about the whole situation. What I said is, hi, yeah, I'm caught off on everything that has been going on. And I've been talking with Annie for the last several days about everything. I know you have good intentions. And

I have always liked and respected you as a person. But I should warn you that you probably aren't going to like what I have to say about this truly horrifying situation. I have to be honest that I don't think any information or insight I give to you about my relationship with Josh is relevant to Annie's experience or relevant to how he can be helped. It feels like anything I would or could say regarding my relationship with him could be used to invalidate Annie's reports

about how he treated her and or how he treats women in general, which I don't appreciate. To be clear, I have no interest in contributing to Josh's wellbeing, but because I feel like I am in a unique position as likely the only other person who has gotten to know Josh in a romantic way, I'll answer your questions. Also, I will always gladly take any opportunity to educate others about the difference between mental illness and predatory and abusive behavior. To answer your questions more directly, no, I don't think that

Josh treated me as poorly as he did Annie. However, I can say with 100% certainty that he would have if I had stayed with him longer. Josh is a textbook manipulator. He is charming, well-liked, easygoing, fun to be around. He also has a large group of genuinely solid, good people in his life. And to me at least, having great friends is such a green flag when dating someone. To be honest, initially after we broke up, I kind of just thought that Josh had a little bit of a drinking problem, that he was immature, and just

not the one for me. However, it took me a while after breaking up with him to realize how truly miserable I was with him and what the reality was of how he treated me. He constantly lied to me about small things, big things, didn't matter. He would often get drunk, start fights with me, typically about how he didn't trust me. These fights almost always ended up in me apologizing to him as he was skilled in twisting my words, changing the narrative, and using his insecurities and low self-esteem as an excuse for his behavior and to manipulate me into feeling empathy for him. Over the months, he would become more and more controlling about how often I checked in with him and about where I was and who I was with. Any attempts that I made to

communicate with him when I was feeling upset about something always ended up in a big blowup argument where my words were twisted and I was gaslit by him relentlessly. I almost always ended up apologizing and feeling guilty, ultimately leading to feeling like I was walking on eggshells around him all the time and that I had to be careful about what I said and how I acted so I didn't piss him off. I think you and I both know that is not love, that is abuse. It also turns out the evidence of his online relationships with women and frequent payments to sex workers goes all the way back to 2015. So it turns out he was cheating on me too. Josh came into my life at the perfect time when my self-esteem was at my absolute lowest. I'm wholeheartedly

believe that is why I tolerated all of the fighting and gaslighting for so long. The person that I am now or that I was before I met him would have never tolerated it. To me, this is even further evidence that he, like other abusers, has a set of skills in picking out vulnerable people. He chose Annie next right before COVID, which was the absolute perfect opportunity for him to hide her from all of his friends and to isolate her and destroy her self-worth. I can't even begin to express how much rage I have knowing that Josh is likely using his quote unquote addiction and alleged mental health issues as a tool to distract his friends and family from the reality of who he really is in an attempt to save his reputation. The reality is that Josh lies, cheats, and exploits others without remorse and he takes women's photos and turns them into pornography without their consent.

That's not mental illness or addiction, that's sociopathic and predatory behavior that, in my professional opinion that I fully acknowledge no one asked for, is not going to be improved with therapy, medications, or whatever. And it most certainly should not be enabled or tolerated by his friends or family. I'm deeply worried about Annie's safety, as all the evidence demonstrates that the typical next steps for abusers like Josh is for the verbal and emotional abuse to escalate into physical violence. To be honest, I was also super hesitant to even send this to you out of fear that it would get back to him. I know he still has explicit photos of me on his phone,

and I'm sure he would be capable of and willing to use against me in some creative way if he knew what I was saying about him. My biggest fear, though, is what else he has hidden in his phone that Annie wasn't able to easily find. I don't really have any interest in talking on the phone or getting involved any further with this other than to support Annie and any of his female friends who were deepfaked and violated by him. Anyway, again, I know you are an empathic and good-hearted person and really hope that

you can at least try to understand where I'm coming from since I imagine that you primarily have Josh's side of the story. Amazing. No notes. Did he respond? He did. He had a good response. Like, it was what you would want.

He was apologizing, but he did, of course, defend. Like, Josh isn't making excuses. We're just trying to figure out how to help him. I never responded. I believe in every word of that, and I sent it to Annie, too, beforehand, because I wanted to make sure she was okay with the things I was saying.

Here's Annie. He was still at Meyer working, and he was staying at a hotel in the area. My friends were all nervous because they thought he was going to come back and try to hurt me. So they were trying to keep an eye out for him. At one point somebody tried to hack my email and I know that was him because he was trying to figure out what I knew, I think. And a couple weeks later, I got a message from a user on Snapchat I had never seen before. It was called like Mama Mia.

I thought it was him. So I said, who the F is this? And they were like, girl, listen, we know Joshua Samuels from the app, the woohoo app. They must have gotten my username from Chloe because I had messaged her before on my own Snapchat. It was a group of these girls that had talked to him and they told me that he's still on the app and he's still spending money. He told them that there's a crazy girl that's obsessed with him trying to ruin his life and if they hear from a crazy girl to block her. I asked them how old they were and they wouldn't answer me. I asked them if they were safe and they

said yes. They told me that he's famous on the app because he spends so much money and that he says he's a rich kid from California who's a real estate agent. He has two dogs and a cat, and he's just lonely because he's so busy taking care of his sick and dying mother that he doesn't have time to go out and spend all his money. He was telling these girls that he was only 28 years old. I told them the truth. I said, no, he's 35 years old. He works at a grocery store. He lived in my house. Those were my dogs and my cat. His mom might be sick, but she lives five, six hours away from him. He does not take care of her. In fact, he told me he was sending her money and he wasn't. She was sending him money, which was something I saw on his phone. She was sending him money

frequently. Not a whole lot, but a hundred bucks here and there. I asked them to explain the gifts. He sent 7,522 gifts to Natasha. And I said, how much does a gift cost? And they said, it's 20, 40, 60, 80, or a 100. And they said to me that he spent at least $3,000 a week on some girls, and he was sending very, very expensive gifts all the time. I did the math. Even if he was sending $20 gifts at 7,522 gifts, you're looking at over $150,000. He was making $40K a year, not $150,000. He told me he was the manager in the meat department, but I

found out that he was a supervisor in the meat department, which is a big pay difference. He was in charge of inventory reviews to make sure all the orders were coming in. And he started to tell me towards the end of our relationship that his numbers weren't adding up and it was my fault because I was keeping him up late and exhausting him and he wasn't adding things in the right way and packages were missing. All this money was missing and it was my fault. I worked a normal 9 to 5. He started at 3 a.m. and he would go till like noonish. So he was home for a good chunk of the day when I wasn't. I asked him, when are you finding time to talk to all these girls? He said,

well, I talk to them when you're at work. And I talk to them when I'm at work on break in my car. These girls, they log on to Snapchat and message me, and then they disappear for long periods of time. And then they log back on and message me again, and then disappear. So this wasn't like their normal Snapchat. This was something they logged into. It seems to specifically talk to me. So it was strange. They said, what you should do is make a fake profile and get on this app and go into this chat room. And they told me the name of the chat room and who ran the chat room that he will

be in there and I should expose him because they all hate him because he has hurt them greatly. I asked for details and they said they would tell me later. They messaged me a couple of times saying he's online now. He's online now when I was at work and I couldn't be on a woohoo app while I was at work. I had a friend who was a sex worker and she was like, this is so not normal. This is not typical. Like you have clients who are in relationships, but

you don't ask and it's not your business and you don't involve yourself with it. And if something goes down, you walk away. You don't have a connection to that. That's for him to work out. It's like, it's so bizarre that they would message you and that they were so hurt and invested in this. There's something odd about that. I know that he was probably a large chunk of their income. These girls seemed very young too. I don't know if he promised them things. The Woohoo app, they have a board, intimacy boards. So if you are more intimate with someone, which means you're spending more money on them, you get to the top of the board.

And he would screenshot it when he was at the top of the board with girls. board, and he would screenshot it when he was at the top of the board with girls. And they have like a group chat, they call it multi-beam rooms, where you can pay to be the man that's talking to all the women, because everyone who works on the app is a woman. When you're looking at the room, there's all these girls and their videos cycle through, and then a guy will be at the top in a video talking to them. So he pays for the amount of time he wants to talk and then he's the star of the show essentially. They're all talking to him. There are private rooms. You can have

private chats and you can talk with them in Snapchat too. So if you're in a girl's room you just see her and you're like typing, but you can also enter a private chat where you are video chatting. The app is shown on the App Store as using filters with friends, but when you open it, it's all video chatting and a lot of it is sexual. There's no nudity on it, but it's like girls in little bikinis or they're in tank tops and they're jumping up and down or they're chatting with guys about sex stuff. Here's Rachel.

That's a whole other thing that blew my mind with that Woohoo app where he was talking to all these women in foreign countries and spending tens of thousands of dollars on them regularly. And he showed me some of their pictures and they definitely could be under 18, which is also very disturbing. I hadn't heard of any of these apps at all. Were you aware if he took any pictures of you when you would hang out with him? He would oftentimes want to get a picture of us together. I mean, if you're good friends with someone, it makes sense. There was this one incident.

The Lincoln Park Zoo has Brew at the Zoo. It's a beer festival every year. That's really fun. We went, just the two of us together, we were riding the merry-go-round because they leave it open and all these adults get so excited to ride the merry-go-round. It's really funny. But we were doing that and he kept taking pictures of me doing that. I hadn't even thought about that, but that's the only time I remember him doing anything like that. I think it was a lot different than what he was doing with Annie and Lauren in terms of taking pictures. There were times where in a group chat with him or something like that, he would send

a picture of him and I together from college. And now looking back on it, I realized he was collecting photos. That's why he had these old photos from like 2008. That was a really creepy feeling for me that he has been collecting photos of me since I have known him, and collecting photos of my friends since they've known him as well. There were also a lot of photos collected of his young niece, which absolutely disgusts me. It took me maybe a day or two to really start to grasp the reality of the situation and the fact that

this person that I thought I knew very well was a completely different person. Probably a month or so in, I was just so beyond angry. Some of the adrenaline from the situation and that initial shock had worn off and I was so angry about what he had done to my cousin, Al, to me, to these two women, Lauren, and then Annie, who has since become my friend. I felt as though he had weaseled his way

out of so many things in the past and I was just so enraged that I kept thinking, is there any way that we can get him held accountable for things he's done not only for justice but also to prevent this from happening to other women because he is a danger he is a risk to women that he is around without question. So I started exploring exploring what could be done in terms of taking some sort of action against him and it seemed the best option we had for this was reporting him to be in possession of child pornography. I ended up submitting something to the FBI and

Kalin did as well. We submitted a general ticket to the FBI and it got routed through Michigan because he was currently in Michigan at that point because after all of this blew up, he had nowhere to go besides back to his parents' house in East Lansing. They reached out to both of us relatively quickly about the situation. I ended up speaking with the FBI twice.

The woman that I spoke to both times seemed very interested. She wanted to gather all the information. We went through everything that had occurred and they said that they were trying to figure out if it would be pursued at a state or federal level. I did verify with them that even if it is a deepfake, if you are putting a minor's face on any sort of pornography that still does qualify as child pornography, they ask questions about the deepfakes in terms of us as adults. But they did say that

due to Michigan law currently, that there wasn't anything that could be done about that. On my last call with her, she said that it did sound like it would be pursued at a federal level. We found out that he was picked up for questioning and held for 24 hours. I have not heard that any charges have been brought against him at all. Had I had the ability to pursue pressing charges against Josh, I most definitely would have.

No questions asked. Here's Annie. I was surprised at how easy it was to do this. Like, Josh is not a tech savvy guy, and he was able to create these. It's scary. It's not even about being careful about what you post online, because he took regular selfies, regular group pics where no one was showing any skin. It was just their face and they were smiling with their friends or their family. I didn't even know what a deep fake was till a couple years ago. He was the one that explained to me what a deep fake was. My friend sent me, it's essentially

a deep fake, but they put your face on like Johnny Depp's body and you're in Pirates of the Caribbean now. I was like, oh, this is funny. Wow, this really looks real. And he goes, oh, yeah, it's a deep fake. He's like, it's usually used for porn. And I said, what? Why would you do that? What do you mean? Here's Lauren. I don't think there's really any way to make sense of it. Ultimately though, this is a unique new way for abusers to take advantage of other people and it's really fucking terrifying. Another thing that really concerns me is how I imagine that there are people out there who might try to confuse this type of behavior with a pornography addiction or something less harmful than what it is. Using AI to create

pornography without someone's consent. That is a whole different thing. The type of person who would do that type of thing would also have the resources and the savviness to manipulate others into thinking that, oh, well, it's just because I have a pornography addiction. Oh, well, it's just because I have a mental illness. We need to see it for what it really is, which is abuse. And it's really gross. I think he's so full of shit.

I just don't buy anything that he's trying to sell. And I think he can't take responsibility for anything. What's hard about this whole thing is that we don't know what exactly the extent of what he was doing on the internet was. Every fiber of my being knows that he is a predator and that he is not a safe person to be around. And he's an opportunist. When I look at the way things escalated with me and he was really demonstrating those controlling and abusive behaviors towards me at the end. When him and I broke up, he had a perfect opportunity to pick things up with Annie and the pandemic I think really, really helped him with that. Any of his excuses are trash and it infuriates me to my core. I have never felt a rage about someone

and about a situation than I have with this. Here's Rachel. I have so much empathy for what they went through with him. I also feel somewhat guilty that I didn't recognize more was going on. Granted, I get how could I have? And at the same time, I wish that we had been able somehow to put these pieces together a little bit sooner. But the reality is he knew what he was doing. This was

so beyond strategic at the end of the day. He wasn't able to isolate Lauren and have as much control over her as he wanted to, partially because she was friends with me. I will fully admit that I do not think I was well enough informed on this topic at all prior to this happening. My biggest thing is I think there needs to be legislation around this and I know some states are in the process of that or have recently passed things that do address this but there really needs to be a crackdown on this because I can see how it would be so detrimental and incredibly traumatic to so many individuals who could experience something like this. The availability based on social media and apps we have on our phone, it almost feels as though anyone could do this.

I agree, legislatively, we really need to see something at the federal level because our laws are already behind when it comes to things like dating apps and the internet, so we definitely need to get caught up quick. Especially when we consider the child sex abuse material, that to me is so alarming. The fact that there's these simple apps where people can just take pictures from people's social media and then impose them in such a harmful, disgusting way. And in general, like how online kids are these days and trying to figure out those things not only as a person who works in this field, but also as a parent myself.

The more I know, the less I share online, especially when it comes to my family in any capacity. I didn't used to always be that way, but I am now. What has it been like for you connecting with Lauren and Rachel? It's been good. It's been nice to have, especially with Lauren, somebody who can confirm the things I went through because she experienced them to an extent too. Like she fully understands what it was like talking to him. We just went back and forth talking about the different lies he told. She told me about weird

instances where he lied to her. We were kind of bonding over the way that he lied and the way that he talked to people. It hadn't changed. He had told me a story about her. He said that she was just really difficult and that's why they didn't work out. He was such a good guy that he went to pick her up from the dentist once and he called her an Uber and she was so ungrateful for it. She texted him all these things about how awful he was after and that was the last time he ever saw her. And I asked Lauren about it and she was like, he was supposed to drive me home from the dentist, but his car was so full of garbage that I couldn't get in it. And I was drugged up and had a tooth pulled and he sent me home in an Uber. And I kept saying,

Josh, I can see your car. It's right there. And he said, no, that's not my car. That sounds way more like Josh than the story he told. I told her about the apartment and how he didn't have it anymore. And that's when she told me that it was her sister's friend who was the landlord and that Lauren had actually helped him get that apartment. She was never really invited over there much either. She had walked in there one day and the ceiling above his dining room table had collapsed pieces of it all over the table, all over the floor. So she took a picture of it and asked him, what the heck happened here? And

he goes, oh, that happened a while ago. She said, Josh, you have to tell the landlord. Rachel, we had conversations about times he would lie to her and weird things that would happen. It's been really nice to have people who understand what he was like. I repeat the story sometimes and I'm like, oh, he said this and this. And people don't understand why I stuck around. But they get it because he was so manipulative. Rachel's a badass. She was the one that reached out to the FBI. She reached out to you. She was like, I'm going to talk to Tiffany Reese. We need to be on this podcast. The amount that we have all been through is incredible. I've never heard anything like this.

I'm reaching out to her and I said, go for it. Nicole Sarris What advice would you give to somebody who is navigating perhaps a similar relationship? Shana King I would say it's okay to just walk away. You don't owe them anything. You don't need to hear their explanations. And you don't have to make people understand you. If they don't understand you, that's fine. You can just leave. I wish so badly I would have just walked away earlier. When we were arguing and I was trying so desperately to explain myself or to get him to understand my side or to admit that he was wrong. I didn't need that.

I started a new job a couple months ago and I get to go back to school for free, so that's exciting. I've just been working on myself and I'm just happy without him. It feels like a weight has been lifted. Here's Rachel. I am somewhat less trusting,

in particular when it comes to men. I do a little bit more due diligence in terms of making new friends. I am more attuned to small things that I definitely wasn't when I was younger in college and before this. I most definitely have a therapist. She is wonderful. I have to be very mindful in terms of when I am working with clients with trauma, there are some specific modalities that I'm specialized in, one of them being cognitive processing therapy.

And there have been points where I have had to take a break from doing that with clients in order to manage my own stuff. This was definitely one of those times where I did have to put that on pause for a little bit. Well, this was consuming so much of my head space and energy. Here's Lauren. I was hesitant to talk about this

because I think as humans and especially as women, we tend to like do that thing, right? Where we're like, well, my experience wasn't nearly as bad as this person's experience. We're tending to like minimize them and compare them. Ultimately, it's not a competition about who had it worse. It's more about the shared feeling of being able to relate to someone, which is just empathy. Listening to other people on this podcast has really helped me process not

just my relationship with Josh, but also the loss of my dad and grief and all of these emotions are super complex and weird. Even in the varying experiences that have been shared, I always feel like I can relate to a feeling or an emotion that someone else is describing in their story. And there's so much power and healing in that. What I would want others to take from this is that just because someone else's experience can be so objectively more horrific and traumatic than yours doesn't mean that your experience wasn't harmful or traumatic. There are behaviors in relationships that even though they might not be explicitly verbally or physically abusive, they can be just as harmful and impactful on your life.

Another thing too is it's really easy to say trust your gut, try to keep an eye out for red flags, but in reality it's not that easy all the time. It's really hard to spot things like love bombing because there are perfectly healthy relationships out there with expressions of love and thoughtfulness without ulterior motives. I've heard time and time again from clients or even just like talking to friends,

how am I supposed to know when I'm having a gut feeling? Those gut feelings are so obvious sometimes, and you know it when you feel it, but sometimes they're just not. And your brain functions to protect you, so it won't always say run or fight right away in a bad situation. It might try to make sense of the situation and rationalize it. Unfortunately, I think the best way to get to know your intuition and your gut is by experiencing it and also getting older and knowing yourself more. I would want people to cut themselves some slack

if they struggle with that, because I think it's something that people experience a lot more than we think. To your point, trauma, it's not a competition. There's no empathy bank that's dwindling away. Actually, the more we give it to other people, the more empathy just continues to blossom around everyone. Yeah. Some of the things that don't get talked about as much or that can get written off as you overreacting.

So if you find yourself questioning your reality or having an instinct to document or record conversations to use later to defend yourself. Being afraid to bring up certain topics, constantly feeling like you're the one apologizing for bringing up certain things, feeling like others are constantly needing to provide admiration and validation when people say really jarring or embarrassing things about you in front of a group of friends or just things that you thought you guys had discussed in confidence. Those types of things, I would just want folks to stop and take a moment and reflect on your relationship and the situation that you're in because it's those subtle smaller

things that sneak up over time and really become more frequent and normalized without us even realizing it. Those are the things that really can escalate into more intensive and abusive behaviors. Lastly, I really thought that as someone who has diagnosed a many personality disorder and feels like I have a very generally good understanding of others and abilities to be in touch with other people, this can happen to anyone. It's not about you, it's about the abuser, and the manipulator, and the situation. What you're doing is so goddamn important

because people don't talk about these things. They just don't. I mean, we all have people that we trust and love, but these are situations that vary in degree of like severity. But it's so powerful for people. I'm just so thankful to the three of you for being willing to share, especially given how much people are thinking about this topic and looking at legislation.

This was a great experience. I truly can't thank you enough. If you do suspect that someone has created these types of images or have found images of yourself online that you are looking for assistance in help removing, the FBI's Internet Complaint Center. Thank you so much for listening. Until next time, stay safe, friends. Something Was Wrong is a Broken Cycle Media Production created and hosted by me, Tiffany Reese. If you'd like to support the show further, you can share episodes with your loved ones,

leave a positive review, or follow Something Was Wrong on Instagram, at Something Was Wrong Podcast. Our theme song was composed by Gladrags. Check out their album, Wonder Under. Thank you so much. If you like Something Was Wrong, you can listen early and ad-free right now by joining Wondery Plus in the Wondery app or on Apple Podcasts. Prime members can listen ad-free on Amazon Music. Before you go, tell us about yourself by filling out a short survey at Wondery.com slash survey.